behind the wall of the campus. A meta could clear it with a jump, easy.”
“And what would I find there?” I was hollow, just waiting to see what he had in mind.
“Maybe nothing. Maybe a ride.” He turned back to the door. “I wouldn’t want to be accused of helping you.”
“You’re not,” I said in a rasp.
He knocked on the door and left without further comment. After he was gone, I stared at the blank TV screen for a while. Decision made. You know what finally did it? What finally pushed it over the top? I saw at least one of the dead cops was a woman. She looked to be of an age where she might have a little girl. A little girl whose mom wouldn’t come home tonight.
Sounds familiar.
I watched TV to kill the time without falling asleep. I found now that the decision was made, all the weariness of the last few days was creeping in, ready to overtake me. But I couldn’t let it, not yet. They hadn’t left me an alarm clock and I didn’t trust myself not to sleep through this, or I would have tried to contact Wolfe in my dreams. I asked the guard at the door for some coffee. He sneered, made a sarcastic comment about how he wasn’t my serving wench, and let me know he’d have someone else deal with it.
I couldn’t wait to punch him in the face.
I’d never passed slower hours, not even in the box, without any visual or auditory stimuli but those I made myself. Every news report that rehashed the incident at the mall and all the new deaths seemed elongated, stretching into infinity. The metal hands of the clock that hung in my room moved as though they weighed tons rather than grams.
The last five minutes were the worst. I would follow the plan Kurt laid out. Even though I didn’t trust him, I suspected he wouldn’t have any problem taking me to die, especially if he could get away with it.
With two minutes left, I stared back at the news. The timing was perfect: they were just beginning a montage of pictures of all the people who had died so far in this insanity. I watched their faces scroll by, some smiling and innocent – the children, mostly – some staid and serious, caught in candid shots. I would have wept, but my resolve was hardened. Soon enough, there wouldn’t be any more.
I walked to the door at six, knocked on the steel and waited for it to slide open. When it did, the same guy that had told me that he wasn’t my serving wench became my bitch instead, and I battered him against the opposite wall with a single punch. Not bad, considering he was at least a hundred pounds heavier than me.
Three more guards flooded the hallway. I pulled the gun from the first and heaved it at the farthest guy, and my enhanced dexterity scored a perfect hit; the butt of the shotgun clipped him in the jaw. I had seen people get knocked out before, but this time it was like slow motion; his eyes fluttered, he looked woozy for a second, then he dropped to his knees and flopped facedown.
I grabbed the closest guy to me as he went for his radio and yanked him forward, pulling him off balance with the ease of uprooting a small plant. I landed a hammerfist on the back of his head and he went down. I surged forward with a front kick, catching the last guy in the corridor in the stomach, knocking the wind out of him. I followed up with a punch that broke his jaw as well as knocked him out, giving the Directorate guards yet another reason to hate me. There were so many.
After the last one hit the floor, I looked down the steel-plated corridor. It stretched about a hundred feet in either direction, and there was no sound or movement. Most of the Directorate staff were out for the night, so this building was likely much quieter than, say, the dormitory building where all the metas and on-campus staff lived. Nonetheless, I crept quietly up the stairs to the first floor, where, without even leaving the stairwell, I found an exit door.
I studied it in a rush, making sure it wasn’t an emergency exit that would set off a fire alarm. It didn’t appear to be, so I pushed through the crossbar and