Divided (3 page)

Impulse has me turning toward the restaurant instead of the way I meant to go, back toward the inner ward train station to get home. My pay credits from teaching at Torth are still in my wallet, as good as money, and the idea of surprising Chord with dinner simply because I want to and am able to seems perfect. The last time I brought him food unexpectedly … well, my intentions were twofold back then, considering I was doing it to drug him in order to keep him away from my Alt, safe.

You? Making me breakfast? In bed? No way this is happening, West Grayer.
The way he shook his head, the way he laughed.

Shut up.
My instant response, a typical one for me back then.

I stand aside as I wait for a customer to leave the restaurant—the entrance is too narrow to fit more than one person at a time. Just a guy, but one who is vaguely familiar, in that odd, warped way people tend to be when you see them out of context.

It clicks. “Kasey?” I call out to him.

He looks over at me at the sound of his name, and dawning recognition has him smiling. His hair is a mop of reddish brown curls, most of it hanging over eyes that are half squinted against the dropping sun. “Hey, Grayer! Whoa, it’s been a while, hasn’t it?”

“Since late fall maybe?” I say, trying to place when I last saw him at Torth Prep. Right before I went active, I’d see him in the halls once in a while, his goofy bellow of a laugh reverberating off the walls like a low, pleasant rumble. But it was only because he used to hang out with Luc a bit that I knew him well enough to tell him apart from the other students. “I didn’t even know you got your notice, Kasey. When did you complete?”

“How did you—”

I look at the thin black cuff strapped around his upper arm.

“Oh, yeah, of course.” He grins. “Just over a month ago.”

“Well, it’s good to see you again.” Acquaintance code between Alts for
I’m glad you didn’t die, even if I don’t know you that well.
Now I gesture more pointedly toward the cuff. “And this explains why you haven’t been back, I guess.”

The black cuff is required dress for completes on a tour. Monthlong stints of manning the barrier, tours are required of all completes, to be fulfilled once a year for five years. Protecting Kersh from the Surround during a tour is usually viewed as an honor because of the path it takes to get there, but it doesn’t mean the completes have earned the right to coast. Sometimes the tour is standing guard along a portion of the barrier’s length, watching for signs of it being breached. Sometimes it’s collecting data brought back by drone scouts sent in the form of bot birds and bot snakes and any incoming audio over the airwaves that could be taken for assault codes and sending all of it off to the Board to be deciphered.

“Yeah, this thing.” Kasey lifts his arm with the cuff and I can see the code BPS15J etched into the black label:
B
for Barrier,
P
for Patrol, and
S15J
for Sector 15, Jethro Ward. So he’s walking the barrier for this tour, then, and I look over to see that his expression is both proud and weary. He meets my gaze, his face suddenly clearing. “So, heard you’re working for Baer after you completed. Now,
that’s
brave.”

I have to laugh. “Some days I think I must have been crazy to accept.”

“That guy had me cleaning knives every day after school for two weeks when I was in weaponry last year. Made the mistake of nodding off while he was talking. He wouldn’t let anyone wake me up until the end of class, just so he could say I slept the whole time. Opened my eyes to the point of a blade an inch from my nose.”

No, Baer wouldn’t take Kasey’s less-than-rapt-attention too well, and I have to laugh again. Argue with Baer as much as you want, but never let him think you’ve got nothing else to learn. “How is falling asleep even possible, Kasey?”

He shrugs. “Not sure. I’m probably still the one and only, considering the punishment.” He shifts the takeout container he’s holding from one hand to the other. “Hey, Grayer, how about you?” It’s how he used to address Luc—
Hey, Grayer, can I grab a ride? Hey, Grayer, let’s go grab some food.
“You do a tour yet?”

“Not yet. Soon, I think.” Once Julis signs off on me being fit, then I can look into registering. “So how is it?” I ask him. “You’re happy with where they placed you?”

“Jethro, north side, Sector 15.” He flashes me the cuff again—BPS15J. “Not exactly scenic, but none of us are out there for the view, right?”

“At least they’re not making you commute out of your ward every day.”

“True, there’s that. And I’m still getting paid the same as if I were putting in my part-time hours down at the plant. Even my crank of a boss won’t argue with the Board about maintaining salary for employees on tour.”

“It’s really not that bad?” I ask him, unsure if I’m reading him properly. I don’t know Kasey well enough to tell if he’s just putting up a front for how he might really feel about being so close to the Surround every day. It’s funny—all the way up until completion, tours are distant shadows without identifiable form, a vague and fuzzy danger compared to that which came with being active. Now that I am a complete, I can feel it, sharper and more pressing.

“Compared to being active?” Kasey shakes his head. “They’re so different, you know? Still a lot of walking around, looking for anything suspicious. But this time the enemy is the Surround and, well … hell, I don’t know. It’s crazy since the Surround is way more than just one person. I mean, it’s the rest of the world out there, and we’re not exactly friends with them. But the danger you feel … it’s not the same.”

I nod, knowing instantly what he means. The Surround wants everyone in Kersh dead, its goal to kill us all, focusing on no one person. But that’s not true for your Alt, the person born to kill a single, lone target.

Yet, already I can tell what Baer and Dire would say if they were here, listening to Kasey right now. They’d tell him to wake the hell up if he didn’t want to die on his first tour, mere weeks after surviving his Alt. Directly outside the barrier lies a strip of huge, tangled, thorny bushes and patches of wild horsetails as tall as a little kid and about as stubborn. We call it the Belt because that’s exactly what it is, a no-man’s land measuring a hundred meters deep at its shallowest point as it encircles Kersh. It’s ugly but invaluable and together with the barrier, it is what lies between the city and the Surround. To reach Kersh from the outside, this no-man’s land would be the first obstacle that would have to be overcome. But those thorn bushes and horsetails still just grow on hard earth … earth that enemy feet can walk on.

“The toughest part is all the alone time,” Kasey continues, frowning now, that weariness coming through again. This time, there is no pride to soften it. So opposite of the guy I remember swaggering his way down the hall. “Other than occasionally seeing the two completes on watches for the sectors on either side of me, there’s no one. So that part of it is like being an active again, if I’m going to compare. All that time just
thinking.
You know, a lot of what your brain cooks up can get pretty dark. Being out there by yourself, no one’s around to remind you that you’re a trained killer. If you forget for even a second, anything can happen.”

An old man brushes past us on his way out of the restaurant and pauses to look back at Kasey. I watch his eyes fall on the black cuff around Kasey’s arm and then back to Kasey’s face. For a second, shadowed by the sheet metal overhang jutting out from the restaurant’s storefront, he and Kasey look nearly alike, marked with shared understanding. Then the old man gives Kasey a slow nod, turns back around, and disappears into the crowd.

“I think the old dude approves,” Kasey says, laughing his laugh that makes me think of Torth, of Luc, who is fading a bit more day by day. “Man, but I should get back to work. I only signed out for thirty minutes, just long enough to run out and grab some food.” He gestures with the takeout container, and the whiff of grease and sauce has my stomach growling.

Kasey gives me a wave and then he’s heading off, in the same direction that old man went. Both of them are completes, soldiers who know what it’s like to be standing right at the barrier where the division between friend and enemy is most clearly drawn.

Chord would know, too, having finished his first tour only weeks ago.

But I learned more about tour duty from Kasey in just a few minutes than I have from Chord, ever.

He’d report to his sector right after school and not get back to his place until close to midnight. For that long month, our time together was threaded with odd, heavy silences, with Chord sometimes falling into quiet, thoughtful lapses that seemed to come from nowhere. When I asked him what was wrong, his answers didn’t tell me much, always coming down to him just being tired.

What Kasey just said, about having too much time to think … I bet that was how it was for Chord, too. And now that he’s done and home and acting normal again, I still can’t figure out how real that normal is, or if it’s something he does just for me.

I head inside the restaurant, where the sounds of people eating and drinking and laughing fill the air just as much as the thick scent of food. The front counter is lined with customers passing the time on their cells as they wait to be seated or for their takeout orders. Cooks and servers are yelling, but there is no anger in their voices, just urgency.

If there are actives or strikers hiding here, they’ve chosen well. And if there are, I feel sorry for them. Whether actives are running from their Alts or the assassins those Alts hire to kill them, I remember all too well how disappearing into a crowd means having to be someone else, someone not quite real, and you begin to wonder if you can ever really come back.

A baby’s loud delighted laugh rings through the noise, high and without any reservation. That earlier rush of happiness I felt, the one that drew me here in the first place, comes back, and suddenly everything from a few minutes ago no longer seems so important—the barrier, tours, and the fact that it’ll be my turn soon. I think of Julis back in her office telling me I’m not so hopeless after all and am actually on my way to getting better. If I can make that happen, I can be there for Chord, too.

But first things first. Food.

Making my way back to the train station, I’m still adjusting the to-go bag filled with hot noodles against the crook of my arm when I see the Board Operator standing across the street in front of Julis’s office building.

I freeze, all thoughts of dinner and getting home and Chord suddenly lost in the panic that floods my brain.
They know,
is what a cold, logical voice whispers into my ear. It sounds a lot like my Alt’s voice, I realize, because it’s mine but not. I shudder.
The Board knows you used to be a striker.

Staring at the Operator, I take in all the details even while a part of me tries to push them away. He’s wearing the gray suit assigned to all Board Operators, complete with tweed shoulder epaulets and polished shoes. His head is shaved smooth enough to have the late-afternoon sun glint off it. Apart from the poppy red handkerchief tucked into his chest pocket to note his rank as a Level 3, he could be mistaken for any Operator. His sheer lack of personality, an utter nothingness that’s carefully maintained by the Board, is as much a part of his uniform as silk and cotton. His sleek black sedan—is it the same one I saw parked alongside the curb, back near the train station outside of Torth?—doesn’t look out of place at all in this part of the Grid.

He must sense my fear. How else to explain the way the Operator’s head swivels in my direction and stops when he meets my eyes?

He steps away from the building and starts heading my way and I wonder if he knows he’s approaching a cornered animal. As the distance closes between us and the crowd on the sidewalk instinctively parts to make way for a member of the Board, time seems to run backward. And of all the moments I could ever want to relive over again, it is not this one. Not even close. I can’t tell if it’s the same Operator who appeared at my front door all those months ago. Maybe, maybe not; it doesn’t matter. The last time I saw one, my world changed forever. He told me it was time to either kill or be killed.

As a complete, I should be free of the Board.

They know you used to be a striker.

He stops when he’s a foot away. Too close.

Being noticed by a member of the Board is guaranteed to leave someone cringing. I’m no different. They breathe, they move, but any creatures with healthy brain stems will do the same. It doesn’t mean they’re human. More like machines, no longer knowing how to feel.

I fight the urge to check the nude-colored bandages wrapped around my striker marks—I know my marks are already well hidden. I’d only be drawing attention to them.

“West Grayer?” His voice is toneless, static.

The world around me is like a dying lung, expanding, shrinking, spots of dark decay dancing along my vision. From far away, I hear my voice. I sound weak again, just as I did when I first received my assignment.

“Yes. I’m her.” The words burn a trail in my throat, hurting the way smoke does. I take a deep, shaky breath that does nothing to calm me. “I’m West.”

He pulls out a Board-issued cell from his suit pocket, taps in something. Repockets it and says, “This way, please.” He turns his back to me and heads toward the car.

He turns his back to me.
An Operator, leaving himself vulnerable to a known striker?

It would never happen.

Is it possible they don’t know?

And then I remember his bright red handkerchief—a Level 3 Operator and not a Level 2. How could I almost forget seeing that? The first twinges of relief let me breathe properly again.

Though the Board has Alts and completions to keep the system running smoothly, outliers of the system who threaten the city’s safety—such as strikers, such as
me
—are handled by the Board in a different manner. I’d be a black contract, officially unofficial, and it’s Level 2 tactical Operators who decide which ones call for stealth … and which ones don’t. When cells throughout the city utter a low, gentle purr, sometimes it’s the vibration of an incoming news file informing the people of Kersh that someone has overstepped, not understood that the system is in place for a good reason, and met a nasty end.