In the far away land of her body, Bobbi felt her teeth grit.
Cagliostro made a soft sound of assent.
Well, no shit. No way was she going to risk stirring up one bogeyman while another one waited to bite her in the ass.
Cagliostro had returned to his chip-mockery of Stadil’s voice, smooth and empty.
Bobbi made a dark little sound.
She scoffed at that.
Christ, he was right about that. At least we aren’t blasting people off of bridges with rockets anymore.
The day had certainly brought disturbing thoughts and revelations, and Bobbi was about done with it for the moment.
He emitted that horrible cold-gravel laughter. Bobbi cut him off by dropping the link. An explosion of scintillating white-noise static expanded in a torus within the void, wind like a brushing of freezing rain upon her cheeks passed over her. At the center, a vaulted ceiling faded into view. Bobbi lay still in the half-aware nonspace of post-logout haze, staring up at the concrete. A bubbling miasma of anxiety and cold fear filled her, but a flame of raw defiance sprang up in its wake and boiled it away.
It spread through her, banishing the numbness. The idea that Scalli’s own fucking people could be pointing guns at her and hers, either because of his own dumb prejudices or because he’d gotten his dumb ass killed, stoked her desire to rain down fire upon her enemies. Though she had become a great deal more warlike in the last four years, she was hardly an idiot. She knew very well prudence was the right way to go.
Even still, she would give everything to send every cruise missile of the American Pacific Fleet into Genefex tower and turn it into fucking cat litter. She wanted to scream. She wanted to howl. She wanted to challenge the Mother of Systems to single combat and win red revenge against the enemy.
Instead, she called for Violet, who emerged from the depths of the suite. She appeared bundled up in a big fluffy robe, her hair draped wet down her back. “I’m here, my lady.” Violet hurried over to the chaise-lounge where Bobbi reclined. “What is it?”
“Change of plans.” Bobbi unplugged the brainwire from her cranial socket.” We’re not sticking around here anymore.”
“We aren’t?” Violet blinked at her, confused. “Where are we going?”
“Seattle,” Bobbi said. “I’m gonna see myself a doctor.”
After packing quickly and hopping a suborbital flight, they arrived in Seattle before the day was out. Shaper and his crew waited for them outside Sea-Tac in a beat up van that idled and shook in the rain like an aging dog. The lanky Brit emerged dressed in a tremendously loud Hawaiian shirt and fatigue pants under a clear plastic poncho, the familiar black Kevlar sleeve and glove covering his gun arm.
“Evening, boss,” he chimed as Bobbi and Violet approached carrying only umbrellas. “No luggage?”
“You know us,” Violet said in a similarly cheerful tone. “We travel light.”
“Sorry for the change of plans, Shaper.” Bobbi squinted at him. “Uhh, nice shirt.”
Shaper gave her one of his best manic grins. “It counts as camouflage if you burn out their retinas, you know.”
Bobbi snorted. “So I’ve been told.”
“Right then.” Shaper pulled open the van’s side door, and they climbed in.
They drove back into the Verge along the bay, watching in silence as the glow of the New City threw a wide swath of color across the water. Bobbi thought about the people at home, the people who had become monsters and then returned again. To know the Yathi, to have them in your head, did more than just wrest away control over your body. It amputated a part of your soul. Nothing Bobbi had witnessed up until Redeye died had made that clear enough for her. Now that she had taken up the dead cyborg’s banner, she had a whole different understanding of what the woman had been responsible for. Bobbi had done more than simply salvage these people, though. They were family now. She had come to love them all, in some strange way; she found it harder and harder to imagine her future without them around her, though whether this was an artifact of conflict or something else she could never say. What she did know, however, was that even success would eventually lead to tears. Success against the Yathi would leave her with a body of mad warborgs without a cause, lethal creatures that devoid of their obsession would turn inward and collapse. Or worse, turn their insanity outward. They would all have to die in the end, somehow. She would have to do it, too. That was Bobbi’s deal with the rest of them. Her duty.
Bobbi leaned against the window, the hot beads of tears budding in her eyes. She closed them, shutting out the world, and let herself nap as Shaper drove them on to the docks.
Soon enough, they were on their way to Plato’s Cave, having taken the long route through the drainage tunnels to a secondary dock where Jenny in the Middle waited for them. Shaper had spared no caution in ensuring that
the Archer station was abandoned; they had no idea if Scalli’s people – if it was Scalli’s people – knew about the place. Cagliostro had left Shaper a note assuring of his certainty the sewer dock remained unknown, which at least offered some small measure of comfort.
“I don’t understand why Scalli would greenlight something like this,” Violet said to Bobbi as they sat in the back of the cargo sub on their way down. “He might think you’ve gone the way of the Eye, but he cared about you, didn’t he?”
“Love is just the sunny side of hate, Vi,” Bobbi said with a shrug. “You know that.”
Violet scrunched up her nose. “Yeah. But I wasn’t aware that he had any reason to hate you.”
“Because I didn’t tell you what happened to get that whole thing started.” Bobbi sighed.
“Well.” Violet glanced Shaper at the conn, guiding the Jenny down into the depths of the bay. She looked back to Bobbi, her blue eyes bright but grave. “I guess you should tell me everything.”
Bobbi made a dark face. “It wasn’t long after we’d blasted Emmet Mills off the face of the Earth. You know, we’d had that party.”
“I remember he did drink a lot.” Violet nodded. “But it wasn’t like he was crazy or anything.”
The hum of the sub’s electric motors filled the silence between them.
“No,” Bobbi said. “He wasn’t crazy. But he did pour his heart out to me later on. ‘You’re the only one I want,’ he told me. ‘Forget him, take me instead. I love you.’”
Violet’s eyes narrowed. “What did he mean, ‘forget him?’”
A thin, rueful smile wriggled itself into place on Bobbi’s lips. “Well, he seemed to be under the impression that I was still pining after Tom, you know. I think he’d always believed up to then that I was doing all of this to try and get Tom back. Because I loved him or something.”
“Then he didn’t know you very well at all,” Violet said. “Jesus.”
“Well, I mean, it’s not like I don’t care about Tom.” Bobbi made a faint little gesture with one hand. “But that’s mostly me wanting to get him out of the hands of the goddamned Yathi. But here he was, trying to make it out like I was risking my life in order to save my prince, I guess, and I got angry about it.”
“As well you should have.” Violet’s tone had taken on a familiar hateful, jealous edge, reminding Bobbi why she hadn’t told her this story in the first place. “Men like to assume they’re the center of everything, don’t they?”
Bobbi chuckled a little bit. “Yeah, maybe, but calm down, okay? Everybody makes fools of themselves when they have feelings for people. Anyway, I got mad at him and told him that I wasn’t doing this for Tom, and I sure as shit wasn’t doing it for him – I was doing it for everyone, and he needed to get it through his head. “The scene sprang to life in her head: Bobbi in a baggy worksuit, sitting on a crate in the Haven’s warehouse section while Scalli, tall and whipcord lean without his lost muscle suit, gesticulated passionately as he confessed his love to her. How the color had drained from his face as she had told him no. How it had set like concrete after.
Violet’s eyes narrowed more. “And then? What did he say?”
“A lot of things.” Bobbi shook her head. “I’d had a lot to drink myself, you know. He wasn’t happy about it. He stalked off, and after that it was all just business.”
Moments passed in which Violet carefully watched her. “So what you’re telling me is that this whole thing – the split in the group, all the hostilities and loss of resources, and now potentially an assassination attempt on both of us…got started because one dude decided to be a ‘nice guy’ and got pissed because you had the temerity to turn him down?”
Well, that was certainly one way to look at it.
Bobbi took a few seconds before responding, pushing back the thoughts that came rushing to the fore. “I don’t think that’s the case. I mean, well, I don’t think he’d try to kill us over that. I think instead that my turning him down allowed him to look at things he had purposely blinded himself to. Like how much he disliked using reclaimed Yathi, or how I had changed from the girl he’d known since we went down the road to Redeye.”
“You’re nothing like the Eye, my lady,” Violet said flatly.
“Am I really not?” Bobbi’s brows arched. “I don’t have a synthetic body, no, but are we that different otherwise? Scalli’s group is entirely human, isn’t it? I’m the one leading former Yathi to battle. I’m the one who has Yathi software in her head.”
Violet shifted in her seat. “Yeah…” She sounded uncertain, butshe took Bobbi’s hands, and her eyes cleared. “No. No, you’re nothing like the Eye. Cagliostro designed and bred for her purpose. She was never really able to be human. She didn’t care for us like you did. She united us with a purpose, yes, and maybe we aren’t as…excited…about combat as we were under her banner. But I believe that has to do with the way you lead, the way you treat us. We worshipped the Eye, yes…but we love you.” At the last, Violet’s gaze faltered, and her blue eyes tracked the floor. Her voice faded to a whisper, and the trembling note of waiting madness lingered there. “Please don’t listen to him. To Scalli. Please don’t think that you’re not human, my lady. I don’t…”
The message seemed clear to Bobbi: don’t think you’re not human, because if you aren’t human, I’m certainly not. And in the absence of humanity, the Yathi could emerge again. The nightmare that nobody talked about. Bobbi squeezed Violet’s hands and took a deep breath. “No. Of course you’re right, Violet, I’m sorry. I can understand why he might feel the way he does, but he’s wrong. He doesn’t understand. “How could he, after all? He had only known the Yathi as targets. He wore machines in his skin, but they had been tools – not part of his life, not the way the brain implants were for her. He did not feel them like she did, did not know them as she did. She could not blame him.
But that did not mean she would forgive him, either. Not if he had signed off on this.
Violet bent to rest her head against their linked hands. She sat there for a little while, the only noise the humming of the submarine’s motors. Bobbi looked down at her friend and heard her words again in her head. We love you, Violet had said. She wondered how much of that came from Violet speaking for her fellow Reclaimed, and how much came from her heart. In the end, it didn’t matter. Nobody else had been there for her with such consistency, been so good to her, so patient. Forget about the crazy, forget about the hardware in her flesh, and the horrible thing chained in her head. Tom had been a puzzle, and Bobbi would always be attracted to him, but he was just a ghost now. Scalli had said that he loved her, but that love had a price. Not so with Violet, who would love her however she was or whatever she did.
And Bobbi loved her too. Not in a way that had anything to do with sex or romance – in another situation, Bobbi might have been sad that she felt so much for her friend without any kind of attraction. But that would have been stupid, and she would have missed out on so very, very much. As she watched the dim cargo lights play sparks off the wealth of black hair pooling in her lap, Bobbi knew she had never loved anyone else nearly so much as Violet. She probably never would again.
“Hey,” Bobbi whispered, and she drew a hand from beneath Violet’s head to stroke her hair.” It’s going to be okay, Vi. We’re going to get it straightened out. We’re going to do everything that we can in order to win this. And we’re not going to go back to the way we were. Any of us.”
“I know.” The voice that filtered out from beneath all that hair was soft and full of trust. “I’m sorry, my lady. I doubt sometimes. And then…I start to panic…”
“Shhhh.” Bobbi leaned down, pressed her cheek against Violet’s hair, and sighed. “I promise. I won’t let you go back to that. I swear.”
They sat like that, taking in the silence and the sound of each others’ breath, until finally the rattle of the docking clamps roused Bobbi.
Shaper’s voice echoed in the back from hidden panels. “We
’re here, boss.”
Bobbi sat up to nod at him. Through the Jenny’s viewport, indistinct shapes moved. For a horrible moment, Bobbi wondered if they might be invaders from elsewhere, Scalli’s people or worse, but the thought perished even before Shaper waved to someone beyond the glass.
“Thanks, Shaper.” Bobbi reached down to nudge Violet.
She had fallen asleep in Bobbi’s lap – but she roused, eyes snapping open without blinking, sitting up without a yawn. “That took longer than I expected.”
“He took the back way.” Bobbi smirked. “You know, slow and with a lot of lube.”
Violet made a face. “Cute.” She grinned. “Come on, I want to stretch my legs.”
They found the others in a state of battle readiness. Shaper had put the cell into state of high alert since Bobbi passed on the word someone had staged a hit on her before leaving Orly. She decided to wait until she returned to the Cave before elaborating on the details. When she did, in the soundproof confines of the conference room, Shaper let off a torrent of curses that could have scoured the paint from the walls.
“Fuck’s sake,” he roared, slamming his gun hand down on the big metal briefing table. “What does that silly cunt think he’s doing? Decided you’re worse than the enemy, has he? Bloody hell!” He stopped to fix Bobbi with a sudden, black-eyed stare. “D’ya want me to kill him, Bobbi? My lads can sniff him out. He’s only human after all.”
Only human. The words had a different meaning here. “So am I, you know,” said Bobbi stonily. “As is everyone in this room. Let’s not forget that.”
Shaper frowned at her. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean it that way. I’m just saying, if he’s gone off his nut, he’s a real liability to everybody, and we should seek him out. His people aren’t nearly as good as ours. They don’t stand a bloody chance.”
“We still don’t know for sure Scalli’s people had anything to do with it,” Bobbi said. “But whoever did it had enough skill to track us down with armed drones.”
Gathering Ashes (The Wonderland Cycle Book 3) Page 10
