Dawnbreaker

by Posey, Jay

  “Must’ve found a hot target,” Roh said. “Maybe he found who he’s looking for.”

  Painter tried not to let his face reveal any emotion in response. Asher had never said anything to him about looking for anyone. What had he been telling Roh? There were only two people he could imagine Asher scouring so broad a region for. Cass and Wren. If he was looking for them, that meant they’d escaped and were alive. Or at least one of them was.

  Painter felt himself tearing through the middle. The idea that one or both of them were still alive was elating. The thought that Asher was burning the whole world to the ground to find them was horrifying. In that moment, Painter couldn’t remember what he’d ever thought Asher was doing, or what he’d ever believed would be worth so much death and destruction.

  “Go give ’em your talk,” Roh said. “Maybe these ones’ll surprise us.”

  Painter nodded numbly and started towards the enclave. Roh had always talked about how Asher was reordering the world, and how superior he was to regular humans now. How he and Painter were the prototypes for a far better humanity. Painter had allowed himself to entertain similar thoughts. Now he realized just how far from humanity he’d come.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Cass started by thinking back to the things Wren had told her about; about how to mask her own signal, and how he could find and open electronic locks. His description of Awakening others, and especially his story of Kit: how he said she’d “sprung open”, like she’d been fighting for it herself. Connections, signals, the digital swirl that bathed the planet ceaselessly. Cass had never concerned herself much about it beyond the necessary basics. She’d always had others around to take care of the intangible, and her talents had always been geared more towards the real. But she wasn’t that woman anymore. She was changed. Transformed.

  And her mind went back to that moment, that rebirth, when her son had called her back to herself, and she had answered. Cass looked down at Swoop, lying in front of her. She leaned forward and placed her hand on his chest, felt it rising and falling gently beneath her touch. With his eyes closed, it wasn’t hard to imagine that he really was just asleep; the same man he’d been just two days before, now enjoying a well-deserved rest. Why the Weir had taken and converted him when they’d left so many others to rot in the open, she didn’t know. There was an ominous implication there that Cass wanted to ignore. That it had been no accident. That Asher had known exactly what he was after when he took Swoop into the fold.

  But that didn’t matter now. Swoop was in there somewhere, and Cass was going to find him, and she was going to bring him back.

  “Swoop,” she said. “I’m coming to get you, OK?”

  And with that, she closed her eyes and looked for his signal. For five or ten minutes, she searched, with all the concentration she could muster, focused on finding some way to establish a connection with her friend. At times, there were glimmers; flashes of images or stabs of emotion that felt like someone else. But they were too faint, too fragmented for her to latch onto. In her effort, she squeezed her eyes so tightly shut they began to ache. And ultimately, her striving was all in vain.

  Cass opened her eyes and blinked away the spots. She took her hand off Swoop’s chest and laid it on his forehead. She could almost feel him in there, trapped inside his own mind while his body obeyed another’s commands. And as she looked on his face, his eyelids fluttered. Cass gasped and pulled her hand back. She started up to a crouch, thinking that he was about to come to. There was no telling what might happen if he woke up now. But his eyes stilled, and a few moments later, Cass eased herself back down by his side. Surely it had been a coincidence, and nothing that she had done.

  But hadn’t that been just like Wren’s descriptions of his abilities? Something he felt rather than did? Cass put her hand on Swoop’s forehead again, and this time, instead of trying to find him, she focused merely on what her instincts told her. At first, there was no change. But as she controlled her breathing and consciously forced herself to relax, slowly an image began to form in her mind’s eye: an image of Swoop, or rather an impression of him. A blur of color and emotion. Personality. Determination. A fluttering, like a moth in a web. Swoop. Swoop was there, fighting to break free. Cass felt herself reaching out without striving, without even knowing how she was doing it. And she was doing something. But just as the slow invasion of wakefulness disintegrates a dream, her awareness of the connection seemed to dissolve it even as she fought to keep it intact.

  “No,” she said aloud, “No, Swoop! Swoop, come back!” But it was no use. It all came apart in her hands, water streaming through her fist as she strove to grasp it. She came back to herself without even realizing she hadn’t been seeing the world around her. It was darker now, the edge of dusk. Mouse, Finn, and Able were standing in a semi-circle beside her. A rolling wave of pressure coursed from the base of her skull to her temples. She closed her eyes, pinched the bridge of her nose.

  “You OK, Cass?” Mouse asked.

  The pressure evolved, spread tendrils of frost through her brain.

  “I almost had him,” she answered. She opened her eyes and looked up at the three men, blinked against the onset of a headache unlike any she’d experienced before; different in kind, not degree. “He was right there, and I lost him.”

  “What do you mean you lost him?” said Finn.

  The pain of the headache was mild, but the discomfort it caused was disproportionate. Fibers aching from overuse, except instead of muscle, it was almost as if she was feeling the neural connections of her brain overheated.

  “He’s in there, I can see him. Or, feel him,” Cass said. She shook her head to clear some of the fog. “He’s there. I just can’t reach him.”

  Finn looked over at Mouse.

  “Wren could do it,” Cass continued. “I know he could.”

  “If he were here,” Mouse added, finishing Cass’s unspoken thought. He said it delicately, making the point without salting the wound.

  Cass nodded.

  “I just can’t keep the connection,” Cass said. “If I had more time, I might be able to figure it out, but...”

  “Yeah,” Mouse said. He looked up at the sky for a span, and then back to her. “And that’s the thing we’re all out of.”

  He held out a hand to her, helped her to her feet. His hand lingered, holding hers. She only noticed it because of how quickly he let go when he realized he was still holding on.

  “I think you probably want to go on to the wayhouse,” he said gently. “We’ll be along in a bit.”

  It was such a waste. Such a tragic, terrible waste of life. But she couldn’t quite bring herself to blame them, much as she wanted to. This was their teammate, a man whose life they’d sworn to protect with their own. A man whose body they’d sworn to deny to the Weir, if ever it came to that. She wanted to do something, anything to change their minds. And she could think of nothing.

  “Please,” Cass said. She could hear the tone in her own voice, knew she sounded desperate. But she didn’t know how to make them understand that her belief was based on anything more than wild hope.

  Mouse looked at her with a sadness in his eyes so deep it broke her heart. “Go on, Cass.”

  She saw the torment now, just beneath the surface of his calm. Mouse, the healer, the lifegiver. He’d be the one to carry out the final act. And he’d desperately hoped for another way. He’d given her the chance, even knowing the odds were a million to one against. He’d hoped for a miracle, and she hadn’t been able to deliver. Worse than that. Cass hadn’t thought of it at the time, but her insistence that Swoop was still in there, that he could still be rescued under the right circumstances, was a crushing blow to his teammates. Better if she had told them he was gone.

  “I’m sorry, Mouse,” she said. He nodded and dropped his gaze to the ground. “I’m sorry,” she said to the others, and she turned and headed for the wayhouse entrance.

  “If the connection was stable,” Finn said from
behind her. “You could do it?”

  Cass stopped, looked back. Mouse was watching Finn closely.

  “I think so, yeah,” she said.

  “You think so?” Finn asked. He was throwing her a lifeline, hoping she’d take it.

  “Yeah,” Cass said, turning back around. “Well, no, I don’t think so, I’m sure I could. I almost had him.”

  “Finn,” Mouse said. “We all decided.”

  “We all decided if she couldn’t bring him back,” Finn said. “Maybe I can help her.”

  Mouse and Finn just stared at each other for a span. Able stood nearby, arms crossed, his eyes shifting between his two teammates. He had to read their lips to follow any spoken conversation, but Cass got the feeling he was reading the silent communication taking place between the other two men just as perfectly.

  And then back behind the three men, a motion caught Cass’s eye. She caught only a fleeting glimpse, but the streak of blue light was unmistakable. A Weir, ducking behind a building. Mouse read her movement, turned around to see what caused her reaction, then looked back at her.

  “Was that what I think it was?” he said.

  Cass nodded.

  “Did it see us?”

  “I don’t know how it could’ve missed us.”

  “We better go track it down before it brings friends,” Finn said. He checked his rifle, readied it. “Which way?”

  Cass looked at the spot, replayed the moment in her mind. Strange. Weir didn’t hide.

  “Maybe it didn’t squawk because it saw me and thought I was... one of them,” she said. “I’ll go after it.”

  Mouse looked at her, and Cass knew he was about to tell her why she couldn’t. Instead, he said, “Not alone, you won’t.”

  “It was only one,” Cass said.

  “Not a discussion,” Mouse said. “Finn, need your rifle.”

  “I’ll go with her,” Finn said.

  “Negative,” Mouse said, holding out his hand. Finn didn’t argue. He quickly unslung his weapon and handed it over.

  “If we can’t find it in five minutes, we’ll come back,” Mouse said as he rechecked Finn’s weapon. And then added, “If we’re not back in ten, lock it up.”

  “Check,” Finn said. Then he looked down at Swoop. “What do you want me to do about him?”

  Mouse stared down at Swoop for a few seconds, brow furrowed. Then.

  “Get him inside.”

  Cass’s heart leapt at the reprieve, and was quickly tempered by the realization that it might have come simply because the threat of discovery was no longer just a threat. It wouldn’t matter if Swoop was with them now, if the Weir already knew right where they were.

  “Yeah, roger that,” Finn said. “Be careful. See you in five.”

  “Yep,” Mouse responded, then to Cass, “All right, lady. Lead on.”

  She nodded and started off in the direction of the Weir. Hearing Mouse call her lady seemed strangely foreign, even though up until a few days ago it’d been a regular part of formal address. Cass couldn’t shake the feeling that the person that title had been attached to no longer existed.

  Mouse followed closely behind, weapon shouldered and ready. As Cass led the way to where she’d last seen the Weir, she realized her headache had subsided. And she wasn’t afraid. There was no obvious reason for it; in fact everything about the situation should have been screaming warnings. Dusk was upon them. The Weir would be out in numbers soon, if they weren’t already. One of their kind had quite possibly just identified the team’s hiding place, and concealment was the greater portion of the meager protection they had. And yet Cass was more curious than fearful.

  They reached the corner around which the Weir had disappeared. She eased up to the edge of the building, leaned slowly around to get a view. It was a wide back alley separating two rows of buildings with their backs to each other. A shallow cement-lined channel ran down the center, dotted regularly with rusted grates. It was cluttered on both sides with scrapped tech, stripped hulks of machinery, steel crates disfigured by partial harvesting or aimless vandalism. A thousand places to hide. No sign of the Weir.

  Cass looked back at Mouse and gestured in the direction she’d seen the Weir go. He nodded and motioned for her to get behind him. And inexplicably, Cass found herself shaking her head. She would lead.

  Without waiting for a response, she peeled around the corner and continued with careful steps down the alley. She hunched her shoulders, brought her hands up, readying herself for the creature to spring out. But Cass realized she wasn’t expecting it to attack her; she was expecting it to try to escape. She couldn’t puzzle out why, but her instincts told her there was something about what she’d seen–

  It came from her left, just as she’d been looking right. Her blind spot.

  Reflexes took over, her left arm flashing up to intercept the attack, right drawing in and back to deliver a counter. But the attack never came. The Weir skittered across the alley in front of her, leapt a pile of debris, and disappeared between two buildings. Mouse raced past, in pursuit. Cass followed a footstep behind.

  Mouse slowed for two steps while he cleared the corner, weapon up, looking for a shot, but the Weir had ducked left out of sight just in time. Mouse accelerated, swung around in a wide arc to deny the creature a chance at ambushing him. Cass, instead, cut the corner and got there first, but not by much.

  And there, ten feet away crouched the Weir, boxed in by a deceptive U-bend in the building. In the half-heartbeat before Mouse got around the corner, it all snapped into place; Cass saw the Weir, recognized the terror in its eyes. More. Recognized the Weir. It was the same one she’d seen at the gate.

  Mouse was there, weapon swinging to target. Without thinking, Cass slapped the barrel up and away. Mouse fired, the round went high and right. The Weir leapt, bodychecked Cass back into Mouse, sent them both sprawling. And in the scramble, the creature made a dash back the way they’d come. Mouse threw Cass aside with one arm and was up in the next instant, rushing after the Weir. He paused at the corner to scan, and then ran around the building out of view. Cass recovered herself and followed.

  When she came around the corner, Mouse had slowed to an aggressive walk. He was hunched over his weapon, sweeping it back and forth as he progressed, covering each likely hiding place or escape path as he came to it. Cass closed the distance between them to ten feet and then maintained the space. They continued down the alley that way for ten, twenty, thirty yards, until it became too apparent to deny. The creature had gotten away.

  At that point, Mouse’s posture changed. He straightened up, his shoulders came back, the rifle lowered fifteen degrees. But he didn’t turn around. Not immediately. When he did, the look on his face was more frightening than anything that had just happened.

  “You got something you wanna tell me?”

  “I’m sorry, Mouse,” Cass said, holding up a hand. “But there’s something going on with that Weir.”

  “Yeah, it’s off getting its friends instead of bleeding out in that alley.”

  “No, it’s... You didn’t recognize it?”

  “Should I have?”

  “It’s the one from the gate. The one we saw when we left Morningside this afternoon.”

  Mouse’s lower jaw jutted out, then shifted to one side like he was grinding something between his teeth.

  “I think it followed us,” she added

  “That’s why it oughta be dead, Cass.”

  “Mouse, I think it’s Awake. I saw something like it before, last night. A different one. And I killed it. I killed it without a thought. But the way it looked at me right before I did... it was scared. It was scared, Mouse, and lost, and I killed it. I killed her.”

  “And I’ve got what’s left of a team I’m trying to hold together out here, Cass. I’m barely hanging on myself. I don’t know why any of what you just said matters right now.”

  “Because you’re not a murderer, Mouse. And that Weir might have been an innocent person.�
��

  “Might have been,” he said, smoldering. “You’ve been getting in the way a lot lately, with your mights and maybes. It needs to stop.”

  Cass didn’t have a response. Whether he’d meant to or not, Mouse’s choice of words had gone straight into her heart, struck her right at what she’d feared; she’d been getting in the way. Is that what he thought of her?

  And as if to emphasize his point, a Weir cried out somewhere in the distance. They were out. Hunting. Mouse shook his head and turned back towards the wayhouse.

  Cass followed along behind, feeling like her soul had been stretched to its absolute limits. Maybe beyond. She thought she was right about Swoop, and about the Weir from the gate. She thought she was doing the right thing. But it seemed like all she’d done was make everything worse. Maybe it was better for her to head off on her own. Better for everyone.

  She’d taken that evening star as a sign that she wasn’t lost or useless. Maybe it had been a sign, but not the one she’d taken it for. Maybe it was warning her that the only way to protect those around her was to get as far away from them as possible.

  As they made their way back to the wayhouse in strained silence, Cass resolved to set things right. She would give it one more try, take one more shot to do what she could for Swoop. Then, maybe she would just say her goodbyes, the way she should have before, come morning.

  Assuming they lived to see it.

  TWENTY-THREE

  “Again,” Haiku said.

  Wren struggled to keep his eyes open, even though he was standing in the middle of a training room, within arm’s reach of Haiku. This was significant because Haiku was armed with a knife, and that knife was now seeking Wren’s heart. Wren twisted and intercepted Haiku’s arm, redirected it, stepped behind the attack so he could check any follow up. He felt clumsy; the execution was sloppy and mechanical. When Haiku had done it, it had looked more like he’d been dancing than fighting. Haiku glided; Wren stomped.

  “What’s that left hand doing?” Haiku said, as he reset his stance. Wren looked at his own left hand, still bandaged, hanging down by his waist. Away from the action. “You have two hands for a reason.”