“You haven’t listened to the briefing yet, have you, X-18?” Commissioner Gregor asked.
“No,” I said. “I decided to give you a call first. Looks like I was right to do so.”
“Maybe you should listen to the briefing, first. It’s not long. I’ll wait.”
I was almost tempted to make Gregor summarize it for me. After all, he was telling me it wasn’t long. Couldn’t be that hard to tell me the gist of it, then.
But my slowly rising anger wanted to see what the mission actually entailed. What the Commissioner could possibly have asked me to do after more or less betraying me to the very enemies we had both fought against for over a year.
He was right. It didn’t take me long to listen to the whole thing. The anger was now reaching a feverish peak.
“You sold me out,” I said.
“I started the first step of your mission.” Commissioner Gregor’s words had a bite to them now. Like I was an unruly kid and he was a teacher losing his patience. “Because I needed the timing to work out correctly. You seem to be ignoring my main directive at the end of the mission, X-18. Survive.”
I was trying not to act out. Mutton could pick up when I was upset, and after what had just happened in my little apartment, I didn’t want to distress the little guy any further.
But it was getting really hard not to slam my fist into the table.
“I got it, Commissioner,” I said. “You need a distraction from whatever else you’re cooking up. I’m supposed to be that distraction. You assumed I would be on board, so you simply decided to leak my private information to our enemies. You just started the distraction part without giving me the time to prepare for it.”
“Don’t tell me you really weren’t ready for this. What did you think would happen after a year of assassinations?” He continued before I could retort. “You’re X-18. You’re the war hero—the Juggernaut of Korkorrain. You’re the only one who almost killed one of the Untouchables of Silver City. You’re fucking Xylen Sears. If you’re not ready, then no one is.”
I laughed softly. “We both know that’s not my real name.”
Gregor was silent for a while. I was glad for the little reprieve too, honestly. It was letting me get back my head. It was letting the anger dissipate just enough for me to think clearly.
Mutton came up and rubbed his furry head against my leg. I smiled, then rubbed under his chin just how he liked it.
“I have a dog, you know,” I said. “I know I never mentioned, so you couldn’t have known there’d be anybody at my place when the hounds got here, but yeah. That’s why I got angry.”
Another moment of silence. “I’m sorry, X-18. Is…”
“He’s fine. Mutton’s a good boy. He ripped both hounds’ throats out without taking a scratch. Although, he did rip through half my apartment to do so.”
Commissioner Gregor actually sighed in relief. “You found yourself a good boy.”
Almost as though Mutton had heard, he yipped in agreement.
“I’m not accepting the mission, Commissioner,” I said. “But you knew that. That’s why you set it in motion before informing me about it, so I’d have no choice but to get it done, whether I want to or not.”
“As I said before, it’s a matter of timing. The last stages are set in motion. We don’t have a moment to waste.” Gregor sighed again. “Maybe I should have trusted you more, brought you up to speed on the whole thing beforehand. But I trust you to do your job, X-18.”
“You trust me to make sure I live.” I couldn’t help but scoff a little. “What makes you think I won’t just sell you out?”
“You can’t.”
“Can’t I? I’m not totally unaware, you know. The precise methods of murder, the specific number of bullets, the fact that all the bodies all needed to be delivered to the Morgue… You’ve got something planned, and it’s big.”
“You can’t, X-18, because you’ve worked too hard for this to be giving up on it now. You’ve put in way too much effort to throw it all away at the eleventh hour.”
“You have way too much faith in my appreciation for your plan, Commissioner. A plan I still don’t really know the full extent of.”
“No. What I have faith in is the fact that you’re a good man. Just like me.”
I got to my feet. Mutton whined a bit, but I patted his head to shush him. There was nothing for it. We needed to get moving. This home of ours was compromised.
“You took a lot of risks and sacrificed a great deal in the war,” Gregor continued. “You made sure Silver City was victorious against its enemies. You believed you gave enough, that you wouldn’t just be a hero during the war, but one when it was over too. Must have felt shitting awful when that turned out to be horse shit, huh?”
I started puttering about, picking up things I’d need, packing up what I could carry without too much trouble. Hmm, I’d have to leave a note to the landlord. Probably explain the bodies. “Oh yeah, I’m well familiar with the taste of betrayal,”
If the Commissioner heard any admonition in my voice at that, he didn’t let on. “The leaders of Silver City had no use for you now that the war was over. Your sacrifices meant nothing to them. You realized just what a rotten society you’d been supporting all that while. That was the start of your radicalization.”
“Didn’t realize I’d radicalized myself.”
“No? What else do you call a terrorist?”
“A revolutionary?”
Commissioner Gregor laughed shortly. “Two sides of the same coin, I suppose. But point is, you found out just how shit Silver City was, if you weren’t rich and powerful and born to a family on the higher levels. So, with the help of your fellow revolutionaries, the war hero, the Juggernaut of Korkorrain, assaulted Level 3.”
“And like you said, I almost got it.”
I paused in my preparations, suddenly unable to pull out of my memories. Unable to get the taste of smoke and blood from my mouth. Unable to prevent my muscles from threatening to seize up.
This wasn’t new. I knew this had been coming as soon as Gregor had started talking about the past.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
Arclight fired through my veins and Augments. I could breathe again. Move again.
“You did,” the Commissioner said. “You got farther than anyone. Where the rest of your little revolution failed, you nearly killed an Untouchable. The elites were shocked. Frightened. No one should have ever come that close. No one should have gotten away with it. Not after something like that.”
“And yet,” I whispered. “I did get away.”
“You did. Amazingly, incredibly, you came out of that alive. Broken, barely alive, forced to go into hiding where no one would find you, but still. You did it. You died to the world—the Untouchables couldn’t let anyone think you’d gotten away, so they faked your death and announced it to everyone—but in reality, you survived.”
“Until now.”
I resumed. In moments, I was done, Mutton patiently waiting in place as I took care of everything. No leaving anything incriminating behind. No clues pointing to my whereabouts. No items of identification.
Unfortunately, there were a lot of traces of DNA I couldn’t exfoliate fully. That would take me too long. But at least they wouldn’t be too dangerous.
Plus, I made sure to remove all the Arclight stuff.
“How long?” I asked. Patient as ever, Commissioner Gregor was still on the call, even while I had been busy packing up. “How long will they be hounding me? How long are you asking me to survive?”
“Depends on how long it takes… to complete the rest of the plan.” His tone changed. “You know why I really want you to survive, X-18?”
I was tempted to tell him that if he really wanted me to survive, he would have discussed this whole crazy plan with me beforehand. Instead, I just asked, “Why?”
“You know why dead men tell the best tales?”
“What?”
“It’s because they’re dead. You had several lives, X-18. A war hero in one life. A revolutionary in another. And now, an assassin in the gutters of Silver City. But the war hero died so the revolutionary could live, who in turn died to give birth to the assassin.”
I shook my head, still not getting it. “Where are you going with this?”
“Right now, you can’t change the past because your past versions died. No one will be convinced that some Underlevel killer is the Juggernaut of Korkorrain. But maybe, if you live after what’s going to happen, you might have a chance to tell your whole story again, X-18.”
I didn’t bother replying. We had talked enough. Now, I needed to get going and get out of here.
Was I being used? To my own detriment? Maybe? Most likely. But it wasn’t going to stay that way for long. Not if I could help it.
“I’ll talk with you later, Commissioner,” I said. “If I survive.”
“Good luck, X-18.” At least Gregor had the grace to sound regretful. “For what it’s worth, I do have faith in you.”
I cut off the comm line. Gathered all my packed stuff in one place. Retrieved the carrier for Mutton. Took one last look at the place I had called home for over a year now. “Let’s go, boy.”
Mutton’s low bark had a note of sorrow.
----------------------------------------
Of course, I didn’t leave just like that. There was one last thing I needed to prepare.
My appearance.
If they could track me all the way to my home, then I had no idea what other sort of information they had about me. I had to scowl at that line of thought. What other sort of intel had been leaked about me?
Point was, I couldn’t walk around the same way I had been doing for the last year. Which was where changing how I looked came in.
Discarding my usual long coat for a bomber jacket and wearing new boots were only the first of some superficial changes. The real difference came on my face. Thanks to my lower jaw having been ripped off and replaced by a cybernetic one, I could adopt a quick, patchwork blond beard. Spraying my hair the same colour and chopping off the excess wasn’t hard either.
The best things to help were the changes in my posture. I had learned how to hunch my knees a little. I knew how to square my shoulder to really look different from normal.
All thanks to the revolutionaries Commissioner Gregor had so kindly brought up. You had to be quite unorthodox to survive as an instigator in Silver City.
I had debated whether I ought to take my bike as well when I was leaving. It could be known too. Checking for bugs had revealed nothing, especially after I used Arclight to make sure. But still. Moving faster wasn’t going to help if I just led my foes to me.
Good thing I could carry all my shit and move both far and fast. Small pro of getting Augmented legs in the war.
Mutton woofed low from within his little cage as we got moving.
“Shh, boy, we don’t want to draw any attention.” I fumbled around with one of the packs. “Here, munach on a treat.”
Mutton started happily nibbling on his favourite candy.
We reached the safe house about an hour later. I’d prepped some safe houses for this exact scenario over the last year in Underlevel. Little out-of-the-way places I could shelter at if my real home ever got compromised.
Not exactly the most ostentatious of living quarters, but refugees couldn’t be choosers.
“Stay here,” I told Mutton. “I’ll be back, alright? Just keep an eye out and get out if things become troublesome, okay?”
The safe house was nothing more than a shed-sized room in a dingy building far away from my original apartment. The landlord didn’t care whether anyone was actually living there or not, so long as he got paid, which I made sure to keep up in a timely manner. I also kept the place stocked with provisions in case of emergencies. Mutton had better appreciate that.
By the time I went out, dawn was well on its way. The streets of Underlevel took on a golden-brown tint as the morning light slowly rose.
It was an effect of Silver City. Underlevel was the lowest rung of the city, surrounded and hemmed in by the massive spires that stretched skywards. The way the sunlight reflected and refracted through the panes on the towers and the bridges always cast a chromatic shadow all over Underlevel. A shadow that made everything look a little too sepia for my tastes.
The colour was far from the only dreary thing about them. With the presence of light, the first of the Zombies were crawling out of the gutters.
They were rousing from their blankets and from the little shaded spots they slept in, looking hungry, destitute, malnourished. Looking dead, except they weren’t. Not yet. Desiccated skin and spindly limbs though they might sport, but their existence wasn’t going to be tamped out just yet.
I could never tell if it was brave that they persevered in life, or foolish. They had nothing to look forward to. Addicts, beggars, amputees selling off pieces of their own body just to exist for another day. I… probably wouldn’t have survived a day in that state.
The rest of Underlevel passed me by in a blur.
Ever-weary people stuffing themselves into the train-elevators to be carried to their meagre jobs on the higher Levels of Silver City.
Carts pulled by kids dragging the dead to the Morgues.
A pack of dogs fighting over a corpse, before some plucky brat doused them with water then ran off with what remained of the body. Probably headed to a Morgue too. Although, I did catch him twisting off a few of the corpse’s fingers and pocketing them for his own use.
“Hey!” A boy ran up to me. He couldn’t have been more than eleven. “Hey, Mister! You happened to see this cobber?”
He showed me a crude sketch on a paper. I blinked. That… was me. A terrible rendition, because I looked way too much of a robot pretending to be a person by wearing a gigantic coat, but I of all people could note the similarities.
“Nope,” I said. “I’ve never seen anybody like that. Where’d you get that, kijo, and who’s it supposed to be?”
“Enforcers are looking for him. Said they’d give ten Arclight drives to anybody who comes up with reliable info.”
Shit. They had already taken it to that level of a manhunt? I thought it was just the crime lords of Underlevel starting to put a bounty on my head. But now, the Enforcers were involved too, according to this kid.
My mouth soured. Of course. Of course. If the Commissioner wanted a distraction—
Arclight buzzed in alarm. Someone was shooting. I dived just in time, shouting at the kid, but even that was too late. A glowing, fritzing blue shot struck the ground where I had stood an instant ago.
The whole place erupted. I was sent flying by the impact, the shockwave destroying the entire area, dust clouding everything as debris rained in blue hellfire.
My Arclight shield had saved me from the worse of the blast, although my skin still burned and my Interface was showing no small a number of warnings. But I ignored them for the moment, rising quickly out of the debris before moving off. There’d be more shots coming as soon as they were charged. I had to move.
A comm lined dinged in my Interface. Aliya?
“Do you know something about this?” I asked as soon as I picked up.
“Oh, so they are after you,” she said. “Figured as much.”
“They just killed a kid in broad daylight, Aliya. Check the newscasts. They’ll be reporting the blast any second now.”
“Sorry. I thought I was going to be fast enough to warn you, but it looks like they got to you before I did.”
I had a lot of questions I wanted to ask just then, but my first priority was getting to safety. Questions could come later. But Aliya’s call had reminded me about my get-out-of-jail-free card. Which, considering the kind of foes I was now facing, I might just need a lot.
“It’s alright,” I said. “You can help me get out of this mess, because I’ve got a plan.”