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  “Boney?” Rylee said, unintentionally speaking aloud. Preston nudged her to keep quiet. She couldn’t risk saying anything incriminating. Even if they were relatively far away from any Regulators.

  Boney? She repeated in her mind, completely shocked. She knew Boney. Everyone knew Boney. Everybody liked Boney. She liked Boney.

  When Rylee was younger, for several years, she had seen him as a lunatic. Always smiling and being friendly to people in the streets. She had seen him as someone to avoid. No one acted like that in the slums. Then one day she had seen him give a can of food to a hungry-looking child. Over the years, she had witnessed him performing similar acts of kindness on numerous occasions. And her fear of him soon transformed to admiration.

  Now the poor man knelt on a concrete platform, frightened, accused of killing two Elects. Behind him stood a merciless judge. A judge who apparently didn’t care if no evidence was found against Boney.

  “Commander Michael Pike’s cycle was found stashed in an alleyway behind this man’s housing unit,” went on Garrison Pike. “We also found a shotgun in this man’s possession. We believe he perpetrated the murders in order to steal the eloctrocyle.”

  A shotgun? Any idiot could tell you that Michael Pike’s wound was not from a shotgun.

  Boney shook his head violently. Eyes wide.

  “For his crimes, the penalty is death.”

  Cries of dissent rose from a few in the crowd. But they were weak and quickly died down. All knew the law. There were no prisons in the Alliance. There was no food to waste on criminals while they sat in a prison cell. Execution or Deprecation. Those were the only sentences leveled. At least, for the Norms—the Normals, the expendables.

  Rylee gripped the lip of the roof’s parapet. Her legs had turned to mush. Had Regulation even bothered to investigate why those Elects were in the slums in the first place? Of course, they hadn’t. Order? Let the Elects do whatever they pleased. That was the order of things.

  She couldn’t let this happen. An innocent man—a good man—was about to be executed for her crimes. How could she just stand there and watch? She should cry out, admit her guilt. No, not guilt. She was guilty of no crime, no more than Boney was. She had stopped a crime.

  Say something! Denounce them. Let the people hear the truth.

  But she only stood there, watching. Inside, her indignation fought to overcome her fear, fought to quell the sickness in her stomach that the very thought of doing anything produced.

  Do something!

  In the end, her fear won out.

  And she watched. Watched as Garrison Pike withdrew a pistol from within his coat. Watched as Boney’s lips sputtered and trembled, as if attempting to form a few last words of defense. Watched as Pike pointed the gun directly at the back of Boney’s head.

  No!

  A piercing crack split the air like a thunder strike. It echoed over and over and over, cutting deep into Rylee’s heart.

  Boney’s body fell forward onto the platform. Dead.

  She had killed him. As surely as if she had held that gun to his head and pulled the trigger.

  From below, a cacophony of sound rose from the crowd. Cries of dismay, gasps of horror, and shouts of rage.

  Rylee turned away, her eyes burning. Rage and despair roiled inside her. She set off across the rooftop, not knowing where she was going. A firm hand gripped her upper arm, holding her back.

  “This is not your fault,” Preston whispered forcefully into her ear.

  Rylee tore her arm away. “The devil it’s not!” She kept on walking. Why hadn’t she stayed away from the square? Perhaps if she hadn’t heeded the sirens, she would have never known. Never seen the damage she had caused. Behind her, she heard Preston calling after her. Words she refused to hear.

  * * *

  That night after work, Rylee went home and holed herself up in her room, refusing to come out. Ordinarily, she would have spent some of the evening with her friends in the crew. Just thinking about them made Boney’s terrified face fill her mind. Her grandfather attempted to get her to come out numerous times. If nothing else to eat her supper.

  How could she eat? She’d seen much of death in her life. Even public executions. None of those had ever affected her as Boney’s did. It wasn’t simply because it was Boney, though. She had been the reason he’d been killed. If she’d never pulled that trigger. If she hadn’t chased after the Chief Regulator’s son. If she’d come forward and taken the blame…

  For so long, she’d always thought herself brave. Chasing after Elects, fearlessly protecting her people. Now she saw her true nature. She was a coward. A coward not just with blood on her hands. Innocent blood. And there was nothing she could ever do to wash it away.

  Sometime during the night, Rylee fell asleep. She left her earpiece turned off, sitting on her shelf.

  Sleep brought her no rest. Her dreams were nothing more than an extension of her waking thoughts. Boney’s face flashed within her mind relentlessly.

  In the morning, she left for work, refusing to either eat breakfast or listen to her grandfather’s Bible verse.

  Outside, she shivered as the morning air penetrated her thin sweatshirt. She paused a moment and looked around. The street, the buildings, the ever-brooding sky all looked the same as the day before. Yet everything felt different.

  She walked around to the side of her building, back behind an older metal dumpster. A tattered and faded blue tarp draped haphazardly over a pile of boxes, cans, and other unseen objects. With a yank, she pulled away the tarp, revealing her bike. A ’32 Harley Davidson Sportster. The sight of it made her momentarily forget her troubles. Not that the bike was much to look at, with its rusty frame, chipped paint, dented and scratched gas tank, and bald tires. But it was all hers. And it could drive like the Devil’s chariot.

  Few people in the slums owned any kind of vehicle. If they did, most wouldn’t be able to supply it with the gasoline needed to run it. Yet her grandfather managed to keep well enough stocked to drive her Harley to work almost every day of the year.

  Unchaining the wheels and handlebars from the dumpster, she straddled the bike. Then she went to work reconnecting the bike’s ignition wires. The bike’s original keys were long lost. So, her grandfather had rigged the ignition to not need a key.

  Wires properly connected, she turned the modified switch. Her Harley came to life with a roar that rattled her bones. Here was power those electrocylces would never know. Electrocyles. Another stab into her fresh wound.

  She gunned the throttle and tore out of the alleyway.

  Rylee had lived nearly her entire life in the slums. Her grandfather had brought her here a year after Desolation first struck Seattle and the outlying areas. By then, much of the population had already been wiped out. And these buildings—pre-Desolation government housing—had mostly survived the earthquakes and floods. Survivors filled them up, seeking shelter and food. Of late, though, this place felt more like a prison than a home to her.

  Her current jobsite was in the Elect sector of the city. They were rewiring a building that the CA wanted to restore. An old skyscraper, relatively undamaged by Desolation’s earthquakes and storms. The building stood thirty stories tall. Its glassy exterior, pockmarked though it was, reflected the black clouds which loomed low enough to swallow it whole. A fire had destroyed five stories of the building. According to the engineers, though, the building’s steel structure was still sound.

  Not that she cared if it collapsed. The CA wasn’t restoring it for Norms to live in. Let the building topple and kill the whole Elect population.

  Hal met her as she drove into the construction zone at the north end of the building. He towered over her, smiling through his ginger beard.

  “Morning,” he said roughly, as she dismounted from her bike. “A little early today.”

  Most days she would be glad to see Hal. As far as bosses went, she definitely couldn’t complain. Today she cringed inside at the thought of human interaction.
She nodded, and hoped he didn’t try any small talk. Not that he tended to say much more than necessary to get a job done.

  “I’ll need you to work with Sophie today,” he said. “Once she gets in, grab a coil of THHN wire and go to work on section fifty-eight, on the ninth floor. Drew’s got the diagram. And be careful. We’ve got some live wires running through that section.”

  Rylee’s heart sank. Sophie was fine enough to work with, though she did tend to gossip the entire time she worked. Usually, Rylee didn’t mind hearing the gossip. Today, the thought of hearing Sophie’s prattle all day and keep her own winces of pain hidden was enough to make her contemplate driving her Harley off the closest pier.

  Within a few minutes, a truck full of other workers rumbled into the construction yard. Sophie, along with several other of the electricians, climbed out. Hal barked out instructions and assignments to everyone, and workers started preparing to enter the building.

  Rylee didn’t go find Sophie, but stood in the yard and waited until the girl sought her out. At about sixteen, Sophie was two years Rylee’s junior. Sophie’s appearance always amused Rylee somewhat. Sophie wasn’t bald. But she kept her blonde hair trimmed so short, she looked it.

  “Are you awake in there?” Sophie said, handing Rylee a hardhat.

  Rylee shook her head, as though just startled from sleep. “No,” she said. “I’m fine.” She grabbed the hardhat from Sophie and pulled it onto her head. “Let’s go.”

  They began their ascent up the service stairs to the ninth floor. Almost as soon as they entered the stairwell, Sophie started to run her mouth. Her words echoed off the narrow walls, pressing against Rylee’s overloaded brain. Plus, walking up the stairs was killing her leg. She didn’t even know what the girl was talking about.

  When they were about to the seventh floor, Sophie said something that snapped Rylee’s brain to attention.

  “What was that?” she said, stopping and turning to look at Sophie.

  Sophie wrinkled her brow. “Didn’t you hear about Garrison Pike, the Chief Regulator?”

  Rylee frowned. “I saw the execution yesterday, Sophie,” she muttered in reply. Then turned and started climbing the stairs again.

  “No,” Sophie said. “Not that. Garrison Pike is dead.”

  “What!” Rylee whipped back around to face the girl.

  Sophie smiled. It was the smile that always accompanied her best pieces of gossip, when she knew she had her audience’s rapped attention and would give anything to hear more. But Sophie didn’t toy with her this time, making her squeeze everything out of her drop by drop.

  “Garrison Pike is dead,” she repeated. “Last night, someone murdered him.”

  EIGHT

  “I heard the same thing,” Serghei said, his Romanian accent sounding stronger than usual. “I say, good riddance to him. He was so concerned about justice being served. A twisted irony, do you not think?”

  Though Rylee didn’t care a bit about Pike, the news troubled her. Their whole crew was together at their hideout—Serghei’s place. That morning, she had had no intention of seeing any of them today. Yet, after what Sophie had told her, she wanted to confirm the news with another source.

  “Any word as to who did it?” Preston asked, sitting in his customary spot on Serghei’s couch.

  “Supposedly, it happened in his sleep,” Serghei said, feeding a potato skin to his pet rat.

  “Man, I can’t believe you waste food on that rodent,” Feng said, shaking his head in disgust.

  In reply, Grant hissed at Feng, baring a pair of yellow teeth, dripping with rat drool.

  “His name is Grant,” Serghei said, stroking the rat’s patchy fur. Serghei had named the rat after an old actor—Larry Grant, or something like that. It also had one black, skeletonized robotic leg. Serghei’s own handiwork.

  “Just keep that mangy disease ball away from me,” said Feng, recoiling.

  Serghei held out the bit of potato skin to Feng. “You would rather eat it, would you? I acquired it from a garbage scavenger. Undoubtedly remnants of an Elect’s three-course meal. Maybe even from the CA’s own kitchen. As it’s likely mingled with raw meat and produce, it likely carries but two or three harmful bacterium.”

  Serghei smiled broadly, that goofy smile that only belonged to him. Feng shook his head as he settled back into his seat. “Dude’s got problems.” Rylee heard him mutter under his breath.

  Serghei went back to feeding his rat. Feng went back to sipping his Mountain Dew. And Preston just sat there.

  “Aren’t any of you the least bit concerned about the ramifications of this?” Rylee blurted out, her voice edging with a hint of hysteria. “I killed Michael Pike. A squadron commander. And look what happened. They didn’t have any evidence against Boney. Yet they killed him just to make a point. What do you think they’ll do when the Head of Regulation is killed?”

  Rylee felt her face burning with the heat of her anger. And she found herself fighting back tears.

  Preston reached over and placed a hand on her shoulder. She pulled away from his touch.

  “Serg,” Preston said, ignoring her coldness. “You’ve mentioned before about hacking into Regulation’s systems to steal reports. Is that actually possible? Could we look up what they know about the murder?”

  Serghei bobbed his head a little. “Anything’s possible, is it not?”

  “How feasible, then?”

  “We have no network in the slums, as you know,” Serghei said, his voice rising a few notches like it always did when he talked about his nerdy stuff. “Regulation headquarters has a private network. It does link to the external network used by the rest of the Elect populous. Two issues there though. Both networks are heavily monitored. Elects can connect to their network wirelessly through their PNU-enhanced brains. I don’t happen to have any PNUs lying around. I’m not sure of what sort of handshake protocol is involved when they connect to the network, but I assume an issued certificate is required. Spoofing that…forget it. Unless, of course, we could find someone to issue us a certificate. But we’re more likely to get promoted to Elects than for that to happen.

  “Now, there are, I believe physical servers which make up that network. Unless the CA’s brain is it. And I wouldn’t put it past him. What better way to monitor everything in your city? Assuming that is not the case, locating the servers and gaining access to them would likely take considerable time. And then after that, there is still the problem of breaking through Regulation’s firewalls. However—”

  “Forget I asked,” Preston said, cutting him off. “I think we get the point.” He shook his head and sighed. “I’m sorry, Ry. I don’t think there’s anything we can do here. Even if we could learn something, I doubt it would make much difference. I don’t think you need to worry about this, though. Regulation would have a blasted hard time linking anyone in the slums to the murder.”

  That was true. Garrison Pike had been killed in his apartment. Not even the Elect Hunters had ever attempted to infiltrate one of the Elect buildings. Unlike the slum’s housing units, the Elects’ buildings boasted security systems to prevent unauthorized access.

  Preston leaned forward and ran a hand through his russet hair. “Well, the good news is that there’s one less Elect in the world.”

  “You said it, brother,” Feng said, raising his can of Mountain Dew. “One less we have to kill ourselves.”

  Rylee’s stomach twisted inside. Could she kill another Elect? Did she have the will to continue as an Elect Hunter? All that they were doing—all that they stood for—came into question now. She understood the others and their motivation.

  Feng’s hatred of the Elects was justified. One of them had taken his sister when he was younger. They found her body a few weeks later in a back alley of the slums, her flesh mangled and torn in ways Feng refused to talk about.

  Preston’s older brother had been killed by a group of Elects who just wanted to try out a new PNU-enhancement that gave them Kung Fu abilitie
s. The Elects had tied up Preston and forced him to watch as they punched, kicked, and elbowed his brother again and again. Even after Preston’s brother collapsed and his chested stopped moving, the Elects continued to batter his bloodied face.

  Serghei? Well, Serghei just loved using his toys. It seemed to her that this was all a game to him. Strategy, tactics, outwitting the enemy—these were all things that excited Serghei. He never shot anyone. Never went out on the streets to hunt.

  What about herself? What drove her to hunt the Elects? Certainly she’d witnessed enough of their atrocities. Senseless killings like the one that took the life of Preston’s brother. That was not the first time such a thing had happened. When the Elects stole young girls or women, it always made her sick. They didn’t always know what became of those abducted. Sometimes they were merely raped and cast back onto the streets. Most of the time, they didn’t come back. Theories abounded on that topic. One rumor—the one which she most believed—is that the Elects used a modified PNU to take control of their minds. To turn these girls into their slaves. The thought made Rylee sick inside. She knew exactly what kind of slave these teenage Elects would make of a girl like Lexi.

  It boiled her blood. Why did the Elects feel the need to do such things? According to Serghei, their PNU-enhanced brains allowed them to see, hear, and feel whatever they wanted without having anything physically there. That was the point of the Elects. Their PNU gave them whatever they wanted. The perfect human—more than human. Then why did they insist on taking from the Norms? That is what drove Rylee, what fueled her passion to fight against them. At least, that’s what had driven her. Was it still enough?

  “You did the right thing killing those Elects,” Feng said. “So, they killed one of us in retaliation. So what? They’re killing us anyway. How much longer would Boney have lasted? No one in the slums is safe. We’re all just an injury, an illness, a twisted Elect’s whims away from death or Deprecation. But you got two of them. And one of them was a Squadron leader. You should be proud.”