The System Hunted Me,So I Became It's Nightmare

CHAPTER 5

Kael made up his mind the way he made up most of his decisions, which was all at once and without any real certainty that it was a good one, and by the time the black truck rolled out of the depot with its taillights smearing red through the smoke he was already running along the edge of the rooftop with his bag banging against his hip. The vehicle slowed at the first corner to let a patrol cross, and he leapt from the roof onto the top of a stack of rusted shipping crates, then dropped to the street, slid across the wet asphalt on his heels, and caught the rear bumper with both hands just as the driver pressed the accelerator. His stitched arm screamed at him when the truck lurched forward, and for a few seconds he simply hung there with his boots dragging over the road, nearly blinded by exhaust, until he managed to hook one leg over a steel bracket beneath the chassis and haul himself into the narrow gap above the rear axle, where the hot metal burned through his jacket and the noise of the engine rattled every bone in his skull.

The first checkpoint came three minutes later, and he lay pressed against the underside of the vehicle with his heart hammering while a guard walked slowly around it, scanning the truck with a handheld blue light that crawled across the body panels and swept beneath the frame. Kael held his breath and watched the beam creep toward him, and it passed straight over his face and chest with no more reaction than it would have given a patch of bare concrete, because the System that registered every rat in the sewers and every weed in the cracks of the road could not see a man who had never been written into it. The guard grunted, waved the truck through, and Kael let out a shaky laugh into the roar of the engine, a laugh with more bitterness in it than humor, because for the first time in his life the thing that had made him worthless was the only reason he was still alive.

They drove for nearly forty minutes, climbing out of the Gutter and through the northern industrial belt, past dead factories and tangled power lines and a long stretch of road where the only light came from the headlights ahead of him, until the truck slowed and turned onto a private access road lined with high chain fences and floodlights. Kael twisted his head to look past the axle and saw the place rising out of the dark, a sprawling concrete building that had once been a regional hospital and had since been wrapped in layers of steel plating and razor wire, with narrow slits for windows and a tall smokestack that gave off a thin line of pale vapor into the night. Above the entrance, painted in stark white letters that had been scrubbed clean of rust, were two words that made his skin crawl even though he did not yet know why, and the words were HOLLOW WARD.

The convoy rolled through a gate guarded by six soldiers and a scanner arch large enough for a truck to pass beneath, and Kael clenched his jaw as the blue light washed over the vehicle again, but the arch only chimed and the heavy doors of a loading bay slid open to swallow them. The truck stopped inside a cavernous garage that smelled of disinfectant and old blood, and he waited in the dark until the engine died and the doors at the back clanged open and boots began to thud against the floor, then slid out from beneath the chassis on the far side and dropped silently behind a stack of equipment crates while the soldiers started dragging prisoners down the ramp.

Everything in him wanted to rush toward Nyra, who had been pulled out last, shoved forward with her wrists bound and a trickle of blood drying on her chin, but he forced himself to watch instead, counting the guards and memorizing the layout while the line of captives shuffled toward a pair of steel doors at the far end of the bay. There were eight soldiers in gray armor, each with a dampening collar glowing faintly blue at the throat, and two officers in white coats who stood at the doors with tablets, calling out names and ticking them off as the prisoners passed through. A woman near the front began to weep and beg, and one of the soldiers struck her across the back of the head with the butt of a rifle so casually that the sound was almost more horrifying than the blow, and Kael felt his hand tighten on the handle of his knife until the knuckles ached.

When the last prisoner disappeared through the doors and the guards turned away to unload the second truck, he moved, crouching low and running along the wall behind a row of storage lockers until he reached a rack of gray coats hanging beside a maintenance door. He pulled one on over his own jacket, tugged a cap from the shelf above it, and walked straight through the nearest corridor with his shoulders back and his gaze fixed on the floor, the way he had once watched dozens of junior employees walk through the supply halls of ruined warehouses when he was small enough to be ignored. Two soldiers passed him without a second glance, one of them muttering something about a double shift, and a technician with a cart full of vials gave him a vague nod, and he marveled at how little it took to turn invisible in a place that believed every person in it had already been scanned.

At the end of the corridor, however, a heavy door waited with a glowing panel beside it, and a guard stood in front of it holding out a handheld scanner. "Badge," the man said, not bothering to look up, and Kael's stomach dropped through the floor. He lifted his chin, forced his voice into a bored drawl, and said that he had left his badge in the locker room, and the guard sighed, raised the scanner, and aimed it at his chest. The device beeped and flickered and displayed a line of nonsense characters, then shut itself off with a faint whine, and the guard slapped it against his palm in disgust. "Another dead one," he muttered. "This whole place has been going haywire since the blackout this afternoon. Go on through, but get a replacement before your next shift."

The door slid open on a stairwell that descended into colder air, and Kael took the steps two at a time with a thrill of terror and triumph running through his blood, because he understood now that the thing he carried in his jacket and the thing he had been born without were somehow part of the same secret. The corridor at the bottom was lit with sickly green lamps and lined with observation windows, long panes of reinforced glass that looked into a series of white-tiled chambers, and every room held a single restraint chair bolted to the floor with a man or woman strapped into it. Some of the prisoners were unconscious, with tubes running into their arms and strange metal bands clamped around their skulls, while others sat staring at the ceiling with the blank, shattered look of people who had stopped believing that anyone was coming. Kael walked past them with his throat tight and his pulse ringing in his ears, scanning the faces for Nyra, until he reached a window at the end of the hall where a crowd of white-coated researchers had gathered and the glow of a bright blue screen was spilling across the glass.

He stepped closer and looked into the chamber, and what he saw there made him forget how to breathe.

A man sat strapped in the chair at the center of the room, a broad-shouldered laborer in his forties with a shaved head and a faded tattoo on his forearm, and his eyes were wide open and rolling wildly while a metal halo glowed around his skull. A technician at a console read numbers aloud in a flat voice, and a woman with gray hair and a clipboard stood nearby, nodding slowly with the satisfaction of a person watching a kettle approach a boil. "Second System integration beginning in three, two, one," she said, and a lance of blue light shot from the halo into the man's forehead. His whole body arched against the restraints in a terrible, rigid curve, his mouth opened in a scream that Kael could not hear through the glass but could feel in his own throat, and on the monitor above the chair two separate columns of glowing text began to scroll in competition, each one attempting to overwrite the other while the man's veins stood out dark and swollen along his neck and arms. The researchers whispered to one another and wrote furiously on their tablets, and one young technician turned away with his hand clamped over his mouth, but nobody stopped the machine.

It lasted perhaps forty seconds, and Kael would remember every one of them. The laborer's screaming dwindled into a wet, gasping rattle, the blue light flared white, and then the man went completely limp in the chair with his head lolling to one side and his eyes fixed on nothing. On the monitor, the two columns of text collapsed into a single line of red characters that read SUBJECT TERMINATED, and the gray-haired woman made a small mark on her clipboard and said in an almost disappointed tone, "Nineteen. Same rejection pattern as the last four, so the biological threshold must be lower than we estimated. Prepare the next subject and tell Commander Voss we are still unable to produce a stable anomaly."

Kael stood frozen in the hallway while the cold fury that had been smoldering inside him since the dungeon finally caught fire. These people were not studying the strange things that had begun to appear in the world, they were trying to build them, and they were building them out of human beings who had been dragged out of their beds and market stalls and sent down a green corridor to die on a chair, and he understood with sickening clarity that if he had been born in any other way, he might have been the twentieth name on that clipboard. His hand slid into his jacket and closed around the black object, and he felt it pulse against his palm, warm and steady, almost like a heartbeat.

Footsteps approached from the end of the corridor, and he pressed himself into a shadowed alcove beside a supply cabinet just in time to see two guards come around the corner, dragging a struggling woman between them with her hands bound and her coat torn at the shoulder. Her dark hair had come loose from its knot, and a bruise was already darkening along her cheekbone, but she was still fighting every step with a stubborn, furious strength, and when the guards stopped outside the chamber door and one of the researchers glanced at his tablet, Kael heard the name spoken in a tone of bored efficiency that turned his blood to ice.

"Solis, Nyra, former analyst of the Central Evaluation Bureau," the researcher read aloud. "Commander Voss wants her processed immediately, and he was very clear that she is not to be interviewed until after the integration is complete."