EDGE OF DAY

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Shock split her open as though the bullet had torn a hole in her chest. She stood over the shikshak's body entering into a full-blown hyperventilation attack. Something warm slipped down her cheek. Perhaps a piece of Shikshak Amada's heart.

She wasn't sure how long the moment lasted—a second or a minute. Then the door swished open, and a droid entered. He saw the body, flipped the safety of the sting gun and took aim. Without a thought in her head, Day leapt forward, kicking the weapon from his grip.

The gun flipped into the air. She caught it and thrust it into the droid's neck. You couldn't see it through the fake skin, but each droid had an important circuit flux system where humans had a pulse. The punch from the sting-gun short-circuited the system and the droid collapsed. An alarm went off. The hard clang of automatic metal bolts resounded down the corridor. Red lights flashed through the building. The external doors were on lock-down.

Day grabbed the shikshak's revolver. She shot the lock in the door of the interrogation cell, tearing it apart with the third bullet. Then she pushed the door back across the suction rails.

The siren in the corridor was deafening. Three droids ran towards her. She shot them with the revolver, bam—bam—bam. Each bullet landed right in the centre of the forehead, burning an essential connection point and causing a malfunction.

With their bodies strewn across the floor, Day leaped towards the exit. Four more policemen appeared at the far end of the corridor, too far to discern neck tattoos. What if one of them was human like the creep who'd been left to guard her? Putting droids out of action was one thing. But she couldn't kill humans.

She shot at the kneecaps of the first two policemen, immediately slowing their pursuit, though they continued to limp towards her--both droids. She aimed for the third policeman but the barrel of the gun spun around empty. Dropping the revolver, she switched the sting gun to her right hand, and fired in quick succession—one, two, three, four shots. The droids kept coming. Their protective skin coating meant either you had to hit them on their connection relay points , or they diffused the electro-shocks. The droids opened fire. Electricity forked through both sides of Day's upper body. A millisecond later, as the surge of energy reached her brain the skies of her soul were nuked. Oblivion as vast and unknowable as deep space moved in, and for a time, there was nothing more.

***

When Day's sense of place and time returned, she wished it hadn't. Some enormous unrelenting power crushed her brain on all sides . A severe ache had set in her body. The lights overhead brightened, then dimmed. She was on her back, arms and legs strapped down, moving somewhere.

"She's awake," a voice said. The gurney jerked to a stop. A dark shape came over the vague trails of light before her eyes. She heard someone else step closer, and a second silhouetted form leaned over her.

"Monday Hollis," a voice said, "you have been tried and found guilty of murder. You are about to be bagged and sent to Urus 4.9 detention centre, orbit eighty-four thousand, nine hundred and forty-two feet above the earth, 45.8 degrees latitude, 35 degrees longitude. Sentence length forty-six years."

With so much pain in her head Day found it difficult to concentrate on the droid's voice, difficult to assimilate the meaning of what was said. But the last bit, the forty-six year sentence, that got through, and something deep inside her surrendered, gave up, stopped the struggle.

What was the point? What was the point of struggling if she was going to spend the rest of her life in suspension? It was over.

The legal rights droid left and she was on the move again. Her vision cleared a little. She could make out the light fixtures in the ceiling. They wheeled her down an enormous, endless corridor, then on through a giant hanger.

Without warning, her gurney pivoted and she was upright, arms and legs strapped tight to the bed so that she didn't fall. She could see all around now. There were rows and rows of other people, barely conscious, fixed up right onto gurneys. More humans than she'd ever met in the whole of her life. Where did they all come from?

It was none of her concern really, if she was about to be sent to a space station and would be held in suspension for forty-six years. But maybe this was why there were so few humans in the northern hemisphere. Maybe they were all being held in suspension circling the earth.

Cold air blew up her legs. Metal track ran along the ground beneath her. Huge frosty boxes moved along it like they were on a conveyor belt. Day realized what was happening, and began struggling against the straps. Other prisoners shouted their innocence or cursed the northern-world government, as a human-sized freezer slotted into a fixed position in front of the prisoners.

Day stopped kicking and listened. Every few seconds there came a rhythmic click and release sound, followed by a dull thud. She glanced sideways and with a momentous effort forced her eyes to focus on the line of prisoners. A cold shiver moved through the deepest part of her. One after another, the prisoners were released from their gurneys, falling like dominos into the freezers.

Was this it? Would her sentence begin before they'd even left earth? Was this the last time for the next forty-six years her body would respond to her wishes?

With all the strength she had, she twisted her head and observed the prisoner next to her. In another second or two he would be dropped into his icebox. Her eyes strained to focus. Tears of pain streamed from them, but she would command her body this one last time. Her final memory of something real, someone real.

The man's eyes were closed, his face appeared relaxed and calm. Peace radiated from him.

"Will!" she screamed. The man's bruised nose and swollen chin deformed his face, but it was Will, she was certain of it. As she screamed his name, the latch clanged, the straps released and he fell face down into his box with a thump. The transparent lid swished closed, fogging up immediately with whatever gas pumped through the vents.

As Day watched in horror and turmoil, a little whizz of a metal contraption buzzed behind her ears, followed by the zip-like sound of her own straps releasing.

She fell and smacked the bottom of the freezer hard. Pain flared through her face.  A memory washed over her. She was eight years old. She'd just fallen from a tree face-down into snow. The same sensation of agony, cold and helplessness filled her, except back then she could get up. Back then  the red sting of her face had met the air. But now there was no air. A lid sealed her inside the box and she was smothered.

They weren't going to be suspended, they were being suffocated and frozen to death. Suspension was a euphemism for murder.

She became conscious of her arm. Was someone touching it? It felt like a needle prick. Something emerged from the cold and snaked up through her nostrils; down through her throat. She was going to vomit. She was dying. She couldn't take this anymore. She didn't care about anything, but for the pain to end. Death, non-existence, she welcomed it.

And then suddenly, liquid oozed through her. It branched though her blood stream. She felt it move up her body, taking the agony with it. It started in her feet, reaching her face in a matter of seconds. Barely enough time for her to realize that not only was it cutting her off from the pain, it was cutting her off  from any sense of her physical self. 

She was a pinprick of consciousness with no orientation in space or time. The liquid blocked the synapses in her brain. Electrical messages no longer passed through her nervous system. She sensed herself but nothing more. No memories. No thoughts.

Only emptiness.

Space.

Quiet.

Until... 

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