Mika sobs a laugh. “Neither did I.”
She lifts the alien again, for the last time.
Syl grunts, spasming in her arms. She mumbles something unintelligible.
Mika brings her ear closer to cracked lips. “What?”
“If I ever meet… Creator of this… Mario World… Going to murder… Murder them,” she pants.
They laugh together, and it’s enough to keep them going. To keep Mika moving, one slow step after another.
00:02:44
In the distance, some kind of structure looms. Blocks, stacked like a hill that towers upward. Mika knows what it is. On the other side is a flagpole they have to hit. A flagpole that, if there’s a God left out there, will get them out of this place.
She doesn’t think about how she’ll climb the hill when she can barely walk. Or whether the other side will mirror the game’s first level, and it’ll be a sheer drop back to the ground.
Above them, the sun dives and whirls, bizarrely tiny against the light blue canopy. For some reason that Mika doesn’t question, it hasn’t attacked. Hasn’t swooped down to ground level to tear them to pieces before tearing back up like a yo-yo of flame.
Yet.
Why is this so terrifyingly difficult? It’s only the first chamber. Mika stifles terror as she ponders. Syl’s so hot against her naked flesh. They found clothes in the first convalescence chamber, just like last time, but the first fireball burned them away. The one that transformed Syl from a machine of death that tore through Goombas like paper to the shivering wreck resting in Mika’s arms. Why is the first chamber so much harder than before?
Why were they still on the Citadel?
Sam. It must have been something he’d done. Her last impression of him was as she was torn from his grip, falling into the vortex Astra’d created to get them the fuck off this place. But when she’d woke, it was the same as the first time. In the hallway, stalked by the Shepherd.
But this time, she was with Syl. And Sam was gone.
Did he rescue Astra?
Were they alive?
Panic threatens to choke her breath away, and Mika pushes the fears aside. If they are out there, they’re waiting. Waiting in the respite chamber where they met Syl for the first time. Where Sam and she had finally acted on what had built between them… What they’d both known was coming from the moment they’d met in this damned place.
God, she misses him.
Please. Please Sam. Be alive.
Each step is almost too much for her. Syl’s eyes are closed now, and she doesn’t speak. She’s still breathing, which is enough to push Mika forward, but the alien’s minutes from death. From her injuries or the Shepherd.
There’s sound from ahead.
Laughter. Familiar, at this point. A dozen Koopas, at least.
No.
There’s no way they’ll survive. She barely has the strength to walk. There’s no way she can draw her flame again. Dodge or move fast enough to avoid the spinning death they’ll send at her.
She’s sitting. She doesn’t remember it happening. Syl lays in her lap, blissfully still as the sound of their death draws closer.
I’m sorry, Sam.
There’s a new sound. A strange sizzle and hiss. Mika’s too weak to look up to see what fresh hell the Citadel’s unleashing. Maybe the diving sun. Maybe a piranha plant the size of a barn. It doesn’t matter. It’s over.
As she passes out, strong arms circle her. Familiar arms. There are words, too. She barely understands them, but they repeat over and over.
“I’m here. You’re safe. I’m here.”
7
Null Chamber
Aspirant #1
Room Timer: ERROR
Mika’s unconscious body is heavy in my arms as I lower her into an ocean of blankets and pillows. She moans softly, turning her head as purple and black locks cascade over her face, hiding the pain of her healing.
She’s not heavy because of her weight, which is pretty much nothing with my upgrades. No, her injuries are a burden on my soul. Every scorch and cut is an indictment. That I wasn’t fast enough. That I didn’t figure out the back hallway’s tricks quickly enough to save her from this.
Maybe it’s irrational. But that’s hard to remember as I watch her twitch and pant in her sleep as healing lights pulse gently overhead.
Nearby, Astra lays Syl down. She’s even worse off, with injuries so horrible I can barely look. “Will she…”
“Yes.” Astra straightens, staring at the alien’s prone form intently. “She’s strong. If we’d been much longer… But yes. Now that’s she’s healing.”
“You can’t… You know.” I gesture vaguely toward them. “Heal them faster? Like before?”
Astra’s mouth twists in regret. “No. Another thing taken from me when I disconnected from the Citadel.”
We stand in silence awhile longer. This is the hard part. The part I hate. Since I’ve come here, it’s been… Confusing. I’ve met women I’ve fallen in love with. Fought by their side. Come alive in a way I didn’t know I could. Life before is grey in a way I didn’t understand before I had to fight for my life.
But this… I could do without this part. The pain. I have memories, now… Stuff I’d definitely like to forget. I shudder, remember the feel of onyx blades slicing through my arms. The spurt of blood as my face impacted the floor of the orc’s dungeon. My synapses frying as I used my power to pull a pile of scaag from Syl’s broken body.
I can push memories aside. I don’t know much about PTSD, but I know I’m not suffering from it. Not yet. Maybe because I’m still in the shit. Still fighting.
What I can’t forget is this. The women I love, broken and fighting for their lives. Their pain is so much worse than mine.
I sigh. They’re okay. We saved them. Pulled them from a nightmare straight out of our childhoods.
“You okay?” Astra’s voice startles me from my reverie.
“Yeah.” I rub my face. “No. That’s bullshit. I’m… I don’t know what I am anymore.”
A soft laugh. “I think I know what you mean.”
Mika stirs at our voices. “Sam,” she whispers, but she’s not awake. Her eyelids flutter and my name on her lips is a prayer she repeats again.
I lean in and kiss her fevered forehead. Then Syl’s, being careful not to touch her burned scales. Then I jerk my head toward the door, finger to my lips.
Astra nods, follows me out. We close a door I’m sure didn’t exist the first time we came here, but her study changing shape is so far down the list of weird at this point that it’s not worth mentioning.
The little room beyond is just how I remember it; warm and inviting with a massive bank of monitors on one wall and black, fathomless windows opposite. Thousands of sticky notes festoon the walls, each etched with mathematical equations and diagrams so complex they might as well be hieroglyphics. I’d have the same luck decoding either.
Astra slumps into a huge, overstuffed chair; the same I sat in while I watched the girls try to figure out how to open a portal out of here. I sigh as I cross the room. God. That was only hours ago. So much has changed since then.
The Earth. Invasion. I can’t wrap my mind around it, so I don’t. “This place is part of the Citadel?”
Astra jerks up, startled. I wonder what she was thinking about. Probably the same shit I’m trying to avoid. She looks around, eyes faraway and sad. “Yes. Elise left it for me, programmed it in before… Before.” She clears her throat, standing and joining me. I’ve stopped at the wall where I found the photo of her creator. “Doubt she ever thought I’d be using it to hide.”
“Hide? From the Shepherd?”
A nod. “He’ll know that we’ve broken the rules. It wasn’t an egregious transgression, though. It’ll take him some time to discover us, chase us down.” She hugs herself, shivering. “We’ll be gone before that happens.”
I put my arm around her shoulders. She doesn’t lean into me, but she doesn’t pull away. Good enough.
<
br /> I want to ask her what to do next. Where we’re fleeing to. But something more important is eating at me. “It’s time for you to choose, Astra.”
A ripple of silver passes through her as her eyes meet mine. “Choose?”
I’ve said it a dozen times already, and I know she doesn’t fully believe it. That she’s with us. That she’s coming when we leave. She still feels tied to this place. To her mission, grooming us to save the world. She still feels separate from us.
How do I get through to her?
I’ve always been good at talking. Bullshitting, some people call it. It might be. But I’ve always held that as long as what you’re saying is true, it doesn’t matter what people call it. So, I start talking.
“When I was a kid, my parents died.”
Astra shivers against my arm. “I know. I… I have your memories, remember? You don’t have to talk about this.”
“No. It’s okay. Sometimes it’s good to talk.” I turn away, bringing Astra with me, but not before I pull something from the wall. She doesn’t notice.
“Anyway,” I say, settling on a padded bench that sits below the black windows. “You know, then, that I didn’t have much family.”
“You entered the foster program.”
I lean back, staring at the wall of black monitors. “Yep. Not really much to say about that time of my life. Five different households in just a few years. Some of the people who took me in were nice folk, some not so much, but that didn’t matter. It wasn’t meant to work out.”
Astra’s gaze is sympathetic and a little skeptical. She feels bad for me but doesn’t know where the hell I’m going with this.
I’m not sure I do, either.
No stopping now. “Losing my parents broke something inside of me. Something no foster parent was going to touch. They got me gifts, set up rooms in their homes, took me to the zoo or the mall… It was… Nice.”
“But it wasn’t enough.”
“Nah. It wasn’t what I needed.”
“What did you need?” Astra’s voice is a little breathless.
Instead of answering, I pull out the picture of Elise and John. I offer it to Astra, who hesitates, wide eyed, before taking it with trembling fingers. God, she’s so real. “Where does Elise end and where do you begin?”
She shakes her head, obviously not following my quick subject change. “Well… I… I mean, I’m me. But I’m also her.”
“Gonna have to spell that one out for me.”
“Like I’ve said, I have her memories. They… Shaped me. I am Astra. But I’m also Elise.”
“You have my memories, too. Does that make you part Sam?”
“No.” She smiles, squeezes my arm. “It’s different. Your memories are like… Like computer files I can access. Elise’s are like things I actually lived.”
“That must get confusing.”
“Yeah. I’m sorry I called you John,” she says, touching the man in the picture. “I was with him… Elise was with him for such a long time. When I’m stressed or scared, it gets confusing."
“You care for her.”
“Yes,” she says. “I love her. She created me, made me who I am. Tried to care for me,” she says, waving a hand around the study. “Like I said, she made me this place. She’s the reason I never let an Aspirant touch me.” She blushes. “Well, not before you.”
“A sense of self-respect.”
“Yes. Though it wasn’t perfect. The programming was partially Threvian, and Elise and the team didn’t understand it. Not completely. The tech for AI like mine would have been decades away, if not more.”
“Wait, that’s… The Aspirant program existed before the Threvians arrived, right?”
“You guessed that?”
“Sure. How complex all this is? And the fact that they only arrived a few years ago?”
“Five years.”
“Yeah. I feel like this had to exist before the invasion.”
Astra’s smile is radiant. “You’re right. Have you heard of Area 51?”
“Sure. Who hasn’t?”
“Something did land there decades ago. But not the little green men from popular fiction.” She licks her lips. “It was a Threvian probe.”
“No shit. That’s… They were scoping us out that early?”
“Yes.”
“So we knew they were coming?”
“We discovered it eventually. Took a long time to decode the probe and access its information. In fact, we couldn’t tell much about it until the computing boom. But when we realized they were coming…”
“Damn.” I sit back, stunned. “The government knew all this time.”
“Which, as you guessed, is why the Aspirant program is older than the invasion.” She runs hands down her forearms. “It’s also why I exist. They learned what they could of Threvian tech, and it made for some incredible advancement in everything from AI to video gaming.”
“That’s… Just nuts. So, they used Threvian tech to program you?”
“More like an amalgam of human and alien. But it was experimental, and it took me a long time to… Get where I am now.”
“Oh?”
She laughs. “You should have seen me with the first Aspirants.”
“Beep boop.”
“That’s not far off. I was… Awkward. Confused. Easily manipulated. You saw the form I took when we first met.”
“Kind of hard to forget.” She opens her mouth, a frown curving her lips, but I grin. “I prefer you like this, though.”
Her narrow gaze is skeptical, but she relaxes. “Anyway, it took me a long time to work up the courage to… To help you. To figure out who I was.”
“To figure out what parts of you were Astra, and which were Elise.”
“Yes,” she says, smile radiant. “Exactly. But Sam, what does this have to do with you? The foster program? Your life? And what is it I have to choose?”
“I’m getting to that,” I say, taking her hand.
She squeezes it. “Today?”
I laugh. “Is that sass? Are you sassing me?”
“Yes,” she says, ducking her head. “I’m not very good at it, yet.”
“That’ll come in time. Just hang out with Mika for an hour and you’ll be insufferable.”
She glances toward the room that Mika and Syl rest in, then down to our laced fingers and frowns.
I tighten my grip. “Hey. None of that. Stay with me.” She doesn’t look up or respond, but she doesn’t pull away, so I push on. “Anyway. I ran away when I was fifteen. Took off from a family that was good to me. Offered me a room in their home, three meals a day, and they even pretended not to notice when I snuck bourbon from their liquor cabinet.”
“They sound nice.”
“They were. But like I said, it wasn’t what I needed. So, I left.”
“Just like that?”
“Of course not.” I smile. “I was terrified. I had a little money, a backpack with some clothes and the rest of that bourbon, and a pocket knife. I didn’t know anyone, didn’t even really know the town I was in. But I knew that staying with them was killing me. That I needed to figure out my own way in the world. Find myself.”
“Like I did.”
“Yeah. And that’s all it was. As hard as it was, as bonkers scary… I had to take that leap of faith. Like you did when you chose to break the rules so you could save us.”
She’s quiet a long time. I don’t move… Just let her marinate on my words. Finally, her eyes dart to mine. “And now my choice is…”
“You’re not the overseer of the Citadel anymore. Your mission isn’t to guide me to the finish line, or to help me through the trials. You’re one of us, now. An Aspirant. A woman cut loose, free to make her own choice. Find her own way in the world.”
Her face is pale, beautiful and frightened. But she swallows. “Like you did?”
“No. This is your path. Your choice. You started it when you plucked us from the witch’s trial. When you smuggled Syl into this
place instead of whoever I was supposed to be paired with. But now you have to finish it. You have to quit thinking of yourself as separate from us. Make that leap and finish cutting ties with this place. Your prison.”
“Leap…” She whispers, breath coming in little pants. Her eyes are wide and luminous as she licks full lips.
“Elise had something in mind for you, but she never saw how far you’d come. You’re as real as I am or as she was. But you’re not her. You’re Astra.” Our faces are inches apart, and I can feel her hot breath paint my lips.
“I’m Astra…” she repeats.
“So, Astra… What do you want?”
Her answer is a kiss, followed by the rest of her, so sudden and violent that we tumble from the bench onto the carpeted floor. Our lips never part, and she devours me, kissing me like I’ve never been kissed in my life. Like she’s poisoned and the only cure is inside me somewhere. Her mouth is everywhere, biting, licking, experimenting. Her movements are sure but somehow awkward, like someone whose read about kissing but never actually tried it.
I respond in kind, instantly in tune. I don’t know when I decided that I was okay with this… That the others would be, too. But I am, and I know they will be. Shit, they’d probably join us.
Later. Right now, it’s just Astra and me. Her fingers frame my face, lace up into my hair, and she chases them with her mouth as she lays a line of nips and licks up to my forehead. I inhale at her throat, surprised at how good she smells. How have I not noticed it before? It's a musky, almond and floral scent, and I wonder if it’s something she naturally exudes or it’s a choice she made in this moment. But if she smells incredible, she tastes better, and her skin is wet from more than my tongue. Is it part of what makes her seem so real? That she breathes and sweats and moans as I nip her delicate skin? Are they details programmed into her? Or are they micro calculations she makes on the fly? Whatever. She’s perfect, and she’s here, and I’m going to stop thinking about her as anything but a woman right now.
Like she’s read my thoughts, she sits up, straddling me and settling against the hardness in my pants. Her eyes roam my naked chest up to my face as she bites her lip. “I’ve thought about this so many times. Wanted it for so long. The memories… They were torment.”
Aspirant 2: A Sci-Fi Harem Adventure Page 8
