Continuance (43 page)

Weakened as he
was, Jason still regained his balance first. He plowed into Neal before he
could steady the gun for a second shot. Jason grabbed both wrists, as wary of
the graphene blade as the pistol. The walls of the imaging chamber drifted
across his vision with the disc’s rotation as he grappled with Neal. Jason drove
the spider a couple of steps back, trying to pin him against the support field
controls. But his temporary burst of energy faded quickly, his arms and legs seeming
to fill with heavy water. A blinding flare of plasma seared Jason’s vision,
sending everything into black and violet negatives, and he realized they’d
ascended through the plane of the imaging field. Sweat poured from Jason’s
hands, and he felt his grip slipping, his strength fading.

When his vision
cleared, Chaela stood on the platform behind Neal. She held something in her
hands, a length of dark cloth like a jet black towel. Too occupied with Neal to
be dismayed, Jason watched as she brought it over the agent’s head, pulling it
tight against his throat. Gripping the makeshift noose with both hands, she
kicked at the controls behind her. Jason felt his skin tingle as the support
field sprang to life. Chaela let go of the black cloth, but it stayed where it
was, suspended in the air.

The suit!
Jason looked at
the cloth around Neal’s neck, saw the retroweave stiffen and hold firm. With
the swipe of a hand, Chaela brought the support field to maximum power.

Neal’s eyes grew
wide, and Jason held his wrists with every ounce of strength he had left as the
blade and gun sought his body like live adders. The gun fired, loud as a canon
blast. Something told him it was
too
loud, more than a gunshot, and he
felt the platform shudder.

A second violet
flash let Jason know the platform had begun its descent. Neal hadn’t.

At maximum, the support
field fixed the retroweave in place around his neck, strong as carbon fiber. Neal’s
shoes skidded on the platform as he scrambled for purchase, and the gun and blade
fell to the floor as he clawed at the suit, searching for a grip. His efforts
were futile. His legs kicked wildly as his feet left the floor.

Still standing
on the rotating disc of the platform, Jason watched with a strange detachment
as he circled the dying man slowly rising into the air in front of him. Balls
of plasma washed Neal in reddish blue from above, giving his jerking form the
appearance of some macabre marionette.

Jason knew he should
be doing something, but could only stand there, fascinated as the man who
wanted to his end his life had his own slip away.
We beat him.

Someone grabbed
him by the arm, pulling him toward the edge of the platform. “Let’s go!” Chaela
screamed. “The doors will open. Hurry, before the sequence finishes!”

Jason tore his
eyes from Neal and stepped off the platform. His knees buckled, sending him
face-first onto the floor grating. Fear prickled in the back of his mind as he
realized the fall didn’t hurt, that it felt good to lie there on the ground.
Even the wound in his side had stopped hurting, and the room felt strangely
cool.

“Jason! Get up!
Get up!”

With Chaela
tugging on him, he willed himself to do as she asked, first to hands and knees,
then into a stumbling run. A stone weight crushed his chest like a vice, making
it hard to draw air, and the left side of his shirt and pants were dark with
blood.

Chaela led him
to the far side of the room, where she’d shoved an access grate aside. Metal
stairs spiraled down to the equipment room below. Sending Jason ahead of her,
she pulled the grating back in place and followed him down. The clank of their
feet on the metal stairs seemed loud in his ears, and he realized Chariot’s hum
had subsided to near silence. The imaging sequence was almost complete.

He stumbled
again at the bottom of the stairs, but managed to steady himself against the metallic
wall of one of the eight-foot coolant tanks that filled the subfloor – one for
each of the emitters overhead. His body screamed for him to stay there, to let
his knees bend, to slide to the floor and rest. But Chaela had him moving again
before he’d taken two breaths, half dragging him through the dim spaces between
tanks, conduit, and utility panels. Had he thought it was cool before? No. It
was cold. Cold enough his fingers and toes felt numb.

The two of them
jerked to a stop. “My God,” Chaela said.

Jason made
himself focus, seeing what she had. The wall of one of the coolant tanks gaped
open, jagged sleeves of metal bent outward like the petals of a flower. The
explosion he’d heard after Neal’s stray shot above. More important, inset in
the nearby wall, Jason saw what they’d come for – the grated cover of a ventilation
shaft. But instead of being locked, it hung open, blown askew by the explosion.
The shaft beyond faded into darkness, beckoning.

Chaela scanned
the area, seeking something in the darkness. “She’s already gone through! Come
on!”

Jason felt a
flood of relief.
Amanda.
Chaela took his hand to help him climb into the
shaft, but he shrugged her off, if only barely. His strength had fled, the water
in his limbs becoming something more like frozen lead.

“You first,” he
said. “She’ll need help. I’m in no shape to give her a push.”

Chaela
hesitated, then climbed in, effortlessly folding her body into the space.

A dull glint of
silver caught Jason’s eye, hidden in shadows. It lay on the floor, mostly
hidden behind the next tank over. Chaela hadn’t seen it. The cold he felt
turned to a crippling chill. Chaela’s face appeared again, seeming to float in
the darkness as she extended a hand.

God, but she was
beautiful. He took her hand in his. “Get started. I’m coming.”

She glanced at
it, then back at him. It was ice cold, he knew. Tears traced a pair of gleaming
streaks down her cheeks. “You’re lying,” she whispered.

He nodded.

Her grip
tightened as her lips quivered. “I love you, Jason.”

“I love you,” he
said. “I always have.”

Crisp light
flooded in from above, washing the violet residue from his vision. Shouts
followed, urgent and tinged with horror.

“Oh my god!”

“Shut it off!
Shut it off!”

Footfalls banged
on the catwalk overhead. Jason drank in one last look at Chaela’s face, made
himself smile encouragement. “Go.”

And then she was
gone, swallowed in shadow. Jason forced numb fingers to close the grate behind
her.
Be strong.

He managed a
pair of steps before his legs gave way beneath him. More shouts came from
above, closer now, but he shut them away, willing himself to move. He covered the
rest of the distance to the tank on hands and knees.

There, almost
seeming to be asleep, Amanda lay still. One cheek rested on the concrete, the
silvery hair he’d seen before fanned across the floor in gossamer symmetry. Too
close. She’d been too close when the tank exploded.

Even in death,
age seemed not to have found her. The lines of her face still held a beauty, a
grace that harkened back to the young girl he remembered. He
reached
back and found what he sought – that face as it had been the last day she’d visited
him with Michelle. The day she’d mistaken him for her daddy and wanted to hold
his arm.

Propping himself
up beside her, Jason twined his arm around hers and closed his eyes.

2090

Chaela pulled her sweater tighter
as she stepped over the trunk of a fallen oyamel tree. The air at this altitude
was crisp, making it hard to believe she’d been in shorts only a few hours
back. The towering evergreens flanked the trail as it rounded another
switchback, offering a glimpse of the valley leading down to the village of
Angangueo far below. Raising a wrist, the tiny photoscreen on her watch showed
a 3D map of the terrain ahead, plotting the trail’s path in red.
Not far now.

“I get it now,” a voice panted
from behind her. “You’re finally punishing me.”

She pivoted without stopping,
backpedaling up the trail. “Punishing you, Stuart? What for?”
This should be
interesting.
Hands on knees, he’d stopped beside the fallen tree she’d just
traversed, catching his breath. Earlier, when he hadn’t been so winded, he’d
been going on and on about how Jason’s M3 had really just been on loan to her.
That as Jason’s roommate, he was still its official caretaker and expected her
to return it. That was something she had no intention of doing, even if she
hadn’t spent the money to get it repaired and running like new. It had
sentimental value, and besides – it was damn fun to drive. Before that, Stuart had
made a game out of testing her perks, asking her to read his lips from a
distance, or seeing if she could spot random little lies.
What’ll it be this
time?

Seeing she had no intention of
stopping, he trudged forward again, hands on hips. “What for? That first day of
class last year. Remember? I called Dr. Fairchild a ball buster or something
like that?” He huffed the words in short spurts as he caught up. “The way you
glared at me. I said to myself, ‘She’s gonna make me pay for this. Just a
matter of time.’ That’s what this is, isn’t it?”

Chaela laughed. “Maybe. If so, it’s
the least you deserve for insulting my family.”

“You know I didn’t mean anything
by it. And you’d know if that was a lie.” He was right on that point. Right
now, she detected nothing but sarcasm, but she didn’t need perks for that,
especially with Stuart.

“Anyway, how was I supposed to
know she was your daughter?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Not my problem. But
I tell you what – we’ll call it even for helping me get out of Everton. And for
the car. Come on. We’re almost there.”

She checked her watch again – less
than 150 meters from the coordinates. Out of habit, she eyeclicked to check on
the suppression script that kept her retinal transceivers offline.
Still
running.
Over the last year she’d gotten so used to making sure it stayed
active it was almost like breathing. She had no idea if the spiders could pick
up the signal this far south, but she had no intention of taking her chances.

The oyamels towered over the
trail here, boughs completely covered in something that looked like dried, orange-brown
leaves. She’d been to this place once before, as a young girl with her father. It
had seemed magical then, a mystical place out of fairy tales where anything
could happen. Then, she’d come again more recently, in the aftermath of her
escape from the Chariot lab. Losing Mandy and Jason sent her into a depression,
and she wanted somewhere calm and remote to think things through. Besides, she
needed to stay out of the DIA’s reach, and Mexico seemed as good a place as
any. But by then, the magic had fled, and she found only ghosts and memories to
keep her company.

This trip up the mountain,
though, was more like the first. Magical. She pulled a scrap of crumpled paper
from her pocket, looking at the printout of the message again.

Ms. Laurensen,

I hope this
message finds you well, assuming it finds you at all. Still - my skills with
photonic surveillance led me to you in the first place, so I trust it will.

I’m sure you
realize a lot’s happened since you headed down to warmer climes. Things have
polarized around continuance more than ever. After it blew up in the press, the
Chariot incident got the naturals (what the anti-continuance types are calling
themselves now) up in arms over the infiltration of the university and the
death of a federal agent. I can only assume that’s why you went ahead and
released the Anza Borrego video into the wild, which of course, got the rubber
lovers riled up against the DIA. (Thanks, by the way.) They say the country
hasn’t been this divided over any single issue since gay rights and abortion –
maybe even the civil war.

I’m writing to
you because the Everton assignment made me realize I was on the wrong side of
that division. I know you’ve been through a lot of pain in recent months, that
I was the cause of much of it. I let my own personal experiences – family
squabbles really – keep me blind and prejudiced. You were a big part of
changing that.

 I’ll do what I
can here inside the Authority to set things right, but I don’t know for how
much longer. And where you’re concerned, I can never fully repair the damage
I’ve already done. So I’ve set aside family squabbles for now and reached out
to a couple of people who might be able to.

For obvious
reasons, I can’t meet you in person, but if you let me know a time and place
that’s safe for you, they will. I think you’ll find it worth your time.

Lindsay Grieves

The trail let out into an open
meadow covered in amber grass and sunlight. A small group stood on the far side,
backs turned as they gazed up at an oyamel on the far perimeter. One of them, a
young man with longish blond hair, leaned in close to the tall blond woman
beside him, placing a hand on the small of her back as he pointed up at the
branches.