Amped (22 page)

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 some
body,
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?”