The Interrogation

The ringing in Tariq’s ears wouldn't stop. It was a high-pitched, flat electronic whine that sat right behind his eyes. The armored truck’s grill was a wall of black metal inches from his booth’s front window. The glass hadn't just broken; it had exploded. Tiny, diamond-sharp cubes of reinforced safety glass were everywhere. They were in his hair, down his shirt, and crunching under the heavy boots of the men now swarming his workspace.

He kept his hands up. His palms were flat against the cold concrete of the back wall. He didn't look at the console. He didn't look at the manual lever he’d just strained his shoulder to reset. He just looked at the boots. They were matte black, heavy-treaded, and spotless despite the spring mud outside.

'Eyes on me,' a voice said. It wasn't loud. It didn't need to be.

Tariq lifted his gaze. The man in the black trench coat—Commander Aris—was standing in the ruins of the doorway. He held a slim tablet that cast a pale blue light up onto a face that looked like it had been carved out of grey plastic. Aris didn't look angry. He looked bored. That was worse.

'Name,' Aris said.

'Tariq... Tariq Lu. ID 88-09-Alpha,' Tariq said. His voice cracked. He let it. A terrified guard was a believable guard. His jaw was so tight it hurt to speak. Every muscle in his body was vibrating, a fine tremor he couldn't suppress.

'You’re shaking, Tariq,' Aris noted, tapping something on his tablet. 'Trauma? Or guilt?'

'A truck just drove into my office,' Tariq managed. 'I think I’m allowed to be a little twitchy.'

Aris stepped over a pile of glass. He reached out with a gloved hand and touched the monitor. The screen was black, currently cycling through the BIOS reboot he’d triggered. 'The system is down. Why?'

'The lockdown siren,' Tariq said, the lie coming out in a fast, desperate breath. 'The power surged when the external floodlights kicked to orange. The old breakers in this sector can’t handle the draw. The whole grid spiked, then the terminal crashed. I was trying to get it back up when the gate... the gate just went dead.'

Aris looked at the manual lever on the floor. Tariq’s heart did a slow, heavy roll in his chest. 'The lever is in the locked position. You reset it?'

'I had to,' Tariq said. 'The mag-locks disengaged when the power dipped. The turnstile was spinning free. I didn't want anyone getting through while the system was dark. I’m Sec-Ops Proxy. I know the protocol.'

Aris didn't respond. He just stared at the lever, then back at Tariq. The silence stretched. Outside, the rain was coming down harder, splashing through the missing windows. The smell of the thawing garbage heaps from the slums drifted in, thick and sickly.

'We’re looking for a woman,' Aris said finally. 'Short. Dark hair. Stolen Genesis Lab jacket. She was on the drone feed two minutes ago, heading exactly this way. You didn't see her?'

'I saw a shadow,' Tariq said. He focused on a single drop of rain tracking down the Commander’s coat. 'Right before the lights flickered. I thought it was a scavenger. I hit the intercom to warn them off, but then the screen went red, the siren started, and everything fried. I was busy trying not to get blinded by the sparks.'

Aris leaned in. He smelled like expensive soap and ozone. 'A Priority One fugitive doesn't just vanish into thin air, Tariq. Especially not at a bottleneck like Delta.'

'Maybe she doubled back,' Tariq suggested. 'The alleys behind the perimeter fence are a mess. If she knows the crawlspaces, she could be halfway to the agro-domes by now.'

Aris didn't look convinced. He turned to one of the armored soldiers. 'Get a tech-team in here. I want the hard drive pulled. If there’s a single millisecond of footage left in the cache, I want it. And scan the lever for recent prints. I want to know exactly when it was pulled.'

Tariq felt the blood drain from his face. He’d wiped the logs, but physical evidence was harder to hide. He shifted his weight, and a piece of glass sliced into his palm. He didn't flinch. He needed the pain to stay grounded. He thought of Sam. Sam, coughing in the dark. Sam, who would be dead if Tariq didn't play this perfectly.

***

Three hundred feet below the street, Sarah was drowning in the dark.

The water in the maintenance tunnels was chest-deep and freezing. It was a grey-black soup of runoff, industrial chemicals, and the city’s filth. Every time she took a step, her boots sucked into the thick silt at the bottom, making a wet, visceral sound that echoed off the low concrete ceiling.

She held the biometrics drive above her head like a holy relic. Her arms were screaming. The Faraday mesh was rough against her palms, and the weight of the thing felt like a lead brick. Her lungs burned. Not from the run, but from the air. Down here, the 'Rust' felt more concentrated. The dampness seemed to carry the spores, a heavy, metallic weight in every breath.

She stopped, leaning her shoulder against a slimy wall. Her breath came in shallow, jagged gasps. She needed to cough. She could feel the tickle in the back of her throat—that dry, sandpaper scrape that preceded a flare-up.

'Not now,' she hissed, her voice a ghost of a sound. 'Not yet.'

She checked the HUD on her cracked datapad. The signal was non-existent. The concrete and steel above her acted like a shield, cutting her off from the world. She needed a hard-line. There was a node—an old relay station from the pre-State era—about half a mile south. If the map was right, it was located in a sub-basement beneath a collapsed tenement in Sector 3.

A splash behind her.

Sarah froze. She didn't breathe. She didn't move. The only sound was the rhythmic drip of water from a rusted pipe somewhere in the distance.

Then, the sound of a drone. A low, wet hum.

It was a Sewer-Seeker. Small, nimble, and equipped with thermal sensors. State Security didn't just guard the gates; they owned the guts of the city too. The drone was moving through the main pipe, its blue searchlight cutting through the murk, reflecting off the oily surface of the water.

Sarah ducked, submerging herself up to her chin. The water was so cold it felt like needles pressing into her skin. She tucked the drive into the waterproof lining of her stolen jacket and pressed her back against a vertical support beam.

The blue light swept over the water, inches from her face. She could see the tiny particles of pollen and dust dancing in the beam. The drone paused. Its cooling fans whirred, a predatory sound in the confined space. Sarah closed her eyes, praying the cold water had lowered her body temperature enough to mask her thermal signature.

Her heart was thumping so hard she was sure the drone’s sensors could pick it up. Her jaw was clamped shut, her teeth aching from the pressure. 'Move on,' she thought. 'Just keep going.'

The drone hovered for five more seconds—five seconds that felt like a lifetime—before the hum pitched up and it drifted further down the tunnel.

Sarah waited until the blue light vanished completely before she stood up. She came out of the water shivering violently. Her skin was blue-tinged, and her fingers were so numb she could barely feel the datapad. She had to keep moving. If she stayed still, the hypothermia would kill her before the Sec-Ops did.

She pushed forward, her legs heavy as lead. The tunnel narrowed, the ceiling dipping low enough that she had to hunch over. The smell changed. The rot stayed, but it was joined by something sharp and chemical. Chlorine. She was getting close to the old water treatment sub-station.

She reached a rusted iron ladder and climbed, her muscles protesting every movement. At the top, she pushed open a heavy grate and rolled out onto a concrete floor.

She was in a small, square room. It was filled with racks of ancient, humming equipment. Cables hung from the ceiling like dead vines. This was it. The Sector 3 proxy node.

She scrambled to the main terminal. It was a relic—a physical keyboard and a thick glass monitor. She fumbled with the biometrics drive, her shaking hands struggling to line up the port.

'Come on, come on,' she whispered.

The drive clicked into place. The monitor flickered to life, bathing the room in a harsh, green glow.

SYSTEM INITIALIZING. ENTER OVERRIDE CODE.

Sarah’s fingers flew. She didn't need to think about the code; she’d memorized it weeks ago, back in the lab when she first realized what they were doing. The sequences felt like a language she’d known her whole life.

CODE ACCEPTED. UPLOAD BUFFERING... 0%

'Too slow,' she muttered, her eyes darting to the heavy steel door at the far end of the room. It was bolted from the inside, but that wouldn't stop a Sec-Ops breach team for long.

***

Back at Checkpoint Delta, the atmosphere had shifted from tense to lethal.

Aris was no longer looking at the tablet. He was looking at Tariq’s hands.

'You have machine grease under your fingernails, Tariq,' Aris said softly. 'That’s strange for a gate guard. You usually just push buttons.'

Tariq looked down at his hands. He’d forgotten. He’d been working on Sam’s makeshift air purifier this morning. Or was it from the turnstile lever? He couldn't remember. The cognitive static was returning, a white noise of fear that threatened to drown out his logic.

'I do my own maintenance,' Tariq said. 'The State doesn't send repair crews to Sector 4. If something breaks, I fix it. Otherwise, I don't get my shift bonus.'

'Commendable,' Aris said. He stepped closer, his face inches from Tariq’s. 'But here’s the problem. My tech just pulled the logs. They weren't just corrupted by a surge. They were wiped. Clean. A brute-force scrub. That takes intent. That takes a specific set of commands.'

'I don't know what to tell you,' Tariq said, his voice flat. He was past the point of trembling. He was in the snap point now. The place where the fear becomes so absolute it turns into a cold, hard stillness. 'The system crashed. Maybe the scrub is a failsafe. You built the software, not me.'

Aris smiled. It wasn't a kind look. 'We did build it. And there is no such failsafe.'

He turned to the soldiers. 'Take him to the transport. Level Four interrogation. And send a team to his registered address. I believe he has a brother. Bring him in too. If the guard won’t talk, maybe the boy’s lungs will.'

'No!' Tariq lunged forward, his mask of compliance shattering. 'He has nothing to do with this! He’s sick!'

A soldier slammed the butt of a rifle into Tariq’s stomach. The air left his lungs in a sickening whoosh. He hit the floor, his face pressing into the glass shards.

'Wait,' Aris said, holding up a hand.

One of the soldiers was holding a handheld scanner, pointed at the pedestrian gate. 'Commander. We have a hit. Traces of high-grade protein sequences on the turnstile bars. It matches the Genesis Lab profile. She was here. She went through.'

Aris looked down at Tariq, who was gasping for breath on the floor, a thin line of blood running down his cheek.

'You traded your life for a ghost, Tariq,' Aris said. 'And for what? A cure? There is no cure for the world we’ve built. There is only the order we maintain.'

He signaled the soldiers. 'Load him up. We’re done here.'

As they dragged Tariq toward the black truck, he looked back at the slums. The rain was washing the yellow pollen away, leaving the world looking raw and grey. He thought of Sarah in the tunnels. He thought of the drive.

He had to believe she was faster than they were.

***

Sarah watched the progress bar.

88%... 89%...

The building above her groaned. She heard the distinct, heavy thud of boots on the floorboards directly overhead. They were here.

'Just a few more seconds,' she whispered. Her hand was on the 'Confirm' key. Her other hand held a small, jagged piece of metal she’d picked up off the floor. It wasn't a weapon, but it felt better than nothing.

Dust filtered down from the ceiling as a breaching charge blew the door at the top of the stairs. The sound was deafening, a sharp crack that made her ears ring.

95%... 96%...

She could hear them shouting. The heavy clatter of gear as they descended the ladder.

98%... 99%...

UPLOAD COMPLETE. DATA DISTRIBUTED TO ALL SLUM NODES.

Sarah hit the 'Delete' key on the terminal, hard. The screen went black, the drive clicking as it self-destructed, the internal thermite charge melting the components into a useless lump of slag.

She turned to the door. The first soldier burst in, his rifle light blinding her.

'Hands up!' he screamed.

Sarah didn't put her hands up. She looked at the red 'Sent' confirmation light on the wall relay, a tiny, pulsing spark in the dark room.

'You’re too late,' she said, her voice steady for the first time all night.

The soldier didn't respond. He stepped aside, and the blue light of a Commander’s tablet filled the doorway.

Sarah felt the cold air from the tunnel behind her, a draft that smelled like the coming rain and the first hint of something clean. She looked at the terminal, then at the men closing in on her, and she smiled. It was a jagged, tired expression, but it was real.

She had done her part. Now it was up to the city to wake up.

The soldier raised his weapon, the laser sight centering on her chest, just as the first alarm began to chime across every speaker in the sector.