THE CLIMB

“Lie down on the ground, facedown.” As if the instruction needed more emphasis, the cocking of rifles echoed all around the Timeout.

A bullet from an Albatross M88 sniper rifle leaves the barrel at about thirty kilometers per hour. The Albatrosses pointed at Six were each less than twenty meters away. A shot would reach him a little over one-fortieth of a second after the trigger was pulled.

Six might be able to dive aside quick enough to dodge a single bullet, if the sniper’s reflexes were poor. But the remaining fifteen shots would kill him instantly. Six stared up into the goggled eyes of the soldiers, and slowly lowered himself onto his knees.

“Facedown,” the soldier with the megaphone repeated. Six put his hands flat on the road and lay down. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a group of soldiers racing across the Timeout towards him, eight holding assault rifles and one holding a remote control. Six remembered seeing remotes dangling from the belts of the soldiers at the apartment block, but couldn’t work out why one was being pointed at him now.

It didn’t seem to matter. It was over.

A gunshot cracked through the air. The sound bounced off the Seawall and echoed through the Timeout. Six flinched, assuming one of the snipers in the windows had fired—but no bullet hit him. He looked up in time to see the head of the soldier bearing the remote snap backward at a fatal angle. The man slumped immediately to his knees. Less than a second later another shot was fired and the soldier behind the first spun around before falling lifelessly onto the road.

The other soldiers dive-rolled to the sides, moving outward, searching for the source of the shots. Six saw it first. There was a figure standing on the rooftop of the building next to Insomnia with a rifle trained on the soldiers. As Six watched, the person ejected the cartridge of the last round and fired again, this time at one of the snipers across the street. Another head shot. The dead sniper slumped out of sight below the sill.

At first Six assumed he was seeing things, but the longer he looked, the more convinced he became. The sniper was the feathery-haired girl who’d asked him to dance. And then some random neurons fired in his brain, connecting two sentences he’d heard today: I thought you would know a trap when you saw one…Do you want to dance?

One had been whispered, the other shouted. But Six was suddenly certain they’d been uttered by the same person. She’s been following me, Six thought, watching with horror as she slowly slaughtered Vanish’s team. But why?

Another soldier was reaching for the remote control, which lay next to the corpse of its previous bearer. He was shot twice in quick succession—first through his outstretched hand, then through his heart.

Six was alarmed at how quickly this simple trade-off had become a massacre, but he had no intention of letting himself be captured. He scrambled to his feet and ran in a low crouch to the cover of a corner building.

The remaining snipers and soldiers were quick. Four seconds and five shots later, they had spotted the girl on the rooftop. She fired one last shot, killing the soldier with the megaphone, before ducking out of sight below the parapet, just before the concrete was splintered by fire from the adjacent windows and the street.

Six was torn. Should he rescue the girl who had saved his life, or should he incapacitate her to stop the loss of further lives? Either way, he needed to get up to the rooftop. He started scanning the building for entrances.

One of Vanish’s remaining snipers had put down his rifle. He lifted an Ostrich RIAC7 rocket-propelled grenade launcher and aimed it at the parapet that the girl had disappeared behind. The soldiers abandoned their formation and sprinted away from the subway entrance, holding their arms over their helmets. Six’s eyes widened. Ostriches fired RPGs with more than enough explosive in the warhead to take the whole top floor off the girl’s building. She would be blown to bits.

Six grabbed an Eagle from the hands of the nearest fallen soldier. He aimed it up at the commando with the Ostrich. His finger tightened on the trigger.

He hesitated. Can I do this?

He didn’t have to. The soldier carrying the Ostrich twisted sideways as a bullet punched through his neck. The girl on the rooftop started to reload. As the RPG launcher tumbled forward out of the dead sniper’s grip, its trigger snagged on his gloved hand.

Six let go of the Eagle and dived forward, flattening his body against the road. He heard the shoomp as the Ostrich discharged a grenade towards the girl’s building.

The blast swept over Six’s head as a chunk of the building’s midsection turned to dust, showering the road with airborne debris. Concrete thumped against the road, cracking into small pieces.

The building still stood, but it looked as though a bite had been taken out of the middle. The insides of several offices were exposed; a desk and a few chairs tumbled out of the jagged hole.

Six saw the girl peer over the edge of the parapet. Her eyes flicked from the sprinting soldiers to the cavernous wound in the side of the fortress. She seemed surprised by neither. She cocked the sniper rifle once again and shot one of the fleeing soldiers. She ejected the cartridge, which fell over the edge of the parapet, and had killed another of Vanish’s snipers before it hit the ground. She glanced at Six for a moment and pointed across the street. He turned to see that more soldiers were abseiling down from the roof of one of the other buildings. Two had already hit the ground and were running towards him, weapons raised, and it seemed at least a dozen more were on the way.

Six looked back up at her, but she had disappeared—presumably hiding below the parapet again.

Six couldn’t see any convenient escape route. One branch of the Timeout was blocked by rubble, and soldiers were approaching from another. Panicked civilians were pouring out of Insomnia, and there was no way he was going to put them between himself and heavy enemy fire.

The half-destroyed building moaned. Its foundations strained under its shifting weight.

Six made his decision and charged towards the soldiers.

“Freeze!” One of the soldiers had his rifle trained on him. Six skipped to the right in case the soldier fired, but kept running towards the team. He was unarmed, so he had no chance of defending himself at long range, but once he was surrounded by troops, they couldn’t use their guns without risking the lives of their comrades. Six was sure he could defeat them with hand-to-hand techniques. He would reach the group of soldiers in less than ten seconds.

With a final roar of protest, the building began to crumble. Six had seen enough buildings collapse to know that a safe distance was a lot farther away than this. Glancing over quickly as he ran, Six saw that the girl was throwing some kind of grappling hook over the monorail. As her platform disintegrated beneath her, she pulled the rope tight and swung out over the street, ambitious gunfire crackling around her. The building shattered downward into itself, shooting debris out from its base. Six felt tiny stones hail down on his back, and he jumped aside as a square boulder bounced out across the Timeout towards him. The soldiers all dropped into defensive crouches as rubble rained down from the sky.

The girl let go of the rope and landed deftly on the rooftop of the opposite building, hair fluttering in the breeze. Barely even pausing, she ran across the rooftop and jumped off the other side, out of Six’s view.

Okay, Six thought. She’s out of the picture. That leaves a couple of snipers and at least twenty ground troops for me to deal with.

He had almost reached the group, but the soldiers who’d made it out from under the building were already standing up again. The team leader opened fire with his Eagle. Six dodged as a line of sparks raced across the cement towards him. He needn’t have adjusted his course—the shots were aimed downward, obviously intended to scare him rather than wound him, and now it was too late to aim again. Six crash-tackled the leader and rolled to his feet without stopping, driving an uppercut into the ribs of the next soldier in line and then ducking as a gloved fist whooshed over his head.

Guns clattered to the ground all around him as the troops realized that they couldn’t fire while Six was in the middle of the group. Six heard the swish of knives being drawn, but not many. Most of the soldiers opted to use their fists and boots.

Six knew that when they had strength in numbers, inexperienced fighters usually attacked one at a time, trying to wear down the stamina of their opponent, and giving each attacker room to deliver a killing blow. However, trained soldiers knew that overwhelming their opponent by attacking all at once was the quickest and most efficient method—particularly if you wanted him or her alive.

If the soldiers attempted to take him one at a time, Six was sure he could defend himself adequately. But if they all attacked him at once, he knew that he could be overwhelmed by the number of limbs alone.

As Six expected, they all attacked him at once. So he jumped, just as the mass of people pushed towards him.

Six ran a few steps across the top of the soldiers, using their helmets and shoulders as stepping-stones, before jumping down to the ground.

Now he had them where he wanted them: confused, tangled up, and still too close together to use guns. At the moment, only those on the edge could see him; the others were confused as to how their target had escaped. Six scooped up an Eagle from the ground.

He readied his weapon, prepared for an attack, but it didn’t come. All of the soldiers were scattering, sprinting out towards the dark, foggy corners of the Timeout.

Six was astonished that he’d managed to intimidate an entire platoon of highly trained soldiers after only a few seconds. They hadn’t even bothered to pick up their weapons and back away; they were fleeing into the darkness as if simply being near him were dangerous…

Six whirled around. Another Ostrich was pointed at him from one of the windows. He just had time to jump before the first shell was launched.

The flash blazed across the Timeout and cast a giant shadow of his wildly flailing body against the Seawall in front of him for a split second. Fallen dust from the collapsed building puffed back up into the air as his body slammed into the ground.

The first thing he saw when he raised his head was the remote control. He remembered the soldier reaching for it even as sniper fire dropped his comrades. It must be important. He checked the buttons as he scrambled to his feet, but it wasn’t what he expected.

It only had a short-range transmitter, powerful enough for about 150 centimeters of concentrated signal. There were four keys, with the words “Syncal,” “Accelerant,” “Morphine,” and “Locator on/off.” He dropped the remote into his pocket and started running just as the Ostrich launched another shell.

Six dived forward into the air. The road behind him shattered, sprinkling shards of asphalt onto the ground. Six executed a perfect rolling landing and flipped back up to his feet, instantly running again.

At the moment his best option seemed to be to keep running, jumping, and doging until the Ostrich used up its ammunition. But he was fast nearing the end of the road.

The next explosion was so close that it blasted him into the air. More dust was injected into the fog around him, making it impossible to see, and when the ground rushed up at him he barely managed to cover his head with his arms before bouncing against the pavement and landing on his behind.

The air cleared above him, revealing the opaque night sky and the Seawall disappearing into it. And suddenly he knew where to go.

Six sprinted towards one of the corners of the Timeout, where Insomnia met the Seawall. Then he turned around, preparing to run parallel to the Seawall, and waited. Every one of his instincts screamed out against standing still, completely exposed. But Six knew that his plan would take at least eleven seconds to execute, and the Ostrich was capable of shooting once every thirteen seconds. If it fired during his maneuver he could lose his balance and fall to his death. He had to wait for it to fire before he started running again.

Shoomp! There was a puff of exhaust from a window as the Ostrich fired.

Six shot forward across the asphalt, sprinting parallel to the Seawall. The shell crashed into the corner of Insomnia behind him, splattering another shower of debris across the Timeout. He figured he had at least twelve seconds before the Ostrich was ready to fire again. And he had just hit the velocity he needed.

Six pushed one foot off the pavement a little harder than was necessary, and felt the momentum suspend his body in the air. Instead of putting his other foot on the road, he put it on the Seawall and pushed down.

His body hovered for a moment, torn between gravity and momentum. He put his other foot against the Seawall, twisting his ankle to get the maximum grip, and pushed again. He rose a little higher.

Running up walls was always difficult. It had taken Six several years of practice to learn how to put his weight on a wall without pushing himself away from it, how to lean in and use his hand as a third point of contact, how to keep up momentum while running across a vertical surface, and how to judge the best angle of ascent—too steep and he would slip and fall; too shallow and he would run out of wall before reaching the top. His running across the ceiling trick was actually easier, because he was really just jumping from one wall to the other with a flip in between. He put hardly any pressure on the ceiling itself—just enough to change direction slightly if it was required.

But Six had never scaled a wall taller than 27 meters, and the Seawall was 160 meters high. Also, the section of the wall exposed between Insomnia and the building at the opposite end of the street was only 200 meters long, 180 excluding the run-up Six had already taken. He was going to have to climb at least eighty-nine centimeters for every meter of length he covered—an angle of about forty-two degrees.

One after the other, his feet slapped against the concrete surface. The wall hadn’t been worn smooth above about eight meters, so gripping was much easier once he hit that altitude. Every few seconds he pressed his hand against the wall to get some extra thrust. Soon he was sprinting fifteen meters above the road and still rising.

But climbing was already getting harder. He was thirty meters up now. He had lost nearly all of the original momentum from his run-up, and he was having to press his feet harder against the wall. His thighs were rapidly becoming sore as the repetitive pushing wore them down.

Forty meters up.

Fifty.

The Timeout was becoming a little darker down below, as the distance grew the fog concealed more and more. Six was slightly relieved by this; the sight of the distant concrete, which he knew would shatter his bones and crush his flesh if he lost his balance for even a split second, was distracting. He kept running.

At sixty meters up, he estimated the horizontal distance between himself and the building at the end, where he would run out of wall: a hundred meters. He gritted his teeth—he hadn’t been climbing steeply enough! He would now have to run at a forty-five-degree angle from the ground—one vertical meter for every horizontal meter—or else he would hit the building and fall to his death.

He pushed harder, trying to ignore the signals from his aching legs. Ninety meters to go, he told himself. Breathe in, breathe out. Left foot, right foot, hand. Left foot, right foot, hand. Eighty meters to go.

He could no longer see the soldier with the Ostrich. That meant the soldier couldn’t see him either, unless his goggles had thermal vision. Six was probably safe.

He was a hundred meters up. Left, right, hand. His calf and thigh muscles burned, and he could feel his strides across the wall getting weaker. “Left, right, hand,” he hissed, trying to focus all his energy reserves into the climb. He tightened his free hand into a fist and tried to halt the pain in his legs with sheer willpower. One hundred and ten meters up; fifty to go. More than two-thirds of the way there.

He looked at the building in his way again. Too close—fifty meters away. He was going to have to make his run steeper—almost fifty degrees—to reach the top.

The ground was now invisible in the black night fog, but he couldn’t see the top of the wall yet. With both ends of his journey cloaked by the inky blackness, and the Seawall stretching into infinity above and below him, he felt a sudden flash of vertigo—as if the wall were actually horizontal and he were running on his side. He almost hesitated and lost his footing; he slapped his hand against the wall instead of his right foot. On the next step he nearly compensated for the mistake by pushing off too hard, before pulling back at the last microsecond as he realized that one over-industrious push would catapult him out into the void.

Breathe in, breathe out. One hundred and twenty meters up now. His leg muscles were screaming and his eyes began to water with the pain. Keep going, he told himself. Pain is mental, not physical—nerves reporting injuries to the brain.

Left, right, hand! The building was coming up too fast—it was twenty meters away, and he still had twenty-five to climb. His shoes scraped across the concrete as if it were a chalkboard, slipping more and more as his coordination suffered. His hand, its palm now pink and sweaty, scrabbled desperately against the wall. His angle of ascent became shallower even as he tried to force his body higher. The building was ten meters away now; he was about to run out of wall to climb, and the top was still twenty meters above. His run became horizontal as his calves and ankles stiffened, and soon he was actually descending.

I’m one hundred forty meters up, he thought. If I fall, I’m dead—but I can’t reach the top! If I hit that building, my momentum runs out, and I die!

The logical part of Six’s brain shut down completely, and raw instinct took over. Instead of trying to run up the wall at a seventy-five-degree angle, he ran straight at the building and jumped up as high as he could. His body rushed through the air, curling into a fetal cannonball position, and hit the side of the building shoes first, seven meters below the top of the Seawall.

The momentum of the jump pressed him against the building’s wall, but instead of grabbing on to it, he threw himself straight back into the air, spinning like a carelessly thrown battle ax, and leaped almost the whole remaining seven meters. He threw out one hand and grabbed the top of the Seawall.

His legs went completely numb as soon as the strain was taken off them, and their deadweight pulled painfully at his hips. His sweaty hand was slipping off the lip as he dangled in the air, and he tossed his other one over the edge as well.

His first attempt to drag himself onto the top of the Seawall failed, and he nearly fell. His shoulders and elbows made a muffled crack as he slipped backward, hanging on by his fingertips. He breathed deeply before trying again, his exhalations echoing off the Seawall all around him, chorusing out into the night.

He tried once more. His grazed fingers strained as they took all the weight of his torso and legs. When his shoulders were over the edge, he let go with one hand and slapped it against the concrete on the top. The Seawall was almost thirty meters thick, so there was no other side to grab hold of. Instead, he braced his elbow against the top and dragged his torso over the edge. When his weight was resting upon his chest, he dragged himself forward until he had room to lift his knee up.

With his last shred of strength, he rolled to one side, a safe two meters away from the edge, and rested.

Six lay on his back, eyes shut, thinking. The pounding of his heart in his ears had faded, and now he could hear the sea booming against the wall, each wave crashing forward, striking the concrete, then sliding back under to make room for the next. He still had the same objective: Find Kyntak.

But where was he? With 7.5 million square kilometers of City to search, Six had no hope of finding him without a lead.

Six’s eyes popped open. The monorail cars which had been resting above the Timeout when he’d arrived—he couldn’t see them anymore, but they’d been there when he started running up the Seawall.

If the monorail cars were there for a party, Six thought, would they have stayed once the snipers showed up? Maybe—he could imagine a few seconds of stunned silence, when no one had gathered the sense to drive them back along the rail to safety. Would they have stayed once the girl on the rooftop started slaughtering the soldiers? Six wondered. It was possible—perhaps everyone was ducking for cover, too scared to run for the controls. Would they have stayed once the Ostrich opened fire, ripping the road to jagged shreds and turning the buildings to rubble? No way. Someone would have had the sense to hit the reverse switch.

Six’s mind was racing now. The person or people inside the carriages had known that something was going to happen in the Timeout.

The only people who knew that the drop-off was taking place were the kidnappers and the Deck agents. And the monorail cars didn’t belong to the Deck.

They didn’t interact, Six thought. They were just there. Watching. A reconnaissance unit for Vanish. They would return to home base once their mission was complete.

Six leaped to his feet. He had to follow those monorail cars—they would lead him straight to where Kyntak was being held. He started running back along the top of the wall.

The black, inscrutable ocean swelled and deflated down below, crashing against the concrete with patient aggression. The wind blasted at Six from the water side of the wall. He ran as close to dead center as he could. Even with fifteen-meter margins on both sides, the long drops made him nervous. If he fell back into the Timeout, the impact would kill him instantly—but falling into the ocean would be just as bad. He would be stranded outside the City until he drowned, froze to death, or was slammed endlessly against the wall by the waves.

It would be hard to follow the monorail on foot without being spotted. He took out the phone he’d taken from the teenager and dialed King’s office as he ran.

“King.” The voice sounded tense, but not cautious. Six didn’t think there was anyone listening in.

“It’s me,” he said. Normally he avoided statements like that, because they conveyed almost no information. But he didn’t want to incriminate King, so using his own name could be a mistake.

“Are you okay? Where are you?”

“I made the rendezvous, but they didn’t give him back,” Six said. “I don’t have a lot of time.”

“What do you need me to do?”

“Put a trace on this phone. I’ll call you again in half an hour, so you can tell me where it ended up. Okay?” Six looked at his watch. 19:11:08.

“Yes.”

“And put the ransom money back in our account,” Six added. “He’s not going to take it now.” He was about to pocket the phone when King broke in.

“Wait. Six?” He sounded uncertain, or nervous.

“Yes,” Six said. “What is it?”

There was a pause. Six could see the end of the monorail line up ahead. “King?” he said. “There’s no time for—”

“You’ll be okay,” King interrupted. It wasn’t reassurance or a statement of fact. It was a compliment. King was telling Six that he was proud of him.

“Yes,” Six said. “I will.” He put the phone in his pocket, keeping the call connected.

The monorail line was directly underneath him, about ten meters down. It was an iron strip, eighty centimeters wide, stretching out across the Timeout in a straight line. Six aimed very carefully. If he missed, there was nothing to break his fall before the road a hundred sixty meters below. He took a deep breath and jumped.

Wham! Six fought to control the instinctive shuddering in his muscles as he hit the line. His hands grasped wildly as he slipped backward over the edge. He managed to hook his fingertips around the edge of the platform and dangled there for a moment.

“Agent Six is alive, unharmed, and not in Vanish’s custody,” the girl said. She glanced reflexively over her shoulder. She was sure that Vanish’s forces were too decimated and distracted to come after her, but she didn’t like the feeling of exposure that came with standing on top of a building. She felt safest with her back against a wall and a gun trained on the only door. She slept in a room with no windows, an electronically locked trapdoor under her bed, and a concealed latticework of piano wire covering the door frame.

“Excellent work.” Lerke’s voice was filled with satisfaction rather than relief. As usual, the girl had the feeling that he sensed her words before she uttered them, and that events had transpired exactly as he had expected them to. “How many casualties?”

“Eight,” she replied. “All theirs.”

There was a pause. “And witnesses?”

“Forty-one hostile, eighty-eight civilian,” she said. Normally she operated invisibly. In an ideal job, no one saw her enter, leave, or do anything in between. But this mission had been different. Lerke had demanded spectacle. Unusual though this was, it had made her job easier. Subtlety was not Agent Six’s strong suit. He tended to draw attention to himself, and protecting him without being noticed at all would have been difficult.

“Perfect,” Lerke replied. “Shots fired?” She could hear a smile in his voice. He’s expecting a good answer, she thought.

“Nine,” she said. “All hits.”

“Hostile shots fired?”

“Six hundred and twenty-six. All misses.”

“Well done,” he said. “Your next task is to go to Vanish’s base of operations. I’ll upload the coordinates to your mobile.”

“What’s the mission objective?”

“For now, just observe. But go prepared. If things aren’t happening the way I want, I’ll expect you to change them so they are.”

“Yes,” Nai said. “I understand.”

Six could see the monorail carriages in the distance. Their shells glimmered a dull silver as the light from the streetlamps below glanced off both sides. He forced himself to run faster, his aching feet slamming down against the iron rail.

The monorail had a maximum speed of forty kilometers per hour, and Six estimated that the driver was at full throttle. But Six was gaining quickly. It wasn’t long before he was illuminated in the rear lights.

The City skyline rushed past as the track joined the greater web that spanned the continent. The carriages bent at their flexible couplings as the rail curved, sending the monorail car west. Six watched another monorail clatter past in the opposite direction, on a track overhead, as he advanced on the tinted window. The rear carriage looked empty, but he could hear noises inside the others—the thumping of footsteps as people moved in between cars, the crackling and buzzing of radios, and the faint rattling clicks of guns sweeping from side to side.

Six would have liked to climb inside the train, hide somewhere, and wait for it to reach the base where Kyntak was being held. But Vanish’s soldiers seemed cautious, and the two carriages were small. He would be found, and he’d have to incapacitate the troops. Then there would be no way of finding out where the base was.

He pulled the mobile phone out of his pocket and checked the screen to see that it was still connected to King’s line. Then he tightened his free hand into a rock-hard fist, drew it back, and punched through the rear window of the monorail car.

The glass was shatterproof. As soon as his fist connected, it was like static on an old television. Six’s view of the interior of the carriage disappeared, replaced by a matrix of white and grey cracks. He drove his hand through the glass and immediately tossed the phone inside. Then he started pulling at the edges of the hole to widen it.

Chunks of the cracked glass came away as he tugged at them, and soon the gap was wide enough for him to see soldiers running through the door between the two rear carriages. As soon as he was sure that they had seen him too, he stumbled and lost his grip on the glass. Springing up off the rails, he started sprinting after the escaping monorail car, but he didn’t push his speed. He ensured that he was quickly falling back, apparently unable to keep up.

Six was about fifty meters behind the trundling rear carriage when the first soldier reached the window and fired at him. It would have been a nearly impossible shot, aiming at a moving target from a moving point at long range, but Six made the soldier think he was an excellent marksman. He hurled his body backward as if he had been hit in the chest, and fell on his rear against the track before pitching lifelessly over the side.

As soon as he was underneath the track and the monorail car had disappeared into the fog, Six broke his fall by grabbing the edge with one hand. He hung there for a moment, visualizing the scene from the soldier’s perspective. He had tried to get into the carriage, had stumbled, was unable to keep up on foot, and had been shot in the chest before falling out of sight. As far as they were concerned, he was dead.

Six swung along underneath the track, from one hand to the other, heading towards the next support strut so he could slide down.

Time to take the offensive, he thought. Nobody kidnaps my brother and gets away with it.