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

CHAPTER 7

The siren shrieked through the Hollow Ward with a voice so shrill that Kael felt it in his back teeth, and for a long moment he could only stand there with his palm still pressed against the dead computer screen, trying to work out how a vision that big could have fit inside his head without cracking it. Nyra tore the black drive from the port, jammed it into the lining of her sleeve, and grabbed him by the front of his stolen coat with both hands. "Whatever you saw, you can tell me while we are running, because the cameras are back, and in about forty seconds every soldier in this building is going to be standing in that doorway."

They went out the back of the archive instead, through a maintenance hatch behind the server towers that Nyra seemed to have known about for months, and the narrow concrete tunnel on the other side stank of old steam and burned dust. She led the way at a crouching run with her satchel banging against her hip, and while they scrambled along the pipes Kael told her in broken, breathless pieces about the glowing map of the city, the web of blue threads tied to every building, and the four words burning at the center of it. Nyra stopped so suddenly that he nearly ran into her back, and when she turned around her face had gone the gray color of wet paper. "Population control," she said slowly. "Active. Kael, that is the phrase I found in the margins of a deleted file two years ago, and nobody at the Bureau would tell me what it meant, and three weeks later the colleague who showed it to me stopped coming to work."

There was no time to say more, because the tunnel ended in a grated door that opened onto the main prisoner corridor, and through the bars Kael could see a swarm of gray-armored soldiers sprinting past in tight formation with their rifles raised and their collars glowing blue. He pulled Nyra back into the dark, thinking hard, and his eyes fell on a red iron lever bolted to the wall beside the door, marked with faded white letters that read MANUAL RELEASE, CELL BLOCK. He had spent seven years noticing the small things that other people walked past, and what he noticed now was that the entire building had been built around the assumption that the soldiers would always control the doors, which meant nobody had ever imagined what would happen if somebody gave every locked room in the facility the same order at once.

"Cover your ears," he told her, and hauled the lever down with all his weight.

Every cell door along the corridor unlocked with a single thunderous clang, and for half a second nothing happened, and then the observation rooms came alive with a roar of voices as dozens of half-starved prisoners shoved their way out of their chairs and into the hall. Some of them were still wearing the metal bands around their skulls, and some of them could hardly stand, but they poured out in a ragged, furious tide that crashed straight into the oncoming soldiers, and the whole corridor dissolved into shouting and flailing limbs and the crack of rifles firing into the ceiling. A woman with a wild halo of gray hair threw herself on a guard's back and clawed at his visor, a teenage boy swung an overturned restraint chair into a soldier's knees, and Kael felt a sharp, complicated ache of guilt in his chest, because he knew that many of those people would not live to see morning and that he had just given them the only chance he could.

He and Nyra slipped through the chaos along the wall, ducking under swinging arms and flying debris, and they had nearly reached the stairwell at the far end when the pressure rolled down the corridor like a cold wave breaking over a beach. It was the same humming weight he had felt in the Black Market, but this time it came with a presence behind it, a tall man in a long charcoal coat walking unhurriedly through the doorway at the top of the stairs with his hands clasped loosely behind his back. His hair was silver at the temples and cropped close to his skull, his face was lean and handsome in a way that made it more frightening, and his eyes had the flat, patient calm of a person who had never in his life been surprised by what other people did. Behind him came a double line of soldiers with their rifles lowered, as though they were bodyguards and not an army, and every prisoner within twenty meters of him went down like a cut rope.

Commander Voss lifted two fingers, and the whole corridor fell silent except for the sound of bodies sliding to the floor. The prisoners clutched their heads and curled up on the tiles, gasping, as whatever strength or skill they had managed to keep was ripped away from them in a single breath, and Nyra dropped beside Kael with a small broken cry, her hands pressed against her temples and her eyes squeezed shut. Kael caught her shoulders and held her up while she shuddered, and when he looked at the commander again he found that the man had stopped on the third step from the top and was looking straight at him with his head slightly tilted.

"Everyone on the floor," Voss said, in a quiet, almost courteous voice that carried across the corridor without any effort at all, "and one man still standing, holding a woman who cannot raise her own head. Tell me, soldier, why are you not on your knees?"

Kael realized in that instant how badly he had misjudged the room. He was wearing a gray coat and a gray cap, which meant that to the commander, for a few precious seconds, he was one more member of the garrison who had somehow resisted the suppression through his collar, and that mistake was the only thing between him and a bullet. He lowered his head and tried to look dazed, but Nyra chose that moment to gasp out his name through her clenched teeth, and Voss's eyes narrowed, flicked to the ripped sleeve where the stitched cut showed through, then lifted to Kael's face with a slow, terrible interest.

"You are the blank from the Gutter gate," the commander said softly. "The one my guards reported disappearing from the dungeon roster. I told them a man without a System could not possibly have walked out of a Rank C collapse, and they insisted the registry was accurate." A faint smile touched the corner of his mouth. "I am beginning to suspect that the registry was the least accurate thing in the building."

The pressure in the air doubled, then doubled again, a crushing, humming weight that made the floor tremble and the lamps on the ceiling flicker, and Kael braced himself for the sensation of his own strength being torn out of him. It never came. He stood in the center of the invisible storm with the prisoners writhing on the ground around him and Nyra sobbing against his shoulder, and he felt nothing but a faint tingle across his skin, like the wind of a distant fan, and the smile on Voss's face slowly faded as the commander understood what he was seeing.

"Fascinating," Voss breathed, and for the first time his voice carried something that was not calm. "I am pushing nearly everything I have into this room, and a man with no skills of his own is standing in it as comfortably as a child in a puddle." He descended another step, and the soldiers behind him raised their rifles with quick, nervous movements. "Take him alive. I want him on a table before the sun rises."

Kael did not wait for the order to finish. He grabbed the fire extinguisher he had dragged all the way from the guard corridor, which had been banging against his hip like a stubborn child, pulled the pin with his teeth, and emptied it across the stairwell in a roaring white cloud that swallowed the steps, the soldiers, and the silver-haired commander in a blinding fog. Rifle shots cracked into the mist and ricocheted off the walls, someone shouted for a thermal visor, and he hauled Nyra upright with an arm around her waist and ran, not up the stairs but down, along a service ramp he had spotted from the corner of his eye that spiraled toward the loading bay where the black trucks were parked.

They tumbled out of the ramp into the garage with the fog still clinging to their clothes, and Kael threw himself at the cab of the nearest delivery truck, found the door unlocked and the key hanging from the ignition, and shoved Nyra into the passenger seat before vaulting behind the wheel. The engine caught on the second try, and the gate guards, who had been staring up at the sirens with their rifles pointed at the ceiling, spun around too late to understand why a vehicle was crashing through the barrier. The truck smashed through the steel arm of the checkpoint with a bang that sent splinters of metal flying, skidded sideways onto the access road, and tore off into the dark with its headlights bouncing across the fences and the spotlights wheeling madly behind them.

Nyra sat hunched in the passenger seat with her satchel clutched to her chest and her whole body trembling, blood trickling from one nostril where the suppression had hit her hardest, and she said nothing for nearly a mile. Then she gave a wet, shaky laugh and wiped her face on her sleeve. "He should have killed us," she said. "He had us in that corridor and he knew exactly what you were, and he still lost to a fire extinguisher."

"He did not lose," Kael answered, without taking his eyes off the road, and the grim certainty in his own voice surprised him. "He found out what I am, and now he is going to stop playing, and the next time he comes for us he will not walk down a staircase waving two fingers in the air." He reached into his coat and felt the black object lying warm against his ribs, quiet now but humming faintly, and in the rearview mirror he watched the lights of the Hollow Ward shrink into the smoke while far behind them, in a cloud of white foam and falling ash, a tall man in a charcoal coat lifted a small silver communicator to his lips and spoke four quiet words that would reach the highest tower in the city before Kael and Nyra had even crossed the river.

"The Null Subject is active."