Mitosis: A Reckoners Story Read Online Free PDF Page A

multiplying. There are hundreds of him, running for you.”
    “It’s okay. I’m a rhinoceros astronaut.”
    She was silent a moment. “Oh, sparks. You’re going delusional.”
    “No, no. I mean, I’m surprising. I’ll surprise him. What’s the most surprising thing you can think of? Bet it’s a rhinoceros astronaut.” The connection was fading. “I can hold out, Tia. You just find the answer to this. Get some music playing across the city, maybe on some copters. Play it loud. You’ll figure it out.”
    “David—”
    “I’ll distract him, Tia,” I said. “That’s my job.” I hesitated. “How am I doing?”
    No reply. I was too far from the hotel.
    Sparks. I was going to have to do this last part alone. I hobbled toward the river.

4
    I tore off part of my shirt, wrapping it around my arm as I stumbled along; then I put my hand back to the side wound. I reached the stairs to the river and looked over my shoulder.
    They came like a wave, a surge of identical figures scrambling along the street.
    I cursed, then hobbled down the steps. Still, this was good. A terrible kind of good. So long as Mitosis was chasing me, he wasn’t hurting anyone or trying to take over the city.
    I reached the bottom of the staircase as the flood of figures arrived, some jumping over the sides of the rail to skip a few stairs, others scrambling down each step.
    I pushed myself faster toward a set of holes drilled into the wall just above the river. Air vents for the understreets; they’d be big enough to crawl in, but not by much. I reached one just before the clones and clambered inside, kicking away a hand that tried to grab my ankle. I managed to spin around, facing the opening, and backed away into the darkness.
    Figures crowded around the tunnel opening, cutting off my light. One of them squatted down, looking at me. “Clever,” he said. “Going where only one of me can reach you at a time. Unfortunately, it also leaves you cornered.”
    I continued to back away. I was losing strength, and my blood made my hands slippery on the steel.
    Mitosis crawled into the tunnel, prowling forward.
    A lot of Epics liked to think of themselves as predators, the step beyond humans. The apex of evolution. Well, that was idiocy. The Epics weren’t above humans. If anything, they were less civilized—more instinctual. A step backward.
    That didn’t mean I wasn’t terrified to see that dark figure stalking me—to be confined in an endless tunnel with the thing as I slowly bled out.
    “You’ll tell me the truth,” Mitosis said, getting closer. “I’ll wring it from you, little human. I’ll know how Steelheart
really
died.”
    I met his gaze in the darkness.
    “I wanna kiss you!” I shouted. “Like the wind kisses the ra-i-ain!”
    I belted out the song as loudly as I could. Tia had played it earlier, and I knew the words, though I’d been too distracted by the whole getting-strangled-then-getting-shot thing to listen closely.
    I’d heard it as a child, played time and time again on the radio until I and pretty much everyone else got sick of it.
    Mitosis melted in front of me. I stopped, breathing deeply, as a second clone crawled over the melting form of the first.
    “Cute,” he growled. “How long can you sing, little human? How are you feeling? I smell your blood. It—”
    “I’m gonna miss you,” I shouted, “like the sun misses the ra-i-ain!”
    He melted.
    “You realize,” the next one said, “that now I’m going to have to kill everyone in the city. Can’t risk them having heard these songs. I—”
    Melt.
    “Stop
doing
that!” the next one snapped. “You—”
    Melt.
    I kept at it, though my singing grew softer and softer with each clone I killed. One of them found a knife and passed it up the line. That didn’t melt; it just fell to the floor of the pipe each time one of them died. The next one picked it up and kept crawling.
    Each clone got closer. I moved back farther in the tunnel until I felt a