Halfskin (18 page)

When he was dressed, he moved his weight onto his bare feet. His bones were fragile. Joints popped, ligaments creaked. He turned back to the bed, stuffed the extra pillows beneath the covers and pulled the sheet up high like someone was sleeping in the comfort of darkness. He made it to the end of the bed and stopped, took a breath.

His skin sizzled with the heat of active biomites.
New breeds.

The door was five steps away. He focused on the handle. Five steps, that was his goal. Get to the door handle, first. Get to the door. He took deep breaths, let go of the bed and started after it. Earlier, his sister helped him to the bathroom. He pulled out his catheter with the help of new breeds numbing the pain in his urethra as the balloon-end popped out. He walked back on his own, but he was wobbling.

Like now.

He held his hand out. The last two steps turned into three. He caught the handle and hit the door with his shoulder. The impact made his insides quake. Rattled his lungs. He needed a moment, took one and then another—

[Go.]

Cali’s voice was a whip, lashing his hand into action. He pulled the door open—

A big man looked up from his paper, sitting outside the door. Not happy.

Nix watched him, waited for him to do something. But he only stared. Confusion swirled in the glassy orbs beneath his thick brows.

[Go.]

Nix yanked the door with unexpected strength. Weakness shook his brittle bones. His muscles were taut. Renewed vigor surged through his nervous system. He was burning adrenaline and needed to go before it hit empty.

“Going to get something to eat,” he muttered, like his sister told him to say.

The big man seemed to be working out what the simple phrase meant, like he’d just heard a thick accent and the pieces of what he was seeing and hearing weren’t fitting. Nix didn’t wait for Cali to jar him with another thought. He started down the middle of the hall before shuffling to the wall for support. He stepped quickly past doorways.

The wheelchair was there, right around the corner. Waiting.

He focused on it, didn’t look back. His goal was to get to it.

Nix panted.

He stopped across from his goal. Summoning the courage, he took three quick steps across the hallway’s gulf to the other side. The tank had reached empty. There were no steps left in him. He fingered the wheelchair closer, collapsed into the cushioned seat.

Made it.

There he was, in the hall. In the wheelchair.

The big man reading his paper.

Nix backed up.

Out of sight.

Where he waited.

35

Cali wasn’t a juggler. But she managed to keep several balls in the air.

So far.

She sat down, appeared to take a nap. She looked exhausted. She was exhausted and she did need to sleep, but when she curled up on the chair and closed her eyes she didn’t slumber. Her mind expanded, feeling the various networks and biomites within a certain perimeter. Her reach wasn’t unlimited—she couldn’t connect with people on the streets—but she was expanding. The new breeds were learning, were dividing and evolving far quicker than she guessed. She was becoming a technological telekinetic, wirelessly talking to anything that chattered computer-speak.

First, she penetrated the security camera fastened in the corner of the room. Once she tapped the video loop, she followed it back to the security servers and downloaded several minutes of Nix lying in bed while Cali stood at the window. She stitched that into a loop and put it on a seamless repeat cycle. It would fool any passing eyes for a few hours, and that was more than enough.

Next, she sensed the security guard outside the door. James was bored, reading a paper. She passively observed his behavior. There were moments when she could actually see what he was seeing, as if through foggy glass. His biomite content primarily enhanced his reflexes and senses, in particular his sight and hearing. He was naturally suspicious and calmly disciplined. Despite the boredom and aches of long periods of waiting, he remained vigilant.

She didn’t want to do this. If it failed, it was all over. But there was no other way. Now or never.

Now or never.

[Go.]

Cali occasionally checked on the security loop while firmly maintaining a connection with James’ biomites. Her next diversion was Nix. She stayed connected to monitor his health and strength. Even if everything went right, this might be too much. She could end up pushing him too far, drive him into overload. There would be no need for Marcus to come shut him down.

She might do the job for him.

When he was dressed, Cali began to manipulate James’ biomites. Slowly, she took control of his sensory input. When Nix reached the door, when he pulled it open, she made him see what she wanted him to see.

It was a struggle, a delicate balance. If she pushed too hard, he’d go unconscious and draw attention. He had to believe what he was seeing. He had to put his suspicions aside and see her going to the cafeteria like she’d done several times over the past week. Those memories supported the false input.

Nix started down the hall.

James’ suspicion eased. He accepted what just happened. But that wasn’t the hard part. He needed to forget she just left, needed to believe that she’d walked past him to get her bag. Cali opened her eyes, grabbed the bag off the floor. The security loop was still showing Nix sleeping, her staring out the window.

When she opened the door, James nearly slid out of her mental grasp. His biomites shuddered like molecules put to flame, threatening to slip from her grasp like ornery children who didn’t want to do as they were told.

She squeezed him.

It was a tiny jolt, one that temporarily knocked him into a blackout. It would feel like a head rush and while he was senseless, she planted a reasonable explanation in his unconscious, that he was bored and tired and achy. And there was no way Cali and Nix could escape, not when their biomites were being monitored. If they left the hospital, an alarm would go off and they could track them. And if they got too far away, they could shut them down.

There was hardly a need for a guard.

Nix was in the wheelchair. Three nurses were down the hall. Cali connected with their biomites, simply commanded that they weren’t their patients, no one that they should be concerned with. Cali turned the wheelchair around and pushed it to the end of the hall and waited for the elevator.

Nix sat with his arms in his lap. His complexion was good, his head upright. She liked what she was seeing. His strength was better than she anticipated. The elevator arrived. Cali sensed it was empty before the doors slid open, accompanied by the sound of a bell.

She pushed him inside, hit the button. They both stared down an empty hallway while the doors slid closed. She resisted hugging him. Instead, they stared at each other in the warped reflection of the silver doors. They made it this far, but it was only the start. And hardly that.

[Ready?]
she thought.

Nix nodded.

They instinctively took deep breaths, preparing for a deep dive into the unknown. Cali closed her eyes. She was firmly connected with Nix’s new breeds. She held her next thought-command on the edge of her mind, like the crosshairs aligned with a target, finger on the trigger.

[Off.]

Cali’s legs buckled. She caught herself on the wheelchair. Her skin tingled as her new breeds compensated for the sudden deactivation of ALL the old generation biomites. She shut down a third of her functioning body. The new breeds struggled to keep her from passing out, to keep her organs functioning and her brain from freezing.

Nix was limp.

But he was breathing. His pulse a distant rhythm.

He was alive. Barely.

They needed time to recover, for the new breeds to complete the transition. Now that the old generation biomites were off.

Now that they were invisible.

Cali’s gut dropped as the elevator lurched upward.

36

Bad food.

Swamps soaked James’ armpits. A toxic fog lingered behind his eyes, fuzzy edges haloed the newspaper. He needed to call in backup. He wouldn’t be any good puking on the floor. Not that there was anyone he needed to be chasing down but he was going to be in the bathroom within the next ten minutes.

He reached for his phone—

The doctor trotted around the corner, his lab coat fluttering behind him, a nurse on his heels. James stood up. They passed him, didn’t pay any attention to him, hit the door and rushed inside. James wandered in behind.

The doctor yanked the covers back, exposing pillows. “Where is he?”

James filled the doorway, hand on the heavy door. He didn’t have enough sense to even shake his head.

“This was in the bathroom.” The nurse handed the catheter to the doctor.

He put his hands on his hips, looking around the room like Nix might be hiding in a corner. He even bent slightly, peering under the bed.

James hadn’t moved.

“Call your boss,” the doctor said, pushing past him.

James was going to puke, for sure.

37

Marcus drummed his fingers on the counter. The hotel clerk tapped on the keys, checking in a woman with frizzy hair and a kid attached to her leg and a thumb in his mouth. The rugrat stared at Marcus, a snot bubble swelling with each breath.

Marcus turned his back.

His driver rolled his luggage to the car, put it in the trunk. He’d wait for Marcus to call, swing by and pick him up when all this was done.

Marcus looked at his watch. 1:00. He didn’t want to be in Chicago a minute longer. When it hit 3:00, those two halfskins were getting shutdown and he wasn’t going to linger. He wasted enough time on this charade. This was done, 3:00, on the dot.

M0ther was an honest system. She was a machine only interested in data. She recorded every event, watched where people went, alerted the authorities when they went redline and shut them down when they went halfskin. She had no feelings, had no investment about who lived and died. It was a simple system, an honest one.

But Marcus reserved the right to keep it that way. Sometimes, honesty can make the wrong choice. Dr. Cali was clearly damaged from her biomite seeding. His people had interviewed her co-workers and neighbors, they’d done a full analysis. Her basement was a fully operational biomite lab that had been cleansed of data. She was up to something and smart enough to cover her tracks.

And while her biomite content mysteriously stayed below the redline, he was sure that she had rigged it. Somehow, she was fooling the meters, changing what they were reading. Marcus had been around enough halfskins to know when they were over the line. He could smell it. They had a way about them. They were slightly hollow, distant and mechanical.

Machine-like.

That was her. Cali was halfskin, he knew it. If she thought she could walk around fooling him, she was wrong. She met the one person that could remedy her deceit. So, yeah, Marcus set the record straight. It wasn’t his meter that cheated the reading, he simply changed what was being reported through M0ther.

She would shut her down.

“I want smoking,” demanded the woman with the snotty kid growing off her leg. “I said that already.”

Marcus sighed, drumming the counter with his fingernails. The woman glared at him, gave him a chance to say something. His phone buzzed. He put it to his ear, not taking his eyes off her.

“Yeah.”

The kid made sucking sounds around his thumb. Marcus wanted to wipe his nose with the mother’s dress.

He barely heard what was said.

Not because he was distracted. Because it was impossible.

“What do you mean
disappeared?”

38

Eight nurses.

Three med techs.

One janitor cleaning up vomit down the hall.

Cali sat in the corner of room 512. Eyes closed. Mind plugged into the fifth floor’s network, reading who was clocked in. She didn’t know what they were doing, except for the janitor that was just called up after Mr. Craven regurgitated his chicken salad on his way to the bathroom.

She sorted through the database, read the patient list. She knew this room had recently been vacated when Ms. Sheila Hartley had been discharged after hernia surgery. Cali immediately filled the room with an alias Mr. Calvin Brown, a man that suffered from diverticulitis. His mother would be in the room with him, sitting in the chair with her eyes closed.

Mr. Brown was currently sleeping.