Tracer (34 page)

We eat while Carver puts everything together. It takes him a little longer than I’d like, but eventually, he straightens up, pulling his goggles off.

Prakesh hugs me tight.

And then we’re out into the passage. And we’re running. Not in single file, not this time,
but in a tight group, Carver and Kev close on my sides. We run at full speed, barrelling through the station, and for a little while, it’s almost as if we’re not running to any destination. We’re just running.

Prakesh watches her go. It’s the hardest thing he’s ever had to do.

He sits for a few moments longer in the hab. The air is cold, but when his hand strays to the blankets that he and Riley were sitting on, he finds they’re still warm.

Riley asked him to spread the word if they failed. He tries to think about how he’d do this, but it’s too big a task. Outer Earth is chaos, turned feral
by Oren Darnell. How do you get people to stop fighting long enough to listen to you?

He hauls himself to his feet. It’s more than that. He’s a lab tech. He knows about plants, and machines, and chemicals. He can transfer smoke from one room to another. He can’t capture people’s minds, or change them.

I changed hers
.

Whatever he has to do, it won’t come from staying in here. Prakesh steps out,
closing the door behind him. He can hear the fighting from here. It’s a jarring rumble of noise, trapped and funnelled by the corridors, twisted and bent by every corner. The air is thick and cloying, and so hot that Prakesh gasps. It’s
his imagination, it has to be, but he could swear there’s a heat haze rising from the end of the corridor, shimmering in the lights. Somewhere, an alarm is blaring,
an electronic voice spouting unheard warnings.

The noise changes. Shouting. It’s closer – close enough for him to pick out individual voices.

Prakesh wipes sweat from his eyes, and jogs down the corridor. When he comes round the corner, he sees a group of people standing in the middle of the next section. Three of them wear gang colours, blue shirts and armbands with black pants. They’ve surrounded
two others, an old man and a much younger woman. The old man is wearing dirty overalls, with one sleeve tied off at the shoulder.

The three gang members are poking him in the stomach, laughing at him as he tries to shield the woman. She’s twig-thin, her head completely bald. One of the gang members reaches over, and taps her on the dome of her skull, laughing. She shrinks up against the old man,
who whirls around, screaming threats.

“Come on,” says one of the others. “I seen you in the market before. You gotta have some food.”

The man says something back, spit arcing from his mouth. A dot of it lands on the gang member’s shoulder, and he flicks it away.

“You spat on me,” he says, and shoves the old man in the chest. He slams against the corridor wall, dropping to his knees. The woman
screams.

“Hey!” Prakesh says.

They all turn to stare at him. Prakesh is walking towards them, a few feet away. There’s no possible way he can do what he’s about to do, but he keeps coming, bearing down on them.

The gang member who shoved the old man gives Prakesh a crooked smile. “Keep walking, man.”

Prakesh grabs the front of his shirt, pulling him in close. As he does so, he sees that he’s
just a kid. So are the others – the oldest one looks like he’s barely scraping sixteen.

“Hey, what—” the kid starts.

“You think what’s happening gives you the right to beat up old men?” Prakesh says. His forehead almost touches the gang member’s, their skin so close that he can feel the heat baking off. “I don’t give the tiniest shit who you are, or what you think you can do. You’ll run, and
you’ll keep running, and if I see you again before this is all over I’ll take that rag off your arm and stick it down your throat.”

He lets go. The boy stumbles backwards, only just managing to keep his feet. The other two are shocked back to life, and the older one takes a step towards Prakesh.

Don’t quit now
, Prakesh thinks, deliriously. He screams in the older boy’s face. “
Go!
”

It breaks
them. They move away, not quite running, but not quite walking either. The one Prakesh took hold of looks back over his shoulder, his face threatening payback. Prakesh holds the boy’s gaze until they vanish, disappearing round the corner. His heart is hammering in his chest, and he can’t quite describe what he’s feeling. It’s not quite surprise. It’s more like awe.

“Thank you,” says the old man.
Prakesh turns around and holds out a hand, pulling the man up. His skin feels hypersensitive, as if some weird drug has been injected into his veins.

The woman wraps her arm around the man, her huge eyes taking in Prakesh.

“Bastards,” the old man spits. “All of them. Take and kill, all they do.” The woman nods, a venomous look crossing her face.

“Yeah, I know,” Prakesh says. The adrenaline
is draining away, replaced by the cold glare of reality. Those three were kids. The next ones might not be.

“Madala,” the old man says.

Prakesh turns to him. “Huh?”

“Name’s Madala,” the man says, thrusting out an ancient hand. Prakesh takes it, and the man pumps twice, then jerks his head at the woman. “This Indira. She not talk much, but she says hello.”

The woman blinks at him, and nods.

“Sure,” Prakesh says. “Listen, you two need to get inside. It’s only going to get worse out here.”

“Ha,” says the old man, barking the word. “Inside? No. We come with you.”

Before Prakesh can protest, Indira and Madala have grabbed him by the arms, and are marching him down the corridor. He tries to say something, but Madala talks over him. “You tell us what to do, we do it.”

Well, OK then
,
Prakesh thinks.

“Where are you?” Darnell says, his eyes on the screens.

His words are barely coherent, blurring together in a husky whisper. Around him, the control room is silent. He doesn’t know where Okwembu is, and he doesn’t care.

He has the Apogee entrance to the Core up on the screen. The protection officers guarding it are restless and worried, pacing with their stingers out. No Hale.

He
selects another camera view – the Apogee gallery, the camera under the Level 1 catwalk, pointing down. It shows a gallery strewn with burning trash, wreathed in smoke. He’s lost count of how many times he’s pulled up the feed, hoping to see Hale being burned alive. Not for the first time, Darnell curses the cameras that no longer work, the blind spots in his vision.

Pain lances through him, driving
a pointed tip through his torn ear, his shoulder, the scabbing burn on his arm. He growls in anger. After he was shot, the pain felt like it belonged to someone else. Now it’s everywhere, ferocious, biting. He can’t get away from it.

He should be savouring these last few hours, using the control room to create as much fear as possible. Instead, he’s obsessing over Hale. The stompers who came
through the Core provided a momentary distraction, but she keeps returning to the front of his mind. He knows that she’s a minor threat at best, that she can’t run forever, but it doesn’t help. The fact that he can’t do anything about her is infuriating. It makes him feel useless.

Like before.

And in the years following the controlled burn, he
was
useless. He was placed with different families.
He had counsellors. But those years are a dark, indistinct smudge – he doesn’t remember a single thing anyone said to him.

Darnell didn’t feel sorry about his mother – she would have died soon anyway, and at least this way she’d been useful. Why couldn’t they understand that? Why couldn’t they see that the plants were just doing what was needed to exist?

He tried to rationalise it, tried to
understand why they’d destroyed the plants, and why nobody had stopped them. He couldn’t. It was too big, a monstrous truth that he couldn’t comprehend.

And it wasn’t just the plants in his hab. The Earth below them was wrecked, its environment destroyed. Humans had done that too.
And they didn’t learn
. Even as they clung to existence, spinning around the Earth, they committed the same mistakes.

Darnell was a minor when he was put into the system. When he was eighteen, in accordance with Outer Earth law, his record was wiped clean. He moved to a distant sector, where no one recognised him. By that time, he had his size, and he found work in the Food Lab, toting sacks of fertiliser. It was there that he had his revelation, which arrived so suddenly that it stopped him in his tracks, the
sack he was carrying swaying in his grip.

He would fix it.

A species that could destroy something so pure and beautiful didn’t deserve the world they were given, so Darnell would take it away from them. Without humans, nature would reclaim the Earth. It would take millennia, but that didn’t matter.

There would be no place for him in that world, either. When he realised that, the relief was
exquisite, like he’d been thirsty for years and had finally found cool water.

He would have to be careful. Blend in, make contacts, accumulate power and influence. It would be immensely difficult. If his plan was going to work, it would need to be total – not a single human survivor could be left alive. He would have to wipe out Outer Earth in one go. He accepted that there was little he could
do about the asteroid catcher ships, but without Outer Earth to sustain them, where would they go? The humans on board would die too, even if it took a little longer.

And it had worked. His patience, his self-control, had all been worth it. In a matter of hours, Outer Earth would be utterly destroyed. Hale couldn’t stop that, no matter what she did. So why is he fixating on her? What keeps him
watching the screens?

“We don’t have much time left.”

Okwembu is behind him; her mouth is set in a thin line.

Darnell ignores her. He’s still scanning the screens.

“I know there’s no point treating those wounds,” she says. “But I can give you something for the pain, if you like.”

Darnell opens his mouth to tell her that he’s fine, but his eyes are drawn to movement on the feed. He quickly
maximises the camera, zooming in.

Something is happening at the core entrance in Apogee.

“Ten stompers,” says Carver. “This isn’t a break-in, Riley, it’s suicide.”

I bite my lip, staring at the entranceway to the Core. We’re off to one side, in the shadows of the corridor. We managed to run up the levels without encountering too much resistance; there was a group of teens looking for a fight, but they weren’t armed, and even undermanned we got through them easily. Now, as
I stare into the room, half of me is tempted to agree with Carver. But with less than ten hours left before Darnell destroys everything, we don’t have a choice.

The entrance is pretty much as I remember it: a massive open space, stacked with pallets for transporting equipment. The walls are lined with rows of lockers, each capped with an oversized keypad. There’s no overhead lighting. Instead,
harsh spotlights at floor level point upwards at the roof, directed at the colossal blast doors themselves. They take up nearly the whole ceiling, reaching from one wall to the other. The seal between the two halves is like a giant set of metal teeth, decayed with age until each tooth is black with rust. The doors aren’t
flush with the roof, but sit slightly below it. Painted across them in enormous
black letters are the words
Reactor Access
.

I can see the control panels on either side of the room. I’d like to get a closer look, but even if I could understand the readouts – about as likely as being able to grow eyes in the back of my head – there’s no way I’d get near them. The stompers in the room are on edge, pacing back and forth. It doesn’t look as if anybody has tried to breach their
defences yet, but from the way they’re fingering their guns I’d guess they’re expecting an attack any minute.

And now, it seems, their first one’s going to come from three exhausted tracers. Lucky them. They’ll probably see it as a warm-up.

Kev squats down next to me, whispers, “Still think this is a good idea?”

“Not really. But it’s the only one we’ve got. You ready to go?”

He grunts, hefting
his backpack.

“Remember,” Carver says to him. “The second it kicks off, hit the ground. They’ll be shooting, and you’ll be the last thing they see.”

Kev nods. I busy myself with pulling on the gloves Carver gave me. They’re thick, made of a stiff outer material stuffed with shreds of old fabric. They’re too big for my hands. I give them an experimental flex, dismayed to find that I have to exert
real effort to make even a clumsy fist. Climbing with these on is going to be nearly impossible. But they’ll protect my fingers from the cold. What happened to Amira won’t happen to me.
In more ways than one
.

There’s a dirty black scarf wrapped around my neck. I’ve already padded myself out under my jacket, pulling on two of Carver’s shirts and a hooded top belonging to Kev. The clothing is threadbare,
barely holding itself together. The under-layer is
soaked in sweat from the run. I’m worried that the sweat might freeze, drawing body heat, but I can’t think about that now. It’d be great if I had a full thermo-suit to wear, but it’d just slow me down. For now, I’ll have to live with the discomfort.

“Last chance to back out, Riley,” says Carver.

I shake my head. My heart is thudding in my chest,
and there’s a curious metallic taste in my mouth. But I push it away, forcing myself to focus. “We’re doing this,” I say.

“I always knew being a tracer would get me killed,” says Kev. And with that, he stands and walks straight into the room. I have to remind myself to breathe.

Kev walks slowly, his hands up, his pack hanging loosely from his shoulders. The stomper nearest to us – a stocky woman
with a ponytail – looks up at the sound of footsteps. “Stop!” she barks. In half a second, she and every other stomper in the room have their guns out and locked on Kev.