I wasn’t asking for permission; I was just leaving. I was just trying to do that as politely as I could without permission, and without being made to stay. I didn’t even wait for her reply as I turned for the door.
I did manage not to run.
I managed to walk across the room, and through the door, aware of being watched by every creature present. Once I hit the walkway, I began to run. I don’t know why. I only knew that this was what I needed to do. I didn’t even know where I was going.
It was easy to take the first off-ramp leading to a human building. I bolted through the checkpoint at the other end, and raced down a corridor until I saw a sign indicating a set of stairs. Yanking the door open, I headed into the stair well. Three flights down, and the surging restlessness rolling through my muscles hadn’t abated.
What the Hell!
“Of all the puke-bucketed shit sticks!” I muttered, not sure who I was referring to, but feeling better for the cussing. I hit the bottom of the stairs, and pulled open the door. At least, that’s what was supposed to happen. The door remained locked, and did not move an inch.
“Fuck!” I slammed it with a flat-palm strike, and wished I’d stayed long enough to find out where my weapons were stashed. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”
After punctuating each word with a hand slap, I tried the door, again. It still did not budge. I rested my forehead against it, resisting the desire to bang my head on the frame, and tried to work out what I was going to do next. The voice from the other side came as a surprise.
“Who’s in there?”
“Never you fucking mind,” I said. “Just get me out of here.”
“Cutter?”
“And who are you?”
I’d been about to say something a lot less polite, but I remembered what the queen had said about me being a poster-girl for Reunion, and figured I’d better start living up to it. The door handle rattled, and I took several steps back, checking the walls and stairs above me. I reached for where the Blazer usually hung, and found it gone, checked for the Zakrava, Glazer and Brahms, and then remembered they were still in the armory…or lost, in the case of the Zak.
Damn. I really had liked that gun. Steppy hadn’t been too impressed, either—but memories of Steppy had to wait, as the door swung inwards, and a young man in an Odyssey uniform stood there. He had let the door open of its own accord, but hadn’t followed it inside. I watched as his curiosity turned to startlement, when he caught sight of me. I was well away from the door and in one of the more aggressive defensive stances, I knew.
His face paled, and he swallowed nervously.
“Um, ma’am? Delight said I should show you to the gym.”
I shook my head, and he spoke again.
“Or the front door, if you insisted. We have cleared the hallways.”
That was…good. A little worrying, but I figured Delight might know why I was feeling a sudden surge of energy, as well as the strangest desire to either kill something or weep.
“Front door,” I said, trying to ignore the crawling sensation over my skin, the restless itch that burned muscle deep.
“Yes, ma’am. Turn left here, and then right when you hit the double glass doors,” and he backed away from the stairwell, but not before I realized he hadn’t been armed.
He must have caught my glance because he added, “Delight also says there are no weapons being carried, right now. She says you needed to know that.”
Delight knew an awful lot about what I was feeling, it seemed. Made a girl wonder exactly how many times she’d gone through it. Funny how Delight was nowhere to be found in my head. I guess she just didn’t want to have her mental ass grabbed and hauled out into the open where I could shake the living shit out of it.
I nodded, and moved to the door. He backed further out into the hall, and kept himself exactly where I could see him.
“Front door’s that way,” he said, pointing, and I took off.
It felt good to be running again.
I hit the double glass and hung a right. I’d been tempted to hang a left, but right felt better. There were people and vespis out there that I didn’t recognize, but I didn’t see a single weapon. It was almost like someone had called ahead…
“Delight?”
Still no answer, but I was feeling good. The running was good, and I was a long way from being out of breath. I’d run five blocks before I realized I was on the way to the airfield. Oh. Good. I could do a few laps around that. I needed to do a few laps around that. Heavens knew why, but that’s just the way it was. I was starting to think that whatever Odyssey had slipped into the tank to get me back on my feet might be responsible—or irresponsible; it depended on the way you looked at it.
That would explain why Delight might know what was going on.
Excellent. She could explain it to the queen and the other vespis, then.
I hit the edge of the airfield and turned right, starting around it in an attempt to run some of the pent-up energy out of my limbs. The field was empty, completely clear of life and without a single shuttle in sight. There was also no sign of the small stage that had been set up, before. I scanned the ridgeline, and the buildings at the field’s edge, only partly relieved when nothing moved in either place.
I hit the end of the field, and turned to run along it, catching a glimpse of a small squad of vespis flying out from the city. They weren’t coming directly towards me, but I decided to keep an eye on them. There was something odd about the way
