“Cut the chatter,” Abram calls back to us. “We just entered the branch perimeter. Wake up and watch for patrols.”
I glance around. There is no visible border, no apparent change in the cityscape, but we must have crossed some landmark that only a local would recognize. A distant part of me is disappointed in the lack of human presence so far. I was looking forward to seeing what an un-exed city feels like. Even a city controlled by Axiom would feel more real than the human zoo of Citi Stadium. But we have been hiking through Pittsburgh for over an hour—roaring into town on the bikes like unconvincing Hells Angels was quickly ruled out—and we have yet to encounter another person.
This is what the early days looked like, says a memory drifting up from my basement, like a disturbed child muttering in the dark. Cities bled out as humanity fled from itself, dispersing across the country with the absurd hope that isolation was the cure, that their shadows wouldn’t follow them. But we did. We followed them everywhere.
“You said it’s been a year since you’ve been here?” Julie asks Abram.
“That’s right.”
She looks from building to empty building. “And there were people then?”
He walks another block before replying. “They must have condensed. Moved everyone downtown.”
How often does prey outrun the predator? The predator is designed to win, and if it didn’t usually do so, if the business of eating the weak did not net a profit, it would fold, and there would be no more predators. But there are always predators. No matter how bare the fields get.
Whoever you are, I tell the melancholy drone, shut the fuck up. And to my surprise, it obeys, leaving a reverberation of resentment in the silence. It’s just me now, watching the ghostly towers of Pittsburgh drift past.
I wonder how many people are in my brain. Perhaps each day births a new version of me with its own thoughts and feelings, thousands of homunculi stretching back from today to yesterday to adolescence to infancy, all stuffed into the same head to argue and jostle for position. It would explain a lot.
? ? ?
Abram is leading us toward the river, which flows around and into downtown, backed up from the overfilled ocean until it spills over its banks and turns parks into ponds. The only visible way across the sea is a single bright yellow bridge.
“I’d just like to point out,” Nora says, “that us walking over that bridge is about as stealthy as a parade.”
“Trust me,” Abram says.
“Now why would I do that?”
Abram stops at the bridge’s entrance and slips his backpack off his right shoulder. He digs around in it using only his right arm, keeping his left limp at his side, but he still winces from the movement. I notice Julie wincing along with him. I’m about to offer him some help when he finds what he’s looking for and straightens up. He points the binoculars toward the end of the bridge, then lets out a relieved puff of breath and hands them to Julie. “Okay. I was right. They just moved downtown.”
Julie looks, nods, and passes the binoculars to me, like we’re a group of tourists taking turns at the view scope. I see office windows. Birds in flight. Julie’s head as a yellow blur. Then I find the bridge. The magnification places me at the far end of it, about fifty feet from six men in beige jackets, standing at slouchy attention with rifles against their thighs.
“Okay,” Julie says, “so the bridge is guarded by Axiom soldiers. That’s . . . good?”
“Better than an empty city,” Abram says, already moving toward an exit ramp that curves under the bridge. “The coup could still be building.”
“Abram,” Julie says, and he stops, turns. “You really think this is happening?”
“I know it was happening. I think it still is.”
“And you really want it to? You want to take down the people who raised you?”
Abram chuckles. “Look, if you think I have any love for the Axiom Group just because they ‘raised’ me, you don’t know me or the Axiom Group. It doesn’t operate on love, it’s a business. It’s an exchange of services. It gives you comfort and security, you give it everything else. And it stopped paying its end.”
He starts walking again. “Besides, if anybody raised me, it wasn’t Executive. It was the guys we’re going to see.”
The air is cool under the bridge, shaded by the looming expanse of steel girders. Behind one of the support pillars, in an unlikely corner where only a city worker would ever think to look, there is a tiny steel door in the concrete wall. He opens it and gestures to the darkness inside.
“What is this?” Julie says.
“Access shaft to the subway tunnels. They’ll take us under the river and right up into the branch campus.”
M is shaking his head. “Nope. I won’t even fit.”
“Rub some grease on you,” Abram says. “You’ll fit.” He holds his hand out to Julie. “Mind giving back the flashlight you stole from me?”
She pulls it out of her pack and clicks it on, aims it into the doorway and nods. “Lead on.”