Everyone woke to loud music. It echoed through the old brick building the team called home. Cheery pop melody. Multiple androgynous voices. Boy band. Wink was back.
The little girl was dressed in a pink-flower tank top and matching flip-flops. She looked like she’d just gotten back from the beach. She danced around the open floor of the garage putting the upgraded ambulance back together, piece by piece.
Ian wandered past without looking at her. He went to the bathroom, making sure to lift the titanium toilet seat, then started his morning hunt for the keys to the tow truck. He had no idea how they kept moving when no one ever left but him. He was beginning to suspect he was the butt of an ongoing practical joke.
He was about to ask the girl when he saw a white box with identical pictures on the front and sides: a pretty woman smiling next to a brand new coffee machine. He walked over. Next to the box was a grocery bag with three kinds of coffee and filters.
Ian could tell Wink was watching out of the corner of her eye, but she didn’t say anything as she affixed a heavy-treaded wheel to its mount. She had her hair pulled back. She wore plastic pink princess sunglasses. She was so tiny.
Ian picked up the box, shuffled toward the kitchen, and raised a fist of solidarity into the air.
Wink smiled.
Xana was next. She made right for the bathroom and threw up. Her treatments, the ones Wink had designed for her bones, made her feel nauseated, especially after sleep. She stood in the bathroom door and wiped her mouth repeatedly while the little girl danced and lip-synced into the round end of a lug wrench like it was a microphone. The cheery music echoed.
John rolled past with a grunt. “I smell coffee.” He looked like he’d been awake all night.
Xana scowled. She wondered how he managed to function in so much pain. But then, the others probably wondered how she could eat so much. She stood in front of two empty kitchen cabinets. “Are we out of toaster pastries?”
Ian was setting up his coffee machine. He snorted. “You ate four bulk packs in three days.”
Xana frowned. “I enjoy them.”
Wink walked into the kitchen. “There’s some in the back of the truck.” The little girl climbed onto the counter, pulled a box of cereal off the shelf, and hopped to the floor. “And four racks of ribs. I couldn’t carry it all in.”
“You’ve been busy.” Cap was skeptical.
Wink shrugged as she grabbed her bowl from the day before, still resting in the sink. She rinsed it and poured the cereal in. “I don’t have to sleep like you guys.”
Ian paused. That explained so much. “Ah!” Ian jumped back as the cat, Roger, leapt down from the top of the cupboard and ran out the door to the junkyard. “Damn cat.”
John’s motor whined as he maneuvered around them through the tight kitchen. Everyone watched him make his way to the duty roster stuck to the faded yellow refrigerator. He pulled it down, crumpled it, and threw it in the trash, then turned to his team.
Everyone waited.
“New plan. From now on, each of you talks to me about where you think you’re weakest, or what you want to work on, and we come up with some ways for you to get where you need to be.”
No one was quite sure what to say.
“You’re still gonna have goals. And a schedule. But we work on it together.”
Still nothing. The trio just stared.
“How does that sound?”
Xana spoke first. She was tentative, like this was a trick. “I would like to learn about fighting. Not fists. Things to think about. How to know what to do.”
“Tactics.” John nodded. “Okay.”
Wink perked up with a thought. “I want to learn how to incapacitate people with my bare hands.”
The others turned to look at the girl.
“You’re gonna finish the Mast,” John corrected. “And then Plan B.”
“Fiiine.” She dropped her spoon in her milk. “But I still wanna learn.”
“Do I wanna know what Plan B is?” Ian asked.
“Yes,” Xana seconded.
“Since Moron is a big wuss,” the little girl turned to Xan, “we’re settling for a second tier breach.”
“Which is?”
“I was getting to that. A tier one breach is a clean incursion where your target is unaware of any unauthorized access. That’s the best. That’s what we were gonna do until—”
“Wink,” John interrupted.
“A tier two breach leaves traces of the incursion but not before all relevant data is acquired. The drawback is that once they figure out what happened, they’ll change all their codes and everything.”
Xana scowled. “Isn’t that bad? I mean, won’t that warn them?”
“Yessss.” Wink glowered at Ian. “But they can’t change their physical infrastructure—building plans, locations, personnel. At least not right away. We won’t be able to get back into the system, but at least we’ll get what we need.”
“Which is?” Ian looked to John.
John nodded. “A location. And if we’re lucky, schematics. I’m pulling together a full briefing. Target. Mission parameters. Everything.” He nodded. “You all deserve to know.”
Xana looked at him. She seemed so relieved.
Wink pointed to the countdown on the far wall. “Whatever it’s for, they have to be running it from somewhere.”
Ian watched the seconds tick. “So we’re trying to figure out where so we can stop it.” He could live with that.
“Only if that’s okay with you.” The girl was sarcastic.
Ian made a face.
“That’s enough.” John rolled to the door. “Chow down. Trainees on the deck in twenty.”
There was a knock at the door. Everyone stopped and looked. No one ever knocked at the door. The team didn’t get mail. They didn’t order packages. They always picked up their pizza on the corner.
Wink skip-danced—tiny body jerking one way, then the other—to the garage doors. She unhooked the padlock and swung the door up with a clatter.
A heavy balding man in dark sunglasses and a black leather jacket looked down at her without expression. The goons on either side of him did the same. A black car idled in the street behind them.
“Babochka!” The man raised his arms and smiled.
“Hi, Evgeny.”
The man bent and put his arms around the girl, who pursed her lips and moved her face from side to side so he could kiss each cheek. Then he snapped his fingers and his men lifted a heavy case and carried it into the garage in shuffling steps.
John, Xana, and Ian stood at the back of the open room, staring, as the skinny eleven-year-old with the pink princess sunglasses slapped a shrink-wrapped, three-inch stack of hundred-dollar bills into the man’s outstretched hand.
He moved it up and down in the air like he was judging the weight. “Seems a little light.” He had a Russian accent.
The girl walked to the heavy, gray trunk. “I deducted fifteen percent because the last load was off spec.”
“Fifteen percent!” the man boomed. He seemed genuinely furious.
The henchmen stood stiff. Their fingers moved to their weapons. Xana stepped forward without thinking. Her hands made giant fists.
Wink spun. She took off her sunglasses and marched over to the round Russian and stood under him without fear. “Four parts impurities per million, Evgeny. Four. I said no more than two.” She held up fingers. “Did you think I wouldn’t find out?”
The man smiled and raised his arms again, money still in hand. “Since Putin, supply is not easy like before.”
Wink put her hands on her hips. “That’s not our problem. You know how much I hate refining plutonium, Evgeny. Hate. It takes so long. And it’s sooooo boring.”
The man handed the money to one of his henchmen. “You are my favorite, Babochka. Good business. No funny stuff. For you, I take off fifteen percent.” He glanced to the back of the garage, then motioned to the others as if asking who they were.
“Eh.” Wink didn’t turn. “Just my minions.”
Ian turned to John and mouthed Minions?
“Plus,” the man added, “I give you five percent off next order.” He turned and spoke as he walked to the car. One of the men opened the rear passenger door. “Take care of yourself, Babochka. Always you are my special friend. Say hello to Prophet.” Then he got into the car and drove away.
Wink cranked the rickety door closed, replaced the padlock, and skipped in the air as she walked to the trunk. “Yippee!” She clapped her hands and immediately opened the clasps.
After a moment she turned and saw everyone staring.
“What? I used my old core in the Mast. And the Russians have the best plutonium.”
Xana wiped her sweaty face and walked back to her weights in the yard.
Ian turned to John. “If I end up sterile from sleeping next to inadequately shielded plutonium, I’m gonna sue you and Prophet and everyone.”
“Shit!” Ian threw the video game controller across the floor, crossed his arms, and retreated to the back of the couch, sulking.
“Woohoo!” Wink jumped, controller in hand, over and over in front of him. She waggled her butt as she danced. “That’s eighty-six to ZEE-ROH.” She pointed and mockingly rolled her finger back and forth.
“Whatever.”
Xana was sitting next to Ian with a stack of six pizza boxes on her lap. She swallowed a bite and scowled at the screens on the wall. “What’s the point of that game?”
“To humiliate me,” Ian fumed.
John rolled to a stop and Xana handed him a piece of pizza. Everyone knew he’d left to replace his colostomy bag, but no one said anything.
“What’s our status?” he asked the girl.
Wink was mimicking an athlete’s victory dance. “Virus is loaded and running.” She shook a finger at Ian and moved her hips back and forth with each word. “We-should-be-live-after-dinner.”
“Good.” John took nearly half the slice in his mouth and turned his chair toward the kitchen.
The lights went off.
Everyone waited for a moment, expecting them to come back on. But they didn’t.
“Wink?” Ian asked.
The little girl looked at the ceiling.
“Were we supposed to lose power out here?”
The little girl didn’t move. Everyone waited.
Nothing.
“Wink?” John asked.
Still she was silent.
Still nothing happened.
Ian stood. He looked to the girl. He looked to the TVs. He looked back to the girl.
She was worried.
“Oh shit . . .” Ian had both his hands on his head. “Did we just do what I think we just did?”
“What happened?” Xana asked.
“Holy fuck.” Ian walked in a circle. “We just blacked out the city.”
“Wink!” Xana chided.
The little girl ran to her computer workstation on the other side of the hall. “It’s not my fault!”
“What happened?” John was trying to keep everyone calm.
Wink sat and started typing. Her computer screens, running on battery power, clicked on.
“Wink?”
“I don’t know!”
“Then how do you know it’s not your fault?” Xana asked.
“Because you guys rushed me! If we’d just stuck to the plan like Prophet wanted us to, then—”
“Wink,” John interrupted calmly. “Keep looking. Find out what happened.” He turned to the others. “Shut up and let her work.”
“I can’t. Everything is down. The Internet. Wireless. Servers. Everything.”
“All right. Then what do you think happ—”
“I DON’T KNOW!”
“Guess,” John urged.
The little girl bit her lip. “I dunno. Maybe if their security was like five years old or something, then it wouldn’t have caught the kind of replicating subroutine I was using. But no one important uses anything that old!”
Ian shrugged. “I worked for a lot of companies with legacy tech.” Five years probably seemed like an eternity to an eleven year-old. “We are talking about the utility infrastructure after all.”
“I didn’t have time to do a full analysis! This is what I was talking about. This is why Prophet said.” Wink turned and leaned into her words. Her little hands made fists. “You all were rushing me and—”
“No one’s accusing anybody of anything.” John rolled between them and raised his hands in the dim light, even his left, burnt and shriveled and shaking. “Okay? This is an accident. We changed the plan”—he looked at Ian—“and this is what happens.” Back to Wink.
“I’m sorry.” Ian was contrite. “I wasn’t trying to blame you.”
“How bad is it?” Xana asked.
“It’s bad!” Wink objected. “Everything’s down. The whole city. At least up to Stamford.”
“Connecticut?”
“Turn on the police radio.” John tried to stay calm.
Ian walked to the Mast and tuned the police scanner. Everyone gathered around. They listened in silence as the entire NYPD was mobilized. Plans were being made to drive by the homes of those who were off duty. Everyone had to come in. The subway was down. Phones were down. So were most cell towers. Overwhelming traffic crashed the remainder.
Without power, traffic lights were blinking. Huge chunks of Manhattan and the surrounding boroughs were immediately, immovably gridlocked. Buses and taxis were trapped. Experts at headquarters were warning the precincts that without public transportation, commuters would soon flood the streets and bridges in order to walk home. Most people with cars would stay with them and wait for traffic to clear (hours hence), but some would abandon their vehicles, particularly in places with a high fear factor like tunnels and bridges. The stationary cars would act as barricades and create choke points, exacerbating the gridlock.
Without power, ventilation systems would stop, buildings and apartment towers would get stuffy, and people would gather on the roads and sidewalks. With nothing to do, many would smoke and drink, and in such close quarters, arguments would break out. Some would turn violent. A few would escalate.
Most banks had back-up systems and would be secure, but jewelry and grocery stores, large retail outlets, or any place with a lot of cash on hand would be vulnerable to looting.
“And somewhere out there,” a gruff female captain warned, “is a pregnant woman trying to get to a hos—”
John waved and Ian turned it off.
Cap turned to Wink. “How long until they can get things up and running?”
She chewed her lip. “The virus corrupts their command code, but it hides in their OS. They’re going to have to do a complete system wipe—”
“Wink,” John interrupted patiently. “How long?”
The little girl’s eyes flicked back and forth as her mind ran a simulation. An hour to diagnose the problem. Three hours to wipe and reinstall. Then configuration and several waves of high-level system tests, each with a twenty- to forty-minute cycle time.
“Twelve hours.”
“Jesus . . .” Ian turned and took a step back.
“But that’s only if everything goes as planned.”
“And if not?” John asked.
“Maybe a day.” The girl was sheepish. She looked like she wanted to cry. “This is bad, isn’t it?” Her voice was soft. Her next question was barely a whisper. “Will people get hurt?”
“Hey!” John called her to attention. “This isn’t your fault. You did what you were asked to do. This is my mission. It was my decision. It’s my responsibility. Understand?”
Wink nodded, but without conviction.
Ian was antsy. “Cap, we gotta do something.”
John looked at Xana. The big woman was staring out the windows near the ceiling.
“You okay, Xan?”
She didn’t meet his gaze. “We have brownouts in my country. Always in the afternoon, if they can help it, when it’s hot and people stay indoors. But sometimes there is a problem and the power goes out at night, when it’s late. They try to enforce a curfew but . . .” She turned to John. “People are always worse in the dark.”
Ian looked at the clock on the wall. “It’ll be dark in three hours.”
“Ian is right, Captain. We must do something.”
John had seen enough of the world to have a sense of how it would go. At first nothing much would happen. People would expect the power back shortly. When that didn’t happen, some of them would test the waters, see what they could get away with. If they met enough resistance, they’d back down and order would more or less hold.
But, if they broke free, others would join them, and whole neighborhoods would riot. Under the arch of darkness, without street lamps and lighted buildings, all manner of depravity could surface. The weak and defenseless would be victimized first.
Everyone looked at John. They waited.
“Hospitals and emergency services all have back-up generators,” he said. “The police band will be active. We can listen in.”
“But how will they even know?” Ian asked. “Landline phones need power, and the cell towers are jammed. How can anyone call for help?”
Wink’s mind ran with the spark. “The Faction has the best hackers in the world. They’ve spoofed every kind of telephony software ever made. I can reconfigure the drones to act as mini cell towers, but taking only 911 calls. We can park them at key points in the city and route incoming calls to the police using the radio in the Mast. Not only will people with cell phones be able to get calls to the police, but we’ll be able to monitor all the traffic.”
John sat back. “Pretty clever, kid.”
“And I’ll run it all through Prophet. We can target the cases where the police won’t make it in time.”
Ian was skeptical. “Can he really see the future?”
Wink nodded, wide-eyed. “But not that far. And not perfectly. Just, like, probabilities for the immediate future. After that there’s too much uncertainty.”
“How long?” John asked.
“Depends. A few seconds usually, up to a minute or two in some cases.”
“No. How long to configure the drones?”
“Right!” Wink jumped up to get the parts she needed. She yelled as she ran. “If Moron drives I can do it on the way!”
John nodded to the team. “Everybody grab your gear. We’ll suit up en route.”
“No, Brad, I won’t be quiet.” Jennifer Torgerrin pointed to the brand-new diesel generator, a twenty-foot, gray-and-white rectangular block wrapped in plastic and resting on pallets at the far end of the parking lot. The orange light of the setting sun cast long shadows on the pavement. “This is exactly why I wanted to do this last year.”
“This is a freak occurrence.” Bradford McRae was a tall black man with a goatee and a fitted suit. “The old generator is still within its depre—”
“Don’t you dare say depreciation window!”
Brad ran a hand over his shaved head.
“Depreciation is a tax concept. You understand that, right?” Jenn was a big woman with a round face, little makeup, and graying brown hair. “Whether the old generator had legally depreciated or not doesn’t change its—”
“I understand that, Jenn, but we replaced a lot of other equipment last year, including the MRI machine. This hospital has a budget.”
“This hospital makes money.”
“This hospital is the least profitable in the network. I was brought on—”
“But it still makes money. We all don’t come in to work everyday to make a profit. On sick people.”
“Yes.” Bradford was stoic. “We do.”
Jenn shut her lips before saying something that would get her fired.
“We are a for-profit company. That’s exactly what we do.” Brad had seen this coming. This was the problem with internal promotions. Jenn was a former social worker who had moved into upper administration. He needed someone from corporate in that role. “I don’t love the idea, but you know I don’t make the rules.”
“Said every bureaucrat ever.”
“Insulting me isn’t going to change anything.”
A milling crowd had gathered outside to escape the dark halls of the hospital. An ambulance chirped; people moved out of the way as it pulled into the lot and parked on the far side of the generator. It was a new model, a wide-bodied search-and-rescue variant. It was huge.
Bradford scowled. It wasn’t one of theirs. And if they were dropping off, they would have pulled into the ER. He pointed at the vehicle and turned to his assistant, Jayne. “All units are supposed to be on the streets. Get them out of here.”
Jenn stepped into his line of view. “Are you listening to me?”
Bradford ignored her. “Jayne.”
“But what do you want me to do?” the young woman asked.
“Go tell them they can’t park here.”
“Brad!” Jenn insisted.
The tall man turned back to her. “There’s nothing I can do! For Christ’s sake, Jenn.” He pointed to the distant New York skyline.
Jenn pointed in retaliation to the dark windows of the eight-story tower behind him. “Go upstairs and tell that to our dialysis patients.” She already had. She’d walked the halls with the head of nursing while Brad—following company protocol—backed up his files before his computer battery died. When Jenn reached the cafeteria, she’d ordered the staff to clean out the ice cream and give it to the patients. Kids first.
“We have time. We can get them to other hospitals.”
“How?” Jenn stepped forward. She wanted to punch him. “The stoplights are out. The city is a parking lot.”
Bradford raised his hands to stop the encroaching woman. “I can’t wave my magic wand and make the power come back. I can’t miraculously move a gridlocked load lifter from the interstate to our parking lot. And I for damn sure can’t pick up a one-and-a-half-ton generator and carry it—” He stopped.
Bradford stared, mouth agape.
Jenn turned and jumped with a yelp.
A giant in a suit of segmented gray body armor had lifted the generator off the ground. The plastic hung off the side as the heavy machinery tottered on the man’s back. Everyone stepped away.
The faceplate of the giant’s helmet was painted in a flower-cheeked, blue and white skull, like the Day of the Dead. He was struggling, with wobbling knees, to carry the heavy contraption toward the fence-lined machine park at the back of the hospital’s central building.
One step. Two steps. Three. The hunched giant gripped the machine with massive, armor-covered hands. His pace quickened with each step, as if his body responded to the strain by growing even stronger.
Jenn’s eyeballs bulged. Her eyelids felt like they were about to twist back into her head. Her heart beat faster. She’d never seen anything like it.
“Dave!” she yelled at the hospital’s chief engineer, who stood motionless in shock.
The man turned instinctively and looked at her without recognition. Then he understood. “Right!” He ran across the gravel to the far wall of the fenced yard. He pointed to the space next to the old, dead generator. “Just put it right here in the middle.” He motioned. “We can get a temporary connection going and move it later.” He waved to his staff, who were all watching in amazement. “Move!”
The milling crowd was silent as the giant went down on one knee, shaking. Then the other. The big man placed the brand-new generator on the gravel-covered ground with a thud. The fence rattled. Tiny rocks flew. Jenn had tears.
The silent giant never said a word, nor did anyone challenge him, not even Brad. Jenn watched as he walked away. In the middle of his back, just below the stiff collar that protected his neck, was a stencil in white: Halo Armor v2.1.
Dan Ping, a roofer from Jersey, awoke on the sidewalk with a crowd standing over him. He sat up. There were tiny specks of red on his white work shirt and his cargo pants were torn on one side. “What happened?”
“Dude,” a round Hispanic man with long curly hair stared at him, wide-eyed. He wore a black, skull-covered heavy-metal T-shirt. “Teach me.”
Dan looked at his hands. They were sore. It felt like someone had run his knuckles over a cheese grater. “Teach you? Roofing?” He grimaced.
“Naw, man! Where’d you learn to fight like that, brah?”
“What do you mean?”
“Yo!” The Hispanic man pointed to the overturned backhoe in the city street. It had crushed a parked sedan.
Dan ran his eyes down the devastation in the road. He remembered. Men were driving the tracked construction vehicle like a tank over the cars in an attempt to escape through gridlock. A cable was attached to the rear-facing hoe. At the other end was a dismantled ATM. The thieves had yanked it from its mount and driven away, hoping to crack it open later. The police, who now swarmed over the scene, had first given chase on foot, but had to retreat after the thieves started shooting. Apparently their plan hadn’t worked as well as they’d anticipated.
But how had he gotten here?
Dan squinted in confusion. He remembered watching the bulky teller machine bounce and spark as it trailed the backhoe. It was loud. And there were gunshots.
He touched his knuckles gingerly.
A skinny woman helped Dan to his feet.
The metalhead was excited. “Man, I saw you on the sidewalk like you were gonna run, and then you went around the corner when the ATM was bouncing all over breaking shit, and then it almost plowed into that guy on the corner, right? And I thought I should bail too, and then next thing you know, you jumped down from the second floor.” He pointed up. “Which was so cool, ’cuz, like, the thieves totally didn’t see you. And then you landed on the roof of the cab and you were all like Bruce Lee dodging bullets and kicking ass and shit. I got fucking goosebumps, man. It was so hard core! You’re like a straight-up muthafuckin’ bad ass.”
Dan looked at his hands again. They certainly looked like he’d been fighting. They were red and throbbing. “I am?”
“You don’t remember?” the woman asked.
Dan shook his head as a small crowd gathered around him.
“What’s the last thing you recall?” She was worried.
“I saw the backhoe plowing over those cars in the street, and the ATM was bouncing around like a wrecking ball, and the guys on the side were shooting at the cops and . . . I ran. But I wasn’t looking where I was going. I didn’t want to get hurt. I had my head turned, and I ran down that alley.” He pointed. “And I tripped over a guy.”
“Who?”
Dan thought for a second. He heard a whirring noise and looked up to see something like a bird, but not, fly over the roof of the building.
He squinted. “Some guy in a wheelchair. Like one of those ones with a motor?” Dan was so confused. He turned to look at the alley, then back to the wreckage on the street. The man in the wheelchair was gone. “His eyes . . .” It was like they were a thousand miles away, like he was staring right into Dan. Into his soul. It was surreal.
Dan Ping shuddered.
“Hii-ya!” The heavy Hispanic man was doing karate moves on the sidewalk. “Imma fuckin’ killa, biatch!”
Dan could only scowl as the pedestrians on the street crowded around and patted him on the shoulder in praise. In the distance, he heard the retreating wail of an ambulance siren.
[Tap or click here to see pictures of New York in the middle of a blackout]