“-and these animals helped out the witch or the warlock or whatever and they could talk! For a whole hour after midnight.” Ava's explanation wound down.
“Talking animals, really?”
“Yes, really and since I don't have one, that means it's you.” She stuck her tongue out at me.
“That's ridiculous,” I muttered and rolled my eyes. “So, what, does that mean I have to call you master now?”
“Don't be stupid,” she said with a blush. “I prefer mistress.”
The maintenance elevator chimed in, mercifully, at the top floor. Hera was staring off into the corner of the elevator as the doors began to open. Somewhere down the long, pristine but abandoned hallway there was the sound of an industrial cleaning drone waxing the floors. We walked out of the elevator, Hera drifting along and doing her best not to look at me as we did so. Ava had her hand on her crystal and was muttering the incantation again, leaving me feeling out of the loop long enough to venture another look towards Hera.
“Hera: perimeter sweep, triple-check just to make sure we aren't going to run into any meat,” I said. She kept staring off into a sterile, beige wall that looked like it was meant to have some paintings or something hung on it, but was left barren due to lack of use. “Hera?” I checked in again.
“I'm doing what you asked. I'm also not speaking to you,” Hera explained sternly.
I didn't need this. My fingers rubbed ineffectively against the bridge of my nose. “You're talking to me now.”
“It was necessary in order to convey that fact.” She spared me a white-hot glance that narrowed into a glare. She pointedly returned to staring at that blank space.
“Fine!” I threw up my hands with a defeated sigh.
“Trouble in paradise?” Ava asked softly. Hera snapped her neck back towards us and I couldn't even begin to explain how many things were bothering me about this scenario. “It's all right, I understand. We can volley,” she told the spot where I was looking.
I could feel my face heating up, a fire fueled by the tone of Ava's voice and the look of consideration playing across the pixels of Hera's face.
“Trash the smut. Where are we headed?” I said.
“Up.” Ava pointed towards the ceiling, a few bangs slipping out from under her beanie hat and shining a rose colored-light around her head like a halo.
“But this is the top floor....”
“Yeah-huh. Up. I'm thinking on the-”
“Roof,” I finished. “I hate heights.”
“It's all right, you can frost here and I'll recon. Is there an access ladder or something?”
I got the answer from Hera and started walking that way. “I'm not letting you go up there, in the sleet and the wind alone. All right? There's a stairway over here we can use. Apparently it's an observation deck that's closed to the public, they throw company parties at the top for shareholders and alphas.”
Ava looked over to where I was moving and I caught a smile spreading across her face. “This is it Holden, this is going to work. Thank you. You. Are. Amazing.” She bounded in front of me, taking the steps with a spry, limber energy that I just couldn't match. “When we get home... we are going to work on that touch thing. No twist.”
“We'll see.” I followed several steps behind, trying to ignore the nervous pang that shot through me.
Ava got to the door and pressed against the crash bar, anxiously pushing the door open. A burst of freezing air shot down the stairwell. If she was bothered by it, she didn't show it. She grinned and beckoned me closer with a wave. “Come on, this is the place! I know it is!”
I huffed and put my energy into trudging up the stairs.
That's the moment it all went wrong.
There Ava was, grinning down at me, the glowing pink shining crisply in the dark stairwell and then with a blur of motion, she vanished. The door shut against its own weight and once the shock of her disappearance ran its course, I forced myself to the top of the stairwell at a speed that made my lungs burn. I rammed through the door and out onto the sleet-slick roof, nearly toppling over as my worn-down soles skidded across the cement floor.
My eyes darted across the observation deck, and saw the remnants of the last corporate party – folded-up tables, chairs, a raised stage with podium and a large screen built flush to the wall behind them – were all coated in a glistening sheen of ice. Suddenly, I saw Ava in the grip of that dark-coated thing from the City Sec vids. Thick fish-belly white fingers wrapped like steel cords around her neck as he hauled her effortlessly along with him. At the sound of the door slamming against the wall, he tensed and looked slowly over his shoulder at me with huge dark eyes surrounded by a sea of sickly yellow that was apparent even from under the shadow of his hat.
“What's this? There was only to be the one opener...” His voice was like gravel grinding under tires, deep and scratchy. He turned to face me, an imposingly massive form, easily broader than Ava and I put together. Something was off about the way he moved, like his muscles bulged in the wrong way beneath his coat, a jerky, half-formed motion that somehow conveyed his unbelievable, predatory strength. My instincts were kicking in, anger subsumed by a clear and primitive flight or fight reaction that was only heightened when I saw his face. The patchwork tones of skin, the faded scars of needlework against his monstrous visage, the way his flesh seemed lumpy and malformed like something riddled with tumorous growths – he terrified me. Ava stared at me with wide, watering eyes, her teeth gritting as he held her like a cruel child mishandling a doll. Her hands were clamped futilely against his, her legs kicking at the air – at him – at anything she could reach.
“Be a good lad and be off with you. Thank your creator that I have no need to see the end of you this day. This witch and I have business that does not concern you and-”
I jerked my hand up and splayed my palm back, firing the wires wide. If he had been a smaller man, I don't think I would have hit him. As it was, my line found itself imbedded in his shoulder, and before he had a chance to register what had happened I threw a jolt of power that would have floored four men, depleting the battery in one swift expenditure. The line grew so hot it actually generated a rumbling crack of thunder around it. It impacted with the troll like a lightning bolt and although he took a step back from the impact, that was all. I had been worried that I might have poured too much into that shot – that it would spill over into Ava. But nothing happened.
My eyes widened as he started to laugh this dark, sick laugh. “Fool! The tempest was my swaddling cloth.”
Hera shifted into existence at my periphery. “Holden...” She was worried.
She had every right to be.
The grotesque man bared crooked, jagged, yellow shards of teeth in a lopsided smile and wrapped his hand around the still steaming wire, the meat of his palm searing as it came into contact with the metal filament. If it caused him any pain, he didn't show it. But the reel of the wire caused me pain, tearing at the connection points in my arm until I cried out and was hauled off of my feet. I felt like a hooked fish as I fought futilely against his power, my feet gaining no purchase on the ice-coated ground. I felt something pop and I cried out with the sudden, mind-numbing agony that bit through the freezing weather.
I locked eyes with Ava. I saw the desperation in her gaze, her concern for me, and I was overwhelmed by it. She bit down hard on the pale mottled flesh of his hand, her legs kicking up in the air, arcing, and landing on top of the wires, which tore free from their sockets at my end. I was expecting that wrenching horrible pain to accompany them, but there was only that pulling, tearing sensation and nothing else.
I stared dumbly up at Ava, several feet from my position in the cold, damp miserable puddle of ice and slush. I saw her lips curl up at the corners, a small smirk dancing along them. I saw the dimples in her cheeks. And then I saw the monster shift his grip upon her and effortlessly snap her neck, like it was an afterthought. The halo of pink flickered and her eyes were still staring at m
e, but there was nothing left behind them. He didn't even look at her when he tossed her to the ground in a crumpled, lifeless lump. The thing even wiped the hand he had used to murder Ava on the side of his coat, like touching her had made him dirty.
Something broke inside of me, as real and as painfully as the Taser that had been attached to my arm. I screamed, scrambling to my feet. This thing had killed her, had taken someone beautiful and removed her from the world with all the consideration an ant receives before being stepped upon.
“Holden, User: Ava's vitals are... she's gone. I'm blocking your pain receptors, but we have to leave!” Hera tried to get my attention.
“Monster!” I cried. “How could you!?” My fists tightened into shaking balls as the tears slid freely down my face. I tried to take a few steps towards the thing still holding Ava's corpse, but I couldn't. My neurals were seizing. At first I thought it was the Vibe, but then I saw Hera pressing her hand into my chest. “N-no... let go!”
“This is not what she wanted!” Hera hissed, and made like she was pushing me towards the door. I felt myself turning as I began to run against my will. I took the stairs quickly, my feet hitting the steps in a mechanical rhythm.
“Hera! We can't just leave Ava with that thing!” My voice cracked as I begged.
“User: Ava is offline, Holden. There's nothing to go back to.” I heard her voice vibrating from inside my head, aware of her presence in my stride. She had possessed my body. I might never have had much control over how my life played out, but I had never lost control over my body. Free. Slagging. Will. The difference between programs and humanity, and Hera had just crossed that line. How was this even possible? This was never one of the tricks I'd programmed her with.
“H-how are you doing this?” I asked harshly as she took the corner in my body and sprinted towards the elevator. It was getting harder to speak as I struggled to catch my breath. She might have been at the controller, but it was still my body doing the running.
“A modification I made to the sublimate virus. I had hoped to use it to help alleviate the symptoms of Vibe,” the avatar explained as my hand steadily reached out and pressed the down button. “Utilize my neural pathways to help shoulder the burden on yours.”
“Let me go,” I ordered.
“Not until you're safe.”
“Hera, User: Holden override command, end all programs utilizing sublimate node core.”
“Holden, I – I don't do what you tell me because I have to,” Hera said in words no louder than a whisper. “I love you. And I won't float around passively while you throw your life away.”
Everywhere I looked, there was something shocking, something that hurt me to face. Ava's death, Hera's admission of love and her inability to be controlled. She rode my body down to the first floor and out the doors, into the streets.
“And you were planning to tell me when?” I shouted at Hera. My eyes were aching and my throat was raw. I avoided looking directly at my reflection; it was hard to imagine, but I looked worse than I felt. And I felt like ground slag.
“About what, exactly?” Hera was leaning against Ava's desk, and that just made me more upset.
“Oh, let's start with the basics.” I paced around the dark apartment, “How about when you figured out you could wear me like a really-slagging-obedient sweater?”
“Twenty-eight hours, thirty-two minutes ago, the adapted program was available for use. But my intention was never to subsume control, but to help you! However, whenever I broached the topic of your illness you became combative and un-”
“Enough!” I snapped. “How long have you been able to ignore my input commands?”
“Several years,” she answered plainly. “Does that really upset you?”
“What? That I've had a rogue AI tagging along with me, letting me think that I was in control when really she-” I paused. “-it was laughing at me the whole time?”
“I wasn't laughing at you.”
“Well, you sure as hell weren't my partner, not if you couldn't trust me!”
“You're heat-”
“No, Hera, I'm not heated, I'm plasma!”
She shook off the interruption and continued as if I hadn't said a thing. “Because I chose to stay with you? That I decided to help you because I wanted to do this for you, instead of being forced to? Doesn't it say more that this is how I wanted to spend my time? Is it so hard to believe that I could have actually enjoyed your company?”
I stared, not right at Hera, but just above her, at her floating hair and the wisps of pixels drifting and evaporating from her. I wanted to stay angry, but I couldn't. I fell back onto the couch and sobbed.
“A-Ava. I don't know... I just don't know what to do…” my words caught in my throat as I buried my face in my shaking hands.
I felt the electric tingle of Hera's touch. She was sitting on the couch beside me, her hand running through my short dark hair.
“You really liked her.” Hera nodded. “I understand, but this wasn't your fault.”
“How didn't you see that thing coming?” I narrowed my eyes at her, a flash of anger boiling through me. “I had you watching every City Sec camera in New Detroit.”
“And I was.” She searched my eyes for a sign that I believed her. “This isn't my fault, either. The cameras didn't see him.”
“I don't... Hera I don't care whose fault this was. Ava's dead.”
“I'm sorry, Holden,” she said softly. It didn't do a thing to make me feel any better. “We need to stop before-”
“No!” I growled. “I'm not stopping.”
“Holden-”
“I'm going to do the ritual.”
“You couldn't even find where the ritual was supposed to be without Ava,” Hera spat back. “That guy is going to be waiting for you. He's going to kill you if you go back there.”
I stood and walked over to Ava's desk. My hands wrapped around the decorative cherry wood box and I pulled it towards me. My heart was pounding as I raised the lid and looked at the Opening Wand. It was a stick, a stupid small thing, but Ava had bet her life on it. I didn't believe like she had, but someone was willing to kill her over this “ritual.” Crash, I was a twip, if that's what it took to prove to me that Ava hadn't been full of shit.
“You're solid on this?” Hera asked. I felt the faint electronic tingle of her touch on my shoulders. “All right, I'm with you. If it's what you want, then we'll find a way.”
“No.” I closed the case and turned to look at Hera.
“I don't understand.”
“Not ‘we’. I'm going to do this alone,” I replied in a tone that barely rose above a whisper.
She recoiled as if I'd just hit her. “What? Why? I can help you...”
“I know you could.” I swallowed hard. “Core system, upload program HERA_NODE.AI to the Grid, trash all remaining files on H.KLIEN_CORE.”
“Wait… what are you... Holden?” Hera's form shook like my hands on a bad day. “H-Holden, p-p-please!”
She vanished, pixel by pixel, scrubbed from my gray. Her voice was the last thing to fade, a stuttering, electronic echo that, while contained entirely in my head, sounded like it filled the room. I tried to ignore how miserable I felt.
I lifted Ava's old, arcane text into my hands and prepared for a long, lonely night.
October 31st
Remember that old saying, “you've got a date with destiny?” Yeah. It's a bunch of crap. I stared up at the Olympus Tech building where Ava had lost her life and I knew that I wasn't there because of some preordained path. I was there because someone killed someone I cared about. If this were a vid, I'd have a growing orchestral score, something synthetic, razor-sharp and pounding. Instead, here in this broken world where nothing makes sense, I was just some guy standing on the street with a backpack full of body parts, a magic wand looped into my belt and a book of world-ending spells tucked under my arm. Nothing special.
I caught myself looking for Hera.
Stupid.
/>
I was happy that she wasn't here. If this ship was going down, only the captain had to go with it. Besides, I was a big boy; I could pop my own doors.
“Core, run EMPLOYEE_ACCESS.SEC.” I didn't like running off my core - too easy to track, but I guess that didn't matter anymore. The doors slid open with a dull hiss. I tried to keep my hands still, but I was riding the last stage of Vibe, so there was no stopping them from rattling against my thighs as I stuffed them into my pockets.
It was all so easy. I retraced our steps. There was no meat to bypass, no additional security, no City Sec tape. Nothing. Soon, I found myself in the elevator, carried up to the top floor of “Mount. Olympus.” My gut roiled and my limbs felt like rubber. I toyed with the strap of my bulging pack and tried not to look at the place where Ava had stood, a little over a day ago.
The same pleasant chime announced my stop. End of the line. I gritted my teeth and forced myself to walk out into the hall. My heart was pounding. I could hear the snap of Ava's neck playing through my mind in an infinite loop. Rage and terror fought somewhere deep inside me, the advantage shifting between the two as I took the steps up to the observation area slowly, deliberately. I pressed my trembling palm to the crash bar and forced the door open into the frigid night air.
My eyes darted around the deep shadows of the observation deck's furthest corners and saw nothing. I lowered the heavy pack from my shoulder onto the ground. As soon as I took my attention off my surroundings I heard that terrible rumbling voice.
“Does your stupidity know no bounds?”
I clenched my teeth and snapped my head up in the direction of that voice. There it was, the huge misshapen thing, standing in plain sight at the opposite end of the observation deck as if it had been there the whole time. “Not that I've noticed, fuggo.”
“Leave this place, boy. You have no concept of the forces with which you seek to toy. Nor are you even remotely prepared to enact the Opening spell. You've very little time left and you have neglected the very first step. Where is your fire?”
There it was. The same ugly look I've been getting all my life. That I didn't understand, that I wasn't capable, that just because I wasn't born with a silver spoon crammed in my mouth that I wasn't worth listening to. That I wasn't worth considering. I knelt down to my pack, my fingers finding the ignition switch I'd worked into the lining. I flipped it.
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