Counterpart (15 page)

Ulrich considers for a moment. “Yes.”

“Really? Not exactly what I was hoping to hear—”

The German holds up a hand, not the one grasping his rifle. “You are one of the most capable women I have ever known. If you wanted to destroy us, you could. With ease. But not like this.” Frowning, he gestures with his gun to our damaged surroundings. Even though Biology suffered no direct assault, there are cracks where the force of the blasts traveled through the rock above and below. The whole base still smells faintly of ash and metal and something else no one wants to name. “This attack was…complicated. Messy.” He settles the barrel of the gun back in the pocket between his neck and shoulder. “You could do better.”

My eyebrows go up, even while my heartbeat begins to slow. “That's…strangely reassuring. So,” I say, catching up to him as he keeps walking, “hypothetical scenario. Your base of operations is attacked. An insider is suspected. Who has the most to gain from allying with the machines?”

Ulrich furrows his brow, side-eying me. “That isn't hypothetical.”

“Right. Forget about McKinley for a minute. Pretend we're talking about another base. Who benefits the most from helping the enemy?”

Ulrich extends his arm and checks around the corner before allowing me to proceed down the next hall. “Depends. There are cowards who change sides to save themselves; fools who believe the enemy's lies; and, in certain instances, the truly faithless. Those who never believed in their own cause, and now seek to replace it with empty promises. Of wealth, future prosperity. Survival. The loyalty of some is more cheaply purchased than that of others.”

He pauses, scanning behind us again. It's starting to make me nervous. What danger does he believe is following us?

“Is that all?” I prompt, sensing he has more to say.

“Or,” Ulrich says, hesitating, “there is the prisoner. Someone caught, who has no other choice. Trapped between a rock and a boulder, many starve to death. But a few—a rare man or woman—will chew their own limb off to escape. Or even for just the hope of escape.”

I think about Ulrich in captivity, a prisoner of the machines. He doesn't talk about the months when he was tortured or the time he spent in the wilderness after he “escaped,” but I see it in his eyes, sometimes, and in the hunch of his shoulders when he believes no one's watching him. The damage is still there, beneath the surface. His infrastructure has changed. Some parts of himself he's rebuilt, but other parts remain demolished.
And if Ulrich came back…

“How do we fight that kind of desperation?” I ask him.

“Some will tell you patience.”

“You'd disagree.”

He stops so abruptly I nearly rear-end him. A hard look comes into his eyes, and in that moment I regret asking him these questions. It's forcing him to paw through the rubble from last year, and he's unearthing something primal, angry. “Sometimes,” Ulrich says, “the greatest kindness you can do for a wounded animal is to put it down.”

As he finishes speaking, Ulrich's walkie crackles on his chest. The council still refuses to give me my own, on the off chance that I'll try to use it to communicate some plan to my clone (or clones), or even the machines directly. Set up more destruction. Honestly, I'm not sure what they think I'm going to do with such old technology. The walkie has a limited range; it barely functions between levels, with all the rock in between.

“Ulrich? Hello?” It's Zelda's voice. Ulrich's face immediately softens at the sound of his lover, while I feel myself tensing up. The last time Zelda and I spoke was the day of the attack. “I know you're with Long so this should be the right channel. Pick up.”

Ulrich rips the walkie from its Velcro and answers, “Zelda.”

“Finally. Is Long listening, too?”

He looks at me, and I nod. Ulrich affirms my presence for Zelda.

“Good,” she says, “because you're both going to want to hear this. I was down in Military going over the security logs again—what's left, anyway. This place is a damn mess. Anyway, I was trying to pin down the date each machine arrived at the base, and—”

“You are supposed to be recovering,” Ulrich interrupts. “Not working.”

“I have a few broken bones. I'm not dying.” I imagine Zelda rolling her eyes. “Like I was saying, they arrived with the Chinese, disguised as subjects approved for testing. Someone must have dropped the ball on assessing their functionality, because their kill switches were all fake. Garbage code. There's also the issue of their dormancy; they remained powered down until a specific command was given. With all our firewalls, that command had to come from inside the base. I think someone inside McKinley helped the machines.”

This is old news, but Zelda can't know that. She hasn't been privy to any of the council's sessions, and Ulrich doesn't strike me as the type to indulge in pillow talk.

“Tell her we already have those same suspicions,” I say to Ulrich, who repeats my words verbatim over the walkie. “Tell her the council's looking into it.”

We've almost reached the Organic Chemistry lab, where I'm hoping to find Samuel or someone who knows where he might be at this late hour, or if he is even back. If Samuel's representative of the group, a lot of scientists are night owls. Knowledge never sleeps, I guess. Though more likely it has something to do with the weird hours many McKinlians keep, given how there's nothing to distinguish between night and day but a few numbers on a clock. Easy to lose track of time down here underneath the mountain.
We're like more hygienic trolls. Or mole people.

Unfortunately, metal blinds have been lowered inside the windows of every lab we pass, preventing me from seeing inside. I wiggle the handle of the door leading to the Biophysical Chemistry lab, but it's locked. Maybe the chemists called it an early night after all. Can't blame them. I probably should have done the same.

“Nice of you to share with the rest of the class,” Zelda says grumpily as Ulrich finishes passing along my message. “Anyway, that's not all. I wanted you to hear it from me first, in case the same person who helped the machines tries to cover this up, too.”

“Cover up what?”

“In reviewing the logs, I noticed a pattern to the discrepancies. While everyone else has been counting corpses, I tallied every questionable shipment that entered McKinley in the past month—and, by my math, there's one arrival still unaccounted for. It's listed here as spare parts for chopper repairs, but there was no request order for it. And—get ready for the clincher—the person who supposedly signed off on it was Rhona Long. Someone must be forging your ID, Long. And if that's not bad enough, I'm willing to bet that shipment's another machine.”

I take a moment to digest this. Another machine. At large in McKinley.
Again.

Suddenly these long empty stretches of hallway seem like the narrow passages of a maze. If they catch us here, we'll have no cover. No means of escape.
This is a death funnel.
I try another door, this one to the Analytical Chemistry labs, yanking down hard on the handle, which earns me an odd look from Ulrich. No luck. With all the expensive equipment inside them, it makes sense for these rooms to be off limits to the general population. Still, for a moment, I consider trying the ID scanner to see if my signature releases the lock.

“Model?” Ulrich asks at the same time I say, “Are you sure?”

Zelda chooses to ignore my question. “No idea what model, since it was never officially logged in.”

I snatch the walkie from Ulrich. “Where was the shipment sent once it arrived?”

“It was delivered to a training room on the military level like the other machines that woke during the attack, but I went and checked. There's just a huge, empty box left. Whatever was inside it is not there now, and everyone who works down here claims they never touched the shipment.” She pauses to allow Ulrich or me a chance to speak.

“So it could be anywhere in the base,” I say. “Just…lying in wait.”

“Pretty much. It might have gone to sleep to conserve power. For all I know, it could be in a broom closet somewhere, waiting for its next command. Speaking of, where are you two?”

A wet slap makes me jump, pulling my attention in the direction of the Inorganic Chemistry lab. From this angle, I can't see anything save the glare of the hall lights on the window.

At the same moment, Ulrich raises his gun and steps in front of me. Once he's facing away, I pocket the walkie and grab the EMP-G holstered on his hip. I switch it on, turn off the safety, and crank the setting all the way up in the span of a few seconds.

“What are you doing?” Ulrich demands without breaking eye contact with the window.

“If you think I'm going unarmed with two machines on the loose, you're out of your mind,” I reply through my teeth, flinging my hair out of my face. I need to invest in a ponytail holder ASAP. “I'm done being someone else's escort mission. Let me back you up. Unless you don't trust me to watch your back.”

I let that final statement hang between us like a curtain of deep fog brought from the sea. I need to know whose side Ulrich's truly on. Whether he believes in me, or whether he's fallen prey to the same suspicions as Hawking and the rest of them.
Please
, I think.
Trust me. Believe in me.

With his free hand, he takes a grenade from a pouch on his belt and passes it to me.

“Ulrich! What the heck! Is this a
live
grenade? Have you been carrying live grenades around McKinley this whole time?”

He shrugs. “Last resort.”

I reach my hand toward the grenade, but he holds on to it a moment longer, giving me a serious look. “Last,” he repeats, “resort.”

And that's when I know. After all, you don't hand over your prized explosives to just anyone. “Thanks.” I fight a smile while folding his fingers back over the grenade. “But you should probably keep that.”

He returns the grenade to its rightful pouch.

“Hello? What's going on?” Zelda hollers from the walkie. It beeps frantically as she keeps clicking the talk button, then letting go to hear an answer. “Ulrich!”
Beep.
“Long?”
Beep.
“Answer me, dammit.”
Beep.

“We're fine, but hold that thought,” I reply—right before turning the sound dial to mute. Zelda will be pissed, but we can't afford a distraction right now.

“We should turn back,” Ulrich recommends, as we venture slowly toward the IC lab, hugging the wall opposite the window, giving the door a wide berth.

“It might be nothing,” I say. Despite my words, I keep my gun level, ready, because our luck is not good enough lately for this to be nothing. My flight instinct is already screaming. Run. Run.
Run.

But this is my home. Humanity's last bastion. There's nowhere left to run to.

The mystery sound repeats itself—like someone dropping a fat, wet sponge into a sink—and that's when I see it. Past the branches of light on the window, just underneath the crooked line of blinds.

A bloody hand pressed against the IC lab window.

Attached to that hand is the body of a thirty-something man, still alive but lying on his back, splayed atop a counter like some med-school cadaver. Clunky centrifuges, glove boxes, and toppled microscopes wall off the lower half of his body, while his coat glitters with broken shards of glass from the flasks and test tubes he must have destroyed when he crashed into them. His chest has been partially excavated by gunfire, the front of his coat drowned in so much blood I almost have to look away.

The fact I can see him at all appears to be mere happenstance. Some kind of tall apparatus has been shoved against the window, preventing the metal shade from sealing completely. It presses down silently on the apparatus, operating on some automatic timer telling it to close.

Smack.

The man lifts his hand and slams it back against the glass, smudging the window with vibrant red fingerprints, and while his head doesn't move, his terrified eyes turn toward me, his mouth moving soundlessly.

Help me,
he's saying, sobbing, though the window reduces his voice to an unintelligible murmur.
Help me.

“Hold on,” I say, though it's doubtful he can hear me through the glass. “Hold on. Hold on…“I fumble for the walkie, unmuting it.

“—is going on?” Zelda is still complaining. “Long, I swear to—”

I cycle through McKinley's emergency channels until I reach the one I need. “This is Commander Rhona Long. We have wounded on Biology level in the IC lab. Need immediate medical assistance. Please respond.”

“Commander Long, this is Captain Paszek of the New Soviet security forces,” a woman replies after a moment. Her voice is throaty and heavily accented. Polish, maybe? “I have people en route to your location now. Can you tell me anything more about the situation?”

“Oh, um. I think I might have the wrong channel.” I double-check the channel number. Yep. Off by one. Damn it. “I was actually trying to get in touch with—you know what? It doesn't matter. Send me whoever you have. Be advised this situation might involve machines.”

“Powiedzia
ł
a maszyny?”
a Polish man asks in the background while Captain Paszek says, “Machines inside the base? Are we under attack again?”

“No,” I answer quickly. “I think this is an isolated incident. The last thing we need is a panic, so don't—”

Squeak.

I'm momentarily distracted by the man's fingers groping at the window.

Squeak squeak squeak

His gaze turns away from me, suddenly focused on something I can't see, just beyond the edge of the window. I watch his lips again, trying to read what he's saying.

No no no

please

God no

“Commander Long?” Captain Paszek's voice buzzes from the walkie in my hand. “If there are machines present, do not engage…”

I'm already halfway to the door when the captain gives me this directive. Ulrich grabs me by the shoulder, pulling me back before I can plant my hand on the ID scanner, but I shake him off with a dark look. “I know what you're going to say, but we can't just stand here and do nothing.”

“We wait for backup.”

I gesture angrily at the window. “Right now, we're all the backup that man has.”

“—to somewhere safe until we can clear and secure the area.” Paszek is still talking. “Repeat: do not, under any circumstances—”

I don't hear the rest of the captain's words. The injured man jerks suddenly as bullets pound into his chest. I cringe, crying out in sympathetic pain, but don't look away, and don't lower my gun, even as Ulrich pushes me back against the far wall.

“I can't see it,” I say to him. “Can you see it?”

Ulrich gives a firm shake of his head. Whatever it is, the thing's smart enough to stay clear of the window. Most predators don't have such a talent for visual-spatial reasoning, except when under the direct control of the higher echelon, but there's no way the AI could be controlling it remotely, not this deep within McKinley.

The shots continue quietly on the other side of the glass. A dull, percussive beat.
Dum. Dum dum. Dum.
Until the man stops moving. His eyes stare vacantly at the ceiling, his face holding those final moments of terror like the sculpted expression of a plastic doll. Permanent.

“Move,” Ulrich says, trying to push me back the way we came.

“No,” I tell him, shoving a hand against his shoulder. “Wait. Wait! If this is the machine Zelda was talking about, this might be our only chance to put it down before it claims more lives. Hold on.”

Captain Paszek is in the middle of saying something about it taking ten minutes for her people to arrive because of a new collapse in stairwell C before I mute the walkie. The long and short of the situation is we're on our own unless I want to waste more time trying to contact McKinley's overworked servicemen and women.

“Or it kills us both,” Ulrich points out, his grey-blond brows pinched together.

“Well, yes. That's a possibility, too.” I glance uneasily at the window, as the body slowly slides from the counter, the man's leg dragged by the unseen machine. “But when is it not? When are our lives
not
in crazy peril?” I lean to the side, craning my neck to see around Ulrich's shoulder. “Crap. What's it doing now?”

“What makes you think we can even kill it?” Ulrich asks. “The others required only a five-second reboot time. This one may not even need that.”

I glance down at the grenade on his belt. “Then we go with your last resort. Nothing a little fiery explosion won't solve, right?” I try to smile, but my heart's jamming like an Olympic athlete on the hundred-meter dash. On my list of ultimately bad ideas, this ranks way up there. Along with approaching that skunk thinking it was a cat in the ninth grade, and more recently, McKinley Taco Night. Okay. Maybe not as bad as Taco Night. “We won't know unless we try. Something. We have to try
something,
Ulrich. Oh my God.”

He turns sharply in the direction of my horrified gaze, and I use the opportunity to slip away.
Sorry, buddy.
Only a few steps are needed to reach the door. I flatten my hand against the scanner, hear an approving chirp, and then the automated click of the door unlocking. It may be too late to save that scientist, but I'll be damned if I let anyone else die tonight.

Ulrich swears in German behind me, but at this point, the horse is out of the barn.

Darkness invades the lab, settling in every corner. The only light comes from the window and the now-open door behind me, but instead of helping, the blade of light cuts a distinct path across the room, sending shadows spearing from even the most innocuous lab equipment. The inside of the IC is similar to the other laboratories on this level in a lot of respects. Chiefly, there's a lot of high-tech equipment I find slightly intimidating, and which I'm sure, given a few minutes with the higher echelon, would probably try to kill me in some fashion.

I move a few steps farther into the lab, keeping my EMP-G at eye level, and my finger resting inside the guard. No point following trigger safety here. My eyes latch on to some kind of precision saw left on the counter, which grows tiny, dark teeth when struck by the light. While, logically, I know the saw is used for dissecting metal and other inorganic materials, I can't help thinking how easy it would be for someone—or something—to use it to cut through flesh. My flesh.

On the floor, the man lies dead, his blood darkening the blue linoleum.

And he's not the only one.

The lab is filled with corpses. Bodies caught off guard, slumped over their stations. Some were caught in flight toward the exit, sprawled across the aisles like mannequins coming apart. One woman, close to the door, fell just short of the intercom—not that it would have worked with all our wiring issues at the moment, but I credit her with the thought. She was trying to save their lives. And ours, I think. Trying to warn the rest of the base.

I don't see the machine that did it.

Listening for that telltale whir, I'm not expecting the quiet release of pressure I hear instead, like something settling down on hinges.
What is that?

I try to think reasonably. Could be some lab equipment still active, performing its job despite the death of its operator. Or something malfunctioning after taking a stray bullet. Though, in my cursory inspection, I don't see any damage suggesting anything less than precision assassination. The machines have never been willy-nilly with their ammunition, but this is something else. Something much, much worse.

“Over here,” a voice says, startling me. It sounds like a woman. Hurt.

“Who's there?” I reply, wrestling calm into my tone. My instinct is to rush over, but nothing here feels right. And I still remember the sound of Ulrich's voice in the bowels of Churchill base, at a time when we all assumed he was dead. The machines' idea of a joke. A way to fool us. Given enough time with a person, the higher echelon can replicate their voice. This could be a trap.

“I'm injured,” says the woman. “I need help.”

I carefully step around the dead man, keeping the counter with the window at my back. “Where's the machine that did this? Is it still here?”

“No. It left. The machine is gone.”

“Gone where?” The lab is a long, oblong room, divided by counters and machinery; it's possible there's another exit somewhere else, but I don't believe for a second the machine fled. Most grunt models aren't programmed for tactical retreat, even as a last ditch effort to preserve themselves. The higher echelon has had no problem throwing its soldiers at us like they're nothing more than cheap solder and wires. Every machine is replaceable.

Except,
the thought occurs to me,
for maybe this one?

“I-I-I don't know.” The stranger's voice quivers, as if she's moments away from waterworks. “Please help me.”

“Are you hurt?”

Ulrich grabs my arm before I can take another step, nearly ripping my shoulder out of its socket. “What?” I growl, while the woman continues her pleas.

His expression is pale and grave. “That voice. You recognize it?”

“No. Should I?”

“It is
your
voice.”

“No way. I don't sound like that…” I begin to object, but Ulrich's dire look dissolves my certainty like nails in a Coke. “Do I?” For as much time as I spend talking and giving rousing speeches, it's true I don't hear myself the way others do. One, it's physically impossible. And two, between managing McKinley's daily operations and organizing the resistance, the last thing I have time for is sitting around playing back old communiqués.

I stop moving forward into the room, and instead call out, “Can you tell me your name?”

“Rhona.” It sounds like she licks her lips. “Commander Rhona Long.”

My stomach clenches. “Is that supposed to be a joke?”

“I don't understand.” Her tone is almost mocking.

I glance at Ulrich, who shakes his head. He's right. I need to be careful how I play this.

“All right. Come out from behind the counter—Commander.”

“I don't understand,” she mewls, back to sounding frightened. “Please help me. I don't understand what's happening.”

That might be my voice,
I think,
but it sure as hell isn't my personality.

“Stand up,” I order. “So we can see you.”

“I can't. My legs are broken.” The way she says it, almost in a whine, reminds me of a child responding to their parent's request to get up and put the dishes away, or go and clean their room. It doesn't quite strike the right chord for someone in genuine pain, though it's remarkably close. So close, in fact, I'm unsure whether I'm reading too much into it. Adrenaline has a funny effect on the brain. Heightens the senses, right to the edge of overwhelming them entirely.

“Okay,” I say. “I'm going to go get you some help. Stay right there.”

Ulrich's eyes follow me as I inch back toward the door.

And close it.

Turning back to Ulrich, I hold a finger up to my lips, and neither of us moves or even dares to breathe. It's a simple trick, a ploy for a child, but if I'm right—if I'm right, the thing that's lurking just out of sight won't know any better.

Because it isn't equipped with the programming to tell it otherwise.

“Hello?” it says into the silence. “Is anyone there?”

After a few more seconds, a dark figure rises from behind the counter. I listen for that same soft whisper as before—only this time it sounds even more mechanical, like a cooling fan inside a computer tower. Not quite the whirring I'm used to, but undeniably its cousin. The stranger straightens, reaching an unusual height for a machine—
my
height, exactly—and turns around.

I'm expecting your typical machine. Metal and wires; hydraulics and electronics; maybe a speaker in place of a mouth or at chest level; red optics, the better to see me with; and some type of machine gun, the better to murder me with. We created nearly a dozen different classes of machines before the Machinations, most modeled on some quadruped (easier for correcting balance issues), with the occasional biped for better speed, power, or maneuverability. A machine for every job, and I know every single one as intimately as a friend. Because my life depends on it.

But this machine—

“Mein Gott,”
Ulrich says.

This machine has
skin.
Loose folds hang from its metal skeleton like bloody cobwebs, drapes of white skin haphazardly pinched and held there by its joints. If that wasn't bad enough, chunks of red hair still attached to scalp have been partially melted to its head using a soldering iron, and judging by the smell, recently. I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing it's been collecting the skin and hair from its victims.