Pattern Black, page 12
The gunner laughed. “Yeah. Good luck with that.”
Four Eyes chuckled. They were all in on some joke to which Mason wasn’t privy.
She was still holding that sheet of foil between its ends. The scroll looked metallic and semi-rigid but didn’t crinkle as it moved. Dust filtered through the fluorescent light in the hallway, spilling in from the lobby. But contrasting the rumble and gut feel of a melee, the noises seemed to be traveling in the opposite direction. Wrapping up rather than gaining volume. Big sounds moving paradoxically farther, like a concert ramping up as a car drove away.
“Look at me,” she said.
Movement behind Four Eyes caught Mason’s eye. The hallway itself flickered from solid to wireframe. From finished concept to pencil lines on a blueprint. Everything was rotoscoped. An artist’s lines chasing the truth of every surface.
Four Eyes had moved his hands from Mason’s head and was looking at his tablet.
Mason couldn’t see the screen. Only the flash of something there ― something bad, judging by sound and color ― reflected in the glasses.
“He’s edging.”
“Mason. Try to focus.”
More flashing, accompanied by a weak beep. “Almost critical now.”
The gunner still had his weapon. “We need to end this. Try again later.”
“There is no later.”
The hallway turned black and white, though the room’s occupants clung to their color. No decorations or pictures or posters or plants. Just this living sketch that hurt Mason’s head. Made his leg kick and his ribcage lurch and jive.
“Fuck. He’s seizing.”
“Mason!”
And in that moment, it all suddenly became clear to Mason. He didn’t know all the wheres and hows and whys and whats, but some deep part of him understood slivers of what was happening. He didn’t know these people or whether he was about to die or be killed, but he was causing this. It was involuntary, like an allergic reaction.
But it was all his fault.
He was sure this had happened to his father before he’d slipped into the vacant abyss.
How many fingers, Mason?
Somehow it mattered.
An instant later, Mason’s eyes flickered, and the four of them weren’t grappling inside a bank’s back-office anymore. They were in a bright white nothingness, a chandelier of black dots hanging above them.
“He won’t go quiet,” said Four Eyes. “I can’t fix his signal. I’m not going to be able to do this, Calliope.”
“Try.”
“I’m goddamn trying!”
“Then fix his identity, so we can at least find him again! Do your job, and let me do mine!”
“Fixing his identity won’t be enough to—!”
“Stay or go,” said the woman precisely, speaking to Mason with an annoyed glance at her bespectacled companion. “You have to decide.”
The disorienting sensation was worsening. The icon flashed faster on the tablet, beeping with ever more urgency.
A man made out of pencil strokes appeared behind Four Eyes, but the gunner saw him coming. The chicken bone weapon swung toward the doorway then blew a hole through the new man’s chest. A SWAT officer, if Mason had to guess, though he was all lines and scratches to Mason’s eye. Not a man so much as a cartoon. Guts made of powdered pencil lead struck the wall, leaving an amateur’s sketch.
Four Eyes said, “They’re coming in. For extraction.”
“Us,” the woman pressed, patient now only with effort, “or them.” A choice pinning him down … or the dead officer in the hallway.
Mason tried to focus and understand his part in this. It gave him a headache. He could stay, or he could go. He could be taken by the coming SWAT team, or he could … well, he could do whatever these people were up to. They were willing to “fix his identity,” it seemed.
Ride. Don’t drive.
“Do whatever the fuck you want.” Mason closed his eyes, unable to stop himself from seeing the world dangling on a broken hinge. “Just do it fast.”
The woman pushed the strange foil thing over his face. She moved over him, all of her barely-substantial weight pressing down, choking Mason into suffocation.
Panic settled in as his breathing grew labored.
He fought.
And fought.
But then Mason ran out of breath. The black and white patterns returned even behind closed eyelids, and he fell down a deep dark hole as he spun and slipped and―
SIXTEEN
Submerged
―thrashed and choked as his limbs struck hard surfaces, legs dangling and kicking nothing.
The feeling was back. That sense of running in syrup, every movement slowed as if by invisible bands on his limbs.
Then came a voice from very far away. “He’s seizing!”
Another, this one muffled as if coming from a different room through paper-thin walls. “Goddammit, reinforce!”
The world was liquid. Mason was flying, no longer flat on the ground. Flying or falling — he wasn’t sure which. He couldn’t see. His stomach grew light, hanging like a cartoon character already inches on the wrong side of a cliff.
Mason tried to open his eyes, but something held them shut. He couldn’t feel the gunner’s weight on his chest or the stilling hands of the man in glasses — and seconds-ago moments felt like years passed already. He couldn’t remember details of his bank adventure. He saw nothing and could focus on less. Felt only sludge and confinement.
The intense woman with the brush-blonde crew cut was gone, that much Mason was sure of even with his eyes held tight. He could tell by feel that her suffocating contraption no longer covered his face. But he still couldn’t breathe. There seemed to be a fist down his throat.
He thrashed in the abject darkness, flailed his arms. Knuckles cracked against something unseen. His hands flew to his mouth to find and clear the obstruction. There was, indeed, something large between his lips. Whatever-it-was covered his entire mouth, blocking his airway.
Mason pulled, but it didn’t budge an inch.
He reached up, found plugs in his nose. He was growing dizzy, brain blitzed by dawning asphyxia. Fingers became claws, and Mason raked the plugs with the urgency of prey fleeing a predator. It didn’t matter that he was, apparently and inexplicably, floating in liquid. All that mattered was clearing those plugs — never mind the drowning.
He heard a noise like a Sherman tank raining from the sky.
Panic dawned as he imagined himself trapped, as he pictured himself speeding off the highway into a bridge stanchion same as his mother and brother, barreling headlong into a so-called gore point, thick snot somehow coming not from inside his sinuses but from the world itself.
Mason tasted something acrid, cloying like spilled petroleum.
He retched, but the thing down his throat still blocked the way.
And now he really was drowning … in whatever this was.
He heard that first voice again. Closer now, but still muffled as if by a pillow.
“NO NO NO NO NOOO!”
Sense departed. The world was made of confusion.
Powerful hands came from somewhere blind above, reaching under Mason’s arms to lift him.
More shouts, louder as his head broke through the viscous gel. He heard none of those shouts in any way that mattered. He’d swallowed some of the noxious liquid the long way around — in the nose, down the back of his throat. He didn’t care for conversation. Only for living.
Finding a latch point, he finally dislodged the thing in his throat and raked it aside. It went with much less fanfare than he’d imagined, sure by now that it was a long thing like a feeding tube. Things were better for a second, then became worse. He went from having something to nothing in his mouth, leaving the sludge free to seep inside.
With the help of strange hands, Mason found an edge to grab. He gripped its surface, felt air, gasped, slipped back down again, then swallowed more as the person holding him yelled for someone else to GET HIM OUT.
Then, with a mechanical sound, another unknown thing pressed upward against his feet. Mason’s hands went out for stability as his legs, curiously weak, wobbled. He felt smooth curved walls around him — a tube-shaped chamber. Light was dawning.
Fingers jabbed him. Yanked him. There were urgent grunts, counterpointed by the dripping of liquid. Mason tried to remove whatever was blocking his vision but found himself unable to focus on little more than his shallow breaths and battle for consciousness.
He heaved, waiting in the forced dim. He’d gone from vertical to horizontal. It didn’t feel elegant. This hesitant standing followed by a graceless slump to the deck. Then came the rattle of steps in an echoing room. Idle fingers fondled all they could reach — a metal surface underneath him, made ridged and rough for traction, like an elevated catwalk.
“Try to stay calm,” said a woman’s voice. “Let it pass naturally. Don’t force your breathing.”
Ludicrous. Mason was delirious enough to laugh. He hadn’t breathed properly since this started.
His mouth opened. Someone swore. Hands with short but tidy fingernails pushed his head sideways while a second set punched him in the abdomen. He vomited without intention or effort, the effluent like spent motor oil.
Something was pulled from his face. A band came off from around his head.
He was breathing normally but still without sight or understanding.
“Try not to ― Mason? Try not to move.”
Mason thought, I know you. Then those sensibly short fingernails were picking at his cheeks, removing what he now knew was surgical tape ― the kind that kept a patient’s eyes shut while doctors did their work.
Delicately, with a second press of fingers to stabilize his skin, someone pulled off the tape, taking care not to remove his lashes with the adhesive. As his eyes flickered, he saw a bright light directly above. He turned sideways to see without pain. In the relative dim, he could now make out the diver’s regulator that had been in his mouth and the blacked-out goggles over the tape to keep it dry.
What. The. Fuck?
Trying for calm and finding it impossible, Mason made himself roll again to absorb his strange surroundings.
He was in what looked like a short grain silo, sparsely illuminated and harsh where the lights hung. There was a metal gangway beneath him. Not far beyond that, Mason saw a circular pool perhaps four feet across — the vertical goo chamber he’d been pulled from, full of what looked like mucus. Leads and wires were affixed to the hinged lid above the thing, open now, a wheel on its top like a hatch in a submarine. More wires ran from the inside, now askew, some dangling into the liquid and some on the deck. Most were still affixed to Mason — to his scalp through a modified swim cap and to his body, which wore a strange and slippery suit with even more tape.
Mason closed his eyes, unable to take it all for long. He heard the shifting of bodies. His head was lifted, then set back on something soft.
He looked back up, his eyes adjusting.
Dakota had pulled him from the tank. And now alarms squealed behind her.
She ran a hand across his head and looked into his eyes. Mason couldn’t speak, so nothing was said.
The owner of the other voice, a man, had rushed down the fluted metal steps of the gangway and was talking into an old-fashioned corded phone ― a relic straight out of great-grandma’s kitchen.
“Uh-huh. Uh-huh. No, intact. But … Yeah, I thought the same thing. What? Oh, of course. Dakota’s watching him.” He vented an exasperated breath. “I don’t know, sir. You’re seeing the same thing as I am.”
He listened.
“Could you repeat that, please, sir?”
Listened again. Then he nodded and hung up without a reply. He glanced Mason’s way, reached for something, then carried it back up the gangway.
“Get me a towel, will you?” Dakota asked the man behind her.
“Step aside, Director Ward,” he said.
“Why?”
“Control says he’s compromised.”
“If anything, he’s stabilized.” Dakota looked down and slapped his cheeks. “Hey. What’s your name?”
“Mason. Mason Shaw.”
She looked up. “See? That’s not the answer he’d have given before.”
“Telemetry shows a schism. You know how deep he went.”
“Doesn’t matter. He’s out.”
“Glitched out,” said the man above Dakota, who stayed on the deck with Mason.
“You know the regulations.”
Dakota’s nerve broke. “He never should have been here!”
“Irrelevant. Please, Director. Step aside.”
Dakota stood. The man had stripes on the shoulder of his uniform and a holster on his belt. He came right up beside the pair of them, and Mason noted his holster was empty. That’s what the man had grabbed before coming back up here.
“Wait,” said Mason.
“It’s concussive,” he said, raising his weapon. “You won’t feel a thing.”
“WAIT!”
The gun fired. Mason flinched, waiting to die.
But the man hadn’t shot Mason. The report came from Dakota. Her weapon wasn’t odd at all. A plain old Beretta ― the same sidearm she’d carried on the force.
Blood spattered. The man’s body pounded the metal as alarms continued to screech.
Dakota extended a hand. Mason ― confused, cold, wet, and weak ― took it.
“Look what you made me do,” she said.
Then in bare feet, freezing and slipping, he ran with her to the backbeat of a rising klaxon.
SEVENTEEN
Medical Factors
Dakota shoved Mason through a door with a red bar on its front, though no additional alarms screamed when she opened it. Her trained heart slammed beats between their clasped hands as they made their exit. It was cold outside, and his limbs were still slow and weak. He was also barefoot and half-nude, dressed only in his boxers.
Mason’s disrupted clock balked at the nighttime. He was sure he’d been in the middle of a hot summer day only moments before. The truth was colder and darker, either past or before the sweeping moon. They’d emerged from a cold utility building ― one of those anonymous structures necessary to every city’s function but forgotten by its citizens. Gray and featureless, bearing no signs beyond KEEP OUT and TRESPASSING INMATES WILL BE SUMMARILY EXECUTED.
A row of posters Mason hadn’t seen before were plastered to one wall in an abbreviated line with the last only half-adhered. The ubiquitous black and white, with pink as the accent color. All showed four women in steampunk garb aiming machine guns at a cowering, uniformed lawman front and center. UNITE AND DESTROY, the legend read.
Strange.
But not as strange as the rest ― as the midnight California waking from a balmy Texas day, as the discordant reality and upside-down logic of the bank, as the liquid still in his lungs and drying to stinking flakes on his skin, as the dead man they’d left behind, as the draw of Dakota’s service weapon and the blood flecking her otherwise no-bullshit blouse.
Mason’s bare feet, greased with snot from the tank, slipped on a smooth section of pavement, and he went down.
Dakota turned back to grab him. “Hurry!”
“What the hell is happening?” he demanded.
“We have to go.”
“But what the fuck is happening?”
Mason saw the white room. The cluster of black dots ― more numerous and closer each time.
Something in his look must have alarmed her. She stopped despite the air’s apparent urgency, taking both of Mason’s cheeks in her hands to focus on his eyes. “Do you have a headache?”
“What’s―”
“Answer me. Do you have a headache?”
“No. Yes.”
“Which is it?”
“Yes!”
Dakota grabbed his wrist, took his pulse with two fingers. Then she pressed them to his neck to check his heart rate at his carotid artery.
“What’s your name?”
“Santa Claus.”
Something moved above. Dakota half-swore, the muffled sound coming out as a grunt. She dragged Mason toward the wall behind them, her strength impressive.
“Goddammit, what’s your name?”
“Again? I know my fucking name, okay?”
“Then tell me!” She looked up at a passing hum, perhaps a drone that had yet to cross their open sky. “Now!”
“Mason.”
“Mason, what?”
“Mason Shaw!”
“And who am I?”
It was hard to resist a sarcastic answer to that one. Mrs. Claus. Abraham Lincoln. My partner. My lover. Jeremiah the Reefer Thief. But Dakota’s face with those intense eyebrows told him to speak straight. What he didn’t understand, she very much did. And though she’d never admit as much, she was terrified by it.
“Dakota. Dakota Ward. Former internal affairs for USPD, now director of intake for the Revival Corporation’s privatized HRO 22, Union Station, California. What do I win?”
She blinked but said nothing. It looked like a reserved comment held for later. Then she startled yet again at something above them that Mason couldn’t see and ducked back without answering.
Dakota planted one foot on a box then sprung upward with her arms extended overhead. She grabbed a machine just above the gutter — a giant thing, churning in her grip like the deck of a running lawnmower. She used gravity and her core to pike the thing downward, driving it hard against the concrete with a devastating crack.
The machine sputtered before slowing. Dakota popped a compartment on its back, one she’d clearly known where to find. Its lights died, and the hulk became a hunk of dead metal. Dakota threw something ― whatever she’d yanked from its innards ― away with a clatter.
“Is that a prison drone?” Mason asked, gawking. “How … How did you …”
Dakota grabbed his hand and pulled. He popped upright like a Jack-in-the-Box. She led again, faster now, hauling him around corners, every tug as easy for her as dragging a rag doll. She could probably lift a car. Maybe leap tall buildings in a single bound while running faster than a speeding bullet. Had she always been this strong? Or was Dakota drawing on the reserves every duty cop developed eventually ― her body somehow knowing it was now or never?
Four Eyes chuckled. They were all in on some joke to which Mason wasn’t privy.
She was still holding that sheet of foil between its ends. The scroll looked metallic and semi-rigid but didn’t crinkle as it moved. Dust filtered through the fluorescent light in the hallway, spilling in from the lobby. But contrasting the rumble and gut feel of a melee, the noises seemed to be traveling in the opposite direction. Wrapping up rather than gaining volume. Big sounds moving paradoxically farther, like a concert ramping up as a car drove away.
“Look at me,” she said.
Movement behind Four Eyes caught Mason’s eye. The hallway itself flickered from solid to wireframe. From finished concept to pencil lines on a blueprint. Everything was rotoscoped. An artist’s lines chasing the truth of every surface.
Four Eyes had moved his hands from Mason’s head and was looking at his tablet.
Mason couldn’t see the screen. Only the flash of something there ― something bad, judging by sound and color ― reflected in the glasses.
“He’s edging.”
“Mason. Try to focus.”
More flashing, accompanied by a weak beep. “Almost critical now.”
The gunner still had his weapon. “We need to end this. Try again later.”
“There is no later.”
The hallway turned black and white, though the room’s occupants clung to their color. No decorations or pictures or posters or plants. Just this living sketch that hurt Mason’s head. Made his leg kick and his ribcage lurch and jive.
“Fuck. He’s seizing.”
“Mason!”
And in that moment, it all suddenly became clear to Mason. He didn’t know all the wheres and hows and whys and whats, but some deep part of him understood slivers of what was happening. He didn’t know these people or whether he was about to die or be killed, but he was causing this. It was involuntary, like an allergic reaction.
But it was all his fault.
He was sure this had happened to his father before he’d slipped into the vacant abyss.
How many fingers, Mason?
Somehow it mattered.
An instant later, Mason’s eyes flickered, and the four of them weren’t grappling inside a bank’s back-office anymore. They were in a bright white nothingness, a chandelier of black dots hanging above them.
“He won’t go quiet,” said Four Eyes. “I can’t fix his signal. I’m not going to be able to do this, Calliope.”
“Try.”
“I’m goddamn trying!”
“Then fix his identity, so we can at least find him again! Do your job, and let me do mine!”
“Fixing his identity won’t be enough to—!”
“Stay or go,” said the woman precisely, speaking to Mason with an annoyed glance at her bespectacled companion. “You have to decide.”
The disorienting sensation was worsening. The icon flashed faster on the tablet, beeping with ever more urgency.
A man made out of pencil strokes appeared behind Four Eyes, but the gunner saw him coming. The chicken bone weapon swung toward the doorway then blew a hole through the new man’s chest. A SWAT officer, if Mason had to guess, though he was all lines and scratches to Mason’s eye. Not a man so much as a cartoon. Guts made of powdered pencil lead struck the wall, leaving an amateur’s sketch.
Four Eyes said, “They’re coming in. For extraction.”
“Us,” the woman pressed, patient now only with effort, “or them.” A choice pinning him down … or the dead officer in the hallway.
Mason tried to focus and understand his part in this. It gave him a headache. He could stay, or he could go. He could be taken by the coming SWAT team, or he could … well, he could do whatever these people were up to. They were willing to “fix his identity,” it seemed.
Ride. Don’t drive.
“Do whatever the fuck you want.” Mason closed his eyes, unable to stop himself from seeing the world dangling on a broken hinge. “Just do it fast.”
The woman pushed the strange foil thing over his face. She moved over him, all of her barely-substantial weight pressing down, choking Mason into suffocation.
Panic settled in as his breathing grew labored.
He fought.
And fought.
But then Mason ran out of breath. The black and white patterns returned even behind closed eyelids, and he fell down a deep dark hole as he spun and slipped and―
SIXTEEN
Submerged
―thrashed and choked as his limbs struck hard surfaces, legs dangling and kicking nothing.
The feeling was back. That sense of running in syrup, every movement slowed as if by invisible bands on his limbs.
Then came a voice from very far away. “He’s seizing!”
Another, this one muffled as if coming from a different room through paper-thin walls. “Goddammit, reinforce!”
The world was liquid. Mason was flying, no longer flat on the ground. Flying or falling — he wasn’t sure which. He couldn’t see. His stomach grew light, hanging like a cartoon character already inches on the wrong side of a cliff.
Mason tried to open his eyes, but something held them shut. He couldn’t feel the gunner’s weight on his chest or the stilling hands of the man in glasses — and seconds-ago moments felt like years passed already. He couldn’t remember details of his bank adventure. He saw nothing and could focus on less. Felt only sludge and confinement.
The intense woman with the brush-blonde crew cut was gone, that much Mason was sure of even with his eyes held tight. He could tell by feel that her suffocating contraption no longer covered his face. But he still couldn’t breathe. There seemed to be a fist down his throat.
He thrashed in the abject darkness, flailed his arms. Knuckles cracked against something unseen. His hands flew to his mouth to find and clear the obstruction. There was, indeed, something large between his lips. Whatever-it-was covered his entire mouth, blocking his airway.
Mason pulled, but it didn’t budge an inch.
He reached up, found plugs in his nose. He was growing dizzy, brain blitzed by dawning asphyxia. Fingers became claws, and Mason raked the plugs with the urgency of prey fleeing a predator. It didn’t matter that he was, apparently and inexplicably, floating in liquid. All that mattered was clearing those plugs — never mind the drowning.
He heard a noise like a Sherman tank raining from the sky.
Panic dawned as he imagined himself trapped, as he pictured himself speeding off the highway into a bridge stanchion same as his mother and brother, barreling headlong into a so-called gore point, thick snot somehow coming not from inside his sinuses but from the world itself.
Mason tasted something acrid, cloying like spilled petroleum.
He retched, but the thing down his throat still blocked the way.
And now he really was drowning … in whatever this was.
He heard that first voice again. Closer now, but still muffled as if by a pillow.
“NO NO NO NO NOOO!”
Sense departed. The world was made of confusion.
Powerful hands came from somewhere blind above, reaching under Mason’s arms to lift him.
More shouts, louder as his head broke through the viscous gel. He heard none of those shouts in any way that mattered. He’d swallowed some of the noxious liquid the long way around — in the nose, down the back of his throat. He didn’t care for conversation. Only for living.
Finding a latch point, he finally dislodged the thing in his throat and raked it aside. It went with much less fanfare than he’d imagined, sure by now that it was a long thing like a feeding tube. Things were better for a second, then became worse. He went from having something to nothing in his mouth, leaving the sludge free to seep inside.
With the help of strange hands, Mason found an edge to grab. He gripped its surface, felt air, gasped, slipped back down again, then swallowed more as the person holding him yelled for someone else to GET HIM OUT.
Then, with a mechanical sound, another unknown thing pressed upward against his feet. Mason’s hands went out for stability as his legs, curiously weak, wobbled. He felt smooth curved walls around him — a tube-shaped chamber. Light was dawning.
Fingers jabbed him. Yanked him. There were urgent grunts, counterpointed by the dripping of liquid. Mason tried to remove whatever was blocking his vision but found himself unable to focus on little more than his shallow breaths and battle for consciousness.
He heaved, waiting in the forced dim. He’d gone from vertical to horizontal. It didn’t feel elegant. This hesitant standing followed by a graceless slump to the deck. Then came the rattle of steps in an echoing room. Idle fingers fondled all they could reach — a metal surface underneath him, made ridged and rough for traction, like an elevated catwalk.
“Try to stay calm,” said a woman’s voice. “Let it pass naturally. Don’t force your breathing.”
Ludicrous. Mason was delirious enough to laugh. He hadn’t breathed properly since this started.
His mouth opened. Someone swore. Hands with short but tidy fingernails pushed his head sideways while a second set punched him in the abdomen. He vomited without intention or effort, the effluent like spent motor oil.
Something was pulled from his face. A band came off from around his head.
He was breathing normally but still without sight or understanding.
“Try not to ― Mason? Try not to move.”
Mason thought, I know you. Then those sensibly short fingernails were picking at his cheeks, removing what he now knew was surgical tape ― the kind that kept a patient’s eyes shut while doctors did their work.
Delicately, with a second press of fingers to stabilize his skin, someone pulled off the tape, taking care not to remove his lashes with the adhesive. As his eyes flickered, he saw a bright light directly above. He turned sideways to see without pain. In the relative dim, he could now make out the diver’s regulator that had been in his mouth and the blacked-out goggles over the tape to keep it dry.
What. The. Fuck?
Trying for calm and finding it impossible, Mason made himself roll again to absorb his strange surroundings.
He was in what looked like a short grain silo, sparsely illuminated and harsh where the lights hung. There was a metal gangway beneath him. Not far beyond that, Mason saw a circular pool perhaps four feet across — the vertical goo chamber he’d been pulled from, full of what looked like mucus. Leads and wires were affixed to the hinged lid above the thing, open now, a wheel on its top like a hatch in a submarine. More wires ran from the inside, now askew, some dangling into the liquid and some on the deck. Most were still affixed to Mason — to his scalp through a modified swim cap and to his body, which wore a strange and slippery suit with even more tape.
Mason closed his eyes, unable to take it all for long. He heard the shifting of bodies. His head was lifted, then set back on something soft.
He looked back up, his eyes adjusting.
Dakota had pulled him from the tank. And now alarms squealed behind her.
She ran a hand across his head and looked into his eyes. Mason couldn’t speak, so nothing was said.
The owner of the other voice, a man, had rushed down the fluted metal steps of the gangway and was talking into an old-fashioned corded phone ― a relic straight out of great-grandma’s kitchen.
“Uh-huh. Uh-huh. No, intact. But … Yeah, I thought the same thing. What? Oh, of course. Dakota’s watching him.” He vented an exasperated breath. “I don’t know, sir. You’re seeing the same thing as I am.”
He listened.
“Could you repeat that, please, sir?”
Listened again. Then he nodded and hung up without a reply. He glanced Mason’s way, reached for something, then carried it back up the gangway.
“Get me a towel, will you?” Dakota asked the man behind her.
“Step aside, Director Ward,” he said.
“Why?”
“Control says he’s compromised.”
“If anything, he’s stabilized.” Dakota looked down and slapped his cheeks. “Hey. What’s your name?”
“Mason. Mason Shaw.”
She looked up. “See? That’s not the answer he’d have given before.”
“Telemetry shows a schism. You know how deep he went.”
“Doesn’t matter. He’s out.”
“Glitched out,” said the man above Dakota, who stayed on the deck with Mason.
“You know the regulations.”
Dakota’s nerve broke. “He never should have been here!”
“Irrelevant. Please, Director. Step aside.”
Dakota stood. The man had stripes on the shoulder of his uniform and a holster on his belt. He came right up beside the pair of them, and Mason noted his holster was empty. That’s what the man had grabbed before coming back up here.
“Wait,” said Mason.
“It’s concussive,” he said, raising his weapon. “You won’t feel a thing.”
“WAIT!”
The gun fired. Mason flinched, waiting to die.
But the man hadn’t shot Mason. The report came from Dakota. Her weapon wasn’t odd at all. A plain old Beretta ― the same sidearm she’d carried on the force.
Blood spattered. The man’s body pounded the metal as alarms continued to screech.
Dakota extended a hand. Mason ― confused, cold, wet, and weak ― took it.
“Look what you made me do,” she said.
Then in bare feet, freezing and slipping, he ran with her to the backbeat of a rising klaxon.
SEVENTEEN
Medical Factors
Dakota shoved Mason through a door with a red bar on its front, though no additional alarms screamed when she opened it. Her trained heart slammed beats between their clasped hands as they made their exit. It was cold outside, and his limbs were still slow and weak. He was also barefoot and half-nude, dressed only in his boxers.
Mason’s disrupted clock balked at the nighttime. He was sure he’d been in the middle of a hot summer day only moments before. The truth was colder and darker, either past or before the sweeping moon. They’d emerged from a cold utility building ― one of those anonymous structures necessary to every city’s function but forgotten by its citizens. Gray and featureless, bearing no signs beyond KEEP OUT and TRESPASSING INMATES WILL BE SUMMARILY EXECUTED.
A row of posters Mason hadn’t seen before were plastered to one wall in an abbreviated line with the last only half-adhered. The ubiquitous black and white, with pink as the accent color. All showed four women in steampunk garb aiming machine guns at a cowering, uniformed lawman front and center. UNITE AND DESTROY, the legend read.
Strange.
But not as strange as the rest ― as the midnight California waking from a balmy Texas day, as the discordant reality and upside-down logic of the bank, as the liquid still in his lungs and drying to stinking flakes on his skin, as the dead man they’d left behind, as the draw of Dakota’s service weapon and the blood flecking her otherwise no-bullshit blouse.
Mason’s bare feet, greased with snot from the tank, slipped on a smooth section of pavement, and he went down.
Dakota turned back to grab him. “Hurry!”
“What the hell is happening?” he demanded.
“We have to go.”
“But what the fuck is happening?”
Mason saw the white room. The cluster of black dots ― more numerous and closer each time.
Something in his look must have alarmed her. She stopped despite the air’s apparent urgency, taking both of Mason’s cheeks in her hands to focus on his eyes. “Do you have a headache?”
“What’s―”
“Answer me. Do you have a headache?”
“No. Yes.”
“Which is it?”
“Yes!”
Dakota grabbed his wrist, took his pulse with two fingers. Then she pressed them to his neck to check his heart rate at his carotid artery.
“What’s your name?”
“Santa Claus.”
Something moved above. Dakota half-swore, the muffled sound coming out as a grunt. She dragged Mason toward the wall behind them, her strength impressive.
“Goddammit, what’s your name?”
“Again? I know my fucking name, okay?”
“Then tell me!” She looked up at a passing hum, perhaps a drone that had yet to cross their open sky. “Now!”
“Mason.”
“Mason, what?”
“Mason Shaw!”
“And who am I?”
It was hard to resist a sarcastic answer to that one. Mrs. Claus. Abraham Lincoln. My partner. My lover. Jeremiah the Reefer Thief. But Dakota’s face with those intense eyebrows told him to speak straight. What he didn’t understand, she very much did. And though she’d never admit as much, she was terrified by it.
“Dakota. Dakota Ward. Former internal affairs for USPD, now director of intake for the Revival Corporation’s privatized HRO 22, Union Station, California. What do I win?”
She blinked but said nothing. It looked like a reserved comment held for later. Then she startled yet again at something above them that Mason couldn’t see and ducked back without answering.
Dakota planted one foot on a box then sprung upward with her arms extended overhead. She grabbed a machine just above the gutter — a giant thing, churning in her grip like the deck of a running lawnmower. She used gravity and her core to pike the thing downward, driving it hard against the concrete with a devastating crack.
The machine sputtered before slowing. Dakota popped a compartment on its back, one she’d clearly known where to find. Its lights died, and the hulk became a hunk of dead metal. Dakota threw something ― whatever she’d yanked from its innards ― away with a clatter.
“Is that a prison drone?” Mason asked, gawking. “How … How did you …”
Dakota grabbed his hand and pulled. He popped upright like a Jack-in-the-Box. She led again, faster now, hauling him around corners, every tug as easy for her as dragging a rag doll. She could probably lift a car. Maybe leap tall buildings in a single bound while running faster than a speeding bullet. Had she always been this strong? Or was Dakota drawing on the reserves every duty cop developed eventually ― her body somehow knowing it was now or never?
