“What aren’t you telling me?”
“The Stalwart II was one of those vessels. Your Aunt Miriam—”
Marlee fell back with a gasp. “She didn’t—is she—”
“Going to wake up in a new body via regenesis. I expect she already has by now. She’ll be fine. I’m certain of it.”
“Oh no! Poor Gramps. And Alex…I can’t even imagine what they’ve been suffering through. But you…” she regarded him oddly “…you left them to come here and search for me anyway?”
“I did. I love you, and I will always come to rescue you. No matter what.”
She reached out and hugged him, inadvertently squeezing his wound. He didn’t care; he’d take this kind of pain any day. “I love you, too. I’m sorry if I’ve been a bitch to you recently.”
He chuckled. “Neither of us has been the best versions of ourselves lately. I forgive you. Will you forgive me?”
“Of course I will. I….” She drew back to stare at him somberly. “Gosh, this is so hard for me to say. But here it is: I’m still staying. I hope you will, too.”
“I’m not leaving without you, but—”
“I know all your ‘buts’ before you say them. And you’re not wrong on any of them. I feel awful about what I’m putting Mom through, and Gramps, and Alex, and Mia—oh god I bet I am totally fired now—and I desperately hope Aunt Miriam is all right. But this has become my fight, too, and I can’t abandon it now. Please join me in it.”
He dropped his head into his hands. As strong as he’d made the wall between them, Akeso still roiled through his veins with renewed outrage and despair. He didn’t blame his esoteric companion. Could he do it? Could he go back out there on the streets and fight these creatures? Could he do it and keep Marlee alive as well?
He felt as if he were being ripped apart from the inside out. He needed Alex, so badly. She was his center, his soul, his lodestar, and he was utterly lost without her. He needed Akeso, needed to subsume himself in its peaceful nurturing. He needed to protect Marlee from this vicious, cruel enemy…
…but she needed him to believe in her.
He took in the hopeful, pleading yet defiant expression animating her features, and admitted to himself that maybe he had the wrong of it. She was brave, and giving, and hardheaded…and not a child any longer. She hadn’t been whimpering in a dark corner since being trapped here; she’d taken up the fight alongside these people. She was strong, talented and fierce. He did need to protect her, but maybe the best way for him to do that was by teaching her. By guiding her into her strengths and helping her become the woman she was determined to be.
He wished the training ground wasn’t an active warzone. He wished he were better prepared for this trial, wished Akeso understood why he needed to make this choice. But here they were. He nodded slowly. “If you insist, we’ll stay. But there will be rules.”
She grabbed him in a bear hug. “Thank you! Yeah, sure, rules, whatever. Thank you.”
“And as soon as the quantum block is down, we’re going home.”
“Yep. More or less.”
“Marlee? It’s called compromise.”
“Right.” She tried to look serious. “We’ll set that as a goal, okay?”
He threw his hands in the air. “Okay. Now, if we’re staying, I should shower and get cleaned up. Then I think you’d better introduce me properly to the people in charge.”
23
* * *
NAMINO
Namino One
Parc Eshett pressed against the alley wall so hard he’d probably sink into it and disappear if the molecules would simply give way and allow him passage. Which would be better—better than dying to the Rasu for the second time, better even than the suffocating terror of trying to stay alive on the streets of Namino One.
His left leg shrieked in pain at his slight movement, and he glanced down to see renewed rivulets of blood seeping out of the wound and cutting trails over his knee. He’d tried suppressing all the pain receptors in his leg earlier, then had promptly fallen on his ass, which served only to tear open the gash yet wider. Apparently the damage was so extensive that cutting off the pain receptors also cut off fine motor control. This left him with a couple of choices, none of them ideal: suffer in breathtaking agony, risk destroying his leg entirely and rendering himself completely immobile, or give up, huddle on the ground and wait to die.
When the Rasu had appeared above Namino, he’d been delving the Makers Market for dyne components, trying to put together a kind of…gearhead gift basket for Ryan as an apology. Thanks to his twin on Mirai, he’d known about the attack long before the Rasu breached the atmosphere and began blowing the city up. But because he was an idiot, he hadn’t fled for safety. No, he’d continued fucking shopping. And by the time the ships showed up in the city to wreak their havoc, it was too late to escape.
He’d holed up in a series of seemingly safe harbors that inevitably lost their status as the Rasu rampaged across the city. With every move, he saw fewer survivors; it had now been half a day since he’d come across any living Asterion. The injury to his leg had happened while he caught a fitful few hours of sleep inside an abandoned light manufacturing plant. He’d awakened to the high-pitched scream of a Rasu laser beam cutting through the walls. The beam missed him, but a giant shard of glass fell from a window above him to impale his left thigh. The artery shut itself off before he bled to death in the first five minutes, and he’d fashioned a tourniquet out of his shirt, but his leg was a ruined mess.
The heavy thuds of bipedal Rasu footsteps grew louder on the street outside, and he held his breath, willing himself not to flinch. A shadow overtook the alley entrance, a harbinger of two Rasu striding by the opening with all the grace of hauler dynes. Then they were gone.
Air escaped through pursed lips in a weak, narrow stream until his lungs were empty. He waited for another one…two…three seconds, then gulped in fresh air and sank down the wall to the ground.
The next thing he knew, he was hyperventilating. The harsh, antiseptic lights of the Rasu lab strobed through his mind. Whirring tools of torture descending from above to slice into him—
Get it together, man. The surest way to get himself killed by the Rasu for the second time was to panic. Damn but he wanted to panic, and the struggle to wrestle his pulse under control left him exhausted.
He’d seen people get taken prisoner, rounded up by roving gangs of Rasu and herded onto transports that soon breached the clouds and vanished. He comprehended full well what awaited the prisoners at the destination. He couldn’t suffer through that again. So he vowed not to allow himself to get captured. If such a moment arrived, he’d self-destruct his OS and suicide.
Honestly, he should just go ahead and suicide now, right? His memories and experiences were synced in real-time with his Plex twin, so this incarnation could be created again easily enough.
But some deep-seated and little-used sense of honor and duty—likely Ryan’s fault—stopped him. He might be the only functioning Plex with presences on both Namino and Mirai. One instance had a front-row seat to the attack and, in theory, should be able to relay the situation on the ground, and the other instance had a free pass into the halls of power at the Initiative. He needed to tell someone what was happening here, even though it would mean revealing his Plex secret and facing the consequences of doing so. Which was going to suck.
The sound waves from a distant explosion boomed off the narrow walls of the alley. The explosions were getting more infrequent, so perhaps the Rasu were mostly done blowing shit up. Now they were crawling through the wreckage and carting away anything that was still intact. Learning all the Asterions’ secrets. Their strengths and, more importantly, their weaknesses.
He made for a crappy spy, though, considering how he could hardly move. His OS worked overtime to manage the wound and speed up the healing process, but then he kept insisting on walking on it and bollocksing everything up. With all the soot and dirt and death han
ging thick in the air, the gaping hole in his leg was already infected beyond his OS’s ability to treat it. He needed shelter—shelter that managed to stay standing for longer than a few hours.
The Initiative had prepared a series of underground bunkers around the city as part of Project Guerilla, but damned if he knew where any of them were. Beneath DAF Command seemed like one possibility, or beneath the central transit hub, or Namino Tower. But they’d been working with existing tunnels and the surrounding geography, so it was more likely the bunkers were located wherever the underground environment cooperated. When the attack had begun, the public nex web had broadcast all sorts of instructions, including directions to numerous bunkers…but he’d suffered an instant PTSD-induced panic attack and hadn’t paid attention to the details.
So now here he sat, busted up and bleeding in an alley somewhere in the southwestern region of the besieged city.
He wasn’t going to last much longer out here. It was time to go fess up and share what he knew, and maybe get some directions to a shelter in return.
24
* * *
MIRAI
Mirai One
Parc tried for the third time to stand up from the couch; when asked to support his weight, however, his left leg immediately buckled. He frantically grasped for the arm of the couch for support, then fell back onto the cushions.
This was ridiculous! His body was perfectly functional and undamaged.
But his mind refused to accept it. Overwhelmed by the pain and debilitating injury bleeding across linked kyoseil strings from his other body, his brain was busily transferring those electrical signals to this body. Maybe Asterion brains weren’t as adept at multithreading disparate experiences as he’d once thought. He could certainly use a little separation about now, but there was no ceraff to disconnect from—he was the ceraff.
He closed his eyes, scrunched up his face and tried again to stand. You are fully capable of walking. So walk, dammit!
Pain shot through his left thigh as he took a step forward, but he did take a step forward. Then another—
—the sound of the door to the warehouse apartment opening distracted him, and his other consciousness surged forward to overwhelm his present mind and send him crashing to the floor beside the couch.
“I just came by to get a couple of—gods, Parc, what’s wrong?”
He peered up to see Ryan hurrying across the apartment to his side. Ryan hadn’t been here in days, having vacated in a huff over Parc’s continued Plex antics, and all his messages to the man had gone unanswered. Despite the absurd circumstances, he was thrilled to see his onetime lover’s face. “Here you are, finding me a crumpled disaster on the floor yet again.”
“You should probably stop doing stupid shit that turns you into a crumpled disaster on the floor, then.”
“Yep.”
“Are you hurt? I don’t see any blood or jutting bones.”
“No. Yes. I mean….”
“Oh.” Ryan stood, took a step back and crossed his arms over his chest. “Another version of you is hurt, is that it?”
Parc shrugged weakly. “I’m afraid so. On Namino. The Rasu—”
My chest is flayed open, the folds of skin held back by clamps. The cavity revealed glows hot like steel fresh out of a kiln. But I can’t peer inside at my own insides, because my head is locked in place by something hard and unyielding. My eyelids are held open by more unforgiving clamps. My eyes are dry, scratchy, sandpaper scraping over unfinished wood. I haven’t blinked in…I can’t say.
Time has blended together into an endless series of brief respites between the pain.
He grimaced through the flaring memory, pressing his fingertips to his temples until the worst of it faded away.
Ryan propped against the arm of the couch. “Well, shit.”
“Listen, I know you’re angry at me, and I know I don’t have any right to ask for your help. But I need to get to the Initiative, and it doesn’t look like I’m making it there on my own. I have information Nika will want to hear.”
“Why don’t you simply send her a message?”
“Because it’s a lot of information, and it’s complicated, and there’s a chance I can become an ongoing conduit for information between the siege on Namino and the Advisor Committee. But to do it, I’ve got to stay alive there, and to stay alive there I need shelter. And I don’t have a clue where the underground bunkers are.”
“So you need someone at the Initiative to tell you where to go. I knew it would all come down to you saving your own ass.”
He hated the acrimony in Ryan’s voice, hated how badly he’d fucked this whole thing up. “That’s not fair. The best way for me to save my own ass would be to straight up die on Namino. But I’m staying alive, despite being in intense physical pain and suffering panic attacks every ten minutes in both bodies, entirely so I can be that conduit between worlds.”
Ryan stared at him intently, suspicion and distrust darkening his normally quite handsome features. Finally he rolled his eyes at the ceiling. “All right, I’ll help you get to the Initiative, but I’m not doing it for you. I’m doing it for all the other people trapped on Namino. For Joaquim and Ava and Dominic and everyone else.”
It wasn’t the answer he’d wanted, but under the circumstances it might be a better one than he deserved. “Good enough. Thank you.”
Ryan crouched beside him, wrapped an arm underneath his left shoulder and helped him stand. “I’m not carrying you, either. I’ll keep you from falling on your face every five meters, but you’re going to have to put one foot in front of the other and walk.”
Omoikane Initiative
“Dashiel, did you hear what I said?”
He jerked his attention back to Nika and offered her an apologetic shrug. “I’m sorry.”
“What’s on your mind? Other than the obvious, I mean.”
“Merely trying to think my way into a solution that will keep the Rasu out of our ships. Somehow. What was it you were saying?”
“Miriam Solovy is back among the living over in Concord, which is good news. They’ve squashed the Anadens’ coup attempt for the time being, though the instigators are still on the loose….”
A minor commotion at the lift drew her attention away, and she looked up in time to see Parc and Ryan stumble into the Initiative. Ryan appeared to be actively holding Parc upright while Parc sweated profusely, his face a worrying ashen.
She leapt up and hastened over to the lift, nudging past several people to reach them. “Here, let’s get him to a chair.” She grabbed Parc’s free arm, and together she and Ryan eased him down at one of the cubicles.
He collapsed into the chair in visible relief. “Thanks.”
She studied him in concern, noting the complete absence of blood or burns. “What’s wrong? I don’t see any open wounds.”
“He doesn’t have any.”
She glanced at Ryan, taken aback by the dry acerbity in his tone. “Then what happened? Parc, did you catch another virutox?”
“Very funny.” Parc pushed himself up higher in the chair and grasped onto the lip of the desk for support. “I have a confession to make.”
Nika dropped her chin onto her hand. “Of course you’re a Plex. If anyone in the Dominion would be a Plex, it would be you. I should have guessed it instantly.”
“Yeah, yeah. Lecture me if you want, but trust me, I am reaping what I bloody sowed right now.”
Behind Parc, Ryan snorted. She vaguely remembered Perrin mentioning something about the two of them going through a rough spot, but then the Rasu had attacked and all other considerations had faded to the background.
She leaned forward to focus on Parc. “Because you’re once again trapped by the Rasu?”
“My own personal hell on an endless loop. Good times.”
“I’m sorry, Parc.”
“No, I most decidedly brought it on myself. But why don’t we table my just desserts for a little while and concentrate on more import
ant things, like the situation on Namino?”
She leapt up so dramatically her chair tumbled over. “No.”
He frowned in confusion. “Um, okay, but—”
“I mean, no, the specifics of the situation on Namino aren’t the most important thing about you being here while also being there. Don’t you see? This means kyoseil can circumvent the quantum block.”
Parc and Ryan’s unexpected arrival had attracted the notice of several of the Advisors, and a small group had gathered around the cubicle to hear his tale of woe. Adlai was one of them, and now he shook his head. “But we don’t think it can. We’ve tried to contact Selene through the Justice Advisors’ ceraff multiple times. We tried several others as well. No one we know was on Namino is answering.”
Parc shrugged. “Maybe they’re all dead, because let me tell you, there are a fuckton of people dead on Namino.”
Nika flinched away. She wanted to bury her face in the crook of Dashiel’s shoulder and weep for hours, but instead she forced herself to project strength she did not feel. Parc’s duty here was to tell the unvarnished truth, and her duty was to weather that truth and find a way to turn the information into a plan. “Or maybe it’s something else. Maybe only connections between the same kyoseil are strong enough to get through the block. A normal ceraff is simply a central connection point for different people to temporarily join, but Parc is literally the same person both here and there. A Plex kyoseil link must be much, much stronger.”
“It makes sense. My link is definitely…” Parc winced “…strong. So I’ll be your conduit for so long as I can stay alive on Namino. I might last longer if you would be so kind as to point me toward one of the underground bunkers.”
“Adlai?”
“We can do that. I’ll pull up the map now. The question is, Parc, do you know where you are?”
Inversion (Riven Worlds Book Two) Page 16
