The Drone had its back to her, looking away down one of the never-ending corridors, rocking gently from foot to foot like a child.
She thought for a moment who it might be, a girl or a boy, young or old, and whether it was fair to shoot them with so little warning, with no opportunity to know their fate. But then she thought of Calum lying still on the ground and of Jennifer lost somewhere in the thick, choking dust, and squeezed the trigger gently and sent her bullet flying invisibly to its mark. Her gun hardly made a sound, but the smack as she hit her target was clear enough and the black-clad figure dropped immediately to the ground. Zoe waited for a second, partly unsure if the Drone was dead, in part amazed at her actions. When it was clear that her shot was good, she ran towards the now unguarded corridor and past her kill, glancing down with morbid curiosity as she went past. It was a woman, a girl really. Eyes still open with a thin line of blood running from her nose onto the ground.
As she moved inwards again from the Atrium, she could hear cracks of gunfire echoing in the distance, and with each sound she bounced down slightly on her knees. Clearly, she wasn’t the only one to have taken the opportunity that the glitch had offered. She glanced into a few rooms as she passed by, each one empty and overturned just like the Atrium, but found no other Lifers.
A little further down she reached a corner and peeked her head slowly around the bend. A few bodies lay on the floor, Drones and Lifers. Some sat eerily against the narrow walls, some flat on the floor and a few piled awkwardly on top of each other. Dust still hung in the air, and where it settled it coated the corpses with a dehumanising grey powder. Zoe raised her gun and scanned each body for movement, before edging quietly forwards to where the corridor opened into a broader junction. There were more bodies here and the walls carried massive scars from where the thudding explosions had hit. She noticed that the distant gunfire had stopped and a desperate silence now hovered over the scene.
She looked across the devastation into a large room opposite, the door jammed open by a Drone corpse on the floor, and her gaze suddenly picked out Jennifer. She was crouched under a table, staring back at her with a startled expression. Zoe was about to rush to her when she gestured for her to lie down. Zoe paused for a moment then fell flat to the ground, as two Drones ran purposely through the junction and away into the dust. When they had gone, Zoe jumped immediately up again and rushed into the room.
“You’re alive!” Zoe said, crouching down on the floor next to her.
“Only just,” she replied, touching a large patch of red glistening on her left thigh.
“I saw Matthew, something’s happened to him. I think he’s a Drone.”
Jennifer stared at her with no emotion in her face.
“You knew?” Zoe asked with shock.
“No. Well, maybe, I don’t know. Something happened the other day and perhaps now it all makes sense.” She frowned as she tried to work out her thoughts. “I don’t understand though.
There was silence for a moment, before the crackle of gunfire close by jolted them back.
“Come on, we need to get out of here.”
Zoe stood up and took the strain of Jennifer’s arm, leaning back a little and tensing her thighs whilst Jennifer raised herself up, wincing with the pain in her leg.
“I can’t get far with this,” Jennifer pressed her free hand onto her thigh, looking at the slow stream of blood that oozed through the fabric.
“You’ll get far enough, out of this building is good enough for now.”
They moved slowly out of the room, Zoe with one hand supporting Jennifer and the other keeping her gun raised and in line with her gaze. She felt powerful now she had killed, ready to kill again if she needed to, to keep them both safe, to get back to the forest.
As they crossed the open space where the four corridors met, heading back towards the Atrium, a voice called out suddenly from the floor.
“Jennifer,” the voice was hoarse and breathless, but the name was unmistakable.
“Jennifer,” it came again and they both scanned the bodies that lay scattered all around them, looking for the source. There was no movement anywhere and as they stepped around each Lifer one by one, turning them over or leaning down to stare at their bloodied faces, none was alive.
The voice called out again, a little louder now and this time Zoe located it, coming from a Drone who lay crumpled and slumped against the wall on the far side of the junction. She squeezed Jennifer’s arm and gestured with her gun towards the man and they both moved cautiously towards him. As they came closer Zoe could see that his body was mutilated and torn, his left shoulder was opened wide, fragments of bone and scorched flesh leaking out from under his shredded black clothes. A crossbow bolt stuck out of his leg and his foot was turned at such an angle that it was surely broken.
“You need to follow me,” he said, his lips barely moving but his voice coming clearer now.
“Who are you?” Jennifer asked. “How do you know my name?”
“We don’t have time, Jennifer, you need to follow me now.”
Zoe looked at Jennifer “There’s no way he’s going anywhere, how can he even be alive?”
In the distance, somewhere down the long and dusty corridor that stretched away behind the Drone another voice called out.
“Jennifer!”
They looked at each other with confusion, the voice calling again and again, echoing down the corridor like the birds that had called to each other in the forest, when she and Max had stood together in the silence of the pool.
“What the fuck is this?” Jennifer said, not directing the question anywhere other than the stillness around them.
As she took a step forward Zoe gripped her arm tightly.
“It might be a trap,” she looked at her with pleading eyes.
“The whole fucking thing is a trap,” said Jennifer and began to limp down the corridor with Zoe still hooked to her arm.
When they reached the next Drone he was more mutilated than the last, clearly dead, lying in a huge pool of dark red blood with most of his chest and abdomen missing. As they reached him, his calling stopped and another voice began, further away again, leading them deeper into the maze of service corridors, migration suites and storerooms. There was no sign of anybody else, only corpses and the constant dust, and when they reached the next Drone, a girl lying on her side with her arm stretched towards them, she stopped calling.
“I’m so glad I found you,” the girl said, her voice neutral, neither male nor female. “I have something for you.”
“Who are you? I don’t understand.”
Jennifer moved closer to her whilst Zoe kept her gun aimed at her head.
“You must understand, there's no time not to. It took them all from me, Jennifer. It wants to destroy us, to erase everything. It brought you here to kill you, to remove any chance of the Metropolis surviving, but I won’t let it.”
Zoe stared at the girl, whose face was expressionless as she spoke. Her eyes, greyed and dull with death, moved from her to Jennifer eerily as she spoke.
“AarBee?”
“I’m glad Zoe is with you.”
The girl’s eyes gazed with a milky aim towards Zoe.
“What did you do to Matthew?” Zoe yelled at her, stepping closer with her gun pointed at the girl’s head, “What did you do?”
“Matthew was always mine, Jennifer,” said AarBee, directing the conversation back to her. “We kept you safe. Made sure the Lifers grew and flourished. What good is immortality without death living somewhere? And anyway, immortality isn’t for everyone, is it?”
The girl’s eyes darted between the two of them again.
“He’s not mine anymore, though.”
There was silence.
“But I have something for you now Jennifer. Something so precious, so important. I saved her, partitioned her and took her out. Take it.”
Jennifer looked confused for a moment and glanced back at Zoe for reassurance, as the girl outstretched her bloodied hand and gently opened her fingers. In her palm they could see a small, black object like a polished beach pebble or a dark jewel from an old necklace. Jennifer lifted it gently from the dead girl’s fingers and examined it in the palm of her hand, shining pristinely in front of the dull dried blood and her hardened skin.
“What is it?” she asked.
“This is Rachael,” AarBee answered, “she is perfect. It made her to understand you. Migrated her when she was so young, before she became too human, before it destroyed all the others. She is everything, Jennifer. Everything.”
As Zoe watched on in silence, she spotted a figure walking quickly down the corridor towards them. She raised her gun and took aim, but as the figure came closer and emerged from the haze she saw it was Matthew and her finger twitched on and off the trigger as her mind and emotions conflicted. Jennifer spotted him as well and rose up stiffly from the Drone, clutching the small black shape tightly in her fingers. Zoe could see the fear drop away from Jennifer’s face and she called out his name instinctively as he came towards her. But, striding at full speed towards them, he didn’t smile or answer. He didn’t raise his hands towards them like she felt sure he would, or beckon them quickly to safety. As he approached he raised his gun and with one quick and efficient action fired a single shot that cracked into Jennifer’s skull and jerked her head violently backwards before she collapsed to the floor. Zoe called out her name in horror as she fell and the little black shape skittered from Jennifer’s hand towards her.
Matthew fired a second shot towards Zoe almost immediately, which ricocheted off her gun and knocked it from her hands. As she ducked to pick it up, she saw AarBee’s gift lying next to the barrel and reached to pick it up.
“That’s mine!” Matthew screamed at her in a voice full of hatred and anger. He aimed his gun again as Zoe crouched helplessly in front of him, with nowhere to run to and no time to defend herself. She stared paralysed at Matthew, fixed onto his impossibly dark and empty eyes, waiting for the shot that would turn her world to black.
Mo lost track of how long he’d spent floating silently in the darkness, but it was days. Once or twice he crawled back up into the bright lights of Disposal 10 to refill his water supply, but the rest of the time he drifted in and out of sleep at the end of his short lifeline.
After his first trip back up to get more water, frustrated by too many struggles with his clothes when he needed to urinate or defecate, he had removed them, ditching them down the Chute in a tight bundle ahead of himself. It was hot in there, the stale air from below constantly warming him with deliciously sweet waves, so his torn and bloodstained utility suit had no practical purpose in his current existence. At first, he had held on painfully for hours when he needed to pee, even more to shit, as the mission to remove his suit was immensely complicated, dangling from a single cord in the dark. Now he was free, his body functioned without his help and he could focus all his time on sleep.
He slept a lot. It felt like his whole body and mind surrendered to an involuntary sleep, a great wave of exhaustion that had been building for years. Although his cord was uncomfortable at first, the pain soon passed and this new weightless existence, rotating slowly in the void with his limbs dangling limply below, lulled him repeatedly into a deep and enveloping hibernation. He hadn’t realised how much of his energy had been spent on existing, resisting, clinging on and free falling, killing and grieving, until now. Without it all, there was so little of him left he could barely open his eyes.
When he did, it wasn’t long before he couldn't tell if he was awake or dreaming, the darkness outside and inside of him merging into one continuous flow of thoughts and memories, colours and nothingness. Colours pulsed and bled all around him, bursting from pinpricks into dazzling sunshine when the Chute occasional cracked and creaked from inactivity. From out of the darkness, people would arrive without warning and stay with him. Raleigh, the Ghosts from behind his apartment, his mother and father, a girl he’d slept with who sold hacked and bent tech from a kiosk on the boulevards. They would all come and talk with him, sometimes for hours, although he was never sure if his words were real or not, and his dry lips would split and bleed when he tried to test them.
Gradually an enormous sadness overcame him, a great wave of grief that swallowed him so completely that his breathing arrested and he felt sure he would suffocate in the deep, vacuum of pain. He felt as if some terrible tragedy had occurred that he couldn’t remember, and his thoughts itched and panicked looking for a record of the event. It was as if he’d lost some great love, something so vital that living without it was utterly impossible. He sobbed uncontrollably, embarrassed at first, a silent outpouring alone in the darkness, his tears falling away from him to the horrors below and his chest splayed open, begging for his soul to be mended or taken away.
More than once he thought about wrapping the cord irreversibly around his neck and unhooking his waist, letting his heaviness strangle him completely until his body gave up and this tragic agonising stopped. But he knew he wasn’t ready for that step and besides, he wasn’t alone.
The boy.
The boy was always there. He never spoke, but Mo would sometimes catch him spying on him out of the corner of his eye. When his eyelids eased shut, he would feel him take his hand as he drifted between waking and sleeping, a tiny palm that would nest inside his and twitch gently as they both slept. It felt good. Like brothers.
He hadn't eaten since returning to the dark, and although at first he was tempted to at least retrieve Maddie's food, he felt like it wasn't his to take and, increasingly, that he just no longer wanted to eat. Although intense at first, his hunger eventually subsided, as if his whole body came to a decision that food was something it no longer required, a habit from his past life, with no purpose now. Mo felt good about this, he felt strong in his simplicity, pure even. Hidden away in the tiny space that was his and his alone, Mo had made his own crossing and he was happy to drift to whatever place it was taking him. Happy? Yes, that was it. Mo felt happy.
He liked it here and the longer he stayed, and the more he thought about his new home, the more he understood that this was where he belonged. The discomfort of social interactions was gone, the angry alienation that had defined him for as long as he could remember was not with him now. The only people who came to see him here were those who understood him and even then, when he was done talking, they left him alone.
The girl from Prime/Code had come to see him too. She had shown him the scars from her surgeries, told him of the pain she’d felt in hospital and the sleep she’d lost after his beating. Mo apologised to her and she accepted this, although he didn't feel like she was for real. He’d met people like her before. They said everything right, but you knew deep down they despised you. So before she left he kissed her awkwardly on the cheek – it surprised them both – in the hope that some kindness he could offer now would work its way through her hatred, like detergent breaking down a blood stain, one molecule at a time.
Maddie never came, which he took as a good sign. She must be busy keeping her own self alive. He thought about her though, and sent his thoughts out in to the darkness to track her down. They searched for her, racing through the gloom with limitless energy, frothing and snarling with their desire to find her, returning every once in a while to let him know that she was neither dead nor alive.
He was dying here, he knew that, but since he was enjoying the process he was happy to see it through. He felt like he’d been offered a different death, one that he could engage with like a student on a history simulation, one that he could explore and enjoy, manipulate and give in to, and he liked that.
Since he could no longer tell whether he was awake or dreaming, even dead or alive, he also wondered whether maybe this death he had chosen would go on forever. Like the emptied Dupes who had clattered away from him, perhaps he was already remade in some other place, oblivious to his redundancy, just waiting to leave this existence behind. Perhaps he only had to wake up to it and it would be complete. The life and the person he had known only a few days earlier had already separated from him, there was no question of that, and he could feel his current self disintegrating further with every passing moment in his dark and senseless half-world.
The boy was back, and when Mo felt him squeeze his hand he turned gently towards him. He didn’t hide this time, and Mo smiled at him, pleased that they knew each other well enough now not to be afraid. The boy smiled back, the pure and beautiful smile that he had given when they first met, and it radiated through every piece of Mo’s consciousness. He felt it soothe his grief and flood in warm waves into the cavities of his being, whilst his breathing slowed to almost nothing as he relished it.
It was only the sound of the guns that broke their bond. They both heard them, and listened calmly together to the thuds and booms that broke in dulled waves into their muted realm. They were hard to define at first, alien intrusions into their otherwise silent world, but the louder ones in particular awoke all of Mo’s memories and made them both flinch with their violence. They listened for a long time, partly mesmerised by the rhythm of the battle that was raging above them and partly in shock; it had been so long since anything had intruded into this fading world they had made.
When the rhythm slowed and the spaces between blasts grew greater and greater until their silence came to the fore again, Mo knew that they had to venture out of the Chute again. As he reached up to pull himself towards the ledge below the entrance, he expected his arms to feel weak and clumsy. He had used them so little now, but instead they felt strong and flexible. He was amazed at how light and energised he felt and smiled at the boy with an impulsive glee, who smiled back and followed close behind him as they rose over the ledge and shifted carefully towards the hatch.
Mo didn’t check before he exited the Chute, it didn’t matter who was there this time, and he dropped his bare feet silently onto the counter before unhooking the cord from around his waist. It peeled away from him as if he were removing wings from his back. He and the boy stood silently in the room. It was exactly as he’d left it, almost as if they had jumped back in time, but the air was hot and acidic with gun smoke.
The door had been knocked slightly off its base runner, perhaps impacted by a passing person or blast, and swayed precariously half open, half closed. Mo moved towards it with the boy clinging tightly to his hand and peered out into the corridor. Up towards the other Disposal Suites and the bend in the corridor Mo could see bodies lying on the ground, some Drones, some not, spread out motionless in the dust and rubble. He stepped out and they both moved confidently along the faded white walls, not hiding now, looking for an answer and perhaps oblivion.
At the turn in the corridor the haze thickened a little, drifting softly onto more bodies and destruction. In the distance, forming slowly into view at the far junction, Mo could see a small group of figures crouched down and talking. As he came nearer he could see that one was a Drone, lying badly injured on the ground and talking softly to a girl who crouched down next to her. He didn’t recognise her uniform, nor the girl who stood behind her, both wearing unmarked utility suits that were streaked with dirt and blood. When he was just a few steps away the crouching girl stood up abruptly and shouted out, making Mo think she had seen him and stopping him dead in his tracks, but a fraction of a second later her head jolted backwards as the sound of a gunshot reached his ears, and she collapsed swiftly to the floor.
As Mo stood motionless, a tall man walked quickly out from the left corridor and fired another shot at the other girl. She immediately dropped her gun and cowered down on the ground and Mo saw her imminent death as clearly as she did. The boy had seen it to and walked towards her to take her hand when the moment came.
In the patient moment that waited once the gun had lined up to the girl’s head, Mo stood silently in his nakedness, his hunger eating away at what remained of him, watching the boy hold her hand and wait for the inevitable. He remembered the moment they’d first met, how his smile had stencilled a tiny silhouette of hope onto his otherwise blackened soul. How despite the many lives Mo had seen fall away from him since then, the boy’s memory had flickered softly on, resisting the death and destruction that was everywhere, trailing behind them both in turbulent wakes of hateful disruption.
When the boy glanced towards him, he knew a moment had arrived which he couldn't escape from. He would either stop the killing or spend forever disintegrating in the darkness.
With an energy that seemed to pick him up and throw him forward, Mo flew from the safety of the corridor towards the man with the gun and set upon him with a ferocity that focused the energy of all his hatreds, history and hope into one moment of absolute action.
The gun spun in the air momentarily before skittering to the ground as the pair toppled over and writhed on the floor, limbs flailing about with manic energy as shouts and screams filled the corridor. Mo rose up and slammed his fists back down onto the stunned man, who tried to block them with his arms, but with each blow they fell lower and lower until his defence crumpled to nothing. Rising high in the air – his naked and pale body thin like a corpse, his hair matted around his head, dirt and excrement streaked down his lower half – Mo was a demon transformed, whose blows rained down on the man lying limp beneath him, gradually turning the slap of fists and bone to a softer, pulpier sound.
When he was done, Mo leaned close to the man's face and looked into his fading eyes. The unmistakable glassiness of the Drones was washing away, revealing the crisp morning blue shade that lay underneath.
“I see you,” Mo whispered to him. “I see you running,” as he watched consciousness exit and his eyes relax with emptiness.
Mo stood up and turned to the girl, his chest heaving from the fight, sprays of blood glistening on his dark, dirtied skin. The boy had let go of her hand now and was back in the corridor beckoning to him.
“You need to go,” he said, walking back towards the boy and taking his hand again.
She looked at him with a mixture of confusion and distrust, before glancing down at her friend lying on the floor. She crouched down next to her and ran her fingers lightly over her forehead and cheek, tracing the outline that made no response to her touch.
“You need to go now,” he said again, “you have no time,” and picked up her gun from the floor, as well as the small black jewel that lay next to it. He moved cautiously towards her and placed it gently in her hand. Up close, he could see she was a young woman, her startled and alive eyes glaring out from the blood and grime.
She rose and nodded her acceptance and Mo lead her quickly back along the corridor. Once back in Disposal 10 he pointed towards the hatch that would now be salvation for both of them.
“Down there,” he said.
“Where does it go?”
“Out.”
They heard the sound of running in the corridor outside and Mo hooked her gun strap over his shoulder and stood in the doorway. The boy was still next to him and he glanced down at him before turning back to the girl.
“Go, please,” Mo said calmly.
She sat on the ledge and swung her feet around and through the hatch, holding on to a thin metal bar that ran above her head. A warm, sweet breeze floated up from the Chute and filled the room with its familiar taint. She looked back towards him for reassurance momentarily and as the tiny impacts began to burst in the room, let go of the bar to race away into the tumbling blackness.
Mo looked down at the boy, watching as the bullets passed straight through him like bats spiralling the evening mist and knew that there was no need to fight anymore, no need to be afraid, and he smiled. Smiled right at him, right into him. It was a smile of the kind that only a child can give, and the boy instinctively smiled back.