but not one of us. His mind hummed like an electronic machine, very compartmentalized and focused. He was worried, but he wasn’t scared. He believed what he said, that he could take control of the nuclear satellite back from Fawkes and back into our hands at the Stillwell camp.
On the screen, he paused for a second, confused. He sensed me.
“Leave him alone,” Ai said without looking at me. I eased off and let his consciousness fade away from me. “Mr. Vaggot, a lot rides on you.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I understand.”
“I know you will not let us down.” The window with his face in it flashed and went out.
“Mr. Raphael,” Ai said, “how are efforts on the streets going?”
She sat at the head of the big table that faced the monitors, and unlike the rest, she sat cross-legged in the middle of a large, square pillow that was right up on the table itself. None of the others at the table looked at her or even seemed to know she was there. They stared down at the tabletop, eyelids half-closed. Her face had a slack, distant expression like it did when she was deep in a vision and flying on pentatrosin. She stared off at nothing, aware of the things around her but not seeing them. She didn’t see us come in, but she’d known we were coming and knew we were there. One of the many pieces of her aura turned its individual pattern toward me, green light spiking up from out of the blue. With one tiny hand, she waved us over.
“The National Guard is being utilized primarily for humanitarian efforts at this point,” Raphael said. His handsome face, young in contrast to Osterhagen’s, which scowled from the monitor next to it, looked tired. “They can handle the peacekeeping effort for now. They’re in the process of aiding the wounded and transferring them to local medical hubs, but the hospitals inside the hot zones are getting overrun. The streets are impassable along many major routes, though, and that’s making transfer to outlying facilities difficult without using air traffic.”
“Are the rescue teams encountering any resistance?” Ai asked, her soft, deep voice airy. “Are Fawkes’s revivors engaging them?”
“Only as targets of opportunity,” he said. “National Guard teams are blockading off areas, courtyards, and buildings to act as sanctuaries to people caught on the street or who can’t get home. But they’re filling up fast.”
“Have there been attempts to run those blockades?” Ai asked.
“Several,” Mr. Raphael said, “but not in any concentrated fashion. They haven’t found any pattern to it.”
“They are looking for us,” Ai said, her eyes dreamy. “But they won’t stop here, with this city. Before Fawkes destroys it, they will try to leave.”
“They’re clustered at the three towers,” Osterhagen said, “but overall movement suggests that might be the case. They’re spreading out to cover a wider area.”
“It won’t work,” someone else said. “All main routes in and out are being locked down. Some will leak through, but not enough to do any real damage.”
“They will leave,” Ai said, causing some to glance at each other nervously. “What about the virus?”
“We were unable to deploy it successfully,” Osterhagen said. “He noticed the breach, and cut off the subject we’d implanted; then, before we could try again, he cut off the lot of them. He must have identified them from the time stamp that keeps track of total reanimation time. He cut off every one of them that was active prior to his sending the code.”
“The virus is sent,” Ai said. Osterhagen frowned, but didn’t contradict her.
“We’ve tried on several captured revivors, but the initialization time is too long,” he said. “He knows what he’s looking for now; by the time the virus has gathered the network information from the mesh and is ready to execute, he’s already cut off the seed subject.”
“A door is open,” she said, staring into space. “Somewhere …someone he’s not expecting and cannot see. The virus is sent.”
“Do you know who?” Mr. Raphael asked. But Ai shook her head, just barely.
“I saw it,” I said, and all the faces on the screens turned to me. Penny looked at me too.
“What?” Osterhagen asked.
“I saw it,” I said. “After we crashed. I know who it is.” The room spun a little as I moved toward the screens, but in spite of everything else, I smiled.
“Who?” Penny asked.
“She’s one of your people,” I said to Osterhagen. “A soldier, the one with the weird name …Flax.”
“Calliope Flax?” Mr. Raphael offered.
I smiled again, feeling giddy. The night I first met Ai, Calliope went to my best friend’s apartment, looking for me. For some reason, she’d beaten the hell out of her piece-of-shit boyfriend, Ted. And for payback, or just because he was pissed, he beat up Karen when she came home. He beat her so bad that time that she died, right in front of me.
I killed him for that. He was the second person I ever killed, and the first one I killed on purpose. I killed Ted, but the bitch who started it never got what was coming to her.
“Calliope Flax,” I said, with a firm nod. “That’s her. She’s a Huma carrier.”
“They checked her,” Osterhagen said.
“Nico lied,” I said. “He covered it up, kept it quiet. He called in a favor, faked it somehow, so we wouldn’t find out.”
Ai had turned to look at me and I saw her smile, just a tiny bit, as her big, spacey eyes looked into my mind. Osterhagen was saying something offscreen to someone, and I saw people move suddenly behind him.
“If she was infected with the same version and she’s not dead yet,” Mr. Raphael said, “then that might just be our in.”
“Find her,” Ai said in her airy voice. It sounded like it came from far away.
Something warm ran down my cheek, and when I wiped it away, I saw blood on my hand. Ai was staring at me, and I felt sweat trickle down my back as she seemed to move away, down a long, dark tunnel.
“Get that doctor down here now,” I heard Penny snap at someone.
I tried to thank her, but my throat had dried up and nothing came out. At the end of the tunnel, everything began to fall away. I was passing out.
Nico Wachalowski—Downtown
The attack had thrown the streets into complete panic. Not long after the first hit, another Chimera appeared and joined the first. They didn’t stage another assault, but they prowled above the streets, waiting for something. Reports flooded in from all over as I crept down a narrow lane the guardsmen had set up for emergency traffic. The Chimeras could easily take out the scattered forces on the ground, but so far they hadn’t done it. When the rescue choppers approached, they let them pass.
“Metro PD got hit too,” Van Offo said from the back. I cut the wheel and felt a jolt go up my dead arm all the way to the shoulder. Some scrambled output trickled by on my HUD off in the corner of my eye.
Van Offo watched me in the rearview mirror.
“Did you hear me?” he asked.
“I heard—”
Pain stabbed into my head, and the gray hand clamped down on the wheel. My foot stomped on the brake, and Calliope jerked in her seat as the car slid to a stop on the wet pavement.
“What the hell?” she snapped.
My head throbbed and light flashed in my eyes. The scene through the windshield flickered, and for a few seconds I was somewhere else; it was a memory, but it was extremely vivid, almost like a hallucination. I was
