Page 26 of Scion

The titanium in my hand is looking the worse for wear, but still functional enough. Old Woman is standing with eyes wide and fearful, staring straight ahead, flinching at every echoing strike. Probably not enough illumination for her to make out much more than the slit itself, yet.

I switch my attack perpendicular to the original, creating a thin cross of light. Then I hold the increasingly battered knife between my teeth, and punch.

Again. My knuckles begin to bleed. Again. My revs are absorbing the damage but it still hurts.

There’s a cracking sound on the third try. On the fourth, my fist makes it through. I rip away the thick flaps of broken plastic and peer through the gap.

We’re in a fluorescent-lit tunnel—larger than the Loop, but not by much. Ahead are four containers identical to ours, dangling from a conveyer. The front one is going through a sort of doorway, into a room-sized area beyond. A glass shield slides shut behind it.

There’s the blinding blaze of a plasma furnace igniting. When my vision recovers, the container is gone.

I start stabbing and ripping again. A touch more frenetically than before. The conveyer swings us forward.

“What do you see?”

“Not… really… important… right…now.” The blade’s not holding up well, but the wall’s weakened. I toss the metal aside and start using both hands to madly rip away shreds, using every rev I have to enlarge the hole.

It’s the size of my head. The next container gets evaporated.

“Oh dear.” Old Woman has moved enough to peek through the gap.

“Yep,” I snarl between grunts as I continue tearing at the wall. The container two spaces ahead of us is in the plasma furnace. Then isn’t. I peel off two more strips, enough to widen the hole to allow for shoulders.

Good enough.

I pick up Old Woman. She shrieks in protest. I ignore her. “Out we go.” I thread her through, head first. She kicks and then, finally accepting I’m still trying to save her life, does an ungainly wiggle through and vanishes.

The glass shield is sliding shut behind the container ahead of us. I slide myself through the gap, skin scraping against the jagged edges of the very much mangled hard plastic. I’m bigger than Old Woman. It’s a tight fit.

I slither through and hit the ground with a roll, coming up just in time to see our container slide forward and vanish behind the glass.

A few metres away, Old Woman is sprawled, staring at the ceiling. For a concerning moment I wonder if she’s dead, but then she gives a little sigh and turns to face me. “Who did you tell, Azure?”

It takes me a second to get her meaning. “No one. You need to take a look at your programming.”

“My code was just fine. Someone meddled after the fact.” Cool certainty in her voice. “We’re not at our destination yet. You lie to me, you don’t get your answers.”

“I didn’t tell anyone,” I insist, a little irritably. “How the hell would I have even gotten word out? I haven’t had ’net access.”

She laughs tiredly. “Maybe it was me, then.” Something wry about the statement, though I can’t see what. Hauls herself to her feet, apparently unharmed bar a few scratches. Tougher than she looks. “We can’t hang around for too long now—there are a million sensors in this tunnel. The people after us will know we’re here within the hour. I know where we are, though, at least. Exit’s this way.” She limps off to the right, around the side of the plasma furnace.

Definitely not feeling concerned, I follow.

DO YOU… REMEMBER MY… NAME… Azure?” It comes out in a pant. Bounces off the concrete walls around us. We’re climbing stairs. So many damned stairs. Have been for the last ten minutes. I’m fine, revs doing their job, but Old Woman looks even more ready to keel over than usual.

“Of course.” She told me. One of those unremarkable names, and honestly I assumed it wasn’t her real one anyway. It was short, began with a “J.” Or maybe an “L”? That early-to-mid part of the alphabet.

“And it is?”

“Lana.”

“Jasa.”

“That’s what I said.”

We’ve finally, blessedly, reached the top of the stairs. Off to the side is the empty Loop platform that we were presumably supposed to be arriving at. A steel door is all that lies ahead, guarded by a keypad. Old Woman walks over to it. “What if you’d needed to shout out something to warn me?”

“ ‘Look out!’ usually does the trick. Or ‘Duck!’ Or maybe ‘Run!’ I mean, we’ve done that last one already, and it worked fine. I feel like there are usually options.”