“Close enough,” I said when they were about ten feet away, visible in the shadows, two binary people, all whites and blacks. “Tell me why you’re here alone.” Somewhere in the darkness water was dripping.
They stopped. Lukens didn’t move or change expression. She was really a pretty girl, baby faced with a fine, long nose, that same strand of brown hair hanging in her face. She stared at me unblinkingly. “I was ordered to keep you alive, Mr. Cates. That order was not rescinded or altered. I saw you break away, and I saw one of those hard-case boys disobey orders and try to terminate you. I decided the best way to comply with my orders was to follow you. Since you left the first two floors of the building pretty clear, it was simple enough.”
She sounded sleepy. I made a mental note to ask her the secret of napping while the whole fucking world died around you. I looked at Marko. “And you?”
He opened his mouth without looking up, but Lukens interrupted. “I requisitioned Mr. Marko as a member of this detail because your chances of survival here are much higher if a Technical Associate is available.”
Marko shrugged without pausing his gesturing. “What the she-hulk here said.”
Lukens’s eyes shifted to Marko for a moment. “Shrimp,” she muttered.
I considered my options. I could handle the Stormer-I’d handled dozens of fucking Stormers-but I wasn’t sure I could afford to waste a resource. She wasn’t under my orders, but if she was going to watch my back while I encouraged Monks to shoot at me, that would be useful. And Marko doubly so, since they’d powered up the complex and the electronic locks, sensors, and security systems it contained.
“All right,” I said, lowering my gun and grunting my way up to a standing position. I hesitated, considering, looking from her frozen face to Marko’s absorbed one, bathed in greenish light. “You both should know that I’m sick,” I finally said. “I’ve been coughing blood for an hour now.”
Marko’s hand stopped, but he didn’t look up at me. Lukens didn’t flinch. She stared at me with that flat, cop stare I’d come to know so goddamn well. Like I’d just told her the time. Like I’d just told her nothing. Fucking cops.
“Gatz shut you down,” Marko said, his voice flat, hands still.
I was watching Lukens. She was still staring at me as if she were doing sums in her head. “Looks like it,” I said. “I think I broke some invisible rule. Kev was never… normal, you know, and now he’s fucking batty. Who knows what I did. Or didn’t do.”
Slowly, Marko’s hand resumed motion, gaining speed. “You’re further along than us,” he said. “We’ll be showing symptoms in an hour, maybe two, depending on when exactly the suppression field was deactivated. I’d estimate you’ve got thirteen hours before the damage done by the nanobots is irreversible.”
I smiled. “Thirteen hours?” I said, chuckling, my chest burning and trying to slip the reins again. “Mr. Marko, I could kill the whole damn System in thirteen fucking hours.” I started to cough, sputtering and flinging spit everywhere. “If… I can’t… kill… one goddamn Techie… in thirteen… hours…”
Marko finally raised his eyes from his handheld, staring at me for a few seconds. “You’ve no doubt noticed that this complex is powered. Sixteen generators, by my count. There may be more offline at the moment, coming into play as others fail. From what I can tell, this complex is about sixty percent bright, which is amazing, since I’m scanning just fifty-three Monks in the vicinity. They’re pulling an amazing load right here.”
I looked around. “You got any plans of this place?”
He nodded. “Sure. We’re one level below street level here-there’s a retro-fitted escalator over there,” he pointed off into the darkness. “But I’d recommend against it, as it’ll be the obvious choice if anyone’s waiting on us. There’s an ancient elevator shaft over there, and despite the structural concerns of such an ancient element, it would be a less obvious entrance.”
I looked in the direction he indicated but couldn’t see much. “You’re helping me?” I asked. “You know why I’m here, right?”
He shrugged without looking back at me. “You’re coughing blood, right? That means I’ll be coughing blood soon.”
I nodded. Everyone was just scrambling to stay alive. We started moving in the direction he’d indicated, me on point and Lukens bringing up the rear, shredder back in her hands.
“Why the hell do they have this place so bright?” Marko mused as we walked. “I can see firing up whatever bullshit security tech this complex has, but they’ve got this thing burning. I don’t get it.”
I swept my useless eyes this way and that as we walked, making more noise than I liked. “Fifty-three Monks, you said.”
“Yeah,” Marko agreed. “That I can see.”
Controlled burn, Kev had said to me. This is a controlled burn. “Fifty-three Monks who expect to pick up the pieces of the System in a few weeks when this is over. And this complex is a hospital.”
“Yeah? And?”
The elevator loomed up in front of us, rusting doors covered in faded, ancient graffiti, the two call buttons missing, disconnected wires spilling out of the wall. I stepped forward and ran my free hand along the seam between the doors, dust spilling down onto the gritty floor. “They’re not going to run the whole world with fifty-three fucking Monks, Mr. Marko. They need the power because they’re making more Monks.”
XXXIII
Day Ten: It was Like Living Underwater
Screaming rust, the elevator doors split open in response to some not so gentle pressure, revealing an empty, shadowed shaft, a damp-smelling breeze blowing gently against us. I leaned in and peered down into almost total blackness and then up, where enough light was filtering in from various sources to outline the dim shape of the elevator car hanging several floors above us. Realizing I was sweating freely, I pulled myself back and looked at Marko.
“Any juice in there?”
He leaned into the shaft with his handheld and stared around for a few seconds, then pulled back and nodded. “Yep. Either they’re using this elevator-which would be insane, considering the last time anyone serviced it-or they didn’t have the time or knowledge to route the power selectively and just juiced the whole place. But that shaft is hot.” He frowned. “I’ve also got a lot of nano traffic… but nothing like what I was seeing before. There’s been a-”
He trailed off to a low mumble, talking to himself, and I stopped listening. I considered, taking quick, shallow breaths. I’d identified the threshold where my lungs rebelled and spasmed, sending up chunks of myself in bloody packets, and if I stayed just shy of that point I could control the urge to cough. It was like living underwater. “I don’t suppose you could get that elevator to come down here?”
The Techie cocked his head. “I might, Mr. Cates, but I’m not sure that would be such a good idea, actually. It’d be noisy and would probably attract attention, and as I thought I just pointed out, that car has been hanging there for decades at best. The chances that it would drop us to our deaths are pretty even.”
I nodded, swallowing blood back into myself, a light fever film all over me. “Excellent.” It was always the fucking Hard Way. Even when I’d just been a street-level Gunner, popping shitheads in a crowd for five hundred yen at a time, it had always been the hard way. Too many people, too many bodyguards. A mark who traveled underground all the time. A mark who wore body armor head to toe. A mark buried inside Westminster Abbey. A mark guarded by a System Pig on the take.