by eden Hudson
I checked the time on my wristpiece. Just after dawn, local time. I’d gotten more than six hours of uninterrupted sleep.
I got up, threw off the clothes I’d fallen asleep in, and pulled on two pairs of socks, clean shorts, an undershirt, thermal pants and a matching thermal shirt, then capped it all off with a festive blue-and-orange tourist shirt and khakis.
Core temperature sufficiently protected, I laid out my snow pants and heavy coats, then sorted the rest of my clothes back into the appropriate compartments of my bag. When that was done, I carried it out to the common area and tossed it onto the couch. The sizzle of a frying pan and the smell of ham and eggs dragged me into the kitchen by my taste buds.
Carina was leaning against the sink, drinking a cup of the station’s freeze-dried coffee substitute and watching her erstwhile bunkmate cook us breakfast.
“It’s been proven that subzero tents can’t stand up to blizzards like ours,” Farrelli said as she stirred the eggs. She wasn’t in nearly as good a mood this morning as she’d been the night before, probably due to sexual frustration that Carina had refused to help her work out. “Rated for north pole weather, they are, not south. The nightly blizzard here consistently drops a foot and a half of snow. Tents’ nanoskeleton’ll crumble under the weight and crush you both.”
A Carina-nod. “We’re planning to dig down into the snow each night to set up camp, use the pack to our advantage.”
“You’ll suffocate,” Farrelli said.
“That’s a good point. We’ll install our ventilation pipes with a two-foot gap instead of flush with the surface and check them for clogs every half hour.” As Carina spoke, her green eyes caught mine behind Farrelli’s back, and she flashed me a tickled smile.
A sudden influx of energy zigzagged up and down my spine. I had to shake out my shoulders to expend some of it. The faraway sound of two little kids’ high-pitched giggling rang in my head. Carina wanted me to see that she was playing with Farrelli, laughing with me at the petty concerns of mere mortals. That old familiar poisoned knife stung as it slipped into my gut, but I held on to the feeling for all I was worth.
“Morning all,” Man Bun Bly said, squeezing through the crowd to grab a cup of lies from the percolator. He glanced from Carina and me to Farrelli’s unnecessarily harsh treatment of the eggs in the pan. “Still dead set on going looking for this ancient ruin?”
“‘Dead’ being the operative word,” Farrelli groused.
“We don’t plan to get greedy,” Carina said. “Seven hours a day hiking, one setting up camp, sixteen riding out that blizzard pattern.”
Farrelli rolled her eyes. “Oh, no one’s ever thought of being cautious before!”
“Go teach your grandmother to suck cocks,” I told her. “And on your way, slop those eggs onto a plate so we can gag them down. They’ve taken enough abuse.”
Man Bun gaped at me over his cup, clearly not a fan of constructive criticism.
“Please ignore my partner,” Carina said. “And please feel free not to feed him. He was born with a very rare speech impediment that makes him sound like an asshole.”
At the stove, Farrelli snorted. A second later, she was full-on belly laughing again.
“Ah, you two,” she said, shaking her head. “Cards to the end. Going to be far too quiet around here without you.”
***
We were still at the table shoveling down our poor, mistreated ham and eggs when a feeling like warm hands closed over my ears.
I looked up.
Across the table, Carina was searching for the source of the change as well. She was about to open her mouth when I said, “It stopped.”
I’d gotten so used to the howling of the blizzard overnight that its absence had surprised me. The wind had cut off completely, not died down or faded away. One second it was there, the next it was gone.
Man Bun checked his wristpiece. “Six-oh-nine. Right on time. Blizzard made it to the end of the line.”
I stared at him until he realized how stupid he sounded and ducked his head to study his plate.
“It stops at six-oh-nine every day?” I asked Farrelli.
Farrelli swallowed the bite in her mouth, then said, “Could set your wristpiece timer by it.”
“Then we need to get out the door,” I said, standing up. “We’re burning clear skies.”
Carina nodded, wiping her mouth, then piling her napkin and fork onto her plate. She picked them up as she stood.
“Thank you both for your hospitality and advice on the area,” she said, turning a look of earnest gratitude to each of them in turn. “They’ve been immeasurably valuable, even for those of us who don’t know how to say thank you.”
That got Farrelli chuckling again, and Man Bun smiled.
When Carina and I had finished bundling up in additional layers and shouldering our baggage, Farrelli and Man Bun saw us to the foot of the stairs. They shook our hands, gripping them a little too tightly for a little too long, as if that might be what finally convinced us not to go out into the cold. As we climbed the steps to the entryway, they turned away like they couldn’t stand to watch.
I grinned. They could pre-mourn all they wanted. They’d never seen a team like Carina and me come through this station before, and after we came through on our way back from the Garden of Time, they never would again.
THIRTEEN:
Nick
Nick wadded up the sketchy schematic he’d been working on, then stopped himself. This wasn’t the Guild’s machine shop, where he could swipe away the screen and start over with a new one. The witch had given him a finite pile of papers to work with. Most of them looked secondhand, as if they’d been pulled out of the trash behind a walk-in-walk-out food joint, grease-stained and with order numbers scrawled on one side. If he used all these up, there might not be any more coming.
He unwadded the paper, smoothed it out, and started drawing again on the other side.
At first, he tried to ignore the wide greasy spot near the corner, but the more into the work he got, the less trivial things like grease mattered and the more getting this suit right consumed him. Not only because of the compulsion—that churned inside of his head like a toxic waste spill, polluting every corner and killing off every thought not related to perfecting the Tect’s suit—but also because he got tunnel vision when he was working, and it was so easy to let that habitual single-mindedness take over now.
The armor needed to withstand both small and large projectiles as well as chain-bladed weapons. Mechanizing and articulating the whole thing wasn’t a problem; he’d done that with the recon knights’ armor. Making something new that put the recon mech armor to shame, though, was going to be harder. He thought he could keep the exoskeleton format, then somehow remove the bulky engine pack from the back. If he could refine the engine, sort of stretch its components over the length of the suit, build the exoskeleton out of twin hulls, and sandwich the components between the inner and outer hull… The trick would be protecting the whole setup against blunt forces that might crush the hulls together and damage the mechanisms inside.
From inside the witch’s little shack, Nick heard the Tect ask, “All of them?”
“I want every bit of that First Earth steel melted down’n reformed into poly,” Re Suli said. “Why, is gettin’ all yer faithful rounded up gonna be too hard on the great cyborgcromancer herself?”
Nick paused mid-sketch. The Tect was a cyborgcromancer? She wasn’t a half-metal, half-corpse cyborg animated by a cyborgcromancer?
If the Tect was a cyborgcromancer, then Nick was willing to bet she somehow used her magic to control the frame she was mounted on to achieve movement, using a network of wires to relay the signals for motion, the way motor neurons would in the muscles of a person who wasn’t paralyzed.
“Where at?” the Tect asked.
“Back to the plant,” Re Suli said. “He’ll know how to use the machines there better’n we do.”
“I know how to use—”
“You don’t know shit, Sol.” The witch’s sweet tone grated against her hateful words. “You might be able to do the magickin’ like nobody’s business, but you just leave the know-how to the folks who got it.”
The Tect didn’t respond. Nick had already gone back to sketching when the witch spoke up again.
“Best suck that lip in afore I snatch it offa yer face, kiddo,” Re Suli said. “You might be the hot-shot hometown prodigy, but you go gettin’ a Self-Made God Complex, and I’ll throw you on the scrap heap to rust and find me ten more little brats just like you who know how to respect their elders.” The witch’s voice rose a few decibels and gained saw teeth. “You hear me, girl?”
“I hear you,” the Tect said.
“Good,” the witch said, back to sounding sweet and loving. “Now, cheer up. When my ace in the hole out there gets done puttin’ yer new suit together, you’re gonna be movin’ like you ain’t done since you was a little thang.”
The compulsion pulled Nick’s focus back to the paper. Apparently, it had allowed him to hear all it wanted him to.
FOURTEEN:
Jubal
Out on the ice cap, the gray-white sky was nearly the same color as the snow the blizzard had dropped, so once we lost sight of the dispatch station, and the dark line of ocean disappeared behind a hill, Carina and I had to check our nav apps over and over again to make sure we were still heading the right direction.
According to the First Earth coordinates I’d translated, we had at least a seventeen-mile hike ahead. In theory, two healthy people in the prime of their lives could make the trek over this terrain in three days and begin searching the target area for the Garden of Time. Calculating the times and distances from the comfort of a warm bed, however, was a world away from struggling through the snow on the planned course. Although the blizzard had stopped, a razor of cold wind sliced through our biothermal protection and blew ice chips at the exposed bits of our faces. Our cheeks were chapped raw before we’d gone a mile. If we hadn’t been wearing goggles, it might’ve been a toss-up as to whether the flying ice splinters or the freezing wind would blind us first.
For the first hundred yards after leaving the dispatch station, we had tried walking on top of the snow, but every step we took broke through the crust that had developed and dropped us knee-deep in powder. Finally, Carina took out her ice ax and started chopping the crust in front of her, so rather than expending more energy stepping up and breaking through, and risking mechanical injury with every step, all we had to do was slog through the looser snow below.
After about an hour of that, Carina called over her shoulder to me, “We could take turns breaking trail, you know.”
“Don’t sweat it,” I yelled back. “You’re doing great.”
She shook her head. “Ten more minutes—and we’re switching.”
The physical exertion broke our sentences into bite-sized chunks expelled between gulps of oxygen, so sweet, but so cold.
“I can’t—break trail—Carina—I’m terminally ill. Why do you—think—I brought you on this—mission? You’re the muscle.”
“You brought me because you—can’t stand to have me—out of your sight,” she said, the icy wind snatching the puffs of steam away from her words. “I might pay attention—to someone else.”
“Puh-lease! You’d spend—the whole—time I was gone—pining—for me.”
She gave a short laugh, but didn’t waste her breath on lying. There was too much work to do.
Even the breaks were strenuous. We couldn’t stay still for more than a few minutes at one time because the cold trickled through the layers of boots, socks, and mittens, deadening the nerves in our hands and feet. Add to this the fact that our state-of-the-art Dri-Bones thermals drew off the sweat and dried it immediately—which prevented us from freezing, but couldn’t protect our bodies from overheating, which caused even more sweat to run, drawing away even more moisture—and dehydration became a very real health concern.
Whenever one of us needed to rest, we dropped on our asses in the ditch our hiking had made, dug the Hi-Alt/Lo-Temp Hydration tubing from inside our hoods, and sucked warm water from the bladders belted against our waists at the innermost layer of clothing. When the breaks ended, we detached the bladders, shoveled more snow into them, tossed in a purification tablet, and reattached the whole apparatus so it could be melting for our next break. When we got hungry—which was often because of the constant calorie burn—we popped Qal-O-Run bars and Restock/Reload/Replenish supplements.
Hiking would’ve been a lot less tedious if I could’ve spent it poking sticks at Carina and dancing out of the way of her return swipes, but after that first hour there was no talking. I might be gorgeous, but even before the beautiful corpse had started ravaging my body, slowly crystalizing my cells into tiny jewel-like calcifications, I hadn’t been in peak physical condition. As we trudged along, I promised myself that when this was over I would finally start that exercise regimen. I would have all the time in the world once I found the cure for PCM; I could afford to waste a little of it getting into better shape.
The memory of Carina grabbing my upper arm to test the muscle way back when she’d first realized I had the plague flitted through my mind. I could picture her hyper-focused green eyes admiring me openly, her hands reaching out to trace the hard lines of my body. It almost wasn’t fair to her to make myself more beautiful.
I raised my eyes from the trail to Carina’s back. She swung her ice ax at the glittering crust. It crunched through. She waded forward a step, swung again, the crust crunched again, she waded again. Her rhythm had slowed down significantly since we’d started, and she was favoring her left leg. Almost more pronounced than a limp. The endless slog was taking a toll.
Here she was, the great and terrible Bloodslinger—supposedly the epitome of Guild physical training and DNA engineering—and a little hike across an ice cap was wearing her out. I filed that away to make fun of her for later.
Then I grabbed her arm and pulled her back. She looked the question at me, but I ignored it. I didn’t have the energy to waste talking. I took out my ice ax, got out in front, and started breaking trail.
***
My wristpiece alarm started beeping seconds before Carina’s did. We dropped where we stood. At some point during the day, the muscles in my arms and legs had gone from On Fire to For the Love of Dry Land, Save Me!, waved as that passed, and settled firmly in the realm of OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD.
“You set yours late,” I wheezed, dismissing my alarm.
She shrugged and did the same, then dug out her hydration tubing for a drink.
Before we left the dispatch station that morning, we’d set our timers for seven hours’ solid hiking. That left us one hour to dig a snow cave and pitch our tent inside before the daily blizzard started.
For the moment, though, neither of us moved. My heartbeat throbbed so hard that everything in my field of vision jumped in time with my pulse. I shut my eyes and took a drink while I waited for it to calm down.
I didn’t realize I’d dozed off until Carina shook me awake.
“Time to start on the shelter,” she said. “Get that done, then we can rest.”
I growled something that even I couldn’t understand, but grabbed the ax out of her hand and rolled up onto my knees.
In the leeward side of our channel, I started chopping at the hard-packed snow below the crust and powder. Carina joined in with a collapsible snow scoop. We piled the excavated snow around the entrance, just like the articles had said to do, and after a while, we had a cavern big enough for our tent to fit inside. While Carina went to work reinforcing the walls and ceiling, I dug a cold well in the center of the floor for the most frigid air to sink into. When that was done, I drove the ventilation piping up through the ceiling. Carina checked that there was enough pipe aboveground to ensure that the nightly snowfall wouldn’t cover our vent. Belowground, I popped up our tent.
My arms shook as I cra
wled inside and unrolled the ThinSuL8 subzero inflatable mattress that would keep the snow beneath me from sucking the heat out of my body while I slept. I just barely managed to wait until the whole thing inflated before flopping onto it.
Either an hour or a few minutes later, I heard Carina’s mattress inflating off to my right. I didn’t open my eyes. She said something about setting alarms to make sure the pipe hadn’t clogged, but her words slid away, meaningless. I was gone.
***
Screaming. My father must not have shut the door to the Guest Room all the way.
I reached up to pull my pillow over my head so I could go back to sleep, but my fingertips sleeeeed across synthetic fabric stretched over a hard surface.
“You’re awake,” Carmelita said. “Are you hungry, sweetheart?”
I opened my eyes, expecting to see her smiling down at me, arms open, trying to entice me into a hug. But I wouldn’t let her kindness and snuggling distract me this time; I would tell her that she had to leave my father. Couldn’t she hear that screaming? That was all she had to look forward to if she didn’t run now.
Instead of Carmelita’s face, I saw the inside of a synthetic womb, illuminated by the glow of a wristpiece light. From her side of the tent, Carina watched me.
I grinned and scrubbed my hands across my face. My three-day growth of beard rasped against the backdrop of the blizzard’s screaming. I must be starting to look like one disgustingly handsome hungry bullwolf.
“You called me sweetheart,” I said.
“No, I didn’t,” Carina said. “I asked if you were hungry.”
“I heard you.”
“I said, ‘You’re awake. Are you hungry, Van Zandt?’ Nothing else.”
“Okay,” I said, making it obvious by my tone that I didn’t believe her.
“Maybe you were dreaming.”
“Maybe you’re changing the subject.”
“I think it’s more likely that you only hear what you want to hear,” she said. “Are you hungry or not?”
