by Anna Mayle
Three things occurred all at once. The Angels converged on Enoch’s unmoving form. A small blond blur darted out of the garage. Jacobi reengaged the electricity to the outside.
A loud clang and screech of metal announced Cora’s success. So did the screams. Angels jumped and shook like macabre puppets on electrical strings while the current danced around and through them, from wire to wire. Smoke tinged the air. Angels fell. Enoch took the full brunt of his rapist as the Angel’s charred corpse toppled over him and Jacobi quickly flopped boneless atop the man’s avatar, increasing his own temperature to simulate the state of the body.
Cora’s smudged little face loomed large in one of the cameras. She smiled wide. “We did it!”
Jacobi reopened the com link and responded without moving from his place over the mechanic. “We did. I’m going to disconnect him. The plug needs to come out no later than twenty seconds after. Can you do that?”
She nodded and made her way carefully over the field of charred dead. Tiny, trembling hands touched Enoch’s neck carefully. Jacobi mimicked the feather lite feeling with his own hand. Tears hit the sand. He wondered why he was still crying.
“Ready,” Cora announced.
Jacobi pressed firm fingers down where the port would be in the flesh, just below and behind the left ear, and counted.
In the waking world, Enoch’s body tensed one last time and went completely limp. In the Network it lay a bare second longer and then faded away.
“Is he breathing?” he asked her hopefully.
The little girl pushed against the dead weight of Enoch’s attacker with all her might. She couldn’t fully role Enoch onto his side with the Angel there, but she did manage to turn his head to keep his face free of the sand. Once she’d managed that, she leaned in close to him and paused there.
Jacobi wished horribly that he could be physically near enough to help, to see for himself…what was taking her so long!
After what might have been hours, she righted herself, smiled toward the cameras and nodded.
If he hadn’t already been lying in the simulated sand, Jacobi might have collapsed with the relief.
“His skin looks really red,” she touched a wary hand to his stomach and pulled it back quickly. “He’s really hot.”
Shit! White skin, too white skin. White skin burned fast. “Cover him up, quickly, we have to get him out of the sun. It will hurt him.”
She scuttled off, tugged a blanket from one of the abandoned cycs and ran back to drape it over him, took his arm in both of her small hands and pulled hard. He moved, barely. She pulled again. “Why does the sun hurt him?” she asked, breathless, between tugs.
“It’s an Angel thing. Some of them, their bodies aren’t right, on some of them it hurts a lot.”
With a determined nod, Cora kept pulling.
Jacobi could only watch and wait as inch by inch over the next hour, the little slip of a girl managed to pull Enoch’s prone body back into the shade of the shop, back into safety. She retrieved the water skin Enoch had given her before and wet her fingers.
“Now that it doesn’t need to cover him, roll the blanket. Put it under his head,” Jacobi suggested worriedly.
She traced the wet fingers over his lips and then did as Jacobi had asked. “Why did they attack him? Isn’t he an Angel too?”
“There are different kinds of Angels, just like there are different kinds of humans,” Jacobi guessed. “I’ve never met one like him till now, but since he exists, others must. There’s a lake below us, but the way to it is blocked by a concrete slab. You wouldn’t be able to lift it.”
“What’s a lake?” she asked while trying to get Enoch to drink.
* * * *
Sparks and fire brought Enoch back to consciousness. For a moment he imagined he was back, standing in that burning settlement. Then he realized the sensation was internal. His skin tingled and stretched hotly, reaching to cover the places where it had been torn.
Torn…the Angels.
The girl!
He sat up quickly and jerked to the side. His rectum pulsed and stung. It felt like there was something still in him, angled awkwardly, wrong. He was swollen, burned, torn. They’d been thorough. If it wasn’t for the hacker…
“Hacker?” He had thought he’d’ used enough force, but the word came out reedy and ended with a hiss of pain. He touched his swollen face gingerly then took hold of his lower jaw and jerked his head to one side. The motion set it back where it should have been. His vision blackened around the edges, but Enoch successfully fought off unconsciousness. He needed to know. “Hacker!”
“He’s trying to think about how to get you to your lake,” a soft voice piped. “I helped him save you.”
Enoch stared at the little human girl. The little human girl stared back.
“You lived,” he said when he’d had enough of her curious gaze.
“So did you,” she agreed.
“I’ve had more practice,” he reasoned flatly.
“I’m younger,” she countered proudly.
Enoch snorted wryly, “You have no idea.” A more familiar pain had begun to lick at the corners of his senses. He needed his injection. The healing was speeding cell growth and death beyond even the usual. He could literally feel his body dying and being born again. “There’s a pry bar, on the shelf in the left corner. Bring it to me. I’ll take you to the lake if you promise not to touch me once I’m in it.”
“Promise!” she squealed.
While the lightning shocks ate away at his resolve to remain conscious, Enoch stood on shaking legs. Some blood had managed to stay pooled in the hollow of his neck. When he straightened, it ran down his skin unhindered by clothing. Damn it. The rolled blanket his head had been laying on was all he had in the shop, so he tied it awkwardly around his waist and made his slow way to the entrance to the underground.
He managed to get the block moved, doors open, he even managed the ladder. By the bottom though, he was dizzy, weak. Habit led him slowly to the large gathering of cables suspended from the rock overhead, framing the Network hub. The injection won’t work if I can’t prep it. I need to wait this out in the Network.
“Girl.”
“Cora,” she corrected him.
“Cora,” he bit out. “I have to go into the Network, which means I have to leave you alone down here. This is my home. There are things here that can hurt you if you play with them.”
“Will the water hurt me?” she asked, hopeful.
Enoch took up his Network plug and breather and he showed her a series of shallow pools made in the rock shelves around the larger lake. “See how you can see the bottom in these pools?”
She nodded.
The scorched sting was traveling further in. Sharp pricks of heat made him twitch, but he gritted his teeth and continued. All he needed was to come up from the Network to find a drowned Wastrel. “You see the dark water there? Where you can’t see below it?”
Another nod.
“That’s because that water goes so far down it would eat you up and keep your bones forever. Stay in the pools here where you can see the bottom.”
Her eyes were wide with fear but she gave yet another nod.
Good, a scared girl will stay a live girl, he thought to himself. With a care born of necessity, Enoch firmly settled a mask over his nose and mouth, fed a tube carefully into place and checked the air flow. He palmed his plug to warm it. The firm center was curved, three inches long and half an inch around. It slid into the port smoothly, lightning licked his nerves and Enoch opened his mouth in a sharp exhalation. Tentacle like protrusions framing the plug came to life, clamped tightly around his throat and sealed the connection.
Enoch stepped into the underground lake and let the water close above him. He exhaled again and let his body sink until he found the weighted bonds to clamp snuggly around him and keep him under. Then he floated, alone in the silence amongst the cool liquid until all he knew was that one connection. Finally, th
at too faded away.
Chapter Five
Enoch came awake sharply within the Network. Something wasn’t right. He kept his eyes closed and body limp, took stock of the situation. The girl couldn’t have fought the Angels off which means they got away. Maybe some of them have ports. They couldn’t though, my security…the hacker! I knew it happened too quickly after he showed up. It was all a ruse, they must have somehow found out about the hub here.
Someone touched him and he buried the impulse to tense or squirm. The hand felt large-ish, fingers long, nails trimmed. Such minute grooming was strange for an Angel, but not unheard of. From the size of the hand, Enoch had the advantage in size, but that meant little if weapons were involved. Had they found the girl? Why were they touching him? Why wasn’t he dead?
The hand was joined by another. They skimmed up and down his chest and sides. Searching him?
No. They didn’t stop at pockets or seams. Instead they slid smoothly beneath the waistband of his trousers.
Enoch jumped and not one to lose the element of surprise for nothing, he propelled himself up and into his assailant, bowling the Angel onto the ground and pinning him there with a strong fist punching into his neck. One down, he dug his fist further into the broken man to lunge up and face the others, but stumbled when the mass beneath him vanished.
It wasn’t until he found himself lying on the carpet of this Network office that he realized what had happened. “Hacker!” he insisted.
“My name is Jacobi,” the now familiar voice answered. “You killed my avatar.”
“The Angels?”
Another avatar flickered into being. The familiar white clothes and changing face struck a chord in Enoch and he shivered. “You…”
“I haven’t changed. No malicious intent. It’s likely you’re memories of two happenings at one time trying to find balance in your mind.”
Enoch’s mind helpfully supplied him with the image of his attacker, the sensation of being torn into and taken, the wire cutting painfully into his back and hands. The face kept shifting. “You raped me.”
Jacobi scowled darkly. “It was the scenario most likely to succeed in keeping your mind whole.”
“I would have healed,” Enoch said tiredly. “I always heal.”
“Finding that many Angels in the south is rare,” Jacobi pointed out. “How many times could it have happened?”
Enoch didn’t want to have this conversation, not with every one of those ever-shifting eyes watching him with a gaze containing both hope and humanity. Neither a trait Enoch possessed himself anymore, but no less precious for his failing. “Cora is enjoying the lake.”
“She helped me to save you.”
“So she said.” He pushed again, “What happened to the Angels? Are they dead?”
“Electrocuted,” the hacker nodded, his voice a bit hollow. “You have an impressive last line of defense.”
“Not so impressive,” Enoch noted dryly. “It didn’t work until I was down. Had I been the only one present, I would likely have lain out there until nightfall before I could manage to pull myself back inside.”
“Cora dragged you. It took her a long time.” Jacobi smiled. “She was very brave. I hope she enjoys the water. It’s very rare and precious in the south, isn’t it?”
“It’s precious everywhere, but yes, it’s rare here.”
“You have a lot of it,” the hacker noted, probing.
“Yes.” Enoch knew what would come next, the wheedling to share it, sell it, help people, invite them in. He’d tried that once. It remained clean of the surface taints by a long travel through the ground and stone until it dripped from one of the stalactites above. The geothermal power drawn from those cave systems to power the Network meant that he couldn’t risk bringing people there, but he had so much water. He’d taken some bottles to a struggling caravan he’d seen out in the Wastes. They’d tried to follow him back to its source relentlessly. Once he’d been forced to kill them, Enoch had learned caution, and been reminded of the greed of human beings.
Instead of the lecture Enoch had expected, Jacobi simply gave him a pensive, half-lost look and wondered aloud, “I read in a historical data marker that in the Once World people constantly immersed themselves in large containers of water. Fresh, clean water each time, too. They used some kind of foam created by forbidden arts to clean and needed the water to rinse it off. They called them ‘baths’. What must that have felt like, to be so clean?”
Enoch wondered how people could question why the world was the way it was, with stories of how wasteful they’d been still accessible on the Network. He could only vaguely recall the feeling himself. Even with his abundance he dared not use so much of it so frivolously. He cleaned with rubbing dust. Most people did, if they cleaned at all. Some just covered their stench with powders and scents. God he missed baths.
“How do you think it felt?” Jacobi asked him.
“Wet,” he grumbled. He hadn’t missed them until the hacker had brought them up.
“In the settlements to the west and east, the ones beside the wide waters, I’ve found people whose skin is dry as scales and colored oddly because of the water. Human people, not Angels, they swim in it, can’t resist it. Even though it isn’t potable, they almost worship it. They have Network ports, some of them, did you know that?”
Before Enoch could respond, the babble continued. “Of course you know that. You’re the one who makes the Network work. Why do you think they don’t just program clean water to swim in, in the Network?”
“Not everyone has the skills to make full and brand new systems like that, the ones that do might not have the experience or memories to program it correctly,” Enoch imagined. “And how did you decide that I was the one keeping the Network?”
Jacobi’s face (face’s?) looked nonplussed. “Was it a secret? I didn’t realize. Once you gave me the passcode for the shop, it was easy to run a probabilities program and factor in your previous actions and defenses, the set-up of the shop itself and your reactions to external stimuli to come up with likely codes and access points for the rest of your system. The use of random choices made it a bit difficult, but even something thought of at random is something thought of, so although it took a little longer than I had imagined…”
“How long did it take you?” Enoch demanded calmly, forcibly tamping down the shock and irritation he was feeling.
“Almost ten hours.”
Ten hours. His entire system in ten hours from one passcode, one sexual experience, and less than a day of interaction, Enoch was annoyed. He wasn’t sure who annoyed him more, himself or the happy hacker. The happy hacker’s face was still shifting and Enoch kept flashing back to the rape, the many faces looking down on him. In his mind the Angels face slipped in and out of the moving mask, jeering at him. “Would you just pick a face and stick with it!”
“Huh?” Jacobi looked confused.
“Your face…” Enoch glanced up to the blond, winded man in the stained glass window behind the hacker. “See that picture?” he gestured. “Use that face.”
Jacobi turned and studied the image momentarily, when he turned back, the shifting had finally stopped. His hair was blond, and fell in waves and curls around the perfect shells of his ears. His lips were a pale peach, full and pouting. His alabaster skin made wide blue eyes look even darker than their true color, the shade of the deep ocean waters from the Once World. His cheekbones were high, nose aquiline and face a delicate oval sitting upon a long graceful neck. Adding in the long limbs and pure white clothing and he might actually have been an angel, a real one, from the Once World. Also, with the off-putting mask gone, Enoch was free to examine the very lovely body it had topped. This might have been a bad choice. Enoch admitted to himself and shifted uncomfortably as his body responded.
“Those Angels probably took out that settlement on Man’s Road too.”
As thrown as he had been by the suddenly very beautiful hacker before him, he had trouble follow
ing the transition. The rapid-fire shifts in topic would have been difficult for Enoch to follow on a good day. He generally didn’t hold conversations that weren’t meant to lead somewhere specific.
“After all,” Jacobi continued, “the route from the north would have put them right past it and Man’s Road is more heavily guarded in the north, so that would have been nothing to them. They probably originated near Wall 1 and the Land of Lakes from their clothing and cycs. I wonder why they traveled so far from the good hunting grounds.”
“Because they aren’t good anymore,” Enoch interjected. “You were the voice from the settlement too.”
“Mhmm,” the hacker confirmed. “How did you think I tracked you down? The women and children got away. They headed out by foot toward the next settlement. Sentries will have helped them.
Or taken care of them out in the Waste away from electronic eyes and saved themselves the trouble of relocation. Enoch didn’t put voice to the thought. Jacobi seemed to carry the belief that people were good and decent creatures. He himself had outgrown such fairytale notions all too long ago.
“So what are we going to do?” Jacobi asked.
“I am going to stay here long enough to allow the worst of the pain of healing to pass, then I will dose myself, clean up the bodies and mess, reset the traps and repair that transport…again.” He listed, confused as to why he was being asked. “I’m not sure what to do about the girl, now that she realizes I’m an Angel and has seen the lake, I can’t just send her on her way.”
“She said the Angel’s killed her people, so she has nowhere else to go. We could keep her! She can’t require too much care, a few meals here and there, maybe some new toys for her to play with. OOH!!! Do you think she can learn to do stuff like—”
Enoch stared at the hyperactive man in consternation. “She is not a pet.”
“What’s a pet?” Jacobi shook his head and pressed on completely ignoring any answer Enoch might have given. Since I was about to say auxiliary food source, that might be for the best. With his random leaps of logic he might decide I’m a cannibal. “I meant what are we going to do about the north?”
