Silence.
We stared at one another, nemesis to nemesis, waiting for the world to fall away from our feet. And just when I thought Qaira had turned into a statue, he punched the door frame with a snarl.
I jumped, backing against the counter, spilling all the coffee I’d made. Chunks of wood and scaffolding lay in a chaotic pile across the dining room threshold.
Qaira was gone.
My shoulders heaved with relief, and then I retched from an over-exhalation of malay. At the top of the stairs, I heard my maid, having been woken by the demolition of Qaira’s fist.
“Commander, is everything alright down there?”
***
Regalis Sarine-376—;
Shatterstar, this was never going to work.
My arm hung loosely at my side, joined to my shoulder only by wire. The circuitry had stopped functioning and the synovial fluid had leaked all over my legs. I couldn’t remember when. There was no way to fix my carapace without the conscious stream.
I tried stuffing the loose socket with shards, but nothing worked. One arm gone was not a huge loss, but the other was beginning to squeak. Without any arms I wouldn’t be able to keep Cassima’s effigy intact. The erosion was confusing; so was the staticky edges of my aperture. I tried to voice my concerns to the Feelers, but all they did was shuffle around, staring vacantly at scenery. They didn’t see me. They didn’t see what I was trying to do.
The garden of Thasadem was no longer therapeutic to my degrading vision. I didn’t know how long I’d been here. At some point I could have left, but what was out there for me? Now I couldn’t, even if I’d wanted to. And I didn’t want to.
I sat, statuesque, beside Cassima’s empty carapace on the bench near the winking vines. They were overgrown, their sighs now predatory to my audiovisual perception. They tried to wrap around Cassima each day, and each day I broke them away.
With trepidation I acknowledged that the day would soon come where I would no longer have any arms to save his carapace, or legs to move when they came for me. The Feelers would be next to go, and they’d probably just stand there and suffocate. It was a fate I accepted.
But still, it made me sad.
I hung my head, feeling the hinges of my mandible groan. I then moved into stasis to preserve energy.
…
“Mia?”
That voice brought me out of stasis. My entire body jolted at the sound, having not heard a voice other than my own for as long as I could remember. That final movement made the wire snap, and my arm fell to the floor.
I looked up, and thought I was hallucinating. The aperture was broken, but at least this was a good glitch. “Cassima?”
He beamed down at me, in his Nov likeness. I looked to the carapace, thinking that finally the Feelers had done what I’d ask them. But no, it was still there, covered in vines again. This was a glitch. My program was eroding.
The Cassima glitch was puzzled when I said nothing and began to rip off the vines. “Mia, can you hear me?”
“You are not real.”
“This is not real,” said Cassima, looking over the broken aperture. “I’m sorry it took so long to find you. If only you knew how hard I looked.”
I froze then, repeating his words in my head. I turned back to him and risked standing. He had to lift his chin to keep his eyes trained on mine. “You’re… real?”
“As real as I can be,” he said, smiling again. “What does real mean, anyway?”
This was not a glitch. I did not know how to program sarcasm. I realized then I’d tarnished our long-awaited reunion and only sat back down, beside myself. He’d stooped to grab my broken arm, looking it over with a troubled frown.
“It’s been a long time,” I said, trying to make an excuse for how damaged and shoddy it looked.
Cassima looked at me, saddened. The pity bled from his chrome-colored eyes, and I felt ashamed. Here he was, organic, while I was just a misfunctioning piece of circuitry. “It’s okay. We can fix this.”
“How?” I asked. “And how… are you even here?”
“I’ll show you,” he said, taking my intact hand, tugging lightly in gesture for me to stand again. “Do you remember what you used to look like?”
“No.”
“That’s okay. I do. Let’s get going.”
“Where are we going?”
He shrugged. “Anywhere you want.”
“I don’t know anywhere,” I said, forlorn.
“Alright, I’ll choose.”
I half-believed I was having a program malfunction while under stasis. A circular space began to ripple at the center of the vine-brush. He’d opened a portal. I knew this to be true, but I didn’t know how. And then I noticed his grey robes and the tinge of cobalt in his eyes. He was Cassima, but he was also someone else. Later he would tell me of all the things he’d done in order to find me; learned to be what he called a quantum wayfarer, so that he could navigate dimensions of spacetime, applicable to no one else. All this was done while I’d waited here; hopeless, rotting.
Cassima had kept his promise.
As he led me toward the portal, I looked back at the carapace, and then at the Feelers. I was abandoning them, but they’d abandoned me long ago. “How are you going to fix my arm?”
Cassima laughed. “I don’t need to fix your arm. You’ll see.”
And then he pulled me through the swirling, blue light.
Thank You
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Covenants: Anodize (Hymn of the Multiverse Book 9) Page 20