Seattle Vance

  I booked it as soon as black uniform jumped down, running down the wrecked office hallways of the ASA headquarters. It didn’t take long to get back to where I started, back to all the corpses of the former Knight Squad. They were strewn throughout the blood-spattered hallway. Honestly it looked like a hurricane had blown through. The lighting fixtures were busted, bullet-holes everywhere.

  The once banal ASA headquarters took on something new, something nightmarish. It was a proper war zone, and I realized then that we might’ve done what the nukes couldn’t. This place was properly trashed, and something told me—though I had no way of being sure—that this hellhole wasn’t going to be rebuilt again.

  After all, who really cares about a dump like City 57?

  I was practically lost in thought as I was kicking in doors. And finally, I found what I was looking for.

  Dust was curled up in a corner. He had gotten out of his restraints, but it looked like he had received the same interrogation treatment I had. He was shaking, and he made a small yelp as I suddenly burst in the room.

  I was glad he was alive. Maybe that’s a little hypocritical as I had nearly killed him. But hey, no one’s perfect.

  “Come on, kid,” I sighed, knowing my face was just as busted and bruised as his. “Time to finish this.”

  Dust didn’t respond. He had frozen up, and I didn’t have time to sit down and give him the talk. I walked over and grabbed him by the arm, dragging him into the body-strewn corridor outside. I pulled the boy back to the black secret corridor, back to where this mess started, back to where I nearly killed him.

  The zurchon corridor was blaring with red lights. It looked like a few of the Knight Squad guys had tried to make a last stand here. Their half disintegrated corpses told me it didn’t really work out. And at the end, the goal sat behind a reinforced door, the server room tantalizingly behind the transparent glass.

  “I just want to go home!” Dust finally snapped out of autopilot as he looked at the scene. “I don’t want to do this anymore, please!”

  The kid was well and truly broken, crying because it was all too much. It was impossible not to see how young he was—how deep down, no matter how hard he tried to toughen himself against the world, he was just a kid at the end of the day. I paused, covered in blood and sweat and my own tears.

  You know, I couldn’t help but remember what Joshua had said to me earlier today.

  I flashbacked to Joshua’s bunker, to when I left the little hide hole. Joshua was hunched over his computer screens as he glanced at me.

  “This is the last time, Vance.”

  I remembered how I grinned at him. “Yeah, sure.”

  He didn’t say anything back, but the sad look on his face told me that it was for the last time. I don’t think it was anything I particularly did. It was just that he realized I didn’t care. I didn’t care about him at all. Didn’t care about anything except getting what I wanted.

  The thing that broke my heart was that he wasn’t wrong… but he wasn’t right either.

  “It’s nearly over, kid.” I grimaced, wishing I had something better to say.

  I sat him in the hallway, while I pillaged the bodies. I slung one of the dead soldier’s M4s over my shoulder. Then I knelt down and started rummaging through the vests of one of the soldiers. Lifting my hand back up, I shook a grenade in my hand. Glancing over to the locked glass door, I pulled the pin.

  It took a few blasts. The reinforced door was plenty sturdy, but even it couldn’t take that kind of beating. A minute later, and I was in the secret room. Black hulks of servers loomed over me, and the dark red room was filled with high-tech equipment I couldn’t make heads or tails of. Searching frantically, I opened every drawer and container.

  And then… there it was. I opened a metal grate of one of the servers, and I saw a black flash drive plugged into it. Ripping it out, I held it in my hand.

  It was bizarre how easy it was. After everything that had happened, here it was. Did I feel happy? Did I feel excited? Not really, I was just tired. I just wanted to go home, but I didn’t have a home. That was the reason I was here.

  I knew my brother’s name was somewhere on that list, but the trouble was, I knew it didn’t mean anything good. What were the odds that he was alive and well after all this time? I knew it was practically zero. But that wasn’t the point. The point was to find out the how’s and the why’s of what they did to him.

  And then after that? If I was still alive, I was going to hit the Democratic Union where it hurt. Today had been a slaughter, but it was nothing compared to what I was going to do with this flash drive.

  I pocketed the device, and walking out, I radioed Raven and August that it was mission accomplished.

  I didn’t get a response.

  Just as I was about to step out of the zurchon corridor, I stopped. Maybe it was a change in the air. Maybe it was just my gut. Maybe it was I couldn’t hear Dust’s sobs anymore. But I sighed and my shoulders fell.

  “Come out, Daniel.”

  There was a long moment of silence. I was beginning to feel like an idiot until Daniel stepped into the doorway holding Dust hostage. He was holding a pistol to the kid’s head.

  Fucking hell, this was twice in a row. I was so distracted with the déjà vu that I didn’t even lift my gun.

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  “Where is Mason’s serum?” Daniel asked.

  He had looked as bad as the rest of us. Blood was streaming down his nose. He was covered in grime and dirt and a thousand tiny scrapes.

  I glanced to Dust, ignoring Daniel. “You ever get around to placing that call?”

  The kid nodded, terrified.

  “Hey!” Daniel shook the pistol. “Where is the serum? I don’t get it, and the kid dies!”

  I looked up at him. “You’re not a killer, Daniel. Well you are—but not that kind. Let the kid go, and we’ll talk.”

  It’s funny. I had a million lies running through my head, a million ways to try to bullshit out of this one, but my heart wasn’t in it for whatever reason. So I told it simply, just how it was.

  I looked at him square in the eye. “There never was any serum. There’s not a damn thing anyone can do to help Mason. Let the kid go. It’s me you want.”

  Daniel processed this for a second. He pushed the kid away and aimed his pistol right at me, but I was faster. I lifted my M4 and shot at him. Daniel blinked out of existence while I doubled back for the server room. Throwing my exhausted body around the corner, I knew I was stuck.

  My teleporting friend couldn’t come in the corridor without losing his advantage, and I couldn’t get out without going through Daniel.

  Bullets pinged off zurchon as Daniel unloaded his gun in anger. “You’re a piece of shit Seattle Vance!”

  I quietly reloaded my M4 and lifted a grenade in my hand. “I know,” I said.

  Pulling the pin, I quickly chucked it at Daniel. There was a bang, and I hoped Dust hadn’t been caught in the explosion. All went quiet with my ears ringing. I knew it didn’t kill him. Daniel was trying to bait me out.

  “You’re wasting your time, kid.” I called out to him. “If you care about Mason, you should head back. Tell him… tell him…” I paused and reflected. “Tell him I’m sorry.”

  “‘Sorry’ isn’t going to fix any of this!” Daniel yelled. Another bullet pinged off the zurchon.

  “Yeah,” I muttered.

  I jumped out and unloaded my M4 where Daniel had been standing. He blinked out of existence again, but I could tell he was slow. He was just as tired and knocked out as I was. All it would take would be one lucky shot.

  I jumped back around the corner to the server room. I don’t why I was playing it so risky. Technically all I had to do was wait for Joshua’s surprise. But I suppose Daniel deserved that chance to take me out. Even as we traded gunfire, he deserved that much.

  I have a funny way of saying apologies I guess. I jumped out and unloaded my M4 again.

  Time blurred. I’ll admit. I expected to look down and see red blossoming on my chest. I expected to fall over dead… and I was fine with it. I was completely calm, almost out of my own body. Everyone has a ledger I guess, debts to be paid. They tell you the world isn’t fair, but that isn’t true—not quite. It’s the people who aren’t fair, but things have a funny way of coming back round again. The world schemes its justice—the problem is people can’t see it because they think they’re at the top of it all. We think it ought to be our justice, our way of doing things. But that’s not how it works. There’s a dance to it, and we’re all just the spectators.

  I had learned that lesson, seen it with my own eyes. And I was okay with paying up what I was due.

  I jumped out again and fired my gun.

  Instead of going back into cover, I took another risk and waited for Daniel to blink back. He did, and I aimed for his head, but he was gone again before I could press the trigger.

  I fired anyway.

  I can’t tell you how badly I wanted him to leave. Not for my life—I just wanted him to relay my apology to Mason. It felt like that was the thing that was supposed to happen. The moral at the end of all this carnage, you know? But when I heard the buzzing of the drone, my heart fell in my chest. I suppose closure is too much to ask for someone like me. It’s a damn shame that. My gun clicked as it finally ran out of ammo. I lowered my M4 and dropped it to the floor. It clacked on the ground as Daniel blinked in, aiming his pistol right at me.

  He was so blinded by rage, and he deserved that shot. I didn’t duck or jump back into cover or do anything. I just looked at him quietly as he had death in his eyes.

  It was all over in a second.

  Joshua’s drone shot in just behind Daniel and detonated. The explosion was twofold. It had a nullifier bomb that emitted a sonic shriek to disable superpowers. The next was a more conventional explosion.

  It wasn’t the sort of thing that should’ve caught someone like Daniel. It was way too slow. But Daniel was exhausted. He was at his limit. And he was so blinded with anger, I was the only thing he was focused on. Nothing mattered except killing me, and then the drone appeared behind him. He could only glance back in surprise as it exploded.

  Bang!

  The force threw me back to the ground, but I picked myself up, shaking off the dust. I was thankfully unharmed. The shock wore off. However, I found that Daniel Peterson wasn’t so lucky. He had managed to dodge the drone from ramming into him, but he couldn’t escape the nullifier and the fragmentation. He was laying on the ground bleeding, missing an arm and his chest looked fairly mangled. But he was alive and breathing.

  He looked at me dazed. I think he was shocked that he lost.

  I walked over and kneeled over him. “Sorry about that. Didn’t mean for you to get hurt in this dust up.”

  He breathed, and he tried to rasp out a response, but all he could do was spit blood in my face. I wiped it away.

  “Let’s get you out of here,” I said as I picked him up. “Stay alive for a little while longer, and I promise things will get better.”

  …

  It was harder than I thought, lugging Daniel Peterson’s unconscious body down so many flights of stairs. I left out the back entrance of ASA building, invisible, of course. Thankfully, our truck had been far enough away from the chaos that it was undamaged. Raven and August never showed. Maybe I would find out what happened to them later. Maybe not.

  Either way, Dust and I piled in with our new friend, and we took off. City 57 had established a security perimeter around the fighting, but since it was City 57, it was a very loose and unorganized security perimeter. It was easy for us to slip on past back into the ugly—but not quite war zone City 57.

  I lit up a cigarette as I dropped Dust off at an Index safehouse. He gave me a quiet look of hate, and that was the last I saw of him. I texted Mr. Greene that I had the kid, and after a few seconds, he texted back coordinates that were on the outskirts of the city.

  It was a long, boring drive. My only worry was that Daniel might try to teleport out of the vehicle. But he was totally out of it. I pulled into what looked to be an abandoned grocery store around the back. It was a quiet, secluded place that seemed to have been passed over by even the homeless. There were three men in unremarkable clothing and Mr. Greene with a fedora. They stood next to a truck that was disguised as a food delivery vehicle.

  While I parked next to them, the men brought out a gurney. They had rightly assumed that Daniel might’ve had some injuries, and good on them for it. Their foresight probably saved his life. I yanked open the door to my truck. Mr. Greene took one glance at Daniel, and he was understandably pissed.

  “What happened?” he demanded.

  “He got in my way, but if you see to him quickly, he’ll live.”

  I got a look of utter contempt, but Mr. Greene pulled out his phone and he clicked on the screen. “Your payment, Mr. Vance,” he explained, pocketing the device. “As promised. Now get out of my sight before I kill you.”

  I shrugged my shoulders and saluted goodbye to Daniel. He was awake again, and he was struggling against the men. They had already hit him up with a sedative, so he was too disoriented to teleport.

  “Let… go of… me,” he muttered weakly as the men put on restraints.

  Mr. Greene kept his back turned to Daniel, as if not wanting him to see his face. But I don’t think it mattered.

  Daniel raised his head and a look of confusion and shock and betrayal filled his expression.

  “Jayne?”