by Mick Fraser
Admitting defeat she rose, activated the lights and wandered into the little en suite bathroom. She had been mildly shocked at first to find an equivalent of a bidet in there, and a water fountain. Oral hygiene was solved with a small cube of yellow paste that tasted of cinnamon and cleansed the whole mouth in seconds. She was slowly becoming accustomed to it all. She dressed in her hypersuit and strapped on the Braid, as requested, before making her way across the Habitat suite to the sancto.
Illith was already waiting for her, and gave a slight nod as she entered. “Today, we see what you have learned so far, mystraal,” she said.
Angela sighed. “Aren’t you getting tired of smacking me around?”
“You are not fighting against me today. Today, you are fighting with me.” Illith crossed to the wall, where the tap of a touchpad dropped a display console that sprang to life with a holocast representation of the sancto itself. Her ice-white fingers danced inside the image, and Angela stepped back as something heavy and mechanical moved beneath her feet.
The room changed, the various apparatus folding into the floor, until the sancto was empty, a huge clean floor bereft of furniture or equipment. Illith activated something else, and several spots in the floor and ceiling opened up. Platforms rose to various heights, sliding poles lowered to differing lengths. Angela’s eyes widened as the tips of the poles opened and small turrets emerged. They automatically trained on her, and she felt suddenly uneasy.
The centre of the floor, just visible between the nearest two platforms, opened like an iris, and from within it rose a small machine on four spider-like legs. Its cuboid body looked like Winston, except the central eye was red. Three more emerged behind it, and they sat motionless, awaiting a command. Without warning, one of the turrets shot Angela in the arm. It felt like a bee sting.
“Ow! What the fuck?”
Illith shrugged. “So you know what you are trying to avoid. The skitters are similarly armed.”
Angela rubbed her arm irritably. “You couldn’t have just told me?”
“Observe.” The Silsir pointed to the far side of the room. “That red ring is goal one, the green ring opposite is goal two. To score a point, we must both touch goal one, and then we must both touch goal two. Both of us, together. When we are hit, the simulation AI will register it and we will lose a point. The purpose is to reach ten points in the time allotted. Destruction of the turrets and skitters is permitted, touching the floor is not. If you place even one foot or hand on the ground, the game is over. Oh, and I will be unarmed.”
“Holy shit.”
“Indeed. Are you ready?”
“No.”
“Good. Now let us attend, mystraal.”
Angela flicked out the Braid. Her mind was racing. Thanks to Illith’s training she could reach the goal alone easily enough, but she couldn’t arc her way there and then wait for Illith to catch up: she’d be a sitting duck. She would have to keep moving, relying on Illith to reach the goal before joining her. Combined with her arcing, the platform columns would provide so much cover that the guns would struggle to hit her, which would make Illith the primary target. The Silsir could handle herself, but Angela would have to run interference. She took a deep breath as symbols appeared on the wall beside the first goal as though projected there, displaying characters she now knew to be numbers. Illith tapped her heel against the floor and the countdown began.
“Go!”
The turrets came alive, opening fire immediately. Illith leapt away, clinging to the first pillar with her cat-like claws. Angela arced upwards, hitting the opposite platform. A red bolt of stinging plasma zinged by her head. She ducked, arcing to the next platform, keeping the goal in sight. Illith somersaulted by, the guns never coming close to touching her. Angela faltered, and felt a bite in her left arse cheek. She swore loudly, and Illith looked back.
“Move! That is a point we owe already.”
Angela leapt forward, knowing the next platform was too far to arc to in one go. Instead she whipped out the Braid, securing it to the nearest ceiling pole and using the momentum to swing onwards. Below them, the skitters were moving, scaling the pillars and firing up at them. Angela landed in a crouch, glancing over to Illith. The Silsir was almost at the goal. She jumped forward, arcing across the gap towards the goal, taking over Illith and landing on the platform below it. She hit it, but nothing happened, and as she turned to wait for Illith she got hit again, this time in the ankle.
Illith landed on the platform beside her. “Together!” she snarled, slamming her hand against the goal. Angela did the same and the scoreboard changed; they were still one point down.
On the return journey Angela performed the same movements, this time attempting to slow herself so Illith could keep up. They reached the goal platform together, but the turrets easily tracked their movements, hitting them both.
“You are not thinking!” Illith told her. “Use what you have.”
“I’m trying!”
“No, you are not. Stop worrying about what I am doing and work with me. This is about synergy. Think! How do we combine what I can do with what you can do. This is what makes a team, mystraal!”
One of the skitters reached a platform ahead of them. Another scaled the one opposite. Angela swore – then she had an idea. “Stop taking the left side. Go up the middle.”
“And you? Which side will you take?”
Angela gritted her teeth. “Both.”
Without a further word, Illith swung, ducking laser fire, and leapt to the next platform. Angela arced left, waited long enough for the skitters to take aim, and arced backwards, then forwards again. Now she looped the Braid around a sliding pole and swung out, kicking the right hand skitter off the platform. The guns seemed to respond to the increased threat, and a barrage of bolts came her way. She arced through them, almost skipping from platform to platform, arriving back at goal one just as Illith did. They slapped the wall together, then swung, repeating the tactic on the way back. As the greater threat, the skitters and guns focused on Angela, leaving Illith to sprint for the goal. The hardest part was coordinating their movement speeds. They had scored six goals unscathed when Angela felt her stamina ebbing.
“Are you OK?” Illith asked her as they cling to a pillar for cover.
“Is that concern?”
“I do not wish to lose.”
“Well,” said Angela with a grimace, “try not to think of it as losing.”
They pushed on, but Angela was clearly tiring. They hit point number seven, but on the return journey Angela’s arc faltered and she almost missed the platform she was aiming for. A skitter took aim but she whipped it away with the orange leash.
“Switch!” Illith shouted. “Drop your threat and stick to the middle. I’ll run interference until you recover.”
Angela scowled. She wasn’t going to fail again; she wasn’t going to give her mentor the satisfaction. “I can do this!” she growled.
“It is not about you. It is about us!” Illith told her, but Angela ignored her. They were almost out of time as they hit the eighth point. Illith grabbed her wrist. “Listen: you are tired. You will make a mistake—”
Angela snatched her arm away. “Get on with it!” she growled, jumping and swinging. Illith moved too, and Angela managed to take out one of the turrets on her way past. They hit the far wall for the ninth point. One more to go. “It’s time you started believing in me,” she said, as they took cover. “I have been paying attention, you know?”
Illith pointed to the timer. “We have thirty heartbeats, mystraal! Let us move! Pick the play.”
She set her jaw, wiping sweat from her brow. “Take the middle. I got this.”
“As you wish,” Illith said, determined. “Now let us get it done.”
The boost of confidence was all Angela needed. She leapt up, leashing the nearest pole and swinging into her first arc. She stumbled out of it, hitting her knees against the target platform and almost falling from the pillar. She gla
nced back to see that she had arced too far, and Illith was still picking her way between the pillars, leaping with precision. Angela was too close to the goal and arced back a platform, but this time as she came out of it her muscles gave up and she almost toppled to the ground. Gritting her teeth she righted herself and clung on grimly, ducking under zinging laser fire. She continued on, swinging not arcing, keeping pace with Illith. The goal was only two platforms away. They’d done it! She skipped right, jumping to the next platform, then lined up her final jump – just as a skitter mounted the platform beside her. She swayed aside to avoid its first shot and batted it away with the Braid, but didn’t see the fourth and final skitter clambering up on the other side of her. Illith alighted on the goal platform, her face a mask of pride – which was immediately wiped away as Angela took three shots to the back, then two to the side from a turret. The pain shot through her and she lost her footing, plunging from the platform to crash violently against the sancto floor. A buzzer went up. The game was lost.
Illith, panting, dropped lithely down beside her as the pillars sank back into the floor. Angela groaned, not meeting the Silsir’s pale eyes as Illith crouched over her. “At first, I thought you could not do it. Then I thought you had. And then you failed, and as a result, we both failed. But this lesson may be the most important one you will ever learn, Angela: know your limits. And by Yharen, vary your tactics. Your enemy will watch you, and read you. Your hubris cost us that game. It may cost you more in the future.”
Angela groggily tried to rise but Illith pushed her back down. “Wait. You’ve head trauma.”
“You called me Angela,” she said. “That’s a victory.”
Illith grunted at her. “Lie still and recover. Idiot girl.”
CHAPTER 33
~GOOD INTENTIONS~
THE SHOCKING WHITE of Purespace beat at the edges of the window, prying between the shutters to snare dust motes in mid-dance. The gentle hum of the engines prickled Angela’s senses, the odd pull of artificial gravity made her feel half an ounce heavier – and these days, with the Amp and the steady growth of what Illith called her ‘personal awareness’, half an ounce might as well be three stone.
She sat up irritably, swinging her bare legs from the bed. The Amp seemed to buzz in the flesh of her neck, and despite Illith’s rigorous training since departing Oraclus, she simply couldn’t switch off. Today’s session had been different, and under more pleasant circumstances Angela might even have called it fun – even with the new bruises.
In the punctured darkness of her chamber she grimaced, rubbing her bruised ribs. She was about to lie back down when there was knock at her door. She brushed the touchpad above her bed and the lights came on dimly. She rose and opened the door to see Gaelan waiting in the hall.
Angela’s heart quickened as she read the haunted look in her eyes. “Gaelan,” she said limply, “it’s late.”
The Avellian’s pale skin seemed golden in the half-light. “I’m sorry, I know you probably don’t want to see me. I just... I can’t sleep. I wanted to talk.” She must have realised how she sounded because she straightened, almost defiantly. “And Illith said you took a nasty knock today.”
Angela sighed and stepped aside. “She wasn’t lying.”
Gaelan came in and Angela returned to her bed, waiting for the other girl to talk. She was silent so long that Angela thought she might leave without saying a word, but then she finally spoke.
“The first time I met the Seraph, she showed me my sin’vah, my mother. I hadn’t seen her in five years, and Guin gave me a gift. At least, that’s what she called it. My mother looked so beautiful in the image Guin conjured. I was just an infant, and she was cradling me in her arms, and she was smiling. It was a powerful gift. Too powerful. I spent five years learning to deal with my mother’s death, and in one instant, the Seraph’s magic undid it all. At first I didn’t care, until I gave it more thought.
“The only picture I have of her is from her service file, taken when she was barely my age.” She chuckled, but her skin rippled pale blue for sadness. “After seeing her so lifelike in Guin’s palace, it took me another year to get over it again. And you know the best part? Do’vah told me later that Guin had never even met my mother. She’d never seen me before that day, and neither of us had that memory of her holding me. It was fake. It was an image based on a half-perceived memory that tricked me into thinking I was seeing my mother. It was a gift that took me a year to recover from, that opened an old wound I had struggled to close. Guin’s intentions may have been good, but in the end it only hurt me.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Angela asked softly.
Gaelan came closer, so that she now stood before Angela. “I don’t know what else she showed you, but just because she’s old and wise doesn’t mean she’s always right. Just because she shows you what you need to see doesn’t mean she should, and just because she stirs up old feelings and old memories doesn’t mean you have to let them in again. Avellians emote on a higher level. I know she showed you something that upset you. You’ve been… distant.”
Angela felt a lump in her throat and forced it down. The incident with Wacko came to mind again, and in that instant she was eleven years old, terrified, trapped against a dead-end wall in a grimy, litter-strewn alley with Wacko and his pale skin and his dead eyes and his hunger – this terrible hunger he always had around her. She had always run away from him, been saved by a passer-by or her wits, but today he had her cornered, and the look in his eye bored into her soul. She had nowhere to run, no way to get away, not this time. He had her. And he couldn’t resist telling her exactly what he wanted to do to her.
“It’s not what she showed me,” she told Gaelan, aware that her hands were shaking. “I mean, what she showed me was pretty terrifying, but... she did something. She made me remember a feeling I’d forgotten. I don’t think she did it deliberately.”
Gaelan crouched in front of her. “I wouldn’t be so sure.”
Angela looked up into the other girl’s eyes and saw compassion. It wasn’t an expression she was used to seeing. She took a deep breath. She’d spent far too long repressing her childhood memories. Frank had told her never to speak of it, to always keep it hidden. She’d done nothing wrong, he said. It’s what they had all said. She dropped her eyes, unable to match Gaelan’s stare. Her stomach burned.
“I... I killed a man once,” she said quietly, her eyes welling. “I don’t tell a lot of people this but, I was dumped as a baby. I was left under a bus shelter in a storm. I don’t know who my parents were, but until I was seven I was raised by a couple of smackheads who did the best they could. They kept me alive, I guess. When Seb disappeared and Emma died, I had to fend for myself. System got me a few times, tried to foster me with new families – but I kept running. I ended up back on the streets on and off until I was eleven, thieving and sleeping rough.” She shuddered, wiping her eyes. “There was this... guy, Warren Acton, but everyone called him Wacko. He was a pimp and a drug dealer. He used to follow me around, threaten me; he liked to make me feel powerless, I think. But he never actually touched me – until one day he did.”
She swallowed hard, trying to clear her swollen throat. “He got me cornered in, ah, Dryer’s Alley. It was night, late, I don’t know what time. He said he was going to... well, he came at me, got hold of me. His hands were all over me, and I... defended myself. There was a piece of broken glass on the floor – a smashed bottle, they said – and I stuck it in his neck. He bled out all over the street, all over me. There was something, I don’t know, horrifying, about that, his blood. It was in my mouth, in my eyes. I never knew a person had so much blood in them. The cops found me covered in it. The papers… fuck, the papers. I don’t know what it’s like out here, but back home the media is a fucking monster. ‘Blood Angel’, they called me – the little urchin girl who saved herself. The police said it wasn’t my fault, but...”
“They’re right,” Gaelan said, her own eyes welling w
ith tears. “You did nothing wrong.”
Angela sniffed, forcing a smile despite herself. “Yeah. Well. I was a kid. I thought I’d seen some shit, but that, that messed me up. The officer in charge of the investigation, Frank Strange, he pulled some strings he shouldn’t have pulled, and arranged for me to be adopted by his son and daughter-in-law. But Wacko haunted me for years. Years. I used to taste his blood when I closed my eyes at night. In the end, I thought all sorts of things. I thought about running, about ending it. I made life hell for the Stranges. I drank, I smoked weed, popped every pill I could get my hands on.” She pulled down the collar of her jacket to show Gaelan the black tip of her tattoo. “I even got this, just to spite them. And I fought, all the time. But they didn’t give up on me. They didn’t force rules on me, they were just there for me. By the time I was fourteen, I was a different girl. The counselling was working, I was doing well at school, I was behaving myself. The next four years, they were like somebody else’s life. Turns out it was more than I deserved.
“When I’d just turned eighteen I was supposed to go on holiday with my foster parents, but I got sick. Frank said he’d look after me – their trip was paid for, it was only a weekend, they should go. And so they went. But I wasn’t really sick. I just didn’t want to go away with them. I had my own plans.” She squeezed shut her eyes as ancient pain punched her in the gut. “I never saw them again. They came back a day early because they felt bad for leaving me, and they crashed. They died.”
“And you blamed yourself...”
Angela shrugged. “In so many ways, it was my fault.”
Gaelan rested her palm against Angela’s face. It felt warm, soft, and she half turned against it, felt her own hot tears pressed against her cheek. “No,” the Avellian told her, “only Fate is that cruel. They chose to come back because they loved you, but you couldn’t have known. You didn’t cause the crash, you didn’t contribute to it. You weren’t responsible.”
