Chapter 6.1

Hey everyone!!!  Two orders of business before chapter 6.1. Firstly, with this last chapter we broke 1k reads! So, thank you so much!! I am super duper happy and everyone deserves a cookie, so have a cookie. *holds out a tray full of cookies* Secondly, yesterday, or the day before, I forget, Turncoat got added to the Rebellion list on the official The Purge: Anarchy page for the upcoming movie. I can only thank you guys, my readers, for making it popular enough to catch the attention of the people who run the page for wattpad. So, enough of me rambling, lets go back to Tawny, shall we?

***

A knocking on the door jolted me out of my work as I finished the fake ID I had been commissioned to make. Four IDs for a family that wanted to leave the slum and higher in the city, plus background and now I could put their information directly into the system, which meant lower prices but more money for me when it’s all said and done, not that it really matters.

“Door’s open!” I shouted as I applied the youngest son’s picture to the card.

Vicki entered with Nick trailing behind her. They both carried a pair of duffle bags slung over their shoulder. “Ready to go?” Vicki asked.

I put my equipment down and brushed my computer screen away. “Yeah, just let me clean up,” I said. I stood and began to replace my equipment in the small bag I kept it in. My bag went back into the chest in my bedroom and I looked around for anything. The picture of my parents drew my attention. I grabbed the basic display stand and ejected the SD card and slid it into the slot on my wrist interface. With a quick check that it registered, the picture displayed on my wrist.

I closed the picture and looked around my room one last time. Nothing else to do here. I returned to the front room to see a pair duffle bags sitting on the couch.

“We came a little early, to explain your gear,” Vicki said. “And uh…reacquaint you with one of them.”

“I know my gear, Vicki, I trained on it for a year,” I said. “And what are we reacquainting me with?”

Vicki opened the one of the duffels and pulled out an exoskeleton with various air brakes and flaps installed on the wrists, shoulders, calves, palms and the bottom of the boot, plus shock absorbers strong enough to terminate a terminal velocity fall. Assuming everything actually works and things don’t malfunction. That was a jump suit, designed to bring a fully armored human being from terminal velocity to zero in a less than a half meter mostly unharmed and the same piece of equipment that cost me my legs and ability to walk without assistance.

I took a step back from the piece of equipment laid out on my table and shook my head. “No, no, no, no, no. I am not putting one of those on again. Vicki, I won’t put one of those on again.”

“The fall won’t be as high this time, it’ll be from a hovercraft onto the train, fifteen feet at most,” Vicki said.

“No!” I cried. “No, no, no, no. Vicki, no. Please, don’t make me.”

Vicki bit her lip. “Tawny, its more for safety than its intended purpose,” she said. “You’re jumping onto a moving train, if you fall off, this will protect you. That’s pretty much all it’s for.”

“Kai won’t let you on the op without it on,” Nick said.

“Then I’m not going!” I said.

“We don’t have a hacker and we need one,” Vicki said. “We don’t know how to use this gear or how to deal with things the way hackers do. We need your training to help us, there’s a hacker aboard the train. We need a counter hacker and you know that. Please, Tawny, we need you and I’m sorry. I should have checked your equipment better.”

“I nearly landed both of us in a work camp,” I said. “I got what I deserved.”

Nick looked between the two of us and raised a questioning eyebrow. “What was your accident?” he asked.

I looked down and bit my lip for a moment, my hand subconsciously going to my back.

“You don’t have to tell me,” Nick started. “I ap—”

I waved my hand to cut him off. “I’ve never told anyone what happened,” I admitted.

Vicki reached over and touched my shoulder. “You don’t have to do this,” she said.

“You’re right, I don’t,” I said. “But I feel I should. Nick, you might want to take a seat.”

Nick sat down on the couch and I sat next to him. Vicki sat down on the arm of the couch next to me.

I took a deep breath before I started. “We were tasked to raid an alliance weapons cache. A small facility guarded the cache and had aircraft sensors that extended up to twenty-five thousand feet above the facility plus an array of sensors that could pick up anything larger than a human being for several miles around. The best method of insertion was a high altitude jump with a HAJ suit, High Altitude Jump suit. It’s like that—” I pointed at the suit on the table “—only hopped up on steroids, bigger shocks, bigger flaps, larger air brakes, you get the point. It’s bigger, it’s supposed to be better.

“I was new to the team, recently assigned and new out of basic training and hacker training. We didn’t work with HAJ or Jay suits, which meant training jumps. We went up, fully geared with thirty thousand foot jump. Almost an exact replica of the jump we’d be doing against the facility, except it was during the day under near perfect conditions. My armor was checked, my HAJ was checked, my armor was checked again, my HAJ again, my HAJ a third time. Full system check, everything worked every time it was checked.”

I folded my hands in my lap and squeezed my eyes shut for a moment. “When it came time to jump, I was third out of the craft. It was so cold but so beautiful up there, the ground so small. A human being reaches terminal velocity in about twelve seconds at lower altitudes, so we were falling rather quickly in the thin air at twenty thousand feet. I was donned in my hacker gear, monitoring the code scrolling across my eyepiece searching for the antiaircraft bubble they had deployed. It has distinctive code that a hacker can pick up. Well, something else scrolled across my screen a minute after I found the bubble and alerted everyone. It was from my HAJ suit’s feed, a corrupted program.

“We were about fifteen thousand feet by now. I figured I had time so I began to backtrack to find the program that had been corrupted. But I couldn’t find it and we were getting into landing position. Everyone hit their flaps at once and began to slow down. I didn’t. My flaps wouldn’t deploy. Airbrakes weren’t supposed to be til lower but I needed to slow down, so I tried them and for a few thousand feet they worked and then they sputtered and died. I had double mechanical failure at two thousand feet. All I had left to trust were my shocks and that I didn’t break my leg.

“I could hear her counting down and with all of my mechanical failures, I was terrified. Vicki and several others had been shouting at me to brake and I was sobbing as I told them I could. I had the flaps and airbrakes activated the whole way down. My feet made impact with the ground and there was a flash of excruciating pain and then nothing. Triple mechanical failure at ground level. I woke up two weeks later in a hospital without my legs and paralyzed from the waist down.”

Nick looked over at the equipment. “Triple mechanical failure?” he asked.

“All three braking systems failed,” I said. “I hit the ground at terminal velocity, I should have died. But a few of the shocks did work. It’s a miracle I didn’t die. And that’s why I’m not putting that suit on.”