Chapter 97: Sixteen Days
Caleb stood at the bed rail.
His brother had closed his eyes again, but the monitors no longer showed the old coma pattern. The brain harmonic had loosened into something ordinary enough to hurt: exhausted, living sleep.
The room was very quiet.
Caleb’s left hand was on the bed rail. His right hand was in his coat pocket, around the folded gown. The fabric was still warm. Looking at it would only make the room smaller.
Soma had been gone for nine minutes.
In nine minutes, his comm had said nothing. The Hacker had stayed silent. Iharu, Hiro, Kikaru. Silent. The squad knew he was sitting with his brother and the squad was leaving him alone for it.
The squad had given him that without making him ask.
[Hacker: Tali is twelve floors down. She’s bringing two operators with her. The kid she calls Olu and a quiet one I haven’t placed.]
"Okay."
[Hacker: Caleb.]
"Yeah."
[Hacker: He’s going to sleep through the move. That’s good. Don’t wake him for it.]
"I won’t."
-----
Tali came through the door three minutes later.
Her hair was in a damp braid. She had three sets of cargo straps over her shoulders and a wrench under her left armpit. The kid in the yellow vest came in behind her, and behind him a thin man Caleb didn’t recognize who was carrying a second containment trolley like it weighed nothing.
"Move," Tali said.
Caleb moved.
She walked to the knelt statue, hooked a strap under each arm, and clamped the contacts. Her eyes stayed on the hardware. So did Olu’s. So did the thin man’s. Caleb noticed that too.
"Olu," Tali said. "Take this one. Service hall, freight elevator. Lobby ceiling has a recruitable witness."
"Yes ma’am."
"Don’t call me ma’am. Move."
Olu and the thin man tilted the statue and rolled it out. The plating scraped the doorframe and left a long pale mark on the paint. Caleb watched the mark and decided to remember it.
Tali turned to the bed.
She slowed.
"Hey," she said. Voice different. Lower. The mechanical part of her gone for a second.
The brother’s eyes were closed.
She put a hand on his shoulder, very gently. "I’m Tali. I built your brother’s suit. I’m taking you somewhere where the people won’t ask wrong questions. You’re going to sleep through the move. I promise. When you wake up you’ll be in a room with a window. Like your old room. We’ll get you food that isn’t tube food. Your brother will be there as soon as he can be."
The brother didn’t open his eyes. But his breathing changed slightly. He had heard her.
Tali turned to Caleb. "He’s going to be okay," she said.
Caleb couldn’t answer that.
"I know," she said anyway.
[Soma: Caleb. Open channel. Olamide is engaging in seventy seconds. You should hear this.]
-----
The diesel of the Lagos port had a specific smell at four in the morning. Olamide knew it. She had stood in this dock yard at this hour for the better part of nine years, in different boots and different weights of body armor and different states of physical wear, and the smell had been the same all of them. Tar. Cold sea-water. The metallic edge of the recyclers behind the customs shed running their overnight cycle. Layered over all of it, the faint sweetness of cocoa from the warehouse two blocks west that had been shipping for sixty years and didn’t stop shipping for anything.
She was on the catwalk above the eastern rail tunnel. Her boots were on the steel grating. Her hand was on the rail.
She had been awake for fourteen hours.
"Adetayo," she said into the comm at her collar. "Talk to me."
[Adetayo: Three minutes out. The civilian sensors blanked sixty seconds ago.]
"Femi."
[Femi: I have the east mouth. Two heat sources on the rail. Neither is breathing.]
"Niru."
[Niru: West mouth covered. Mama, there is something moving in the water tank above platform three.]
Olamide held her answer.
The water tank above platform three was a thirty-thousand-liter reservoir built in the 1980s by a Norwegian shipping company that had stopped existing in 2004. It was structurally sound and it should not have anything moving inside it.
"Niru," she said. "Don’t look up at it."
[Niru: ...]
"Look down at the rail. The thing in the tank is not your problem yet. The thing on the rail is."
[Niru: Copy.]
She let her hand fall from the rail and walked the catwalk to the access stairs.
-----
The statue came out of the tunnel mouth at four-eleven exactly.
Adetayo’s rifle cracked twice. The rounds hit plating and didn’t go through. The statue turned its head toward the rifle fire.
It fixed on Adetayo.
The marks on its neck went brighter.
Adetayo’s rifle fell out of his hands. Then his knees fell. Then his torso. He stood there for half a second with his arms still up and his eyes locked on the statue and his mouth half open, and then his body knew what his face did not, and his body let go.
He hit the platform, and his body stayed where it fell.
"Femi," Olamide said. [Femi: I see it.]
"Niru." [Niru: With you.] She vaulted the catwalk rail.
Twelve feet to platform three. Her knees absorbed the drop. The subdermal bracing along the femur and tibia took the impact and shed it across the long bones. Her boots hit the concrete and held. She was already moving when her feet landed.
She had been carrying her body weight at velocity into things larger than her since she had been twelve years old in the wrestling rooms behind her father’s house in the Surulere district, and the technique had not changed.
She hit the statue at the hip.
The hip joint was the weakness. The plating was at its thinnest there. She drove her shoulder up under the angle and let her body weight do the work.
The statue staggered. Two lit marks dimmed at the joint disruption.
She rolled away before the remaining arm came down.
The concrete where she had been a second ago cracked.
Femi opened up from the west mouth. Three rounds, three cracks. The statue’s left arm dropped slightly.
"Niru," Olamide said.
[Niru: Mama.]
"Now."
Niru came down off the catwalk on a fast-line. He drove a magnetic clamp into the statue’s lower back at the spinal plate. He twisted the activation key.
The charge was a focused EMP. Built specifically for plating-disruption work, and built specifically by Tali Yusupova in a workshop in another city Niru had never visited.
The statue’s marks blacked.
All twelve.
For one second.
Olamide rolled inside the arc of its arm and drove the heel of her left palm up under the chin plate.
The marks came back on. Eight, not twelve. The neck pair stayed dark. The spine pair stayed dark.
It turned and went back into the tunnel at the same steady pace.
The boots rang along the rail, six hard impacts before the dark swallowed the sound.
-----
In Saint Halvard’s, Caleb listened to all of it.
He stood at his brother’s bed rail. The fight unfolded in his ear. Adetayo’s rifle. The silence after. A woman he’d never met saying a name into a comm channel and then saying nothing else about that name. Soma’s reply: I’m sorry. No heat in it. The same control he’d used at the audit table that morning.
[Soma: She broke two of its marks. Spine and neck. The statue is going north on the old line. It won’t reach Paris tonight. It might reach Paris tomorrow.]
"Okay," Caleb said.
[Soma: I’ll be on the ground in seventy minutes. I’m sending you Iris. She is twenty-three minutes out from your location. Do not leave the building until she gets there.]
"Why Iris?"
[Soma: Because I trust her with you.]
The channel went quiet on Soma’s end.
Tali was at the head of the trolley, prepping the brake locks.
[Iharu: Cal. You there?] "Yeah."
[Iharu: Heard the Lagos team lost one.]
"Yeah," Caleb said.
[Iharu: I’m sorry. Hiro and I are rolling. Sector Six. Iris briefed us. You stay with your brother. Don’t try to fight any statues without an SSS in the room. That’s an order. From me. Not from Iris. From me. Don’t be stupid.]
"Copy."
[Hiro: Cal. We’ll see you when this is over.]
"Yeah."
[Kikaru: Mercer.]
"Mitsurugi."
[Kikaru: I am rolling out in eight minutes. I’ll be off-channel for at least four hours. If you require First Division support before I am back on, request through Captain Elara, not through me.]
"Copy." [Kikaru: Mercer.] "Yeah."
[Kikaru: ...Stay alive.] "You too." The channel went quiet on her end.
[Hacker: Tali is ready to move him. We’ve cleared the route.]
"Okay."
-----
Tali released the brake locks.
The trolley rolled forward. The brother’s eyes were closed. His chest rose and fell. The faint purple light at his sternum had faded to nothing. For the first time since the augments had gone in, he seemed like a person who was just asleep.
Caleb walked beside the trolley to the door.
Soma had told him to stay in the room until Iris came, and Caleb understood the order even as obedience scraped at him.
At the door, his brother opened his eyes.
His brother opened his eyes for a second and found Caleb in the doorway.
His brother said, "Sixteen days."
Caleb said, "What?"
"Sixteen days. Father said sixteen days." His eyes closed.
He was asleep again before the trolley cleared the threshold.
Tali had stopped pushing. Her attention was on Caleb.
"Did he just say..." Tali asked.
"Yeah. Sixteen days from what?"
"I don’t know."
She started pushing again. The trolley turned the corner. The thin man took the head. Olu took the foot. Caleb stood in the doorway and watched until the elevator doors closed behind them.
-----
The room was empty.
The bed was empty.
The medical gown was in Caleb’s pocket and the fabric was still warm.
He sat down on the edge of the bed his brother had been on a minute ago.
The mattress was still warm too. His brother’s body had been there long enough to leave its heat.
[Hacker: Caleb.]
"Yeah."
[Hacker: He said sixteen days, and your father said it before he disappeared.]
"How do you know my father said it before he disappeared?"
[Hacker: Because your father said it to me.]
Caleb’s hand tightened on the rail.
[Hacker: I was twenty-six. Charity gala my mother had me host for VeilWard.]
"Go on."
[Hacker: He bought a drink at the bar. Walked it to me. Set it down.]
"And said what?"
[Hacker: ’Tell my son when he comes that sixteen days is what I have. Tell him not to do anything in the first fifteen.’]
The answer took a moment to settle.
"You never told me."
[Hacker: I didn’t know which son he meant. I thought he meant one he had with someone else until your brother said it. I am not asking you to forgive the delay.]
"How long have you been wrong about that?"
[Hacker: Eleven years.]
-----
In Lagos, Olamide sat down on the catwalk steps and let her thigh bleed for a minute.
The thing in the water tank above platform three was still watching her.
She still didn’t look up at it.
She unclipped her flask, drank a third of it, screwed the cap back on, and waited for Soma to land.
The cocoa warehouse two blocks west started its four-thirty shift. A single forklift began moving pallets. Somewhere in the city above her, a call to prayer started, faint and clean through the cold air. Olamide let the sound pass through her and kept watching the rail.
She had sixteen days.
That knowledge was still hours away.
