X: METROCLAVE
Min lies in a crumpled heap just inside the MetroClave's foyer, her hands clasped over her ears. The gunshots died down ten minutes ago, but there are still sounds coming from outside—horrible sounds, screams and snarls and the dripping-wet rrrrip of teeth shearing through living meat.
But the MetroClave door is strong, Min tells herself. Hardened against intrusion. This is as safe a place as any to rest.
Min closes her eyes and attempts to clear her head. There's a jangly feeling in her nerves, a peculiar, caffeinated jitter that rattles her bones. She searches for the manufactured tranquility of her security grafts, then recoils. They've been stretched to their limits, she realizes with queasy certainty. Any further, and the calm that's protecting me will tear wide open… and the pain will come rushing in.
She breathes deep, trying to bring the jittery feeling under control. Half-repressed memories of her torturous hobble to the MetroClave door come to her unbidden, then go circling through her head like a carousel of nightmares. "I won't sugar coat it, kiddo," Willow had told her. "You're about to witness things no one should ever have to see."
She was right.
Min remembers the sound of a half dozen fire alarms, all tripped simultaneously in the office parks surrounding her. Their shrill wail swiftly gave way to the deeper, throatier roar of emergency klaxons warning of impending atmospheric venting.
Like clockwork, the buildings' exterior doors slid open to eject their terrified occupants. Scores of trembling city officials—high-status refugees from the Blackout—came stumbling out in a daze, decompression alarms screaming behind them. Then, one by one, the buildings locked down again to vent their atmospheres into space.
In a span of minutes, Min went from a lone girl to completely surrounded by shivering, frightened people, all huddled together like sheep against the cold. They hadn't known what was coming for them. If they had, they might have preferred hard vacuum.
She remembers the oncoming Botched swarm, spilling forward in a roiling tangle. A shifting carpet of twisted bodies, bucking and screeching and trailing ropes of milky drool. Some of them were sheathed in an oily substance that shimmered like black vinyl. Others were bent nearly double under the weight of dozens of recursive limbs. Ruptured hoses spewed gastric ejecta, and chipped teeth flashed in the dark.
She chases the nightmare image away, and it's swiftly replaced by another. One of the buildings' security teams, a dozen hard-looking men in body armor, screaming and pissing themselves at the sight of what was coming for them. Their weapons barked and spat fire, but the swarm surged forward anyway, absorbing them in a carnivorous tide.
The carousel turns. Min's memory is invaded by a Botched old man, gaunt save for a grotesquely swollen belly. As she watched, it ensnared a shrieking city administrator and buried its teeth in his neck. A second later, it arched its back, tearing away an enormous hunk of meat and swallowing it in a single gulp. The abdominal hoses that dangled between its legs flooded red, then black, with blood.
Through all this carnage, Min had stumbled forward, convinced of her own impending death. But against all odds, she'd made it. How many lives her survival had cost, she couldn't begin to guess.
"Willow?" Min calls for the tenth time. "Can you hear me?"
Static. With the MetroClave's doors shut, she's cut off.
And so she lies back, covers her ears, and waits for her injured body to knit itself back together again.
***
Later, Min prods at her knee, gently probing with her fingertips. It feels sturdy again. Solid. She feels like she's been resting here for hours, but she has no way of knowing for sure.
She shifts her focus to the images that Willow sent her: a series of landmarks that will lead her to an access terminal. The sooner I get the gate open, the sooner Willow will come back, she tells herself. And then we can go to her sanctuary together, and this nightmare will finally be over.
And so she struggles to her feet and begins picking her way through the silent MetroClave, searching for a path forward.
Each room she visits is more terrible than the last. Bodies, either shot dead or blasted apart, lie strewn everywhere. Bloody handprints mark the walls, and the overturned office furniture has been pockmarked by bullets.
But there are no scratch marks on the walls or floor, Min realizes as she winds her way through another ruined meeting room. No spidery, corrupted remains.
She pauses again to take stock of her surroundings, to compare them with the slideshow that Willow flashed into her head. The MetroClave is as still and quiet as a mausoleum. Whatever happened here wasn't caused by the Botched, she decides with quiet certainty. The people who took refuge in the MetroClave—Enforcers, Board advisors, city administrators—they did this to each other. And some, perhaps, to themselves.
She remembers the Revel, just hours prior. It feels like an eternity ago. She pictures the man who'd sought shelter under her parents' awning, and how her father's security chief had destroyed his jaw. Desperate people, tearing each other down to improve their own chances of survival, she frowns. Doing the Blackout's work for it.
Min picks her way under a final collapsed doorway, sliding under ceiling beams and around rubble. And then she sees it: the access terminal. Her sense of relief is so powerful that she could scream. Her fatigue forgotten, she races to it, locates its NeuroSim cable, then patches it into the port at the base of her neck.
The connection is instant, plunging her into a menu structure that feels as dark and placid as a subterranean sea. You've done it. Min allows herself a moment of satisfaction. You're here, standing at Willow's gate. All you need to do now is turn the key.
She taps the bony growth behind her ear. Nothing. If there's a way of triggering it, Willow didn't tell her.
Instinctively, Min shifts her focus to the strange pressure behind her left eye. She runs imaginary fingertips over its contours, gently probing for some sort of button or release. Eventually, she finds it: an invasive thought, utterly foreign to her, lodged in her mind like a metal shaving. She imagines pinching it in the jaws of a set of pliers, and squeezing until she has a solid grip.
Now, she thinks, breathing heavily, what if I—
A crackling buzz ignites behind Min's eye. It pulses, swells, and then bursts, sending a shockwave of electricity into the graft on her skull, then down through the rest of her body.
As the terminal melts down, she falls to the ground, convulsing.
Everything goes black.
