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It was long past midnight when the alarms finally went off. Connected to the backup to the backup generator, they had been untouched by the storm, and they were kept far enough away from the backup generators that they were unaffected by the homemade EMP that had been stuffed under the regular backups this afternoon. They had only taken so long to power the alarms because they were kept on an irregular cycle to keep anyone from realizing that there were backups to the backups. This had worked better than the security team who had designed it had anticipated: though it had been a failsafe against exterior threats, it had guarded just as well against an internal threat. It had worked perfectly.
Up in his bedroom on the second floor of his father’s house, Ogami Banri turned from the lamp on his desk to the window. His had been the only light on for some hours now, the power in his room connected to his own generator, one of the first rewards he’d requested from his parents’s bosses back when he was thirteen and still getting used to his job. They couldn’t pay him, not even under the table, because kids didn’t usually get paid to spend time with their friends, no matter how weird the friend in question was. But Banri got expensive gifts quarterly, and this was understood to be his compensation for babysitting the top researcher, which he’d understood from the time he was twelve to be a nice way of saying prisoner, and which he’d understood for the past year to be an awful thing, a really really cruel thing, a horrible thing to do to somebody who thought you were their only friend.
The situation was this: the Research & Development department of a certain private security company had realized that the young son of one of their consultants was a genius with chemicals, and also with music. Before the boy entered school they had bargained with his parents for him; he had grown up isolated from any non-company personnel after that, a fact entirely unrelated to the construction of a small gated community with a massive research compound underground. Most of the houses were inhabited by employees of the company; one of them was inhabited by the consultant and her husband and their son, and the boy was homeschooled, except for the fact that most of what he did was related to composing one specific song. It wasn’t a real song, Banri knew; years and years back his parents and their coworkers had connected each individual element on the periodic table to a different musical note, and the “song” that the so-called top researcher was trying to compose was in actuality a gas poisonous to kill an elephant with one gulp of air—poisonous enough that no human would be able to survive it, with bonus points if it could get through most gas masks. The goal was for the company to monopolize both the gas and the masks, and thus make a great profit.
Banri’s goal was related to this, though somewhat different. When Banri was eleven and accidentally stumbled across proof of the deal the company had made with the consultant over the fate of her son, he had been told by the people in charge that the lack of success so far had been the real cause of his parents’s divorce, and that if he did a good job of monitoring the top researcher then his parents would get back together, and that had been his goal for the next three years. When he was fourteen, he had figured out that his parents weren’t going to get back together no matter how much money he helped the company make, because not only did they not love each other but they each disliked the other enough to play hot potato with him as each tried to move on to their new lives. They were good fakers—all three of them were, really—but Banri had stopped being able to pretend even to himself that he would get his family back when he’d mentioned a censored version of this to the top researcher, and the top researcher had gotten angry on his behalf, despite the fact that he was a prisoner and Banri was his jailer. This had smarted like all hell under his skin for a year until he’d finally soothed it by taking the top researcher into the proper underground compound one night—not just his music room, but the whole thing—and sitting him down in an observation room and explaining the entire situation to him.
“I’m not your friend, Yuki,” he’d said, looking the top researcher carefully in his ice-silver eyes and waiting for the hurt to set in. “Nobody here is your friend. Nobody here wants you, not really. They just want what you can do. ”
“You’re lying,” said the top researcher, which was fair, because Banri did want him, desperately, and somewhere beneath his own pain he was dimly aware that tomorrow, when the truth had set in and they weren’t pretending to be friends anymore, he would miss the top researcher so badly he’d want to die. He had kept going, though, pulling up the first records that he’d ever found, and then handing over his own contract, folded nicely and neatly. He had explained where he got his generator, his keyboard, his gaming PC, each and every cool thing that lived in his room or in the top researcher’s, and he had watched as the truth settled in with the deluge of evidence, and then he piled on even more. They were making the top researcher kill animals; soon they would make him kill people. They wanted to kill people. They made money from it. And they would kill the top researcher, too, if he became a liability, if he stopped making progress, if he started costing more money than he was worth.
“And I’ll tell them if you do,” Banri added, driving the hurt home as far as he could. “That’s why they have me spend time with you, you know. So that they know when they need to get rid of you.”
The top researcher almost called Banri’s bluff, but didn’t; instead, he sat silently as Banri showed him the rest of the evidence, and then let him watch Banri carefully wiping and looping the security footage and scheduling it to return to normal in forty-five minutes, at which point they both would be in their beds, where they were supposed to be. This was important for him to learn, the second most important lesson of the night. You couldn’t escape half as well if there were always cameras on you, so you had to trick out how to get them off without anybody noticing. More importantly, nobody could ever escape a prison when they had somebody to stick around for. That night had been important for making sure that there was nothing at all the top researcher had to stay for. It had rubbed in the fact that he was all alone, and nobody liked him, not even his only friend, and it had worked well enough that Banri had been throwing smokescreens up over escape attempts ever since.
Tonight was the most successful one yet, if it weren’t for the alarm; Banri had really thought that the only danger would have come after the top researcher was out of the gate and out on his own, and not before he’d even reached the thing. He first thought that his EMP had failed him, and then he thought that maybe they had added extra security measures to the top researcher’s house that they hadn’t told him about. This was possible—it had been a year since the two of them had really spent time together outside of Banri’s after-school shifts, where they mostly ignored each other and Banri occasionally “forgot” various rewards that could prove useful for getting out, or for living in the outside world. Sixteen was old enough for a part-time job in places, though, so recently he’d begun getting a paycheck, which had been great for when it came to “forgetting” a jackknife in the top researcher’s room to join the Swiss army knife he’d left there the day before he ended the friendship, but it had been less great for leaving things whose parts could be used to build things for living on your own outside. He had thought then that he was as worried as was humanly possible; now, as he stared out his window at the waking neighborhood—at the waking security company— he thought that that time had been quite relaxing, actually. He knew—had known for so long—that the minute the company realized that he’d covered for their top researcher’s escape attempts, his life was forfeit. He had just expected that forfeit to occur after the top researcher had escaped, that was all. The top researcher was too kind for his own good. He’d never forgive himself if Banri died for him; if they held Banri’s life hostage, even now that their friendship had been dead in the water for an entire year.
Fuck.
Lights were flicking on across the neighborhood; no matter what else happened tonight, the moment they found the EMP in the backup generator he was toast. The moment that he was toast, there would be no reason not to use him as a hostage against the top researcher. The moment he was hostaged would be the moment the company won, because the top researcher loved him more than anything in the world, would do anything for him. It had taken over a month after learning the truth for him to start trying to escape, because at first he’d thought that doing a better job developing chemical weapons would make Banri love him again; Banri had had to bite his tongue until it bled and then hiss, as venomously as he could, that he had never loved him and never would, and just wanted the top researcher gone. Lie and truth, lie and truth: Banril loved the top researcher more than anything else in the world, and that was why he wanted him free and far from here. Banri had never stopped loving him and never would, and that was why he intended never to see him again once he was free. They weren’t friends; they never had been. Banri was just the cage, just the manacles weighing him down, and you couldn’t be friends with the instruments of your captivity. It just wasn’t possible.
The alarm continued going off; Banri laced up his shoes and grabbed his jacket and wished he’d thought to keep a knife of his own in his room. Too late now. Too late to risk it and see if the top researcher had brought both of them like he should have, either: it was a race against time and nobody here was on Banri’s side. Instead, he took his just-in-case rope and put the looped end around the leg of his bed—it was strong enough to support his weight, he’d tested it multiple times in the last year after the knot failed him in the night after killing the illusion of friendship with the top researcher, and even if climbing out of his bedroom window wasn’t what he’d gotten it for it was the most useful thing it had ever done for him. He landed in the bushes under his window without a problem and ignored the direction the alarm was coming from—it was just informing everyone that the top researcher wasn’t in his bedroom, which Banri already knew, please and thank you. If the boy had any sense he was halfway through the landscaped trees and to the gate by now, which was electrified usually but should have been turned off by Banri’s EMP.
Now that the alarm was going off, Banri was going to need to find out another way to cut off power at the gate. He wasn’t stupid enough to assume that just the alarm had had a secret backup, and it was too late now to try and find it, and to find whatever other backups Banri had been too stupid to notice.
People were coming out of their houses now; Banri’s phone buzzed in his pocket and he picked it out and saw a notice for search parties to form, if the top researcher was found anywhere other than in the vicinity of his house or Banri’s, and then another notification appeared above it, one asking Banri for an update on the top researcher’s movements, asking if Banri had known anything about this beforehand. Obviously he had, and obviously he hadn’t: if he’d known enough the top researcher would have gotten out with the company none the wiser until morning, or until tomorrow if Banri could swing a fake illness well enough, and there would be no alarm and no electrified fence, and nobody would notice there was a problem until they found Banri’s body, and by then the top researcher would be safe and far away, and if ever he heard of Banri’s death he wouldn’t even mourn, because he would know Banri for the monster he really was.
He responded to that one saying No, obviously not, I’ve been working on homework all night, I don’t know what’s going on and then to the other stating that he wouldn’t be joining any search parties because the top researcher would trust him more if he was on his own, and then he threw his phone in one direction and took off in the other, just in case anyone got the bright idea to track him. It wasn’t like he was really going after the top researcher, but it was still better to be safe than sorry—and anyway if they noticed him fucking with the power on the fence the jig would be up.
There were far too many ways for the jig to be up. It had almost come up with this alarm—if anyone found the top researcher, or if the top researcher found Banri, or if the EMP was noticed, or someone reviewed the camera feeds and noticed all the times they’d been tampered with, the pieces might be put together, and that was disregarding the million and one ways this all could go belly-up that Banri hadn’t even thought of yet, and couldn’t think of now, because none of those variables could help now. Once upon a time the top researcher had looked at him and said Ban, you worry too much, you don’t need to plan for everything, but look what happened when you didn’t, take that, Yuki, now you might die and I didn’t do enough to protect you.
Banri shook off the memory and kept running. When he reached the gatehouse, which was really a guardhouse, which was really connected to the underground compound and which was the best place in the area to get at the security system, he was relieved to find the door open as though the person inside had left in a hurry—probably in order to investigate the alarms—and he walked inside without caution, cursing under his breath. He was right: it was empty, and empty in the sort of way that said that whoever had been here had left in a hurry, in the middle of doing something too important to pack away but not important enough to stay for. For a moment he thought of sheet music scattered over the top researcher’s bed in much the same way, and then he shoved that thought away and sat in the swivel chair in front of the monitors. No point in risking going below if he might be able to turn off the fence or gain important information from above; if nothing else, here he could hinder the search parties. Here he might even get an idea of which section of fence and which gates to avoid…
The password he entered was wrong, and the screen told him he only had one more password attempt before the computer system wiped itself, and he cursed again and rooted through drawers until he found the new password taped under the rubber bottom of the stapler so that each guard shift would be able to access the computer without necessarily memorizing the password. You really had to be thankful for the laziness of people drawing a paycheck at a job they didn’t really care about. They might have just saved a life with that password.
The first surprise came when Banri logged into the computer. The screen showed exactly what he expected to see for this time of night—video feed of the neighborhood, each camera and its view intimately familiar, and not even a hint of what could have caused the guards to whirlwind through the room, leaving drawers open and files out at random. He checked the internet browser and found that the search history was nearly entirely different kinds of porn, and that each moment was accounted for there up until the alarm went off; some kind of dis-ease crept its way up his spine, and Banri exited the browser, navigated back to cameras and then found his way to the control system on the gates. He had never tried to mess with the system this way before, because it was too easy to get caught, and so he was flying blind, heart racing more with every passing second, muttering to himself, “The fence, the fence, the fence…”
Something moved behind him, and Banri jumped and whirled all the way around before he could think of a good lie for what he was doing. He couldn’t get caught here, he couldn’t—it would be worse than doing nothing at all, because then the company would misunderstand his relationship with the top scientist and he’d be used to hurt him all the sooner. He couldn’t let that happen, and so when he caught sight of a crouched silhouette halfway out of a ransacked cabinet he threw himself at it even though he’d never properly fought a day in his life and hit the mouth with one hand and the neck with the other and snarled, “Don’t you even fucking think about it.”
The silhouette gasped wet against his hand, but didn’t fight back, didn’t struggle at all, and a second later Banri saw the moonlight reflecting against the silver of his hair and went slack with horrified recognition.
“Fuck,” he said, and moved off of the top researcher. “You should have at least hit me back.”
“I could never do that, Ban,” said the top researcher, far too earnestly, and Banri sat back on his hands and cursed with the exact air of an overworked, alcoholic office employee. “Were you looking for me?” he added afterwards, and Banri shook his head.
“No, but everyone else is,” he said. “I had another job.”
There was a flash of disappointment in the top researcher’s eyes, and Banri felt anger swell up in him.
“You can not have been doing this for my attention,” he said. “You cannot have. They’ll kill you for this.”
The top researcher shrugged. “It’s a win-win,” he said. “Either I’m out or you’re talking to me again.”
Banri folded his arms. “And what makes you think that. ”
There was a smirk now, a little vicious grin that made Banri hope that he’d gotten the top researcher to hate him, really hate him, enough at least to not care if Banri was hurt or maybe even to take a little pleasure in it.
“Because they need me,” said the top researcher, “and they don’t need you, and if I tell them everything you told me and then say that I’ll stay and do whatever you want if you start faking it again, they’ll make you do whatever I want.”
Banri folded his arms, pressing them tight against his chest. “And they’ll tighten security around you so that you wouldn’t even dream of getting away again,” he said. “Don’t be an idiot, Yuki.”
“I’m not an idiot,” said the top researcher. “I know I’ve been caught. You’ve probably already told them all where I am.”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” Banri said. “Like I mentioned earlier, I’m here for another reason. I didn’t even know where you were until you started making noise.”
“Why are you here, then?” the top researcher asked, and Banri shut up, mind racing. There was no way in hell he could disable the electric fence with him in here, breathing down his neck. For one, it would be all too easy for the top researcher to realize what Banri was really doing, and for two, Banri still had no idea how to get to wherever you turned off the electrification, and now he was on a time crunch, because the top researcher was quite possibly the clingiest person Banri had ever met in his life and he would not be letting Banri out of his sights now unless he was physically stopped—or perhaps if he got a taste of freedom. If he could manage that…
There was another way to turn off the electricity, one far riskier to everyone involved. If Banri were able to short out the fence for long enough for the top researcher to get through, then not only would he be successfully out, but nobody would be able to follow—first all the power would go out, not just the security system and its backups, and then it would come back on with a vengeance, every single lock jamming up tight, and nobody would be able to follow until they’d untangled whatever poor soul had shortcircuited the system. Banri had seen it happen to a deer, once; the poor thing had still been breathing when they finally got it out, though it had stopped making the terrible noises some hours earlier. Nobody had wanted to explain to Animal Control what the electrified fence was doing here, though, so instead they carried it to the side of the road, and one of the less squeamish employees had run its head over with a car—because apparently enthusiasm over making weapons to murder humans didn’t always transfer over to a willingness to kill animals.
Banri was willing to do the short-circuiting himself, if only he could guarantee that the top researcher would climb through immediately after; the problem here wouldn’t be getting it done but rather keeping up the illusion, making sure that the top researcher thought that Banri was his enemy to the very last.
“That’s…none of your business,” he said finally, turning away from the top researcher to try and find more answers in the unhelpful computer. This was not his best lie, and they both knew it, but if Banri was facing away it was harder for both of them to admit that the top researcher knew him down to the bones, and that those bones wanted to protect only him. He clicked open the minimized camera feed and pulled it to one corner of the screen, and ignored the top researcher over his shoulder as he investigated the electronic locks on the gate, as if the secret to cutting the electricity lay there.
It didn’t, but after a few minutes one of the search parties appeared on the camera, and they were shit out of time. Banri considered for a moment, and then he unlocked the gate—so goddamned easy, just a click, you’d never know that if you put your hands on the thing it would shock you to hell and back. The second step of this process would be to press a button to actually open the gate, but then it would be too easy to follow, and anyway if anyone heard it opening the search parties might actually beat them there.
Besides, he couldn’t let the top researcher know that he was letting him out.
“Hey,” said the top researcher in question, “why did you just unlock the gate?”
“Reinforcements,” Banri lied. “Just in case. Come on, there’s a search party nearby. I’m going to hand you off to them and then get back to my job.”
The top researcher nodded, and Banri thought that if he really did still buy into the company’s lies this would have been very reassuring. The top researcher would do anything for him, would destroy himself completely to make Banri happy, and that was very good job security indeed. More importantly, however, it was extremely dangerous for the top researcher, and if anyone other than Banri noticed this he was damned. Better that he thought Banri hated him. Better that they never, ever saw each other again.
They walked together out of the small building, and the top researcher took Banri’s hand in his, and then after a moment wrapped his other hand around it, too.
“You’re shaking, Ban,” he said.
“I’m cold and tired,” Banri said. “It was storming earlier, and I couldn’t get to sleep, and now everything is wet. That’s all.”
“It’s warm out,” the top researcher said, and then, “Come with me, Ban. You’ve already unlocked the gate.”
Banri smiled without mirth. “No, oh, no,” he said. “I couldn’t, Yuki. I really couldn’t.”
“You can.”
“I won’t, then.”
“Not even if I tell you I need you?”
Banri’s heart squeezed in his chest, and he was suddenly, horribly glad that he had found the top researcher here in the guardhouse, even if it had made things so, so much harder for both of them.
“Not even then,” said Banri, “because it’s a lie. You’ll survive just fine out there without me. Better, even—two people are more conspicuous than one.”
“And if I tell you I love you?”
“Then I would break your nose and leave you out for the vultures,” Banri snapped, voice rough. He didn’t even know why he was so upset by this—of course the top researcher loved him, of course Banri knew this, it was why he’d worked so hard to make the other boy hate him. If the top researcher didn’t love him he would be so much safer—and if the top researcher still loved him, and they acknowledged this, then everything Banri had done over the past year had been for naught.
“Ban…”
“Don’t.”
The top researcher’s hands tightened on Banri’s, and Banri hated himself in a way he hadn’t ever hated anything before, and he yanked his hand away and picked up his pace.
“Ban, please, ” said the top researcher. “Please. Just tell me what I need to do for you to forgive me. I miss you. I lo—”
“I told you last year,” Banri said harshly. “Get out of here and don’t let me or anyone else who works for the company see your face ever again. ”
“Come with me, then.”
“No,” said Banri. “I don’t want to be around you. I’ve already had to deal with you for far too long.”
There was no response to that, and he was glad to not have to see the top researcher’s face. He deserved to hurt for the things he was saying to the person who loved him more than anything, it was true, but he also knew that if he saw how much he’d hurt the top researcher it would be nearly impossible to keep from taking it all back, to hold himself back from apologizing and swearing to find a way to escape together, from wrapping a blanket around the boy and building a far riskier plan just to gain a smile. That was a bad plan. That was too dangerous. This was better—this was how to protect him. There were a lot less variables this way.
They were silent until the search party’s flashlights showed up, twenty feet from the unlocked gate; Banri froze in place immediately, but the top researcher didn’t, so Banri had to grab his arm and yank him back.
“You’re giving me serious mixed signals here, Ban,” he whispered, and Banri hissed, “Shut up, stupid, and stay still,” and they watched the search party move, the top researcher’s arm warm under Banri’s hand, until it stopped, and turned in on itself to discuss something, and then the treebark above their heads exploded.
“Fucking—thermal!” Banri said, and tried to yank the top researcher further down and away. They slipped in the mud a bit, and for the first time ever the top researcher actually fought against him, the whites of his eyes growing in terror, and as they writhed against the wet earth Banri lost his grip, and then there was an explosion of gunshots and the top researcher was running towards the researchers—running, Banri realized with a mixture of terror and relief, for the gate.
Banri pushed himself up and gave chase, yelling out, “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot, I’m here too!” in the hopes of throwing the company employees off long enough to give the top researcher a head start. It worked, or at least he thought it did; the top researcher kept running, though Banri almost imagined that he had glanced back, fear and betrayal written all over his face.
He thinks I told them to kill him, Banri realized as he ran. That was it—that was what I needed to do to break his trust completely.
He didn’t have time to be reassured by this thought, if it was possible for it to reassure him; the fence was still electrified, and the top researcher was getting closer to it with every passing breath. Banri burst through the search party, grabbed something metal in the closest employee’s hand without pausing to see what he’d taken, screamed as his hands clenched around the red-hot barrel of a gun. They were running on glistening asphalt, now, inches away from a deep puddle lining the road near the gate, and Banri threw himself bodily across it, finally overtaking the top researcher to skid across the road like cheese over a grater, leaving the skin of his hand and forearm and knees all bunched up where the road hadn’t fully managed to carve it away, and then he jammed the gun—metal, a conductor even better than water—between the bars of the fence with one hand and then wrapped that hand around both gun and bar and wrenched the gate open with the other hand, shoving his head into the gap in the last moment before the electricity rendered him paralyzed. A second later the top researcher was through the gate, stumbling over Banri’s head in the process and letting it clang shut—and, as the electricity returned, locked behind him. Then he realized what had just happened, what it was that he’d kicked away, and his animal screaming joined the awful noises Banri was choking on in the puddle. He couldn’t quite figure out how to move again, but finally he coughed and thrashed and met the escapee’s eyes and finally managed to scream out one last word.
“RUN!”