The Broken Third (Digitesque Book 4)

by Guerric Haché

  She plunged the code into her spine, into the code that Cherry had etched into her back, and connected it with the wraith, fully and utterly. She was the wraith, she was herself, both at once. It was there, it had strength of its own. She could use this, somehow, to fix this -

  He eyesight started to dim. What?

  No, no, not like this. Not out here.

  From the wraith’s own form she had the energy to keep thinking, to keep trying, but what -

  She was blind, she couldn’t see. The pain - the pain was gone.

  Isavel.

  Her body was gone.

  There was only darkness.

  Chapter 7

  Ada was dead.

  She was dead, wasn’t she?

  Well.

  This wasn’t what she had expected.

  The mental muscle of her gift was still there, her last locus of control, but she was blind. Couldn’t see what was going on. Frustrating.

  But Ada knew how to make light of the darkness.

  She slowly, carefully tweaked at those spindles, these spiderlegs of black that were her only link to the world. Through their branches, her branches, she knew where they all must be, and she began to cross and lock and spin them together. Braids of black weaving around her mind. Eyes. She knew how to see. Code connected, power flowed. Time to see again.

  Let there be light.

  And so it was.

  Silent and strange light. Time hard forgotten her in this particular moment, left her behind. The flash from the tip of a gun frosted her vision, people hung suspended in leaps for cover. A second eye, and everything suddenly popped with depth. Oh, much better. A third eye, and… good gods.

  She looked down.

  Ada was lying on the ground, on her back, eyes staring into space, blood seeping out from beneath her.

  Well, shit.

  What the hell was she now, then?

  Whatever she was was still her. This was just a setback. A huge setback.

  Time to solve some fucking problems.

  First things first, she squeezed those eyes of code, shrank them down, gave them light of their own. She made more eyes. She needed as many eyes as she could get. She pierced into her dead body’s wounds and took a look. It was squishy, wet and bloody, but she got the jist of it, didn’t she? A hole through her heart. Clean, relatively tidy - no burning, no decay, no exotic decomposition. She had healed cut tissue before - several times over the past week, in fact.

  But this was her heart . She needed to do it right. She needed to know what a heart was supposed to look like, whether there were any pieces missing. Where could she find an intact heart?

  A thousand dark eyes coiled towards the colonial that had shot her. Time’s glaciers had ground on enough for him to begin lowering his gun, for a look of fear to be born across his face. Good. Smart thinking. He was right to be afraid.

  Forests of black bled across the air, crossing the room in instants wedged between thought. Clothes were barely a nuisance. Pale skin, kind of flabby, likely wouldn’t be missed. She dug in.

  Oh, right, ribcages. Hm. A disintegration sigil for each rib was enough to crush it into paste. Pull the ribs out of the way, dig away at some other stuff - and there it was. A human heart. Not unlike hers, but with a crucial difference - it didn’t have a hole in it.

  Yet.

  It was amazing just how small she could make these eyes, just how close to the cells she could get. It was improbable. Once this was all over, she would have to return to the ring and ask the gods what, exactly, code was .

  Her body sprawled awkwardly on the ground. She needed better access, but moving it at these speeds might be dangerous. She let time flow normally, and suddenly there was motion, and then there wasn’t. Everyone had frozen of their own accord, in their own time. Whatever.

  She wrapped her dead self in dark code and raised it to a standing position, the tears in the suit already sealed up again. Inconvenient for once. She pried the suit off, slowed time again, and set to work on her naked corpse.

  The guy who had shot her was gone. Collapsed. Right, she had taken his heart apart.

  She wove into her own chest, gently snaking through the wound, on a microscopic level. Just like the little cell viewer she had used back in Campus, just like Cherry had taught her. Whatever code spindles were made of, their size seemed a matter of convenience, and they shrank as needed. With hundreds of eyes also on the intact heart for reference, she started picking through the bloody mess of herself, kneading muscle fibres, pinching tears back together, etching healing sigils into what tiny spaces there were.

  She was not alone in here. Her gifts still lived, swarming like ants. They were helping her, weren’t they? As she strung muscle fibers across the hole in her heart and tried to coax the cells to life, the gifts surged across the tissue. What, exactly, were they doing?

  She continued to string out muscle fibers wherever there were tears, pinching the wounds shut, gathering stray shreds of flesh back into the main whole, coaxing the right kinds of tissue into the right shapes, peeling apart the assassin’s heart for flesh and reference. The nanites in her blood, such as it was, continued fixing. But this wasn’t the end, no - she had lost a lot of blood. Well, she could scoop it back up, right? Hm, maybe not.

  There were other people in the audience with guns, though, other assassins. She reached out to one of them, a woman with a small, snub-nosed pistol. What a waste of flesh. She tore into the body in slow time, into the widest arteries, and started grabbing blood, funneling it over latticework ducts of levitation sigils. Into her veins, into her heart - but the gifts in her blood cleared it out of some of the heart’s chambers. Fine. She trusted the gifts to know where blood did and didn’t belong.

  Blood. How much blood did a person need, anyway? She watched her tiny little nanites invade this fresh blood, popping into the colonial human’s cells and reforging them for her own purposes. She smiled. Her gifts lived on after death, and they would bring her life again.

  Her veins filled, her heart sealed shut. The nerves were unmoving at first, but the gifts began to move on them, and jolt them, and as she pulled the tiny eyes of code out of her chest, she closed those wounds up too, and the nanites did their job sealing everything up again, slowly but surely.

  She needed to connect to her brain. Oh, she still was. Had been the whole time. Her brain was just… out of commision.

  First things first, get the heart moving. That require timeflow.

  People were still standing around. Were they staring?

  Whatever. Heartbeats. Squeezes. She squeezed her chest with a whorling black fist. Then the gifts did something to her nerves, and she… felt . Something fleshy.

  Heart beating, brain lighting up -

  There was air in her lungs. She hadn’t been breathing, and now she was.

  Pain shot through her head, excruciating pain. Her lungs burned. The nerves punctured by the hole in her chest screamed.

  Horrified screaming, like people were being torn apart.

  The air burned in her lungs, acid and fire, and she screamed along with all the chaos.

  Then she sucked one deep breath. Exhaled slowly. It had worked . Her head still throbbed in pain, sparks danced in front of her eyes. Code enveloped her body even as it supported it. She slowed time. Reached out with code.

  There were so many guns in this room - so many guns.

  She destroyed them all, all to dust. Back to real time.

  She looked up with a hundred thousand eyes and - didn’t really need those anymore. They fell to ash, and with her own fleshy eyes Ada Liu saw the assassins she had scavenged for resources, what blood she hadn’t taken sprayed inconsiderately across the floor.

  They had killed her.

  The colonials had killed her.

  Ada Liu cricked her neck, hiked up the corners of her mouth, split her lips, and bared all her teeth. She laughed. She roared at the pain in her head even as it subsided. “I’m alive!”

 
Everything was rushing past her, howling winds, a hot rage boiling right behind her eyes and blowing steam out her ears. She reached out, slowed time, still enraged, pulled one of the living assassins forward. Without a gun, what could he really do? She pulled her suit back up from the floor with her tendrils of code, and let it wrap around her again as time returned to normal.

  She grabbed the assassin by the throat, with her living hands, holding him up in the air dangling and kicking in front of her. She kept laughing, howling. She couldn’t believe it.

  “You thought you could kill me?! ”

  These colonial humans were weak. Pathetic. Subhuman. She squeezed her hand as hard as she could and heard a crunch. A windpipe, maybe, or a spine. He fell limp and she tossed him aside, muscles searing in pain.

  She stared at the machines around them. Still humming, still recording, still showing all the Union what was going on. Showing them their mistake. Showing them the consequences of meddling with the legacy of the ancients. The dark lake of her alien magic sloshing all around her, fed into all those monitors as electric currents she could practically taste in the air. She stared right at the nearest device.

  “I did not leave Earth and cross the stars just to die! I did not come here to be your pet! To be dissected on a table by your armies!”

  She looked over at Elsa, who was huddled against the wall with a hand covering her mouth. Next to her, Sanako’s face was painted pure terror.

  “Your military wants to invade Earth!” She shouted at the cameras, but she saw the fear on the guests’ faces, hiding behind their seats. “They want to open me up and use me to decide how to conquer it! They want to kill their own soldiers to cover it up! You’ll all see the proof soon enough.”

  Sanako yelled. “Ada, Ada stop -”

  Ada screamed back. “You’re all fucking lying! Ever since I got here this entire thing has been nothing but lies! You colonials don’t know anything - you’re weak, afraid, fucking decrepit! I will not be stopped by guns or soldiers or fussing about old legends! You may be human, but I am so much more. I am the First Sorceress of Earth. I can ruin you . ”

  Her heart was pounding her ribcage, alive, sweat trickling down her brow, skin heating up. She could practically see the red glow of her face in her peripheral vision.

  “I’m not playing your games. I’ll take what I want and leave you to rot. And if you come for Earth I will rip worlds apart so quickly you’ll wish your fucking Haints came back instead. ”

  She reached out with code, carefully picking her way through the stillness of time, and cracked all the devices apart at once. Only then, in that rush of smoke and silence, did she realize there had been a technological buzz in the room the entire time.

  She turned around, facing the great window behind her and the boreal forests beyond. Time to get the hell out of here. A few quickly, well-placed inverted force sigils on the glass and she could float her way out. One, two, three -

  The glass shattered and the world behind it vanished, leaving a blank, stained, gritty concrete wall behind it.

  Ada blinked. All her rage and bluster came to a screeching halt of puzzlement as she realized what happened.

  “That’s a fucking screen, Ada.” Elsa ran over to her and shook her shoulders. “Please tell me you’ve got some kind of plan? ”

  Ada stared at Elsa, slowed time, looked at her face. She looked horrified, but she also looked determined. She didn’t look like she had heard Ada just threaten and insult her entire race. “You -”

  “Like I said, we’re in this fucking mess together.” Elsa’s eyes narrowed, and she pointed to the side. “What do you want? You want a window? This way. Now.”

  Ada turned, saw the door she was talking about. She took a deep breath, her head and lungs and chest still stinging. If there was anyone she could trust right here and right now it might be Elsa, singled out for sacrifice by her own leaders. She could apologize for overly broad threats and insults later, if she remembered.

  She darted past Oussil and Magna, still cowering behind their couches and gaping like their faces were falling off. Finally not smiling, for once. The door opened easily, she and Elsa barrelled into the narrow hallway, and suddenly it was quiet again. Elsa followed on her footsteps, closing the door behind them.

  “Elsa, you said -”

  “Down the hall, to the left. That’ll get us to a windowside hall. I don’t know what the hell you want with a window but -”

  Ada started moving down the hall, pressing her hands against her temple to try and ease the pain. “Shut up.”

  An alarm suddenly started blaring, and red lights flooded the hall.

  “What now? ”

  “You just magic-murdered three people on a live feed in front of two billion people. Your assassins, by the way, were not military - that was a terrorist attack by someone you don’t even know. And the audio? Sure, if we don’t leak it others will, but you have no idea -”

  “There are other ideas I’d rather entertain right now.” She tried slamming open the next door, but her hands met resistance, and the door just jostled. “What -” She rammed her shoulder into it and it broke off its hinges.

  Elsa yelled at her. “Use the fucking door knob, Ada!”

  The words meant nothing to her, so she ignored them. They stepped into a clean hallway with a vast, open window along one side, facing the towers of Daneer beyond. People were running around in panic; most turned and fled when they saw Ada.

  “What now, space witch?”

  Ada walked over to the window and immediately spotted moving shapes. Boxy ships slid by the windows, cruising above the city streets at a decent clip. They were not unlike the shuttle that evacuated the outers from Campus. “Can you fly one of those?”

  Elsa looked out the window. “A skimmer?”

  “Can you?”

  “Yes, but these can’t go to space -”

  Time dilation, a few force sigils, and this window blew open like a proper window, a violent blast of glass raining shards down to the ground below. Ada cracked black through the air, towards the nearest of these skimmers. It was easy to call up giant force sigils behind it and push it towards the tower. The skimmer shuddered with the ebbs and flows of time as she adjusted its course, shoveling it towards the glass-toothed maw of the broke window.

  “Holy shit, what are you -”

  The skimmer was a few meters from the wall. Ada pried the door open, tore out the pilot, and dumped him bewildered in the hallway. As he scrabbled away she grabbed Elsa and forced her in front of the window, bringing up a fan of sigils around her back to ward off gravity’s urgent pawing.

  “Hang on!”

  She jumped, hefting Elsa under the shoulders, and they glided towards the door of the skimmer even as it began sinking, wings of code keeping them aloft. They crumpled awkwardly into the skimmer’s cabin, Elsa scrambled over Ada towards the controls, and Ada pulled the door shut - a simple mechanical door, like one might find in the least interesting ancient ruins on Earth.

  The skimmer stopped falling and started flying.

  “Ada!” Elsa was shouting, eyes fixed ahead. “Talk to me! What are we doing?”

  “Why are you even with me?” Ada asked. “You could just as easily -”

  “Can you drive this thing?” Elsa cut her off by gesturing towards the controls. It was a strange, articulated wheel-like thing covered in buttons and knobs. Oh, it was primitive. Gods damn these colonists.

  Ada nodded. “Gods. We need to get out of the city.”

  “The countryside? Seriously?”

  “Go!”

  Elsa clenched her jaw. “Fine.” She jammed her hand into her pocket and handed something to Ada. “You don’t seem to have a fucking plan so call Turou and see what he’s got.”

  Ada stared at the device, poking at it. “How do you -”

  Elsa grabbed it. “Damn fucking space witch can’t use a simple -” She did something to it, glancing between it and the canyons between the towers of D
aneer, and thrust it back at Ada. The words “Chiu Turou” were on the screen, and there was a buzzing sound.

  “What -”

  After a moment Turou’s voice, also buzzing a bit, cut in. “Lieutenant? Uh, Elsa? What’s going on? I just saw the stream -”

  “Turou, it’s Ada. Elsa’s piloting a... skimmer? We’re getting out of Daneer.”

  His words choked off. “Ada?! Did you… I’m not sure what I saw -”

  “Later. Where’s your friend?”

  Turou stammered. “I - on the way already, but not in Daneer yet. Halfway here from Saegan.”

  “I know the heading.” Elsa twisted the controls, and suddenly the skimmer veered hard to the right. “We’re on our way. Ada, keep an eye on our tail.”

  “Turou, anyone finds out you helped me -”

  “I, uh, right.” He seemed to swallow something. “I’ll be there. I - well - the important thing is, lieutenant? White 3325 Cirrus class. Do you -”

  “I know what a Cirrus looks like.” Elsa was nodding. “Tell them we’re in a dark grey skimmer branded Jalack’s. CitySec must have us pegged so we can’t wait around. If you’re coming, be fast.”

  “Jalack’s? The pizza company?”

  Elsa rolled her eyes. “Remember when I said Ada was a huge deadly teenager?”

  Ada glared at her. “I don’t know what a teenager is but I can tell -”

  Something caught her eye on one of the screens along the front of the cabin. From the way the scenery moved, it seemed to be showing a rear view of the skimmer.

  “Turou, gotta go. Elsa, there’s something behind us. It’s got flashing red and blue -”

  “CitySec.” Elsa hissed.

  “What?”

  “City branch of the military. Look, don’t kill them -”

  Creating a wraith was second nature to Ada now. She reached out, wove the code together in dilated time, and filled the wraith’s mind with a single command. Disable the skimmers with the flashing red and blue lights. Simple. She tossed the wraith out the window and saw it snapped away by the wind. A second later it appeared in the rearview screen, coiling and scratching away at one of the skimmers in pursuit.