Mirror's Edge

by Scott Westerfeld

  At the front of the column, X and the others turn to see. Our weapons are pitiful and improvised. Without cover, we don’t stand a chance against autocannon.

  The officer behind the others looks at me.

  “You will surrender,” she says. “At once.”

  I swallow. Boss X won’t go back into his cell. But if he fights now, he’s condemning us all to death.

  “Give me a minute,” I say. “I’ll talk sense to them.”

  “A minute?” the officer says. “Don’t be absurd. Cycle up!”

  The guns whir to life, their barrels spinning too fast to see. The whine of it fills the air like a steam whistle.

  The officer steps through the line, careful to leave the field of fire clear.

  “Do you surrender?” she asks me. “Yes or no?”

  “I’m not in command,” I say. “Some of us are rebels, some Victorians. It’s complicated!”

  “No, it’s simple. If you don’t lay down your weapons and surrender, we will open fire—and you will all die.”

  I look back over my shoulder. Boss X is strolling toward us at a casual pace, pulse lance in hand.

  One sweep of the lance will kill all six of the Security officers, and they know it. X is going to fight.

  In his certainty, he looks magnificent.

  The officer’s eyes go wider.

  “If your friend comes any closer, we will end every one of you.”

  I turn back and shout, “X, wait there—I’ve got this!”

  He pauses in his stride, but all of us can see his muscles coiling, readying to strike.

  X went into that cell to save me and the city of Paz. But he’s not going back again. It’s not something I can ask of him.

  And I realize—it’s not something I can let happen.

  There are no more arguments inside me, no reasoning. Not with someone who still obeys my father’s orders.

  As I turn back to the Security officer, my fist tightens, my knife going long and thin, nothing but a shimmer in the air.

  “Frankly,” I say, “this surrender isn’t happening.”

  “Unfortunate,” she answers.

  She raises her hand to give the order.

  All at once, every cell door in the hallway opens.

  They come stumbling out, scores of them.

  These aren’t rebels and terrorists, like the priority prisoners. Most have the bland surge of Shreve citizens.

  So many of them look young. Maybe they were in the cliques that protested during the Battle of Shreve. Or maybe they just said the wrong thing while the dust was listening.

  I try to smile, hoping Col in the control room can see me. However this turns out, our friends’ timing was exquisite.

  Some of the prisoners recognize each other, and for a moment, there are hugs and greetings. But when they see the dark blue uniforms of Security, the hallway goes quiet.

  Surrounded now, the armed officers have lost focus. They’re looking around nervously, guns pointed at the ceiling.

  I manage to speak. “I’ll accept your surrender now. You can’t get all of us.”

  The officer hesitates.

  “We’ve taken your control room,” I say. “Your city will fall tonight. There’s no point in killing anyone.”

  She swallows. “There’s still a duty to be done.”

  “You don’t have to—”

  “Eyes forward!” she shouts.

  Her officers gather themselves, leveling their autocannon at the crowd. I can hear Boss X just behind me.

  It all happens in a flash—

  The officer raises her hand again.

  My variable blade sweeps across the space between us, high and fast, invisibly thin. I feel only the faintest pings when its molecule-width edge intersects flesh and bone.

  Her hand falls first, spilling from her wrist. The stump is a clean and perfect cross section. She tries to look at it.

  But her head turns wrong, slower than her neck. An awful sound, meat and jelly sliding. Her mouth still opens somehow, her panicked eyes staring at the sudden froth of blood at her wrist …

  The hand lands on the floor with a muddy slap.

  She goes down on one knee, and the hard pop of kneecap against stone seems to jar everything loose—vertebrae, muscles, veins and arteries, the skin and fat of her neck—all of it reluctantly, wetly disconnects.

  Her head tumbles, collapses from her shoulders.

  The other Security officers stare in horror, watching as her heart settles in her chest, spraying red across gray stone, each beat lessening a little.

  Boss X steps forward to command their attention, his lance purring softly in his hand.

  His voice is miraculously steady. “Cycle down your weapons.”

  It takes endless seconds, but one by one the autocannon spin to a halt.

  For a second, I forget the blade in my hand, invisible and deadly. But finally I let my fist relax, and the plastic writhes back around my fingers.

  Like this was all a magic trick, and the Security officer is about to stand up to take a bow. But she just lies there, her blood spreading across the floor toward my stolen shoes.

  I stare at the rings on my fingers, but they’re clean. The blade was too thin for any part of her to cling to.

  Boss X places a hand on my shoulder. “Well struck.”

  I turn away from his praise, his pride in me.

  This camo-surged body feels like it’s falling apart, all its stringy tissues snapping. My bones are liquefacted, like the shock of what I’ve done is a fall at terminal velocity.

  Dysmorphia by proxy.

  Sensei Noriko is still beside me, and I expect to see horror in her gaze. But her eyes are calm.

  “Young lady,” she says, taking my arm. “Walk with me again.”

  She leads me away from the fallen officer, her steps measured, my weight leaning into her. He body is lined with iron, a dancer’s muscles beneath silk.

  In a soft voice, she tells me a story about a girl who loved a fish, and how its shining scales became the mountains and craters of the moon.

  There is an etiquette, it seems, for beheadings.

  The way Noriko holds my arm, it’s like her fingers are pressing on my burned-out feels. I imagine Sublime and Philosophical passing through my veins.

  All bodies fall apart in the end.

  The escape is still happening around us. The former prisoners crowd the surviving Security officers into a cell, distributing their autocannon, sidearms, and body armor. X takes his place at the head of the line again. The shuffling throng around us has become formidable, the beginnings of an army.

  But the battle frenzy has gone cold in my veins.

  Col comes pushing through the crowd. He watched the beheading on a screen—I can tell from his face.

  When Noriko sees him coming, she smiles and bows, withdrawing one elegant step.

  Col wraps his arms around me. His breathlessness, the pounding of his heart, tells me that he ran all the way.

  “You had to do it,” he says.

  I look at him—wondering if he knows how sad his words sound. They only make me feel worse.

  I chopped off someone’s head, like a mad queen from some littlies’ story.

  “What’s happening to my city?” I ask.

  “The tower’s still standing. The Shreve feeds are claiming they’ve repulsed the invaders.”

  “But it’s a lie?”

  In answer, the building shivers around us.

  “It’s a work in progress,” Col says.

  I look at the prisoners filing past. There seems to be a never-ending supply of haggard faces, stunned by sudden freedom.

  If you added up all the years they’ve been in those cells, how many lifetimes has my father stolen?

  The eight years that Rafi and I stole from Sensei Noriko are unforgivable. Multiplying those years by all these people, unimaginable.

  “How are we going to get everyone to safety?” I ask. “There must be hun
dreds of them.”

  “Six hundred and seventy-one,” Cols says, “according to Kessa Shard. She’s awake and cooperating—we told her Demeter was on our side. Or maybe she can see it’s all over for your father.”

  I shake my head. Nothing can be certain until he’s dead.

  The battle above our heads is still raging. But I don’t care if the sky falls in on us, as long as this attack ends my father once and for all.

  “The free cities should have done this last year,” I say. “The moment he invaded Victoria.”

  Col places a hand on the wall, as if to feel the vibrations of bombardment better. Shreve must have burned in his dreams a hundred times.

  But he says, “This was never going to be simple.”

  I pull his hand away from the cold stone, keeping it in mine.

  “Kessa gave the HQ evacuation order,” he says. “Security’s gone, along with most of the hovercars. But we found a few mass arrest shuttles in the bay.”

  Mass arrest, like the night of the Revelation.

  I shake off the thought.

  “We’ll put one commando on each shuttle,” Col says. “Our extraction transmitters will keep our side from shooting us down.”

  “But they’re expecting to rescue eight of us—not hundreds!”

  He shrugs. “Sometimes a change in plan turns a trip into an adventure, Islyn.”

  I turn away, watching the stream of freed prisoners filing past.

  If my father’s regime doesn’t fall tonight, he’ll be looking for someone to blame for this attack.

  Who better than a bunch of old political enemies and crims?

  “They might be safer in their cells,” I say, “if this all goes wrong.”

  Col laughs. “Ask if they want to go back.”

  I squeeze his hand. “You set them all free at just the right moment, by the way. It saved us.”

  “Boss Charles did that. I think the rebels always planned to free everyone here.”

  “Of course.” I remember X, a few moments out of his cell, taking command. “It must be nice, being so certain.”

  I must owe hundreds of these prisoners an apology, for leaving them exposed to my father’s revenge after the Revelation. But I don’t even know what to say to my first victim.

  Or maybe I do.

  I turn to Sensei Noriko, who’s been listening to me and Col with quiet interest. Maybe it’s been a while since she’s heard a conversation.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  She tilts her head a little, confused. “For rescuing me?”

  “No—for getting you locked up in the first place.” I lean close and whisper, “My face has changed, but my name is still Frey.”

  “You were the changeling,” she says.

  Genuine shame pours through me—something more real than the humiliation manufactured by a feed show. A rat in my chest that has gnawed at my heart for eight years.

  Our childish prank cost this woman everything.

  “I was a body double. We were just trying to play a trick. We didn’t mean to get you in trouble.”

  Get you in trouble—as if a decade in a cell were twenty demerits.

  “A body double is what I guessed, after I’d had some time to think about it.” She looks me up and down, a little uncertain. “But you were only nine. And now …”

  “Almost seventeen,” I say.

  Noriko can’t hide her shock at how long she’s been in that cell. She crumples a little before my eyes, and I have to look away.

  “We’re twin sisters,” I explain to her. “When we were little, pretending to be the same person felt like a joke we were playing on the world.” My throat is tight around the words. “Until we played it on you.”

  “A joke?” A flash of anger crosses her face—years of staring at blank cell walls, of betrayal bottled up and finally released.

  “I’m sorry” is all I can say.

  Slowly, as if controlled by a dial, calm descends on Noriko’s face again.

  “I made the choice to work for your father,” she says. “I knew he was a monster, but I thought I could help his daughter gain empathy—which might help the world.”

  She looks at me questioningly.

  I’m not sure if I have the answer Noriko wants. Rafi has empathy for me, but she also thinks I’m part of her.

  “We knew right away we’d done something terrible,” I say. “Both of us were sorry.”

  Noriko nods. “But you’re not the same, you two.”

  It takes me a moment to answer, because the question has haunted me since I transformed my face.

  “Not anymore.”

  “You were different then, Frey. That’s how I knew something was amiss, when you came to my class. You moved like an entirely different creature.”

  “I took combat lessons; Rafi took ballroom dancing.”

  Noriko shakes her head. “It was more than that. The way you responded. The way you listened. Like a mirror image—the reverse of her.”

  After all these years, I realize something.

  “You were the first person to see me.” Before Col knew my real name. Before X saw the rebel in me.

  And from that moment, part of me knew I was my own person.

  “You must hate us,” I say.

  “For a long time, yes. But mostly I was worried for you. You were so young, with no one to protect you.” Noriko looks at Col’s hand in mine. “I’m glad that you’re not alone anymore.”

  Something passes through my anguish, delicate but boundless, a ripple on a vast sea.

  In Rafi’s and my private language, the name Noriko was a muttered warning—a reminder that the truth of us was dangerous. A lesson we forgot before the Revelation.

  All the people we betrayed that night may never forgive us, but at least Noriko has.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  She answers with a small and perfect bow.

  And then Boss X is beside us, abuzz with the havoc of battle.

  “The first shuttle’s being loaded. We need you aboard.”

  Col takes my hand. “I’ll come too.”

  “Only one commando per shuttle,” X says.

  Right—our extraction transmitters are in demand.

  “Let me stay a little longer, Boss,” I say.

  “You have to be on the first shuttle out. For you, the free cities will definitely hold their fire.”

  Col frowns. “I’m fairly certain they won’t shoot me down.”

  X smiles and pats him on the shoulder. “That’s why we’re sending you second.”

  Boss X takes my arm, ready to get moving. But I resist, turning one last time to Sensei Noriko.

  There’s no etiquette for saying good-bye to someone you sent to prison for eight years.

  She speaks first. “And your sister? Did she escape him in the end?”

  Escape him? She’s a rebel queen in the wild, with her own army, her own mountain, and my name.

  But she’ll never be free from him the way I am.

  “She got away,” I say.

  A smile. “I suspected she would. Please give her my best.”

  I promise to, and Noriko’s eyes release me at last.

  Col and I surrender ourselves to Boss X’s impatience.

  We push our way through the crowd, into the control room with its host of flickering airscreens. Half the Security officers are cuffed and sitting on the floor. The other half are at their screens, under the vigilant watch of Yandre and Lodge.

  I catch a glimpse of Kessa Shard in conversation with Zura.

  How many people in my father’s regime are making deals with the free cities tonight?

  We don’t have time to stop and listen. X hustles us through Kessa’s anteroom and out into the parking bay.

  A giant hovershuttle looms there in the dark, its row of windows reinforced with heavy ceramic mesh. It rests on the permacrete floor, its lifting fans churning the air.

  “How many people does it carry?” I ask.

&nbs
p; “A hundred seats.” X’s eyes are bright—a challenge is in front of us. “If we crowd them in, four shuttles can handle everyone.”

  “Through a war zone,” I remind him. “And how do we get across the border?”

  “We’ll make an exit.”

  There’s a line of prisoners already boarding. In the time it took me to apologize to Noriko, my friends have organized a mass evacuation.

  Col gathers me into a hug. “I should get back to the control room. Stay safe. I’ll see you in the wild.”

  We kiss, fitting together as if our new bodies are the originals. Col’s surged face seems true now, like some side of him I hadn’t seen before.

  I’ll miss it, just a little, when he transforms back into himself.

  “In the wild,” I say.

  X and I go aboard. Cruel-looking restraints hang from every seat, and I recall military history classes about ancient warships rowed by slaves. The shuttle is only a quarter loaded but already has a scent familiar to me from fighting in the field—chem rinse.

  My father didn’t give his prisoners enough water to bathe.

  X sits us down at the front, in the empty cockpit. A solid wall of metal surrounds it, to protect the crew from the prisoners.

  “You’re coming with us?” I ask.

  “Of course.” X shuts the door to the cockpit. “We have a conversation to finish.”

  I turn away, gazing through the front windshield at the parking bay. Through its doors, the battle rages, rendering Shreve’s skyline in flickering silhouette.

  Nerves flutter in my stomach.

  The last time X and I spoke was on the Iron Mountain, my father’s drones coming at us. That was when he learned that I’d killed the love of his life. Then he told me that lover’s name—Seanan, my brother.

  A moment later, I was running and X was captured.

  And here we are.

  It’s too much to expect forgiveness twice in one day.

  “I’ve been trying to figure out what to say,” I begin. “It’s been a month, but I’m still not sure.”

  “Did we save Paz?”

  Right—X doesn’t know anything that’s happened since his capture.

  “We restored the Paz AI. It’s a free city again. And the backup was full of seismic data, proving the earthquake was my father’s doing.” I wave at the flickering skyline of Shreve. “The world finally turned against him—this is the result.”