Kira Vex's Arc

Chapter 2 of 8

Kira ran until the market noise died behind her. The deer had her scent now. She could feel it the way you feel a hand under thin ice, close and patient. Her suppression was slipping. Sweat cut through it. Fear cut through it worse. She had maybe two hours before it caught her in the open. She needed walls the thing could not walk through, and time to think. At the edge of the city she found it: a tower left over from some older century, tall and rust-streaked, its elevator shaft dark behind cracked glass. Antennas leaned off the roof like broken fingers. The door hung on one hinge. She went in and pulled it shut and jammed a length of pipe through the handle. Inside smelled like dust and old wiring. She climbed the stairs two at a time, past dead panels and pale green lights that still blinked for no one. On the third landing she stopped. She drew the weapon from her pack. It was a wide butcher's blade with two laser emitters seated along the spine. She thumbed the switch. The edge lit pink, then steadied. The battery would give her one clean cut. Maybe two. She kept climbing. She needed height. She needed to see the thing coming. The top room was a ring of dirty windows. She pressed her forehead to the glass and looked down at the street. Empty. Empty. Then not. A figure stepped into the open below. Not the deer. A man. He stood in the middle of the road and looked up at the tower as if he had been told exactly where to find her. She knew his face before he lifted it. She knew the line of the jaw and the set of the shoulders because they were hers. Same height. Same dark hair cropped short. Same small scar above the left eye that she had gotten at fourteen in a training yard she would not be born near for decades. Her hand went numb on the handle. The blade dimmed. He raised one palm, slow, the way you calm an animal. In his other hand he held something small and matte black. He pressed it. A soft pulse went out from it. She felt her own wrongness fold flat inside her chest, tucked away, gone. Somewhere past the tower, she heard the deer stop running. Heard it turn. Heard it walk off in another direction, chasing nothing. He had masked her. From the street he mouthed one word up at the glass. Down. Kira stepped back from the window. Her hands shook. The tracker was off her. She was alive for the next hour. And a man wearing her face was waiting at the bottom of the tower, holding technology that should not exist in this century, and he knew her name before she had given it.