head and saw a figure trudging forward, the hand that was gripping my boot trailing behind him. There were two others with him.
Screaming and the tearing of cloth cut through the ringing in my ears, then the crunching of metal and electronics. Someone was shouting into a radio, it sounded like, and gunfire was being exchanged.
I reached for my gun, but it wasn’t there. My knife was gone too. I struggled, and three sets of dead, yellow eyes stared back at me from above. I tried to kick free, but one of them grabbed my other leg. They dragged me out of the brush and into damp, soft soil as I felt myself being pulled downward.
Dirt was forced up the back of my shirt, and ants and termites scattered as I was dragged underneath something. I craned my neck back to see the mouth of a tunnel getting smaller behind me, the earth swallowing the sounds of the screams and gunfire….
“Nico?”
The memories scattered, and I opened my eyes. Sean’s gaunt face looked down on me, his narrow eyes serious. His once-black hair had begun to turn gray, and he looked tired. After a moment, he smiled faintly.
Sean Pu and I had served together. He was a tech man now, running the soft side of many operations in the field. He specialized in bioaugmentations, and kept a section of the Agency field ready. Unofficially, he was still more like my wingman; my pair of eyes on the inside when I was out there. Un-unofficially, he was more like my personal guru.
“You know those stims are for emergencies only,” he said.
“I know.”
Everything felt more or less back to normal. I took a deep breath and felt pretty good.
“You threw everything out of balance back there,” Sean said. “You shouldn’t drive when you’re like that.”
“Am I okay?”
“Your blood levels are back to normal,” he said. “I’m just finishing up replacing the stim packets.”
“Thanks.”
He continued working next to me. All I felt was a tugging at the back of my neck and an occasional tiny jolt down my spine.
“Why didn’t you put down the revivor?” he asked.
“I did.”
“The other one,” he said. “The one in the restroom.”
“Word travels fast.”
“It does.”
I sighed. The truth was, I’d had every intention of doing it; from the moment I walked into the building to the moment I walked into that bathroom, and even the moment I pulled the codes from it.
“Did they ask you about it?” I said.
“Yeah, they wanted to know if you’ve seemed unstable at all.”
“What did you tell them?”
“That you’re fine, which was a lie. Of course, if they listened to me, they wouldn’t have sent you in the first place,” he added.
“You recommended they didn’t use me?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“For the same reason they wanted to send you,” he said. “Because you have experience with revivors. But unlike them, I know what some of those experiences were. I questioned how you might react, and I was right.”
A strange sensation crept up my back and neck as he withdrew the thin series of tubes, the ends popping softly as they came free. He smoothed down the little dermal strip.
“Good as new.”
I stretched, flexing my muscles and cracking my back. Everything felt like it was in order. When I ran the diagnostics on my heads-up display, everything came up green. I swiveled my legs around and hopped off the chair.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “All the revivors are going down after they’re done with them anyway.”
“You did everything right. No one’s going to complain about the job you did, but why would you want to go back to that place? How often do that many revivors end up stateside?”
Sean had a way of echoing my own thoughts. The truth was, I could still feel that cold slab of meat crushing my neck, that saliva and breath that should have been warm but wasn’t. I could still see those eyes, just barely glowing in the dark like they used to at night, and that damn girl, that walking sex doll and the way it spoke.
“It mixed me up,” I said.
“Hmm?”
“The pleasure model they set up,” I said. “I was just talking to myself, talking out loud. It looked like a snuff job to me. I said someone was probably still looking for her. You know, the girl.”
“I get it.”
“It said, ‘He is.’ It said, ‘He’ll never stop looking.’ ”
“I see.”
I shook my head, remembering that wax doll’s face looking up at me.
“It’s crazy,” I said, “but I was sure it meant her father.”
Sean pressed his lips together.
“It got to you?”
“No. It wasn’t that. It was the way it said it. It was like something else was in there looking out…. It was like it paged through the memories there, and dredged up a piece of information it didn’t even understand.”
Sean didn’t say anything, and after a while, I thought maybe I should stop talking.
“I meant to do it,” I said. “I’d have been doing it a favor.”
He smiled a little, and clapped me on the shoulder.
“Nico, I won’t bar you from the case, but as a friend, my recommendation to you is to walk away from this one. It took you a long time to—”
“I know.”
“You have never been quite the same.”
“I know.”
“When they ask me, and they will, all I have to tell them is your body is chemically stressed, and I recommend a short time to readjust. No one would blink at that. This case will move on, and the next one will move in.”
My first reaction was to say no, but it didn’t come out of my mouth. Instead I shook my head. I grabbed my coat and shrugged it on.
“Revivors are not human beings,” he said.
People said that all the time. I’d said it too, early on. Revivors weren’t living, but they weren’t dead either. Their knowledge, their compulsions, were human. That I knew. I thought of the girl, her pale face and her dark hair. Her soft voice. She was not like the revivors in that hellhole, the revivors I had known. She was not like them, and she was like them.
I learned more about revivors than I’d ever wanted to when they dragged me into that hole. It made no difference what you were in life; strip away the brain chemistry, and you had a revivor. They were what lurked under the surface of all of us, even me.
“I don’t know what they are,” I said to Sean.
Sean watched from across the room, but he didn’t say anything more as I left the lab and closed the door behind me.
Faye Dasalia—East Concord Yard
The sun came up shortly after we emerged from the tunnel. The lights from the previous night had flickered
