Fugitive X (4 page)

“Who the hell are you?” said Nick. “What do you want?”

“I’ve been watching you wandering back and forth in the woods yelling.”

How long had this girl been tracking him?
thought Nick. Was he really that easy to shadow? He shrugged, as if the news that he had been tracked was irrelevant. “You haven’t answered either of my questions.”

“I’m a survivor, like you. Revolution 10,” said the girl. “I was going to just leave you to your own business, whatever that is, but there’s a rebel patrol coming through here soon from the west, and I decided why not, I’ll let this guy know, because it doesn’t seem like he has a clue.”

“Rebels?” asked Nick. Were they the armed men he had seen?

She uncrossed her arms and tucked her thumbs into the front pockets of her pants. “They’re unpredictable. Might just leave you alone, but who knows? Better to avoid them.”

“Well, okay, thanks. Can I have my knife back?” said Nick.

She tossed it to him. “Sorry. You can never be too careful.”

He didn’t know what to make of the girl, or the situation. She could have robbed him or left him to get caught by the rebels. Was she really on her own? Could he trust her? But if she was lying, then to what end? He struggled to see what she stood to gain. The girl nodded. “Have a good life. Down with the bots, and all that.” She began walking away.

“Wait,” said Nick. If this girl had been watching him, maybe she had seen something. . . . “My little brother. He’s missing. Thirteen years old. Have you seen him? Seen anything?”

The girl stopped and turned back to Nick. “No. Kevin, that’s the name you were calling? Didn’t see anything. And what about the other one? You missing a third person too?”

“How’d you . . . ?” began Nick.

“Three packs,” said the girl, pointing at the backpacks near Nick’s feet. “Educated guess.”

Nick hesitated. “My sister,” he said. He paused again, then
continued, unable to keep the bitterness out of his voice. “Not missing. Taken by the bots.”

The girl stepped toward Nick. She pushed up the sleeve of her right arm and held her forearm up to Nick. On the arm, in black ink, was a rough, obviously homemade tattoo that read “Peter, Amelie, Oliver.”

“My parents and my brother,” said the girl.

“I’m sorry,” said Nick quietly. He didn’t know what else to say.

“They’ve done it to all of us,” said the girl. “Hope they all rust in hell.” She pushed her sleeve down, backing away from him. As her eyes passed over Nick a last time, her face softened, and she seemed to change her mind. “Your brother, Kevin. Maybe he was taken to the Freepost by a Post tracker. Or the rebels could have picked him up and dumped him in the Freepost. They’ve got no use for a little kid.” The girl studied Nick appraisingly. Nick returned her stare, fighting the reflex to hide his bot eye. She had large brown eyes, with flecks of gold. Pretty eyes, he couldn’t help but notice.

The girl, apparently satisfied, nodded and held her hand out. “Erica.”

Nick shook her hand. “Nick,” he said.

Erica bent down, picked up Cass’s backpack, and slung it over her shoulder beside her own. “Come on then. The Freepost is your best bet. Try to stay quiet and keep up, and I’ll take you there.” She began walking north.

Nick hesitated a moment, then grabbed his backpack and Kevin’s and hurried after her.

THE ISLAND, ON THE INSIDE, REMINDED KEVIN OF HIS FREEPOST—
scattered trees defining clearings and pathways, and clusters of small structures. The buildings had the Freepost’s same mix of materials—Kevin could see timber mixed with high-tech military plastics, concrete, even masonry using some sort of dull metallic bricks. Obviously these Islanders were a bunch of scavengers, just like Kevin’s Freeposters.

The few people Kevin could see—two men, walking into a building in the distance; a boy, about Kevin’s size, stopping in his tracks to stare at Kevin for a moment, then dashing away down a tree-lined path—seemed normal enough. But the four patch-faced bots strolling along with him were
anything but normal. What was this place? They led him into a small one-room structure with a large window that looked out at the Island gate. The room looked like prefab military construction, with thin metallic gray walls and plastic slats for the floor. The only furniture was a roughly made wooden table and three chairs. Grennel led Kevin to a chair, then left when Kevin and the woman sat down. The bots waited outside. Kevin didn’t like being alone with the woman, even though she had given her rifle to one of the bots and was ignoring him, staring silently out the window. He was relieved when Grennel returned after a few moments with a canteen full of water, an apple, and a slab of bread. Kevin drank greedily, then began working on the bread, which was warm and buttered.

Just as he was starting in on the apple, another woman entered the room. She had short brown hair streaked with white, and she wore a white apron over a pair of jeans and a green camouflage shirt. A small black case was slung over her shoulder. She set the case down on the table next to Kevin and looked at him appraisingly, her hands on her hips. “Broken, no doubt.”

“Who are you?” asked Kevin.

“Medic, obviously,” said the woman. She flipped a latch on her case and it slid open and expanded, revealing three tiered rows of glass vials, and steel and plastic tools. She pulled out a black cylinder, about the size of her thumb, a cotton swab,
and a vial, then turned her attention back to Kevin’s face. He leaned away from her.

“Don’t move,” she said, holding his chin with her left hand and peering at his nose. She swabbed a patch of dried blood, then slipped the swab into the vial and pressed a lid onto it before placing the vial into her case.

She lifted the black cylinder up to Kevin’s face. “Close your eyes.”

“What is that?” asked Kevin. “What are you doing?”

“Fixing your nose. Now close your eyes, and your mouth. It’s better not to ingest the anesthetic directly.”

Kevin shut his eyes and mouth, forcing himself to be still when all his instincts were screaming at him to jump out the window. He heard a hiss, then a moment of cold air on his face, and then the throbbing pain from his nose that had been with him all day was abruptly gone. He opened his eyes. “That’s wonderful!” he said. “Much better, thank you—”

The medic reached out quickly, grabbed Kevin’s nose, and twisted. Kevin heard a loud click and felt the cartilage of his nose shift, and even though it didn’t hurt—his nose was completely numb—he still cried out and jerked away.

“Had to straighten the septum,” said the medic. “All set now.” She tapped on the side of her case and it contracted and slid shut. She slung it back over her shoulder and left.

Kevin gingerly felt his nose, but it was still anesthetized and all he could feel was a dull pressure when he prodded it
with his fingers. He looked at Grennel and the woman. “Okay, now what?” he asked.

The woman smiled in that way that made Kevin nervous. “Now,” she said, leaning toward him, “we ask you a few questions.”

CASS OPENED HER EYES AND STARED AT WHITENESS. A CLOUD? DEATH?
She was naked, with a thin cloth sheet draped over her to her neck. She felt no pain. She could breathe. Cautiously, slowly, she reached for the area on her chest where the stick had impaled her. The wound was gone. The skin was slightly raised in a jagged circle—scar tissue—but she was otherwise whole.

She shivered. She was lying on something cold. She sat up, and she felt dizzy and weak, as well as famished and thirsty. She closed her eyes a moment, waited for her head to settle, then reopened them.

And then she realized, now fully awake, that she was no longer in the woods. She was sitting on a metal bed, in a small
white room empty except for the bed, a toilet, a small table and chair, a door with no handle or control panel, and a vid screen in the corner of the wall.

Where was she? The white cell . . . the vid screen . . . She began to feel a seed of panic rise up in her belly. She stood, wobbly, holding the sheet over her body. And then she saw the gray jumpsuit on the chair, folded neatly, waiting for her—a re-education center jumpsuit—and she sat down heavily, hugged herself, and began to shake. “No,” she whispered. “Nick, what happened?”

The door opened silently and a bot walked in, holding a tray of food and a container of water. It was a Lecturer, Cass knew. Exactly as Nick had described them—the sickly white plastic skin, the long thin limbs and neck, the dead green eyes. Cass felt a jolt of recognition—the bot’s eyes were the exact same shade of green as Nick’s new eye.

The bot set the tray down on the table. “You will be hungry, thirsty, and weak after your extensive rejuvenation,” it said. “First, you will pay careful attention to a message of guidance from the Senior Advisor. Then you will dress and eat.”

The vid screen snapped to life and an image of a bot appeared, sitting at a wood desk, its hands clasped together in front of it. “Greetings, future Citizen,” the bot said. “I am the Senior Advisor, responsible for the management of the ongoing Great Intervention . . .”

The message continued, and Cass stared at the screen,
nauseous from fear but also feeling anger building up. She was Cass. They would not take that away from her. She would survive, and she would still be herself. The bots would never beat her.

NICK FELT NUMB AS HE WALKED WITH ERICA, DUCKING THROUGH SPARSE
woods, quickly crossing the cracked roads lined by burned-out pre-Rev buildings only when they had to. He was leaving his brother and sister behind. He thought about heading back to the City to get Cass, but he couldn’t break her out of re-education on his own. Kevin was gone, vanished, and the Freepost was a good place to look for clues. Erica walked in silence, which Nick appreciated. He wouldn’t have been able to handle a conversation when all he could do was think about his brother and sister and how quickly he had lost them.

Erica seemed to know where she was going—she moved confidently, only occasionally checking an old-fashioned pre-Rev compass that hung on her belt next to her hunting knife.
And she was certainly comfortable in the woods and pre-Rev roads—she obviously wasn’t a City dweller, the way she broke a trail with minimum effort and made almost no noise with her passage.

They paused for lunch with their backs against a small house, the roof caved in but the windows and doors miraculously intact. Nick didn’t like stopping so close to the road—he felt too exposed—but Erica seemed relaxed and he decided to let it be. Lunch consisted of water and a dehydrated military supply protein kit that Erica dug out of her pack and rehydrated with a splash of water and a flick of the tiny built-in one-time-use conduction unit that came attached to each kit. She found two spoons, offered one to Nick, and they sat close together, sharing the bitter brown paste. It tasted like hell, but Nick knew from experience that it was good solid energy, better than anything they would be able to scavenge.

“Thank you,” he said. It was a big deal, sharing scavenged supplies with a stranger. Military kits weren’t easy to come by.

Erica nodded. “No problem.” She held up a spoonful of the nasty paste. “Fine meal like this needs company.” She looked away, staring off into the trees as she ate, and Nick took a few moments to study her. Her hair was dirty and ragged, like she had chopped it with that long hunting knife of hers. And she smelled like sweat. Not that he smelled any better. But she was pretty, with her large brown eyes and tan skin, strong but lean arms, long legs tucked underneath her.

She turned quickly to look at him and he guiltily jerked his gaze away, belatedly trying to act casual. “Your eye,” she said, pointing at his face with her spoon. “How’d you get it?”

Nick froze and felt himself flushing. Damned bot eye, turning him into a freak. . . . It was worse than the original blind one. “Long story,” he said.

“Well you must have spent some time with the bots, to be carrying around a piece of their tech in your skull.”

“It’s not your business,” he said gruffly. He instantly regretted his tone, but said nothing else. He wasn’t about to tell this stranger about his time in the City.

Erica stared at him a moment, then shrugged. “Man of mystery. Fine by me. We’ve all got our secrets.”

“I’m sorry,” Nick said.

“Really, not a problem, I understand,” said Erica. “So tell me something that you
are
willing to talk about.”

Nick thought for a bit about what he could tell her. “My Freepost was destroyed by the bots. My brother and sister and I escaped.” He paused, needing to compose himself. “And now it’s just me.” He took another spoonful of the paste, not because he was hungry but because he didn’t trust himself to say anything else without spilling the whole sob story. “Tell me about these rebels,” he said, finally.

“Don’t know all that much about them,” said Erica. “They got their hands on a bunch of nice weapons somehow, and
they run little guerrilla-style attacks on the bots. Don’t really accomplish much, as far as I can tell. At least, they haven’t changed my life for the better. I’ve run into them a few times in the woods, a few more times trading in the Freeposts. . . .”

“I think I saw a few of them, scouts maybe,” Nick said. “They had burst rifles and—” He cut himself off. Erica had suddenly stiffened, staring at something over Nick’s shoulder.

“Don’t move,” she said.

“What is it?” Nick whispered, feeling a rush of dread and adrenaline. “A bot?”

Erica slowly, carefully, reached into her pack at her feet and pulled out a pistol. It was a bolt gun, similar to Nick’s stunbolt, but more powerful, with a longer range. And unlike the stun-bolt, it could kill a person with one shot.

Erica raised the gun toward Nick’s face.

Nick tensed. “What the . . . ?”

“I said don’t move,” Erica hissed, aiming the gun over Nick’s left shoulder. “Do you want to get shot in the face?”

Erica held the gun steady, aiming, and Nick held himself very still.

Nick saw a flash, bright, and felt a rush of heat on his left cheek and heard a buzz zip past his left ear.