“Right.” Tyrone tries to find the right words. “You got no family, then?”
The guy’s eyes drop to the ground. “Nah. They didn’t make it. You?”
“Same. Mum died just after. Lived with my aunt for a while, but she only lasted a few more years.”
“Sorry.”
“Yeah.” Tyrone suddenly can’t match his gaze, feels the hair pricking up on his neck, his skin temperature drop like he’s been enveloped in a bubble of cold air. “Likewise.”
Seconds pass like minutes, Tyrone trying to think of something to break the awkward silence. Luckily Grids wanders over from where he’s been agitatedly hovering, shifting weight from foot to foot, trying to eavesdrop. The atmosphere is suddenly very businesslike.
“Right. They going out.” He leans in close to Ty, drops his voice low. “Keep an eye on them. Like I said, Mary doesn’t leave the Croft. She doesn’t pass the gates, under any circs. Get me?”
“No problem, man. I’m on it.”
“I fucking hope so.”
Anika didn’t know what those long-dead futurists were thinking when they built the 5102, but she suspects they just thought it would look cool to have a road flowing under a building, a Fritz Lang–shot world of tomorrow where cars appeared and disappeared into the very fabric of the city, like trains disappearing into Alpine tunnels. Maybe that’s all it was: just architects flexing their terraforming muscles by building urban mountains, not allowing their future city to be restrained by the limitations of such antique concepts as roads and streets.
Of course, what they’d actually created was a wall. A huge, ten-story-high wall with the smallest of gateways at the bottom, just wide enough for a single road—the A38 Stokes Croft—to slip through. The cynic, the class warrior still hidden deep inside Anika, would always whisper that it was intentional—that they had actually glimpsed the future, and knew exactly what they were doing—building a barrier with a single, controllable gateway to the badlands of St. Paul’s and beyond. That they’d seen everything that would follow, from the race riots of the ’70s through to the cataclysmic rebellion of the new century, and had built a wall to try to keep it out, a preemptive strike on the geography of the city’s undesirables.
She knew that wasn’t true. For a start, a true prophet would have seen how it would have been reversed, deflected back as defenses for the other side. A wall of protection, fortification—not exclusion.
At least for a while, before the tides turned again and it became the wall of a prison, a tomb.
It hadn’t been called the 5102 when they built it, it was Avon House—the main offices for now-long-defunct regional authorities. It had sat derelict for years before being reborn as city-center apartments, part of that first wave of turn-of-the-century artisan gentrification that swept along Stokes Croft like floodwater, staining the buildings with graffiti and coffee bars as it receded.
And then, later, as Stokes Croft had grown beyond just being a street and had become a place, for Anika the 5102 had become not just a symbol, but home.
She honestly hadn’t been sure, as she’d emerged from the shadows of the Bearpit, that it would even still be there. But here it is, the fortress wall, breached yet still standing. The star-shaped hole they punched in it reveals all Anika needs to know, as it exposes crumbling concrete floors and twisted metal entrails, the rotting honeycomb of an empty, abandoned hive. The building might still stand, but it looks like it’s been bled to death.
Anika stands, stares up at it, unsure what to think. She remembers the last time she saw it, glancing back over her shoulder as she fled, smoke still seeping from broken windows and a handful of defiant residents still on the roof, waving their improvised red flags and raining tiles onto retreating, unseen aggressors. She remembers a shot ringing out, a sound like fractured air, and the mass of people around her ducking, flinching as one, a few standing out from the crowd as they remain immobile, numbed and unmoved, failing to hear it, failing to care, or just refusing to be shocked anymore.
Below the fractured wall she stares into the gloom of the underpass, the once-ever-busy road silent, the once-barricaded gateway clear. Well, temporarily, at least—someone has built a gate across it, two giant sliding doors welded together from scaffolding poles and chicken wire, mounted on what looks like a couple of dozen shopping cart wheels. Putting aside the fact it’s wide open, it hardly looks secure, like it couldn’t keep anything out—or in—just another symbolic barrier, a physical manifestation of a long-forgotten virtual boundary.
As Anika steps across the line between July sun and the shadow of the 5102’s underpass she clocks the two guys—kids, really, less than half her age—standing just the other side of the darkness, both holding guns. Big guns, old AKs refurbished with printed parts, their dull metal color patchworked with sections of gray plastic. As gate guards they’re both pretty shit, she figures—they’ve got their backs to her for a start, staring inward. She looks past them, into the Croft, follows their line of sight to a small group walking slowly but steadily straight toward them.
Four people, heading up the center of the mainly empty street.
They’re led by a girl, young—younger than even these two kids on the gate. Dark hair tied back tight, hoop earrings, aging stormsuit a couple of sizes too big for her.
A man, older. Suited. Obvious VIP.
Behind them:
A black kid, apparently unarmed.
A Land Army trooper, full battle dress, assault rifle. Obvious VIP detail.
Anika instinctively flattens herself against cold brick, trying to merge into the shadows, become invisible, hood up. Hand in bag.
She closes her eyes briefly, slows her breathing, recalls her Bloc mantra.
With zero bandwidth there is no calling for backup.
With zero bandwidth the advantage is ours.
With zero bandwidth there is no many.
With zero bandwidth there is no legion.
With zero bandwidth we are singular.
With zero bandwidth there is no time to hesitate.
With zero bandwidth there is only opportunity.
With zero bandwidth opportunity is our only weapon.
When her eyes open again she’s identifying targets—the suit and the trooper, calculating distances, angles.
The trooper first.
No, wait. The suit first. Too good an opportunity to waste.
With zero bandwidth there is only opportunity.
With zero bandwidth opportunity is our only weapon.
She’s no idea how these kids with the guns are going to react. They’re not LA but they’ve obviously got a job to do.
The suit, the trooper, then these two kids.
The girl looks like low priority. Collateral at best.
The kid at the back… the kid at the back is the wild card.
She closes her eyes again, measures her breathing. When she opens them again the group is closer. In line with her predictions.
The kid at the back… the kid at the back is the wild card.
The hand in her bag flexes, exercising fingers, regripping the metal and leather.
Wait.
Wait until they’re close to the shadows.
“Here. She was here.”
Again faces stare at Mary; the only one not expecting anything flutters in her hands, on that really nice paper.
What none of them, apart from her, can see is that she’s already flipped across, back to then.