Guardian

by Alex London

  Syd couldn’t take his eyes off them.

  Liam felt a moment of relief that he was bleeding so much. It made it impossible for him to blush again.

  Marie cleared her throat.

  “I should clean the wound,” Syd told Liam, snapping his eyes away from the letters. He knelt next to Liam with the BioGlue and the medic’s kit, taking out a sterile cloth and wiping down Liam’s side. There was so much blood, he couldn’t even see where the cut was in order to seal it.

  When the cloth touched his side, Liam winced, but not because it hurt.

  Syd shot a look up at him and, when their eyes met, he looked back down just as quickly, focused on the task, not on the rise and fall of the rib cage, the tattoo across the side, the way the light through the porthole made Liam’s pale skin glow.

  No different from fixing a broken machine, Syd told himself.

  No different from any other wound I’ve had patched up, Liam told himself.

  Marie went back to organizing the supplies in the hovercraft, inventorying what they had, the weapons, the food, tools. She didn’t know what they’d need or why Syd thought they’d find what they were looking for in Mountain City, but it would help to have an inventory regardless. And it would keep her from watching Syd and Liam in the most awkward medical procedure she’d ever seen.

  “I—” Syd started to say something.

  “I—” Liam said at the same time.

  They fell silent again.

  Syd located the edges of the wound. He dabbed the blood away gently and Liam sucked in a breath. Syd began to apply the BioGlue and it stung more than Liam would have imagined. He clenched and unclenched the metal fist, reminding himself he had suffered much, much worse than this.

  Syd filled the silence between them with things that didn’t need saying. “So, uh, I think, in the city, we might find the Machine, or, like, the parts I need to build a machine . . .”

  “Uh-huh,” Liam grunted through the pain.

  “I mean, if there are pieces of tech left that could do it, I think we’ll find them there,” Syd continued.

  “We have to,” said Marie. “If we can’t get the network back on . . .”

  “Your parents,” said Syd.

  Marie nodded. “Everyone.”

  Syd sighed. “You, me, Liam—”

  “Not me,” Liam whispered. Syd looked up at him. “I was never linked to the network, never had biodata installed. I grew up out here. I’m one of the few. I won’t get sick, at least not from this.” He looked down at Syd. “Not like you will.”

  Syd went back to applying the medicated bandage over the sealed wound, kept his eyes lowered. He studied his own dark hand pressed against Liam’s pale skin, the dried blood on his fingernails, and through them, like a reflection in water, he saw the Guardians with their black veins oozing, their silent groans as they itched their own skin off, bled out, died. Were they a vision of his future? All their futures? All but Liam’s?

  “You sound like you want to apologize for it,” he told his bodyguard.

  “I do,” said Liam, and Syd finally looked up and saw those sad puppy eyes, Liam’s face twisted into a frown. “I don’t know how to protect you from this.”

  “The Council is gone.” Syd looked back down at his hand against Liam’s skin. He didn’t pull it away. “The Reconciliation is over. I’m not their symbol anymore. I’m not Yovel. Your job is done. The Reconciliation doesn’t need you to protect me.”

  Liam swallowed. “I never did it for them. You know I didn’t.”

  “I know you didn’t,” said Syd.

  Liam raised his good hand under Syd’s chin, lifted his face up so their eyes would meet again. He felt a chill run through him, heard his own pulse in his ears. There was a reason he never touched Syd with his good hand. He could almost feel himself shaking. “Let me protect you.”

  “You just said that you can’t.”

  “I’ll find a way.”

  Syd’s lips were cracked, his eyes wet and dark. His stubble grew in unevenly. They looked at each other. “I’m not an easy guy to protect.”

  Liam leaned down, in spite of the pain in his side. His face was just in front of Syd’s. He whispered, “I don’t need easy.”

  Syd took his hand off Liam’s side, wrapped his fingers around Liam’s hand against his cheek, held it, closed his eyes. Then he took Liam’s hand away from his face. He turned away.

  “You’ll need to keep that bandage on for at least twelve hours,” he said, standing. He looked to Marie, who was pretending to be absorbed in organizing the tools in the repair kit by size and shape and color. “When we get to Mountain City tomorrow,” Syd told her, “I’ll need you to navigate for me.”

  “Okay,” she agreed quickly, acting like she hadn’t just been listening to their conversation. “Where to?”

  “Knox’s father ran SecuriTech,” said Syd. “If there is a Machine, he would’ve had it.”

  “The SecuriTech offices were emptied right after the network fell,” said Marie. “I saw it myself.”

  “The offices, sure,” said Syd. “But that’s not where we’re going.”

  “Where then?”

  “Where you and I first met,” Syd said. “We’re going to Knox’s house.” Syd looked at Finch’s body on the floor. “But first let’s bury my old friend.”

  [24]

  LIAM TOOK THE FIRST watch of the night, letting Syd and Marie sleep. Then they rotated. Syd and Liam didn’t say a word to each other as they switched places, just grunts and nods. They were careful not to bump into each other in the narrow cabin.

  As the purple of the desert started to show hints of morning red, Liam woke Syd to restart the engines. Syd startled, but then, seeing the metal hand shaking his arm, remembered where he was and what he was doing. He stood, wiped his face on his shirt, and got to work.

  “You feeling all right?” Liam asked.

  “Fine,” said Syd.

  “No symptoms yet?”

  Syd shook his head. “Marie?”

  “Nothing yet,” she said.

  “How’s your side?” Syd asked.

  “Fine,” said Liam.

  “Well, here we go,” Syd announced, as the engines growled to full power and the vehicle lifted from the desert in a cloud of yellow dust. He jammed the throttle and they shot off into the morning. Syd focused on driving, Liam scanned for threats on the horizon, and Marie watched the landscape race by, waiting to see something familiar.

  Four hours later, she spoke the first word since they’d taken off: “There.”

  She pointed up at the shining skyscrapers of the city in the mountains, catching the light high above them. Buildings filled the slopes, smaller and more densely packed the lower down they were. A network of roads wound around the mountain, and as they got closer, they saw many of the roads were destroyed, their guardrails and blast barriers ripped down, or the roads themselves, riding high over the slums, collapsed down off their pylons, crushing the tin shacks beneath.

  “If we go around the other side, we can come in through the restricted speedway that I know,” Marie told them.

  “I can’t imagine it’s restricted anymore,” Syd replied.

  “Force of habit. It’s probably not much of a road at all anymore.”

  By Marie’s route, they came to the southern wall of the city, an imposing barricade of steel and concrete.

  The wall had been there when they lived in the Mountain City, ringing the entire thing, but neither of them had ever seen it. There was a no-man’s-land on the other side, a mile-wide strip of open concrete, dotted with guard towers and patrolled by robotic sentries. No one could cross it unauthorized, and a proxy like Syd would never have been authorized. A patron like Marie would have left the city by a more dignified route, if she ever left at all, which she hadn’t . . . until the l
ast time, with Syd and Knox. And then they’d snuck out. There was no way, however, to sneak into the city driving a hovercraft. They drove around until they found an access gate.

  The paint wasn’t even faded on the steel blast door and they could see the shining logo of SecuriTech. Someone had tried to etch some scratchiti curses over it, but the door was resistant. It looked brand-new.

  Looking much less new, although in fact far newer than the door, was a sandbagged sentry post beside the gate, open to the desert wind. In it stood a tripod-mounted fracture cannon—old tech, but powerful enough that the Reconciliation had seen fit to ignore their rules by placing it there. And manning the fracture cannon, wearing a green uniform, a white hood, and a respirator against the red dust cloud their hovercraft kicked up, was a Purifier, with his cannon aimed straight into their cockpit.

  Syd’s blood turned to ice. He tightened his grip on the throttle, steadied the craft, but crept closer. No warning came. No order to stop. As they moved, the fracture cannon did not track them. The white-masked Purifier was still as stone.

  Syd set the craft down in front of the gate. The figure in the sentry post didn’t turn to look at them. Marie peeked from the side porthole.

  “He’s . . .” She pointed, unable to find the words to describe what she was seeing.

  Syd idled the engine and Liam got up to look.

  “I need to look closer,” he told them and lowered the rear hatch. “Stay here.”

  Syd followed him out into the blazing afternoon. Liam shook his head, but didn’t stop him.

  They blinked at the sun and coughed in the dust. The land around them was barren hardpan. Any water in the ground had long since been sucked into the city and any life outside the wall had long since been killed off. There was only heat and wind and the wall.

  Syd caught up to Liam and they walked side by side to the Purifier. Marie followed with the bolt gun in hand.

  The Purifier’s white mask was tinted rust red from the desert sand and his uniform was coated with the same red dust. His hands were tied to the fracture cannon with rough cord, but the cannon’s mechanism was ripped out; all the circuits and pieces that had made it a weapon were gone. It was just a prop.

  Just like the Purifier himself.

  “At least we know why he didn’t shoot us down,” Syd observed.

  The Purifier’s hands were all bone, no flesh, and beneath the white mask, they could see a glimpse of a bare skull—the jagged toothy grimace, the black eye sockets. A skeleton.

  “He’s been posed like this,” Liam said.

  “Why would someone pose a skeleton?” Marie wondered.

  “It’s a warning.” Syd reached out and brushed the dust and sand from the front of his uniform to reveal writing in a brown smear of dried blood. The writing was childish.

  NO RECONCILATION ALLOWED.

  “The Mountain City doesn’t belong to the Reconciliation anymore,” Liam observed.

  “I don’t think it has for a while,” Syd added.

  “The Reconciliation evacuated most of the city,” said Marie. “Moved everyone out to the countryside right after the networks fell. They only left a few people behind to gather the stragglers and the resisters, and to organize the salvage.”

  “Just a skeleton crew?” Syd suggested.

  “That’s a joke Knox would have made,” Marie said back. Syd bit his lip. He would have liked to take it as a compliment, but the memory stung. And in truth, while he lived, Knox’s sarcasm had annoyed Syd. Now he held on to it because he was afraid not to. He was afraid of what he’d lose when he let it go.

  “Whoever they left behind was clearly overrun,” Liam said. “We have to assume whoever still lives in this city is going to be hostile.”

  “We’ve got to go in,” said Syd. “If it’s Machinists who’ve taken over, that’s what we want. We’re on their side now.”

  “I’m not,” said Marie. She looked over at the dead body. She had pledged herself to the Purifiers, wore the uniform, tried to lead the younger ones as best she could toward the better society she thought they were making. She had no desire to turn back the clock. She just wanted to save her parents.

  “We’re not going anywhere unless we can get that gate open,” Liam noted.

  “Remember how we got out of the cell?” Syd asked.

  “Uh, Syd.” Liam shook his head. “This gate is about a thousand times the size of that cell door and a thousand times as strong.”

  “Yeah,” said Syd, “but we’ll use the same principle.”

  Liam stared up at the giant door. “The same principle?”

  “Our hovercraft has a solar fission battery, right?”

  Liam shrugged.

  “It does,” said Syd. “I wasn’t really asking.”

  “How is that the same principle as blowing out the air locks on a prison door?” Liam imagined himself bending pistons and crossing wires under Syd’s direction. He wasn’t sure he had the strength for it.

  “Well, not blowing out this time,” said Syd. “Blowing up.”

  “You’re going to self-destruct the hovercraft?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Guys?” Marie called.

  Liam shook his head. “The explosion will tell everyone we’re here. Whoever killed that Purifier. Cousin’s goons coming after us. Anyone. They’ll all come running.”

  “We’ll just have to run faster.”

  “This is a terrible idea.”

  “You have a better one?”

  “Guys?” Marie tried again.

  “Fine,” Liam relented. In truth, he couldn’t think of a better idea. He wasn’t really an ideas guy. He never really trusted complicated plans. He had a bias toward action, even half-considered action. Blowing up the hovercraft certainly seemed half considered. “So how do we do it?”

  “If we can open that hatch—” Syd pointed to a metal panel near the rear of the vehicle that looked painfully heavy to Liam. “Then I’ll shut off the coolant system. The engine will overheat; I short out the safety catches, we’ll create a feedback loop and when we hit critical mass, well, then, we better be under cover and—”

  “Guys!” Marie yelled.

  The boys turned to her.

  “We could just open the gate.” She walked up to a large box with a lever in it, swung open the box, and yanked down the lever.

  A siren sounded three times and the gate split open in the middle, two halves sliding into the wall.

  “Why do guys always go right to blowing things up?” she wondered aloud, walking past them back to the hovercraft.

  Syd and Liam stared at the open door, the warning skeleton, and the empty concrete beyond. They looked at each other, then back to the hovercraft, and climbed aboard.

  “I’m glad she’s on our side,” said Liam, and Syd couldn’t have agreed more.

  [25]

  THOUGH BOTH SYD AND Marie had grown up in the city, they recognized nothing as Syd guided the hovercraft along the broken road. Where once the packed jumble of shanties at the base of the city had teemed with life, there were only smoldering piles of soot, the odd retaining wall, or empty concrete storefront. The city looked like the ruins of Old Detroit, without the graceful cover of nature that hid the old disasters. Civilization without humanity was just a graveyard.

  Liam thought he saw movement from the corner of his eye, but when he turned, there was nothing there. The city was a security nightmare. Every dark opening looked threatening, every turn held an unknown danger. How could he keep Syd safe in a place like this?

  “They must have abandoned the Lower City,” Syd said. “No one would stay down here longer than they had to. Even when the city was alive, people did whatever they could to get out.”

  He thought of Finch, his body buried in the desert. He’d had dreams of his own and plans that the network col
lapse had undone. Bitterness, rage, vengeance . . . could Syd blame him? How many millions of plans had been destroyed when the networks fell? How many millions more now that this sickness had begun to take hold? If Syd failed, if everyone died because of him, did all his mistakes die too? Would negation free him or would there be judgment on the other side? Justice or oblivion?

  Which did he hope for?

  They roared over a broken blast barrier that had separated the Lower City roads from the restricted speedway of the Upper City. Syd was able to move faster there. The ruins had more order to them, as if the lux Upper City even decayed better than the poor districts. The slums of the Valve and the Lower City might as well have never existed, but the Upper City was dug in deeper. Its patterns endured.

  They rose and rose, and as they rose, their large vehicle knocked aside the burned and abandoned husks of small transports. Syd didn’t look too closely as he smashed them out of the way, in case he saw the bodies inside. The barriers were in better shape the farther into the Upper City they climbed. He figured that once the borders had been crossed, there was no need to tear the walls down. There were richer targets for destruction: SecuriTech depots and Xelon Corporate Credit Bureaus, fashion boutiques and medical clinics, EpiCure Flavor Emporia and Gamify Data Centers. There were offices and apartments and mansions. There was wealth in the ruins.

  The destruction seemed wanton at first glance, but patterns emerged. There appeared to be different sets of motives at work: the spontaneous revenge of the liberated Lower City, the Reconciliation’s deliberate destruction of the old mechanisms of power and control, and then the plain old pragmatism of looting.

  The scratchiti carved into the walls told the stories.

  PROXIES ARISE and NOT YOUR SLAVES ANYMORE and BURN THE KNOCK-OFFS ALIVE and THE ONLY GOOD PATRON IS A DEAD PATRON and GREED IS GONE and above them all, REPENT FOR THE MACHINE, CHEY IS WATCHING.

  “What is Chey?” Liam asked.

  Syd shrugged. Sometimes people just wanted to leave a mark. It didn’t have to mean more than that.

  Strangely, as they crept into the swanky residential district where Knox had lived, they still hadn’t seen any people. Marie pointed Syd along the roads, as Liam scanned the perimeter. Syd slowed the engines; the roar became a whine and they sank closer to the ground.