The Brightest Fell

by Seanan McGuire

  The next file contained another fairy tale, this time telling the story of a brave knight, struck down in battle against a deadly foe. In this story, it was the night-haunts themselves who decided the death had been unfair, catching the knight’s vitality before it could escape them, leaving it undevoured. They went to the nearest blood-worker they could find, offering all the riches the dead could reveal if only the blood-worker would agree to perform a ritual for them, allowing the knight to return to the land of the living. Again, the blood-worker slept, for seven years and a day, eventually waking restored and richer than the sun.

  I was not sure the sun possessed any signal wealth. Still, the message was clear: people could be stolen back from death, if their bodies were intact, if the night-haunts had not yet come to strip the vitality from their blood, and if a blood-worker of sufficient power was willing to pour some of their own life into the ritual.

  The other files contained variations on the ritual itself, lists of herbs and flowers, sacred woods and precious stones. Some of the instructions contradicted one another, but that was an easy thing to reconcile. A ritual, like a program, can use many different tricks to accomplish the same end. If someone poured enough blood magic into the casting, it would work, and all those who possessed bodies to restore and vitality to replace would be able to wake. My part in this process, according to Li Qin’s notes, would be to guide the frozen minds of my subjects out of the machines where they were captive, back into the fleshly shells they had never intended to abandon.

  I closed the file. I closed my eyes. I considered, for a moment, releasing my hold on this virtual environment, allowing the code to claim me. This would be easier, in the code. That was why I decided I must remain. I did not deserve easy. I did not deserve peaceful. I needed to decide whether I would allow this thing, this thing that could not save my mother, or whether I would be petty, and small, and say that if I must suffer, everyone must suffer.

  It was . . . tempting, in a way it never could have been, when my mother had been alive and I had been innocent, Dryad daughter of the cybernetic world. Death had been a mystery to me, real but untouchable, and always as reversible as Li Qin said it would be now. When someone went off-line, they could be rebooted. When someone fell, they could get back up.

  What it was that the night-haunts represented, that my mother’s machine had stolen and somehow preserved . . . I was sure some would call it the soul, although the fairy tales in Li Qin’s files used the word “vitality” with reliable firmness. It was difficult not to think of it as the operating system for the body. So long as it could be reinstalled, they could come back.

  Barbara, Yui, Colin, and Peter had all been killed by my mother’s machine, and their unique operating systems were on file, ready to be restored. Even Terrie’s partitioned OS was still available. My mother, however, had been killed with an ax. She had been—

  She—

  I opened my eyes.

  She had been killed with an ax, yes. But, according to October, the blood in her body had been as lifeless as the blood of all the others. Her operating system had been transferred to another location. The ax had not been Gordan’s only weapon.

  My body, made of pixels and thought, felt strangely heavy for all its insubstantiality. I thought this might be horror. I thought I might deserve it. On the walkway, when Gordan and October had fought, when Gordan had threatened to upload Quentin as she had uploaded the others, Gordan had claimed my mother could not be recovered, because she had not been backed up to the server. She had said my mother was lost forever.

  But she had not used the machine again. I—and October—had stopped her, had taken the machine away without destroying it. The machine, which was designed to operate despite power outages; which was meant to preserve data at all costs.

  The machine, which possessed its own local backup system.

  The capacity was limited and the battery was small—the battery might already have died, after all this time sitting unused—but it had been my mother’s intention never to risk anything being lost simply because the timing of a transfer happened to synchronize with some issue on the server.

  Gordan had stated that my mother’s data—her operating system, her vitality—had not been transferred to the server, but she had not said anything about wiping the machine’s local memory.

  I stood. The idea of my legs did not wish to support me. I compelled them to do so anyway. They were an idea, this place was an idea, I was an idea, and they were not going to defy me when I had need of them.

  Would Gordan have lied? Could Gordan have lied? Or—no. I could review the footage in my mind’s eye, recalling it as easily as I would open any other file. Li Qin likes to speak of the fallibility of memory, but she refers to the memory of meat, to the hot and anxious data contained in neurons and flesh. My memory is electronic, as still and unchanging as the people trapped in my storage banks, and it never changes.

  Gordan, on the walkway. Gordan, enraged. Gordan, striking October and saying, “Do you know the real reason I killed her that way? I didn’t back her up, that’s why—even if the others come back, she won’t. She’s gone, and nothing your masters do will bring her back.”

  She never said she had wiped the upload device’s local memory.

  She never said she had removed the battery.

  She never mentioned the upload device at all. Had she been able to successfully copy Quentin’s data into the machine—killing him in the process, but that had not been a concern for her, not by that point—she might have overflowed the buffer and overwritten the data it contained. She never had the chance to do that. October had stopped her. October had prevented the machine from being used again.

  This time, when my legs attempted to buckle, I allowed them to do so. I did not hit the ground. Instead, I disappeared, dissolving into light and code, racing from Li Qin’s preprogrammed environment and into the comforting embrace of my living network of connection and ever-flowing data.

  Transition between one point on the network and another is close enough to instantaneous as to make no difference. Still, I paused, allowing myself to hang suspended, bodiless, defined only by my thoughts. Somewhere outside the network, the modified server interlaced with pieces of the tree that had been my first home and harbor continued to function, keeping me connected, keeping me tethered to myself. As long as it existed, so did I, even when I chose, as now, to be nothing more than an idea.

  Time did not pass here as it did outside. I could see it ticking by, seconds building into minutes, but it lacked the urgency of the material world. I could stop. I could think. I could . . . not breathe, not exactly. I could allow myself to take a moment, as I had done when I was a true Dryad, as I could not do when I walked among the people made of blood and bone.

  If my mother’s data was contained in the backup machine, then what? Her body was gone. We had burned it, taking Gordan at her word. It seemed a glaring error now, on the precipice of hope, but at the time, we had been traumatized and frightened and willing to accept certain things as inevitable. I had been sliding into adulthood, aging myself by the hour, and had not been best equipped to judge what was the right thing to do. Li Qin had not yet come home. I had not yet heard Elliot speaking to her on his office phone, trying to fumble his way through the words that would make her a widow and me a widow’s daughter in the eyes of Faerie, not only in the eyes of what was known and true. I had not yet survived so many things.

  We might have my mother’s operating system prisoned on a piece of equipment that had never been intended to contain a living mind for any length of time, and no way to restore her to flesh. What then?

  Then we would find a solution. We would build her a server of glass and wood and circuitry, as she had built a server for me. We would save her. What is a daughter for, if not the salvation of her mother?

  I released the code, falling into the light, and appeared in
the only room at ALH Computing which I normally refused to enter. It was theoretically mine, networked like all the others. I had every right to enter it, to claim it as my own, to repurpose it for my own use. I did not wish to do so. It was not mine. It had never been intended to be mine.

  Cascades of paper covered every surface suitable for file storage, and some which truly were not. My mother had been a modernist by the standards of her kind, but she had also been far older than our modern forms of electronic storage and communication, and sometimes she found it easier to pursue her answers in physical form. She could review code by hand and tease out its secrets with incredible accuracy. Her work was a hybrid, like her alchemy, like her heritage . . . like me. Anyone else would have seen a dying Dryad as a lost cause. She had seen me as a daughter.

  I walked across my mother’s office, swallowing the sadness I felt at seeing her treasures dusty and forgotten. Her tiny army of plastic dinosaurs still menaced the coffee maker. One of them had fallen over. I paused to pick it up and put it back among its fellows. Under normal circumstances, she would have moved the herd long since, shifting them to some new location, threatening some new defenseless appliance. With her gone, everything was frozen.

  Almost everything. I had changed nearly beyond recognition. How much of my fear at Li Qin’s suggestion was rooted in the idea that waking our slumbering dead would open me to their judgment, who had known me only as a child in need of protection, and never as their Countess?

  Maybe it was better to be a plastic dinosaur.

  After Gordan’s death, no one had been sure what to do with the machine that had stolen so many of our own. In the end, we had placed it in the safest location we could think of, more secure than a vault, more private than a locked filing cabinet: the one place no one would ever go without good reason. We had placed it in my mother’s desk. January had never guarded what was hers with unnecessary spells or cruel traps. She had simply requested we respect her privacy, and we had, because disappointing her had been unthinkable. Upon her death, that respect had endured, even as those of us who survived had been unable to shake the feeling that we had disappointed her beyond all measure.

  I walked to her desk. I sat in her chair, sending a puff of dust and the scent of ozone into the air. I inhaled deeply, looking for the trace of her, looking for some memory of my mother that might otherwise have been forgotten. I found neither. Only dust, and ozone, and regret. I opened the bottom drawer.

  The machine was nothing special to look at: a tube, of sorts, packed with circuitry, wires, and bits of improbable nonsense. A sliver of redwood, a shaped moonstone, a small vial of seawater mixed with mercury—the creations of an alchemist’s clever, clinical mind, combined with an artificer’s training and a scientist’s ambition. She had never been content unless she was violating some natural law or other. I smiled a little as I lifted the assemblage from its resting place. My mother, the wild genius.

  Carefully, I extended a tendril of my awareness, testing the device for power, for responsiveness. I found it, slow and sluggish, but still present. The batteries would need to be charged before we did anything with the machine itself.

  Their weakness gave me pause. If the batteries died while I was interfacing with the storage system—something that was not outside the realm of possibility, as my presence has a tendency to cause spikes in power consumption—I might find myself trapped. As I had left no indication of where I was going, that could be . . . complicated.

  Refusing to look solely on the basis of a possible complication, on the other hand, was very simple: I was afraid. I was afraid of what I might find. Not an hour ago, I had been willing to accept the fact that my mother was lost forever. Now, with the sliver of a chance dangling in front of me, I was scared to grasp it. What if I was wrong? What if this had all been me getting my own hopes up after Li Qin said that it was time to move on? I wasn’t sure I could bear it.

  I was a Countess. I was January’s heir. Any choice I had was an illusion: loyalty and love made it so. I grabbed the nearest USB cable from the snarl on the corner of the desk, ramming it into the port, and was rewarded with a small amber light. It wasn’t enough to fully charge the machine—that was going to take a much greater power source—but it should keep things stable enough that I would not be trapped. Not allowing myself to hesitate any longer, I plunged my awareness into the shimmering line of the device’s memory.

  Lines of code scattered around me, sluggish but still moving, still flowing, still alive. I dug deeper, all too aware of the fading battery, now draining even faster as it strained to support me. The power coming through the USB cable was not coming fast enough. I needed it to last. I needed to find—

  The battery flickered. Instinct I didn’t know I possessed took over, rocketing me out of the machine before the battery could shut down with me inside. I landed on January’s floor on my behind, sending papers flying in all directions, eyes wide as I stared at the device. It remained as it had always been, but I knew better. Everything was different now.

  Gordan had lied.

  SIX

  My appearance was accompanied by the smell of ozone and the crackle of static. Elliot looked up, eyes widening as alarm replaced recognition. “April?” He dropped the papers in his hands, beginning to stand. “Are you all right?”

  “No.” I had been flickering almost constantly since ejecting myself from the upload device, my physical manifestation moving back and forth between my adult mien and the child I had been when my mother died. I could make it stop, if I concentrated, but I needed my attention for other things. I needed him to understand. “Where is Li Qin?”

  “She had to go back to Dreamer’s Glass. Are you—”

  It would take too long for her to drive to us. I couldn’t go to her, not without taking my portable server. Why hadn’t my mother recruited us a teleporter? Even October’s Cait Sidhe would have been able to bend the distance into a more manageable shape. Li Qin needed to know what had become possible, what Gordan had rendered possible. I did not want to tell her over the phone.

  “I am fine,” I said brusquely. “Contact her. Request her return. I will be in Gordan’s workshop.”

  Elliot’s eyes widened further. If there was anyone who hated Gordan more than I did, it was him. He had to hate her, to keep himself from blaming me for the loss of his liege and his betrothed, both of whom should have been beside him forever. “Why?” he asked.

  “I am attempting to restore one of her projects to functional condition. The battery is undergoing tremendous strain from maintaining the active components over the course of several years. I require some measure of privacy while working, as I am not always aware of the potential damage to those around me.” All this was technically true. Being made of light, I am not good at assessing safety conditions. I once set Alex on fire when he wandered into my workshop without warning me.

  “What are you going to do with it?” asked Elliot.

  “That remains to be seen,” I replied. “Please, can you contact Li Qin and request she return? I need to discuss the favor she asked of me today. It may have certain ramifications she did not initially consider.”

  Like the resurrection of her wife . . . or the admission that we could do no such thing, because we had destroyed her body. Because she was lost to us.

  “All right, April,” said Elliot reluctantly. “Are you going to tell me what this is all about?”

  “You know what Li Qin asked of me,” I said. “Do you really want to know what may have complicated her request? Or will you be happier to remain ignorant until such time as we are able to move forward with the project?”

  Elliot took a short, sharp breath, and held it for a count of five before he unsteadily said, “I don’t like not knowing what’s going on around here.”

  “I know,” I said. “But in this specific case, I believe knowledge would have a negative impact on your mental and em
otional health. Can you please trust me, and allow me to continue as I am until such time as we are able to tell you more?”

  “I can, if you’ll answer one question.”

  “What?” If he had figured out what I was doing, if he had guessed that January’s resurrection might be possible—

  “Are you going to let her try?”

  There was an aching, burning need in his voice, one which I understood better than I understood most emotional response, for I had felt it myself. He needed Yui returned to him. He needed his family back.

  “Yes,” I said, after a long pause, and watched the need washed away by relief. I cocked my head to the side. “Elliot?”

  “Yes?”

  “If you had to choose between restoring Yui and restoring all the others currently waiting to be brought back on-line, what would you do?”

  Elliot took a breath. Then, wryly, he smiled. “I don’t think I could say this to anyone else, but I know you won’t judge,” he said. “I know you can’t. I’d bring back Yui. I would tell all the others I was sorry, tell them they deserved better than to have me be the one making the choices, and I’d bring back Yui. And I’d never be able to tell her, because she wouldn’t forgive me for choosing her over our friends, and that would kill me eventually, and I wouldn’t care. I would have Yui back, for however long it lasted, and that would be enough.”

  “It would . . . kill you?” I asked uncertainly.

  “There are some choices people shouldn’t have to make.”

  My mother was the only one without a body to call her own. October’s blood magic was powerful, to be sure, and she might agree to a decade of sleep as a consequence of restoring our sleepers. She had done more for less. But what would it take to bring my mother back to life? We had no ritual for that. We would be in uncertain territory. I would be asking Li Qin to choose.

  I had already killed one mother. I was unwilling to kill another.