Apex Cypher (Prequel to The Techxorcist series) Read Free Page A

pulse: nothing.
    Screaming for help, he placed her flat on her back, and one hand over the other pumped her chest. Time had no purpose then. He had no idea how long he’d been pumping her heart when a voice called out to him from beyond the fence.
    “What are you doing out there? Who are you?” the voice said, in a gravely singsong kind of way.
    It had to be the Tinker. She fitted the description given to him by Xian, and the voice sounded similar to the one on the video recording.
    “I think she’s dead!” Gabe said. “Help me!”

Part 2 - The Tinker
    Gabe had never seen Petal like this before. She’d blacked out once or twice, lost consciousness on many occasions, but she always came round. It sometimes took a shot of NanoStem—a solution made from nanobots that healed wounds and cured illnesses, but he had no ‘Stems, and this time, there was no pulse at all.
    A figure in a makeshift leather cloak, stained black from dirt and grease, entered a code into a keypad attached to a fencepost. Gabe knew the power to the fence was now off due to the lack of hum, more apparent because of its absence. With the rain and the wind, he hadn’t noticed it before, but the silence now was like someone had switched off a white-noise generator.
    The figure opened a door within the fence, and stopped about twenty metres away as if regarding them as threat, or perhaps expecting this was just a setup to lure her from her graveyard. Gabe couldn’t make out their face, hidden deep within the shadow of the hood. Rain lashed against the stiff leather fabric, making a drumming sound.
    It lifted its head no more than an inch, but it was enough for Gabe to see two pinpricks of blue light, like two miniature Earths floating in a void. It was she: the Tinker.
    “Please,” Gabe begged, hunched over Petal’s still form, “Help me.”
    No reaction.
    “Are you listening? Ya damned fence has probably killed my friend! Hell, my only friend! Don’t just stand there. Help me. There must be something ya can do?”
    A hot prickly sensation crawled up and down his arms and back as his muscles tensed. Her inactivity and passiveness enraged him; made him want to destroy her, punish her for not helping him save the only person he held dear. His one precious thing in a world of ruin and struggle. Petal was as close to family as anyone could be. And the only family he had left.
    The Tinker ambled forwards a few steps, her feet scraping against the hard earth. Her right hip rose higher than her left like two out-of-sync pistons, giving her an awkward, waddling gait. When she was just a metre away, she pulled back the hood.
    The two lights were some kind of optical replacement. Attached to her head by a leather strap, the two orbs set in a steel surround. The orbs themselves were no more than a centimetre in diameter. Behind the strap, rough, amateur stitches lined the circumference of scar tissue around the profile of the eye socket. The wounds looked old, matched the soft-edged scars that ran diagonally from the socket where it met the bridge of her nose and down across her sunken cheeks to finish at her jawline.
    She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out for a few seconds. She had just three teeth on the bottom row, pointing at counterpoint angles, and two canines on the upper row, which as he noticed looked especially sharp.
    Her foul breath carried to him even through the wind and rain. It stunk of rotten meat or some kind of rancid fungus. Her blackened tongue probed tentatively at her teeth.
    He was reminded of how a snake would taste the air with its forked tongue.
    “Well?” The tension was killing him.
    Finally she spoke, uttered with the cadence and timbre of words that had sat eager in a throat with no audience to hear them for far too long. They came tumbling out, tripping over each other. “What who do you are... I mean... who are you? What do you want?”
    “Want? What does it look like?” He stood, pointed to Petal. “She