The waiting was the hardest part.

The second hardest part was controlling himself when the app chimed, letting him know that Rotgoriel had died. This had happened before, earlier in the day. But it hadn't lasted long.

The fact that it had only happened once before now made Rich happy. Rotgoriel was learning.

The good feeling didn't last long. Rotgoriel was learning. After what he'd learned from Cutter's file, that was a double-edged sword.

But he had no time to worry about that now. Rich lay in his bed and waited, watching the app's timer.

A minute crawled by. Two.

It's time, he thought, and opened his eyes. He sat up, and his mnemoi stirred. “Sir?”

“Sigma twelve,” he told the man.

The mnemoi inhaled, and nodded. He drew his gun, and checked the door.

Rich got up, feeling the aches and cramps of an idle day threaten. He stretched, taking a precious few minutes. Then he tripped the automated mailer that he'd set up to notify Pat and Greg.

It's just like a program, really. Everything's set up in advance. Now let's see if this sucker runs...

“It'll need to be quiet,” he told the mnemoi. The man nodded and started screwing a silencer into the pistol's barrel. Rich followed him into the main room of the little suite, and grabbed his bug-out bag along the way.

The mnemoi opened the door, and put two rounds into the back of his colleague's skull.

Then he caught the falling corpse and dragged it inside, heedless of the blood on his suit.

Rich let out a breath. Not the first time he'd seen someone die, but it was still a shock. He'd killed that man, the mnemoi had only been his weapon.

The first of two, anyway. “Tell number four Sigma twelve, message him directly. And tell him to make it quiet, too,” Rich informed his weapon.

The minutes passed. The corpse twitched and shat itself. Rich put his face in his hands.

The mnemoi programming setup was a top-notch system. Well-protected against hackers like him, too. A special standalone machine let the mnemoi's masters put messages on the tapes, which were then delivered to the projector for briefing daily. The projector couldn't alter the tapes, it was mechanically impossible. And the message encoding machine was under guard at all times, watched by Mayhew's own guards.

But the projector was a different story. They'd put it in one of Waverly's lesser-used lecture halls, and left it there. What could you do with it? It was just a projector. If it broke they could get another.

And they didn't think about the AV jacks in the academy's antique cabling infrastructure. It was easy enough for Rich to put a bug up there. Easy enough to watch a few of the briefings, and get an idea of how to fake his own.

And then he'd bypassed the tapes entirely. It was easy to put in a priority work order to “fix” the projector, by disabling the tape reader, and rerouting the input to an external terminal.

Earlier today he'd put in his own “tape,” and the two mnemoi assigned to him had watched it. For the next twenty-four hours, they were his.

The problem was that he couldn't get all four of them, due to the staggered briefing shifts. Too much chance of discovery, too much risk.

Which was why two men had to die to make this work. And yeah, they probably deserved it, had probably done worse to better people, but still it made him feel bad. He was sacrificing people like pawns on a chess board.

It made him feel like Mayhew. That was not a comfortable feeling.

“It's done,” his weapon reported.

“Good. Tell him to meet us at doorway seven.” Rich hitched his bugout bag over his shoulder. His stomach was a roiling mess of acid and nerves.

The mnemoi nodded, brushing a bit of blood off his suit. It hadn't stained, was made of something designed to hold no blood, wipe free of grime as easily as their minds could be cleansed of their sins.

They passed the body on the floor, avoiding the spreading puddle around him. The other mnemoi waited at door seven, and then it was out onto the grounds. There were a few students abroad in the muggy heat, slapping at mosquitoes as they moved between buildings. There were a few looks, but no second glances. The way they were moving meant business, and nobody sane wanted to be that business.

Rich checked the camera feeds as they went. All slaved to his programs, and all the pertinent ones that could see him were running slow loops. No footage would remain of their exit.

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

Then an alarm spiked, and he froze. “Hang on,” he told the mnemoi, and flicked his attention over to the sector that was going off.

Mayhew's quarters, he realized.

Rich thought he'd gotten every bit of surveillance on his planned route, but evidently not. Well that was fine. He had plans for this.

With a quick command, he triggered Waverly's chapel bell.

It tolled, calling the faithful to prayer.

He released the surveillance cameras, letting them record as people spilled out of the buildings, gathering in and around the chapel, kneeling in submission to God.

Pat was waiting at the doorway to his dorm, letting people file through. He smoothed his hunter's camo down, and glanced around like he expected to be attacked at any moment.

“Cool, man,” Rich muttered. “Play it cool.”

There were agents moving through the main building now. And someone had put in a medevac call. Was this simple bad luck? Rich didn't think so.

Rich thought it more likely that the betrayal he'd been expecting hadn't been limited to Generica.

But it didn't matter. They made their way over to the river gate, and Rich watched the proctor on guard as they approached. The man looked nervous, and that wasn't good.

“We're heading out,” Rich announced, stepping up as the guard looked them over. The guy wasn't much older than he was, Rich reflected.

“I'll need to see authorization,” the guard said. His nametag read “Curtis.”

“Sure,” Rich said, and sent him an Echo flashbang that he'd found on the darknet a few days ago.

He could tell the exact moment that the malware kicked in. The guy reeled like he'd taken a stomach punch.

He reeled back harder when Rich broke his nose. Then Rich's follow up punch put him on the ground. “No, it's fine,” Rich called back as he heard the mnemoi surge forward. “I've got this.” he crouched over the young man, pulled his rifle off and scooted it away. A few slaps, but the guard didn't stir. “Pick him up, we'll leave him on the other side of the gate,” Rich said, taking a second to scan the gun before wiping its tracker chip. Then he tossed it to Pat.

“Dude, what the hell?” Pat stage whispered.

“You're a better shot. Come on, let's go.”

There was shouting in the distance, and a medical siren added to the tolling of the chapel bell. Waverly had a small clinic on its grounds, and it sounded like they'd sent out the ambulance cart.

Definitely a farther-reaching betrayal. “They'll be looking for us soon,” Rich said, keeping his voice matter-of-fact. “Ready to jog?”

“Fuck me running,” Pat groused.

“Nope. Fuck you, running. Comma's important.” And without wasting his breath further, Rich took off.

Outgoing Message to: Patrick Bayer>> Greg's in a good spot?

>>Last time I checked. Don't know what strings you pulled to let him go on a “spiritual retreat,” right now.

>>It was easier than you'd think. The security on you two wasn't as tight as mine.

>>I got him the package you asked for, too. My contacts weren't happy about it, but they managed. For three times cost, so I hope this works.

>>It will. Rich knew it was an empty promise. There was a lot that could go wrong, here. And as the trees rose around them and the lights of Waverly fell behind, he knew they literally had a long way to go before they were out of the woods.

A dull crack broke the silence.

One of his mnemoi fell. “Shit! Run!” Rich yelled, putting on a burst of speed. He didn't look back, couldn't spare the time for it. Lights danced along the ground, round and searching and hungry, and he booked it for the thicker parts of the forest.

Shouts from the walls, and a ragged stutter of gunfire. Something brushed the air near his head, and slapped into the weeds, sending them rustling.

How did they find us so quickly? It has to be the mnemoi, he realized. You didn't put that much money into altering someone without having a way to track them if they went missing. Only common sense, really.

“Mnemoi!” he yelled, “Take cover and hold them off as long as you can!”

The man dove behind a tree and pilled his pistol, snapping rounds back at the walls. A searchlight winked out.

“Shit shit shit!” Pat yelled. “Should I...” he twisted, tried to bring the rifle to bear, and almost fell.

“No!” Rich snapped, grabbing his arm. “Keep running!”

They diverged from the jogging path a quarter mile up, with the sound of gunshots still ringing in the distance. More long arm than pistol, if Rich was any judge. He didn't know how many bullets the mnemoi had on him, but hopefully he had enough to sell his life dearly.

Rich breathed a sigh of relief. Then he fired up his GPS, and started picking his way through the dusk. “Follow me closely,” he told Pat. “The trail gets rocky in about a hundred yards.”

“You remember when I used to tell you you were wasting your time mapping out these woods,” Pat panted, leaning against a tree as he looked around.

“Yep.”

“Well I wish you'd taken more time now.”

A few minutes later, the gunfire stopped. But by then they were at the river. It took another three minutes to find the ford he was looking for, but once they'd waded for a while and crossed he breathed a sigh of relief. Waverly didn't use dogs, but if they were close behind with infra-red, then the water would fuck things up.

“What was that?” Pat whispered.

“What?”

“Thought I heard something splash behind us.”

Rich paused, and listened. Nothing but the bugs and bats and night birds. The bugs were finding him, too, and mosquitoes took their red tithe the longer he stood still. “Nothing,” he decided finally. “Let's keep moving.”

It was a cold camp they came to, though cold was a misnomer in the near-hundred-degree heat. It smelled of sweat and waste and gun oil, and Rich moved up to the tent with caution.

Caution that was justified, as a gun cocked behind them.

“Cutter,” Rich said. “It's me. With a friend.”

“You cracked the file.” His voice came from the ring of trees surrounding the clearing, but Rich couldn't tell where.

“It wasn't easy. You need to stop trying to kill me, man,” Rich let some of his frustration bleed into his voice.

“You know what the third seal guards. You know what they can do with that.”

“Riiiiiich?” Pat said, in that 'I'm trying not to panic' tone that he'd heard his friend use in the most stressful situations. “This is sounding kinda crazypants...”

“It won't matter if you kill me now,” Rich said. “Rotgoriel will keep going on. He's too close to this to let it go. You need me to go back in there and sort it out, if you want to stop them. You know what's on the line, here.”

A long moment passed.

Then Cutter sighed, and stepped into the moonlight. A full moon tonight, just like in Generica. The man was dressed in camo himself, unshaven and with a pair of nightvision goggles pushed up on his forehead. He trained a silenced carbine on them, looked them over carefully. “Three of you, then? All right, I can work with that.” He lowered the gun.

“Three of us?” Rich asked. “Greg? I told you to cover—”

BLAM!

Cutter dropped, like a puppet with its strings cut.

“The fuck?” Rich spun around...

...in time to see Cole fade out of the darkness, and press a smoking pistol to the back of Pat's head.

“Hey Rich,” Cole whispered, trembling in the moonlight as Pat dropped his rifle and raised his arms. “I'm sorry, man. I'm so fucking sorry. But it won't let me stop, and it really, really wants you...”