Robogenesis (23 page)

So I say nothing.

Bracing myself on my knees, I turn and level the M240 on the roadway behind us. Then I open fire. Tracer streaks saturate my vision as the pavement spits shrapnel. The quads are trying to dodge, but it’s too late. Needles of kinetically charged ammunition send them both tumbling.

And a blue bolt of lightning falls from the sky—a transmission.

“Arbiter, this is your Adjudicator. Route yourself to Freeborn City. Acknowledge.”

“Negative that,” I transmit.

I pivot the nose of my gun up and turn to the rear window. There is no choice but to speak in human-audible frequencies. I hope they do not react poorly to my low-pitched, grinding voice.

“Identification: Freeborn Arbiter-class designated Nine Oh Two.”

“Holy shit,” says the bearded male, slowing the car down to a stop. A pale face peers out at me through the dusty slide-panel window. The vehicle idles loudly, shivering and coughing in the chilly night. “Holy shit. What does it want?” asks the male.

“I want to help you,” I respond.

Adjudicator Alpha Zero will have to wait.

NEURONAL ID: MATHILDA PEREZ

Crouching in the dark, I hear the flames before I smell smoke.

In the street, Nolan stood over the body of the man he killed and he yelled at me to run. The panic in his voice sent me flying over dirt-encrusted pavement and straight into the black doorway of this leaning ten-story building. Straight into the cool, cavernous dark. I barely glimpsed the fading red X that the NYC Underground scrawled over the doorway during the New War.

Now something moves at the door. My eyes switch over to far infrared on their own. A warm red arm appears, holding a lump of cold black metal. I drop to my knees as the handgun fires three times. The muzzle strobes and drywall showers into my hair as the wall behind me swallows bullets.

Hands out, I’m crawling, ducking behind a rain-bleached reception desk and entering a short hallway. The bark of more pistol shots is muffled by moldy walls and carpet. Somewhere behind me, the lobby door squeals as it is shoved all the way open. I hear snarling voices and heavy boots. The Tribe.

A cracked glass door hangs at the end of the hall. I nudge it open
and slip into a wide-open room crammed with desks and cubicles. There must be windows somewhere, because my eyes are amplifying trace amounts of light. Leaves and trash have been blown in from somewhere.

A maze of water-stained, fabric cubicle walls have fallen over each other. Rain and wind and sun have warped the floors and desks. But time is the only force of destruction that’s been at work in here. The Underground never even bothered to carve hidey-holes into this dead-end building.

It’s a loner structure with no connections to other buildings or tunnels or any potential lifesaving cover. The red X tells people who are running, out of breath and in a panic, that this place does not offer life. With no escape route, no way to wriggle through and lose a Rob pursuer—this building is nothing but a death trap.

It’s a place to be hunted.

I stay low, weaving between rotting cubicles. Window offices line the far wall, each with its own door. My feet scrape over stiff carpet as I reach the nearest office. Faint light filters in from outside and puts stripes on the floor.

There are bars on the first-floor windows.

Shit, shit, shit
. The lowest floors of this building must all have bars on the windows. No wonder it’s marked.

I hear voices in the office behind me.

“This shit is gonna be like the Fourth of July,” says an excited voice. “Un-bee-leevable.”

On my knees, I sit still and watch. Two men are walking the dim aisles. One carries a weak plastic flashlight. He smacks it against his palm when the beam wavers. The other man carries a big can, its metal skin visible to me as a blackness. I hear liquid sloshing. He’s pouring something on the floor.

The smell reminds me of when I got big enough to sit in the warm passenger seat of my mom’s car. Watching her through the glare of gas-station lights while she pumped gas outside. Nolan would sit in the back, in his child seat, and she would blow on her cold hands and rub them, knock on the glass, and smile at us.

“Yeah, well, we don’t wanna be anywhere near here when they light this bastard,” says a more subdued voice. “I’m serious. You ever seen a can of ethanol go up?”

“Pussy,” says the other voice, snickering.

The flashlight switches off and the room goes almost pitch-black again. The men are visible to me now as two orange-red smears winking in and out of bluish clutter.

“Real funny,” says the guy with the ethanol. “Cut it out.”

I’m already on my hands and knees. Scurrying down another aisle. I cut wide around the would-be killers, but the mildewed carpet crunches loudly under my hands and knees. The forms in the darkness are alert, heads turning, eyes wide and unseeing.

“C’mon, you’re not a pussy,” says the gas man, throwing down the empty can. “Serious! I think I hear something. Turn it on!”

“I’m trying,” says the other guy, smacking the plastic flashlight. The light blinks on and off.

“It’s over there,” says the gas man, quieter now.

I stop, keeping low. Try to breathe quietly. The gas man has his gun out and up. Aimed roughly at my head. I dive forward as he pulls the trigger. A bullet ricochets between desks and pings off an old metal chair. The noise is deafening.

“Come on out, little fish!” shouts the man, firing.

The glass door explodes into shards as I reach it. Sneakers crunching on glass, I dart through the fanged gap and into the hallway. I press myself against a gray metal stairwell door. Going any deeper into this building is suicide. But through the lobby I can see a half dozen of the Tribe milling around outside. They’re pacing, watching the exit and waiting for me to run.

The only way out is up. A few floors higher and there will be no more bars on the windows. I can jump for it. Maybe I’ll make it and I’ll see my brother again and I won’t die in this moldy hallway—

A gun noses through the broken doorway behind me, blue-black and leveled. I’m flat against the gray door now, chest heaving. A glow is expanding behind the gunman as his quiet friend with the flashlight gets closer.

Now
.

The light grows. I can’t keep swallowing my gasps and they’re coming out louder now. High-pitched panicked breaths that make the world fade in and out. My stupid legs won’t work and it feels like someone poured napalm down my throat.

From outside, distant, I hear Nolan screaming. It’s just one word, over and over again: “No.” His adolescent voice breaks and I can tell my little brother has been crying. A circuit connects somewhere inside me.

“There!” shouts somebody, and a flashlight beam envelops the side of my face. A gunshot explodes in the hallway, but I’ve already turned the knob and now I’m falling into the black stairwell. My eyes sing as they dial up the active infrared: cold blue stairs crowded with trash and debris. A crumpled outfit with bones inside it. Somebody tried to make a stand here once. On all fours, I’m scrambling up the stairs right over the crumbling corpse.

The stairwell door opens, squealing, but nobody comes inside.

“The fuck?” echoes a voice from below. “She’s gone, dude. Can she see in the dark or what?”

“Don’t matter,” says the quiet voice. “It’s over for her.”

The stairwell door clangs shut. The echo spirals up to tell me what’s going to happen.
You ever seen a can of ethanol go up?
I stop at the third-story landing. Push into the hallway and slam the door shut behind me.

Crouching in the dark, I hear the flames before I smell smoke.

A concussion rattles the building, sending the floor seesawing out from under me. The room shivers and convulses with explosions. An elevator door across from me buckles, swings, and disappears into the shaft.

Then it’s over.

The whooshing crackle of flame is growing. I creep over rusting office furniture until I see the windows. No bars, thankfully. But thick smoke is already rising, creating whorls and vortices in patterns of light and dark.

They’re going to burn me alive.

On my knees, I watch as the shivering wall of ivy outside the window turns to light and ash. The hot glass wavers and the world outside disintegrates into a light-streaked oil painting. The melting glass shatters
wetly under its own weight as waves of heat cascade up the side of the building.

I can’t spot Nolan through the smoky gap. Instead, I catch a glimpse of a dirty man pacing on the ground, his rifle a dark weight slung over his shoulder. And he’s not alone. More slouched jackals are circling the building.

Also, three stories is way too far to jump.

Smoke is gathering at the ceiling, rivers of ash-specked fumes escaping out of the shattered windows. I hear a high-pitched whine—air being sucked under the stairwell door to feed the flames.

Three stories.

Behind this building is a parking lot bordered by what used to be a park. Over the years, the park has turned into woods, rows of trees swaying now in the hot wind coming off the burning building. Oddly, nobody from the Tribe is back here. I’m seeing sparkles on the ground. I resist the urge to rub my eyes. Warm people-shapes are running into the park, reddish-brown blobs that disappear between cold blue tree trunks. Among the trees, I spot a person dragging somebody who is hopping on one leg in a way that seems familiar.

I’m going to have to jump, but it’s too far to jump
.

Something big falls behind me. Part of the ceiling collapsing into the stairwell. A gust of scalding heat washes over my back, spitting sparks out the window over my head. My hair flies one way, then it pulls back, blown over my shoulders by the night air being sucked inside to feed the fire.

A chant starts inside me. My lips move as I whisper.
I love you, Nolan. I love you, Mommy
. My hands go to the hot windowsill.
I love you, Nolan. I love you, Mommy
. I push one foot out of the window and toe the ledge. Bring the other leg out and hang over the windowsill. The heat climbing the building is already melting my shoes.

I suck in a breath and cough it back out and let go of the ledge.

Push away from the building and fall.

… love you, Mommy … love you, Nolan … love you—

The ground looms at me and I land on bent legs. Pain spasms up my leg. Biting down on a scream, I roll over onto my hands and knees.
Something is popping around me, little explosions like popcorn in a microwave. And when I see why, I do decide to scream. Not in anger but in despair.

Stumpers.

The rat-sized little walkers are waking up. Coming out of the woods in a gleaming flood. Each one carries enough explosives to blow off a limb and now I understand the hopping gait of that person in the woods. It’s the hop of somebody who just lost a foot. The stumpers were built to find the warmth of a human body. They love the heat—any heat. Right now, this building must be the hottest object in this hemisphere.

Breathing in tight gasps, I flex my ankle. Peering through to the muscles, I see it is not broken, only sprained. Moving slow, I force myself to stand on it.

The last time I saw her, my mommy told me to use my eyes to find a safe way out of danger. I did what my mother said and these eyes have never let me down since. Now I see that the weed-covered parking lot is a patchwork quilt, made of tiles of heat intensity, swarming with a tide of stumpers skittering toward the inferno rising up behind me.

Tens of thousands of tiny antennae scratch over the pavement. Little clawed feet dragging awkward bodies over grass and leaves. Only a foot away from me, a dirt-encrusted stumper pauses. Antennae tapping, claws scratching … searching.

My legs are willing me to run, run, run away. I bite down on the impulse. The vibration of a running gait will detonate the stumper. If I kick it or step on it, the stumper will explode. If it detects body heat within a half meter, it will self-detonate.

But my body warmth is camouflaged by the burning building. Squinting, I make out streaks of heat on the pavement. The streaks of hot and cold match the stumper routes. They’d rather crawl over each other on a hot spot than go around on a cooler route. With the heat behind me, I’m casting a cool shadow on the pavement at my feet. A wavering shadow in the silhouette of a skinny fourteen-year-old girl.

Faith, Mathilda. Have faith
.

The stumper meticulously crawls around the shadow of my head. Wincing, I take a step forward. My shadow parts the tide of stumpers
like an ice-breaking ship. Stumpers flow around my sneakers. Long antennae sweep over the ground, occasionally tickling my shins. Those tiny legs churn, propelling the walking bombs closer to the big blaze. One step. Two. Take it slow.

They move on toward their oblivion, and step by step, I move on to mine.

I leave the stumpers behind and march through the cold woods. Eventually, I spot something hard and angular looming out of low, misty trees. I stop, midstep. The glint of metal doesn’t move. After a moment, I let out my breath. I’m looking at an old swing set. I must be in an overgrown backyard. Now I can see the brown apartment building that the playground equipment belongs to—a rotten husk, partially crushed by a fallen tree and decomposing fast in the elements.