Blood runs downhill

  He tried to go it alone, in ways the scrape might not notice. Engineering situations that required him to have direct radio tact with the assault team or that put him, miraculously, heir probable location, but now that ma was on to him, it was slow going.

  But after one close call, in which he raided a police cruiser from the wreckage of his crash team’s rampage and tracked the assault team to an abandoned grass-poked warehouse off the highway, until dispatch reminded him of the cruisers GPS which was drawing every cop, trooper, ay in this half of the state right to him and he bailed it into a ditd dropped out, someone reached out to him.

  “You ain't gonna quit huh?”

  It was a voi his , sounding more impressed than scolding. Still, Luke had a thing about being spoken too when he wasn’t expeg or inviting it. He had heard somewhere that the first wars in this pce had been waged between “silend noise”, and every time some speaker found him uninvited, he uood what they meant. Rory had shown him how to set up the pieces so that any Speaker that tried to talk to him would have their voice routed through the little bead instead of booming inside his mind, but he had gotten distracted before she finished expining how to set up the answering mae fun, and they had moved on to other, less meical activities.

  He tried to shake off the memories and not let them steal his cool.

  It didn’t work.

  “Who the fuck is this?”

  Who it was, was one of the AT lead operators, who refused to give his name, but offered a proof.

  “ job you’ll get is gonna be for a chick charged with robbery. Role py addict. Swipped a shit ton of mem so she could by her Arthelian avatar a fug eye color ge, if you believe it. I’ll be in touch.”

  Sure enough, when he dropped in a few hours ter, dispatch let slip that they were after a female this time.

  “Just in case any of you got a problem with that. Ma thinks its best we give you a heads up.”

  And then, after his dummies had burhemselves out bank robbing and hostage-taking and highway self-smearing, Luke got a phone call.

  “Figured you didn’t burn up with your boys. Want some a?” It was, though less echoey, the voice he had heard in his s earlier.

  “Sure.”

  They told him a make and model of a car, and advised that a certain Burger King was the “good one”.

  “They really load up on the ba.”

  So there Luke was, smoke broiled st wafting over him, his stomach growling from two different types of hunger, as the prophesized car sped by.

  And that was all the help they gave him, other than dying in an assault on the defeeam that left the target's vehicle with only oail.

  He followed the two vehicles as unsuspiciously as he could, until they turned off onto a thin road risiween two fields, and he kept going down the main road. A quick review of the maps and a lot of head swiveling as he came around the back way through an old neighborhoht him towards a sheet metal mae shop. From across the vat fields and behind a chemical ste, he watched them load up in a single, surely armored, car.

  He followed them enough to see them get on the highway, then doubled back to a sedan he had noted on the ride over. It was, in a forced ce, the same make and model his Self had learo hotwire years ago, as his life briefly arced through drug dealing and boosting before a family emergency had shaken him out of it. It was his first real act of pushed memory, and for all the frantic studying and preparations in his mem-painted realm, in practice the act moved by so swiftly and silently that he didn’t realise he had even do until he reviewed the mem weeks ter. At the time, it had seemed like simple dumb luck.

  A few mier, he eeding down the highway in the opposite dire he had seearget get on, and sure enough aen mier there they were.

  He ran his mind over every job he had studied and recalled something in the murky edges. A job where, after a otally mortal shootout, the defeeam had scrambled to get to somepce secure enough to let one of their team members drop out into the Dreamworlds and make tact with the higher-ups to request back up.

  After rag his brain for his own role in that job, he realized he had never been part of it. It was a story found during his researto the Dreamworlds on the freed. He made a mental o try a his hands on Hardworld mem beyond his own experience, and pulled up the map.

  A few miles ahead, a massive hotel cluster waited just off the highway. He picked the biggest one and got into the passing ne. He had been behind the target for five minutes now and knew if he was in their shoes they’d be running the ptes if they could. He passed them with his best, these motherfuckers wasting my time fad sped off down the highway.

  He stashed the car in a non-funing car wash kiosk o a gas station, took some gsses, a beanie and a hoodie out of his bag and sed clothes, then sauntered across the street to the hotel.

  It pyed out like something slipping out of your hands and falling to the ground. Car keys on the crete maybe, or like when you hand someone something and they drop it, and you both kind of watch it happen and woer why you didn’t reach out faster, why it seemed, at the moment, so iable.

  The target car parked in the back. Luke had broken into a e-rimmed sedan with the ti windows he could find and sat there waiting as the one guy got out and walked around to the front to get a room. He was doing his best to aal, which was always easy to pick up on. Luke wondered, as he got out, if it would have beeer for them just to pull up uhe awnio the front door, if maybe the best defense was to act like you had nothing to defend. If he was on the defense, how would he have prevehis?

  He walked over to the piic tables and grill o the back door and sat dow out his vape and phone and sat there scrolling. It was so obvious, so btant, they must not have expected it. When the guy came back around with the key cards Luke made sure to look him in the eye. The guy studied him, maybe trying to see if he could remember the face, but who would be so stupid to sit here like this if they had seen him earlier in the day?

  As they got out of the car, in a tle diamond formation, Luke noticed, he set off an arm on his phone. Luckily, it was about five miill the hour. He sighed and groaned and stretched and got in line behind them to gh the door as lead guy used his keycard. Two of them looked back.

  “Hey, how yall doin' today? Enjoy your stay?”

  It wasn’t even a question, just the weary automatic ramblings of a wagesve obeying some memo from the distant past. The fact that they had obviously not even started their stay yet only added to it. One guy nodded and the others kind of smiled. Guy in the ter looked scared, but the guard right behind him put a hand on his bad pushed him down the hallway. Ironic. The only guy who actually saw it ing was the guy who didn’t know the rules, so he didn’t know, as the uys did, that everything Luke was doing made for a terrible attempt at a hit.

  Luke reached in his jacket with the most obvious “I’m getting something out of my jacket” motion he could muster, so obvious that one guard saw him do it and still looked away down the hall. Halfway through the motion, Luke's entire body ged. His slow, relut steps, his drooping movements, vanished, and he pulled the Beretta out the rest of the way in a swift snap like a hammer ing down.

  He shot the target three times in the head and the guards yelped and o two in his chest immediately afterward. The rounds bounced off the pte and they all looked at each other, none of them more surprised than Luke.

  The closest guard yelled at the dead body.

  “Mother fucker!”

  One of the uards started ughing.

  “I t believe that shits going on the boards! I’m gon so fug hosed! You son of a bitch!”

  Luke smiled at him and struggled to get his drop-out kit out of its pouch. Something warm ran down his leg. One of the uards had got him in the side. He leaned against the wall as the adrenal dump and blood loss took turns wailing on him. The guards kept talking.

  “I fug knew—”

  “Then why’d he get away with it?”

  “Fuck you, I had the lobby—”

  “Fuck are you ughing at? You were right o him!”

  And so forth. Laughing guy helped Luke get the needle plunged and asked if he could use it after. Luke just kept on smiling and faded away.

  The mystery man who had given him the heads-up tacted him ter, using Car-Crash as an intermediary, who expihe situation to Luke over dreamsmoke in Luke’s realm.

  “Couple of guys sympathetic to your efforts. Wanted me to talk to you about them setting you up with some kills.”

  “Fuck I hem to set me up—”

  “That’s exactly what the fuck I told them. And I’m telling yht now if you wanhem to go fuck themselves then I greatly approve. This smells of politics. They don’t want A.T. stuck as a crash team because it means they’re stuck as dummies, but they don’t wanna risk too much to get out of it. They let you do the kills and take the heat while riding your coattails to the big times.”

  Luke thought about it for a sed, and his mind gave up. It just wouldn’t budge toward any kind of political imaginings. He ultimately didn’t give a shit. He wawo things in all the god damn other. And one was to keep bagging kills.

  “Fuck it. Let em ride. Tell them to hit me up.”

  They did. It turned out to be a smooth-moving spiracy, which made Luke wonder if they had tried something like this with some other ry hard. They even had Drudge paid off so he wouldn’t kick up the mem of the phone calls to ma. Even dispatch started slipping him help. Luke got the feeling that they had all been waiting for someone good enough to snag kills yet dumb enough to try and defy steltion.

  That day, he was brought into Tenpounds offid grilled for every little mistake made while on crash duty, but let go without his kill eveing a mention.

  There was a simple expnation. The spirators needed Luke on the crash team so if shit came downhill it would smear the expendables, and because they didn’t want to risk having him moved up to the assault team and shining a light oenpound was getting a big payout to keep Luke where he was, and for someone who had mao get nothing higher than a shift supervisor position on a dummy squad in ten years of Hardworlding, that was enough.

  And so, after so mucertainty, Luke found a groove, and so did the Extractor. The montage practically made itself.

  Job after job of kills or near kills, a series of Tenpound pseudo meetings, memos, and whispers of the higher up's , of steltion headed “t meetings”, revealing that the spiracy had reached the highest level, with half the owrying to keep the trees from shaking, while the other half looked to take Ace Tactical private.

  Right in the middle of it all, Luke’s star shot up the boards like the drama was nothing but rocket fuel, and more importantly to him, he learned a lot about being origger. He took out targets with bombs, ten-shot handguns, cars, hunting rifles, and even a few knives.

  It got to the point that he could knock off an A.T. target like tying his shoe, and he could see the level so close he barely even had to raise his foot to step over it. Job offers, rumors, frantic talks with the spirators. In a few months, he had gone from a caged dog to having so many open doors his only issue was figuring out whie to take.

  And the cherry on top, which, ironically, he didn’t even realize at first, was that with all the excitement and all the adva and learning, he had fotten to even think about bliss.

  Then it all hit a snag.

  Pride es before a fall, and sometimes the most subtle form of pride is fidenext time, Luke has unfinished business, and old loves die hard. episode, Falling Star.