Read The Digital Plague for Free Online Page A

dropped at an angle, catching my chest on one set of seats, red pain shooting through my chest and straight into my head, as if a spike had been jammed up through one armpit. The hover yawed again, and I was tossed toward the rear, smacking into the flat wall there. I closed my eyes and flexed my hands, making sure I still had movement, and with a deep breath I pushed the pain aside and tried to clear my head. I grabbed onto the back of the row of seats and pulled myself up and forward. Hand over hand, I made my way toward the two men who were a jumble of limbs on the floor, hanging from seats. I clung to the seatback and reached down to roll Shockley over; he was unconscious, a blue and black welt on his forehead. The other man was groaning, feebly pulling at his coat, which was caught on a bolt in the floor, the tight fabric restricting his movements. I hit him hard against one temple, new pain shooting up through my arm, and he fell still.
    The tearing, bending noise around me was hurting my ears as the hover’s displacers fought against physics to keep us in the sky. The air had turned burned and smoky, scratching at my throat. I pushed myself upright, leaning hard against the seats, and just panted for a second or two, sweat streaming down my face, one side of me feeling like someone had shoved a particularly long and well-barbed piece of rusty metal between two ribs. The hover began to shake violently.
    Moving carefully, I climbed my way to the cockpit, one heavy step at a time. The back of the hover seemed to have its own immense gravity, as if a black hole had erupted into being just behind the plate metal, sucking at me relentlessly. I couldn’t get enough air into my lungs, and every step was an effort of immense proportions. When I clawed my way through the cockpit door, I hung there, straining, and stared out the windshield. A stupid smile spread over my face. We’d drifted wildly north; instead of the city beneath us there was the rubble-dotted wilderness of the northern island, old abandoned Inwood just one long riot scar. The Unification Riots had burned half of Manhattan to the ground, because the only people who’d thought welding the whole world under one government was a good idea were the folks who planned on running things afterward. No one had ever bothered to rebuild it, and I was about to ride this hover straight into the scar tissue at roughly a hundred miles an hour.
    The smile remained on my face even though I wasn’t feeling remotely humorous—it was like an alien thing on my face. I watched the ground approaching in deceptive slow motion and then glanced down at the pilot, lying in a shallow pool of blood on the floor up against the wall. I glanced back, twisting my head around to look at the triplets.
    The whining noise of the displacers was ear-shredding.
    I dived forward and took hold of the pilot’s chair, my ribs lighting up into a wedge of fire stabbing into me. I let out a strangled yell and tore two fingernails pulling myself into the chair, where I was able to just go limp and let gravity and inertia press me back against the thin cushioning, panting in painful little hitches.
    “This isn’t fair,” I muttered. I didn’t have time for this. I had people to kill.
    The displacers reached an almost silent crescendo so loud my ears couldn’t process it, and then, with a few hundred feet between me and the pitted bank of the river, they flatlined and went silent.
    I could hear the wind howling as we tore through it. I breathed in tight, rapid snorts I couldn’t hear. Scrabbling with bloodied fingers, I pulled the safety straps across my body and clicked in. Without warning, the ground wasn’t coming in slow motion anymore—it was rushing up toward me faster than made sense.
    Twenty feet up, I closed my eyes.

V
    Day Three: Keeping Panic at Bay with
Lies and Cheap Tricks
    Thinking it was a bad idea, I opened my eyes anyway and blinked, feeling pain, one giant ache that stretched