stepped in and the door closed slowly behind him, shutting off all sounds of the street.
'Hello?' he called out. There was another door just ahead, on his right. He'd never been through it before. He stepped up to it and pushed. It opened smoothly.
Somewhere behind him he heard a faint tpp-tap sound. He glanced over his shoulder to see a security device of a kind he vaguely remembered from some technology-obsessed gridchannel but had never encountered in real life. It moved across smooth cream plaster on tiny insect-like legs, suspended there by no obvious means. Tiny lenses reflected light as its head swivelled towards him. It was safe to assume that his every move was now being recorded.
Fine. So be it.
Kendrick walked back out and along to the stairwell, then called Hardenbrooke's name loudly. He waited for several seconds without hearing an answer, gazing down at the steps curving away below him.
Fuck it. He walked back to the door he'd opened earlier and entered to find himself in a room entirely devoid of furniture, equipment… anything.
Peeling wallpaper curled down from one corner of the ceiling, and a thin layer of dust coated the white- painted sashes of the windows overlooking the street.
A large empty packing crate stood over to one side, while a greyed-out eepsheet lay in the dust beside it, its internal power source long since dead.
Behind the crate he found a chair, its plastic grey and scarred, the fabric of the seat stained and torn.
This room clearly hadn't been used in a long time.
Tickety-tap, tickety-tap. The spider-device had somehow made its way all the way down from the hallway ceiling and around the door frame, following him into the room. Or was there more than one of them?
Kendrick peered up at it, noting a tiny metallic platform, with a range of minuscule equipment mounted on top, propelled by six cruel-looking jointed legs. It had the smooth metallic-organic appearance of vat-grown molecular technology. Tiny, perfectly machined gears and joints slithered in perfect accord, shifting to follow Kendrick as he stepped back out into the hallway.
He stood again at the top of the stairwell, watching with a certain degree of foreboding as the device negotiated its way back out of the empty room to continue watching him.
Then he heard it: the distant muffled sound of a smothered cough, inaudible to anyone with normal hearing. It had come from below, from the rooms where Hardenbrooke held his regular appointments with Kendrick.
He laid a hand on the black-painted banister and went down. 'Hardenbrooke?'
Below, the clinic was wreathed in semi-darkness, the leather couch and the apparatus that surrounded it in the centre of the room resembling some esoteric hightech sculpture. Next to them stood the familiar wheeled tray of surgical instruments and sprays.
Someone was here – Kendrick had heard them. So why were they hiding?
At some point in the past the basement area had been partitioned to allow the addition of a small office, the interior of which Kendrick could now see through a long rectangular window with half-closed shutters. He stepped towards it, seeing nothing more exciting through the glass than the corner of a desk and a tall steel cabinet.
He entered to find two large wooden crates stuffed with cardboard folders, as if Hardenbrooke had been in the process of packing. Ever since the LA Nuke, people paranoid about losing data through EMP weapons tended to keep hard copies of everything. Considering Hardenbrooke's own history, it wasn't surprising that he shared this tendency.
Okay, nothing like a little breaking and entering. Whoever had coughed could wait. Kendrick scanned the contents of one cardboard folder and recognized a name: Erik Whitsett.
If his heart had still been working, it would have skipped a beat then. There's a name that keeps cropping up. He dug around some more, coming up with yet more names. Some he didn't recognize, others he did. All of them Labrats – but maybe that wasn't so surprising.
Kendrick dug further down, finding more names. Again, one or two of them were recognizable. He started on finding Caroline's name listed there. But Caroline had never received any treatments from Hardenbrooke. Or had she? And why hadn't she told him about it in that case?
He studied her file. Augmentations in highly accelerated state, he read. A polite euphemism for turning rogue. More names, soon scattered across the floor. Then – Buddy Juarez, with exactly the same words: Augmentations in highly accelerated state.
He couldn't be sure about any names he didn't recognize or was uncertain of but he was willing to bet every last one of them had passed through Ward Seventeen, down in the Maze. He studied more records: every one of them dead or dying from their rogue augments.
Just outside the office, something moved with a metallic click. Kendrick froze, then carefully stepped back out into the main area.
Tickety-tack, tickety-tack.
He glanced up towards the shadowed ceiling, catching the glint of light on a lens…
And then it was on him.
It landed right on his upturned face, tiny needle-legs catching onto his cheek so that he yelled with pain and surprise. He reached up to rip it off, but even the gentlest tug, he knew, would take skin and flesh away with it. The tips of the device's legs were icy, and a numbness began to spread through his face, his mind. And then Kendrick slid into blackness, lost in a deep, fathomless night.
Consciousness seeped back only slowly.
At first Kendrick saw only dim shapes, their edges blurred. Then his eyes focused more clearly. He did not like to think too deeply of the biosynthetic tendrils that sprang alert along his optic nerves, allowing his vision to snap into such remarkable, almost surreal clarity. In this state, he was entirely capable of discerning the tiniest cracks in the plaster ceiling above his head. It gave him a sense of sharing his skin with some other being whose intent and purpose he could not really know – which was maybe as good a definition of Labrat augmentation as any.
He couldn't yet move, although a distant tingling and dull itch was beginning to make itself felt in his limbs and face. Apart from that, every muscle was frozen. When he tried to speak, only a thin mumble passed through his lips, which refused to part.
Kendrick could hear someone talking upstairs. He was picking up sounds better – and from further away -than he ever had before. Rather than being good news, this was instead an indication of how unstable his augmentations had become, altering his flesh and his nervous system in new and alarmingly unpredictable ways.
At first, the words from above were muffled, but his augments filtered and boosted the sound of them until he could listen with relative ease. Even with such enhancements, however, only a small part of what Hardenbrooke was now saying made sense.
'I don't give a shit,' he overheard. Was Hardenbrooke speaking over a line? Then a brief exclamation, as of someone else about to raise an objection: so Hardenbrooke was not alone there. 'We've got to get rid of him. Smeby must have told him something, otherwise why would he sneak around like this?'
Another voice: 'Maybe because you let him in to go wandering around? Jesus, how paranoid can you get?'
Malky?
A pause as Hardenbrooke's voice faded then came back again, as if he was moving about on the upper floor. '… Take care of making sure he's still out, okay? So if I leave you here, sure you can't screw up?'
Soon cautious footsteps echoed down the basement steps, sounding to Kendrick like dustbin lids being smashed against a wall.
Kendrick's body tingled as he imagined the machine-growths entwined with his flesh and blood filtering the drug out of his body according to some complex set of heuristic rules, as if his body was a fortress and the nanites its defenders.
Which possibly explained why the tingling sensation grew exponentially for several seconds before Kendrick found that he could both feel and move his arms and legs again.
One moment he was strapped to the basement couch, the next he was crouching in the shadows just behind
