Against Gravity

The sound of her cough reflected off the hard surfaces of the hotel room's walls before arriving at Kendrick's ears. There his augmentations processed the sound through a variety of arcane algorithms, thus generating a crude map of the space contained by the four walls.

So Kendrick did not literally "see" Helen standing in one corner of the hotel room, but he could sense her.

Then another sound, a faint creak that Kendrick interpreted as his wallet being opened.

Alarmed, he lifted his head a few inches from the pillow. Now he could make out her silhouette.

She stopped then and glanced over at him. He could not be sure if she could see him watching her.

"Helen?" he said softly.

She turned away again, and his eyes, more fully adjusted to the light, could now see that she was studying the contents of his wallet. Angry and confused, he slipped naked from the bed and went over to her. He reached down to take the wallet from her hand, thinking how easily he'd been taken in and that she was nothing more than a thief.

Helen whirled, her limbs and torso blurring in motion. Some enormous force lifted him and threw him against the opposite wall. He landed back on the bed, its springs creaking in protest. A cheap framed print tumbled from the wall above the bed and fell to the floor.

She flew at him across the room, and at once he realized that she was an Augment. The heel of her fist slammed into Kendrick's chin, pressing him so hard into the mattress that he could feel the springs digging into his spine.

However, she no longer held the advantage of surprise. Kendrick twisted his legs and thighs upwards, allowing him to slide a few inches down lower on the mattress and dislodging the main focus of her grip. Grabbing at Helen's hair, he pulled her face down towards him. Then he dug the fingers of his free hand into one of her eyes, feeling a sense of satisfaction bordering on the sadistic when he heard her scream.

As she managed to twist out of his grasp he seized the chance to pull himself off the bed. She came at him again, kicking and punching blindly.

Kendrick barely managed to fend off her attack. Whatever kind of augmentation Helen had, it made her react faster than he could.

Still, he had learned in the Maze what he was capable of, so he managed to block some of the blows that rained down on him at lightning speed, if not all of them. Helen glared at him, the flesh around her right eye now bruised and raw-looking. As one blow caught him on the side of his head, Kendrick felt the back of his skull rebound off the hotel-room door. He heard wood crunch under the impact.

While he was still dazed, Helen pushed him to the floor and, gripping the top of his head in both hands, began to slam his cranium against the floor.

The first couple of impacts stu

The sound of someone drawing on a cigarette. Then a silence, lasting several seconds.

"Awake yet?"

Kendrick heard footsteps moving closer. A hollow click, as of the safety being taken off a gun. Tensing, he found that he was tightly bound, the bonds cutting painfully into his flesh.

A painful tearing sensation as the blindfold was removed, and he stared up into sunlight so bright that he had to screw his eyes up tight against it. He tried to speak but found that he'd been gagged.

Kendrick stared up at a face reduced to a hazy silhouette by the jagged ferocity of the sun at high noon. Wherever he was now, it was somewhere very hot.

The dark outlines at the edge of his vision told him that he'd been deposited in the boot of a car. His body was folded up painfully in the limited space.

Hands dragged Kendrick out, the hard metal lip of the boot scraping painfully against his flesh. Now he could see that his wrists were bound in front of him with narrow strips of white plastic. Although these strips looked relatively fragile, he could barely flex his hands.

With some dismay, he realized that his legs too were bound. He fell down hard on a dusty desert road.

A handgun wavered into view, a vicious-looking thing with a long barrel. Its muzzle was pressed against his temple.

"Here's the deal." Now he could make out Helen's face. "If you need to take a leak or a shit, the time is now. Then you're back in the car."

As Kendrick nodded, she tucked the gun into her jeans and yanked his trousers down around his thighs. He felt a hot flush of humiliation.

"Don't make the mistake of thinking I'm enjoying this," Helen muttered, "but there is absolutely no fucking way I'm going to untie you."

She dragged him to the side of the road where the tarmac merged with rough desert grasses, then kicked him over onto his side.

"Right, take a leak if you need it. Don't take for ever."

Kendrick tipped himself a little further over onto his side, and urinated onto the desert soil, only partially managing to avoid wetting himself in the process. He gritted his teeth and twisted away from the puddle of urine.

"D'you need to shit?" Helen asked him.

Kendrick twisted his head from side to side in the negative, staring into the middle distance while she yanked his trousers back up around his hips.

"Well, thank Christ for that," she muttered. A few minutes later she lifted him up and rolled him back into the boot of the car. Kendrick watched the daylight disappear again as the boot-lid came down with a solid thunk, leaving him with only his own thoughts and the petroleum stink of a pile of greasy rags – which was the nearest thing he had to a pillow.

Summer 2088 (exact date unknown) The Maze

Kendrick shivered, wrapping his arms around his ribs. His thin paper uniform provided absolutely no defence against the freezing cold of the darkened corridors. He'd given up trying to count the hours and days since their abandonment.

Someone had died recently just a few metres from where he now crouched. The death had occurred in a sudden outburst of violence that'd had nothing to do with Sieracki's instructions. It might already have been a few hours ago, but time was getting harder to judge.

The man's dying screams had gone on for far, far too long. Nobody knew exactly what had happened, or who was responsible for the killing. Kendrick had been the first to stumble across the body, while it was still cooling. The weapon used to slay him – a piece of metal twisted from one of the trolley frames – still lay nearby in a pool of gore.

And that's how it happens, Kendrick thought, alone now in the darkness. Fear and desperation were driving them all apart.

He'd known from the start that he would answer Sieracki's call when the time came.

Sieracki's voice had boomed out again, some indeterminate number of hours before. Three names had been called; nobody Kendrick knew, but all of them men. A crowd had followed them to one of the great shield doors beyond which lay the lowest levels, but Kendrick hadn't had the stomach to witness it.

As always when the names were called, the door lay open.

The first time this had happened, several men and women had rushed eagerly towards the suddenly open shield door, not seeing what the rest had noticed – automated gun turrets positioned just beyond. Those who ran forward were cut down instantly; as the rest fell back, the turrets powered down with a whine like a jet plane approaching a runway. Kendrick witnessed it all.

When those first two names were called out again, a woman had stepped hesitantly forward from the crowd, her expression unreadable. Kendrick realized with horror that she could see nothing in the darkness; she made her way hesitantly, by touch.