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Fifteen-hundred. Time. Zero hour. The sky is not the soft blue-gray poetry of midafternoon but the boiling darkness of sunlight struggling through thick clouds, a haze of smoke. The result is the color of blood oranges, age-scarred Vietnam, heavy canopy. She knows this without looking; this is how it always is. She can smell the sulphur in the air, a constant presence, and she does not need the accompanying visual. She can barely hear, through the insulation and the thick-poured cement, the clatter of Kitty's keyboard, barely hear the sounds of another person, another life. The Compass was built to last; it survived the post-Pulse chaos, the late-nineties riots, and all that came before. It stands as a witness, she thinks, a passive observer, marked by time and yet somehow outside that force. Like she herself does, removed save for a single cause. In the scheme of things, does it matter whether that cause is shelter or Logan?
At least the Compass, this part, is hers. She's heard stories about what happens Inside, to the captives, the prisoners of war. It's all government-sanctioned, of course, though there's never an official story, never an authority to comment. Just word on the street. Rumors. If she didn't have personal experience, she might be able to believe that the stories are exaggerated, propaganda and gossip to pass time. Instead, she just wonders what the storytellers don't know, what they haven't seen. What else goes on and how much worse it really is. Hot-cold-sharp-loud-blunt, and all refined by R&D teams. They've had him for three months. Time enough, she knows, but for what? The ones inside come out different, or they don't come out at all, just as with any war, any machine.
But, she thinks, his shell would be better than nothing at all. Still, she will try not to think of him burned out to the point of nothingness. In her dreams, rare as they are, he is himself, as he used to be, untouched by time and this apocalypse. She knows that the chances of this being reality are slim.
Right now, though, if she doesn't leave, she will be late. She doesn't knock on Kitty's door when she leaves this time. No one can know where she is going, she thinks, as far as she can control. As after the Pulse, chaos allows for relative freedom of movement, at least in theory. She knows that they are looking for her, that she is supposed to be among them, camo-clad soldiers on the streets, enforcers, assassins, protective detail for the nameless man. Her freedom comes at a cost. She cannot resist. She cannot act, cannot inspire action. Silence, or the appearance of silence, is the price of her life, this life, or whatever this existence is called.
Her footsteps create an intolerably loud rhythm on the cracked sidewalk. Her reaction to the noise is paranoia, she knows. No one is watching her in particular, no one is seeing her with more than a cursory glance. The guards are not paying her any more attention than they are the others, the passersby. She wonders if she is walking into an ambush and dismisses the thought. If they want to kill her, there are thousands of other chances, thousands of other times and easier ways. If they want to break her, they will have to kill what is left. An obsession. And that is so much harder to destroy than hope, because it's not an emotion and it's not even really alive.
The phone booth stands ahead, a lone figure at the edge of the abandoned market. She remembers streamers, jostling elbows, the constant cry of hagglers, buyer and seller alike. That's all gone now. The soldiers do a sweep every night. The ones caught within the boundaries are taken away and probably executed; she doesn't know why the military would bother keeping them alive. They would have nothing to offer, nothing at all.
She opens the plexiglass door, spiderwebbed by more than close-range impact, and closes it behind her. There's no point, but the illusion of safety is an interesting distraction. She stares at the obscured phone-company logo, the outline of an abbreviation in once-bright blue. The phonebook is missing; paper is a source of heat. Paper burns. What happens when they run out of warmth? Summer, nearing now, will only last for so long.
But maybe this will all be over by winter, one way or another. Anything is possible.
She answers the phone before it rings, sensitive to the change in the air, electrically-charged particles. She has never met the contact in person, face-to-face. She knows that whoever it is, they're in a position of power. They know who she is, what she is, and they know what she wants. They're willing to give him to her, for a price. She's not sure if this exchange will come at any danger to the contact; she really knows nothing about it. Even its gender is unknown, its voice disguised and carefully modulated to betray nothing.
"I've prepared an offer." The rustle of silk, delicate skin and a delicate garrote. She remembers that they used to use mistresses as assassins. It worked, she thinks, because who would be expecting that? After the first time, though, she'd thought they would have learned.
"I'm waiting," she says. She will be polite. Her free hand is clenched into a fist, trembling with the effort of not moving. She's glad it's not a video call.
There is no noise in the background, no music or voices. Nothing to betray a location, an identity. "You know what we want." And she does, but she will not give in immediately. There are steps to be carried out, a game to be played.
"I have money." Taken from the already dead. She does have some principles, still. She wonders if he will appreciate that, when she sees him. If he will care, or if he will comprehend.
A huff of breath, laughter or annoyance. Either way, it is too blank, too monotone, to be considered an expression of emotion. "I don't need money."
"I'll pay," she says, proud of her own lack of emotion, her cool tone. "What condition is he in?" The words are sterile, medical and distant, and she didn't mean to say them. She wishes she could take them back. Even if she is answered, there is no guarantee that the answer will be truth.
"Does it matter? You'll still pay." It bothers her that the voice knows her this well, knows this much about her, but there's nothing she can do about it. What Lydecker knew, his knowledge, they now possess. "He's alive." She can't tell if she's being taunted or if the contact is taking pity on her.
"Good." Her voice is steady, free of any betraying quavers, any expression. She doesn't know if it's true, anyway.
"Tomorrow morning," the voice says.
Her grip on the handset, scratched plastic, tightens. "That's not enough time."
"It will be." Because she doesn't have a choice. She's waited this long and she will find a way. All of this they know. "The docks. Oh-seven-hundred."
"I'll be there." And then the handset is back in the cradle and she's staring at it with no recollection of ending the call. She steps from the booth, heads away from the empty square. The Space Needle is still there, ancient and curved against the terrible sky, but she dares not scale those heights, defy them so obviously and so deliberately. But she has no need for a void, now, no need to escape from the all-too-human aspects of life. Instead, she searches for memories, points in time and space which will remind her, which will ground and center.
She keeps her head down and walks without stopping to where her apartment once stood, the building she shared with Kendra and then with Original Cindy. She stands outside the barrier, looks at the charred walls and remembers. There is where she stood unmoving in the shadows, where she crouched when they grew closer. There is where she stood, and there is where she watched her sister order the execution of her best friend, where she heard the guns being cocked and then watched them fire, each bullet's glowing trajectory etching its own path, its own map of synapses and neurons.
Her defining thought at the time, she remembers, was that it sounded so much more final when it was a friend. In her defense, there was nothing she could have done. There were too many of them for her to intervene, too many special-ops forces, and that was In Between, the day after she lost him and sometime before she found RAF Kitty, or before Kitty found her. She does not know why she went home or where she went after that, after Cindy fell. She has impressions, freeze-frames like negatives exposed to light, but the following few days as a whole are a blur. Sweat, slow-burn at the back of her mind, the trickle of rain and tears down her face. And then eyes, Logan's eyes, looking at her from a woman's face, and life as she knows it resumed.
And now it's going to change again. She has fifteen hours, fifteen hours in which to plan and execute a murder. Zack would be proud of her rationality, she thinks, the coldness of her thoughts, even if he didn't agree with the reason, which he certainly wouldn't. It's just what has to happen. The means to an end. She wonders if Logan would understand. She wonders what she will need to do.
She wonders if Valerie will recognize her. It's been awhile and they've both been busy, both changed. Valerie Locke, formerly Cale, is as of recently a high-ranking figure in the nascent opposition movement. Inspired by her ex-husband's imprisonment to speak out, to do something. To act. And Max . . . Max is harder. That's what it amounts to, really. Before this apocalypse, she would never have considered doing this. In the aftermath, she wasn't particularly shocked when the contact suggested a name, hinted for the first time at the desired result. It makes sense, she has to admit. She will be able to enter where their forces cannot, simply because of who she is and who she isn't. She will be able to enter, to kill, and then to leave. And then one of their enemies will no longer be a threat, they will have the knowledge of a crime to use against her in the future, should they need another reason to hunt her down, and she will have Logan.
Ultimately, only the last matters.
She turns from the remains of her old apartment and walks in the direction of home. She knows where Valerie is, where she lives. Logan told her, afterward, so that she would be able to help the other woman, if something happened. So that she would know. She will use this knowledge to save him.
The rain begins when she's a block from the Compass. Not enough to clear the sky, to wash away the grim and the ash, to have any effect at all. Instead, only the desolate slide of small raindrops down sheets of dirty plastic.
xxxxx
"Shouldn't the rain be clearing the smoke?" A mundane question, discussing the weather. Her clothes are damp from the water. While he works on electronic communication, she's been outside, listening to word on the streets. Hoping that someone, somewhere, knows something. So far, no one does.
His eyes are bloodshot behind the lenses, behind the glass. He speaks without looking out the window, without seeing the weather, his gaze on her alone. "There's too much of it." This, too, she already knows.
She nods, though he doesn't see her, wonders if things get progressively worse. If pre-Pulse life left everyone unprepared for the EMP, has life since prepared them for this? "What do you think it is who's responsible?"
"A foreign government or our own? I can't say. There's nothing . . . it's too soon. Everyone's still in shock, I think. They're scattered." Except for them; they're holding together. For each other or because of each other or because what the hell else is there except madness. They're not unique; there have to be others. The ones around the barrel fires, holding their hands over microcosmic explosions, were sane enough, but they've lived with this all along. What about the ones with houses, children and things to care about?
"Hope they get it together in time. Before it's too late and all that." She wrings out her hair and gets wet ash on her hands. They leave gray trails on her dark jeans. No idea when she'll next get the chance to do laundry. "They're holding meetings in the churches. Saying these are the end times."
"They've been saying that for a long time. Maybe they're right." She looks at him sharply and he looks away. His sigh is unfamiliar, the edge of irritation tempered with the apathy of overwork. "I need sleep."
"Got long days ahead." And she knows that goes without saying. A quick exhalation of laugher at the unintentional comedy of the understatement. There will be no waking up, no reprieve. This is not a dream. Say it again as though repetition will make it real. This. Is. Not. A. Dream.
This is not a dream.
xxxxx
