by Tam MacNeil
The huge door rolls open and sunlight spills down onto the mechs. The other two start moving. He doesn’t know which one is Evie and which is Joel, all the mechs look the same, red, glowing in the golden wash of the sun, gleaming with sea spray.
He follows. Doesn’t know if he’s supposed to but there’s no power on earth that could stop him, excepting, maybe, one of the other mechs. Every step is a crushing blow, and the force of it parts the sea where his foot comes down. The mech sinks into sludge and obliterates stone. The wake left by the other two turns the water the colour of the foam that falls from a sick animal’s mouth. He cannot wait to fight.
He doesn’t have to wait long. He sees them, black and towering, and he remembers how it was that first time, in English Bay. It was dark then and he could not see them, not really. They were monsters, darkness, unknowable and unknown, they were colossal and compelled him.
Now he is as big as they are, now he is as strong. Now he thinks of Ava, how she took her hand out of his when she lay face down in the water, and he thinks of everything he lost that night and then he is moving in the cage, and his teeth tight on the mouth guard.
“Pilot, your cannon is active.”
He has never been big before, he has never been strong before, has never been able to fight back before.
“Pilot, do not damage the other mechs.”
But he’s a good shot. He’s a damn good shot, even when he’s moving. Aside from Chen he might be the best fucking shot in the world. He doesn’t miss. The cannon is like a knife. It cuts the nearest shinigami in two, and the thing vanishes, as if it was never there.
“Jesus,” the comms operator whispers. Then Alex closes the distance, between him and another of the shinigami, this one in the grip of one of the mechs. He shoulders in, grips the shining darkness that yields like cooked fat under his hands, and tears it open because he hates the sight of it, tears it to pieces because Ava drowned beside him, and his mother didn’t even kiss him before she lay down, and his father smiled at him and said, “Don’t be afraid, Sasha, it won’t hurt,” but he was wrong, wrong, and nothing ever stopped hurting after that.
There are things inside the shinigami; a river of stars that pumps like blood, a globe of luminous material like a small sun that might be a heart. A huge eye that stares at him. He tears it free of the torso, digs in the metal fingers, and rips the iris till it bursts apart and fluid falls like rain. He is strong and it feels good, it feels good, maybe it’s the only thing that has ever felt good in his life.
“Jesus,” he comms operator whispers again.
The euphoria lasts until the techs open the cage, pull off the helmet, and start unbuckling the straps. Coming off the neck port makes him small again. Small and flesh and helpless. And hurt. Everything hurts. He can’t hold himself up, his legs are too weak, the muscles hot, and his arms feel like they’re running with blood.
That’s when he understands he moved a machine far beyond the limits of his body, a machine he tried and failed to move at first. That’s when he realizes his brain has been screaming at him to stop but he couldn’t hear it over the interface. Now things are torn and broken and he’s been using them anyway and now they’re damaged and they hurt and they might not work right ever again.
When they take the mask off he’s screaming like the pain is going to kill him.
Six
Alex wakes up as they are loading him into the cage. “Simulation?” he asks when he can make his mouth work. The guy doing up the straps shrugs.
None of the techs talk to him any more, not really, not since that first run, but sometimes he can get information out of them before they put the helmet over his face. The guy knuckles Alex’s lips and Alex opens his mouth. The plate with the electrodes goes in, buckles on, pure oxygen comes rushing in and it helps cut the grogginess.
The comms plate isn't as uncomfortable as it used to be. It used to cut his mouth up, and the taste of blood would linger for days, but now it’s like a boxer’s mouth guard. He bites down on the soft edges and listens for the telltale hum that means the cannon is responding, then lets go. Then the helmet goes on. The guy gives it a little tap once it’s snug in place. Not sure if that’s friendly or cruel. Doesn’t really matter.
The crew finish with the straps, leave the cockpit, and the glass panel closes after them. It shuts out the sound of the tank, dulls the lights. He’s coming to like this place. A cocoon that suspends him. All he must do is pretend to walk and pretend to fight. In some ways it is very easy.
The cage shakes when the dock retracts. The mech settles under him. He closes his hands into fists. A chain reaction passes through the head’s-up display, showing him the limb that’s moving, and even with the helmet on he can hear the machinery moving.
“Pilot, move to coordinates.”
No one expects him to answer, not with the sensors in his mouth. The comms only go one way. The coordinates appear on the head’s-up in front of him and he shifts, pushing weight against first one leg then the other, aping a walk, so that the mech will move under him. It lurches at first, Alex is not natural at this, not like the others. But it moves. He follows the other two.
They leave the Tank, could cross over the bridge but it’s dangerous and pointless when you can just walk across the river. They go. The riverbed is mud all the way to his knees, and the work is hard going. He’s sweating by the time the mech climbs up the other side. Then up the grey ribbon of the highway, and to the North Shore mountains where, the last time he was outside, the slopes were still green and forested. He thought the shinigami only came to the water, he thought drowning was what they made people do. He wishes the comms went both ways. He wishes he could ask what’s going on.
And then he sees it. The display doesn’t show it, because the display only shows the living, but the window on the front of the suit doesn’t edit, and now he can see. See the dead. See them hanging like banners from the trees that frame the summertime ski slope. And the shinigami, bleeding night out in the middle of the day.
“Kill the shinigami,” says the voice in the comms.
He moves in. One of the mechs is already pounding one of the shinigami, and the other mech is moving fast toward a second. He goes for the third, the untaken, and raises his hands to fight. The shinigami do not fight, not in a sort of punching kind of way. It’s something closer to wrestling. Instead the mech pilots grapple with them, push them back through the tears they’ve made in the world and close the tears up after.
This is not a simulation he reminds himself. Grabbing for the lower half of the shape, grabbing it, shoving it with a mechanized shoulder that commands a thousand tonnes of force. He hears the shinigami scream; the song never bothers him but the scream cuts right through him and makes him cold. He squeezes. If it has lungs maybe he’ll be able to make the noise stop because the sounds are terrified and desperate and he sometimes makes those noises too.
It’s still screaming, twisting in the metal grip. Twisting till it gets to however it wants to be and pulsates, the unclear form undulates like something is rolling under it. The starred darkness in it splits and there’s an eye there, staring into the cockpit of the mech.
Alex has never seen the eye looking back at him before. It’s impossible that there could ever be such a thing. The iris is the blue of neon signs, the pupil is massive and then contracts. It rolls, fixes on him. He stares back at it.
You, it says. You are hurting me.
He didn’t realize it was a thing, that it was alive, that it could hurt. He drops his arms.
“Pilot what are you doing?” The comms guy is going crazy in his ear. “Engage, engage!”
The eye is staring at him. It shivers, starred darkness and then the eye again, it must have blinked. The voice is in his head, not really a voice but kind of a voice. You can hear me? He wants to answer, but doesn’t know how, and the comms guy screaming in his ear, “Get in there pilot, get in and fight!” and if he doesn’t obey orders he's going to get hur
t.
He shoves forward again, catching up the shinigami and crushing it to him, moving it toward the tear in the sky. Through the windscreen he can see one of the mechs grapple a shinigami around its midpoint and shove. The shinigami goes back into the darkness and as it goes something bleeds out of it, like ink in water, the stain suddenly solidifies, wraps the mech and holds it close as a lover. When it falls back through the abyss, the mech falls with it.
He doesn’t know who’s gone, doesn’t want to know.
“Holy shit,” the comms guy in his ear. “No, the sig’s gone. It’s gone. No sign. No vitals. Yes sir. Pilot, do not get entangled.”
But it’s too late. There’s something holding the body of his mech in place and it is in his head and it is saying Why are you hurting me? He would answer, because I have to, if he could, but he doesn’t know how to and he can’t break free, not with his own strength, but there’s a cannon in the mech’s chest and maybe that. He plants his foot on the shinigami to lever himself up. He summons up the cannon. The interface in his mouth heats up.
“Pilot, you are too close to your target. Do not use your cannon. Repeat: Do not use your cannon.”
He pushes back with everything he has, mechanical arms shoving the sticky mass of the shinigami away and then there’s a flash, a thoom, and the world goes white, he’s weightless, airless, and then… and then he lands. He goes tumbling back, ploughing a furrow in the raw ski-slope, knocking down trees and chair-lift-supports and crushing corpses, head smashing against the interior of the helmet, the interface in his mouth lacerating his tongue, filling his mouth up with blood. He can’t swallow it’s so much, opens his mouth and lets it fall out.
"Close your mouth!” the comms guy yells.
He can’t. He’ll suffocate. Something is wrong with his hands. Something is wrong with his leg. “Pilot, close your fucking mouth!”
He has to obey. He bites the mouthpiece, lets the blood run out between his teeth. Hard to breathe like this. Hard to breathe and he’s desperate for air.
“No, sir, but a fair bit of damage.”
Something hurts. Something is wrong. His hands. He has to push against the cage to see them. They are twisted, gnarled, like claws. Not hands at all. He realizes the window’s been blown out and there’s metal and blood and earth all over the place. He realizes the head’s-up display is flickering on and off. That he is alone. That the shinigami are gone and so are the other mechs. And parts of his hands.
He can see the pearl-white of splintered bone, the deep red of muscle, the way the tendons curl where they gave. He leans forward in the cage, looks down at his stinging leg. There’s a big piece of twisted sheet metal lying under him. It must have struck him, because his suit is torn, and meat hangs from his thighbone, and there’s blood going taptaptap on the metal.
“Vitals are all over the place.”
He’s going to be sick. Desperately doesn’t want to be sick in the helmet. He can’t take it off with his arms strapped in like this.
“Pilot, you are ordered to wait. Do not move.”
Maybe there is another shinigami. Maybe they’re sending him to fight again. Maybe they don’t know how bad the damage is. The comms don’t go both ways. He can’t speak with the plate in his mouth. His heart is going to explode in his chest. His mouth is full of puke.
“Pilot do not move.” Then, softly, almost kindly, “Medical is on its way.”
He tries to hold still, listening to the taptap tataptap of his blood on the sheet metal, while the agony in his hands and his legs begins to percolate through. Eternity. This must be what hell is like for the damned.
Cool air, sharp with the scent of pine and leaking diesel, brushes the sweat on his face. He realizes that his visor is broken, and the comms are partially torn away. Which is good, because everything hurts like broken glass, like fire, and now he’s throwing up and the pain makes it impossible to stand. He hangs against the harness.
“Keep breathing,” says the voice in his ear. “They’re almost there.”
Then the thrum of helicopters. Then the clatter of feet and voices. Hands and faces and black SysCorp jackets. Someone says, oh Christ and makes a retching sound. Someone puts a needle into the port in his arm. He’s never known such mercy.
He wakes. The Tank is empty. The other beds are gone. The place is spacious without the other two. He is alone.
When he looks, his hands are hands again. The meat of his leg is covered with skin that doesn't match. Everything hurts.
He tries not to cry, but when he does, he tries to do it silently. They must be monitoring him, though, because the dark-haired doctor comes in. She shines a light into his eyes, then puts a needle into the port his arm. Things are better after that.
Seven
The first night, Sean sleeps in the 1950s style office. The couch has a pullout that's not bad, and Simone, who's good with medical stuff, asks him if he wants something for the pain. When he says yes she gives him something that makes everything stop sucking and he sleeps a blissful, still, and dreamless sleep.
The next day they put him a different room in the hotel. Not the kind of room that he and Alex used to get, all shitty carpets and creaking beds. This is a bit of a swank sort of place; leather couch and reading chair with a lamp and a little kitchenette with glossy stone tiles. He limps around the whole place, checking the door first - there’s a deadbolt and a flip-lock and a chain, but the doorframe is cheap as hell, and he could kick through it if he needed to, which means somebody else could kick it in, too. Then he goes to the windows, which are old-fashioned sash windows. They lock. Kind of. Crappily.
His view is of the roof of the next building over. Tarpaper roofing and a big metal box that probably houses elevator workings or AC or something. There are two escape ladders, and another building, a hotel, judging from the uniformity of furniture on the balconies, which would be a great place for someone to line up a shot that would blow his brains out. He drops the blinds and goes back to exploring.
He looks for bugs, but doesn’t find anything. There’s a TV and near by that a desk with a computer, that stands against one wall. He goes over to it, turns the computer on. It starts up, no problem. No password required. Internet connection. He perches on the edge of the chair, bandaged leg out extended so the muscle doesn't hurt, and types simple wiki into the search engine, then kidnapping, then P.O.W., and then, stupidly, not like he’s going to find an article on it, he types, whats going to happen now. He doesn’t care if they’re monitoring what he’s looking up, but he figures they are.
He puts on the TV, watches the talking heads flap their mouths about the sudden mech deployment and the disaster at the condo. The pictures are pretty bad. A couple people are saying they heard popping noises before the mech hit the condo, but nobody’s calling them gunshots. They’re calling it an industrial accident. There’s Cameron’s PR lady, wearing a serious suit, making a solemn statement about safety and about how non-human mech pilots increase the likelihood of error, like this is the DNDs fault for not offering up their people or something, and Chen, fucking Chen, standing in the background. When she looks at the camera, he feels like she’s looking right at him, and flips the channel.
After a bit he dozes with his head on his arm, in and out while the TV babbles. Then he wakes up enough to drag the chair from the desk over to the door and jam the back up under the door handle. He turns the TV off, drags himself to the bed, and sleeps some more.
Sometime later someone knocks on his door. Light’s seeping in from under the blinds and the place is stuffy and warm and he can hear traffic in the street. He’s slept all through the night, managed not to think about anything, not to think about Alex, or Cameron, or all the people who died in that building, or what the hell he’s done.
The knock comes again and he tells himself that if they want him they can kick the door in. It’s not like it would be that hard. He closes his eyes and maybe he sleeps a bit more. But now he’s started thinking about
what’s lost he can’t stop. He lies there till the light is gone, and the city’s quiet again.
Sometime in the night he gets up because he can’t put off pissing any more. Afterward he looks at his face in the bathroom mirror and a hollow-eyed stare looks back at him. Never was all that good looking and losing Alex hasn’t done him any favours. He’s still got glass and plaster in his hair and when he turns his head he realizes there’s a splatter of dried blood on the side of his face. It’s either his or Alex’s. He turns on the taps, washes it off, and dry-heaves into the sink a couple times.
He goes back to bed but he’s too hungry to sleep, so he goes to the kitchen looks around it. It’s stocked, at least a little bit. There’s milk and apples in the fridge and a box of granola bars in one of the cupboards. He eats the granola bars, all of them, one after the other, in a kind of exhausted trance, drinks a couple glasses of water. He wonders if this is how it feels to be caught up in the shinigami song, thinks about Tbilisi and the way he felt on the train, and the fact is the feeling is pretty fucking close.
But there’s no shinigami, it’s just him, like it used to be when times were bad. He takes himself back to bed.
He wakes up because someone’s knocking on the door again. Fuck them. It’s not like they don’t have a fucking key. It’s not like they couldn’t kick out the door frame.
He lies in bed till they go away. It’s daytime and it’s raining. He can hear the water rattling through tin downspouts, splashing into rooftop puddles. The traffic hisses through the streets. He doesn’t need the blinds up to know.
He wishes there was booze somewhere, makes a thorough search of all the cupboards and there’s nothing. Not even a cheap forty of bad vodka forgotten at the back of a cupboard.
He eats all the apples and drinks most of the milk and lies on the couch and stares at the TV till the rain stops and the dark settles and he’s sick of being covered in sweat and salt and dust and goes and has a shower. There was blood in his hair too.
