Apex Cypher (Prequel to The Techxorcist series) by Colin F. Barnes Page B

now?”
    “City Earth,” Petal said. She referred to the great Dome city in Mongolia: the last real surviving city. It was essentially The Family’s plaything. A million souls existed in a tightly controlled, lab-condition, bio-dome. Each citizen was connected to a great computer network that monitored and controlled everything. That anyone else remained alive outside of the Dome was a minor miracle, given how The Family would often send out their Unmanned Aerial Vehicle drones to scour the skies for pockets of survivors, and destroy them.
    The survivor town with the server wasn’t far from the Dome. Gabe suspected they’d only be allowed to stay alive there if it was of some benefit to The Family. He thought it was all part of The Family’s experiments. They probably wanted to see how people behaved in different environments. Either that, or they were a control group.
    Whatever the case was, those running the Dome, and those living in it, had everything they needed: clean water, food, education, entertainment, and safety. But at what cost? Their freedom, and free will, certainly.
    He often wondered if he’d give that up and become a City Earth citizen, but that idea never lasted long. Even if it were possible for an outsider to join their society, they’d never welcome borderline psychopath hackers like him and Petal.
    They never toed the line, or did what ‘The Man’ expected of them. It was the one thing Gabe knew that had kept him alive when so many of his people perished back in Hong Kong. His people populated the Jamaican quarter. They were also one of the first to be massacred by the gangs when it was safe enough to leave the fallout shelters.
    So much loss and destruction, it was a miracle he could operate at all, but Petal was a driving force for him now. She gave him hope. Hope that there might still be... no, he wouldn’t start dwelling on the past again. He had a job to do.
    Find the Tinker, get some food, and move on to Mongolia.
    He picked up the pace and used the Geiger counter to show him the way.
    A single splash of something wet hit him in the face. At first he thought it was a Kamikaze bug, but when he went to wipe it away another drop soon followed.
    Petal squealed. “The rains have come early!”
    That was not a welcome development, despite only having a one-gallon canteen of water between them. The rains meant more radiation, ash, and contamination. All the toxic crap that got blasted into the atmosphere by the nukes came back down to earth in the rain, poisoning more of the land, bringing disease to the few remaining survivors.
    “Screw the rain,” Gabe said as he pulled the brim of his black padre’s hat over his brow. “Cover up. Ya don’t want it on ya.”
    “Killjoy,” Petal said. She shrugged her shoulders, pulled a piece of plastic tarp from her battered backpack, and created a makeshift poncho that covered her head and shoulders.
    The patter of drops matched their footsteps.
    As they increased their speed, so the rains followed, until it became a race.
    Gabe grabbed her hand and urged her forward.
    The counter clicked still faster, and before Gabe knew it, they were turning in circles. An unseen enemy shrouded any clear path. There was only backwards, or dangerous levels of toxicity. Had the Tinker tricked him? To what ends? He was on his way there to do a job for her. She needed his and Petal’s abilities more than she could have wanted them dead.
    “What is it?” Petal said after Gabe had come to a standstill.
    “I dunno, girl. But we can’t go on, and we need shelter.”
    “Go back?” she said without conviction. She knew, like Gabe, that they’d never make the day’s trek back to the shelter before the rains had come in full force. He looked up: dark clouds formed, heavy and sodden with poisonous precipitation.
    Petal stepped closer and lifted the tarp poncho up and over so it covered them both.
    “We’ll have to make camp,” she said.
    “With what? We only have