Ultraviolet (20 page)
Someone she couldn’t see shouted a string of words over the heads of the knot of people in front of her. Violet managed one more step forward, then the unmistakable sound of machine-gun fire shattered the dankness of the afternoon subway, immediately punctuated by the startled screams of people on the sidewalk. Violet froze, then hurtled forward, shoving people aside as she tried to see beyond the growing crowd of people gathered around a couple of security team men and something crumpled on the sidewalk. She elbowed past the last line of gawkers and sucked in a burning lungful of air as the thing on the sidewalk filled her vision, momentarily blotting out everything else in her life—
The small, bleeding body of a boy wearing a blue jacket.
The world went on around her, but all Violet could do was stand there, paralyzed. Had she really failed, after coming this far? Had she really let this happen because she could think only of herself and her so-called mission, that useless, personal pilgrimage of revenge that she had cultivated for so long? And had it cost this sad and lonely little boy the only thing in the world he had, that he had
ever
had—
His
life?
She stood there with a hundred other passersby and watched as the security team soldiers clustered around the pathetic little body. The entire time, all Violet could think was,
It should have been
me.
It should have been
me.
It should have been ME!
“It’s not him.”
One of the team members’ gruff voice cut through the fog bubbling through her brain and for the first time Violet registered that the man was holding a scanner over the dead child’s face. Her eyes widened, then she instinctively looked down at the sidewalk, as though one of her shoes—even though she was wearing boots—was untied, turning her face in any direction but where one of the guards might look over and see it. Before the soldiers dispersed, she saw that it wasn’t Six at all, just some poor, hungry street beggar who’d thought finding the blue jacket on the edge of the trash receptacle had made it his lucky day. Now he was nothing but a corpse, and even the security team that had mistakenly killed him couldn’t be bothered with gathering up his remains and seeing to a decent burial. The bastards looked down at him, then turned and started scanning the crowd as they sought their real target. God, but this world was getting to be a colder and more savage place with every passing minute.
Careful to stay unobtrusive, Violet took a couple of steps to the rear and blended back into the onlookers, barely hearing their grumbled comments about the street child’s death and the uniformed men who had murdered him. Nothing much would ever come of it, anyway—humans were big on talk but small on action. That much had been obvious from the way the civil rights groups had failed miserably to defend the Hemophages. Violet wasn’t going to be like that—she’d made the decision to give up bombing the ArchMinistry in favor of saving Six, and that was exactly what she was going to do. She just had to find him, and logistics demanded that he couldn’t be that far; she’d start with the row of vending machines where she’d last seen him. All little boys loved ice cream, and while it was a long shot that he’d still be there—she really figured he was too smart for that—it was as good a place as any to start her search.
But the vending machine area was empty, at least of anyone resembling the little boy for whom Violet searched. There were no security teams converging on the area so far, so something must have managed to break their signal lock—too much concrete, one of the two-hundred-miles-an-hour trains, an electrical burst from the tracking satellite. Whatever it was had left them with only the last known description of the fateful blue jacket. Violet cared only that it had done the trick; now she just needed to find the boy and get him out of here.
But which way would he have gone? For a few seconds she turned back and forth, mired in uncertainty. Then something on the ground caught her eye, a thin, gold object shoved against the wall over by the entrance to the lower subway tunnels.
Her bracelet.
Violet didn’t bother to pick it up as she dashed into the tunnel—she probably wouldn’t live long enough to go shopping again, anyway. It wasn’t that long of a distance, but it seemed like miles, pushing through more and more people, dodging around shopping bags and briefcases that were probably full of business papers relevant to a world in which she no longer belonged. But the boy wouldn’t be here, not in the midst of this crush of people—although his life span had been short so far, he had learned too much for that and he was smart enough to know that out in the open like this he was nothing but machine-gun fodder, a target easily locked on and eliminated. No—he would go for something more clever, something hidden and not so easily accessed. Something small—
The catwalk.
With a quick glance around to make sure no one was watching or following her, Violet slipped onto one of the concrete catwalks that ran on either side along the track and headed deeper into the dirt-encrusted darkness of the train tunnel. Stretching ahead of her for as far as she could see were evenly spaced lights, but they did little to break the long, gloomy expanse of the train tracks. Each light, nothing more than a dull, bug-filled dome over an energy-saving bulb, was positioned over an alcove large enough for a worker to slip into as the train passed; inside each alcove were iron handrails set into the concrete walls, and the workers needed these to hang on to since the train’s momentum could easily suck a man right off his feet. Violet figured that some of the alcoves would have doors leading to maintenance tunnels or storage areas, but she had no idea which ones actually did. That didn’t matter; if she had to, she would check every single one in case Six was hiding inside. The distance between alcoves wasn’t far because there was damned little time from when a person first heard the train coming and its actual arrival, and safety—
survival—
depended heavily on how fast you could get to those precious handrails.
But Violet needn’t have worried. There was no sign of an impending train by the time she’d sprinted her way around several curves and finally spotted the boy several blocks ahead. Yes, he was definitely smart—there was no way the security teams’ trackers could lock on him this deeply beneath the earth and the thick layers of concrete and metal overhead.
Of course, there were always the manholes.
As Violet moved faster to try to close the distance between them, she saw Six suddenly pause beneath one of the metal coverings. She frowned and tried to step up her pace, but it was difficult—the catwalk was narrow and slick with dampness and layers of old mold. She felt like she was slipping backward with each step, or at least going in slow motion, and when the child came to a full stop and craned his neck to see upward, she knew something was dreadfully wrong. He was standing in a shaft of hard, white light, almost like a spotlight. But there shouldn’t be any light coming down from the manhole cover, those were supposed to be
closed,
and as Violet desperately tried to stretch an extra inch or two into her stride and slipped precariously on the thin ledge, she found her voice and called out to him—
“Six,
please!
”
And, as so often happens when the nightmare that’s called life is at its most difficult, something so much worse manages to take place.
Nerva.
Although Violet had used her own Gravity Shifter any number of times, she’d never been in a situation where one had essentially been used against
her
—she hadn’t even known Nerva had developed one that could process so much weight. Now, stunned and still too far away to be able to do anything about it, all she could do was keep lurching forward as she watched Nerva calmly crawl through the open manhole, walk down the rounded side of the subway tunnel, and yank Six off his feet. It was a horrifying thing to see, like Nerva was some kind of giant, predatory spider in the darkness, but Violet wasn’t sure who was more frightened—Six or her. The child must have been paralyzed with fear, because he made no sound at all as he hung from Nerva’s grasp for a split second, legs and arms dangling limply over the tracks; then he was dragged up and through the manhole, and he disappeared into the circle of brutal, overhead light.
“Six!”
Violet screamed.
She closed the final yards just in time to look upward and see Nerva’s dark and not at all remorseful grin centered in the light of the street, silhouetted by the daylight behind it. “Sorry, V.”
Self-preservation instinct kicked in and she dived for safety, narrowly escaping the sudden spray of machine-gun fire he sent through the hole. She flattened herself against the curve of the filthy wall, then jerked around the edge and into the nearest alcove as the bullets chewed up the concrete surface and sang off the metal train tracks. She’d pocketed her dark sunglasses back on the platform so she wouldn’t seem odd to the other passersby, and now bits of concrete mingled with the bullets’ spark showers and sent little star blossoms of light against her painfully sensitive eyes. By the time Violet rubbed them away, Nerva and the boy were gone.
And the hunt was on.
Violet didn’t give it much time—less than sixty seconds—before she decided she was clear, then she found and activated her own gyroscope. Sixty seconds . . . only a minute, but as she was scuttling up the side of the tunnel, then pulling herself out of the manhole, she was acutely aware that every second counted. Was Nerva going to kill the boy outright, or take him somewhere else? Nerva was already a wanted man and would be shot on sight if the security forces ever caught up with him, so why not just go on and do it? The notion of secreting Six away didn’t seem logical—back in the conference room, Nerva had proved his intent when he’d pulled out his laser pistol and, he thought, killed the boy right there. If he truly wanted to murder the child, why hadn’t he simply leaned through the manhole and gunned the boy down where he stood? No, something had changed—there was something else going on here, something she didn’t know about.
Nor did she care.
Right now, all she wanted was that child. What happened after that . . . well, it could be negotiated.
Standing sideways on the subway wall, Violet jammed her sunglasses into place, then catapulted out and onto the street. A careless thing to do, and for her trouble she nearly got run over by a motorbike; the driver swerved and cussed her soundly, shaking his fist as he sped away. Violet ignored him and frantically scanned the street, but Nerva and Six were nowhere in sight.
She spun helplessly, feeling her anxiety spiral to the point where she wanted to simply fold in on herself. She wasn’t sure how far they’d gone underground, or even in what direction. At least she’d been out here long enough for her eyes to adjust a bit; the sky over the intermittent buildings was a merciful shade of gray, layered in clouds that made the whole light-sensitive thing a bit easier to take. One side of the street was virtually empty—industrial, in fact. Somewhere along the seemingly directionless turns of the catwalk in the subway the world overhead had gone from bustling downtown to dirty manufacturing, a change that wasn’t at all uncommon in the larger cities where rich neighborhoods could border on noisy airports and the seedier areas, such as this one, could be the backyard to cemeteries.
Such as the one across the street.
Nerva was headed into it now, dragging the boy along with him. Six wasn’t fighting . . . but he wasn’t cooperating, either. He was letting Nerva drag him along like some kind of life-sized, tangled-up marionette. The two figures twisted through the poorly maintained tombstones, all marked with the yellow and black biohazard symbol that identified them as victims of the Hemophage virus.
Violet started to dash across the street, then gasped as the boy surprised Nerva by suddenly twisting out of the vampire’s grasp. He spun and ran for it, but he didn’t get far. A pair of Nerva’s soldiers—Violet had thought she’d taken care of all of them, but like flies, they seemed to come from nowhere—slipped in front of Six and blocked his way. With vicious speed, one of them reached out and slapped the boy, hard; he reeled backward into Nerva’s outstretched hand and Nerva buried his fingers in Six’s collar and hauled him along like a misbehaving dog.
For a moment, Violet’s fury at the way the child was being treated blotted out everything—reason, sight, the
world.
When the red cleared from her vision she was already on the move, pounding across the pavement straight for the three Hemophages and Six. She didn’t get very close, though—when they spotted her, one of the ’Phages yanked out a machine pistol and sent a deadly spray of bullets toward her, forcing her to duck and roll along the chilly, rock-strewn ground. The gunfire sounded like high-speed, pounding drums, the sound bouncing from building to building in the deserted industrial area. When Violet dared to raise her head again, the vampires and the child had once again disappeared into the sea of headstones.
She scurried into the cemetery, moving low and fast and working her way through the tall, desolate grave markers. It was such a depressing, soul-depleting place, a small but powerful testament to the millions who had fallen victim to the Hemophage virus, and the overcast sky just added to the morose atmosphere in the cemetery. Everything around Violet was a bitter reminder of the fate of her brethren and of her own impending death, and had any of the uninfected—those with the power and the money and the resources like Daxus and the ArchMinistry—worked to combat it? To find a
cure?
No . . . they had only exterminated. In another ten or twenty years, unless a miracle happened, the Hemophage virus would be eradicated like so many other diseases. That, in itself, was not a bad thing, but did they have to murder all of its victims, too?
Violet swung around the corner of a double tombstone and abruptly stopped, melting back into the concrete camouflage provided by the wide stone wings of the double-angel display on the top of the grave markers. There, at either side of an overgrown, narrow rock pathway, were Nerva’s two Hemophage soldiers. She had never seen these two before, and they were grinning widely, showing their confidence that she was nothing to be bothered with when faced by the two of them. One was tall and thin with long, lank dark hair, the poster child for a nearly anorexic cocaine addict. The other was like his negative image—platinum-blond hair cut short and spiky; washed-out blue eyes peered at her above his black sunglasses and his skin was so white it seemed transparent in the gray light of day. Both of the men had let their incisors grow long enough to hang out below their upper lip. They curled their lips at her now and showed their teeth, bright white and sharp like young, ignorant puppies. In Violet’s eyes, they were next to useless—immature and foolish men more in love with the vampire lifestyle than with survival, more concerned with their carefully stylish hair and designer clothing than reality. They wouldn’t care about either for much longer.