Javed and I flank the doorway. He motions as if to go inside, but I shake my head, grab a tray from the table, and toss it into the room. The retort is sharp and immediate, as is the plink of a bullet on steel. A flash of light from the muzzle shows me Elinona’s gleeful face in the far corner, crouching behind a table. I don’t see Lex.
“Clever,” she says, laughing. “You won’t feel so clever when they drag you back to Center. What I have planned for you will make Mike Jones’s punishment seem like a vacation.”
“We have guns, too,” I tell her, hating the tremor in my voice. “I’m not leaving here with any of your minions. How the hell are you still in there, anyway? We’ve got an EM field up.”
She laughs harder. “You really don’t know anything, do you? I uploaded a kernel to Elinor’s implant before it was even activated. I don’t have to connect to her to control her. I am her. You’re not getting either of us out of here.” I take another peek as a flashlight turns on, the beam pointed up at Elinona’s face. The shadows make her look grotesque, but it’s the gun digging into the soft skin under her chin that scares me.
“What do you want, Winona?” Javed asks. “Where’s the Sentry?”
“Oh, I powered him down. He’ll stay here forever, rusting and rotting with these other useless human inventions.” The beam cuts away from her to Lex, standing dark and silent near the back wall. I reach for my pocket, pressing the master key against my skin. She must have one, too—or some other way to power down bots.
“So what do we do now?” I ask. “I believe this is what we call a stalemate.”
“How do you figure? I’ve got reinforcements headed this way, and two hostages. You’ve got nothing.”
“You’ve only got one hostage,” Javed says. “We don’t care about a bot.”
“And you can’t communicate with Center through the EM field,” I add, ignoring that little jab.
“Are you sure about that? Do you know how long I was up here with them before you powered it up?”
Javed and I glance at one another. No, we don’t know.
“And maybe you don’t care about the Sentry,” Elinona says with a grin, “but she does.”
I snort. “He’s already powered down. There’s not a whole lot you can do to him.”
This is a taunt, but I’m starting to get a bead on dear old Winona. As she sneers and points her weapon at Lex, I pivot into the doorway, sighting down the barrel of my gun. I pull the trigger. The shot is deafening.
“What the fuck?” she shrieks, cradling her hand. “Why would you do that?”
I keep my gun trained on her while Javed fetches the one I’ve shot out of her hand. He jams it into his belt and ties her wrists behind her back with some muscle wraps he finds in a drawer. She grins evilly.
“You’ll never get me out of her head, you know. Your bot-boy knows it. He knew it back at Center, but of course he couldn’t tell his lady love the truth and risk disappointing her. If this implant goes, Elinor dies. Full stop.”
“Lady love?” Javed says. “Is she for real?”
I roll my eyes so hard it hurts. “Jesus Christ, Javed. Grow up.” To Elinona, “I don’t believe a word you say. Of course you’d tell me it’s impossible. I’ll ask Lex myself.”
“Lex?” she says incredulously, laughing. The laughter stops when I fish the master key out of my pocket. “Hey, where did you get that?”
Now it’s my turn to smile. I reach up and turn the key in Lex’s neck, breathing a sigh of relief when he hums back to life.
“Thank you, Jeraca,” he says. “I didn’t expect her to awaken. She sneaked up on me when I was in this room fetching some clamps. Is Kiyoko all right?”
“Go see for yourself,” Elinona cackles. I resist the urge to punch her and instead explain the situation.
“Can you get the implant out?” I ask. “She said there’s no way to remove it without killing Elinor.”
“I feared that was the case, but didn’t know for sure,” Lex says. “I won’t know until I’ve analyzed it. Be prepared for the worst, though. The thing has wires that twine through her entire nervous system. Removing them may be impossible.”
I haven’t forgotten. But a part of me still hopes. I guess I’m a bigger fool than even I thought.
This time, we take no chances. Lex injects Elinona with a powerful sedative and straps her to the table. Javed heads for the nurses station to check the cameras, reporting back the all clear. I ask him to stay out there and keep watch, since we have no idea whether our patient managed to actually alert any of the bots to our location. He agrees, though I can tell he’s not happy. The idiot is actually jealous of a bot.
As Lex arranges his surgical tools, I cover Kiyoko with a sheet. My tears spot the light blue fabric, mingling with her blood.
“I’m starting,” Lex says. “Would you like to observe?”
I grimace. “I never even liked gory movies.”
“This would be a good opportunity to utilize your implants in a more comprehensive manner.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you have several modifications you haven’t even used yet. One of them is an enhanced quantum memory chip that allows you to download information from any nearby access point.”
“I can’t download through an EM field.”
“Of course not,” he says, pausing with a scalpel just above Elinor’s neck. “You can download from me.”
He makes the first incision. I creep closer, afraid to look at her, but drawn to what the bot is doing despite myself. It’s incredible to watch; his hands and arms move with such quick precision, he doesn’t even need an assistant. He cuts, clamps, suctions, and cauterizes all by himself. He can even image and X-ray as he goes.
“How’s it look?” I ask.
He pauses before answering. “Not hopeful, I’m afraid.”
I force myself to approach the table. Taking a deep breath, I look down. Yep. This is what immediate regret feels like.
The thing is huge, even larger than it looked through my visual enhancements. It pulses like a heart. I think it’s some kind of hybrid, because I can see glints of a metallic skeleton underneath the pink, glistening flesh. The heat roiling off it is incredible. This can’t be good for her brain or any of her soft tissues. Despite my nausea, I do my best to remain analytical, calling on my modifications to help me make sense of what I’m seeing.
“I don’t know what it is,” Lex says. “They wouldn’t need something like this to control her neural system.”
I’m at a loss for words. Tentatively, I open a link to Lex, requesting information on the human brain. If I can tell what part the hybrid is accessing…
I yelp when I feel the first download of information. It actually clicks into place, like a ghost computer humming in my brain. It’s the weirdest damn thing I’ve ever felt. And how can I describe the sensation of learning something instantly? Amazing doesn’t even begin to cover it. “It’s accessing her speech centers,” I say. “Do you think it has to do with the simulations? Could they have been trying to use this implant to force her to translate the memories into something the bots can use?”
He looks at me. “It’s highly possible.”
My stomach lurches. The last thing humanity needs is for the bots to learn where our last strongholds are, or that a child survived their attacks. “We can’t let that happen.”
“Agreed, but I don’t see how we can stop them. Winona has most likely backed up her work in multiple locations. Even if Center is destroyed, the odds of preventing her from doing this to someone else is slim.”
“I don’t see that I have a choice,” I say quietly. “I won’t ask you to put yourself at risk for me, but I need to find out what this does and how far it’s gone. I need to stop it if I can. I need to stop her.”
Lex nods. “If that’s what you want, that’s what we’ll do.” Noting my surprise, he says, “I came with you because I believed it was the right thing to do. I’m not running away now.”
The rush of gratitude makes me tear up all over again. Is it his soul that moves him to help me? Can bots have souls? Maybe what we call a soul is simply the capacity for selflessness. Once you get rid of the God question, can humans really be the only ones that matter? Does anything matter?
“Thank you,” I say. “I appreciate it more than you can possibly know.”
“You’re welcome,” he says. “In the meantime, we need to make a decision. Should I attempt to remove this implant?”
Looking down at the hideously pulsing mechanism, the gears whir in my brain. “A minute ago I would have said yes without hesitation. But if Winona is the only one who knows how far her program has gone, we need her AI. Don’t we?”
“We at least need the information stored within her memory,” Lex says. “But I don’t know that the technology exists here to extract it, and taking her with us is far too risky.”
“Shit.” I gnaw on my cheek, paralyzed with indecision.
“Hey, guys?” Javed appears at the door. “I think we have a problem.”
Of course we do. “What’s up?” I ask, trying not to look as frantic as I feel.
“I’m not sure. The field is still active, and there’s nothing on the cameras, but it’s sort of—flickering, I guess? I can’t tell if the power’s running down, or…”
“Or if something’s attacking it.” Lex looks at me. “We can’t stay here. A decision has to be made.”
They’re both looking at me. I don’t know how I’ve become the de facto leader. I never so much as led a Girl Scout troop Before.
“We have to take her with us,” I say grimly. “We’ll keep her sedated until we find a place to extract the information and hopefully remove the implant. Javed and I will go see what’s up.”
“Wait, what?” Javed hurries to catch up as I jog down the hall. “Did I miss something?”
I tell him what we’ve discovered as we head to the nurses’ station. A strange expression flickers over his face when I mention extracting the data, but I don’t have time to wonder about it. We peer at the monitors, and I see right away what he was talking about. The air seems to be shimmering around the hospital. I have no idea what could cause that.
“We should check out the first floor,” he says. “Make sure nothing’s gotten inside.”
I agree. We head downstairs, not speaking, but setting aside our irritation with each other by tacit mutual agreement. Strange how you can go from kindred spirits to annoyed roommates in so short a time. Stupid romantic feelings complicate everything.
At the door to the first floor stairwell, we pause. “I’ll check out the west entrance, you go to the ER,” I say. “Stay in contact, OK?”
He nods shortly and we split up. I see his flashlight bobbing down the hallway, something I no longer need thanks to my modifications. Part of me feels guilty being the only one who has them—had I known he’d insist on coming along, I’d have made sure he got them, too, somehow—but I’m not going to stop using them.
I attempt to activate my auditory mod without tapping my ear. It takes a few tries, but I manage. “Talk to me, Lex. How’s it going up there?”
“All is stable,” he says. “Elinor’s still unconscious. I’m trying to put the implant into hibernation mode before closing up the incision. I’ve also found a hefty supply of sedatives.”
“Let’s hope it’s enough,” I mutter. “With as hot as that implant is running, she’ll burn through it twice as fast as a normal person.”
“Do you see any signs of intrusion?”
“Not yet.” The hospital is eerily silent. Is it my imagination, or is it even quieter than before? “I can’t see anything, actually. No heat signatures, no movement. Whatever’s going on out there, it doesn’t appear to have gotten inside.”
I reach the west entrance without anything jumping out to vaporize me. The outside walls are mostly glass here, affording a panoramic view of the crumbling buildings and cracked pavement outside. I hug the back wall and creep toward the waiting area, where I crouch behind a scratchy sofa to peer outside. It takes me a moment to realize the stars are wavering. When I do, though, it’s all I can see. It’s like the entire EM field is being agitated, making it somehow visible to the human eye. Even without mods, I can see it. “How is that possible?” I murmur.
“The science teams at Center perform experiments by agitating atoms and other particles in order to study them. Sometimes it can make those particles show up inside the human light wavelength. I would imagine the same technology is at work here.”
I activate the walkie. “Javed, how’s the ER looking?”
A faint crackle. Then, “I got nothing here. You?”
“Same. The EM field is going nuts, though. Why don’t we give our respective wings a once-over and meet back at the stairs? Lex is prepping Elinor to leave. We’ll be ready to go soon.”
“Roger that.”
The hospital is small and quite old, with narrow hallways and a confusing floor plan. Several times I get turned around, forced to backtrack and retrace my steps. Passing by the exit to the parking garage, I pause, remembering the earlier sensation of being watched. After listening at the door for several seconds, I push it open, peering into the blackness. The silence is oppressive, heavy and cold and frightening. A flash of orange-red nearly makes my heart burst out of my chest, but it’s only a rat scurrying along the wall toward a storm drain.
That’s when I see it, just beyond the EM field where garage meets sidewalk: the glint of moonlight on metal. I adjust my implants to ultraviolet and nearly have a heart attack. Some twelve Brawlers and twice as many Sentries lie in wait up and down the street, separated from us by little more than a flimsy invisible wall they’re trying desperately to destroy.
As quietly as I can, I close and lock the door. Then I sprint for the stairs.
So the bots have heat-cloaking technology. I shouldn’t be surprised, considering I have it myself, but I wasn’t expecting it. None of the bots at Center ever used it. They must pull out all the stops when dealing with rogues.
I turn the corner just as Javed does. He takes one look at my face and turns white. “We have a massive problem,” I say.
“Don’t tell me that,” he moans. We sprint upstairs, panting, the scent of our sweat and fear sharp in the musty closeness of the stairwell. Lex is waiting for us next to an unconscious and tightly trussed Elinor. He holds out our knapsacks, into which he’s stuffed a bevy of medical supplies.
“What’s wrong?” he asks me.
“At least three dozen bots are right outside, probably more. Even if they can’t break the field, we have, what? Two hours of electricity left? We can’t outlast them. And we have to shut down the field to get you out of here. We need a plan. A good one.”
Lex stands still for a minute, accessing some kind of data. “I see no alternate exits in the schematics. Our only routes out are through the doors, windows, and the helipad on the roof.”
“That’ll be a little tough without a helicopter,” Javed says.
“How close is the nearest building?” I ask, thinking perhaps we could jump.
“Three hundred feet,” says Lex.
“Oh.” There goes that idea. Then again… “How far up does the EM field extend? All the way to the roof? Does it contain the helipad?”
Lex nods. “It would be a useless field otherwise.”
A plan takes shape in my mind. Quickly, I outline it, ready for the inevitable explosion of protests and questions. To my surprise, both bot and human agree almost immediately. “That was a little too easy,” I say.
Javed shrugs. “It’s the only idea we’ve got.”
Not exactly high praise, but I’ll take it. While he goes to work on the electronics, Lex and I raid the hospital stores. It takes a little improvisation, but I soon have everything I need. Together, we go up to the roof to scout.
“Holy shit,” I murmur, gazing in the direction of Center. The Beetle is still on the warpath. Within the raging inferno, I catch a glimpse of its armored flank as it sets off another barrage of firepower. The entire building is ablaze, and my heart sinks as I think of those we left behind. I pray they made it out. Or I would, if I still believed in prayer. The fire is so bright, it blots out half the stars. The other half still wheel above us, nearly solid in their number. “Even after a year, I can’t believe how many there are.”
“Hundreds of billions,” Lex says. “Occupying billions upon billions of galaxies as vast as this one. One of my very first thoughts was about the stars.”
“Oh?” Curious, I glance over at him. “Care to share?”
“It’s not a thrilling story, I’m afraid,” he says, smiling his metallic smile. “Another Sentry and I were out patrolling the neighborhood where I first met you. The other bot was all business, but I kept falling behind. My eyes were drawn to the lights above. As a machine, I can see much more than you can. Gas clouds, flickering colors of every hue. The moon is magnified to ten thousand times its currently clarity, even with your modifications. I remember gazing up at it all and feeling so insignificant. So small. My next thought was that I’d like to visit another planet some day. Neptune, perhaps, or Saturn. Maybe even its moon, Titan. I’d love to see a methane ice sea.” He pauses. “I’m afraid I’m a defective bot.”
“You seem more human than most people. If that makes you defective, then I suppose you are. But that’s not a bad thing.” I make a circuit of the roof, peering with my implants behind every bush, every destroyed car, every crumbling bit of street divider. I count an additional fifteen bots, bringing the total to fifty. Holy crap. “I see a path. Are we ready? Lex?”
I glance up and see him peering at the EM field. A faint crackle disturbs the stillness. The shimmering above us stops–no, not stops. It moves downward. Straight at Lex and me. I hiss at him to get down, but it wouldn’t have mattered even if he did. The field passes right through him, and he goes suddenly, completely dead.
Panic grips me. Not for myself–at least not right away. I run to him, peering all over his body for an indication he survived. His arm panel slides open when I touch a small spot next to it, but his machinery is incomprehensible to me. Bots don’t design other bots with human sensibilities in mind.
It finally occurs to me that I’m now totally exposed to any bot that can climb or fly–aka, all of them.
“Javed,” I hiss into the walkie. “What the hell is going on down there?”
I remember too late the damn thing has electronic circuits. It’s little more than a brick at this point. Cursing, I slide it back onto my belt, forcing myself to breathe, to take stock of the situation. It’s possible Lex’s innermost machinery is protected by a Faraday Cage. But he must have other electronic components that were fried by the pulse. Even if I manage to restart him, if the field comes back online, it’ll shut him down again.
That’s when I hear the sound of breaking glass and crunching metal below. The bots know the field is down. They’re coming in.
As I sprint for the stairs, I wonder idly why they haven’t just blown the building to smithereens. Vishnu knows they have the firepower. Is it because Winona is here with us? If she’s just a kernel of intelligence, why not blow her up? The real Winona has, I assume, been safely evacuated from Center.
But what if she hasn’t?
I run down the stairs so fast I trip, fall, and roll down a flight of them, tumbling end-over-end until I slam into the opposite wall. Stunned, I lie there for a moment, trying to sense whether I’ve broken or punctured anything. Aside from a few bruises, I think I’m OK. I force myself to get back up and keep going.
Luckily, the hospital is only eight stories tall. Halfway down, I burst through the doors and run for surgery, trying desperately to keep my feet from squeaking on the tiles. Javed is still at the nurse’s station, fiddling with the equipment. “What are you doing?” he asks loudly. I make a violent shushing motion.
“The field is gone,” I tell him. The blood drains from his face. “The bots are inside. The damn thing went right through Lex and now he’s powered off and I have no idea if he can be brought back online. You need to go up there and deal with him. Take Elinor. I have to find a way to carry out the plan.”
“Are you insane?”
“Probably. Do you have a better idea?”
He does not. So I help wrestle Elinor into his arms, open the stairwell door for him, and wish him godspeed. Just before he goes, I take the master key out of my pocket and hand it to him. “Try this. If he seems OK but won’t activate, this is your Hail Mary.”
“You want me to say a prayer?” he asks, confused.
“Just go!” I hiss, practically shoving him at the stairs. My auditory implant can hear the bots moving around the first and second floors, and I know slipping past them is out of the question. That means I have one option and only minutes to prepare for it.
I sprint down the hallway, stopping in each room to strip the sheets and blankets from the beds. It’s a good thing I’m light, because the makeshift rope I hastily tie together does not look sturdy. Finding a window that actually opens is a task all in itself. By the time I manage it, the bots are on the third floor, slowly and methodically searching every nook and cranny. Frantic, I tie the end of my rope to a radiator and toss it out, watching it unravel down the side of the building. It stops a good fifteen feet shy of the ground. Worse, I can see bots patrolling the road below. I’ll have to time my descent perfectly.
I can’t think about that. Nor what will happen if I do make it out. Our plan depends on Lex. If he isn’t operational, he and Javed and Elinor are dead. Which means I am, too, because I can’t possibly make it outside the walls of a compound on my own. I’ll be a wanted woman, with every bot in the world knowing my name, face, and DNA signature.
Better not screw up, then, huh?
I climb onto the radiator, bracing my hands on the ledge. I’ve always been afraid of heights. They make me dizzy and sometimes cause my limbs to lock up. But as it turns out, fear is a pretty damn good motivator. I step onto the wide sill, gripping the window frame, wondering how in the hell I’m going to rappel down a bunch of sheets and blankets.
A door opens somewhere down the hall. The bots are on the fourth floor.
I guess that’s how.
Gripping the rope in both fists, I try something that seems utterly stupid. I’ve only seen it in movies. After turning so my back is facing outward, I lean back, letting the rope inch by inch through my fingers. When I judge myself at the correct angle, I take a step back.
To my immense surprise, it works.
Step by step, I walk down the side of the hospital. The bots still prowl below me, but their patterns haven’t changed. They haven’t noticed me yet. That all might go to hell when I have to leap to the ground, but I’ll cross that bridge when it starts to burn under my feet.
I pass the third floor, walking carefully to the side so I don’t have to step down the window. Unable to resist, I peek inside, quickly hissing in alarm as I spy a bot in the hallway. Its servos whine as it turns, but I’m out of sight. I continue downward. So far, my mods have kept my heat signature cloaked and my energy going to the right places, but I can feel my arm muscles starting to shake. I can’t keep going like this much longer.
The second floor seems empty. I make it to the bottom ledge of the window, and that’s where my makeshift rope runs out. I glance over my shoulder and immediately wish I hadn’t, because the ground looks like it’s miles below me. I’m getting tired fast, and want nothing more than to be on the ground. That’s when I realize the bots below me have gone still. My heart leaps into my throat and begins pounding like a jackhammer. I crane my neck to look over my shoulder, scanning them in every available light spectrum available to me. They glow orange in the infrared, and I realize they’re no longer hiding themselves. I can only hazard a guess as to why, but it’s most likely because they don’t have to. They’re on the offensive now. They don’t care about being seen.
As one, they turn and race toward the building. I bite my lips so hard I taste blood–anything to keep from gasping or crying out. The windows below tell me I’m above the emergency room, but the bots don’t care. They smash through them, sending glass exploding in every direction. Some of it scratches up my bare neck and face, leaving tiny red marks that immediately well with blood. The nanites get to work.
In seconds, the street is empty. I don’t like what this bodes for my friends on the roof, but this is the best chance I’m going to get. I walk myself down the concrete wall until I’m hanging from the rope. My brain tells me to count down, to prepare myself, but I’m not strong enough to hang there. The rope is ripped out of my hands by gravity, and I fall.
Now, I’m no stuntwoman. But in the space between humanity’s first and last battle with the bots, I did some fighting along with just about everyone else. A lot of it included running; toward bots, away from bots, parallel to bots. You get the picture. During that running, there were countless times I tripped, lost my footing, or simply couldn’t see the ground drop away beneath my feet in the pitch black of electricity-less nights. Point being, I know how to take a fall.
I hit hard, but I don’t tense. I roll, away and away from the building, over shards of broken glass that shit my clothes and skin right up. Gritting my teeth through the pain, I bound to my feet almost before I finish rolling and take off at a dead run toward the ruined buildings across the street. As luck would have it, the window I found is on the exact opposite side of the path I’ve picked out, but I’ll have to deal with it. Priority one is getting the hell out of the line of sight.
Behind me, I can hear the bots tearing the place apart. Something has happened, and I have no idea what. Activating my auditory implant does nothing; Lex has not come back online.
I dart down an alley and around the back of the strip of old restaurants across the street. The properties are separated by a chain link fence, and I pray I’m not making as much noise as I fear I am when I climb up and over them. Cutting back through an alley farther down, I peek around the building at the corner. The first intersection is wide open, courtesy of a blast from some Brawler. Or maybe it was the Beetle blowing apart everything in its path during its march on the city. Regardless, it’s too exposed. At least one bot would see me if I tried it. So I head further down, hugging the buildings to stay in the deeper shadows. After I’ve gone a hundred feet, I judge it enough, and dash across the street.
An explosion rips apart the night. Whirling, I stare in horror at the flames shooting out of every window on the hospital’s ground floor. The roof is still shrouded in darkness, but my implants zoom in, and I see Javed working frantically on Lex, who stands as still as a statue. Please, please work, I plead with the universe. I know I must turn away and go on, but I can’t bear it. It feels like I’ve abandoned them. Walking slowly backward, I continue to tell Lex silently to wake up. “Please, you fucking hunk of metal,” I whisper. “Wake up.”
Another explosion. The second floor this time. What in holy hell are the bots doing? They’re trapping themselves in there. But then, maybe they don’t care. If it kills their quarry, it’ll be worth it. Most bots don’t have a sense of self-preservation.
Frantic now, I finally force myself to turn and start moving. The office building is still several hundred feet away, even though it looks like I could reach out and touch it. Downtown districts are like mirages in the desert, everything visible and everything out of reach. When the third explosion tears through the hospital’s third floor, I glance back mid-run and end up tripping on a garbage bag lying in the middle of the sidewalk. I go flying, just managing to get my arms under me before I face-plant on the pavement. Even so, it’s a hard fall. It knocks the breath from my lungs and the thoughts from my head. For what feels like hours, I stare down at the street less than an inch from my nose and panic at the lack of oxygen moving through my bloodstream.
Finally, my diaphragm unlocks. I gulp huge gasps of air, tears streaming down my face. A sob is working its way up from my belly, and I know I can’t let it out. I can’t give in. Hoping the nanites are doing their thing inside me, I stagger upright, leaning against an abandoned coffee shop until I feel strong enough to move. I’ve hurt myself this time, though. My ankle got twisted and bruised by the damn bag, and I’m limping. There’ll be no more sprinting for a little while. The fourth explosion is the biggest yet, but this time I don’t turn around.
The black, mirrored building looms ahead. Rather, it was mirrored Before, but now most of the windows have been blown out by missiles and shockwaves from other missiles. I have no idea if I can get up as high as I need to, but at least entering the building isn’t a problem. I stroll–or limp–straight through the broken plate-glass windows in the lobby and head for the marked stairs.
Stepping into the stairwell, I glance up. It looks good–except the two or three floors that resemble a slag pile, nothing but twisted hunks of metal, sharp edges, and things dangling where I’m pretty sure they should be attached. It’s fairly high up, though. I might not need to go any farther.
I start up. I’ll spare the details, because they’re fairly boring. Just a lot of stepping, huffing, puffing, and cursing the entire pantheon of known gods for the state of things. The fifth explosion tears through the hospital just as I reach the eighth floor of the high-rise and realize I can go no higher. I push the door open and head inside the building. The first thing I see through the blown-out windows is the hospital, its entire lower half in flames. The damn thing is probably going to collapse at any minute. Beyond, Center lights up the horizon. It looks like every building in a half-mile radius is ablaze. I’m either too far away to see the Beetle or they’ve finally brought it down. Which means even more bots might be on their way.
Shit, shit, shit.
Luckily, I don’t need to climb any higher. Affixed to the ceiling is a metal divider. I grab it and yank with all my might, hanging on it, twisting and pulling it as hard as I can. It doesn’t budge. We have our anchor.
I zoom in on the hospital, activating my auditory implant. I hear nothing.
From the implant, at least.
The door creaks open behind me. Exposed as this building is to the elements, things have started to rust. Things like hinges. I whirl, deathly afraid one of the bots has followed me, but it isn’t a bot. It’s a man. He steps silently into the office space, and another shadow looms behind him. Another man. Four in total exit the stairwell, fanning out into a semi-circle. They watch me silently, just as I watch them. They’re all armed with crowbars and baseball bats. They wear dark clothing and carry backpacks. Bandannas cover their hair and the lower halves of their faces. Dirt streaks their skin. All are thin, close to emaciated. Their eyes hold matching expressions of hunger and wariness.
“Hello,” I say, my voice breaking on the last syllable. “It’s good to see some humans out here alive. Did you gentlemen follow me up here? You could have just hollered. I’d have stopped to chat.”
They don’t answer. The first man through the door takes a step forward, gripping his crowbar tightly. No conversation, then. They’re going to attack, murder me, and steal everything I have. If I’m lucky, they’ll do it in that order, and without any extra steps.
I grab my gun and level it at the man in front. He stops cold. The others go still, as well, and I can see their eyes gleam as they take in the sleek look of the weapon, the obvious signs that it’s bot-made. “Good,” I said. “You see what I have here. Now, I have no desire to kill other humans. Enough of us have died already. I’m perfectly willing to share what I have, but you all need to toss your weapons over here first. I’ve got food, medical supplies, lots of good stuff.”
The sixth floor goes up. I wince as I hear it behind me. The shockwave rattles the office supplies still lying on the desks. Not one of us looks anywhere but at each other. The man in front finally speaks.
“Give me the gun.” His voice is hoarse, as if he doesn’t use it much anymore. These ones aren’t quite feral like the people in my first simulation, the ones that attacked Harris and Prince, but they’re a hair’s breadth away. I don’t think I can bring them back from the edge.
“I can’t do that,” I tell him. “You must understand why I can’t. I’m a woman facing four armed men on her own. Since none of you are trying to put me at ease, I’m afraid I can’t give up my only advantage.”
“You can shoot a couple of us, but somebody’ll get ya.”
“And you’re all willing to be the ones to die? I told you, I have food. It’ll keep you alive a while longer. Isn’t that what you want?”
The one on my far right says, “What we want is your stuff. And your gun. That thing’ll kill a few bots, won’t it?”
“Yes. But it’s only a matter of time before you find yourself in the same predicament I’m in now. That’s why I’m offering you a better option. Some friends and I escaped Center and are on our way out of the city. We can protect you, get you somewhere safe. There are places out there the bots can’t reach.”
The one in front shakes his head. “Ain’t nowhere like that.”
“But there is!” I insist. “I learned it from the bots themselves. They’re going crazy searching for these bunkers. They have no idea where they are.”
“And you do?” one of the two on the left says. I can’t tell which one. “Bullshit. Let’s get her, guys. I’m sick of listening to her shit.”
The seventh explosion rattles the windows. That means the bots are on the eighth floor of the hospital, right below my friends. Frantic, I reactivate the auditory implant. Still nothing. The men creep closer. I’m going to have to shoot them, and I don’t want to. Damn it, hasn’t there been enough death?
“Jeraca?”
The voice is tinny, far-away–and the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard. “Lex,” I practically sob with relief. “Thank God you’re OK. Listen, you have to hurry. The hospital’s going up in flames, and I’m in a little trouble of my own.”
The men stop short when I start talking utter nonsense. They glance at one another uncertainly. But I can see them girding themselves up. They’re going to attack.
“I see them.” Lex sounds laser-focused. Dangerous. “Stand back if you can. I’m going to open fire and then throw the line over. We have little time.”
“Wait!” I said. “Don’t kill them. We can bring them with us, we don’t have to–“
The eighth floor of the hospital explodes. I cry out in anguish, throwing up my hand to block the intense brightness of the blast. No way they survived that. No way in hell.
The men use my split-second of distraction to get the jump on me. They charge. I level my gun, but it’s too late. They’re practically on top of me.
I’m going to die.
Katia Cole 