by eden Hudson
“Nah, you can check it,” I said, pushing one of the splint-socks away from the screen of my wristpiece and offering my arm to her. “I haven’t been able to load a single naughty holo since we left the dispatch station.”
She saw that I was offering my wristpiece screen, and she shook her head as if she wasn’t that concerned about it.
“Guess we’re lucky nav apps rely on deep-core satellites instead of the laptic grid,” she said, crawling into the tent.
I followed her in, limp-crawling like a three-legged bullwolf. “What do you care, anyway? We’re on the track of the biggest score anybody’s ever made, Carina. This isn’t the time to be playing on your wristpiece. This is the time to focus.”
I braced my wrist, then flopped down on my mattress and shut my eyes, too tired to fight my way into the sleeping bag yet. I heard Carina’s hair whisper against the fabric of hers as she shook her head.
“I just wanted…” She trailed off.
I let my head fall to the side to face her. Even inside the tent, the glow of the cavern was bright enough to see her glaring up at the ceiling fabric, trying to look angry so the pain wouldn’t show.
“You wanted to see if Nick messaged you,” I said.
Heartbeats passed in silence. Then her hair whispered again as she nodded.
After a while, she asked, “You don’t know why he’s not answering me, do you?”
“It’s always just a matter of time with them, Carina,” I said. “They realize what we are, and they get scared. Or jealous. Or both. Personally, I don’t know why you bothered with him for so long.”
A Carina-pause.
Then, “I wanted something real.”
“And just what the balls am I?” I snapped. “Fake?”
She fixed me with a stare that looked almost clear in the dim blue-green lighting. “People like us can never be real.”
“Wrong,” I said, stabbing the index finger of my good hand at her face. “We are the only thing that’s real.”
Carina opened her mouth, but I didn’t get to hear what she said.
Fire rolled through my veins, not burning anymore, but purifying. Some higher spice—something that wasn’t rooted in taste and smell, but a combination of all my senses—filled my eyes and ears and mouth and skin.
When I came out of the fit, when disgusting cold flooded back in and those extra senses were locked away again, Carina was staring at me, waiting.
“What?” I asked.
She sighed and rolled onto her side. “Nothing.”
“What did you say? Tell me.”
“Goodnight, Van Zandt.”
I grabbed her shoulder. “I was having a PCM fit! I couldn’t hear you. Tell me what you said!”
Carina’s hand whipped out and closed around my broken wrist. She put just enough pressure on it that I could tell the grip was meant to warn, not injure, but it didn’t hurt like it should.
“I said goodnight.” Her voice was colder than the blizzard above. She dropped my wrist and turned back over to face the tent wall.
I flexed my fingers, open and shut. The stabbing pain that should’ve been there was not.
“It healed my wrist,” I said. I rolled my fist around a few times, then with my free hand, poked at the bones the fall had snapped. “Feels like a bruise… Carina, the PCM healed my broken wrist. It still hurts a little, but the bones aren’t broken anymore.”
She didn’t crane her neck to look at me, just asked the tent wall, “Is that a good thing or a bad sign?”
I lay awake for a long time trying to figure out the answer.
TWENTY:
Nick
Nick only knew the basics of ancient metallurgy, but from his explorations inside the First Earth factory, he gathered that the place was broken down into stations—one for iron-making, one for blowing oxygen through the pig iron and adding alloys, one for casting molten steel into sheets, one for fabricating and machining steel parts—all connected by a collection system for hazardous gasses. Not a whole lot different from the modern poly-alloying process, but with cruder tools.
It looked as if he’d have to use fire instead of electricity to melt the steel down, both because the place didn’t have anything resembling an arc furnace and because there was no power to the building.
Nick grabbed a thick chain connected to a rusted metal arm overhead that directed the movements of a giant pot for pouring molten metal. He gave it an experimental jerk. The arm screeched in its track. Nick put his weight into it, and the arm swung toward him, screeching every inch of the way.
“Awful screamy,” Het said. The chubby little guy was perched on the railing off to Nick’s right, covering his ears with his hands. Only one of his bare feet was hooked in the middle railing, keeping him from falling off backward.
Nick wanted to tell the kid to get his hands on the rail if he was going to sit up there—it was a twenty-foot drop to the factory floor—but the compulsion wouldn’t allow the words to form in his head, just forced him back to examining the machinery. With a few thousand gallons of RustMelt, this place could be operational even without electricity, but it would require a huge workforce to man it.
A little before dusk, it became clear that finding a workforce wasn’t going to be a problem.
Nick was giving his report to Re Suli when the Tects arrived. Most of that first wave scurried along on mechanical limbs. Some were just heads mounted on spidery or tentacular legs, like the Tect he and Carina had encountered in the burnt-out skinner village what felt like a hundred years ago. Others were full or partial torsos with extra arms and dozens of legs. A few had full bodies, but from what Nick could see, they used their metal legs for propulsion instead of their flesh ones.
The Tects flooded into the factory through the huge loading door that had been caved in by a fallen tree. Their legs clanked on the First Earth concrete as they darted across the factory floor toward the Tect cyborgcromancer, Sol. She opened her arms wide, hands hanging limp at the ends of her frame, as if to wrap every one of them in a dead-handed embrace.
As cyborgs filled the place, the stench of putrid decay rose to the staircase where Nick and the witch were standing. Nick gagged. The witch didn’t seem to notice.
“Don’t you worry ’bout them scrap heaps,” she told Nick. “Now, what were you sayin’ about the furnaces?”
“They’ll have to run at a constant of at least three thousand degrees to melt First Earth steel,” he said, trying to breathe through his mouth. That didn’t help much. He could taste their decomposing skin. He gagged again, thankful he didn’t have anything in his stomach to throw up, then soldiered on. “I didn’t find any major weaknesses in the first three, but—”
A wave of noise broadsided Nick. It was as if all the machinery below had spontaneously started up at once. Re Suli’s pale eyebrows drew down over her nose in a frown. She leaned over the railing and tried to shout an order down at the cyborgcromancer, but the saw blade of her voice couldn’t cut through the banging and clanging.
Down below, the Tects had begun ripping their metal limbs off. When one of the heads ran out of legs to tear its other legs off with, a neighbor that still had its legs would reach over and finish the job. Here and there, legless heads hit the floor and rolled. A few flattened at the point of impact and didn’t roll, testifying to how rotten they were. A dozen or so of the Tects were scrambling over the bodies of the rest, picking up the discarded limbs and taking them to a pile they were forming in the corner. Another dozen Tects were piling up the cast-off corpse parts. Every second, more Tects were cramming in through the broken loading door.
Nick couldn’t look away.
At the center of it all stood the cyborgcromancer. She had amplified her voice somehow so that it could be heard over the din. “Do some of you doubt me even now? I resurrected you once, repaired all your earthly pains, and I will do it again. I’ll make you stronger than you are, better than you ever could be. Have faith. My faithful will always be reward
ed.”
Cries of Selha! came from the press of Tects fighting to get in the loading door. When Nick looked, their faces were contorted with religious ecstasy. They tore metal limbs and braces from their bodies—a few so excited that they ripped chunks from their rotting flesh—and flung them into the factory at the cyborgcromancer’s feet.
Re Suli slapped Nick’s forearm and pointed up the stairs to the roof access. He followed her up, keeping one eye on the action below.
When they made it outside, the witch slammed the roof door shut, closing off the ear-shattering tumult.
“That’s better,” she said, adjusting the wide headband in her halo of frizzy red hair. “Now, as I was saying, you’ll just have to work with what you’ve got, sugar. Three furnaces’ll have to do it.”
This wasn’t a question, so Nick couldn’t respond.
Movement over the edge of the roof caught his eye.
God Almighty, his brain whispered, unable to speak the words aloud.
Tects. Thousands of them, all coming out of the jungle from the north. Not just the spidery head or torso cyborgs. Full and half corpses—men, women, children—outfitted with all sorts of extra metal limbs, moving more slowly than their spidery kin. So many more than any of the Guild’s estimates regarding the Tect population.
Re Suli grinned at Nick’s expression of shock. “That there’s the raw material you and Sol’ll be workin’ with.”
TWENTY-ONE:
Jubal
The next morning after we packed up camp, I checked our position against our nav marker. According to the map, we were still six miles from the target area. The cavern and the asphalt path seemed to be heading in the direction we needed to go, but even if it hadn’t been, I would’ve wanted to follow it to the end. The severe seasonal glitch this place represented was worth a hundred Totten Effect blizzards. Either adjacency to the Garden of Time was causing the dissonance, or we would run into an even stronger temporal anomaly somewhere nearby that would lead us to the Garden.
I checked the ancient texts as we walked, looking for old maps or regional descriptions that might tell us where the road led, but didn’t find any cities within walking distance of Time Garden Caverns.
“I guess they never rebuilt the town after that second massacre,” I said.
“Did it say how exactly the people were killed?” Carina asked, glancing over at my wristpiece. “Massacre’s a fairly general term. You can massacre a village with a sword, a gun, poisoned gas…”
“The Bloodslinger would know.”
“I’m just looking for clues as to what we’ll be up against. You can learn a lot about an enemy from the aftermath.”
I scrolled through the pertinent texts again. “It just says ‘massacre.’ The writers didn’t go into detail. Apparently the native tribes were blamed— What the balls was that?!” Something small and grayish had just scrambled past in the corner of my peripheral vision. “Did you see that?”
“I thought it was…” Carina stopped and craned her neck to see around me.
Movement behind her caught my eye. A grayish figure about the size of my hand. Stubby approximations of arms and clubfeet stuck out of an elliptical belly. On top, it had something like a head, but with empty holes instead of eyes and a mouth.
“Mutie!” I stepped around Carina and kicked it.
Instead of punting the little bastard across the cavern, my foot passed through it like fog. That seemed to set it off. It threw back its head and opened its mouth-hole in a silent howl. Another one appeared beside it, this one with straight legs and a lumpy tumor-shape sticking out of its head over one eyehole.
Tumor-Head stared at Clubfoot. Clubfoot made a kicking motion at Tumor-Head’s fat little gut, his foot passing through too, then they both threw their heads back and howled. Another pair appeared, mirror images of the first two, then two dozen pairs, then a hundred, until the whole space around the road was full of the little freaks.
“Sick!” I slung my backpack off and cocked it back to start smashing some muties.
But Carina grabbed my arm. “Wait! They’re not mutants.”
Clubfoot—the original one, not any of the hundred-some that had appeared later—mimed kicking Tumor-Head again. The whole disgusting little troop grabbed their guts and threw back their heads. One of the latecomer Tumor-Heads grabbed its Clubfoot partner’s arm like Carina had done mine and opened its mouth in a silent shout. This prompted more howling. A few even fell down and started pounding the ground with their tiny fists.
I cocked my bag back again. “They’re laughing at us.”
“Don’t,” Carina said, jerking the bag out of my hands. “Don’t they look like little Fergs and Gams to you?”
“Like whatnows?”
“Ferg and Gam. Friends forever…even on the other side?” she said it as if she were quoting something I should recognize.
“Let me guess,” I said, “one of Sir Psycho-Mommy’s scary bedtime stories?”
“Try one of the Trailer Tales,” she said. “The children’s fables? You’ve seriously never heard of Ferg and Gam?”
“No.” I glared down at the little freaks. They appeared to be communicating with each other now. “And your tone of shocked disbelief is really starting to grate. Are we positive they’re not muties?”
“Mutants are corporeal,” she said.
“As far as we know,” I said. But as I said it, I realized the little freaks weren’t gray, but a soft white. The fact that they were slightly transparent made them appear darker. “So, if not muties, then what are they? Shades? Haints?”
Carina considered it for a second. “Maybe. I guess the ending was kind of ambiguous. After Gam disappeared, Ferg cracked his skull on a sharp rock—see the dent those ones with the weird feet have in their heads?—then he could see Gam again, and they skipped off to play. ‘Friends forever, even on the other side.’”
We started walking again. The little weirdos followed along the path beside us.
“What’d Gam die of?” I asked, nodding at one of the Tumor-Heads. “Brain cancer?”
Carina laughed. “That was ambiguous, too. But now that you mention it, yeah, I think he must’ve.”
“Lame.”
“I’d think that would be right up your alley,” she said. “Didn’t you say Tsunami Tsity was the greatest story ever told? And everybody died in it, too.”
I snatched my bag back from her and put it on. “That was different. Yisu and Miyo’s friendship was beautiful and tragic, and in the end, they both became something better for finally having found each other.”
The image of Yisu holding out her hand to Miyo came to mind, immediately replaced by the memory of Carina grabbing my hand to pull me up onto that ice ledge.
Then the memory shot forward. I saw her green eyes go wide. I heard Carina yell my name and my flame kigao tell me the electricity was about to go out.
At the same time.
I stopped walking.
“What?” Carina asked, looking around.
“You saw her,” I said. “Just before the ice broke, you saw my flame kigao.”
She cocked her head at me as if she didn’t think she’d heard right. “Your what?”
“My flame kigao. The spirit who warns me of approaching danger. You saw her. That’s how you knew the ledge was about to break off. She warned you, too.”
“I didn’t see anyone, Van Zandt,” she said.
“Then how did you know it was going to break?”
“I could feel the ice kind of groaning. Or snow. I think that ledge was mostly snow. You probably felt it, too.”
I cackled and strode off.
Carina jogged after me. “Van Zandt—”
“I know when I’m being called a liar, Carina.”
“I didn’t say that,” she insisted. “I only said that I didn’t see anything. I don’t even know what a kigao is.”
“Yisu? Miyo? You saw them yourself at the end of Tsunami Tsity, so don’t give me that bolog
na about not knowing what they are.”
Sudden comprehension crossed her features.
“She!” Carina said. “‘She always says’—that’s what you said after the attempted hijacking. The flame spirit, this kigao, she’s the one you’ve been trying to tell me about. She warns you about danger before it happens.”
My face twisted into a cold grin.
Carina took a step toward me when she saw it. “I don’t think you’re a liar.”
“You believe that I believe I see her, is that it?” I said, throwing Nick’s condescending words in her face.
She flinched, but didn’t back away. I expected her to reach out and brush her fingers across my arm, her go-to trick for horny old men, but she wisely kept her hands to herself.
“I believe that you see her,” she said. “But I need more information if I’m going to understand. Did you assign her to warning you, or did she just start doing it one day?”
I searched her green eyes for any hint of patronizing and found only earnest curiosity. Then I went over her again, searching for the trap. I couldn’t see any, so I proceeded with caution.
“She found me, if that’s what you mean.”
Carina nodded and started walking again. People—men especially—feel like you’re challenging them when you stand directly in front of them and talk face-to-face. Putting yourself at an angle or engaging them in an activity while talking removes the subconscious threat to their dominance and suggests comradery. Of course, Carina would know that I knew she knew that. Either she wanted me to know she was on my side by communicating it in a language we could both manipulate, or she wanted me to think that so I would relax and drop my guard.
A sudden pain in my chest took me by surprise. I wanted it to be the first one. So badly. But she would know I wanted that, which meant she could use how badly I wanted it against me.
I fell into step beside her, still watching for the trap.
“Is your kigao like Yisu and Miyo?” she asked. “Was she murdered?”
I sighed. “Carina, if you want to know whether I killed her, just ask.”
