Page 46 of Jump or Fall
He took the box and slipped the bird inside. Then, he fastened the top and searched for an alley with fewer people.
Gordon wove through a narrow gap between two pipes and buried the box under some old flyers, and retreated.
From a safe vantage point, he called Kimmie.
“Kimmie Alphito, Division—”
“It’s Gordon. The camera was a bird. I’ve stuffed it in a box here.” He sent the coordinates to her. “I have eyes on it and can wait until you show up.”
There was a pause.
“You good with hanging there?” she asked. “If a bunch of enforcers hover around, he might not pick it up. Hell, he might have another—you said it was a bird?”
“Yeah, it’s a bird.” He sighed. “I’ll watch it for an hour. I really don’t want to spend my whole day doing this.”
He could practically hear the smirk on the other end. “Oh, got big plans?”
“Shut up, Kim.”
“Calling me ‘Kim’ now?”
“Just fuckin’ get here.”
She was starting to talk to him like a friend, but he wasn’t interested in making friends. He just wanted to get this over with so he could start over. If he could leave everything behind, that would be for the best.
Her tone shifted from playful to irritated. “Fine.”
She ended the call, and he found a spot out of the way to wait. The space was dim, with only a small bit of light filtering down through the gaps in the upper levels.
Maybe he had been too harsh. She’d done a lot for him already and had only been trying to joke around. The nightmare was making him edgy.
He pondered his escape from the city. What was the way out? How would he even get to Naxos? Would the people there accept his scar, or would he be moving to another place to deal with the same shit?
Gordon took out his tablet and started researching Naxos. A hidden forum had posts from people who claimed to have visited.
One of them described the road from the front gate cutting through the forest and forking twenty miles out—east led to Naxos, west to Cygnus.
A post underneath insisted the directions were wrong, and another responded with a map proving the original poster’s claim. The map showed that Naxos was an additional twenty-five miles past the fork, with several small settlements along the way.
Gordon laughed bitterly. How the hell could there be a camera disguised as a bird, yet no one knew how to get to the next fucking city? He saved the map—at least it was something concrete in all this mess.
Shifting gears, he looked up information on Naxos itself. One of the sites was locked and required a passcode. He rubbed his chin, considering his options. Hacking it would take more time than he cared to spend at the moment.
Out of curiosity, he tried Paul’s passcode. Gordon wasn’t supposed to know it, but he’d happened to see him use it one day.
It worked.
He snorted. Standard practice was to change passcodes when someone left Surveillance. Either they thought he hadn’t survived, or it was human error.
The site contained a brief description of the city:
Officially named the “Naxos Free Society”, Naxos is an open city-state located at the foothills of the Hyrcanian Mountains. The government, like all city-states in the Western Domain, is headed by an Archon, elected by popular vote every three years by citizens nineteen years and older.
The climate is considerably milder than in southern coastal cities like Teichus due to the proximity to the mountains, though thunderstorms and torrential rain remain common.
Naxos is well known for its advancements in metallurgy and robotics. Recent achievements by PanopTec in robotics include lifelike animals and semi-autonomous surgical tools. The city’s Secretary of Health has made it their mission to provide stellar healthcare services to citizens and residents. New ventures in the realm of medical advancement include improvements to Rapiderm's revolutionary medi-spray and artificial organs.
Gordon glanced up at the box hiding the bird. Why would someone from Naxos be selling a fake scar serum?
