Nicolas had shown her a little of how to gain access to networks, and the airtrain certainly had one, and even now she sensed—oh, gods. Nic. He had been asleep in that chair when they dragged her away. For all she knew, he was still in the wonderful experiences. For all she knew, he was already dead.
I must get back to him. She must get him out—whatever he'd done in the village, she couldn't just leave him in the hands of those people. And if it was too late...
They will pay. For Nic, old Nic, Mom, Dad, Melanie, and Arisa's baby—for everything.
"Beep. Beep."
Why was the computer beeping without messages or network, and with her doing nothing to it yet? And that shivering. She couldn't shake it off. It must be what riding in airtrains for big distances did to people. Big distances—where were they sending her? She had no time. She must work with that airtrain now, get access to its computer and take over.
Now. Quickly. Somehow.
"Beep. Beep." She was shivering so hard that she almost dropped the computer.
The pilot was still not looking at her. Outside the airtrain's big windows, the ground was beautiful and green.
No junk fields. No poison. Healed, somehow all healed. She thought she'd ask Benedict more about microorganisms—and then she remembered that she couldn't ask him. That he was one of those who would kill her.
Shivering, beeping, more shivering, sweating.
Gods-damn you, did you give me poison already? Why go through the airtrain trouble then?
It might be a quicker, cleaner, modern version of the boat journey. Pilot, not boatman. She'd see Mom.
"There," the pilot said. "Our destination."
She shook the blurriness away from her eyes and typed madly on her computer.
I will see her. But not today. Not yet. Mel had nothing to pay the pilot with, that must count for something.
No network. Nothing. Then something strange. She'd turned the hummie interface off, but the computer vibrated as if the hummie was working, as if it were sending the gods knew what, to the gods knew where. Even though there was no network.
It didn't help that the screen was blurring before her eyes again. She felt as if she was bleeding on the inside, and she had no idea why.
The airtrain shook. Meliora fell from the seat and dropped the computer.
Pilot, what's wrong with you?
The vehicle shook again, and she rolled on the floor. The computer was out of reach. Her neck screamed as her cheek was slammed against the window. She could see what was outside now, what the pilot had pointed at.
A village. But not hers. As they flew over it, she saw people down there, little girls in bright dresses, a field of crops and an enormous field of green grass, and—what? Sheep. And sheep dogs. And—no, she couldn't be wrong—medstats walking amid the flocks.
So you'll have some primitives kill me? After all the trouble Nicolas went through to get me from my father's village? You could have just let my dad punch me a bit more and be done with it. She thought she was laughing, but she wasn't entirely certain. Everything was shaking so much, what was the pilot thinking? The airtrain was plunging down.
She had no time to worry about what was wrong with the pilot. She typed, and typed. Yet, she couldn't connect to a network! Not at all—even though moments from now they would hit the ground!
Then it was suddenly over. The airtrain righted itself. The pilot was as sweaty as Meliora, and he was pale.
Her own sweat was drying, the shaking was ebbing. His, however, only grew, and he was as pale as a sheet of paper.
She rolled towards her computer. She typed so fast that her fingers blurred. She was certain she'd gotten a hint of a network connection a moment ago, and those lines still in the air...
The computer beeped again, normally, and she suddenly had the City of Death's network. Here you go, the message from Nicolas read, just as the pilot pressed a button, and something, the soft flakes of what looked like snow, started gently drifting to the ground.
The people down there looked up. She could see no more of their clothes, faces, houses—anything. She only saw the falling snow and for a few long moments wondered what that was all about.
Then, with just one thought and one motion, she gained access to the airtrain's controls, and the airtrain shot down towards the village and under the flakes. She could get them all before they had fallen. She could! The airtrain zigzagged with a speed that blurred the village, the trees, everything. The pilot was shouting something at her.
She'd gotten almost everything. She plunged down again, almost to the roofs. Children were looking at the airtrain, pointing at it. Someone was screaming loud enough to be heard.
Then the children started falling—gently, gently, toppling on the packed dirt of the village's only street as if for sweet sleep. A little boy, Ronny's age, even smiled as he closed his eyes. But the mothers wouldn't let them sleep there. Mathilda never would.
"You can't!" The pilot's words registered. "There is no use! Once it is in the air, there is nothing you can do. The air in a ten-mile radius is pure poison and will be so in the next hour. There is nothing you can do, Meliora! Nothing at all! They had seconds. Now leave it be, all right? Did you let go of the airtrain? Yes, you did. Oh, Meliora, be careful with that! You didn't use just the network like most people would. I saw you, you're like me, you sense computers—and you saw me almost crashing the airtrain because of that. Emotions can interfere with this greatly! People's minds weren't meant to connect to machines like this! Just use the interfaces! I'm programming the airtrain now. It will return to the City of Death by itself. You leave it all be. And"—he smiled at her for the first time, and for the first time, emotion registered in his eyes. "My task is done. Tell Jerome I am sorry that I won't be back, I am sorry that I was not good enough for the City of Death. Goodbye."
There was a glass door dividing them, and it was hermetically closed. None of them breathed the same air as the other. Each of them breathed the purified air of his or her compartment. He stopped the aircraft and let it hover in the air.
She ran to the door and beat at it with fists—because she could not, could not connect to the airtrain again just now. No matter what she tried. She could not open the door, either. He, on the other hand, opened a door. Then, he jumped.
She got access to the airtrain's computer, barely. It was shaking now in rhythm with her. She thought she screamed something, made some threat with Jerome's name in it, but she could not even hear her own voice. Her computer was beeping, her head was beeping. Nevertheless, she was on time to shoot down and catch the pilot's body on the airtrain's roof, like she'd caught the snowflakes. It was of just as much use.
The inertia was such that the airtrain hit the ground. It had happened to her once, long ago, with a flying bike. The bike had leaped back up just as the airtrain leaped up now, and she'd lost control. There had, of course, been a medstat. Now, her fingers were typing on the keyboard so hard they were bleeding, and her nose was bleeding, too—because there wouldn't be a medstat, and she didn't want to go the pilot's way, even though it might be easier.
She'd seen his eyes. All there had been was relief that he'd done his task, and that he didn't have to live with it.
"Oh, Jerome, you will pay. You will pay so dearly!"
The airtrain cut through trees, broke branches, tore leaves. It spun at some point. Finally, somewhere far from the ten-mile radius—but if it were close to the City of Death, she'd no idea—its nose lodged into the ground, and it stayed still.
***
She woke up hours later. She lay on her side, with one leg unnaturally twisted, the other one cut by a shard of glass. The glass door was shattered, and the door to the outside hung crooked on its hinges. The seat she'd sat upon at takeoff was wrenched away from the floor. The pilot's control board was smashed. An enormous branch lay on top of it, the green of its leaves a strange, glaring shade because of the blinking light.
Meliora scrambled up on all f
ours and crawled through shards until she found her computer. It was dark. No network. Just Nicolas' feeds from the old cities and his recent message—No, there were other feeds, too. Video feeds.
Real world, the first was titled and showed her moving pictures of the four cities, several villages, and a lot of green space with forests and rivers between them.
When she looked closer, she saw the empty streets and silent buildings of more cities. Aetna and the others? Had it snowed there, too, once upon a time?
There had been too many people, Jerome had said.
More villages, with crude cottages, silence, and smokeless chimneys. Then, in the next video frame, the empty cities and villages were gone, and only greenness, water, and the few inhabited places remained. So, the City of Death cleaned its debris. Only the inhabited cities with their smiling people remained, and the villages, with their—what? People who smiled in the rare cases when food was plentiful, disease was interested somewhere else, and no one was chasing anyone with a knife.
The other feed was of the villages. She saw her own village. She recognized Nicolas' house with its evenly-cut smooth stone and mortar. She saw the temple, too, but it had an additional building attached to it. The camera zoomed in on that building, then switched to another view. It must be showing inside the building now. It had no windows, which was very strange for the Village of Life. Even the warehouse had windows in the village.
Inside the building, there were several rows of artificial wombs, each growing a child in it. There were medstats, too. Outside the building, in the temple itself, a man Mel didn't know was talking about the miracle of creating life, and that humans should not mess with it.
"Why!" someone else shouted from amid the people standing before the man. It sounded like a question that had been asked already but hadn't gotten a satisfying answer. "It can't happen without us! You can't be the only one to see our children grow in their first moments, chief!"
"Now listen to me, Leonard—"
Meliora didn't listen to the chief. His voice got lost in noisy arguments. Everyone had something to say, it seemed. Except for one. Mel watched a girl her own age, silent when everyone else was shouting, looking now at the chief, now at Leonard. She had old Codes' eyes and old Codes' frown.
Was your aim to loosen the City of Death's influence on your home, Leonard? Would old Codes even tell me if I asked? At least I can guess now where that thing with the women beneath men started.
Another of the villages still had the wombs. At least, this was what the feed showed. In that village, women were above men. So, it could go both ways. She watched more villages—it could go many ways. None of the villages was exactly like the rest—and none of them were nice.
Jerome and the likes of him must be having so much fun watching all this. She could imagine him wheezing. Was this the reason they watched at all? She'd seen the people who watched wars on screens in Jerome's wonderful experience.
Mel stopped watching. None of this was fun for her.
And why do you have the cities, Jerome?
Because unnaturals must be even more fun to watch than villagers—especially if they finally got out of the cities and got, possibly, to the villages. Or to the City of Death.
She'd seen computer games in that wonderful experience of Jerome's. People had built whole worlds—inside computers, true, but still whole worlds—for other people to play in. Those worlds had their own people, and each had watchers from outside the computer controlling their moves. Computer games hadn't survived. Not in Lucasta, not as what Jerome had shown her. Computer games were based on conflict or watching other's lives or building things—and who in Lucasta cared for any of that? Whoever wanted to do anything strange got a job—or pills.
A game had survived in the village, the chief's chess. It had nothing to do with computers, of course.
"Yes, Jerome, I know. I am not even like one of Dad's pawns for you. I am one of those computer-game characters. You make them, you train them, you play with the numbers that represent their strength and emotions. But do you know, Jerome, that in Dad's chess, a pawn that reaches the end can become a queen?
"You could have healed my Mom. You could have healed my Mom, you gods-damned old bastard, and all the people in the village—you with your power—can't you use it for anything useful, gods-damn you? But it wouldn't have been fun!"
Mel gritted her teeth and stopped shouting at the broken airtrain and the forest.
Jerome still had Nicolas. So, she must go back. She must get Nic back out. She owed him that.
Airtrain
At least Nic was alive. At least that. Meliora crept out of the crashed airtrain. The moon was but a crescent in the sky, and the stars weren't that many. Except for the owl hooting from the trees, she was all alone. She had only her computer—Nic's computer. She realized she was squeezing it so hard that her hands hurt. Her head also hurt, and shivers were creeping up her back again. For a moment she even though she glimpsed shadows behind the trees, of countless cities, poison, power, and junk.
She lay down again, checked her body for injuries again. Nothing. The airtrain must have been well prepared for an accident. After all, airtrains were used by the powerful. Though the pilot didn't look that powerful. No matter his snowflakes.
She crawled further. She could not walk just yet, but she thought that if she crept under the trees, the satellites would have a harder time seeing her. There she could think of what to do next. She had no idea any more if there was any place on this earth that was safe, unseen. But she could not just lie down and surrender.
Now she understood that Nicolas had truly saved her in the village. After watching those feeds, she knew that what he'd done was less bad than what could have otherwise happened. She remembered Andreas. Andreas wanted power. He might not know it, but he did, and she thought he might like to crush small things. A little. He would have never let a small thing such as Mel take control of the whole village. He wasn't the only one, either.
Nicolas had set up a mini-world in that village where someone like Andreas might do well as a chief. Andreas was a good hunter, and hunting plus chiefing would take the time and energy he might otherwise spend on worse things. There would be no heavy bloodshed for some time. Until Ronny grew up.
Mel shuddered. She thought of Mathilda again. At least Mathilda had Belle. The weak had Belle and her herbs.
Herbs. Mel must find some for herself. She knew exactly what to give people for burns from fire—and right now her computer felt as if it were burning in her hands.
She crawled further in the forest. She found a trap. Two rabbits were inside it, visible in the pale moonlight. They stood as still as rabbits sometimes would when threatened—as if that would help them hide. But humans saw them. Humans saw everything. Now, Meliora saw that she knew that trap, and she knew the path that wound close to it. It led to an old witch's cottage. It had first led Meliora to killing, when she'd still thought that Mom could live.
I would have done anything for her. I would have done anything to heal her, to make everything better. She suddenly looked at that dark sky, where the gods knew whoever was watching. She clenched her fists so hard that it hurt more than electrodes—and I am not done yet! It is too late for Mom. But not for everyone! Not for everything!
She lowered herself into the trap, without throwing any stones this time. She chased the creatures and caught them—then reached up and let them run. She smiled.
She smiled even when an old woman's voice sounded in the night.
"Nice to see you again, Meliora," it said. "What else do you need, except my food? More herbs and venom?"
"No," Meliora said. "I'd rather that you showed me the way. The right way, this time. I know you can."
"Ah." Meliora could not see her well from the pit but could imagine her raising an eyebrow. "How do you know? Did they tell you?"
"They did. But I would have known, anyway. Because of words you've said before that didn't make sense. Hints you've
made. Besides, you have a computer that is connected to their network."
"And how do you know that?"
Meliora shrugged. "Some of us are better with computers than others."
"Come on." The old woman gave her a hand. "Climb out—can you? You could get in well enough. Yet, I think you do need herbs. Special herbs. No, do come with me, Meliora. The way to reaching that city again, and to saving your boyfriend—or is he your husband? Your mate? Whatever terminology you might be using for that old thing—is through my cottage. Unless you'd like to walk through the forests and find it alone, of course. It's not impossible. It has happened. I knew a boy who did it once."
***
They sat by the first table Meliora had seen in the real world and drank tea. Meliora's had anti-burning herbs and anti-shock herbs in hers, and she had food beside the cup, and a pure city-made pill for pain relief.
"Won't make you dizzy," the witch said. "You can't afford to sleep, I know—but do drink everything, and you know very well that you have to drink it slowly for it to work. No rushing—and yes, I know you'd rather run to your boy and to Jerome and give each of them what he deserves. So romantic, running without thinking. Not so romantic when the runner falls. I did tell you that a girl can afford to adorn herself with romance now and then—but not when it matters. Not in the moments when paths and worlds hang on threads. That boy is your world now, isn't he?"
He, and the villages, and the cities. All were hers to save. Yet, he—
Meliora thought about it. Mom was gone, and she'd said goodbye to Dad. She had no place in the village the way it had become, and she'd relinquished whatever place she might have had in Lucasta. Nic had no place in the village any more, either, and he must have never truly had a place in Annabella. He was like her. He'd taken care of her. Yes, he was her world now: in his own way, he was the only stable thing she could lean on. She must get him out of there. She must not let them harm him. They harmed everyone else I love. But I won't let them. Not this time.
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