Mistrunner 2 - Chapter 13 - Home is Where You Store Your Ammo (Patreon)

I remember that first job like it was yesterday. I was so young. So naïve. It was a simple task. We were just supposed to hijack a transport truck headed toward one of the higher platforms. We were massacred, and I was the only one to make it out alive. That should have been my first hint that he didn’t care about any of us. But all I could feel was pride that I was the only one strong enough to walk out of that situation still breathing.

Nora Lancaster

After showering and changing, Patrick slipped under the bed’s blankets and promptly passed out. Using Misthack, I set a quick alarm on the door before heading to the bathroom myself. For the first time in a while, I let Mimic drop, and when I glanced into the smart-mirror, I was more than a little alarmed at how exhausted I looked. There were heavy bags under my eyes, and my cheeks were a little hollow from how much weight I’d lost. Ration bars were great, but their bland taste meant that I only ate when I absolutely had to. Contrast that with how much I looked forward to the Dewdrop Inn’s food, and it wasn’t difficult to see why my caloric intake had seen a precipitous drop.

Besides, I hadn’t really stopped moving for weeks. I hadn’t rested. And I had killed more people than I wanted to count. That combination had robbed me of what innocence I’d managed to maintain as well as the comfortable body I had cultivated during my training. I’d never been fat, but now, my compact figure looked stringy with corded and lean muscle. It didn’t bulge like Nora’s had, but there was certainly power there.

I quickly undressed and hopped into the shower, where I spent quite a while just luxuriating under the steaming hot water. My muscles unkinked, and, for the first time in a while, I just relaxed. Even so, there was still a layer of tension that would take a lot more than a hot shower to banish; after all, I wasn’t quite safe yet. Maybe I never would be again.

That was a depressing and troubling thought. Was I destined to go through the rest of my life always looking for the knife in my back? Or would I eventually find leave to let my guard down? Had my uncle? Was that why he hadn’t seen Nora’s betrayal coming? Or was trusting her a conscious choice, like the one I’d made when I’d let Patrick in? Or when I had chosen to trust Gunther or Gala? I wasn’t sure if I wanted to let my paranoia infect every facet of my life. At some point, I needed to let some people close, didn’t I?

My stomach twisted into knots as I considered my uncle thinking those same thoughts. Certainly, trust hadn’t worked out well for him. Could I hope for any better? I didn’t know, and I knew that figuring it out was the work of a lifetime.

Sighing, I reached out with a cupped hand and let the automated dispenser squirt some body wash into my hand. It was cheap stuff that went way too far with the floral scent, but given where I was, I didn’t think I had any reason to expect anything different. So, using that soap, I spent the next fifteen minutes arduously scrubbing the filth of weeks’ worth of travel from my body. By the time I’d finished, I felt like I’d been hit with a sandblaster, but at least I was clean.

As I activated the air-drying function, I found myself appreciating the fact that I was finally back in a civilized city. I would always cherish my time in Mobile – as well as the people I’d met there – but there were definite advantages to being back in Nova. Not only were the amenities vastly superior, but the city was host to a wide variety of other advantages. From fashion to equipment, and everything in between, it was one of the hubs of what was left of human civilization.

Once I was dry, I stepped out of the shower and glanced at my reflection in the mirror. I looked better without all the dried blood, dirt, and other various filth I’d picked up along the way. My body had changed quite a bit during my training, and not only had I filled out in all the right places, but I looked quite a bit healthier than when I’d first arrived. At some point, I had left girlhood behind, and I’d run headfirst into maturity.

After looking at my hair, which had been put through the ringer over the past couple of months, I frowned in disgust. I’d gotten over my hatred of my wild, curly hair, but it was an unassailable truth that the lack of attention had left it looking pretty terrible. During my training, I’d spent plenty of time experimenting with various styles, but while I’d been on my mission, that attention had fallen by the wayside. That, coupled with a few close calls where a few patches had been ripped out by the roots, had left it lopsided.

Shaking my head, I pulled the auto-styler out. However, the moment I looked at the helmet-like apparatus, I was assailed by grief. It had been a birthday gift from Jo. A thoughtful present that showed just how well she knew me. But now, she was gone. Dead like so many others. I would never be able to return the gesture with a gift of my own. Nor would we ever hang out and talk about boys. Or in her case, girls. I would never get the chance to show her around Nova. Nor would she ever realize her dreams of finding what I suspected was a mythological safe haven in the mountains out west.

Before I could stop them, the tears began, and I sat on the closed commode, burying my face in my hands. Like that, I remained, weeping for all the people I’d lost. It was easy enough to ignore my grief when I had a task in front of me. I was well versed in putting one foot in front of the other. However, the moment I stopped, those emotions crept up and tackled me to the ground.

I don’t know how long I sat there weeping, but it wasn’t a short span of time. Eventually, though, I pushed everything to the side, put on some spare clothes – really, my only truly clean set – and forewent the auto-styler, choosing to simply put my hair up. After all, I wasn’t going out. I didn’t need to impress anyone.

Except maybe Patrick.

He certainly had his strong points. He seemed kind. Loyal. And he definitely wasn’t bad looking, with his stocky frame, strong jaw, and wavy blonde hair. And blue eyes that were easy to get lost in.

“God,” I muttered to myself, trying to wrangle my thoughts and emotions. It didn’t matter if I found him attractive. Right now, he was off-limits. Maybe that would change sometime in the future, but we were both far too vulnerable to head down that road. Besides, he was too young. And too innocent.

But even as the thought crossed my mind, I knew that last part wasn’t so true anymore. He might be a little naïve and ignorant of how things worked in Nova City, but after everything he’d been through, I suspected that his innocence had gone the same way mine had. After all, he’d lost just as much as I had.

With a sigh, I took one last look at my reflection before padding out into the room. Patrick’s even breathing told me that he was already asleep, so I set myself up in the room’s lone chair, and I spent the next few hours going through my puzzle program.  My progress was shockingly fast, and, not for the first time, I thought that I would need to soon replace it. Soon enough, I abandoned that program in favor of delving into the portion of my interface reserved for writing Ghosts.

I didn’t have any ideas for anything new, so I just worked on some older projects for a while. It was soothing, in a way, fully concentrating on the mechanical tasks of slowly building and adjusting the complex programs. Some of it reminded me of the logic or number puzzles to which I’d grown accustomed, but mostly, it was an exercise in creativity, trying to balance the intended features with the Mist limits imposed by my skill’s tier.

Once, my instructor, Helen Stone, had likened it to a combination of building an incredibly complex and layered electrical circuit with mathematical equations. Add in a little old-Earth programming for flavor, and you had a hint of how writing a Ghost worked. For me, though, it had always felt like building a pyramid. Of equations that were all dependent on the layers below. While trying to use materials that were ill-suited for the job at hand.

Okay – so it’s not easy to explain how it all worked because a lot of it was facilitated by my skill; without it, I could have stared at that mass of numbers, glyphs, equations, and connections for years without gleaning even the slightest meaning. But with [Mistrunning] opening the door, it all somehow made sense. I didn’t have much of a reason to wonder why. I just accepted it as it was. Perhaps one day I’d have the freedom to investigate that sort of thing, but for now, I had so many other things on my plate that I couldn’t afford to let my focus waver.

Finally, the alarm I’d set went off in my interface, and I woke a bleary eyed Patrick up. He was half awake, but he didn’t complain when I told him it was his turn to play watchman. We swapped places, and I couldn’t help but smile a bit at how warm the bed was. I was asleep in minutes.

Six hours later, I awoke to the sound of the alarm once again going off in my head. For a few minutes, I lay there, my eyes still closed as I debated whether or not I wanted to actually get up. Finally, I pushed myself out of bed to find that Patrick had dozed off in the chair. My initial reaction was to berate him, but I chose not to. After everything we’d been through, I couldn’t really blame him for succumbing to his exhaustion.

I rose from the bed, then shook him awake, and he blurted, “I’m awake! I was just resting my eyes!”

“Sure, sure,” I said with a grin. “My uncle always said the same thing. C’mon and get dressed. I want something other than ration bars for breakfast.”

After that, I went into the bathroom to both take care of my morning ablutions as well as for a little extra privacy. For the day, I chose a nondescript pair of jeans and a tee-shirt that was mostly clean. I wouldn’t be turning any heads in an outfit like that, but that was probably for the best. I topped the outfit off with a pair of worn sneakers. My combat attire remained in a corner of my Arsenal Implant.

After I left the bathroom, Patrick took his turn, and about twenty minutes later, we were on our way. For the day, I’d adopted a new persona by using Mimic to copy the appearance of one of the less-outrageous prostitutes. Luckily, it didn’t affect my outfit; I couldn’t imagine walking around in those kinds of clothes. I’d have died of embarrassment.

In any case, we quickly found our way to the mono-rail, which took us back into the Garden, where I wasted no time in leading Patrick to my favorite restaurant, called the Fortuna Diner. In retrospect, it couldn’t hold a candle to the Dewdrop Inn, but I had many fond memories of going there for Sunday breakfasts with Jeremiah.

The restaurant occupied a corner of one of the district’s ubiquitous megabuildings, but unlike most businesses, it was only accessible from the street entrance. The interior reminded me of the diners I’d read about in stories from the pre-Initialization world, with various booths and a long bar. It was packed with patrons, but Patrick and I found a booth in one of the corners.

Breakfast went about how I’d expected it to, though the food was a lot worse than I remembered. I could only think that I’d gotten spoiled by my time in Mobile, where meals were comprised of fresh ingredients and prepared by Jo’s parents, who were skilled cooks. The diner, for all it tried, could only dress the soy-based meat substitute and powdered eggs up so much. But Patrick and I both agreed that it was a lot better than a ration bar.

“What’s the plan for today?” he asked, biting into a faux sausage.

“We need somewhere to set up shop,” I said; normally I would have worried about being overheard, but the place was so busy that even with the help of Observation, I had difficulty picking out individual conversations. Besides, it wasn’t like I expected anyone to be hunting me. I was just a normal person, now. And I intended to use that anonymity to my advantage while it lasted. “I’m thinking Algiers. There are a lot of abandoned buildings there that might serve our purposes. Plus, nobody goes there unless they have to, so it shouldn’t be hard to keep things under the radar.”

“Oh,” he said. “Makes sense.”

After that, we spent the rest of our breakfast engaged in small talk before we made our way back to Algiers. As we rode the monorail, I accessed the city’s intranet to look for potential headquarters, and it didn’t take me long to find a few good candidates.

Unfortunately, the first two turned out to be complete busts. The first one was right next to one of the supply depots in the dock area, which meant that it was crawling with Enforcers. Given that I didn’t want to wake up with a bunch of guns in my face, I didn’t think that was a great place to set up shop. So, we moved on to the next, which was just about falling apart. The photos I’d seen on the intranet were, to put it mildly, horribly inaccurate and so generous as to be outright lies. So, it was with a bad attitude that we crossed the district to visit the last option on my list.

When we approached, I was initially disappointed in the size. At only two stories tall and about two thousand square feet, it was the smallest of the buildings on my short list. But once we got inside and looking around, I said, “This could work, I guess.”

“What’s that over there?” asked Patrick, pointing to a corner.

“I don’t know,” I said, approaching the seam in the floor. I knelt down and dusted it off, which revealed that the crack was part of a trapdoor. I quickly levered it open. Grinning at Patrick, I said, “Wish me luck.”

Then, I hopped into the hole, landing a split second later. After retrieving a mist-lamp from my Arsenal Implant, I looked around. “Oh, this is nice. Very nice.”

Initially, I’d expected an unmarked basement, but what I’d found was an entrance to a cavernous underground space that was at least a couple of hundred yards wide. I knew that a significant portion of Nova City lived beneath the surface of the city; in the beginning, they’d confined themselves to disused draining tunnels, but they’d long since begun to expand, carving enormous caverns into the city’s various platforms. Colloquially, it was known as the Undercity, and access points were a closely guarded secret.

I felt certain that this “basement” wasn’t that, largely because I didn’t see any other entrances or exits. Instead, I suspected that someone had built it for some nefarious purpose. Perhaps it had housed an illegal farm. Or maybe a dust refinement operation. It might’ve even been an illegal warehouse, given its proximity to the city’s exits. Whatever the case, I couldn’t help but think that it made the property the perfect place to set up shop.

“What’s down there?” asked Patrick, sticking his head down through the trapdoor.

“I think we’ve come home,” I said. “This is perfect.”

After that, I contacted the seller via the intranet and bought the property anonymously. At only two-hundred thousand credits, it was far cheaper than it probably should have been, but the moment I transferred the fee, the electronic deed of ownership appeared in my interface.

With that out of the way, Patrick and I set up a rope for temporary access to the basement, and then we started unloading his implant. Before long, there was a small pile of crates taking up a corner of the basement. Rubbing my hands together, I considered summoning my hoverbike and testing it out, but I held off. There were more important things to do first.

That in mind, I contacted Gunther, and he put me through to some discrete contractors who could set up proper security in the building above. A separate and far more expensive contractor would be used to modify the basement appropriately. Once all of that was done, I sat down and looked around. By establishing a base of operations, I’d taken the first step in my quest for revenge.

And it felt good.