Blood Zero Sky by J. Gates Page B

leaving me seething in frustration. I’m not supposed to be helping her. I’m supposed to get her killed! She’s an anarchist or something, a traitor to the Company, an unprofitable and probably a heathen. She has a gun pointed at me, for God’s sake! Why should I help her? But I am. And she has the nerve to complain about it.
    We roar on through the flawless blue sky. Sirens bellow up from the street below, a dissonant soundtrack to our doomed escape.
    “So where am I taking you?” I ask.
    She shakes her head. “I’m thinking about it. They’ll be tracking us with their satellites. Even if we go out of the hub and land in the forests, by the time we touch down they’ll have us surrounded. As long as the sats can see us from above, we have no chance.”
    “Maybe we should land here, take off on foot,” I suggest, peering out at the street below.
    “Same problem. The squad trucks will run us down.” There’s an ominous undercurrent in her tone. Judging from her demeanor, the situation is hopeless.
    “So what do we do?”
    “I have to get a hold of Ethan,” she says.
    “Who’s Ethan?”
    She doesn’t answer.
    I weave us around another tall building. In a few minutes we’ll be at the edge of the hub. Already, the glass-tower temples of commerce are becoming scarce, replaced by the sea of whitewashed square structures, N-Corp housing for the low-credit-level workers. Shortly, we’ll pass over the countless factories of the industrial arc, then the miles upon miles of horribly polluted forests and grasslands, abandoned fields, and rotting old houses beyond.
    Almost all agriculture is now done by our divisions outside America Division for efficiency reasons. The land here is too poisoned to support crops anyway.
    “We don’t want to get too far outside the hub city,” Clair says. “Then they can just shoot us down and nobody will even know.”
    “They couldn’t do that,” I say. “It would be on the news. Besides, my father is the CEO of N-Corp. He’d be furious.”
    “Yeah, Blackie?” she says sardonically. “What makes you think he’d ever find out?”
    Now we’re reaching the industrial arc. We pass through a column of white steam rising from a power plant. The bright afternoon sun is eclipsed by it, and it feels like we’ve passed into a new world, a barren place peopled by ghosts where all life is choked away by cement and steel.
    The sirens have passed out of earshot now, but they can’t be far behind. I know that Clair is right about the satellites—they don’t blink, they don’t sleep, and there’s no shadow in which to hide from them. I think back to the many episodes of N-Squads LIVE I’ve watched on the imager. It’s a great program—the second most highly rated show behind Jimmy Shaw’s—and I’ve seen it a million times. Each N-Squads LIVE episode plays out the same way: somebody breaches the Company’s HR policy and then tries to escape. Many of the criminals have ingenious hiding places, fast cars, or clever disguises. Still, every show ends the same way: the squads close in like a pack of wolves surrounding their prey, and the fugitive is caught. He’s dragged, usually bloody, into the back of a big, shiny black squad truck. Blaring music from the truck’s stereo and raucous laughter of the squadmen form his eulogy as the truck doors slam behind him, and the criminal, the unprofitable, is gone.
    Sunday Hangings is the show that tells us where they go after that. It plays on the second Sunday of every month and is the third highest-rated show in the N-Corp lineup, with top ratings in the fifteen to twenty-two age group. Normally watching these shows makes me feel good—especially N-Squads LIVE. It’s exhilarating, with lots of action and lots of drama, and the good guys always win. It reminds me that the world is in order, the Company is in control, and I’m safe. There is no denying the moral of N-Squads LIVE : nobody gets away from the squads. But as illogical