Ashes of the Fall (29 page)

“I’m sure you’re gonna tell me.”

“A conscience,” Kid says, like it’s a foreign concept. “You actually
care
. And that makes you ill-equipped for the world at hand.”

A rocket whistles through the sky as if to put emphasis on his point.

“I’ve done all right so far.”

I watch as Kid leaps out of the second story window. He hits the ground and rolls nimbly to his feet without any sign that the impact hurt. The gun remains trained on me. I glance up and down the long street. AoF forces linger around, but they’re sparse here. No doubt why Kid chose this particular ambush point.

With his free hand, Kid takes out two small drives. “I found what you lost.”

My mind flashes red at the thought of the ribbon. “If you hurt Evelyn—”

“Don’t worry,” Kid says with a flash in his eyes. “HIVE still needs beta testers. Your little friend was headed to snoop on our secret coordinates.” There’s a long pause, punctuated by shouts and more explosions. “Looks like the last stand’s begun.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you,” I say, recalling that they need this HoloBand. I start to reach for the pistol. “You can’t shoot me. You need me.”

“You do that,” Kid says with a shrug, “and your beta testers die. And they’re both so lovely, that it would be a
shame
.”

“Both?”

“Who do you think I found with the original drive?” Kid says.

“Carina’s dead,” I say.

“What do you think I am,” Kid says with a roll of his eyes. “A savage?”

He says this without menace or irony. Just a cold calculation, like a math problem he already knew the answer to: Carina plus Evelyn equals Luke Stokes, the reluctant hero and willing sucker.

Which makes it much, much worse, when I take the gun out slowly, put it on the ground and then say, “Lead the way, then.”

Kid Vegas knows
he doesn’t need the gun on me, so while we walk he uses it to scan the landscape. It hurts, knowing that I’m not quite a prisoner—that, somehow, I’m complicit in the mess that will follow.

He’s right about the conscience. It’s getting me in trouble. First at the Red Bee, then with Slick, now with Kid once again. I’m ping-ponging back and forth, back and forth, between a cadre of men with a moral character far lower than my own.

“Might want to get your gun ready,” Kid says. The winding alley we’re in cuts directly through the center of the plaza. Chunks of concrete and steel litter the shantytown. The massive skyscraper chops the mega screen in two, one of the halves dangling by a thread of steel cables and sparking electrical wires. “You got the good sense not shoot me, I suspect.”

I take out the .38 and say nothing. His words are like medicine going down my throat—except, instead of a cure, the prognosis is prolonged misery. I dig some bullets out of the box Slick gave me, take out the clip, and pop them in one by one.

A grenade explodes twenty feet away, sending dirt and smoke spewing into the air. The AoF forces hidden behind a dumpster in the middle of the plaza pop up, returning fire. They’re cut down by unseen snipers on the other side.

No one’s made it beneath the toppled building that bisects the plaza yet.

“I assume you got a plan,” I say, watching the carnage unfold. New AoF forces move into makeshift foxholes to replace their dead comrades. “And the exact location.”

As if to say
fuck you
to any plans, a leather sofa comes hurtling down from the overturned skyscraper, leaving a sizable crater upon impact that resembles a small explosive. The bullets might not kill us, but the building has no dog in this fight at all, so fate might get us both in the end.

“You’re the one with the plans, Stokes,” Kid says. “You always got one.” I stare at him, silent. “Don’t give me that look and don’t play dumb. You’ve been running the numbers on how to get out of this jam since my pretty face showed up.”

Kid gives me more credit than I really deserve. In the past, maybe, I would be running the scenarios out of self-interest. But now, with a couple lives on the line—hell, millions—my mind is largely blank. I guess my skills don’t work for the greater good or on a scale much larger than the size of
me
.

I open my mouth to say something, but a rocket whistles out from one of the AoF foxholes, exploding unseen across the plaza.

Instead of telling him off, I say, “There’s no way we’re crossing here.”

Kid looks over his shoulder, eyes shining like he’s planned this all along, and says, “We’re not going back, either.”

I follow his eyes down the serpentine alley, find that the intersecting street we just came from is already crawling with AoF forces. Through the slightest sliver, I can see them pushing forward on bikes, armored ATVs, trying to advance their position.

The alley we’re in has no exits, and the walls go straight up—a sheer vertical, a hundred stories, at least. This is more of a crack, a defect in design than a true street. Maybe Marshwood and Matt’s builder bots didn’t have everything tuned quite right when this section of town was built.

“Where’d the coordinates actually go?”

“You’re in this for real, then, Stokes?”

“I’m not out here for my health,” I say. “Tell me where they lead.”

“The screen. Beneath the maintenance room.”

“Maintenance room?”

“Yeah,” Kid says. “You know, where they keep the monitors, the network equipment, all that.”

“You need a key to get in there?”

“You did,” he says with a grin. “Circumstances change.”

“And if we make it across and the door’s locked?”

“Better hope you’re bulletproof.”

Thirty yards away, two AoF foot soldiers peek out from behind a stack of wooden crates, shooting wildly. Within seconds, they’re shredded by a hail of bullets. I stare across at the ruined screen, running calculations in my mind. Gotta be—what, at least six hundred yards, easy. Probably closer to seven hundred.

“You’re the brilliant one,” I say. “The Gifted Mind. You come up with something.”

But Kid, for once, has no answers or solution to the situation unfolding outside our little haven. I glance down the alley, checking to see if the road has opened up. Instead, I find that forces are beginning to stream down
our
alley, presumably as reinforcements for the campaign in the plaza.

I grab Kid by the shoulder, without a plan.

He says as we begin to run, “So, you thought of something.”

I say, “Something, yeah,” but it’s drowned out by an explosion as we step into the open. Shrapnel and dirt fly up around me as I fall to the ground and roll. Heat buffets my face.

And now, out in the middle, totally exposed, I realize I’m finally going to die.

Amidst the smoky ash
, I drag myself towards an overturned truck. The vehicle had been retrofitted into a cozy studio apartment for two, but now the rusted chassis provides me with cover from the maelstrom. I search for Kid in the smog, and spot him stumbling up from the blast zone. He appears uninjured.

Through the shield of the painkillers, I’m aware of a throbbing my leg and torso. Kid catches my gaze for a moment,
as if to say don’t you dare
.

A burst of gunfire rings out, and I pop out from the van and dart across the field of debris. Although waste dots every inch of the landscape, out in the middle it still seems like an empty expanse when the bullets fly and the bombs explode. A smoke trail shoots past five feet ahead, followed by an orange burst. Screams.

I crawl under a ruined steel girder and put my hands over my ears. Like that will do anything. This isn’t a plan. It’s suicide, pure and simple. I’m not sure how that will help anyone—Carina, Evelyn, Slick, Blackstone, Kid, Vlad or the
citizens
everyone pays lip service to—but dying will sure help me. Because I won’t be around to see the aftermath of my actions. Action isn’t that hard. It’s living with the consequences.

The girder snaps, and I roll over just in time to avoid getting impaled. Glancing to the southern part of the field, I see that the AoF forces are mobilizing. I don’t check on Blackstone’s troops, on the other side of the fallen building, but I assume they’re doing the same. Vying for control of the middle.

I’m closer to the south, but still dangerously in no-man’s land. The lip of the ruined skyscraper looms above me, blocking out the starless night.

A plan forms. Without Kid, I can just blend in with the AoF, use their lines as a buffer. They know who I am, apparently, and won’t bother me if I travel sans traitor. I scramble to my feet, and burst into an all-out sprint back to the southern lines.

Two soldiers raise up, guns leveled at me. My hands shoot up in the air, indicating I’m a friendly. They’re about to squeeze off a couple rounds, my whole plan going to hell, when they’re popped from across the field, right in the head. I dash behind their vantage point—a busted up refrigerator—and breathe heavily.

The dead soldier to my right sinks down, his head resting on my shoulder. From the corner of my eye, I can see other AoF members on the front lines point their guns my way before deciding that I’m a friendly.

I grab the helmet from the dead soldier and strap it on. That should help me from being misidentified. I then work my way away from the front lines, through the firing masses. The soldiers pay me little heed, hell-bent on taking control of the plaza.

Why it’s so important, now, with the mega screen gone, is a mystery. It must be the symbolism—this is the capital of the oppressed. The screen is now only fifty yards away. I whirl around and look for Kid, but see no sign of him in the middle of the melee.

It wasn’t an outright betrayal, so wherever he has Carina and Evelyn stashed, I doubt he’s given the word to execute them. My survival is paramount to his plans—I took an opportunity and ran. He’s gotta know that. I still don’t have a plan for stopping him from gaining control of HIVE. After all, he’s got the drives. Two of them. If the third isn’t here, then…

Well, it’ll have been a whole lot of work for nothing.

Heading towards the ruined screen requires me to start moving towards the front again. I slide into a concrete barrier behind which four men are huddled, clutching rifles.

“Simmons,” their squad sergeant announces. “Take the one up high, one o’clock.”

“Yessir, Sergeant Reyes,” Simmons answers, then pops out with his rifle and almost squeezes off a round before a bullet finds him.

“Fuck!” Reyes screams. He glances at me. “So you’re this Golden Boy everyone’s been hearing about?” Even in the midst of the battle, he has the cool to reach into his pocket and pull out a smoke. His hands don’t even shake as he lights it. Then he goes back in his pocket and brings out a balled up piece of paper. Tosses it in my face.

I pick it up and unravel it. Here’s how Slick got the word out—partially through his trackers, scouts and following the HoloBand signal. But also because of good old boots on the ground word of mouth. There’s my mugshot from when I was put on blast by the Circle, in the center of the black and white page.

Beneath it, the instructions are simple.

Protect Luke Stokes At All Costs

“Personally, I don’t see what’s so special about you,” Reyes says. “But if the Prez says you’re special, that’s good enough for me.”

The other two surviving soldiers look at me with a mixture of awe and skepticism, unsure how to feel about my presence and Reyes’ assessment. I take a quick glance over the concrete barrier. The mega screen dangles precariously about twenty yards to the left. But it’s a long, long run without any cover.

I feel a strong hand push me down. “The fuck you doing, son,” Reyes says. A burst of gunfire stings the concrete, some bullets sailing overhead into the side of an old sedan behind our position. “I just said it was my job to protect you.”

I jerk my thumb towards the screen, this time keeping behind the barrier. “I need to get to the screen.”

“You crazy?” Reyes says. A grenade explodes nearby, showering us with dirt. When the ringing subsides slightly, he shouts, “the hell you going over there for?”

“You heard about HIVE?”

“From the bastard Blackstone?” Reyes shakes his head, the helmet rocking back and forth. “Everyone needs to get the fuck out of my head.”

I couldn’t agree more. “He gets what’s over there first, it’s game over for whatever it is you stand for.” Making it clear I’m not really on any side but my own.

Reyes chews the words over for a second, then says, “We’ll cover you.” He rolls over my legs, to where Simmons’ body lies. After ransacking the man’s pockets for supplies, he shoves the entire lot of them into my lap. “A grenade, a couple extra clips for that pistol of yours.”

“Thanks.”

“You toss that out on my count,” Reyes says, “and then you run like hell, no matter what.”

I want to say,
wait, we should think about it
, but he’s already counting down.

“Three.”

I’m convinced that the explosions are picking up, that the building is about to fall, that the entire universe is conspiring against me in these three brief seconds.

“Two.”

I pull the pin.

“One.”

I grip the little textured ball tight and close my eyes.

“Time to run.”

I chuck it hard to the right and, after waiting a beat to steel my strength, I vault the barrier. The grenade explodes, a chorus of shots accompanying it as I run in the opposite direction, left, towards the infinite gap that separates me from the screen. As I approach, I can see it swaying, holding on by the slightest of threads.

Behind me, I hear Reyes’ unit return fire, providing the promised support. I dig deep, leg burning, realizing I need to re-up my painkillers and whiskey. I’m closing in on the ruined screen hanging hundreds of feet above.

Where the hell is it?
I have no idea where the maintenance room
is
. I scan the debris at the bottom of the building as I move, now almost on top of it, still staring at what looks like a dead-end.

Then I spot it: a small door at the base, blocked by a chunk of concrete. Just enough room to squeeze through at the top. I accelerate, climb the concrete, and begin to kick at the door’s corner. The bent metal scrapes and groans.

Above me, a rocket sings out, flying into the screen. Cables snap and wires hiss. When I look up, I see the screen’s tenuous hold begin to unravel.

“No, no,” I say, and kick faster, the building shaking from the ten ton screen about to drop. The door pops open, and I get in down to my hips, when I hear the rest of the cables snap all at once, the screen zooming through the air, towards the earth.

I slide inside, blown backwards by the impact against a wall.

The whole structure shakes, and I think that the skyscraper cutting into the top will collapse, bury me in here forever. But, after a minute, everything stops moving.

Which is when a voice says, far away, down beneath the floor, “I’m glad you came.”

My breath stops cold. It’s a voice I haven’t heard in fifteen years, and never expected to hear ever again.

Because the voice belongs to Matthew Stokes.