I laugh as I reach the revolving doors. “Mein Gott, ich hoffe nicht.” I wink back at Taylor over my shoulder and shout, “Don’t wait up!”
“Your enthusiasm sickens me.” Their dismay chases me out into the warm, windy night.
Pushing my hair back from my face, I come to a quick stop at the sight of the massive dark-green Humvee double-parked in front of my building. It isn’t that I’ve never been in a Humvee before—I have. It’s that, usually, the vehicles I travel in tend to match their surroundings. A well-marked press van in Gaza. A beat-up Toyota on the streets of Port-au-Prince. A bulletproof SUV during riots in Tehran.
But a matte-green Humvee elevated above all the other cars on the block of sunny Sundale? I snort. The sun is still lingering in the sky as it makes its slow descent, and the bright orange of the sunset glints against the black windows. Overkill, much? But when the back door opens and a tan face pops out and waves at me angrily, I roll my eyes and jump in.
“Hi,” I say to the man sitting beside me and the backs of the heads in front of me. All men. All armored and armed. All wearing black except for the man in the passenger’s seat wearing a shimmering baby-blue uniform. He doesn’t turn around when I get in the car. None of them do. The faceless driver just pulls away from the curb, and we go rumbling down the road.
Since no one bothers acknowledging me, I don’t say more. If that surprises any of the men in the car, it shouldn’t. I’ve been into battle before, and I’ve been around men going into battle before—if that’s what this is—and I know how this all works. The machismo andtestosterone aren’t worth beating a head or a fist against, so I’ve learned to read the air and get what I need in as few words as possible.
“Gear?” I say to the guy seated next to me. He’s a Hispanic man underneath all that black fabric, and gives me a mean look.
“You were late.”
I wasn’t, but I don’t respond to that. “Do I need a vest or not?”
“Give her her fucking gear, or am I gonna have to hear her ask a third goddamn time?” The voice that lashes out into the car startles me. I don’t recognize it, and I glance around like I’m looking for speakers through which this terrible voice sounds. “Fucking incompetent pill-popping jocks. Don’t even know why the COE bothers sending you sorry fucks. You only ever slow me down or get in my way.”
Unlike me, these men don’t seem to understand that arguing with a man is pointless, especially one who sounds like the prickliest of all pricks. The one in the driver’s seat says, “We’re with the SDD, not the COE, and we’re here to protect you.”
The voice scoffs, and it’s abitter, angry sound that I feel all the way in the depths of my chest. My mom may not talk nice to me all the time, but she’s never sounded half as violent as this. “Tell that to the last SDDbrowith a missing leg.”
“We’re not even here for you,” says the guy next to me, and as he leans forward, I realize two things: He’s speaking to the guy in the passenger’s seat, and that guy is Taranis.
Whaaa . . . ?
“This is a simple fucking power grid fix. We’re here to make sure you don’t blow anything up you’re not supposed to, and make sureshestays safe.” The guy next to me jerks his thumb over his shoulder toward me, clearly considering me a nuisance. “And that she stays out of the way and doesn’t take pictures of anything she shouldn’t.”
“The SDD isn’t happy with her on your tail,” the driver adds.
“I don’t work for them. Now, stop fucking talking. Can’t stand the sounds you make. And when we get to the train station, keep yourgoddamn guns holstered. Don’t need to get accidentally shot by one of you trigger-happy fuckers.”
The guy next to me slams his elbow into his door as he leans back. Not sure if it’s intentional or accidental, but it punctuates his next words when he says, “You keep it up and you just might.”
Taranis snorts and looks over his shoulder at the man on my left. The expression on his face is utterly mesmerizing, only because I don’t recognize it. Like the voice that spoke earlier, the one that’shis, there isn’t one single thing about it that harkens back to the man—themale—who rescued me from the elevator, who I’ve seen before a handful of times, who I’ve photographed laughing alongside other Champions who aren’t half as charismatic.
I blink and keep blinking, watching as Taranis’s eyes glow a cataclysmic purple, the buttons on the dashboard brightening with them. I suddenly worry about the cell phone in my pocket and remove it, slipping it into the seat back in front of me, rather than risk carrying it or putting it in my pack, where it might explode.
Taranis’s voice bottoms out into the lowest whisper, “You think your friend lost his leg byaccident?” He chuckles and turns to face forward.
All the words thrown back and forth are hard to absorb. I hesitate, wanting to document the look—that exact look—on Taranis’s face, but he’s turned forward again, and I get the feeling that this version of him isn’t something he’d approve of being published to the world. And if his last words rang with even a hint of truth, I’d also like to keep both my legs.
I’m nervous at the sudden way my reality has been tipped, but as the man sitting beside me hands me a bulletproof vest markedPress, I, too, become a different me as I slip it over my head and fasten it tight around my body. I pin my hair back with thick silver clips while the adrenaline in my body thickens my blood to molasses. Everything slows. We drive for another half an hour in silence before we pull into an underground parking garage in East Sundale, one that was once used for commuters traveling to and from Old Sundale Station.
Fifty years ago, this area was the center of commerce, and Old Sundale Station was the city’s primary train station. Then the Forty-Eight were discovered, and Sundale bid to have the US regional Champions’ offices here. Sundale beat out larger cities, but the influx of new commerce—plus the COE headquarters themselves—required more space than what the then–city center could afford. So they moved Sundale twenty miles west, and what was once known as Sundale became East Sundale. Just like that. Because Taranis’s pod fell right in the middle of Sundale, in Memory Park, and the world loved him first and loved Sundale for the happy accident. Back when he was a boy and I was a girl with posters of him on my wall, taking portraits with a disposable camera.
The car bounces over potholes and trash spread out over the ground of the entrance in a thick blanket, as if placed there intentionally to ward off newcomers. Now Old Sundale Station is known to be a hub for squatters and even a meeting spot for gangs and other criminals. The parking garage even has its own name: the Gallery. A name I find particularly fitting, given my background, as we enter it.
A bottle or two hits the outside of the Humvee as we descend to the lower levels of the garage. I feel like Judge Dredd making his way through Mega-City One. I snap a few pictures through the windows. They won’t render well, and I likely won’t use them unless this turns into a longer story and some outlet, or the COE itself, wants to use these photos to set the scene. Though if this is really only about restoring the electrical grid for the Old Station—why it’s out, I’ve got no clue, and why any higher-ups would order it turned on, given that the station is no longer in use, I’ve got no clue either—I can’t imagine these pictures will be of much use for anything.
“Taking pictures of the dark there, sweetheart?” the guy next to me says. I can feel the energy radiating off him, and want no part of it, so I just ignore him and keep my focus on the world outside the thick glass window.
As the car finally slows, coming to a stop on the lowest level of this subterranean city, a dozen people skitter out of the rays of the Humvee headlights before the car stops, the headlights power off, and Taranis opens his door. I follow.
My feet hit the concrete, and my adrenaline has fully settled. I’ve got the resting heart rate of a sea turtle. I’ve got my camera bag looped over my back, my zoom lens and my 200mm lens in my cargo pocket—though I don’t expect to be able to use the latter in this low-light setting—and the 50mm lens attached to the Nikon around my neck. Fearing Taranis’s explosivity, I’d left my iPhone back in the car, which means I’m relying solely on my smaller Nikon Zfc, now safely tucked into the front of my Kevlar as a backup.
Farther away, I can see folks watching us around the lit rings of open fires, some in trash cans, some set up in metal dishes of all kinds. There must be two hundred people down here.
