Upgrade(92)

I fired again, hit her center mass, watched her punch back, her arms falling to her sides, the pistol clattering to the floor out of her left hand.

She was reaching for the gun when I arrived, and I kicked it across the polished concrete slab and through the open window frame.

Kara’s leg was bleeding, and I could hear in her respirations that her right lung had been punctured. With each breath she wheezed. Blood trickled out of the corners of her mouth, and I forced her right hand open. She clutched a bundle of black fabric, which was attached to an S-folded strap that connected to the pack she wore.

Her eyes were open, watching me, a deep pain exuding from them, and I could not let this emotion touch me.

“Are there still remnants of the viral upgrade in your lab?” I asked. “Something the government could take and—”

“Yes, but the lab won’t be here much longer.”

“When?”

She glanced at her wristwatch. “Ninety-two seconds.”

I loosened the leg and chest straps, Kara whimpering as I rolled her over and freed her shoulders. I awkwardly maneuvered the entire harness rig down her legs. She’d worn the Tumi backward, strapped to her chest. I ripped it off, opened it, stared down at roughly a hundred auto-injectors.

I inspected the harness and container for signs of damage from the bullet. I saw none. It was still inside of Kara. Stepping into the harness, I finally shouldered the pack. Tightened the leg straps. Cinched the chest strap. The cord connecting the pilot chute to the container had become tangled, and I stepped away from Kara, letting the bridle slowly unfurl.

“So this is it?” she asked, struggling mightily to speak. “Just going to let us destroy ourselves?”

I began to refold the bridle. No expertise beyond what I’d seen in Kara’s hand and a video I’d haphazardly watched about BASE jumpers on a bored Tuesday night, many years ago.

I lifted the Tumi bag, strapped it to my chest, said, “You can’t kill humanity to save humanity. Human beings are not a means to an end.”

Kara took a ragged breath. “Logan.”

“What?”

“I can’t see a thing.”

There were voices in the northeast stairwell. I needed to go. Instead, I sat down behind my sister and pulled her toward me, enveloping her in my arms.

“Don’t think of me this way,” she said. She was shivering violently, and I could feel the warmth of her blood running onto my leg. I smelled its coppery scent. “We were more than this.”

“I don’t just see you in this moment. I see you in all of your moments. All of our moments. We had some good ones.”

“Eighteen,” she said.

“What?”

She coughed blood. “We had eighteen perfect moments.”

I thought about it.

“Nineteen.”

“How do you get nineteen?”

“This one. But I’m sorry to have it.”

Kara was crying. She was dying and had let her defenses go. I could feel mine wavering.

I wanted to say something in our last moment together. Something profound. Kara did instead. It was the simplest of things. But it was everything.

She reached back, her hand touching my face.

“You can’t do nothing, Logan.”

I wanted to tell her how much I would miss her. How sorry I was for every time I almost picked up the phone to call and didn’t. For not being more in her life. But the words caught in my throat.

Her hand slipped away.

“Kara?”

I felt something go out of her.

Whatever I was holding wasn’t my sister anymore.

I eased her down onto the concrete, closed her empty eyes. I saw her, not as this shell, but in a perfect memory: twelve years old, riding ahead of me on her bicycle down the dirt road outside our grandparents’ house. It was late afternoon, and in the golden light, she glanced back at me and Max, taunting us to, Catch up! Go faster!

I came to my feet, my pistol in one hand, my other holding the pilot chute. I walked to the edge of the glassless window and looked down.

Kara had come to this side of the building because it was the only aspect that didn’t have another skyscraper crowding up against it. I looked out over the plaza and Broadway, and what had once been Zuccotti Park—a 33,000-square-foot oasis in the heart of the Financial District. Now just a patch of dead, flooded trees.

A strong wind was still blowing off the harbor. I would need some velocity to clear the building.

I jogged back forty feet from the window, and as I turned to face my runway, something zipped past my ear.



* * *



—

Hazmat-suited people were flooding out of the northeast stairwell. A projectile struck my pack. I pulled out a tranq dart, tossed it aside, and fired twelve rounds in under two seconds, everyone scattering, and then I was running.

Thirty feet from the window.

Twenty feet.

Two darts struck the pack.

Ten.

I shot past Kara, thinking: This is the last image I will ever have of my sister.

Two feet from the edge, I leaped, exiting the building at a dead run, my consciousness dividing—

It was the strangest sensation of my life, falling at one-quarter speed, my stomach lifting, the ground looming toward me, the wind blasting my face, and out of my right eye, I saw a light burst from the roof of One Liberty Plaza. Sniper.