Heather had asked Pat to send her everything he could remember about this ceremony, so he did his best to concentrate on Harrison Castro’s speech, the longest explanation Pat had ever heard for why smart rich people deserved to be rich because they were so smart, and were obviously smart because they were so rich. That night in his room, he used up half his candle ration for the week, and there were nine handwritten coded pages. It was cold, so he burned his scratchwork, and as the room warmed up, finally fell asleep, thinking about how all the movies had lied about what the life of a spy was like.
15 HOURS LATER. BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA. 9:35 AM EST. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2025.
Roger put in his next-to-last magazine. Counting the one in the chamber he was down to nine rounds—eight, saving one for himself.
More than twenty tribals on the ground floor below him.
They could come up two staircases, one at each end of the concrete hallway, but he could cover both of those from his improvised fort at the central desk on the floor. They could set the building on fire and make him come down one staircase, but on his way down he’d have another chance to take one or two with him. When it comes to getting shot at the end of the game, everybody wants to be in the back row.
Angry shouting: “All right, follow me!”
Roger set himself. Just like rifle range.
The man lunged from the right stairwell. Point and squeeze. He fell over. Another clean head shot. They’d be so proud of me back in Pueblo.
He got the next one from the right staircase, then another from the left. He was down to one in the chamber, one in the magazine, one magazine to go. He fumbled the last magazine out of his pocket.
It was empty. He must have absentmindedly tucked it back into his pocket sometime in the last three hours of being chased around the U of I campus. It seemed really unfair that he had just lost count.
The two rounds left were what he had. In a few minutes there’d be another rush. He’d take one more with him, and then, remembering Ecco, he’d use the last round to take the fast dark exit.
Since it was almost over, he might as well go comfortably. He stood, stretched his legs, and treated himself to a long, luxurious piss into a drinking fountain drain. He could hear them arguing and squabbling below about who would rush him next.
The big room he’d had his back to was a chem lab; he smashed the window in its door with a chair. Downstairs, they yelped and whined “What’s he doing?” at each other. Wish I had the ammunition to invite them up to find out.
The supply closet was familiar territory; a year ago he’d been finishing his first year as a ChemE major.
Except for some strong caustics, the dry chemicals had been in plastic jars that had rotted. He swept the heaped-together powders, and the goopy remnants of the jars, into a dustpan, carried the pan down the hall, and emptied it just out of sight of one stairwell entrance. He went back and got more, putting that at the other end of the hall, dragging one body out of the way as if it were furniture. He wiped his hands on his pants, noticing he didn’t care that the man was dead but hated how grimy his skin and clothes were. Funny, before Daybreak the only corpse I’d seen was at Grandpa’s funeral.
Next he took the dry chemicals stored in glass, which were generally the most reactive, and poured them onto the tops of his piles. They were still arguing about whether they should rush him, and what it might mean that he was moving around up there.
Back in the supply closet, he set aside the strong acids. The rest of the liquids in glass were mostly complex organics, which had turned to something like cheese, but a few flammable solvents seemed all right; these he carried, bottles and all, to add to his piles.
Sudden scuffling downstairs. Shouting. Screaming.
Two shots.
RRC agents or maybe TNG troops; Daybreakers had no working guns. Roger froze and listened.
“Hey, don’t shoot.” A grinning Dan Samson burst from the stairwell. “Roger! I didn’t know Heather had sent you too! I surprised’em a little,” the big man said. “If we go now, I think we can shoot our way out—”
“Need ammo,” Roger whispered. “I have two.”
“Seven,” Samson said quietly.
“Let’s set off the surprise I’ve been fixing up and see if we can get out with just hatchets. What are they doing down there?”
“Trying to figure out what to do because you killed the big boss and two little bosses, and they’re afraid to go home and say they didn’t get us, and even more afraid to come up the stairs. Let’s try your idea. I’ve always loved surprises.”
A few seconds later, they hurled one jug of nitric acid to the far end of the hall; the mess of powder there foamed, fumed, burst into flames, and poured out dense blue smoke. They charged down their own stairwell, staying well separated, and at the first landing, threw the big bottles of hydrochloric and sulfuric acid up behind themselves, through the propped-open doors and into the piles of chemicals. There was a low, pulsing boom and more dark smoke gouted into the stairwell.
Holding their breaths, they plunged down the stairs. At the double doors Samson plowed into a Daybreaker sentry coming in, pinned her to the wall with the door, and chopped her forehead, twisting the blade to wrench it free.
Roger yanked the other door open and charged into the now-terrified group, slashing and thumping with his hatchet, and Samson was on them a moment later.
The surviving Daybreakers fled. “This way,” Samson said. They climbed through a broken window onto a low fire escape, dropped to the ground, and ran.
“Those were some pretty shitty soldiers,” Roger gasped, as they ducked between two buildings. Behind them, the chemistry building was pouring dense blue smoke from its lower floor.
“Those weren’t soldiers. They were slaves. Their leadership was three sorta-soldiers from Castle Earthstone. More afraid of their bosses than they were of us.” In the chemistry building, a window belched orange flame. “What did you do back there?”
“I have no idea. Where to from here?”
“Well, not back to that building. South, I think. Let’s go.”
17 HOURS LATER. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 12:30 AM MST. SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2025.
“This is pretty senseless of me,” Allie said. She cupped her wineglass like a baby bird in her hand, looking at the two empty bottles as if they had just appeared from nowhere. “I’m just the tiddliest bit drunk, I’m going to have a hangover tomorrow for the conference when I really need to be patient with Graham, and I’m feeling so totally extremely indiscreet.” She touched the long red lacquered nail of her index finger to her nose and said, “Numb, numb, numb. Can’t feel a thing. Also num, num, num, dinner here was amazing, Arnie. I think in the new post-Daybreak world, if Olympia is the new Washington, it’s gotta be that Pueblo is the new New York. Better restaurants, smarter people, I mean what else could it be?”
“Well, Johanna’s What There Is is the place in Pueblo.”
“Yeah, and back in the day you’d have taken me to the place in New York, if I’d’ve even looked at you when you were teaching at that fancy school—”
“Columbia.”
“I know, Arn, just having fun with you.” She sighed and drank some more.