Beat (17 page)

If Bren were alive, I’d send it to him.

One of the other Pushers. I wracked my brain, finally coming up with Melisa’s ID. I sent the message and headed for the door I had come in earlier in the day, not the one that led down to the holding rooms. It was time to get out. The door slid open with a swish and I glanced into the strange cylinder that I’d had to go through. It had to be a scanner of some kind. I took the spoke out of my pocket and poked a hole through my zip, sliding the spoke up next to the zipper again.

I stepped out of the office, remembering how this had gone earlier. First the long hallway, then the reception room, or whatever it was, and then this strange cylinder hallway. Lights flashed again, colorful,bright, and accompanied by pops, then the voice came again, “Proceed.”

I proceeded. Fast. I ran through the doorway to the reception room, cut quickly through there, and within seconds was jogging down the long hallway. Lights came on above me, obviously sensitive to motion.

When I hit about five meters from the doorway that led to the platform that the Enforser ship had come down on, I stopped. The robots were going to be there. They didn’t have to sleep, but maybe they were powered down for the night. No, that was wishful thinking; they were guard robots.

This wasn’t going to work. I’d go through that door and be caught immediately.

Maybe I’d get lucky. Maybe they’d be gone, or wouldn’t be on. Or maybe I could move fast enough that I could get away even if I was being chased. Those treads they moved on didn’t look fast.

I stood for a moment, torn.

The door slid open and a robot, glinting in the cold light above, whirred through.

A gun of some kind unfolded from its arm and a metallic voice spoke.

“Halt.”

I didn’t halt. I spun and ran, making for the door I’d just come through. A quick, loud explosion behind me; I flinched and dodged. A rubber bullet slammed into my left shoulder, sending me stumbling almost to the ground with pain. I’d felt worse over the last day and kept going. Through the open door, the first room, and the flashing cylinder. The few seconds that the scanner took to clear me and let me through felt endless. When were they going to lock all the doors? It had to happen soon.

I ran through the Prime Administrator’s office. Incredibly, the doors were still working, but they were sure to be locked soon. I’d be trapped the moment the guards or Admins locked them. I ran down the hallway, glancing behind me for other guards or robots.

Positive there were more around, I had nowhere else to go but toward the elevator that had taken me down to my holding room. Which meant that if I tried to get in that elevator, that would be the end of it. The guard or monitor system or whatever they had in Prime One knew exactly where I was going, even if there weren’t any cameras. I had to change that.

I closed on the elevator door quickly. As I stopped to catch my breath, despair clawed through me. It seemed like the only way the chasing was going to stop was if they just killed me.

I ran my fingers down the elevator door, searching for a gap I could use. Nothing. I should have left the thing propped open. I let my left hand drop and felt my entire body slump. End of the road. I had robots behind me, guards of some kind for sure coming up the elevator. And they would want to kill me once they realized I had no intention of going along with their cover up.

The cover up. Maybe I should just go along with it. I remembered Bren’s last moments. How scared he had been. The confusion in his eyes. I couldn’t go along with it. For Bren. For everyone else, whether or not they realized that the New Chapter was based on a lie.

A lie that covered up the truth about the Bug.

I had to find out if I was right. Not just for everyone else, but for me. I couldn’t let them beat me, like they must have beaten anyone else who had tried to figure out what was going on before.

The freaky robot had seen me only a minute or two ago. No way could human guards have reacted yet.

If I called the elevator—I hit the button. I had to risk it; I couldn’t get this door open. Less than thirty seconds passed before I heard the elevator car approaching. A hum, then a few faint clicks, and the door slid open. I braced myself to jump anyone who might be in there. I even stumbled a step when the opening door revealed that the car was empty.

Bug me. My heart hammered like a crazy carpenter or engineer. Within seconds, the door slid closed behind me and I felt myself moving down. It didn’t take long to get to S3. I remembered the long tunnel I’d seen stretching out from S4 on the schematics, but I couldn’t leave yet. I had to find out if I was right about the Bug and the knockout. I had to.

I clung to the side of the car as the door slid open. No shouts, so I peered around the bank of buttons into the corridor that led to the labs. Nobody. Which made sense. Where would they expect me to go? Not for the first time in the last hour, I felt thankful that they hadn’t plastered Prime One with cameras. Their confidence that the people of New Frisko would obey without question was serving me well. They would have to search all over the building, although they probably had some way of monitoring the doors that opened. And the elevator. I had to expect that robots or guards could be right behind me.

I stole another glance down the corridor outside the elevator, which was probably four meters wide and four meters tall. I had no trouble seeing due to the lights that had flickered to life when the elevator door opened. I slipped into the corridor and had a revelation just in time.

I jerked back and stuck my body in the way of the closing elevator door, yanking off my zip. It took precious seconds, but I was sure this would be worth it. I dropped the zip in the path of the elevator door, stepped into the hallway, and held my breath. The door squeezed the zip against the slot where the door was supposed to seat, but it couldn’t close all the way and it bounced back the other direction. That might slow them down. I hadn’t seen any other elevators, although there had to be more, or at least some stairs.

I exhaled and searched the hallway, calling back to mind the schematic I’d seen a bit earlier. That main lab should be down this hall and around the first right turn. I came to the door I was looking for. Big pale, green letters were plastered across it, proclaiming simply “LAB.” The door didn’t slide open.

I stood there, mentally yelling at myself. Stupid. Of course the door would be locked; this part of Prime One was too important. And I had no way to open it.

But I had to get in there.

I kicked the door. It didn’t move. I kicked it again. The same result. “Stupid.” I stepped closer and looked closely at the door; it was just like the rest of the pocket doors all over New Frisko. A three-foot wide panel that slid into the wall when activated. A gray and black sensor pad was on the wall to the right of the door; that had to be how to get in. It probably only allowed access to a few people. Special people.

Spam. People like the Prime Administrator. I reached for the pocket on my zip. The elevator! I ran back the way I’d come. My zip was steadily getting stuffed into the slot for the elevator door and there was a loud, high-pitched alarm sounding from inside the elevator. I took the place of my zip, grabbed it and found the small green card. It was the same color as the letters on the lab. I knew this would work.

On my way back to LAB, I passed several other doors. I pulled up short at one. COMS. I didn’t waste time to question the idea, but scanned the Prime Administrator’s card and darted into the room. Yes! Communication technology clustered on tables throughout the room. I did the fastest circuit I could manage, trying to take in every bit of tek in sight. On the last table before I hit the back wall, I found what I was hoping for: EarComs. I grabbed a few and ran to the door.

Seconds later, I flashed the Prime Administrator’s card in front of the sensor. The lab door made a sucking noise then sank in maybe a centimeter. A long second passed. The door slid into the wall.

I stepped through and the door closed behind me. I stayed in that spot, assessing the room and stuffing my handful of EarComs into a pants pocket. I figured the room was maybe ten or fifteen meters on every dimension. Three wide silver doors with big levers for handles lined the wall to my left. A couple of shining plasteel tables ran lengthwise from a couple meters in front of me toward the far wall, dividing the room into three sections. These tables were empty. On the right-side wall extended another long table, this one holding several large monitors and a bunch of instruments that I didn’t recognize.

The silver doors first. I pulled the first open and was assaulted by cold air. These were cooling units. A light flickered on at the ceiling of the room, illuminating maybe twenty tall metal cylinders, all of them with a bright red triangle on them. The cylinders came up to my chest and were a meter in diameter. Making sure the door wouldn’t close behind me, I went to the closest cylinder, peering at it. No labels, only the big red triangle. I pushed it carefully; it didn’t move. I tried tipping it—still no movement. It had to be a couple hundred kilograms.

I felt around the top of the cylinder, discovering an almost non-existent seam that ran all the way around its diameter. So the cylinder had to open somehow. I ran my hands all over the thing, but couldn’t find a button or keypad or anything. Straightening from my crouch, I banged the top of the cylinder in frustration.

It gave a little. A hiss followed and the top of the cylinder popped up, then rotated open, revealing hundreds, maybe even thousands, of vials. I’d seen these before; they were the knockout refills that the Admins used on our Papas every month. I glanced down at the red triangle on the cylinder again, dreading what that meant. The horrible, impossible idea I’d had in the Prime Administrator’s office danced back into my mind.

I forced down the fear that wanted to stop me and reached into the cylinder, holding my breath. The vials weren’t glass. They felt like some kind of transparent plasteel. I pulled one out, realized I was holding my breath again, and carefully exhaled. The liquid inside the vial was slightly see-through, but was tinged green, the color of a new leaf. This was the knockout; I’d seen it every month of my life since I was brought out of the Nursery dome. Everyone knew that babies’ heart rates were way faster than normal grown people’s, and the knockout might not be safe for them, so small kids had to be kept in a really carefully controlled environment every minute of their lives until they were about four years old. My parents told me that they would visit me every day during that time, but it wasn’t like I could remember that.

I didn’t get why a huge cylinder of the knockout had a symbol that looked like a danger warning on it. I wanted to act like I didn’t know the answer, but I couldn’t deny it. This had to be why I had lived and Bren had died.

Gripping the vial carefully, I left the big cooler and headed for the wall of instruments. I needed to see if I could find proof. The video would be enough to make some people question the New Chapter’s preaching about the Bug, but there was no way for me to prove to anybody that the vial I held was more than just the knockout injection.

This vial was how the New Chapter kept us controlled. The knockout wasn’t saving us from anything.

The first monitor came to life when I touched the space in front of it on the desk. A keyboard illuminated under my fingertips. After a few seconds of fiddling around, I realized that this computer wasn’t encrypted or secured. “Mr. Prime Robot-thing didn’t think anyone would get in here,” I said under my breath. “Bug him.” I tapped a little more, feeling like robots or other guards would burst in the room in a just a few heartbeats.

Most of the directories that appeared on the monitor meant nothing to me. Scientific and technical words mostly. I scanned through them quickly. One directory was called “Development,” while the one under it was called “Eradication.” I hesitated for a moment, then selected “Development.”

Before I could see the directory, noise exploded in my ear, so powerful and sudden I felt like my body was being squeezed, my head pressed down on my neck. I flinched, my heart rate instantly breaking 100. I spun, scouring the lab. Nothing new appeared. Gripping the vial in my right fingers, I cursed the cast on my arm again and ran to the door. Bright red lights flashed from inside the light fixtures built into the ceiling. I couldn’t tell where the noise was coming from, but every time it sounded, I felt like something sharp was cutting out a part of my brain.

I tore toward the elevator, praying my zip was still there.

I don’t know if I felt a change in the air flow or pressure, or detected a change in the pitch of the alarm, but I turned on instinct, just before bending to retrieve my zip. One of the doors down the hallway I hadn’t checked out burst open, spilling Enforsers in their dark uniforms and sculpted armor. They immediately raised their Keepers. I heard clicks as the ammunition clips rotated. I fell backward into the elevator in the same second the guns blasted, fire licking out the front of the barrels.

Concrete dust and bits exploded from the wall I’d just been leaning on, splattering my face. Real bullets.
Drek.
Something hit my right eye, digging painfully. I grabbed my zip with my left hand, still gingerly holding the vial in my hand and praying the elevator door would close. And that it was bullet proof. I hit S4. That tunnel that led to the Dumps. The Enforsers and guards had to expect me to go up; they wouldn’t expect me to use the conveyor belt tunnel. I hoped.

The elevator door slid closed, but some bullets slammed into the wall right next to my knee just before the door seated itself. I tucked my legs up, rolling frantically away, blinking fast to try to clear my eye.

The elevator didn’t move. Had I missed the button? I glanced over, peering through my left eye. The S4 button flashed red. “Come on!” I flung myself at the button panel. “Move!” Red flashing. A small black sensor panel next to the S4 button. I dug in my pocket for the Prime Administrator’s card. Bullets hammered the outside of the doors. I had seconds before the Enforsers hit the button to open the door from their side.

I flashed the card at the sensor. The button stopped flashing then glowed creamy white. A half-second, then the elevator jerked downward. My heart skipped in relief. “Please think I’m going up.” I knew this was stupid; they would know I was going down. Down was my only way out. But if this was the only elevator down, which it seemed like it had to be since the Enforsers had obviously come from stairs, maybe I could get ahead of them. I forced my racing thoughts to slow down, taking slow breaths. I rubbed my left eye; a little pebble of concrete came out on my fingers with a trace of red. 

I blinked. Good, no longer half-blind. The elevator car jerked gently and stopped. I had about two seconds before the door opened, during which I yanked my zip over my cast and got my other arm started.

The door slid left. I poked my head out. Red lights spun on the walls, intermittently painting the walls of the brightly lit corridor that stretched left, right, and straight ahead. Conduits, pipes, air vents, and other things that I couldn’t identify plastered the walls and ceilings. I saw nobody, but the alarm was still sounding, and I quickly found the door that matched the stair door on the level up. They’d be coming through there. I mentally reviewed the schematic I’d seen, hoping I wasn’t remembering wrong, and darted out of the elevator, tearing up the hallway that led directly in front of me. I had about forty meters of hallway to cover before the hallway ended at a T. Halfway down the hall, over the alarm, I heard shouting behind me. I tossed a look over my left shoulder. They weren’t in sight yet. I poured on the speed and reached the T, turning left.