Move Like You’ve Got a Purpose
The access panel opened up onto a stretch of immaculate rolling lawn. Nadine pinched off one of the remaining mesh nodes and stuck it to the edge of the opening as she pulled herself up. To one side, a white single-story building, walls of coarse stucco. To the other, a row of trees, their limbs spreading wide, then beyond that, a high, solid-looking fence of no-nonsense black metal. Above her, a dark shape against the sky, long and oval, held within a rectangle of small ducted fans. “Shit,” Carlos’s voice buzzed. “Drone. They’ve got you.”
“That was going to happen regardless.” Nadine started toward the rear of the building, remembering the diagrams she’d seen. Flat expanse of pavement, generators, door, all ringed by a concrete wall about head high, open in the back…
She’d made it around the wall and was moving toward the back of the building when the rear door banged open. Two figures came through, fast and low, dressed in the sort of black security uniform that suggested rapid escalation. The one in the lead drew a gun. “Freeze!” Woman’s voice. “Hands where I can see them!” Yellow alert triangles danced in the air.
Nadine stopped, arms at her sides. “I’m looking for my cat!” she called. “Have you seen it?”
“What?”
Two pops, one after the other, no louder than the cork leaving a bottle of champagne. Two pale yellow flashes of light, quick bright flares, there and gone. Two louder pops, these ones wet somehow, and sharp, and then screams…
Nadine turned away from the figures convulsing on the ground, arms and legs flailing, bright arterial jets of blood spurting from their necks. The generators, three of them, sat in a silent row on concrete pads against the back of the building, tall exhaust stacks plumed with black grime. “Two hostiles down,” Carlos said in her head.
Nadine stripped off the silver foil suit, dropping it as she crossed over to the tall cylinder that rose next to the generators, like an LP tank turned up on its end, supported by rust-stained metal legs. A thick steel pipe ran from its base, branching toward each of the generators, valves at each branch. She knelt, inspected the pipe. “What are you doing?” Jake’s voice, tightly controlled.
“Looking for a way to dump the fuel. There’s got to be a pressure release valve, something.”
The drones hovered over her, her own protective swarm of hornets. “There isn’t,” Carlos said.
“Goddammit.” Nadine rose and kicked the valve violently. “Come on! Dammit!” She kicked again, and again, bringing the boot Jake had given her down hard. “Fuck!”
On her sixth kick, the valve twisted slightly. On the seventh, the pipe started to buckle. She kept at it, kicking again and again until at last the pipe cracked. Liquid gushed out, filling the air with the pungent stench of long-chain hydrocarbons. Nadine crowed in triumph. “What are you doing?” Carlos said.
“Setting off the alarm. I need some way to light it.”
“I’ll use one of the drones.”
“No! We only have four left.” She ran to the two security guards, their blood pooling on black asphalt. The woman still twitched feebly. Nadine patted her down. “Do you smoke? Do you have a light?”
The woman’s eyes followed her. Her lips moved soundlessly. She was young, only a little older than Nadine, and pretty, Nadine noted. The hole in the side of her neck had stopped jetting blood and was now oozing more slowly.
“This will be useful, thank you.” Nadine pulled a security card on a lanyard from the woman’s neck. She twitched one last time and lay still, eyes staring sightlessly into the sky.
Nadine moved to the other body. “Please cut me a break here,” she said, patting the man down. “Tell me you smoke.”
“Someone inside just tripped an alarm straight to Terracone,” Liz’s voice said. “Expect more company soon. Doesn’t look like they’ve rung local PD yet.”
“On it,” Carlos said. The drones divided into two groups, one hovering on each side of the door.
Nadine reached into the dead man’s front pocket. “Yes! Thank you.”
The door slammed open. Two more pops, two more loud cracks. Screams. Nadine pulled off the sweater, wadded it into a ball. Fuel puddled around the concrete feet of the generators. Nadine wet the edge of the sweater in the torrent of fuel that poured from the broken pipe, flicked the lighter. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Carlos said.
Nadine watched flames consume the ugly sweater with distant detachment. She tossed the flaming ball into the pool, watched the greedy flames spread out.
“Melody! Run!”
Carlos’s urgency shattered the detachment. Nadine bolted, adrenaline giving wings to her flight. As she rounded the edge of the sheltering wall, a roaring column of flame licked at the sky. When the tank blew, Nadine heard a dull “whump.” A great invisible hand pushed at her chest. Breathless heat, hard and deep, washed over her, filled the night around her. “Fuck,” Carlos said in her ear. “Last two drones are down. Fried. Didn’t get far enough away.”
“Fuck.” Nadine picked herself up and stole a peek around the edge of the wall. One corner of the building had crumpled inward, consumed by the ferocious inferno. Even from the edge of the lot, she could feel the heat like a physical weight.
Nadine picked herself up and ran toward the door. “What’s happening?” Carlos said. “I don’t have eyes.”
“I’m trying to get inside.” She held up her arm to shield herself from the heat, ran the dead security guard’s card over the pad. The door unlatched. “Thank God,” she said. “Is the alarm going?”
“Oh, yeah,” Liz said. “Police, fire, ambulance. The only people on earth who don’t know about it are Terracone.”
“Good.”
“Good?” Carlos said. “In what possible way is that good?”
Nadine pushed her way through the door, found herself in a narrow hallway lit by long rectangular LEDs in the ceiling. Alarms shrieked around her. She closed her eyes, calling up a mental image of the floor plan, then set off at a jog down the corridor. “All that attention, a hazmat response truck will fit right in. Hell, the cops will probably wave you in, and keep everyone else out of your way.” She rounded a corner and nearly collided with a man in a black uniform. For the barest instant, their gazes locked. His eyes widened. “Oh, fu—” Nadine said.
The security guard’s hands blurred. Red arcs slashed out toward her. Nadine jumped backward. The red turned green, barely grazing her. He reached for his side, where yellow triangles danced.
Without thought, without intent, Nadine lunged for him, watching herself dive for his weapon with an almost clinical interest. He reached it first, unsnapped the strap, started to draw. She grabbed his wrist with one hand, grabbed the thing’s strange square barrel with the other, twisted. He let out a cry of surprise, then it was in her hands, and she was pulling the trigger…
The gun whined, light in her hands. Something shredded his shirt. His chest erupted in thin slivers like the needles on a cactus, and he screamed, a desperate shriek of agony that rose and rose until nothing human remained. He fell backward, clawing at his chest, eyes wide, legs kicking uselessly on institutional gray carpet.
For a moment, he wore Marcus’s face, and Nadine was back there, in the home she shared with Anna, Marcus screaming on the floor, Lena leaning over him…
Nadine dropped the gun. Smoke crawled like a living thing along the ceiling, choking her. Jake’s voice grated in her head. “Six minutes out. Pull out.”
“No,” Nadine said. “I’m going for the server room.”
“Pull out!”
“There’s no time! The fire, it’s spreading fast. If the servers burn we are utterly fucked.”
“Jesus Christ,” Jake said. “I’m almost there. If the fire—”
“She’s right,” Liz’s voice cut in. “Get there as fast as you can, be ready to pull her out if she gets the drives before you do.”
“I have no birds. I’m blind here,” Carlos said. “I can’t back her up.”
“Five minutes out,” Jake said. “Goddammit, don’t get yourself killed.”
“That’s the plan. Carlos! I’m in the corridor from the back door. Getting smoky in here. Could use a little help. Get me to the server room, and do it fast or this whole show’s for nothing.”
“Roger that. Stand by…okay, I’m seeing a corridor that comes to a T-junction. That where you are?”
Nadine looked left and right. “Yeah.”
“Okay. Left leads to a bunch of…huh. Looks like a lab of some sort. You want to go right.”
“Fuck. I was afraid you’d say that.”
“Problem?” Carlos said.
“That’s where the fire is.”
“Better move like you’ve got a purpose, then. Security door five meters down.”
“Got it.” Nadine passed the dead woman’s stolen keycard over the reader. An LED glowed green. “I’m through.”
“Bunch of offices on your right. Server room will be on your left at the end of the hall.”
Heart hammering, Nadine sped, as quietly as she was able, down the hallway, darting a quick glance into each office. The rooms sat empty, LED panels still glowing, computers still on, all abandoned in haste. In one of the room, a forsaken mug half-full of coffee rested precariously on the edge of the desk. The alarms kept up their raspy drone. Red lights blinked.
When she was midway down the hall, the lights flickered and went out. Suffocating blackness closed around her, then the panels flicked back on. Wisps of curling smoke crawled along the ceiling.
A massive, heavy door guarded the entrance to the server room. The red light on the pad changed to green when Nadine swiped her card. The door opened into a long space, narrow aisles between long black racks filled with geometrically precise silver rectangles with small blue and green lights behind glass panels. Warning lights strobed in the ceiling. Another alarm, high and shrill, battled with the insistent rasp of the fire alarm. “What now?”
“You’re looking for a storage array,” Liz said. “Might be at the end of one of the rows. Flat panels, divided into squares, four rectangles in each square. Blinking lights.”
“Got it,” Nadine said a minute later. “Looks like four racks’ worth.”
“Okay, here’s where it gets tricky,” Liz said. “I have a logical address, not a physical address.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Means I don’t know which drive pack you’re looking for.”
Nadine stared at the banks of storage units, blinking behind the glass. “Lot of them here. No way we’re walking out with all of them.”
“Look for labels. Gotta be labels. The data’s on a cluster called Mordor.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes.”
Nadine scanned the cabinets. Each one had a rectangular bit of tape stuck to it, neat handwriting in felt-tip: Elysium, Gallifrey, Nostromo, Mordor. “Found it. Um…” Nadine tuned it all out—the alarms, the strobing lights, the smell of smoke. “I see a bunch of little stick-on labels, a letter and two numbers.”
“Look for D-22.”
The labels seemed random, no order that Nadine could see. “T-16, R-74…got it, D-22.” Tiny green lights blinked on a square storage unit a bit larger than her palm. “What do I do?”
“There’s a button on the upper left. Push it, wait for the lights to go out. There’s a carrying handle that unfolds. It also unlocks the drive unit. Lift the handle, pull the unit straight out.”
Jake’s voice cut over Liz’s. “I’m here. Jesus Christ, what did you do?”
“Set off the alarm,” Nadine said absently.
“Well, it’s a circus out here. Cops beat us. They’re keeping people away.”
“Good.” Nadine pulled the latch to open the glass door over the drives. “Fuck. Locked.”
“What’s locked?” Jake said.
Nadine pulled the heavy gun from her back, gripped the barrel, swung it hard against the glass. The door shattered. “Nothing.” She tucked the gun back in her waistband and stabbed the button. Lights blinked. “Come on, come on…”
With a roar, the corner of the room collapsed. Flames poured up the wall, licked at the ceiling. Instantly, nozzles in the ceiling sprayed a cloud of fog that settled around her, cold and slightly sweet-smelling. “Room’s on fire. Some kinda gas coming in. Do I need to worry?”
“About the gas?” Carlos said. “No. Fire suppression system. Harmless. About the fire? Yeah, I’d worry about that.”
“We’re on our way to you,” Jake said. “Twenty seconds.”
The blinking lights went out. Nadine grabbed the handle and pulled the array free. It slid out, surprisingly deep, leaving a gaping hole in the rack. “I’ve got it.”
“Good,” Liz said. “Go back out the way you came, make your way to the front of the building. Jake will meet you there.”
“Isn’t it faster to go out the back?”
“Sure, if you don’t mind being burned alive. Go out the front. Jake’s got a spare hazmat suit for you. Just walk right past the cops, they won’t even look at you.”
Smoke filled the hall, hot and thick. Nadine pulled her shirt up over her nose and mouth. “Is it true most folks in a fire die from smoke inhalation?”
“Yup,” Carlos said.
“Great.” She crouched low, turned toward the front of the building. “Jake, I’m on my way out.” Pause. “Jake? You there?”
“Northeast corner office,” Liz said. “Move fast. Building’s coming down.”
“On it,” Nadine said. “Hey Jake, that firefighter’s gear is sounding really good right about now. Gettin’ pretty uncomfortable here.”
The hallway opened into a cubicle farm, every box the same: computer, holographic display, little squares of Post-It notes, staplers. The smoke hadn’t intruded here, but the strobing alarm lights were starting to give her a headache. Two-thirds of the overhead LED panels were out, and the remaining third gave the room a surreal, gloomy air.
Still keeping low, Nadine worked her way around to the corner office. “In and out, huh, Jake? Guess you could’ve sat this one out.”
“Cut the chatter.” Liz’s voice, curt, with undertones of stress. “Get your ass suited up and out of there. You’re running out of time.”
“I’m here, just going into the office now—”
Nadine froze, taking in the scene in one blinding instant of clarity. Oversized executive desk, dark polished wood; potted ficus in a shiny brass pot in the corner; whiteboard on the wall, financial numbers written in black dry-erase marker; and on the floor…
“Jake!” Nadine cried. He lay on his side, firefighter suit open. A figure knelt over him. “Safan?”
“Melody!” Safan straightened, turned toward her. “Over here! Quick!” He reached toward her. A yellow triangle bloomed, line following a red arc that slid like a scythe toward her.
Nadine jumped back. Red turned green, and somehow the gun was in her hand, summoned there from the small of her back by unconscious sleight of hand. She brought it up in line with Safan’s face, thumbed off the safety, pulled the trigger.
The gun clicked.
Safan smiled. “Knew giving you a gun was a bad idea. Took the liberty of filing down the firing pin just for this eventuality.” He lunged again. Red arcs. Nadine twisted away. “You’re fast,” Safan said. He leapt at her. More red arcs. Nadine spun, swung her fist at Safan’s face. He cursed and ducked. She bolted for the door.
A wall of yellow blocked her way, outlined in reflective tape. “Going somewhere?” Benjamin said.
With a shriek of pure rage, Nadine swung the pistol square into his face, felt something crunch. He cried out in pain and staggered back, blood gushing from the side of his head. Then the probes of Safan’s stun gun hit her neck, and suddenly her body didn’t work anymore. He took the drive unit from her nerveless fingers as she collapsed.
“Bitch hit my face!” Benjamin said, the last thing she heard before blackness swallowed her.
When she opened her eyes again, she wished she hadn’t. Pain sleeted around her. Her stomach knotted. White light, much too bright, pressed down around her. She rolled her head to one side and vomited.
“Hey, slow, take it easy.” Unfamiliar voice, blue latex gloves, dark blue uniform. “We found you unconscious. Probably smoke inhalation, miss…” He flipped up the security card that still hung from the lanyard around her neck. “Patterson.”
Nadine brought her hand to her head. “How long—”
“We brought you out about five minutes ago.”
“Out?” She frowned, looked around. Her surroundings came into focus: stretcher, bins, light. Ambulance. A bag hung over her head. Saline flowed down a tube through a needle in her hand. She lifted her head. Through the open door, billows of orange flame roared toward the sky.
Someone banged on the side of the door. Nadine got a glimpse of yellow firefighter gear. “Medic!” Jake’s voice came through the door and into the bones of her head at the same time. “Need you outside, stat.”
“I’m with a patient—”
“She’s stable. We have a code blue.”
The man grabbed a red and white case and scrambled from the ambulance. Jake climbed in the moment he left. “Nadine!” he hissed. “We need to move. Now.” Red arc, then he yanked the needle from her hand. She yelped. “Sorry. Window of opportunity is closing fast.”
Nadine scrambled from the ambulance after him. Red and blue lights shattered the evening. An inferno twisted up to the heavens. Fire trucks ringed the blaze, surrounded by yellow-jacketed men wrestled hoses that snaked across the asphalt. Jake dragged her by the hand past a row of ambulances, their doors open. People sat dazed, wrapped in blankets, fussed over by blue-uniformed EMTs. When they reached Safan’s fire truck, Jake said, “Get in. Time to go.”
Nadine slumped in the enormous front seat, arms around herself, as the raging fire dwindled behind them. The glow lingered on the horizon for a long time.
“Fuck!” Jake pounded the steering wheel. “Fuck! Fuck! They took my fucking rifle, too. Jumped me as soon as I got inside. Please tell me we have something.”
“Safan was waiting for me,” Nadine said. “He took the drive.”
“Fuck!”
Nadine huddled further into herself. “Now what?”
“Now we get the fuck away from this clusterfuck. First order of business, we need to lose this truck. It’s not exactly inconspicuous. We’re gonna need another ride. I’ll dump the truck, we’ll walk a while, call a Booker—”
“How? Your implant’s disabled.”
“Fuck!”
They slept that night in a motel in a small town three hours south of Amos City. Jake parked the truck in the back of a vehicle auction lot, between a crane and a cherry picker. Then, rocks in their shoes and masks bearing adversarial input over their faces, they limped across town. Cold despair settled over Nadine, its weight dragging her down. “I don’t understand,” she said. “What was it we stole?”
“Not information to clear your name, that’s for sure. They used you. Found out what you needed, told you what you wanted to hear, pointed you at Data Storage Systems and Services LLC, you got in, got what they wanted, they took it.”
“What do we do now?”
“Nothing. It’s over.”
“But—”
Jake spun toward her, eyes blazing. “It’s over! We took our best shot. We lost. Game over.”
“So now what?”
“I don’t know! You still have money. Use it to disappear. Right now, we need sleep. Tomorrow we rent a Booker, take it to…I don’t know. Something tells me we’re gonna have a tough time crossing the border. Whatever. We ain’t figuring it out ’til after we get some sleep.”
Nadine spent most of the night staring at the ceiling, feeling tears that would not come. Jake was already up and had loaded more money on his prepaid Booker card by the time Nadine dragged herself from bed into the shower. As they finished room service, the Booker pulled up in front of the door, a long, black, heavy thing with dark tinted windows. “We’re riding in style,” Jake said.
“Where to?” she said as they climbed in and settled into rich, soft leather.
“Good question. Houston, I suppose.”
Nadine studied his face. Jake stared grimly forward, jaw clenched tight. His claw opened and closed, over and over, click click click. “Why Houston?”
“There’s a chance Safan will head back there. They still have business interests. That shit takes time to wind down.”
“Suppose they’re there. So what?”
“He fucked us. I fuck back.”
“And then?”
“There is no ‘and then.’ End of the road.” Click click click. “We did well. Better’n we had any right to expect, once you went off script and said no to Canada. Hell, for a second there I actually thought we might come out of this alive. End of the day, we still lost.”
“Then why go after Safan?”
“Make sure he loses, too.”
The rest of the trip went by in silence. Eventually Houston came into view, glittering towers surrounded by decaying interstates. Yellow haze hung over it all, wrapping the city in fumes.
The Booker dropped them off at a tiny hotel with no cameras in the parking lot, well outside the interstate that circled the city’s heart. Jake checked them in. “You know,” Nadine said as they arranged a makeshift bed on the grubby couch against the cracked, peeling wall, “this is the second time I’ve ended up with nothing but the clothes on my back.”
“And the bank chips in your sock,” Jake said. “Lucky thing Safan didn’t find them, or else we’d be even more fucked than we already are. He didn’t have time to search you.”
“Why didn’t they just shoot us?”
“Don’t know. Probably thought the flames would get us.”
“Even with police and fire on the scene?” Nadine tossed a pillow onto the sofa. “You take the bed.”
“Maybe they thought we weren’t worth shooting. And I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. Your leg’s a mess. If you’re serious about going after Safan, you’re going to need to be in top form. Get some sleep, we’ll figure out what to do tomorrow.”
The phone on the nightstand, an antique black Cisco IP thing made of glossy black plastic, chirped. Nadine and Jake exchanged looks. “That can’t be good,” Nadine said.
Jake raised the square black handset. “Yeah?” Pause. “From who?” Pause. “I see. I’ll be right down.”
“What’s up?” Nadine said after he hung up.
“Courier just delivered a package for Jake Fox to the front desk.”
“Trap?”
“Bet on it.”
“You going to get it?”
“Yep.”
“Why?”
“Because if I don’t, they’ll try again. They know where we are. Might as well get this over with. What are you doing?”
“Going with you.”
“The hell you are. Stay here.”
“But—”
“Non-negotiable. You hear shit go sideways, you book it out of here.”
Nadine sat. The sofa creaked beneath her. “Fine.”
A minute later, Jake rapped on the door. “It’s me.” He came through the door with an envelope in his claw.
“Nobody jumped you? No shootout?”
“Nope. Just this.” He dropped the envelope on the nightstand next to the Cisco phone. It was made of heavy, cream-colored paper, richly textured, with Jake’s name written on the front in swirling fountain-pen calligraphy.
“What’s in it?”
Jake cocked his head. “How would I know that?”
“So open it.”
“Might be a bomb or a biological.”
“Maybe.” Doubt filled Nadine’s voice. “”Easier just to shoot you when you went to the office.”
“Suppose.”
“So open it.”
“Fine. But stay back.” Jake tore open the heavy cream envelope. A small storage drive and a folded card in the same elegant cream slid out. Jake unfolded it carefully with his claw.
“What’s it say?”
“It’s a network address and ‘2 pm tomorrow’.”
“I suppose this means life just got a good deal simpler.”
“Suppose.”
At 1:56 the next afternoon, Jake and Nadine sat in a Keep Your Data franchise shop in the back of a Happy Gator Ship-n-Store in Atascocita.They took seats at a square metal table in the back near the fire escape. Nadine settled the goggles over her eyes and punched up one of the built-in avatars, a big-eyed anime girl with spiky blue hair. Jake punched in the address.
At 2:00 exactly, the Keep Your Data franchise dissolved in a spray of pixels. They found themselves in an elegantly appointed bedroom, giant four-poster bed against the wall. A candle flickered on the edge of the antique roll-top desk. “Right on time,” Liz purred.
Jake’s boxy suit-clad avatar folded its arms. “You called us here. You must have something to say to us. So talk.”
“The fact that you’re here tells me you got my package,” Liz said. “The drive has everything you need. Martin Taylor’s instructions to set up you and Anna, raw footage of the deepfakes, everything. That man loved his memos, oh yes. He even wrote memos about your friend Marcus. Should be plenty there for even a halfway decent defense lawyer to get the terrorism thing cleaned up, assuming the prosecutor bothers pursuing charges. Which they won’t. All’s well that ends well, hmm?”
“I have a question,” Jake said.
“Yes?”
“What was on the drives we stole?”
“Jake. I thought you were smarter than this. What do you think?” Liz rose from the bed, every motion grace embodied. She walked past Nadine to the desk, leaned over to blow out the candle. An animated ember sent up a curling wisp of smoke. “Come on, Jake, you know this. What would Terracone have in cold storage, out of reach of network access, even from inside the corporate network?”
Jake’s avatar raised its hands to its face. “Mirage.”
“Mirage. Now we have it.”
“But why?” Nadine said.
“Why?” Puzzlement crossed Liz’s immaculately rendered features. “Money, mostly. I already took it for a spin. There’s a certain state senator who’s using his government contacts to throw some very juicy jobs to certain contracting firms he happens to own. You know how long it took me to find that out? Less than a day. Know how long that’s going to be paying dividends?”
Somewhere back in a room behind a ship-n-store, Nadine’s eyes flooded with tears. “Money? You did it for money?”
“Well, that too. I have my own ideas about how the world ought to work, and maybe now I’ll be able to pull the strings instead of being pulled by them. But mostly money, yeah.”
“You had the information to clear my name from the start.”
“Yeah.” Liz seated herself on the bed again. “It was all over Terracone’s network. Martin Taylor was arrogant. Didn’t exactly cover his tracks.”
“You could have told me.”
“But then you would not have had any reason to go into Data Storage Systems and Services.”
“I trusted you.”
“And I delivered.”
“You betrayed me!”
“Nonsense.” Liz shook her head. “The way I see it, we all won. You got what you wanted, we got what we wanted.”
“You left us to die.”
“Oh, hon. We did no such thing. We told the responders where you were. And now, with all that money still in your girlfriend’s account plus what’s on the drive I gave you, you have your life back.” The glowing ember on the candle wick faded. “Goodbye.”
The bedroom dissolved. In the little room behind the ship-n-store, Nadine wept, great shuddering sobs without end.