Yet I know I’m not in the gray yet.
The storm is calm, hanging like a fog that has forgotten to lift even though morning has come.
It’s waiting.
This thing Augustus has created has an energy of its own. Just a whisper, but distinct. Unique. It’s blameless in this horror show. Augustus will simply charge it again with captured souls, given the chance.
It has to die.
This pains me in a way that releasing the others doesn’t. This is my wild brother. The twin that didn’t thrive. My fellow traveler in ascender experimentation. It’s the thing I could have been if I weren’t human… I am my mother’s son, but this thing is my other half, the part that serves as a mechanical link to another plane of existence. It is me.
And it could easily destroy everything.
I hold my arms wide one more time, calling the storm into me. I know where this final crossing will take us both, but I stand unflinching as the wind stirs, swirling then funneling down into a twisting knife of fog that blasts straight through me.
It shatters the thin strings that hold me together.
I float.
The weightlessness of not caring is an act of mercy, I decide.
Deciding is difficult.
I don’t float alone.
The scattered pieces of Caleb, John, and a dozen others float beside me. They’re not truly pieces of those other beings, just the echoes of them. The silver traces left in my mind, now broken and scattered in the endless, timeless gray. The Mind is also here, but its pieces are elemental particles again. It’s never coming back together.
I’m different.
I know this idly, like I know acrylics are fast-drying and Kamali’s hair is silk-spun beauty. It’s a simple fact.
But it also carries the weight of meaning.
I am different.
I’m not the Mind. I’m human. And humans have this odd sense that they matter. Individually. That they are unique and have names and, therefore, identity.
I am Elijah.
It’s a clarion call to the scattered pieces of me—a gravity well that recreates me with its very existence. As I come together, coalescing the swirling mass of memories—some mine, some utterly alien—the identity that is me transforms into something more like us. A pastiche of humanity comprised of those who left tread marks as they traveled across the bridge I was designed to be. The marks are so deeply embedded, there is no differentiation.
I am Caleb.
I am the Mind.
I am Elijah.
The last one rings most true. With the gravity of my being suddenly turned on, I fall. Through the gray, through the void, hurtling toward some moment in time and space where I have focus. Meaning. I matter there.
I’m right back where I started: Augustus’s lab.
I’m still in the fugue state, standing in front of the box. Only the Mind is dead. Anyone with eyes can see the pink has turned gray. The red liquid is soiled with inky tendrils of death. I turn to face the others, the ones I left behind.
Kamali kneels at my body, holding me up.
Augustus frowns at my slumped form. A blue trail of transmission zips between him and Hypatia. Nathaniel is still on his knees, Tristan just now lurches to Kamali’s side, and Grayson eyes the room like he’s scanning for weapons. Leopold and Marcus are still puppets-at-attention, locked down near the door.
It’s as if all the time I was in the Mind and the void happened in an instant. Or, more improbably, that I returned to the moment where I needed to be. I don’t understand that, but I have precious seconds before Augustus realizes the Mind is dead.
I move with barely a thought, suddenly standing between Hypatia and Augustus. I poke my finger into the transmission between them. I’m buffeted by the flood of information, but somehow stitching together the pieces of myself has made the cohesion stronger. I can absorb more information while still maintaining my identity—I am Elijah.
I take in all the information that flows through me. It’s not good.
Hypatia is encouraging Augustus to inject the implant in the back of my skull. They don’t realize the Mind is dead—else they wouldn’t be trying to feed me to it. Like Grayson, I scan the room, looking for a way out.
Leopold and Marcus.
I move to their sides, faster than ascender speed. They’re locked down, but personal keys are things I gather from ascenders, not things that keep me out. I tentatively reach toward Leopold’s mind. Human minds and ascender transmissions are one thing—the total volume of information is relatively small—but interfacing with ascender minds is another level altogether.
I sink into Leopold’s head.
It’s a torrent, too much—I can tolerate it for a moment, then I have to pull back. Even so, I sense how Leopold is locked in. His cybernetic skull is a cage, and Augustus holds the key.
I flit to Augustus’s side. He’s stalking toward my body, neural chip in hand. I’m about to plunge my hand into his head, hoping I can snag the key to unlock Leopold and Marcus, when Grayson suddenly launches himself at Augustus. In the fugue state, I’m surprised to see Grayson wearing a ragged linen shirt and a homespun kilt, but I know in the physical world his legs are made of black ascender-tech metal. They connect with Augustus’s hand and knock the neural chip free. It skitters across the floor to Nathaniel, who lurches to his feet and crushes the chip with his boot. Augustus knocks Grayson into a bank of machines with such strength that they nearly topple. Grayson slumps to the floor and doesn’t move.
I plunge my hand into Augustus’s mind.
It’s overwhelming, and I have to pull out almost immediately. Augustus jerks upright and looks wildly around the room—to Hypatia, Marcus, Leopold, and finally to my body—clearly sensing my presence but unsure of the source.
My brain processes the snatch of information I pulled from him. I have the key to unlock Leopold and Marcus, but more importantly—I sensed Lenora in Augustus’s mind. She’s fragmented, but she’s there. I whisk to Leopold’s side, hold out my hand, and visualize the key. It glitters, hovering above my palm and twirling through a dozen possibilities. Strangely, I understand the key better than before—I even see how to change it—but that’s unimportant right now. I spin and click it into place with Leopold’s cognition.
He unlocks.
With his mind freed, a rush of thoughts blares at me—he has a way out, it’s risky and deadly, but first, he has to save Lenora. Only he has no idea how.
But I do.
With my other hand, I quickly conjure Marcus’s key and unlock him. His first instinct is to physically attack Augustus, and that draws my attention back to the real world gyrating around us.
Hypatia flits about the room. Augustus menaces Kamali, who is throwing words of defiance at him. Tristan hovers protectively over my body, which is now sprawled face-down on the floor. Nathaniel is trying to yank free one of the tubes running to the box!
If Augustus or Hypatia notices him…
I have no time left.
I whip back to Marcus and Leopold. A flickering line of transmission strings between them. They’re clearly making plans, and I need to be involved. I jab my finger into the stream.
I can hold him. That’s Marcus.
Hypatia will attack, Leopold responds.
Then take them both down.
The weapon, Leopold says. But not until we know for sure.
Lenora is gone, Leopold, Marcus rails. Black ribbons writhe across his face, giving him away.
Lenora is alive. I push the thought to both their streams, hitching a ride each way to reach them. They exchange quizzical looks. It’s Eli, I transmit. Lenora is trapped in Augustus’s mind, but I can free her. I shove a series of images into the stream because it’s easier to explain that way.
It takes a full second for them to process—to realize it really is me speaking to them somehow, and that I have a solid plan, except that I need Marcus’s help.
I’ll use the weapon once she’s free a
nd you have her stored, Leopold says to Marcus, and by way of eavesdropping, to me. Not a millisecond before.
I’m not entirely clear on the weapon Leopold has, but he’s convinced it will free us all.
Very well. Marcus doesn’t like it, and I can’t blame him—he’ll have to carry Lenora’s cognition alongside his own, and I can’t imagine that’s comfortable. In more than one sense.
I turn my attention back to Augustus—things are getting worse by the second. Hypatia has found another implant chip for the back of my head. She shoves Tristan aside with such force that he sails across the floor. Kamali is yelling at Augustus, but he’s ignoring her. Just as Hypatia is about to shove the implant into my head, a siren wails through the room, and a torrent of gushing liquid grabs everyone’s attention. Nathaniel has worked a hose free, and a fountain of it sprays all over the room. He’s using it as a weapon—a slick, disgusting, extremely attention-gathering weapon, that has Augustus sputtering in rage. But Augustus is not using the electric weapon built into his bodyform hands, the one he shocked Nathaniel with before. Probably for fear of shorting out the entire lab. The liquid is everywhere.
I could kiss Nathaniel.
Instead, I focus everything I have on calling Lenora out of Augustus’s mind. The pieces of her are scattered, just like mine were in the void, but I realized something before, during that brief moment of touching her while inside Augustus’s mind. There was nothing trapping her there, at least nothing that would keep me out. Like the blue sparks in the cloud of the Mind, I could be a bridge for Lenora—an escape from the trap of Augustus’s cognition. Only I don’t want to send her wherever the others went. The void? Death? I’m not really sure, but for Lenora, I could be a bridge to somewhere.
And that somewhere is Marcus’s head.
It helps that I know her already. It helps even more that she knows my voice, longs to hear it, yearns for me in a way that’s causing a tumult of feelings to cascade through my mind. But slowly the pieces of her are coming together, pulled by the gravity of my desire, and streaming into Marcus’s waiting cognitive embrace. The torrent isn’t too much to bear, given that it’s one fragment at a time. I don’t know how all the pieces will come together once she gets there, but at least she’ll be all in one place. And safe.
I watch, trapped in the middle of the transfer, as Augustus recovers from his spitting rage enough to physically knock Nathaniel free of the hose he’s using to soak the lab. Hypatia attends to the flailing hose and spewing liquid, quickly disabling it, but the transmissions fly between her and Augustus.
She has discovered the Mind is dead.
It’s gray and lying in the bottom of the drained tank. Hypatia tips her head up, opens her mouth wide, and screams her frustration—I’m in the fugue, so I don’t hear a thing, but the sight of it is horrifying in a way that almost disrupts my steady gathering of the pieces of Lenora into Marcus’s mind. But I keep my focus. When the last of her is safely inside Marcus, I turn to him, only to see something I do not expect at all: he’s uploading.
The same kind of transmission line that flits between Marcus and Leopold now beams up through the ceiling of Augustus’s lab. I pass a finger through it, tasting what’s there, and it becomes suddenly clear: Marcus is backing himself up and taking Lenora with him.
A splintering movement draws my attention back to the physical world. In a fit of rage, Augustus has flung the box into a nearby bank of equipment with enough force to smash it into a thousand shards. The Mind bounces along the floor, coming to rest in a pile of red-slickened glass.
Augustus charges toward my body, still inert on the floor.
Kamali flings herself in his path, arms wide, blocking his way.
NO!
Augustus fires an electric shock from his palm so powerful it lifts Kamali and tosses her over my body. She slides along the floor to my fugue form near the door. I stumble back, horrified and unbelieving. Tristan scrambles across the glass-strewn floor on his hands and knees to get to her.
Marcus’s upload finishes.
Augustus hauls my body off the floor—my bunched shirt in one hand, the implant in the other.
A transmission line flits between Marcus and Leopold. I jab a finger into it, to tell Leopold to use his weapon. I absorb their words, but before I can do anything about them, Leopold plunges a hand into the side of his bodyform, straight through his thin ascender-tech clothing and his own skin, and tears a silver orb from inside. He hurls the orb against the door of the lab.
Everything whites out.
The first thing I feel is my face hitting the floor. The second is Augustus crushing the air out of me as his bodyform lands on my back. I gasp in air and struggle to roll him off. The floor is so slippery with red muck that I can barely get traction, but I kick and push and manage to get free of him.
Everyone is down.
I don’t understand what’s happened until I stagger to my feet and see Leopold’s bodyform limp on the floor next to the blast radius of his bomb. I stumble around Augustus, nearly going down on the slick floor, but I see what Leopold did, and the truth of it sinks in.
His final transmitted words were, Is she safe? He waited until Marcus and Lenora had uploaded. Then he pulled out the one weapon that would destroy every bodyform in the room but let the humans live. He even pointed it away from Kamali and Tristan at his feet. Only I know Leopold has no backup.
He killed himself to stop Augustus.
And save me.
My mind is too numb to take this in.
A movement next to Leopold captures my attention. It doesn’t register what Tristan is doing at first. I think he’s kissing Kamali, but he’s not—he’s trying to resuscitate her. He pulls away from her mouth and places both hands on her chest, pumping and pumping. He’s sobbing.
No. No, no, no.
I stumble to them and fall to my knees.
“We need a med bot!” he cries, not looking at me, but there’s no one else. He keeps trying to make her heart beat by pounding on her breastbone, but Augustus’s electric pulse must have stopped her heart. Each strike of Tristan’s hand on her chest is a jolt that electrocutes me. He tries to breathe life into her, but that’s not working.
None of it is working.
I blink because I can’t see with the tears flooding my eyes. I look around for help. Marcus is gone. Leopold is dead. Grayson is either dead or unconscious on the far side of the room. The same for Nathaniel, who lies amid the smashed glass. He bought me a few precious seconds… time that wasn’t enough… not to save the one person who stood up to Augustus with nothing but her human body and fierce will.
It’s becoming hard to breathe.
I look back to Tristan, but he’s stopped. His hands hang at his side, and his shoulders jerk up and down in silent sobs. I want him to try again. I want him to do something. He’s the only medic we have. The only person here who even knows how to administer first aid.
I know she’s beyond first aid.
I crawl closer. Her clothes are soaked with Nathaniel’s spray of red liquid. With speechless horror, I realize her legs are crooked in a dancer pose, the blood muddying her body just like the painting I made of her so long ago—back in the Olympics, back when I had no idea what this horrible, terrible gift was capable of doing.
I painted her dead.
And now she is.
I can’t help the cry of pain that escapes me.
Tristan whips his tear-stained face to me. “Don’t you dare!” he yells, lunging for me. He misses, but only because he’s slipping on the muck of the floor. “Don’t you dare cry for her!” Then he scrambles harder, climbing over her bent legs to get to me. His first punch slides off my cheek, both of us slick with liquid, but it knocks me back anyway. I just lay on the floor, looking up at him, letting him hit me again and again, the pain a welcome penance. After the third time, I just leave my head flung to the side, and he stops. He shoves off me and bends over, hands and knees on the floor, like he’s going
to throw up… but nothing comes.
I blink at the ceiling, clearing my vision, then slowly roll over and crawl back to Kamali. Her hair stands out in every direction, a leftover from Augustus’s shock weapon that stopped her heart. Tristan is half sobbing, half heaving, but I can’t do anything for him. I gather Kamali’s thin, steel-strong shoulders into my arms. I bury my face in her free flowing hair. My tears are wicked away by it.
“I can’t do this without you,” I whisper to her. “I can’t.” I say it again and again, like a mantra, as if wishes can change—
—anything.
I’m in a dance studio. The polished wooden floor shines with spots of sun that beam in through the windows. The light is gauzy and glowing, and the shine is reflected a million times in mirrors that surround me on all sides. Music bounces with the light, more like vibrant, transcendent singing than instruments playing actual notes. It’s the sound of joy, and it draws me inward and expands me outward at the same time, like the ecstatic space of Lenora’s virtual cathedral.
Kamali is dancing to it.
She’s twirling and twirling, around and around, hair flying out, arms reaching with impossibly delicate sweeps. Her face is lit with a happiness that’s almost too bright to look at. She’s dressed as I first saw her, dancing in that nearly nude leotard, holding nothing back.
Her soul is dancing.
Just as she wanted. Just as she imagined that very first time I painted her. She has exactly what she wants now. Exactly what she’s dreamed of all along. I should let her stay and dance forever.
I can’t.
I hold out one hand. My desire to move her closer has a power I’m ashamed of—because it pulls her to me. Selfishly, I let it happen.
She stops her spinning. “Eli, it’s wonderful.”
“I knew it would be for you.” I’m crying inside, but I don’t know if it shows.
She lifts her arms in a graceful embrace of the universe. The stars are dancing in her eyes. How can I take this from her? How can I be such a wretch, such a selfish inhuman monster, that I would deny her this? I should let her stay.
But I’m not that good.
The Duality Bridge (Singularity #2) (Singularity Series) Page 30
