The Seeds of Winter

by A. W. Cross

  “Ailith? Ailith, we have to go.” Tor’s voice swelled with adrenaline. He sounded far away, as though we were underwater. His hands lifted me up.

  Focus. My legs didn’t seem to be working.

  Tor gathered me up in his arms. His heart hammered against his ribcage, the way it did when I touched him. It seemed so long ago.

  I need to tell him about his heart, so he can remember. Instead, I rested my head on his shoulder.

  He carried me through an opening in the wall of wires. He hadn’t needed much effort to bend them, after all. I was glad. He might’ve hurt his hands. But I would’ve taken care of him. I could’ve kissed his hands and told him…

  I can’t remember.

  The Saints of Loving Grace lay on the ground, many with blood leaking from their ears.

  The sun burned brightly in my eyes. I will describe it to Tor one day. He hasn’t seen the sun for years. It will be my gift to him.

  Pax and Oliver supported Cindra between them. Oliver’s eyes darted back and forth as we made our way through the village, landing at last on the crumpled form of a woman. Celeste. He dropped Cindra’s arm and walked over to her. As he stood gazing down at her, fear for her curled up my spine.

  One of his legs swept back. But, after a backward glance at Cindra, he instead knelt by her side and pushed the hair off her cheek. He whispered something to her, the muscles in his neck twisting under the skin. Cindra smiled sympathetically at him and turned her head to speak to Pax. Oliver stood and crushed Celeste’s hand under the heel of his boot.

  “Are they dead?” I asked Tor.

  “No, they’re unconscious. They’ll wake up in a few hours. We’ll be far gone from them by then.” His voice was low, soothing.

  “How did we escape? Did I stop the electricity?”

  “You didn’t need to. Don’t you remember? They’d just turned off the power and opened the door to lead us out. Your timing couldn’t have been better. The blast hit us all pretty hard, even though we were prepared for it. Luckily, Pax was right and it didn’t affect us too badly. Did you know it wouldn’t?”

  “No. But…”

  “I mean, I felt different right before it hit us, but it seemed to…roll over us somehow. Must be the nanites. I wonder if they foresaw all this when they made us, eh?”

  “Did it survive?”

  “Who?”

  “It. The…amplifier.”

  “Well, no. The release of the sonic pulse pretty much obliterated it. But that was your intention, right? Besides, what does it matter? It’s a machine.”

  “It helped me, at the end. Helped me.” I began to cry.

  Tor shushed and stroked, but I couldn’t explain this new emptiness inside me, another loss.

  “Where will we go?” Tor asked Pax. He’d given up trying to get any sense out of me.

  Pax seemed surprised, as though the answer was obvious. “Home,” he said. “We’ll go home.”

  Love is a strange thing, Omega. How can anyone ever say that it is real? Or that if it is real in one moment, but not in the next, whether it ever truly existed?

  Love is something we use to define our humanity. Like humans, love dies, but it does not simply cease to exist. Love dies because it grows old. Its death comes from neglect, from darkness, from contempt. It suffocates under fear and suspicion. It disappears incompletely, leaving its ghost behind. The lucky ones, they can forget, move on, fill the haunted space with something good.

  For some, it refuses to die. It festers, and teases, and tempts, succumbs to self-loathing and hope. They used to say there was a fine line between love and hate, a knife’s edge on which few can balance. Their love was like that, Omega. Born out of salted earth, there was nowhere for it to grow. And yet it did. Imperfectly and bitterly, but deeply rooted nonetheless.

  —Cindra, Letter to Omega

  The pain still throbbed in my freshly-healed chest. It was difficult for me to move quietly. All my new-found grace seemed to have drained away along with the blood I’d lost. I stepped down hard into a dip in the ground, nearly losing my balance. The jolt sent a wave of nausea through me, teaming up with the ache in my chest to make me breathless.

  I wasn’t sure what hurt worse: the bullets that had slowly pushed out of my chest, or her betrayal.

  It wasn’t like I’d never killed before. But this was supposed to be my fresh start, my do-over. I was back to where I’d started, a puppet.

  It wasn’t the same. It had been an accident, but that was what disturbed me most about what had happened. It would’ve been different if she’d done it on purpose, if she’d intentionally controlled me. But I couldn’t stop her, and she couldn’t stop herself.

  Thinking about it made my spine ache. When I’d killed before, it had taken days of planning, a hunt executed with precision. Each time had been a struggle, a success hard-bought. Not this. This was effortless, bones snapping between my fingers like kindling. I had no idea I was so powerful. My fingers ground against each other at the memory. It had been so easy.

  Worse, a small part of me had liked it. That kind of power was intoxicating, how God must feel. Maybe the Terrans were right when they protested our existence. It made sense that I was stronger than before, but why this much strength? And Pax and Ailith, what was the purpose of their abilities? They were too intense, too specific.

  We’d been lied to.

  I’d also lied. I’d told her I wouldn’t leave her. I had feelings for her, more than I wanted to admit to either of us. But I didn’t know if they were real, or something else programmed into me.

  They were out of sight now. I was far enough away that I could relax, get my head straight. Or so I believed.

  Something in my mind began to tear, a sharp sting at the back of my skull. Vomit rose in my throat as pressure squeezed my brain.

  Someone pulled on my strings.

  My knees hit the ground, hard, the pressure growing until my brain threatened to burst. Something wet trickled down my face.

  I started crawling.

  In the wrong direction.

  Back to the campsite. Back to her. I had to save her. Despite everything, I wouldn’t let anything hurt her.

  The pain receded as I got closer. Everyone still slept. For now, we were safe.

  It was her. When I reached out and touched her, the pain disappeared. She was having a nightmare, her fingers knotted up in her blanket.

  Please, don’t let my suspicions be true.

  I walked a few yards away from her, bracing myself for the pain. Nothing.

  I’m a fool.

  I readjusted my pack and struck out the way I’d come. Within minutes, I was again on my knees, scrabbling in the dirt.

  I couldn’t leave. I was tied to her. I suspected we all were. Our bodies, anyway.

  The only way to save myself now was not to love her. Not to want her. To ignore the ache in my chest whenever I looked at her. Forget the taste of her, her rain-and-earth scent.

  Would I eventually have the strength to free myself? I hadn’t before, not directly. I hadn’t been able to kill my puppet-master then, but maybe I could now.

  “…Things are not going well here. Actually, that’s an understatement. We’ve lost two of them already, and the third is touch and go. I don’t understand what went wrong. Was it the programming? The war? We’d thought they were getting better. I don’t think Lexa will ever get over it. I’m not glad it happened, but at least now she’s starting to see: we’ve created something we can’t control. No sign yet of the others. Perhaps they’re dead as well. Maybe it’s for the best. Maybe, after everything we’ve done, it’s what we deserve...”

  —Mil Cothi, personal journal; June 15th, 2045

  She wasn’t what I—or they, for that matter—expected. She was the translucent wings of a dragonfly, the gossamer strands of a spider web. She was only now becoming. By the end, she would be lightning, an earthquake, the sun.

  She’d known I was following them. She’d known for a long time.
She’d spoken to me, although she didn’t think I heard her. Her voice was a caress that made me stand taller.

  She’d told him about me. He suspected I might be bad. Perhaps he was right. He was wild and secret, a mist on the water, the shadow of a great tree. And something else, something I didn’t yet understand. I wanted to be between them, for them to touch me. I didn’t think I would mind.

  I’d stood guard over the pyre, the way she’d wanted me to. I’d given them that, at least, although I’d wanted to do more.

  I’d been there when they met the Terrans. A tightness had gripped my chest, like the time I accidentally wore Stella’s shirt. A scream had risen in my throat, forcing itself out of my mouth before I could stop it. My lack of control over it had thrilled me.

  And later, I’d wrapped myself around her, holding her steady to save them all.

  I wished to go to them now and introduce myself. But the time would come for that later. If I spoke to them now, I would give the game away. I needed to get back. The others may have begun to distrust me. Ethan already did. He had never trusted me, which was ironic. They’d stopped telling me their plans. Lien pretended they had no plans, that our group was honest. We were not.

  But I also wasn’t who they’d planned for me to be. I was making my own plans.

  I wanted to warn Ailith that everything was not as it seemed. But if I did, I might disrupt the path. And it was already tenuous.

  I’d gotten some of her hair. It had caught on a branch as she walked by. It was my insurance policy. It smelled of smoke and salt, and her fragrance of soaked earth. Ailith.

  They were so close to home, so much closer than they knew.

  When they arrived, we’d begin.

  Thank you for reading The Seeds of Winter. I hope you enjoyed the beginning of the journey as much as I enjoyed writing it.

  The story of Ailith and the Pantheon Modern cyborgs continues in The Gardener of Man (Artilect War Book 2). Turn the page for your preview!

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  PREVIEW

  I suppose that what happened to us could be told in the story of Frankenstein. Do you remember that story? It’s not one of mine. Victor Frankenstein was a young man, who, like many others of his time and ours, witnessed those he loved sicken and die. His grief over the tenuousness of human life was devastating, as it was to us, and his mind turned toward alchemy and immortality to ease the sorrow of the human condition. And like the scientists in our time, Victor discovered the secret of life.

  —Cindra, Letter to Omega

  The dream changed when I changed. When I became. The green grass of the emerald sea decayed and fell to a wasteland, an endless graveyard of what we once were. I stumbled over the others who lay beneath me as I ran, the splinters of their bones opening the soles of my feet.

  I was no longer a child. No longer even human. Everything that had once held me together now swarmed: my bones, my skin, my flesh, my blood; I was undone. My hands-that-were-no-longer-hands were empty, my kite gone. I mourned its loss as the pieces of me ran toward the tree at the center of the barren earth.

  It still lived, though only a single green leaf remained. He stood at the base of the trunk, waiting. As always. Only, this time, he wasn’t expecting me. Instead, he anticipated the end. His end. Ours had already come, and he no longer saw me.

  His face wasn’t as I remembered it. He’d covered it with metal, and his mouth, once mournful, was gone. I reached out to trace the lines where his markings should’ve been, but I wasn’t present enough; neither of us felt the other anymore. Only when he raised his hand in farewell did we finally meet, the fragments of me embedding in his new skin.

  Something moved in the corner of my eye, distracting me, and when I looked back, he was gone. He’d taken the splinters of me with him; he’d never forget, and he would return. Always.

  I found my kite at last, propped up against the withering trunk of the tree. He was still a man, but not a man, his featureless face bowed to the ground. His skin was no longer smooth and shiny, and the silver ribbons that had streamed behind us like shooting stars as we’d run were gone, crumbled into dust.

  I took hold of him, to see if, after all this time, he could still fly. What remained of my hand touched a chest that moved, a chest that was warm. As the ghost of my fingers spread over his beating heart, he lifted his head and opened his eyes.

  With every pulse of his heart, my flesh knitted, and, finally, I knew pain again. I cried out, but all that came was a flood of tiny machines. They flowed from my mouth into his, and I was restored.

  At the base of the dying tree, a seed took root.

  They’ve finally come home. Five of them, it seems. We’d almost lost hope. To be safe, I will implement protocol Alpha-6. Only then can we bring them in. I’ve told Lexa not to expect too much, that we have no idea what they’ve become, but she won’t listen. Even now, she’s in the kitchen, rifling through rations, trying to find treats with which to spoil her children.

  —Mil Cothi, personal journal; June 23, 2045

  “Does it change the future if I do this?” Oliver asked, kicking a rock into the deadfall at the side of the path. He snapped a dry branch off a nearby tree, the crack echoing through the woods like gunshot. “What about this?”

  “Oliver, don’t you have anything better to do? Or is being an asshole the only thing on your agenda today?” I asked. He’d been taking jabs at Pax ever since we’d broken camp—only twenty minutes ago, but I was surprised it had taken even that long. Oliver’s obnoxiousness was a finely-honed skill.

  He laughed. “Just trying to figure out how this ‘future-path’ thing works. I mean, God forbid I be the one to finally end the world.”

  “Well, you’ve already given it a damn good try,” a deep voice growled behind me. Tor. He trailed after the rest of us, ostensibly to keep watch. The real reason was more complex.

  Our relationship was complicated. We had strong feelings for one another, but we were linked by a bond we hadn’t chosen and didn’t yet understand. This bond gave me power over Tor, and had made trust between us difficult. He’d even tried to leave a few nights ago, stealing away in the dark as I’d slept. But whatever bound us together had stopped him, incapacitating him as he’d crossed some imaginary threshold.

  I knew this, because I thought what he thought, saw what he saw. Felt what he felt. My mind was connected to his, and to each of the others. It was my ability, manifesting when I became a cyborg. Tor’s was physical power. Pax calculated the future from the present. Oliver was annoying. The fifth member of our little group, Cindra, had yet to discover hers.

  Oliver raised his hands in surrender. “Hey, I was happy where I was. If you and your puppet master had left me alone…well, let’s just say that certain events could’ve been avoided.”

  Tor stepped toward him, his hands curling into fists at his sides. The tattoos on his face contorted, and Oliver took a step back.

  “Oliver! Can you come help me, please? My pack feels unbalanced.”

  I mouthed a silent thank you to Cindra as Oliver smirked at Tor one last time and sauntered over to her. She winked at me then flashed Oliver her blinding smile. How she could stand him was beyond me.

  Of course, her history with Oliver wasn’t quite as checkered as mine. He’d sworn a vendetta against Tor and me for destroying his godhood—a godhood he’d achieved only thro
ugh deception, but to him, that was a minor detail.

  “Tor? Are you okay?”

  He’d already turned away, his shoulders stiff.

  We were all on edge. And why wouldn’t we be? We’d woken up five years after the end of the world, nearly been executed, and were now living rough as we followed a mysterious signal to god-only-knew-where.

  Fingers tugged on my sleeve, bringing me back to the present.

  “Are you okay, Ailith?” Pax asked.

  “Not really. Are you?” On the outside, Pax seemed fine. His coppery hair was unkempt, and he had dirt on his chin, but he showed no physical signs of the torture he and Cindra had endured at the hands of the Terrans.

  “Yes. I mean, I think so.”

  “Pax, after what happened, don’t you feel…I don’t know, anything? Regret? Sadness? Anything?”

  He scratched his nose, smearing more dirt across the bridge. “I’m sorry about what happened. I didn’t want it to happen, but it had to. I—” For a moment, he looked lost, his jet-black eyes wide. “If I let myself feel bad about it, I won’t be able to keep us moving forward.” He put a hand over his heart, pulling on the fabric of his coat. “I’m sorry.” Pax had known we would massacre the Terrans, had even contrived to make it happen. It had, he assured me, been crucial to keeping us on a path that would prevent a terrible future.

  I tugged his hand from where it plucked at his coat and squeezed his fingers. “No, Pax, don’t be. We’re all…we’re just trying to do our best, right?”

  “Except Oliver?”

  I punched him playfully on the arm. “Except Oliver.”

  “Ailith, can you see anything about where we’re going? I feel like we’re almost there.”