“I’m in.”
Samir stands in the nexus of corridors. They recede from him in all directions, motion-sensor spotlights on the ground fading along the path he’d taken, plunging the past into darkness. He’s a young man, cuts an unimpressive figure: medium height, medium build, dark hair that falls in lank strands below his ears, quick, black eyes, and a sullen brow.
“Great.” Cenny’s voice crackles in his ear. “The medical wing should be to your left.” He turns. “How do you know which way I’m facing?” His voice is a harsh murmur in the darkness. In the corner of his vision, a red double-arrow points down. It’s tacked there so no matter where he turns, he sees it. He can’t help himself; he pokes at it like tonguing a missing tooth, and the data sprawls out, and he knows he’s almost out of time.
“Is that really the most important thing right now, Stupid?” She sounds exasperated, and that makes Samir grin.
He starts moving. The floor is soft, not quite carpet, something government-made and clinical. His steps are near-silent, but his heart pounds in his chest. Working overtime. Running down. Even now, as he slides down the corridor, flicking between soft bars of white light that flare to life with his passage, he can feel the disease churning in him.
The corridor ends in a seamless door with a sign overhead.
Samir squints at the kanji. He was never the best reader.
“This it?” He snaps a pic and shoots it over to Cenny. Two kilometers above him, on the roof of the towering complex, she looks at it and sends back a negative.
“Augmented Control Lab and Storage,” she rattles off for him. Samir feels a thrill shoot up his spine. “You really can’t tell the difference?”
“Well, not all of us have a thousand fucking languages downloaded to our super-brains. God damn, Cenny.” He traces his way back down the corridor, but looks over his shoulder again and again.
“I only keep thirty-seven on hand. Dick.”
She almost catches on to him when he doesn’t quip back. Samir is busy because he’s come to the nexus again and sees his mistake, sees the empty corridor with the faintly-glowing sign at the end and now he stands there with the red arrows pointing down and Cenny in his ear telling him to get a move on, they’ve figured out the evacuation orders were a diversion, they’re on their way.
Medical wing, or augmented storage. He has one hacked security card, one chance, one door he can open.
He makes a decision.
###
His black combat boot slaps against an oily puddle. The grimy water splashes his pant leg, and the gray material clings wet and cold to his ankle. Damp city air condenses into beads of water on his face and neck as he sprints down the crowded street. It mingles with the sweat sliding down his temples and burns his eyes.
“I’m tracking you.” There’s a flash overhead and to his right, just a black shape leaping across a gap in the close-packed roofs of the market district.
“Just get away, Stupid.” Samir is breathless. There are three red arrows pointing down, now, and he can feel the last booster fading. He tells himself it had only ever been a temporary measure, anyway. “I got this. You’re gonna get caught.”
“Can’t,” she says, and he misses the fact that she really should have said won’t. Instead, he grinds his teeth and thinks that he made the right decision back there in the research complex, the only decision he could ever live with.
Samir dodges around a rattling metal cart. Its triangular roof keeps the worst of the perma-rain off the electronic wares. A happy-colored sign flashes a dancing bear, accompanied by a burst of sound – a feminine voice gleefully assaulting him over an electro-pop jingle. The merchant pushing the cart curses at Samir’s back, but all they are is a stoop-backed figure cloaked in rags like the many who stream down the sidewalks to either side, and he doesn’t have time for them.
None of them cares who he is or what he’s running from. They keep their heads down so the retina scanners won’t pick them up on the way as security drones scan the crowd for their fugitive. Everyone has some little secret – unpaid loitering citations, a dodged work camp draft. It’s just Samir who was stupid enough to steal something precious from the city’s vault. “I’m sending you a route.”
Samir’s too winded to answer. Feet still pounding the pavement, arms pumping, shoulders jostled by the people flowing by, he pulls up the glowing route that only Cenny could have made, just like only she could have hacked that security card or tripped the evacuation alarms or done any of the other dozens of little things that make it possible for them to eke out their pathetic existence on the fringe of society. One step ahead of the law, one step ahead of starvation.
He follows the glowing purple line that snakes ahead of him. It veers right and he careens down an alley, streaking past graffiti-covered walls, leaping over heaps of garbage. His lungs are burning, and his legs feel weak. Hatred seizes him like an iron fist around his heart. He remembers a time when he could’ve kept up this pace for hours.
He wonders if Cenny feels that way, too. If she ever thinks back to a time before, she’d let them put all that shit in her brain and wishes she could still do things like walk into a building without setting off every fucking sensor in the place, or leave the city after dark.
Her voice crackles in his ear. It distracts him from the faint beeping that accompanies the red arrows. The sky yawns open above him, a heavy, wet mouth. Rain patters in the alley. The narrow space between buildings muffles the steady roar of the street behind him—a hundred conversations tossed in the air, bicycle horns, and echoing advertisements fading into a murky soup.
Samir stumbles to a halt. Lights flash behind him, purple-blue, blue-green, purple-green, green-blue. He watches his shadow flick in and out, in and out. Cenny’s glowing line leads to a fence at the end of the alley. Samir hooks his cold fingers into the chain links and begins to haul himself up.
Somewhere above him, the whine of security drones dopplers in.
“This how you plan to get rid of me, Cen?” Samir wheezes. His boots scramble for purchase. One elbow clears the top of the fence. His weight hangs on his armpits for a second before he can muster the energy to roll his lower body up and over. Talking helps, even if it wastes his breath. “Yaknow, could just transfer you. Lots of people looking for augmented contracts these days.”
“This isn’t a trap, and you aren’t funny. Once you’re over the fence – ”
Samir slips and plummets to the ground with an undignified yelp. His jacket catches on a loose metal link and tears. As he lies on the wet pavement, cheek scraped and bones rattled, he hears Cenny sigh.
“You’re in a blind spot. Between jurisdictions. No doubt they’ve sent out an APB on you already, but they’ll still have to scramble to coordinate across district lines.” “Ouch.” Samir massages his jaw.
He pushes to his feet.
“And anyway, why would I want a different contract?” She sounds irritated. Not that that’s unusual, when she’s talking to him. “You’re the best option I’ve got, Stupid. That’s why you need that medicine.”
That’s why you need that mod, he thinks.
Cenny’s path leads him to an abandoned warehouse. It looks like a hulking gray beast that had muscled its way in between its neighbors and then abruptly collapsed there. Samir steals a furtive glance across the wide but near-abandoned street connecting the alley to the warehouse. As he approaches, a cautious walk this time, ears primed for any scuff of shoe or whirr of drone, a flock of seabirds bursts into the sky from behind the building. Their dark triangular shapes pattern the murky sky, and their calls echo mournfully. Samir can smell briny water nearby, semi-stagnant.
The shadow of the building swallows him up, and Samir feels safer. He squeezes through the barricaded door; rotting wood breaks off in his hands, damp and festering with mold. Inside the building smells like an old boot that had been left on the bottom of a riverbed. There’s also a tang of oil, so the place feels somehow soaked and flammable all at once, like it could drown him and burn him alive.
“You should be able to rest here. For a few minutes, anyway.”
“Yeah? I’ll rest when I’m dead.” Samir hates that she knows, or at least can guess, that he feels like shit. Moving further into the space, he kicks over an empty crate. It sends up a puff of
dust as it thunks against the cement floor, and Samir winces when the sound echoes in the rafters. He plops down on the crate.
“That won’t be much longer if you keep kicking up such a racket.”
It won’t be much longer, anyway. Samir tips his head back. Nausea grips him; he feels it clawing its way up from his stomach to latch onto his throat. When he closes his eyes, he can still see the red arrows, pointing down, blinking now. The implant that monitors his blood chemistry is, in short, freaking out.
An argument could be made that Cenny chose her lot, while Samir had just had the shit luck to be born like this. It isn’t an argument that Samir is very interested in.
“What’s the plan, then?” A rat scurries past his feet. Its beady black doll eyes shine up at him, and its nose twitches. Is he food? The rats here are big enough to ask the question. Samir thinks about shooting it. Knows Cenny would hate that.
He can be good, sometimes.
“Plan? I’m supposed to be working on a plan?”
“Fuck off.” He laughs. The warehouse walls creak like arthritic joints, and the vault of the ceiling above him is skeletal, the big empty ribcage of a hungry beast. Nothing about this place is welcoming, but Samir wants to crawl under one of the moldy old tarps littering the floor and fall asleep.
The only thing stopping him is the prize he stole from the research complex. A talisman, burning a hole in his pocket, making him anxious to keep moving.
Cenny tells him what to do next, and he listens with his eyes closed, lulled by her voice, heart pounding out an erratic rhythm in his chest. His whole body is wrung out like a ragged old towel
with threads coming loose. He’s never hungry anymore, even though he knows his muscles and organs are burning through fat in a last-ditch effort to keep him going.
Something cracks against the boarded-up door. Samir’s head whips toward the sound, and he springs to his feet. He draws his revolver and points it at the door.
“You have to go. NOW!”
He whirls around and lurches into a run.
The barricade explodes behind him. The warehouse is a maze of hunched shadows lit sparingly by the city’s muted glow, falling in bars of fuzzy light as it squeezes past broken-tooth slats that bar the windows. Samir’s night vision sucks. He trips over a metal box that squeals against the ground and nearly goes sprawling on hands and knees, which would have been the end of him.
He catches himself at the last second. His jacket flaps against his thighs as he runs, zig-zagging around the detritus of failed industry towards the loading dock in the back. Heavy footfalls and shouts echo behind him. No security drones this time; those are augmented humans back there, agents with aerospace-ceramic limbs and fast metabolisms, and brains stuffed to the ears with gear.
It’s a less charming look on them than it is on Cenny.
“Shit, shit, shit, shit!” Samir is trapped. The loading dock is sealed shut by a heavy metal door. Rust lines the rivets and edges of the accordion panels, but he doesn’t have time to try to open it or force his way through. He skids to a halt and then dives left, throwing himself at a set
of stairs that lead up to a gantry. The whole structure shivers under his weight, metal joists clacking like dry bones.
He doesn’t have a plan, and Cenny can’t help him here. Samir reaches the catwalk and his palms slap against the rail as he vaults across empty space, landing in a crouch on the adjacent walk. It swings, and Samir hears a winnowing snap. One of the wires securing it to the ceiling breaks; in the sudden release of tension, the wire whips upward, its jagged end slicing a rafter and striking sparks.
The catwalk lists like a drunk. Below him, the agents are closing in, the first of them starting to climb the stairs. Ahead of hi,m he sees a bright rectangle of silver light. A miraculously unbarred window, facing out over the loading dock.
He doesn’t think. (This is among one of his better traits.) Samir backs up a few steps, then starts to run towards that light.
With a strangled shout, Samir explodes through the glass and into the saline night. His arms are crossed over his face, his knees drawn up as he plummets through the air, shards of glass trailing him like diamonds. For a moment, there’s silence. Everything is muffled by the wind that tugs cold fingers through his hair. He can see black shapes on the water and the lights of the far shore. They’re hazy with smog, an Impressionist landscape with too much black and gray, the river itself a single colorless brushstroke. Samir has time to think it’s all weirdly beautiful.
Then he hits the water.
He plunges into blackness. Immediately, the briny mix stings the dozens of little cuts he’d sustained from the window. Water rushes up his nose and into his mouth, and cold seizes him, almost paralyzes hi,m before he can force his limbs to work. He flails towards the surface.
When Samir breaks the surface, he draws in a ragged breath and coughs. He hears a tiny splash to his right. Just ahead of him, the water plinks upward, and he spends one second too long wondering if it was some improbable fish trying to fling itself into the air. The next bullet tears through his arm.
“Come on, Samir! You’re so close!”
He knows he’s in trouble because Cenny uses his name.
Samir dives. More bullets streak through the water around him like insectile torpedoes. Cenny is ahead of him; she’d commandeered an old trawler, had time to set up a blackout zone around the vessel that would make them invisible to their pursuers long enough to get away for good. He just has to reach her.
Samir kicks through the water. It drags at him like something thicker, and he makes frustratingly slow progress. Before long, his lungs start to burn, and he has to surface again, presenting a target once more to the snipers on the bank.
“They’re right there. I’ve got a clear shot.” Cenny sounds like she might cry. “God damn it!” He hears her breathing frantically, too distracted to cut the feed when she’d finished speaking. He wants to tell her not to worry. He knows she’d pull the trigger if she could. She swears in another language. He thinks it might be Romansh.
His body might be failing him, but at least he can still tell it what to do. He imagines Cenny frozen with her finger on the trigger. Wanting to take the shot, stopped by the wiring in her super-brain. A paroxysm of anger grips him. He prays that the talisman in his pocket is waterproof.
Samir has always been the luckiest unlucky son of a bitch. No more bullets find their mark. He limps through the water despite his fading energy and the hole in his arm. Then he’s out of
range of the firing squad; then he’s bumping up against the hull of the trawler; then he’s dragging himself up the ladder, fumbling for a grip with fingers that feel like shards of ice. He collapses on the deck. Rolls onto his back, uninjured arm flopping out to the side, chest rising and falling rapidly as he catches his breath. He blinks up at the sky. There are no stars, but they’re close enough to the other shore for the hologram billboards of the city to splash neon colors against the fog.
Hands slide under his shoulders. Cenny grunts as she hauls him up. Samir is too exhausted to do anything other than flop back against her, and she pauses there, kneeling on the deck and sliding her arms around his chest to hug him from behind.
“Welcome back, Stupid.”
Her voice is a smooth alto that sends a frisson through him. Samir grins and shakes river water out of his eyes. He feels like a hapless sailor who escaped a siren’s trap through no skill of his own. Spit back out onto land and wiggling fingers and toes to make sure they’re all still there.
His arm is on fire, but he’s pretty sure it was a through-and-through. He can deal with that later. All that matters is that he’s back with Cenny and that they’re safe, for now. Samir tilts his head to look at her.
Cenny’s is a round face, cherubic and deceivingly sweet. Her warm brown skin is almost the same color as her mop of curly hair. She’s a compact little person, nearly a foot shorter than Samir but solid. Thick clusters of freckles turn her face into a canvas. He watches her lips quirk up into a hesitant grin.
“So. Did you get it?”
Samir realizes that in all the chaos of his escape, she hadn’t even asked if he got what he wanted from the research complex. He nods, biting his lip to hide an excited, guilty grin.
“Your card worked.” He sidesteps the real answer. Cenny beams at him. She helps him to his feet, and he leans against the railing, his back to the city, silhouette limned in a fuzzy purple glow. He’s suddenly lightheaded. The world fades in and out as his whole body seems to step out of time with a whomp he feels in his bones. A high-pitched screech sounds in his ear. The red arrows he had ignored for so long blink a few times, then disappear.
Samir winces and shuts off the alarm. He knows what it means. He doesn’t need a reminder, thank you.
He knows he is past the point of no return. His organs are failing, one by one, like an army pulling back until it’s trapped in the castle. The enemy has breached the walls, and it’s only a matter of time before the last defenses fall.
Samir smiles. He knows he made the right decision. Cenny is close to him, breathing hard, freckles splashed across her face, and a line of neon light reflecting sharply off her nose. He cups her face and kisses her.
He slides the mod into the port at the base of her neck, and it docks with a soft click. Cenny gasps. Samir drinks up the sound from her lips. She pulls back, just slightly, just enough to look up at him with dark eyes that reflect the scrolling neon banner behind them. Hiragana and kanji, words that Samir can almost read.
“You’re free,” he whispers. And he knows that Cenny is going to punch him, and he laughs when she does. There’s anger and sorrow and hurt and concern swimming across her features, but among all those other things, Samir also sees hope. Maybe she never would have wanted this, but he’s going to give it to her because that’s the kind of selfish ass he is.
He’s still laughing when she starts to cuss him out in every language she currently knows. She vows to storm the research complex herself, this time, so he can’t screw it up. And she could do it now, with that mod freeing her from the chains of an augmented brain. Samir isn’t sure there’s time, but maybe there is. Hell. Stranger things have happened.
Cenny ushers him into the cabin. There’s a dirty cot that looks like the most luxurious thing Samir has ever seen. He peels off his wet clothes and collapses onto the cot, shivering, exhausted, satisfied. Cenny gives one of her patented can’t-believe-I’m-with-this-fuck-up sighs and climbs in behind him, wrapping her arms around him almost too tightly.
Night closes over the trawler. It bobs on the river, slipping silently beneath the towering buildings of the city that crowd right up to the banks. The glut of light from thousands of windows, hundreds of scrawling, dancing, shimmering billboards, dozens of security drones flitting through the air like dragonflies on the hunt, all of it casts a shadowy net of safety on their temporary shelter. Look too hard and you’ll miss it. The fog wraps around the trawler, and it disappears.
