Then she could put it off no longer. She said, “Yes, panther. My task is complete.”
Several things happened at once.
There was a mind-shattering roar from behind her. She’d never heard it up close before, but the sound itself was a weapon. Her legs went numb and she tumbled from her feet.
At the same time, Grampharic grasped his rifle barrel with two hands and whipped it off his back. The strap slipped neatly up his arm, and the rifle flew past Caulie and into the panther’s mouth.
The rest of the squad separated like a threatened fish pod but much faster, seeming almost like a magic trick in Caulie’s peripheral vision. Tachba battle reflexes. They sprinted in every direction, unloading their weapons in long bursts at the panther’s body.
Caulie landed on the rocks and bounced. She didn’t feel a thing. She kept her eyes on Shanter, who still crouched in the panther’s cockpit.
Shanter snatched Grampharic’s rifle out of the air and drove it muzzle-first into the hinge at the back of the panther’s jaw.
The panther darted toward Caulie with a rapid, low-bodied stride. It was only two of its long steps away—but Shanter was already leaping out of the mouth and diving for the panther’s extending foreleg.
He didn’t try to wrestle the leg. Instead, he grasped the long metal claws that dangled under its raised paw and wrenched them beneath the pad of the foot. With both arms straining, he managed to fold the claws halfway closed before they hit the rocky ground.
When the foot came down, it found no stable paw and no traction on the rock—the machine’s immense weight and inertia caused the forelimb to fold sideways, showering Shanter with sparks. Shanter threw himself clear as the panther tumbled diagonally away from Caulie with the sound of a crashing train.
The machine skidded into the disabled artillery gun beside Caulie’s bunker, catching Grampharic before he could jump aside. The panther’s bulk pinned him at the waist. Gouts of blood poured across the metal but he didn’t cry out. Caulie watched him calmly pull his pistol from his jacket and fire twice, point blank, into the panther’s lantern eyes. It was a two-shot pistol and, when it was spent, he had time to flip it in the air, catch its smoking barrel, and hammer a third pod on the panther’s hull, shattering the sensor’s protective screen.
The panther flicked a claw and tore Grampharic’s torso in half.
Caulie watched in horror. Her numbness was already fading—the panther’s sonic weapon had been more like a slap than a punch—but she still couldn’t breathe or cry out. Her mouth opened with a silent wail as Grampharic tumbled to the ground.
The panther rolled to its feet and tried to close its cockpit. The grinding was louder than normal but the sound of snapping bones never came. Caulie saw Shanter’s rifle still embedded in the exposed gears.
After a moment, the panther gave up. It swiveled toward Caulie but made no move her direction. It was only a few paces away, a trivial distance, yet it didn’t pounce. It swept its blunt nose in an arc as if scenting the air. It knew Shanter was nearby, and still its main threat—but it didn’t know where he was.
Caulie finally understood Shanter’s plan. He was standing in front of the panther’s mouth, motionless as a statue. The sensors, Caulie realized, it can’t see him. She’d made Shanter’s skin the temperature of the air, so the panther’s thermal sensors would be no help either. As long as Shanter didn’t move, and made no sound, he would be safe.
Shanter had something in his hand. Caulie recognized the shape of it—an offensive grenade. He waited.
She knew, she knew. She drew her first breath to shout, “No!”
She was too slow.
Shanter tossed the grenade. As soon as he moved, the panther saw him. It swept its claws through his body like a scythe.
Caulie screamed.
Shanter bloomed into a spinning rosette of blood. His arms and legs fell away, trailing streamers of red. His eviscerated torso bounced across the stone. He rolled to a stop against a stack of supply chests.
The panther finally turned back to Caulie. Bullets from Grampharic’s squad needled it mercilessly but caused no damage. The panther bunched its hind legs for the leap that would end Caulie’s life.
The grenade went off.
The explosion of white smoke seemed too small to make a difference, but it was only the beginning—the explosion kept growing and Caulie even saw the fireball, nearly subliminally brief, as it blew out the body of the panther.
The blast picked her up and sent her spinning into darkness.
* * *
She opened her eyes to Prodon’s smiling face. “You’ve had an adventure, ma’am!”
“Shanter,” she said. Blood drained from her mouth. She’d bitten her tongue again, just like she had on her first day at the front.
Now Prodon looked embarrassed. “About the helpie—”
“Take me to him.”
He obeyed immediately, as if her hoarse voice was witch talk and not simply the result of being stunned, battered, and exploded. She was permitted to briefly stand before Prodon picked her up and carried her the rest of the way. She stared over his shoulder and found the carnage.
The panther was dead, surrounded by baffled Haphan officers. Crowds of Tachba explored the wreck without any regard for the bodies, of which there seemed to be too many.
Prodon noticed her gaze. “Which it kept fighting a few minutes more. Everybody wanted in on the fun. Blood-feds, if you ask me! They could have waited for the contrivance to tick down and stop. The rest of the squad survived. Not Grampharic, but the rest of us.”
“I’m glad you and the others are safe,” she said with all her heart.
“We’re nothing special,” he said, but Caulie knew he was pleased. A few steps later, he set her on her feet and released her. “Here is where you must be strong, pretty girl!”
She wobbled and turned.
“Ah, damn, Shanter.”
He was at least more whole than she’d thought—whole to his knees, only one arm missing and the other hand off at the wrist. Deep tears across his chest and stomach had already stanched. She could not have borne it if he’d looked like the wizard’s spare torso, but he didn’t, he was still Shanter. His face was miraculously unmarred, though covered in blood. There were all the features she knew: his jaw, the sharp cheeks, the piercing eyes.
The eyes were watching her.
“He waited for you,” Prodon added, blushing fiercely.
Shanter was incredibly, horribly awake. Panting but lucid, even in his destroyed body.
She collapsed to her knees by his head but didn’t know where to touch. She saw his furrowed brow and couldn’t stop herself. She brushed her fingers through his hair.
I did this. I set this up and it worked. One machine for another. I did this.
“Shanter,” she whispered. “I’m here now.”
“Watch this,” he said softly. He tried another wink—it still didn’t work. “We’ll remember it a different way?”
She nodded, fixed on his face. She would not miss any detail. She wasn’t sure what he needed—really, he just seemed relieved to have a chance to wink again.
His eyes narrowed as he finally realized she might be sad. The idiot.
They shared the briefest moment. He gazed up at her like he knew every direction of her thoughts, how they started in guilt and looped into remorse. She had done this, she had broken him on the rocky plain—thoughts that spiraled back to her alone. She had been clumsy with a precious thing. He must have glimpsed it all in that brief moment. If so, then he saw when Caulie finally realized the truth.
If Shanter was only a precious thing, she wouldn’t feel this way. She wouldn’t feel like she’d betrayed him. He was a person, and alive. For Caulie, it was the strangest rush of feelings: relief that they had both been wrong, satisfaction that he had seen her fill with certainty, sadness for what she was losing, joy to learn what she’d had, regret that she hadn’t recognized it sooner—she loved this
man, didn’t she? Shanter was a person and alive. She knew it by how it felt to watch him die.
She winked back at him.
His eyes were glassy but his lips trembled, a twitch in the corner of his mouth he used for smirking. It was that smirk that appeared when he awarded himself points in a conversation, when he had stymied her or caused a blush and could therefore relent for a time before starting again. Then he would usually ruin the moment with some inane comment, and that would give her space to hide inside her irritation . . . Ah, shit. He’s been managing me all along.
“Shanter, what am I going to do now?”
She didn’t expect a reply. Nonetheless, he answered in an airless voice: “After hanging on the rope, I started appreciating gallows humor.”
Confused, she turned his head to check his face. She was touching his cheek when he closed his eyes and went still.
Chapter 40
Caulie carried Shanter’s mutilated body to the bunker. The man was persistently ridiculous: so enormous and heavy even after being butchered. Could he never be appropriate? Her desperation gave her manic strength, and she staggered through the bright morning in fits and bursts.
When she emerged again from the tooth-lined doorway, the Tachba who had drawn close scattered again.
“Prodon,” she snapped. “Get Thattie out of the bunker. He’s still tied to the bench and I need it.”
He gestured to the squad and they wordlessly obeyed.
She knew she was a sight. Covered in blood, sobbing aloud one moment and laughing the next, and all the while practicing snatches of a new song in the worst Tachbavim ever spoken at the front. The words didn’t matter, it was the space between the sounds . . .
She gathered the limbs of Grampharic’s body, dragging them back to the bunker. She left the torso where it lay in two halves.
The song was firming in her mind. When she returned to the panther’s killing ground, she had it ready. The Haphans had ordered the men to collect the rest of the bodies with all due haste, before that woman came back. She stopped the Tachba with groans and clicks. They filled with revulsion at the metallic scent of blood and retreated, giving her room to search.
Best would have been Shanter’s own limbs, but those had been shredded by the grenade’s explosion and scattered by the blast. The panther had also apparently stepped on the severed hand, because Caulie found it smeared across the rock. None of this mattered anyway—the pieces would not have lined up after cleaning and trimming. She harvested from the other corpses.
This is insane. What I’m doing is insane.
But then: the stories. The composite creature on the cliff-side path. The obtained man in the pool of water.
Shortly, she had her bunker filled like the basement of a mad queen. She shouted out the door to Prodon, who heard and reluctantly obeyed. Twenty minutes later, the Haphan medic’s supply chest bounced into the bunker and fell open.
She went on a preparation bender. Bandages were opened and sanitary cauls were torn off of sterile utensils; it felt like she was doing something. Eventually, she had to turn to Shanter and begin.
Her mind felt clear but she knew it wasn’t. She was somewhere between reason and wishful thinking, an unhealthy equilibrium that turned out to be quite serviceable. She was certain she knew the process and desperate enough not to care if she was right. After all, she couldn’t make things worse. The secret, Caulie now knew, was that everybody was a machine. Haphans and Tachba and brain birds alike. Pipes and fuel and waste. The Tachba simply made things easier—manage the bodies with logic rings and swap broken parts with spares? Pure Antecessor genius.
Madness, don’t leave me now.
She really had to start. There was probably some civilized rule for when a body became a corpse.
She checked Shanter’s pulse: still gone. That’s okay, that’s okay. She had shut down his heart at the last moment before it could quit autonomically. His eyelids fluttered when she whispered “schaxx.” Something was still ticking.
“I am the foremost expert on the Pollution,” she informed Shanter’s immobile face. “On the entire planet!”
She began cleaning the wounds.
* * *
The first day passed. Caulie ate stimulants from the medical supplies and stuck an intravenous peristaltic pump on her inner thigh to supply glucose and fluids. Shanter’s recurring issue was rejection—the limbs didn’t stick or, if they did, they didn’t stay for long. Yes, she thought, chortling aloud when yet another leg briefly latched and then popped off. I’m doing serious medicine here. Nothing absurd at all. Grampharic’s limbs were sent back like bad cooking. The other limbs seemed more promising, but lasted only a little longer.
She went to the door and shouted for Prodon. He was a full minute before answering, though she saw him hiding in the lee of the disabled artillery piece.
“Bring more arms and legs. Nothing that’s been dead too long, and nothing too hairy. Do you hear me, Prodon?”
“I—I wish this was something I didn’t have to do.” The boy was on the verge of tears.
She increased the pressure. He was a young Tachba and supposedly easy to crack. In fact, she had to escalate all the way to screams and threats. She really didn’t want to force the 188th to become a fire brigade for limbs and arms. How would such a song even start? She didn’t have the time. If there were deadlines for freshness and reattachment, she was blowing through them.
Prodon finally caved when she cried, “Will you say no to my face?”
“Don’t come out!” he shouted. “Consider it done.”
The shower of limbs started an hour later. They were from the trenches, based on their grime and the nature of the wounds. She laughed again: where else would these limbs be from? Maybe Prodon’s squad had found one of those inexplicable piles of arms and legs from the pictures Jephia had showed her. Caulie didn’t waste time wondering. What mattered was, with this wide sampling, she was able to find the specific limbs that would snap into place.
It was an assembly-line process. She should have intuited that. This was the Pollution, and the Antecessors planned at scale. Press, wait, discard. Press, wait, snap. When the limbs cohered, they turned hot and twitched as the flesh fused.
It was as unnerving as she’d feared, but also not as simple as she’d hoped. When she restarted the heart, the bleeding resumed and she suddenly had a body with multiple traumatic injuries. Moreover, with blood, the muscles seized up and became dangerously active. She shrieked and stopped the heart again before her precious supply of synthetic ichor drained away. For surgery of this delicacy and precision, she clearly needed a bit of gallows rope to tie the patient to the bench.
She restarted the heart again as soon as possible. One day without steady blood flow couldn’t be helped, but two days in a row? Probably unhealthy. She cackled at herself. With the heart going and the body behaving no worse than a leaky bag, the blood returned to Shanter’s brain.
He woke long enough to recognize her. He opened his mouth to speak but dropped unconscious before he could utter a word. She nearly dropped herself—bless all madness. Bless the Pollution.
Shanter fell in and out of consciousness while she worked. By the thirty-sixth hour, he could speak to her. By the fortieth hour, she would have liked a break.
“Caulie.”
“What now, dammit?” She didn’t spare him a glance. The procedure to line up the nerves in his wrist was too delicate for her to look away. She’d already failed twice—the flesh could cohere but the specific parts on one side didn’t always find their counterparts on the other.
“‘Caulie’ is short for something,” he said.
“Oh no,” she muttered.
“What does ‘Caulie’ stand for?” Shanter waited before becoming impatient. “Do you remember that I have now died twice for you? Answer the question.”
“My name is Cauliflower. Blame my parents.” An earlier version of Caulie would have waited for the puzzlement and then the mocking. Th
is version was too busy to care. But he didn’t answer, so she checked his face.
“That’s beautiful.” The idiot’s eyes were shining. “Cauliflower. What does it mean?”
Oh. This was the part with the mocking. “Well, Shanter, cauliflower is a kind of vegetable from a long time ago. It was engineered for Grigory with seeds and juice. Nowadays it’s called a blandfruit.”
“That’s perfect.”
“Won’t you give me some peace? Do you see what I’m doing?”
“Cauliflower is lovely. A vegetable-fruit that looks like a brain. It’s you, through and through.”
She couldn’t grin because it would only encourage him. He continued anyway. “Can I whisper it to you in secret, when no one is around?”
“For all love . . .”
“Cauliflower.”
She sank her scalpel into his calf and he screamed. She blanched when she realized what she had done. “Shanter, I’m sorry! I didn’t think you’d notice!”
“You stabbed me!” he cried, and started laughing. Caulie couldn’t help herself and laughed along. “Who are you, my mother?”
At other moments, he was annoying in a different style. Once, when he’d fallen quiet for a full hour, she asked, “What thoughts in that head of yours?”
“Not sure. Whatever’s supposed to be there, probably.”
“This again?”
“I know what I am, Caulie. Look what you’re doing to me. How can I see this and keep fooling myself?”
“I don’t care if you fool yourself, you just have to fool me.” She’d meant to be clever, but it came out wrong.
“You’re going through a lot of work for just one servitor. There are easier ways to get a helpie.”
“Believe me, I have options.”
“You do? Is it Prodon?” He searched her face. “Anyway, I think I should tell you that I’m grateful. I think I should. I just don’t know if it’s me who would say it.”
* * *
By the third day, Shanter finally shed his cadaverous complexion. Caulie had brought him back to life, this man. She had broken and restored him, the full circle, and she still believed he was unique in all existence.
What the Thunder Said Page 33
