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

CHAPTER 8

Kael drove the stolen truck for twenty minutes before he admitted to himself that the headlights behind them were not a trick of his exhausted eyes, and when he finally swung the wheel and sent the vehicle bouncing down a service road into a graveyard of rusted shipping containers, he was almost grateful for the excuse to stop moving. He killed the engine, tore the loose panel from beneath the dashboard, and found what he had been dreading, a small silver tracker blinking patiently in a nest of wires, which he pulled free and dropped into a puddle with a feeling close to satisfaction. Nyra sat very still beside him with her satchel clutched against her chest and the dried blood still crusted under her nose, and when she finally spoke her voice came out thin and tired. "That tracker has been telling Voss exactly where we are for half an hour, so I would like to know why he has not sent a single drone after us."

"Because he wants to see where we go," Kael said, climbing out into the cold and listening to the distant drone of the city beyond the river. "A man like that does not chase a mouse when he can follow it back to the nest."

They left the truck among the containers and crossed the old rail bridge on foot, keeping low against the frozen girders while the black water crawled beneath them and the lights of Ironhaven burned in the haze behind their shoulders. Nyra led the way with her coat flapping around her knees, and although Kael had walked every crooked street in the Gutter, she took him through a part of the city he had never seen, a district of collapsed apartment blocks and dead streetlamps that everybody called Sector Nine and that nobody visited after dark. At the end of a cracked lane stood a squat concrete building with a water tower looming behind it like a rusted giant, and on its eastern wall, hidden under a tangle of dead vines, was a narrow door painted a faded shade of blue. The key she had pressed into his palm in the Black Market turned in the lock with a reluctant click, and the room beyond swallowed them in the smell of dust and machine oil and burnt coffee.

Nyra found a switch in the dark, and a bank of cheap lamps flickered on one after another, and Kael stopped in the doorway because for a moment he could not take in what he was seeing. Every wall of the old substation had been covered from floor to ceiling with paper, photographs, maps, and torn pages of official reports, all of it connected by hundreds of lengths of red thread that crisscrossed the room in a vast, delicate web, and in the center of the web, pinned in neat rows, were the faces of people. There were old men and young women, laborers and clerks and teenagers, and beneath each photograph a small card gave a name, a date, and a single typed word that appeared on every one of them, and the word was DELETED. "Seventeen of them, and that is only the ones I could prove," Nyra said quietly, setting her satchel on a battered desk and sinking into the chair behind it. "I started this room eight months ago after my colleague disappeared, and I have been adding to it ever since, and until tonight I could not make a single piece of it fit."

Kael walked slowly along the wall, reading the names under his breath, and with every card he passed he felt the same cold weight settle deeper into his stomach, because he knew some of them. There was a baker from the Gutter who had stopped opening his stall two winters ago, a boy he had once carried supplies for who had never come back from a dungeon run, and a woman with a long scar down her cheek who used to sing in the market and whom everybody had assumed had died of fever. He had thought of every one of those absences as an ordinary tragedy of a violent world, the kind of loss that happened in the margins of every life, and it was only now, with their faces lined up in front of him, that he saw how many of them had vanished in the same quiet way. "They were not killed by monsters," he said, and heard how hoarse his own voice sounded. "They were collected."

"They were collected, processed, and erased," Nyra said. "And every one of them touched something that the System could not read, or was touched by something that could not read them." She reached into her satchel and drew out the thin black drive she had stolen from the Hollow Ward, slotted it into an ancient terminal that wheezed to life with a groan of cooling fans, and began to scroll through the archive with quick, practiced fingers. "The Directorate keeps a symbol on everything it controls, a circle divided by a single vertical line, and it was painted on the side of the truck that took me to the Ward. I thought it was a department stamp until tonight, but now I think it is something else, because I found the same mark carved into the metal of your relic."

Kael took the black object from his jacket and set it on the desk beside the terminal, and in the warm lamplight he saw it for the first time clearly. The faint lines etched across its surface, which had looked like meaningless scratches in the dungeon, were slowly gathering themselves into shapes as his eyes adjusted, and near the edge, half worn away, a thin circle ran around a single vertical line. He felt the old, quiet hum rise through the desk into his arms, and Nyra stared at the mark with her lips parted, and neither of them spoke for a long moment. "Whoever made the Directorate's seal copied it from this," she said finally, "or from something like it, which means they have known about these objects for a lot longer than seven years."

The terminal chimed, and she turned back to the screen and began to open the files she had pulled out of the archive, one after another, with Kael reading over her shoulder. They were mostly fragments, transfer orders and facility maps and half-redacted memos in the cold language of officials who had never once pictured the people they were describing, but one document near the bottom stopped them both. It was the list of children she had mentioned in the market, thirty-one names under a header that read FACILITY ZERO INTAKE, and at the end of the list, with a small gray photograph beside it, was the entry that made his heart stumble. He stared at the thin serious girl with the missing front tooth and the crooked braid, and the date typed beside her name told him she had been taken from her home three days before the First Synchronization.

"That cannot be right," he said, and his voice sounded strange to his own ears. "Mira was with me the night the System came. We were in our kitchen, she was ten, and she was eating cereal out of the box because our mother had told her not to, and when the lights went out she grabbed my hand so hard that I had bruises the next morning." He pressed his palm against the edge of the desk because the room had started to tilt. "I have gone over that night a thousand times, and she was there, and I would know it if she had been gone for three days before that."

Nyra watched him with a gravity that did not feel like pity, and when she answered it was slowly, as though every word cost her something. "There are two possibilities, and I do not like either of them. The first is that the file lies, that somebody altered the dates to hide where she was taken or when." She paused, and her gaze dropped to the black object glowing faintly on the desk between them. "The second is that your memory of that night is not entirely your own, because I have seen cases at the Bureau where the System edited what people remembered, small things at first, a face or a date, and the people never noticed because the edit was seamless. Kael, I cannot tell you which of these is true, but I can tell you that the one thing you have always trusted completely, your own mind, may be the first thing they ever took from you."

He did not answer, because there was nothing in him that could. For seven years he had carried that kitchen like a lantern, the cereal and the dark and the small hand locked around his, and it had been the one warm thing he owned in a world that had taken every other warm thing. Now a single line on a screen was asking him to hold it up to the light and wonder whether anyone had ever really lit it. He might have stood there for hours if the lamps along the wall had not begun to tremble, and the red threads in the web had not started to hum with a thin electrical whine, and the relic on the desk had not flared with a sudden pulse of heat that made them both flinch back.

Through the narrow window above the desk a cold blue glow was spilling into the room, and when Kael went to the glass and wiped the dust from it he saw the sky over Sector Nine slowly filling with lights. Dozens of small black drones were rising out of the haze above the river in a perfect widening arc, each one trailing a thin blue beam that swept the rooftops below, and behind them, steady and silent, rolled a line of armored vehicles with the Directorate's seal on their doors. Voss had never lost them at all, Kael realized, with a sick, falling feeling; he had simply waited until they led him to the one place where every piece of Nyra's work was gathered in a single room.

"We have maybe three minutes," Nyra said behind him, and he heard the files hissing as she tore them from the terminal and stuffed them into her satchel with shaking hands. "The only person in this city who knows the Directorate's security well enough to get us out of Ironhaven is a man named Darius Vane, a disgraced commander who lives as a broker in the Rustline district and who hates absolutely everyone." She looked up, and in the cold blue light that pressed against the window her face was fierce and frightened and strangely alive. "He will probably try to kill us the moment we knock on his door, but he is the only chance we have, and if you can get us across the rooftops before those drones lock on, I will tell you everything I know about the first man who ever carried a mark like the one on that relic."