The Eternal Prison (48 page)

 

“Up and
out?
” Marko shouted. “Do you see the fucking
impact craters?
”

 

“They’re not looking for us,” I shouted back, climbing into the ruined crawl space. “This looks like a shutdown operation—tear this fine complex off the earth, make sure it’s unusable. You stay in one place, you
will
die. Keep moving. If I happen to leave you behind, Zeke, you will be on your own, okay?”

 

I heard him panting behind me as I grabbed onto a jutting piece of rebar—warm in my hands—and experimentally gave it my weight. “Okay?” he complained breathlessly. “Like that’s fucking
news.
”

 

As my head rose above the edge of the foundation, the noise and dust slapped at me in sudden fury, making me squint and cough. Through the glare and haze I could see a lot of matériel moving around the prison grounds: hovers in the air—both the shiny new ones the civil government had been building and the dull gray ones the SSF flew—some of the strange solid-cell vehicles like the one Marlena had transported me in (with swivel turrets mounted on the back), and clumps of Stormers in yellowed desert uniforms, their faces hidden by huge black respirators like spiders clinging to their chins. As I hung there, stunned, two shining hovers swooped overhead, low, and just a few hundred feet away the yard began to erupt like a fountain of sandy dirt, a beautiful, perfect line of dancing earth. As the line passed through a clump of Stormers and their vehicle, I watched them each split apart in apparent silence, each of them suddenly dividing like worms, parts of them rising up and floating away. I didn’t see any blood, but whether these were avatars or their blood just mixed in with the dirt and dust I couldn’t tell. When the line of fire hit the car—a dull metal wedge on four huge black wheels, wires and conduit snaking all over it, the windshield black and blind looking—it split neatly down the middle, just flopping over to each side, two white uniforms strapped inside wriggling like maggots inside a dying fly.

 

Someone pushed me, hard.

 

“Avery,” Grisha shouted into my ear, sounding washed out and far away. “
Go!
”

 

Do not fear,
Dennis Squalor whispered from somewhere in the back of my brain, the dark and unmapped portion where all the fucking ghosts had taken up residence.
You exist with me now. You have been called home. You are eternal.

 

A wide, flat spike of terror suddenly landed in my chest, and I pulled myself up and out with a grunt. Marin began whispering directions to me, and I ran according to his instructions. There was nothing else to do—the noise was constant, and the ground that had once been Chengara’s yard kept erupting, spewing up chunks of dirt and rock, the ground beneath my feet lurching this way and that, threatening to roll me. Closing my eyes, I forced myself to stop and spin, dancing back a few clumsy steps as I grabbed a quick glance. The avatar, with Dick Marin’s face locked in a mask of concentration that looked completely wrong in his features, was right behind me, Marlena bouncing in its arms. Behind it by a few steps were Marko and Grisha; the Russian had one hand in Marko’s coat, urging the other Techie forward. Grisha did not look happy, and I was reminded that he’d followed me around the System, almost killing me twice, simply because he felt betrayed.

 

I spun again and found myself facing a cluster of Stormers double-timing right at us. I brought my gun up instantly, but they ignored me, splitting apart to hustle around me in a jangly, eerily voiceless cloud, holding their shredders in front of them like totems. They were past me in seconds, a sour cloud of cops disappearing in our wake, completely uninterested in us.

 

Left, Avery,
Marin suggested.
See the hover pad? Better hurry before some Augmented army jock up there needs a fresh target and spies it. Fucking mutants have pretty good eyesight even at that speed, I understand.

 

Mutants or Droids—that was our fucking future choice. I swerved as best I could, sweat dripping off me. I considered shedding some clothing, but I had no idea where I was going or if I’d be able to replace anything, and there was no time, no fucking time. Something huge and angry burst a few dozen feet away, the shock wave almost lifting me off my feet, hot dirt raining down on me as I skidded and stumbled, keeping my feet by sheer dumb luck.

 

The hover pad was just a square of cement set into the desert behind the prison. The walls had hidden it from the prisoners, but there it was, a slab of cracked stone with a single, small hover sitting on it, undisturbed, like a piece on a game board. Dragging my bad leg along like it belonged to someone else entirely, I huffed and puffed, looking up in time to see two hovers collide in the air, both spinning off into wild new trajectories that had the ground in common, both adding a keening new whine to the jelly-thick noise around us that made me hunch my shoulders and put my head down. Fuck dodging the rubble—just keeping my legs moving through the chaos was taking every shred of my will and energy.

 

As we got closer, the hover resolved into Ruberto’s luxurious state boat, gleaming and beautiful, sleek and light. My head began to swim with memories of his wet bar, the thick carpet on the floor, and the smell of that high-quality crank air, the kind they had to pump out of the fucking arctic circle and compress and then feed into the cabin, fresh and cold.

 

The bulk of the chaos was now behind me, and I imagined us bare and obvious against the ground, specks running like ants—at any moment we would be noticed again and scooped up, or crushed. A strange exhilaration filled me, a lightness and cheer. It didn’t matter. I’d made it a lot further than I’d ever imagined. For years now I’d been on the run, desperate, and if the cosmos reached down and crushed me right at this moment, well, at least I wouldn’t ever be handcuffed on a fucking hover again.

 

The hatch was open, the elegant folding stairs deployed. We were in the middle of a desert in a prison with exactly three prisoners—theft had obviously not been much on Ruberto’s mind.

 

I crashed into the steps, my leg giving way, and avoided a painful fall by clinging to the railing and swinging myself around. The avatar was on my heels and knelt down on the concrete, setting Marlena down gently.

 

“Grisha,” I panted, recalling Marko’s handling of the hover during the Plague, “get this thing online.”

 

Grisha nodded, his face flushed red, his mouth hanging open loosely. He pushed Marko up onto the steps wordlessly, staggering up behind him. The Techies disappeared into the hover. I closed my eyes for a moment, breathing hard, my whole body burning. The noise sharpened, and I could pick out the sound of small arms, the whine of shredders, the random, shuddering explosions, the soup of displacement roaring behind it all. It was as if the whole world was being torn apart, starting right here in the middle of fucking bone-bleached nowhere, and it was soothing for a moment.

 

With effort, I opened my eyes to the painfully bright sun and pulled myself back upright, swinging myself onto the bottom step. I turned back to the avatar.

 

“ Well —” I started to say, and froze.

 

It was kneeling over Marlena, who lay there limp and pale and very, very dead, her open eyes staring up blankly. The avatar kept rubbing its hands on its legs, over and over again, and when it looked up at me, Dick Marin’s face was blank, slack, like it had just come off the assembly line in the factory.

 

“She’s dead.”

 

I nodded, stepping down from the steps as the hover swelled into life behind me, the low buzz of its displacement absorbed by the rest of the noise and lost. I stood over them.

 

For a moment we were both still. I thought of her turning to me in the yard and saying
Wanna fuck?
like most people said hello. I remembered the knife dancing across her knuckles. I didn’t feel anything. I’d given up feeling bad for the people I managed to kill by accident. I killed people, it was what I did, and imagining that I always got to
decide
who I killed was just arrogance.

 

Of course, sometimes I did get to decide. I stared into those fake eyes, Marin’s fake eyes.

 

The avatar and I both moved for our guns. It beat me. It beat me by a second, maybe two, more than enough to kill me. We both pulled our guns, and it had me easy before I had a good bead on it, and it didn’t shoot. I had ordered it not to hurt me, after all. Its shoulders slumped and it turned the gun a little, staring at it.

 

“Well, look at that,” it said.

 

I squeezed the trigger. The shot was swallowed by the maelstrom, and the avatar’s head exploded in silence, snapping back from its neck and dragging its body after it for a few inches. It twitched once and then lay still, a small puddle of white coolant springing to life beneath its head.

 

I turned and holstered the gun, climbing up the steps slowly, taking my time, daring the cosmos to shoot me in the back. As I pulled myself into the beautiful cabin, Marko came skidding out of the cockpit, saw me, and gave me a hasty thumbs-up, spinning around and dashing back, out of sight.

 

I leaned down and pulled up the steps, folding them into place and locking them down. The hover slowly began to rise, smooth and calm, Grisha’s hand competent on the stick. I stared down at her, and as we rose the wind started to lick into the cabin like invisible flames, growing stronger and more insistent. She seemed to stare back at me, her face frozen, her eyes watching as I rose up into the air, as I left her behind in Chengara.

 

“Fucking hell,” I whispered. My hands twitched, and I thought that Marko was lucky he wasn’t standing next to me.

 

Just as she receded into a dot on the ground below and I’d raised my hand to gesture the hatch closed, an enormous sound in the distance brought my eyes back up to the horizon, where a series of flashes trickled left to right, each slowly forming into a brief fireball and then a puffy, seemingly frozen mushroom-shaped cloud.

 

Well, shit,
I thought.
That’s fucking strange.

 

 

 

 

EPILOGUE

KID, I’M NOT A COP

 

 

 

 

The sun didn’t bother me anymore, and besides, it wasn’t the melting-flesh levels of hot I’d come to know so well out in the desert, out in Chengara’s yard. It was just hot, and the sun wasn’t an angry orange welt; it was just fiery yellow and sinking fast behind me. I’d been sweating all day, but then I’d been sweating steadily for the last few weeks, it felt like, and I couldn’t even smell myself anymore.

 

My boots were about to just split open and slide off my feet, exhausted, and my coat had seen better days. I wasn’t used to being outside so much—I’d grown up in the city, in crowded streets of apparently permanent buildings looming over you, and even the past few years of constant kidnapping, imprisonment, and hover flight had always had a roof over my head. Shaking Grisha and Marko’s hands and making my way from the spot where the hover had finally crashed, plowing a deep furrow into sandy dunes of scrub brush and rocks, had been weeks of sleeping out in the open, being rained on, sun-baked, and starving.

 

The only thing that had saved me were the towns.

 

I’d always imagined a big expanse of nothingness stretching out across the country—imagined that most of the System, in fact, was just vast emptiness with a few big cities you’d heard of.

 

Staggering eastward from the crash site, I’d stumbled on these old, rotting towns, abandoned for decades, dotting the countryside. The first one I’d come across had been called Grafton, or so a sloppy sign on the side of a beaten track had proclaimed. It had been a few ancient, sagging old buildings, the oldest things I’d ever seen, set in a soupy ocean of mud. At first I’d assumed it was just empty, but I’d found five or six people living there, escapees from cities with stories about the civil war, about their homes being bombed into splinters and System Pigs executing entire neighborhoods to save them the trouble of figuring out if they were dangerous or not. They were huddled in a one-room building they’d put some sort of roof on, eating game they’d killed and generally resembling Mud People. Initially they’d been terrified of me—twin army-issue Roons in hip holsters and the good cheer inspired by a few days out in the open had made me less jovial than normal—but then they’d been kind of happy to see me. I had some news, after all, and if I wasn’t going to shoot them all and steal their crap—and the word
crap
had been
invented
to describe their possessions—then they were pretty happy to let me get in out of the rain and have a bowl of some of the most disgusting meat I’d ever seen. I’d been able to trade about a million yen for a handful of nutrition tabs, too, though they’d tried to insist on seeing what I might have to trade first before accepting the cash.

 

Since then, I’d come across two or three other places like Grafton—old places that had been empty since before Unification, now filled with a dozen or two filthy, unhappy refugees from the war. They were all scratching out an existence and rebuilding where they could. Most of them had created little governments, electing mayors or governors or, in one tiny spot boasting a population of thirteen, a duke. They were mixtures of people, by and large, white and black and tan, speaking different languages. Some had been friendlier than others, but I’d survived them easily enough.