Ultraviolet (2 page)

And then the box finally arrived.

It was all there, all the feedstock I had ordered and dumped my life savings into, so I went to work, carefully inserting all of the cylinders into the printer. The metals, the plastics, the rubbers, some as thin as a pencil and some as thick as my arm. Then I loaded the new prototype specs from my phone and pressed Print. It said it would take two hours, so I lay down on the floor beside the printer and went to sleep with the smell of melting plastic burning my nostrils.

Bang, bang, bang.

I sat up so fast it made me dizzy, and I frowned at the printer, and then at the door of my apartment. Time had passed, but I had no idea how much. The printer wasn’t making any noise.

Bang, bang, bang.

“Miss Zhao? This is Special Detective Gabriel Frost with the Baltimore City police. Please open the door.”

I stared at the door.

Special Detective?

There was nothing special about them, they were private security on permanent loan from Cygnus Systems to the local precincts and I didn’t need to be an ex-Cygnus employee to know that when a Special Detective comes looking for you, you don’t let them find you. They made people disappear. At least, that’s what I’d heard.

I leapt to my feet and grabbed my jacket and my shoes. My heart was racing and my palms were sweating and I had no idea what I should be doing except that I wanted to be out of there. I knew why they were there, of course. I’d done everything I wasn’t supposed to do. Continuing research into proprietary technologies for private profit, loading non-Cygnus specs into my printer, and who knew what other charges they would throw at me.

Stupid rubidium. There must have been security flags on that too. Idiot!

I froze.

The printer!

I dashed across the living room and grabbed the neatly arrayed pile of black, webbed fabric from inside the printer, and then I dashed back through the apartment to my bedroom just as I heard the electronic override on my front door chime and the door swung open on its squealing hinge. The floor thumped and creaked as someone came inside. Or maybe two or three someones.

I shoved the window up, which betrayed me with a horrible wooden shriek, although it didn’t open all the way, so I had to slither out the narrow gap on my belly and just tumble out onto the rusty fire escape face-first.

“Stop! Freeze!” a man shouted.

I scrambled to my feet and lunged toward the steps, and at that moment I both saw and remembered that the fire escape only went down to the third floor because everything below that had been torn off when a garbage truck malfunctioned and hit the building a year and a half ago. So I froze for a second, because apparently that’s what I do in a crisis, just freeze up and stare at an obvious problem. And then I spun around and started going up the stairs to the roof.

I’ll admit, before that hot, muggy afternoon when Special Detective Frost knocked on my door, I hadn’t had to deal with many stressful situations. Not up close and personal. No siblings to fight with, no overbearing parents to rebel against, no bullies at school, no sexual harassment at work. Whenever I admit these things to my friends, they all say the same thing.

I’m lucky.

They think I’m lucky.

I think that’s sad, and terrifying.

But that afternoon, it felt like the universe was making up for all my good luck all at once. I reached the roof with my legs and lungs on fire, and there I was treated to a view of ancient chimneys, exhausts, fans, antennas, satellite dishes, bird nests, and bird shit. Lots of things, none of which could help me.

The fire escape behind me clanged and jangled as Frost hurried up the old metal steps. I could hear him grunting. I glanced down and saw the top of his head, just a smudge of black hair through the metal grating of the landings.

I ran.

I bolted along the side of the building, looking over the edge for something, anything. I’d only seen about a million movies and games where people escaped from the roofs of buildings just like this. There was always a clothes line or a power cable or some precariously leaning pole of some sort, or maybe just a small gap between the buildings so the hero could jump to the next building. But there were no cables or poles, and the neighboring buildings were all taller than mine. So there was nowhere to go.

I ran to the little shed-looking thing where I figured I would find the stairs leading back inside, and grabbed the handle.

Locked.

Naturally.

“Carmen Reyes Zhao!”

I spun around. A man in a black suit was stepping off the fire escape and onto the gravel roof. He strode toward me with this dull, grim look on his face, like he chased people onto roofs every day and this was just one more lousy day at the office. And for him it probably was.

I didn’t know what to do.

“Hi there!” I forced a fake smile. “Sorry, but I think you’ve got the wrong Carmen Reyes Zhao.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Are you sure? It’s a really common name.”

“No, it’s not.”

My mouth moved but I didn’t know what to say. I watched his hands, slightly grateful that at least he wasn’t holding a gun.

Hands.

I looked down at my hands, at the black webbed fabric that the printer had made, at the thick fingers of the gloves full of experimental fibers lined with traces of rubidium.

“Carmen Zhao, you are under arrest for multiple felony counts under the Corporate Espionage Act.”

He was halfway to me, halfway from the fire escape to the locked door of the stairs. I still didn’t know what to do or what to say. A part of me wished I could go back in time two months and tell myself not to bother making these things. Just don’t do it, and nothing bad would have happened. But I did do it, and now something bad was happening.

I put on the gloves.

“Drop that!” Special Detective Frost pulled a small black pistol from inside his jacket and pointed it at me.

I swear my heart actually stopped. I had never seen a real gun before, not that close, and never pointed at me. Instinctively, I raised my hands in front of me, as if my hands were bulletproof and could magically protect me.

“Drop the gloves!” he shouted.

I wanted to do it. I did. I wanted to do anything to make him stop pointing the gun at me, but I couldn’t quite move. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from that little black hole where the bullet was hiding, waiting to kill me.

He kept marching toward me. The gun kept coming closer, and getting bigger.

My lip shook. I was barely breathing. And then a little light caught my eye. It was a tiny green dot on the back of the gloves. It meant they were charged. They were on. They were working.

And for some reason that I still don’t understand, I looked at the man with the gun and I said, “Lux, shield.”

A thousand tiny lights flashed across the webbed fibers of the left glove and lanced outward in a brilliant laser show of thin violet beams. In half a second, the beams traced the shape of a large circular shield, a sort of Trojan design that I used sometimes in
Demon Age 3
. If it had been made of steel it would have weighed a ton, but my shield was made of cold photons, and it weighed nothing at all. It was almost perfectly black because the light was all trapped in the object, but it did have a soft violet glow all over that was a little brighter along the edges.

Damn. Photon bleed at the upper edge of the visible spectrum.

Well, no one gets it right the first time.

I was still looking at the inner side of the shield attached to my gloved hand when the man started shooting at the outer side.

He fired four or five times before I really understood what was happening, and then he paused and we both realized that his bullets weren’t getting through my solid light shield, and I angled my hand closer to my body, more deliberately shielding myself, just as he fired three more times, and then twice, and then five more all in a row.

I huddled behind the shield, my heart in my throat. But I felt nothing. No impacts, no injuries. But I saw the smashed bullets clinking quietly on the ground at my feet in front of the shield.

Holy shit, it works.

I peeked out around the shield and saw Frost reloading his gun, so I turned and punched the edge of my shield against the locked door, and the laser-fine edge sliced through the lock, letting the door swing open. I dashed down the steps, holding the shield awkwardly over my shoulder to cover my back, and its violet edges scraped and shredded the walls behind me as I ran.

Apparently I had miscalculated how sharp the edges of an object made out of warped lasers could be.

Oops.

I got all the way down to the street before I stopped to look back and saw how the damaged walls were falling apart to create a jungle of boards and plaster and metal spearing out across the steps all the way up the stairwell, and it looked like Frost was still way, way up there, fighting his way down through the mess.

I ran out into the alley behind the building where I found a lot of boxes and trashcans and a dead cat, and I ran.

“Lux, off.”

The big black shield with its violet glow disappeared, and I ran and ran and ran until I couldn’t run anymore.

Chapter 2
Field Test

When I finally stopped running I was about eight blocks from home and barely able to breathe. A lifetime of sitting at a terminal or sitting with my phone hadn’t really prepared me for running from the cops.

My phone. Shit.

I yanked it out and turned off the GPS, and then with a roll of my eyes, I started walking again. I’d been leaving digital breadcrumbs east, so now I turned south just so I wouldn’t be where they thought I was. It was the middle of the afternoon, so I felt somewhat safe staying in the alleys behind the shops. They were completely empty and too narrow for a car to drive down, so it felt safer. Maybe it wasn’t but it felt that way.

After another three blocks, I pulled out my phone again and logged back into my printer at the apartment and cleared out the queue of designs so no one would find the specs for the holo-gloves in its memory.

Then I walked another three blocks.

I tried to think, I tried to come up with a plan. That’s what you do when you’re on the run, right? You have to stay one step ahead of the bad guys. Except that technically, legally, I was the bad guy. And I knew it.

And the memory of that gun pointed at my chest just wasn’t going away.

So I took out my phone, activated the illegal scrambler app that no one was supposed to have but everyone had anyway, and I called a friend.

Dominic answered immediately. “Hey Car.”

I tried to smile to sound more normal. “Hey Dom. How are things?”

“Well, my weight is up and my blood pressure is up and my mom won’t stop coming over here to check on me, but other than that, things are only as bad as usual. How are you?”

“Oh… Kinda in trouble, actually.”

“What’d you do, blow all your money at that casino? I told you not to waste your time on that crap.”

“No, nothing like that. I wish it was that.”

“So what then?”

“Well… I’ve got a Special looking for me. Shooting at me, actually.”

“What!”

“Yeah.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing. I—”

“Carmen, what did you do?”

“I…” I paused and glanced around the intersection before crossing. No signs of cops. No obvious security cameras in the street. “You know the holography project I was working on back at Cygnus?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I’ve been working on it for the last two months on my own.”

“Seriously? And that’s what they’re pissed about?”

“I think so.”

“Huh. So they found your research? Did you post something somewhere?”

“No. I just… This afternoon I printed a prototype of my holo projector.”

“Okay.”

“But I needed some exotic feedstock. Rubidium.”

“Carmen! Jeez!”

“I know, shut up!” I rubbed my forehead as I walked down the sidewalk so I could partially shield my face. How long had it been since the rooftop? An hour? Two? If Frost was really working with the cops, then he could have them all looking for me by now. But if he was trying to keep things quiet, keep things in-house, then maybe I had a little more time. “Listen, it works, okay? I turned the projector mesh into a pair of gloves and they can project solid light objects.” Mentally I flashed back to the bullets pinging off the shield. “It works really well.”

“Great, I hope you have a lot of fun with it. In jail.”

“You’re not helping, Dom.”

“I shouldn’t even be talking to you right now. Do you know how long I would last in jail without my meds and everything? Less than a day.”

“This is a scrambled line, you’re fine.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

“Okay.” Dom heaved a heavy sigh. “Okay, so where are you now?”

“Downtown. Crossing Charles at the moment.” I ran between two bikes as the light changed.

“Okay. So what happens now? What are you going to do?”

“I need to get off the street and hide for a little while. I just don’t know where it’s safe.”

“Lexington Market.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah. They’ve got so many drug deals going on down there these days, the dealers have hacked all the cameras. It’s the safest place in the city. You know, if you’re a criminal.”

I winced. I didn’t want to go anywhere near the market. It was one of those places you hear about all your life as a terrible place where terrible things happen. If there was a violent crime on the news, odds are it was near the market. The only place worse than Lexington those days was Pigtown. But Pigtown’s always been scary, so that hardly counts.

“How do you know so much about it?”

Dom laughed. “Where do you think I get my meds these days?”

“Oh. Right.”

Yeah, I’m not sick. Like, ever. Yet another thing my friends say is lucky about me. It seems they’ve all got congenital this or early-onset that. All of them take at least three pills a day, and it costs them about half of their take-home pay. And it probably would for the rest of their lives. But not me. I’m fine. Always have been. Allergic to peanuts, of course, but who isn’t?