Meki's petrified tone sliced through the daze. They were already pulling themselves off me, their own injuries forgotten, their hands grabbing my jacket to haul me up. All thought of their aversion to physical touch was erased by sheer, primal terror.
The spell was broken. I came to my senses, scrambled to my feet, and together we ran, stumbling under the dark arch of the fly-over and into the welcome shadows of the tree line that marked the boundary to the local park and maybe, just maybe, freedom.
We slipped into the park's embrace like shadows into deeper night. Here, under the canopy of ancient oaks and between the silent, skeletal frames of playground equipment, we were the heroes of times gone by, the knights of a realm the world had forgotten. The sprawling towns and suburbs were our fiefdom, and we knew every alley, every drainage ditch, every hidden path to survive.
Leaning against the rough bark of a large pine, safe for a moment in its shadow, the transformation began. With a rustle of synthetic fabric, we reversed our jackets. My matte-black shell became a garish fluorescent pink. Meki's earthy brown flipped to a mundane sky blue. We were chameleons, shedding our nocturnal skins for the uniforms of inconspicuous, if oddly dressed, civilians.
Next came the final disguise. We both sported the anti–facial-recognition makeup - swirling, asymmetric patterns of stark white lines and dark blotches designed to scramble the algorithms of every camera we passed. Mine was a little sweat-smeared at the temples. Meki's was in a more tragic state; the elegant patterns dotted with raw grazes and smears of blood from our fall. It was no longer perfect, but it should still work; the wounds just added another layer of digital noise.
A shaky, adrenaline-fuelled laugh escaped Meki as they slumped against the tree, still gasping for breath.
"We made it."
"Yeah," I added, my own voice raw. "Close, though. Too close."
But the spark of triumph was already igniting behind their eyes, cutting through the pain and fatigue.
"We got an E.I.T.S.-5," they said, the words filled with awe. "The others… the others will never believe this." The excitement faltered slightly. "It's a damn shame we never really got to harvest it properly."
"How much did we get?" I asked, a thread of hope in my voice. Maybe it was enough.
Meki patted their pack, the gesture producing a disappointing rattle of loose components rather than the solid thud of a prized logic core.
"Not much. Scraps. Let's see what Maro makes of it."
They pushed themselves upright, their gaze scanning the path ahead that wound through the park. Their voice dropped into a formal, almost ritualistic tone.
"Sandman home."
"Sandman home," I echoed.
The phrase was a relic, taken from some old '80s film Maro was always quoting. It meant more than just let's go. It meant walking in single file, shadow to shadow, pausing at intervals so any watching enemy, be it a drone or a patrol, couldn't easily count our numbers or distinguish our forms as a group. It was the wisdom of our tribe, passed down through the cracks of a broken world.
And we used it to fight back against the city's eyes and sensors: walking in single file, shifting positions often, reversing our clothes in every patch of shadow, and constantly altering hairstyles and silhouettes. Anything to disrupt tracking. Anything to stay uncatchable.
We moved through the waking city like rats in the walls, using the late-night crowds as our living camouflage. We merged with a group of drunks heading for the next nightclub, our bright jackets making us momentarily invisible, then ducked down a service alley as they passed. We crossed a busy square, our shoulders brushing against normies drinking and dancing in their bikini-like nightwear and then slipped into the quiet canyons of residential streets, constantly changing our vector. Doubling back.
We were a blur, a data packet lost in the noise, ensuring no digital eye could lock onto our trail.
Before long, the oppressive weight of the skyscrapers began to increase, and the signal bars on our FM walkies flickered to life. We were in range. Marco, ever the paranoid strategist, had engineered an early warning system: a call-and-response protocol that was our only key to sanctuary.
The ritual began, tense and silent.
First: Three sharp, precise beeps transmitted on channel three. My thumb on the button felt clumsy, my heart thudding against my ribs. This was the first knock on the door.
We waited, breath held. The static hissed back, a taunting white noise. Then my walkie chirped twice.
Second: Change to channel eight.
The hiss of the new frequency was like stepping into a different, silent room. We counted ten agonizing seconds in our heads, the silence stretching taut. This was where a failure would manifest, a burst of scrambled police chatter, or worse, just dead air.
Third: Change to channel six. I brought the device to my lips, my voice deliberately flat, playing my part in the code.
"Hi Dad, we're late for dinner."
Another static wait. I counted to ten, each number an eerie blow in the quiet.
One… two… three…
What if the safehouse was compromised?
…six… seven…
What if Marco was gone?
Fourth: Change to channel two.
The response was immediate. Marco's voice, filtered through a low buzz of static, was the most beautiful sound I'd ever heard.
"Mum's in the kitchen."
The code was complete. The coast was clear. The tension that had held my body like a steel cable suddenly snapped, leaving me weak with relief. We could come in.
We slipped into the heart of the city's grimy underbelly, down a narrow back street that smelled of stale beer and damp concrete and pushed through the smudged glass door of the cheap-looking all-night burger bar: the Drop Inn.
The place was a meticulously preserved relic, a sarcophagus of greasy nostalgia designed to look like an American diner from the 1980s. A real, functioning jukebox glowed in one corner, its coloured bulbs reflecting off the red vinyl of the booth seats, cracked and patched with silver tape. The air was thick enough to taste, a heavy, cloying miasma of old frying fat that coated every surface. It gave the faded posters of muscle cars and rock bands a sticky, dull shine, as if the entire diner had been varnished with cooking oil.
It was only 23:30. The frantic, post-club crowds hadn't yet descended for their greasy salvation, and the lonely daytime hangers-on had long since drifted away. The silence was broken only by the low hum of a refrigerated display case.
The cavernous room was nearly empty. A young couple sat in a booth, staring dizzy-eyed at each other over half-eaten burgers, lost in a world of their own. In a shadowy corner, an old drunk smelling sharply of piss and despair snored into the vinyl, his body curled protectively around an empty glass.
The only other signs of life were Liz and a server I'd seen before, Tracey, or Tracy, or something like that, standing behind the long Formica counter.
Meki and I didn't hesitate. We moved to the booth closest to the beaded curtain that led to the back room, a space crammed with dead or dying arcade machines and one-armed bandits. The faint, ancient beeping of a solitary Pac-Man game drifted out like a digital ghost, a sound from another era seeping into our own.
I heard Liz's low, raspy voice as she said to the younger woman, "I got this, Tracy," while she waddled over to us.
Both she and Tracy wore the establishment's uniform: fading yellow, threadbare, matching zip-up-front American diner dresses. But that was where the likeness ended.
Tracy was maybe twenty-something, all fresh flesh and sharp edges, her face a mask of heavy makeup framed by impossibly large, fluttering Bambi eyelashes.
Liz, clearly over forty, carried the weight of a different history on her face. One side was a landscape of melted flesh, a web of shiny, taut scars and discoloured patches, the brutal remnants of an acid attack from a decade ago.
She had been a doctor then, in a different time and place, until some twisted soul decided that throwing acid in an abortion doctor's face would better their cause.
A dark, cynical part of me thought: well, the mad soul won. Because now, today, abortions were thoroughly illegal, and the good doctor only served burgers, her healing hands now wiping down sticky tables.