PART 2
chapter FOURTEEN
The first alarm sounded at four in the morning. Afa had rigged the first-floor doors and windows with small electric alarms, wired to his bedroom and a few of the main research rooms, and the small jingle woke Kira almost instantly. She was still on the couch in the film studio, where she’d been for just over a week—the most permanent sleeping arrangements she’d had in ages. The alarms were persistent but quiet, designed to alert the occupants without letting the intruders know that anything was amiss. Kira was on her feet in seconds, pulling on her shoes and then grabbing her gun. If she had to flee, those were the essentials.
Of course, with Afa poised to blow up the entire building, even fleeing barefoot and unarmed wasn’t the worst-case scenario.
Kira met Afa in the hall, both silent; he shut off the alarm and listened. If it was a false alarm, maybe wind or a stray cat pawing at the glass, the building would stay silent. Kira listened with her eyes closed, praying that nothing would—
Beep. Beep.
Afa shut it off again, permanently this time, jogging heavily down the hall to another bank of switches. The solar panels on the roof stored massive amounts of electricity, more than enough to power their jury-rigged security systems at night. Afa woke up a sleeping monitor, the picture jerking to life like a slide show, just in time to see a black-clad figure in body armor slip through the window. The helmet was round and faceless, the too-familiar calling card of the Partial army, though this armor was battle-scarred and damaged to the point that Kira wondered if it was salvaged. The brief outline of the intruder’s body against the moonlit street beyond showed that it was female, though the second form climbing in behind her was probably male. Kira glanced at Afa, his face of rictus of anxiety and indecision: His other safe houses he’d simply blown up when they were threatened, but this was his headquarters, his main library of documents, his life’s work. He didn’t want to blow it up.
But then again, he wasn’t exactly a clear thinker in stressful situations.
Kira and Afa were on the seventh floor, and there were two full levels of security measures before any ground-level intruders reached the important stuff. The first story was the explosives, enough to bring the entire building down, and Kira carefully placed herself between Afa and the manual trigger for the bombs. They watched on scratchy, closed-circuit cameras as the intruders—only two—picked their way carefully through the rooms and hallways, from one camera to another, the different angles and monitors giving their path a crazed, disjointed trajectory. Left to right on the third monitor; right to left on the first. Top to bottom on the second and fourth simultaneously, one in front and one behind. They moved slowly, rifles at the ready, colorless shapes in the darkness. Their helmets seemed to provide augmented night vision, and the two figures were seamlessly coordinated in their movements. A surefire sign of the link at work. They were most definitely Partials.
Kira checked her ammunition carefully, never taking her eyes off the monitors; she might be able to drop one of the Partials if she surprised him, but the odds of beating two in concert were minuscule. If she didn’t run now, she’d probably wake up back in Dr. Morgan’s lab, stretched out naked on an operating table while the mad doctor cut her open to find her secrets.
She took a step to run but forced herself to stop. Breathe, she told herself. Breathe deep. Stay calm. Nobody in the world is more paranoid than Afa—he knows how to protect his home. Give him time. There’s still another floor between us.
The final camera showed them at the stairs, testing the door and then slowly coming up. The first floor was devoid of traps because Afa didn’t want the bombs to trigger accidentally by a stray animal, but Kira hoped the Partials would misread it as a lack of security entirely. Would they be less cautious on the second floor? She held her breath, and the Partials’ feet disappeared into the darkness at the top of the stairs. There were no cameras on the second floor, just sensors and automated booby traps.
A red light flashed on the wall panel, and Kira heard a violent clatter shake the building. “Antipersonnel mine,” said Afa. “It’s called a Bouncing Betty—when someone walks by, the mine jumps up about four feet in the air, like a ball from a Little League pitching machine, and then explodes out, like this, in a ring.” He demonstrated with his hands, showing an expanding halo of destruction in a single plane. “Nails and shrapnel and buckshot, right at gut level. They’re wearing armor, but it can still do a lot of damage without bringing down the building frame.” Kira nodded, her stomach queasy, watching the next light in the row. If the Bouncing Betty had stopped them, no more lights would come on. The threat would be over, and all they had to do was clean it up. Kira prayed—
The second light came on.
“They’re moving through the east hallway,” said Afa, his hands curled in front of him like an infant’s, weak and fetal. His face was streaked with sweat.
“How do we get out?” asked Kira. There was a fire escape, she knew, but it was laden with traps as well, and she hoped there might be a faster way down. Afa swallowed, staring at the lights, and Kira asked again, “How do we get out?”
“They’re in the east hallway,” he said, “coming up on the shotguns. They’re motion-sensored, not wired like the mines—they won’t know what’s coming until it’s too late.” The third red light came on, and Kira heard a distant crack. She waited, gritting her teeth in desperation, and the world paused.
The fourth light blinked to life.
“No,” Kira muttered, shaking her head. Afa was looking up and down the hall, his hands opening and closing on some imaginary tool. He had no guns, and barely tolerated Kira’s; he did everything by trap, distant and impersonal. If they made it up here, he was helpless.
“Afa,” said Kira, grabbing his elbow. “Look at me.” He kept searching for something, moving his head, and Kira placed herself firmly in his field of vision. “Look at me: They’re going to come up here, and they’re going to kill us.”
“No.”
“They’re going to kill you, Afa, do you understand me? They’re going to kidnap me and kill you, and burn this entire building to the ground—”
“No!”
“—with all your records in it. Do you understand? You will lose everything. We have to get out of here.”
“I have my backpack,” he said, pulling away from her and snatching up the massive backpack from the floor, never more than a few feet away from him. “I never lose the backpack.”
“We need to take it and go,” said Kira, pulling him toward the studio. She had a few seconds to grab her things and then they had to run, as far and as fast as they could. She thought about the radio station upstairs, about Marcus and the way she’d helped him. Dr. Morgan had taken control of East Meadow, and every other population center on the island, and it was all Kira could do to use the radios and keep Marcus one step ahead of his pursuers. She was about to lose it all. Afa resisted, pulling away to go back to the sensor panel, and Kira ran to the studio without him, quickly gathering her things to flee.
“They’ve passed the conference room,” he said. “They’re moving slowly. They’re past the second Bouncing Betty in the east hallway, moving on to the—there’s more now.”
Kira stood up, her bag half-packed with the last of her survival gear. “What?”
“One in the east hallway and one in the west. There’s another group.” He spluttered, his voice growing wilder and higher. “I didn’t see anyone else come in! I’ve been watching the monitors—I would have seen them come in!”
Kira snapped her pack closed, leaving the bedroll and sprinting back down the hall. “It’s not more,” she said. “They’ve split up.” She pointed at the seventh light. “There’s a central hallway here, right? It’s the same on every floor. This is a two-man kill team just like a dozen others I’ve been following on the radio—they don’t need a second team, they just split up the first—” She paused, midsentence. “They’re split,” she said again, as if it meant something entirely different this time. “They’re alone. Afa, where do the separate hallways join the third floor?”
“The stairs,” he mumbled.
“Yes,” said Kira, placing herself in his eye line again. “I know it’s the stairs, but I need specifics. You built this entire system, Afa, you know where they’re going next. This one.” She pointed at a red dot. “Where will that dot reach the third floor?”
“The back stairs,” he said, practically stuttering in fear. He reached for the manual bomb trigger and she stopped him, pulling his hand away. “The service stairs. They come up from the delivery room in the back.”
“Perfect,” said Kira. She wrapped his hand around his backpack and pushed him gently away from the control panel. “You need to save this backpack, do you hear me? Do not blow up the building—if you blow it up, you will lose your backpack.”
“I can never lose the backpack.”
“Exactly. You find whatever escape route you have planned and you take it—you run far away, and you don’t come back for a week. If the Partials go away, I’ll be here be waiting. Now go!”
Afa turned and ran down the hall, and Kira shouldered her pack and ran the other way, swinging around the last doorway and practically throwing herself down the stairs. Sixth floor. Fifth floor. If she could reach the third floor first—if she could get there while the Partials were still split up, still alone, right where she knew they were coming—she could ambush the first and retreat before the second arrived as backup. She had a chance to kill both of them, but it was only a chance. Fourth floor.
Third.
She slowed, placing each step carefully, listening at the corner before moving around it. The stairwell was clear. She dropped to her knee, raising the rifle to her cheek, peering around the corner into the second floor. Moldy carpet stretched away in the darkness. The metal door had been completely removed, hauled upstairs as armor for one of Afa’s mini bunkers—that was where Kira would retreat, she decided. Kill the first, fall back to a bunker, and wait for the second to make a mistake. If the Partials even made mistakes.
The second floor was empty, but the signs of chaos were clear. A pattern of holes in the walls and blackout curtains showed that the latest round of Bouncing Betties had gone off exactly as planned, but there didn’t seem to be any bodies. The floor was dimly lit by the holes in the curtains, and a small flame flickered in the wall near the back. Kira waited, trying to remember what the last trap on the floor had been—something incendiary, she thought, and it obviously hadn’t gone off. The Partial was still inside.
Kira waited at the top of the stairs, her rifle aimed and ready. As soon as a Partial appeared in the doorway, it was as good as dead.
She waited.
Maybe I was too noisy, she wondered. It heard me coming and went the other way—or worse, it’s waiting for me. I could retreat back up the stairs, but then I lose my advantage. I can’t take both Partials at once. If there’s any chance I can ambush this one, I have to take it.
How far has the other one gotten? This is the service stairwell, but the other hall leads to the main stairwell. Has the Partial reached it yet? Did it go upstairs? Did Afa get away? She hoped that Afa had been smart enough to run, that he wasn’t sitting in the hallway with his finger on the trigger of the bomb, ready in his paranoia to destroy his entire life’s work—and he and Kira with it—just to keep it from the Partials. I need to get back up there, she thought, and I need to stay here, and I need to run away. I don’t know what to—
And then she knew, as firmly and as strongly as if she’d seen it with her own eyes, that there was a Partial creeping toward her on the third floor.
The third-floor doorway, like the second, had been cannibalized for Afa’s bunker. The door was open, and the Partial would have a clear shot at her as soon as it came around the corner. It’s the link, she thought, it’s the only way I could know this so clearly. It’s broadcasting everything we’re doing. I don’t have the full complement of sensors that Samm described, but apparently I have enough to sense where they are—and maybe enough to give myself away. She patted her jacket, wishing she had something she could throw—a grenade or even a rock to distract them with—but all she had was the rifle, and by the time she had a clear shot with that, it would be too late. She had to move. She shifted to the balls of her feet, ready to race down the stairwell to the first floor, when she got a second impression, as clear as the first, that there was another Partial in the stairwell below her. They hadn’t paused inside the doorway, waiting, they’d jumped ahead and completely encircled her. There was nowhere to go but into the second floor, still rigged with one last trap. She jumped to her feet and ran.
The Partial agents didn’t shout to each other, for the link warned them of danger in much more effective silence, but Kira still felt it in her head like a chemical scream: SHE’S RUNNING. Feet clattered on the stairs behind her, and Kira fired a burst from her rifle into the stairwell below, keeping the second Partial from sniping her as she raced past into the second-floor death trap. Kira tumbled through the open door and scrambled back to her feet, looking around wildly for the final trap, but Afa had hidden it too well. A Partial pounded through the door behind her and Kira spun, tracking shots across the wall in a deadly line headed straight for the attacker’s chest. The Partial—obviously a woman, but with her face obscured behind a visored helmet—paused when she saw Kira, then converted her charge into an acrobatic roll; she pulled her rifle in close to her chest, tucked herself into a ball, and somersaulted under Kira’s spray of bullets before Kira had time to correct its course. The Partial came up just feet away from her, firing almost immediately, and Kira had to dive to the side to stay clear. The Partial followed with uncanny speed, pressing the attack, lashing out with a devastating kick that knocked Kira’s rifle from her hands. Kira stumbled into a conference room, recovered her feet, and sprinted past the rotting wooden table to the second door at the far end of the room, just three steps ahead of the Partial. She came back into the hall and ran back to the door, only to collapse with a crash as the Partial tackled her from behind, knocking the air from her lungs. Kira fought for breath, wrestling madly with the Partial, managing to connect a solid elbow slam to the side of the attacker’s helmet. She reeled back and Kira rolled away, crawling another few feet before the Partial, already on her feet, kicked her thigh out from under her. Kira grunted in pain, falling to the side, and when she looked up the Partial was a few feet away, her boot raised over a tiny trip wire, her hand pointed to a spot above Kira’s head. Kira looked up and saw the nozzle of Afa’s incendiary trap, a flamethrower aimed directly at her head. All the Partial had to do was stomp down, and a jet of flame would roast Kira alive. She cringed, staring at the Partial’s featureless visor, and heard a male voice cry out.
“Kira!”
Kira froze. She’d know that voice anywhere. Her jaw dropped as he stepped out of the stairwell, his helmet in his hands.
“Samm?”