Mirror's Edge: Impostors 3, page 16
With one elegant cut, he cleaves a perfect hole in the next door. A few steps later, the one after that.
Soon the hallway is full of choking clouds of metal dust. The roar of the pulse lance blends with the distant thunder of explosions, until it sounds like the world is crumbling.
Stunned, half-awake prisoners begin to step from their cells, discovering that they’ve been rescued by a half-naked wolf-man wielding a shrieking blade.
‘You think the control room is seeing this?’ I ask Yandre. There could be scores of Security officers still in the building.
‘Yes.’ Yandre steps through the hole into Boss X’s cell, looks up at the corner, and makes two rebel hand signs.
Back in Kessa Shard’s office, Boss Charles has her orders.
X’s pulse lance is running down. He decides to save what’s left of the battery, waving us down the hall after him.
He’s the boss now.
His crew is me, Yandre, and Zura, along with the motley gaggle of priority prisoners. I recognize a few—my father’s political rivals from a decade ago, walking stunned through the rumbling corridors. A handful are Victorian army officers, who still look battle-fit. Yandre and Zura give them what weapons they can spare. I recognize a member of the Paz post-quake resistance and hand her my pistol.
As we move down the hall, the last prisoner in line is an older woman in a gray kimono. Her frame is slight, her movements elegant. She looks too frail to have threatened my father.
I take her arm, and she turns to me …
My heart skids.
It’s Sensei Noriko.
When we were little, Noriko was Rafi’s etiquette master.
She taught my big sister the tea ceremony, how to use a fan, how to wave to crowds. All the precise degrees of bowing, to greet the more and less powerful of our father’s business partners. And also subtler arts, like how to graciously apologize.
I copied many things that Rafi learned from Noriko, but I only met the woman once. There was a curtsy I could never get quite right, so Rafi convinced me to take her place one day in etiquette class.
With her perfect eye for movement, it took only a few minutes for Noriko to see that I was an impostor.
The next day, she disappeared forever.
That was eight years ago.
‘Thank you, young lady,’ she says, her weight leaning into me. ‘It’s been some time since I’ve taken a walk.’
I open my mouth, with no idea of what to say.
Do I reveal who I am? Blame my sister for the trick that cost Noriko everything? Tell her that my father, her true tormentor, may soon be in a cell himself?
My only certainty is that I’m the last person she wants to see in her first moments of freedom.
‘Lean on me all you need,’ I say.
There’s a shout from ahead.
Gunfire erupts.
I cover Noriko with my body, but the firefight lasts only seconds. Then we’re moving again, the two of us straggling behind the rest of the crew.
For a moment, I wonder why my father put her in with the priority prisoners, an etiquette master among soldiers, politicians, and freedom fighters.
But she knew his greatest secret—me.
I stare at the cell doors stretching out before us. How many other secrets will we unleash today?
The walk back to the control room takes longer than the way here. We’re a crowd, negotiating stairways and blind corners, fighting stray Security officers in our path.
But there are no coordinated attacks, no sentry drones; there’s no knockout gas coming through the vents. Col and the others must have taken the control room.
Security is a snake with its head cut off, writhing around us.
Or maybe not.
‘Do you hear that?’ Noriko whispers beside me.
I almost think she’s joking, with a war in its birth pangs all around us. But then I hear them—running footsteps from behind me.
We’ve just passed a junction of two corridors.
‘To the rear!’ I cry out.
I charge back at the junction, making a fist to summon my variable blade.
They step into view before I can reach the corner, half a dozen Security officers. But they don’t have shock wands or pistols—
Five of them are armed with autocannon, rotary machine guns as wide as firehoses. The staple of Shreve’s crowd control, they can spray a hundred rounds a second.
Those five fall into line across the hall, ignoring me. Another officer stands behind them, ready to give the order.
This corridor has no cover, no bends, no place to hide.
Within seconds, they’ll kill us all.
I skid to a halt, turning back toward the prisoners.
‘Hold your fire! Everyone!’
Most of them freeze—they’re unarmed, still dazed from the shock of freedom.
At the front of the column, X and the others turn to see. Our weapons are pitiful and improvised. Without cover, we don’t stand a chance against autocannon.
The officer behind the others looks at me.
‘You will surrender,’ she says. ‘At once.’
I swallow. Boss X won’t go back into his cell. But if he fights now, he’s condemning us all to death.
‘Give me a minute,’ I say. ‘I’ll talk sense to them.’
‘A minute?’ the officer says. ‘Don’t be absurd. Cycle up!’
The guns whir to life, their barrels spinning too fast to see. The whine of it fills the air like a steam whistle.
The officer steps through the line, careful to leave the field of fire clear.
‘Do you surrender?’ she asks me. ‘Yes or no?’
‘I’m not in command,’ I say. ‘Some of us are rebels, some Victorians. It’s complicated!’
‘No, it’s simple. If you don’t lay down your weapons and surrender, we will open fire—and you will all die.’
I look back over my shoulder. Boss X is strolling toward us at a casual pace, pulse lance in hand.
One sweep of the lance will kill all six of the Security officers, and they know it. X is going to fight.
In his certainty, he looks magnificent.
The officer’s eyes go wider.
‘If your friend comes any closer, we will end every one of you.’
I turn back and shout, ‘X, wait there—I’ve got this!’
He pauses in his stride, but all of us can see his muscles coiling, readying to strike.
X went into that cell to save me and the city of Paz. But he’s not going back again. It’s not something I can ask of him.
And I realize—it’s not something I can let happen.
There are no more arguments inside me, no reasoning. Not with someone who still obeys my father’s orders.
As I turn back to the Security officer, my fist tightens, my knife going long and thin, nothing but a shimmer in the air.
‘Frankly,’ I say, ‘this surrender isn’t happening.’
‘Unfortunate,’ she answers.
She raises her hand to give the order.
All at once, every cell door in the hallway opens.
41. OVERWHELM
They come stumbling out, scores of them.
These aren’t rebels and terrorists, like the priority prisoners. Most have the bland surge of Shreve citizens.
So many of them look young. Maybe they were in the cliques that protested during the Battle of Shreve. Or maybe they just said the wrong thing while the dust was listening.
I try to smile, hoping Col in the control room can see me. However this turns out, our friends’ timing was exquisite.
Some of the prisoners recognize each other, and for a moment, there are hugs and greetings. But when they see the dark blue uniforms of Security, the hallway goes quiet.
Surrounded now, the armed officers have lost focus. They’re looking around nervously, guns pointed at the ceiling.
I manage to speak. ‘I’ll accept your surrender now. You can’t get all of us.’
The officer hesitates.
‘We’ve taken your control room,’ I say. ‘Your city will fall tonight. There’s no point in killing anyone.’
She swallows. ‘There’s still a duty to be done.’
‘You don’t have to—’
‘Eyes forward!’ she shouts.
Her officers gather themselves, leveling their autocannon at the crowd. I can hear Boss X just behind me.
It all happens in a flash—
The officer raises her hand again.
My variable blade sweeps across the space between us, high and fast, invisibly thin. I feel only the faintest pings when its molecule-width edge intersects flesh and bone.
Her hand falls first, spilling from her wrist. The stump is a clean and perfect cross section. She tries to look at it.
But her head turns wrong, slower than her neck. An awful sound, meat and jelly sliding. Her mouth still opens somehow, her panicked eyes staring at the sudden froth of blood at her wrist …
The hand lands on the floor with a muddy slap.
She goes down on one knee, and the hard pop of kneecap against stone seems to jar everything loose—vertebrae, muscles, veins and arteries, the skin and fat of her neck—all of it reluctantly, wetly disconnects.
Her head tumbles, collapses from her shoulders.
The other Security officers stare in horror, watching as her heart settles in her chest, spraying red across gray stone, each beat lessening a little.
Boss X steps forward to command their attention, his lance purring softly in his hand.
His voice is miraculously steady. ‘Cycle down your weapons.’ It takes endless seconds, but one by one the autocannon spin to a halt. For a second, I forget the blade in my hand, invisible and deadly. But finally I let my fist relax, and the plastic writhes back around my fingers.
Like this was all a magic trick, and the Security officer is about to stand up to take a bow. But she just lies there, her blood spreading across the floor toward my stolen shoes.
I stare at the rings on my fingers, but they’re clean. The blade was too thin for any part of her to cling to.
Boss X places a hand on my shoulder. ‘Well struck.’
I turn away from his praise, his pride in me.
This camo-surged body feels like it’s falling apart, all its stringy tissues snapping. My bones are liquefacted, like the shock of what I’ve done is a fall at terminal velocity.
Dysmorphia by proxy.
Sensei Noriko is still beside me, and I expect to see horror in her gaze. But her eyes are calm.
‘Young lady,’ she says, taking my arm. ‘Walk with me again.’
She leads me away from the fallen officer, her steps measured, my weight leaning into her. He body is lined with iron, a dancer’s muscles beneath silk.
In a soft voice, she tells me a story about a girl who loved a fish, and how its shining scales became the mountains and craters of the moon.
There is an etiquette, it seems, for beheadings.
The way Noriko holds my arm, it’s like her fingers are pressing on my burned-out feels. I imagine Sublime and Philosophical passing through my veins.
All bodies fall apart in the end.
The escape is still happening around us. The former prisoners crowd the surviving Security officers into a cell, distributing their autocannon, sidearms, and body armor. X takes his place at the head of the line again. The shuffling throng around us has become formidable, the beginnings of an army.
But the battle frenzy has gone cold in my veins.
Col comes pushing through the crowd. He watched the beheading on a screen—I can tell from his face.
When Noriko sees him coming, she smiles and bows, withdrawing one elegant step.
Col wraps his arms around me. His breathlessness, the pounding of his heart, tells me that he ran all the way.
‘You had to do it,’ he says.
I look at him—wondering if he knows how sad his words sound. They only make me feel worse.
I chopped off someone’s head, like a mad queen from some littlies’ story.
‘What’s happening to my city?’ I ask.
‘The tower’s still standing. The Shreve feeds are claiming they’ve repulsed the invaders.’
‘But it’s a lie?’
In answer, the building shivers around us.
‘It’s a work in progress,’ Col says.
I look at the prisoners filing past. There seems to be a never-ending supply of haggard faces, stunned by sudden freedom.
If you added up all the years they’ve been in those cells, how many lifetimes has my father stolen?
The eight years that Rafi and I stole from Sensei Noriko are unforgivable. Multiplying those years by all these people, unimaginable.
‘How are we going to get everyone to safety?’ I ask. ‘There must be hundreds of them.’
‘Six hundred and seventy-one,’ Cols says, ‘according to Kessa Shard. She’s awake and cooperating—we told her Demeter was on our side. Or maybe she can see it’s all over for your father.’
I shake my head. Nothing can be certain until he’s dead.
The battle above our heads is still raging. But I don’t care if the sky falls in on us, as long as this attack ends my father once and for all.
‘The free cities should have done this last year,’ I say. ‘The moment he invaded Victoria.’
Col places a hand on the wall, as if to feel the vibrations of bombardment better. Shreve must have burned in his dreams a hundred times.
But he says, ‘This was never going to be simple.’
I pull his hand away from the cold stone, keeping it in mine.
‘Kessa gave the HQ evacuation order,’ he says. ‘Security’s gone, along with most of the hovercars. But we found a few mass arrest shuttles in the bay.’
Mass arrest, like the night of the Revelation.
I shake off the thought.
‘We’ll put one commando on each shuttle,’ Col says. ‘Our extraction transmitters will keep our side from shooting us down.’
‘But they’re expecting to rescue eight of us—not hundreds!’
He shrugs. ‘Sometimes a change in plan turns a trip into an adventure, Islyn.’
I turn away, watching the stream of freed prisoners filing past.
If my father’s regime doesn’t fall tonight, he’ll be looking for someone to blame for this attack.
Who better than a bunch of old political enemies and crims?
‘They might be safer in their cells,’ I say, ‘if this all goes wrong.’
Col laughs. ‘Ask if they want to go back.’
I squeeze his hand. ‘You set them all free at just the right moment, by the way. It saved us.’
‘Boss Charles did that. I think the rebels always planned to free everyone here.’
‘Of course.’ I remember X, a few moments out of his cell, taking command. ‘It must be nice, being so certain.’
I must owe hundreds of these prisoners an apology, for leaving them exposed to my father’s revenge after the Revelation. But I don’t even know what to say to my first victim.
Or maybe I do.
I turn to Sensei Noriko, who’s been listening to me and Col with quiet interest. Maybe it’s been a while since she’s heard a conversation.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say.
She tilts her head a little, confused. ‘For rescuing me?’
‘No—for getting you locked up in the first place.’ I lean close and whisper, ‘My face has changed, but my name is still Frey.’
42. SENSEI
‘You were the changeling,’ she says.
Genuine shame pours through me—something more real than the humiliation manufactured by a feed show. A rat in my chest that has gnawed at my heart for eight years.
Our childish prank cost this woman everything.
‘I was a body double. We were just trying to play a trick. We didn’t mean to get you in trouble.’
Get you in trouble—as if a decade in a cell were twenty demerits.
‘A body double is what I guessed, after I’d had some time to think about it.’ She looks me up and down, a little uncertain. ‘But you were only nine. And now …’
‘Almost seventeen,’ I say.
Noriko can’t hide her shock at how long she’s been in that cell. She crumples a little before my eyes, and I have to look away.
‘We’re twin sisters,’ I explain to her. ‘When we were little, pretending to be the same person felt like a joke we were playing on the world.’ My throat is tight around the words. ‘Until we played it on you.’
‘A joke?’ A flash of anger crosses her face—years of staring at blank cell walls, of betrayal bottled up and finally released.
‘I’m sorry’ is all I can say.
Slowly, as if controlled by a dial, calm descends on Noriko’s face again.
‘I made the choice to work for your father,’ she says. ‘I knew he was a monster, but I thought I could help his daughter gain empathy—which might help the world.’
She looks at me questioningly.
I’m not sure if I have the answer Noriko wants. Rafi has empathy for me, but she also thinks I’m part of her.
‘We knew right away we’d done something terrible,’ I say. ‘Both of us were sorry.’
Noriko nods. ‘But you’re not the same, you two.’
It takes me a moment to answer, because the question has haunted me since I transformed my face.
‘Not anymore.’
‘You were different then, Frey. That’s how I knew something was amiss, when you came to my class. You moved like an entirely different creature.’
‘I took combat lessons; Rafi took ballroom dancing.’
Noriko shakes her head. ‘It was more than that. The way you responded. The way you listened. Like a mirror image—the reverse of her.’
After all these years, I realize something.
‘You were the first person to see me.’ Before Col knew my real name. Before X saw the rebel in me.
And from that moment, part of me knew I was my own person.
‘You must hate us,’ I say.
‘For a long time, yes. But mostly I was worried for you. You were so young, with no one to protect you.’ Noriko looks at Col’s hand in mine. ‘I’m glad that you’re not alone anymore.’
