Crossover (6 page)

'Keep walking,' he
whispered.

Ash didn't. 'We should
run away.'

'One woman, on foot.
Therefore, not police. Therefore, we need to know who she is.
Go!'

Ash walked into the
alley, keeping her footsteps loud and crunchy. She still couldn't
hear anyone approaching. Perhaps Six – if that was actually his
name – was just trying to get rid of her. But there were easier
ways to do that, especially since he was able to run much faster
than she could.

A puddle splashed
beneath her shoe, and soaked through it almost immediately. She
shivered in the cold.

Perhaps it was just a
random pedestrian. It wasn't inconceivable that someone else might
be walking at the same speed in the same direction. She should have
asked Six how long this person had been supposedly following them.
Perhaps she should go back, on the off-chance that he was about to
hurt an innocent person.

'Hey!'

Ash spun around. Six
had grabbed a teenage boy by the throat, lifted him up and pressed
him against the wall.

'Who are you working
for?' he demanded.

The boy gurgled, a vein
bulging on his forehead.

'Six!' Ash yelled,
sprinting back up the alley toward him.

'I'm not going to ask
twice,' Six growled.

'Six! Put him down!'
Ash tried to pull Six away, but he felt like a stone statue. 'He's
with me!'

'With–' Six dropped the
boy, who slumped to the ground, wheezing. 'Who is he?'

Ash crouched down next
to her friend. 'Benjamin,' she said, 'meet Six.'

* * *

'You said you were
alone,' Six said.

'I never said that,'
Ash said. She clenched Benjamin's shoulder. 'You okay?'

He nodded, still
coughing.

'You said you couldn't
tell anyone you were at the conservatorium,' Six insisted.

'Benjamin was there
too,' Ash said. 'He started the fire to distract the cops.' She
hauled Benjamin to his feet. 'Good work, by the way.'

'You too,' Benjamin
panted.

'Why were you following
us?' Six demanded.

'To protect Ash.'
Benjamin dusted himself down.

Ash's phone was still
in her pocket, and she had hoped that Benjamin was listening. But
she hadn't realised he would be using the GPS to follow her.

Six looked Benjamin up
and down. 'You're no protection for anyone,' he said. 'I could
flick your arm and your ulna would snap.'

Ash
doubted that this was an exaggeration. But Benjamin was the
smartest person she had ever met. If she was in danger, he
would
think
of a
way to keep her safe.

Benjamin was clever
enough to say nothing.

Six looked at Ash. 'Why
were you at the conservatorium?'

'I was stealing a
violin.'

'Why?'

'It was worth $11
million.'

His face was impassive.
'Is that a lot?'

Ash raised an eyebrow.
'You don't have money in the future?'

'We have
ChaoCredits.'

'Right. Well, yes –
eleven million is a lot. But you screwed up our plan.'

Six's pale eyes scanned
the darkness around them. 'Why did you need the money?'

What kind of dumb
question is that? Ash wondered.

'For food,' she said.
'Shelter. Medicine.'

'You're sick?
Malnourished?'

'Not right now. But I
might be in the future.'

Six's incisive gaze
made her feel uncomfortable.

'The violin is stolen,'
Benjamin said.

'You hoped to return it
to the rightful owner?' Six asked.

'The theft took place a
hundred years ago. The owner, and his descendants, are long
dead.'

Six was silent for a
moment. His fingers twitched at his side as though he were
operating a calculator.

'This was a mistake,'
he said finally. Then he turned and walked away into the alley.

Ash and Benjamin looked
at each other.

'Does he expect us to
follow him?' Ash asked.

'I don't think so,'
Benjamin replied. 'I think he's just leaving us here. Thank
goodness.'

Six was already nothing
more than a distant silhouette.

'Wait!' Ash
shouted.

'What are you doing?'
Benjamin hissed.

Ash suspected Six could
still hear them, so she couldn't say what she was thinking. 'Trust
me,' she said. Then she ran after him.

Her shoes slapped the
asphalt. This time she sidestepped around the puddle. She found Six
standing at the far end of the alley, watching her as suspiciously
as a cat.

'What do you want?' he
asked.

'You need us,' Ash
said. 'You can't go around talking about ChaoCredits and being
grown in a jar. People will take notice, and you'll change the
course of history in unpredictable ways.'

Abruptly she realised
she believed what she was saying. Six really was from another
time.

'I've spent my whole
life blending in,' Six said. Ash thought she detected an echo of a
wound in his voice.

'Amongst a different
kind of people.' Ash stuck her hands in her pockets. 'Here in "the
past", you'll need help. Especially when it's time to steal the
ununoctium.'

Six said nothing.

'We're professional
thieves,' Ash said. 'We can find out where it is – and get it out –
with much more subtlety than you can.'

'Why?' Six asked. 'Why
do you want to help me?'

Because I bet the
ununoctium is worth more than $11 million, Ash thought.

'Because you're right,'
she said. 'Me and Benjamin, we've done some bad things. But if we
can help you destroy the ununoctium, maybe we can make the future a
little better for once.'

Six held out his
hand.

Ash hesitated.

'You do shake hands in
the past?' Six asked.

'We do,' Ash said, and
reached out. His grip was hard and cold.

'We have a deal,' Six
said.

My
future, Ash thought, is about to
get a whole lot better.

Ring,
ring
.
Ring,
ring
.

'Pick up, damn you,'
Kyntak muttered. 'Are you trying to stress me out?'

The phone kept chirping
in his ear. Eventually Six's voice came on the line:

'You've called Vornan's
AC installation and consultancy,' he said. 'All our operators are
currently busy, but we will return your call shortly. You're
welcome to leave more details after the tone.'

The phone beeped.

'You should have been
back hours ago,' Kyntak said. 'If you don't call me before eight
PM, I'm sending a team to look for you.'

He hung up, and resumed
pacing around his office in tight little circles. Six must have run
into a complication. Perhaps ChaoSonic had gotten there first, with
enough soldiers to capture him – or worse.

Kyntak woke up his
computer and activated the tracking beacon in Six's phone. It took
a few seconds for the Deck's satellites to pinpoint its location.
The phone was inside the building to which he had sent Six. It
wasn't moving.

If Six was there, what
was holding him up? And if he wasn't there, why had he left his
phone behind? And if he had been abducted by ChaoSonic troops, why
had they left his phone in one piece?

Kyntak leaned back in
his chair. Two likely possibilities. One: Six had been captured,
but had secretly planted his phone with a clue to his current
whereabouts. Two: ChaoSonic had left Six's phone behind to see who
would come after him.

Kyntak stood up and
pulled on his coat. If it was a trap, ChaoSonic would have listened
to his voice mail message. They would expect a team after eight PM.
What they wouldn't expect was him, alone, right now.

* * *

'So you don't know who
they are, how many of them there are, whether you'll have to fight
them or sneak past, or even what they'll be armed with?'

Kyntak nodded.

Jack beamed, showing
slightly crooked teeth. 'I have just the thing.'

'I thought you might.'
Kyntak scanned the walls of Jack's workshop, admiring the gadgetry.
There were Tasers which looked like phones, phones which looked
like glasses, climbing ropes as thin as blades of grass and
parachutes concealed in wallet-sized packages.

Jack dug a floppy
bundle of glistening rubber and tossed it to him. 'Your second
skin,' he said. 'Covered in tiny reflective panels, each of which
hangs vertically so they don't reflect the sky or the ground – only
the surfaces around you. So long as you stay still, no-one will see
you from further away than a few metres. The suit will also conceal
your body heat from any infrared cameras.'

Kyntak stripped down to
his underwear and started stretching the rubber over his limbs.
'This is amazing,' he said. 'Does Six know you have this?'

'He refuses to wear it,
because it's so flammable.'

Kyntak froze.

Jack laughed. 'Just
kidding. He hasn't seen it yet – it's a prototype. I'll give it to
him next time he's on a mission and none of the other agents is
using it.'

'You had me going there
for a second. Anything else you can give me?'

Jack tossed him a small
tube. 'If you need to open a door, just squirt this into the lock,
wait fifteen seconds and turn the handle. Faster and easier than
picking it. Don't get any on your skin or your suit, though.'

Kyntak found a small
pouch in the rubber skin, and deposited the tube inside. 'Got
it.'

'Can you see through
walls?' Jack asked. 'Or am I thinking of Superman?'

'Who's Superman?'

'A religious figure
from pre-takeover times, I think. I was joking.'

'Oh. Well, I can't see
through walls.'

Jack tossed him a
collapsible telescope. 'Now you can. Press the lens against the
wall and extend it to turn it on. The battery's good for twenty
minutes.'

'How does it work?
X-ray?'

'I tried that, but my
test-subjects kept getting eye-cancer. So this one uses
magnetism.'

Kyntak hoped Jack was
kidding again. 'Thanks. Is that everything?'

Jack ran a hand through
his curly hair. 'That's all I got,' he said. 'Good luck.'

The Deck wouldn't be
much without Six, Kyntak thought. 'For both our sakes,' he
replied.

* * *

Kyntak parked the sedan
on the shoulder of a highway about two kliks from the building. He
figured that was safe. Other cars rumbled past from time to time,
headed for various destinations at various speeds, providing his
vehicle with a certain amount of camouflage.

He stepped out of the
car and pulled off his coat, revealing the reflective skin. Then he
scrambled down the concrete embankment toward the endless fields of
rubble and debris below.

When he reached the
flat surface, he started running. Kyntak could sprint at almost 40
kliks per hour, but here the broken bricks and crooked shards of
plastic slowed him down. He kept his head low, partly to reduce his
visibility from the road, partly to sweep the ground for hazards as
he ran.

After about two minutes
he skidded to a halt, kicking up a cloud of dust. The dust drifted
past a dark metal cube, illuminating a spiderweb of laser
tripwires. Perhaps the cube was rigged to explode if the beams were
breached. Maybe it simply sounded an alarm.

Six would have spotted
this, he thought. Therefore it's new. Set up to catch whoever came
after him.

The laser beams faded
from view as the ashes settled, but Kyntak had already memorised
their positions. He hopscotched from one safe patch to the next
until he was clear of the trap. Then he kept running through the
broken rocks.

His gaze stayed low.
There could be inner rings of security.

The building appeared
up ahead, a square silhouette in the swirling fog. Six's phone was
inside. Probably some ChaoSonic soldiers, too. Possibly – hopefully
– Six himself.

Kyntak stopped moving.
He crouched in the fog for a few minutes, just watching.

No-one left the
building. No-one came in, either.

He crept closer,
willing himself to believe that the rubber skin made him invisible.
The silence was overpowering. Under different circumstances, Kyntak
would have bet a hundred credits that the building was empty.

He circled it until he
reached the back door and flattened himself against it, listening.
No sound.

Stretching out Jack's
telescope, he pressed the lens against the door. The eyepiece gave
him a grainy, monochromatic view of the empty corridor behind
it.

Kyntak tried the
handle. Locked. He squirted some of Jack's lock-picking liquid into
the lock, and listened for fifteen seconds as the acidic gel ate
the tumblers. They crackled as he turned the handle and pulled.

The corridor wasn't
much different in colour than it had been in black and white.
Dirty, but not disused. Kyntak could see patterns in the grime
beneath his feet – some parts had been more recently walked on that
others. He followed the most recent trail, as quickly as he
dared.

It led through the
dirty shadows to another door, bolted shut from the outside.

Who locks a room from
the outside, Kyntak thought, within a locked, deserted
building?

Someone who's keeping a
prisoner.

He extended the
telescope and pressed it against the door–

And froze.

What
the hell was
that?

The building wasn't
what Six had expected. For one thing, there was an incredible
amount of space around it – two, perhaps even three metres. In
Six's time, adjacent buildings were never further apart than the
width of a motorcycle.