Opposition Shift Read online

  OPPOSITION SHIFT

  BEAUTIFUL RESISTANCE BOOK 2

  By Sarah Stone and

  Sean-Michael Argo

  Copyright 2017 Sarah Stone

  and Sean-Michael Argo

  Edited by TL Bland

  Chapter 1

  There was something sticky between his fingers that he thought, blearily, might be blood. Given the coppery scent that stung his nostrils, it seemed the most likely explanation, though Hayden couldn’t quite remember why. There were a great many reasons in this world that one might bleed, and none that came to mind was in any way a comfort to his battered senses.

  Soon came the awareness of asphalt underneath him, hot with the heat from his body and his blood, as well as the sun slipping down between the buildings, still warming the air in spite of the shadows cast.

  For a few moments more, Hayden thought his eyes were open, but it was too dark for that to be true. There were no stars in the black that he saw and he knew that that was wrong. Even though the thickest of pollution that blanketed the skies in New LA, you could make them out, the tiny pinpricks struggling to shine through the clouds. The light always found its way.

  Breathing hurt badly and soon he realized there were people around him, speaking in low voices that were hard to track through the pain. He regretted struggling so hard for data and determined that given his body's many discomforts, consciousness was highly overrated.

  He felt hands on his shoulders, pulling him up, but they still felt a long way off, and the voices sounded further still. It was like bad cell phone service and still trying to have a conversation with someone despite the dodgy connection.

  One of the voices was familiar, but only barely so, a half-remembered thing. It was old and bit a rasping and reminded him, despite the accented English, of his grandfather, though he had died when Hayden was twelve. The voice spoke of how the wound wasn’t bad, wasn’t bad at all and it sounded to Hayden like his ears were ringing. The voice faded out and the hands moved him again as he drifted.

  The next time consciousness was nearly within his reluctant grasp, there was a second voice he distinguished from the background hum of pain. A woman. His vision was blurry and failing enough that he thought it might be Laine or Nibiru.

  His next thoughts were of the female operative who’d been shot.

  At least he thought she’d been shot.

  Kelso, that was her name.

  Wait.

  He had been shot, too, hadn't he?

  There was something else too, a bright, liquid yellow in his eyes and he closed them to keep out the searing light.

  “His kit is almost empty,” the old man said. “What else will work?”

  There was the sound of shuffling feet, rummaging, doors, or drawers being opened, rifled through, and slammed shut.

  His awareness flagged again, his thoughts as shifting as the shadows. At long last, the sounds of discovery filtered through; a relieved sigh, the sound of fingers drumming against plastic before a lid was twisted off.

  “Here,” the woman’s voice said, something changing hands between the two humanoid shapes that were only now beginning to separate themselves from the general haze of his clouded vision.

  Hayden found himself hoping it was a gun with a bullet in the chamber, about to be pressed to his temple and fired. The pain would vanish and there would be no risk of more to come.

  So much for all that Union anti-interrogation training Bascilica had paid to put him through, Hayden thought with a troubled smirk.

  “Should help with the internal bleeding,” the older, male voice said.

  “Infection?” the woman questioned.

  “That, too,” the man replied.

  Something was pressed to his lips and a hand upon his jaw squeezed with insistence. His muscles were tensed from the pain, but it opened all the same at the old man’s urging. Hayden coughed raggedly at the rush of liquid but got it down without too much choking. His mouth was left tasting bitter and the coughing fit left his chest feeling as though someone had tossed a match into his lung and set it alight.

  “This is made of earth and jungle,” the old man said, “The old power heals, but it will make him a little loopy for a good while.”

  The man leaning over him was the same old man from the alley, dressed in the same worn clothes that gave the impression of a homeless man, or at least someone used to living rough.

  He saw Hayden’s open eyes and gave him a friendly smile. “Not that he will mind too much. I imagine it will be a nice change from the pain and hectic pace of his chosen life.”

  Hayden’s eyelids felt as if they were weighted down with lead. His blinks grew slower. He only just caught a glimpse of the woman before they slammed shut and stayed there as if sewn. He saw the dark hair and a face that looked familiar, though not so much as the old mans. Her expression as she watched him was impassive, as if his breathing wasn’t still hitching as his lungs tried to remember how to work through the burning.

  As his eyes closed again though, the burning transformed into an odd warmth that spread through his middle and his limbs. Tense muscles turned liquid and released their strain. His breathing floundered for a few moments longer, the discomfort still focused on one point in the middle of his chest. Finally, though, it began to ebb. Each breath was longer and less tremulous than the one before it.

  Reality had been blurred before, hard to grasp, but now it became fractured and disjointed as something unfamiliar coursed through him. The shadows behind his eyes grew deeper and darker, impenetrable, like the dark inside ocean trenches. Nightmare black. He tried to sleep, but each time he drifted too far, the voices pulled him back.

  He was left with fragments of dreams. Nibiru with her feet propped up on a desk, working on a dragonfly prototype with a screwdriver so small he expected it to bend in her hands. In the corner of the room, a skinny reddish dog, an exact reflection of a stray that took up at his home when he was a kid, sat watching. There was gunfire in the corridors. The dog snarled and licked its chops and Nibiru had no gun in her office.

  There was Laine in the field, a rare partnered assignment with Hayden. Normally, he would watch her back via the datascape, safe at HQ, but this time, she’d asked for his company. He knew this, in the dark behind his eyes.

  In her hands, she held a bulky camera, the sort his grandparents would have used, and she bent to take pictures of the body on the ground. Hayden knelt with her and didn’t realize how small the body was until he recognized the child from the market.

  Each lasted seconds or hours, and he woke from each with a jolt, his heart doing a defibrillator leap within the confines of his ribs.

  “Una,” the old man was saying. “There’s no need for that.”

  “No,” the woman replied. “We don’t need to, but we should. If we don’t tell them, it will be on our heads when they find out. And they may know more about him than we do. He might need to be disposed of.”

  This time, when his eyes opened into watery slits, he recognized the woman. The dark hair and the strong, angled face. Her eyes had been closed when she lay bleeding in the alley, but now, he could see that they were dark as well, a ring of rich brown around the pupil. She looked different, without all the blood, beautiful even. Distantly, he thought that the sight of her standing was wrong. He looked for the wound that had stretched across her torso, but her clothing had been changed and there was no trace of the wound. The laceration at her temple was now a thin, pink line.

  Her eyes caught his own, though from the look in them she still thought him insensible, and perhaps he was. His thoughts were certainly muddled, alternating between barreling along with the same quick intensity they did in MassNet and delving sl
uggishly into the splices of images and dreams that still plagued him between blinks.

  Whatever they'd given him was unlike any medication or designer drug he'd ever taken, and the slinger had experienced plenty of both. She leaned over him and checked the wound in his chest.

  Apparently, he had been shot.

  He wondered if the fabric was ripped, but figured not, that would have given the bullet the opportunity it needed to rip straight through his armored shirt. It was probably just a serious impact wound.

  That was the downside of wearing plainclothes armor into a firefight instead of regular combat plates. For a moment, her face was close to his, and he thought he glimpsed his reflection in her dark eyes. He looked just as he was expecting, pale and heavy-lidded, eye sockets looking bruised. It was such a perfect rendering that he almost didn’t notice the twist of wrongness in his stomach at the sight of her strange eyes.

  The perfect cut out of his reflection was upside down, only, in her eyes, it should have been right side up.

  The home remedy must have been doing something to his vision.

  He blinked quickly to clear away the lapse, placed his focus on the wall behind her shoulder. When he looked back, hoping to watch the illusion dissolve just like the myriad of half-formed dreams he’d experienced since the old man poured the medicine down his throat, the woman had already turned away, this time concerned with some quiet commotion at the door. Una. He thought the old man had called her Una, but that might have been a hallucination as well.

  His consciousness still thready as a failing pulse, Hayden seemed to drift back and forth on his own timeline, unable find his limbs and move them.

  The bitter taste filled his mouth again and he was being moved again and there were shadows gathered around his bed again. With the drug filtering his thoughts, they looked hooded and menacing, their voices sharp as claws. He blinked quickly, catching a glimpse of a man in a hooded jacket—so that much was right—a red bandana covering the lower half of his face.

  It had been a solid week since his vision focused on the man with the same colored cloth during the firefight with E-Bloc, but when he saw this man looming over him, his first struggling thought was that they must have been the same. There were others behind him. All their faces were covered in one way or another.

  Akiaten, he thought.

  I am so screwed.

  The man stared at him harder. He turned to the old man, and Hayden realized he must have uttered some of that aloud instead of just thinking it.

  “What the hell’d you give him?”

  “His armor got shot to pieces. Busted his ribs and his chest up pretty bad. Una was worried about internal bleeding so we dug something up.”

  “You wasted good medicine on him?”

  “He wasted his on me,” the woman, Una, said.

  Red Bandana scoffed. A few of Akiaten behind him followed his lead and made the same disgruntled noise.

  Hayden’s eyes were rolling toward the ceiling and then so far back that he saw nothing but the inside of his own skull. He felt like he'd kill for a pair of equilibrium pills right about now.

  A sort of reddish-black still permeated the flickering light on the ceiling. He wasn’t sure where he was, had the picture in his mind of some dingy motel room, but it could have easily been the sort of place that Laine had scoped out as a safe-house. Some fallen down building in the sticks, half overgrown by the jungle closing in on the city’s edge. Maybe an abandoned tenement complex like the one Union Americana had built the new HQ in, with only a few errant squatters that had to be threatened or bribed into silence.

  “So, he’s soft,” the man said. “Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t kill him.”

  “He thought she was a civilian,” the old man answered. “She’s not dressed like the rest of you. Not today.”

  “We’ve killed the other invaders—" the Akiaten continued.

  Hayden missed words here and there, perhaps he even added his own. You’d think he’d be able to keep more concrete track of a conversation in which his life quite literally hung in the balance, but all he managed to gather was that Una and the old man were arguing in favor of his living. Distantly, he supposed he appreciated that.

  Internally, while the voices buzzed around him, muffled, as though they came from behind glass, he watched the woman fight in his imagination. Her voice was knife-sharp and her eyes had narrowed to match it. One of the men flinched at the tone. She moved like the others did, but with more grace. Half a dance, he would have liked to see her fight for real.

  He wanted to laugh, as the thought seemed close to one of Laine’s more poetic ruminations, but his chest was too tight for anything more than careful breathing, especially through the fog of the drug still coursing in his system. It felt like it was getting easier though, the longer he lay there and listened to the voices.

  Invaders. He was an invader.

  That was what they called him, and it must have been true. He'd known it all along of course and allowed the paychecks to smooth over the hole it always made in his heart.

  That was the game if you wanted to play cyberagents and slingers at the big kid's corporate table.

  If he and the team hadn’t followed the trail to the fish market, would E-Bloc have wound up there anyway? Would dozens of people still have died? He didn’t know, but it hurt to think of all the same. He let his thoughts soften at the drugs urging, drain away until he merely absorbed what was there, processing it distantly, absently, filing phrases away to be examined later.

  The voices had risen into quiet shouting—the kind where tones were hard and often cruel, but careful not to rise into a dangerous volume. The part of his brain that was still capable of analysis decided that this meant they were still in the city or close to it. Close enough to something that his captors or his saviors were worried about who would hear and what they would grasp of the situation. This might be a low-grade region but there were always microphones and cameras where you'd least expect them. That was the world.

  Una’s voice cut through the din of the others.

  “You aren’t killing him. It’s unnecessary. Do you really think he’s a threat? Look at him, 8 was impressed by what she saw, but without his throne or a serviceable rig, he's got nothing. He wouldn’t be able to identify you if they stood you right in front of him.”

  “What about the two of you?”

  “Let us worry about ourselves,” the old man said. “We’ve got it handled.” He sounded so sure that even Hayden believed him. The arguing stretched on a bit longer, but Hayden’s mind was more concerned with the pattern of colored fireworks behind his eyelids than anything else.

  When he opened them again, the world looked clearer, sharper, and the only two people remaining in the room were the two he’d begun with—Una, and the old man.

  “They’ll come back, you know, the rage in them is not so easily harnessed or diffused,” the old man said. “He just wasn’t brave enough to cross you without more people behind him.”

  Una nodded. “And when he comes back with more, you and the slinger will be gone.”

  The two looked at each other, something passing from one’s gaze to the other, and the slinger had a distinct impression that they were still speaking somehow.

  Hayden almost felt awake now, almost felt normal, and his thoughts were getting easier to piece together. The pain in his chest had ebbed to something dull that was easier to breathe through, but it still hurt as he was heaved to his feet, and held there with a shoulder jammed under his arm.

  The old man was smaller than him and the positioning awkward, but he found that his legs were mostly working. His steps were crooked and faltering, as though he’d had a few too many drinks, but with the old man’s support, they were well enough to hold him up.

  He only caught glimpses of the room he’d been in as the old man helped him to the door. Crumbling cinderblock walls that had, at one time, been painted white. A couch with yellowed stuffing oozing from its rips th
at he’d apparently been laying on, as the only other viable flat surface was a very rickety looking table that Hayden was almost sure would have collapsed under his weight. Just another of the many abandoned buildings scattered throughout the city.

  The woman slipped back through the door, though Hayden hadn’t noticed her leave in the first place. She looked at the old man more than him.

  “Ride’s waiting outside,” Una said simply.

  The old man nodded, the movement quick. She held the door as they passed.

  Shaking the last of the fog from his head, Hayden met her eyes as he passed. He noticed two things. They were indeed a rich brown, and that the trick with his reflection being upside down was more than a dream. It was right there clear as day. Was that some kind of augment? He could not shake how troubling it was. There was a warning in that inversed reflection of himself, a red flag flying high and yet he was drawn in by it.

  Before Hayden had time to consider it further or to escalate tensions by silently staring at her, the old man had pushed him into a waiting bicycle cab and Una had turned her back.

  Chapter 2

  As the cab wove through the dark streets, Hayden and the old man jostling in the seating area as the cab cut in front of and around cars, Hayden’s brain felt close to functional. The cab had a covering, but the sides were open to the air and the slightly cooler, nighttime breeze sharpened and focused his fuzzy thoughts. Nevertheless, he spent the first portion of the ride leaning heavily against the seat, his head lolling back on the rest behind him as control slowly leeched back into his muscles. When the old man started talking, it was without any prompting on Hayden’s part.

  “You all think you know something. All you high and mighty corporate types. You think you understand, so you don’t even think to ask us anything. The Nexus is not what you think it is, boy.” He lowered his voice and looked at Hayden hard.

  “The real problem is nobody listens these days. Not like they used too. They’re all too busy with themselves and their grand schemes to notice that the world has many voices. The insects are speaking and nobody hears them. You with me?” His voice was easy and his eyes were dancing like a smile despite the harshness of his words, as if he were admonishing a willfully disobedient child.