Defy the Fates

by Claudia Gray

  The corner of her mouth twitches in a smile. “You’re not in a position to declare terms.”

  “Don’t be so sure.” He points to the small box at his belt. This isn’t much of a gambit, but it’s all he’s got.

  Gillian’s face falls as she recognizes the faint shimmer of the force field. “They didn’t take that from you?”

  “The mechs you sent after me can’t think for themselves, as you must be aware. Even if they could, I’ve set the force field to deactivate only when a code is input. An incorrect code will result in a self-destruct—not tremendously powerful, as explosions go, but it would be sufficient to destroy me.” Stiff from the electromagnetic “squeeze” of the field, Abel rises to his feet.

  “You’re having trouble moving?” Gillian regains some of her smugness. “Doesn’t look like you can wear that field forever.”

  “I can.” With great effort, he doesn’t add. Abel needs to keep the bargaining advantage. “Also, you should know that I’ve recently taken damage—possibly significant damage to key systems. It’s the kind of damage unlikely to show up on a scan. The kind that might prevent you from achieving your goal.”

  “You could be bluffing about the damage,” Gillian says. “But why come here if you legitimately thought you had nothing to bargain with?”

  The rhetorical question is more for herself than for Abel. He continues, “I also want to give you a challenge. The chance to do something unique in the world of organic cybernetics. Something your father never even attempted.”

  She pauses for 1.5 seconds. Abel knows Gillian is loyal to her father, but he’s studied her recent cybernetic work. She obviously wants to make breakthroughs of her own. “What would that be?”

  “Noemi Vidal has been seriously injured. She needs more organ replacements than the human body will accept. No standard medical treatment can save her. However, if you were to use some of the organic technology you’ve developed—and you were to transplant it into Noemi’s body while she’s still alive—”

  “You want to use cybernetic parts as med tech?” Gillian hasn’t spent much of her life trying to heal human bodies; she’d rather make them obsolete. But the novelty of this idea obviously intrigues her. “How would that work?”

  “I don’t know any better than you do,” Abel admits. “However, I would work alongside you to come up with the correct process.”

  “It’s going to take days, weeks. It could even take months. My father shouldn’t have to wait so long in limbo—”

  “The alternative is waiting forever,” he points out.

  She folds her arms in front of her. “There’s no guarantee of success. I want your word you’ll surrender yourself to me at the end, regardless.”

  “You can’t think much of your father’s programming, if you think he would’ve made me foolish enough to take such a deal.” Abel shakes his head. “You need incentive to succeed.”

  Gillian narrows her eyes. “You’ll find it difficult to escape, you know. You’re on my planet. In my castle.”

  “I appreciate a challenge. I hope you do as well.”

  After a long pause, she murmurs, “After modification on this scale, the patient would—well, would no longer be entirely human. It would be a hybrid. A true human-mech hybrid.”

  “You’re interested,” Abel says.

  “Yes. And you understand the price.”

  He nods. This is something he’s realized from the beginning.

  She raises her head. “You’ll shut off the force field. You’ll surrender to me. And you will allow me to transfer my father’s consciousness into your body—which is what you were made to do in the first place.” The last words are spit at him, as though it were indecent of Abel to fight such a cruel fate.

  He must lay out his conditions. “I’ll do all this… upon Noemi Vidal’s recovery to consciousness and her free departure from the planet Haven in my ship.”

  “She’ll be an unprecedented leap forward in cybernetics,” Gillian argues. “I should get the chance to study her. To analyze how a mech nervous system interacts with a mostly human body.”

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to reserve that honor for your next test subject. Noemi leaves Haven, alive and well, or there’s no deal.”

  White-faced, Gillian straightens. “My father deserves his chance to come back from the dead. He earned it the day he made you.”

  Yes, this is what he was made for. The reason he was born. Mansfield never saw Abel as anything but a potential vessel for his own mind, thoughts, and ambitions. The fact that Abel’s own soul will be destroyed in the transfer… that never mattered much to Mansfield.

  Now it doesn’t matter to Abel either. Not if it saves Noemi.

  The following fifteen days, twenty-one hours, and five minutes are filled with unique intellectual challenges, the sort of thing Abel would enjoy under other circumstances. But even science is no fun under this kind of pressure.

  If he gets anything wrong, Noemi will die.

  The cryosleep pod is brought inside like a glass coffin from a fairy tale, held high on mech shoulders, opalescent fluid swirling within. It is settled in the middle of the stark white lab, the center around which they all rotate. Noemi remains in the pod during the long days in which Abel and Gillian try to invent a new field of science on the spot.

  “She won’t be able to coordinate mech parts and human movement,” Gillian says late one night, as they work outside the pod. “A human nervous system won’t do it.”

  “You want to implant a cybernetic one?” Abel’s unsure about this, though he sees the need as well as Gillian does. “Supplementing a human nervous system with a cybernetic one has never been done—not with clone parts, donors, ever.”

  “You want to leave her completely unable to function?” Gillian raises an eyebrow. “This is your option. If I didn’t think it would work, I wouldn’t offer it, would I?”

  Remaining unspoken are the words because I have to succeed to destroy you.

  It must be human, this desire to avoid the inevitable. But Abel cannot let Noemi continue to linger between life and death. “Let’s design the nervous system.”

  In some ways, this process is deeply intimate: Abel examines every nerve ending in Noemi’s body, watches the slowly undulating patterns of her unconscious brain activity, traces the flow of her blood. But that intimacy makes what should be routine feel savage—like removing her pulpy, ruined liver from her open abdomen with his own hands, seeing his gloves become red and slippery from the gore. Or shearing her hair from her head, preparing to slice through her skull to unite her mech and human brains.

  The odds of Noemi’s survival improve as he and Gillian work, but they’re never good enough for him. It seems impossible that Noemi will ever emerge whole again—that she could be the same again.

  She won’t be the same, he reminds himself. But she’ll still be Noemi.

  Why doesn’t it feel like enough?

  Maybe because he knows he won’t be there with her.

  Finally, there comes a point where every test has been run, every procedure performed. Abel and Gillian have managed to work side by side all these days without ever looking each other in the eye, but she does so at last as she says, “We have to take her off systems. See if she survives.”

  “I know,” Abel says, but he doesn’t move away from the modified pod they’ve built. Noemi lies still within it, lungs breathing only on cue. Will they continue once the machines are shut off?

  Only one way to find out.

  5

  HEAT—INSIDE HER BODY, INSIDE HER SKIN, AS THOUGH her skeleton had become a kind of gentle fire.

  Light—not visible with her eyes shut, yet somehow sensed, fully known.

  Stillness—within her chest, where always before a heart had beat.

  Now, at the core of her, is… something else.

  Noemi Vidal opens her eyes. The brilliance of the light shining down on her blinds her to anything else, but she knows she is not alone.


  “Don’t move,” says a female voice. It’s one Noemi’s heard before, though she can’t place it.

  Nor can she disobey the voice, because she’s realizing she couldn’t move much if she wanted to. Her limbs and reflexes don’t seem to be paralyzed; it’s more as if they were—waiting. And somehow that feels right. It’s as though this motionlessness is as much a part of her as her skin.

  Though some of her skin feels odd, too, sort of prickly… her chest and belly, her breasts, her sides… a painless throbbing in her head…

  Darius Akide. Abel laid flat, unconscious, endangered. The blaster in Akide’s hand. The terrible scorching pain—

  —I’m going to find Esther’s star. Come to me there someday—

  Noemi closes her eyes tightly, trying to ward off the nightmare. That has to be a nightmare, not memory, because if it were a memory, Noemi couldn’t be here. Couldn’t be anywhere. In her bad dream, Akide betrayed both her and Abel.

  Akide killed her.

  Whatever strange situation she’s in at the moment, Noemi’s absolutely sure this isn’t heaven.

  I thought I read once that if you died in your dream, you would wake up. But I’m not awake—not completely—why can’t I wake all the way up?

  Mist shivers through her. Sort of. Mist is the only word Noemi has for the ethereal coldness that’s unfurling beneath her skin, tendrils spreading out thinner and finer within her as the sensation reaches her extremities. It’s contained within her skin, and yet somehow it feels as though it contains her. Nausea clenches her belly, and Noemi moans.

  “She’s hurting,” says a male voice. Noemi knows that one, too—knows it, loves it, understands he’s trying to protect her—

  “It’s within acceptable parameters.” It’s the same woman from before, even colder.

  “Acceptable to you, perhaps. Not to me. We must—”

  “Must what? Leave her as she is? That’s impossible.”

  The voices bounce back and forth, back and forth, always falling silent one word before Noemi can recognize them.

  The male voice says, “How much worse will this get?”

  “How would I know? We’re in uncharted territory, and there’s no way out but through. Her vitals are strong; there’s no reason not to finish bringing her online.”

  A new fire sparks into flame within Noemi. This one burns inside her head. It doesn’t hurt. If anything, it feels good, like she’s being warmed up where she hadn’t even realized how cold she truly was. Her mind seems to sway toward that flame—

  Strange thoughts, feelings, data pour into her brain, shattering all rational thought. There’s no way to think, not when she has to process.

  Elbow joint currently resting at one hundred twenty degrees, flesh 89 percent healed, blood flow optimized.

  Liver functions successfully rerouted, healing around excised organ at 71 percent, kidneys shifting abdominal location as body adjusts to new parameters.

  Artificial rib splice into living skeleton continuing.

  “Processor functions normally,” says the female voice. “I wish I had better readings, for next time. A pity we had to rush this.”

  A memory takes shape in Noemi’s buzzing brain: A ship’s hold filled with broken mech tanks and injured, sobbing people. A woman with damp red hair, crawling toward a child who is not a child. “I’m sorry we had to rush—it’s going to be all right—”

  Gillian Shearer. The person speaking is Gillian Shearer, daughter of Burton Mansfield, as zealously loyal to him as any cult follower could be. How can Gillian be here, in the Genesis system?

  Am I still in the Genesis system? What happened? Where am I? Noemi tries to remember, but her brain will show her nothing but that bad dream, over and over and over—Darius Akide firing his blaster—

  The weird voice in Noemi’s head reports, Memory accuracy verified.

  No. No, it can’t be—I’m dreaming the voice, too—

  Gillian says, “Initial activations complete.”

  All the bright light around Noemi instantly switches to total darkness. Suddenly she can move—she knows this, on a level she can’t define, even before she tries to act on it. The darkness splits along its seams, and Noemi figures out that she’s in a pod, one that’s opening around her like the petals of a flower in the sun. Instead of sunshine, though, what’s revealed is a blindingly light room. A row of expressionless mechs stands at guard, near what must be a door. Machines beep and whirr, like scientific instruments.

  Is this Shearer’s lab? Noemi’s terror deepens; the cold misty tendrils within her continue to spread. That lab ought to be half a galaxy away. Am I on Haven? How is that possible?

  She doesn’t know and doesn’t care. The one thing she’s sure of is that being under Gillian Shearer’s control is very, very bad, and she has to get out of here, this second. Noemi sits up—

  —or tries to. Her torso rises, but her balance is shot, or isn’t even in existence, because she leans so far to the right that she nearly falls off the strange bed she’s lying on. Jerking to the left makes it even worse, and this time she does fall. The floor is only about half a meter down, but pain flares through her rib cage and along the seams in her skin.

  Seams?

  As she lies there on the floor, useless and limp, she hears two sets of footsteps approach her, and Shearer speaks, her voice sharper and less muffled. “We just got done fixing her, and she’s determined to break herself again already.”

  “She can’t walk. She can’t move. What have you done to her?”

  It’s the male voice again, and this time it, too, awakens a memory: An upside-down theater on a crashed spacecraft. Red velvet and broken mosaics. Blue eyes looking at her as though she were a miracle. “Maybe I’m programming a new Directive One for myself.”

  Past and present finally connect. Hope bursts through the confusion and nausea like sunshine through clouds. Noemi manages to speak. “Abel?”

  More gently he says, “I’m here.”

  He kneels next to her. Bright light shines behind him, obscuring his features, but she knows Abel’s face by heart. He’s conscious, free, totally functional—he’s alive. In the dream, Akide had overpowered him and would surely have destroyed Abel. Thank God it was only a nightmare after all. The voice in her head was only part of the bad dream. Wasn’t it? Noemi feels the impulse to sigh in relief, but her chest doesn’t do it. Physically it feels… unnecessary.

  What feels necessary is being with Abel. Remaining close to him. Making sure that anywhere she goes, he comes with her—

  “All her nervous system functions are normal,” Shearer continues. She steps close enough for Noemi to see her, that signal-flare-red hair pulled back in a tight bun. “If our projections prove accurate, motor control should adjust within the next day or so.”

  The hardness in Abel’s expression when he looks up at Shearer is startling. Noemi’s never seen him look like that. Never seen him angry. “You told me the cerebellum implant would coordinate motor reflexes with the new nervous system.”

  “It’s calibrating as we speak. Give it time. This is unprecedented, on every level.”

  “What is she talking about? Is—is that Shearer?” Noemi manages to roll onto her back. Now that she looks directly up at Abel, she can see a faint shimmer along his skin. Is she hallucinating?

  “You’re disoriented,” Abel says quietly. “We shouldn’t get into all the details now.”

  She wants to protest that she’s fine—that he should explain the confusing jumble of bad dreams and memories inside her head—but everything tilts sideways again, and she has to fight not to vomit.

  “Do you remember being shot by Darius Akide?” Abel asks.

  Noemi winces with both present and remembered pain. “Oh my God.”

  “I will take that as a yes,” Abel says, with his usual precision. “Your injuries were too great to be healed by any medical means. My only chance to save you was through cybernetics.”

  “What?
” Noemi tries again to sit up, and fails. “You’re not making sense—I’m not awake yet—”

  “The damage to your body went beyond what artificial organs alone could fix,” he continues. His voice sounds so gentle, so kind, so wrong for the strange things he’s saying. “Without central processing through a cybernetic nervous system, you couldn’t have survived. So we gave you one.”

  Cybernetics inside her? “That’s not possible.”

  “It is now,” Abel replies.

  “But—I’m human—”

  “Not so much, anymore,” says Shearer. Noemi’s helpless bewilderment must be amusing for her, to judge by the cruel smile on her face. “You now contain a high percentage of mech components. To be exact, I’ve replaced your entire cardiopulmonary system and your liver, along with a few bones of your skeleton, and I’ve significantly enhanced your nervous system. You wouldn’t have been able to coordinate all of that with only a human mind, so I added a processor to your brain. Don’t worry about the hair, by the way. It should grow back even faster now, actually, between the regenerative fluid and more efficient processing of nutrients overall.”

  Why is she talking about nutrients? Who cares about my hair? Noemi wants to scream. All she can understand in her present confusion is that she’s been altered—blood and bones and brain—and that the person responsible is Gillian Shearer, who would gladly see Noemi and Abel dead. Shearer would only have changed her into—

  A monster, her brain supplies.

  But as she looks at Abel’s gentle, worried face, she finds a tiny shred of hope. He wouldn’t let Shearer do anything terrible to me. He wouldn’t let her transform me from human into… into something else.

  She has to stay with Abel. That’s the only thing she knows.

  “You’re a hybrid now, Noemi,” Shearer continues. “Half human, half mech. Well. Maybe three-quarters human, one-quarter mech?”

  “Exact percentages are beside the point,” Abel says.

  He said percentages didn’t matter? That can’t be right. Maybe this is just the most vivid, awful nightmare of her life.