Chord.
Where is he? My eyes are still fuzzy and it’s hard to see and his name is on my lips—
His hand clamps over my mouth. I can just make out his face. He’s crouched over the side of the bed closest to me and he’s holding a finger to his lips.
Don’t make a sound.
Someone’s outside. At the patio door. There’s a slight shifting of moonlight from behind a shadow.
Fear works its way up my throat and shakes me fully awake. Chord’s low, soft whisper in my ear as he leans closer to me. “Take this and get out of sight. Wait for me.”
He presses my gun into my hand, the grip warm enough to tell me that he’s been holding it for a while now, letting me sleep under his guard. He gets up and slips out the front door, around the corner from the patio. A flash of something in his hand as he leaves, and both relief and dread fill me.
Chord’s good with a knife. But he’s never used them for me, or over me. What if his emotions get in the way?
I scramble off the bed and stay low to the ground as I shuffle over the few feet to the wall along the patio door. Flatten myself against it as much as possible as I straighten up again. I clench the grip of my gun.
Now that I’m closer to the patio door, I hear it: from behind the cheap drape pulled across the door there’s the thin, high-pitched buzz of a glass cutter at work. Then the nearly silent snick of the small panel of scored glass being lifted away.
I watch—admiration and frozen panic fighting a battle of their own in my head—as a hand reaches in through the new hole in the glass, pushes aside thin cloth drape, and feels for the locking mechanism.
Flips it open and begins to slide the door over.
I lift my gun, and it trembles in the dark. It wavers, unsure.
Shoulder or knee? Shin or elbow? What’s the best way to slow down without killing?
I don’t know.
I don’t know.
My lungs are straining from not daring to breathe and my mind is frantic with thoughts of Chord and where he could be and what he could possibly be doing. The barrel of my gun is still undecided when the Alt steps in, perfectly silent, perfectly smooth—exactly as I would have done it.
Without warning, he’s flying into the room with a broken shout and landing on the floor in a clumsy heap. Caught off guard and pushed from behind.
Something I would
not
have done.
Chord steps into the room from the patio. His knife is still in his hand, ready to be put to work, as he readies himself for the Alt who’s already on his feet, gun beginning to aim. Not at Chord but at me.
Fast recovery at least. In that, I can still be an equal.
My flying leap takes him down at the knees, his gun flying across the room, and only for the most fleeting of seconds does it cross my mind how slight he feels, how his weight can’t be much more than mine—
And then I’m pointing my gun at his face. His face, twisted and harsh.
And see that he’s a
her.
A girl not much older than I am, with vivid copper eyes and long brown hair in a sleek ponytail. But in my mind I’m back in that alley in Gaslight and the eyes I see are bleached of their copper color, the ponytail messy and dyed violet and tangled up with a yellow scarf that has a floral pattern.
This Alt. This is the Alt of that idle I hurt. This is the Alt who I saved … who now wants to kill me.
Confusion turns to cold fury and that dark part of me hisses sharply in my head.
Just finish it.
I push the voice away and ever so slowly lower my arm, let my hand go slack. My gun drops to the ground next to me, next to her. This Alt who owes me her life.
“Why are you here?” I ask her. I hate the sound of my voice, full of doubt and hurt, sounding younger than I am—and much too innocent to last much longer in this match. “How did you find me?”
A long beat of silence. “The Roark,” she finally says. “Prototypes are built with a shadow system so they can be recalled for testing. You forced my father to withdraw one for you to use. But it’s not hard for a Level One Operator trainee to access tracking and restart a shadow if they know there’s a missing one to look for.”
My father.
This is Sabian’s daughter.
“I don’t understand.” I’m confused, reeling, thinking about that black contract and Sabian knowing exactly where I was this whole time. “Why did Sabian send you here to kill me if he could just track me down himself? And you’re a complete. You don’t need any more training. You don’t need the reward.”
“This isn’t about that stupid reward.” Her words don’t hide her anger, or disgust, and beneath it all I hear her Alt, speaking on her cell to her mom, that she was going to be home soon. “This is about what my father hired you to do.”
“He hired me to save you.”
“You had no right to save me.”
“West, who is she?” Chord asks as he helps me up, his other hand grabbing my gun. Even in the flickering, uneven light, the confusion on his face is obvious.
I hold on to his arm and pretend to be steady. “A complete. Sabian’s daughter.”
A single indrawn breath. “You mean one of the ones Sabian hired you for?”
“Yes.”
“But you got rid of her Alt for her. Why would she want—”
The girl gets to her feet, careful to move slowly. Two against one, and neither Chord nor I are easy targets to overcome. “A complete at the hands of a striker means nothing,” she says fiercely. Fire in her voice, laced with hate. If words could kill, I would already be dead. “You took away our only real chance to prove ourselves worthy! Everything we’ve trained for and worked for since birth!
You had no right.
”
Only Chord’s hand on the small of my back keeps me from physically backing away from her rage. I’m struck dumb at her venom, and it’s he who speaks next.
“Watch it,” Chord says to her. His voice is deceptively quiet, pushed nearly too far.
“She saved your life.”
She ignores him, glaring at me. “You and our father took away what should have been ours.”
“You say ‘ours.’ You and your brother’s?” I need to be careful. I can’t mention Auden yet, not until I know why he’s been set up to be killed. Not until I know he’s not going to be in danger by her finding out, this daughter of Sabian’s.
“Mine and my brother’s,” she confirms. “The two contracts.”
So she doesn’t know how far Sabian’s plans really go. But what
does
she know, then? What to say without saying too much? Because there’s more than guns and blades involved in this game.
“You don’t have an answer, do you?” she goes on. “What made you think it was okay to decide who was worthy and who wasn’t?”
“What difference does it make?” I say. “You’re a complete, what every Alt fights for. And not only a Leyton one, but also a Board one. Exactly what Kersh needs to stay strong.”
“I still need to prove that! I don’t know how strong I really am or that I’m what Kersh needs. All you’ve done is put everything in doubt.”
I wrap my arms around myself, wholly chilled, not only from the cool night wind blowing in through the open door, but also from the depth of what she believes.
I
don’t even know what to believe anymore. Didn’t I make everything stronger? How could I prove it? What could make this girl believe it?
I look at her. Feel the wind find its way into my guts and deep into my bones. “Why are you here?” An echo of the very first question I asked her. I’m not going to let it go unanswered again.
“You killed our Alts.” The glint of faint moonlight off her eyes, which are all too sane and full of determination. The same kind that I’ve tasted myself, lived off of, made me keep going. “So
you’re
going to be those Alts now.”
“What are you talking about?” I ask her.
“There’s only room for the best. If we can beat you—the striker who killed our Alts—then we’ll know we’ll have killed them for sure, if we had the chance. And I need to know we would have won, if not for you.” Full-blown pain reaches her eyes, obliterating the logic and the will that was there. “Besides, if not for you,
Auden would still be alive.
”
Beside me, I can feel Chord’s entire body go tense.
“Who was Auden to you?” I ask her.
“I loved him,
and you killed him.
”
She sounds broken, hollow, and for a second I think of my Alt. She must have felt like this, holding Glade’s necklace in her hand and knowing it meant I’d killed him, the boy she loved.
“Auden is—” Chord begins.
I squeeze his arm, hard, to make him stop talking. As much as I want to tell her Auden’s still alive, I can’t. She’s Sabian’s daughter—no way I can trust her to keep such a secret. It’s still possible to save Auden. His being alive is the one card I have left to play in making sure he stays that way.
But now I can also add revenge for Auden’s death to her list of reasons of why she needs to fight me.
“Why would I ever agree to your challenge?” I ask her.
“Because we’re not giving you any other choice. With this black contract out on you, you’re dead either way, whether it’s going to be some idle or our father.”
“Unskilled idles don’t scare me, and neither does Sabian.” A lie, if only so I can make myself believe it.
“What about
him
?” she asks, her voice rough and savaged as she looks at Chord pointedly. I know she’s thinking about Auden, wondering why he’s gone and Chord’s not. “He might be an accidental PK. It could be tomorrow, or years from now.”
My hands are fists at my side. The only thing keeping me from attacking is knowing that I would do the same if I were her; I would say the same, think the same, if not worse. The idea of Sabian going after Chord makes me raw, furious. “If you win?” I ask her.
“You can die knowing that Kersh is in good hands after all,” she finishes. Not even a trace of arrogance there, just the simple fact of truth. She’s an idle of the Board, born and raised to be the best. You’d expect being complete to be enough for any Alt; that it’s not for her, this future Board member and Level 1 Operator, speaks well of her eventual intentions for Kersh. I also acted for the city’s sake, but it’d be wrong to say my reasons were entirely selfless.
“And if West wins?” Chord asks.
“My father lifts the contract. No more being hunted.”
“You can’t force Sabian to do it afterward. You’d be dead, remember?”
She turns to him. Her look is withering. “It’s not hard to set up a news file. And tapping into our broadcast system as future Level One Operators isn’t that hard, either. A news file about our father hiring her in the first place is already triggered to go public if he doesn’t call the contract off. And if she dies, I’ll delete the news file myself. I’d have no reason to shame the dead.”
Such a threat can only mean one thing.
“Sabian doesn’t know you’re doing this, does he?” I say to her, another piece slowly falling into place.
“Even if he did find out, he couldn’t stop us. Not with what we know now.”
“West.” My name on Chord’s lips, full of warning. “Don’t listen. You don’t need to do this.”
I shake my head. “Chord—”
“She does need to,” the girl says to him. “She owes us.”
Chord swears at her. “What if she told you your Alts are still—”
“They’re dead, Chord,” I blurt out, cutting him off. I know he wants to save me, but not by setting the Board after the non-Alts instead. I’ve already taken away too much from them. “They’re gone.”
The girl shakes her head. “Nothing you say will—”
“What if she wasn’t the one who killed Auden? Or Meyer?” Chord snaps at her. “What reasons would she have to want them dead?”
She looks over at me. Her eyes are very hard. “So then who hired you?”
I can’t tell her, as much as I’m tempted to scream her father’s name in her face. I remember Sabian’s warning about what would happen if details of the contracts ever leaked—how he would hurt those important to me.
I look down and say nothing.
“And if I killed you first?” Chord says to her. The coldest and calmest I’ve ever heard him—he’s furious at my silence. He’s pointing my gun toward the girl. “West doesn’t have to do it. No one would know the difference, if you’re going to die anyway. No one could stop me.”
“
She
would stop you,” the girl says, her gaze moving from Chord back to me, as though already sure he’s no real danger. “A part of her knows she shouldn’t have done it. That it’s absolutely gutless to kill an idle without any warning. She’s already wondering how she’s going to live with it.”
Chord’s shaking his head. The flickering of filtered light is to his back, leaving his face in the dark, but I don’t need to see it to know his look of defeat. In this, he can’t help me. “West, just say the word, and I’ll do it,” he says.
But of course I can’t, because she’s right.
Chord stares at me, my silence my answer.
“West—”
“No, Chord. I have to do it.” My words are impossible to take back. Not that I would, because Chord’s safety is not something I’m willing to play around with. Revealing Auden wouldn’t save him for long, and claiming innocence over Meyer’s assassination means nothing without proof.
“I win, you get rid of Sabian’s contract on me and no one touches Chord,” I tell her. “You win … well, I guess it means I’ll finally have paid for what I’ve taken.”
She nods, cool in her success, more Level 1 Board Operator than sixteen-year-old complete now, and the movement is almost regal, reminding me of Auden. Both of them born and bred to be the best, and what she says next, succinctly and matter-of-factly, puts ice in my gut: “But you won’t win.”
I probably won’t. No spec sheets to work from means going in cold. No memory of fighting their Alts to draw from, and all I can remember of what Sabian told me back in that diner, lifetimes ago, is the fact that they are the ones; they are worthy.
“What are the rest of the terms?” I ask her, sounding much calmer than I feel.
“We have a twenty-four-hour window when we’re expected to be away from headquarters for off-site training.” She says nothing else, and I don’t miss what it means.