Текст книги "Amped"

Автор книги: Daniel H. Wilson

Соавторы: Daniel H. Wilson
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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 16 страниц)

“You never ate Mister Chicken? Damn, how do you live?” Lyle asks me.

We’re outside a fast-food shack, a few hours outside Eden, sitting on molded plastic chairs that have faded to the color of dirty cotton candy. The building is perched on the side of a hill, hugging a winding road. A motley collection of trailer houses are roosted along the steep route, bleached and broken, like flotsam left behind after a flood.

“How have you lived this long, driving that shit heap?”

Lyle’s blue pickup truck is sitting ten feet away, engine still ticking. The sun-blanched dashboard is buckled with tectonic cracks, and coiled springs root through the foam seats, only occasionally, painfully, breaching. The rattling monster gives me bad memories of high school. And Lyle starts it with a screwdriver. No kidding.

The cowboy points at his car with a nugget of fry bread that trails gossamer tentacles of honey. “Sometimes you gotta go backward before you can go forward. That heap may be shitty, but she’s never been touched by the government.” Lyle takes a bite, talks with his mouth full. “Lucky for us, Oklahoma never bought into safety inspections.”

I poke fingers through the red plastic ribs of my chicken basket. The food is greasy, hot, and astonishingly good.

“Did you call Valentine?” I ask.

“Yeah,” says Lyle. He activates an e-cigarette and lounges back in the chair. “Couldn’t say much with him under surveillance. Told him enough to put him and his boys on lockdown.”

“Let’s hope we get there before Vaughn’s Priders,” I say.

Lyle nods lazily, pushes steam out of his nostrils. The hypnotically wailing cicadas and restless grasshoppers fill in the conversation for a few minutes. It’s peaceful out here. The sporadic rush of cars going past is like a fall wind.

“What do you really want out of this? Astra?” I ask Lyle.

He tosses an empty e-cigarette cartridge onto the ground, where it joins a hundred others in various states of decomposition. Activates another.

“Change, man,” he says. “You ever hear of the scala naturae?”

“Aristotle. The great chain of being. A medieval categorization of living things. Before there was a difference between science and religion.”

Lyle shakes his head at me, lips curling up at the corners, takes a drag.

“Teacher,” I say, shrugging.

“Then you know the order,” says Lyle. “Plants, animals, men, angels, then God. Difference between men and angels is that men are stuck in a body. They feel pain, hunger, thirst. But me and you, we don’t have to feel them things. Body diagnostics come on level one. Easy. We can turn off the human condition. So maybe we’re closer to angels, you know? Creatures of the mind. A higher morality.”

I push my food to the side. “The machine doesn’t make us into something new, Lyle. It only amplifies our abilities. More of the same.”

Lyle stands up, paces.

“But when you’re whole hog, the decisions come from so far down … goddamn. The machine takes us deeper into our souls. That far inside, we’re capable of anything. Way beyond right or wrong.”

“A friend of mine once said that if you’re good, you’ll do good things. If you’re not, you won’t.”

“Don’t let Jim fool you, Owen. We’ve all got a killer inside us.”

I watch the cowboy pace for a moment, trying to judge how serious he is. “We’re men, Lyle, not angels. The Zenith can’t take the blame. If anything, it makes us more responsible. We can do more.”

Lyle smokes and watches the road. I ignore the fluttering grasshoppers and winding cars, pulse pounding in my peripheral vision. If Lyle really believes that he is beyond right and wrong, then I have a serious problem.

Finally, Lyle turns and claps me on the shoulder. “Maybe you’re right,” he says, walking around the side of the shack. “Because I got to piss like a racehorse and I never seen an angel do that.”

Lyle and I drive maybe a couple hundred miles northeast before the cowboy wordlessly pulls off the main highway. Thirty minutes later, we’ve reached a dust-choked road lined with rusty barbed-wire fences. We follow it until we come upon a tractor trailer beached by the side of the road.

Lyle slams on the brakes, spraying rocks and gravel. Our rooster tail of dirt catches up to us on the breeze as we get out of the car. I sneeze as the haze swallows the tractor trailer. Leaves it looming there like a Jurassic dinosaur.

“Pit stop,” said Lyle.

We’re somewhere in Missouri, I’m guessing. Not to St. Louis yet. Maybe a quarter of the way to Detroit. “We don’t have time,” I say.

There are only four generals left in charge of protecting amps nationwide and one of them is on the verge of being ambushed.

“It’s worth it,” says Lyle, getting out of the truck. Reluctantly, I follow.

The rear half of the abandoned tractor trailer sits cockeyed, sunk hubcaps deep into the reddish dirt. It looks like it’s been here through a few prairie-swept rainstorms, leaning into a sagging barbed-wire fence like a bull scratching himself. Waves of brown grass lie down and stand up at the whim of a hot breeze. It’s been a long day driving.

Pretty soon the sun is going to go down and the rattlesnakes can all go home.

We walk closer and I see a beat-up generator sputtering around the side. Next to it, about a half dozen of Lyle’s soldiers sit in the shade of the trailer. A few of them pass an electronic cigarette between them, the LED tip of it glowing in time to their puffs. They nod to Lyle like soldiers.

Lyle’s got one blood-crusted hand on the clasp that will let those double doors swing wide. He flashes a wry smile my way and gives her a yank.

I’m hit by a sudden blast of refrigerated air from the back of the trailer. It carries a sharp antiseptic smell that reminds me of my dad. I blink a few times, trying to understand what I’m seeing.

Some kind of mobile surgery station.

A surgeon stands in the very back of the trailer, glaring at us with his eyes over his surgical mask. Several layers of clear hanging plastic separate us, but he’s outlined by bright circular spotlights that are mounted from the ceiling, hovering like alien spaceships. A patient sits facedown on a paper-covered massage chair, not moving.

The surgeon waves his latex-gloved hands at us, urging us to hurry up and get the fuck inside already.

Lyle nudges me in the small of my back, and I scramble inside, getting a lift from the trailer hitch. He follows me up and we stand in the leaning doorway.

“Shut the door,” says the surgeon, voice muffled behind his mask.

Lyle hauls the doors closed. The surgeon drops a magnifying monocle over his right eye and gets back to work.

“This looks like a bad idea,” I say, breath frosting.

“You need this,” says Lyle.

“I’m not going under the knife.”

Lyle sighs. “A lot of amps are depending on us. In Eden and all over.”

I remember that anatomy poster on my dad’s office wall. Frontal lobe. Temporal lobe. Motor cortex. Sensory cortex.

“What are we talking here?” I ask.

“A simple sensory suite. Retinal and cochlear. Eyes and ears. Outpatient shit. Takes fifteen minutes. It links up with your Zenith and I’m offering it to you for free. And it ain’t even close to free—right, Norman?”

In reply, the surgeon waves a small shiny tool at Lyle. Then he jams it into his patient’s temple, bracing the guy’s head with his other hand. I hear a pneumatic click, and shudder.

“Why?”

“You’ll see better in the dark. Hear better than a field mouse. All that shit. But the real advantage is in the connections. Zenith will use the extra information. Retinal talks. Cochlear talks. Zenith takes you to another level. Full sensory network.”

“And why do you think I’d want that?”

“Why, to protect Eden,” he says.

He’s right. Thinking of those spotlighters, of Nick sad and bleeding, makes me want to claw through those plastic sheets and leap into the chair.

“All my generals have it,” says Lyle, eyebrows up. “Get it. Learn to use it and you won’t bother to hide your face no more. You’ll be the baddest motherfucker on the block. You’ll be Astra.”

A general? I’ve only been down to level two. Am I ready to lead an army?

Ducking under a leaf of plastic, I take a closer look and my breath catches. The reality of those surgical instruments drops onto me. Gleaming silver, razor edges, and hypodermic tips.

“Relax, man,” says Lyle. “Even little Nick has one of these. They’re so simple to install that this guy can do it in a goddamn trailer in the middle of nowhere.”

“I—I need to think about this—” I stutter.

“You think Vaughn’s gonna let us just walk in and warn Valentine?” asks Lyle. “You’re gonna need every advantage you can get. We don’t have time to fuck around.”

Lyle gestures at the patient. He’s a Hispanic guy curled on his side, eyes wide as the surgeon works on his temple. “Look at us. Amps. We’re morons smarter than Lucifer. Cripples stronger than gravity. A bunch of broke-ass motherfuckers, stinking rich with potential. This is our army. Our people. Strong and hurt. We’re the wounded supermen of tomorrow, Gray. It’s time you got yourself healed. New world ain’t gonna build itself. And the old world don’t wanna go without a fight.”

“Where’s yours?” I ask.

In response, Lyle leans forward and pulls down his lower eyelid with a greasy fingertip. Faintly, I make out a rectangular square floating over the white of his eye. A trace of gray, it’s nearly invisible.

“Came with Echo Squad. Part of the package,” he says.

“You never seemed like the military type.”

Lyle snorts. “Military was my family for a long time. But all that ended once they put the Zenith in me. Saw things clearer then. Realized I had a whole new family—one that needed me.”

“So you got lucky that the names of your unit were leaked and the army kicked you out?”

“Yeah. Lucky,” says Lyle, smirking. Something in the tilt of his smile is off. Some memory, half suppressed. “And you’re lucky, too. This kind of hardware only goes to my closest. Folks with potential. You handled your initiation like a man. I know you can handle these upgrades and a lot more. I’m proud of you, buddy.”

Lyle’s smile goes genuine.

Something bumps into me, and I see it’s the patient. He’s stumbling out of the operating room on wobbling legs. Lyle reaches up and grabs the guy’s shoulders, steadying him. Cups the guy’s cheeks in his dirty hands, orients his face toward me.

“Check out his retinal,” he says.

I peer into the guy’s eyes. They look the same, except the right one. It has a small rectangle sort of floating on it. Like a circuit diagram or a microscopic tattoo. Hardly noticeable, like the one Nick has.

“Thank you, Mr. Crosby,” says the guy.

“Ad astra,” says Lyle.

“To the stars.”

Jim told me to trust myself. Absorb the technology into my body and hope like hell that I’m a good man. We’ll see if he was right.

“If I do this,” I say, “we find who is hunting Zeniths. It’s not enough just to help Valentine. Whether it’s Priders or the government or the military—I don’t care. We’ve got to find out who it is and put an end to it.”

“You’ll find out,” says Lyle. “I promise.”

I push through the last plastic sheet and into the operating room. Lyle fades to a blurry figure on the other side. “Your vision is about to get a whole lot clearer, Gray,” he calls. “You’ll be seeing shit you can’t imagine.”

I take a deep breath and sit down on the padded chair. Nod at the doctor. Then I call back to Lyle. “How can you pay for this?”

“It’s covered,” he replies.

“By who?”

Lyle stops for a second, thinking about how to respond. Finally, he pushes his blurry face against the plastic and looks me dead in the eye.

“By the boss. Who do you think?”

My mind and body are still out of tune.

I hope they run into each other real soon.

–JIM MORRISON

Attacks Deplored, Inquiries Pushed

OKLAHOMA CITY—Against a background of violence and uncertainty, a special federal grand jury was convened today to investigate the outbreaks of violence between implanted and nonimplanted citizens that continue to plague the nation.

Assistant US Attorney Clarence Albad, in his charge to the grand jury, emphasized the savage beating of Pure Pride demonstrators in Eastern Oklahoma last week that injured two dozen people. Similar incidents have been reported in major metropolitan areas across the nation, including the burning of a house in Houston that was used for Pure Human Citizen’s Council meetings.

From his offices in Pittsburgh, Senator Joseph Vaughn has announced that a round of new Pure Pride protests have been scheduled to occur around the country. Sequoyah County, near where the beating incident occurred, has become a symbolic destination for protesters. The governor of Oklahoma announced that 300 Oklahoma state troopers and 500 National Guardsmen have been put on alert statewide, ready to back up local police if violence erupts.

I’m staring up at a four-story row house made of moldering red brick. Shaggy yellow moss coats the seams between bricks like tooth decay. The roof is partly caved in, and swollen slats of plywood cover all the windows but one. Someone has spray-painted a hand-sized image of a bloody star on the porch, and vines have eaten all but the star’s points.

This building was beautiful once. That was a long time ago.

Blinking, I feel the rasp of my new retinal implant under my eyelid. My eye is a little tender, but otherwise I feel the same. Lyle says it takes a while for the Zenith to acclimate to the new information being collected by retinal and cochlear. My new eyes and ears.

“Valentine is in charge of the whole Detroit area?” I ask Lyle. “And he lives in one of these?”

Lyle makes his way carefully down the sidewalk toward me. Puts a finger to his lips. Points to the house.

I stare up into that lone dark window and a wave of white light suddenly bleeds across the surface of the building. The blackness behind the window fades up to gray and I glimpse something inside. I wince and the dazzling light fades. The retinal implant has some kind of autoexposure and it’s always on. I squeeze my eyes shut to block out the overexposed building and to block out something else.

A glimpse of something gnarled and man-shaped, standing behind that window.

“Valentine is in charge,” Lyle says quietly, cracking his knuckles and sizing up the boards that cover the front door. “This neighborhood is Beverly Hills compared to the others. There’s ghettos like this over southwest Detroit. Amps got no other place to go.”

These few blocks of row houses are huddled together in the middle of an abandoned industrial park, falling against one another in a decomposing heap. The carbon lick of extinguished flame rises from some of the gutted windows. At least most of the debris on the street has been stacked or burned. Twisted piles of plastic, broken glass, and scrap metal are scattered like modern art.

I follow Lyle farther down the block. The front stoop of the house next door leans at a vertiginous angle, permanently italicized by rot and the elements.

“Let me check this one,” he says.

“Are you sure he knows we’re coming?” I ask.

“Told you I sent word. But there’s only five Zeniths left out of twelve. He ain’t likely to answer the door to anybody. Even a good friend like me.”

“Where are Stilman and Daley?” I ask. The other generals haven’t been back to Eden since their little vote. Off protecting the amps of America, I suppose.

“They’re around. Checking a couple other spots.”

Lyle smiles with nicotine-stained teeth. I have no time to wonder why we’re sneaking around, because he’s already on the move. He climbs the broken stone steps with wary grace. As he leans forward to peer in a cracked window, Lyle’s jacket hitches and I catch a glint of black metal. A pistol tucked into the crook of his back. A numbness creeps in around my shoulders—this feels wrong.

This whole place feels wrong.

Around us, the grass and trees are twisted and dead. With each breath I feel the metallic sting of air pollution on the back of my throat. A rust-colored grime coats everything: the streets, sidewalks, and abandoned cars and trailers along the side of the empty roads. Under this overcast sky, with the sun a glowing haze on the horizon, the street has an otherworldly, Martian feel to it.

And I can sense the eyes on us.

Families haunt the broken porches up and down the block. They sit on old couches and faded lawn chairs. More people are inside their homes, looking out through cracked panes of glass. A kid on a bike makes lazy loops in the street, somberly watching us, tires scratching over the grit. Unseen dogs bark from the shared backyards behind the row houses.

Different place, same story. Families like the ones in Eden. Regular people who happen to have technology under their skin and no other place to go. Over the months, they must have filtered out of the suburbs and the country to this place and hundreds of others like it. Shuttled along by friendly reggies, but hustled away just the same. Amps with no jobs or family to turn to.

Lyle speaks to me quietly, cupping his eyes against a dusty window. “He could be in one of these. I don’t know which. Haven’t been here in a year. But we need to hurry. Priders could be here already.”

In the distance, a crumbling factory glares at me with a thousand broken eyes. It would be the simplest thing in the world for Vaughn’s men to camp out in there with a pair of binoculars. Or maybe a rifle. I scan the street again.

My retinal picks out vivid details. Seamlessly lays the extra information into my vision. The device works all the time, slipping more visual data into my head.

I point to the house next door, the one with the collapsed roof. It seems abandoned, with a front door that is barricaded with rotten two-by-fours.

“He’s in there,” I say.

“How you know that?” asks Lyle.

I shrug and nod at the bleeding star that has been spray-painted on the front porch. The symbol is hidden by weeds and the dirt that coats everything, but it’s unmistakable.

“Ad astra,” I say.

“Damn right,” says Lyle. “No use messing with that front door. Follow me.”

Lyle climbs back onto the fallen porch next door, quick and silent. Scales the rotten spine of the fallen porch roof, testing each footstep on bloated wood before going higher. I follow him up, stepping gingerly without my amp activated.

I’m only human, for now.

At the top, we both jump from the splintered porch to the roof of the porch next door. This porch is more sturdy, buttressed by a tar-covered layer of galvanized steel that is warped into black waves. That empty window breaks the cold brick face of the house. Its frame sprouts fanglike shards of glass.

The cowboy considers the window. Pulls a piece of chalk from his pocket and marks a white X on the brick beside it. Drops the chalk and peeks inside.

“So our friends know where to meet us,” he says.

“Careful. Something’s in there.”

Lyle cocks an eyebrow at me. “You mean somebody, right?”

Before I can answer, he ducks under the glass slivers and into the window’s dark throat. For a moment, I’m alone on the sagging porch. The window, just a hole in the bricks, has the treacherous feel of a spider’s nest.

Turns out, that’s not far from the truth.

I hear somebody’s shout from inside, cut off. Hurrying, I crouch and manage to drop inside the window without cutting myself. For a split second, it’s too goddamn dark and I can’t see anything. A body hits the brick wall next to me with a slap. In the reddish slant of window light, an unconscious man falls into view. I step out of the light and press my back against the sweating bricks while my retinal amplification kicks in.

Lyle’s boots crunch off down the hallway. Now I can make out the guy at my feet. A young amp in an army jacket, lying still on a bed of stiff, moldy carpet and rain-bleached trash. I watch him until I see his chest rise and fall.

More strangled shouting comes from deeper inside the house. A crunch of plaster and a shriek. Lyle is long gone. This room is weather-beaten and empty. A dim rectangle of light leads to a claustrophobic hallway, choked with swathes of paint hanging from the ceiling like moss.

Eyes squinted, I take one step toward the hall before I see it coming for me.

The man-sized thing is black on black and galloping toward me in fast, insectile lurches. A spurt of childish bogeyman fear shoots into my veins. I step back and put out three fingers without thinking. Three. The thing falls sideways and bounces off a wall, keeps coming. Two. I can hear its breath hissing in and out. One. A nightmare bursts through the doorway and into the room.

Zero.

Level three. Tactical maneuvers. Evasion. Room clearing. Flanking. Improvised weaponry. Combat medicine. Do you consent? Do you consent?

Yes, oh fuck, yes, yes.

This thing looks like a twisted rag doll come to life—a scarecrow escaped from an abandoned field. It leaps for me and I’m instantly on my back, elbows crunching through broken glass and water-stained trash. Shrunken black fingers claw for my throat. I can see in flashes, my retinal feeding this thing’s movements to my Zenith. I grapple with impossibly thin and strong arms. Wrestle for position against spidery legs. Scrabbling through debris, I feel a shard of glass dimple the skin of my right palm, penetrate, and lodge itself warmly between flexing tendons.

It should hurt, but it doesn’t.

In a detached way, I notice that I am fighting something less than a man. And somehow more. There isn’t much but a torso and head with a four-limb prosthetic replacement. Each wire-thin prosthetic leg and arm has been wrapped in black plastic trash bags held in place with twine and rubber bands. As the wire man manipulates his prosthetic limbs, muscles in his chest and stomach flex like bugs crawling under his skin. He’s strong as rebar and quicker than me.

But he’s light. I manage to heave him up and off. Leaning back on the bricks, I scratch and grope my way to my feet. I make a mental note that my right hand is pretty fucked up. A piece of smoky glass shark fins out the side of my palm, stuck there.

I run for the hallway. About halfway across the room I hear him coming and I turn. The wire man sways toward me, alarmingly fast on his knotty stick legs.

His prosthetics are too strong. They swing at me like baseball bats, bruising my forearms each time I deflect them with the uncanny speed-boost of my Zenith. And his basic physics are off. The wire man’s arms are longer than his torso indicates they should be. The discrepancy seems to fool the built-in mechanics of my Zenith. He feints and one arm dips, hooks under my neck. A brutal metallic knee crushes into my diaphragm, pinning me to the wall.

While I gasp for air, two gnarled arms wreathe my torso and squeeze. I’m impaled on the blunt knee, breath rushing from my lungs. I wrap my fingers around the plastic-encased metal arms, pushing with every fiber of muscle I have. Even with all my strength, I can’t breathe.

The thing leans its face in close to mine. When it speaks, I can see that inside those shrunken cheeks are nothing but purple gums and a wormlike tongue. “Valentine won’t go easy, Zenith,” it hisses.

I have no breath in me to tell this thing that I’m a friend.

At level three, I am deep inside. The glass shard embedded in the butt of my right palm throbs, but the pain is informational. I force myself to let go of the wire man’s arms. His knee plunges even harder into my diaphragm and my vision erupts with pinpricks of capering light. I’ve got enough oxygen for another second or two of consciousness.

So I better make it count.

In one deliberate jab, I drag the side of my right palm across the wire man’s forehead, just over his eyes. The shard peels his scalp open even as it bites deeper into my hand. The wire man shrieks in pain as warm blood gushes out over his eyes.

That anvil lifts from my chest and I fall to my knees, coughing and gagging. The wire man writhes on the ground, spewing spittle and curses from wrinkled lips. I’m able to scramble to the hallway, shove the water-warped door closed behind me on broken hinges.

I put my back against it.

Looking at my hand, medical information telegraphs into my head. I bite the fabric of my shirt sleeve and rip a piece off with my good left hand. Fabric dangling from my teeth, I yank out the blood-coated sliver of glass and drop it on mildewed carpet. I wrap my hand tightly and tie it off.

There is no pain, no urgency. There is only the Zenith.

Through the floor, I feel the tremor of fighting in another room. The Zenith tells me where Lyle is, like an intuition. I dart through the broken hallways and stairwells lit only by the grayish amplified light of my retinal. A couple of times, I see motionless people shapes lying on the floor as I pass by.

Finally, I see a blade of light on the moldering floor. Wrenching open the door, I find Lyle standing with his back to me in a wide-open room, a patch of dusky sky visible overhead. Several interior walls have been torn down and part of the ceiling opens up to the evening air. The wood floors are bleached gray and the weather has washed the trash into congealed clumps along the walls. A couple of trees are growing in here, reaching awkwardly for the ragged hole of light above.

Gaunt and tall and breathing hard, Valentine leans against the far wall, his long fingers splayed out behind him. His green eyes are wide and unblinking, collecting information. He hunches forward slightly, collarbone pushing through his olive green T-shirt. His army jacket hangs loose.

“You okay?” Lyle asks me, without looking.

“Fine,” I say. “This is not going according to plan.”

“What makes you say that?” he asks, advancing toward the cornered amp.

“Hey, number thirteen,” Valentine calls to me. He tries to grin, but a thrill of panic chases the curl out of his lip. His eyes dart back to Lyle. “How much does he know?”

“The right amount,” says Lyle, taking a step forward.

“We’re here to help you,” I say. “Stop running.”

Valentine laughs once gutturally. “You don’t know enough, kid,” he says.

“I know that Elysium has a whole dossier on you. You’ve been compromised. We’re here to warn you,” I say, walking deeper into the room.

“Check out the desk, thirteen,” says Valentine, “then get back to me.”

He lowers his forehead and trains his eyes on Lyle. His fingers have stopped drumming the wall. I look back and forth between the two soldiers. It strikes me how still they both are, like gunslingers, two sweaty palms hovering over gun butts.

“Lyle—” I begin to ask.

Quick as a mousetrap, Valentine has pulled his arms away from the wall. He wraps his thumb around his pinky and leaves the three remaining fingers splayed like knives. In the greenish light, his spotted forearms are the mottled color of a shallow ocean floor. His face looks like he’s about to cry.

“No,” says Lyle.

Valentine lets his fingers collapse into a fist: three, two, one, zero. His body shudders once, jerks as though he’s just completed an electrical circuit. Lyle is already diving forward as Valentine’s lips twitch.

I know from experience what he is saying: Three, two, one. Yes, yes, yes.

Lyle lunges and hits the wall, collapsing rotten plaster with his elbow. But Valentine is gone, already pivoted on his foot and stepped perfectly out of the way. His red hair hangs sweaty over his forehead, and underneath it I can see that his eyes have gone slack and empty in a familiar way. Breathing harshly through a snarl, he lifts one leg and blindly kicks out the window behind him.

“Shit,” mutters Lyle, as Valentine hunches like a crab and spins in place. He disappears through the window without a sound, without touching the jagged remaining glass or so much as tickling the frame. Here and gone like a vampire.

Lyle pauses, looks at the desk, then the window. Makes a decision and follows Val outside, moving just as naturally, with eyes just as dead. I can hear the iron fire escape outside clattering against the building as Lyle gives chase.

On Val’s rust-eaten metal desk, a spray of papers and folders lie open. My retinal is picking out the words in the dim light before I can even think of reading them. Mission Analysis and Planning. Familiar names pop out of the dense text: Stilman, Daley, Valentine, and Lyle Crosby. My name. And the names of places: Houston, Chicago, Detroit.

 … necessary to execute synchronous combat operations on key political targets to continue decreasing regional stability…

The words describe a battle plan.

. . . escalate operations to precipitate “crisis moment” that spur regional factions to engage local forces independently, triggering widespread chaos…

Civil war.

. . . as a Zenith you have a destiny, Valentine. Failure to respond to this proposal will be recognized as a tacit rejection of your duty to your squad, your people, and to Astra. It will be met with lethal response…

And the signature at the bottom: Lyle Crosby.

The laughing cowboy doesn’t want to warn Valentine; Lyle is here to kill a rogue Zenith.

My world realigns, shifts into new focus. On the roof, Lyle is doing his best to murder an innocent man who refused to join him in a new war.

Cradling my hurt hand, I duck through the window and onto the rattling fire escape. I climb the rungs, one-handed, my cloth-wrapped palm stained with dirt. The sun has just slunk over the horizon, leaving the clouds bloody.

A gunshot punches into the twilight as I reach the top of the ladder. Pigeon wings flap in my ears like an echo. I peek over the edge.

The rotten sloping roof is empty. Dirty-pink insulation peeks through collapsed holes like diseased flesh. At the far edge, two silhouettes embrace. Lyle holds the gun in his right hand. His left arm is wrapped around Valentine’s shoulder. He lowers Val to the rooftop.

“Sorry,” I hear him murmur. “I’m sorry, Val.”

Valentine lies on his side. He tucks his right hand under his left armpit, forearm over the wound to his chest, shoulders arched in pain. His breath is coming in shudders and his shirt is dark and heavy with spreading blood. Lyle crouches next to the fallen soldier, head bowed, his back to me.

Val’s green eyes open and he spots me. His mouth spreads into a red smile, teeth washed in blood. “Thirteen,” he chokes. “Good luck.”