Free Shattered by Robin Wasserman Page B

still watching the red light pool in the whites of their eyes.
    Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

TOGETHER ALONE
    â€œWe’re all better off now.”
    T he red light turned to tears, trickled down pale, still faces.
    Their eyes were bleeding.
    Alert! Biohazard! Alert!
screamed the vidscreens, although there was no one left to warn.
    â€œGet it together!” Riley’s hands were rough on my arm and back, pushing me forward. “We have to get
out
.”
    What’s the hurry?
I thought, a mad giggle rising in me.
No bio equals no hazard. Safe and sound.
    But I shook him off and I ran with him, down the dead, empty hall, the corp-town in lockdown, its residents hiding or evacuated. Or neither. Steel shutters had dropped to shield the glass walls, trapping us inside, in the dark. The biohazard protocol had locked even the glowing emergency exits, sealing thecorp-town tight—no nasty microorganisms would escape to the outside world. And no mechs.
    Riley went straight for the control panel to the right of the nearest exit and ripped off the cover. He began messing with the wires, stripping two of them with his teeth and winding them together, then touching them to a third, and before I could ask what the hell he was doing, the steel slid up toward the ceiling, and he pushed through the door. His hand gripped mine, tugged hard, and I followed.
    We cut across the matted astroturf surrounding the residential cubes, ignoring the solar-powered cart that had carried us here—even if it wasn’t on lockdown with the rest of the compound, it was too slow and too easily tracked by the secops. Alarms were blaring across the campus, and steel shutters had dropped across all the residence cubes, turning them into bunkers, a fitting accessory to the corp-cum–war zone. The air split with distant sirens. Thunder shook the sky. Except it wasn’t thunder; it was a squadron of helicopters dropping toward the glass cube as the emergency vehicles, the fire trucks and ambulances, appeared on the horizon. Next would come the secops looking for someone to blame. I suspected we’d do.
    â€œWe didn’t have to run,” I said, my brain finally starting to work again, though I was still running, because he seemed so sure and I was so not. We passed the wastewater ponds and trampled through deserted soy fields. The workers had presumably all been hustled away to the underground safe houses dotting the perimeter, and only the reaping and spraying machines remained to witnessus tearing through the knee-high fronds of sallow green. “We could have stayed—maybe we could have helped.”
    Riley sped up. “We’re helping ourselves.”
    We ran for miles, quickly crossing the boundaries of the corp-town into open country. Security at the borders was light—in most spots nonexistent—and it would probably take at least an hour before the secops had a chance to cover the grounds. In the meantime, the more distance we could put between us and them, the better. Mech bodies didn’t tire, so we just kept going. Through industrial wastelands and past smokestacks puffing purified clouds into foggy sky, beyond the boundaries of the corp-town, away from the sirens, through flat fields and more fields, staying off the road, feet tramping through the high grass, another mile and another stretching between us and the corp-town. I’d been a runner, before, and I knew my stride. Counting paces was easier than thinking, so I focused on the wet thump of our shoes on the soggy ground, marking off five miles, then ten, then twenty. Until a cloud of green mushroomed on the horizon, resolving itself, as we drew nearer and nearer, into a wide, dense grove of trees. We’d reached the border of a Sanctuary, twenty square miles of unspoiled wilderness, off-limits to orgs. Which meant, except for the birds and squirrels and deer, we were alone.
    â€œHere,” Riley said, letting himself slam into a