Time flows, memories fracture, I remain
The rain was a thing with many faces, all speaking. It roared on the cracking tar and gravel roof above her head, gurgled out through a drain spout and splashed across the cement in a flat cracking sound outside the barricaded back door, and on the other side of her monitor-covered wall, in the thick darkness of the abandoned grocery store, it streamed through the roof into what had once been the frozen food section, falling, frothing, whispering, into a puddle that had flashed like a mirror found in the dark when her drones had made their last security sweep.
Snuggled into a soft armored office chair, in the center of what had once been the loss prevention office, EP’s fingers clattered across a keyboard and three separate keypads and she sent her drones off on new routes. Some would fly to the self-storage for recharging, some would track the operators on the road, and others would move to landing zones, unoccupied or abandoned buildings, safe house backyards, even stash vehicles, ready to be recharged and deployed if needed. Others would fly to a remote area and melt from the inside out, their feeds fizzling to black. She had about a hundred fielded right now with about twice that in reserve, stashed on other landing zones throughout the city, powered down and undetectable. One of the massive screens covering the wall in front of her was dedicated to her drone map. On it, the metroplex looked like an irradiated ant hill.
Outside, the rain had died to a drizzle. On the camera feeds that monitored the operators, it still came down in sheets.
“You wouldn’t know about that.”
Years ago, when, for the first time, a computer had given its secrets to her completely, revealing a hidden world, and the knowledge of its operation had sprung up from the Self’s memory into working knowledge without hesitation, she had lost herself in the excitement. Now, she felt, and not for the first time, that something had been lost along the way.
She had envisioned moments of hacking security systems followed swiftly by the thrill of moving, personally, into the now exposed areas, gun in hand. Then she had found out about the Hardworlding division of labor, and her performance during the first shootout had placed her decidedly into a single sector of operations. Like a lot of things, she could never point to a single choice that had brought her here. It felt like her present position must have always had a kind of gravity to it, and every step from there to here was only part of an arc.
She loved what she did. The planning, the control, the feeling of being everywhere. But sometimes she just wanted to run out into that wide world of direct fire and hands-on everything. Sometimes being everywhere felt like being nowhere.
Out in the rain, a million traps and sensors lay in wait, dividing her from the world she watched and studied so closely. The Uzi in the drawer gathered dust. Her pistol slept on the base of a monitor stand, waiting to get buried under scratch paper or crushed cans. She had long since given up wearing it on her hip. It made moving comfortably in her chair impossible.
Her earbuds chimed and Michael’s voice came through with the sound of heavy rain.
“How are we doing?”
“They got out clean. Didn’t find it, of course.”
“Good. Well, we know where it’s not, that’s something.”
She nodded, then remembered he couldn’t see her. Somehow, she always felt like he saw everything. Like these calls to check in were only out of courtesy, or some kind of test.
“You had Kate on overwatch for a bit, correct? With Alan?” He wasn’t angry or even accusing. That was the worst part.
“Yeah, I had to watch April.”
“You didn’t ask me.”
“I’m sorry.” She immediately knew it wasn’t what he wanted to hear.
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“I’m asking why.”
“I figured you were busy.”
“Don’t figure. Don’t assume. Don’t guess. Know. That’s your purpose here. To know.”
Soft words, gentle tone. Sometimes she wished he would just scream.
“Alright. I understand.”
“How’s Johnny?”
“Sleeping, finally.” Michael had refused to let Luke anywhere near either search, instead attaching him to guard duty at Philip’s storage, and ordering him to give his Self a full eight hours of sleep. When EP asked about it, Michael had only said “Disengaging isn’t his strong suit.”
She logged it away as a lesson. A good leader knew what his people would do, and it didn’t take more than a few jobs with Luke to know that if anyone shot at Sam or Lindsey, he wasn’t likely to lie down until every shooter was dead and sorry. Not to mention that he’d already taken a liking to Gradie.
“Good,” Michael said. “I have a feeling tomorrow he’ll be glad he got some sleep. Unless he’s plastered.” He chuckled.
EP found Michael’s marker on the map and pulled up a drone feed. He was walking through an abandoned park at the edge of downtown, a cluster of grey rectangles and trees stuck between a bridge and a parking garage, like it had been trying to slide into the river when something stopped it. Brutalist cement walls, square stepping slabs over flooded mud, and concrete rooms, all water stained and disused. Dead leaves tried to form carpets. The troughs and spouts meant for piped fountain water, clogged by the leaves and dirt of decades, now rushed white again in the rain, sloshing with angry chaos in places designed for calm reflection.
EP’s file told her it had been closed to the public for ten years. A chain link do-not-enter fence blocked it off from the street. He always found the strangest places.
“I’ve got background on the cops,” she said. “Still scanning the buzz for anybody else.”
The buzz was a general term for talk on a variety of mediums; radio chatter, chat rooms, messenger apps, phone calls, and other tapped personal communications. EP had a knack for mining the buzz for info. Some sources got fed into crawlers that looked for specific speech or text strings, others she reviewed herself, or kept on as background noise, her subconscious picking up on things she might have otherwise missed.
Hardworlders could be anyone and anywhere, and like the team, they tried to stay hidden. But unlike the team, they didn’t have Michael’s experience to guide them. They also didn’t have EP.
“Good,” Michael said. “Keep an ear open, but stay low energy. And get some rest soon. I’ll need you at full throttle tomorrow.”
EP dropped off the line. For a while she watched him walk through the concrete park. With a touch of guilt, she zoomed in on his face with a micro drone and got the feeling he was seeing things there that were invisible to her, as if ghosts walked near him. It felt like spying on someone at a wake, so she closed the feed and went back to monitoring the buzz.
Lightning flashed out over the river, beyond the Main Street peninsula, and the land glowed in his NVGs like some lost third sibling to night and day. He remembered, with a crystal clear recall that only the most experienced of Spirits possess, another storm years ago, over the same city. Even now, he could feel the drop in his chest, that electrifying feeling of flight.
When the thunder had passed, he listened again to the water. It rushed down the troughs and overflowed in the square pools. It dripped off the oaks and splattered on the concrete. It stung him to hear everything lit up in sound, like it was just as alive as it had ever been.
He had walked the entire park. The elevated walkway, high above the sloping river bank, where the crowns of oaks stretched over the railings and flicked rain at him when the wind blew. The once named waterwall, its fountains now dead, its pools trash filled. The covered spaces, where rain sounds echoed and the dead stillness was so thick he could barely breathe. The square stepstone paths. The staircases.
He let the memories flow out of every inch of concrete. The ones he could still call on. The ones they hadn’t taken. He needed them now.
He flipped up his NVGs and sat on a bench, breathing in the wet smell of everything. The square slabs of dark cement stood solemnly while the Oaks and the water and the leaves danced without care. Lightning flashed again and pieces of it glowed everywhere, like shrapnel that dug itself in so deeply he felt it even when everything had passed back into darkness.
He exhaled, closed his eyes, and found the park waiting in his mind. It was dry as a Texas day could be. The sun broke through the tall oaks in thick beams that flashed off the yellow concrete like glass. They were arrayed around him, standing, squatting, sitting, reclining. All six of them. Like nothing had ever happened. Like he had never left.
They smelled of soda, sweat, and gunfire. They celebrated a job well done. They laughed and gave each other shit over the fuckups and under played or over played the successes. They smiled at each other. They said with everything they did that they knew it would last forever.
He held the vision for a breath, long enough to repeat the same promise he had made all those years ago, and let it fade.
The cold and the wet returned, his tears disappeared in the rain pouring down his face, and the unbearable, merciless weight of twenty years rushed back in, filling the space between here and then, and he was left alone again.