Remote Control (22 page)

“Tough,” Kyntak whispered. Then he shouted at the red-eyed woman, “Hey, butterfingers. Open the door or you’ll need someone else to sign your paychecks.”

The door slid open behind him. She hadn’t spoken a word, so Kyntak backed away towards the wall so he could see the doorway while keeping his gun trained on Vanish.

Six was standing there, clothes shredded, face blackened, scratches all over.

“Six,” Kyntak rasped. “You look terrible.”

“At least I still have my hair,” Six pointed out.

“Okay, now you’re fired,” Kyntak replied. Then, to Vanish, “Stop right there!”

Vanish had moved behind the table. His gun was still pointed at Kyntak; Six was unarmed. “That wasn’t a good strategic move,” Kyntak said. “You can’t beat both of us, and we’re between you and the door. How long do you think that table’s going to protect you?”

“Longer than you think,” Vanish said. A mad smile flitted across his face.

“Toss me your radio,” Six said to the woman. She didn’t move.

“Do it,” Kyntak said. “Or I shoot your boss and then take it from you. You don’t have a whole lot of leverage here.”

The woman threw the radio. And as it was in the air, Vanish opened fire. Two bullets had hit the ceiling before Kyntak squeezed off his first shot, which missed Vanish, who had ducked behind the table. Kyntak and Six stooped into identical crouches, minimizing surface areas as the ricochets sparked off the ceiling and the walls.

The bullets ground to a halt after their second or third deflection, and clinked harmlessly on the floor.

Kyntak was feeling weak, and his aim was shaky. He threw his gun to Six, who caught it and aimed it at the table.

“Put down your weapon,” Six said. “Hold up your hands. You have until I count to five, then I come around the corner firing.”

There was no response from behind the table. “One,” Six began. “Two.”

“He’s gone,” the woman interrupted. Her face was white and sweaty—there was fear in her expression. “He’s disappeared.”

Something in Niskev Pacye’s voice struck Six as raw truth. All her icy confidence from the ransom video was gone. She was scared. Six leveled his gun and walked around the table in a slow circle. There was no sign of Vanish anywhere.

“Cool trick,” Kyntak whispered from his position on the floor. “How’d he do it?”

Six remembered the plastic plate he’d seen on the floor when the bot picked up the table in his cell. He kicked the side panel of the table. It didn’t budge. “The doors to the cells can’t be opened from the inside,” he said, pressing his palms against various spots on the panel. “And he wanted them closed while the prisoners were inside, even while he was in there with them, to minimize the risk of escape. Therefore there was some small chance that he’d get trapped in one.” A part of the table depressed under the pressure from his hands, and the side folded in, exposing the hollow inside of the table. Six rapped his knuckles on the plastic square embedded in the floor underneath. It sounded hollow.

“So he built tunnels,” he finished, standing up. “Escape routes, well hidden and hard to open without the know-how.”

“Do we follow him?” Kyntak asked. He had clamped his hand over his wounded wrist, trying to slow the bleeding.

“No,” Six said. “We don’t know where it leads, and he’ll be waiting for us. We have to get out of here.”

He ripped the tattered shirt off his chest and knelt down beside Kyntak. “Let go.”

Kyntak released his wrist, and Six wound the shirt around it. He looked at Kyntak’s face. He was pale, and his eyes were unfocused.
He’s lost too much blood
, Six thought.

“Kyntak,” Six asked. “Can you hear me?”

“It’s not that bad,” Kyntak whispered. “Barely hurts.”

Six glanced around for something he could use. He’d stopped
the bleeding, but he might have done it too late. He saw a syringe lying on the ground, filled with blood, and he reached over and grabbed it.

“Kyntak,” Six said. “Stay with me. Is this your blood?”

“Stole it,” Kyntak breathed. “Wanted me weak…”

Vanish was draining him, Six realized. That’s why the blood loss seemed so bad—he was already depleted. He rolled up Kyntak’s shorts, tapped the syringe, pushed the valve to get the oxygen out, and put the needle in Kyntak’s femoral artery. “Can you feel that?” he asked as he pushed the valve.

“I knew you’d show up,” Kyntak said. “You always…you…” His eyes drooped. He was still as white as a sheet.

“Stay awake,” Six said. “Stay awake!”

The syringe was empty, and Six took it out, pressing his thumb against the needle mark. He’d never done a blood transfusion before—he hoped he had done it right. But it didn’t look like enough; Kyntak’s lips were still blue, and he was now unconscious. Six felt for a pulse. It was faint and slow.

Of course
, he thought.
Kyntak and I have the same blood type!
He pushed the needle into his arm, ignoring the sharp sting, and filled it with his own blood, then tapped it again and pushed it into Kyntak’s leg. “Come on,” he whispered. “I didn’t come this far to watch you die.”

Kyntak’s chest was no longer visibly rising and falling. Six filled the syringe again from his arm, and gave Kyntak another transfusion. He was starting to get dizzy now, and his head ached from dehydration.
I can’t give any more blood
, he thought,
or I’ll lose consciousness myself.

He felt for a pulse again.

There wasn’t one.

Don’t panic
, Six told himself. He put his hands on Kyntak’s ribs and pushed down repeatedly.
One, two, three, four, five.
Kyntak had stopped breathing. Six pinched Kyntak’s nose, held his mouth open, and exhaled into it twice. He put his hands back on Kyntak’s chest.
One, two, three, four, five.
He was pushing hard enough to crack ribs on a normal human, but Kyntak’s bones were stronger than most. Six put his ear to Kyntak’s lips; the only sound was the frenzied pounding of his own heart. He put his mouth over Kyntak’s again and breathed:
one, two.
Kyntak’s chest rose and fell with the breaths, but there was no movement once Six stopped forcing air into him.

He touched his fingers to Kyntak’s neck. Still no pulse.

“Give me your remote,” he shouted to Pacye.

She looked up in alarm. “Why?”

Six picked up the gun and aimed it at her. “Just do it!”

She tore the remote from her belt and threw it to Six, who pointed it at Kyntak and jammed his finger down on the
ACCELERANT
button a few times. He hoped that the benefits of the epinephrine would be greater than the danger of the NENB.

He dropped the remote and bashed the heels of his palms
against Kyntak’s chest.
One, two, three, four, five!
He put his mouth to Kyntak’s.
One, two!

There was no response. There just wasn’t enough blood in Kyntak’s veins, and no amount of CPR was going to change that. Six’s brother was becoming little more than a still-warm corpse.

Six stuck the needle into his arm again, but hesitated. If he pulled the plunger, he would lose consciousness in seconds—long enough to give Kyntak the transfusion, maybe, but not long enough to do any more CPR. Kyntak would die. He was nearly dead already.

“What blood type are you?” he demanded, turning to Pacye. But she had disappeared—either run out into the corridor or followed Vanish down the tunnel.

Six thumped his fist into the floor next to Kyntak’s drained flesh. They were both O positive. They needed someone who matched, or someone with O negative blood, the universal type.

Think
, Six commanded himself.
There has to be a way. There’s always a way!
Vanish had O positive blood. He couldn’t transplant his brain into a body that didn’t match. But they had already ruled out catching him as a possibility, let alone taking some of his blood and running back to the cell. There were soldiers out in the corridor, but they were unconscious and there was no way to tell what blood type they were. If he gave Kyntak the wrong kind of blood, he would poison him.

Six’s eyes widened. There was another candidate, someone close by who had O positive blood. Six’s mind recoiled from the idea, but he knew it was Kyntak’s only shot for survival. He lifted Kyntak in his arms and carried him out the door.

He couldn’t run; he was too dizzy and exhausted. He staggered slowly down the corridor, Kyntak’s lifeless body flopping sickeningly in his arms. “Stay with me, Kyntak,” he whispered.
He stumbled in as straight a line as he could:
left foot, right foot, left foot…

As he passed the elevator, he kicked the gun of one of the fallen soldiers between the doors. They wouldn’t close with it in the way, so the elevator couldn’t move. No reinforcements would get to this floor for a while.

He reached the cell door and opened it. The clone looked up at him with the same terror in his gaze that Six had seen before. Six laid Kyntak down on the table and pulled the syringe from his pocket.

He fell to his knees and shuffled across the floor of the cell toward the clone, who backed into a corner. Eight months ago, Six had unwittingly stolen this boy’s body parts to save his own life; now he intended to steal more to save Kyntak. A part of him felt like he was no better than Vanish. But he knew that he had run out of options.

Six held the syringe in his right hand, bracing himself against the floor with the left arm that he would never again think of as his own. The clone stared at the tip of the needle, his breath coming in rattly hisses from the mask that half concealed his deformed face.

“I’m sorry,” Six whispered. “So sorry.”

And he lowered the needle to the clone’s skin.

Kyntak’s chest arched, his arms thrashed, and his whole body shuddered as a cough exploded out of his lungs. Six fell backward onto the floor of the cell as Kyntak gasped for air, hacking and wheezing on the table. Six stared at him, wide-eyed. A part of him had accepted that Kyntak was dead.
The logical part
, he thought.
It’s a miracle!

Kyntak rolled off the table and fell to the floor beside Six. “That,” he choked, “was the least pleasant experience…I’ve ever had in the line of duty.”

“All you had to do was lie there.” Six coughed. “I was doing all the work.” He forced himself to think about the potential harm that the heart failure could have done to Kyntak. Brain damage was the most likely. “Do you remember who I am?”

“I don’t feel brain-damaged, Six of Hearts,” Kyntak said. He stared gloomily at the floor of the cell.

“It’s not something you feel,” Six replied. “What’s twenty-eight multiplied by seventeen?”

Kyntak frowned. “Four hundred and seventy-six?” he said after a pause.

Six nodded. “What color is the bandage around your wrist?”

Kyntak grimaced. “Orange with red splotches.”

Six shut his eyes and slumped back against the floor. Kyntak’s memory, sensory, and calculation apparatus all seemed to be okay.

“Are we safe?” Kyntak asked. He thumped his chest with his fist and coughed again. “Are there guards coming?”

“The elevator is disabled and all the guards on this floor are unconscious. We’re okay for the moment.”

The clone in the corner whimpered—a muffled, hissing squeak. Kyntak saw him for the first time. “Who, or what, is that?” he demanded.

“Our little brother,” Six said. “The clone that Crexe made last year to harvest body parts for me. Vanish stole him and kept him as a test subject.” He kept his eyes closed. “And I took his blood to replace the amount you lost.”

“Wow,” Kyntak said, staring in horror at the boy’s glass eye, the respirator mask, and the stump where his arm should be. “That sucks.”

“I didn’t have a choice,” Six began. “If—”

“I know,” Kyntak said, cutting him off. “I’d be dead if it weren’t for you. And him. It just sucks, that’s all.”

Six longed to remain lying on the floor and go to sleep. Every muscle screamed for rest. But there was still more to do.

“Come on,” he said, grabbing the edge of the tabletop and dragging himself to his feet. “Vanish knows what floor we’re on. Soldiers are probably blocking off the exits as we speak, and since the elevator isn’t working, they’ll be looking for another way down. We have to get out of here.”

Kyntak stood up slowly. “How? Even if we weren’t weakened and exhausted, we’re still hopelessly outnumbered. There’s no way we’re walking out the front door.”

Six looked Kyntak in the eye and was frightened by the despair he saw there. He had given up, Six realized. Vanish had wrung the hope out of him like water from a sponge, and now all that was left was sorrow.

“There’s always a way,” Six said. He wanted to put a reassuring hand on Kyntak’s shoulder, but couldn’t—it would seem too weird. “Always.”

When they went back to the surgery room Six had passed on his original search, they discovered that some rations were kept in one of the drawers—small, heavy bars of protein, sugar, and vitamins. Six felt better after he had eaten four or five of them; the pain in his muscles died down, his headache disappeared, and he could already feel his body metabolizing the food and replenishing his blood. There were also clean clothes, both hospital scrubs
and orange prison garb. Six told Kyntak everything that had happened since waking up in the morgue while Kyntak munched on the bars in silence. Six applied some styptic to Kyntak’s wrist to stop the bleeding properly as he talked, and replaced the torn-up shirt with proper gauze. He treated his own wounds too—the knife cut on his arm and the bruises from the fight with the bot. Then he grabbed a pair of scissors, a razor, and some shaving foam from one of the drawers—a plan was forming in his mind.

They offered some food to the clone as well, but he wouldn’t touch it. The fear was gone from his gaze, replaced by a heavy-hearted resignation, an acceptance that no one was ever going to help him. They unwrapped the bars and left them on the table in his cell, hoping that he would eat them after they were gone.

Six considered closing the cell door, so the clone would be safe until they came back for him. But he decided against it. There was a chance they weren’t coming back. If they died trying to escape, he didn’t want the clone left at Vanish’s mercy.

“We’ll come back for you,” Six said. “We can’t take you with us now, but we’ll be back with help.” The clone stared helplessly down at the floor as Six rolled the door towards the wall, leaving a narrow crack. Hopefully any soldier who happened to look wouldn’t be paying enough attention to notice.

Someone had called the elevator. The doors were sliding back and forth, starting to close and then backing off when the lasers sensed the gun lying in the way. Six suspected they didn’t have a lot of time. They went back to the sleeping troops.

He started pulling their helmets off, looking at their faces. This one’s skin was too tan. The next one’s hair was blond—useless. The third was female. He kept looking.

Kyntak was doing the same thing; he pulled the helmet off a
sleeping soldier and held up the body so Six could see—it was a man in his early twenties. “What do you think?” he asked Six.

Six nodded. “It’ll do.”

“Give me the scissors,” Kyntak said.

Six threw them to Kyntak, who started work immediately. Six kept pulling helmets off. Another woman, a guy who was too stocky…There! Perfect.

“Six,” Kyntak said, pocketing the scissors and prodding his soldier. “This one’s waking up.”

“Grab their remotes,” Six said. “Hit the
SYNCAL
button on them; keep them asleep.”

We’ll have to hurry
, he thought. He took a watch off the nearest soldier’s wrist and put it on. 05:27:27.

There were sixteen soldiers in the room. Two on each side of the elevator door, three on each side of the stairwell entrance, and the remaining six distributed randomly throughout the room, crouching behind the bomb-making chambers, pressed up against the half-constructed vehicles, and standing guard by the glass cube.

They had been thoroughly briefed on the situation. There were two escaped prisoners on the loose in the lower level. The elevator was the only way up, and the fugitives were expected to try to take it. The orders that the soldiers had been given were very clear. The mission priority was to keep them from getting past; the secondary objective was to leave them undamaged; and the escapees were to be considered dangerous even when unarmed. They had nanomachines in them, but they had jammed the elevator. This meant that there was no point in sending the “sleep” signal to the bottom floor. It would overdose the soldiers who
were still down there, and the fugitives would wake up before anyone could get down there to recapture them. So instead, they guarded the elevator. The soldiers down there should wake up soon and take control. But if the escapees tried to come up, they could be taken down with the remotes. And the soldiers had been issued with AM-92s as backup.

All heads turned and guns were raised as the elevator doors slid open. There were two soldiers in it. The prisoners were slung over their soldiers, apparently unconscious.

“Stand down,” the soldier carrying the bald prisoner said, walking forward out of the lift. “Holster your weapons. The situation has been neutralized.”

“Don’t come any closer,” commanded a soldier standing next to the glass cube, not lowering his weapon. “Our orders state that the fugitives are not to pass this checkpoint. Why did you bring them up here?”

“The cells have been compromised,” the soldier carrying the dark-haired prisoner said. “The lower level is no longer suitable for holding the prisoners.”

“That information doesn’t match ours,” said one of the soldiers standing beside the elevator doors.

The soldier carrying the dark-haired prisoner kept walking. “Then recheck with command. I’m prepping the hostages for transport.”

“I said no closer!” repeated the one near the cube.

“Well,” Six muttered under his breath, “it was worth a try.” He threw the orange-clad soldier at the one who’d just spoken and stepped backward, cracking his fist down onto the helmet of one of the door guards. He lunged forward, driving a solid uppercut into the ribs of the other guard beside the elevator, then he ducked. A Syncal dart cracked against the steel doors where his head had
been and clinked uselessly against the ground. Six curled into a ball, exposing as little surface area as possible—Kyntak would take care of the threat.

Kyntak did. He’d just finished wrestling two stunned troops to the ground when his head turned to face the sound of a tranq gun firing. Six watched him fly forward, energized by the transfusions, the rations, and the accelerant, slamming his left foot against the soldier’s right shoulder. The AM-92 went flying, and Kyntak pushed the soldier over backward with his palm.

Six stood up again. That was six soldiers down, ten to go. He scooped up the AM-92 as he ran to the opposite side of the warehouse. One of the commandos was yelling into his helmet mike, “We need reinforcements at the Basement Two checkpoint,” when Six shot him. The Syncal dart zipped through the air, visible to Six’s accelerant-charged eyes, and slipped into the flesh under the soldier’s chin. He dropped like a stone.

A dart was fired somewhere to his right—he spun to face the sound, ducking at the same time. The shot had been fired at Kyntak, not him, and Kyntak had dodged it, but there was a second guard taking aim. Six was about to charge forward to help when a gun butt hit him in the back of the head. He collapsed forward in surprise, dropping the tranq gun. The shock of the impact rever-berated around the inside of his helmet. His vision swam and his ears hissed as he tumbled towards the floor.