Blood Zero Sky (5 page)

As I near the podium, Dad grins at me then glances down at his own IC. Ms. Yao frowns, her arms folded. Jimmy Shaw gives me a wink. I step up to the microphone, clear my throat. The mic squeals. Suddenly, I panic. In my mind, I flash back to last night, walking through the shopping plaza in a tie and pants.

I love wearing a suit, love winning at Rocketball. I love to wear pants. I love women. Everyone can see through me. I am a fraud.

Pull it together, May . . .

I adjust the microphone, and it squeals again.

I begin. “In reviewing the revenue and expense projections for the next year . . .” My voice sounds too low. I am a sinner. Everyone knows. I wipe the sweat from my brow, clear my throat, try again. “In reviewing the numbers, Randal Watson and I have discovered an unfortunate trend. . . . ”

The pause seems to last a decade as I build up the courage finish. “It appears that in the next fiscal year, N-Corp is projected to suffer a considerable financial loss.”

I expected a long, stunned silence, a few outraged questions, laughter and disbelief, maybe then a vigorous discussion.

But the words are barely out of my mouth when all hell erupts around me.

—Chapter ØØ4—

The explosion sends a tongue of flame
through the double doors in the back of the auditorium, and everyone in the room screams as one. Shards of glass glitter past, like a hail of diamonds. People are panicking, slamming into one another, screaming, rolling on the floor to put out burning suit jackets and skirts. To my left, a small army of security squadmen has appeared seemingly from nowhere, wearing helmets and bearing riot shields. They’ve positioned themselves between the board members and the hysterical crowd. Already, my father is being hustled out of the room, followed by Jimmy Shaw and Blackwell. That’s all I see before a curtain of smoke rolls in and obscures everything around me. Half blind, choking on the hot, dusty air, I stumble down the steps, away from the podium.

“Randal?” I shout. “Randal?”

He’s my only friend. Other than my dad, he’s the only one in the room who I have to make sure gets out of this alive. But this was his seat, I’m sure of it, and he’s already gone. I look around, searching for him, but everywhere I turn it’s the same: roiling, billowing smoke, churning limbs of fleeing tie-men, shrill screams, fluttering flames.

Then, suddenly, there’s a hand gripping my elbow. I turn and see her, and that’s when I finally panic. Hazel eyes bloodshot with smoke, strawberry-blonde hair disheveled.

“I’m Clair,” the beautiful stranger shouts over the din. “Come on.”

It helps that the world is burning around me, that I have no idea how to get out of the conference room, that smoke obscures all the emergency exits, but who am I kidding? Even if the Headquarters weren’t crashing down around me, I would follow her anywhere.

~~~

Inside the echo-filled stairwell, a red emergency light flashes in rhythm with my pounding heart. The air is better here, though still unclean. Clair and I clamor down the steps, side by side now. The descent seems endless. Once, something in the walls coughs and the whole building shutters and seems to rock on its foundation. Shouts linger all around us, some piercing, some low, all terrifying.

“We have to get out of the building,” Clair shouts over the chaos. “Is there a faster way?”

There might be, but I haven’t used my dad’s “special exit” in years. I’m not even sure if this is the right stairwell.

“Follow me,” I say, and take the lead.

Flight after flight we descend, until my legs ache and tremble beneath me. My hope at being Clair’s savior is giving way to despair when finally I see a door with a sign on it. Through the smoky haze, I can barely make out: Floor 125—Rooftop Access

“Here,” I cough, hardly recognizing the inhuman rasp as my own voice.

I shove through a heavy steel door, and Clair follows me into the whispering breeze of the South-Annex rooftop.

Stumbling into the afternoon light is like awaking from a nightmare. Bizarre serenity. Behind us, the rest of the building rises up, a smooth shard of blue-black mirror, fractured somewhere above. Down here, the only signs something is wrong are the tiny particles of debris that fall onto us from above, drifting as placidly as flakes of black snow.

“Thanks—” I try to finish with
for getting me out of that conference room,
but I’m wracked with a violent coughing fit before I can.

Clair doesn’t even look at me. She’s glancing around the rooftop, back toward the door from which we emerged. “We have to get out of here,” she says.

From above comes the low rumble of another small explosion, and in my mind I’m back up in that room, remembering that lashing swirl of yellow flame, the people who were sitting in the back few rows of the auditorium, who are probably now burned to ash. How could this have happened? An accident? It seems impossible. But if it wasn’t an accident, then who could have done it? Unprofitables? Anarchists? But Dad told me they were just myths, made up for newscasts, fictional boogiemen for the workers to root against. . . .

“Hey,” Clair says, “Come on.” There’s a harshness in her tone that, judging from the sweetness of her features, I would never have thought her capable of. Her hand, still on my arm, clamps down harder as she tries to drag me across the rooftop, but I pull away.

When she turns back to me, her demeanor has gone from harsh to downright dangerous.

“Come with me,” she repeats.

“No,” I say. “What’s going on?”

I’d never seen her before in my life, I remind myself. And she was staring at me minutes before the explosion. As soon as it happened, she found me and dragged me away, and now she’s dying to get away from the scene of the crime. What if she had something to do with it? What if that was her intention all along, to cause a diversion and then kidnap me? What if—

She reaches into her coat and comes up with a gun—a strangely shaped pistol the pale color of bone.

“You’re an anarchist, aren’t you?” I whisper.

“Of course not. Don’t be an idiot.” She grabs the lapel of my jacket and is once again hauling me across the rooftop, her gun barrel jammed into my ribs. This time I’m too confused to resist. My mind races as I try to put it all together.

“Why?” I ask, my anger finally setting in. “Why did you kill those people?” I pull away from her again, halting. “Tell me the truth, or I’m not taking another step with you. You can shoot me right here!”

For a second, the rage in her eyes looks so potent I think she might shoot me after all.

Then Clair, if that’s even her name (but it must be, because the cross-identification program can’t be fooled, can it?), chokes back a cough and makes herself stand up straight. She’s taller suddenly, stronger looking. Her carriage is regal though her face is smudged nearly black with soot. Her eyes burn into mine.

“We had nothing do with that explosion,” she says. “That’s the truth.”

Her eyes, red around the edges and full of unspilled tears, meet mine. I try to stare into her soul. I give her no quarter. But I can see no trace of a lie inside her—and I don’t think all her tears are because of the smoke.

“Who’s ‘we’?” I press.

Before she can answer, a sound interrupts us. From somewhere below: the lamenting warble of sirens.

We both look off into the distance, listening, and then her eyes return to mine. “I need your help, May,” she says, suddenly softening. “If you don’t help me, they’ll kill me.”

By
they
, I assume she’s referring to the men behind the sirens: the HR security squads.

“If you had nothing to do with what happened, why would they do that?” I ask.

“Please,” she says, and cocks her gun. Now that’s persuasion. For an instant, I could almost crack a smile—if I wasn’t so worried that she might actually shoot me.

But it’s not the gun that makes the decision for me: it’s the curiosity. I want to know this woman. I want to know what’s going on.

She grabs me again—this time taking my hand. (And yes, a thrill runs through my body at her touch.) Her eyes locked on mine, she says, “Please, May.”

And before I know it, I’m leading her across the rooftop. I haven’t been up here in years, but it’s all just as I remember it. And when we round a corner of the building, our hoped for destination comes into view on the far side of the rooftop.

“May, you’re my hero,” Clair says.

Ahead, my father’s N-Falcon personal helicopter waits.

~~~

Mountainous glass buildings flash by us one by one, rising from the jumble of traffic-choked streets below.

Clair and I are in the chopper, running away.

Flying low under the radar grid just as Clair instructed, I slalom past the countless skyscrapers, all of them monuments to N-Corp’s seemingly infinite wealth. The tilting and turning, the speed, the blurred world racing past, it makes me want to puke and laugh all at once.

“Executive Two, come in,” the radio belches. I glance at it, then at Clair.

“Don’t answer,” she says. She’s mostly recovered from all the soot she inhaled, but her eyes are still red and watery. She keeps running one hand through her hair nervously, but her gun is still pointed at me.

“Executive Two, come in, this is an emergency.”

A web of thick power lines confronts us around a blind corner, and I yank us upward. The roller-coaster feeling twists in my stomach, except this no N-Fun Park. There’s nothing safe about this ride.

“Executive Two—” Then, in the hollow-sounding world of radio waves, we hear the speaker address someone else in the room with him.

His words are soft, but audible: “No answer. The anarchists must’ve stolen the chopper.”

Then, someone else comes on: “Executive Two, we know what you’ve done. If you think you can get away, you’re mistaken.” I recognize the voice immediately; it’s Blackwell. I don’t know much about security-squad procedures, but I know he probably has the means to shoot down a helicopter with the push of a button.

“What are we going to do?” I ask Clair.

She just shakes her head. Her face is horribly pale.

The first voice comes back on: “Executive Two, come in.”

Before Clair can stop me, I snatch up the radio receiver.

“Executive Two here, over.”

A moment of stunned silence, then: “Who am I speaking with?”

“Who do you think? May Fields.” Maybe if I act annoyed they’ll leave us alone.

“Oh. Everything alright up there, Miss Fields?”

“Yeah, why, you don’t think a woman can fly a chopper?”

“No, no, sir—ma’am—it’s just that we saw the explosion during your speech, and then you were missing. . . . ”

“I took off down a stairwell and evacuated. Would you prefer I waited around for another bomb to go off?”

“No, ma’am, of course not. But you didn’t log your flight. I need to know your current destination.”

I hesitate for an instant, then say, “My apartment. I’m going to take the rest of the day off, if that’s okay with you. I’m not exactly used to being blown up, and I frankly don’t feel like I’d be very productive today. If anyone needs me, tell them to use my IC. Bye.”

“Miss Fields,” the man interrupts before I can shut off the radio. “It’s just . . . is there anyone with you?”

“No,” I say quickly. “Why would there be?” I glance at Clair to gauge her reaction to my lie, but she continues to stare out the windshield, pale and lost in thought.

There’s a silence on the other end of the radio, then a shuffling, and a new voice greets me: “Miss Fields, this is Blackwell. We got reports you were being kidnapped at gunpoint.”

Of course, the squad has cameras on the rooftop. I’m such a moron. Clair looks over at me, her eyes wide.

“Well, you were misinformed,” I say. “Anything else?”

“Yes,” he says slowly. “If you’re going back to your place, why do our satellites have you heading in the opposite direction?”

I open my mouth a little, but nothing comes out. My mind’s a blank. Surely there should be some easy answer, some logical, simple lie, but at this moment I’m completely bereft of thought.

“Fields?” Blackwell says.

Clair reaches over and snaps the radio switch to “off.”

“You just got me killed,” she says.

“I’m trying to help you!”

“Well, you’re doing one hell of a job of it.”

I grit my teeth. “You kidnapped me at gunpoint, and I’m still trying to save your life! What more do you want from me?”

She ignores me, turning back to the window, leaving me seething in frustration. I’m not supposed to be helping her. I’m
supposed
to get her killed! She’s an anarchist or something, a traitor to the Company, an unprofitable and probably a heathen. She has a gun pointed at me, for God’s sake! Why should I help her? But I am. And she has the nerve to complain about it.

We roar on through the flawless blue sky. Sirens bellow up from the street below, a dissonant soundtrack to our doomed escape.

“So where am I taking you?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “I’m thinking about it. They’ll be tracking us with their satellites. Even if we go out of the hub and land in the forests, by the time we touch down they’ll have us surrounded. As long as the sats can see us from above, we have no chance.”

“Maybe we should land here, take off on foot,” I suggest, peering out at the street below.

“Same problem. The squad trucks will run us down.” There’s an ominous undercurrent in her tone. Judging from her demeanor, the situation is hopeless.

“So what do we do?”

“I have to get a hold of Ethan,” she says.

“Who’s Ethan?”

She doesn’t answer.

I weave us around another tall building. In a few minutes we’ll be at the edge of the hub. Already, the glass-tower temples of commerce are becoming scarce, replaced by the sea of whitewashed square structures, N-Corp housing for the low-credit-level workers. Shortly, we’ll pass over the countless factories of the industrial arc, then the miles upon miles of horribly polluted forests and grasslands, abandoned fields, and rotting old houses beyond.

Almost all agriculture is now done by our divisions outside America Division for efficiency reasons. The land here is too poisoned to support crops anyway.

“We don’t want to get too far outside the hub city,” Clair says. “Then they can just shoot us down and nobody will even know.”

“They couldn’t do that,” I say. “It would be on the news. Besides, my father is the CEO of N-Corp. He’d be furious.”

“Yeah, Blackie?” she says sardonically. “What makes you think he’d ever find out?”

Now we’re reaching the industrial arc. We pass through a column of white steam rising from a power plant. The bright afternoon sun is eclipsed by it, and it feels like we’ve passed into a new world, a barren place peopled by ghosts where all life is choked away by cement and steel.

The sirens have passed out of earshot now, but they can’t be far behind. I know that Clair is right about the satellites—they don’t blink, they don’t sleep, and there’s no shadow in which to hide from them. I think back to the many episodes of
N-Squads LIVE
I’ve watched on the imager. It’s a great program—the second most highly rated show behind Jimmy Shaw’s—and I’ve seen it a million times. Each
N-Squads LIVE
episode plays out the same way: somebody breaches the Company’s HR policy and then tries to escape. Many of the criminals have ingenious hiding places, fast cars, or clever disguises. Still, every show ends the same way: the squads close in like a pack of wolves surrounding their prey, and the fugitive is caught. He’s dragged, usually bloody, into the back of a big, shiny black squad truck. Blaring music from the truck’s stereo and raucous laughter of the squadmen form his eulogy as the truck doors slam behind him, and the criminal, the unprofitable, is gone.