Breaker

Chapter 2-2

“I’ll pass,” Eddie choked, not meaning to speak the words out loud and regretting them the moment they came out.

A yellow light flashed on the dash and the cab began to speak. “Our apologies, Mr. Florence, but we are unable to pass traffic at this moment. Please wait in your seat. Your calm and patient cooperation is greatly appreciated.”

The voice was, in fact, a warm, sexy female voice, and hearing its soothing cadence lifted some of the tension off his shoulders. He was no fool, though. He had no doubts whatsoever the voice had been carefully planned, weighed, and tested to ensure it would do just that.

“Well, hello there.” Eddie pasted a big Mr. Nice Guy smile on his face as the monitor lit and the dispatcher’s image solidified. Sweat slipped down his back. “The cab has stopped. Is there a problem?”

“A minor delay, Mr. Florence,” she replied, her perfect face warmed with a perfect smile that showed the slightest hint of her perfect teeth. “Your vehicle will resume operation shortly.”

“Oh.” He frowned, but kept his voice light. It was weird, maybe even outright odd, but he had to imagine that they’d hold the flight for him if things got sticky. Surely the airport would know there was a delay. Everything was linked to everything—

The intruder clanged in Eddie’s mind, shoving anything of himself out of the way. The stranger’s thoughts threw words around—freedom, vengeance, clarity. And then, worse: automatic weapon and necessary casualties.

Eddie sucked a breath. His fingers dug into the cracked seat’s upholstery. He mouthed the word, “No” but the intruder couldn’t hear him. Didn’t care.

Eddie didn’t need to know what a gunshot sounded like to know when he heard one. It came at him from two places at once—from his head with a snarl of self-righteous pleasure, and from inside the airport with a hundred screams of terror.

Now he didn’t need to ask why the cab had stopped.

An alarm began to blare. The double set of doors at the entrance of the building slammed shut. A dozen heads swiveled to look their way. Wall, bench, and pole-mounted monitors began to scroll with the words, “Code Four Security Breach.”

Eddie clawed at the door of the cab as the face on the monitor dissolved to its own version of the announcement and began to snap commands at him in a voice that was the opposite of sexy or soothing. “Stay inside the vehicle. Security detail has been activated.”

The voice inside his head grew clearer.

(f*****g bastard lot of you. Dirty, filthy, sons of whores)

—and the—

(automatic)

—weapon barked again. Nobody had to tell Eddie that there were children, infants even, in the line of people, because the person in his head knew there were and couldn’t care less.

(As man condemned to death, for we are made a spectacle unto the world, and I will be crowned in honor and glory.)

Eddie managed to open the door to the cab a single second before the lock engaged.

The dash of the cab lit up red and began to jitter. Light fanned across the roof. A voice said, “Emergency Scan activated.”

All public vehicles had Scanners. They were there to detect threats. Anomolies. Monsters like the man inside the airport.

And also like the one in this very cab praying to make it to an island.

The scanner swept down and over Eddie, hovered over him for what seemed like forever, and Eddie closed his eyes and squeezed the handle of the door so hard his knuckles hurt. The light turned the darkness behind his eyelids a brilliant red and in less than a breath, a siren inside the cab began to pulse. Eddie winced, shrinking from the sound, and opened his eyes. The image of a padlock began to flash on the cab’s screen—on, off, on off—and the robotic voice that had been demanding he stayed put hardened into the well-known sound of a security recording. “Immediate attention required. Lock activated by Scan. Do not depart the vehicle.”

And then, for a horrible second, everything went dead quiet and all Eddie could hear was his mother’s voice:

“Oh Eddie. What did I tell you? Bad little boys get caught.”

Siren. Voices. Screams. The world erupted in noise. “f**k, f**k, f**k,” Eddie said. He shoved at the door to the cab. They’d found him; they must have. There was a psycho inside the airport killing people and still someone had taken the opportunity—

(die, you worms! Die!)

—to scan for Estrangements. Because it was always the Estranged who caused the trouble. Women, witches, the Jews, gypsies, gays, and now…the Estranged. The latest and greatest scapegoat. And Eddie…he was one of them. And they’d found him. They’d found. Him.

Eddie stumbled through the door and onto the hot grooves of the grid. He desperately tried to silence what was happening in his head and find a way to disconnect himself from the man shooting up the airport. Panic rose with acidic bile. It always went like this. He couldn’t control it; couldn’t stop it; couldn’t predict it or warn anyone in time to save anyone. All he could do was hide it.

“No one can know,” he murmured, “don’t let anyone know, or you’ll be just like Gillian.”

He could see it, as clearly as he could hear the bullets fired from a weapon Eddie had never even heard of: he’d be the one who spent the rest of his life slack-jawed and zombified on Suppressors while the government kept him hidden, be it for the safety of the world or to use at their discretion. It’d be him in that unused traffic control tower, listening for the crazy thoughts of insane people. They’d make him find risks. They’d threaten to kill his family and torture him for life unless he did what they wanted. Helped them kill who they wanted to kill. Wipe out the Estranged. Burn them.

There was a bright laugh, like a crack of thunder resounding through his brain—and Eddie felt the man relish the fall of another body.

He heard a high-pitched whine, and only when it got loud enough to draw the attention of a woman on the walkway did Eddie understand it was coming from him. He barely registered the pain when his legs gave out from under him and he went sprawling. He heard another high buzz, like a fuel cell getting ready to explode, felt a moment of striking terror that didn’t belong to him, and the connection in his head rose to a peak, shimmered into painful brilliance that whited-out his vision and filled his ears with a roar of noise.

And then it was gone.

“Dead,” Eddie gasped. “They killed him.”

There was a moment of absolute silence, and Eddie looked down at his pavement, panting. He thought of the woman on the walkway watching him warily before he dropped. He thought of his mother wringing her hands and having to come up with lies about how she’d never known he was any different from anyone else. He thought about the hours he’d spent on the revolving track at the gym back at his school, and he debated his chances at running.

“Stupid,” Eddie mumbled. It was a stupid idea. The scan in the cab was most likely nothing more than the security in the cab reacting to what was happening in the airport. Code one, code four, whatever. They weren’t coming for him. There was no way for them to know, not even with the scan.

And if they suspected, he would lie to them. He would lie, lie, lie in that very small room with very hard chairs with people who asked very hard questions because they thought he was different. He’d tell them he’d been so scared, and he didn’t remember what he did.

No, sir, I didn’t mean to disobey and crawl out of the cab. No, ma’am, I wasn’t trying to avoid the scan. That’d be ridiculous. It’s for our own safety.

They couldn’t know. He might get fined for code violation. In the event of a Code Four Security Breach one was to stay still, not engage the security officers, not speak to the press, take no pictures, and speak to no one. So he’d get fined, but he wouldn’t get…processed. He wasn’t Gillian. There were no visible signs of Eddie’s Estrangement. Everything Eddie felt was internal. The technology couldn’t pick out a thought from Eddie’s head.

Could it?

Eddie closed his eyes. No, it wasn’t possible. And yet still he forced himself into a crouch, dragging his knees on the rough ground. His heart was beating his breastbone black and blue. His clothes were soaked. Everyone all around him was frozen: passengers in the other cabs, their faces pulled into a mask of shock and horror; pedestrians on the sidewalks towing luggage gaping up at the security signs announcing there’d been an attack and to stay where they were.

And then the doors to the airport opened and Security began to file out, two-by-two, shields raised and stun-batons aloft.

Run. He had to run.

No. Stupid. Even if he could run, he’d never make it anywhere safe, and the sensor system in the cab would have already made note of his departure. The security details were trained for just this kind of thing. They’d catch him.

He thought of the wind in his hair as he raced around his high school track. He thought of small rooms, of needles, of never seeing sunshine ever again.

The sirens continued to blare and they synced to the rhythm of his heart. He took another breath. He tensed. Then he barked a shout as a hand fell on his shoulder.

“Get up.” The voice was male, firm, and so close to Eddie that he startled. The fact it came from empty air was no less jarring.

“Come on, get up,” the voice repeated. “No one can see you. At least for the moment.”

The air flickered, wavered, like a monitor trying to cling to a failing Comm-connection. A man’s image almost came into focus, and then was gone just as quickly.

“Seriously, kid,” the now-empty air said. Another flicker of energy, the illusion of a person cut into horizontal lines, a glimmer. “Now.”

“How…” Eddie squinted, frowning. “What?”

“You’re about to run from a security detail.” There was amusement in the man’s voice. “That tells me all I need to know about you. Now move.”

“The cab will report me—”

Eddie’s wrist was grabbed, silencing him. “f**k the cab. If it’s going to report you, then it already has. So get up, get on the walkway, and then go right. When you get to the open laneway where the transporters come off the main gridline, run for the buildings.”

The pressure on Eddie’s shoulder released, and Eddie flexed his arm. Weird. It had felt so f*****g weird to be held by something he couldn’t see. He looked up, desperate for some kind of interaction to confirm he was making the sane, or, if not sane at least the right decision. The only thing he got was another flash of pixilated spots and bars that might have, maybe, been in the shape of a human body.

Eddie lowered his head, set his gaze on the ground, and hoped he wasn’t playing the part of an absolute fool.

He walked slowly, staying close to the flickers and pulses of air that suggested a man’s shape, and as Eddie passed a boy—maybe eight, maybe ten, who stared in rapt, almost lusty appreciation at the security officers in uniform—Eddie stare directly into the boy’s eyes. His presence didn’t seem to register on the boy’s face at all.

He can’t see me. This close, with Eddie’s gaze drilling into him, and the boy was either unable to see or unable to comprehend what his eyes were detecting.

Send the right signal, activate the right cluster of cells in the human brain, and voila. “Nobody’s home,” Eddie whispered. He was immediately hushed, and though the man’s words were nothing more than a whisper, the tone was insistent. Maybe they couldn’t be seen, but they could sure as hell be heard.

Eddie stepped around an old woman standing with one foot on the walkway and one foot on the street. She’d taken the directive to stay in position to the extreme, dutifully watching the security detail stream out of the airport, and her little dog stared up at her as if it thought the woman had lost her mind. It did, however, swivel its pointed muzzle in Eddie’s direction; it looked long and hard at them, and Eddie had to resist the urge to wiggle his fingers at it.

Can’t fool a dog, though. He grinned manically, his heart pounding, and stepped up the curb and onto the walkway.