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Pale pink dawn had begun its slow, blanketing crawl over Detroit by the time Jensen staggered his way to the back entrance of the Rialto.
Like a slab-coat of paint over rotten wood, no beautiful sunrise could ever make the city what it once was—that was all too clear to Jensen as the skeletal remains of Sarif Industries rose overhead, stretching ad infinitum upwards like twinned gravestones. Maybe they were—monuments left behind in memoriam of the golden age of augmentation technology, or for Sarif Industries itself, or for the hundreds of thousands (most likely millions, Jensen corrected himself) who lost their lives in the Incident and beyond. And for what? For aug ghettos and harvester gangs to rule the roost? For Darrow Deficiency Syndrome to sweep across the world like some new, horrific plague, for cybernetic engineering to be monopolized by Tai Yong?
Jensen couldn’t answer that question—it would take a smarter man, a more stable man, than himself to truly explain what the hell has happened in the last two years.
He let the crumbling, powdery brick hold his weight as he looked upwards. The new servos, courtesy of TF29, were stiff, and did nothing to assuage the pain lingering in his organic parts. His nose was broken, paired with a superficial cut across the bridge. His ribs, enhanced as they were, were cracked. He had lost an eye shield, and the concussive damage of both grenades and being tossed around like a ragdoll left him with a concussion that made a migraine blossom behind his eyes and blur his vision. His ears began to ring as another wave of nausea overtook him.
Jensen clutched his abdomen and doubled over, not wanting to dry-heave lest the shooting pains in his ribs accelerate, but the ringing just would not stop. It crescendoed into static, an out-of-range radio, a tv that lost its signal, nothing but pure white noise that vibrated his eardrums so violently even his jaw began to buzz. If only it would just stop...
To his surprise, it did stop, only to be replaced by a familiar, sneering voice.
“Do you plan on throwing up your internal organs on my back lawn, or can I let you in with the caveat that you know how to behave like civilized company?”
“Pritchard,” Jensen gritted back, swallowing the rising bile. “Ho-?”
“How’d I know you’re outside? Heat sensors. No one else I know lights up like a floating torso on them like you do…at least, not anyone still alive, that is.” He continued, not letting Jensen get a word in, edge-wise. “I’m unlocking the door and disarming the mines. Just try not to expel your bodily fluids all over the carpet.”
Jensen pushed the metal door open, one hand still clutching his stomach. “How generous,” he mumbled, “remind me to put a ‘thank you’ in the mail, Francis.”
“Keep that attitude up and it won’t be necessary. Pritchard out,” was the curt reply.
Jensen carefully picked his way down the darkened hallway, cognizant of the mines hanging like fishnets from the dry-rotten ceiling tiles. Balancing was a herculean feat with how addled his mind felt, how his vision blurred and stuttered, how his limbs didn’t properly respond to his impulses. This was none the more evident as the toe of his boot caught on a thick cable running along the floor and he tripped into the opening of the theater, crashing to the ground, undignified and embarrassed.
Pritchard, standing in the middle of his makeshift workstation on the dais with his arms crossed, let out a snort.
“What, the billion-dollar-man doesn’t have any gyroscopic enhancements? A shame, really,” he prattled.
He stepped down from the platform and crossed over to Jensen, holding out a hand to him, looking bored with the whole situation.
“Here.”
Jensen took it—hesitantly, knowing Pritchard didn’t have the strength to haul him up, but thankful regardless. Once he was on his feet, however, dizziness took over, and he reached out towards Pritchard with both hands, gripping his forearms and swaying forward.
“Jesus, Jensen, don’t you know how much you weigh?” Pritchard bit, his voice rising an octave. His actions betrayed his words though as he guided Jensen to the closest available seat.
Seated, Jensen was able to take a few—short, labored—breaths. The dizziness faded into a dull ache, joining the rest of the pain across his body. Pritchard loomed over him; arms crossed once more.
When Jensen was able to speak, he looked up at him, reflexively trying to extend his eye shields until he remembered only one survived the night’s brawl. He sighed.
“Thanks, Pritchard,” he slurred, his tongue sluggish in his mouth.
“Tch, don’t thank me,” he paused, looking Jensen over with an impassive expression. “You look like hell, by the way.”
Jensen rolled his eyes with a small smile. “Nice to see you, too.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You wanted to.”
“No, I didn’t. Don’t you think I would have said that if I wanted to say it?”
“I don’t know,” Jensen responded, “you have a habit of not saying what you mean.”
Pritchard pinched the bridge of his nose and let out a breath. “You look like shit, and I mean it.”
“See? Was that so difficult?” Jensen chided. But as he inhaled to laugh, a pain like ice-cold fire lanced through his side, causing him to wince.
Pritchard was on him immediately, a hand clamped on Jensen’s shoulder, his lips pulled taut in a straight line.
“Let me guess, broken rib?”
“Several, probably,” Jensen was able to get out between clenched teeth. “I’ll be fine, Sentinel’s just a little dinged up.”
“’A little dinged up’? Is that what you’re calling it?” Pritchard let go and began moving across the theater with a long-legged stride. “Honestly, Jensen, I don’t know why you even bother lying to me when I’m plugged into your biometrics…most of the time, anyways.”
Jensen tilted his head back and stared at the peeling ceiling. What once was a beautiful mural of some Shakespearean classic was now nothing more but fragmented colors, dusty and long-forgotten. He closed his eyes, fatigue washing over him, unstoppable waves on a rolling tide…
A cold, damp bag was pressed into his hands, startling him. Frowning, he righted himself to glare at Pritchard.
“What’s this?”
“An icepack, or what constitutes one when you live in an abandoned theater. You’re welcome, by the way.”
Jensen pressed the makeshift icepack—which was nothing more than a bag of frozen carrots—to his ribs. He let out a sigh of relief and closed his eyes once more.
“Never said thank you,” he quipped back after a moment, “but I do appreciate it.”
“I’ll take what I can get,” Pritchard scoffed. “When you’re done with that, I’d like to take a look at your Sentinel, if you don’t mind. I have no clue what’s happened to you in the last twelve hours, so God only knows what sort of monkey-brained, ham-fisted doctoring you’ve attempted on yourself.”
“Careful, Francis, you’ll start to sound like you actually care,” Jensen admonished, with no real venom behind his words. When Pritchard didn’t respond though, Jensen sat up.
“Pritchard?”
“What?” came the shrill-sharp reply. “I didn’t say anything.”
“Well, yeah, that’s why I’m concerned.”
“Contrary to popular belief, Jensen, I don’t always have something to say.”
Jensen tutted. “Could’ve fooled me.”
Pritchard huffed and turned back towards the platform, clambering up and falling with hurried gracelessness into his computer chair. Seconds later, loud, frantic typing began, filling the empty hall with its rhythmic clatter.
Jensen shrugged, mostly to himself.
The pain in his side was starting to numb, thankfully, and he took his first deep breath in what felt like days. The assault on the cargo train was only a few hours ago, but by all accounts, it could have happened in another century—the dogged exhaustion coursing through Jensen’s limbs the only reminder otherwise. He hadn’t told Pritchard anything yet—not about Vande, or Thorne, or Jarreau, or even the giant, Germanic ogre that tried to crush his skull. He safely assumed Pritchard at least knew about the derailment considering it was all over local PD radio, but for all he knew, the train Jensen was tasked with infiltrating had crashed of its own accord in some freak accident. And then, he showed up here, hours later and battered in every way possible.
He was due an explanation, and Jensen felt a pang of guilt for not giving him one immediately. If the dark circles under the hacker’s eyes were any indication, he’d been awake all night, waiting for any sign of life from either Jensen himself or Vega. And Jensen, both out of stupidity and selfishness, had silenced his InfoLink for the majority of that time, only reactivating it when he was outside the Rialto.
Still, an explanation could wait. Jensen pulled his coat closer around his shoulders and sank deeper into the musty seat, grateful for what little comfort it could provide. He closed his eyes and started to doze.
No sooner had he fallen completely asleep was he awoken by bony, cold fingers prodding at his skull.
Jensen instinctually swatted the hands away, frowning.
Pritchard wore a frown of his own. He sat on Jensen’s left; a bundle of cables that ran to God-knows-where clutched in his hands.
“Well, aren’t you just a ray of sunshine?” He snapped.
“Says the guy trying to plug something into my brain.”
“It’s not something, it’s a transcranial electrodiffuser, and you ought to be thanking me just for having one of these, do you have any idea how much this would sell fo—”
“I don’t care how much it costs; I don’t want it near me,” Jensen interrupted.
Pritchard sat back and crossed his arms. “You want your Sentinel back, don’t you?”
Jensen paused at this.
He’d noticed at some point between the start of the assault on the train and now that the burning, itching, static-under-the-skin feeling of the Sentinel’s angiogenesis protein therapy he’d grown accustomed to had slowed to a crawl, then stopped altogether. He figured it meant he was healed, that the augmentation had finished its job, but the superficial wounds on his face—oddly—hadn’t even scabbed over fully, let alone faded into nothingness.
“What do you mean, back?” Jensen asked, looking Pritchard squarely in the eyes.
The computer technician looked away, squirming. “I mean, it’s still there, but…”
“But…?”
“But I suspect it’s used its entire reserve of energy. Tell me, how are your biocells?”
Jensen summoned the HUD and sighed at the flashing red icons.
“Drained.”
Pritchard shook his head, almost morosely. “That’s what I thought. The cardiovertor defibrillator built into the Sentinel system has an energy store for up to eighty electrocardiographic discharges. But Sarif, bless him, thought this number was too high. So, he had a subroutine—a failsafe—added that would allow the defibrillator’s battery to be used by other systems when the biocells are shot.”
Jensen frowned deeper.
“I wrote the code myself,” Pritchard sighed this time, looking down. “David ‘didn’t trust anyone else to do it,’ in his words.”
“Shit,” Jensen whispered, trying to make sense of it. Had he really used that much energy?
“It’s nothing to worry about, really,” Pritchard started, “it can be recharged fairly easily. But you’ll have to stay put for a bit.”
“How long’s this gonna take, Pritchard?”
“Just a few hours, by my estimate.”
“Great,” Jensen rolled his eyes.
Of the things he hated more than being scrutinized and nitpicked by Pritchard, being tied to a machine was one of the bigger ones.
“Relax, Jensen,” Pritchard said, running his fingers once more over Jensen’s scalp, “it won’t hurt. And it’ll give you time to tell me where the hell you disappeared to last night.”
Jensen winced as the cable was plugged into his cranium, feeling the liquid-cool jolt of electricity. “What are you, my mom?”
Pritchard rolled up his sleeve and began typing on his wrist keyboard.
“No, Jensen, I’m not,” he began, “but when you live with someone, there’s a certain…expectation that you’d at least communicate your whereabouts every once in a while.”
“Is that what you call this, living together?”
Pritchard balked, his voice rising an octave. “Well, what do you call it? This is my home, after all, and you’ve been here for weeks, eating my food, drinking my water, starting fights with the local gangs…”
Jensen stood, fury boiling quick in his blood. “I’m so sorry, Francis, I didn’t know I was intruding so much on whatever the hell life you live now.”
Pritchard opened his mouth to speak, but Jensen continued.
“You know, I thought, almost, for a second, that you were happy to see me again. That we’d actually maybe become friends after all this time. But obviously that’s not the case, so I’ll stop being such a burden on you. Thanks for the help, but I’ll be on my way.”
Jensen yanked the cables from his head and turned to walk, his legs stiff and ungainly. But a hand around his wrist stopped him.
“Jensen…I…” Pritchard spoke softly, uncharacteristically.
Jensen turned to him but pulled his arm away.
Yes, Frank had every right to be mad; Jensen was dead up until a month ago, and not only had he asked Pritchard for help escaping Facility 451, but also in his investigations around Detroit. He asked for help with Stacks—ignoring Frank’s concern towards the man—with Task Force 29, and with the Juggernaut Collective. He asked Frank for everything; Frank, a man that had presumably already grieved Jensen and moved on, eking out a meager living in an abandoned theater, entirely and completely alone after Sarif pulled the plug on the company. Frank, a man that had already given Jensen all he could before the Incident, who stayed up for hours and days waiting, watching, seeing as Jensen uncovered tangled web after tangled web of lie and truth.
But Jensen didn’t have much of a choice in the matter, either. No one else would have answered a phone call from a dead guy, no one else had the means to get him out of Alaska, no one else could keep the secret of his return safe or give him some footing in this new, hellish landscape. He had to ask Pritchard—no one else was listening, after all. Sarif was in the wind, Malik, too. Megan couldn’t be trusted—as much as that truth hurt—and outside of her...?
No, Frank was all Adam had.
Adam sighed. “Francis…Frank…look…I should have been upfront with you. About everything.”
Francis scoffed. “That’s an understatement.”
“No, I mean it,” Jensen started, taking his seat once more. “I should have told you what happened.”
“And you shouldn’t have silenced your InfoLink,” Pritchard added, wasting no time in reattaching the transcranial electrodiffuser. “But we have a few hours, at least.”
Jensen snorted, leaning back in the threadbare seat. “You’ve got a point.”
“Of course, I do, when don’t I? Here,” Pritchard replied, pressing an energy bar into his hand. “This’ll help, for the time being.”
Jensen stared at the wrapper, turning the bar over and over in his hands. A small smile crept across his face.
Pritchard snapped his fingers in front of Adam’s face. “Have you fully lost it or something?”
“No,” Jensen shook his head, his smile growing a bit more. “Just remembering how I used to take these off your desk every single day…and you never knew.”
“That was you?! Christ, Jensen, I almost had Carella fired I was so convinced it was him!”
“He’s lucky he didn’t get fired for that little neuropozyne stunt, to be fair.”
“Lucky? No, I think he just found some sucker to listen to his sob story,” Pritchard tutted, side-eyeing Adam. “God, what a time…”
Adam stared at the wrapper some more, then pocketed it. He was still nauseous to some degree and wasn’t about to take that chance. “Yeah,” he said, stretching his legs out in front of him. “It was definitely something.”