As Taylor rushed out into the hallway, she braced herself. She knew what would happen, had gone through it during training. Enforcers. Darkness. Gasbots shooting at them.
Everything happened quickly. Doors in the hallway opened; people walked out. She saw the surprise on their faces, the fright. Most rushed back into their rooms. Two Enforcers dressed in the black laser-deflecting armor rounded the corner. Both lifted their laser boxes to shoot.
Xavier threw down two vials—the sleeping and concealing gases. A black cloud exploded into the hallway, instantly darkening the area and masking the group.
The Enforcers shot anyway. Slivers of light cut through the cloud, arrows in the roiling darkness. Taylor lunged against the left wall. She hoped Xavier hadn’t been hit. She wanted to call out to him and tell him to use a disrupter. She didn’t speak for fear it would give away her position. She pushed forward along the wall, hurrying toward the stairwell. More shots cut past her. She felt the heat of one hitting her back.
She knew why Xavier hadn’t used his laser-disrupter box. It would destroy their own laser boxes as well as the Enforcers’, and he didn’t want to lose those weapons. He was gambling that the Enforcers wouldn’t be conscious long enough to hit any of them. A dangerous gamble for him since he’d given his shirt to Allana.
With one hand on the wall, Taylor hurried down the hallway. A voice from the building’s speaker repeated, “Air toxicity is high. Evacuate the corridor immediately.” Colored spots of light flicked on the wall, pointing the way to the elevators. She reached the bend in the hallway. The gas had arrived there first, a wave of darkness that covered everything she could see. It wouldn’t last long though. Three or four minutes. The building’s air filters were already working to clear it.
Taylor heard noises in front of her. Footsteps, an Enforcer calling for backup, people coughing. She couldn’t tell where anyone from her group was. For all she knew, everyone else had been captured.
Even if she got separated from the rest of the group, Taylor had been trained to continue on with the escape plan. She would use a lock disabler on the stairwell door, go to the roof, and zip line to the building just east of the Scicenter. From there, she would use another zip line to go to the building behind that one—the courthouse. The idea was to get far enough away from the Scicenter to avoid the Enforcers converging on and searching it. Once she made it to the courthouse roof, she would take off the scientist overalls, use a laser cutter to get inside the building, and then blend in with the streams of people who were coming and going inside. The DW had taped a mobile crystal underneath a bench outside the courtyard. She would use it to take a car to the Traventon Plaza Recreation Center, then go to Fisherman’s Feast.
It was one thing to complete a mission alone during training; it was another to consider that possibility in a darkened hallway surrounded by people who could kill her. The voices in the hall stopped, replaced by the thumps of people hitting the floor. Where was the stairwell? Shouldn’t someone on the team have reached it by now?
Taylor heard the clicking sound of doors being locked. The building’s sensors had realized that anyone who hadn’t passed out by now was wearing a gas mask—was an intruder. In another moment the gasbots would come out. They wouldn’t be able to locate movement through the black cloud, but they would still shoot randomly into the hallway. The group needed to make it to the stairwell before then. Xavier wasn’t protected.
The next sound was the twang of small doors springing open to release gasbots.
Had she missed the stairwell somehow?
A rectangle of light flashed a few yards ahead of her. Xavier had gotten the stairwell door open. His profile was visible against the outline of light.
“Run!” he yelled to the others. If they could all make it through the doorway before the gasbots reached them, they could lock them out.
Taylor sprinted toward the door. She heard footsteps behind her. Echo and Allana. She also heard the whir of the gasbots moving down the hallway. The ripping sound of laser fire filled the air. Streaks of silver light cut past her.
Seconds later, Taylor ran through the door. Allana followed her, gasping so quickly that the air filter in her gas mask flapped back and forth like a trapped butterfly. Echo came in last and pounded the button to close and lock the door. Taylor was fairly certain Echo could have outrun Allana. He had kept behind her to shield her from laser fire.
Xavier had already turned on the speed boosters in his shoes. Taylor and Echo reached down and turned on theirs as well.
Allana looked up the stairwell, still gasping. “Why are we going up?”
“Because they’ll expect us to go down.” Xavier motioned for Allana to come over to him. “Hold on to my back. You won’t be able to keep up otherwise.”
Allana groaned out a protest. Taylor didn’t wait around to hear more of Allana’s complaints. She bounded up the stairs, the boosters in her boots hissing as they rocketed her upward. It was like jumping on a trampoline. She took the steps four at a time, could have even done more, but leaping that far made it hard to turn in the stairwells.
The sound of the group’s jumping steps echoed all around. Could anyone outside hear them? Had the Enforcers figured out where they’d gone? Every time she made a turn in the stairwell, she expected to see black-clad Enforcers careening downward toward them. She looked for their dark forms, for the helmets that made them seem inhuman.
Echo passed Taylor, and then a floor later, Xavier passed her too. His movements, even carrying Allana’s extra weight, were precise and athletic. Every time he landed, Allana jostled against his back and let out a small ooof! sound.
When the group reached the nineteenth floor, Xavier’s boosters began to burn out. Echo switched places with Xavier then, carrying Allana on his back. Xavier took the lead, even though his boosters were only half strength. “I’ll go ahead and get the door open,” he said, and disappeared around a stairwell bend.
Just past the thirty-first floor, Echo’s boosters ran out. They weren’t designed to carry two people.
“I can’t carry her,” Taylor said. Her boosters were getting low too, and Allana weighed at least as much as Taylor did.
“Go,” Echo told Taylor. “It’s only four floors. We’ll run up the regular way.”
Allana looked put out by this news, which irked Taylor. Boosters or not, the rest of them had sprinted up twenty-seven flights of stairs. Allana hadn’t done anything but hang on to men and pretend they were her personal ponies. Still, Echo took Allana by the hand, murmured words of encouragement, and pulled her up the stairs.
Taylor gritted her teeth as she left them. Allana had dumped Echo and then broken Dakine rules so that assassins had hunted him down. And yet Echo still treated her like she was a damsel in distress. What sort of sign did he need that it was time to move on? A literal knife sticking out of his back?
When Taylor reached the top floor, Xavier was leaning against the doorframe and getting his zip-line shooter from his pack. Taylor told him Echo and Allana were on their way, then took his place in the doorway to keep it open. While she waited, she pulled the gas mask off her face and shoved it into her pocket. Xavier, soundless as a cat, padded over to the far edge of the building to set up the zip line.
Echo and Allana finally appeared. Allana was red-faced and out of breath. Strands of her silver hair clung to her neck in sweaty tendrils. She must have never exercised a day in her life.
Taylor motioned for them to follow her. “We need to go to the side of the roof. Be quiet, quick, and stay near the building’s edge so the people on the floor below don’t hear us.”
Taylor went that way, carefully placing each foot on the roof. It felt like there should be a breeze up here so high. Instead the air felt stagnant, trapped against the opaque dome that covered the city.
Behind her, Allana panted out the words, “Couldn’t you have come up with an escape plan that didn’t involve running up stairs?”
Taylor ignored her. She’d reached the edge of the building and picked up her pace. “Hurry,” she told the others.
“Sangre!” Allana cursed. “We shouldn’t be so close to the side of the building. I can’t . . . sangre . . . This is too dangerous.”
They weren’t that close. The edge was a sidewalk’s width. Taylor went faster, just to show she wasn’t afraid. “We don’t want the people down on the street to notice us and report us.” The team was counting on the fact that people down below on the streets were used to ignoring the videos that played on the tops of buildings. Their gazes wouldn’t be drawn up here because of movement.
Echo’s voice was gentle and coaxing as he spoke to Allana. “You won’t fall. Here—hold on to my belt and watch my back.”
Taylor laughed and looked over her shoulder at Echo. “If you want someone to watch your back, I think you chose the wrong person.”
Allana took hold of the back of Echo’s belt. “What’s that supposed to mean?” she snapped.
Taylor never explained the twenty-first-century figures of speech and didn’t plan on starting now. She kept walking along the ledge. The trick was not to look over the side of the building.
“It’s an old saying,” Echo told Allana. “When men went to battle and fought by hand, they could only see the enemy in front of them. They needed comrades to watch their back. The term came to mean anyone who protected you.”
Taylor turned around to face Echo, going backward as she did. “I’m impressed you knew that.”
“I’m a historian,” he said.
“So are Joseph and Jeth, but their knowledge of past slang is pathetic.”
“Oh,” Allana said, her tone changing from frightened to condescending, “you’re one of Joseph’s historian friends. That partially explains your rank, I suppose.”
Echo didn’t pay attention to Allana’s commentary on his profession. His attention was riveted to Taylor and her backward progress. “You’re the one who needs to watch her back, or you’ll go off the edge. You do realize how far down it is, don’t you?”
“I’m fine,” Taylor said. She was; she could judge where to put her feet by seeing where she’d come from. Still, she turned around. Her comlink pulsed out a tingling sensation and she smelled pine trees, the signal that Joseph had messaged her. While she walked toward Xavier, she looked at the message.
It read, Have you destroyed the QGPs yet?
She used the speech-to-text function to send a message back to him. “Have you already rescued Sheridan? How is she?”
A moment later she got another buzz and a whiff of pine. Be reasonable, the message read. Think about what Sheridan would want you to do.
“I am. Sheridan would want me to rescue her.” And then because Taylor was still angry at Joseph, she whispered into the comlink, “By the way, Echo used the Time Strainer to save Allana. Lovely girl, except I’m afraid she’ll jeopardize the whole mission. Do you have any messages for her?”
It took only a moment for the scent of pine to wash over Taylor. No, Joseph wrote back, but tell Echo the next time I see him, we’re going to have a long talk about that choice.
Taylor let out an incredulous grunt that her comlink wrote as Chuuu! She erased it, and said, “That’s the pot calling the kettle black.”
Tingle. Pine. What does that mean?
Taylor had reached Xavier. He’d already set up a stand, a thin rod about six feet tall.
“You tell me,” Taylor said into her comlink. “Then I’ll know you have Sheridan and her memories are still intact.”
Xavier aimed his zip-line shooter and shot. A nearly invisible cord zinged across the distance between the buildings, connecting somewhere on the other building’s roof. Xavier pulled the line tight.
Another tingle and whiff of pine. Mendez isn’t our contact anymore. Do you remember who is?
Taylor let out a stream of swearwords, which the comlink did its best to phonetically transcribe. Frustration gripped her. She didn’t know the new timestream well enough to be able to retrieve those sorts of details. “How are you going to rescue Sheridan without outside help?”
We’ll do it, Joseph wrote back. If you remember our contact, message me. Otherwise we’ll meet at the old rendezvous place.
The Fisherman’s Feast restaurant was still run by DW. That wouldn’t have changed. Taylor and Joseph could go there and ask to speak to the chef. He could check up on their story.
“I’ve got to go,” Taylor said into her comlink. “Let me know when you have Sheridan.” Taylor shoved her comlink back onto her belt.
Xavier had attached the line to the stand, then used his laser cutter to slice the line from the gun.
Taylor peered over the edge of the building. The ground somehow seemed farther away than it had in the VR programs. The Enforcers’ cars converging around the building were tiny. She could make out several rail-jumpers zooming along the streets that led to the Scicenter. Most Enforcers used cars like everyone else, but in emergencies they called elite Enforcers who rode rail-jumpers. The high-speed bikes could jump over the slow-moving cars in front of them. From here, they looked like little leapfrogging toys.
Xavier attached a handle and two slender rope harnesses to the zip line. During training, Taylor had argued against using the harnesses because they took longer to get into and out of, but Joseph had told her the council wanted every safety measure possible to protect her. Now she realized the harnesses were for Echo as much as they were for her. Joseph hadn’t known how injured Echo would be after his transportation into the future.
Xavier unbuckled the first harness. “Two people will have to share.” He eyed Taylor, calculating. “I’ll wrap the harness around you and Allana. It won’t be comfortable, but it will work.”
Allana took a look over the side of the building and then backed up, gasping. “We can’t go over that. Are you neurocrashed? We’ll all die.”
Xavier motioned for her to come over. “The equipment will hold. We’ve tested it.”
Allana stared at the meager pole that held up the zip line and shook her head. Her silver hair swayed around her shoulders. “That thing will come loose.”
Echo took hold of Allana’s arm and tugged her forward. “We don’t have time to argue about it. It won’t take the Enforcers long to figure out where we went.”
Allana planted her feet and pulled her arm away from Echo. “You can’t trust these people. You don’t even know them.”
“You’re right,” Echo said patiently. “Joseph knows them, and I trust him.”
Allana still didn’t move. She swallowed uncomfortably and fidgeted with her crystal band.
“Don’t you trust Joseph?” Echo asked her.
Allana peered at the zip line and didn’t speak.
Honestly, it was like some sort of soap opera. It was bad enough the group had to take Allana along, readjusting things at every step and risking themselves for her. Taylor was not going to let herself be taken prisoner because Allana was having second thoughts about their escape plan.
“Do it,” Taylor said.
Allana gave her a scathing look. “I don’t take orders from you, Ms. Five Million.”
Taylor yanked her laser box from her belt. “Your two seconds are so up.”
She fired at Allana’s throat. This time, Taylor didn’t miss. Allana let out a whine, stiffened, and toppled backward.
Echo caught her shoulders before she hit the roof. He stared at Taylor incredulously. “Did you even check your laser-box setting before you shot?”
Taylor made a waving motion in Xavier’s direction. “Get her into the harness.”
Echo half dragged, half carried Allana toward the harness, all the while staring at Taylor. “You didn’t, did you?” His blue eyes swirled with anger.
Taylor clipped her laser box onto her belt. “It’s been on stun since we got to Traventon.”
Echo helped Xavier thread the harness around Allana’s arms. “Every time laser boxes turn on, they reset themselves. You’re always supposed to check the setting before you shoot. Next time you get impatient, you could kill one of us.”
“All right then, how about next time you don’t give me reason to shoot one of you.”
Echo didn’t reply to that. They were done with the harness, and Allana hung, mannequin-like, near the building’s edge. Her eyes looked blankly upward at the white opaque dome.
Xavier surveyed her, then the second harness. “I should go first; that way I can catch Allana on the other roof. After I go, push her off, then wrap the harness around you and Echo.”
“Go,” Taylor told him. “I can take care of it.”
Xavier grabbed hold of the handle he’d attached to the zip line, took a running start, and leaped off the edge. He flew through the air, zooming toward the other building. It would take him only a minute to reach it. Taylor slipped the harness over Echo’s injured shoulder. While Echo slid the other side of the harness on, Taylor took hold of Allana and towed her to the edge of the building. Taylor gave Allana a kick in the seat of her pants, which toppled her off the roof and set her swinging back and forth as she slid down the line. Silver hair streamed out behind her like a metallic flame.
Echo walked forward, holding the harness buckles out to Taylor. The straps weren’t big enough to fit around both of them. “And now?”
Taylor snapped the buckles together across Echo’s chest and held on to the strap that went over his uninjured shoulder. “Now we jump.”
Echo didn’t move toward the edge. “I don’t want you to slip. We’ll figure out—”
“We don’t have time for that.” Taylor looked over at the door they’d come through. “Go. I’ll be fine.” She gripped the strap tighter. “Unlike your last girlfriend, I know how to hold on to a guy.”
A hint of a smile lifted Echo’s lips and he wrapped his good arm around her waist. “All right. Let’s fly.” They took running steps. One, two, and the roof disappeared. Gravity jerked them downward. Taylor held her breath, then the line caught them, and they glided through the air, dangling from a line so thin it seemed to vanish along the way. The wind rushed against her face, knocking off her hood and tugging at her bun.
Allana reached the next building. Xavier grabbed her arm as she went by, yanking her to stop her. It sort of worked. She only partially hit the roof.
“Ouch,” Taylor said.
Echo made a grumbling sound in his throat. “I still can’t believe you shot her.” He turned his head to consider her. “There weren’t laser boxes in your time. Who taught you to use one?”
“Joseph.”
“Joseph? When did he learn to use one?”
“After you were killed.”
Echo didn’t reply to that because they reached the other building. Both concentrated on the approaching roof. “Lift your feet up,” Echo said.
She did, and Echo landed on the roof, running to slow his momentum. He didn’t stumble, didn’t even jar much. He set her down carefully.
“You’re pretty good at this,” she said.
“It’s like a VR adventure program—well, except for the threat of actual death. That’s new.”
Xavier had already unhooked Allana’s harness from the zip line. Taylor unhooked Echo’s, then Xavier pushed a button at the base of the zip line, which sent a heated pulse through the rope. A white flash went along its length and it disintegrated. Bits of ash fluttered downward. When the Enforcers found the stand on the roof, at least they wouldn’t be able to use the zip line to follow.
Fast paced, Xavier, Taylor, and Echo carried Allana toward the other side of the building. When they reached the edge, Xavier shot a zip line to the next building, tied it to a rod, and cut the line from his shooter. Taylor helped him attach Allana’s and Echo’s harnesses to the line. Xavier went first, Taylor pushed Allana off, and then she and Echo stood on the side of the building. “You still know how to hold on to a guy?” he asked.
She grabbed on to his harness strap. “I won’t let you go.”
He leaped and they sailed through the air. Now that she knew what to expect, there was something exhilarating about flying through the air this way. “This would be fun,” she said, “except for, you know, that threat-of-death thing.”
“Yeah,” he said. “You’d be surprised at how many activities that ruins.”
She laughed, and then she felt bad for laughing, for enjoying this moment. She shouldn’t enjoy anything until Sheridan was free. And depending on what Reilly had done to Sheridan, maybe not even then.