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“Cigarettes,” said Mason, and stepped out into the howling rain.

⚔ ⚛ ⚔

He found cigarettes three blocks away, an old convenience store set into crumbling brick walls.
 
The water hissed and spat at him, driving into his eyes, and he almost missed the doorway, the sign above it a blank rectangle, faded, the words lost.
 
The door had pulled away from the frame as he’d opened it.

Mason took shelter inside from the rain, walking the aisles.
 
The blue from the fusion reactor on the back of his suit pushed a soft light through the store, fingers of light spreading their way out behind and around him.
 
Old magazines sat on shelves, rotten pages fallen open, glossy starlets marred and stretched on ancient covers.

Magazines.
 
Now there’s a thing that hadn’t been seen for years.
 
Not where Mason walked, anyway.
 
Sadie might still know a place or two to buy them.

Bonus Round
.
 
Sadie.
 
It’d been a mistake to bring her along.
 
Another bad call in a really bad day.
 
She was a damn illegal, or close to — when the Syndicate Registration Act was passed, she’d been getting a chip or a free trip to jail.
 
He shouldn’t care, except —

It’s not fair.
 
You picked her up from where she lived — a place you blew to pieces — and dragged her to some place called Richland.
 
You can tell yourself you were doing the right thing, but the right thing would have been to walk away
.

He walked down the aisles, products scattered across the ground.
 
The cigarettes were still huddled on a rack, packets stitched with writing.
 
He picked one up.

What the hell is a Surgeon General?
 
And where the good goddamn is Richland?

The town wasn’t on any map he had stored in the overlay.
 
He came up empty every time he tried to search for it.
 
He’d found a Rich
mond
, but Richland?
 
Ghosts and echoes.

He looked around the store, taking in the aisles again, the products.
 
Brands stacked in shelves from companies he didn’t recognize.

“Carter,” he said out loud, “how old is this place?”

The link was empty, gone, no reply coming.
 
What had she said?

It’s got a sort of grid of its own.

He nodded, the water dripping from his hair, and he stared back out into the rain.
 
Mason pulled the plastic wrapping from one of the boxes —
Marlboros, the Burger King of cigarettes
— lighting one, taking a long pull.
 
He blew smoke out into the store, the sweet smell of the burning tobacco shouldering its way through the stale air.

How did a place stop existing?
 
The stores were old, but there weren’t signs of looting.
 
The shelves were stocked, products standing or falling where they’d been left.
 
A whole town had stood here one day, and then the next day —

Where did all the people go?

The fusion reactor at his back hummed soft and low, the suit idle.
 
He looked back out at the rain, and the lattice tugged at him, remembering.
 
Mason grabbed a dirty plastic bag from one of the checkouts, his lips quirking at the archaic legacy as he tossed cigarette boxes into the bag.
 
Checkouts were old, gone, forgotten.

It’s a place that doesn’t exist.

Mason walked back out into the rain, flicking his optics to infrared, pulling in the town around him.
 
There, in the distance.
 
The curved stacks of…
 
My God
.

There was an old nuclear facility.
 
He looked back the way he’d come, could just make out the break in the wall where he’d left the others.
 
Mason remembered Laia’s eyes, the way she’d looked up at him.

Do you trust me, Mason Floyd?

What with?

With your life.

“Carter,” he said to the rain.
 
“Where have you sent us?”

He started off at a jog, the armor hissing against the rain as he made his way towards the stacks standing out dim against the sky.

What had she said just before the link dropped?

I’m sorry, Mason.

⚔ ⚛ ⚔

The cooling towers were old, a crack running up the left one.
 
The trees at the edge of the facility were blasted, ancient, dead.

Mason was breathing hard, the run longer than he’d expected.
 
The lattice shuddered under his skin, tasting the rads peeling away from the building in front of him.

He walked through the main door of the facility, the rain lashing at his back, a gust of water following him in.
 
He stood in the dark of the first room, an old sign, covered with verdigris and dirt claiming this was a
RECEPTION
.
 
A desk stood, a chair in rotted ruins behind it.

Mason felt the lattice pull under his skin, pushing him back towards the door.
 
He almost listened —

His hand reached out, the fire burning white hot.
 
The man inside the inferno thrashed, blind eye sockets looking out through the windscreen.
 
Mason pulled the door away, the squeal of the hinges lost against the roar of the flames.
 
His hand charred, lighting on fire, the lattice thrashing away, wanting to run —

It’d do as it was told.
 
He moved deeper into the building, past the dead reception.
 
Ancient electronics sparked and fired, and a single lamp lit in the ceiling, old and red and tired.
 
The light was flattened with the blue from the reactor at his back.

Mason saw the body, an old skeleton stretched out on the ground.
 
There wasn’t anything left, no tissue, no clothes, just the skeleton and an old wrist watch, the crumbling plastic falling away.
 
He reached out and picked it up, looking at the face.
 
He rubbed grime away with the rubber tip of a gauntleted finger.

Casio
.
 
A company he hadn’t heard of, another one that didn’t exist.
 
Not anymore.
 
He wondered which syndicate owned their IP, knew which model of watch replaced this one from decades ago.

Standing, Mason looked around again, trying to imagine this as a place with people, doing their jobs.
 
Trying to make a living.
 
Tried to imagine what had happened.
 
There were a lot of rads.

He wondered how the man at his feet had died.
 
He looked over the skeleton again, poking through the bones.
 
Dust drifted up, and he coughed.
 
There
.
 
It was small, hardly conclusive, but the bones of the rib cage were chipped, shattered.

Could be rats.
 
Could be gunfire.
 
He looked around the dark room, red light seeping into the edges.

Probably gunfire.

Mason walked further into the gloom, the blue of the reactor at his back casting shadows that licked at the walls.
 
He keyed the suit’s lights, the chest plate throwing a clean luminance from under the hard shell.
 
The strong white light shoved back the dark.
 
Mason shivered as something scurried away at the edge of his sight.

He followed the corridor to the end, past security doors long gone, pausing at one.
 
The edges were fragmented, and he touched the old metal, feeling the bend in it.
 
So much time had passed, but the fingerprint of explosives was hard to miss.
 
Someone had come through here, had a real hard-on for busting their way through.

Who the hell breaks into a nuclear reactor?

At the end of the corridor, old elevator doors stood open and broken.
 
The shaft was dark, the car gone.
 
As he walked closer, the light from the suit edged its way into the shaft, hard shadows thrown back from cables hanging down.

Mason stood at the edge, looking up.
 
The machinery at the top of the shaft was mostly gone, an old gear wheel large and pitted, hanging on through a warped clamp.
 
He let his gaze fall down the shaft, the light from the suit stopping before the bottom.

He reached for the ladder set into the wall of the shaft, and started to climb down.

⚔ ⚛ ⚔

The control room was old like everything else, but the bodies were different.

Bodies.
 
Dried husks,
 
not skeletons.
 
The rads here were higher.
 
A normal would be dead by now, the lattice bunching and twitching under his skin.
 
Nothing could live down here, not people, not the bacteria that fed on the dead.

The glass wall at the front of the room was shattered, a few pieces stuck in the frames.
 
The suit’s light pushed out into a vast chamber beyond, old girders spanning a pit sunk into the ground.
 
Somewhere above, light from the sky broke through, the dimness of it lost against the light from the suit.
 
Rain poured in, pattering against the a massive concrete and steel structure standing vigil in the gloom.

Meltdown
.
 
They’d put a lid on where the reactor used to be.

Mason’s overlay hissed with static, his optics flickering in a struggle against the radiation in the room.
 
He stepped over to one of the bodies, looking at the armor.

Nuclear plant workers didn’t wear armor.
 
Not anywhere Mason had heard of, anyway.

He stepped away from the body, looking at the white fabric dressing a man facedown on the ground.
 
Shot in the back, body stretched towards the control panel.
 
Mason followed the line of his hand to the panel, stepping over to it.
 
He wiped away years of grime, scraping through to something that might have been red once.
 
The shutdown button.

Mason looked back at the white of the lab coat.
 
“You didn’t make it, did you?”
 
His voice sounded thin to his own ears, stretched out in the space of the reactor chamber beyond.
 
It didn’t seem to have the strength to touch the concrete mass standing vigil in the dark.
 
“You didn’t manage to start the shutdown before these assholes shot you in the back.”

Probably wouldn’t have mattered.
 
Shutting down a live reactor wasn’t like turning off a switch.
 
Still, the man had tried something.
 
He hadn’t run from danger, he’d run to it, trying to stop —

What?
 
What had he known was coming?

Mason stepped back to one of the armored men.
 
The bodies were slumped, fallen in a loose formation, no obvious marks on them.
 
He reached out to one, wiping grime from the plates.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, standing, stepping back.
 
The lattice shivered in sympathy.

A falcon’s wing stared back at him from the armor.

⚔ ⚛ ⚔

It was when he reached the bottom of the elevator shaft for the climb back up that they came for him.
 
Bounding out of the dark, misshapen, hideous.

He flicked his optics overlay, looping back the live feed.
 
They were still there, not bodies of the dead, but humanoid, skulls lumpy and bulbous, wispy strands of hair still clinging in places.
 
Their arms were thin, teeth crooked and extending outside their lips, and they were dressed in tattered rags and scraps of scavenged clothing.

They howled and chittered at each other in the darkness.

“Fellas,” said Mason.
 
Were these… Jesus, were these people?
 
“I’m pretty sure you don’t want to do this.”

Eyes wide and black stared back at him.
 
One turned to another, clawed parody of a hand slashing at the air, then they rushed Mason.

Overtime fell in place, natural as breathing, and he pushed the lights from the suit up high.
 
The white was blinding, the cascade of brilliance burning pure against the filth of the walls, the warped bodies of the lost men and women around him.

Mason moved amongst them, spinning and turning against the rush, moving between them, striking hard and fast.
 
The inductive tasers in the gauntlets fired, cycled, fired, again and again.
 
One of the hunched people was thrown clear, Mason’s fist hitting it hard enough to knock it across the corridor.
 
Another tangled with him, then convulsed and jerked as the reactive armor discharged into it.

The blue of the reactor on his back burned bright.

Two rushed him, and he slammed the edge of a hand into the neck of one, dropping it, the taser firing.
 
The other grabbed at his face, Mason pushing it away, stepping back —

The edge of his boot was against the black of the elevator shaft.
 
He stood, panting, overtime pulling the color from the faces around him.
 
He felt rather than heard more of them coming from above, and up from the shaft below.

How many —

They ran at him, pouring from the way he’d come, pushing him back and…

Mason fell into the shaft, white and blue spinning against the shaft as he fell into the dark below.
 
He fought as he fell, the tasers firing as he lashed out.
 
He snagged an arm through the ladder at the side of the shaft, felt the jerk as the ancient metal sagged away from the wall.
 
His boot slipped on a rung, and one of the creatures leapt from the wall to latch onto him.
 
The reactive armor fired, the thing twitching, the smell of burnt flesh in the air.