Chapter 122: Two Steps

Climbing into a helicopter is nothing.

One step up onto the wheel, one hand on the doorframe, one pull, and any functioning human is inside.

But I was no longer a functioning human.

It took me three attempts, both arms, one knee slipping off the wheel arch, and thirty full seconds of graceless scraping before I got my chest over the cabin floor and dragged the rest of me in after it while Tikki rode my shoulder through every second of the performance without one word of commentary, which from him is the deepest sympathy there is.

But still, the door slid shut, the deck tilted, and the ruined district dropped away beneath us and swung south, and twenty kilometers of dead black city slid in under the nose.

I sat against a crate with my legs straight out in front of me, keyed my radio, and got static.

Open, empty, fractured static, no carrier, no voice, nobody sitting the penthouse set, and I let my head fall back against the crate while the rotors beat through the airframe and into my spine.

[West... They went west.]

The letter had said evening. The letter had said don’t wait, take the vehicles, take everyone, and head west.

The letter had said leave Nia.

They had probably done every word of it, which meant they were alive and moving and exactly as far from this city as I had begged them to be, and it also meant that somewhere out west, in some vehicle in the dark, a trauma surgeon was sitting with his hands empty, having closed a door on his own sedated daughter because a letter from a dead man told him to.

I couldn’t build his face. I didn’t try.

[Two percent...]

The city crawled past below, and then the penthouse came up out of the southern dark, and my heart dropped straight through the cabin floor.

Every floor of it was black, no glow at the seams, no light anywhere on the whole top of it, ten stories of tombstone standing against the moon, and my chest had already filled with concrete before my brain arrived, slow and limping, with the answer.

[The tape...]

Every window on our floor was black duct-taped from the inside, sealed edge to edge against exactly this: light spilling into a dead city. I had ordered them to do it myself.

[...Right. Right. My idea. Good idea... Terrible idea.]

"Balcony," I told the System, since the roof was a water tank and solar panels and my plant beds with nowhere to put the helicopter, and the ladder down from it might as well have been a cliff face tonight.

The Ghostbird slowed, swung wide, and came in against the south face, easing sideways meter by meter while the rotor arc closed toward concrete and the downwash flattened against the wall and came boiling back up at us, until the open door hung a long stride from the balcony rail and would come no closer.

For two lifetimes there would have been a thread for this, one line of will wrapped around Tikki, one around myself, the cheapest insurance in the world, and I reached for it out of habit and found the socket empty and the coal behind my eyes flaring at the attempt.

"Hold on, booger..."

"Meh."

I got a boot on the door sill, both hands on the frame, waited for the sway to bring the rail a handspan closer, and jumped.

The downwash shoved me mid-air, the rail hit my hip instead of my hands, and I went over it sideways and landed on the balcony tiles in a pile, elbow first, then shoulder, then face, with every point of contact detonating up through me at full price, no Barrier, no cushion, nothing between me and the world anymore except skin.

-Thud-!

And I just lay there.

The rotors pulled back off the building and faded east toward wherever the System parks its toys, while the cold tiles pressed against my cheek, and the quiet came down over everything like a blanket.

The tiles were honestly not that bad, cool and flat and holding me, and my eyes had already drifted most of the way shut when the teeth found my hair again.

"MEA!"

[...Up. I know. Up.]

I peeled myself off the tiles one limb at a time, got the balcony door unlatched, and slid it aside on its rail.

The penthouse sat silent around me as I stumbled in, chairs pushed in neat, surfaces cleared, the radio, every trace of those four people folded up and carried west.

The room still smelled faintly of them, of Nora’s cooking and gun oil and the awful floral cleaner Leo loved, while the moonlight came through the seams of the taped windows in thin silver threads.

[The letter... right... they should be heading west...]

That was good. That meant the plan was working.

Then my eyes fell on the sofas sitting there in the dark with their cushions plumped.

I want to be clear that I have stared down a Tank at one meter, but those sofas were worse, soft and enormous and singing to me from four meters away.

[One minute, just one minute, thirty seconds even... you’ve earned thirty seconds...]

And I stood there swaying with my whole body leaning toward them one degree at a time before I tore my eyes off the cushions and put them on the staircase instead.

On the low door tucked beneath it.

I pulled the suppressant out of the Inventory as I walked, a matte black auto-injector the length of my palm, one hundred and fifty million credits of dense cold weight, and I locked my fist around it and thumbed the cap loose now, while my hands still answered, since the plan had exactly one step left in it and I knew i would be mid-collapse when I finished it.

Reach her. Jam it in anywhere soft. Then the floor can have me.

[Two percent... hold on... I’m right here...]

The door under the stairs came up in front of me, and through it, faint and slow and even, was her breathing.

Sedated and steady and still hers, still climbing that last two percent in the dark alone, two steps and one needle from being pulled back down.

I pushed the door open, and stepped in, and the moment I did, my boot caught on something.

I never learned what.

And the dark took the floor and rushed it up to meet me. My hands never even came up, and I went down face first with the injector locked in my fist as the world arrived against my cheek in one flat, total-

-THUD-!

And every ounce of everything left my body at once.

Gone, all of it, at once, the whole account emptied between one heartbeat and the next, my limbs lying where they’d landed with no more connection to me than the floorboards under them, while I screamed down every nerve I owned, up, get up, GET UP, she’s right there, she’s RIGHT THERE, two steps, TWO STEPS, and my body ignored every word of it the way concrete ignores rain.

My fist stayed locked around the injector, but nothing else answered at all.

"Mea!? MEA-!"

The cracked little voice arrived from somewhere above my ear, paws landed against my cheek, and my eyes slid shut on their own, gently, without permission, without mercy, plunging the screaming rest of me down into an endless dark.