Dualed (24 page)

As soon as I fall onto the couch in the front room, I close my eyes. With my bag on the floor next to me and my gun beneath the couch cushion I’m using for a pillow, I drift off almost immediately.

When the buzzing from my cell wakes me up, I realize two things before I even open my eyes. One: It’s the middle of the night, but I feel like only minutes have passed since I first fell asleep. Two: I should have told Chord I was in Leyton—and safe. He’ll have no way of knowing where I am, having figured out long ago that I’ve taken out the tracking chip. How else to explain why I’m apparently still in the apartment in Gaslight?

Another buzz, and guilt has me yanking the phone from my pocket.

Where are you?
the screen shouts at me.

Chord.

Rubbing the bleariness from my eyes, I text back.
In Leyton be back tomorrow
.

I was worried you ok?

Yes I’m fine see you soon
. I reread what I’ve put on the screen. Too late to take it back. I pretend it’s because I’m still half-asleep
that I’ve admitted I want to see him. Not since before I became a striker have I been the one to reach out to him … and especially not since I became active.

Chord’s words flash back at me.
Sounds good we need to talk can we meet tomorrow?

The idea of seeing Chord outside of what has become our crazy routine—him constantly shadowing me, me getting pissed off at him—could all too easily become natural again. Like it was never not that way. I don’t know if either one of us still believes it’s possible to cut the other loose … or if we even want to.

For a long minute, I hold the cell in my hand and stare at Chord’s message. Such a simple question on the surface, but the answer he wants is too much for me to handle right now. I deflect it like a blow.

Sorry can’t I just took another job
, I text back. Necessary lies don’t change the fact that they’re still lies.

He doesn’t text back immediately, and I know he hates me for what I feel I have to do, for what he can’t understand. I don’t entirely understand it myself. How can I kill Alts for strangers so they can live, yet keep running from my own? Endangering my own survival, even as my skills are getting stronger?

In my hand, my cell thrums with his reply.

Will you let me know once you’re back?
Nothing about me taking on another job. As if he knows there’s no point in arguing with me, or trying to figure out anything beyond what I’m willing to give him.

Yes
is all I let myself respond with.

A fast and terse reply this time.
Fine
.

As angry as he is with me, he can’t be angrier than I already am with myself.

I’m putting my cell to sleep and sliding it back into my pocket when a sound comes from outside the apartment.

The elevator, on the move, being called to attention.

A flutter in my gut, mild and restrained as a bird’s breath.

“Time,” I ask out loud in the dark.

3:20
.

I sit up on the couch, frowning. Press a hand to my gut.

There are so many reasonable explanations. A visitor, a resident, a night custodian. Any of these make perfect sense for an apartment complex.

Except that it’s three-twenty in the morning. And this is Leyton. Wardwide curfew is at 23:00 in deference to the substantial business district. The ward doesn’t so much cycle down for the night as
shut
down. And Leyton’s custodians, keeping the ward as clean as they do, don’t work in the middle of the night.

There’s the distinct ping of the elevator doors as they open onto the floor … this floor. The soft, careful shuffle of shoes on carpet, moving down the hall. Getting closer.

When the sound stops right outside the apartment door, I know I’m in trouble.

I give myself thirty seconds.

Instantly, I’m on my feet and moving away from the couch. I throw my bag on and shove my gun into my pocket.

The doorknob is being turned. Being tested. The white tag hanging off it shimmies just the slightest.

Twenty-five seconds left.

I run down the hall on my right into the bedroom and grab the body from the floor. She’s small, so it’s not too difficult to drag her onto the bed. My injured shoulder bellows in protest, but I can’t stop now.

Ten.

I position her limbs just so and pull the blankets over her. Tuck them in around her, but not too neatly. There. It’ll have to do.

Five.

As I run past the apartment’s front door to duck around the corner into the kitchen, I pull out my gun so it’s ready.

Zero.

In the dark, I hear another attempt at turning the doorknob, more aggressive this time.

There’s a splintering crash as the door is kicked in. Shards of wood from the door frame fly in to litter the ground. When he steps inside, I know I’m not looking at a stranger. I’ve seen him before—once. On that street in the Quad, standing next to my Alt.

So she really did hire a striker for me. And now he’s found me here in Leyton. But if he were any good, I’d have died many times over already. There were more than a few instances today when I was more vulnerable than I would have liked. And that very first time he went for me, when he shot at me in the alley … I would have made that shot.

He’s probably a cheap hire if he’s as green as he seems to be. Not all strikers are equal, and we charge accordingly. Though most of us get better with experience. We have to, or we don’t last long. But some come by it more naturally, and I don’t think he’s one of those.

As it is, he barely takes the time to check the front room before heading for the bedroom. There’s a glint off the gun he’s holding in his hand. Covered by darkness, I move forward until I’m right behind him. He’s breathing so heavily that there’s no way he can hear me.

As a fellow striker, I feel some sympathy for him in his learning pains. But as his intended strike, I feel a curious mixture of emotions: relief that he’s not as skilled as I am, stunned disbelief at being a targeted strike, and a renewed drive for survival, alive and screaming inside me.

The incomplete’s body fools him. He shoots at her once, twice, three times. The bullets make a deep, thwacking sound
as they hit flesh and bone. A streetlamp shines through the bare window, and I can see the lump of her figure jerk on the bed with each impact.

Without even giving him a chance to double-check that I’m dead, I press my gun into the side of his neck, right below his ear. Where it’s soft.

He freezes. His heavy breathing stops midbreath, and everything is quiet again.

“Hey.” My voice is as brittle as glass. “Surprise.”

He says nothing.

“Throw the gun down on the bed. Now.”

A second of consideration before he does. It bounces off and lands on the floor on the other side of the bed. Beyond reach now.

“You’re her striker, aren’t you?” I ask him. “The striker she hired for me.”

Still nothing.

His silence is infuriating, and I drill the muzzle harder into his skin. To his credit, he doesn’t give.
“Aren’t you?”

Slowly he nods. “I guess you do have some guts, then,” he says. He wants to sound tough, but his voice is shaking. Way too fresh. What was Dire thinking, taking him on?

“Don’t talk to me about guts,” I spit out. “Who ran away that day, huh?”

“More like who should have shot her Alt when she had the chance.”

My hand is clammy, sweaty, and feeling almost clumsy beneath the fabric of my pulled-down sleeve. I wasn’t able to slip it free before he broke in. “There’s still time.”

He laughs, but it comes out too high. Still scared. “Not much. You should probably stop hiding now.”

Now it’s my turn to stay silent. There is nothing I can say that would change the truth of his words.

But he’s not done, and he sounds steadier now. As if he’s drawing guts from my lack of response. “It’s not going to be you, you know. You’re always a step behind. She’s the one who’s come to you, who’s chased you from the Grid. She’s the one who’s watching your—”

“You don’t know me,” I blurt out. I can’t listen anymore. My arm begins to shake, and I steady it with my left hand. Bright anvils of pain flare from my damaged shoulder. They pound a drumbeat into my fingertips. “You don’t know anything about me!”

“I don’t need to. I know
her
.”

“You don’t know her!” My voice is rising. A bad sign, telling both of us I’m losing control. “She’s nothing but another client! You shouldn’t have even met! Does Dire even know what you’ve done?”

A pause, longer than it should have been. “Yes.”

A lie. I know it before the word leaves his lips. And it hits me, then—what I should have caught that first time I saw him.

The fact that they were together, when strikers are supposed to remain faceless, even to each other. It’s to keep both striker and client safe, in case the Board suspects an unnatural completion. Dire would have told him this.

The thought of Dire, again. Something there, wanting me to connect the pieces—

“How did you find me?” I demand, even as unease begins to set in. Because I’m already starting to circle the answer.

Another pause before he answers. “Through Dire’s contract log.”

Something nearly like betrayal is bitter in the back of my throat. “No
way
he would have let you see that.”

“Not Dire. But Hestor would.”

An image of the resentful salesclerk in my head, and I’m swearing silently.

“I saw the marks on your wrists that day, you know,” he says, “back in that alley in the Quad.”

“
You
saw them,” I say slowly, a new thought taking shape. “What about
her
? Does she know she’s just wasted a whole whack of money, setting a striker on another striker?”

“She doesn’t know.” A note of smugness in his voice, grating at me. “I didn’t tell her, or she wouldn’t have let me sign up for this.”

The memory of her eyes, the utter determination in their depths.

“You sure about that?” I say to him. “What are the chances of her missing my marks if
you
saw them?” The memory of the two of them, standing across the street from me. How they disappeared into the darkness together. Like sylphs into thin air, I thought then. But more than that, I think now. Maybe not just friends. “Just who are you to each other?”

He’s gone motionless at my words, gone silent. Listening to something he never fully considered before. The muzzle of my gun is absolutely still against the skin of his neck.

“Because if she
did
know I wasn’t just a normal Alt, what
does that say about her putting
you
in danger?” I ask. “Maybe what she is to you isn’t what you are to—”

Then he’s swinging around, a yell on his lips. Lamplight glints off the switchblade in his hand, either pulled out of his pocket or hidden in his left hand all along, and I barely have time for either possibility to register before I’m lunging to the side, out of its path.

Balance tips. Feet stumble. My gun shifts and slips against a sleeve of cotton before being righted again. Almost too many seconds are lost—his blade comes within inches of my neck before I finally shoot him.

He collapses like a felled tree. I stagger back before his body has stopped rolling.

My harsh breathing fills the air now, overlapping with the sound of the gunshot still ringing off the walls. I sit down on the floor next to him. Look over with suddenly heavy eyes.

His sleeves are ruched up, and the sight of his marked wrists leaves no doubt that he was a real striker. I pick up a hand, rub my finger over one of his wrists. Raised, with still-healing scars. Proof of his willingness to skew the system and risk death—for
her
.

Dully, I wonder if he loved her. He must have, a lot. I wonder if she loved him, too. Maybe not as much as she let him believe, if she really did use him for this, knowing what I am. Or maybe she loved him too much to keep this away from him. My thoughts are muddled, going places I’m not ready to go.

I use his body as leverage to stand, and as I jostle him, something around his neck hits the floor with a small clink.

A necklace. A set of small, hammered-metal plates, all strung together on a thin black string.

I yank it free, feeling the slight weight of the plates against my skin. It’s still warm. I slip my bag off my shoulders, shove the necklace inside one of the interior pockets, and slip my bag back on.

I’m not quite sure why I’m taking it. Maybe it’s the satisfaction of killing someone who wanted me dead. Or some kind of twisted guilt, loved as he was by a person only a shade removed from me. I’ve just killed an Alt who wasn’t my own, and I have no client, no one to answer to. But against the threat of death, I had no other choice.

Whatever the reason, I can sense a change. The last buffer between me and my Alt has been removed, eliminating whatever distance I’ve struggled to put between us, drawing us toward an inevitable final meeting.

I do a quick check of his pockets, seeking a clue to who he was. Nothing, except his switchblade on the floor next to me. Even in the dark, I can tell the blade is fine and straight, the handle a good fit in my grip. It’s too sturdy to leave behind, no matter where it comes from. That it could’ve killed me doesn’t change the fact that it’s here for the taking. I snap it shut and slide it into the knife roll in my bag.

I close the apartment door as well as I can behind me (more like a propping up, actually), careful to replace the white tag on the outer doorknob. After making my way onto the elevator, I ride down, and then drift through the empty lobby. Outside, the wind plays with my hair and cuts right through my layers of clothing until I’m shivering. It pushes me along until I reach an outer ward train station. When I climb on the train heading back to Jethro, the wind can no longer touch me, but
I still feel cold inside. I huddle into a seat in the back, next to the emergency exit as always, my bag taking up the seat next to me.