We ran through the dark and quiet streets, avoiding the pools of light cast by the streetlights and the drifts where snow was beginning to gather – tiny mounds, but treacherous to running feet; anything from ice to spikes could lie beneath. At the outskirts we turned north and jogged down a farming lane to a copse of trees; using them for cover we moved north-east until the asylum was to our south. Like the town, the countryside was quiet and dark – darker by far, and the solitude imposed by the drifting snow broken only by an occasional barking dog.
We crouched in the lee of trees that bordered the back of a farmer’s lot; they and the bushes that grew between them had fulfilled their purpose as a windbreak and the snow was piled high enough there to hide more than two men laying prone. On an ordinary fall night the farmer might have been out of doors or at least looked out, come out to confront the intruders with his rifle. But tonight it seemed everyone was snugly burrowed into their houses, nested around fireplaces or curled up under thick blankets: even the animals were quiet, eyes blinded and noses dulled by the snow. Before us, the ground rose in easy stages to the hulking monstrosity at the top of the hill, and there looked to be enough cover for us to safely make an approach. I worried about footprints, but Makhearne thought the drifting flakes would cover our tracks quickly enough. Better, he said, to open all our senses, for Frost might have laid sensors, and possibly traps, though he though not. The risk of an innocent person stumbling onto a grenade or a robogun would make her cautious of deploying them, and the finding of a single piece of advanced technology would point immediately to her location. The interior of the building would be a different matter and potentially a far more dangerous one. We would have to go and see, and take what came.
My thought was to zig to the left and ascend the northeastern path; Makhearne favored splitting up, and taking the northwestern route for himself. Seeing that he was obdurate, I agreed, and rather than lie in the wet cold any longer we set out. Before we quite lost sight of each other I messaged him. “Why the cold and the snow this early in the year?”
“
Quiet,” was all I received in return; he vanished behind the floating snowflakes and merged into the black jumble of the background as though the earth had opened and swallowed him up.
I realize that I am drifting back and forth between the present and the past, but I have decided not to edit this text – at least not too much. If parts appear to be out of sequence, or told from one minute as though they were happening now and in another as if long past – well. I make no apology. These memories are vivid, some sharp and cruel, my senses still closely engaged. I shall tell the story as I like and leave this for you to find, you whom I do not know in any personal sense but only as an abstraction… enough digression. Painful as it is, I must resume.
Up that hill I went, taking advantage of every scrap of cover and straining every sense I possessed. If there were detection devices they would be as hindered by the night and the snow as I, unless they were sensitive to body heat. Such a passive sensor would not have much range tonight, not with the interference of the snow. And I doubted their placement in any case: the local farmers let their livestock graze on the hill, and neither Frost nor Messoune struck me as having patience with false alarms. The building, as I approached it, seemed fortress enough to defend its secrets by strength of masonry alone. All of the windows on the lower floor were tightly shuttered or had been bricked up, and the doors appeared to be chained and locked. I say appeared; I was confident that Frost and her people had some way in and out, perhaps through the main doors on the other side of the building or through some other, unseen portal – and I was equally certain that detection devices would protect that path completely. As for the chains and locks, I could not risk detection by trying them, so only one way remained: to go up.
Climbing that vertical wall of rough brick and stone would be… interesting, with proper equipment and in the daylight. In the cold and dark, with surfaces wet and icing over, it was an unattractive prospect, but unless I could find an alternative that was what I was going to have to try. The building formed a U with the open end facing south down the slope we had ascended. Makhearne had gone to what would be the top of the left arm of the U and I was now at the top of the right. A quick look at the outside wall showed nothing useful but along the inside wall, the one fronting on a scrubby untended courtyard, were drainpipes. Securely-fastened, cast-iron drainpipes, whose flanges and brackets I could use as finger and toe-holds. A second-floor window opened to let me into what might have been a large office or a small classroom, or served some other function entirely – there was no clue from its present condition, stripped to bare walls and varnished wooden floor. I eased the door open and slid out into the hall.
Like the room, the hall was silent and cold and empty. Unlike the room, the floor had been mopped or swept at some point in the recent past; there was little or no dust upon it and no visible footprints. I made a slow and cautious way to the staircase at the elbow joining the main building to the wings, testing every step for planks that might creak or groan. From the intersection I could see down the hallway that formed the bottom of the U, but it was also apparently deserted. What might lie behind the rows of doors I could not say but I sensed no light, no warmth, and no noise. I decided to go up the stairs first, not because I believed the attic of harboring Frost and Messoune but only because I wanted to eliminate the possibility and avoid a later surprise.
At the top of the stairs was a landing and a door – locked. It was the work of a moment to jimmy it open and I needed only seconds to see that it held nothing for me. True, there were footprints on the dusty floor, but the imprints themselves were dusty. No-one had been here recently, and that was all that I needed to know tonight. I closed it up – carefully, silently – and made my way back down the staircase. To my surprise, one of the rooms along the main hall now showed a light beneath the door. I ghosted along the corridor to the wall on the hinged side of the door and was just preparing to press my earbud to the door when it opened and a slim figure stepped out. I swapped the stunner into my left hand and dropped her, then pivoted around the door and shot a second woman standing in the room beyond. Hoping no-one had heard the noise of two bodies going down, I went through the little apartment – no more than a pair of rooms – looking around and under the furnishings. There was no-one else there.
I turned down the wick of the oil lamp and seized the first woman’s feet to drag her inside. A flicker of motion gave me a fraction of a second’s warning, and then Messoune was out of the hallway and upon me.
Messoune… Temic Messoune: dandy, rake-hell, assassin, sadist, bon vivant, monster. What I saw was not a man but a grim preview of the thing that lurks inside all of us who have undergone the Brotherhood’s regimen of enhancements. Ceramic plates, metallic devices, clear plastic structures warped and melted, and over and around it all the hard scarred keloid ridges of burned flesh scabbed over twisted mechanisms. In that dim apartment the horror made my own flesh creep, not least because of my revulsion at what my own body contained.
He leaps – I roll, only a fraction of an inch, but it is enough to spoil his grapple. There is no time for the anger, the hatred I feel surging up: as we are augmented, so too are our glands enhanced but they react at far less than electronic speeds. He lands instead on the unconscious woman and flips himself head over heels, slams into a wall and staggers. I bounce up and whip out with my foot, catching him in the plate over his kidney and throwing him backward over the bed. I advance, ducking and dodging as his powerful arm hurls anything it can find at a hundred miles an hour directly toward my face. Only one connects – a dish or ashtray glances off my cheekbone, giving me a nasty cut and distracting me while he launches himself directly at my throat.
We roll, grapple, fists piston. I have never been a fighter, by nature or training; when martial classes were offered at school I avoided them or did as little as necessary to complete the course. But Messoune shows no more skill tonight than I, or perhaps no interest in using anything but hands, nails, teeth… it is an instinctual, animal assault. As we roll his hands find my throat and he begins to squeeze. From the corner of my vision I see a post – the foot of the bedstead – and instead of going for his throat in turn I grab his long, dark hair in one hand and slam his head against the metal. It rings – he growls – howls – my sight darkens but I put all my strength into my arm and hand, ramming metalloid skull against the iron bedframe again, again, again… Something bestial flares in his eyes and he panics, swipes with a knee at my testicles and rolls away. I reach for him – miss – and he is gone. I clutch at myself for a moment before willing the pain away, for there is no time.
If they didn’t know we were here before, they know it now.
