Scarlet

Nine

“Argh, get it off, get it off!”

Cinder spun, steadying herself on the curved, slick concrete walls as she cast the flashlight behind her. Thorne was writhing and squirming in the cramped tunnel, swatting at his back and emitting an array of curses and unmanly shrieks.

She sent the beam of light to the ceiling and saw a thriving mass of cockroaches scuttling across it in all directions. She shuddered, but turned away and kept moving.

“It’s only a cockroach,” she called back to him. “It’s not going to kill you.”

“It’s in my uniform!”

“Would you keep quiet? There’s a manhole up ahead.”

“Please tell me we’ll be exiting through that manhole.”

She scoffed, more preoccupied with the map of the sewer system in her head than on her companion’s squeamishness. Even though the thought of a cockroach beneath her shirt did make her squirm, she figured it would still be preferable to walking through the ankle-deep sludge with one bare foot, and she wasn’t whining.

They passed beneath the manhole and Cinder detected the steady sound of water growing louder. “We’re almost to the combined main line,” she said, at first eager to reach it—it was hot as Mars in this cramped tunnel and her thighs were burning from the crouch-walk routine. But then a gut-turning stench wafted toward her, so strong she almost gagged.

No longer would it just be surface water runoff they were trekking through.

“Oh, aces,” said Thorne, groaning. “Tell me that’s not what I think it is.”

Cinder wrinkled her nose and focused on taking shallow, burning breaths.

The smell grew nearly unbearable as they traipsed through the sludge and came to the sewer connection, finding themselves on the lip of a concrete wall.

Cinder’s imbedded flashlight searched the tunnel beneath them, darting up the slimy concrete walls. The main tunnel would be tall enough for them to stand in. The light bounced off a narrow metal grate that lined the far edge, stable enough for maintenance workers and covered in rat droppings. Between them and the grate, a river of sewage swelled and churned, at least two meters wide.

She fought off another bout of nausea as the pungent stink of the sewer clouded her nostrils, her throat, her lungs.

“Ready?” she said, inching forward.

“Wait—what are you doing?”

“What does it look like?”

Thorne blinked at her, then down at the sewage he could barely make out in the darkness. “Don’t you have some tool in that fancy hand of yours that can get us across?”

Cinder glared, light-headed from her body’s instinctively short breaths. “Oh, wow, how could I have forgotten about my grappling hook?”

Spinning away, she gobbled down another rank breath and lowered herself into the muck. Something smooshed between her toes. The current pounded against her legs as she made her way across, the water up to her thighs. Writhing on the inside, Cinder crossed as quickly as she could, choking down her gag reflex. The weight of her metal foot keeping her grounded so the current didn’t knock her off balance and soon she was on the other side, pulling herself onto the grate. She flattened her back against the tunnel wall and peered back at the pretend captain.

He was staring at her legs with unbridled disgust.

Cinder looked down. The stark white jumper was now tinged greenish brown and clung, sopping, to her legs.

“Look,” she yelled, aiming the flashlight at Thorne, “you can either get over here or you can go back and serve the rest of your sentence in peace. But you have to make a decision now.”

After a stream of curses and spitting, Thorne inched his way into the sludge, holding his arms aloft. He was grimacing the whole time as he slinked his way to the grate and hauled himself up beside Cinder.

“This is what I get for complaining about the soap,” he muttered, pressing himself against the wall.

The grate was already digging into Cinder’s bare foot and she shifted her weight onto her cyborg leg. “All right, Cadet. Which way?”

“Captain.” He opened his eyes and peered down the tunnel in each direction, but beyond the pale light filtering in from the closest manhole, the sewers disappeared in blackness. Cinder adjusted the brightness of her flashlight, sending it darting over the frothy surface of the water and dripping concrete walls.

“It’s near the old Beihai Park,” Thorne said, scratching at his whiskered chin. “Which way is that?”

Cinder nodded and turned south.

Her internal clock told her they’d been walking for only twelve minutes, but it seemed like hours. The grate dug into her foot with each step. Her wet pants were plastered to her calves and sweat dripped down the back of her neck, sometimes tricking her into thinking it was a spider fallen down her jumpsuit and making her feel guilty for giving Thorne a hard time before. Though they didn’t see any rats, she could hear them scurrying away from her light, down countless tunnels that fanned out beneath the city.

Thorne talked to himself as they walked, working through his clogged memory. His ship was definitely near Beihai Park. In the industrial district. Not six blocks south of the maglev tracks … well, maybe eight blocks.

“We’re about a block away from the park,” Cinder said, pausing at a metal ladder. A spot of light drifted down toward them. “This goes up to West Yunxin.”

“Yunxin sounds familiar. Sort of.”

She pleaded for patience and started to climb.

The ladder rungs bit into her foot, but the air was blissfully fresh as she neared the top. The sound of the rushing water was replaced with the hum of maglev tracks. Reaching the manhole cover, Cinder paused to listen for signs of humanity, before pushing the cover off to the side.

A hover glided overhead.

Cinder ducked, heart racing. Daring to inch her head up, she spotted silent lights atop the white vehicle. It was an emergency hover. Visions of androids armed with brain-interface-overriding tasers sent a shudder through her, before the hover turned a corner and she saw a red cross on one side. It was a medical hover, not law enforcement. Cinder nearly collapsed from relief.

They were in the old warehouse district, near the plague quarantines. Medical hovers were to be expected.

She glanced both ways down the deserted street. Though it was still early, the day was already hot and whimsical mirages were rising from the pavement, having forgotten the drenching summer storm from two nights before.

“Clear.” She hauled herself up onto the road and sucked in a deep breath of the city’s humidity. Thorne followed, his uniform glaringly bright in the sun, except for the legs, which were still murky green and smelled of sewage. “Which way?”

Shielding his eyes with his forearm, Thorne squinted at the concrete buildings and rotated in a full circle. Faced north. Scratched his neck.

Cinder’s optimism crumbled. “Tell me you recognize something.”

“Yeah, yeah, I do,” he said, waving her away. “I just haven’t been here in a while.”

“Think faster. We aren’t exactly blending in with our surroundings out here.”

With a nod, Thorne started down the street. “This way.”

Five steps later he paused, pondered, turned around. “No, no, this way.”

“We’re dead.”

“No, I’ve got it now. It’s this way.”

“Don’t you have an address?”

“A captain always knows where his ship is. It’s like a psychic bond.”

“If only we had a captain here.”

He ignored her, marching down the street with spectacular confidence. Cinder followed three steps behind him, jumping at each sound—trash skidding across the road, a hover crossing an intersection two streets away. The sun glistened off the dusty warehouse windows.

Three empty blocks later, Thorne slowed his pace and peered up at the facade of each building they passed, rubbing his chin.

Cinder began desperately searching her brain for Plan B.

“There!” Thorne jotted across the street to a warehouse that was identical to every other warehouse, with giant rolling doors and years of colorful graffiti. Rounding the building’s corner, he tested the main door. “Locked.”

Spotting the ID scanner beside the door, Cinder cursed. “Figures.” Kneeling down, she pried the plastic face off the scanner. “I might be able to disable it. Do you think there’s an alarm?”

“There’d better be. I haven’t been paying rent all this time for my darling to sit in an unprotected warehouse.”

Cinder had just downloaded the programming manual for the scanner’s product number when the door beside them swung open and a plump man with a thin black goatee stepped out into the sunlight. Cinder froze.

“Carswell!” the man barked. “Just saw the news! I thought you might be showing up here.”

“Alak, how are you?” A grin broke across Thorne’s face. “Am I really on the news? How do I look?”

Without answering, Alak swerved his attention toward Cinder. His friendliness froze over, buried beneath a trace of discomfort. Gulping, Cinder shut the scanner’s panel and stood. Her netlink was already connecting to the newsfeed she’d abandoned during their escape, and sure enough, there was a stream of warnings flashing across her own picture, the one they’d taken when she’d been admitted into the prison. ESCAPED CONVICT. CONSIDERED ARMED AND DANGEROUS. IF SEEN, COMM THIS LINK IMMEDIATELY.

“Seen you on the news too,” Alak said, glancing at her steel foot.

“Alak, I’m here to pick up my ship. We’re in a bit of a hurry.”

As sympathetic wrinkles creased the corners of Alak’s mouth, he shook his head. “I can’t help you, Carswell. The feds watch me close enough as it is. Storing a stolen ship is one thing, I can always claim ignorance to that. But assisting a convicted felon … and assisting … one of them.” His nose wrinkled at Cinder, but he simultaneously took a step back as if afraid of her retaliation. “If they track you here and find out I helped, it’s more trouble than even I can risk. You’d better just hang low for a time. I won’t tell I saw you. But I won’t let you take your ship. Not now. Not until all this blows over. You understand, right?”

Thorne flushed with disbelief. “But—she’s my ship! I’m a paying customer! You can’t just keep her from me.”

“Each man for himself. You know how it is well as anyone.” Alak slid his gaze back toward Cinder, his fear easing more and more into revulsion. “Get on your way now, and I won’t comm the police. If they come around, I’ll tell them I haven’t seen you since you dropped off the ship last year. But if you stay here much longer, I’ll comm them myself, I swear I will.”

No sooner had he finished speaking than Cinder heard a hover down the street. Her heart skipped at the sight of a white emergency hover—this one without the red cross on its side—but it disappeared down another street. She spun back toward Alak. “We don’t have anywhere else to go. We need that ship!”

He stepped back from her again, his body framed in the doorway. “Look here, little girl,” he said, his tone determined despite the way his attention kept swooping down to her metal hand. “I’m trying to help you out because Carswell’s been a good customer of mine, and I don’t rat out my customers. But it’s no favor to you. I wouldn’t blink twice before sending you off to rot. It’s the best your kind deserve. Now get away from my warehouse before I change my mind.”

Desperation welled inside Cinder. She clenched her fists as a surge of electricity lashed out, blinding her. White-hot pain flared up from the base of her neck, flooding her skull, but it was blessedly brief and left bright spots sparking in her vision.

Panting, she reeled back the burning energy, just in time to see Alak’s eyes roll back. He toppled forward, landing in Thorne’s arms.

Cinder staggered against the wall, dizzy. “Oh stars—is he dead?”

Thorne groaned from the weight. “No, but I think he’s having a heart attack!”

“It’s not a heart attack,” she murmured. “He’ll … he’ll be fine.” She said it as much to convince herself as him, having to believe these accidental flares of her Lunar gift weren’t dangerous, that she wasn’t becoming the terror to society that everyone believed her to be.

“Aces, he weighs a ton.”

Cinder grabbed Alak’s feet and together they dragged him into the building. An office to their left had two netscreens—one with a security feed showing the warehouse’s exterior, just as the door closed behind two white-clad fugitives and the unconscious man. The other screen showed a muted news anchor.

“He may be a selfish jerk, but he sure does have good taste in jewelry.” Thorne held up Alak’s hand by the thumb, fiddling with a silver-plated band around his wrist—a miniature portwatch.

“Would you focus?” Cinder hauled Thorne to his feet. Turning, she scanned the massive warehouse. It stretched out the full length of the city block, filled with dozens of spaceships, large and small, new and old. Cargo ships, podships, personal fliers, raceships, ferries, cruisers.

“Which one is it?”

“Hey, look, there was another jailbreak.”

Cinder glanced at the netscreen, which now showed the chairman of national security talking to a crowd of journalists. On the bottom of the screen scrolled the words: LUNAR ESCAPES FROM NEW BEIJING PRISON, CONSIDERED EXTREMELY DANGEROUS.

“This is great!” said Thorne, nearly knocking her over with a slap on her back. “They’re not going to worry about us if they have a Lunar to track down.”

Cinder dragged her attention away from the broadcast, just as his grin fell.

“Wait. You’re Lunar?”

“You’re a criminal mastermind?” Spinning on her heels, she stalked into the warehouse. “Where’s this ship?”

“Hold on there, little traitor. Breaking out of jail is one thing, but assisting a psychotic Lunar is a bit out of my league.”

Cinder rounded on him. “First, I’m not psychotic. And second, if it wasn’t for me, you would still be sitting in that jail cell ogling your portscreen, so you owe me. Besides, they’ve already got you pegged as my accomplice. You look like an idiot in that picture, by the way.”

Thorne followed her gesture to the screen. His own jail picture was blown up beside hers.

“I think I look pretty good…”

“Thorne. Captain. Please.”

He blinked at her, a touch of smugness wiped quickly away by a brisk nod. “Right. Let’s get out of here.”

Cinder sighed in relief, following Thorne as he marched into the maze of ships. “I hope it’s not one in the middle.”

“Doesn’t matter,” he said, pointing up. “The roof opens.”

Cinder glanced up at the seam in the middle of the ceiling. “That’s convenient.”

“And there she is.”

Cinder followed Thorne’s gesture. His ship was larger than she’d expected—much larger. A 214 Rampion, Class 11.3 cargo ship. Cinder pulled up her retina scanner and downloaded the ship’s blueprint, speechless at everything it could claim. The engine room and a fully stocked dock with two satellite podships took up the underbelly, while the main level housed the cargo bay, cockpit, galley kitchen, six crew quarters, and a shared washroom.

She rounded to the main entry hatch and saw that the seal of the American Republic had been hastily painted over with the silhouette of a lounging naked lady.

“Nice touch.”

“Thanks. Did it myself.”

Despite her worries that the painting could make them more easily identified, she couldn’t help being faintly impressed. “It’s bigger than I expected.”

“There was a time when she housed a twelve-man crew,” Thorne said, petting her hull.

“Should be plenty of room for avoiding each other then.” Cinder paced beneath the hatch, waiting for Thorne to open it, but when she glanced back she found him lovingly rubbing his temple against the ship’s underside and cooing about how much he’d missed her.

Cinder was in the middle of rolling her eyes when an unfamiliar voice ricocheted through the warehouse. “Over here!”

Turning, she saw someone crouched over Alak’s body, haloed in a square of light. They wore the unmistakable uniform of the Eastern Commonwealth military.

Cinder swore. “Time to go. Now.”

Thorne ducked toward the hatch. “Rampion, code word: Captain is king. Open hatch.”

They waited, but nothing happened.

Cinder raised panicked eyebrows.

“Captain is king. Captain is king! Rampion, wake up. It’s Thorne, Captain Carswell Thorne. What the—”

Cinder shushed him. Beyond the ship’s hull, four men were making their way through the crowded warehouse, flashlights shining off the assorted landing gear.

“Maybe the power cell is dead,” said Cinder.

“How? It’s just been sitting here.”

“Did you leave the headlights on?” she snapped.

Thorne harrumphed and crouched against the ship. Footsteps grew louder.

“Or it could be the auto-control system,” Cinder mused, racking her brain. She’d never worked on anything larger than a podship before, but how different could they be? “Do you have the override key?”

He blinked at her. “Yeah, let me just pull it out of my prison-issued pocket and we’ll be on our way.”

Cinder glared, but was silent as an officer passed two aisles away.

“Stay here,” she whispered. “Keep trying to get in and take off as fast as possible.”

“Where are you going?”

Without answering, she slinked around the side of the ship, a blueprint already streaming to her retina display. She found the access hatch and pried it open as quietly as she could, before crawling up into the ship undercarriage, contorting her body to avoid the wires and cables that crammed the space. She pulled the hatch shut behind her with a dull click, and found herself encased in darkness. The second interior door was more difficult to break into, but between the flashlight and her screwdriver she was soon wriggling out of the insulating layer and into the engine room.

Her flashlight beam zipped across the massive engine. She found the computer motherboard on the blue lines overlaying her vision and squirmed toward it. Pulling the universal connector cable from her hand, she snapped it into the main computer terminal.

Her flashlight dimmed as her own power was diverted. Pale green text scrawled across her eyesight.

DIAGNOSING COMPUTER SYSTEM, MODEL 135V8.2

5% … 12% … 16% …