Chapter 366: Locked Away

It’s the kid that came up to meet Call and me when we first got here. And he’s… well… not quite dead yet, but whoever left him here fully expected him to be dead by the time anyone found him. I brush his short bangs away from his face and study his body with my awareness for any other signs of a struggle. Aside from the obvious wounds, he’s perfectly fine.

Like someone snuck up behind him and took him out in one clean slash.

“Where’s the armor?” Pearl asks. “I really doubt he’d have come here without his armor.”

That’s true. Call doesn’t go anywhere without his armor, either, and he’s not an excitable kid. But who could’ve done this? I’m damn sure he went back to the floating island when Call turned him down; someone must’ve called him back here. Let’s see if Call’s program has anything to say about it.

I open Call’s speaker monitoring program and swipe through everything I can find. There’s not much in the way of stored data; just current assignments, remaining shift times, and a long list of inquiries for breaks. Speak herself is apparently on rest right now, which is goddamn bullshit–she should be helping out at ground zero of the mech impact. Just like a good half of all the speakers who aren’t away on other missions already are.

“Find anything?” Slosh asks from inside Taylor’s mouth.

I shake my head and send the card away. “Nothing the official movements will tell me. If anyone called this kid down here, it wasn’t on official channels. Pearl, you think he just got caught up in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

Pearl’s forehead scrunches into a frown. “It’s a possibility, I guess. If you want to know what I think? Whoever put those wisps over where the old man’s body was probably the same one that murdered–almost murdered–this boy. Slosh, is it looking like you’ll be able to save him?”

A much smaller version of Slosh pours out of Taylor’s nose and shrugs, then goes right back to work. Not much for confidence, but it’s also not a guarantee that the kid’s going to die. It’s infinitely better than the chances he had five minutes ago. Though if I’m standing here when he possibly wakes up, he’ll definitely recognize me. Can’t have that.

I brush the drying blood off my hands and stand to leave. “We’ll be in the hangar. You left a drop of yourself in the flask so we can communicate, right?”

An even smaller version of Slosh struggles to pull itself out of the open flask. It grins and flashes a single-handed thumbs-up, then falls back down into the container. I shove the flask in my pocket and push the water bottle a little closer to the body in case Slosh ends up needing it, then turn and walk right past the wisps.

The hangar looks no different than it did an hour ago. My footsteps echo through the mostly empty space, filled only with mechs and some damages, until I stop right in front of where the dangerous mech was. All of the other mechs are still exactly where they were, and if I’m remembering right, all of these mechs were already here when I first got here. The one that went rogue and exploded over the city arrived after us.

“There’s no way they don’t keep a ledger for this,” Pearl says with a general gesture at the mechs. “Call had to get permission to come find you. So someone else had to have signed out the mech that eventually got turned by the apocalypse.”

I nod in agreement, but something tells me that we won’t find that information here. The old man’s injuries were so much worse than Lizzie’s, and she was here at ground zero. Hell, after that first burst of radiation that killed the speaker, I’m pretty sure nobody else actually got killed. Plenty were seriously hurt, yeah, but I don’t think there were any more casualties; even the one who got split in two seemed like they were going to be saved.

So why did the old man and the first victim get so hurt? Why did Lizzie only have radiation damage on one arm? And why was she so hard to get a fix on in the first place? It all reeks of a set-up. But if the set-up was done by Speak herself, she wouldn’t have left Lizzie there. She would’ve just taken her away before and claimed she was found on the hangar floor; the psychics could’ve even made Lizzie herself believe it.

“Hmm. We’re missing some important pieces here,” I muse as I lean on the railing and look up at a giant mech. “So let’s start with the unknowns we know: the blatantly obvious magical wisps. Taylor’s I.D. still being in his pocket even after the attacker went through the trouble of putting the anonymity pebble in his brain. Whatever plan Call and his allies had in place before I pushed up their timeline. Am I missing anything?”

Pearl raises a finger. “Speak watched before coming to help, so the Preservation obviously knows something is up. They should know who was piloting the mech that came in after us, but Call didn’t mention anything about anyone other than Lizzie being arrested. And they didn’t even bother quarantining the hangar after all of this, even though they shouldn’t know if any of these mechs are at risk of being taken by the apocalypse.”

I nod and trail my eyes over the mech. Even if they were damn sure the mechs weren’t going to get apocalypsed right away, I’d still put someone here to make sure whoever caused this in the first place didn’t do it again. Of course that’s assuming the Preservation didn’t do this to themselves for… some goddamn reason. Propaganda would be my first guess, but to anyone but exactly the resort, the Preservation is still very much the good guys.

…Hm. Yeah, I need to get to the bottom of this before they can make up some explanation that suits them best. I lean forward and hop to the mech closest to me, put my hand against the chest cockpit, and push my Shellraiser… stuff… against the mechanisms. My permissions win out easily against the Preservation’s defences and it silently swings wide open.

Everything inside falls under my awareness in an instant. Cables, controls, rooms that shouldn’t fit in the damn thing, and a whole lot of supplies. If the crates are to be believed, there’s enough food, water, clothes, and survival gear to make an outpost that’d last at least a few weeks. I let go with one hand and swing myself in, then pull the door shut behind me.

“It’s going to be under surveillance,” Pearl reminds me. “You should do something about that.”

I roll the anonymity pebble through my knuckles. If it worked in Taylor’s brain, then what if I just pop it in my mouth? I rub the thing clean on my shirt, give it a quick once-over to make sure there’s no brain matter left on it, and place the pebble between my teeth.

Pearl sighs and shakes her head. “You still have the whole mask, Shelby, right?”

“Yeah. But they have… whatever name I made up for myself in that mask on file, remember? They’d recognize me as being from the resort,” I say and tap my Class Card against my thigh to check Call’s speaker dispatch. “No movement yet; looks like they don’t have alarms set up everywhere. Or our permissions overwrote the alarms.”

I take a step further into the mech. My foot clicks against the floor just a little harder than it’s supposed to, and I feel something focus in on me. Cameras everywhere, all tiny and nearly imperceptible if I wasn’t already on edge with my awareness. All I’m looking for right now is a functioning reactor core. Once I find that, I’m out.

“Check the panels; I’ll find out where the core is,” Pearl volunteers.

Her awareness entwines with mine for a moment to point towards a blackened pane of glass littered with scratches. The kind that an armored hand would make after continuous use. I walk right up to it and place my hand against the screen. A popup briefly asks me for my speaker identification.

Pearl’s authority over the shellraiser-inspired device wins again in less than a heartbeat. She leans in close to study the blueprint that pops up, then directs me towards the center of the room.

“It’s under all those wires,” she says. “There should be a hatch with footholds, and if you open it up, there’s a path to the core containment chamber.”

Right down in the ribs. I divert my attention from the panel and move for the mess of wires and cables dangling from the ceiling, but before I open any hatches, I make a quick pit-stop to check one of the boxes. It opens up with a single touch to reveal dozens of dehydrated soup bases, freeze-dried fruits, and canned goods. My awareness doesn’t sense anything much out of the ordinary, so I step away and let the thing close back up around the food. It snaps shut with a little more force than needed.

“They really don’t want anyone taking more than their fair share,” Pearl notes. “I think I could open all those crates at once if you wanted me to. Is that an ‘after-the-reactor’ thing?”

“I think it is,” I say and bend down over the hatch. “Should’ve asked this a second ago, but can you monitor the Preservation’s movements from in here?”

Pearl tilts her chin upwards in consideration. “I think I can, yes. They’ll know I’m here if I try to log into anything without permission, though, so it’s just base level surveillance.”

“That’s more than good enough. Tell me if you notice anyone looking at this mech’s camera feed; we have to get the hell out of here before anyone comes searching.”

I pop the hatch with a simple twist, then pull. Not hard to imagine a pilot standing here accidentally doing this with their feet, so it isn’t really the best way to build the mech. Pearl shoots me a glare that says ‘we didn’t build an obvious design flaw into the mech’, so it must be Preservation design. Putting the pilot right over the access hatch. That’s a recipe for disaster a dozen times over.

Unless the pilot is, for some reason, the most expendable person in the mech. I’m going to choose not to believe that.

I kneel down next to the hatch and feel at the space with my awareness. It trails through an unbelievably long maze of single-person sized ducts, then ends in a chamber that thrums with magic that feels like a magnetic field. From the one second I caught of the Mech’s blueprints, that’s exactly where the core should be.

Emphasis on ‘should’.