Goddess in the Machine

by Lora Beth Johnson

  She was chained to the throne.

  “I broke free,” Rashmi said, raising her wrist where the chain wreathed it.

  Rashmi’s white hair was matted, and her clothes were streaked with blood and mud. She smiled, though, showing the gap between her teeth. Her dark eyes were glassy.

  Andra’s throat hurt, her skin itching in the heat. It almost seemed as though everything around her was clouding over, shimmering like a mirage.

  “Do you know where the key is?” she asked, fumbling with the chain. It was an old-fashioned lock. No ’scanner or key code here. She had two choices: physically dismantle the lock—which, to be honest, wasn’t happening—or find the key. The ache in her throat increased.

  “You’re the key, Andra. Don’t you know that by now?”

  “You’re ill, Rashmi, we need to get you out of here.”

  Andra couldn’t hold back a cough any longer. Her lungs burned just like when she’d woken up drowning.

  “Hello,” Rashmi said.

  “Hi,” Andra muttered, but then noticed Rashmi wasn’t looking at Andra, but instead at something behind her.

  Andra tensed, suddenly realizing why she’d been coughing, why her skin itched. She turned. The room was filled with a shimmering cloud of nanos. Her breath grew short. The nanos were so thick, Andra couldn’t see to the far side of the room, but they parted like a fog and a tall figure stepped forward.

  “Hello, Goddess,” Maret said.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THE BASTARD

  Zhade had lost sight of Andra in the stardust, but he instantish recognized Maret’s voice as it cut through the mist.

  He’d hurried to trigger the glamours, staying just long enough to watch the first illusion explode in a wash of color and sound. It had been spelled to look like a bomb had gone off, toppling part of the palace. Somewhere on the other side of the Yard gate, Skilla and her forces were adding real gunfire to the illusion. Zhade hadn’t seen Maret, so he went in search of him, and it led Zhade here. To the throne room. Andra, the Second, and his brother: all in one place.

  He eased himself into the room, at care not to make a sound. The stardust shifted and he got a glimpse of Maret.

  His brother stood alone, in the shadow of the throne room’s side entrance, the hallway beyond dark and still. He was draped in his usual midnight robes, but his hair was a mess, his face half-hidden in shadow. Zhade dashed behind the nearest column, but the Guv was full focused on Andra.

  “Did you come here to kill me?” he asked her, and he nearish sounded relieved.

  “No,” she said. She was kneeling next to the Second, her voice muffled. “I’m here to save Eerensed. I’ll only kill you if you get in my way.”

  Zhade crept forward, darting from pillar to pillar. The room was hot, and his clothes were drenched in sweat. He had to walk at care, so his shoes wouldn’t squeak against the marble. His sword was still sheathed, but he clenched the icepick dagger in his hand. If Andra wouldn’t use it, he would. His brother had been a fool to give it back to him.

  “We want the same thing, Goddess,” Maret was saying.

  “You have a funny way of showing it.” Andra stood, putting herself between Maret and the Second, her fists clenched at her side.

  Maret stepped out from the shadows, and Zhade finalish got a crystal view of his face. A jagged gash ran down his cheek, dripping blood. He gestured to the cut. “I bleed for my city.”

  Zhade didn’t reck how Maret had gotten the wound, and he didn’t care. He was almost close enough to give him a matching one.

  “If you really want to save the city,” Andra said, “then call off your swarm of nanos and let us go.”

  “I can’t. Not again.”

  There was a sharp shing as Maret drew his sword. Zhade didn’t comp why Maret was brandishing it when he could kill Andra with the stardust. Maybe Maret didn’t want to kill her. Maybe he had something else amind.

  “You’re Guv,” she said. “You can do anything you want.”

  The Second coughed, still curled on the floor, and said, “It isn’t time yet, Third One.”

  Maret pretended she hadn’t spoken. “I’m full certz your halftime as goddess skooled you no one can do whatever they want.” His voice was a whine. “Power is an illusion. I have to give the people what they want to maintain that illusion. And right now, they want you dead.”

  Andra took a step toward him, and Zhade tensed as she passed behind a pillar, out of his line of sight.

  “You’re such a hypocrite, Maret. You say you want to protect your people, but what you really want is control.”

  “I’m the one who has been saving Eerensed while you slept,” Maret growled. “You don’t even reck who you are. Why you’re here. I imagined you would be different from the others, but you’re not.”

  Zhade heard Andra take another step and willed her to stop.

  “I know Eerensed is dying,” she said. “This whole planet is. You can save—”

  “You don’t reck anything bout Eerensed or me,” Maret interrupted. “You have no idea what you’ve marched into.”

  Zhade was so close.

  “Then explain it to me.” Andra’s words were breath scraped from her lungs, like she was choking on stardust, like she was dying.

  Close enough.

  Zhade shot forward, dagger raised. Maret’s back was to him, his neck vulnerable, but at the last minute, he stepped aside as though he’d recked Zhade had been there the full time. Zhade’s forward momentum brought him skidding to the ground.

  Andra stumbled back. The Second gasped. But Zhade sole had eyes for Maret. He stood, watching his brother’s expression retreat from something like hope to betrayal.

  Zhade had been under the same roof as Maret for over a moon. He’d planned for this moment for four years. The imaginings of it, the anticipation, all built up inside Zhade, and he drew his sword and shot forward again on a burst of adrenaline.

  “Wait!” Andra shouted, just as Zhade’s sword clashed against Maret’s.

  For the four years he’d spent adesert, Zhade had been working on two things: the graftling wand, and his swordsmanship. Maret had been a whiny, coddled brat, but the one thing he excelled at was sword fighting. Zhade imagined he had surpassed his brother.

  He was wrong.

  Maret knocked Zhade’s sword aside, then drew back and slashed Zhade across the abdomen.

  He heard Andra scream before the pain hit him. He stumbled away, clutching his stomach. Blood seeped through his fingers, and for a moment, he imagined he would faint. But he dodged Maret’s next blow. Then the next. He threw the icepick dagger, missing wildish, but distracting Maret full well for Zhade to roll to the side and pick up his fallen sword.

  He stood, weakish. This was not how he’d imagined this. In his mind, the fight had been short, firm, but for a different reason. Distantish, Zhade recked Maret could end him at any time with the stardust, but his brother wasn’t even using High Magic. He was fighting fair, and the realization made Zhade full bars angry.

  “You killed my mother,” he growled.

  He danced away from Maret’s blade, arm still wrapped round his stomach.

  “Your mother—” Maret blocked Zhade’s sword, shoving him back. “—betrayed the people. I did it to save the city, to save you, you ungrateful fraught.”

  Zhade took another swipe at Maret, missing. “You killed her because she would have told the people I was the heir. You killed her so you could be guv.”

  “Firm, because look at all the fun I’m having being guv of this fraughted city.” Maret lunged and his sword nicked Zhade’s arm.

  He staggered back, hissing in pain. He had to admit Maret was full true the better swordsman, but Zhade was fighting harder. Too hard. He was off-balance, losing too much blood. He tripped over his own feet and fell to his knees.

>   Zhade tried to get back up, but his injuries were too much. His sword clattered to the ground, and he gripped his arm, screaming through his teeth. Maret stood above him and pressed his sword to the soft part of Zhade’s throat just above his breastbone.

  “I can’t believe you’re making me do this, Zhade,” Maret said, the words leaving him in gasps.

  “What’s another death on your conscience?” Zhade rasped.

  Maret hesitated. Blood vessels had broken in his southhand eye, and it was now coated red. His other eye focused at the place his sword met his brother’s neck, and Zhade saw the moment Maret decided what needed to be done, his muscles tense, the grip on his sword white-knuckled. Neg, Zhade thought. Not like this. Not yet.

  He closed his eyes, tried to slow his breathing.

  Sorries, mam.

  Andra’s voice broke through the haze. “Hey!”

  “I have to do it,” Maret said through gritted teeth. “I’m the Guv.”

  Behind Maret, Andra stood, proud and strong, the stardust now a swirling mass above her and around her, and in her hand was the icepick dagger.

  “Yeah?” she said. “Well, I’m a fucking goddess.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  control, n.

  Definition:

  the relation of constraint of one entity by another.

  a mechanism that commands the operation of a machine.

  the component of a CPU that decodes instructions from memory and directs other units in their execution.

  Andra felt the ’swarm around her, roiling and twisting, waiting in anticipation for her commands. She felt alive and whole in a way she hadn’t since she’d woken. Holding the dagger firmly, she commanded the nano’swarm to coalesce and shot them toward Maret. It was instinct, it was will, it was her nature. It was no effort at all.

  She only meant to distract him, not harm him, but Maret’s eyes hardened and she realized her mistake.

  Maybe she could control the nanos while holding the dagger, but Maret could control them through the crown. And when two ’implants were trying to command the same tech, it became a battle of wills.

  The nanos stopped before engulfing him, shifting like a flock of birds. They passed into shadow and seemed to gleam dark in the moonlight, swarming in Andra’s direction. She was too slow to react and they submerged her, flooding around her and into her, and she felt them fill up her lungs, heard them buzz in her ears. She couldn’t tell where she ended and the technology began. A spark in her fingers reminded her she still held the dagger, and she gathered her thoughts and pulled the nanos from her lungs, swept them from her skin. With all her force of mind, she shot them back at Maret.

  “I don’t want to hurt you!” she croaked, her lungs burning.

  She felt rather than saw Maret take back control of the nanos. Just for a second, then Andra’s ’implant took over. She pushed them forward, but they met an invisible force—Maret’s will pushing against hers.

  Blood was gushing from a cut beneath his crown, his left eye nothing but a coat of red. His pale hair hung limp, clumping into bloody tufts. Teeth clenched, his growl turned into a scream. The cloud of nanos came rushing back at her.

  Maret’s grip on his sword slackened, and Zhade started to scuttle back. That was what Andra needed. She was barely keeping the ’swarm at bay, but Maret couldn’t fight both of them at once. Zhade tried to get to his feet, but a huge metal hand landed on his shoulder, pushing him back down.

  Mechy. Maret had taken control of the ’swarm and the mech’bot.

  He was used to this, an expert at interfacing with the tech around him, controlling multiple things at once, splitting his thoughts. Andra had just gotten her ’implant back, and before this, she’d mainly used it to play sims and turn on a light when the switch was out of reach.

  Her body started to tremble. It took everything in her to hold off the ’swarm of nanos. They swirled restlessly between her and Maret, but he was slowly gaining ground. He was stronger. His crown was more powerful. And he wasn’t using a patch to upgrade his own tech to match that around him. Even if Andra could take control of the ’swarm and Mechy, Maret had access to all the tech in Eerensed.

  All of it except . . .

  There was tech in Eerensed he couldn’t touch. It was completely out of reach, running on such different software that the Eerensedians hadn’t even tried to control it.

  But Andra could.

  Andra hadn’t been holding the dagger when she’d called the pocket to destroy the nano’patch that day in the desert. Nor when the pocket had entered the city at her execution. Her ’implant had instinctively reached out to the corrupted tech, the nanos left over from her own society.

  Her ’implant was running on thousand-year-old software.

  And so were the pockets.

  The one in the city wasn’t close, but if Andra thought hard enough, she could feel it on the outskirts of her consciousness, a slight tug, like a gentle breeze running through her hair. Using an ’implant was as easy as thinking. Like moving a limb. Thoughts translated to action using electrical impulses and muscle. But you could think about moving your leg without actually moving it. Thoughts with intent were what Andra needed.

  She could feel the pocket. It was wild and unstable. An unbroken stallion. It could so easily rise up and swallow her. Destroy them all.

  She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and tugged. The pocket jolted forward, but too much, too quickly. She pushed it back. Too far.

  “Just a few,” she murmured. “I just need a few of you.”

  Someone was calling her name. She pulled again.

  This time, she focused in on a thin strand of nanos. Little more than a wisp of cloud. She commanded the rest of the pocket to stay put, but it didn’t want to obey. It was a hive consciousness making its own decisions. She pushed against it.

  “Andra!” Was it Zhade? Or Maret?

  Andra ignored him. Holding the rest of the pocket at bay, she let the small nano’swarm come closer, closer, drifting through the city, above rooftops and through walls. She saw what it saw. People running. A garden battle. Moon and stars and glass and marble, until it was there, in the throne room, until it was right next to her.

  She focused her thoughts on what she wanted the ’swarm to do. Infect Maret’s nano’bots, make them hers. She felt them respond, could almost visualize their code shifting, changing. Andra’s eyes were still closed, but she could see in her mind as the code of the pocket passed from nano to nano, changing the glistening ’swarm of clean Eerensedian tech into a black mass of corruption. They were all hers. And she could do whatever she wanted with them.

  Power rushed through her, the sheer destruction and creation of it. It extended from the back of her mind outward, until the tips of her fingers and toes tingled with it. She could do anything, command anything. She—

  “ANDRA!”

  Her eyes flew open.

  Maret’s face was a mask of terror, sword at his side. Zhade was still in Mechy’s clutches, gaping at her. Above her was the roiling mass of corrupted tech, a miniature pocket hovering above them.

  Too far. Too much. She couldn’t control it.

  There were too many nanos, their corrupted code too strong. The rein she had on them was slipping through her fingers.

  “No,” she groaned, tightening her mental grasp. “No.”

  She couldn’t let them free; they would destroy the palace and everyone in it.

  She pushed back. They resisted. She pushed harder.

  “Get out,” she said, but the nanos only listened to thoughts. Thoughts with intent. Sparks of electricity running through her brain, passing from neuron to neuron, until the tiny piece of tech in the back of her mind caught the signal and translated it into ones and zeroes, the string of numbers passing from the ’implant to the nanos, the code
shared like a rumor, a disease. A single message. Go. Go.

  “GO!” Andra shouted, the word tearing from her throat.

  The small pocket she’d created started to recede, slowly, sluggishly, kicking and scratching and lashing out. Andra pushed harder, thought harder. It was the tide going out, it was the sun setting, it was water falling from a cliff. It was returning home.

  The ’swarm withdrew, shooting through the ceiling of the throne room and sending a shower of glass and broken wood below. Andra felt scratches on her forearms, her feet, down her cheek, but she didn’t let her focus waver. She didn’t let up until all the corrupted tech was across the city, in the lost district, in the pocket, returned to where it belonged.

  Her vision cleared. The room swam around her. Maret’s face paled as he watched her, then something came over his features—some resignation, some determination, an outside force propelling him forward. He gripped his sword with both hands, and Andra knew what he was going to do.

  He swung the sword, arcing it toward his brother. Andra felt the same surge as she had the night of the Third Festival when she’d put Doon to sleep, the same rush she’d felt the next morning, when she’d done the same to Maret.

  Andra called to whatever nanos were left in the palace. Thoughts raced through her brain, faster and more complex than she thought possible. It was almost instantaneous: she had an idea, and it was implemented. The nanos came, responding to the code that her ’implant was sending them, that the dagger was translating to them. In the space of a blink, of a heartbeat, of a breath, all the nanos had been converted to cryo’bots.

  They rushed Maret, his blade almost at Zhade’s neck. It took a single gasp for the shimmering cloud of nanos to infiltrate his body. Surrounding him and seeping into his pores, they put him into stasis. He fell, his sword clattering beside him, and lay still.

  THIRTY-SEVEN