Before the Fall, I Filled the Vault

Chloe's POV

Blood kept coming through my fingers and it wasn't stopping. Brad Danforth's knife went in three inches, and his face didn't change when he pulled it out.

"Why," I said.

"Ironport was always supposed to be mine."

Emily Reinhardt was hanging off his arm, her chin on his shoulder, two fingers wound into the strap of his vest and turning slowly. "Brad," she said, her voice soft enough to melt, "say the word and I'll save her. Say the other one and I won't."

Brad didn't look at her. His eyes stayed on me. "We've kept her this long. Time to settle it."

So you two really are together. I kept it down in my throat. It wasn't worth another breath.

Zach Rusk came at me from the left, crouched, got my jaw with his thumb, dragged it across my face, then flung his hand away like he'd touched something filthy. "I fooled around with a few women and you broke my leg over it?" He slapped his right thigh. "Lucky Emily's got a generous heart. She put it back together for me." He paused, and when his voice came back it had gone soft and sticky. "You know, I actually liked you once."

I didn't move. Not because of him. Because when I moved, the blood came faster.

Renee Ashby was crying in the corner, ugly crying, snot and tears running together. "You got my only family killed. I begged you to let me go get her and you said no—" She dragged the back of her hand across her face. "I know she didn't have an ability. I know she was deadweight. But she was my daughter."

Liam Thayer pushed his glasses up his nose and kept his eyes pinned to the floor tile. "I'm sorry, Chloe. Ironport doesn't need you anymore. It needs a competent manager."

Cole Lindholm stood at the edge of the light with his arms crossed, looking down at me. "Whether you live or die stopped mattering to me a while ago." Then he added the most honest thing anyone said all night. "You dying is when I get the good stuff."

I had treated him like a little brother.

I laughed. It tore something and the blood came faster. I didn't stop.

The panel in front of my eyes was mine alone to see. It had been with me since the first year, handing me jobs, handing me supplies. The buttons on it answered to me and nobody else. If anybody else put a hand on it, nothing would light.

I couldn't lift either hand anymore, so I moved my eyes to it. Last row of the second-level menu: DEFCON 1, Scorched Earth Protocol. The kill switch for the safehouse. Ten-second countdown, no way back once it's pressed, the whole bunker coming down from the inside in one white sheet.

"Nobody walks out of here alive," I said out loud.

I pressed it.

Ten seconds. The room went white from the inside.

For a second I just lay there. No wound. No blood soaking through my shirt. I pressed my hand flat against my stomach and held it there until the fact settled: twenty-one years old, dorm bed at Oakhaven State, the ceiling water stain I hadn't thought about in five years right where it had always been. Somewhere in the hall somebody was playing music off a phone speaker.

Seventy-two hours. The number came up before anything else. Seventy-two hours before the crimson rain.

I got my breathing flat, put my face back together into something a roommate could wake up to, and sat back against the wall with the headphones on. The jack stayed unplugged. The show kept running on mute.

It didn't take long. Emily woke up on the other side of the room, both hands pressed hard over her mouth, a sob caught behind them. Then she checked her own arms. Then she looked at me.

"You're up," I said. "I'm watching my show."

"What time is it."

"Six forty-something. You already missed breakfast."

She didn't move right away. She sat on the edge of her bed and watched me for five or six seconds, her breathing not steady yet, her fingers working the sheet back and forth.

"You look terrible," she said, and stood up, concern laid over that practiced pity of hers. "I'm going to get coffee. You want some?"

"No."

"I'll bring you one." She was already grabbing her jacket, her phone, her keys before the sentence was out. The zipper got halfway and she glanced up at me, then back down. I could see her hunting for an excuse to get out of that room.

At the door she stopped, fingers hooked over the frame, and looked back for a second. Then the door shut.

Headphones back on the desk. Six shopping tabs spread across the screen, a handwritten supply list under the keyboard.

She had called out names in her sleep before she was properly awake: Brad, Liam, Zach, Renee. Every one of them was coming.

That detail was enough. Brad was the kind to round the others back up, and if he was back, odds were all six of them had their memories.

My first thought went to Renee. Every word she'd said in that bunker held up. That hatred was real, too real to fake. But in this life she didn't have a daughter yet. No daughter meant no grief like that, and no grief like that meant no reason to come back — or else she simply hadn't.

I sat on the edge of the bed and went back through the last life, account by account. Brad's second affinity: X-Gene Catalyst I fed him, bottle after bottle. Emily's cell-healing rating: nano-med needles I pushed into her one at a time — without them she'd have topped out as a field medic. Zach's leg: Emily's work, and Emily could only do that work because I'd built her up to that level first. Cole: went from a nobody to a metal-class heavy on mission payouts that should have gone into my vault. Every wall at Ironport: concrete I poured with my own system experience, layer on layer. They stood inside those walls and put me down as overhead.

All of it cleared to zero. Starting today, nobody took anything out of my hands again.

I didn't write anything down. There was nothing to write. The math was already done: every one of them was going to pay for it, and none of them were going to pay fast. Fast would be letting them off easy.

I didn't call Brad. I opened the banking app.

The black card's available credit sat at the top of the screen, a number that looked very good and would be worthless paper in seventy-two hours. I scrolled down. One line of small print: apply for additional credit secured against real property.

My thumb sat on it for four seconds. That was Ironridge Homestead. My grandfather's fence posts, the ones he'd driven in himself one at a time, the reserves he'd stacked in that basement over twenty years after he came back from Vietnam. He left that land to me and not to Cole's branch of the family, and that account had never once been settled inside the family.

I didn't tap it. It could sit. I'd put the weight on it when I actually needed to.

Then something flashed in front of my eyes and steadied, and blue type floated up.

System V2.0, Doomsday Pioneer Edition: upgrade complete.

The panel opened. Modular safehouse: Tier 3, American red-brick hunter's cabin, three-stage filtration system, counter-surveillance mode three hours, two-mile drop radius, three exterior camouflage profiles.

Last time I'd started with a plywood shack and spent eleven months stacking Ironport up to that size, and then somebody put a knife in me from the inside.

I looked at "Tier 3" for three seconds.

"System. Deploy the safehouse."

I scrolled to the bottom row. It was still there, folded inside the second-level menu: DEFCON 1, Scorched Earth Protocol. The system hadn't put it away. I hadn't turned it off either. It sat where my hand was closest, one fingertip away from a thought.

Last time I pressed it because there was no other road out. This time I kept it not because I planned to use it, but because keeping it there helped me sleep.

Outside,two girls ran across the lawn on the far side, laughing, ducking it. Nobody looked up.

"All right," I said, and let the breath out. "Not a bad start."