Upgrade(63)

I climbed on top of him.

“Blink wrong, I’ll slice you to ribbons.”

He nodded frantically.

His face was a wreck, and I could see exactly where my blow to his throat had landed. It had crushed in the upper part of his larynx. I ran my finger down his throat until I felt another bulge—the cricoid cartilage. The indentation between this and his Adam’s apple was where I’d make my incision.

When I flicked open the Blue Phantom, the man’s eyes went wide.

Its blade was insanely sharp.

I eased it in, the man whimpering as blood poured from the new wound. I carefully pushed the blade through a membrane until it punctured into his airway.

His face was turning blue.

Seventy-eight seconds.

I knew I’d penetrated his airway, because some of the blood sucked in through the wound. I lengthened the incision to half an inch.

Whether from the pain or oxygen deprivation, the man was now unconscious.

Retracting the knife blade, I came to my feet and started opening kitchen drawers, looking for a straw or— I grabbed a BIC pen with bite marks on one end, quickly separating the body from the writing components.

The cut I’d made in the man’s neck was ugly—ragged and bleeding like crazy, but with some effort I was able to finesse the hollow body of the pen two inches through the man’s neck.

He wasn’t moving.

I put my lips to the pen, blew two breaths into the man’s airway, and waited.

Nothing happened.

I started CPR—one hundred chest compressions per minute.

Then two more breaths into the pen.

Repeat.

Four minutes, twelve seconds.

I was about to start another round of CPR when the pen shuddered in its hole and made a gurgling, sucking noise.

The man’s eyes opened. He took long, desperate breaths through the pen and stared up into my eyes with a helpless intensity. The color in his face was returning to normal.

He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out.

I watched the panic return, and for a split second, almost felt sorry for him.

“I hold your life in my hands,” I said.

He nodded. He knew.

I touched the pen. “This is all that’s keeping you alive.”

I rushed into the living room, grabbed my laptop out of my pack, and returned to the kitchen.

I sat next to the broken-throated man and opened a blank document.

I didn’t have much time—someone must have heard the gunshot that killed Tiffany.

“What’s your name?” I asked, then handed him the laptop.

He typed: Andrew

“Is my sister in Glasgow?”

He shook his head.

“How did you get entangled with Kara?”

We were in Myanmar together. I was a part of the team that rescued her. She approached me last year to be a part of her project “Why is the upgrade killing people?”

I have no idea

Probably true.

“What were you supposed to do with me?”

Transport you out of here

“To Kara?”

Yes

“Where is she?”

I don’t know

I reached over, yanked the pen out.

Gasping.

Desperation.

Hands clutching at his neck and that oxygen-starved purple beginning to color his face again.

“You think I won’t watch you slowly suffocate?”

Andrew typed frantically: Colorado

“Where in Colorado?”

Near Silverton, please

“Give me an address and I’ll let you breathe again.”

58 Eolus Way

I shoved the pen back through the hole in his throat, and as he gasped for air, I watched him, trying to surmise if he was lying, but the trauma of the tracheotomy was drowning out any expressions, much less readable microexpressions.

I heard footsteps on the front porch. I grabbed the laptop, jumped to my feet, and raced into the living room, shoving it into my pack as someone pounded on the front door.

I grabbed Andrew’s bag off the dining room table and ran past him, unlocking the back door just as the front was swinging open.

Soldiers entered the house.

I bolted through the backyard, past an old grill and shed, then hurdled a teetering, three-foot fence into an alley.

Finally got a deep breath of air into my lungs, and a shining pain spread through my entire midsection. My ribs had been bruised during our fight, the pain in my chest still blossoming, but I couldn’t stop.

I kept running.

Through backyards and front yards.

Across an empty street.

I finally broke out of a backyard and there was nothing but darkness ahead. I’d reached the field I’d crawled through earlier. I ran as hard as I could, then slid down into an irrigation ditch and slipped on my NightShades, which had miraculously survived—a little bent, but basically intact.

I peered over the edge of the ditch, the lights of Glasgow burning a brilliant green. Three figures emerged from the windbreak of trees surrounding the city.

National Guard soldiers.

At just fifty feet away, I could see their rifles and respirators. They weren’t wearing night optics. I watched one of them walk a short distance into the field—a short, stocky man. He must’ve had some kind of nightscope on his rifle, because he just stood there, methodically panning the field.