Birds were always part of our dreams of Earth. It’s because we didn’t have any animals on Australia, and the idea of them was so strange, so alien and free—especially animals that didn’t fall but flew where they liked. We were told about them—their beaks, their wings sweeping and swooping across the world. When I came here I went to the museum and learned about them. They were real. But they were mostly all lost, it said. Not entirely, but mostly.
I saw them, though. When I first arrived I would lie on the grass, stare at the sky, and sometimes see them way above, soaring past in formation. It was only when I saw one up close, being tended to by a technician, that I realized the mistake I made.
Things can have the same name and not be the same thing, I know. Because the birds we have now? Most of them are not alive. Most of them are machines, and they hunt.
I can hear the buzz behind me. They are coming. They could be silent, but the noise is to warn you, to scare you—like sirens or alarms. High above, they follow as I rush down the streets. I dive into dumpsters and hide in cubby holes and eventually I slip down into sewers flowing with runoff from the houses and the Wall. They are full of this freezing-cold, weirdly thick liquid that laps at the sides of the tunnel; a river of sluiced, chipped ice that flows underneath the whole city. The drones scan the streets and they can’t find me. I watch through a grate as they swoop in, their formation a complicated knot that covers every angle; they won’t miss much. They move in a dance, forming shapes. Now a circle, an endless loop of the birds chasing each other in a spiral; now a star, different points jutting, sending light out, pulsing to find me.
When they decide that the street is clear, they move on. This is my chance to escape. But I’m as cold as I’ve ever been. My feet are numb, my toes so tense they feel almost brittle through my shoes. I can’t move them, I don’t think. I’ll worry about that later. They’re still good to run on.
So I do: I run and I watch the sky and I keep away from the birds. They’re not remote-controlled. Apparently they used to be, but now they’re automated—operated by some part of the Gaia intelligence that puts them in a flock and keeps them working together. Individually, each bird is a fraction of a whole, a fragment of a picture that needs to be assembled into something complete. But all it takes is for one of them to spot you. That’s why they change formation so much: It’s easier to cover more ground that way, to put more eyes in more places at any one time.
A few streets over comes the noise of fighting; a couple is having an argument, their voices raised to screaming. The birds swoop away to investigate and that’s when I run. I go as fast as I can the other way, quiet as I can manage, hugging close to the buildings, hiding behind cars, behind railings, underneath awnings. I’m not far from Ziegler’s apartment building. I can see it, one of the many towers looming high. He wants me to be safe. He didn’t approve of my plan, but he didn’t betray me. He cares about me. I could hide out in his apartment. I’m sure that he would let me in, give me shelter. I can stay there until the birds are gone and things calm down; then I’ll leave, I’ll fetch Mae, and—
No, I won’t. I didn’t get her file. I didn’t find her. I don’t know where she is. She might not even be in the city. She could be anywhere. Maybe she’s not even here. Maybe she’s in another city entirely.
Maybe another country.
I slump against the wall of the building I’ve stopped next to. I’m tired. I can’t face Ziegler now. He cares, but I know he’ll judge me. He’ll disapprove. I’ve got the disc for Agatha. Maybe it’s got enough on it, enough information that I’ll find out where Mae is and she’ll find out—
Alala. Not Agatha. The disc is for Alala.
I push off from the wall and turn away from Ziegler’s apartment and head home—or what passes for my home. I’ve only lived here for a few months but it suddenly feels like all I’ve ever known.
By the time I get back to the docks it’s morning. The sun’s heat is burning away the morning mist. I wonder what it would be like to sit up on top of the Wall, closer to the sky, to let the light and heat burn your skin.
Something like freedom.
This part of the city is mostly quiet at this time of day. If you’re awake, it’s to get a job or get a fix. There’s nothing really in between. None of those people look at me. Nobody even notices me; I must look like just another junkie. I’m stumbling from the tiredness, my feet dragging behind me. I have to sleep. I’ve been awake too long, been moving too long, too much. I just want to sleep.
But I have to see Alala first. Mae’s waiting.
Zoe is standing outside Alala’s home, scratching as she always does. She’s not alone. Waiting with her in various states of waking are the other addicts. Some of them are in a worse state than Zoe—missing limbs replaced with cheap, black-market, last-generation augments, vacant looks in glazed-over eyes. Many of them have augments in their throats, lifetime survivors of living as outcasts here.
“There’s a line,” Zoe says. She stands up, neck tilted, head almost limp. She drags her nails along her skin in tracks of pulled-pale scars. “Just because you think you’re special,” she starts, and I cut her off.
“I’m going to see her now,” I say. I’m too tired to argue.
“I was here first,” Zoe snaps. She grabs my arm—her grip weak—but digs the tips of her fingers in as hard as she can. The feeling of her nail breaking my skin, the trickle of warm blood running down my arm. “You hear me?”
“I heard you,” I say. I put my own hand on hers. “But I’m not listening.” I slam my forearm into her shoulder and she spins, tumbling to the ground. The other junkies stare. They’re trying to work out what to do here: get involved, defend Zoe, or step aside and let me through.
They’re sensible. They can see what I’m feeling on my face: hurt, anxious, angry. They part, letting me through to Alala’s door.
“Come back!” Zoe howls.
“No,” I say.
Alala paces inside her small house. There’s barely room but she makes it work for her, using every little bit of space she can find. Up and down, left and right, and I sit on the table in the middle of it all, where the woman gave birth, where less than a day ago I got the mods that let me break into the Archives. It’s best to stay out of her way and let her talk when she’s like this—let her get it all out.
“I told you we needed all of the information. Every bit! Nothing left over.” She punctuates these words with jabs of her finger in the air between us. “Because I need the data as well, little girl. We made a deal. That is what happens. A deal. You said, ‘Alala, you get me access to the Archives. Help me.’” She does an impression of me, simpering and pleading. “So I helped you. I got you access. You understand the cost of what I did? The favors I used up for you? This is all a trade, all of it. Everything is give and take. I need the information that you went for, you understand?”
“So do I,” I say.
“You think what you need is important to me?” she whispers, almost hisses. “You do not even know what I need information for and you think you are just as important?”
“I might not have Mae’s information—”
“And this is not my problem. No, not even close to my problem. Because you asked me to get you in there. I did that. Did I not do that for you?” I don’t say anything. It’s not that sort of question. “But now, you might have let me down.” She looks through to the other room. “Is it ready yet?”
“It’s coming,” her hacker says, moving his hands in the space in front of the holo—numbers and letters again, lines of code. “It’s encrypted, obviously.” He has augmented eyes to keep up with the speed at which he’s working, along with thin metal slivers that run the length of his fingers to make them even faster, so fast they’re almost a blur. It’s expensive tech. “Where did you get this?” he asks me. His accent suggests someone well-off; he speaks with clipped neatness, more like Ziegler than the people who grew up in this part of the city.
“Does not matter,” Alala says. She looks at me—don’t say a word.
“There’s some messed up stuff here, names and addresses. What are you planning?” He turns and looks at her. “This sort of thing could get me sent to Baltimore.”
“Just get this done,” Alala replies.
“You’re not paying me nearly enough,” he says, but then stops moving his fingers, locks them together and bends them back. I’m expecting them to crick but there’s a sound like a hiss instead and he blows on them. “Done. I’ve got the files out, at least the ones that were here. No idea if there’s anything missing.”
Alala rushes to his side, to see what he’s looking at. “The name I wanted to find?” He types it, gets a result. Leans back. “There. It’s here. You got a system I can air this all onto?”
“Leave me yours,” Alala says. She’s thinking, plotting something, not looking at us.
“Mine? It’s custom.” He smirks. “This isn’t for sale.”
“Everything’s for sale,” Alala replies, her attention snapping back. She pulls a tablet from the side and types something. “Take a look at your bank balance.” He opens a tab on the holo and types in his login. His eyes widen.
“It’s all yours,” he says, gesturing at his computer. He stands up, nods at me, and then he’s gone. It’s just Alala and me, alone with the computer. Alala grabs my arm.
“No,” she says.
“I need to find—”
“Enough of what you say you need. You need to help me, is what you need.”
“I helped you. This is your information, on here.”
“You think this was all? What I have here? This is only the first part.” She isn’t smiling at me. She isn’t being nice, isn’t joking. Somehow, it even sounds like she’s got less of an accent than she had before. “I have another job for you. You do it, maybe I think about if we are even; if you get the information you say you need.”
I think about how I could attack her right now. Take the information. The computer is right here. Mae’s name, address—everything might be somewhere on it. I find out where she is, and I go and sleep for a few hours—maybe at Ziegler’s—and then when I wake up, I go and get her. I keep my promise to her. Then I take her away—out of the city, maybe. Find one of the settlements that are out there; live quietly, stop running. We can be a family. I’ll save her because that’s what I promised I would do, and it’s a promise that there is not a chance in hell I am going to break.
Alala reads it in my face. She steps back, looks shocked. “Or maybe you think you can leave?” she asks. “But you are wrong.” She brings a holo up, and it immediately starts playing. I recognize myself. I see myself in Dave’s suit. It fits better than I thought it did. It’s easier to concentrate on that than the look on my face as I fight the guards in the Archives. The video has been slowed down, and I can see that my teeth are gritted, my eyes wild. Somebody is speaking. “I will turn it up for you,” Alala says, and the voice of a reporter fills the room.
The reporter describes how I broke into the Archives, how I attacked workers and then detonated a device—her words—that caused the erasure of the locally stored files. “It’s not clear how such a device was smuggled inside the Archives, they say, but . . .” Alala turns the volume down.
“I didn’t ask you to fight them,” she says. “One of them is in hospital, critical. Wait until they find the guard that you took the outfit from. Maybe they already have.” She smiles again. It’s a different smile. I don’t trust this one. “So you need my help, little girl. When this is over, I can help get you out of the city, get you a new identity, maybe. You know that I can do these things.”
I can feel my mouth trembling. I think it’s my lip, but it’s not; it’s my jaw, my entire lower row of teeth, juddering against the top, as if I’m cold. But Alala’s got her heaters on and it’s not even chilly in here.
“So maybe you need me, after all? Maybe . . .” She pulls out her poitín from the cupboard and takes a swig (doesn’t offer it to me). “Maybe you should not be so quick to dismiss what I can offer you, the deal that I want to make with you now.”
“No more deals,” I say. Or maybe I only think I say, because Alala acts as though those words were never even spoken, as if I don’t have a choice.
“You are going to visit somebody for me. Nothing too complicated. Then you come back, and we are even.” Hands into fists, stretching my fingers. Everything ticks in my mind. I look for my exits. I try and work out what could happen next, not what should.
“Look at you here,” she says, indicating the holo. In it, I have my foot on one guard’s throat while I punch another in the gut. I look impressive—so much so I’m barely sure it’s actually me. “You are quite the asset. And when you get back? Then I give you your little girl’s location. Here is the target.”
She shows me the file she was looking for on the hacker’s computer. There’s an image of a man, older than I am but not by much. Head shaved, with a scar running down the middle of it until his eyes. He has kind eyes, in as much as that is a thing, but dark—not sure if they’re augments or not. He has more scars than just that one, and there’s something wrong with his mouth on one side because it curls up, a scar next to it running across his cheek. There’s a name across the top: HOYLE GRANT. And under that: THE RUNNER. Alala reaches over and spins the image of his head around, so that I can see it from every angle. “Now I have his details, and you can go to him.”
“Who is he?”
“You don’t recognize him? You really have not been here for very long, have you?” She says it like she should be smiling, but she’s not. She’s deadly serious. “You will go to him, okay?” She clears the footage of me at the Archives, types something in, then picks up a small device—a wristband tracker. “Use this to find him, okay? I have put his details in here. He is chipped, you should find him with that.”
“Is he a criminal?”
“Does it matter? You go to him, and you do me my favor.” She says it in such a way that I don’t need to ask the next question. I haven’t needed to ask it this entire time. That won’t stop me, though. My teeth chatter. Everything seems darker than it is, like the sun isn’t coming up outside, like it isn’t morning.
It feels as if everything is going backward.
“What do I do when I find him?” I ask, my voice sounding like it’s not actually mine, my words controlled. She smiles, and I know the answer. Of course I do.
“You kill him for me,” she says. Her face drops back to stone, back to nothing at all. “Maybe then I help you find the little girl you look for, okay?”
I try to leave, try to push through the curtains, but the addicts—still waiting outside her home—stand up and face me. Zoe is at the front, scratching again. She rubs her chest as she sees me, a reminder of what I did to her before.
“Let me past,” I say.
“Alala?” Zoe asks.
I glance at the older woman. She nods, face serious like stone. The junkies—clients, mutes, heavies, whoever they are to Alala—step toward me.
Maybe they haven’t heard that much about me, because they don’t look prepared for me to fight back. As Zoe steps forward, slipping metal bracers onto her knuckles, I think, I should show them the news footage of me at the Archives before they make their move, let them see what they’re getting themselves into.
Zoe rushes first and crumbles easiest, because she’s not a fighter. She’s not the get-your-hands-dirty type, and I only have to hit her gently before she runs, squealing like she’s trapped somewhere. The bigger ones are harder to hit. The tight leather skin of their muscles hurts my fists. They’re drugged, augmented. One of them is holding something—a lump of stone, it looks like. Only when he swings it, I see the metal on the end—the rusted iron jutting from it.
Just before it slams into me, I think how heavy it looks, how impossible it is that he’s swinging it as quickly and easily as this.
I hear a crack from deep inside me. It feels like I’m wet inside all of a sudden; it’s like there’s something actually running down the insides of my body. But there’s no pain, not yet. I know it will come, because it always does. Adrenaline, Ziegler explained to me: It’s like a drug that your brain makes that gets you moving and dampens the rest. Adrenaline blocks the pain, along with pretty much everything else you should be feeling when you’re in a fight, or in danger, or dying. Suddenly I’m not as scared as I was before this fight started.
But adrenaline can only do so much. The big guy swings his weapon again and I move. I’m fast, but not quite fast enough; and I’m hurt badly, I can tell that. So when it hits, it’s not where he intended, the middle of my spine. Instead, it’s in the back of my ribs. No crack this time, but the pain is like falling and landing on your back.
There’s nobody there to pick me up, though. To carry me off, to make me better.
Instead, I’m on the dirt floor staring up at the sky at the edge of the Wall looming over us. Zoe pushes herself to her feet and stumbles in front of me, leaning in and acting like she’s the one who brought me to the dirt. She drives her hand into my face, the blunt of her palm right between my eyes.
There’s another crack, and everything fades to black.
My eyes are open and I wish that they weren’t. I am on my front, and they are standing around me. The feeling of something pulling in my back—like a tooth loose in its socket, but deeper. It’s actually inside me. The doctor is here, the one that Alala uses for mutings. I see medical tools in his hands, thin white gloves pulled up to his trembling elbow; Alala next to him, assisting him; thread between her fingers, the other end of it in her mouth, trapped between her teeth. I’m on her table, her operating table. There’s blood.
“Don’t wake up,” she says. “Do not want to be awake for this, not while he fixes you. You can wake up at the other end, little girl.”
I shut my eyes again. She’s right. I don’t want to be awake for this.
There’s no pain. I’ll die or I won’t. But at least now I can sleep.
Click, click.
Her fingers in front of my face. I can smell the teas that she makes, the sweet perfume of things that don’t naturally grow here in the city but that she can still get her hands on through back channels. She has her ways.
“Don’t worry,” she says. Nothing like that phrase to have the opposite effect. I try to move, expecting rigidity and paralysis, expecting bandages. “You’re fine,” she says. “No problems at all, everything very smooth. As smooth as anybody could want.”
“What did you do to me?” I keep anticipating that I’ll be broken in some way, that there will be something missing, like my voice (taken away, as she has done so many times in the past to so many infants), or something will be changed, like the augments that she gets fitted into people, illegal and unapproved additions to their bodies.
“Incentive. I fixed you, to begin with. You had a broken rib. You want to avoid fighting, eh? It’s sealed now, made okay. No stitches—special glue. Can’t rip, no tearing of your skin, okay? Are you grateful?”
“It’s your fault,” I say.
“Wasn’t my fault that you fought back,” she says. That smile, a slit that could have been made with a knife, cheek to cheek, wider than it should be; I fixate on it and I can see what looks like too-smooth skin at the edges of her lips. Her makeup spreads out beyond where the brighter pink of her flesh ends. I think of The Runner, of his own scarring. There’s something there, a connection. “But I gave you another . . . incentive. While I was in there.”
“What did you do?” I push myself to standing. It aches, but only like I slept badly—joints tugged into strange positions that aren’t wholly natural. I look down at myself. I’m whole, intact. I reach around, trying to feel my back, where they were operating. I think I can feel it: soft skin, smoother than it should be. A new scar.
“Won’t find it like that,” she says. “It is attached to you. It is a part of you.”
“What did you do?” I ask, my voice small, thin.
“I have helped you to help me.”
“What did you do?” This time I scream it and my hand shoots out, almost of its own accord. My fingers wrap around her throat. She is taller than me, but I’m in control.
“I show you,” she coughs. “I show you. Come, come.” I let go of her and she rubs her neck. I can see bruising already. But she hasn’t stopped smiling. The ache in my back grows. I stretch, and there’s no click from my spine. Usually I can get the pain to go away, pushing parts of my body back into place. Not today.
Outside it’s still morning. In the sky, through the membrane across the city, I can see the dulled glow of the midday sun.
“Zoe?” Alala says, and the girl stirs. She’s asleep on the ground a ways away, propped against a wall, half-buried under a blanket. She’s spacey, blanked out. Her mouth hangs open, dried saliva all down her chin, dripped onto her chest. “Lovely Zoe, get up and come here. Come here, now. You want another shot? On me?” Alala talks the girl to her feet, watches her push herself to standing. I don’t know if she has an actual home, somewhere else that she goes to. Maybe this is all she has; she sleeps close to Alala, close to where she always needs to be. This is where she gets her fix, and Alala might protect her, maybe. Maybe their relationship is closer than I imagined. “You wake up now, the next one is free,” Alala says to her.
Zoe tries to slap herself half-jokingly; she gets it wrong, misses her own face. It’s too hard. “You’re still here?” she slurs, looking at me. Or, looking below me—her gaze askew, as if she can’t quite home in on exactly where I’m standing.
“She won’t be here for long,” Alala says. “She is going to do a job for me.” I don’t know why Alala thinks I’ll just kill somebody for her. I haven’t killed anybody since I thought I killed Rex, since she—
No. The worker from the Archives. Dave. He died, and maybe I killed him. Maybe I’m to blame for that. That’s what she knows—that I broke him and brought her his pieces, so we could break in somewhere else, to steal something that I wanted, that I needed. She doesn’t care what I feel about how I got them, whether I’m responsible for his death or not. She doesn’t know how much I care. She’s seen me fight, seen me move. That’s all that matters to her.
Zoe stands in front of us, her face still. Her body wavers from side to side, a doll threatening to topple over.
“Brace yourself, lovely Zoe,” Alala says. “I am sorry.” She points at Zoe with the finger that’s normally missing its tip. But now it’s not. The tip is back—a metal end, an approximation of what a finger might look like, clunky and gnarled. She switches the finger, only slightly.
Like flicking a switch.
Zoe drops to the ground and screams. It’s a delayed noise, her mouth open long before the noise comes—she wasn’t prepared and it was a shock, a total shock. Now the noise is struggling to come up. It finally brings with it bile, spit, and vomit; and she’s totally powerless. She moves the best she can. That’s the worst part of watching her in pain: knowing she’s really battling to get to her feet, to push herself up, to fight against whatever’s going on inside her body. But she fails, and she slumps down, her face slamming into the hard concrete of the ground. Her teeth break at the impact, blood spilling from her mouth. Her head rocks back, and she gasps in air. Then, thud! Face back down into the dirt.
Alala twitches her finger again, and Zoe falls still, not even a tremble to her.
“This technology . . .” Alala says. “It is so old. Outlawed. Radio bands. You know what a radio band is?”
“No,” I say. I grit my teeth.
“They were how we used to send information, before they found it was dangerous—like radiation. Once, way way back, people would listen to music through these bands on the air. Then we learned we could control things with them. The birds. Then we could control people. Now? I can make her dance for me.” She walks over to Zoe, nudges her with her foot. “I can do so much more with her. You want a demonstration?”
“No,” I say.
“That is a good choice. She is a customer. A good customer.” She looks around. One of the lunks—the one who hit me with the rock, I realize, who’s muscled out of his skull—is standing a short ways away, hands all over some poor girl, places that they shouldn’t be. “This one, though. He owes me more than he can ever pay back. And I can use his augments for somebody else. A repossession.” She nods to the other junkies, and they nod back.
They swarm him. They pile onto him from behind, drag him away from the girl and out of the house, drag him through the makeshift streets holding him by his ankles; Alala makes me follow. He struggles too much, fights back, so they drop him and kick his head until his tongue flops out of his mouth and his eyes glaze. Then they drag him by his ankles, face down in the dirt. Alala leads them—and me—through the docks, down past the houses. “I put one in him when he had his muscles augmented. It’s safer, this way. You need to make sure that if you want somebody to do something, they understand that I have insurance.” She points at his twitching body. “See? A scar, like yours.” She’s put one inside me. I look at the other junkies, the ones carrying him, and they’ve all got the same scars. This is how she controls people. “You kill this Hoyle Grant, and we’re even. I take it out. Then I help you get your little girl back.”
Then we reach the edge of the docks, the water not quite still—the ice shifting, melting a little in places where it’s warmer.
Alala’s people pick up the lunk and haul him up over their shoulders and then heave him into the air, out over the water. He smacks into the water and starts to sink, still unconscious. I thought the body reacted to water—woke you up when you were submerged, some last-chance survival mechanism. I keep waiting for it to kick in for him, to save him.
I turn my head. I don’t want to watch him die. But she reaches over and grabs my face with one hand, turns it toward the water. With her other hand, the metal finger, she points to him. His body finally twitches back to life as he fights against the cold water. He struggles, barely visible through the broken ice that floats on the water’s surface. She flicks her finger, and there’s suddenly an explosion—a geyser of water blowing up into the air, then raining down all around us. Carrying with it fragments of ice and his body.
“Please take it out of me,” I say. I don’t want to beg. I will.
“When you have done the job. But you had better go, little girl. The Runner waits for you and I wait for you. Let us say . . . six hours. Six hours—if you’re not back here with his blood on your hands, I find you.” She comes close to me and she kisses me on one cheek, then on the other. She holds me close, presses something into my hand: an EMP, just like the one that Ziegler had, the same black-market tech. At least I know how it works, this time.
“You will need this. Don’t be afraid to use it. And hurry back, Chan. Bring me evidence. Because if you do not come back here—if you run—I will save your little girl myself. I will find out where she is, I will go to her, and I will bring her up as my own. You understand what that means?” I nod. I don’t, not really, but I’ve got an idea. “Zoe, she came to me for help when she was a little child, and I helped her. ‘Save me,’ she asked.” She mimics her voice, but it’s nothing like the truth. It’s some pastiche of a begging addict, like some punch line to a joke. “So I did. If you want that for your precious Mae, then disappear. Then never see me again.”
Then she’s gone. She walks off, back to her home. Her people go with her, or disappear into whatever parts of the docks they live in. And I’m alone, the water around me freezing on the ground, some of it red from the dead man’s blood.
I don’t know what to do now.
No. I do. I do.
The tracker on my wrist twitches as I half-run through the streets, letting me know when to turn, when to carry on. I repeat the information Alala gave me, over and over. Willis Tower. Financial district. Hoyle Grant. The Runner.
I know nothing about him, nothing at all. His face. I don’t need to know anymore, not now, not yet. Out of the docks, through the housing—the towers, the quieter older suburbs. I think about what happens if I don’t stop running, if I go farther than I have before. I could get out of the city. I’ve never left. They always say, “Don’t leave. It’s hellish out there. It’s hot and it’s ruined.”
I’ve wondered, of course, if that’s another lie. Maybe now is the time to find out. Only that will leave Mae here, and Alala wasn’t lying. I could see it in her eyes—she will find her and she will punish her somehow.
I promised that I would save her.
I walk along the edge of the freeway that heads into the center, that cuts right through the city. There’s no sidewalk—few cameras, either—and nobody who’ll recognize me. That’s my worry; that somebody will recognize me and the police will come—or the birds (that would be worse).
I step onto the bridge, in the part of the road reserved for cars having problems. As the traffic passes, drivers and passengers crane their necks and stare at me. I need to get off this track, but it is the shortest route to where I need to be. Getting a bus wouldn’t be safe—too many cameras. I have to walk this. I keep my head down, like always. I wonder if I’ll ever be head up. They slow down sometimes to see what I’m doing. My hand is in my pocket, clutching the EMP. It’s soft, squishy. It’s strange but weirdly comforting knowing that I could squeeze it harder and everything around me—cars, buildings, birds in the sky, maybe even the Wall, if I was close enough—would just stop when I made it.
A small comfort.
The bridge crosses the polluted river that intersects the city. Once it flowed, but you’d never believe that now. Now it’s a mess. It’s a scar on the city. a divider that serves no purpose. The ground is too soft to build on—that’s what the museum said—so it stays; but no water comes, only what bubbles up from beneath the sediment.
As soon as I can, I get off the freeway, down a side street. It’s not far until the scrapers, and then I can lose myself a little more. A car follows me—like a coincidence, but it’s not. It stops, the door opens, and a man leans out.
“You lost?” He’s young. Not much older than I am. He’s wearing a suit, tie yanked up to his chin so far that it doesn’t look comfortable anymore. Augmented facial hair: a cheap job that doesn’t look like it’s taken properly, a beard he’s too young to actually have.
“I’m fine,” I say.
“You don’t look fine.” He shuffles across the seat, gets closer to the door. One foot steps out. “I’m a doctor. I can probably help you. Give you a lift, maybe. You need a lift?” I need a doctor. I don’t trust him. No reason I should.
“Leave me alone,” I say, and he starts to get out of the car.
“You look tired.”
“Go away,” I say. I don’t let him say anything else. He’ll scan me, I know, if he hasn’t already done so. He’ll ID me. He won’t even have a chance to call the police—the central servers will do it for him and they’ll descend in seconds.
The girl who raided the Archives.
The girl who fought the guards.
Maybe if they put two and two together, the girl who came from Australia.
I run away from him. He doesn’t shout or try to follow me. I don’t look back.
The towers in the heart of the city are enormous. A cluster of them, like fingers reaching up—stretching to pluck something from the sky. Ziegler once said that they’re like the citadel in the heart of the Bastion. He told me about how castles used to be thousands of years ago. You build a wall around the city and you put what you really want to protect in the absolute middle. Everything around it? It’s expendable—the most expendable parts being those farthest from the center—like the docks.
As you walk between the towers, you can stand still and look straight up; the buildings make these lines on the edge of your vision, as if they’re guiding you toward the sky. You’re always in their shadow when you’re in the center of the city; they stand hundreds of stories high, taller and more impressive than anything I could ever have imagined. The first time I saw them, I thought that climbing one would be like climbing in Australia—over and over and over, endlessly. Ziegler told me that they’re wonders of construction, the best that humankind has ever made. Apparently they’re perfectly balanced. But, as I said to him, perfect balance doesn’t mean you’ll never fall.
I’ve taken too much time getting here. I no longer know how long I’ve got left. I didn’t set myself an alarm, didn’t even look at the clock when I set out. Going by the sun, I’m a few hours in. What happens after six hours? What can Alala do? She can’t see me, can’t pull the trigger on me. She can’t find Mae that fast, I’m sure. But I don’t know, I don’t know. I follow the pulses on my tracker, moving farther and farther into the city. I’m surrounded by people in suits. It’s much busier here and they don’t care about me. I look wrong to them, out of place; they ignore me and push me aside. All I want is to not let them see my face, not let them get a clear image in case they’ve got augments in their eyes—in case those augs are networked. There are police everywhere, and cameras. Anyone anywhere could potentially spot me. But I’m also conspicuous with my hood over my face, because I look like I’m trying to hide something. But it doesn’t matter if they’re suspicious. I keep moving, they won’t follow me.
I’m scared and worried that I’m lost, that the tracker is wrong, and I try not to focus on what might happen. Agatha says she’ll help me when my task is done—get me out of here, a new identity, a new place to be. Another city. But what about Mae? Will she come? Will I get her first? Or maybe Agatha will—Alala. Alala.
Fingertips, nails, digging into my palms. A reminder. They are not the same. They’re nothing like one another.
Willis Tower is tucked away between other towers, like it’s ashamed. Compared to the other buildings I’ve walked past, it’s almost faded, filled with offices that aren’t attended to or that look vacant. The building is from the city before everything happened, before the renovation projects and the rejuvenation. It’s been painted, but that’s not enough to disguise its age and its decrepitude. It’s shorter than the others, stumpy. Floors have been added, struts jutting out at the base, but it’s tired and permanently in the shadow of the other buildings.
I have no idea what to do once I’m here. All I have is his pseudo name, his photograph, the address. The AI at the desk terminal inside the building asks me what I want. Gaia’s voice, just like everywhere else, but this version of it, I swear, has a distinct tone. Brusque—like it doesn’t want to answer any questions. They’ve set the mood to sound hostile from the get-go.
“I’m looking for Hoyle Grant,” I say.
“Nobody by that name here.” Get lost is implied, a bit of programming that pushes you away. There’s nothing to see here.
“H O Y L E, second word G R A N—”
“Nobody by that name here.”
You can’t argue with a computer, so you circumvent. I walk past it, down toward the elevators. But I don’t have a pass and I can’t get into one without it.
The fire doors, though.
“Exit the building now,” the computer tells me.
“No,” I tell it. The door only opens from the inside. Alarmed, reads the sign across it. I charge, slamming my shoulder into the wood. It buckles, almost crumbling under the weight, and reveals a staircase beyond. I crouch, braced for an alarm.
So I start upward. At the first floor, I prop the door open. It’s vacant. Why is there a vacant floor in a building like this? This is the center of the city. The important part. The protected part. I shout The Runner’s name, because he might respond. Or he might run. Either way, I’ll know he’s here.
I try not to think about what I’m doing.
But then, it’s the only reason I’m here. I never had a choice. I always knew this moment would come.
There’s no coming back from murder. That’s something my mother told me once—she and I sitting together, watching the chaos that consumed the rest of the ship, watching the gangs tearing each other apart like starving animals. She sat there, feet dangling off the edge of the floor we lived on at the time—I don’t remember which home this was, which berth, which floor. I remember clinging to the railing that ran along the side (so this was when the railings were still there), before they were wrenched out and turned into whatever they became. That was destiny on Australia: everything having one purpose but another use. I was young then. I didn’t have my purpose, not yet.
“They don’t know what it does to you,” she said. Her voice was so soft when she wanted it to be. Talking to me—unless she was trying to scare me, trying to make me realize that she wasn’t kidding around, that something was so desperately serious that she needed to drive the point home—she was always soft. It was for the benefit of others that she used her different voice: stronger, more bitter, sharper. A smack of every syllable as she spat words from her lips. “They don’t realize that it’s not inside us to kill.”
I asked her what she meant. Inside us? Like guts? Like blood, bone?
“Something else. In here.” Tapped me on the skull. “It’s not part of who we are. It’s part of what we can become, and those are different things. We’re not born with it. It’s not in the blood—that desire, that ability. The people here all started as babies. They were babies and then they were your age and then they were adults, and somewhere in between all of that . . . Somehow, they became these people.” Tap, tap to my head. “Something changed up here to make them think this way, to change who they are, to give them a different part of their personalities. Do you see me killing for fun?”
I told her that I did not. I had seen her kill, of course. But that was different. That was defense. It was protection, for me and her both.
“When you do it and you are the aggressor, something changes inside you. You kill somebody without a good enough reason—and the only good reason to act viciously is survival, Chan, that’s the only thing that justifies blood on your hands—you will change. These people?” She pointed down to a group of Lows holding a body between them, tearing it apart, starting a fire, licking their lips. “They’re not even human anymore. They have become something else. They’re too far gone to be saved.”
We sat and we watched. There was nothing else that we could do.
I shout his name, but there is nobody here. I return to the stairs and I continue up. More abandoned floors, more and more. I can’t do this all day. I don’t have time and even if I did, it’s likely that the desk called the police or raised an alert with a security team. There will be somebody coming to look for an intruder and I don’t want to be here when they arrive.
That’s when I notice the elevator.
I’m on the fifth floor, and the elevator is stopped at the thirteenth. Somebody’s been here, and they’ve gone up there. It’s as good a place as any to start. So I run up the stairs, thinking about Australia and about running, always running. That has to stop. I wonder if the body ever forces you to stop. Like, actually shuts down. Screams, No more!
I arrive out of breath, but this is his floor. I can tell. Everything in this building is abandoned apart from this floor. A policeman, asleep on a chair. Uniformed street police, but lazy. He doesn’t wake up when I’m next to him, and he can’t when I find the target. He’s armed.
Okay, I tell myself. My mother’s words, Don’t die.
No, before that. Before that. The only good reason to act viciously is survival.
From behind, I put my hand on the cop’s mouth. I clamp down harder, my fingers pinching his nostrils. He wakes, struggles for breath, beats at me, but it’s not enough. He’s down faster than I thought he would be. But he’s not dead.
I go quietly down the hallway. I don’t want my target knowing I’m here. If he runs—and I’m guessing from his nickname that’s what he’ll do—I don’t know if I’ve got the energy to catch him. Besides, he might not be alone. One policeman might mean more. I slip through the strong door, into a hallway. I can see four doors from here. I open the first. A bedroom, beautifully made and laid out nicely. Clean. Nothing else, nobody here.
The second room is the same. This one has been lived in because the bed isn’t made, some clothes on the floor, the bathroom messy with stuff. But he’s not here.
The third—I hear movement behind the door before I open it. Something soft and quiet, whirring. The sound of a weapon, most likely.
Okay, okay. Think, Chan.
I’m a pawn. That’s what Ziegler would say. He tried to teach me chess: A game of war, he told me. People think it’s thoughtful, intelligent, all about strategy and planning. It’s still war, though. It’s killing and it’s brute force; it’s scaring your opponent so much that they make rash decisions that betray them. You win by making them lose.
Alala is making me lose. She’s making this Hoyle guy lose. That’s how she wins.
He’s waiting in this room. He knows. But the room I tried before had a window. It was adjacent to where he is. Maybe there’s a way to surprise him still. I go back, flick the latches, push it open.
I’m good with heights. But there’s never usually people below me. I’m only used to a dark, bottomless depth. This isn’t that. This is alive, full of movement. But nobody spots me. I hope that there aren’t any birds doing circuits around here.
I cling to the ledge that runs from this window to his apartment. His window is open. I don’t know what I’d have done if it wasn’t. Broke the glass? I don’t know. I don’t have to know. I creep toward it.
I can’t see much through the window—too much glare—but I can make out his outline by the door, waiting for me. He’s primed to make a move.
Don’t look down. It’s scarier than on Australia. Who knew it was easier not being able to see what was beneath you?
Breathe. Hands on the open bit of the window. Breathe, quietly. I wrench it open as he turns. The Runner. It’s him. I see the scars, recognize him. He’s a blur, moving across the room faster than I thought possible—faster than I ever could. A flash of gray and silver, of augmented limbs; the window open as he reaches me, reaches his hand out, grabs me around my neck. Cold metal on my skin. He pulls me inside, holds me up in the air as I kick out.
“Who are you?” he asks. His voice is cracked and broken, the buzz of something mechanical helping him speak. “Who sent you?”
There’s no time to pause. I kick at him and he scowls.
“Don’t,” he says, and he throws me—hurls me—at the wall. I collapse into it and it cracks, I crack. My pain, all of it, smashes right back into me. I’m on the floor—push up, try to get to my feet—but he’s already in front of me.
And then he’s picking me up; I’m on my feet, his hand on the back of my neck. He doesn’t know what to do with me, and I can see him now, hesitating. He’s broken and repaired. His skin is peeled back from bits of his face; where there should be bone there’s metal—or this smooth pink replacement that looks like skin but with the wrong texture, like it’s cheap, a lie. I take his whole body in, as much as I can. He has one arm and a space where the other should be. The legs are there, but they’re not wholly original. He’s in shorts and I can see the lines on his flesh where the replacements swoop and slide through the skin that’s left there.
I’ve never seen anybody as not-quite-still-human as he is.
“I know you,” he says. His eyes flicker. Augs in them, scanning me. They’re like Ziegler’s camera, his antique one: the shutter on the lens like a slow eye, closing and opening, whirring while it works out who I am. He’s stronger than I am, I know now. He can stop me from killing him, and now he’ll know that’s what I’m here to do. “Who sent you?” he asks.
“Alala,” I say. I try to reach for my pocket, for the EMP. Now I understand why I needed it. He notices my hand creeping and nods. “She—”
I don’t get a chance to finish what I’m saying. He throws me again to the other side of the room. My head hits something—the bed, the wall, the floor, I don’t know—and everything goes black.
He’s propped me up in the corner. There’s some sort of wire wrapped around my arms and legs. There’s no give, and when I struggle—try to find a loosening, a fraction of something that I can use to escape—they tighten. He smiles as he sits down opposite me.
“It’s an Unabler. They’re synced to you. Touch your skin, they can tell what you’re trying to do. They work with you or against you. You struggle, they go tight. You don’t struggle, they stay loose and don’t hurt you.” I stop wriggling because the wire is digging into my skin so hard I can feel it about to cut me. “You should calm down.”
He pours a drink. Steam rises from it, the smell of sweetness, of fruit stewing. He tells me that it’s Asian tea. Imported. He makes a joke about how expensive it is, how my shaking had better not make me spill any of it. “That’s a month’s wages for every drop that doesn’t make your lips,” he says. He smiles. His jaw is wired; the raised tracks of the electrics run underneath the skin all the way down past his neck, up around his ears. That’s what the scars are for. They’re totally symmetrical, a perfect pattern etched into his flesh. He passes me the cup, I have to lift both my hands at the same time to hold it.
“Don’t kill me,” I say as he presses my fingers around it. It’s metal like cups we used to have on the ship but painted nicely. We had no paint on ours. Maybe we did once. “Please.”
“You think I’d kill you?” he asks. “Police don’t kill people. Drink that, all of it. You need fluids.” He seems calmer now. “We’re trained to keep you alive. Kind of the point.”
He’s police. Alala didn’t tell me that.
Oh God.
He sits and waits for me to finish my drink. He’s quiet and still. When I’m finished, he takes the cup and puts it onto a table in the corner of the room next to the EMP from my pocket. He sits down again and taps his fingers on his knee: false on false, the hollow sound of whatever artificial material they’re both made of. You glance at him and you’d never tell. It takes closer inspection: the stillness of his face, the smoothness of the skin.
“She made me do this,” I say, and he nods, waves the words away.
“How long have you known her?” He doesn’t need to look at my face to see my reaction. “What has she got on you?” I don’t say anything. “I’m not angry. I understand, okay? We’re the same, you and I. I mean, not exactly.” A flex of his arm—the plates, sheets of metal almost folding over one another. “I haven’t been the same for a while now. I’m not angry.” He has a strange accent. I haven’t heard it before. It’s softer than it should be for how he looks. There’s a lilt to it, an airiness from a different place altogether, I’d guess. He flexes his fingers. There’s nothing threatening to the act, though. “She told you to come here, kill me. In return, what? You an addict?”
“No,” I say.
“I didn’t think so. You don’t look like an addict. How old are you?” He’s older than me. It’s hard to tell his age exactly from the original bits of him that I can see, the lines and tone of his skin. He knows what I’m doing, what I’m trying to tell. “You’re still a kid. Seventeen?”
“Eighteen,” I say. I think. I think it was my birthday a few weeks ago. Maybe I got that wrong. It could be today for all I know.
Maybe I should say that. Maybe as a present he’ll let me go.
“I met her when I was your age.” He looks at my stomach. “She put something on your spine? You know what it is?”
“Yes,” I say.
“You think she might have followed you?”
“Yes.” I’m close to tears now.
“Blinds,” he says, and the windows darken—adaptive glass that makes the room almost pitch black. There are lights in his augments, I can see: pale trims of faded blue and green.
“Have you called for backup?” I ask. I don’t want to be caught. I don’t want to be.
“No,” he says. “Not yet. Maybe we can sort this out. Chan, yeah?” He knows that’s my name. He’ll know everything about me. “Let’s see if I can get this right. You ended up in the docks doing whatever you can to get by. Odd jobs, probably some people telling you to join the work lines, go and do some maintenance on the Wall, right? The promise of those lines: get a job and an apartment. A proper life.” His face scowls, his mouth curling around the bit of his jaw that doesn’t move. “But she was a better option. Easier. She was for me, at one point in my life. What’d she offer you?”
“I’ve lost somebody,” I say, “and I want to get them back.”
“So she said she’d help you find them. Guessing it was her sent you to the Archives the other day? That’s her handiwork all over it. And after that, she told you that you weren’t quite done. One last favor, and then she’d give you answers, set you free.” He stands up. His legs move strangely, like the mechanics are a few steps ahead. He picks up the EMP, tosses it from hand to hand. The hands react seemingly of their own accord, like he doesn’t have to think about it; there’s no chance of them dropping it—not even a slight chance. Silver flashes around his torso where the skin is peeling. More and more of him is not quite right, not quite human. “She builds these herself, she tell you that? Used to be in technology, then everything fell apart for her. So she rebuilt her life differently.” He puts it down, squats next to me so that we’re level. “How did I do?”
It’s more complicated than that, I want to say; because he doesn’t know the full situation. There’s a past to every tale, a complicated backstory that serves to be everything when you’re making your choices. It’s always there and it has to be important. It can’t just be about now.
But I don’t say that.
“You know why they call me The Runner?” He grabs something else from the desk to fiddle with. For the first time I look around and take in the room properly. It’s temporary, sure, not somewhere that people actually live for any real amount of time. Everything is clean and must have come with the place—blended into the walls, fastened to the floor. There’s no personality here, not really—not like Ziegler’s place, or even Alala’s. There’s no stamp that says, this belongs to somebody. No clothes on the backs of chairs. The bed in the next room is bare, the sheets stripped, the curtains pulled tight.
He hands me the tablet he’s holding. It’s old—even I can tell that—solid, no holo tech. Instead it’s running some software that I don’t even recognize and work has been done to it on a hardware level. The back of it is exposed so that wires jut and circuit boards are exposed.
“That’s me,” he says. A video plays on the screen of a man running, sprinting, an athlete in a competition. It’s him. His legs are pumping, no visible augments. Two arms, no scars that I can see. He’s so fast that it’s barely conceivable. He presses the screen and it slows down, showing me everything about him—how his body is behaving for him, the muscles all working with each other. “She’s rich,” he says. “You know that? She doesn’t need to live there. She’s got resources, contacts, people all over. She could move anywhere she wanted, but she stays there, in that shack on the edge of the outskirts, I’ll bet.” I nod. “Because it’s not about money for her. It’s about power. She got me the augments I needed to compete, to win. Simple as that—pulled strings. Don’t ask me how. Told me I’d repay her afterward.”
“You were fast,” I say. “That’s how you got the name.”
“Not quite. And I wasn’t fast enough, not even close. Couldn’t afford the augments for it by myself. She knew people from her life before: new models, prototypes. Anything’s allowed on the circuit provided you can mentally control it, so you do what you have to do. But you know, it doesn’t always work like that. If I’d won, maybe I could have done something—paid her back, paid her off, whatever. But . . .” Then he plays another video. This one shows him fall—his limbs like spider’s legs trapped underfoot, snapping and bending at strange angles, the ground beneath him churning as the mechanics in his broken legs keep going. His face is still. “I’ve seen this hundreds of times,” he says, “never get used to it. I was healing when she called in the favor. She said she’d make everything okay—outfit me with better augments if I did everything she wanted. And I needed that, because I lost. I couldn’t refuse, but I didn’t even want to. She’s like a genie or something—there when you want her, when you need her.”
“From stories? They grant wishes. That’s what she does. What makes her invaluable.”
“What did she ask you to do?”
“After I ran, I joined the police. With the augments I was an asset. They wanted me, and I needed to work. Made sense.” He leans forward and looks away from me, props himself up on the table. “Then one day, she came to me. Turned up at my door. Told me she’d been watching. I’d almost forgotten her—or, I’d hoped she would have gone away. That’s when she laid me out. I woke up with something in my spine—I’m guessing the same as you’ve got. She told me she wanted me to do something for her now. Get her information.”
“Did you go where she sent you?” I ask. I’m captured by the story. He seems like a good guy. He’s just like me: scared, lost.
He nods. “I went. She wanted something from the Archives, and of course I had the access to get in there. I stood there by the computers, ready to get the information she needed, and I realized she couldn’t see me. Couldn’t reach me there to do her . . .” He makes the same finger twitch Alala made. “I called it in. Told my bosses what happened. I didn’t tell them about Alala, though. Told them I didn’t know who’d done it. I had been buying black market augments; likely I’d have been kicked off the force. Lost everything. They got surgeons to defuse the device and told me to get back to work. That was about a year ago. Since then I’ve been waiting. Doing my job, bringing down criminals, waiting for her to screw up—to make a move that I can use. I went to see her a couple of months ago, told her the device was gone. She told me that I would regret it one day, not helping her. And I thought, right there and then, that I could take her out. Solve my problem. Nobody would know why.” There’s a glimmer in his eyes, and he’s somewhere else for a moment. Then he’s back with me. “But I couldn’t do it. I have to do it right. She sent you here to kill me?”
“She said I had to,” I say, “but I’m not going to. I can’t. I’m not that person.” I say that, and I get a flash—a rush, almost like falling, like the ground is screaming toward me. But it’s faces of people who have died, who I didn’t save—of Agatha and Jonah and Mae, even Rex and then Dave. And I feel sick, dizzy for a moment; my stomach knotting, churning.
“Did she give you a weapon?” He’s quiet. He’s ahead of me.
“Only the EMP,” I say.
“So what are you meant to do when you’ve used it? Slit my throat?” He draws his finger—one metal finger—across his neck, in the action. “That’s not the weapon, Chan. You are. She’ll be waiting to explode you, take us both out. You’re no use to her now.”
“I’m alone,” I say, and this suddenly feels like bargaining—for my life, for my freedom. I’m alone and nobody will miss me. Nobody will know I’m gone. Ziegler will publish his story as it is, and nobody will believe him without the evidence. Mae will be taken by Alala, or left where she is, and I’ll never know how she is. Nobody will know. I want somebody to know, to miss me. “Please.”
He moves away, sits on the bed behind me. I can’t see what he’s doing, but there’s a hiss, the sound of something crunching. I bend my neck to try and get him back in my sight. Then he walks back around, his other prosthetic arm fitted to his body. He tenses it, twitches the fingers.
“What are you going to do?” I ask.
“Nothing,” he says, “and neither are you. And I’m not going to give Alala the chance, either.” He drags me, grabs my shoulders, props me up against the wall underneath the window. There’s a mirror opposite, on the wardrobe, and I see what I look like right now: a disaster, hurt and tired and wrecked.
He shuts the door, locks it, barricades it by dragging over the chest of drawers as if it’s nothing; it’s so light for him to move it barely registers.
“Now we wait for my guys to arrive. Sorry, Chan. I wish we could help you more. But this is always how it was going to end for you, you have to know that.” His eyes flicker; he’s sending a message though his augs, finally getting the backup he’ll need to lock me away, to defuse the bomb in me, likely, before we get out of here. “We can get you a deal, maybe. You help us to take down Alala, maybe we can help you find whoever it is you’re looking for.”
It’s a good deal. Safer. But there are no guarantees, and Alala’s got the information now. That’s faster. I don’t want to kill him, but I don’t know that I can trust him either.
I lunge for the EMP. I make it, both hands on it.
“No,” he says, but I squeeze it.
The lights pop off; the noise that I hadn’t even noticed—all the noise from outside, from the street, from the building itself—comes to an end. Hoyle clatters to the ground, hissing coming from his limbs, which, when I look over, are limp—a stillness to them that they didn’t have before this moment. His face has gone dead as well, though his eyes are moving; his jaw is tight, like he’s gritting his teeth. The Unabler drops off my wrist and falls to the ground, suddenly useless. And inside me, something changes. I worry that what I squeezed wasn’t an EMP but a device—that I am on the cusp of exploding, of taking Hoyle out with me. But I don’t. Instead, there’s a gnawing pain from deep inside me that’s like nothing I’ve ever felt before—like cramps, but a hundred times worse, creeping through my insides from my spine. From down below, noise rises again and then there’s panic. Cars have crashed into each other. It sounds like chaos. People scream. Everybody’s devices will have stopped working—augs as well. Some people will be crippled, blinded.
Then I hear the sound. It’s a buzzing, a furious whirr. It’s not right outside, but it will be soon enough.
The birds are coming.
I look over at Hoyle and he stares back, totally still. He can’t move. Another surge of pain hits my insides—huge and horrible, scraping at me like fingers clasping my organs. I struggle to my feet and Hoyle makes a noise, his half-useless mouth telling me to stop. But I can’t. I push up using the wall, the sill. There must be a weapon here, a knife or something. Something that I can use to defend myself.
“Don’t,” he says. His voice is strained, the words forced out of a mouth that can’t do what he wants it to, not just yet.
“I have to!” I scream, and I realize that I can’t not scream—that the noise is pain and anger and terror, all coming out, one crash of everything I’m feeling. The birds are getting closer. The door is locked and I can’t see the key or how to open it, even. It’s electrically coded, likely. All that’s left is the window. I can maybe go back the way I came in. I open it, try to make out the birds as they soar down the streets toward us. They’re harder to see in the daylight—grit against the backdrop of the buildings in every direction, floating motes of dust, the sun only glinting on their shells when they’re at the right angle.
I’ve got thirty seconds, I figure. No more.
Foot up on the sill. The pain inside me hurts more. I’m nearly out; I don’t care if Alala sees me because—
Hoyle’s hand on my ankle. He’s turning back on.
He grabs me, throws me against the chest of drawers and I thud painfully against it. I try to move right away, but I can’t. My arm kills, so do my legs and neck. I’m out. I can feel it. I’m in too much pain to dig any deeper, to find a last reserve to send me running. Something’s broken. I look down and there’s bone jutting through my shoulder where it hit the drawer unit. I can’t really feel my spine anymore.
I’m done.
Hoyle stands in front of me, gasping as his body becomes operational again. Everything is slower than it was, twitchier. I’m guessing it doesn’t happen often that his whole system shuts down. I think about how vulnerable he must feel when it does. I know what that’s like.
The birds are so close.
“I’m sorry,” he says. Then he’s quiet, waiting, and I wait with him. The buzzing is right outside the window. There’s a mechanical voice—Gaia issuing some sort of alert, telling the crowds below not to panic. Hoyle crouches in front of me. “Who were you trying to rescue?” he asks.
“Mae. Little girl,” I manage. It hurts too much to speak. My jaw is broken, I think.
“I’ll find her. Do what I can.”
I don’t have time to say anything. I want to thank him. The birds are outside the window, a swarm of them, a shape made in the air as they orbit each other.
They drive through the window, smashing the glass, flapping and beating against one another with their tiny silver wings.