Redeye (The Wonderland Cycle Book 2)

by Michael Shean

  “Her mother.” Bobbi nodded. “Yeah, I can see that.” She heaved a deep breath. “Maybe her father, too. She’d always been set on my mother being the one who caused it all.”

  “Not everybody wants to be truthful about where responsibility lies.” Mason looked at her again, canting his head a little bit. He looked very much like the wise old father now, despite the youth his face insisted. There were some things new flesh just couldn’t bury. “What about you? I heard about your man, the one you were with back when this all started with you. You’re not blaming yourself, I hope.”

  Well, this conversation was taking a turn that Bobbi wasn’t certain she wanted anything to do with. “Look,” she said, “if you’re asking me if I feel responsible for getting him into all of this, I don’t. He’d have gotten into it some other way. Or Stadil— Cagliostro— would have done something else to get him involved.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about.”

  “Well, then what do you mean?”

  Mason shrugged. “You may not blame yourself for him getting into the whole mess, but I wonder if you don’t feel responsible for him vanishing when you blew up the hospital.”

  Bobbi stiffened. “Maybe I used to,” she said. “But if he did die, then he was better off for it if he had one of those things inside of him.”

  “I don’t think you believe that, either,” Maston said. “I used to think, ‘I’d rather be dead than have an arm blown off’. That is, until I saw it happen on the field. After that I wanted them to keep me alive any way they possibly could— it’s part of why I ended up with the gene surgery.” Mason shrugged. “I’m just saying, I know that it can be hard. But on the other hand, I don’t want you to sit there thinking that you were responsible for any of this. I mean, sure, you were a fellow traveler and all, but this…this was where he wanted to go. He could’ve stopped after you got that bogus file. As Scalli tells me, you wanted to. But he went out on his own.” Mason waved his hand, then. “You don’t have to reply, just remember who’s responsible for what, that’s all. Survivors’ guilt never did anything but kill people faster.”

  Things were quiet after that until they got to the Scrap Field. Bobbi dropped Scalli outside of his place so he could re-arm and repair himself. The rest of them headed over to the Temple, which was still intact. Mason let out a whistle as he saw the building looming over them. “Could add on to Tenleytown with this,” he said, “or establish a satellite colony. You must have a lot of cash on hand, girl.”

  “I do okay,” Bobbi said as she parked the van in front of the building. Stadil’s money, and the fact that she was a wealthy woman on her own, had only just returned to her mind. It was funny how she never really thought about it until she had some kind of need. “Anyway, let’s get inside. I’ll get you all some drinks, you can eat up or whatever. We can talk about what we need to do.”

  “Sounds good to me,” said Mason, and reached for the door handle.

  “Wait.”

  Mason looked at her. “Yeah?”

  “You said that you’d seen what Redeye’s people had done before. What did you mean?”

  Mason pursed his lips. He sat back in his seat as the others began to pile out of the back of the van. “When they first started,” he began, “before they were hitting facilities, I mean, they were clearing out the ferals in the area that might give them trouble. Those were pretty close to Tenleytown – we were going to war with ‘em pretty often. Then Redeye and her people would go in, there’d be a hell of a racket, then…silence. And, you know, we’d go see what they’d done afterward. I just…we’d see what was left of them.” Mason shook his head. “It was never pretty. Worst violence I’d ever seen, even during the War. They’d just…pull people apart. Stack the limbs and torsos in neat piles. It was just obscene, you know?” Mason shook his head again, this time more vigorously as if trying to clear the memory away. “All I’m saying is that I’m glad that she’s on our side. And I’m glad the rest of them are dead. She’s right that we don’t want those people loosed upon the world.”

  “And she’s the toughest one,” said Bobbi. “So that’s fun.”

  “Yeah,” said Mason, and he reached for the door handle again. “Well, we will see what happens, I guess. I’d be lying if I said we shouldn’t be ready to do her in as well.”

  He got out of the van, leaving Bobbi alone— alone, and thinking of how to do just that. Redeye would be the beast she didn’t want to let out of the box without a clear idea of how to clip her. At the moment, however, she had no choice, and no ideas. But that would change. It would have to.

  They spent a while in the club, waiting on Scalli to return and getting the next leg of planning started. Bobbi offered them all the use of the facilities upstairs, which Redeye declined but Violet accepted with wide and grateful eyes. Bobbi wondered how long it had been since the poor woman had been able to take a shower. Mason was content to stay downstairs and draw a pint of beer while Bobbi and Redeye went upstairs after Violet. As the shower steamed away, the two women sat in Bobbi’s office. After checking fruitlessly to see if Cagliostro had returned, Bobbi watched Redeye while the woman slouched in one of the chairs opposite her desk. Redeye looked around the office with an easy sort of grandeur that Bobbi had seen at the complex, as if none of the night’s events had taken place. Bobbi wanted to say something to her, but she found that she had no words. What could she say? The woman had lost all of her faction, people whom she had taken care of and led against terrifying enemies. She’d certainly had more to deal with than Bobbi had in the past few weeks, and that was saying something. And yet here she was, sitting without any real expression save mild curiosity. As they sat in silence, Bobbi tried to grasp for something to say, until finally Redeye spared her the trouble.

  “You are angry with me, I think,” Redeye said, settling her gaze on Bobbi.

  “I am?” Bobbi blinked at her. “Why would you say so?”

  “Because I do not seem upset now. You must think that I do not care about what has happened.”

  “You seemed plenty upset earlier,” Bobbi pointed out, not sure what the other woman was getting at. “And as much as it might rankle me, your decision made sense. It’s not like you had no problem at all sending them off to be killed.”

  Redeye shook her head. “You’re wrong about that,” she said. “The truth of the matter is that I did have no problem sending them to their deaths. It was the reason I brought them all together in the first place, as I told you.”

  “But it’s not as though you feel nothing for them,” Bobbi said. “Otherwise, what would separate you from what they fought in the first place?”

  “That’s a good question.” The other woman frowned a bit. “I’ve been wondering about that since we left.”

  Bobbi wrinkled her nose. “I don’t know if that’s fair,” she said. “It’s true, we don’t’ know much about you, but we’re on the same side here. That was a great sacrifice that your people committed, and I want to honor that.”

  “But it was a sacrifice that I ordered,” said Redeye. “You could say that I should have died with them.”

  “Maybe, but then who would stay behind to help us?” Bobbi leaned forward a bit, propping herself up on the desk with an arm. “Look, I don’t pretend to know half of everything going on here, and we’ve just gotten out of a horrendous situation that we really need to talk about. But, barring that? I don’t see that any of you people had much of a choice but to do what has been done.” Bobbi said the words, not entirely believing them, but she did believe that in order to learn about the situation to its fullest extent she would have to ingratiate herself to the…whatever she was.

  Redeye drew the long sheet of sleek, dark hair from her face, showing not only the burning eye but another that was a rich honey-brown in color. “Then let us talk.”

  “Just a second,” Bobbi said, and called up the intercom system.

  “Yo.” Scalli’s voice drifted out from concealed speakers.


  “You and Mason come on up, Scalli. It’s conference time.”

  Not long after the lot of them gathered in Bobbi’s office. Scalli and Mason came up from the bar floor, both of them having dipped into the stock of whiskey from the smell of them, and a very much scrubbed Violet finally emerged from the bedroom after having been given stern instructions from Bobbi twice over to find something fresh in her closet to wear. Though still mutilated, the years of filth scrubbed from her skin showed what was once a very pretty girl indeed. It made Bobbi’s heart tear with pity to look at her, and she smiled as Violet shyly took a seat over near Redeye’s chair.

  “So Red and I have been talking,” said Bobbi, nodding at Redeye from behind her desk. “I figure we should talk about what’s happened, what she’s been up to, and…” She paused to look at Redeye a moment, “and I hope you’ll forgive me for saying it, but just who – and what – you are.”

  The other woman’s lips flattened into a frown. “I would have thought that would be obvious,” said Redeye. Violet shrank a little bit at her side. “I am your ally.”

  “Yeah,” said Scalli, “but you aren’t exactly normal, are you? So what are you? I don’t get that you’ve ever been picked up by the White Legion there, at least not possessed.”

  “I was not aware my origins were going to be questioned,” Redye said, and her lips grew harder.

  “Begging your pardon,” Scalli said, leaning forward in the other seat, “I can’t imagine how the hell you would think that we wouldn’t ask.”

  Redeye’s scowl remained for a moment longer, then dissipated into a helpless frown. “Very well,” she said, though she gave Scalli a withering look. “You are correct in that I am not formerly Yathi. I am human, or at least, marginally so.”

  “You’ll have to explain that,” Mason said, quirking his brows. “Not Yathi, but only marginally human?”

  “Yes,” said Redeye with a nod. She folded her hands in her lap, looking around the lot of them. “I was born human, at least. Created in a laboratory, artificially conceived and independently gestated. My father— by that I mean, the male genetic contributor— was an employee at a Genefex subsidiary, Applied Defense Solutions, in their Detroit laboratory complex. He was a researcher in their Applied Bionics and Cybernetics division developing combat systems for the War.”

  “The European War,” Scalli said.

  “Yes.”

  “Go on.”

  “Once I had been decanted, my father took me to the laboratory in which he worked, located on a research plantation in Switzerland. There a battery of procedures were performed upon me as I grew in the tanks: nerve augmentation, sensory augmentation, more. I did not undergo augmentation surgery; the systems were literally grown into me.” She smiled very thinly, and lifted her arm. Her skin, pale and poreless, seemed to gleam like porcelain. “There’s not much left of me that isn’t synthetic.”

  Scalli squinted at her. “So. You’re a full-conversion rig, then.”

  “That is correct.” Redeye shrugged. “My brain and central nervous system are mostly organic, but the rest is synthetic. Combat-purposed.”

  Bobbi stared at Redeye again. The bizarre had become a regular occurrence, considering the road that they now traveled, but she hadn’t expected for the leader of the feral army to have been a human brain riding in a synthetic body. “So he made you into a machine,” she said, and found that Violet was no longer the only target of her pity.

  “Something like that, yes,” said Redeye with a nod. “Over time, my systems finished their initial integration and I was given training. I learned how to use my body, and when the time came that my father believed me to be ready for deployment, he put me in cryogenic stasis until the time the company wanted to use me.” She shook her head, shivering slightly. “I can still remember what it was like, going under in the dark. It was…hard.”

  Bobbi frowned, and she felt that pity inside of her swell. “I can’t imagine what that must have been like for you. Or what it must be like for you now, for that matter. But how did you get where you are now?”

  Redeye leaned back against the side of the truck. “That is an interesting story. In suspension, I was still connected to the network. Mind you, this wasn’t the Network as you know it; it was back during the time of the Internet, which of course expanded into the Network we know back in the Thirties. I was just connected to the laboratory computer system. I slept for years…but as I did, I kept hearing a voice in my head.”

  “A voice?” Scalli turned a bit to look at her. “What did it say?”

  “It told me about many things, really,” said Redeye. “About the Yathi, what they were, their purpose. Someday, it told me, I would be responsible for helping destroy them. But I had to get out first. I had to escape.”

  There was a bit of a pause before Scalli grunted. “That was a long time to be in the freezer.”

  “For good reason, as it turns out. Whoever it was that told me the truth of things, they also somehow kept my location off the books and instead stepped up production of the xsiarhotl to distract from the project costs. And so I slept in a vault, quietly developing a personality.” Redeye took a deep breath, then sighed. “After a fashion, at least. But because the world is a funny place, I believe that I have just met the person who helped me all that time ago.”

  That took Bobbi aback. “You’re not talking about Cagliostro, are you?”

  “He responded to the name that the voice used back then,” said Redeye with a nod. “The Yathi designation. I suspect that it was indeed him who spoke with me all that time ago.”

  Bobbi tried to wrap her head around it. Cagliostro had said that he’d been planning things for a while, long before he made the decision to destroy his body and become the thing he was now, but Bobbi hadn’t imagined that his web reached back as far as it apparently did. “Well,” she said, “I guess we’re all part of his plan. Cagliostro said you were borged up something good, and a failsafe. So I can’t help but wonder what you’re amped up with. You said you were combat-purposed. Are you like your people back there? All reflexes and martial arts and crazy strength?”

  “No.” Redeye shook her head.

  “You have like cannons and shit in there? You shoot rays out of that eye of yours?”

  “No.”

  Bobbi squinted at her. “Well what the hell are you, then?”

  The smile that Redeye gave her was so fragile Bobbi expected that it might shatter off her face at any moment. “You mentioned that Cagliostro said that I was a failsafe – that is not entirely incorrect. I am a failsafe…after a fashion.”

  Bobbi’s squint tightened. “What kind of failsafe, then? Do you shut down systems when you interface with them?”

  Redeye nodded her head. “Essentially yes,” she replied. “Suffice it to say that were I to fulfill my true potential, there would be nothing the Yathi have built that would be able to resist me.”

  Bobbi and Scalli looked at each other. “That sounds…impressive. Can you give us some detail?”

  Chuckling, Redeye started ticking points off her fingers. “Target analysis and acquisition,” she said, “information display, infrared and ultraviolet visualization, passive sonar. I also have a ranging penetrative radar unit in my skull along with a miniaturized network module with wireless and satellite uplink.” She paused. “My skin was replaced by a flexible biphase polymer. It looks like skin, feels like skin, but it absorbs or reflects a host of lethal radiation and hardens into armor against various impacts and damage types. Skeleton and musculature replaced to put up with impact force and to carry the failsafe hardware. I also have a full suite of hand-to-hand combat hardware, including plasma-sheathing generators in my limbs that cut through most known materials.” The thin woman paused a moment, then gestured to her eye again. “And there are the indicator lamps, of course.”

  “Christ.” Mason whistled. “You’re like Queen of the Combat Borgs.”

  Bobbi watched the other woman’s face for a
moment, seeking…something. She wasn’t sure what, but she felt it was significant to look at her all the same. Then she sighed. “Nothing like making you feel like industrial machinery,” she said. “That’s just fucked up. I’m sorry that you’d had to go through that.”

  Redeye shrugged. “It’s what it is,” she said. “I’m not terribly sad, myself. Were I something less durably built, I wouldn’t be here now.”

  “I guess you’re right on that one.” Scalli squinted at her with new interest. “So why the hell did they make you in the first place? How is it a good idea to create a bomb that can walk, talk, and isn’t easily killed? You’re wired up like a combat mech, for Christ’s sake!” He shook his head. “And why didn’t they try and kill you outright the moment that they knew you were around? Once you started collecting people and sacked your first facility, it’d make complete sense to come grinding your people down with a large force and make excuses about it.”

  “Yeah,” Bobbi said, grateful that Scalli was giving voice to what she’d been wondering for a while now but had yet found the right time to bring up. “I mean, your intent was plain. Why wouldn’t they throw everything at you if they knew you could take their systems out?”

  “Because they don’t know what I am,” Redeye said with a shrug. “As part of his plan to destroy the Yathi, Cagliostro ensured that all records of my development were destroyed and the development team killed in a variety of incidents. It isn’t as if I might beseige Genefex Tower and crack it open, after all. Between its armored construction and defense systems, an outright assault would be folly.”

  Bobbi frowned all the more. “Forget I said anything,” she replied. “So all right, you can’t get them from the outside. But within, surely.”

  “That is the objective.” Redeye frowned. “Though, of course, there have been two serious blockages to progress, the first being a lack of a primary target. And then, of course, there is this.” She gestured to her blazing eye.