The Eternal Prison (19 page)

 

I closed my eyes.
Why not?
The universe was protecting me. I imagined Gleason next to me, her tiny body tucked easily into the copilot’s seat, saying something mean.
Oh, Avery’s cold-blooded. Avery’s
scary. Or,
Avery can pull a trigger. Avery’s a fucking
trained monkey. I smiled, thinking of her. She was safe now, at least.

 

I opened my eyes and was startled to see Michaleen, Marlena, and Grisha running for the hover, the skinny Russian hanging off Marlena, blood from a deep scalp wound covering his face. His glasses hung from his nose and one ear, bent and shattered, but the crazy bastard was smiling lazily, like something wonderful had just occurred to him.

 

I smacked my head against the low ceiling of the cockpit as I stood and made it to the open hatch as they arrived.

 

“Damn, son,” Michaleen said breathlessly, grinning the most natural smile I’d ever seen on his sharp, edged face. “You
are
pretty good dealing the cards, eh? Sure, sure.”

 

“Grisha here left them some surprises,” Marlena said, grinning.

 

“Where’s Bartlett?” I asked. Marlena pushed Grisha up at me like a sack of groceries, and Michaleen vaulted into the drop bay like a man of fifty, muttering under his breath.

 

“He’s back there being an asshole,” Marlena panted, taking my offered hand and pulling herself up. “And probably having his old badge shoved up his ass. The old woman he moons around got snatched up, taken down—
under
us, man; that’s where all this mystery shit happens. He said he had to go after her.”

 

I glanced at the cockpit, where Michaleen had disappeared. “You just left him?”

 

She was dragging Grisha toward the back wall where the safety netting was. “The
cop?
Uh, yeah, Avery. We left the
cop.
No one was stopping him from coming along.”

 

For a moment I just stood there, slightly hunched in the open hatch. I was calm—I had no worries. I was on the rail. “I’m gonna go extract them.”

 

“What?” Marlena was busy strapping Grisha in. Then she turned and glared at me. “Extract?
Them?
What the
fuck
is wrong with you?”

 

I shrugged. “We all get out. The cop’s part of this,” I said easily. I hadn’t made any promises, but you didn’t just leave someone behind because it was convenient. I didn’t say anything about Salgado and our conversation. She’d told me not to worry about her, but I thought it might be good to snatch her back, if only to deny Marin whatever she had in her head. I studied Grisha, who’d gone unconscious. I jerked my head toward the cockpit. “Don’t let that fucking midget take off without us,” I said, giving her a little smile.

 

She was still hunched over the Russian, head twisted back toward me. She blinked and opened her mouth and then something took hold of my shoulder and pulled, hard, and I was sailing through the air. I landed on my ass, teeth clicking together on my tongue and filling my mouth with blood, pain shooting up my leg and directly into my brain.

 

My non-Crusher, the bearded one from the train Bartlett had taken out just a few days ago, stepped quickly toward me, snapping out its shithead-be-good stick with a smart twitch of its wrist. Grinning, it swung and cracked the club against my head, spinning me over backward, my skull smacking against the hard-packed ground.

 

With a sudden roar, the hover lurched up, an ugly liftoff that had it fishtailing, displacers whining unhappily. My non-Crusher grunted, stumbling as the displacement hit it. I stared up, head swimming, as the hover smoothed out and began rising into the hot, smoky air. Marlena’s head had appeared over the edge, staring down, her face a wide mask of surprise, one hand stretched out down toward me.

 

Then the hover shot upward, shrinking fast. The non-Crusher, fat face bristling with real-looking dark whiskers, appeared in its place. “Welcome back,” it hissed, and swung its arm down again.

 

 

 

 

XV

A MARKO ORIGINAL

 

 

 

 

I looked around, the silence so thick and dusty it almost sizzled. “No alarms?”

 

Krasa shook her head, her eye moving around the room in quick flashes. “No need. Our badge sigs won’t work anywhere, so no doors will open for us anyway. They know where we are.” She removed her badge, tossing it onto the floor without looking at it. It glowed there like a cold ember. “We’re trapped in here until the Worms show up.”

 

Marko had removed his badge as well and was holding it in front of him, staring at it.

 

“Guess you’ve been de-promoted,” I said. I twisted my hands and held them out in front of me. “Maybe we don’t need this anymore?”

 

Krasa glanced at me, her eyes distant. “What does it matter? You’re going to be scooped up with us.”

 

“Who is speaking?”
Amblen whispered, his voice a hiss all around us.
“Who is there? Dr. Marko?”

 

I twisted my wrists, bracing for pain out of old habit, and gave a sharp tug in opposite directions. I felt nothing, though, as one of my hands popped free. I let the bracelets drop to the floor. “We can’t just sit here,” I said, trying to stay calm and reasonable.

 

“We can’t just
let
them.” I’d come too far. I’d been through too much. I’d had too many people die on me. I’d killed too many.

 

“
I need to be in my
lab,” Amblen whispered.

 

I looked up at the ceiling, imagining Internal Affairs, fucking avatars, making their way to us, burrowing through the steel and rock of the building, spreading webs of wires apart to slide through, their eyes clouded and blind in the darkness. The Worms come to eat Krasa and do worse to me. An uneasy shiver of fear swept through me. If the cops were scared… shit, that didn’t leave much for the rest of us. “Where’s your lab?” I said to the air.

 

For a moment there was just the sizzle of that unnatural silence. Then Amblen’s voice:
“Who is there? Dr. Marko?”

 

“Where’s your
fucking
lab, you dead shit, or I’ll tear you out of the wall and break your brick in half, okay?”

 

The sizzle again. Marko looked up at me sharply and blinked, his eyes coming back to life. Then Amblen again, sounding stronger, louder.

 

“You’re a rude person, whoever you are. Dr. Marko? Are you still here? I will not deal with this person.”

 

I opened my mouth, but Marko waved at me and stepped forward, looking around as if Amblen were in the air between us. “I’m here, Dr. Amblen. I apologize for my… assistant. He’s not very bright, and things he doesn’t understand anger him.” I raised an eyebrow at the Techie, and he flushed, turning his back to me. “We need to know where your lab is, Dr. Amblen, so we can take you there.”

 

I nodded to myself and decided to forgive Marko the insult. At least the kid was still working it. Walking over to Krasa, I waited until the last second and then flashed my arm up, intending to slap her across the face. Her arm came up fast and blocked me, and for a moment we stood there, our forearms touching, a few inches apart, her breath coming in short snorts through her nose, her golden eye catching the flat white light and blazing at me.

 

“Oh, are you awake again?” I said. “Sorry. For a moment there it looked like you were going to pull the fucking covers over your head and have a good fucking cry. They’re coming, right? You got, what, a minute? Two?”

 

She swallowed. “They will take their time,” she said. “What’s the rush?”

 

“You going to cry, Krasa?” I said.

 

Her nose flared. I wondered if that fucking eye of hers could beam out lasers or some shit—if there was any possibility, this would be the moment.

 

She blinked. “How?”

 

It was a clipped, businesslike syllable, and it gave me some hope. “Mr. Marko?” I said without looking away. “Any thoughts on escaping this building?”

 

“None whatsoever,” he said amiably. “We’re dead.”

 

I made fists. I wanted to hit him a little, knock the life back into him. “Well, let’s start small,” I said, pushing the words out. “Can you open the fucking door?”

 

“Sure,” he said. “Dr. Amblen? Where is your lab?”

 

A memory bubbled up suddenly—of course I knew where Amblen’s lab was.
Everyone
on the streets knew that or at least knew where it was rumored to be. “The Star,” I said. “It’s in the goddamn Star.”

 

“The Star,” Marko said under his breath. “Sure, of course.”

 

“You might call it that,”
Amblen’s voice complained.
“Street trash call it that, yes.
We
called it Liberty Island.”

 

Corny,
I thought. “Marko, open the damn door,” I suggested. “Let’s get moving.”

 

“Sure, sure,” Marko muttered vaguely, looking like he was happy to just stand there and stare around, absorbing knowledge from the air or some such shit. I strode over to him and took hold of his jacket, yanking him off his feet like he weighed nothing and tossing him across the room toward the door. He spun awkwardly and danced a few steps, arms out, until he caught himself against the wall.

 

“Open the fucking door,” I suggested again. “Or I’ll beat the beard off you, okay?”

 

He stared at me and then surprised me by smiling. “Good to be working with you again, you psychopath,” he said and turned to examine the door, one hand disappearing into a side pocket, searching.

 

I nodded and turned toward the wall of sockets, taking the brick in my hand. “Dr. Amblen, I’m going to unplug you now.”

 

“Un
plug?
What the —”

 

I tore the cable from the wall, and his voice disappeared.

 

“Don’t do it that way,” Marko called from the door, sounding calm but irritated. “You could corrupt his data profile. Scramble him.”

 

I studied the brick. I couldn’t feel it, but I had a sense that it was warm. Made me think of someone’s brain inside it, like a compacted Monk, and I wanted to put it down and wash my hands. I slipped it into the pocket of my coat and looked at Krasa, scrubbing my hands against my shirt. “Weapons?”

 

She looked at me for a second and then nodded, kneeling down and extracting a nice-looking small automatic from her ankle holster and handing it over to me.

 

Krasa pulled her own auto. “I’m not going alive,” she said to it, eye moving up and down, admiring. “Let’s try, but if it comes to a decision, I’d rather be dead.”

 

“Speak for yourself,
Officer.
How do we get out?”

 

She started pacing, which I took as an encouraging sign. I felt nothing—no rush of adrenaline, no pounding heart, nothing. Prison had burned it all out of me.

 

“Got any allies?”

 

She snapped her hand up and waved it at me. “Fuck, allies. We’re all dead. Police. Everyone’s a goddamn robot now.”

 

I wasted a second or two staring at her. “I thought System Pigs were tough.” I pictured her handling me so easily on the street, calloused hands shutting me down the old-fashioned way. “How’d you become a cop?”

 

She was looking around as if dazed. “I scored well on a test,” she said, finally focusing on me. “When I was a kid.”

 

“There,” Marko hissed from across the room. The door sagged open, like it had gotten tired of holding itself shut. “Come on.”

 

Krasa fell into step next to me. “Drop your badges,” I suggested. “So they can’t trace us.”

 

“We’re tagged,” Krasa said, her voice firming up as we approached the door. “Subdermal chip. They can track us anywhere in the System.”

 

We stopped at the door.
I
wasn’t tagged. And I had Amblen in my pocket—I didn’t need two burned ex-SSF leading every fucking Worm in the world right to me. From this moment forward, I realized, my life would be incredibly simplified if I left Marko and Krasa behind. My finger moved to the trigger on the piece-of-shit auto, and then off—I’d made a deal, of sorts, with Krasa. I could walk away from her, give her fair warning, but to just clip her from behind was weak. Grimacing for myself, I took a deep breath.

 

“This is your building,” I said, my voice low as we listened to the foyer’s air. “I’m all ears.”

 

“Morgue,” Marko said immediately, peering through the crack of the open door. “Go out with the bodies. Dumped into transport every night and hovered over to incineration. Hover’s autopilot, all Droid.”

 

Fucking efficient. I turned back and retrieved Krasa’s badge from the floor.

 

“They’ll see our tags, asshole,” Krasa complained. “They’ll dig us out.”

 

“Where are the tags?” I asked.

 

She moved her eye to me. “Back, over the right shoulder. Deep. You can’t miss the scar,” she said in a low, steady voice, like she was filling up with herself again, slowly firming up. “Why?”

 

I ignored the question. “Marko, how do we get to the morgue?”

 

“Easy peasy. All roads in this building lead to the morgue.”

 

He said it flatly, without emotion, and I got the feeling it was a phrase he’d coined a long time ago, a Marko original. I wanted to twist his nose again.