The Society (A Broken World Book 1) (6 page)

He'd said that I'd never left the zones with the highest social desirability index, but I knew that wasn't true. I'd left—only once, but I'd left. That meant that the system wasn't perfect, that it didn't track us as completely as I'd always suspected it did.

He'd said that Megan had left once, but the fact that some trips didn't register meant that she'd actually left more times than that. Megan was a hypocrite. Her holier-than-thou attitude had been hard enough to stomach when we'd all believed that she really meant the things that she was saying. Now that I knew it was all an act, that she was off doing something that wasn't strictly in keeping with the precepts, she turned my stomach.

She smirked at me as I stepped onto the textured, no-slip training floor, and I wanted so badly to wipe that expression off of her face. I knew I could take her—she'd always had a slight edge in hand-to-hand during the few instances when we'd crossed paths in training sessions, but even if she was franchised now, there wasn't any way that she could hope to take me down now, not with my newfound advantages.

All that work, that hypocritical, catty mask she'd worn for years, and she'd ended up coming in second place to me. Only this time the gulf between first and second was even bigger than normal. There'd only been one dose of the prototype nanites and I'd gotten it.

"Okay, you two. I want to see what you're capable of—no killing blows and nothing that will take more than twenty-four hours to heal. I'm under orders to make sure that you don't interfere with the training schedule that's been laid out for you. Don't make me break the two of you up."

The instructor slapped his stun baton against his leg, emphasizing his point. The baton was plenty deadly enough—for a blunt weapon—on its own, but the handle carried a battery capable of emitting a charge that would drop a buffalo.

We nodded at each other and then I stepped forward and sent out an exploratory jab. What I found made me grit my teeth. Her reaction time was better than I'd been expecting. Despite my best efforts I hadn't been training hard enough. Apparently she'd always been a hypocrite, but she'd pushed herself harder than I'd ever done. Given a few more weeks our baseline capabilities would level out as I caught up with her, and then the greater multiple from my nanites would make a fight like this child's play.

Unfortunately this wasn't taking place in the future, it was taking place now, and our capabilities were too close for comfort. She dodged my jab and stepped into me with a punch to my short ribs. As quickly as that, the fight was full on and the two of us blurred into a flurry of blows that no normal human could have hoped to follow.

I checked her punch with my left elbow and launched my knee up towards her midsection. She blocked that with her shin, using enough force to nearly knock me off balance, and then moved forward with a palm strike to the base of my throat.

I slipped to the side, just far enough that her hand shot through the empty space next to my ear, and then I slammed a punch home to her ribs, smiling as I heard a pair of cracks that signified she was going home that night with at least two broken bones.

I expected her to back down—broken ribs weren't the kind of injury you could fight around without feeling every muscle contraction. Instead, I saw something change behind her eyes. I'd always suspected that none of the rest of us were really real to her, now I had confirmation. She wasn't just fighting to hurt me now, she was going to try to kill me—she just needed to find a way to make it look like an accident.

She hooked her heel around the back of my leg and pulled as she threw her weight forward and slightly to one side. I'd put too much into my punch to her ribs; my balance was too far off.

I was going down—there was no stopping it—but I wasn't going to make things easy for her. I grabbed hold of her mid-fall and tightened every muscle along the front of my body to generate the maximum possible force as I drove my knee into her gut.

She screamed out in pain—something I'd been convinced I would never hear—as the shockwave from my blow sent fragments of rib up into her lung. I expected to feel the lash of the instructor's stun baton at any second, but until it actually landed I had no choice but to keep going at her with everything I had.

A split second later I hit the ground with her on top of me, and her elbow slammed into my chest with enough force to break several of my ribs. Even nanites could only go so far when it came to overriding involuntary muscle contractions—she'd knocked the air out of me.

Before I could knock her off of me she repositioned, throwing me into an arm-bar as she flipped me over on my stomach. She'd won—there wasn't anything I could do to get out of the hold—but I knew that wasn't going to satisfy her. She needed a pretext for killing me; she was going to let my arm slip out of her hands.

I felt her pull back and knew she was about to make her move. From a kneeling position with only my back exposed to her and no weapon there were only so many options open to her. She was going to try to snap my neck.

My timing had to be perfect. I heard the faintest whisper of breath and chose that moment to move. I tore my arm free of her hands at the same time that I brought my right leg around and slammed it into her knee, destroying the joint.

She was falling, but I knew I couldn't just back off—not against Megan. I had to prove I was the more lethal fighter. I wrapped both of my legs around her upper body and used my hip as a fulcrum to snap her arm.

A second later I felt the paralyzing jolt of the instructor's stun-baton. Darkness tried to claim me. I couldn't move, but I still refused to let myself fall unconscious until after I saw the baton slam into Megan as well.

I'd underestimated Megan, secure in the supposed superiority of my nanites, but I wasn't going to repeat that mistake. Shattered ribs, blown knee, broken arm, none of that mattered as long as Megan was conscious. As long as she could still move she was dangerous.

Chapter 5

Present time

Traveling at night was dangerous, but I needed to get out of Piter's territory before sunrise or I risked being trapped on the wrong side of his barricades. I'd gotten extra sleep before my drop into the city, but hadn't wanted to get too far off of a normal sleeping schedule—it was one more difference from those around me that I hadn't been sure would have been justified.

It meant that I was exhausted by the time I reached the barricade on the far side of Piter's territory. Luckily I seemed to have arrived before word of Bash and the other enforcer made it to the border. That meant that security along the barricade wasn't as bad as it could have been, but it was still significant. I saw the expected collection of clubs, knives and swords hanging from the belts of the enforcers on Piter's side of the barricade, but there were also several blocky, two-hundred-year-old firearms in evidence.

That was concerning—I was fast, but nobody could outrun a bullet. The Society's intelligence on this section of the city was better than what we had on the territories of most of the other warlords, but it still left a lot to be desired. I knew there had to be ways through the barricade, routes used by smugglers and others who profited on moving goods and people to other territories, but I didn't have any contacts on the ground, and despite my hopes from before I'd jumped out of the plane, I wasn't going to have time to perform any kind of detailed analysis of the perimeter.

If Piter was anything like most of the warlords, he couldn't care less about murders that happened inside of his territory—unless they happened to his enforcers. Crimes against his men were one of the few things that he couldn't afford to turn a blind eye to. Piter would have someone publicly executed before the sun set again.

Justice inside of grubber cities was swift and less concerned with accuracy than it was with creating deterrents. I knew better than to let my guard down though. Executing some poor individual who was in the wrong place at the wrong time wouldn't stop Piter from continuing to look for the actual murderer. He couldn't afford to let me get away any more than he could afford to let his 'citizens' think that I'd gotten away.

My only way to make sure that I was beyond Piter's grasp was to find a way across the barricade and into the territory to the north of his, the territory where my target lived.

I spent nearly twenty minutes scouting Piter's northern border without any luck. I found a couple of likely holes in the wall of metal and wood that ran from building to building, but each and every one of them was guarded by at least two guys. It spoke volumes that Piter was so concerned about keeping everyone in his territory from leaving, but I suspected that it was much the same in any of the territories controlled by the various warlords who ran the city.

I could feel the clock ticking down with each passing minute. With all of the disruption from the bombing, and the late start that Piter had awarded all of his people, there was a chance that the two bodies I'd left behind me wouldn't be discovered until dawn, but it would be foolish to rely on that. There was no choice but to go inside one of the buildings on the border.

It was risky—once I was inside there were fewer options when it came to running away from any pursuit. Even more concerning was the likelihood I would quickly be recognized as a stranger by the building's normal occupants, but the buildings were the last possible vulnerability. My clothes were already worn and singed in several spots. Even without the damage from the bombing and the fire I'd wanted to make sure that I would blend in with the rest of the grubbers, so I'd made sure to tear both the shirt and pants before I'd left home. I picked a couple of likely rips and strategically lengthened them to show some upper thigh and a healthy chunk of shoulder.

Then I took a deep breath and walked into the nearest building with the confident stride of someone who belonged there. I should have known that the doorway would have a guard on it, but my ruse worked. The guard flinched at the bruising and swelling easily visible all over my face, but he didn't ask me who I was going up to see. I walked past him with a gait that was part shame and part strut, and then once I was out of sight I hurried up the closest stairwell.

At some point this had been an office building. That meant a plethora of windows, but I knew that Piter wouldn't have left the first two floors unsecured—not as paranoid as he seemed to be about security, not for a building that bordered the territory of one of his rivals.

I ducked out of the stairs on the third floor and bit back a curse as soon as I got to where I could see the closest window. Metal plating had been welded across the space that had once contained a window. As I headed back towards the stairs, arm pressed against my ribs, I heard yelling. The odds of anyone having tracked me to this building already were astronomical, but I had to assume that was what had happened.

Maybe Piter's men had access to radios and someone had seen Bash pull me off into the alley. If so, the guard downstairs had probably alerted his fellows to my presence in his building just based on my height, build and gender. I hurried up to the fourth floor, but the first window I checked was blocked off by a steel mesh that would take equipment I didn't have to cut through.

I debated going up one more floor. There was a limit to how much metal even a psychopath like Piter would be willing to dedicate towards sealing off egress from this particular building, but the paracord I'd brought with me hadn't been measured with a hundred-foot drop in mind. I had to find an exit from this floor or I wasn't going to survive the drop.

At least the fact that they'd used steel mesh rather than welded sheet metal was a good sign. I could hear a group of people running up the stairs as I crashed through the plywood separating the next-door office.

This room wasn't abandoned, but I subdued the two occupants—a guy and girl roughly my own age—with a pair of carefully targeted blows that left them unconscious. I turned to look at the window and felt a surge of relief. There was nothing more than plywood sealing the room off from the elements.

The relief lasted only as long as it took to rip the plywood down and see the bars that had been welded across the opening. It was a patchwork mess, but there weren't any spaces big enough even for someone as small as me to slip through…unless…I checked a suspicious-looking bar and confirmed that the weld to the rest of the framework was corroded.

I gritted my teeth and then lashed out with a kick that sent a jolt of pain shooting through my foot. I'd just fractured the reinforced bones in my foot, but the blow had succeeded in breaking the top of the bar loose. I grabbed the free end and started working it back and forth in the hopes that I could fatigue the bottom weld. It wouldn't have worked if not for the kick that had broken the top free, but between my first blow and the corrosion, the bottom weld gave just a few seconds later.

I pulled the paracord out of the pack wrapped around my waist and tied one end to the most secure part of the remaining framework. The other end went around the metal bar I'd just finished tearing free, and then it was time.

More screams rang out from the third floor as Piter's enforcers went room to room looking for me. I wriggled through the opening I'd created in the framework, and then stood on the windowsill with one hand on the framework and the other wrapped around the bar that connected me to the paracord.

I told myself that it wasn't going to hurt as bad as I thought it would, and then I stepped off into thin air.

My length of rope was just over forty feet long—long enough to be useful, but not so long that it would be impossible to believe I could have scavenged it from somewhere inside of the city. By the time I'd used several inches tying into the bars crisscrossing the window and several more inches securing the knot around the bar in my hand, there was a tad less than forty feet of slack racing past me as I fell.

I grabbed hold of the metal bar like a water-skier from back home, and locked the muscles in my hands and arms. Nobody—even an operative from the Society—was strong enough to absorb the forces involved in a one-hundred and twenty-five pound weight falling forty feet, but I came close.