Broken People (20 page)

As the descent began, her body instinctively
reacted, preparing the robo-suit for landing. She’d done it in
training countless times. Never during battle, though. She hadn’t
made it that far. Sometimes, she wondered what her life would have
been like if that storage facility she was in hadn’t exploded. What
if the circus crew hadn’t salvaged a pile of scrap metal, finding
her inside?

The ground shook under her feet when she
landed. She missed flying already. The flip she’d performed turned
her around so she was facing the tent. Inside, the aerialists had
to have started their act already. The robo-suit’s internal clock
said so. One would think they had a lot in common since they were
all passionate about flying, but Fei Lin didn’t feel any connection
with them. It was difficult to forge any when she only spoke a few
words in their language. The translation module had been disabled,
along with other functions. For obvious reasons, she couldn’t tell
Rake and Spinner about it. After all, she was the enemy.

The crowd cheered and yelled something she
understood to mean “more”. There were four more charges in the
cannon, enough for the rest of the night. To the delight of the
kids, she did a little victory dance. She picked two faces in the
crowd her database had identified as having been there before. To
the horror of their parents, because she stood a half-meter taller
than everyone else, she high-fived them. Her helmet was unable to
convey emotions, but light flashed on the breastplate of the
robo-suit.

It was all part of the show. They had
trained her well. Granted, she had to earn her keep somehow. No one
would feed her—or, in her case, provide the required nutrients—for
doing nothing. Once she’d been discovered in the junkyard, she was
lucky no one had cut the robo-suit and sold it by the ton, although
it had come dangerously close to that. Of course, it could have
been worse. They could have delivered her to the army and let them
torture her until they extracted all the information she had. So,
in the end, being fired from a cannon each night wasn’t such a bad
place to be.

Fei Lin danced her way back to the cannon
and positioned herself inside the long barrel. Around her, the
clowns burst into the crowd in their colorful costumes and made a
big fuss out of firing the cannon with lighters borrowed from the
audience. They refused to return them when people failed to produce
papers proving their ownership. In the middle of the debate, one of
the mimes dressed in black-and-white, with reflecting lines along
the arms and legs, climbed on top of the cannon, straddled it, and
pulled the switch, releasing her.

She couldn’t feel the wind brush against her
skin, but the sensors told her it was cold. The robo-suit kept her
well-protected from the outside world. While she flew above the
circus, she checked the activity on the ground as part of her
payment for being rescued.
See if anything out of the ordinary
is happening. Spot the intruders. Prevent any casualties.
Well,
the last part was the enforcers’ job because they didn’t think she
was capable of such violence, a fair assumption if you saw what
poured out of the robo-suit in the rare occasions that she left
it.

The food kiosks looked all right. It helped
that they kept the alcohol in the beverages to a minimum. It was
enough to give a faint buzz, but no more. The game area was another
place that could experience a disturbance if people got too
excited. Her optics had no problem adjusting to the distance to the
big wheel and the machineries surrounding it. Nothing there,
either. A quiet night, as usual.

Only that the usual monotony had been
interrupted the past week by some brave and obviously insane
burglars who wouldn’t make the same mistake again. It was only by
accident she now glanced past the train. No one else would have
spotted those shadows. Nobody had any business on the other side of
the tracks. What to do? Land first. She couldn’t fly all the way
there, but she could run.

Fei Lin took off through the crowd, her
motion sensors informing her the enforcers were sprinting after her
already. She was not supposed to leave the fairground, either.

Taking a five-ton bot across the fair during
the peak hour without crushing anyone in the process was not an
easy task. Her systems were able to predict people movement
patterns, but it slowed her down. There was no time to make it
around the train. So she jumped.

The suspension held.

She hadn’t realized she had been holding her
breath until an alert flashed at the edge of her visual field. The
oxygen level in her blood was getting low, and her heartbeat
reacted accordingly. The robo-suit provided her all the oxygen she
needed, but it couldn’t force it into her lungs. Fei Lin inhaled
deeply and rotated her head in search of the enemy. The target
display locked on the two shadows fifty meters away from her.
Patched sheepskin coats. Cheap, old prosthetics. Obviously
locals.

They hadn’t heard her land. The stealth
module had activated by default, and she hurried to turn it off. It
didn’t matter anymore. They couldn’t escape. The enforcers would
catch up soon, and it would be better if they didn’t know about the
stealth unit.

She ran towards the men, switching on the
lights on her shoulders to blind them. They were too stunned to
oppose any resistance when she grabbed them by the neck and pinned
them to the ground. The tactical module worked, too. She hadn’t had
a chance to use it since joining the circus. This wasn’t war, but
if these men had come after the Nightingale, it was now. Big Dino
had made that clear to her.

“Don’t kill them! Don’t kill them!”

Fei Lin understood the words “kill” and
“don’t”, but there wasn’t any danger the intruders would escape, so
she waited for the enforcers to arrive.

The gray masks waved at her to follow them
back to the train.

She had to drag the men, since she’d slammed
them against the ground so hard, she’d knocked them out.

One of the enforcers opened a door, and she
tossed the men into the empty car.

“Oh, not them again!” Spinner cupped the
side of his face in a half-annoyed, half-puzzled gesture as he
stared at the two unconscious men propped against the wall of the
train car. “I thought we got rid of them…”

Beside him, Rake shrugged.

The lights flickered, casting shadows over
everyone and giving Fei Lin’s robo-suit a reddish hue. She squatted
in a corner, occupying a good part of it, and waited. Spinner
didn’t know for what.

“So did I.” Nicholas climbed into the car.
“What happened here, gentlemen?” He closed the door behind him.

Spinner snorted at being called a gentleman.
For as long as he could remember, he’d never been called that, and
his memory went back a long way. “You can stop performing. There’s
no audience here.”

Rake crossed his arms but didn’t say
anything.

“What happened here?” Nicholas asked. “Why
are they back?”

Spinner didn’t like the demanding tone, but
Rake said, “It didn’t take. Not fully…”

“Not
fully
?” Nicholas frowned at
them. “How could you screw this up? You know how important this
is.”

“Hey, it’s not like we do this every day!”
Spinner gestured at the intruders. “In fact, we never do. We only
handle the mechanics. Big Dino deals with the brain.”

“Why didn’t you wake him then?” Nicholas’s
frown grew deeper.

“You have no idea how grumpy he gets when
woken up without a serious enough reason.” Spinner raised his
shoulders. It was so not worth the hassle. These were only two
small-time thieves who no one would miss if anything happened to
them. The police might even thank them if they found out.

“Why didn’t you wait for
me
?”
Nicholas’s dark eyes pierced through him, and he looked like a
leader for a moment. Then he looked lost.

“Because you wouldn’t get your hands dirty,”
Rake said. He turned to Fei Lin. “You okay?”

She gave him the thumbs up. Her helmet only
turned to the left and right so she was unable to nod.

“Who caught them?” Nicholas asked.

“She did.” Spinner pointed at Fei Lin with a
wide grin. “All by herself. Before they entered the train.”

“I see …” Nicholas ran a hand through his
hair. “Then I take it we don’t know what they came for?”

“We reckon the same as before,” Spinner
said. “We probably didn’t go far enough with erasing their
memories. They forgot about the encounter and how it turned out,
but the idea to break in had to still be lingering to bring them
back.”

“If they had come for revenge, they would
have been better armed,” Rake said. “Plus, they came alone, so we
can assume no one else is in on the plan.”

“It better stay that way,” Nicholas
said.

“We’ll do it again,” Spinner said with a
grim voice. “We’ll go deeper this time. It will either work or
they’re dead.”

“It’s a win either way.” Rake smirked.

“No.” Nicholas raised one hand. “I’ll do it.
Wake them up. I need them conscious for this.”

Spinner hesitated. “Are you sure you’re up
for this? Unless you practiced in your spare time … I don’t know—”
He shook his head. “This is
more
than rocket science.”

“I know exactly what it is.” Nicholas’s lips
flattened into a thin, straight line. “Wake them up.”

Rake pulled a syringe from his coat pocket,
a little too fast in Spinner’s opinion. He wrinkled his nose. Aside
from Big Dino, Rake rarely took orders from anyone.

The leg of the man on the left twitched and
his collaborator groaned seconds after Rake had plunged the needle
into their necks.

Nicholas took off his tailcoat, folded it,
and placed it on a crate. “Now get out.”

“We haven’t restrained them,” Spinner said.
“We can’t leave you alone with them. What if they attack you? This
is not a good time to be left without a boss.”

“You seem to forget who I am,” Nicholas
said. Not their boss and a strong telecharger. “Out.”

“Fine. But she stays.” Spinner pointed at
Fei Lin and gestured at her to stay put.

Rake opened the door, and they both jumped
out onto the frozen ground. The crowd was thinning at the fair, a
sign it was getting late.

Spinner tilted his head while Rake slid the
door shut. “Did you screw up that procedure on purpose? Do you
want
him to get a more hands-on approach?”

A hazy cloud covering the moon hid Rake’s
smirk. “We need a leader,” he murmured.

Nervously, Nicholas rolled up his sleeves.
He didn’t need his hands free to exercise his powers, but it made
him feel better. From the corner of his eye, he glanced at Fei Lin.
The bot sat on her haunches, hands resting on her massive thighs.
From this angle, her shape resembled that of the knife throwers.
They both used to be war machines at one point, and despite
Spinner’s claims the girl inside wouldn’t hurt a fly, the men in
front of him told another story. Someone needed to keep an eye on
her and, obviously, that task couldn’t be entrusted to Spinner.

Shaking his head, Nicholas turned his
attention back to the men who groaned and whined about their
injuries but didn’t leave the support of the wall. They couldn’t.
Nicholas kept them pinned there. During the two long years of
hiding from the drafting committee, Nicholas had been in tight
situations more than once, and only the use of his power had helped
him walk free and in one piece. Those years weren’t far gone, and
he hadn’t forgotten how to use it.

He began with a simple question. “Why did
you come to the circus?”

“Prosthetics …” The man on the left licked
his lips.

“We heard there’s a car full of them here,”
his companion said.

The areas of their brains where those
memories were stored lit up, and Nicholas memorized the locations.
Some fine-tuning would be needed later on but, for now, it was
enough. “Who told you that?”

“The owner of a pawn shop in town …”

“We heard him talking with a customer who
was looking for something to have fixed here.”

That made sense. Aside from the circus acts
and the Nightingale, this was the other thing the whole city was
talking about.

“How did you get here?” Nicholas asked.

“The car …” The man on the left groaned.

“We left it by the warehouse.”

So he knew the who, the how, and the why.
“What happened then?”

“That … that
thing
—” The less chatty
man pointed at the bot with a trembling hand.

“Attacked us! We didn’t make it to the
train.”

Nicholas had enough information to proceed.
He sent a low electrical current to the mapped areas and
short-circuited the cells, destroying the encoded data in the
process. The eyes of both men rolled back, and they slumped on
their sides in awkward positions.

He gave Fei Lin one last look, wondering
what she was thinking of the power display, but since he couldn’t
read anything on the metallic face, Nicholas grabbed his coat and
opened the door.

Rake and Spinner raised their eyebrows.

“It’s done.” He climbed out of the car.
Somewhere behind him, the bot moved to follow him, but he didn’t
pay any attention to it. “Get their car from the warehouse and drop
them into town. They won’t remember anything when they wake
up.”

Before they could ask any questions,
Nicholas stalked off in the direction of his car. No one followed
him, and that was a good thing. He wanted to be alone. He needed to
think.

It didn’t take long until Anya peeked inside
and found him pacing in the solitude of his cluttered room. The
Hrad blueprints lay on the table, but Nicholas’s thoughts couldn’t
have been farther away from them.

“This isn’t a good time,” he said.