Time flows, memories fracture, I remain

  The rain was a thing with many faces, all speaking. It roared on the crag tar and gravel roof above her head, gurgled out through a drain spout and spshed across the t in a ft crag sound outside the barricaded back door, and oher side of her monitor-covered wall, ihick darkness of the abandoned grocery store, it streamed through the roof into what had once been the frozen food se, falling, frothing, whispering, into a puddle that had fshed like a mirror found in the dark when her drones had made their st security sweep.

  Snuggled into a soft armored office chair, in the ter of what had once been the loss prevention office, EP’s fingers cttered across a keyboard and three separate keypads and she sent her drones off on new routes. Some would fly to the self-ste for recharging, some would track the operators on the road, and others would move to nding zones, unoccupied or abandoned buildings, safe house backyards, even stash vehicles, ready to be recharged and deployed if needed. Others would fly to a remote area a from the i, their feeds fizzling to bck. She had about a hundred fielded right now with about twice that in reserve, stashed on other nding zohroughout the city, powered down and uable. One of the massive ss c the wall in front of her was dedicated to her drone map. On it, the metroplex looked like an irradiated ant hill.

  Outside, the rain had died to a drizzle. On the camera feeds that monitored the operators, it still came down is.

  “You wouldn’t know about that.”

  Years ago, when, for the first time, a puter had given its secrets to her pletely, revealing a hidden world, and the knowledge of its operation had sprung up from the Self’s memory int knowledge without hesitation, she had lost herself in the excitement. Now, she felt, and not for the first time, that something had been lost along the way.

  She had envisioned moments of hag security systems followed swiftly by the thrill of moving, personally, into the now exposed areas, gun in hand. Then she had found out about the Hardworlding division of bor, and her performance during the first shootout had pced her decidedly into a single sector of operations. Like a lot of things, she could never point to a single choice that had brought her here. It felt like her present position must have always had a kind of gravity to it, and every step from there to here was only part of an arc.

  She loved what she did. The pnning, the trol, the feeling of being everywhere. But sometimes she just wao run out into that wide world of direct fire and hands-ohing. Sometimes being everywhere felt like being nowhere.

  Out in the rain, a million traps and sensors y in wait, dividing her from the world she watched and studied so closely. The Uzi in the drawer gathered dust. Her pistol slept on the base of a monitor stand, waiting to get buried under scratch paper or crushed s. She had long since given up wearing it on her hip. It made moving fortably in her chair impossible.

  Her earbuds chimed and Michael’s voice came through with the sound of heavy rain.

  “How are we doing?”

  “They got out . Didn’t find it, of course.”

  “Good. Well, we know where it’s not, that’s something.”

  She hen remembered he couldn’t see her. Somehow, she always felt like he saw everything. Like these calls to che were only out of courtesy, or some kind of test.

  “You had Kate och for a bit, correct? With An?” He wasn’t angry or even acg. That was the worst part.

  “Yeah, I had to watch April.”

  “You didn’t ask me.”

  “I’m sorry.” She immediately k wasn’t what he wao hear.

  “I’m asking why.”

  “I figured you were busy.”

  “Don’t figure. Don’t assume. Don’t guess. Know. That’s your purpose here. To know.”

  Soft words, geone. Sometimes she wished he would just scream.

  “Alright. I uand.”

  “How’s Johnny?”

  “Sleeping, finally.” Michael had refused to let Luke anywhere near either search, instead attag him to guard duty at Philip’s ste, and him to give his Self a full eight hours of sleep. When EP asked about it, Michael had only said “Disengaging isn’t his strong suit.”

  She logged it away as a lesson. A good leader knew what his people would do, and it didn’t take more than a few jobs with Luke to know that if anyone shot at Sam or Lindsey, he wasn’t likely to lie down until every shooter was dead and sorry. Not to mention that he’d already taken a liking to Gradie.

  “Good,” Michael said. “I have a feeling tomorrow he’ll be gd he got some sleep. Unless he’s pstered.” He chuckled.

  EP found Michael’s marker on the map and pulled up a drone feed. He was walking through an abandoned park at the edge of downtown, a cluster of grey regles and trees stuck between a bridge and a parking garage, like it had been trying to slide into the river when something stopped it. Brutalist t walls, square stepping sbs over flooded mud, and crete rooms, all water stained and disused. Dead leaves tried to form carpets. The troughs and spouts meant for piped fountain water, clogged by the leaves and dirt of decades, now rushed white again in the rain, sloshing with angry chaos in pces designed for calm refle.

  EP’s file told her it had been closed to the public for ten years. A link do-er fence blocked it off from the street. He always found the stra pces.

  “I’ve got background on the cops,” she said. “Still sing the buzz for anybody else.”

  The buzz was a general term for talk on a variety of mediums; radio chatter, chat rooms, messenger apps, phone calls, and other tapped personal unications. EP had a knaining the buzz for info. Some sources got fed into crawlers that looked for specific speech or text strings, others she reviewed herself, or kept on as background noise, her subscious pig up on things she might have otherwise missed.

  Hardworlders could be anyone and anywhere, and like the team, they tried to stay hidden. But uhe team, they didn’t have Michael’s experieo guide them. They also didn’t have EP.

  “Good,” Michael said. “Keep an ear open, but stay low energy. A some rest soon. I’ll need you at full throttle tomorrow.”

  EP dropped off the line. For a while she watched him walk through the crete park. With a touch of guilt, she zoomed in on his face with a micro drone and got the feeling he was seeing things there that were invisible to her, as if ghosts walked near him. It felt like spying on someo a wake, so she closed the feed a baonit the buzz.

  Lightning fshed out over the river, beyond the Main Street peninsu, and the nd glowed in his NVGs like some lost third sibling to night and day. He remembered, with a crystal clear recall that only the most experienced of Spirits possess, aorm years ago, over the same city. Even now, he could feel the drop in his chest, that electrifying feeling of flight.

  Whehunder had passed, he listened again to the water. It rushed dowroughs and overflowed in the square pools. It dripped off the oaks and spttered on the crete. It stung him to hear everything lit up in sound, like it was just as alive as it had ever been.

  He had walked the entire park. The elevated walkway, high above the sloping river bank, where the s of oaks stretched over the railings and flicked rain at him when the wind blew. The onamed waterwall, its fountains now dead, its pools trash filled. The covered spaces, where rain sounds echoed and the dead stillness was so thick he could barely breathe. The square stepstohs. The staircases.

  He let the memories flow out of every inch of crete. The ones he could still call on. The ohey hadn’t taken. He hem now.

  He flipped up his NVGs and sat on a bench, breathing i smell of everything. The square sbs of dark t stood solemnly while the Oaks and the water and the leaves danced without care. Lightning fshed again and pieces of it glowed everywhere, like shraphat dug itself in so deeply he felt it even whehing had passed bato darkness.

  He exhaled, closed his eyes, and found the park waiting in his mind. It was dry as a Texas day could be. The sun broke through the tall oaks in thick beams that fshed off the yellow crete like gss. They were arrayed around him, standing, squatting, sitting, reing. All six of them. Like nothing had ever happened. Like he had never left.

  They smelled of soda, sweat, and guhey celebrated a job well dohey ughed and gave each other shit over the fuckups and under pyed or over pyed the successes. They smiled at each other. They said with everything they did that they k would st forever.

  He held the vision for a breath, long enough to repeat the same promise he had made all those years ago, a fade.

  The cold and the wet returned, his tears disappeared in the rain p down his face, and the unbearable, merciless weight of twenty years rushed ba, filling the space between here and then, and he was left alone again.

  The pce where Michael stood may be soon be demolished, if it even still stands as you read this, but the memory will remain. ces will you remember till you die? ime, Gradie and Sam get settled i episode, Takeout.