“Let’s just get topside and see what plays out from there.”
She nodded. I liked 19. I liked her a lot. I don’t know why I couldn’t tell her, but I just couldn’t. It wasn’t my way. I don’t know how much of what she said was true—she was, after all, hardwired to get people to like her, to love her—but if she was willing to stand between me and Mercer’s rifle, well, I couldn’t think of another person on the planet who would do that. Not for me.
“I’m going up,” said 19, gripping the ladder in one hand.
Mercer and I trained our guns back down the corridor. The odds of anyone sneaking up on us at this point were slim, but this was no time to get sloppy. The hall was long, dimly lit, shadows gripping tight the spaces between distantly spaced lights. As anxious as I was about what might be topside, I knew we would have to backtrack if we weren’t alone. If we got boxed in, we were done for.
19 climbed the ladder, lifted the hatch, peeked through, then looked down, nodding. Up and through the hatch she went, out into the blistering sun. Daylight spilled in, painting the ferro-concrete walls with a bright white, fading into a dim pale blue farther down the corridor. We waited, each of us pressed against the wall, guns trained back down the hall. If I had a heart, it would have been pounding; breath, it would have been held. Instead my insides whirred and chirped all but silently, calculating the many different ways this could go down.
Something moved in the passage. A shadow. Something small. Skittering across the hall.
Was it a glitch? It happened from time to time, code going astray and processing something wrong. Bugs were bugs. But I definitely saw something move from one shadow to the other.
Then I saw it again. This time moving to another shadow—in the light just long enough to have shape, and yet still seem formless. What the hell is that? Small, no more than three feet tall. Arms. Locomotion. A new facet? Something swift and silent, maybe? A stealth model?
If I could have gripped my rifle any tighter without breaking it, I would have. I leveled my gun at the shadow, ran back my memory frame by frame, my 120-fps recording moving from millisecond to millisecond.
There was nothing there. I had recorded nothing. Impossible. I knew I saw something.
“Britt?” 19 called down. “Could you come on up?”
I warily looked up, nodding, and took a step forward. Mercer grabbed me by the arm.
“You ain’t going up before me,” he said.
“You heard her. She just asked for me.”
“I don’t care. I’m not giving you a clean shot as I try to clear that hatch.”
“Mercer, I’m not giving you a clean shot either. But I’m not going to shoot you. We aren’t out of this yet.”
He stared at me, clearly concerned, but realizing he had no other option. Would I shoot him? I had thought about it. But no. Not yet. We really weren’t out of this. Not by a long shot.
“Just keep your eyes open, huh?” I said. “I thought I saw something.”
“You didn’t see shit. Just get up there.”
I climbed the ladder out into the light. 19 crouched low to the ground, waiting for me, lending me a hand.
“See anything?” I asked as she helped pull me out.
She shook her head. “Not a damn thing.”
I crouched next to her, and Herbert quickly followed up the stairs, spitter slung over his back, his wide girth barely able to clear the portal. He hopped out into the sunlight, standing tall, towering above us, looking down. “Why are you down there?”
“So we’re not seen,” said 19. “Get down!”
“But we’re out in the open,” he said. “There’s nothing for miles.”
“How in God’s name have you survived for so long?”
“I’m covered in two-inch armor plating.”
“Well, you’re going to get us killed.”
“If there are snipers in those hills,” said Rebekah, climbing out from the hole, “then we’re already dead.”
“That doesn’t mean we have to make it easy for them,” I said.
One by one, the others followed out of the hatch. One, Two, Murka, Doc, and finally, Mercer. As Mercer made his way slowly up the final rungs, 19 stood up, motioning for me to get behind her. He peeked out of the hatch, saw that I didn’t have a gun trained on him, then vaulted himself quickly out. His foot hit the dirt, skidding, and he fell to one knee. He raised his gun, pointing it right at 19.
“Mercer,” she said. “Put the gun down.”
Mercer shook his head. “You gonna afford me the same protection you’re giving her?”
“Yes. No one dies here. Not today.”
He nodded and very slowly lowered his gun. “I just don’t want her gunning me down like a dog.”
“Yeah?” she said. “You don’t think you have it coming?”
“Oh, I have it coming. That don’t mean I have to let it happen.”
“Well,” said Murka. “This has been fun and all. But I’d rather not stick around for”—he waved his arms in a circular motion toward me and Mercer—“any of this shit.”
Two spoke up, the first time he had done so since introducing himself. “Rebekah, we need to move.”
One piped up immediately after: “Two’s right. We need to get as far away from here as possible.”
19 nodded, pointing west. “Okay, we’re goin—”
She never finished that sentence.
Her entire torso exploded, an explosive shell shredding all of the circuits between her neck and her waist. Shrapnel showered half the group. 19’s head toppled to the ground, her legs staggering around for a few seconds trying to maintain balance before tottering over, first to one knee, then over onto the hardpan.
“19!” I screamed, even though I knew screaming her name wouldn’t do a goddamn thing but tell anyone else in the area exactly where we were. But it just slipped out.
There was a sniper in the hills.
And that was only the beginning of the shitstorm.
The desert started to shimmer in places as a dozen shadow-blankets—six-foot-long light-bending holographic invisibility blankets—were cast off at once. One dozen plastic men leapt to their feet, guns immediately trained on us.
Mercer swung his weapon over to fire from the hip, but two carefully aimed plasma bursts blasted the gun clean out of his hand, sparing his fingers, but not the gun.
“Weapons down!” one of the plastic men bellowed.
This was it. This was the nightmare. A sniper in the hills and a tactical unit—all of one mind—ready with their fingers on their triggers. I ran a dozen simulations in my head at once, trying to figure out how many I could take out if Herbert reacted in kind.