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

CHAPTER 9

Kael kicked the blue door off its hinges instead of unlocking it, because the lock would have cost them four seconds they did not have, and the two of them burst out into the frozen lane just as the first drone swung around the corner of the water tower and flooded the street with white light. The beam passed over his shoulder and swept on across a wall of cracked brick, and in the second it took the machine to correct its aim he caught Nyra's wrist and dragged her toward the fire escape of the collapsed apartment block next door, a rusted iron ladder that groaned and shed flakes of paint under their boots as they climbed. By the time they reached the roof the entire sky above Sector Nine had filled with the thin, whining hum of rotors, and Kael understood from the way the lights fanned out in a careful half circle that the drones were not hunting them so much as herding them toward the river.

He did not argue with the shape of the trap, because he had learned a long time ago that the best way to beat a net was to run along its edge until you found the gap the weavers had not noticed, and what he noticed now was the long chain of rooftops stretching east toward the glow of the Rustline district. The buildings in Sector Nine had been abandoned in the early years, and the gaps between them were narrow enough that a man with strong legs and no sense of self-preservation could jump them, which was exactly what he did, hauling Nyra after him over a drop that she did not look at once. She landed badly on the far side with a gasp and nearly slid off the slick tar, and he caught the strap of her satchel and pulled her upright without breaking stride, and the two of them went tearing across the roofs with the cold wind biting their faces and the blue beams stabbing the darkness behind them.

It was somewhere around the fifth building that the first rifle shot cracked out, a flat, ugly sound that sent a spray of concrete dust across Kael's cheek, and he looked back to see a gray-armored soldier leaning out of the side door of a hovering transport with a long rifle braced against his shoulder. The second shot struck the roof between his feet and the third whistled past Nyra's ear, and she cried out and stumbled, and Kael did the one thing that came to him, which was to yank the black object out of his jacket and hold it up in his fist like a lantern. The air around them rippled, and the drones overhead stuttered, their rotors coughing and their blue beams flickering out one by one, and for three heartbeats the entire squadron dropped through the dark like startled birds before the machines caught themselves and began to climb again. It was enough time for them to reach the edge of the last roof, where a rusted water pipe ran diagonally down the side of the building to an alley below, and Kael slid down it with his teeth gritted and the metal tearing through his gloves, and Nyra followed with her eyes squeezed shut.

They hit the ground running and did not stop until the roar of the rotors had faded into the far-off thunder of the city and the cracked streets of Sector Nine had given way to the narrow, crowded, lamplit alleys of Rustline. It was a district of scrapyards and repair shops and cheap taverns built under the shadow of the great elevated rail that ran across the north of the city, and the air was thick with the smell of burning oil and frying dough and the sour tang of home-brewed liquor. Nobody looked up when two filthy, exhausted strangers stumbled out of the dark, because in Rustline every person had a reason to hide and a policy of never asking about anyone else's, and Kael felt his shoulders drop for the first time in hours as they slowed to a walk beneath a string of sputtering paper lanterns.

Nyra leaned against a wall and pressed her palm over the cut on her lip, which had reopened during the climb, and when she lifted her head her eyes were bright and steady in the poor light. "I told you I would explain about the mark," she said, and her voice was low enough that only he could hear it. "There is a file I did not show you in the substation, because I was not sure it was real until I saw the symbol on your relic, and I only copied it because the name was struck out and I wanted to know why." She drew a folded sheet from the lining of her coat and opened it carefully against her knee. It was a printed intake record, old and yellowing, and in the center of the page a black bar had been drawn across a line of text, leaving only a single capital letter visible at the very edge of the censorship, the letter D. Beneath it, in small typewritten words, someone had recorded the circumstances of the entry. "Carrier of the first Null fragment, recovered alive, refuses all cooperation, transferred to Facility Zero eleven months before the First Synchronization."

Kael read the line three times, and each time a different part of him went cold. Eleven months before the System arrived, someone had already been carrying one of these objects, which meant that whatever the black metal was, it had not been waiting patiently in the ground for the world to end, and that somebody had gone looking for it long before anybody on Earth saw a blue screen. "A man with a name beginning with D," he said slowly, and noticed that his own last name began with the same letter, and noticed too that Nyra had seen him notice it. "It does not have to mean anything. Half the people in the Gutter have a name that starts with D."

"I know," she said, and her gentleness was somehow worse than an argument. "I am not telling you it means anything, only that I could not keep it from you." She folded the page and tucked it away, and then she pointed down the alley toward a sagging three-story tavern with a crooked sign that read THE BROKEN COMPASS, swinging in the wind on a single chain. "That is where Darius Vane drinks, or at least where he makes everyone believe he drinks, and I have to warn you of two things before we go inside. The first is that he will pretend he has never heard of me, and the second is that if he sees that relic he will either throw us out or shoot us, depending on how much he has had."

The tavern was warm and loud and smelled of damp wool and spilled beer, with a long scarred bar down one wall and a dozen mismatched tables crowded with scavengers who were arguing over the day's hauls, and Kael felt the weight of the place settle around him like an old coat. Nobody paid them the slightest attention as they threaded through the room toward a corner booth half hidden behind a broken piano, where a man sat alone with his boots propped on the opposite chair and a half-empty bottle at his elbow. He looked to be about forty, broad through the chest and gone slightly soft around the middle, with a rough gray beard, a faded army coat with the insignia torn off the shoulders, and the red, unfocused eyes of a drunk who had given up on every promise he had ever made to himself. He looked up when Nyra's shadow fell across the table and smiled in a slow, lazy way that did not reach his eyes. "Do not tell me," he drawled, nudging the bottle with one finger. "You are the sort of lady who wants a favor from a man who owes the entire city money, and you have brought a muddy boy with a bandaged arm to look sincere."

"Commander Vane," Nyra said, without a trace of amusement, "we need a way out of Ironhaven tonight, and you are the only man alive who knows the Directorate's checkpoints well enough to find one."

"Commander," Darius repeated, and chuckled at the word as if it were a joke he had heard too many times. "That is a title for someone who still has a regiment, and I have not had one in six years, so go and find yourself another hero." He reached for the bottle, and it was in that moment, as Kael stepped forward to say something he had not yet decided on, that his jacket shifted and the edge of the black object slid out of the pocket and caught the light of the tavern lamps. The change in Darius was so abrupt that Kael almost missed it, a sudden stillness that fell over the big man like a hand pressed flat against a table, and his fingers froze an inch from the bottle's neck. His red eyes cleared as though someone had poured cold water over them, and in a single smooth motion he swung his boots off the chair, rose to his feet, and pulled a heavy pistol from beneath his coat, aiming it squarely at Kael's chest while the nearest tables went quiet around them.

"Where did you get that," Darius said, and there was no drawl left in his voice, only a low, deadly steadiness that Kael had last heard from soldiers about to give an order they knew would be obeyed. "I have seen that symbol exactly once in my life, in a sealed vault under the Directorate's oldest facility, on the night they ordered me to sign away the lives of an entire settlement, and I have spent six years trying to forget it." His finger tightened on the trigger, and the hand that held it began to tremble ever so slightly, not from drink or fear but from something older and heavier that Kael could not name. "Answer me, boy, because I am about to decide whether you are the answer to every prayer I stopped saying, or the thing that is going to get me killed."