For the second time in as many days, the world fell out from under me. I ran as fast as I could, driven forwards by an overwhelming terror that flooded my limbs with primal strength in a flight response that was older than this world and all the ages that came before it.
The worst of the insect spirit panic was well before my time, but the fear of them was omnipresent. It was the fear of cults spreading their roots throughout your city, luring in your loved ones with the promise of universal brotherhood only to use them as nothing more than incubators for the cult’s masters, their bodies and souls burned up to provide an otherworldly monster with a foothold in reality.
It was city-wide destruction once those cults reached critical mass; the burned-out centre of Chicago abandoned and walled off for years until Ares cracked it open and dropped biologically engineered magic-eating pesticides on the surviving bugs and any awakened soul unlucky enough to still be alive in there. It was the world’s first wholly magical threat, as alien to this world as the resonance and those entities that dwell within it.
Beside me, Theo was running as fast as he could, adrenaline forcing him to move faster than he probably ever had on legs that I doubted had run in a while. Victoria was already ahead of us, stopping at the end of the alleyway to fire an entire magazine of useless shots at the pursuing insects.
I spotted a CCTV camera at the end of the street, flinging a resonance spike towards it to shatter its firewalls before I swivelled it on its mount to give me eyes in the back of my head. The insect spirits were shadowing us, darting in quick movements from wall to wall. But that was all they were doing; following us, rather than hunting us. Tracking our position to guide something else in.
It had to be Neith. This had to be her filthy secret; one that had driven her into this miserable existence, struggling against the malignant effects of her shamanic magic even while using her connection to those foul entities as a weapon. I wondered how any of the other shadowrunners could stand to be in the same room as her. I didn’t wonder why Calvert tolerated her; a man who’d make a deal with a monster like Kayden Anders wouldn’t hesitate to exploit a modern-day Faust.
I could hear sirens all around us now, but I was barely aware of them. This whole endeavour had been a clusterfuck from the very start, but there was no longer any room in my head for Ballistic or Sundancer or Trickster. Just the hunters and the hunted.
“This way!” Victoria shouted as she threw her shoulder against a doorway. She bounced back without effect, then scrambled aside as I hunched over and twisted my body to drive my own shoulder into it. I didn’t even slow down as I trampled the door underfoot, with the two students sprinting in after me.
It was unfair, in a way. Victoria was in the peak of physical health; the absolute pinnacle of what a twenty-one year old human woman could achieve without dedicating her entire life to professional athletics. I had none of that, but because of what I was I outweighed her and could probably out-punch her too.
Of course, every physical benefit was outweighed by a hundred different downsides. I became acutely aware of that as I knocked down the door at the other end of the corridor only to end up face to face with four armed Knight Errant officers gathered around two black and yellow patrol cars, their blue and red lights almost blindingly bright through eyes turned watery by sweat and adrenaline.
I froze, throwing my hands in the air even as the officers all raised their guns. As Theo and Victoria spilled out of the door behind me they did the same, while the officers shouted a barrage of panicked and contradictory orders that were drowned out by the pounding of my heart, their commands blurring together into an indistinguishable noise.
“Call Firewatch!” I managed to stammer out. “Call them now!”
I took a half step forward, then froze again as I saw guns jerk. Abruptly I realised that while I’d thrown my hands up, my finger was still wrapped around the trigger of my submachine gun. I wasn’t sure I could move it at all, never mind drop the thing.
The officers were all wearing Knight Errant’s typical uniform of black taksuits trimmed with yellow, with full-face helmets and yellow visors that hid any expression I could use to judge whether they were about to shoot me. But one of them was wearing a mage’s tabard, with a pendant around his neck and a kind of hood drawn up over his helmet.
I turned to meet his eyes, or where I guessed his eyes were.
“Get ready,” I said, diving to the floor and throwing out my organic arm to bring Theo down with me moments before the wasps shot out of the door behind us.
The officers fired, but the first shots went over us. A third person hit the ground beside me; Victoria flinging herself down just in time. The second shots came almost immediately, but they weren’t aimed at us.
There was a cry of “bugs!” as the Knight Errant officers panicked, firing blindly at the wasps. Two of them staggered back, their shots going wild, but the mage seemed to remember his training; he dropped his pistol, pressing his palms together and sweeping them out as flames sprang from his fingertips, forcing the wasps up and over the officers.
Horrifyingly, a third wasp had joined the pursuit at some point, before they dropped down onto the two officers who’d lost their nerve. Two of them landed on one officer, driving their stingers through his taksuit and injecting him with unreal venom that had already killed him, even if he was still standing for the moment.
The last wasp gripped another officer’s shoulder in its mandibles, the officer freezing up as some kind of paralytic spell crept across his body. He escaped his comrade’s fate only because the mage shot a powerbolt through the before it could drive its stinger home, while the last officer was shouting into his radio, his gun holstered and his baton drawn.
I grabbed the back of Theo’s shirt, pulling him up as I started to scramble away, keeping low while the Knight Errant mage tried desperately to fight off the insect spirits alone. The moment we were clear, we ran again, though it seemed none of us could manage more than a jog.
Gambling, I took us off the street and into
“They’re too small,” Victoria said, panting.
“Too fucking small?” I stammered out. “They’re huge!”
“They should be as big as a person,” she continued. “And a lot smarter than that. It’s like they were made from animals, if that’s even possible, or the shaman’s some kind of fuck-up.”
“I’ll count my damn blessings,” I snapped, but it made a sick kind of sense. There was clearly something wrong with Neith. Insect Shamans were supposed to be cult leaders, not walking health cases, but I couldn’t see Neith luring anybody in.
“Do you think Knight Errant will hold them?”
“Not those guys,” Victoria said, bleakly. “Firewatch will be coming. We just have to survive until then.”
“We need to get off campus,” I said, pulling up GridLink’s city map as I scanned the campus for ways out before finding a building that straddled the line of the campus’ perimeter fence.
“Come on,” I said, moving through the building at a brisk walk, since Theo looked like he was about to die of exhaustion and I didn’t feel far off joining him. Victoria still looked as infuriatingly unflappable as ever, striding ahead of us with her pistol raised.
I was actively scanning the matrix, taking in the location of every single device within a radius around me. We were back in an academic building, which meant most were simple terminals, projectors, screens and access nodes to the university library, all held together by the thin strands that tied them to NBU’s host.
There were a scant handful of private devices, some of them simply forgotten in the evacuation while others were shifting from side to side, no doubt in the pockets of those who hadn’t got the message to leave, or who’d assumed it would blow over only to be caught in the middle of a catastrophe.
I found myself thinking back on what Victoria had said about the strange insect spirits, as well as what I’d seen of the team’s dynamic when they were talking to Calvert. It seemed pretty clear that the treatment he promised them was to deal with Neith’s insect problem, but that in and of itself suggested that she wasn’t a true insect shaman; if she was, she wouldn’t see anything wrong with feeding people to bugs. I wondered how tight a hold her team had on her. She’d seemed almost like a leader, but Sundancer and Ballistic had both shackled their magic, and I was sure she was the reason why.
Any attempts to think over the problem further ended when I caught another web of devices moving towards us at a rapid pace, probably trying to cut off our escape from the Knight Errant patrol.
Ballistic’s cybersuite was immediately recognisable to me, as was the profile of the marksman’s rifle I could detect through its connection to his heads-up-display. He couldn’t know where we were, not exactly, but he was on course to intercept us by pure chance.
“We’ve got trouble,” I said. “That sniper’s coming our way.”
“I’ll draw him off,” Victoria said, without any hesitation.
“That’s insane,” I snapped. “He’ll gun you down. For fuck’s sake, you’re just a student!”
“Yeah, I am,” Victoria shot back, “and you and your trigger happy friends are shooting up my university. “Get Theo out; I’ll fire a potshot at him then run the other way. If I lose him, I’ll try and link back up with you.”
“This isn’t your fight.”
“Maybe not, but it’s the right thing to do.”
I couldn’t understand her, or maybe I was just ashamed to see her. I’d walked blindly into a moral abomination, while here was someone so steadfast in her sense of justice that she was willing to risk her life for a stranger.
Beyond that, she was right; I had, however indirectly, brought this calamity down on her university by helping Calvert advance his schemes. She’d have friends here; friends who could be alive or dead if the second team really have abandoned all restraint in their determination to kill Theo.
“Fine,” I said. “I’m loading his location into your commlink. It won’t hold forever, but it’ll be good until I get out of range.”
Victoria pulled out her link with her left hand, her right tightening its grip on her scavenged pistol as she glared down at the screen for a moment. Then she was gone, disappearing around a corner as she moved to double back around Ballistic.
I heard the shot a few moments later, following her movements through her commlink’s icon in the matrix as she sprinted across an junction. When Ballistic turned and ran after her I let out a breath I hadn’t realised I’d been holding, both because the distraction had worked and because she was still alive.
Wordlessly, I grabbed Theo by the arm and started to jog again, leaving the building through the nearest exit and hurrying down an access road towards the outermost edge of the campus.
It was almost quiet, if I ignored the distant Knight Errant sirens and the occasional burst of gunfire. In spite of the primal dread she inspired, somehow I doubted Neith had many insect spirits on hand. If nothing else, as a team they had to be mobile enough to more from city to city. They’d be like Bitch before she joined us; hauling their life around in the back of a van.
There was a wash of downdraft as a helicopter passed low over our heads, the doppler effect of its rotors a sudden and deafeningly loud imposition on the relative calm. In spite of myself, I grinned wildly at the sight of the red and white livery of Valkyrie Paramedical, before I hurriedly checked the fuselage for the team’s name.
Eir, not Brunhilda, which meant I wouldn’t have to hide from the cavalry.
Unfortunately, the helicopter was hovering over the wrong part of the campus, where we’d made the call to Max. With Theo’s commlink tossed, they had no way of knowing where we were. Ideally they’d be able to latch onto the ritual sample Theo probably gave up to Medhall security, but I wondered if the insect spirits and whatever the hell Sundancer was bound to would throw up the magical equivalent of a spam zone?
After a moment’s consideration, I decided to blow my cover – just a little. I reached out to the helicopter in the matrix, carefully trying to work my way into its systems so that I could guide it in by taking over its GPS. I could have just forced my way in, but the last thing I needed right now was to face the aircraft’s countermeasures, adding a plague of digital wasps to the spiritual ones who were already hunting for me.
Theo, on the other hand, tried a more direct method of grabbing its attention; standing on a nearby parked car and waving his hands in the air.
“Hey, shoot a couple of rounds in the air!” he exclaimed. “We’ve got to grab their attention.”
“Them and everyone else’s,” I countered. “I’m working on it, just keep an eye out for now.
The code was frustratingly difficult to parse, especially from this distance. It would be easier if I uncoupled my persona from my body and approached the aircraft directly, but I just couldn’t risk that kind of vulnerability when I was the only gun Theo had.
Instead I focused on cyberspace, gradually teasing away the layers of encryption around Valkyrie Paramedical’s own private comm network even as I scanned the street and the skies for any signs of life.
“Hey!”
I jolted, spinning around to see Theo cupping his hands to his face and shouting up at the sky. “We’re over here!”
“The fuck are you doing?!” I demanded, reaching up and practically pulling Theo down from the car. “They’re a hundred feet in the air, in a fucking helicopter! Only things that’ll hear that are-”
I didn’t finish that thought, because it was already here. A wasp spirit had darted over the rooftops, zigzagging left and right as I reflexively opened fire, my cybernetic arm whipping around as fast as I could think. The shots went wild, of course; I couldn’t exactly cheat like usual by lining the cybernetic limb up with whatever online device my target had on them.
As the wasp dropped down almost to the ground and shot across the road towards us, it was clear that their orders had been changed from hunt to kill. Taking a single deep breath – all I had time for – I shoved Theo behind me and let go of the gun, abandoning the near-useless weapon as I positioned myself in my best approximation of a fighting stance.
I couldn’t beat it, but maybe I could hold it off for long enough for Theo to get clear. All I had to do was last longer under the paralytic effect of its touch than the Knight Errant officer had.
As it darted in, I threw a punch with my cybernetic arm, a solid mass of metal and plastic swinging forwards to connect with the spirit. Miraculously, my closed fist met its head with the strength of steel and the force of a troll’s momentum, knocking the wasp off its flight path and slamming it into the ground.
Unfortunately it sprang back up, slamming into me with more momentum than even a dog-sized wasp should be capable of. I was barely able to bring my arm up in time to jam its closing mandibles, feeling synthetic nerve-analogues firing a numb sensation into my brain as it bit down on metal and plastic. I braced for the paralytic that might have been working its way through into my soul, or however the magic worked, but there was nothing. However their magic worked, it needed flesh and blood.
I struck back with my other arm, driving my organic elbow into the wasp’s head with enough force to knock my cybernetic free. Immediately, I drew back my freed fist and slammed it down into the wasp’s thorax then pressed it down into the asphalt with a knee as I gripped one wing with both hands and pulled.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
The pearlescent sheet fought against me with the force of a well-muscled arm, almost wrenching itself from my grip before I finally tore it free from the body of the wasp, leaving a wound that leaked some golden ichor that almost seemed real. In response, the wasp latched onto my leg with its mandibles and squeezed.
I screamed, closing my cybernetic hand into a fist and slamming it down on the wasp’s head again and again. With each blow, the wasp jolted as its carapace slowly began to dent even as my leg started to tingle with a paralytic sensation. I just had to hope it took longer to affect trolls than humans.
After a moment, however, one of my blows struck home, crushing a section of carapace that wept spiritual ichor as the wasp was finally forced by reflex to release its death grip. I seized the moment and staggered to my feet, kicking out at the wasp as I stood before stamping down on one leg with my boot, snapping the limb and leaving it momentarily trapped against the ground.
Swinging my other leg, still trembling and numb from the paralytic magic, over the wasps back, I dropped down and used my own bodyweight to press it against the ground before grabbing the wasp’s head with both hands and twisting as hard as I could.
It spasmed, its limbs flailing as whatever passed for its nervous system started to misfire. If anything, this seemed to be more effective than punching it. I knew very little about magic, but one of the details I’d picked up almost by osmosis was that spirits could be vulnerable in some strange ways.
Even before Ares had deployed their horrifically indiscriminate mutated insecticide, history had leant even store-bought insecticide an inexplicable strength against them, carried by the magical weight of decades of bug spray manufactured and marketed for the genocide of their mundane kin.
This felt like the same effect; kids have been pulling wings off flies for the entire span of metahuman history.
The wasp’s flimsy neck gave way beneath the force of my arms, the head coming loose with an audible crack before more golden ichor wept out as the entire spirit started to dissolve, the foul-smelling fluid rapidly evaporating into a shimmering fog that disappeared back to whatever nightmare realm the spirit had come from.
I scrambled forward at the abrupt dissolution of the weight beneath me, grabbing my gun from where it had fallen before standing up and staring exasperatedly at Theo, who was still there.
“We’re leaving,” I snapped, succinctly, as I strode determinedly into the building on the edge of the campus.
One broken window later and we were out in the streets of the city, where it was clear the evacuation orders hadn’t yet reached. I could sense a massive congregation of commlinks on the next block over, where the student population of NBU had probably been corralled according to some pre-written emergency action plan.
Up above us, I could see people peering into the campus from high-rise windows as they tried to film whatever was going past, while the road beneath my feet rumbled as a twin-rotor helicopter roared overhead, broadcasting a Firewatch IFF as both a warning and an eager declaration of intent.
Whatever Calvert had been expecting his second team to do, he couldn’t have intended this. No doubt he was hoping for a quick burst of violence; for Theo and his security guards to be gunned down in the library, or caught in magical spellfire. I pictured him in his command centre, watching the atrocity that he had unleashed on a city campus full of students.
This was too big to hide, and that scared me. His plans had gone off without a hitch so far and there was every chance he’d respond to this setback by switching to a scorched earth strategy. Why not, when this operation would already be making headlines? Whatever his next move was, it would have to be something big to eclipse this.
My frantic pace slowed as a figure stepped out into the street in front of us, creeping out of the darkness of an alleyway like a cockroach emerging from beneath a dumpster.
She walked with the same jerking motions she’d demonstrated in Calvert’s hospital but with a rapidity to them that had been absent before; an insectoid skittering, rather than any metahuman motion. Her outfit was still the same overlong skirt and hooded jacket, but the eyes beneath the hood were alive with an ancient and wrothful hate.
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” she stammered out, making it sound like an accusation. “I didn’t want to do it, but you gave me no choice. We’re here because of me, so I had to fix it when it went wrong.”
“Does that happen often?” I snapped, levelling my gun at her. “I hear bad luck follows bug shamans around like a bad penny.”
I squeezed the trigger, only for the shots to impossibly miss as Neith shifted to the side in a rapid flash of movement, leaving her clothes hanging in the air as if she’d stepped out of reality for a moment. I felt ice grip my heart at the sight of her.
Neith’s face was still human, but the rest of her had long since left the species behind. She looked like a misshapen humanoid wasp, with flesh and chitin merged across her torso like Frankenstein’s menagerie. Her limbs, with the exception of her hands, were almost entirely insectoid, patterned in the same yellow and black as the wasps she summoned.
Tattletale’s pendant seemed to tremble on my chest as I suddenly felt a crushing fear that pressed down on me from all directions, strong enough to force Theo to his knees beside me. Some distant part of me realised that it wasn’t just the natural fear I felt for her, but a magically-induced terror that was every bit as catatonic as her wasps’ paralytic bite. Neith seemed to shudder at the exertion of casting the spell, rolling her shoulders even as a quartet of pearlescent wings unfolded from her back, hanging down behind her like a cape.
She started to walk towards us, her insectoid legs clacking against the concrete with every step. Each movement was jilting and a little unsteady, but there was an undeniable, primal menace to her that overwhelmed any physical weakness in her shell.
“Neith!” someone shouted. “What are you doing!?”
It was Trickster, sprinting towards his teammate. I had just enough awareness left to identify the source of his distress; people were looking down from the buildings on either side, their commlinks pointed down as they filmed the confrontation with the reckless stupidity of bystanders who thought they were removed from what they were observing.
There goes my anonymity, I thought, hoping that they’d all be focusing on the bug rather than me.
“I have to stop them, Krouse,” she said, clearly slipping out of lucidity.
“We had it in hand, Neith,” he countered, stressing the codename. “You don’t have to step in like this; it’s too risky. Too public.”
“I’m not dead weight,” she snapped, the words given a staccato edge by her stutter.
“Of course not,” Trickster said, with something like reverence. “You’re important. That’s why you have to stay safe. Just… just go back, okay? I’ll deal with them.”
I was still paralysed by Neith’s fear spell, helpless and unable to move as Trickster reluctantly turned away from his girlfriend before levelling his hand at us, his tacky suit and too arrogant stance turned inexplicably horrific.
“This is all your fault, whoever the fuck you are,” he said to me. “That’s why I’m going to make this hurt.”
I braced myself for whatever was coming, trying to stand up straight even under the oppressive weight of fear. Instead of a spell, however, there was a flash of light between us, like a lighthouse cutting through fog, and for a moment I was afraid another spirit had decided to join the fray.
Instead, however, my heart leapt and the fear spell slipped from my mind as I saw Tattletale’s astral form between Trickster and I, her back to me as she hovered a foot off the ground. She didn’t even look at me, but just seeing a friend in that moment felt like divine intervention.
“Quite the mess you’ve got yourself into,” she said, genially.
“Your friend’s fucked up,” Trickster said. “Now she’s going to pay for it.”
“Oh, I wasn’t talking to her.” She waved a hand dismissively, then pointed to Neith.
“I’m talking to you, half and half. I’d say your first mistake was getting involved with a bug cult, but to be fair I don’t know if you went willingly. I guess the real mistake was made by the shaman who tried to use your body as the vessel for a queen. You ever stay up at night asking if you’re still human?”
She paused, to give her next cutting words more time to swing.
“Because you’re not. I can see you in there. You’re half an insect spirit stuffed into a human vessel that hasn’t shed all its psyche, both of you thinking you’re one person. But the human isn’t real; she’s just memories you’ve forgotten aren’t yours. In the grand scheme of things, you’re a fucked-up bug that thinks it’s a person.”
“Liar!” Neith snapped, jerking forwards as her wings thrummed angrily behind her. “I know who I am!”
“Do you?” Tattletale asked, with an audible smirk. “You’re not even the most interesting bug here. You, in the suit. You haven’t told her, have you?”
Neith’s head snapped around to Trickster, glaring at him accusingly. That rapid anger and unearned trust in a stranger’s word had to be a side-effect of… whatever she was.
“Don’t listen to a word she says, Noelle,” Trickster implored her, and I knew Neith was vulnerable from the way he used her real name.
“The cult got him too, didn’t they? I bet he told you he escaped before they could use him as a host,” Tattletale continued, preening like a cat who’s caught a bird and can now rip its head off at her leisure. “He’s not your friend. He’s not Noelle’s friend, at least. The shaman put him through the same process, only with him it stuck all the way. He’s a wasp, Noelle. A flesh-form spirit that’s kept the body and the memories of your friend.”
“Don’t listen to her,” Trickster snapped.
“You can feel it, if you reach out. Maybe you have already. Its connection to you. Its slavish devotion.”
“You said you wanted to fix me!” Neith cried, all her alien terror coming to pieces in a single, all too human moment of manic betrayal. “To solve all… this!” She swept a hand over her mutated body in an angry gesture.
“I do!” Trickster argued. “I love you and I serve you, and I want you to finally realise your full power! To understand what you really are! I thought if I could get the right person to believe you were human I could trick them into fixing your soul, allowing you to finally finish manifesting in this world.”
“You lied to me!”
“Never!” Trickster sounded distraught. “I lie to the others because they’re not us, but I have never lied to you! I am your devoted servant, my queen!”
“Then obey me,” Neith began, her voice hot with tears and rage as her wings thrummed hard enough that she took flight, “and die!”
Neith shot upwards, then swept down towards Trickster as ghostly claws appeared over her hands, formed from a sharp, yellowish light. Trickster backpedalled, leaping aside far more fluidly than he should have been able to, even as Neith tried to dart in for another attack. Above it all, I could still hear the cacophony of sirens and the now-distant rotors of Firewatch and the Valkries.
“Spider, go!” Tattletale said. “I can’t hold them off for long if they attack, but I can buy you time. End this, now!”
I nodded, too dumbstruck to talk even as I grabbed Theo once again and dragged him away from the battling insect spirits, ducking into the lobby of an apartment tower before rushing out through a back door into a small plaza surrounded on three sides by office buildings. Behind us, a chittering scream of agonised rage echoed through the streets. I had to hope that some of the voyeurs had called Knight Errant before they started filming, and that Firewatch would arrive before the bugs drove Tattletale off – or worse.
“So…” Theo began, speaking between heaving breaths. “What happens now?”
I sighed. I knew this moment was coming as soon as this turned into a clusterfuck, but part of me still shrank at what I had to say next. It didn’t feel right, but in the end it was the only thing I could do.
“Max Anders is going to die soon,” I said, watching as Theo’s eyes widened in shock and alarm. No matter what else he was, Max was still Theo’s father. “That team was sent to clear the line of succession for Aster.”
“And Kayden?” Theo asked. His genuine concern made me sick. “Is she alright?”
“Kayden’s alive, aware and cooperating,” I said. “I’m sorry, but she knows.”
The distraught look on his face made me feel like I’d kicked a puppy. I couldn’t blame him; he’d been living a relatively normal life, focusing on his friends and his studies while wholly ignorant of a scheme growing beneath his feet.
“And you’re… trying to save us?”
“To save you,” I corrected. “I can’t stop what’s going to happen to your father, and honestly I don’t want to. But you don’t deserve to die, and I couldn’t let Kayden take over Medhall. You have no idea what your father’s been doing with the company, and she’d be worse.”
“I know some,” Theo said. “Dad didn’t say anything, of course, and I didn’t like to think about it, but I know some things about the company he keeps.”
“You don’t know anything,” I snapped. “His business partners are genocidal, Theo. Your dad’s helping them sterilise whole populations of nonhumans, and your step-mom wants to keep going.”
I was half expecting an angry denial, but it seemed like Theo no longer had room in him for anger. Our desperate flight had worn him down, draining him of the will to resist or even object. A callous part of me acknowledged how useful that was.
“Where did Kayden even find those guys?” Theo asked.
“She didn’t,” I said. “Their employer found her, made the pitch. She runs Medhall as a subsidiary of his employers, with a free hand to do what she wanted so long as she generates a profit for the parent company.”
“Their employer… and yours?”
I sighed.
“Yeah. My team extracted Kayden and Aster. They’ll be out of the city soon enough, at least until all this blows over.”
“And you came alone because you don’t approve?”
“I came alone because I didn’t want to put my team at risk. Our client is a dangerous man, which means I can’t just scrap his scheme without coming up with an alternative that still gets him what he wants.”
Theo’s eyes widened.
“No…” he whispered, his voice strained with shock and even despair.
“I’ve been watching you for a long time, Theo. You’re a good person and I get wanting to leave all this behind, but because you’re a good person I know you won’t be able to. Not now that you know the truth. If I’ve got to be the snake in your Garden of Eden, I can live with it. You know, and you can’t ever un-learn what you know.”
I abandoned subtlety, flinging a resonance spike across the hundreds of metres between us and distant Valkyrie helicopter, still circling over the campus as it searched for some trace of Theo. The spike smashed ineffectively against its firewalls, but just enough of the solid shard of resonance pierced through to deliver the message that I’d encoded into every part of it.
It gave them our position and, for just a moment, altered the pilot’s head’s-up-display by flashing a simple, plain-text message.
As expected, digital wasps spilled out from the nose of the helicopter, but the directness of the attack was a defence in itself; instead of being actively dispatched to hunt down the perpetrator, the wasps were circling the aircraft in case any further attacks were coming.
“Keep your head down,” I said to Theo as I backed away. “When this is done, you’ll be contacted by a man from Evo. If you can’t bear staying then sell your shares to them, but I think you’ll do the right thing and take his deal. Take the company, use Evo to purge your father’s empire from the ranks and fix what your family has done to this city.”
“I can’t!” he shouted, frozen in place.
“You can,” I replied, my lips curling up in a manic grin. “It took me a while to figure it out myself, but all you have to do is take the first step. Once that’s done, there’s no going back to the way things were.”
I left him there, ducking behind a fountain at one corner of the plaza as Theo stood in plain view of the approaching helicopter. I reached out in the matrix, across the city to the command centre built into the eleventh floor of the CrashCart hospital. I didn’t bother hiding the fact that I had a tap on his network, overriding the frantic calls he was making to Trickster as I opened up an audio link.
“Mr Johnson,” I said. “We need to talk.”
“Spider,” he began, almost hissing. “This isn’t the best time.”
“I know,” I replied, with deliberate emphasis.
“You do?” he asked, falling silent for a moment. “Yes… Yes, I suppose you would.”
The Travellers knew my face and my description, and I’d no doubt been recorded by dozens of CCTV cameras and commlinks. It was better to show myself now, on my terms, than wait for Calvert to be told by someone else.
“I have a proposition for you,” I said, as the plaza was abruptly flooded by downwash, the force of the rotors expelling waves of water from the fountain behind me. “A better asset than the one you found.”
“Your proposition seems to be more of an ultimatum,” Calvert remarked, in a venomous tone. “I do not appreciate being forced into a decision.”
I don’t appreciate genocide, I wanted to say, but I knew I needed to think clearly if I wanted this to succeed. I had to approach him on his level, speaking only through his language of sound business decisions.
“Kayden Anders is a poison pill,” I argued. “You know she’d be more loyal to the Human Nation than Evo. She’d cut you out the first chance she got. You could remove her and take Aster, but do you really want to wait fourteen years for that investment to mature?”
The helicopter had touched down, a quartet of Hight Threat Response team specialists – three gunmen and a mage – forming a perimeter around the aircraft while two Paramedics led a stunned Theo Anders into the back.
“You can’t hide what happened tonight,” I said. “I don’t know where you found those psychopaths, but if Kayden takes over then there’ll be always be rumours that she set insect spirits on her own son-in-law. Beyond that, you’d have every Anders loyalist gunning for her head to avenge him.”
I paused for a moment, taking a breath as I tried to collect my thoughts. This was it; the make or break moment that would decide the fate of the city and either save or condemn my team.
“This is New England. It might be the birthplace of the American Revolution, but we’ve never quite managed to shake off those old names, old families. You don’t need Theo, but you want him; you can’t thrive in this city without a dynasty. It sucks, but it’s true. He’s a man, Aster’s a toddler, Kayden’s a jilted wife. You put Theo in charge of Medhall and the executives will see him as a Judas, but the workers? The managers? They grew up in Medhall schools, hearing how the Anders have done nothing but good for this city.”
My heart was racing a million miles a minute, as blood rushed to my head. The helicopter was deafeningly loud as it took off, carrying Theo away to parts unknown.
“So make a deal with the son, because he’s willing to deal with you. Lionise Richard Anders, pin all of this New Revolution bullshit on Max and let Theo be the city’s saviour. You’ll get what you want on the Human Nation from Medhall’s systems. Hell, I’ll get it for you once your heavy-hitters wipe out Max. Every scrap of data in their host.”
With that, the line descended into agonising silence. Even the background sirens started to fade into nothingness. Idly, I was aware of the Firewatch helicopter descending on the next block over, of figures standing in the open ramp with weapons drawn, but it barely seemed to exist. Everything, everyone, depended on what Calvert said next.
“You weave a compelling narrative, Spider. I came to this city with a single purpose; a single task to complete. Now I find I have a single path to that goal. I will use the son because no other options remain. I will unlock Max Anders’ defences and strike at him when he is most vulnerable, and I will use you as my key to him and his secrets.”
I almost gasped in relief, but my head only felt lighter. Abruptly I closed to connection and tried to stagger to my feet, only to slump down onto the fountain as my legs gave out. Every part of me ached, from my body to my mind, but I’d done it. All I had to do was show Calvert a better way; a way that gave him everything he wanted without any of the drawbacks of his plan.
For all his monstrousness, Calvert thought like I did. It was why I’d gambled everything, knowing he would take the deal I offered him. When all was said and done, we were both rational people.