Prologue

Prologue

Some kids thought they could be cool.

Like, if they trained hard, if they just found the right gear or made the right friends, if they were given an opportunity, they could grow up to be a badass motherfucker, chewing nails and spitting fire.

I was one of those kids. Daydreaming of being awesome, of kicking ass. I’d find some discarded samurai super-gun. I’d discover that my parents were linked to one of the cooler cartels somehow and they’d take me in. Maybe I’d just start my own gang with the kittens as recruits.

It was all stupid daydreaming.

Weird how life twisted things around sometimes.

I paused mid-step, then stood a little straighter to look out the window. Earth was below me. Just… the entire planet, hanging there. The part below us was brightly lit, stark white clouds over dark greens and brilliant blues. The place where I’d spent my entire life.

“You okay?” Gomorrah asked. She had paused a few steps ahead, Deus Ex–still in her pyjamas
–by her side.

“Yeah,” I said. “Just taking it all in.” There was this weird feeling of vertigo, my stomach doing little flips as I took in the world below. It wasn’t just the fear of the drop that had me feeling that way. A week ago, I’d been a nobody orphan; the kind of street trash that no one sensible gave a fuck about.

I’d come far in a few days.

“Let’s keep moving,” I said. “Clock’s ticking, right?”

There were thirtyish hours left until the apocalypse started.

The girls nodded, and we continued down the dark grey corridor of Deus Ex’s home away from Earth. She stopped us in front of a pair of doors set against one wall. Big bulkhead looking things, like I’d expect to see in some futuristic submarine. “This is your way down,” she said. “Get in, grab on, and then enjoy the ride.”

The doors opened into rooms the size of broom cupboards, with slits against the walls and handles at about waist-height. There was a sort of leaned-back chair at the rear too. “How, exactly, is this going to bring us back to Earth?” I asked.

“Gravity.”

I shook my head and got into the pod first.

“See you ground-side,” Gomorrah said.

“Yeah,” I replied. “Deus Ex, you’ll keep in touch?”

The shorter girl shrugged. “I’m busy, but I might have a few hours to spare, yeah. The trip over to Mars takes a week or so. I’ll be stuck in my ship that whole time with nothing to do but binge shows and take naps.”

“While we’ll be on Earth fighting for our lives?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Want to go fight for your life on Mars instead?”

“I think I’ll take my chances down below,” I said as I settled into the pod. The door closed with a heavy thump, and I felt it as the pressure changed. The walls unfolded, and clamps grabbed me around the waist and shins and arms. It was uncomfortable to be restricted so much.

Then the pod started to fill from the bottom up with some sort of goop. It rose and rose, cold as it seeped around my armour.

“What in the fuck is that?” I asked.

It’s a heavily-oxygenated shock absorbing liquid. You should be able to breathe it, and it will diffuse any impacts so that they don’t harm you.

Myalis was always so damned comforting. “That’s real nice to hear,” I said as the goop swelled up, then reached my arms. It was hard to move in, like gelatin. Then it swallowed my head, and I found myself holding my breath for a moment.

It didn’t last long. I trusted Myalis, even if she was a bit strange at times.

The pod clunked, and the wall before me lit up. It was a screen, one that showed the inside of a tube.

Something clanged, then the tube shot up while I went down.

Then we left the station. I glimpsed another pod falling a little bit above before I was rotated around. Jets of some gas realigned my pod with little spurts, and then I was falling back down to Earth.

A lot of kids really wished that they’d grow up to be badasses. I had been one of them.

Now I was falling out of a samurai’s space fortress back towards the Earth in a little metal casket moving so fast that soon the bottom of my pod lit on fire as I screeched through the air. A timer hovered on the edge of my vision, counting down to what might be the end of everything. There were few things as badass as what I was doing, I figured.