Hard Reset (Relics Singularity Thrillers Book 2), page 17
His planning instinct processed this immediately. No lock meant one of two things: they were covering the door externally with enough confidence that a lock was redundant, or they didn't consider him a threat worth locking in. He spent a moment deciding which was more likely and found he couldn't fully resolve it, which itself said something.
Something is changing in me.
He could feel it, the way you felt weather coming in before the sky changed — a shift in the internal pressure of things, a quality that was new and didn't have a precise name. A passivity. A serenity that was arriving from outside him rather than generated by anything he was doing. He'd noticed it since they'd landed in Relica, creeping in around the edges. He'd seen something similar in the faces of the people they'd passed on the tour — in Red-hair, in the other one. A particular smoothness, an absence of the rough edges that friction and urgency and unresolved anxiety tended to leave on faces.
He wondered who Red-hair had been before Crane had found him. What he'd led, what he'd built, what the System had seen in him that warranted the enhancement and then the discarding. He didn't look like a crony by nature — none of them did, up close. He looked like someone who had been somewhere and done something and arrived here at the far end of it, and had made peace with the arrival.
Diane.
The thought of her came without being summoned, the way the strongest thoughts did. Seeing her face had done something to him that he couldn't fully account for — calmed something and disturbed something else simultaneously, the two effects running in parallel without resolving into a single emotional state. There was an ocean of time between them that he had no access to. She had years of memories, years of herself, that didn't include him in any form. He was, to her recent history, an absence. And she was, to his, the clearest image that had survived.
He drifted into those thoughts the way you drifted toward a current in deep water — not swimming, exactly, just moving in the direction the water was already going. The memories that would allow themselves to be seen swam alongside him, some keeping pace and some pushing against the current, each with its own persistence.
And that was when he understood he'd fallen asleep.
The boundary between waking thought and sleep had dissolved so gradually that he hadn't registered the crossing. How long he'd been under, and how much of what he'd been thinking had been dream and how much had been genuine waking cognition, he couldn't determine. He sat up and gave his body the physical instruction to be awake, the way you could sometimes force the transition by committing to the posture of it.
The shack was dark. Not middle-of-the-night dark — something about the quality of the darkness felt thin, provisional, like something that was nearly finished rather than settled in for the long stretch.
He stood and crossed to the door and pushed on it gently.
It gave without resistance.
He opened it a few inches and light came through the gap — pale and horizontal, the specific light of early morning arriving at a low angle and striking everything it touched with the indiscriminate generosity of a sun that had just cleared the horizon. The shack had been blocking it almost entirely; even this narrow opening was a significant adjustment after the interior darkness.
He looked through the gap. The space immediately outside the door was empty. He widened the opening and looked further.
Still no one.
He stepped over the threshold — a single plank of wood pressed into the ground, the door's only gesture toward a proper frame — and stood fully outside. Let his eyes complete their adjustment to the morning. The sun was rising directly behind the shack, which threw the entire street in front of him into deep shadow, a long band of cool gray that stretched toward the square.
He followed the shadow's edge toward the center of the city.
The Tracer was where they'd left it, still sitting in the landing field at the square's center, its profile visible from here at an angle. But there were shadows moving around it — shapes that resolved as his eyes continued their adjustment into people. Many people. The square was occupied, filled with the quiet movement of a crowd that had gathered for a reason he couldn't yet read from this distance.
No one had stopped him leaving the shack. No one had emerged from a doorway to redirect him. No voice had called his name from behind. He turned once to check and found the street empty in both directions.
He was, as far as he could determine, completely unwatched.
He stood in the shadowline and looked at the people in the square and tried to feel something useful about what he was seeing. The plan he'd been reaching for in the shack — the one that existed somewhere underneath the place the memories used to be, in the procedural layer that the scraping hadn't reached — was trying to surface. He could feel the edges of it.
He took a breath and started walking toward the square.
MYERS_
The uncanny feeling of being alone while completely surrounded by people made Myers shiver.
His mind was still slow — operating at a reduced speed that he could feel in the way that you could feel a fever, not as a specific sensation but as a wrongness in the background of everything. Like something that should have been running at full temperature was being gradually cooled, or melted, losing the precision of its edges. He was aware of the slowness in the way you were aware of things that were happening to you rather than things you were doing, which was itself part of the problem.
But he was aware enough to see that something had changed since last night. The square was full of people, and no one had stopped him leaving the shack, and Crane would not have left him unguarded. That much he knew without needing to reconstruct it — it was the kind of knowledge that lived below the memory layer, in the assessment of character that survived the scraping the way professional knowledge sometimes survived it. Crane was thorough. Crane was careful. Crane had the particular quality of a man who had led things for long enough that leaving details unaddressed had become genuinely uncomfortable to him.
He would have posted guards. He would have checked. He would not have allowed Myers to walk out of that shack and into the morning without someone knowing about it.
Which meant something had happened that Crane hadn't anticipated.
The plan changed. Or it was changed for him.
Myers moved with the crowd, keeping himself in the middle of the drift, letting the general motion toward the platform at the square's center carry him without requiring him to commit to a specific direction. The people around him moved with a quality he couldn't immediately categorize — not urgency, not the focused intentionality of people going somewhere specific. More like a tide following a pull. Eyes forward, expressions settled, none of the side-conversation or shared-glance behavior of a crowd that was gathering because it wanted to gather.
He tried to make eye contact with a woman crossing the street nearby. She walked with the same forward-fixed quality as the others, her gaze tracking toward the platform without deviation. He watched her for a moment, then made the attempt.
"Psst."
She startled — a genuine, full-body flinch, the reaction of someone unexpectedly interrupted by a stimulus their nervous system wasn't prepared for. She turned and found him, and something moved across her face that was more complicated than simple recognition. Confusion, disorientation, and underneath both of those something that looked almost like the beginning of waking up from something.
"You — you're…" she started. Stopped. Tried again. "I — you're…" The words dissolved before they completed themselves, her voice trailing downward through registers that became too quiet to follow. Then she turned and continued toward the platform, her pace unchanged from before he'd spoken to her.
Myers stood still and watched her go.
What is happening here?
His first instinct — and he registered it as an instinct rather than a conclusion, which meant he held it loosely — was something along the lines of manipulation. Someone or something had incapacitated these people's decision-making in some functional way, had introduced into the population of Relica some mechanism that was directing their behavior toward the platform without them being entirely aware that they were being directed. He'd seen remarkable things in the past several days. He'd revised his understanding of what was possible more than once.
But this seemed too far. He'd seen technologies that could disable aircraft systems, track people from orbit, eliminate memories from living brains. He hadn't seen anything that could reach into a crowd of former executives and civic leaders and smooth out their agency entirely, reduce them to mobile bodies drifting toward a central point on an invisible signal.
He couldn't rule it out. He also couldn't act on it yet, so he set it aside and moved toward the square.
Then he heard the scream.
He knew it before he'd processed it consciously. The sound arrived and his body responded to it — muscles tightening, weight shifting forward, a readiness that preceded the identification of what had triggered it. Then the identification came, and it was worse than the physical preparation had been.
Diane.
He came up on his toes, trying to see over the crowd. The people around him were taller on average than he'd been accounting for, and the drift of bodies had thickened as it approached the platform. He pushed up as far as his height allowed and scanned.
Crane was visible above the rest. The man's height was useful now as information — Myers tracked the large head moving through the crowd with the deliberate speed of someone who had been informed of a problem and was addressing it. He watched Crane reach the platform steps and ascend. The crowd parted for him in the automatic way crowds parted for people they'd oriented themselves around, bodies yielding without being asked.
Then Red-hair, following. Then the other man. Then —
Rand. Diane.
Both of them being moved forward by people on either side, guided rather than dragged but guided with a firmness that made the distinction largely semantic. They reached the center of the platform and were bound — thin cord around wrists, around ankles — by the guards flanking them. Rand was saying something. Even at this distance and over the ambient sound of the crowd, Myers could read the specific energy of Rand talking through a situation he was not happy about. Diane stood straighter, her chin up, her eyes moving across the crowd in the systematic sweep of someone gathering information even now.
Lansing wasn't with them.
Myers registered the absence and didn't have time to pursue what it meant.
He started moving — not toward the platform directly, but at an angle, threading through the gaps between bodies with the careful, specific attention of someone who had decided not to be noticed for as long as not being noticed remained possible. He kept his profile low, his movements smooth, nothing about his speed or his posture that would read as urgency to anyone who happened to be looking in his direction.
He was almost to the platform steps when he saw Red-hair.
The man was standing near the stairs with his back to the crowd, watching the guards on the platform finish their work. Slightly swallowed by the people around him — his height made him easy to lose in any group of adults — but visible if you were specifically looking for him.
And at the man's belt, in a leather sheath, was a knife.
Myers registered it and then looked away, continuing to move at the same pace, the same apparently aimless drift. He did one slow internal accounting of the situation and found that his options were limited and this one was better than the alternatives. He couldn't get to Rand and Diane without getting onto the platform, and he couldn't get onto the platform without either being stopped at the steps or drawing the attention of everyone standing on it.
But if he had a knife, the calculus changed.
He moved toward Red-hair from the side, staying in the man's peripheral blind spot — the zone behind and beside the shoulder where attention narrowed — keeping one layer of other people between them for as long as possible. Red-hair's eyes were forward. His weight was balanced toward his front foot, his attention on the stage.
Myers got within a few feet and stopped, watching.
Red-hair didn't turn.
He extended his hand slowly, leading with his fingertips, keeping the motion in the range that crowds naturally generated — small adjustments, tiny shifts of position, nothing that stood out against the general ambient movement of a hundred bodies in close proximity. His fingers found the sheath. Leather, smooth and cool, stiff in the way of things that weren't used often. Two fingers on either side of it, gentle pressure to understand the attachment mechanism before committing to the pull.
He could feel the clip. Just a clip, nothing looped around the belt.
He lifted.
His hands wanted to shake. The muscles of his arm were trying to do two contradictory things simultaneously — the slow, controlled motion the situation required, and the faster motion that urgency was demanding — and the conflict produced a trembling that he suppressed through the simple act of not allowing it. He breathed. He focused on his fingertips rather than the outcome.
The sheath moved upward. A centimeter, two. The clip releasing cleanly as the sheath cleared the belt's upper edge.
He lifted the rest of the way and the knife came free.
He opened his eyes — he hadn't realized he'd closed them — and found Red-hair looking directly at him.
The recognition was immediate and visible. It moved through the man's face in a single fast sequence — surprise, then identification, then the reaching motion that came from training rather than thought, his hand going to his waist for the knife that was no longer there.
Myers didn't deliberate. He dropped.
He hit the ground harder than he'd planned for, the impact jarring through his knees and palms, and came up already scanning. The crowd around him had registered something — a disturbance in the immediate vicinity — but were doing almost nothing about it, the same forward-pulled quality that had characterized them since he'd first entered the square apparently still operational. He looked left, right, at the ground immediately around him.
A rock. Irregular, fist-sized, half-buried in the dirt but loose enough to come free when he grabbed it.
He came up with it in his right hand and the knife and sheath in his left.
Just like Istanbul, he thought. Armed with a rock. The thought was almost funny, and almost was enough.
Red-hair had cleared the bodies between them and was closing — faster than Myers had expected, with the compact, focused movement of a smaller man who had learned to compensate for size with economy of motion. He had no other weapon drawn. He hadn't called out. Myers registered both of those facts and built a quick and possibly wrong theory about what they meant: Red-hair wanted to resolve this quietly, which meant he either didn't want to draw Crane's attention to the fact that Myers was free, or he wanted Myers captured rather than alarmed.
Either way, it meant he was operating with constraints.
Myers waited. Let him come. The instinct to move too early was strong and he held against it, watching the man's feet, reading the weight distribution, waiting for the last moment before the point of no return.
Red-hair stopped directly over him.
Myers pushed off the ground in a single motion, driving upward with everything his legs had. The rock came with him — uppercut trajectory, directly upward along the vertical line of the man's body, connecting with his chin at the apex of the swing with the specific crack of bone meeting dense stone under force.
Red-hair went down.
Myers stood over him, still holding the rock, breathing. Around them the crowd continued its drift toward the platform as if a man had not just been knocked unconscious in their midst. People stepped around the fallen body, over it, with the same even forward motion they'd been maintaining since he'd entered the square. None of them looked at Myers with anything resembling alarm or intent.
He dropped the rock.
He looked at the knife in his left hand, still in its stiff leather sheath, and made a decision about it. He tucked it into his waistband and pulled his shirt over it.
Then he turned back to the platform, where Rand and Diane were bound at the center of the stage and Josiah Crane was standing at the front of it, looking out over the crowd he appeared to believe was assembled for a purpose he controlled.
Myers started walking toward the steps.
RAVI_
Ravi was having a hard time reading Solomon Merrick.
They stood side by side at the top of the cliff, on the open expanse of terrain that stretched back from the canyon's edge, and Ravi watched Sol's face in the way he watched things when he needed information and wasn't going to get it any other way. Sol's face was usually a controlled surface — the product of decades of executive rooms and high-stakes negotiations and the specific discipline of a man who had learned that the information on your face was information you'd given away. But right now the control wasn't holding.
Ary was there, standing a few feet ahead of them. And beside her, a younger man — dark eyes, a seething quality to his stillness, the particular intensity of someone who had arrived at this moment through a long and specific grievance and had been waiting for it. Behind them, five or six older men in a loose arrangement, not quite a formation but too deliberate to be casual. Ravi read them immediately: Unders, by their gear. Mostly EHM equipment, the kind that found its way out of ARU inventories through the mechanisms the Unders had been perfecting for years. High-powered EHM rifles, matching sidearms on most of them, and on two of the men he could see short-range pulse grenades clipped to their vests — the kind that rendered everything electronic within twenty yards useless for an hour. Good equipment, well-maintained, carried by people who knew what they were doing with it.
None of that surprised him. What surprised him was Sol.
