“What are we going to find?” she shouted, but was cut off by the handset going dead.
“Fuck this,” Fury swore, hurling the receiver over the side. “Can you feel it? We’re close. Can you feel the energy?”
For just a second, she did. But then she realized what it actually was.
“I feel my mark,” she whispered. “He’s close.”
*
Eighty-Three was running straight down the hall he thought he’d never see again.
Come to think of it, he wasn’t sure why he did remember the place. He’d never been there as far as he could remember, but something about it stuck out in whatever was left of his mind. Then again, he wasn’t sure if he even had a mind either, or if it was just his robot brain manifesting memories that were programmed into it.
“I am not a goddamn robot,” he growled, the words coming through his respirator in a quiet hiss. “Not a robot. I am a person, I have a f-family.”
Person.
Family.
Those words hitched in his brain just like the hallway – the cold steel and tile hallway – where his boot heels thudded over and over in that rhythmic tune. When he went slower, he glided easily, but when he really got going, the fact that one of his legs was slightly shorter than the other became very apparent.
Parts of him that should have been perfect – his slight limp, the way one of his ears worked less than the other, those things had long since made him realize that he was unique. Or if not unique, at least he wasn’t exactly like all the others.
The one thing that really set him apart was his lisp.
It was always hidden by the static that came out of the mask. But it was there. Every time he spoke, he heard it if no one else did. And all that meant that he couldn’t be a robot. No one would program a lisp into a robot. No one would make one leg shorter than the other, or one ear a little less functional.
No, there had to be more than this. There had to be.
Closing his one good eye, he wove through a complex web of tunnels he shouldn’t have remembered, but did. In the distance, he heard the rush of water, and knew what it was. He also knew who was down there, so far below, and spared a moment to hope they’d make it across the river and into the place they were going.
With the next flicker of his mind, he thought how much he couldn’t wait to see them again.
No way I’m a robot. No way. Robots can’t care, they can’t... love.
The further he ran, and the more he knew that whatever he found at the end of his trek, he wasn’t a robot... and he wasn’t alone.
In the distance, obfuscated by a thick, industrial haze that surrounded this end of the complex, was the door he’d been running toward ever since he escaped. Somehow – and he didn’t have the slightest clue how – he knew that behind that door lay the answer to his pain, the answer to the mystery of his existence.
Drawing up next to it, he breathed heavier and placed his hand flat on the door’s brushed nickel handle. He swallowed hard, his throat clicking painfully. That was nothing new though – his throat had always hurt, speaking always caused pain – at least, since the first time he opened his eyes... eye, to find himself seeing out through the goggle.
Behind the door, he heard a wheeze and a whistling. Grabbing the handle and steeling himself for whatever was behind it, Eighty-Three, the one soldier who had come to his senses, could not possibly have been ready for what he saw.
*
Claire and Fury instinctually grabbed for one another as they skidded to a halt at the end of the massive bridge crossing the river of sludge that flowed beneath them.
It wasn’t the river that stopped them, or the thought that they might end up in it should one of them make a bad jump – it was the screaming of an extremely heavy door opening on heavy-duty hinges. Looking up, Claire noted the crisscrossing mess of catwalks and overhangs.
“There must be twenty of those paths above us. What the hell was that?”
She and Fury exchanged a glance. A heavy footfall hit their ears, and then a laugh. Syrupy, sickening, phlegm-lined and whistling.
“Eckert.” Both Fury and Claire said at the same instant.
“He found him, I guess,” Fury said. “And as much as I want to go join in the fun, we have something to do.”
“Something more important than revenge?” Claire asked. “From you, that’s almost like me saying I found something more important than chocolate chip ice cream. Besides you I mean.”
“We save them first, and then we go find Eighty-Three and Eckert. He promised us he was sending us where we needed to go, didn’t he?”
Claire nodded. “Do you think he meant for us not to find Eckert? Do you think he meant for us to lose his trail? Or is it something else?”