lining up the flat end between her breasts. Laura gulped in air, each breath pushing her skin against the end of the cylinder. The metal was cold.
Laura cried out again – not a scream of fear, but of anger, screaming at the goddamn robot that was going to kill everyone, including her, as the robot pushed, breaking bone, breaking flesh, as it tried to upgrade her.
TWENTY
Rad woke in a hot sweat, his mouth filled with a foul, chemical taste. He coughed and rolled over, banging into the side of something hard. Looking up, he saw through watering eyes that it was one of the slab tables in the downstairs workshop.
He sat up, yanking the scarf from his neck and awkwardly pulling himself out of his trench coat. It was hot in the workshop, the chloroform-induced headache giving Rad a sudden rush of claustrophobia down on the floor. He grabbed the lip of the table and stood, leaning against it as his coat fell to the ground, where it hit with a dull thud. Rad bent down and picked it up, slipping the gun out of the coat pocket and into the back of his waistband. It was careless of his captors not to have searched him, but he was grateful.
He stood, leaned against the left-side slab and took long, deep breaths as he oriented himself. A breath caught in his throat and he coughed as he saw the machine on the slab, empty earlier, was now occupied. There was a robot lying it in, a flat, unfinished metal head sticking out of the dark green box. Rad watched it as the thumping in his head subsided. The face was crude, nearly featureless save for two short slots for the eyes and a longer one for the mouth. The robot didn’t move.
Rad turned and, leaning his back against the machine, began rolling his shirtsleeves up. He laughed, remembering what it was like up top, in the city, with its ice and darkness. Then his laugh turned into another cough and he was suddenly desperate for a drink. He glanced around, but there didn’t seem to be a faucet in the workshop.
“Rad?”
Kane. His voice was weak. Rad moved over to the head of the machine and looked down at his old friend. Kane was sick, there was no doubt about it.
“I’m here, buddy,” said Rad, pulling the stool closer and perching himself on it.
Kane smiled, and closed his eyes.
Rad sighed. He’d known Kane for… well, for as long as he could remember. He was older than Kane by a fair margin, but he remembered those first jobs, hiring the teenage Kane first as a runner and messenger around town, but then, as his charisma and prowess became apparent – the uncanny way in which he seemed to be in the right place at the right time, his knack for talking to people in just the right way – Kane had become more than a messenger boy. They became friends, and Kane helped more and more, particularly after he got a job at The Sentinel, the Empire State’s first, foremost – and only – newspaper. Kane used that charisma to build up a network of contacts that stretched right across the city, and his work with Rad not only got Rad’s cases solved a lot quicker but provided the material – sometimes sensationalized, of course – for Kane’s newspaper.
Rad scratched his chin and coughed again. He was feeling a little better, more awake, despite his thirst and the oppressive heat of the workshop.
Kane Fortuna. Rad knew that wasn’t his real name, but he had never known any other. Sometimes it didn’t pay to think too much about the past in a place like the Empire State.
Rad’s last memory of Kane was burned into his mind’s eye, so much so that it was the last thing he saw when he closed his eyes and went to sleep, and the first memory he had when he woke up each morning. Kane Fortuna, wearing the powered armor that used to belong to the Skyguard, one of the two protectors of New York City – whose very actions had led to the creation of the Empire State itself. Kane, in the armor, pulling against the energy of the Fissure as he stood across the threshold between one universe and the next, caught like a fly in honey.
Rad rubbed his face, and watched his friend sleep. He’d tried to help him, done his best, his very desperate best,