Kira Vex's Arc

Chapter 4 of 8

They walked three blocks before Kira stopped him. The street was empty. The pup padded behind them, quiet as smoke. The man with her face waited, hands still open. She had followed him this far on words. Words were cheap, and her handlers had proved cheap words could kill innocent people. She needed something she could test. "Stop talking," she said. "I need proof, not a story." He nodded like he had expected it. "Then pick a test." She thought. A tracker copy could lift facts from her head. It could not know things she did not know. If he was really from her future, he had lived past this week. He had memory she had not made yet. "The archivist," she said. "The one they sent me to find first. Where does he keep his records?" He did not hesitate. "He doesn't. There is no archivist. It's a bot. Century-old body, gears showing through the chest plate. It stores the files. They gave you a person to look for so you'd stop looking at the boy." Her stomach dropped. She had never questioned the word archivist. She had pictured a man. "Where." "Two streets over. Basement of the corner shop with the green door. It walks at night to charge. You'll know it." She pointed at an alley mouth. "Wait there. Hands on the wall. The pup stays with you." He went. She watched him press his palms flat to the brick. She left the mask device on a crate between them so his hands stayed clean of it. She moved fast. Two streets. Green door. A shop shuttered forty years too early for her century. The basement hatch was unlocked. She went down with the cleaver lit. It was standing in the dark, plugged into a wall socket by a frayed cord. Metallic body. Elegant joints. A cage of brass gears turning slow behind a cracked chest plate. Its lens rotated to her and focused. It said her handler's name in a calm voice and asked for her authorization code. She gave a wrong code on purpose. It answered anyway. It began to recite her mission file. The target's name was not the boy she had been briefed on. It was a different name. A girl. Fourteen. Lived on the coast. Kira cut the power cord. The lens dimmed. The gears wound down. She climbed back to the street with her hands shaking. He was still against the wall. The pup sat at his heel. "You told the truth," she said. "Part of it." "The girl. On the coast." "They'll send someone else now that you've stopped. We have maybe a day." Kira picked up the mask device. The hooves started again, far off, turning toward the sound of the cut wire.