Reboot (17 page)

The shuttle was silent as we rode to the slums. Paul dug into his pocket and produced four bullets as we landed, offering them to me.

“Take any unused ones out before boarding the shuttle,” he warned as I closed my fist around the bullets.

I nodded and followed Callum into the cool night air. His eyes were glued to the gun as I loaded the bullets. I didn’t want to tip off the HARC officers watching our video feed. They needed to believe we were following orders, for as long as possible.

I held the gun out to Callum, but his hands remained at his sides.

“Callum,” I said quietly.

He wrapped his fingers around the gun, holding it away from him like it was contaminated. His eyes met mine.

“I have to?” he asked, his voice strained.

No
. “Yes.” I cleared my throat and jerked my head to the right. “Let’s go this way. It’s a shortcut.”

Callum frowned down at his map and the assignment slip, then looked up at me, mouth open to most likely tell me we were headed in the wrong direction. He quickly snapped it shut as understanding crossed his face and I turned away so HARC wouldn’t see the hope there.

I led him to the intersection of Holly and Nelson, whipping my head around to find Leb.

Nothing.

The night was quiet, nothing but the sound of wind in the trees and a few crickets as we stood in the middle of the dirt road surrounded by little tents.

Maybe he wasn’t coming tonight.

“Can I see the map?” I asked, to stall.

Callum handed it over and I pretended to look at the straight lines representing the streets of Rosa. I didn’t have long before the HARC officers watching me grew suspicious. I rarely needed to look at a map.

I stole another peek around but there was no one but me and Callum. I let out a long sigh.

“We should go that way,” I said, trying my best to keep the defeat out of my voice.

Callum’s face fell and he looked down at the gun in his hand. “So I have to shoot her in the head, right? To kill my own kind?” He glanced down at the assignment slip. “Danielle. I murder Danielle?”

I winced at the word choice and the anger dripping from every syllable. HARC surely heard it.

“Yes,” I replied. “Aim for the forehead, not the face. You want to destroy the brain. Two shots are best, to be safe.”

“And then what? I drag her back to the shuttle?”

“Or I will.” I turned away, unable to meet his accusing gaze. He might have been mostly mad at HARC, but there was plenty there for me as well. Would he ever be able to forgive me if I made him do this?

“I—” A high-pitched screeching in my ear interrupted me, and Callum and I both grimaced and pulled our coms out.

“What was that?” Callum asked, rubbing his ear. “Did our coms just go out?”

My eyes darted across the area, hope filling my chest so much it was difficult to breathe.

A man peeked around the edge of a tent, a broad figure in black. He rose from his knees and jogged to us, pushing the brim of his hat up as he stopped in front of me.

Leb. He held a knife with one hand and with the other pulled a black object out of his pocket, and Callum stepped forward, the gun half-raised to defend us. I shook my head at Callum and he slowly lowered it, eyes still glued to Leb’s knife.

“Stand still,” Leb said, lifting the black object to my chest. It was a small device about the size of his palm, and it lit up with a red light when he scanned it over my upper right arm.

“Take off your jacket,” he said.

“How’d you get it so fast?” I asked as I shook off my jacket.

“Getting it isn’t the problem,” he muttered. “It’s the shit storm that will erupt when they realize it’s gone that’s the problem.”

He lifted the knife and sliced a gash a few inches above my elbow, using the edge of the blade to knock a little metal device to the ground. I wrapped my fingers around the bloody wound. It wasn’t deep enough to be painful, but my fingers still shook as I clutched them to my skin.

I stared at the bloody silver tracker. Freedom. I could run now, and no one would know where I was. What I was doing. What I was saying.

Leb waved for Callum to come closer, but he just stood there, staring at the blood seeping out of my arm. He looked shocked, on the edge of happiness, like he couldn’t believe it was real.

“Would you hurry up?” Leb snapped, grabbing him by the arm and waving the locator over his body. “The shuttle officer is probably already on his way.”

Leb spun Callum around and ran the locator down his back until it turned red. He lifted his shirt and cut a short line across his back just under his shoulder blade. He grabbed the tracker and carefully set it on the ground.

Leb took off down the street, motioning for us to follow him. We ran two blocks, coming to a stop behind a dark house with an assortment of trash and broken toys in the backyard.

Leb shoved something into my hand and I looked down to see some papers, the locator, and a map of the Austin slums. I didn’t think I needed a map—I remembered it well enough—but he’d marked a particular spot in the middle of a residential area.

“Her name is Adina,” he said, tapping an envelope and a picture of a dark-haired Reboot below the map. “She’s on assignment Tuesday and Wednesday night. The shuttle usually lands at the end of Guadalupe Street. Give her that letter. I marked the rebels’ address on the map. If you get Adina, go there and they will tell you how to get to the reservation.”

“Fine,” I said, shoving everything into my back pocket. “Do you have any bullets? We only have four.”

He pulled his gun out and emptied about ten into my hand. “They’re militant about keeping this location secret from HARC. Go at night. Don’t call attention to yourselves.” He dropped the knife in my other hand. “Take that, too. Go.”

“Thank you,” I said as Leb turned to run. He gave me a slight nod over his shoulder before disappearing down an alley.

I was frozen. Leb had said
go
. Which way? Where? To some mythical Reboot reservation that probably didn’t even exist?

Panic gripped my chest as I realized what I’d done. I was in the slums, surrounded by humans, and I wasn’t going back to HARC.

I wasn’t going home.

“Wren.” I looked up to see Callum’s excited face peering at me. He broke the camera off my helmet, took my com from my clenched hand, and tossed them both on the ground. “I think we should run.”

I GRABBED CALLUM’S HAND AND WE WOVE THROUGH A DARK alleyway, breaking into a full sprint as we headed for an abandoned shelter. In the years after the war it was meant to help the humans get back on their feet. When the drug dealers and gangs took over Rosa, HARC boarded it up.

We were at the edge of Rosa, near the city line and in the heart of the slums. HARC was on the other side of town, past the fields, but it wouldn’t take them long to dispatch officers. In terms of hiding, this was not the best place. The houses were tiny and the tents on the next road over would provide even less cover.

An alarm pierced the silence and a spotlight swooped across the area. I scrambled to the back of a shack, pressing myself against the rickety wood. Callum did the same, his eyes on the sky as a shuttle spotlight surveyed the area. It moved down the street and he looked over at me.

“Should we keep going?” he whispered.

Yes. Maybe?
I wasn’t sure. Almost every decision I’d made over the last five years wasn’t really mine. I knew the rules of HARC and I followed them.

The spotlight swung to us and Callum gripped my hand as we took off across the patchy grass surrounding the shack. I heard the bullets before several pierced my shoulders and bounced off my helmet.

“This way,” I called, dropping Callum’s hand as we crossed the dirt road. The spotlight lost us as I wove in between houses and darted over lawns, but I could see officers in the distance, a huge group of them dispersing on the streets.

I came to a stop at the back of the old shelter and yanked so hard on the door that the building actually swayed like it was going to fall over. I stumbled as the door swung open easily and stepped inside only to reel back, hitting Callum’s chest.

People. Humans, everywhere. They smelled like grime and filth and infection. I knew that smell.

I recognized the humans huddled in their own little corners, some using only clothes or sticks to mark their territory. Saw the track marks on their arms, the shaky hands, the desperation etched on their faces.

As a child, I lived in a similar place for months while my parents floated on an intense high, a drug that lasted so long they often didn’t have time to come down before finding an opportunity to shoot up again. The squatters in the abandoned buildings were the worst off of the slum dwellers, the ones who gave every cent they had to the drug dealers and criminals who had stalled Rosa’s progress.

I’d forgotten most of my time squatting with my parents, but I remembered the smell and how I used to hold the blanket to my nose at night to block it while I slept.

Callum gagged, which drew a few interested looks. Some of the humans blinked and stared, too high to recognize the two Reboots standing in front of them. But others weren’t that far gone.

I raised my fingers to my lips, begging for silence, but it was useless. A regular human was bad, but these people were worse.

They screamed and I was struck by the sudden impulse to pull out my gun and start shooting. There were about thirty of them. How long would it take to kill them all?

“We can go out that way.”

Callum’s voice sliced through my thoughts and I looked over at him in surprise. I had almost forgotten he was there.

It occurred to me that he would be horrified if I started killing people. He’d give me that look, like I was a monster. He had been willing to die because he refused to take a life.

But me, I contemplated shooting everyone.

“Wren,” he said, pulling urgently on my arm.

I let him drag me to the front door and out into the darkness. We took off in the opposite direction of the spotlight.

I forgot that I hated humans. I had been clinical about the assignments; that’s how we were trained. But I hated them, even when I was one.

Dirty, disgusting, violent, selfish, impulsive, and now I had to spend days—weeks—wading through them to find Adina and this mythical Reboot reservation.

I wanted to hate Callum for it, but my brain immediately screamed at only me. Me, the one who could never get Callum to follow the rules. Me, who couldn’t train him well enough to survive inside HARC. Me, who brought him into this madness, where he was most likely going to be killed anyway.

Bullets peppered the ground as we ran, biting at Callum’s ankles and spewing blood across the dirt. It slowed him down, so I pulled ahead and grabbed his arm to tug him along.

The houses were closer together, the night quieter as we crossed into the nicer area of the slums. The bullets from above stopped and I thought maybe they had lost us.

But the ground crew had found us. The officers, six, seven—no, nine of them, came barreling around a corner, their guns poised.

“Duck,” I said, pushing his head down as they fired.

I left him on the ground and flew at the soldiers. I recognized a couple familiar faces through their plastic masks, although the terror splashed across them was new.

I slammed my foot into an officer’s chest as he fired at my head, dodging the shot and knocking the gun out of his hand. The others tried to grab me but I darted away, faster than their little human eyes could keep track of.

I lifted the gun. One, two, three. I shot each one in the chest, ignoring the bullets that tore through my jacket and bounced off my helmet.

One of the soldiers unhooked a grenade from his belt and tossed it frantically in my direction, missing by several feet.

Callum.

The grenade sailed past him and hit the house just behind him. He dove for the ground as the blast blew out the back of the little wooden shack, engulfing the lawn, and him, in flames.

The barrel of a gun pressed against my forehead. The panic hit, for only a moment, and I kicked his legs as the bullet grazed my ear. My fingers tightened around my gun and I fired a shot into his chest.

Another blast rocked the ground, and I snatched a grenade off the dead officer’s belt and launched it at the men running for me.

One remained, and I turned to see him taking aim at Callum, who was on the ground, trying to extinguish the flames lapping up his legs.

I fired three times, my aim messy as fear took over. The final soldier fell after the third shot and I dove for Callum, jumping on top of him and rolling us through the dirt. I smothered the lingering flames with my hands and hopped off him, pulling him to his feet.

He swayed, his hands shaking as he lifted them to examine the damage. His skin was red, charred in places. His shirt was almost totally gone, his pants nothing but scorched threads.

“Are you all right?” I asked, swiftly taking a glance around.

“Yes,” he stammered. “I’m—I’m sorry, I tried to get away, but as soon as I got the first fire out they threw another one and—”

“It’s fine,” I said, taking his hand as gently as I could. “Can you run?”

He nodded, wincing as we took off. We only had to go a block; I was headed to the closest hiding place I could think of.

The large square trash receptacle was piled too high, as usual, and sat not far from the brick wall of the schoolhouse. I pushed the large gray container closer to the wall, gesturing for Callum to get behind it. My first instinct was to jump inside and bury ourselves beneath the trash, but if I were an officer, I would immediately look in every place with a lid or door that shut. We weren’t entirely covered behind the trash bin—they’d be able to see us from the side, at the right angle—but it was such an open place to hide I hoped they wouldn’t even think to look for us there.

I edged around and leaned against the wall next to Callum, casting a worried glance in his direction. I’d never been burned to the extent he was—his arms were black in places—but I remembered the pain of lesser burns well. The stinging had been impossible to totally shut out, mixing with the uncomfortable sensation of new skin stretching over the dead.