Dawnbreaker

by Posey, Jay

  “I think I can help you,” she said. “If you’ll let me.”

  The Weir kept his place. Cass began walking towards him, slowly, hands held open and out to the side. And even though the man-creature didn’t relax, he didn’t run away either. She stopped about ten feet from him; enough distance for her reaction time, just in case. From there, she tried to reach out through the digital to him, to find his connection and attach to it. She could sense it now, or at least picture it in her mind’s eye. For a brief moment, she thought she’d found it, but when she stretched out to it, it was like sticking her hand into mist or shadow. Form without substance, nothing to grasp or follow to its source. The Weir made another sound, this one with a vaguely questioning tone.

  She had hoped it wouldn’t be necessary to try to touch the Weir. She had no way of knowing how it would react. But after a minute or two of standing there, she couldn’t think of any other way to proceed. And though she wasn’t necessarily afraid of what might come with nightfall, she didn’t really want to be standing out in the open when it arrived either. Cass held out her hand.

  “Will you come with me?” she said.

  The Weir looked down at her outstretched hand, and then back up at her.

  “We’ll find somewhere safer,” she said. “Follow me.”

  Immediately the words left her mouth, a change came over the Weir. It relaxed, moved towards her. Almost submissive. Cass turned halfway and took a few hesitant steps. The Weir followed obediently. He continued to watch her intently, but for whatever reason his posture didn’t suggest any fear or planned flight. Cass walked on, increasing her pace. The Weir matched it.

  On her first trip around the loop, Cass had passed one building that seemed more intact than any of its neighbors. There was no way to know if it was a particularly good place to spend the night, but it seemed like a good option for some quick cover. She led the Weir back around her previous route, located the building. The front door had a barred gate over it, but the lock was broken off. They entered into a narrow foyer that led to a corridor with rooms on either side.

  “Wait here,” Cass said, and the Weir stopped by the door without complaint. It was uncanny how compliant he’d become. His eyes were just shy of wild, but he did exactly as he was told. As Cass explored the corridor and its adjoining rooms, the thought rolled around in her mind. Did exactly as he was told. Responds to commands, not questions. Was he still under some kind of control or influence? Did the Weir-state make him susceptible to external demand? She checked the rear exit, the nearby staircase, and then after confirming that the back rooms were clear, Cass returned to the foyer and decided to put the idea to the test.

  “Come here,” she said. The Weir promptly walked to her. “Sit down,” she said. He did, right at her feet. She knelt in front of him, looked into his watchful eyes. A war raged in them. She’d been wrong before about him not being afraid. He was afraid, very much so. And helpless. A wave of pity rolled over Cass as she realized her commands were indeed overriding whatever liberty the Weir-man had enjoyed before she’d spoken. He was trapped in some kind of in-between state, partially awake, aware of his circumstance and powerless to change it.

  “Take my hand,” she said. The Weir reached out and held her hand. “I’m going to help you,” she said, though she didn’t know if that would mean anything to him. “I’m going to get you out.”

  And with that, she closed her eyes and tried again to find his connection. Cass spent a minute or so calming herself, breathing deeply, clearing her mind. It’d been easier before when she’d let the connection come to her. She waited. Five minutes became ten, threatened to stretch into twenty, and still she could find nothing. She’d thought after her experience with Swoop, after having observed how Finn structured the signal, that she’d be able to replicate the process. And though holding the man’s hand had made her sense of him stronger, the result was the same; there was nothing firm for her to cling to. It had been a strong memory of Swoop that had helped her find him, a perfectly clear image of him in her mind. This poor fellow holding her hand now was a stranger. Worse, he was a complete puzzle, his very existence an unanswered question. She didn’t know exactly what she should be looking for.

  Then Cass realized that wasn’t entirely true. She didn’t know this man at all, but she’d seen the datastream that held all the Weir together. The thought occurred to her that maybe instead of starting at the individual, she could pull back and find the collective first, then work her way to him. She switched her focus.

  The effect wasn’t immediate, nor was it easy, but Cass did find it. In her mind’s eye, the churning datastream reformed, present but indistinct, as if viewed through a fog. Without Finn’s help, her footing was less secure and she felt the strain of maintaining her connection to the signal. But her previous experience helped her keep calm. She could do this. Slow and steady.

  Gradually Cass shifted her attention to the man’s hand in her own. And though she wasn’t using her eyes, the sensation was much like glancing down at a child, close at hand, while keeping an angry crowd in her peripheral vision. Her attention went to the man, but her awareness stayed with the datastream, passively watching for any sudden changes that might signal danger or require a reaction.

  She could almost see him now, standing out from the raging stream. Not trapped in its flow, fighting the current like Swoop had been. This man’s personality was distinct from the flow, yet still tethered by thick tendrils and surrounded by wisps of something other. And compared to Swoop, he seemed... thin. Not in shape, but in substance, like there was somehow less of him.

  And there, behind him, was something else entirely.

  It was distant in her mind, itself wrapped in a mist, but once she noticed it, she couldn’t draw herself away from it. A convergence. In a manner that had no parallel to the real world, the thing seemed to both radiate and absorb the broad signal of the Weir, and others beside. A swirling nexus, half-whirlpool, half-star, both source and terminal point of the datastream. Cass’s mind bent at the image, trying to comprehend the impossible angles and movement.

  And yet it had structure. Structure so impenetrably complex she had no hope of understanding its architecture. Even so, she was compelled to bypass the man for the moment, and to stretch herself towards it, to try to find meaning in its impossibility. It grew larger in her mind, began to solidify. Cass continued to reach towards it. As she did so, she gradually became aware of a vague sensation of falling, or of being carried along by the current. The nexus was drawing her to it, and now that she’d allowed herself to be caught up in it, she feared she might not be able to escape it. And yet she didn’t fight. Not yet. Just a little closer.

  Though she couldn’t see any others, her gut told her there were others out there, connected to it; a vast network. This was merely a single node, one of many. And there in the midst sat something bright, brighter than all else, yet pale with a sickly light. Even without knowing what it was or what purpose it served, Cass felt an immediate revulsion. It was a bulbous teardrop, shimmering at the center of the nexus, and she couldn’t force herself to imagine it as anything other than the bloated body of an immense spider. There was something else too behind the instinctive reaction; a vague familiarity, like the sight of a strange animal triggering the memory of another’s bite. There was danger here, Cass knew.

  She turned her focus back to the man whose hand she still held, fought her way back towards him, struggled against the current that threatened to carry her into that alien mass. And as she strove to free herself, she heard in her mind sporadic warning cries of the Weir, as if they’d awoken to her presence. They’d noticed the intrusion. The glowing thing at the center of the nexus twitched and pulsed. Cass wrestled herself free, felt the convergence receding. But still the spider-thing shifted and remained clear in her mind. And to her horror, it began to unfold itself; not eight legs but eighty, or eight hundred. Tendrils stretched and spread and probed. It was alerted to her presence, if
not her location, and was searching, bending itself towards her. Without consciously processing, Cass knew this was the same intelligence that had pursued her when she’d freed Swoop. This was the thing that had risen from the deep to seize her.

  This was Asher.

  She fled then, pausing only long enough to snatch the man free before she severed her connection. The physical world snapped shut around her. The man cried out in pain or in shock and fell forward, cradling his head in his arms. Cass too felt pressure in her skull; the onset of the strange headache that had accompanied her two previous attempts. She hoped she wasn’t going to relapse into whatever state she’d experienced when she’d freed Swoop. She was counting on that reaction having been the result of the trap that had been attached to him, and not simply an escalation of the symptoms she’d suffered after her first attempt. Her ears were ringing slightly, and the experience of her second escape from Asher lingered with terrible clarity. The cries of the Weir still echoed in her mind. After a few seconds the pain reached a threshold and stabilized. Not pleasant by any means, but bearable.

  The man was bent double in front of her, but he wasn’t moaning or showing any other obvious signs of distress. Cass touched his shoulder lightly. He didn’t respond immediately. His breathing was heavier than it’d been before she’d brought him out. Finally, he raised his head and his eyes to hers.

  “What...” he said, and then stopped, apparently surprised at the sound of an actual word coming from his own mouth.

  “It’s OK,” Cass said. “You’re OK now. You’re not connected to the Weir anymore.” He shook his head and sat up, trying to comprehend her words and their implications. “It’s a lot to process, I know.”

  He’d been staring right into her eyes since he looked up, but now became self-conscious, or maybe troubled by them. He looked away across the foyer at nothing in particular, mouth open.

  “What’s your name?” Cass asked.

  Seconds passed before he responded. “Orrin,” he eventually said, slowly. “... I think.”

  “Orrin, I’m Cass.”

  “What’d you do to me?” he asked quietly, still unwilling to look at her. The tone was more curious than accusatory, but there was an edge to his voice that was unsettling.

  “I set you free,” she said.

  “You’re the girl from that city,” he said, flicking his eyes to her and then down to the ground in front of him. “Right? Aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And before that, you stopped a man from shooting me,” he said.

  “After the city,” Cass corrected. “That came after.”

  He shook his head, though she couldn’t tell if he was disagreeing or was trying to clear his thoughts.

  “You followed me from there, Orrin. We saw you last night and tried to find you. You ran away. Then today, you followed me here. Why?”

  “I don’t know,” he said sharply, agitated. But he quickly softened. “You were... you seemed different. From the others. I wanted to see why.”

  Between the headache and the strangeness of the interaction with Orrin, Cass had lost some awareness of her surroundings. It came back to her as if she’d realized she’d just caught herself right before nodding off. The foyer was darker; quite a bit darker than when they’d first entered. And those echoes of the Weir in her mind, she discovered, weren’t just in her mind at all. They were real; the Weir were out.

  Something about her change must have drawn his attention. He looked up at her, then back at the door behind him.

  “Is that them?” he asked. “Are they coming here?”

  “They’re out,” Cass answered, “but I think we’ll be OK in here.”

  Orrin scrambled up to his knees and backed up against the wall.

  “Is that them?” he asked. “Are they coming here?”

  He said it in the exact same tone, with the exact same cadence, like a recording stuck on a loop. His reaction hit Cass with a fresh note of dread. She’d been so intent on rescuing this man she hadn’t fully considered the potential outcomes; it’d never even occurred to her that he might not be completely stable. Everyone that Wren had Awakened had reacted differently, of course. Some, like Kit and Luck, had been relieved, and grateful, and had adjusted well. Others, like Mez, had kept to themselves and never really seemed to recover fully from the experience. But none of them had come back in the sort of shape that Orrin was in. It was too late now, though; he was Awake and it was becoming increasingly clear that he was coming apart.

  “You don’t need to worry, Orrin,” she said. “I’ve done this plenty of times. We’ll be all right.”

  His eyes stayed fixed on the door.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “They’re coming. They’re coming here!”

  “They’re not,” Cass said, trying to soothe him. “They don’t know we’re here, Orrin...”

  And as she said it she felt it was a lie. Now that she listened carefully, it did seem like the cries were growing in both frequency and volume. They were calling to each other, certainly, but not in the sporadic, almost casual way that was normal to their hunt. They were coordinating. Worse. Converging.

  Her experience with the datastream and the node. Maybe they really had noticed her, not just in that plane, but here too, in the real world.

  “They’re coming,” Orrin repeated, shaking his head.

  “Yeah,” Cass said. “Yeah, I think you’re right.”

  She rose to her feet, scanned her options. He turned and looked at her then, eyes wide. The rear exit wasn’t necessarily a better choice than the front door. She knew better than to go up the stairs. Rear door might be locked or rusted shut. Out the front then, the way they’d come in.

  “Come on, we’ll find somewhere else. We can lose ’em,” she said, heading towards the entrance. But he shook his head again as she passed, stayed huddled against the wall. Cass stopped, turned back towards him. “Orrin, I need you to stay calm, OK? I need you to trust me. I can keep you safe, if you just do what I say.”

  “You!” he shouted. “You brought them!”

  “I’m leaving,” Cass said, trying to keep emotion out of her voice. “I’m going to find somewhere safe. You can take chances on your own, if you want to. They might not even notice you if you don’t do anything stupid. Or you can come with me, and I’ll do what I can to protect you. Either way, I’m leaving now.”

  She turned back around and headed out the door. As soon as she exited, she saw the first of them. Fifty yards down the street, looking right at her. Too far for the jittergun. Not far enough to get much of a head start. The Weir made the decision for her. It rushed her, mouth wide in a howl.

  Cass hunched down, tucked her chin, brought her hands up to eye level. Waited. The creature closed the distance in short seconds, leapt. And Cass sidestepped, delivered a perfect hook, buried her fist in the side of its head as it went by. It sprawled in midair, landed in an awkward heap, face down on the concrete. Motionless, once it stopped skidding.

  There was a gasp behind her, and Cass turned to find Orrin standing in the entrance, eyes wide and wild.

  “You... you...” he stammered. “You can’t fight them!”

  Cass looked over very deliberately at the Weir she’d just felled with a single blow, and then back at Orrin, cocked her head.

  “Wasn’t much of a fight,” she said. Other cries picked up, no doubt responding to the Weir’s previous howl. Orrin swiveled his head back and forth frantically, like a man trapped in a prison spotlight.

  “Come on,” Cass said. His head snapped back around, his eyes locked on hers. From his wild look, she knew he was lost.

  “You’re crazy, is what!” he said. “You’re crazy!”

  And he took off running in whatever direction his feet happened to be pointing him.

  “Orrin, no!” Cass called, but she stopped short of trying to grab him before he got out of reach. “Don’t run off!”

  If he heard her, he didn’t make any sign of
it. And though Cass felt she ought to chase him down, she noticed she wasn’t actually doing so. She stood and watched as he fled back the way they’d come. Right back into the arms and claws of the very thing she’d just rescued him from. Orrin disappeared around a corner.

  Maybe he’d be all right. Maybe the Weir wouldn’t notice him, or they’d ignore him. But Cass had learned long ago you couldn’t save people from themselves. If she went chasing after him in his current state, he might very well think she was trying to kill him herself. And even if his head finally cleared enough for him to realize what he’d done, it was likely his panic would make him unpredictable and impossible to control, the way a drowning man clings to a would-be rescuer and dooms them both.

  She’d done what she could for him, and risked all she’d been prepared to risk. Guilt tugged at her as she turned around, but it didn’t prevent her from heading off in the other direction. A lesson she’d have to think more deeply about later. Right now, getting clear needed all her attention.

  Cass set off at a jog, head up, eyes constantly scanning for threats. Orrin had been partially right; she couldn’t fight them all. Evasion was her primary goal. But if they came at her one or two at a time, she wasn’t particularly worried about running a path right through them. She cut through an alley, and then back down a wide avenue, zigzagging her way more or less northward.

  The biggest question was whether the Weir were merely closing in on her last known position, or if they were actually tracking her. The thought that they might have identified her individual signature was by far the worse possibility. If they’d caught her digital scent, it might be hours before she could completely shake pursuit. It might even take until dawn.

  There was no way to know until it played out. And there was nothing she could do about it now anyway. She pressed on, ever watchful. After ten minutes of winding her way through the broken urban terrain, she had her answer. The Weir’s cries hadn’t converged in any one location and they weren’t getting any more distant either.

  They were tracking her.