Redhead cursed, and fired his pistol—hollow sound as the bullet chanked into the wall above Enda’s head. She fired one burst and Mohawk’s leg shattered in a shower of blood, the white of bone showing through torn meat.
Redhead fired again as he ran for the door, the Glock popping like a child’s toy compared to the roar of the AK. Enda swung the weapon past Osman and took aim at the door. She let off another burst, unsure if she hit Redhead as he disappeared from view, leaving the echo of footsteps in his wake.
Mohawk cried and jabbered—rapid-fire Korean spilling from his mouth intercut with English swearing. The target in the corner was out cold, a small halo of blood pooled around his head. Bowl Cut groaned and got onto all fours.
Enda stood over him and pressed the AK-47 to the back of his head. “Are you going to try and hit me again, Jin?”
He shook his head, scattering tears across the floor.
“Have you got a belt?” Enda asked. He nodded, slow and hesitant. “Pull it tight around your friend’s leg and maybe he won’t die.”
She approached Osman, strapped to the seat, chest stained red with blood. One eye was swollen shut, the other rolled in the socket.
“Osman, can you hear me?”
His eye stopped and found Enda. He groaned, a guttural sound from deep within.
“Help is coming, okay. Stay with me.” She checked his pulse with her free hand. It was too slow. She would have thought he was dead if it weren’t for the whistle of his breathing.
He opened his mouth. “Find—” He paused to swallow blood. “Find JD.” He coughed and a fine mist of blood sprayed over Enda’s face. It was not the first time that had happened.
“Stay with me, kid.” Enda felt his pulse jolt through the veins of his neck and waited for another.
And waited.
Nothing.
Osman’s mouth hung slack—a red mess of bleeding gums and missing teeth. His left eye was open, sad even in death.
“Sorry, kid,” Enda said. She turned back to Jin. “Who’s JD?”
“Fuck you.”
She pulled the gun back, ready to slam its butt into Jin’s face, but the sound of sirens stopped her. They were close. Enda glanced around the room and sighed. She lowered the gun, took out her phone, and called the Mechanic.
“Good afternoon, Enda.”
“It’s really not,” Enda said. “I’m going to be offline for a little while. But I need you to run a name—initials really. JD. Cross-reference that with Tyson’s gait recording. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
“Understood,” Natalya said. “My concern is that this may provide rather a large quantity of poor-quality hits.”
“I trust your judgment. Just sift through them and have a list ready for me by tomorrow.”
Enda hung up, and dropped her phone on the floor. She aimed the assault rifle at it, and opened fire. The phone bounced with the force, glass and metal glittering as they exploded into the air.
The tight tattoo of boots reached Enda through the sharp whine of her ringing ears. With a series of quick movements she released the magazine from the AK-47, cleared the chambered round, and field-stripped the weapon, tossing each piece onto the ground by the doorway.
As she knelt on the floor and laced her fingers behind her head the flash of light off Tiny’s lens caught her eye. The drone hovered in the middle of the room—without her phone, her link to it was lost.
“I hope you got my good side,” she said.
A second later, SWAT officers poured into the room, yelling commands in Korean and English, scanning the room with their shotguns—Enda, three incapacitated thugs, a dead body, and blood pooling on the floor and spattered on the walls.
It did not look good.
It was almost 3 a.m., and JD was still awake. I could tell he hadn’t slept—sensors in my phone-body tracked his breathing patterns and the way he shifted in bed, sighing and turning while beside him Troy lay still.
JD picked his phone off the floor, tethered to the wall by a charging cable. The screen came on, blue-white light shining over the bed, illuminating both JD and Troy so I could see them clearly.
“What are you doing?” Troy said, words dull and groggy.
“I can’t sleep,” he said. “Soo-hyun isn’t answering their phone, and Khoder hasn’t been online for hours. I’m worried.”
“You’re safe here.”
“What does that matter if the others aren’t?”
“You’re doing everything you can.”
“I haven’t done anything.”
Troy sighed. “You’re doing what you can without putting yourself at risk.”
JD didn’t respond. I counted eight seconds of silence before he spoke: “I should go to the police. They’ll find me soon anyway.”
“Prison isn’t safety.”
“What?”
“If you, Soo-hyun, and Khoder are arrested, you won’t be safe.” Troy shifted in bed to kiss JD’s shoulder. JD wrapped an arm around him, pressing my phone-face against Troy’s back.
>> Why are you worried about Khoder and Soo-hyun?
They stayed entwined for thirteen seconds. When JD moved his hand away, he saw my question. “Because they could be in trouble,” he said.
>> Many people are in trouble at this moment.
“You mean, why am I worried about these two in particular?”
>> Yes.
“I care about them. Khoder is a friend, and Soo-hyun is family.”
>> You are connected to them. But now you cannot connect.
“Exactly.”
>> What do get from this connection?
“It’s not about that. You don’t connect to people to get something—”
“You can,” Troy added.
“You can, but you shouldn’t,” JD said. “What do you get from connecting with me?”
“Me?” Troy asked.
“No, I’m talking to my phone.”
>> I learn things I might not otherwise have a chance to learn.
“Right,” JD said. “If you don’t connect with people and learn how their lives differ to yours, then you risk becoming self-absorbed, narcissistic. You can’t tell what a person is like until you spend time with them, and in finding out what they’re like, you learn other ways to be a human.”
“Person,” Troy said.
“What?”
“If you’re going to teach it ethics, you should use ‘person.’ A nonbiological intelligence could never be human, but it could be a person.”
JD
