Tracer (6 page)

Once, there were hundreds of thousands of boxwood trees across Asia. Beautiful trees, with thick, green foliage. All gone. But maybe, Darnell thinks, they might grow again. If no human beings are around to interfere, to cut them down,
to destroy their habitats.

The door hinges creak. Reece enters, his long coat sweeping around his legs. Darnell doesn’t look up. “You know that tracer, came in earlier?” he says.

“Uh-huh.”

“She was ambushed on her way over here. Some gang or other. They’ll need a visit. Make her tell you who they were. Be persuasive.”

“What about the tracer?”

“Kill her.”

I make it as far as the Gardens border before I have to stop. I can feel every muscle in my legs and abdomen, white-hot filaments criss-crossing my body. When I slow to a jog, a stitch springs up in my side, biting deep. My body begs me to bend over, to relieve tension on the muscles, but I force myself to stay upright, breathing long and slow through my nose. My eye socket throbs with
pain.

I did it. I finished the job, delivered the cargo, got away clean. I have no idea how the hell I pulled that off, but I did it.

No more jobs today. I am going home, and then I’m going to sleep. Probably forever.

I’m on the bottom level of the sector, and the corridor is blissfully deserted. I let myself lean on the wall. The metal is cold and oily under my palm, so I rest my shoulder
on it instead. Then I turn so I’ve got my back on it. And before I know it, I slide right down the wall. There’s a low power box jutting out right where the wall meets the floor, and I sit down on it, my legs splayed out in front of me. My breathing has slowed, and the heat in my muscles has gone from white hot to a sullen red. It’ll do. At least until I can get back home.

I can still hear the
crowd from the distant corridors behind me. The noise is given a metallic edge by the time it reaches me, twisted and bent by the floor and walls, so that it sounds like a weird alien monster roaming the station.

It takes me a minute to realise that there’s another sound too. Footsteps. My eyes fly open, just in time to see a figure stepping towards me, silhouetted by the flickering fluorescents.

The figure stops, raises his hands. “Woah, hey, be cool. I just wanted to ask if you had some food.”

I blink. The voice is weirdly familiar. Then my eyes adjust, and I see that it’s the tagger I saw earlier. The one I blazed past in the upper-level corridors, just before the border, while I was running to the Air Lab. He’s younger than I first thought, little more than a kid, with a bad case
of acne and dark hair that sticks to his forehead. His paint can is tucked in his waistband.

If he recognises me from before, he gives no sign, just gives my pack a pleading look. I’m about to tell him to get lost, but then I remember that I already flipped him off once today, and feel kind of bad.

“Sure,” I say. I’m almost certain that my bag’s empty, but there’s always a chance that half a
protein bar or something got lost in the bottom. Part of me knows I should stay alert, but surely not even I would be unlucky enough to get jacked twice in one day.

“Thanks,” he says, as I zip open my bag and rummage through it. “I haven’t had anything to eat all day, and I can’t go to the mess hall until I find a job, so – hey, what—”

His words turn into a horrific, bubbling scream. I jerk
my head upright just in time to see a flash of metal at his throat, followed by a dark spurt of blood. I bolt to my feet just as the figure behind the tagger shoves him to the side.

I react on instinct, leaning backwards just as the knife flashes out at me. I get a half-second look at my attacker’s face – it’s
Darnell’s guard, the one who let me into the control room. What the hell?

He slashes
at me again, and I manage to grab his arm, just below the elbow. The tip of the knife nicks my neck, and I hiss in pain. The guard twists away, laughing, then attacks again, driving me back down the corridor. Behind us, the tagger’s body twitches as he bleeds out.

I turn to run – there’s no way this guy can beat me in a straight sprint. But I barely manage two steps before he grabs the back of
my jacket. For a second, it’s like we’re locked in an insane dance. I’m bending over backwards, leaning into his body. He’s dropping his shoulder towards me, the blade close behind it.

I twist to the side, ripping free of his grip, only just managing to stay on my feet. He laughs again. Little needles of terror are shooting through me, but there’s something underneath it too: anger. I delivered
the cargo clean.
I finished the damn job
. And now Darnell wants me gone? Like I’m a loose end that needs to be snipped off?

No way. Not today.

The guard reaches out for me. He’s a good fighter, and fast, but he’s easy to read. He wants to pull me in and drive the knife into my belly. So instead of leaning back, like he expects me to, I drop, swinging my right leg in a wide arc.

He spots the
move, dodges back, but not before the edge of my shoe clips his ankle. It’s just enough. He stumbles, tries to stay upright, then crashes to the ground. His right foot hits the ground, bounces up, comes to a rest on the power box where the wall meets the floor.

I don’t let myself second-guess it. I jump as high as I can, and bring both feet down on his kneecap. There’s a thin snap, like someone
breaking a stick of celery, and then the guard is screaming.

I stumble off him, grab my pack, and run.

The glass beaker smashes against the wall. In the silence that follows, the only sound is the gentle hum of the lab’s DNA thermocycler.

Prakesh Kumar looks away from the mess of glass, furious with himself. Glass beakers aren’t easy to replace. Still, at least he can clear it up before anyone notices. He’s by himself in the mobile lab, on the opposite end of the hangar to the main
control room. Not that it bothers him. He likes working alone.

Especially when he decides to vent some anger by smashing things.

He grabs a bucket from a nearby tool shelf and crouches down, picking the big pieces off the floor and dropping them inside. Damn thermocycler. He couldn’t get it to work – the temperature wouldn’t rise, and he had to reset the system three times to get it to budge
even a little. By the time he got it working, every muscle in his body felt like it was on an electrical circuit. He didn’t even realise what he was doing until the glass was in jagged pieces on the floor.

Except it’s not the thermocycler Prakesh is angry with. Not
really. It’s a machine. He can understand machines, just like he can understand trees, or algae. When they stop working there’s always
a solution that you can use to set the problem right – a system reset, a different kind of fertiliser. They’re not like human beings.

When he’s filled the bucket, he pushes it under the table, telling himself he’ll deal with it later. He stands and rubs his eyes, amazed at how tired he is. It’ll take a couple of hours before he can send the results for gel electrolysis. Time for a break.

He
steps out of the lab, shutting the door behind him, and walks back to the control room, zig-zagging down the walkways between the trees. There’s no one around, not even Suki, who’s known to stay way past the shift change. No one interrupts him as he walks down the hangar.

Riley’s back in his head. He always end up on the same image of her: the first time she came back to the Air Lab to visit
him, after that first delivery. She was jogging to a stop, her hair flying out behind her, a smile playing across her face. He remembers thinking that he’d never seen anyone so at ease with speed, so in love with movement.

Not that it matters.
She won’t let you in
, he thinks.
She won’t even let you help her when she gets hurt. You’re a friendly face to her, someone who can get her some food when
she needs it. Nothing more
.

The locker room is at the back of the main lab. The floor is grimy with tracked soil, the lockers bent and rusty. The one Prakesh uses doesn’t even shut properly any more, but the only thing he keeps in there is his lab coat, and anybody who wants to steal that is more than welcome. He slips it off his shoulders and shoves it in, shutting the door with a bang. Then
he rests his head on the metal and shuts his eyes, just for a second.

When he turns around, Oren Darnell is standing there.

He’s standing with his arms folded, his face expressionless.
He’s close enough for Prakesh to pick out the pores on his skin.

Prakesh tells himself not to freak out. He knows Mr Darnell’s reputation – everyone does – but he’s not in the habit of messing with the techs.
Not unless they cross him. He needs them to keep producing results, so he can stay in the top spot at the Air Lab. Prakesh meets his eyes, even though he really doesn’t want to.

“Something I can help you with?” he says.

Darnell doesn’t answer. Instead, he grabs Prakesh’s shoulders, slamming him up against the lockers. They creak and groan, juddering against his back. He’s too stunned to speak,
caught too tight to move. His shoulders feel like they’re trapped in a vice.

“Where is she?” Darnell says quietly. He could be asking for an update on the electrolysis results.

Prakesh swings his arm up, trying to hit Darnell across the side of the face. Darnell knocks it away, his hand swinging back. Prakesh’s anger vanishes, replaced by bright terror. He tries to hit Darnell again, but the
lab boss grabs his wrist.

“Do that again, and you’ll lose the arm. Where is Riley Hale?”

Prakesh tries to answer. He might as well try to make trees grow using his mind. All the stories, all the little rumours he’s heard when he’s taking a break with the other techs, are popping up one after the other. It feels as if they’re clogging his throat, sealing it shut.

Darnell sighs. He jabs his forearm
into Prakesh’s neck, banging his head back against the lockers.

Prakesh claws at the arm, desperate for air. There’s a tiny sting in his neck. It grows and grows, the pain flooding through his body. He has to scream, he has to, but Darnell clamps a hand over his mouth.

“You’re not going to like what happens when you wake up,” he says. He’s at the end of a very long, dark tunnel, and by the time
Prakesh figures out what the words mean, he’s gone.

Too close. That was way too close.

Every stride brings another image flashing up. The tagger standing above me. The glint of metal. The sound of his scream, like water burbling through a rusted pipe. If he hadn’t been there, if I hadn’t stopped in that exact spot …

No. I can’t think about it like that. Darnell’s guard killed the tagger because he was in the way. If it wasn’t him, it
would have been someone else. I was the target – and since not even Darnell would risk murdering me in the middle of the Air Lab, he sent his goon to do it for him. It’s a good thing I left before …

Oh gods –
Prakesh
.

I’m already running through every memory I can think of, trying to remember if Darnell had ever seen us together. I don’t think so. But the last words Prakesh and I said to each
other are running over and over in my head.

I should go back. No. No way. I can’t show my face in Gardens until I’ve figured this whole mess out. Stompers? Not a chance. They’ll throw me in the brig along with Darnell.

Amira. She’ll know what to do.

I keep running, fast as I can, doing my best to push everything else away. But the anger I felt when I was attacked is still rolling in my stomach.
It’s not just anger at Darnell. It’s anger at the ugliness of the station. The dirtiness of it. It’s like I’ve ripped back a scab, one so old that I’d almost forgotten it was there. I feel like I’ve had a look at the raw flesh underneath.

Enough. Focus on running.

Movement helps. It always does. I let my muscle memory take over, and in no time at all, I’m in the upper-level Apogee corridor that
leads to the Nest.

For most people, there are only six levels on Outer Earth. But there are things in this place you won’t find on any official map. Vents, wiring ducts, sewerage pipes. And storage units that a person can easily stand up in. These are places that the rest of the station has long since forgotten about. But if you know where to look, you can score yourself a very handy base.

I have to look for a moment to spot the hatch in the ceiling. In the dim light, I can just make out the yellow warning label, its Hindi and Chinese script almost illegible. I break into a run, willing my body to go a little further. It’s nine miles from the Air Lab to the Nest in Apogee, and I can feel every single one of them in the arches of my feet.

As I run up to the hatch, I jump towards
the wall, launching myself back off it in a reverse tic-tac towards the ceiling. I flatten my hand against the hatch as I pass underneath it, and push – it glides silently upwards and away, the hydraulics Carver built into it working perfectly. I land, and then immediately leap towards the opposite wall for another tac, pushing off and backwards in one smooth move.

I fell on my ass hard the first
few times I tried this. As I jump, I reach up and behind me, grasping the lip of the opening. I relax into the movement, letting my body rock backwards,
and then using the forward momentum of the swing to haul myself up through the hatch.

I roll onto my side as I do so. My body screams at me to stay there, but I ignore it, forcing myself to my feet.

The hatch slips back into place with a tiny
hiss. The entranceway is almost completely dark, the only light coming from a tiny digital keypad bolted onto the wall behind me. It’s the perfect security system: getting up into the storage unit requires either something to stand on, or the moves of a tracer, and even then you’ve got to know the access code to the inner door. Whoever designed this part of Outer Earth probably didn’t plan on it
being used this way, but it’s worked out pretty well for us.