The Gardener of Man: Artilect War Book Two

by A. W. Cross

  Tor cocked his head, amusement quirking the corners of his mouth. “He’s got a point.”

  “I know,” I said, rubbing my forehead. “I’m not blaming you Pax, it’s just…”

  “What are you going to do?” Tor asked, gazing at the two men. Asche was explaining something to my father, drawing shapes on the palm of his hand with slim fingers. My father nodded and replied then folded the end of his scarf into the breast of his coat and flipped his collar up against the gnawing cold. Putting his hands in his pocket, he began to turn away.

  “They’re leaving. Shit. What do we do? We can’t just go sauntering up to them and say, ‘Oh hey, Dad, Asche, how’s it going? Shame about this apocalypse. You’re looking well.’ Can we?” Creeping hysteria had replaced the irritation in my voice.

  “If your eyes get any wider, they may burst,” Pax noted helpfully.

  Tor tucked a piece of hair behind my ear. “Hey, it’s okay. Cindra, it’s…” He patted her helplessly on the shoulder as she started to cry.

  I can’t imagine how she feels . You expect to lose your parents, but not the love of your life. And here he was, a second chance long-buried and newly arisen.

  “Look, you two couldn’t speak to them anyway, even if you wanted to. They both know you became cyborgs, right? So you’d be putting all of us at risk.” He gazed thoughtfully at the two men, and I could almost see his mind at work. “I know they loved you once, but you don’t know how they feel about what you are now.” He came to a decision. “But I’ve got a plan,” he said, straightening. “Come with me, Pax. You were asking me yesterday about the work I used to do? Let’s go do it.”

  “You’re going to kill them?” I asked, horrified.

  Tor shot me a fierce look. “No. We’re going to do some reconnaissance.”

  Pax’s smile shone brighter than Lily’s. He hopped from one foot to the other. “Do we use fake names?”

  “No,” said Tor. “The first lesson is to speak the truth as much as you can. We’re here, new to town. Let’s mingle.” He placed his hand between Pax’s shoulder blades and pushed him forward. “You two should stay out of sight.”

  Cindra and I scooted around the corner of the block and huddled on the concrete.

  “I can’t do this. Sit here and wait. Do you think they’ll come back with them? What should I say? I have to look—” She worried a hangnail with her teeth.

  “Cindra, sit still. They’re only doing recon. They’re not going to tell them about us.”

  “Fine, distract me.”

  “Get your fingers out of your mouth, and I will.”

  We talked about our childhoods and teen years, our memories of this town that I’d grown up near and she’d visited many times.

  “It’s funny, isn’t it?” she said. “We came down to the market nearly every Saturday. I remember your booth…I probably even bought from you, touched your hand.” She patted my fingers. “Who knew we’d end up like this?”

  I sighed, inching back so I could lean against the brick wall behind us. “Would you still have done it, if you’d known?”

  She slid back next to me, her head pressed against the rough surface as she stared upward. “Yes. This wasn’t our fault. None of it was. Other people would’ve gone through the process, the war still would’ve happened. The only difference is that we might not be alive now. And I want to be alive more than anything else. More than the grief and the loss. Even though the people we know are dead or changed, at least we’re alive to remember them. It’s not as good as actually being with them, but it’s close enough for me.”

  “I think I—” Tor and Pax rounded the corner. Tor looked upset; Pax looked…like Pax, calm and serene.

  My stomach twisted.

  Cindra covered her face with her hands. “I can’t bear it.”

  “What happened?” I asked Tor. “Why do you look like that? They’re alive, right? How can that be bad?”

  “It’s not,” he replied. “It’s just…I don’t know. I wanted to—”

  “He wanted to bring you a gift,” Pax said. “Something for your heart.”

  Tor pressed his fingers over his eyes as the tips of his ears turned pink. “Thank you, Pax.”

  Pax nodded, satisfied with his part, and sprawled onto the pavement next to Cindra.

  “Anyway,” Tor said, his voice weary, “it’s not the news either of you was hoping for.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “It isn’t them?”

  “No, it is. But…”

  “Just tell me, please,” Cindra whispered. “I can’t wait any longer.”

  Tor knelt in front of us, looking first at Cindra then at me. “Cindra, Asche is the leader of your community.”

  “She’s dead, then. Grandmother is dead.” She closed her eyes. “But Asche, he’s okay?”

  “He is. He’s, uh…married. And he has children.”

  Cindra swallowed hard, but her face was impassive. “I’m just so glad he’s alive.” She sagged back against the wall.

  “Is my dad, okay? I mean, that’s all I ever wanted. Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “Because,” Tor said, gazing down at his hands, “he denies ever having a daughter. According to him, you never existed.”

  The silver rain first fell a few days after we’d left the city. Mom wouldn’t let me go outside in it. She thought it would be dirty, like the black rain, from all the ash in the sky, but it was worse than that. Dad went to check in with the neighbors, in their cabins closer to the lake. Determined not to be afraid, they’d been having a BBQ when the silver rain started to fall. Now, they were dying. After he and Mom whispered back and forth about it, she went into the bathroom and threw up. I wasn’t allowed to play outside after that.

  —Love, Grace

  Cindra and I didn’t speak on the long road back to the compound. Lily, oblivious to our silence, had invited us all to stay the night, tempting us with descriptions of the dinner she’d cook. Thankfully, Lexa had decided we should quit while we were ahead and made our excuses, saying she didn’t want to leave Mil alone, just in case. This provoked a flurry of activity from Lily as she insisted on packing a parcel of delicacies for him. Her honest kindness was like a thorn, stinging all the more because of our deception.

  As we walked the road under the darkening sky, Callum’s pockets bulged with treasure, and he slipped his fingers in periodically to touch one thing or the other. His eyes were unfocused, and he didn’t react as Oliver regaled us with his tales of adventure, which were impressive considering we’d only been in Goldnesse a few hours.

  “You’re all awfully quiet,” he observed. “Did something happen that we should know about? Besides Kalbir here being rejected?” He winced as her fist connected with his shoulder. “ Fuck! Well, you shouldn’t have told me then, should you? Everyone knows I’m not to be trusted.” He rubbed the spot Kalbir had punched then glanced toward Cindra as though expecting a response.

  Cindra stared straight ahead, taking one step and then another.

  He stopped walking. “Seriously, what did I miss?”

  “Cindra?” Lexa asked. She stepped into Cindra’s path, stopping her gently with her arm before they could collide. She looked at me.

  “You have to tell them,” Tor said softly. “This affects all of us.”

  “I know,” I replied. “It’s just… Basically, my father and Cindra’s ex…someone Cindra used to know are alive, and they were in Goldnesse today. That agriculturalist Lily was talking about? That was my father.” I frowned. “I’m surprised you’ve never met him, Lexa.”

  The color leeched from Lexa’s face. “What? Do you mean Luke? He…he never said he had a daughter… Did they see you? You didn’t talk to them, did you?”

  “No, we didn’t. Tor and Pax did, though.”

  “They didn’t suspect what you were, did they?”

  “No,” Tor said. “We kept with the story, gave as little information about us as we could. We mostly just asked them questions
about themselves. Asche is a hunter, so we talked about that.”

  “So your old boyfriend’s here?” Oliver asked Cindra. He tried to sound casual, but the whiteness of his knuckles on his pack straps betrayed him.

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” Cindra said, her chin up. “He’s married. And he has children. And I’m glad for him. He always wanted a family. But my grandmother is dead, so if you don’t mind, I’d like some privacy to remember her.”

  “I’m sorry.” For once Oliver had nothing else to say. Then he turned to me. “And your father’s alive, eh? That’s going to be an interesting reunion.”

  “I doubt there’ll be a reunion. According to him, I never existed.”

  “Ouch,” Oliver said, and laughed. “Looks like you got some comforting to do, big boy.” He thumped Tor lightly on the shoulder then ducked away, smirking at Kalbir’s scowl.

  “I’m sorry,” Lexa said, real sympathy in her voice.

  “What are we supposed to do?” I asked. “Do we just never go to Goldnesse?”

  “Asche doesn’t live in Goldnesse,” Pax said. “He only comes every week for trading.”

  “I’m not sure. I’ll have to talk to Mil about it, but I doubt you can avoid them forever.”

  We walked on in silence. Oliver’s steps were erratic, jaunty one minute, somber the next. It must’ve been hard for him, pretending to be a decent person and actually feeling bad for Cindra.

  When we finally entered the compound, Lexa ran headlong into Mil, who looked as though he’d been hovering by the entrance since we left.

  “How did it go?” he asked.

  Lexa drew him away from the rest of us, nodding at Cindra and me as she did so. They walked off toward their office, speaking quietly, urgently.

  At the top of the dormitory stairs, I gave Cindra a hug. “You going to be okay?”

  “Yes. I just need some time, alone. But I’ll be fine.” She followed Pax down the hall, patting him on the shoulder in thanks before disappearing behind her door. Callum scooted furtively into his room, the lock clicking into place and leaving the hallway to Tor and me.

  I paused at my door and, knowing I shouldn’t, asked Tor if he’d like to come in. “I could use someone to talk to.”

  He paused then shook his head. “No. I’m sorry about what happened, but…no. I’m tired of letting myself down.”

  So, I ended up having a one-sided conversation with a girl in a coma in the middle of the night.

  I slid into the chair next to her bed as quietly as possible, trying not to knock over anything that might make a sound. It was the middle of the night, and I’d stolen out of bed, creeping down the stairs in the dark the way Tor and I had once crept through the woods.

  She lay on her back, her arms resting at her sides over the bedclothes. I’d expected her to be covered with tubes and wires, to be surrounded by the humming and whooshing of the machines keeping her alive, but there were none save a single thin tube that bit into a large vein in her hand, held fast by a layer of thick tape. Her coma was so unobtrusive that we hadn’t even noticed her when we’d been in the same room, less than twenty feet away.

  Eire.

  I traced my fingers over hers. They were small and cool to the touch, like my brother’s at his funeral. Dorian. I rarely let myself think about him, about the person he would’ve been now. Just newly a man, would he have had the same patchy stubble that had plagued my father? He hadn’t had a mark on him except for the slight compression of his chest.

  Would he and my mother have survived the war? Or, if they’d been alive and then died during it, would Dad have followed them?

  Since he didn’t have a daughter, he’d have had nothing left to live for but life itself, and my father had never been that kind of man.

  “And so that, Eire, is the whole sordid tale. According to my own father, I never existed.”

  A flash in my mind. “I don’t exist either, not without her.”

  I jerked my hand backward, nearly taking her lone tube with me. “You can speak to me? We can…speak to each other?” Until now, Pax had been the only other Pantheon Modern cyborg I could communicate with. I hadn’t even known about Eire until we got here.

  “Yes. We are pairs.”

  “What do you mean, pairs? Do you see the future too?”

  “Not the future. The past. A ladder. We are like a ladder. Where’s Ella?”

  Her hand was so thin, her veins forming a tiny blue network under her paper-fine skin. “Ella’s dead, Eire. I’m so sorry.”

  “Sometimes I still hear her. I can feel her close by.”

  “I’m sorry,” I repeated.

  “Did they kill her?”

  “Who?”

  “Mil and Lexa. Did they kill her?”

  “No. They said she just…died. Like she got lost and couldn’t find her way back.”

  “They killed her. She would never leave me.”

  “Why would they kill her?” Paranoia began to stir.

  “They are not what they seem. They are guilty. They have done some terrible things. I can see what they’ve done. We are wrong.” The pinkie finger on her left hand twitched.

  “Eire? What do you mean? Can you wake up? Lexa says there’s nothing physically wrong with you.”

  “Not yet. Not without her. I need to know what happened. Why she left me.”

  “I—”

  “The kill switch. Did you find the kill switch?”

  “Yes, we—”

  “There’s more. Ella. I will try to remember.”

  ***

  “They are not what they seem. They are guilty. We are wrong.” Eire’s words tumbled around in my head, making it impossible to sleep.

  I knew I shouldn’t do it, but Tor’s breathing as he slept was one of the few things that calmed me. And for someone who’d had such a violent past, he rarely dreamed. That was what I needed right now: a dark, quiet space, the reassurance of something familiar. And the only place I could find it was in his head.

  What I hadn’t expected was to discover him at Kalbir’s bedroom door, her perfect teeth bared in triumph.

  Dad went out every few days to see what was happening. First, he’d driven then when he couldn’t find any more fuel, he walked. Each time he came back, his face seemed thinner, grayer, as though the grayness of the sky was seeping into his skin. Then, one day when he was searching for food, he met Asche.

  —Love, Grace

  I shouldn’t have been here. I’d accused Ailith in the past of making me do things I didn’t want to do, and it was because of her that I was here now, outside the door of a woman I was pretty sure was going to eat me alive.

  I’d told Ailith the truth when I said I didn’t want to kill her anymore. I’d known it the moment we’d woken up here. My first thought was of her, of where she was, and when I saw her lying unconscious in that bed, looking so…human, the rage that had filled me… I knew then that she wasn’t the enemy. If anyone was, it was those who’d created us.

  I never should’ve slept with her again. I knew it would happen, knew I shouldn’t, and then I did it anyway. Did I really think it would change her mind? Make her suddenly give up her control? Could I blame her for that?

  Yes, I could. She shouldn’t have had that power over me. But would I feel differently if it were anyone else? What if it were Oliver she could control? Would I ask her to get rid of her ability then? No. I would tell her to keep it, just in case. So why should I feel otherwise? Because it was me and her. Was it even about the control? Or was it more about making her sacrifice something to prove herself to me? Either way, it had backfired. It just made everything worse. And now I was here.

  After what had happened in Goldnesse, I didn’t know what to say to her. I mean, I was happy her father was still alive, but part of me couldn’t help feeling bitter about it, and not only because my mother was dead. Before, it was just the two of us, even with the others. Her new life started when she woke up, and selfishly, I liked being her history. Now s
he had her old history back, a history with lots of memories that had made her who she was—and I wasn’t a part of it.

  Maybe we were programmed to feel a certain way. Maybe what Oliver had said about our connections to each other as a group was true, and that was why we had feelings for each other. So if that was true, I had to ask myself: did it matter? Was it any different than natural feelings? People always said they couldn’t help how they felt, who they loved. So maybe we couldn’t control it. But I could choose what I did with it.

  I knew now that we’d never have a normal relationship, a quiet life. I was a fool for ever thinking otherwise. It wasn’t her fault, not directly. It was what she was. If what Pax said was true, we would change the course of the future not only for us, but for what was left of the human race. Being one of those people, the kind who change the future, never ended well; they rarely died of old age. Either she would die, or I would, probably for each other. And to live like that, each day wondering if today was the day…I couldn’t do that. It would happen regardless, but with some distance, maybe we’d survive it.

  So here I was.

  I needed a buffer to put between us. I needed to look at today as the first day of my new life, and I thought Kalbir was the one to help me do that. I knew she liked me. She was beautiful, strong…everything a man could want. And she wasn’t the type to get emotionally involved with me; she’d made that pretty clear. Maybe I’d fall in love with her; maybe I wouldn’t. Either way, it didn’t matter. My purpose was served.

  She didn’t even want to talk. Her hand on my arm was cool; I’d had to wipe mine on my pant leg. After she’d pulled my shirt up over my head, she stood back and appraised me, her eyes glittering with approval.

  She was just as fast as me; before I knew what was happening, I was flat on my back on her bed. She hesitated only long enough to strip off her own shirt before straddling me.