Those That Wake 02: What We Become (13 page)

“Your cabinet has weathered natural disasters, military atrocities, and financial crises, Mr. Bramson,” Kliest said, “and you’ve managed to hold back from any definitive action on those occasions.”

Bramson? Mal recognized the voice instantly, then. Kliest was speaking to the president of the United States. Not simply speaking to him: berating him.

“This kind of action, in a city that size, even with the full MCT deployed, it’s unprecedented,” the president continued, his voice holding as strong as it always had issuing forth from newsblogs and HDs. “If, God forbid, this should slip from your control—”

“Things”—Kliest’s voice was a razor held to the throat—“do not slip from our control.”

“No,” the president allowed after a pause, “of course not. Nevertheless, the American people will need to be reassured.”

“And you, Mr. Bramson,” Kliest finished the narrative with her own twist, “will remain silent.”

“I cannot in good conscience—”

“Save it for your campaign,” she cut him off. “You are planning on campaigning again? And being reelected?”

The room—and the hallway Mal stood in—flooded with uncomfortable silence.

“Yes,” the president’s strong voice returned. “But, Ms. Kliest, I’ll have you know that I’m working toward a time when—”

“Until that time comes, keep your mouth closed and your head nodding.” There was a thump, as of Kliest’s hand hitting the cellscreen switch harder than she needed to. She disgorged a deep sigh. “The power-mad can be kept on a leash with one show of strength. Idealists need to be threatened over and over again.”

“You knew he was an idealist when we installed this cabinet.” A third voice, liquid smooth and speaking in perfectly refined and enunciated English, also came in via cellscreen. “That’s how we sold him, after all.”

“Yes, yes. Government is so . . . superfluous. On to the other project,” she said, making a new start of it. “Where do we stand, Mr. Alhazred?”

“As you know, the Metropolitan Counterterrorism Task Force holds steady at pacification-level yellow. A move directly to red would normally require a clear and direct threat to the urban environment.”

“That won’t do.”

“Yes,” the slick voice said, having already predicted this response. “You will need the MCT primed and ready to move into full urban pacification with almost no notice. Therefore a heightened state of readiness is necessary. Therefore certain pressures need to be applied to the governor. Therefore I have mobilized corporate interests to this end. I am just waiting on your word, ma’am.”

“The word is given, Mr. Alhazred.”

“I’ll see to it immediately. If I may ask,” Alhazred said carefully, “are you intending on being in the city when we initiate?”

“Your concern is duly noted, Mr. Alhazred, but we’re quite untouchable up here. Quite untouchable.”

Mal yanked his head back as someone’s fist hammered into the wood paneling he left behind, splintering it with one long crack running above and beneath the point of impact. Mal spun, and before he even defined his enemy visually, he put an uppercut into a hard gut and shot a right cross that cracked into a cheek and sent the figure reeling backwards.

Castillo toppled into a niche behind, upsetting the heavy sculpture within. From an open doorway just to the side, diagonally across from the one Mal had been listening at, Roarke glided out toward him.

He was large—half a head taller than Mal, even—but his feet and his body moved with synaptic quickness, and he went under Mal’s hook and blasted rigid knuckles into Mal’s taped ribs with horrific accuracy. Mal felt the shock wave as the cracks expanded, the rough edges pushing into soft tissue, sending an electric buzz through his nerves.

Roarke moved back into a defense, expecting that his blow would have put Mal out of it. Mal feinted, doubling over in pain, but then snapped back up and lashed out with a jab.

Roarke’s performance-enhanced body had a matchless perception and speed, and he caught Mal by the wrist before the blow made contact. He began to twist it around, moving it into a lock, even as his other hand fended off a series of blows from Mal’s free arm.

Never had Mal felt so physically helpless. He had lost fights before, of course, but never been so hugely outmatched, never been made to feel so much like a child at the mercy of a cruel adult.

Mal lurched forward, trying to smash in Roarke’s jaw with the hard plane of his own forehead. Roarke avoided the head butt by pulling back, but in doing so loosened his grip and shifted his weight backwards. Mal shoved forward hard. The move sent him into Roarke, and Roarke into the recovering Castillo, and all three of them toppling to the ground. Mal leaped up, the hallway spinning around him again. From the jumble, a hand whipped out and caught his ankle, only to have its wrist stomped. It released, and, bouncing from wall to wall trying to keep steady, Mal raced back down the hallway. He heard another door open from behind.

“What the hell is—” Kliest cut herself short, obviously having caught sight of Mal’s departing figure. “Don’t be a fool, Mal,” she yelled over the sound of feet beating down the hall after him. “This is our building.”

He made it to the stairway door, shut it behind him knowing that, though it locked from outside, it would not from within. There were two private floors below him, but he had no idea what they looked like, what sort of exits they offered. Then there was the rest of the tower below, men in neat suits with angry little machine guns. Remak could control two of them, three perhaps. Could he control five, twenty, a hundred? He could not, however, control Castillo or Roarke at all. Mal, as ever, was alone.

He shot upward, past the sign that read
ROOF ACCESS
. Below, the door shuddered. Remak had it locked so that even from within it couldn’t be opened. Perhaps Mal was not as utterly alone as he’d thought.

As Mal saw the roof access door pop open in invitation, he heard the door below come open as well.

“Something locked this door.” Roarke’s voice echoed upward as he spoke to Castillo. “And I can’t get through to security for some reason. You need to use your override code.” The voice was coming closer, as Roarke moved up the stairs.

Mal made it to the final landing and cast a glance below him. Roarke rounded the corner, and with the clarity of rushing adrenaline, Mal could see the detail of his lips twitching in subvocalized communication, ordering Castillo elsewhere, in preparation.

Mal threw the door open, burst onto the roof. He found himself in a forest of small encasements, low housing units, metallic arrays wired to one another and down into the building. The edges of the roof were gated off by a high wall of tightly knit metallic links, and no sound at all was coming up from the streets, so far below they may as well have been a different universe entirely. The sky opened above him like a bright promise.

The door behind him hissed shut and sealed itself closed. Mal raced between the various apparatus and up to the fence, jamming his fingers through the links and hoisting himself up. His muscles stretched and pulled, tightening over the cracked ribs. Mal coughed hard, spraying the fence before him with blood, but didn’t stop climbing.

He heard the door open, not like it was smashed, but with its signature hiss, as though Roarke had employed a security override. Mal pulled hard, levering his legs over the fence, feeling something stretch to its limit within him. His feet came down on a six-inch ledge of concrete that looked over yawning space.

He had come over on the south side of the spire, facing across toward the second tallest tower, its expanse of roof some three stories below and fifty feet distant. Windows ran down that building’s north face, separating around the covered walkway that joined that building to this one many stories below. Far, far down beneath, a distance that made Mal’s labored breath choke in his throat, was the insect crawl of people and cars, grouping like colonies around the dome to the west and the glowing river to the east. The whole city, spread before him, was trapped between the sky and the distant asphalt.

Mal pulled his face away from the view, pressed it against the metal links that his fingers were clutching with a death grip. Mal’s life had been such that fear seldom crept into him. There was so little left for him, so little to hang his hope on, to look forward to. He wasn’t afraid to lose anything, because there was nothing left to lose. He battled life just because he wasn’t willing to give up the fight. But here, the immediate threat of a shattered body was so sudden, so total, his heart was racing, blood shivering through his veins like frozen needles.

“Mal, stay where you are.” Roarke’s voice was shockingly intimate, just on the other side of the links, right in his ear, the man’s breath tickling his cheek. “I’ll pull you back over.”

His eyes focused tightly on the links in front of him, Mal lowered his body, fingers gripped in the links, foot finding purchase on the small concrete lip that arched over the highest window just a few feet below the ledge he stood on. Then his hands came down and found the ledge, and his feet slid down across the hardened plastic of the window and came to the lip at the window’s bottom. Mal’s eyes never left the surface directly in front of him, his face pressing against the nicks and bumps of the concrete as though it were a lover.

“You’re a walking zero, Mal,” Roarke’s voice called from behind the fence, even and professional as always. “A walking zero.”

Mal moved, hand to top of this window, foot to top of the next window, then hand to bottom of window and foot to the bottom of the next window, climbing down the building as if it were a gargantuan ladder. The wind rushed him, blustering around him like an enemy, tugging, shifting at unexpected moments. It gave Mal strength, infused his muscles with energy. An enemy was exactly what Mal needed.

Fight me, Wind
.
Fight me
.

His hands moved; his feet moved. He pressed his body as close to the building as he could, making himself too small and flat a target for the wind to grab hold of. There were times, though, suspended between one window and the next, that his body couldn’t lie flat, that he had to search with his limbs for the next hold, and the wind grabbed at him; his muscles tightened in anger, and he growled until he found the next place with a shaky foot, a sweat-slicked hand.

Like before. Like climbing down from that mountain in the Idea’s impossible prison. Climbing down the harsh, rocky surface. But not alone that time. With others. With Laura.

An impact shuddered against the window that Mal pressed his face against. Castillo stood there, behind the tinted plastic. Thank God the surface was made to withstand extraordinary pressures. Castillo’s fist crashed against it, but it held. Nevertheless, Mal felt the vibration of it, the shock of Castillo’s angry face lurching through his heart. The adrenaline racing, the blood flowing, it was working the doctor’s stimulants right out of Mal’s system. Beneath the strain of holding his weight aloft, he could feel the tears and the bruises getting the better of him again. He could feel the pain in his ribs spreading through his torso, his entire body like burning acid. If his vision weren’t locked on the space just before his nose, it would be swimming, he knew. He could feel the thunder in his head, cracking against his skull from within.

Fight me, Castillo
.
Fight me
. He looked down, away from the burly man’s angry, screaming face.

Beneath him, the building stretched down and down forever, vertigo or his concussion whipping the view from side to nauseating side. But a story down and one line of windows to Mal’s left was the top of the covered walkway that joined the buildings.

Mal looked back up at Castillo. He thought to smile but could not pull his lips from the rigor of strain they were in. Mal put his tongue on that jagged tooth and bit down, felt blood course from the tongue and the infected wound beneath, tasted iron and pus, the pain giving a single instant of crystal focus. He used it to shift, reach to his left, find the next window over, and grip it hard enough to—in his mind—crack the concrete beneath his fingers.

Castillo threw his body against the window. His frustration was so intense that he had not thought to use his security override to open the window. Yet.

Mal was at the next window, in line over the walkway. The trembling in his arms was uncontrollable now. The wind snatched at him, whipping his hood, the cuffs of his pants against his flesh so hard they felt like lashes. He looked between his feet at the roof of the walkway fifteen feet below, and he let go.

For a single moment both chokingly terrifying and heart-racingly beautiful, Mal flew free, the wind raging in his ears, tears streaming from his eyes.

“Laura!”
He screamed it at the wind, his voice swept off into—

He came down on the roof of the walkway on his feet and his forearms, felt his ankle fracture, sending a blade of pain up his leg, felt his cracked ribs break loose, their jagged edges slicing into his lungs. Immediately, his throat was clogged with fluid, which he retched out in great red and yellow gobs. It cleared, but he could not catch his breath, could not take a full gulp of air. He held there on his elbows and knees, hacking, coughing, expelling fluid from his nose and his mouth, involuntary tears from his eyes, the wind racing around him, still trying to tug him that extra foot that would put him over the edge.

Minutes passed before he could even raise his head up with an effort. There, straight before him, was Castillo, at the window directly above the walkway. The tinted surface slid up neatly, and Castillo pulled back, shocked for an instant by the strength of the wind. But then his eyes found Mal again, and he began climbing from the window. If his enemy would do it, he would do it, too.

Mal looked beneath him, at the surface of the walkway’s roof. It was the same tinted plastic as the windows, held in by a framework of metal. He gathered what was left of himself into his fist and plunged it down in the center of a square pane of the plastic.

Castillo made his way out, uncertainly onto the walkway, throwing himself back and clutching at the wall as the wind encompassed him. Mal pounded down, again and again, leaving bloody knuckle prints on the surface.