Afterburn, p.21
Afterburn, page 21
In the half moment after that, Valeria unloaded on the leader, blasting him multiple times.
Then the firing came from every direction. Alton dove out of the sleeping area and sprinted toward the two boulders. He skidded to a stop behind the first, gasping as he skirted the edge of the ridge, gravel flying off into the abyss, then huddling as weapons-fire thundered across the echoing silence.
He stuffed his fingers into his ears, but every sickening sound got through: petrified shouts, a gurgling, high-pitched scream. It was impossible to imagine they couldn’t be heard from leagues away, and he permitted himself a foolish hope that somebody out there would raise an alert, save them.
But he knew that wouldn’t happen and he’d better do something to help them fast. Then he remembered what was in his bag. He unslung it from his shoulder just as Valeria burst from the trees.
“Over here,” he shouted. “Look out!”
Valeria turned as two pursuers erupted from the foliage behind her. She had seized one of their assault rifles, and she laid down a carpet of fire as she high-stepped backward toward Alton.
But the men in their TALOS absorbed the blasts and tore off a pummeling fusillade in return. She yelped as the projectiles bounced off her thighs and shins. As she came careening behind the boulder, Alton wrapped her up so she wouldn’t slide over the ridge, then held her as she shuddered in rage and pain.
She had been hit dozens of times, and her TALOS was mottled everywhere. Her left sleeve was shredded, and her hand was slick and dark with blood. He gasped as she turned toward him, and he saw that a chunk of her right ear had been blown off. The blood was pooling on her neck and shoulder, thick and syrupy. He tried to conceal his shock.
“Whe . . . where are the others?”
She slumped hard against the rock. “I think Gagné got out. Everybody else is down.” She took deep, convulsing breaths.
He fought down his mushrooming panic. “What the hell is going on? Why would the military want me? Why would they kill their own?”
“Those have to be Hagen’s men,” she gasped. “I don’t know how they got here first. Maybe they scanned us out here somehow. But more likely somebody tipped them off.”
“Who?”
But three, then four, more men were charging them, their volleys igniting the night. Valeria slid the barrel of the assault rifle around the side of the boulder and ripped into them.
“You have to get out of here,” he said. “Take this.” He shoved his pack at her.
“I’m not leaving a Civvie,” she said. “Or abandoning this mission.” Three of their four assailants were moving again. She tore off another burst in their direction.
“They said they were here for me,” he said. “Which means they’re not going to kill me.”
Hopefully, he thought. He thrust the pack into her chest. “Get the fuck out of here! Regroup!”
She agonized for a moment, then snatched the pack. They would be overrun in moments, but she had the jet out and affixed with lightning speed.
She strapped it on and lit it up, then took out her sidearm and jammed it into Alton’s hand.
“Cover me,” she said.
He waved the gun above his head and fired a few shots, which they answered with a shattering salvo. Alton and Valeria covered their heads as boulder chunks showered them.
As Valeria slid toward the edge, she said, “I’ll come back for you.”
He stuck the pistol up again, but they were already wrenching it from his grasp just as Valeria took a diving leap into the blackness.
They fired down on her location, the bursts booming across the gorge. One of the commandos pitched forward, bellowing into the abyss as she got him, but another took his place instantly. This one had a web gun.
Alton lurched forward, trying to stop him, but the others viciously restrained him. He saw the yellow glow of the web, heard her cry out, and then was pulled away before he could see anything else. Like Bernardo in his dream, she fell. And as in his dream, he could do nothing about it.
They wrestled him up as a craft touched down in front of them, its lights blinding him. The men shoved him up its ramp and into a drop seat, then cinched him with straps until he could barely breathe.
A few others shuffled in behind him, banged up and limping, one bleeding from a forehead gash.
“Christ, you guys got creamed,” the pilot said.
“Just fly,” somebody barked, and he brought the ramp up and lifted off the plateau.
There was a deathly silence inside the shuttle. It was obvious they knew they were lucky to have made it out. Alton tried to take a deep breath but couldn’t. “Can you loosen these a little?” he croaked.
“If we loosen those straps,” one of them said, “it will be to dump you overboard.”
CHAPTER 39
As they lifted up and over the mountains, the pilot cut the lights and put them in drone mode, but not before Alton finally saw snow on the peaks. They must have been close to the highest part of the range, and the most remote, he thought.
He strained to make out details in case he needed to remember how to return, but it was too dark, and the tilt and shiver of the craft was making him feel sick. He closed his eyes and saw the image of Valeria web-bound and plunging. He hoped against hope that she had managed to survive.
They were in the air for maybe fifteen minutes. Then, as the first gray seam of dawn split along the horizon, they began to descend between the peaks. Below them, just visible in the faint illumination, were more of the endless slabs of jagged slate, dotted at this elevation with only tundra and the heartiest alpine flora.
Just as Alton began to wonder where they would land, he felt the craft shake, then saw the windshield mottle and blur. In the next instant, a facility appeared in the valley below. A landing pad, metal installations jutting from the rock, a huge door carved into the mountainside, all became visible inside the stealth shield they had just penetrated.
He would have thought a shield of the capacity to conceal an entire base for this long was the sole purview of the military. And yet, as with the ability to remotely neutralize their augmentation, Alex appeared to have it. He must have raided more military installations than even Lance had suggested. Or maybe insiders had helped him, disgruntled spies willing to smuggle him weapons and tech, perhaps even some of his father’s old connections.
Alton couldn’t help but admire Alex’s dedication, trudging back and forth through the frigid outback to construct this fortress. Still, even the most committed efforts on foot wouldn’t have begun to haul a fraction of the materials necessary to erect what he saw before him, never mind whatever lay inside the mountain. And a steady airlift would have been spotted and shut down a long time ago.
If this had been his primary base for all these years of waging civil war and then hiding for the last two years, how had he managed to transport people and equipment without being discovered?
The craft alighted softly on the pad. The instant the engines ceased, the men untethered him and dragged him down the ramp and over a narrow catwalk toward the massive steel door.
On the journey here, with its hardships and distractions, finding Alex and Kiara had seemed purely theoretical. But now that he was being steered into a dimly lit tunnel, a profound dread welled up at the prospect of facing them at last.
He needn’t have worried about it for the moment, however, as the room along the corridor into which they thrust him was empty of people.
The heavy door boomed and bolted behind him, and he stood frozen in a murky space. Shadowy shapes, a damp chill, and a chemical stench sent his adrenaline racing. He would eventually realize this was his torture reflex, a permanent physiological response to strange, dark places with nasty-looking machines.
But as his eyes adjusted, he relaxed a little. It wasn’t a torture chamber, at least not a conventional one. A long stainless-steel table occupied the center. As he took in his surroundings, dully gleaming under an iron-colored light, it began to look familiar.
He had seen more contemporary versions of these displays and interfaces, buckets of parts, canisters and bottles of liquid metals, rusty first-aid cabinets, and shelves stacked with sinister-looking tools, scalpels, and other blades. He looked into each shadowy corner until . . . yes, there it was. A reclining chair with tubes and wires like that of a . . . what had it brought to his mind? Steampunk dentist.
He was in an augmentation lab. Although this one was grimier and more sinister than the sterling studio in which he had been augmented a few days earlier. He shivered, wondering what had been done in here. And to whom.
He was spared from having to imagine the worst when the door swung open and three men came at him. Two held his arms, and the third jammed a nasty-looking syringe into his neck. He couldn’t muster a single objection before the world slipped out from under him.
CHAPTER 40
The bedchamber was steeped in a faint copper glow. The corners receded into darkness, but Alton could tell that a figure sat cross-legged in one of them because of the huge, gnarled shadow thrown against the opposite wall.
He moved a little in the rickety bed, then threw off a coarse Afghan to find bandages swaddling his arms and right leg. His left leg—the prosthetic—was coated with some kind of shimmering material. He tried to reach out, but his puffy-bandaged arm was too heavy, as were his eyelids, which closed around the sight of his fingers dropping back to the bed.
When he next awakened, he was more cautious with movement as he let his mind filter toward awareness. He was startled to see the figure still in the corner. He hesitated to rouse its attention, but thirst savaged him.
“Water,” he rasped. The figure stirred, then left the room. A minute later, it returned with a thermos. A hand removed the top and flipped up a plastic straw. “Drink this. It’s a nutrient-electrolyte solution.”
He was weak, and the thermos rolled onto the floor. The figure kneeled to retrieve it, and in the burnished light, it looked like Kiara. Her eyes floated in and out of deep shadows, making her seem like an apparition. She placed the thermos gently into his hands, then brought the chair to his bedside. It had been her watching him from the corner, throwing that monstrous shadow.
“It’s so good to see you, Alton,” she said, her eyes moistening.
Hearing her voice made his mind race back over the years. Grief clutched his chest.
“How . . . how did you know where I was?”
“I’ll let him give you the details,” she said. “Are you in pain?”
He thought about this. He was always in pain, couldn’t remember a time when he wasn’t in pain. But this seemed a little melodramatic, so he just grunted.
She nodded toward the bandages. “You’ll get those off shortly,” she said. “I apologize for the . . . invasiveness of the surgery. I wanted to talk to you about it first, but you know he does love the grand gesture.” She shrugged as though it was all out of her hands.
“Don’t worry; I’m used to it.” He could feel what they had done to him but didn’t need to consider the ramifications just yet. At least nobody had removed a limb this time.
“We were also going to implant a DNA scrambler until they found that you already have one.”
“I’m guessing everyone here has one?”
“Of course.” She leaned in and touched his forehead, then his cheek. “No fever,” she said.
Pride told him to brush her hand away, but it felt too good.
“I’m sorry for what happened to you,” she said. “The camps.”
He did pull away then. “You don’t seem to have a problem with the person responsible for them.”
“He’s not responsible for them, Alton. Guerrero is.” She sighed. “Alex has always fought for the rights of our people. Minority rights now.”
Our people. It was the first time he had ever heard her utter such a thing.
“And where has your holy crusader been these last two years while I was wasting away? Not fighting for my rights, that’s for damn sure.”
“I know it’s hard to accept, but what he’s preparing has taken a lot of time. You’ll soon see that it’s all been worth it.”
She was more beautiful than ever. Her chestnut hair was cut close around her ears now. She was dressed simply but elegantly in light cotton pants and a navy fleece, dusty hiking boots laced up the ankles. Her eyes were still lustrous, even in the drab light, though perhaps flintier than they once had been.
“I met your parents,” he said. It was hard to tell from the shadows on her face, but he thought he saw sadness flicker there. “They seemed to think they were never going to see you again.”
She stood. “I’m glad you made it here, Alton. We don’t have much time left.”
“Deciphering your clue was easy enough, but how did you know I would find it there? How did you know Áquilar would come up with the idea to use me in the first place?”
“Because it wasn’t her idea. It was mine.” She let this sink in, then said, “I suggested she enlist you in tracking Alex before I slipped the grid.”
He stared at her. How long had they been planning this?
“You almost got me killed,” he said. “More than once.”
“Some things are worth the risk.”
“If only people would let me decide that for myself.”
She stood and went to the door. “Someone will come and remove your bandages, get you cleaned up. Once that’s done, I’ll take you to him.”
He stood naked in the cramped shower receptacle and stared at himself in the plexiglass reflection. Shaved head. Augmented eyes. Scars. Prosthetic leg. Newly fused electric veins shimmering like rivulets of mercury beneath his limbs.
He had struggled his whole life to figure out his identity, torn between one parent who refused to acknowledge his existence and one who openly resented it. Confronting this bizarre hybrid stranger did nothing to clarify his confusion, although he almost smiled at the thought of standing before his class in Gypsum. What would his students make of him now that he was like them?
He increased the water temperature and let the steam cloud over his unsettling image, then luxuriated with his eyes closed. Being in camp had made him realize that a lot of things had let him down in life but never a hot shower.
After twenty minutes, the water shut off, and he climbed out and carefully dried himself, wiping the towel back and forth over his forearms, feeling the funky substance underneath.
There was only the faintest of lines where they had lasered the incisions. He thought of Alex’s first set of EVs, the back-alley crudeness of them, the pipes sticking out of his elbow joints. What he was looking at now was as smooth as could be, just the faintest metallic sheen underneath the flesh, not heavy at all. If anything, his limbs felt lighter, more mobile, more flexible.
Nothing was activated though. His augmentation had yet to be restored. And the EVs were not yet operational. He wondered what color they would be. Just one more thing he’d had no say in.
And yet part of him had begun to accept that he was being swept along now. He had been at the mercy of others for so long, the concept of choice had become as foreign as the concept of requited love. Given the opportunity to pilot his own life, he had to admit he had little idea where he would start.
They had confiscated his TALOS, and so he dressed in the clothes they had left for him and went out into the corridor to find Kiara waiting. The shock of seeing her seized him fully now that he was more awake: the warm, breathing reality of a person whose memory he had both fetishized and resented for so long.
They fell into step without speaking, and she led him through the dark tunnels. He was conscious of brushing against her in the close space, their sleeves softly rustling, and his heartbeat quickened as he remembered their nights together in DC. When they came around a curve and a faint light began to seep in, he stopped and put a hand on her shoulder.
“I came here for you,” he said. “Come back with me before it’s too late. What good end can this possibly have?”
“Alton, I’m with him till the end. You know that.”
The old familiar pain welled up in him, and he looked away. “I always thought we had a special connection.” He wanted to tell her how her picture in his locker had kept him going in camp but thought it would make him sound pathetic.
“Of course we did,” she said. “Why do you think you’re here?”
She smiled at him—equal parts sadness and pity, he thought, with maybe a pinch of gratitude. It made him want to smash something.
“Because I’ve been your third wheel my whole life.” He almost spit.
“I promise you that won’t always be the case.”
He didn’t know what she meant, but he let her lead him out onto a catwalk, where he stared, dumbfounded.
The massive cavern was at least six stories high and five hundred meters in circumference, so vast he could hardly see the other side. Steel girders held up the floors, and gantries with guardrails crisscrossed between them. Far below, human figures were scattered among industrial equipment and machines. A vehicle that resembled a lunar rover crawled among them.
He gawked but couldn’t get his mind around it. They couldn’t have dug this out in half a century. This was an International Construction Consortium kind of job. Army Corps of Engineers.
“How did you manage . . . ?”
“We didn’t,” she said and led him along the catwalk to show him what was directly beneath them: two massive hollows, side by side, carved into the granite wall.
He shook his head, uncomprehending.
“Hydro-Channels,” she said. “This was their origin point, guzzling up all the fresh runoff from the peaks to send downstate. But they were abandoned after desalination. No point in maintaining the expense anymore. This place has been deserted for . . .”
“Twenty years,” he said. He remembered seeing the termination points of the tunnels just at the edge of Cosmost when the team had been flying out of LA.
“Give or take.”
Then the firing came from every direction. Alton dove out of the sleeping area and sprinted toward the two boulders. He skidded to a stop behind the first, gasping as he skirted the edge of the ridge, gravel flying off into the abyss, then huddling as weapons-fire thundered across the echoing silence.
He stuffed his fingers into his ears, but every sickening sound got through: petrified shouts, a gurgling, high-pitched scream. It was impossible to imagine they couldn’t be heard from leagues away, and he permitted himself a foolish hope that somebody out there would raise an alert, save them.
But he knew that wouldn’t happen and he’d better do something to help them fast. Then he remembered what was in his bag. He unslung it from his shoulder just as Valeria burst from the trees.
“Over here,” he shouted. “Look out!”
Valeria turned as two pursuers erupted from the foliage behind her. She had seized one of their assault rifles, and she laid down a carpet of fire as she high-stepped backward toward Alton.
But the men in their TALOS absorbed the blasts and tore off a pummeling fusillade in return. She yelped as the projectiles bounced off her thighs and shins. As she came careening behind the boulder, Alton wrapped her up so she wouldn’t slide over the ridge, then held her as she shuddered in rage and pain.
She had been hit dozens of times, and her TALOS was mottled everywhere. Her left sleeve was shredded, and her hand was slick and dark with blood. He gasped as she turned toward him, and he saw that a chunk of her right ear had been blown off. The blood was pooling on her neck and shoulder, thick and syrupy. He tried to conceal his shock.
“Whe . . . where are the others?”
She slumped hard against the rock. “I think Gagné got out. Everybody else is down.” She took deep, convulsing breaths.
He fought down his mushrooming panic. “What the hell is going on? Why would the military want me? Why would they kill their own?”
“Those have to be Hagen’s men,” she gasped. “I don’t know how they got here first. Maybe they scanned us out here somehow. But more likely somebody tipped them off.”
“Who?”
But three, then four, more men were charging them, their volleys igniting the night. Valeria slid the barrel of the assault rifle around the side of the boulder and ripped into them.
“You have to get out of here,” he said. “Take this.” He shoved his pack at her.
“I’m not leaving a Civvie,” she said. “Or abandoning this mission.” Three of their four assailants were moving again. She tore off another burst in their direction.
“They said they were here for me,” he said. “Which means they’re not going to kill me.”
Hopefully, he thought. He thrust the pack into her chest. “Get the fuck out of here! Regroup!”
She agonized for a moment, then snatched the pack. They would be overrun in moments, but she had the jet out and affixed with lightning speed.
She strapped it on and lit it up, then took out her sidearm and jammed it into Alton’s hand.
“Cover me,” she said.
He waved the gun above his head and fired a few shots, which they answered with a shattering salvo. Alton and Valeria covered their heads as boulder chunks showered them.
As Valeria slid toward the edge, she said, “I’ll come back for you.”
He stuck the pistol up again, but they were already wrenching it from his grasp just as Valeria took a diving leap into the blackness.
They fired down on her location, the bursts booming across the gorge. One of the commandos pitched forward, bellowing into the abyss as she got him, but another took his place instantly. This one had a web gun.
Alton lurched forward, trying to stop him, but the others viciously restrained him. He saw the yellow glow of the web, heard her cry out, and then was pulled away before he could see anything else. Like Bernardo in his dream, she fell. And as in his dream, he could do nothing about it.
They wrestled him up as a craft touched down in front of them, its lights blinding him. The men shoved him up its ramp and into a drop seat, then cinched him with straps until he could barely breathe.
A few others shuffled in behind him, banged up and limping, one bleeding from a forehead gash.
“Christ, you guys got creamed,” the pilot said.
“Just fly,” somebody barked, and he brought the ramp up and lifted off the plateau.
There was a deathly silence inside the shuttle. It was obvious they knew they were lucky to have made it out. Alton tried to take a deep breath but couldn’t. “Can you loosen these a little?” he croaked.
“If we loosen those straps,” one of them said, “it will be to dump you overboard.”
CHAPTER 39
As they lifted up and over the mountains, the pilot cut the lights and put them in drone mode, but not before Alton finally saw snow on the peaks. They must have been close to the highest part of the range, and the most remote, he thought.
He strained to make out details in case he needed to remember how to return, but it was too dark, and the tilt and shiver of the craft was making him feel sick. He closed his eyes and saw the image of Valeria web-bound and plunging. He hoped against hope that she had managed to survive.
They were in the air for maybe fifteen minutes. Then, as the first gray seam of dawn split along the horizon, they began to descend between the peaks. Below them, just visible in the faint illumination, were more of the endless slabs of jagged slate, dotted at this elevation with only tundra and the heartiest alpine flora.
Just as Alton began to wonder where they would land, he felt the craft shake, then saw the windshield mottle and blur. In the next instant, a facility appeared in the valley below. A landing pad, metal installations jutting from the rock, a huge door carved into the mountainside, all became visible inside the stealth shield they had just penetrated.
He would have thought a shield of the capacity to conceal an entire base for this long was the sole purview of the military. And yet, as with the ability to remotely neutralize their augmentation, Alex appeared to have it. He must have raided more military installations than even Lance had suggested. Or maybe insiders had helped him, disgruntled spies willing to smuggle him weapons and tech, perhaps even some of his father’s old connections.
Alton couldn’t help but admire Alex’s dedication, trudging back and forth through the frigid outback to construct this fortress. Still, even the most committed efforts on foot wouldn’t have begun to haul a fraction of the materials necessary to erect what he saw before him, never mind whatever lay inside the mountain. And a steady airlift would have been spotted and shut down a long time ago.
If this had been his primary base for all these years of waging civil war and then hiding for the last two years, how had he managed to transport people and equipment without being discovered?
The craft alighted softly on the pad. The instant the engines ceased, the men untethered him and dragged him down the ramp and over a narrow catwalk toward the massive steel door.
On the journey here, with its hardships and distractions, finding Alex and Kiara had seemed purely theoretical. But now that he was being steered into a dimly lit tunnel, a profound dread welled up at the prospect of facing them at last.
He needn’t have worried about it for the moment, however, as the room along the corridor into which they thrust him was empty of people.
The heavy door boomed and bolted behind him, and he stood frozen in a murky space. Shadowy shapes, a damp chill, and a chemical stench sent his adrenaline racing. He would eventually realize this was his torture reflex, a permanent physiological response to strange, dark places with nasty-looking machines.
But as his eyes adjusted, he relaxed a little. It wasn’t a torture chamber, at least not a conventional one. A long stainless-steel table occupied the center. As he took in his surroundings, dully gleaming under an iron-colored light, it began to look familiar.
He had seen more contemporary versions of these displays and interfaces, buckets of parts, canisters and bottles of liquid metals, rusty first-aid cabinets, and shelves stacked with sinister-looking tools, scalpels, and other blades. He looked into each shadowy corner until . . . yes, there it was. A reclining chair with tubes and wires like that of a . . . what had it brought to his mind? Steampunk dentist.
He was in an augmentation lab. Although this one was grimier and more sinister than the sterling studio in which he had been augmented a few days earlier. He shivered, wondering what had been done in here. And to whom.
He was spared from having to imagine the worst when the door swung open and three men came at him. Two held his arms, and the third jammed a nasty-looking syringe into his neck. He couldn’t muster a single objection before the world slipped out from under him.
CHAPTER 40
The bedchamber was steeped in a faint copper glow. The corners receded into darkness, but Alton could tell that a figure sat cross-legged in one of them because of the huge, gnarled shadow thrown against the opposite wall.
He moved a little in the rickety bed, then threw off a coarse Afghan to find bandages swaddling his arms and right leg. His left leg—the prosthetic—was coated with some kind of shimmering material. He tried to reach out, but his puffy-bandaged arm was too heavy, as were his eyelids, which closed around the sight of his fingers dropping back to the bed.
When he next awakened, he was more cautious with movement as he let his mind filter toward awareness. He was startled to see the figure still in the corner. He hesitated to rouse its attention, but thirst savaged him.
“Water,” he rasped. The figure stirred, then left the room. A minute later, it returned with a thermos. A hand removed the top and flipped up a plastic straw. “Drink this. It’s a nutrient-electrolyte solution.”
He was weak, and the thermos rolled onto the floor. The figure kneeled to retrieve it, and in the burnished light, it looked like Kiara. Her eyes floated in and out of deep shadows, making her seem like an apparition. She placed the thermos gently into his hands, then brought the chair to his bedside. It had been her watching him from the corner, throwing that monstrous shadow.
“It’s so good to see you, Alton,” she said, her eyes moistening.
Hearing her voice made his mind race back over the years. Grief clutched his chest.
“How . . . how did you know where I was?”
“I’ll let him give you the details,” she said. “Are you in pain?”
He thought about this. He was always in pain, couldn’t remember a time when he wasn’t in pain. But this seemed a little melodramatic, so he just grunted.
She nodded toward the bandages. “You’ll get those off shortly,” she said. “I apologize for the . . . invasiveness of the surgery. I wanted to talk to you about it first, but you know he does love the grand gesture.” She shrugged as though it was all out of her hands.
“Don’t worry; I’m used to it.” He could feel what they had done to him but didn’t need to consider the ramifications just yet. At least nobody had removed a limb this time.
“We were also going to implant a DNA scrambler until they found that you already have one.”
“I’m guessing everyone here has one?”
“Of course.” She leaned in and touched his forehead, then his cheek. “No fever,” she said.
Pride told him to brush her hand away, but it felt too good.
“I’m sorry for what happened to you,” she said. “The camps.”
He did pull away then. “You don’t seem to have a problem with the person responsible for them.”
“He’s not responsible for them, Alton. Guerrero is.” She sighed. “Alex has always fought for the rights of our people. Minority rights now.”
Our people. It was the first time he had ever heard her utter such a thing.
“And where has your holy crusader been these last two years while I was wasting away? Not fighting for my rights, that’s for damn sure.”
“I know it’s hard to accept, but what he’s preparing has taken a lot of time. You’ll soon see that it’s all been worth it.”
She was more beautiful than ever. Her chestnut hair was cut close around her ears now. She was dressed simply but elegantly in light cotton pants and a navy fleece, dusty hiking boots laced up the ankles. Her eyes were still lustrous, even in the drab light, though perhaps flintier than they once had been.
“I met your parents,” he said. It was hard to tell from the shadows on her face, but he thought he saw sadness flicker there. “They seemed to think they were never going to see you again.”
She stood. “I’m glad you made it here, Alton. We don’t have much time left.”
“Deciphering your clue was easy enough, but how did you know I would find it there? How did you know Áquilar would come up with the idea to use me in the first place?”
“Because it wasn’t her idea. It was mine.” She let this sink in, then said, “I suggested she enlist you in tracking Alex before I slipped the grid.”
He stared at her. How long had they been planning this?
“You almost got me killed,” he said. “More than once.”
“Some things are worth the risk.”
“If only people would let me decide that for myself.”
She stood and went to the door. “Someone will come and remove your bandages, get you cleaned up. Once that’s done, I’ll take you to him.”
He stood naked in the cramped shower receptacle and stared at himself in the plexiglass reflection. Shaved head. Augmented eyes. Scars. Prosthetic leg. Newly fused electric veins shimmering like rivulets of mercury beneath his limbs.
He had struggled his whole life to figure out his identity, torn between one parent who refused to acknowledge his existence and one who openly resented it. Confronting this bizarre hybrid stranger did nothing to clarify his confusion, although he almost smiled at the thought of standing before his class in Gypsum. What would his students make of him now that he was like them?
He increased the water temperature and let the steam cloud over his unsettling image, then luxuriated with his eyes closed. Being in camp had made him realize that a lot of things had let him down in life but never a hot shower.
After twenty minutes, the water shut off, and he climbed out and carefully dried himself, wiping the towel back and forth over his forearms, feeling the funky substance underneath.
There was only the faintest of lines where they had lasered the incisions. He thought of Alex’s first set of EVs, the back-alley crudeness of them, the pipes sticking out of his elbow joints. What he was looking at now was as smooth as could be, just the faintest metallic sheen underneath the flesh, not heavy at all. If anything, his limbs felt lighter, more mobile, more flexible.
Nothing was activated though. His augmentation had yet to be restored. And the EVs were not yet operational. He wondered what color they would be. Just one more thing he’d had no say in.
And yet part of him had begun to accept that he was being swept along now. He had been at the mercy of others for so long, the concept of choice had become as foreign as the concept of requited love. Given the opportunity to pilot his own life, he had to admit he had little idea where he would start.
They had confiscated his TALOS, and so he dressed in the clothes they had left for him and went out into the corridor to find Kiara waiting. The shock of seeing her seized him fully now that he was more awake: the warm, breathing reality of a person whose memory he had both fetishized and resented for so long.
They fell into step without speaking, and she led him through the dark tunnels. He was conscious of brushing against her in the close space, their sleeves softly rustling, and his heartbeat quickened as he remembered their nights together in DC. When they came around a curve and a faint light began to seep in, he stopped and put a hand on her shoulder.
“I came here for you,” he said. “Come back with me before it’s too late. What good end can this possibly have?”
“Alton, I’m with him till the end. You know that.”
The old familiar pain welled up in him, and he looked away. “I always thought we had a special connection.” He wanted to tell her how her picture in his locker had kept him going in camp but thought it would make him sound pathetic.
“Of course we did,” she said. “Why do you think you’re here?”
She smiled at him—equal parts sadness and pity, he thought, with maybe a pinch of gratitude. It made him want to smash something.
“Because I’ve been your third wheel my whole life.” He almost spit.
“I promise you that won’t always be the case.”
He didn’t know what she meant, but he let her lead him out onto a catwalk, where he stared, dumbfounded.
The massive cavern was at least six stories high and five hundred meters in circumference, so vast he could hardly see the other side. Steel girders held up the floors, and gantries with guardrails crisscrossed between them. Far below, human figures were scattered among industrial equipment and machines. A vehicle that resembled a lunar rover crawled among them.
He gawked but couldn’t get his mind around it. They couldn’t have dug this out in half a century. This was an International Construction Consortium kind of job. Army Corps of Engineers.
“How did you manage . . . ?”
“We didn’t,” she said and led him along the catwalk to show him what was directly beneath them: two massive hollows, side by side, carved into the granite wall.
He shook his head, uncomprehending.
“Hydro-Channels,” she said. “This was their origin point, guzzling up all the fresh runoff from the peaks to send downstate. But they were abandoned after desalination. No point in maintaining the expense anymore. This place has been deserted for . . .”
“Twenty years,” he said. He remembered seeing the termination points of the tunnels just at the edge of Cosmost when the team had been flying out of LA.
“Give or take.”
