She leaned closer to the mirror, putting a hand on either side of the frame and locking her eyes upon their reflection. She stared calmly into herself for a few moments, occasionally twitching her nose and yawning her mouth, before leaning closer still and gently kissing the cold glass.
“Goodbye,” she whispered.
Mo had swayed and rotated silently in the dark of the Chute for over an hour. There was only quiet from the room above him now, the faintest hum from various bits of tech that sat waiting for interaction and although he listened as hard as he could, he couldn't hear gunfire anymore. He'd had plenty of time to think about what the hell was going on, but despite running through every conceivable idea, he couldn't come up with anything that made sense.
Lifers? No, they were definitely Drones doing the shooting, and there was no way Lifers could take control of them. A crackdown by AarBee? Sure, but of what and why would they want to kill Zayn of all people?
Mo could see them having it in for him, although it still seemed pretty harsh, but Zayn was exactly the kind of dick they loved in AarBee’s paradise. He was prime meat.
He wondered what had happened to Maddie and felt a wave of guilt that he’d sent her off into that shit on her first day, but perhaps she was OK. Perhaps it was just him and Zayn, and everybody else was just waiting to come back into the Disposal Suites and carry on.
Whilst Mo puzzled over who might be where, it occurred to him that AarBee could easily track him down with the bots in his blood. His hiding place might have worked as a short-term solution, but if he really was a wanted man, for reasons unknown, he would have to deal with his ID bots. They kept stems in the Sync rooms, it was the only way to get them out, so Mo would have to venture down the corridor if he wanted to flush them out, or to find out what was going on.
He listened his hardest for another ten minutes, moving his eyes around in the dark as he focused his hearing, but there was nothing. Slowly, conscious of every creak and rumble as his body contacted the sides of the Chute, he dragged himself up over the edge of the drop and crawled towards the hatch. The edges glowed like tech store neon into his dark, death-scented hideaway. It was hard work and by the time he reached the top and had grabbed hold of the maintenance hook, he was sweating profusely.
Mo lifted the hatch a fraction and dropped his cheek onto the smooth surface of the Chute to peer underneath. Sweat pooled around his nostrils and tear ducts, stinging as it blotted across the surface of his eye. He blinked hard and rubbed it out with the back of his hand. From his strange viewpoint, peeking out at a sharp angle from the counter top across to the far corner of the room, Mo could see nothing apart from the headrest of a chair and the bolt gun hanging motionless from the ceiling. Nothing moved. He opened the hatch a little wider, but his view still didn't improve. He would have to stick his head right out if he wanted a clear view around all four corners of the space.
He dropped the hatch again gently and then, with his heart pounding in his throat, pushed his head straight out into the room. He looked left and right quickly as he went through and brought his arms down swiftly onto the counter in a kind of comical pounce. He figured that once he was visible he might as well go all the way, as retreating was not an option and surprise – at least – was on his side.
He was alone. The trolley in the room was left untidily in the middle of the space, but other than that, everything was as he'd left it. The air felt fresh and clean in his mouth and lungs compared to the thick and oily oxygen in the Chute, and for a moment he crouched in the stillness whilst it cleansed and cooled his insides.
He wriggled out of the Chute and swung his legs around to plant his feet on the floor. AarBee would have sensed him moving already, so he had no time to waste. He rifled in the storage cupboard under the counter and retrieved the large alloy spanner used to strip down the bolt gun, it wasn't much, but it was the only weapon he had and would at least be useful up close. Gripping it firmly in his fist, he made for the door which slid quietly open as he approached it.
In the corridor nothing had changed and nothing moved. The broken trolley was exactly where it had been when he was last here, bits of it still scattered across the otherwise pristine floor. It felt like life had paused, a glitch in time waiting to be reset once fate had decided which future he would have. He moved quietly but quickly up to where it rested and peered in through the still-jammed-open door of Disposal 9. On the far wall, close to the ground, dark blood exploded violently upwards, not thinning out until at least waist height. There was a matching pool on the floor that smeared slightly towards the middle of the room, but no body. Mo glanced suspiciously around the rest of the space before quietly moving on, forcing himself to be part of the stillness.
Just beyond the sharp bend in the corridor, before the cluster of Disposals 5 to 8, there was another bloody trace. Much less this time, what looked like a hand print next to a small puddle no bigger than an apple, but again nobody. There was an eerie silence and Mo could smell the blood and gun smoke still hanging in the air. He edged further along on the opposite wall to the Disposal Suites, not wanting to trigger any doors for fear of what, or who, might be on the other side.
Each time he came upon a camera, he smashed it swiftly with his wrench. He knew AarBee could track him anyway, but at least with some cameras gone he might be a little less visible once the bots were out.
After the next bend and another camera, Mo reached the first of the Sync rooms. He was amazed that he'd gotten this far without hearing Drones coming towards him. It didn't make much sense, but then again the lack of bodies and the whole of the last few hours was a complete head-wreck. It was weirdly close to one of his recurring nightmares, slipping and sliding down the grease soaked corridors of Echo Farm, trying to run from something but always falling, as the bodies of all those he'd bolted in the last two years lay strewn around every doorway and patch of ground.
Mo let the Sync Room door slide open and dashed in with his wrench held high above his head, but there was no one to fight. Blood was everywhere, on the Dupe trolley and up every wall. Trailing back towards the door he'd come in from he could see a couple of wheel tracks that printed rhythmic red dashes away from a large, glistening pool.
After tugging open a few drawers, Mo found the stems he was looking for and – without stopping to think about it – unwrapped one, before jamming it into the proud blue vein that tracked across the back of his hand. He spasmed from the pain and gripped the sticky trolley with his other hand to settle himself. These things came with an anaesthetic on the other end, but there wasn't the time. Stem inserted, he clicked the small blue button on the top of it and soon his blood – sparkling from the bots like a mineralised mountain stream – began to drip onto the floor.
It took five minutes for the blue light to go out, the longest five minutes of his life, watching the door that led out to the Atrium and listening hard for footsteps. There was still nothing. Maybe they weren't after him after all? Mo thought. Either way, he was clean now, so he would be a lot harder to find, providing he could avoid the cameras.
He crept out of the far door and headed down the wide and bright corridor towards the Atrium. He passed a couple more cameras, but was now so puzzled as to why nobody had come for him that although he ducked instinctively passed them, he left them intact. As the walls grew wider and wider his footsteps began to echo slightly until he finally emerged into the vastness of the arrival Atrium. Furniture was turned over, jackets and shoes were scattered about, and bullet holes tracked across walls and shattered windows, clustering in a frenzy around door frames and pillars where people, perhaps successfully, perhaps not, had tried to shelter from the violent spray.
The warm night-time air was drifting through the main entrance in pine-scented waves that made the tall and elegant ornamental sunblinds yawn away from the glass and clatter back every few seconds. One of the blinds lay in an untidy heap at the foot of the great glass entrance, twisted and knotted as if it had wrestled with a wild animal before giving up and collapsing into a dejected tangle on the floor. The glass pulsated slightly, darkening and lightening in great sweeping waves as the climate control tried to make sense of the cracks that spindled here and there across the great sheets.
As Mo looked around the room it occurred to him that there were no Hollers. Evidence of the struggles of flesh and blood were all around him, but where had the Hollers gone?
At the reception counter, all of the terminals were switched off and the call screens were blank, but the lights around the room were working as normal, and the doors and camera systems were clearly running.
Just then, the faintest sound caught his ear, dancing delicately past on the breeze that was the only sign that time was still flowing. He couldn't make it out, but he edged slowly towards the darkness that waited outside the building, desperate now to make sense of the moment, or at least find someone else to share in his confusion.
At the entrance he crouched down as low as he could, his instincts encouraging him to be small and silent. In the distance, at the far end of the boulevard, where the Vactrains endlessly shuttled in with their cargo of excited migrants, and out again with the lighter load of hushed loved ones, he could see bright lights and figures moving about. The lights cast long shadows from the pine trees and hydrangea bushes that lined the smooth white pathway, and Mo moved cautiously closer through the dark patches to get a clear view of the activity in the terminal.
As he edged nearer, his heart creeping back into his chest, he could see the figures were Drones. They were moving slowly and awkwardly around the concourse, he could see a few more inside the train moving at a similar pace, scanning the ground with narrow white beams of light from their helmet torches. He peered hard into the dark to see what they were scanning, and as his eyes adjusted he began to make out the twisted angles, curves and textures of bodies. Hundreds of them, almost completely covering the floor of the concourse and the perfect, clipped grass that stretched back towards him.
In a far corner of the terminal, a small group stood huddled in the glare of the lights. They were almost all children. He couldn't make them out clearly enough to be sure, but judging by their size compared to the three Drones that stood around them, the oldest couldn't have been more than ten.
As the Drones scanned spectre-like through the corpses, Mo saw a hand rise slowly from the shadows as the thin torchlights converged on it with an unforgiving glare. There was no sound, but the arm, hand and fingers snaked and writhed a short dance of pleading and helplessness, before the crack of a Drones gun jerked it sharply back into the dark and the little group of children let out a collective squeal.
Mo buried himself tighter into the cover of the small trees and bushes and looked back towards the children in the terminal. Poor bastards. He wasn't about to save them, but he did feel sorry for them, all that death washing around their feet with whoever it was each had come to wave off into AarBee, lying somewhere in the dirt nearby. Besides, there was no way he could get anywhere near them without being spotted and if he did, the number of Drones combing through the bodies meant it would be impossible to get them even a few steps beyond the lights.
As he stared at them, transfixed and helpless, something whizzed passed his ear, quickly followed by another two, then countless more, zipping around him in invisible fizzings that exploded in the leaves and branches overhead. Thinly stretched beams of light fidgeted urgently around the bushes and trees before intertwining and picking him out of the dark. He slammed himself hard onto the ground as another two bullets flew overhead, before wriggling quickly to the next bush. He glanced up briefly and could see at least half a dozen Drones running in his direction. The bush behind him danced and shook as they fired mercilessly at where he'd been. He crawled to the next. Another glance up and he knew he would have to move much faster if he was to get anywhere safe before they arrived.
He crawled to one more bush and then with his focus only on the tall sheets of glass and gleaming white walls up ahead, bolted towards the Atrium. He was halfway there before the lights picked him out again and the bullets only began to get close to him as he made his last few strides into the temporary safety of the building. Once inside, he made straight for the corridor he had come from, not bothering to duck now, just going for speed. He had a head start and he knew that once he was in the corridors, with the cameras out and no bots in his blood, his pursuers would have to split up and slow down to search for him. Mo, however, knew exactly where he was going and sped through Sync rooms and corridors back to Disposal 10.
When he burst back into the room Mo felt a strange sense of coming home. He'd never felt this before in these spaces. Normally he would enter the room with only a habitual glare at the clock to mark the start of another shift, perhaps kicking the furniture roughly out of the way or lobbing his shift bag unceremoniously to the far corner counter. But today, today the room was like a secluded hideaway he could scurry back to, a plastic and anti-bac burrow that for now felt familiar and safe.
Mo planted his hands on the counter and dropped his head, dragging air into his chest and waiting for the panic of adrenalin to ebb. He thought again of the children, tiny figures clustering like puppies and surrounded by a knotted and twisted blanket of death. Then he thought of the boy, drifting away from him in slow motion, his perfect smile fading to helpless confusion as the dark swallowed him.
The distant pop of gunfire lifted him out of his memories and back into his current situation. He reached into the cupboard under the worktop and pulled out his shift bag, took a few gulps from the water bottle he kept there, before refilling it at the tap and shoving it back inside. He scanned the inside but there was no food. He reached back under the counter and pulled out Maddie's bag. Inside was a water bottle and two nutrition bars. He reached in and grabbed them and was about to transfer both into his bag when he paused, he stared at them intently for a few moments, before chucking one of them back into her bag and bundling it under the counter. What if she was still alive somewhere? What if she came looking for them, a silent figure seeking out mouthfuls of survival? He had to leave one.