Chapter 13
THE QUESTIONS CONTINUE SPORADICALLY FOR the hours that follow, though they’re blessedly punctuated by long periods of silence.
When they do come, they’re personal but absently asked, almost offensively unimportant.
Things like whether I prefer the sun on a cold day or the shade on a hot one.
Running or swimming. Sleeping on my back or my side.
I remain entirely mystified as to their purpose, but answer truthfully.
No reason to risk my chance of finally finding out what in the hell is going on.
Old Woman’s been resting her eyes for almost the past thirty minutes—not surprising, given it’s very early morning now—and I’m just beginning to hope that we might be nearing the end of our journey, when she suddenly opens them again, and leans forward.
“So tell me, Azure. How did you get started in all of this?”
“Working for the Keres?” She nods. “I was a Runner. You know—for anything you wanted kept completely off-net. But after the Ten-O-Ten commercial amendment got its seven-year renewal, I signed up for a bunch of trials. A lot of new businesses jumping into the market, back then, and plenty of us looking for a way to make more tokens past Basic. Not sure which one the Keres got my DNA from, but that’s when they realised I was compatible with revs.
They were offering a hell of a lot better pay, and as a bonus it was all legal. ”
Her brow furrows even more than it does naturally. “Why do you hate them, then? The lifers?”
“Hate them?” I reflect her surprise back at her.
“You don’t?”
“Why would I?”
“You kill an awful lot of them.”
“For tokens,” I emphasise, slightly offended. “It’s my job.”
“It has to be more than that. Surely.”
I frown. “You don’t hire an exterminator because he hates roaches. You hire him because you do. Maybe he hates them too, but he kills them because that’s what he’s paid to do. It’s what he’s good at. It’s his role in society.”
“So you see lifers as cockroaches?”
“I don’t. Society does,” I emphasise.
Old Woman gestures, a little disbelievingly. “You make it sound so simple, Azure. But you are an assassin. You cannot be unaware of the moral culpability of your job.”
“Ten-O-Ten kid here, remember? Your generation created the problem. My parents’ generation, and then mine, overwhelmingly voted to solve it.
” I’m no saint, but this outdated line of thinking annoys me.
“Or maybe everyone with enough credits should be allowed to live forever, while the rest of the world deals with pop-control restrictions? With two-thirds of us crammed into megacities, and everybody else trying not to starve on the Lat-60 belt? Hell. Morally culpable? I may do this job for the tokens, but if anything, I’m an extension of morality.
Not yours, maybe. But the real world’s.” I’m not heated.
I’m not. Just firm. Really, really firm. And maybe a little loud.
Old Woman says nothing as I finish. Eventually, she nods. Not agreement or approval, just an acknowledgement. “You intend to keep doing it, then?”
I shrug. Irritation passing. “How many lifers on record, now, worldwide?”
“About seven thousand?”
“Enough to keep me in tokens for a while.” Seven thousand. Seven thousand out of one and a half billion. And they wonder why people like me exist. “Of course, if things—”
I cut off as the container shivers.
There’s only that moment of warning and then I’m suddenly sliding forward with the abrupt arresting of our momentum.
I throw myself to the side, barely managing to avoid slamming into Old Woman and instead hitting the container wall with a forceful, and mildly painful, thud.
The light bar does the same, but with far less success. It shatters.
“I think we’ve stopped,” I groan into the sudden, and absolute, darkness.
“I think you might be right. Thanks for dodging.”
“My pleasure.” I roll my shoulder, feeling at the point of impact and looking around vainly. The container’s sealed airtight. Even my ocular revs won’t be any use in here without the light bar. “Don’t move until the lid cracks. That glass will be everywhere.”
There’s a few seconds of silence. Then a few more.
A jolt, and the container starts to move again.
“Um.” I shift. “Wouldn’t this be the point where the bot lets us out?”
“It’s alright. We’re probably just in a queue.”
Another few seconds. We’re still moving. Slower than before, but definitely moving.
A faint sound ahead. A kind of crackling and zipping. “I’m not sure we want to be in this queue.”
“I marked the container for storage, not disposal.” Old Woman’s voice is almost more protesting than concerned. “I’m sure! I told the bot to—”
“Maybe let’s talk about your coding skills later.” The blade I took from Fish Boy is in the satchel. I rummage around until I find it. If we were still in the Loop, we wouldn’t be able to hear whatever it is up ahead. Breaching the container probably won’t result in our suffocation. “Hold still.”
“Why?”
I grip her with my left hand, holding her firmly out of the way. “Because there’s a reason people use the phrase ‘stab in the dark.’ ”
“What? Oh.” I feel her go very still beneath my hand. “Alright.”
I activate my somatics in my arm, torso, waist, and legs.
Swivel, and slam the knife as hard as I can into the plastic.
The titanium blade is well-made and sharp but the toxic waste container is, well, a toxic waste container.
Shock ricochets up my arm but there’s no time to shake it off; I rip the metal out of the wall and stab again, and again, and again in a frenzy of power and precision.
There’s a slit of light as I successfully hit in precisely the same place several times in a row; as soon as I have that, my ocular revs enhance everything.
The titanium in my hand is looking the worse for wear, but still functional enough. Old Woman is standing with eyes wide and fearful, staring straight ahead, flinching at every echoing strike. Probably not enough illumination for her to make out much more than the slit itself, yet.
I switch my attack perpendicular to the original, creating a thin cross of light. Then I hold the increasingly battered knife between my teeth, and punch.
Again. My knuckles begin to bleed. Again. My revs are absorbing the damage but it still hurts.
There’s a cracking sound on the third try. On the fourth, my fist makes it through. I rip away the thick flaps of broken plastic and peer through the gap.
We’re in a fluorescent-lit tunnel—larger than the Loop, but not by much. Ahead are four containers identical to ours, dangling from a conveyer. The front one is going through a sort of doorway, into a room-sized area beyond. A glass shield slides shut behind it.
There’s the blinding blaze of a plasma furnace igniting. When my vision recovers, the container is gone.
I start stabbing and ripping again. A touch more frenetically than before. The conveyer swings us forward.
“What do you see?”
“Not… really… important… right…now.” The blade’s not holding up well, but the wall’s weakened. I toss the metal aside and start using both hands to madly rip away shreds, using every rev I have to enlarge the hole.
It’s the size of my head. The next container gets evaporated.
“Oh dear.” Old Woman has moved enough to peek through the gap.
“Yep,” I snarl between grunts as I continue tearing at the wall. The container two spaces ahead of us is in the plasma furnace. Then isn’t. I peel off two more strips, enough to widen the hole to allow for shoulders.
Good enough.
I pick up Old Woman. She shrieks in protest. I ignore her. “Out we go.” I thread her through, head first. She kicks and then, finally accepting I’m still trying to save her life, does an ungainly wiggle through and vanishes.
The glass shield is sliding shut behind the container ahead of us. I slide myself through the gap, skin scraping against the jagged edges of the very much mangled hard plastic. I’m bigger than Old Woman. It’s a tight fit.
I slither through and hit the ground with a roll, coming up just in time to see our container slide forward and vanish behind the glass.
A few metres away, Old Woman is sprawled, staring at the ceiling. For a concerning moment I wonder if she’s dead, but then she gives a little sigh and turns to face me. “Who did you tell, Azure?”
It takes me a second to get her meaning. “No one. You need to take a look at your programming.”
“My code was just fine. Someone meddled after the fact.” Cool certainty in her voice. “We’re not at our destination yet. You lie to me, you don’t get your answers.”
“I didn’t tell anyone,” I insist, a little irritably. “How the hell would I have even gotten word out? I haven’t had ’net access.”
She laughs tiredly. “Maybe it was me, then.” Something wry about the statement, though I can’t see what.
Hauls herself to her feet, apparently unharmed bar a few scratches.
Tougher than she looks. “We can’t hang around for too long now—there are a million sensors in this tunnel.
The people after us will know we’re here within the hour.
I know where we are, though, at least. Exit’s this way.
” She limps off to the right, around the side of the plasma furnace.
Definitely not feeling concerned, I follow.