A Long, Long Sleep (12 page)

“Oh.” Bren stood up and looked down the corridor. “You mean him?” I looked.

My attacker was advancing, slowly but steadily. He was halfway down the corridor, but he was going to get to me eventually.

“Oh, God!” I breathed. “Come on!” I tugged at his arm. “He’ll get you, too!”

Bren took hold of my shirt, keeping me from running away. “It’s not a he,” Bren said, rather arrogantly, I thought. “It’s a machine. Quit trying to run; it’ll keep itself between you and the lift, and you’ll get tired long before it will.”

“He said he was going to terminate me!” I said. “What I’m I supposed to do, offer him tea and crumpets? Last time he nearly killed my dog!”

“What did Barry and Patty say last time?”

“Nothing.”

“You got people trying to ex you and they said nothing?”

“I didn’t tell them,” I hissed.

“Why not?”

I opened my mouth, but I didn’t really have a reason. I’d convinced myself it was a dream, but why didn’t I say anything that first morning? “I don’t know.”

Bren stared at me for a moment, and then he shook his head. “Ae, Rose. Learn to talk!” He stood up and pointed at the man. “Abort mission!” he said in a loud voice. “Abort, abort, abort!”

“Bren!”

“Abort! Abort! Target at specified return location! Abort! Abort!”

“Voice match invalid,” said the flat, mechanical German accent. “Secondary target impeding mission. Terminate secondary target.”

Bren froze. “Coit,” he whispered. He grabbed my shoulder. “You were right the first time. Run!” He pushed me away from my broken chair and down one of the corridors. He ran the other way.

Of course, the thing came after me. I ran as fast as I could, but now that the thing had me in its sights, it was going much faster. My heart pulsed with an arrhythmia as my overworked nanos protested the exertion. With a terrifying screech, a wall of shelves collapsed behind me, shedding boxes of out- of- date clothes and plastic toys before landing with a terrible crunch. With inexorable determination, the shiny man plodded through the rubble, crushing the aluminum shelving beneath his feet. Bren was right —this thing was definitely not human.

It was just like my nightmares. I wanted to run, but my stass- fatigued body was already past capacity. My lungs were burning, my heart was racing, and my feet seemed stuck in treacle. I couldn’t possibly go fast enough.

The thing jogged behind me, and I could feel him, nearer and nearer. Until something struck me in the back.

He hadn’t hit me; he’d only touched me with his cylindrical baton. But even through my uniform jacket, the stick could clearly do its job.

My body stopped working. It was as if I were the machine, and I’d been turned off. I wanted to scream, but couldn’t. I collapsed like a rag doll, every muscle tensed and powerless, as if I were a puppet cut from its strings. It was worse than if I’d merely been electrocuted. Shooting pain radiated out from the point where the stick had touched me. I was sure he’d shorted out my nanobots.

How long could I survive with my organs functioning purely on their own?

I felt a burning touch as my attacker turned me over. I couldn’t move. A strange sound was coming from my throat — the sound of the raw, agonizing pain I was suffering.

I could still move my eyes, and they focused on the control collar my attacker was pushing toward my neck. I knew that once he had that thing on me, my body would no longer be my own. There was nothing I could do now. At least he hadn’t gotten Bren.

Then my eyes widened as I saw, over my attacker’s shiny head, what he could not. Another one of the tall shelves began to tip. Everything was moving very slowly. I watched a box fall off the shelf, then a crate, then two boxes, and then the entire storage unit came right down on my attacker’s back, and onto my legs.

My attacker seemed jolted rather than truly disabled. I whimpered as fresh pain shot up half my body. Bren stood triumphant behind the shelves, but he started when he saw me. “Rose!” He picked his way over the rubble and began pulling me out from under my attacker.

“Come on,” Bren said, crouching at my side. “We have to get you out of here.”

“I really hurt,” I complained. I couldn’t think clearly enough for anything more coherent.

“I know,” Bren said. He slid his arm around my shoulders and hoisted me to my feet. I could barely find them to put weight on them. I actually whimpered, just like Zavier had. “You’ve been hit with a stumble stick.” He reached through the rubble and plucked the stick from the unresisting hand of the shiny man.

“We have to cell the police. You have yours with you?”

“I think it’s by my bed,” I muttered. I hadn’t really been together when I went down into stass.

“Let’s get you upstairs and away from this thing before it resets.”

“Thing? Resets?”

“Yeah, thing,” Bren said. He dragged me through the storeroom to the door of the subbasement. He pushed me through and then pulled an old- fashioned biometric key card from his pocket. A wave of nostalgia hit. I hadn’t seen one of those since before coming out of stass. He passed it through a slot beside the door. “Override, Sabah,” he said. “Lock.”

A small whine came from the slot, and a click sounded from the door.

“There,” Bren said. He took me around my shoulders again and pressed the button for the lift.

“What did you do?”

“I have a master key card,” he said. “Only my parents and I can open that door now.” The lift doors opened and he pulled me inside. I panted as the lift slowly climbed. Every part of my body hurt. As the lift stopped, my legs buckled, and I fell to the floor. “Burn it. Hold this.” Bren pushed the stumble stick into my hands and scooped me up like a child.

“Don’t,” I said, as it became clear that he meant to carry me to my door. “I’m too heavy.”

“How do you think I got you out of the basement the first time?” he asked, wrapping one arm around my shoulders and the other under my legs. “You’re only barely heavier now.”

I blinked as Bren picked me up like a new bride. “You carried me?”

“I couldn’t just leave you there,” Bren said brusquely.

The idea of him carrying my unconscious body up out of the cellar was both embarrassing and compelling. A real Prince Charming. Apparently tennis built some strength, or at least encouraged stubbornness. I closed my eyes as he cradled me, telling myself that even this, right now, meant nothing. My body wasn’t listening. I laid my head against his shirt, breathing in the smell of his sandalwood soap and of him. He smelled like heat itself. His arms felt so strong around me, damn him. He kicked on my door. No one answered. I heard raised voices coming from inside. Were Barry and Patty having a fight?

“Open the burned door!” Bren shouted.

To my surprise it was Mrs. Sabah who opened my door, and her almond eyes opened wide at seeing me in her son’s arms. “Good God, get her inside!” she cried.

“She’s fine,” Bren said, though the strain of carrying me was beginning to show in his voice. He pushed past his mother and into the living room.

Mr. Guillory was shouting at an older, white- haired man I assumed was Bren’s grandfather. I hadn’t seen the old man since the day I came out of stass, when he was just a white blur. The argument continued as Bren lugged me into the room.

“No, I do think the feds could do the job; I just don’t think we need any more forces than the ComUnity police!” Guillory said, his voice sounding very loud in the subdued apartment.

“What if she’s no longer in ComUnity. Did that ever occur to you? We’d never find her! Ach, why am I arguing this with you? You’d just as soon we’d never found her in the first place!”

“I wish none of this had happened, true!” Guillory shouted. “It’s a logistical and public relations nightmare! It’s not going to get easier, you know. You think you’ll be able to keep all your little pet projects once she gets her hands on the board?”

“Hey!” Bren snapped, drawing their attention. “Get out of the way.”

The two men started, identical looks of surprise on their faces. Then they hurriedly stepped away from each other, clearing a path to the couch. Bren pushed between them and tenderly laid me down. “ Ro — Is she okay?” asked Bren’s grandfather.

“Cell the cops,” Bren said, ignoring the question. “She just got hit with a stumble stick.”

“Those are illegal,” said Guillory.

Bren pulled the stick from my hands and passed it to his grandfather. “Tell that to the Plastine downstairs.”

“A Plastine?”

“Yeah, someone’s trying to assassinate her.”

“Where was she?” asked Bren’s grandfather.

Bren hesitated, then said, “Down in the subbasement. She was, ah, opening boxes. Trying to see if anything of her parents’ was left in storage.”

I briefly wondered why he didn’t just tell the truth, but I was too sore to say anything.

Bren’s grandfather stared at the stumble stick with his eyes narrowed. He glanced at me, then backed away toward the door. “I’ll cell the police, and an EMT,” he said. “Where’s the Plastine?”

“Resetting itself in the subbasement,” Bren said. “I aborted its plan. It’ll take it a minute to formulate a new one.” As his grandfather turned his back to leave, Bren called after, “Take Mom, you’ll need her key card to open the door!”

Things were swimmy and incoherent for a while after that. There were a lot of people coming and going. Someone sat me up and checked my vitals, then reassured interested onlookers that the stumble stick hadn’t done any of the tricks to my system that they are wont to do. My nanobots did need to be reactivated, but one of the EMTs had a remote that could manage it. My heart felt better after that. Someone tried to question me, but the same EMT had given me an injection of something that was supposed to ease the muscle tension. Unfortunately, it seemed to work in conjunction with the rest of the stass chemicals in my system, and I was basically down for the count. Through my stupor, I could hear Bren’s con fident voice telling everyone about what had happened to me.

One moment stood out, when the sound of shouts half roused me. “What do you mean there’s nothing there!” That was Bren’s grandfather, and an angrier, more terrifying voice I had never heard. “You get down to that subbasement and you find that blasted thing!”