Black Marion

22

Alex stared at the dead Tag, waiting for the notice of her simulation results to appear. Then she remembered this was real, and with her emotions suspended in air, she exited the network.

Out in the physical world, her heart and head were drumming up a storm. Against the ache of both, she opened the Tower monitors through her connector. Holding cell 6559C had Haneul slumped on a steel chair, bound, unconscious. The blue light that had been on his neck when she had last seen him was gone.

But he was not moving.

Alex blinked, mind blank, blood slow. She was beginning to feel the moment erode, her whole world splinter. Then those shoulders jolted. Haneul lifted his head, shook it next. She exhaled a shaken laugh. It was 4:52 AM.

She watched Haneul look around, his neck bare of the Sky's electric light. Her own eyes burned. Blurred. She wanted to shiver and cry, but there was no time, so she shut her eyes for three, four seconds. Then she dusted the folds from her oversized coat and left the port room.

The elevator took her down to floor 650, where the doctor was being held. Automated lights flashed down a darkened corridor as Alex walked, painfully conspicuous. She should have disabled the sensors—but this close, she couldn't be bothered to fix that mistake. At section 59 of the floor, she ran into the first physical restriction she'd seen in a Sky building: steel bars. These opened after she tampered with the control settings she'd linked to her connector, and then she was in a long, sterile hall. On the right was a spanning pane of one-way glass, interrupted only by the frames of entrances. She could see the first one, 6559A, empty. 6559B, empty.

6559C.

She stopped here. Behind it, Haneul was sitting with his eyes closed, jaw loose. No winces or flickers, shoulders spread and straight. He seemed to be waiting.

Alex opened the door.

Through the frame, Haneul lifted his eyelids. He saw her and blinked, but his expression did not change.

He said, voice graveled and monotone, "What's this?"

Alex hesitated. She looked away because it hurt to see that Haneul did not recognize her—but where was the surprise? Last they had met was, to Haneul, the only time they had met—a passing encounter that had not lasted even a minute. Even if her code had eliminated the memory suppression, there was no guarantee Haneul's memories of Alex would return. That science was beyond her expertise.

Her eyes caught on the opened navigation screens of her connector. The corner read 5:04 AM. The Tower would open for business soon.

"There's no time," she said, going to the panel set into the wall. There she pulled her hand into a sleeve and punched in the command to release the restraints on the chair. In her peripheral, Haneul turned his palms with a frown, then stood warily.

"Come with me," said Alex.

She left the room. She heard quiet footsteps behind. She knew she needed to say more, give an explanation, but she was having trouble finding words among everything else in her head. They were passing back through the glass of 6559B when Alex was roughly spun by her shoulders. Her back hit the glass. Haneul pressed a forearm to her neck, leaning close.

Her blood rushed. She was almost scared, but her first thought was that Haneul was warm—feverish.

"What," said Haneul, "is going on?"

She gripped his arm.

"I want to help you. I'm—" the woman you saved six years ago, but she was afraid of the blank or disbelieving look she'd see in those eyes, so she bit her lip and brought up her wrist instead. Haneul's gaze flickered to the screens on his connector, which showed the occupied cells on the opposite section of the floor. "Morning is coming. We need to get the others before the first workers arrive."