Authors: Jack Heath
The nightclub’s fluorescent sign came into view as Six rounded a corner. The blue faded smoothly to green before sliding into a violent crimson. There was a logo next to it—an eye with black-light lashes, making the painted iris glow. It was only 18:43:06 and already there was a throng of people outside the doors. Three clean-shaven heads rose above the crowd on broad shoulders: bouncers, standing by the doors with their tree-trunk arms folded across barrel chests.
Six slipped into the crowd. The bouncers weren’t there to check for ID. Since ChaoSonic had replaced government in the Takeover, only about one in ten nightclubs cared what age you were. The bouncers were there firstly to scare the patrons straight—fewer rules would be broken if everyone knew there were bigger, tougher people hanging around. Secondly, the bouncers had the right to refuse entry to anyone they felt like—anyone who looked like he wasn’t there to spend money.
Six bobbed up and down gently to the beat as he waited in line, trying to blend in, not making eye contact with anybody. It was 18:49:29.
The bouncer was almost half a meter taller than Six. He peered down incuriously at him for less than a second before shoving him roughly across the threshold. Six climbed the stairs quickly, dodging the people stumbling back down them. Broken glass and drinking straws flattened under his feet as he reached the top of the stairs.
Insomnia was already packed. The sea of gyrating, waving heads with bleached, dyed, gelled, and blow-dried hair on the dance floor below Six made the garishly lit ceiling seem uncomfortably low.
The noise hit him like a kick in the chest. He’d never been inside a nightclub before, and hadn’t expected it to be so loud. People went to nightclubs for fun, he thought. They dressed in style, met their friends, danced wildly, and drank too much. Six didn’t do any of these things himself, but he could understand the appeal of each. Dressing up impressed and attracted other people. Seeing friends signified a welcome relief from work, a life independent of employment. The physical exertions involved in wild dancing released endorphins in the brain, creating chemical happiness.
But who could enjoy music this loud? he wondered. Where was the fun in being slowly deafened?
Six had met a wide variety of people in his sixteen years. But he still didn’t feel like he understood humans.
Maybe the variety is the problem
, he thought.
I should spend less time with secret agents and murderers. I need to meet more normal people.
Six’s ears were adjusting to the volume. One of the more subtle benefits of his designer DNA was a valve in each auditory canal. This was pressed up against the outside of each eardrum and would quickly dilate or contract depending on the volume of the noise surrounding him, in much the same way as pupils in the eyes of humans adjust to light. This meant that his hearing abilities were more sophisticated and robust than those of everyone else—but as with eyes, the valve could not completely close. Sudden noises still hurt, and prolonged exposure to noise of more than 110 decibels was harmful. The music of the nightclub was exceeding that. He pulled the earplugs he’d found in the armory out of his pockets and put them in his ears, dulling the repeated thuds to a tolerable volume.
Six leaned over the bar and ordered a ChaoCola. He couldn’t watch the Timeout and dance at the same time, but he would look suspicious standing still without a drink in his hand.
The dance floor seemed less claustrophobic than it had from above. The waving of hands in the air and the swishing hair above heads created the illusion that people were larger than they actually were. Once Six was among them, he saw that everyone at least had space to bend their knees and sway their hips—the only movements required for nightclub dancing. Six pushed his way through, trying to look as though he was working his way towards someone.
A feathery-haired girl appeared seemingly out of nowhere in front of him, and his reflexes barely had time to stop himself from bumping into her. Her face registered surprise—apparently she hadn’t seen him either—before offering an apologetic smile. Six waited for her to move out of his way.
She looked him up and down, then blushed. “Do you want to dance?” she shouted.
Six shook his head, stepped around her, and kept moving. His clothes were enough to make him blend in. He didn’t need to dance as well.
Six reached the window quickly. He leaned against the sill, ignoring the bouncing people surrounding him. Kyntak would either be there or he wouldn’t, but either way, Vanish would want to know who came to the rendezvous, and Six wanted to avoid being spotted.
Kidnappers were among the most information-hungry of all Code-breakers. There were many different aspects of the crime to balance: abduction, containment, negotiation, and subsequent escape. It required careful planning, swift and precise execution, and accurate prediction of the ransom recipient’s actions. Four out of five kidnappings failed. The remaining twenty percent worked because the kidnappers knew everything. They had plenty of concealed surveillance before and during the event. They had tapped phones, bugged rooms, inside sources.
According to Shuji, Vanish had a large network at his disposal. Therefore, the Timeout was being watched. If Kyntak didn’t appear, Six would find whoever was watching it and follow him or her back to their base. He looked at his watch. 18:54:11.
There were two monorail cars sitting on the rails above the Timeout. They were probably there for a private party, where
middle-aged guests in rich tuxedos and gowns would sip expensive drinks. Six wished that this was his vantage point, instead of Insomnia.
He had absentmindedly finished his ChaoCola. He glanced around, but the only bin was the one near the exit, so he licked the last of the sticky residue off his cup and straw and placed them on the sill.
“Hey!”
Six glanced over his shoulder. A short man in a white undershirt was approaching him—wearing earplugs, Six was surprised to see.
“Were you looking at my girlfriend?” the man demanded angrily.
Six turned back to the window. “No.”
“You calling my girlfriend a liar?” the man exploded.
“Go away,” Six said. He wondered if the girl who’d asked him to dance was the one the man was referring to. But she had looked about Six’s age—much younger than this guy.
“Want to take it outside?” The man was balling his fists.
Six gritted his teeth.
Why do I bother defending these people?
he wondered. He looked back at the man, narrowing his eyes, and held his gaze for a full second before replying, trying to squeeze every drop of his ice-cold contempt for humanity into his words.
“Go away.”
“You think you can just walk in here dressed like that,” the man said, “and start ordering people around?”
The statement struck Six as odd. He was dressed the same as half the other people in Insomnia.
This man doesn’t have a girlfriend
, he realized suddenly.
And he doesn’t care how I’m dressed. He’s just trying to start a fight.
But why pick him? In Six’s experience, men usually picked fights with people taller than them—a primitive display of bravery or ability. This man was short, but no shorter than Six. And there were plenty of other people in the club, many of whom would have committed actual slights to give the guy an excuse.
“I’m sorry,” Six said, testing the waters. “I don’t want any trouble. Let me buy you a drink.”
A flick-knife appeared in the guy’s hand, and he spun it expertly around his knuckles.
So
, Six thought.
He doesn’t care what I say, and he’s not only armed but also trained.
He tried another test. “Come any closer and I’ll kill you,” he said with as little emotion as possible.
The man didn’t flinch. “Are you threatening me?”
He has combat experience
, Six thought.
He didn’t pick me because he thinks I’m weak.
Six feinted to one side, and the guy leaped towards him as though his trigger had been pulled. But his attack was a punch—the knife hand stayed back.
Nonlethal force
, Six thought.
Interesting.
Six ducked under the punch and stepped in, throwing his shoulder against the man’s legs just below the knees. The man didn’t cry out as he fell forward over Six, dropping the knife and smashing through the window Six had been leaning against, vanishing into the darkness outside.
The sound of the window shattering could barely be heard over the music, but some of the nightclub patrons who’d seen what happened stopped dancing and stared. Those surrounding Six tried to back away from him, but the crowd was too thick to move through. The bouncers who had been guarding each stairway started pushing their way through the onlookers towards Six.
So much for subtlety
, he thought. Getting beaten up by a half dozen bouncers would draw too much attention, and successfully defending himself would be even worse. Slipping away into the crowd wasn’t an option either; the people were still backing away, leaving Six in the center of a widening semicircle.
Two options. One: He could shove his way across the dance floor, dodging around the approaching bouncers as he went, head down the stairs, and hope that the people outside weren’t blocking the door.
Six chose option two.
Just as a bulky arm shot out of the mass of people to grab him, Six launched his body up into a backflip, shoes scraping stalactites of glass off the top of the window frame, and flew into the night outside. His body became vertical as he reached the peak of his trajectory, as if he were doing a handstand on the empty air, and then he plummeted down into the Timeout, ten meters below.
Broken glass crunched under his sneakers as he landed, less than a meter from the fallen body of the flick-knife man. Six glanced at him—minor lacerations and a dislocated knee—nothing serious. Unconscious, maybe concussed. One of the man’s earplugs was lying on the ground, and Six nearly dismissed it as unimportant, but then he saw the tiny speaker embedded in it.
It wasn’t an earplug. It was an earpiece.
Hence the nonlethal force, Six thought. Hence the weapons training. Hence the trying to get him thrown out of the nightclub so he’d be in the open, exposed. This guy was one of Vanish’s men. But how did he know Six was a Deck agent? And how did he know Six was in the nightclub?
Six picked up the earpiece and glanced around. The people waiting in line to enter Insomnia were staring at him, and while
the bouncers hadn’t appeared yet, Six was sure that someone would be coming after him soon. He ran out of sight around the corner, into another of the Timeout’s three cul-de-sacs.
The Seawall rose into the sky opposite him, a massive slab of concrete. The illumination from the streetlamps didn’t reach high enough to reveal the top, giving the impression that the wall stretched right up into outer space. Six felt like he had walked in a straight line for his entire life and had now reached the end of the world. Underneath the dull thumping and yelling from Insomnia, which bounced off the smooth surface of the wall in confusingly jagged pieces, Six could feel the concrete exuding menace. If he pressed his ear against it, he knew he would hear a deep, bass rumbling, the sound of the ocean crashing against the thick barrier in an unyielding attempt to flood the City.
ChaoSonic had put up the Seawall when Six was a small child, supposedly to protect the residents of the City from terrorists in other countries. It was Methryn Crexe who had told him that this was a lie. There were no other countries anymore. Global warming had melted the polar ice caps, and the rest of the world was underwater. ChaoSonic had put up the wall to keep the City from sinking into the ocean, and to make sure the City’s residents never knew they were the last people on earth.
Six removed his earplugs and replaced one with the borrowed earpiece, just as his watch ticked over: 18:59:59 to 19:00:00.
“
…now seven o’clock, Team Two
,” crackled a voice calmly.
“Drop off the hostage.”
“
Copy that
,” came the immediate response.
Six peered around the corner and watched the rest of the Timeout intently. Vanish clearly had operatives working behind
the scenes, but where? The only movement Six could see was the line of people slowly flowing into Insomnia, and there was nothing even remotely suspicious about them.
Six squinted into the darkness. The fog was concealing details, but something orange had appeared near the center of the Timeout, right next to the subway entrance. He looked carefully.
It was a person in an orange undershirt and shorts, sitting on the asphalt. There was an orange bag pulled over his head, concealing his face. Six took a long look, heart pounding. It could be Kyntak, he thought. The body shape was right, and the clothes were the same as those in the ransom demand video, but his posture didn’t look good.
The body was sitting up, but there didn’t seem to be any weight in his arms—they were hanging limply onto the road. The legs were resting flat on the ground, ankles twisted outward.
Whoever he was, he wasn’t moving. And he had the posture of someone who no longer felt any pain.
Six raced into the open, not caring about being spotted by the Insomnia crowd or Vanish’s operatives. As he approached he saw that the body was not moving even slightly—no breaths were being drawn into the chest. He slid to a halt and crouched beside it, pulling off the bag.
It wasn’t Kyntak.
It wasn’t anyone.
A white polystyrene head stared blankly up at Six, and even as he recoiled in shock he felt how light the torso was.
Vanish hadn’t returned Kyntak. He had left a dummy at the rendezvous point, taken the money, and disappeared. Before Six had time to wonder what was to be gained from sending at least
three operatives to leave a decoy hostage, the earpiece crackled again.
“Go, Team Two.”
“Stand still,” a voice boomed, “and you will not be harmed.”
Six whirled around, unable to see where the voice was coming from. He looked up. The first thing he saw was a soldier with a megaphone leaning through the second-floor window of one of the buildings; the second was the sixteen snipers aiming at him from windows all around.