Dangerous Things

There are no boundaries. That’s the first thing I notice as the pod speeds toward the Preserve. Not that I thought there’d be barbed wire, but something. A fence, at the very least some tech. Dangerous things should be caged.

The translucent belly of the transport brushes the green stalks beneath my feet, a federal cornfield. The stems bend, heavy with dew. I think of the agros who will migrate here to harvest the cobs. Spines bowed just like the plants, palms chapped, their necks burnt to peeling under the Dakota sun. I don’t like thinking about agros anymore than I like thinking about zealots, and I scowl at the evidence of both growing larger in the windscreen.

“Nervous?”

I refocus on Felix Walton jogging in place beside me. “A little,” I say. No point in lying.

That’s one of the first rules of training: don’t lie unless you have to. Makes it easier to keep a handle on the truth.

Felix smiles in response. He’s always smiling, in all my memories of him, but it’s been almost ten years since I’ve seen him up close. I was too young to be invited when he made lieutenant. Like most of the country, I watched the ceremony remotely. The SyNCasters said he was the youngest officer to be appointed since the Peace. The Lieutenant General herself tattooed his stripes. I look at them now, two horizontal lines on the left side of his neck, poking up over the collar of his fatigue jacket.

The insignia isn’t the only thing about him that’s changed. He’s taller, and there are new angles in his nose and jaw, a shadow of stubble on his chin. He holds his arms tight to his sides, hands raised at the level of his chest. His long fingers curl against the lighter flesh of his palms. He’s been at it since we pulled out of the city, warming up, but his breathing is perfectly even.

“Don’t worry,” he says, “I was spiking on my first raid, too.”

He’s saying it to be kind. Felix has never been afraid of anything. And neither have I.

I point to the copse of trees ahead. Through their brittle fingers, a rusting iron cross, red with the patina of a thousand rains, rises to stab the steely sky. The color reminds me of old blood. I swallow the imagined tang of iron on my tongue and turn toward the branches, stripped bare as old bones. But it’s spring.

“There’re no leaves.”

Felix’s eyes narrow along my line of sight. He nods and says, “No.”

He’s so close I can feel the heat from his body. He smells like standard issue soap and something else. It reminds me of…I can’t think what. I wipe a sheen of sweat from the back of my neck. Felix was right, I am spiking.

“How long do we have?” I ask as I set down my kit to rub feeling back into my palms.

Felix squints slightly as he checks the specs on his SyNC. “T minus four.”

It’s a delicate balance, keeping close enough that we don’t miss our target time but not so close that we blow cover. Through the windscreen, I study the skeletons of birch and aspen with the wary curiosity of a pathologist peering into a ribcage, expecting clumps of cancer. That’s what zealots are, a cancer. But there’s no one in the trees.

“No leaves,” I repeat, to myself this time. “It’s creepy.”

“It is definitely siren,” Felix agrees.

I wipe my right palm along the fine-knit wool of my regulation pants as the transport slows to a stop. Beside me, Felix finally stills.

“The sky’s enormous out here, isn’t it?” he asks.

Before I can answer, he smacks a hand against the glass, and the hatch opens with a rush of biting air. Clutching my kit with both hands, I follow him onto the platform.

“I’ll SyNC-up to HQ. You link to me.”

His low voice is full of an authority that cuts easily through the wind. I give the mental command, and instantly, Felix’s self-assured baritone resounds, slightly metallic, inside my head.

HQ, this is Lieutenant Walton, reporting with Trainee Agent Mraz. We’ve arrived outside the Mercy Preserve. Prop raid effective at 0600 hours.

Copy, Lieutenant, a female voice responds. Close in on target.

Felix winks at me. It’s Mraz’s rookie run.

I shoot him a scowl as we race toward the tree line, but he just breathes a silent laugh into the dawn.

Best of luck, Trainee, the female replies. Thanks to the SyNC, they can see me blushing all the way at headquarters. And Trainee…?

Yes?

Turn on your viz-comm.

I smother an impulse to swear as I SyNC my visuals to the link line and my eyes convert to organic camera lenses.

You’re at one minute, the female says, and then as planned, HQ goes silent.

#

I hate links. It’s frakking awkward trying to see with Felix’s visuals interposed on top of mine. And I loathe being babysat. That’s what the visuals are for. I don’t need HQ’s help to scrub a scene.

I catch the ghost of Felix’s fingers and turn to see him waving them in front of his own eyes. Subtle, I tell him.

Straight back from the church.

The last word gives me gooseflesh, but I hook my thumbs around the cuffs of my jacket, casual, apath. I was there at the briefing, you know.

Just a friendly reminder, Shy.

It’s good to hear him use my old nickname, and I venture a smile. As we make our way closer, though, the smile vanishes. I pull my sleeve across my nose.

This air is evil.

Sewage. Felix crosses the empty street at a saunter. I have to force myself to slow up so I can keep his pace. You’ll get used to it.

I hope not, I think, and though I don’t mean for him to, he hears it.

Our target is a two-story house, sagging in too many places to count. The whole thing has a cramped, decrepit look, like it’s embarrassed. It looks too defeated to be a propaganda den, but zealots are nothing if not devious. The upper windows are covered with tarp. I can’t get over how tiny it is.

How many people live in there? I ask.

Usually around twenty. More today if our mole’s got his facts right.

Felix leans around the corner of the building. I copy him and gaze along the sun-bleached southern wall. We draw our guns. Despite the dereliction, the concrete doorstep that leads from the lopsided porch down to the dirt road is scrubbed spotless. It’s so clean, I’m almost afraid to step on it, but Felix scales it, no problem, and places his hand on the worn wood of the door.

Ready?

Ten seconds, I remind him.

Felix grabs a strand of hair that’s strayed from inside my cap and gives it a playful tug. I swat him off and stuff it out of sight. It’s red: recessive. Stigmatic. But I’ve been too busy lately to dye it. He raises his left hand, his right side pressed against the door, and I hear him count the final seconds in my SyNC.

Working fast, I pull a taser from my kit and set it to mark the perimeter of the building. The black ball emits a faint buzzing sound as it zips around the house at shoulder level, setting a ten-foot radial field. That should be wide enough for anyone who tries to jump. The taser returns to my hand, and I press the button to arm it just as Felix’s voice says, Zero.

He rams his shoulder hard above the ancient metal lock. The door rocks in its frame, but it doesn’t budge. Inside, someone wakes with a shout.

What in chaos are you doing? I shout into his brain.

Frak it. Felix rubs his shoulder. I hate these things. He pulls a knife from his belt, flips it open, and jimmies the blade between the frame and the door, but it doesn’t budge. Usually they just give way.

Move.

I elbow him aside, choose a pick from the set on my belt and jab it in the lock. The door releases with a satisfying click. Inside, someone shrieks. Felix plants his hand on the face of the door and pounds it open against the wall.

“Outside, let’s go!” The sudden force and coldness of his real voice startles me, but I don’t let it show. “This is a raid. Hands on your heads.”

“Ten-foot perimeter,” I warn, although there’s so much screaming, I don’t know if they hear me. I aim my weapon at a man with a kitchen knife. “Drop it,” I tell him.

When he doesn’t, I shoot.

A woman drapes herself, shaking and wailing across his fallen body. Without looking at her, Felix grabs the knife from the man’s limp hand and tucks it in his belt.

“Outside,” I shout. “No more than ten feet.”

Felix secures the upstairs while I take down. When it’s clear, he stations himself on the porch, guarding the zealots while I get to work.

My first task is to extinguish a fire in the stove. I extract a handful of blackened documents and, more promising, a SyNC chip. Zealots aren’t supposed to have access to them. Punishment for blowing up the frakking world in the name of their siren Gods. First they fought each other, then we brought them down. Our mole was right. They have someone on the inside—our side. If I’m lucky, the data on the chip won’t be too damaged, and maybe we can find out who. I insert it into my port and send the upload to HQ.

A carbon scan upstairs gets me a hefty stack of propaganda posters: pale blue with a white bird holding a green branch in its beak. Scrawled across the bottom are two words: Keep Faith. I reserve one for the lab and feed the rest into my portable incinerator.

“You about done?” Felix calls.

The purr of approaching hovercraft tells me the enforcers have arrived.

“Almost.”

I drag a rickety chair to the center of the room, stick my scanner to the ceiling, and start collecting relics. Beads, scrolls, a battery-powered clock—where in chaos did they get batteries?—a compass, and the jackpot: a bible. I’d love to burn it right there, but I bag it.

The scanner beeps. I move the chair under the flashing red spot on the ceiling. Loose boards. I punch them up and push them aside.

The space between the second floor and the roof is tight, barely high enough for me to crouch in. I trigger my night vision and edge along the beams between thick bats of decomposing insulation, trying not to breathe the motes of fiberglass floating in the air.

And then I see it. The flaw in the pattern.

One of the wallboards has been laid backwards, the grain going opposite of the others. It’s too easy. Almost as if they wanted me to find it.

When the board falls away, something glints in my SyNC. A necklace, gold, in the shape of a heart. There’s a hinge on one side.

“They’re secure,” Felix says when I descend with the locket in my fist. “Enforcers have got them. What’s that?”

I hold up the chain. The necklace twists—and I catch sight of something. On the back, carved in sharp, jagged letters, is a word. Or rather, a name.

I stare at it, stunned. And I spike. Because HQ is seeing this, too. And because it’s not just any name.

It’s mine.

Felix looks from me to the necklace. I hold out my wrists. I don’t fight. I don’t know how they got my name, but until I do, I’m not safe. Anything to do with religion is dangerous. And dangerous things should be caged.