Teek Read online

  8:35 AM

  Agent Fred Jackson stood outside Stone’s office, talking into his pseudo cellphone. The sound of a security alarm from outside leaked through the walls.

  The orderlies didn’t look comfortable, and Fred— the one security person there— looked angry. He paced between the orderlies and the door, and shook his head as he shouted into the phone. “What do you mean, dead? Are you sure? How in the hell did this happen? When? What’s the damage?”

  As he talked, a trio of guards ran up the corridor toward him and the orderlies. The orderlies edged next to the walls and a painting of Anubis, to let the newcomers pass. The guards had their weapons drawn.

  “Wait a minute,” Fred said into the phone. He stopped pacing, pressed the phone to his chest, and said to the three guards, “And what the hell are you all about?”

  They stopped in front of him and the lead one said, “There’s been a serious security breach—”

  Fred nodded. “Christ, I know that. I hear the damn alarm. I’m talking to the cleanup team now.”

  The three of them looked at each other with blank expressions.

  “Shoot-out between security and one of our scientists,” Fred said. “Security breach in the server room. Right?”

  The trio still looked confused.

  “Right?” Fred repeated. This time it didn’t sound as if he was asking a rhetorical question.

  The lead guard shook his head. “I don’t know about that. We’re here because there’s an active loose in a secure area— And Mr. Stone isn’t responding to any calls.”

  “Shitfire.” Fred backed up and pounded on the doors to Mr. Stone’s office. The sound was muffled by the thick wood of the door. “Stone’s in a meeting. Who got loose, where?”

  “Allison Boyle, the Class III, near medical. We have to talk to Mr. Stone, sir.”

  Fred nodded, and his knocking took on a desperate character.

  “Who’s Mr. Stone having a meeting with?” One of the other guards asked.

  Fred stopped knocking, shaking his head. “Oh fuck.” He drew a gun from a shoulder holster.

  “Sir?” asked the lead guard.

  “I told him.” Fred muttered. To the others he said, “Jessica Mason is in there with Mr. Stone. She’s another Class III.” He looked back at the door. “We’ve already had problems with her.” He backed away from the door and waved one the new guards forward with the gun.

  The orderlies backed down the hall as the security team followed Fred’s lead and flanked the door.

  One of the guards opened the door and stepped inside, covering the room with his gun. After a moment he said, “My God.”

  The others slipped in after him. Fred yelled at the orderlies, “Someone get a medic in here.”

  Inside Stone’s office, a grayish haze hung from the ceiling. Stone was sprawled on the floor behind his desk. One of the guards bent over and felt Stone’s neck for a pulse. He shook his head.

  Fred led the guards around the other side of the table. Video monitors and other piles of electronic equipment had been tossed on to the floor, leaving a large bare section of the wall behind the desk. A six-foot-long section of drywall had fallen and had broken apart on the dead pile of electronics.

  One guard picked up a section of the drywall about a foot square. A hole was burned through it, about the diameter of the guard’s little finger. The rest of the drywall was perforated by similar holes.

  “How could this happen without setting of the smoke alarms or the sprinklers?” One of the guards asked.

  “She disabled them,” Fred said. He kicked the warped plastic case of a smoke detector as he approached the hole in the wall.

  The hole went completely through the wall. A section of the rear wall, about six feet tall and four feet wide, was missing except for the metal studs that used to hold the drywall. The surface of the galvanized metal was dark and had a rainbow sheen, especially around the fasteners where the drywall had been attached.

  Beyond the wall was an empty, darkened office.

  “Fuck it,” Fred said. He put away his gun and pulled out his phone. He pressed a button and said, “We have a situation here.”

  8:40 AM

  Allison opened her eyes when she hit the ground. They’d fallen under the walkway between the medical building and the Ward. The door to the Ward was about ten feet away. Zack scrambled out from underneath her, grabbing her arm. They started moving again just in time to avoid being hit by another dart.

  He pushed through the door into the Ward. As soon as they were through the door, Allison could breathe again. “Are you all right?” Allison asked.

  Zack reached up and pulled a small dart from his jacket and handed to her. “I guess it didn’t make it through the leather.” He looked out the door and said, “That’s a lot of darts.”

  Ten feet from the door, where the two of them had collided, a semi-circle of darts lay on the ground where they’d been dropped by her teek. “Yeah,” Allison responded.

  “Here comes the cavalry,” Zack said.

  Allison looked up from the ground and saw a quartet of guards making their way across the courtyard. They were halfway toward them already. “Run,” Allison said.

  She wanted to barricade the door, but these weren’t like the fire doors she’d wedged closed with her teek. These doors were mostly glass. She turned and started down the hall, pulling Zack after her.

  “You’re the guide,” Allison shouted at him, “Where do they keep the kids in here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “It’s not like I’ve ever been in here.”

  Behind them, Allison heard the door to the courtyard fly open. She pushed Zack ahead of her, down an intersecting corridor, around the corner from their pursuit.

  The corridors here were bare cinderblock, the ceiling snaked with an assortment of pipes. They passed brown-painted doors that were featureless except for white stenciled numbers. Behind some of them, Allison could hear the hum of machinery.

  “We need to get upstairs,” she said.

  Zack nodded. Getting to the kids was part of the plan, and right now it looked like the kids, along with everything else, were upstairs.

  Allison had no idea how valid her plan was at this point. It was falling apart like every initiative she had taken so far. Security wasn’t supposed to be after them yet. How were they supposed to get out of this, even if they launched a decent distraction?

  Dad and Macy were probably already in the hands of Prometheus.

  Somewhere, in the back of her head, she heard a lone dissenting thought. Think like that and you’re going to die, sweetcakes. With the thought came a horrid, sick feeling that she didn’t know whose thought it was.

  She and Zack turned a corner in the corridor which ended in a stairwell. At the corner was a freight elevator, and sitting in front of it were a pair of wheeled carts carrying between them about a dozen cylinders of compressed gas.

  How serious am I about getting out of here? Allison thought as she passed the cylinders. She thought about her mother and had the answer to her question.

  They both took the turn, and she could hear the security people running after them. After they turned, Allison stopped running and said, “Keep going. I’ll meet you upstairs.”

  Allison could see an objection rising in Zack’s face and she shouted at him, “Move!”

  He moved, though he didn’t look pleased about it.

  As soon as he had moved beyond ten feet, and her teek began working again, she gripped the top valves of the canisters with her teek, and begun twisting them off. They broke off with the sound of sheering metal and escaping gas.

  She didn’t see their pursuit, but she could hear them in the corridor around the corner from her. She heard their running feet come to a halt as the fourth valve clattered to the ground. She heard someone down there whisper, “Shit.”

  Allison began backing toward the stairs as her teek gripped the top
of canister number five.

  “Allison! Allison Boyle!” Someone yelled from around the corner. “Give yourself up. You don’t want to do this.”

  The top of the fifth canister spun free with a hiss. Allison kept backing toward the stairs. She yelled at the people around the corner, “You better move back from there.”

  “You can’t get away with this. Give yourself up before more people get hurt.”

  More people get hurt? No one’s been hurt yet.

  Allison pushed the stairway door open behind her. Before she stepped through, she took out the dart that’d been caught in Zack’s leather. She tossed it into the hallway behind her.

  “Back out of that hallway,” Allison said, “and no one will get hurt.” She stepped into the stairwell and pulled the door shut. When the door was shut, she grabbed the dart with her teek, lifting it off the ground and pointing it down the hall toward the canisters.

  She stared down the hall through a tiny rectangular window, her view segmented by chicken wire. Her mind wrapped around the tiny dart with a numbing grip. The effort throbbed in her skull in time to her pulse.

  “Give yourself up,” came the voice, distant and small through the metal door. Allison was barely aware of the noise. She was aiming the dart down the hall. All that oxygen, she thought, one spark…

  “Give yourself up,” the voice kept talking. “This is going to be your only chance. Security’s been told to use lethal force to protect the complex.”

  On one level Allison was aware of the words, but on another her world was a fixed tableau, the dart floating in the corridor, the emptying canisters, and the trajectory between them. Her mind tensed like a spring behind the dart, and when she felt/saw motion, her teek let the dart go before she was ready.

  The motion had been one of her pursuers rounding the corner. The man had a gun out. The dart shot down the corridor, faster than it was designed to go. Allison had been startled into throwing the dart, and the man had moved between it and the canisters.

  Allison had planned to strike the dart off the canisters, and spark an impassable fireball. Instead, the dart slammed into the guard’s abdomen like a bullet. The guard’s stomach erupted in a flower of blood as he doubled over.

  Allison backed away from the window as the man collapsed. He fell into the carts, knocking canisters everywhere. The gun fell from his fingers. Allison tried to grab the gun with her teek, but everything was going too quickly. The gun struck the ground and discharged—

  The corridor erupted in an orange fireball around the man, and Allison ran, tears streaming down her cheeks.

  8:45 AM

  Jessica had spent all night planning the destruction of Stone’s dream, the dream that had betrayed her. Finishing Stone wasn’t enough, she knew that. Stone had been the brain behind the machine called Prometheus, but PRI had existed before Stone, and could conceivably exist after Stone.

  To Jessica, that possibility was now intolerable. Prometheus now saw her power as a threat, not an asset. Jessica knew extremely well what that meant. She had seen it too often. Threats to Prometheus ended in the Ward at best. At worst they were destroyed. Jessica knew, because she had once helped identify such threats for Prometheus.

  Stone had taken that control from her, and if she couldn’t control this thing called Prometheus, she had to destroy it. If she didn’t, then Prometheus would surely destroy her.

  She also knew, very well, what the heart of Prometheus was. It wasn’t the dormitories where the kids were kept. For the most part the kids were expendable to Prometheus. It wasn’t in the classrooms, which were only a tool to keep the kids in line— like the cafeteria, the gym, and everything else that helped to shore up the facade that somehow the kids’ imprisonment was voluntary.

  No, the heart of Prometheus was research; the testing, the examinations, the processing of medical data that was supposed to eventually lead to Stone’s Change.

  When she made her way back to the medical building, she didn’t make the mistake she had made yesterday. She did not walk out into the open where a sniper with a dart could put her down. She had left through the hole she’d burned into Stone’s wall, and had walked downstairs to the underground tunnels that connected most of the Prometheus complex.

  As she had walked, and as the degenerate drugs in her veins ate at her gut and her brain, she let her power slide behind the walls of the corridors. Inside the walls, synthetic insulation slid off of wires. Bare wires shorted out, charring their outlines in the wall, showing sparks from light fixtures, burning out security cameras.

  Twice, guards had tried to stop her progress. Once they were armed with darts, once with firearms. In both cases, a sudden influx of heat had ruptured their weapons. The first instance, the liquid tranquilizer vaporized within the darts, wrapping the guards in a searing anesthetic cloud. In the second, the ammunition had exploded within the clips, tearing the guards’ hands apart.

  Both sets of guards had been easily finished off by cauterizing the major arteries in their necks.

  There were locked doors in her path, but their components were metal, and their low specific heat easily succumbed to Jessica’s will. Heat warped the locks holding the doors shut, until the doors’ skin glowed red through charred and bubbling paint. After that, they were easily forced open. No door delayed her more than fifteen seconds.

  When she pushed her way into the basement of the medical building, she drove the technicians ahead of her. A warped, steaming door opened onto a forest of empty cubicles. To her left, a glass wall protected the researcher’s servers where they sat in air-conditioned comfort. To her right, three or four of Prometheus’ researchers pushed through an exit, away from her.

  Jessica smiled, even though it felt as if the entire surface of her skin burned. Sweat stung her eyes, her muscles were cramped, and a migraine flowered behind her eyes. She was dimly aware that there was a possibility that her manipulation of their drug might have poisoned her. But she was past caring. If anything, she seemed more powerful than ever.

  Her awareness expanded past the suspended ceiling, into the pipes feeding the sprinkler system. The effort was almost a reflex now. Even in a point of view that rendered physical objects into an endless matrix of motes, she could still tell the copper pipe from the solder that held it together. The solder was a layer of motes that responded much more quickly to her power, so quickly that the solder went fluid, its motes escaping the binding of its matrix, long before the energy could escape into the nearby water.

  For each pipe she did, the water pressure separated the pipe for her, draining the sprinkler system. Behind her, water began leaking around the squares of the suspended ceiling.

  She walked into the room and turned toward the servers. This was the heart of Prometheus— research, information, the data they pried loose from the skulls of the kids they controlled. She stared into the white room. Inside were a half-dozen white cabinets about as tall as she was. In the center of the room was Prometheus’ Cray, sitting like a chunky top hat central to the room.

  Jessica focused on the Cray.

  Inside it, behind one of the panels, insulation began to slide off of wires, connections began to discolor, and semiconductors cracked, releasing white smoke.

  All over the Prometheus complex, networked computers began to crash.

  When she was certain the computers were dead, and the air-conditioned room behind the glass was hazed with smoke, Jessica turned to follow the fleeing technicians upstairs.

  8:50 AM

  Allison caught up with Zack at the third floor landing. As she climbed up the stairs she watched him strain against the door, trying to pull it open. He grunted acknowledgment to her when she was up next to him.

  After another pull, Zack said, “Maybe we should drop this idea? I think we’ve already confused the hell out of them.”

  Allison shook her head. She could still see the man engulfed by the fire, and that wasn’t helping her ability to plan their escape. “What’s on the
other side of the door?”

  “Look for yourself,” Zack said, “But you got to get the door open. They’ve buttoned up the stairwell tight.”

  Allison bent over in front of Zack and looked out the rectangular window. The corridor here was the same shape as the one downstairs, but the walls were whitewashed, and the floor was carpeted. As downstairs, an elevator sat at the corner where the corridor turned a corner out of her view.

  Also, there was a new feature, a round mirror set at a forty five degree angle in the corner.

  “Look in the mirror,” Zack said, “What you can see is set up like a mental hospital, or a prison. I think that’s it.”

  Allison could see what Zack meant. The mirrored corridor ended in a wall that had a large featureless door. Set in the wall next to the door, was another chicken wire window, behind which she could see an orderly move about. This was it, or at least part of it. Behind that door were the kids Prometheus decided to lock up—

  Was it right to go through with this? Allison thought of what the guard had said, “Lethal force.” If she went through with this, she’d be putting those kids in danger.

  Security made her mind up for her. She heard a door above them slam open, and she heard something small clatter down the stairs. Her eyes, nose, and mouth began burning.

  “Tear gas,” Zack said, pulling his shirt collar up over his nose.

  “Away from the door,” Allison hissed, trying not to inhale. She placed her hands over her mouth and closed her eyes. “Give me room.”

  She felt it when Zack had backed his interference away from her. She reached her teek through the door, finding the metal tongue holding the door shut. It didn’t want to move, but she yanked it back inside the door with all the strength she could muster. The metal snapped, igniting a burning pain inside her skull to match the pain in her eyes.

  She stumbled out the door for fifteen feet or so before she felt safe opening her eyes. The air still burned, and everything was blurred. Zack, who sounded as if he was coughing up part of his lungs, slammed the door shut behind him as he followed.