Firestorm Page 3

  “Can you see anything?” I asked, squeezing Blaze’s arm.

  A pause. “No,” he said. “It’s a very long tunnel. Have patience.”

  Patience. It wasn’t a trait I had in spades, despite all the years I’d spent in the facility. With every clone I brought into the world a surge had gone through me, and I wanted it to be done, for this iteration to be the one we needed. And every time we'd failed, the frustration built in me.

  Another source of frustration: Luther Ides would be waking soon, and he'd be pissed. I still hadn't told Blaze about what the man could do.

  What the man could do...

  "Blaze," I said, stopping, "I need to ask you something."

  He stopped with me and remained silent—an invitation for me to go on.

  "Touch the spot at the back of your head where your skull meets your neck. Do you feel something hard under the skin?"

  I waited anxiously in the darkness. The "hot" infiltrators—the ones prone to hyper-aggression—often ended up chipped by their Scarlets in case they did something really bad. Like try to escape.

  And Blaze hadn't exactly been obedient before we'd gotten out of the facility. If he was chipped, that meant Ides could do anything to Blaze.

  At any moment, he could make the chip light up with activity. He could reprogram an infiltrator, activate their conditioning word, even set the thing off like a bomb.

  "Nothing," Blaze said in the tunnel. "There's nothing."

  My heart gave a tremendous beat, and I let a breath I hadn't realized I'd been holding.

  "Wait," he said, "I feel something. A small square."

  Three

  Friday, May 9, 2053

  7:14 a.m.

  Blaze

  "Shit," Darcy said in the darkness. She let go of my arm, backed toward the tunnel's wall and slumped down it.

  I knelt at her side and brought her hand into both of mine. "What is it?"

  "You're chipped."

  "Is that a pretty way of saying I'm flawed?"

  She exhaled fast through both nostrils—her form of a mild laugh. "This is serious."

  "It's this thing under my skin."

  "Yes."

  "Tell me what it does."

  Her head dropped back against the wall, and she stared into nothing. "At some point your Scarlet must have put it in. Basically, it's a safeguard that only Luther Ides can control. When he wakes up, he can do whatever he wants to you."

  "Specify."

  She raised her hand, sticking her fingers out one by one. "Reprogram. Incapacitate. Blow up."

  Well, those were pretty godlike powers. Made sense they were reserved for the only man treated like a god in that facility.

  I reached back and felt the chip again, tracing the edges of it with my fingers. It was about a quarter-inch wide and tall, and sat just under my skin, above the muscle. My body had long healed from the incision, but I did feel a slight remnant scar along one edge.

  She was right: I'd heard my Scarlet say my conditioning word—"goodwill"—so many times during the week I was in the facility, I knew she'd had ample opportunity to implant the chip.

  Especially since the word, pronounced by her, made me into human jelly. Moldable, commandable, complacent.

  Until Darcy shot herself; that had brought me out of it pretty effectively.

  "So I cut the bugger out," I said, reaching for the tanto in my boot.

  Darcy jerked forward, groping for my arm. "No! If you try to remove it, the chip will automatically detonate. It's wired straight into your skull. I need specific tools, a lab."

  I slid the blade back into my boot. "I take it those tools aren't in this backpack."

  "No. But they have them in Beacon. I used to work in the science lab up there, before I was conscripted to the facility."

  I glanced down the tunnel. The humming had grown louder, but we were still at least a few miles off whatever was at the other end.

  And who knew if that would allow us access to the city? Taking this route might not have been the best choice.

  I turned back to her. "How long before Ides wakes?"

  "I don't know. We've never tried that drug before, so he could be out for twelve hours or a day."

  "What's the protocol for an escape like this one?"

  "Honestly, I don't know," she said. "I'm a geneticist, not a soldier. And...we've never had this happen before."

  "How is that possible?" I said. "How is it possible the infiltrators never took over?"

  She raised her palms. "You saw it all. The Scarlets condition you to be weak to their authority. They try to drive any fire out of you."

  "Because it's better to be apathetic and efficient than passionate and fuck things up," I said. "From what I saw, it worked on most of us."

  "Not on you."

  "Not on me."

  Silence fell between us. I was still holding her hand between mine, my thumb rubbing over the back of her hand. "Will I have any warning before the chip activates?" I asked.

  "If Ides detonates it, you'll feel a heat in your neck about three seconds before it goes off."

  Three seconds. That would be enough time to get her safely away from the blast.

  "And," she said, "we have another wrinkle. They'll probably send people after us."

  I thought back to the Scarlets, the Gales, the way Luther Ides ran his facility. "They will," I said. "I guarantee it."

  "Things are looking pretty grim, aren't they?"

  I smiled, lifting one hand to her cheek. My finger trailed down her face. "Not from where I'm looking." I stood, dusting off my pants. "Let's go."

  Darcy stared up at me—well, at my chest, which was where she thought my face was. "Go?"

  I reached down, helping her up. "We keep moving."

  "But you could die at any moment."

  "That was true before. At this point, I'm more used to the prospect of dying at any moment than not. The only difference is," I said, lifting her hand to my lips and kissing it, "that now I've got you with me."

  Her eyebrows came together, and she set her hand to my cheek. "It'll take us hours."

  "Not if I run."

  "I can't—"

  "You're not running, Darcy. I know you can't right now." I slipped her hand over my shoulder, swung around so that my back was to her. "But I can carry you."

  I knelt down, and her slight frame came over mine, her good arm threading over my shoulder to clasp my chest.

  "Are you sure?" she asked.

  I nodded, rising with her straddling me. I slid my hands under her thighs. "What good's 'Blaze' as a nickname if I spend all my time walking?"

  We ran.

  Well, I ran. I had recovered enough from my time in cryostasis, and the silver wound to my thigh barely hurt anymore. Still, I was human; even if I was engineered to be rugged, I felt the fatigue of the fighting, the lack of sleep and sustenance.

  But the counterweight was the urgency of our situation. I needed to get us into Beacon—or at least, I needed to get her there. My survival was secondary to hers.

  Which meant Darcy's weight made hardly any difference—not with everything bearing down on us as it was. Her wound, the chip, whatever the facility might send after us.

  Meanwhile, she told me about the world.

  "Beacon," she explained, "is the last human outpost. It's where I was born. There were others, but they were destroyed by the silvers when I was a child."

  I remained silent, listening.

  "When I left five years ago, there were just under a thousand of us—the last humans in the continental United States. They might still exist elsewhere in the world, but we haven't had any contact with them to know."

  The tunnel rose endlessly before me, but every step brought us closer to the thrumming machine. The closer we’d gotten to it, the more distinct it had become to my ears, so that by now I could distinguish a massive source of electricity as well the rushing of an underground river. Probably one tied in with the other.

  Tha
t was good, because I could tell that, even as she talked, Darcy was dangerously dehydrated. She'd lost blood, and she hadn't had a sip of water since I'd come out of cryostasis. That was eight or nine hours ago.

  But she remained uncomplaining, her grip around my chest solid as she talked of her home. On the contrary, she seemed to resist complaint.

  I hadn’t realized she would be this gritty, this capable in a situation like this. Every day that I had the chance to observe her behavior and choices, I found I respected her even more. I believed a little more in the core of goodness inside her.

  "This is the place—and these are the people—we designed you to defend." She paused. "How are you?" she breathed into my ear. Her voice gave me a little more vigor, and I sped up.

  "I'm good," I said. Which was more or less true, if I didn't take into account my physical state. Mentally, emotionally, I was the best I'd been.

  I was free. I was with her. What else did I need?

  Water. I needed to get her water. And maybe that was why I scented it. Stale, yes, but up ahead I scented water. We were still a couple miles off the source of the noise, but what I smelled was much closer.

  "Blaze," she murmured, "do you hear that noise?"

  I'd heard it, and already I was increasing my pace. It sounded like a set of wheels over the tunnel floor, moving at a much faster speed that we were capable of. Than I was capable of.

  Which made it pretty damn fast.

  "It's coming this way," she said.

  "I know."

  "What should we do?"

  I didn't answer; I didn't know. I just kept running toward that scent of water.

  Soon a pure white light appeared, and I heard a whine above the sound of the wheels. The light grew until it was nearly blinding, and I knew it would be on us in thirty seconds.

  "Blaze!" Darcy said. "Up ahead, to the left."

  An alcove. She'd spotted it before I had, which was a miraculous thing in itself.

  Within a minute, I'd brought us to the alcove, which ended up being a door carved into the rock. It sat on the side of the tunnel like it had always been there, its face etched with a language I didn't recognize.

  I let her down, and we pressed up hard against the door as the light grew and grew and finally the thing swept past us so fast I felt the breeze off it.

  "What was that?" she asked, staring after it.

  I squinted, but I couldn't make it out before it slipped into the darkness. "It had wheels. Some sort of vehicle, maybe."

  "That's a good sign," she said, turning back to me. "But also a bad one. You can't be seen by them."

  "Because I'm so blindingly handsome?"

  She made a face. "Because you're not supposed to exist."

  I smirked, turned toward the door behind us. "There's water behind this."

  Her hand came up before her, and she touched the metal face of it. "The old language."

  I touched the lever, set halfway up, and found it responsive.

  "Wait," she said. "We don't know what's inside."

  "I know there's water inside. And you need it—desperately," I said. I reached down, lifting the blade from my boot. I brought her behind me as I turned the lever and pushed the door open.

  It groaned loudly, and a light flicked on.

  It was a small office, empty except for a desk, a computer, and papers strewn across. I stepped inside, found three jugs of water and rations on the shelf on the wall behind the door.

  Darcy came in after me, squinting in the harsh light. She looked so pale I was stunned she had managed to stay upright long enough to walk inside.

  "Come," I said, pulling her toward the small wooden chair in front of the desk. I sat her down, and she didn't object. "Drink," I said, unscrewing the cap on one of the jugs and handing it to her.

  She took it, brought the opening to her nose for a sniff. "It's old," she declared. And then she upturned the jug so far the water nearly spilled out the sides of her mouth. She drank and drank and drank.

  When she'd finished, I unsealed one of the rations and handed it to her. "This is old, too."

  She set the jug on the desk, took the ration and stared at the seal. "This was packaged four years ago. It must be really terrible not to have been touched."

  "Want to find out?"

  "I don't know." She took a bite of the ration, chewed as her eyes roamed the space. "Not bad." When she turned to the desk, she set the ration down and passed her hand over the papers. "These are reports."

  I lowered the jug I'd been drinking from; the stale water tasted like nectar. "What kind?"

  She leaned closer, lifting one of the sheets up. "Hard to say. They look like something to do with electricity. I see kilowatts a lot."

  I looked over her shoulder, scanning the page she held. This was New English, a language I had been taught. "Why can I read this but not what was on the door?"

  "On the door?" she said, glancing that way. "Oh, the old language—they taught us it as children in Beacon."

  I gestured to the door. "What does it say?"

  "It's the number twelve. That's the generator we saw running in the dock."

  "And what's this report about?"

  She turned back to the papers. "It's a report on the generator's status." She rifled through the papers, flicking them aside one by one.

  "And?" I said.

  "The numbers are going down," she said, "the output of kilowatts is down by 12% over the past five years."

  "So they're dying."

  She looked up at me with wide eyes. "This is too fast. The twenty-four generators are supposed to last for a hundred years."

  "How long have they been around for?"

  "I don't know," she said, chewing her lip. "A while before I was born."

  "Maybe they have run for a hundred years."

  "No," she said definitively. "The silvers only appeared thirty-five years ago. The government built Beacon and the generators in the same year." She stared hard at the page she held. "But this report...it shows a gradual decline over the past five years."

  "So generator 12 is losing efficacy," I said.

  She nodded.

  "How many are needed to power the city?"

  "I don't know," she said, still scanning page by page. "More than one. And if Beacon loses electricity, it's not just a matter of not having night lights or running water."

  "What happens?"

  Her face angled up toward me. "We're done. The whole human experiment is done."

  My first morning as a free man, and things were grand.

  First, I could detonate at any moment like a human grenade. Second, the facility had likely already sent out one or more trained soldiers to neutralize us. Third, Beacon's power was, bit by bit, failing.

  We jogged together down the tunnel, hands clasped, the rations and a jug of water in the backpack I carried. I held the flashlight for Darcy, its cylindrical beam bobbing as we ran.

  "It's not much farther," I said. "Maybe half a mile. Do you need my help?"

  "I'm good," she breathed beside me. Her weak arm was braced to her chest, and she ran awkwardly. "Don't worry about me."

  But of course, that was an impossibility. Already I was attuned to her scents: the smell of her sweat, of her arousal, of exhaustion, of fear. All of them were her, but distinct flavors.

  And right now her body exuded a mixture of sweat and fear.

  But she would never give up. Neither would I. Maybe that unconscious understanding was what had bound us together from the beginning.

  "I see something," she said. The machinery had grown so loud even my acute hearing struggled to pick up her words.

  Ahead, a faint light glowed through a tall, curving doorway. Something revolved beyond it, casting faint, regular shadows.

  "That's it," I said into her ear. I squeezed her hand, and she returned it.

  I wanted to embrace her, but now wasn't the time. For better or worse, we'd reached the tunnel's end. We'd reached light.

&nbs
p; Four

  Friday, May 9, 2053

  10:02 a.m.

  Darcy

  The light at the end of the tunnel came gradual at first until it shifted to a sudden, overpowering brilliance.

  Even with the flashlight, my eyes had become so adjusted to darkness that I shielded them as Blaze and I stepped in, the walls opening up into a cavern so large it seemed to have no sides, just went out and out and up and up.

  At the center sat some kind of metal water wheel digging into an underground river. It powered a pillar at the center of the room, up whose sides black cords wrapped like vines.

  We stood in an alcove, the noise shielded by the rockface partially blocking us from the water wheel. I retrieved the jug from the backpack, and we both took long swigs of the old water as we stood at the edge of the cavern.

  “This is…” Blaze said, trailing off, his face upturned.

  “Beacon’s central power,” I finished. I understood now: the generators were satellites, each of them wired up like spokes to the central power station.

  It was a safety measure; if one generator was taken down, the other twenty-four—still safe in their own docks—could compensate.

  In theory, no one should be able to get to the central pylon. And if they did, then things were really dire.

  I had lived in Beacon my entire life and not known this. As a child, the electricity provided by the government had always just been there, and in my mind, would be for my entire life.

  But now I saw that, like anything else, our survival boiled down to metal sheets sloughing water—tiny, necessary cogs that all added up to the lifeline that was electricity.

  But the generators were running out, with a 12% drop in output in just a year. The system wasn't working as intended, and whether that was tampering or something else, I still didn't know.

  Blaze started toward the water, and I squeezed his chest. “Wait,” I said. “it’s dangerous for you to go. Let me.”

  He turned toward me, nostrils flaring. That look said he was the one who took on the danger—not me. “Excuse me, Doctor?”