Текст книги "Amped"

Автор книги: Daniel H. Wilson

Соавторы: Daniel H. Wilson
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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 16 страниц)

Lyle stands up and faces me. I watch him, motionless. Only my head is visible over the lip of the roof.

“You saw the pages,” says Lyle, with a tone of finality. “Valentine was talking to the Priders. He was going to warn them. I can’t have a rogue Zenith on my hands, Gray.”

I hear movement in the room downstairs.

“I’m not the bad guy, understand,” continues Lyle. “And that girl who killed herself … Samantha. She was right, Gray. Made the coward’s choice, but she was right. This world is never going to accept us. There’s no place for us in it. We’ve got to fight to make a new one. Especially if you’re a Zenith.”

On the ground behind Lyle, Valentine’s chest stops rising and falling.

“Think of it,” says Lyle. “Coordinated strikes on reggie targets, timed to create maximum confusion. Guerrilla warfare, house-to-house. Not just us soldiers but all the amps against all the reggies. Forging a new country out of plastic and titanium and silicone. It’s happening tomorrow, Gray, on a scale you can’t imagine.”

“Why are you doing this?” I ask.

“Change, man,” he says. “Carving out what’s mine. Every living thing will fight to survive. And if the people don’t want to fight, we’ll make them. You don’t pick your revolution. It picks you.”

My eyes flick to the open window a story below me. I catch sight of Stilman and Daley inside. The two Zeniths are moving quickly and efficiently around the room. Stilman is carrying a dented gasoline can.

“Four of us left,” says Lyle. “What’s your choice?”

He raises the gun and trains it on my face, steadies his hand.

“Fight or die,” calls Lyle. “Stilman joined. Daley. The rest died. Are you my general or not?”

Valentine’s eyes are open and glassy, reflecting the gory clouds in the darkening sky. Sweat still evaporates from his forehead. The wind caresses his red hair.

Lyle pulls the hammer back. “Nobody is surprised when an oppressed people fight back. We are not the aggressors, Gray. We’re freedom fighters, joining the tradition of our ancestors who fought for their humanity. They won’t give us rights? We’ll take them. We’ll take everything we want.”

In my peripheral I can see the hood of Lyle’s truck just up the street. I know that the screwdriver that starts it is lying loose in the floorboard. Slowly, I lean my body away from the railing. Feel the wind breathing on the back of my neck.

“Okay,” I say.

“You’ll fight?” Lyle asks, warily lowering the gun.

“Yeah,” I say. “I’ll fight.”

And I let go of the railing.

*** SPECIAL REPORT ***

By JANET MARINO

Hundreds dead as detonations rock Chicago, Houston, Detroit Amp Extremists claim responsibility for horrific carnage

The Associated Press

CHICAGO

A simultaneous series of detonations crippled the downtown metropolitan areas of three American cities late last night in what witnesses described as a highly coordinated terrorist attack conducted by trained teams of amp extremists.

…

Ten hours on the road, and my eyes feel rough as cracked porcelain. Not even Lyle could run fast enough to catch me when I bolted. Got this truck started and peeled out before he could even get off a shot.

I’ve been hightailing it back to Eden ever since. Got to find Jim.

Traffic started bogging down a few blocks away from Jim’s work site. I saw a lot of people gathered and it was a bad sign, so I skirted around on a side street. Crunched Lyle’s old pickup to a halt in a weedy ditch.

The rattling truck is finally stopped, but my body still tingles with phantom vibrations. My hands don’t want to relax their grip on the plastic steering wheel. I put my forearm across it and rest my sweaty forehead, feeling my injured palm throb in time to my heartbeat.

Try to think.

The reports on the radio are chaotic. I don’t know what to believe. Timed detonations in cities around the country. Buildings falling. Hundreds dead, maybe thousands. Astra claiming responsibility for the start of a new war. Lyle must have thousands of amps ready to fight. A whole rank structure. Training and upgrades. He’s building a new world and I was too late to stop him.

It is chaos in the parking lot out in front of the site. Full to overflowing with screaming demonstrators. More than just the guys who lost their jobs. Priders are here from everywhere. I wonder what Lyle is planning to do to them.

The double-wide chain-link gate is closed and locked today. Just inside, I spot a familiar hulking figure. The Brain, unmistakable, flanked by dozens more of Lyle’s gang from Eden. They stand behind the flimsy metal links, staring out. Taunting the demonstrators with smiles and crossed arms.

Lyle wasn’t fucking around.

I haul myself out of the truck. Scale the back fence and hop over, keeping a lot of room between me and the Brain. The work site is about half as full as normal. Mostly just the old men, heads down. Still doing their jobs while the angry crowd outside builds and builds.

I scour the site for Jim until a worker points upward.

Four stories up, I exit the wooden scaffolding to find the old man unloading bundles of rebar off the crane and stowing them in long lines for the rod busters to drop into concrete. Jim is working relentlessly, drops of sweat hanging off his chin, the putter of his exoskeleton motor cutting through the quiet air up here. The way he is moving is thoughtful and automatic at the same time. Calm compared to the madness unfolding downstairs.

“Hey,” I call out.

Jim turns to me, looks me up and down without saying anything. His eyes settle on the weeping improvised bandage wrapped around my hand. With a sigh, he sets down a piece of shivery rebar.

“Let me look at that hand,” he says.

The first-aid box is at the base of the building. Jim signals the crane operator that the load is finished. Then he leads me down the creaking scaffolding to the ground floor. The subbasement for the parking garage isn’t complete yet, and the three-story drop still tickles the pit of my stomach. In the cool cement interior of the half-completed structure, Jim pops open the rusty first-aid box and sets out the antiseptic, cotton balls, antibiotics, gauze.

In here, the rumble of the people outside sounds like distant traffic, punctuated by an occasional angry shriek. Other old men are standing outside the building, smoking and trying to look calm.

“You save that Zenith?” asks Jim.

“I … no,” I say.

“Jim—” I start to speak and then stop. I can’t think of the right way to say this because there isn’t one. Sometimes you’ve just got to blurt it out. “Lyle is the one killing Zeniths. Astra isn’t defending us. It never was. Lyle’s trying to start a chain reaction …”

I trail off when I see the look on Jim’s face.

“I’m too late,” I say.

Jim pauses from wiping dirt off my hand with a cotton ball.

“Shit’s hit the fan. After the tri-city attacks, Priders are rioting and looting amp neighborhoods all over the country. They got Joe Vaughn himself rallying up the road,” says Jim, turning my hand and examining the wound. “He’s outside the old post office, a mile from here, whipping these people into a goddamn frenzy.

“I don’t know how we’re gonna—” he is saying, wrapping my hand in gauze, but his voice is swallowed as the dull roar of the demonstrators rises an octave. The front fence starts ringing like a bell. Sounds like it’s being tossed around by a tornado.

“Priders are coming in,” I say, looking around and seeing no easy way out of the site. “We can make it out if we run now.”

“I didn’t want this to happen. But that doesn’t mean I can skip it.”

“What do we do?” I ask.

Jim gives me back my hand. Surveys the work site—taking in the worried faces of his elderly coworkers. His face is grim when he turns back to me. A saw blade slides out from under the forearm of his exoskeleton.

“We fight,” he says.

In the winking shadows of the half-finished building, the old men stand side by side, dirty jeans and flannel work shirts wrapped in titanium exoskeletons. Scowls on wrinkled faces. Their blades and saws are out, whirring like cicadas under the biting heat.

Jim and I join them as a wave of Priders pushes down the rest of the fence. They’re trampling into the site, grabbing improvised weapons off the ground. Pipes, boards, and pocketknives. Lyle’s people are fighting back. Not the erratic, robotically efficient fighting of a Zenith but old-school brawling. Sharpened reflexes fueled by real anger.

The police officers who were patrolling outside are coming in, too. Stepper-wearing riot cops, pushing forward in a line with plastic shields up. Batons out and guns holstered, for now. Obsidian statues crashing into a line of amps, just a bunch of kids with heads full of government cheese. The kids aren’t trained as well as soldiers, but they strike fast and bounce out of harm’s way quicker than fleas.

The Priders are surging in around the cops, pushing one another forward in a faceless crush of human limbs. It’s a tidal wave that pushes the line of old men back. Makes fighting nearly impossible.

Jim shrugs off a tubby guy with a tough-guy mustache, arms swinging. Another guy gets hold of me, and Jim accidentally runs his blurring saw blade over the man’s forearm. The guy gapes at the red slash and it gapes right back at him. The crowd eats him up and he stumbles away clutching his arm.

The horizon rushes in until it’s a wall of stinking sweat and body heat and shouting faces. Jim and I retreat slowly, side by side, shoving violent demonstrators away from us. Punching only when we have to. Jim’s saw blade spews bluish smoke as he waves it at Priders dumb enough to get close.

Then rocks and chunks of gravel start falling in on us. Priders out beyond the fence are throwing them from a safe distance. The stone rain adds to the confusion, hitting amps and Priders alike. A jagged hunk of concrete cartwheels past Jim’s leg, a tangle of wire barely missing his calf.

We keep backing away until we can’t.

At the scaffolding alongside the base of the building, we run out of ground. Behind us, stripes of warning tape crisscrossing a three-story drop to the subbasement. In front, a boiling wall of anger advances. Regular people gone insane, buttressed by stepper-wearing cops in body armor.

The sharp shoulder of Jim’s exoskeleton digs into my arm. The world is closing in around us. Not even a Zenith could save me now.

“I’m sorry, Jim,” I say. “I guess I was never meant to protect Eden.”

“All a man can do is fight,” says Jim. “You fought.”

A flash.

It’s so bright and vicious that at first I think it came from inside my own head. My ears ring and my skull thrums with it, vibrating like fine crystal. I mash my palms against a concrete wall and brace myself against sudden vertigo.

I gag, then vomit.

Screams. I think I can hear screams through the ringing in my ears. Shoulder muscles knotted, I drag my face away from the wall. Lift a numb forearm and wipe drool from my mouth.

“Jim?” I ask, leaning against the wall, letting the gritty surface anchor me to reality. I can barely hear my own voice. The atmosphere seems leaden, too thick to transmit sound. I smell fire.

Blinking away dust, I’m able to focus on the ground.

A Rorschach blob of yellowish vomit stains a piece of dirty plywood at my feet. I watch a glistening drop of blood heave itself from my face, dropping toward the center of the earth. A tacky wetness creeps down my cheek, a slug trail from temple to jawline.

“Jim?”

I turn to Jim and there is no Jim. The warning tape is gone.

The reality of what this means settles coldly over my shoulders. My head bobs idiotically as a surge of grief claws its way out of my chest. “No,” I say, and I can’t hear the word, only feel the fluttering vibration of it in my throat.

On my knees, I clamber to the edge and look into the subbasement. Another drop of my blood leaves my temple and escapes into the world, pulled away in a shining arc. I see only dust falling down the shaft in a silent waterfall. Down, down, down. My retinal brightens the image. There’s Jim at the bottom of the shaft, lying on his side in fetal position. One arm is outstretched, still reaching for balance. His body is coated in chalky dust from head to toe, a bas-relief.

There is no blood. It looks like he fell asleep down there.

For some reason I think about his trailer. Two miles away. Sitting empty and still, hot water heater ticking to itself in the closet. Sunlight groping through the blinds, doggedly starching the pages of old magazines on the coffee table. Cards still laid out in an unfinished game of solitaire. Empty now, empty forever.

I stand up and swallow a cough and look out on the site.

At the front gate, a plume of smoke swirls madly upward. The crane’s latest bundle of rebar oscillates over my head, buoyed by the upswell of dusty wind. In the haze, elderly men lie sprawled like fallen mannequins, exoskeletons frozen in whatever position they were in at the moment of detonation. Inside each exoskeleton, an old man struggles. Mice caught in particularly complicated traps. The machines have stopped working, frozen, but the men inside are alive.

Some of the Priders are crouched for cover. Others are getting in kicks and punches while they have the chance. Amps are holding their heads, moving sluggishly. Even the cops are struggling to get out of their steppers.

A bomb. The Priders must have let off a bomb, the kind that makes an electromagnetic pulse. The EMP passed through us all like the ghost of an explosion. But where the pulse finds electronics, it generates a surge of current that can freeze a motor or make an implant so hot it burns your skin.

I smear blood and dust across my face trying to wipe it clean. My hands won’t stop trembling, but I’m still alive. Whatever they set off wasn’t strong enough. But I imagine the next time this happens, they’ll do the job right.

Only one person stands.

Lyle Crosby moves across the parking lot like a ghost, sidestepping fallen bodies and swinging Priders. That plume of dirty smoke sprouts behind him as he strides toward me. The laughing cowboy is shielding his eyes with one hand and advancing fast and confident. In his right hand, he has a pistol out and swinging. The explosion must have gotten his attention.

He spots me through the dust.

I throw myself forward, staggering, running for the fence. But somehow my feet are tangled together and my palms are out and skinned as I fall headfirst. Sliding through the dirt, I’m already climbing onto my knees.

“Jim fell,” I say. “Jim’s hurt—”

Crouched, I turn and see Lyle standing over me.

Three, two—

Lyle’s knife-handed strike catches me in the side of the neck before my trigger can go off. I land on my stomach in the dirt, diaphragm muscles seizing, head buzzing with pain. He casually walks past me, leans over the gap, and peers into the subbasement.

“Damn,” he says.

Hands on his hips, Lyle surveys the work site.

“EMP, huh? Them Priders are crafty. But it didn’t have to be this way,” he says. “I did everything I could. Coddled you like a goddamn baby. You wouldn’t fight to save your own life. And now look at you. Look at Jim. Eden was never going to last, Gray.”

I choke out the word. “Lucy.”

“Jesus Christ. I sent Lucy your way. How blind are you? I saw that dopey look on your face the night I kicked that deputy out of Eden. Wanted to know more and she told me all about you. Thought I could get you on my side, fangs out. But Daley was right, you ain’t got any fangs.”

Flashes of memory. Lucy dropping by to talk with Jim, staying to talk with me. Squeezing my hand in Jim’s trailer. My piss-stained shirt, cleaned and pressed and waiting for me on the arm of her couch. Our kiss.

“What?” I ask.

Lyle is pacing. Manic. He wheels on me then stalks away, again, speaking all the time. “Wuh-wuh-what? Why you think she came over to your place? So friendly? How do you think I found out you were a Zenith? You think I showed up at your trailer that day and saved you by accident? You got a head full of rocks. And that’s sad, too, because, man, you had some serious fucking potential.”

He taps his temple with a finger, presses it in hard enough to make his fingertip go white.

“Did you know I qualified for Echo Squad out of two thousand two hundred and twelve Army Rangers from all three goddamn battalions? And I’m Zenith class, but, Jesus Christ, the shit you got ain’t even military grade. It’s better than military grade. They don’t make ’em like that anymore because they never made ’em like that. I don’t know what your daddy was smoking, or whether he saw the end of the world coming or what, but that man was not fucking around the day he put that shit in your head.”

Igaveyousomethingextra, is how my father put it.

I’m a means to an end. A soldier in Lyle’s make-believe army. My breath is back now, passing ragged through a bruised larynx. I’m leaning against a piece of plywood. Watching Lyle pace.

“You used me.”

“Correction. I tried to use you.”

I lean forward, grunting to get up. He raises a lanky leg and drops a boot onto my chest, crushing the air out of me.

“Sit down, hero,” he says. “I don’t have time for this shit. These people think they’re fighting now, but I haven’t even got started yet. I’ve got a goddamn ace up my sleeve that’s been waiting there for ten years. Since the birth of Pure Pride. Wait until I show them what I got, Gray. Then they’ll know war.”

That gun glints darkly in his hand. Curses and shouting come in a steady torrent from the front gate. Lyle glances over his shoulder and licks his lips. His chest is rising and falling like he just ran a marathon.

Pinned, I struggle to wriggle out from under the boot. I don’t want to die here, groveling in the dirt.

Lyle lifts his foot, looks at me like I’m a carpet stain. “I’m not gonna kill you, Gray. There’s something better planned for you.”

He saunters ten feet away, then turns.

“When you get arrested, don’t resist,” he says. “Try to have some dignity when the feds lock you up for the rest of your life. After all, you’re the leader of Astra.”

Violence Plagues Nation in Wake of Attack

HOUSTON—Anger over the tri-city amp attacks on Chicago, Houston, and Detroit has quickly erupted into escalating acts of violence nationwide.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation estimates that over 120 incidents of violence against implanted individuals have occurred since the attacks were perpetrated.

Reports of harassment and assault are pouring in from all over the country but are concentrated in the cities directly affected by the attacks.

Instances continue to pile up: In Chicago, a man on an anti-implantee rampage fatally shot an implanted panhandler at a gas station. In Detroit, a Molotov cocktail was thrown Tuesday at a community center run by the Free Body Liberty Group. Three were injured and the downtown building was severely damaged. Possibly the worst incident occurred in Houston, where a mob of 500 people surrounded the home of a local implantee. The man was beaten severely and left in critical condition and his home partially burned before the group was dispersed by police.

So far, the government has been unable to quell the violence. FBI Director Greg Wright has repeatedly told the press that “vigilante attacks and threats against implantees or their loved ones will not be tolerated.”

Lyle stalks away, head lowered. His right hand is out, fingers extended. Three, then two. One. He makes a tight fist.

The laughing cowboy trots and then breaks into a run. Skips across the dust-smeared work site too fast, movements birdlike and stomach-turning. Ducking between Priders and amps alike. The Zenith is clearly whispering in his ear.

Gotanewworldtobuild, he said and I know immediately where he is going.

A mile from here, the Pure Human Citizen’s Council is staging a rally that’s brimming with good, upstanding reggie citizens. Joseph Vaughn has got politicians and speakers and reformed doctors on a stage raised to the eyes of the world. The cowboy is going to continue his fight.

Lyle laughs hoarsely as he dodges through the crowd of dazed Priders. He calls out commands to the other amps. The plume of smoke still rises over broken exoskeletons and police-issued steppers. A half dozen of Lyle’s gang jump up to follow him, grinning and panting. I hear his boots slapping the empty street erratically, skipping in unnaturally long strides. Then he’s around the corner, out of sight, gone with his trained seals into the industrial neighborhood that wraps around the construction site.

I wrench myself up and stagger after him. My legs are swinging heavy and stiff in bloodstained jeans. But the grime on my face is dried up and whatever electrical surge happened to my amp is over now.

On my own I’m too slow to catch Lyle.

Taking a deep breath, I try to hold out my fingers. Still wrapped, my hand will barely obey. So instead, I visualize my hand. Curl my imaginary pinky and slide the ball of my thumb over it. As I perform the mental countdown, I take a perverse pleasure in it. Try to think good thoughts as I oh so carefully engage the Zenith. Gentle, like you’d tap a hot water faucet in a crummy shower. Level three and that’s it, Jack. I’m not going any deeper than I have to.

Three, two, one, zero. And when my eyes open, the Zenith shows me more.

For one, I see that I’ve got a bigger problem now. About seven feet and three hundred and fifty pounds of problem, looming with its hands out, breathing like a bull. Blocking the open fence and my way out.

The Brain.

The titan stands watching, as alien to me as a Cro-Magnon must have been to a Neanderthal. I know he’s human. But he used that diagnostic amp to sharpen his training, to push his body within millimeters of the breaking point, day after day. He used sheer willpower and pinpoint mental control to become the template for a new species.

I consider this as the Brain puts out his meaty arms. He shakes his great head at me slowly, tendons in his neck the size of my biceps. He’s only human, I remind myself. And he’s not a Zenith.

The body, no matter how bizarre, is just an extension of the mind. And my mind is bigger than his.

“Let me through, Brain. You know what I can do.”

His face splits into a pink smile. “And I know what you won’t do,” he says.

The dreamy look on his face reminds me of his fight with the Blade. The Brain was alone in his own mind then, according to Lyle, fighting in a smoky room. Focusing on his face, I dial out the writhing old men around us. Let the grayness seep in around the edges and absorb all distraction. I even banish the sadness and shock I feel for Jim, sensing it laced through my thoughts like venom.

My view of the world is purified.

I feint to the left and try to scramble around the Brain. My lunge doesn’t fool him. With a mauling grip he catches the back of my shirt, twists me up into the air. My shirt collar gags me and then rips, and I slip out of his grasp, hitting the concrete hard on all fours.

A black motorcycle boot lifts out of my vision and I roll, knowing that the boot is coming back down like a pneumatic hammer. I almost make it. The heel mashes the fingertips of my left hand. Grinding pain corkscrews into me and I gasp, remembering the time I caught my fingers in the hinge of a car door and wondering how this could be so much worse. Then I tune it out. Yank my hand from under his boot, leaving bloody finger paint on the street.

Grabbing the Brain’s trunk of a leg, I yank myself upright and keep going, climbing up his back. It’s like mounting an angry elephant, the smell of sweat and heat coming off his neck in waves. Muscles slither under his skin as he swings his arms at me.

The first blow sledgehammers into my shoulder blades, and I squeeze my arms tighter around his chest and suck wind. His fists are dense as a sack of ball bearings. I reach up and wrap a hand around his forehead where he can’t bite me. The next fist thuds into me and the light starts doing funny things in my eyes.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper. With one hand I grip his forehead tight, and with the other I dig my thumb directly into his port. A dirty move. Dirty as sewage. Twisting, I cram my thumbnail into the puffy flesh of his temple. His head twists violently and that arm rises again, and I tense for impact. But something gives. The tip of my thumb sinks in a quarter inch. The arm wavers and then drops, hesitant. I let up.

The Brain coughs a couple times, the choke of an old car that won’t turn over on a cold morning. He stumbles, arms out for balance. Finally he collapses to his knees like a dynamited building.

I slide off the Brain’s back and quickly check his face. Even kneeling, he’s as tall as I am, staring vacantly ahead. He sneezes once, expelling a cannonball of air from his lungs.

“Brain?” I ask. “You okay?”

He takes a halfhearted swipe at me, eyes still unfocused. I take that as a yes and leave him, hurry across the empty street. Just after I cross, four police cars whiz by in a line behind me. Doppler-shifted sirens pushing and then pulling me along.

Toward the mayhem.

Running hard, I leap over cracked pavement, charge past roll-top doors and beige commercial warehouses. The thrum of several thousand people rolls toward me from somewhere up ahead, but the streets are oddly empty. Plastic bottles and discarded flyers stalk each other in the breeze. Locked doors and closed garages. Hazy clouds and the faint smell of smoke.

A half-fallen wooden roadblock slants across the street ahead.

I hear the shouts before I see anything. Sporadic gunshots and the edge of naked panic, unrestrained anger in the cries. Two women and a man appear and hobble past me. One of the women is holding a blood-soaked shirt against the man’s face. She shrinks away when she spots my temple.

Rounding the corner, I stumble into a full-blown melee.

I’m too late. Way too goddamn late. Every one of Lyle’s amps is here and they are attacking Pure Priders with anything on hand: rebar from the construction site, two-by-fours, rocks, and fists. Some have guns and some carry scavenged riot shields. The amps are charging in from the side streets, trapping reggies in the intersection. Other reggies are making a run for it. It’s a slaughter.

In seconds, I see an overweight amp smash another man’s cheekbone with one fist and keep on running, catching another guy in a sternum-crushing bear hug. A group of four reggies have got another amp by the arms, his shirt ripped mostly off; he slithers out of their grasp and sets about taking them apart with his fists and elbows.

Other people are lying facedown, not moving.

A burning car throws smoke over a cluster of reggies in front of the stage, back-to-back against the onslaught. These people are bloody, scared to death. Their signs are forgotten on the ground, trampled underfoot along with those who are hurt. Homemade T-shirts with angry slogans have been ripped into strips, turned to bandages.

Black uniforms intermingle with the group. Police separated from one another. On their own, defending the demonstrators and themselves with nightsticks and Tasers and sidearms.

And then there’s Lyle.

For just an instant, I spot the cowboy standing on the stage itself, above the scrum. He takes in the havoc with his knuckles resting on his hips, fingers curled up like feathers. Scans the crowd, eyes flickering past me without settling, and turns. Speaks to someone behind him, neck tensing with a shout.

Lyle leaps off the back end of the stage.

I fall forward into the fray, and the Zenith guides me as I shove and dodge my way toward the cowboy. The fighters batter my body back and forth. Rolling off sweaty backs and ducking fists, I skirt the defensive line of reggies and mount the stage two steps at a time.

Craning, I spot Lyle sprinting down a backstreet, away from the fight.

I cross the stage and leap down, follow Lyle as fast as I can. Flatten my palms and let my knees pump like pistons. Behind me, the concussion of multiple gunshots boomerangs around the intersection. I press onward, accelerating even as my lungs ignite with pain. The cowboy is so goddamn fast and everything is on the line and I can’t help sliding backward, going deeper into myself.

Level three just isn’t cutting it anymore.

Level four. Man-portable weapon systems. Small arms. Infantry support. Lethal organic fire support. Obstacle breaching. Do you consent? Do you consent?

Yes.

Ears trained on the plock-plock of Lyle’s boots, I let my vision collapse. Feel my eyes go dead around the edges even as every follicle and nerve ending of my body buzzes with life. My movements smooth out and gain a liquid flow. Running silent and smooth and swift as a tsunami on the open sea.

When I come upon Lyle, it’s all I can do to stop.

In a blind alley, the cowboy is leaning against a black town car with its door open, talking to a guy in a business suit. Lyle sees me and winces and at that moment I realize who he’s chatting with.

Senator Joseph Vaughn.

The leader of the Pure Human Citizen’s Council is taller than he appears from a distance—an athlete. Under his expensive suit, he’s muscular. The politician stands next to the car, relaxed and disheveled. He’s sweated through his suit. Tie half on. His hair is mussed and his cheeks are flushed.

“No, Lyle,” I say. “No.”

The laughing cowboy grins at me, shrugs his crow-bitten shoulders.

Lyle is standing here in this alley, chatting with Vaughn like they were old friends. These two should be worst enemies and they’re not at all and the meaning of that puts a sag into my knees. Who’s paying for all this?

The boss, man, who do you think?

“You’re working for the Priders?” I ask Lyle, my voice flat with blank disbelief. “You did this for them?”

Lyle stands up off the car, sighs.

“The Brain still alive?” he asks.

I nod.

“Thanks,” he says, then turns and I see his eyes have gone dark and blank. My body leaps away before I’m aware of it. Lyle hits the space where I was standing like a torpedo, fists stuttering in the air. His boots scrabble over the gravelly pavement as he gets his balance. He turns back, eyes half closed.