Petra Vane's Arc

Chapter 3 of 10

The first branded fugitive found Petra two days after she hung her tools. He crawled from the drainage tunnel with a cut brand on his shoulder and an implant under his skin. Petra cut it free in twenty minutes. She dropped the bloody chip into a tin cup. Then she heard boots on gravel through the wall. A patrol light swept the grate above. The chip still pulsed on the table, calling them straight to her room. She pressed her hand flat over the cup, as if that could smother the signal. It could not. Every patient meant a new live chip. Every live chip meant a patrol at her door. She had lost her last clinic this exact way. She would not lose this one. A small sound came from the tunnel mouth. A barefoot girl stood there in a torn white gown. Her head was shaved. A barcode marked the back of her neck. Petra had seen her twice before, watching from the dark, never speaking. The girl could not speak at all. She only pointed, now, at the tin cup, then at the wall that faced the prison. "I know," Petra said. "It won't go quiet." The girl's eyes went wide as the boots grew louder. Petra's pocket watch stopped ticking. So did the drip from the ceiling. The whole room held still, frozen around the frightened child. Petra had felt this before near her. In that silence, she understood the girl's meaning. The prison was full of trackers already. One more would vanish in the noise. The boots faded. The watch ticked again. Petra grabbed the cup. "If a chip pings inside those walls," she said, "they read it as a prisoner. Not a fugitive. Not me." She climbed to the grate at the tunnel's high end. Through the bars she saw the near wall of the prison compound. Watchtowers. Sealed gates. The dead strip of gravel between. She worked the chip through the bars, drew her arm back, and threw. The tiny thing arced over the wall and dropped inside the yard. She waited. No siren. No light turned her way. A patrol did roll past below her, but it rolled toward the prison, not her room. They were chasing a ghost behind the walls. Petra climbed down. The girl watched her, steady now. Petra held up her empty hand and almost smiled. "That's the answer," she said. "Cut it out. Throw it over. They chase their own walls." But the girl pointed again, at the barcode on her own neck, then at the tunnel behind her. More were coming. Many more. And each chip Petra threw would land in a yard that counted its prisoners every night. Sooner or later the guards would find chips that matched no cell, and they would start looking outward, at the dead space where the signals began.