Jay Posey - Three

Wren didn’t understand. People often shipped in the final moments of their lives, sending their consciousness off to a digital warehouse for preservation, effectively ending their own life.

“But… if you shipped, how can you be here now?”

“They didn’t find me. So I came back.”

He paused, sucked his teeth.

“But… I don’t think I came back alone.”

Jackson dropped his head into his hands, clenched his eyes tight. Pulled his hair back, tight.

“Night is a bad time for me.”

The two stayed silent for a time, Wren not sure how to respond, and Jackson seemingly lost in his own thoughts. Finally, Jackson was the first to speak. He stood.

“It’s alright, I’m not going to hurt you. Sometimes I just have trouble remembering which one is me. But I’m OK. Right now, I’m OK.”

Jackson stretched out his hand.

“Come on, little one. Let’s go get your mama.”

Three crouched at the entrance of the Vault, running his fingers along the edge of the gate where it separated from the wall. Eyes closed. Hunting for a mechanism or release that might activate the door. For now, he focused on solving the problem at hand, on reuniting Cass with her son. Once that was taken care of, then and only then would he let his mind consider the gathering storm that RushRuin surely presented for them.

His fingers brushed across a small, angular piece of metal just inside the gate. As he probed it with his fingers, he snuck a glance at Cass, standing nearby, wearing his coat. Chilled, pale; fragile. And somehow in her raw humanity, utterly captivating. Her eyes flicked to his, as if she felt his gaze. He didn’t look away.

“Any luck?” she asked.

Three shook his head, opened his mouth to explain he was unlikely to find any sort of way to open the gate from the outside. Instead, the sudden sound of straining steel. The gate shifted, rose in jerking steps. And suddenly, a gasp from inside, and a cry from without. A blur of motion. Cass on her knees, Wren in her arms, both sobbing. Inside the Vault, Three saw a gaunt young man operating a jury-rigged crank. The two nodded to each other. But for a time, it just didn’t seem right to speak. Even in this collapsed and decaying world, the reunion of mother and child demanded some semblance of reverence.

Three looked at the two of them, the delicate pair that he had brought out into the open. Without question, he was responsible for them now. And in a sudden flash he felt, without question, they were the mistake that would cost him his life.

And he wasn’t sure it was a mistake at all.

Three sat cross-legged on the floor, staring down the empty corridor, letting the hollowness fill him until he could taste it. He wanted to feel rage, wrath, a burning righteous fury to unleash upon the Weir when next they met. But here, now, in this heavy, silent hallway where the air barely dared to stir, he felt nothing. The emotions he had expected to surge and seethe were as dead as the shell of this underground city.

Loss was nothing new. He’d lost more than a few acquaintances out in the open, and even a couple he’d have dared to call friends. But Gev? If there was anything like family left in the world for Three, Gev had been it. And he’d never seen the Weir hit anything on this scale before. Gev, the Weir… Dagon. Too much to process.

And Cass. She’d played him, and he’d let her. He’d killed for her, nearly died for her, even left and come back for her. Even now he didn’t know why. Or wouldn’t admit that he did. He’d seen women and children plenty of times before, in the shelters, in the gutters, never thought of them as anything more than human debris. But these two… he felt something for them, but couldn’t, or wouldn’t, identify it. Pity? Compassion? Was it the boy? Or his mother? He found her intensely frustrating. And even more fascinating. Such a small thing to be so fierce. He cursed himself for getting involved, for taking responsibility for someone else’s mistake. And all the while he felt that he’d never had a choice.

Cass and Wren were somewhere upstairs, in the top third of the Vault, high above him. At Three’s direction, Jackson had taken them to the Vault’s medical apartment, where they could get cleaned up and reconnected. He knew they needed that time together, to be close again, to know the other was alive, and safe, and real.

And he knew every minute he sat in the disquieting silence of these vacant catacombs was another minute lost. Standard procedure dictated that any action was better than none. But Three couldn’t shake the feeling that in this case the wrong action would be impossible to correct. It was chess, and he was running out of room to maneuver. His mind churned, rushing from one thought to the next, trying to sort through the collision of events. Searching for the solution. For an escape.

If Dagon had reported their location, it was possible that RushRuin was already on the way. But Dagon had crossed through the open by night, during the Weir’s peak hunting hour, without any apparent concern of being tracked. That gave Three a critical piece of information: Dagon must be disco’d. Which meant he had to do all his communicating the old fashioned way, face-to-face rather than via pim. That was some comfort, as Dagon couldn’t just tail them and constantly update the rest of the crew as to their location. It was equally troubling, though, to know that Dagon had tracked them precisely to their hiding point by purely physical means. Up to that point, Three had known they were being followed, but had assumed that it was the woman or the boy whose residual signal was giving them away. But now he couldn’t be sure. If Dagon was off-grid and a hound, he was a master tracker that even Three might not be able to shake. How exactly he had done it was a mystery. Three hated mysteries.

There was some calculated risk in lingering at the vault. By his way of thinking, with the time it took for Dagon to return and report their location, RushRuin would assume Three and his companions were on the move again. And even if they did send someone to the Vault to check, chances were Three had a better shot at picking them off or slipping them entirely here than in the open.

His thoughts flashed back to the early morning hours, outside the gate. Gev, his friend. Or rather, the husk of him, inhabited now by something completely other. Three wondered how many of the Vault’s old inhabitants were dead, and how many had instead been cored. And he wondered if there was any real difference between the two.

Jackson he’d known tangentially, remembered him as the kid who liked to wander. Gev had spoken of him often, usually complaining about his recklessness but always with a hint of fondness, like the proud uncle of a mischievous nephew. He seemed decent enough. A bit scattered, but clever enough to survive on his own for however many days or weeks it’d been since They had come.

And Three wondered for the first time if he’d have to add Jackson to the list of dependents. It seemed likely. Surely the kid wouldn’t want to remain behind, no matter where Three decided to lead them. As if there were anywhere left this side of the Strand that RushRuin wouldn’t follow.

He shook his head, trying to clear the scattered thoughts. Took a final deep inhalation, resigned himself to the fact that he’d have to rejoin the others sooner or later. The fatigue was getting to him. Tonight they would remain at the Vault. At first light, they would set out again, somewhere, and he knew that for every step by dangerous step of the journey they’d undertaken, what they had accomplished was nothing compared to what lay ahead.

Cass wondered what Three was up to. He’d disappeared a couple of hours before, saying he needed to scout out the rest of the Vault, leaving Jackson to look after her and her son. While he was away, Cass had bathed in crystal clear water that ran hot, hotter than she could stand. It’d been so long she’d almost forgotten it was possible to feel clean. Jackson had provided her and Wren both with clothes, worn but comfortable. And after she’d bathed Wren, Jackson had led them to the Commons, a section separating the entrance and work areas above from the living quarters below, and given them hearty rations in generous portions. Now, meal completed, feeling contented in nearly every way possible, Cass sat back in her chair with Wren on her lap, and for the first time really took notice of her surroundings.