“Fine. But what about—”
“See, this is where I’ll admit I was wrong. You were hurting. You were in so much fucking pain. I wanted to spare you from more. I was going to say something. But then the days got away from me. They became weeks and those weeks eventually became months. Things just kept getting harder for us. The Dirty Dozen was down to two.” Is the choked-up reverb of Rita’s voice for theatre or the consequence of sincere confession? Maya can’t tell. And yet, and yet still she catches herself hoping, straining for . . . what? Fuck if she knows anymore. “God, we were practically hemorrhaging from loss. By the time I realized exactly how much time had gone by, it didn’t feel appropriate anymore.”
“You’re kidding me,” Maya growls, the sound tectonic. “This is your excuse. Really?”
A glitter of laugh. “The truth is, Maya, it was tactical. Everything I have ever done and said and will do revolves around strategy. Sometimes, I don’t tell you things because there is no point. You don’t clarify the philosophy of war to a gun. You point it. It shoots. It does its job. You are a weapon, Maya. Don’t forget this. Your job is to kill. That is it. That is the only purpose you have in life. So, do your job and don’t question mine. Got it?”
Permutations of Rita’s possible death fire haphazardly through Maya’s vision, some acuminating into high-definition mirages, others simply evaporating from the overlay. One way or another, they’re still hallucinations from an alternate timeline where Maya can become unconditionally free. Free of this bullshit. Free of her affection for Rita. Free of the solipsistic loyalty invented for Maya upon the event of her birth, a loyalty exacerbated by proximity and endless hormone injections.
Inhale, exhale.
Maya counts the width of time between each breath, pressing against her programming, metaphorical knuckles rapping on the hypothetical coffin walls, seeking where the wood might have rotted, where it could give.
Nothing.
Nothing at all.
For all that Maya might rage against the machine of her body, she cannot detach from its circuitry, the encysted lobe of tissue in her head no more hers to steer than the planetary body in whose silhouette they’re concealed. The heart wants what it fucking wants. And Maya, in whatever capacity her predilections allow, wants Rita’s approval. Craves it, requires it, is fundamentally built on the aspiration for an unrestricted supply of it.
The bulb overhead goes pop, more metallic a noise than what ricocheted through Maya’s skull when the new implant shot online, closer to a whine, somehow still more organic, better at being natural than she could ever be. Its demise casts Rita in rusty shadow and coerces Maya’s attention to jounce upward. Immediate, the effervescing of that old coyote cackle. Maya, thinking to herself in that instant: Let’s not kid ourselves here. You weren’t ever meant to win anything in this life.
“Fucking answer me when I talk to you.”
Maya chokes down her gibbering. “Got it.”
There’s a trick time occasionally likes to pull, a joke she repeats during both seasons of grief and moments, as before, when you’ve a scalpel two inches too deep in your eye socket, paring away at a dying nerve. It slows. It syrups, becomes not unlike amber while it is a warm resin, languidly asphyxiating an unlucky bug in gold. Compounding the insult is how crystalline the connection between synapse and stimuli becomes during such phenomena: no rosy cloud, no convenient fog, nothing to temper how corrosively unpleasant it all feels. Maya stands there, marinating in her resentment. She’ll remember this.
You’re a dog, says a memory from a happier fucking time when there wasn’t an insurrection in Maya’s goddamned soul. Dogs need their masters.
“Good. I suppose we’re finally done with that discussion.”
What Maya doesn’t say: You could have let me shoot her.
You could have let me puree her cerebellum with a bullet. You could have let me reach in, snap her neck. You could have let me help her die. She didn’t deserve a slow death. And you sure as fucking hell could have let me do the same for Johanna, that poor animal.
“How’d you find out about Elise?”
Hesitation.
“You just have to ask all the hard questions tonight, huh?”
Somewhere, burrowed into the fatty crenellations of Maya’s brain, a paleolithic configuration of neural circuits rings up an instinct from the dawn of time: the amygdala wakes and it lets forth a limbic growl. Something is very wrong.
“How’d you find out about Elise, Rita?”
“You’re not going to like the answer.”
“How’d you find out about Elise?”
“An old friend.”
“Don’t.” Maya is cozying up to the brink of her self-control. “Don’t mess with me.”
A drawn breath. “The Merchant Mind. Do you remember it? It and I, we had a conversation. It told us where to find her. And what it’d pay to take possession of her.”
Something inside Maya bursts.
“No. Sure. I mean, it might have been the one who told us where to find her. But we don’t have to give her to it. I don’t understand, Rita. What does it have to do with anything? Elise knows the way. You said so to Ayane. I don’t see why we have to waste time with the Merchant Mind.”
“Actually, my phrasing earlier might have elided a few things.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying I didn’t lie, per se. Elise can get us to Dimmuborgir safely. But it’s not because she knows how.”
A litany of fucks explodes in time with Maya’s footsteps, even as she stalks a hard tattoo across the perimeter of the clinic, anger strangling what little eloquence she ever had because there are twenty other things she’d rather be doing, all of which end with that smug sack of chewed-up scrotums shitting screws. “What the fuck, Rita? What the shit-stuffed fuck? You don’t really intend to give Elise up to him, do you?”
“Maya. Please.”
“Do not fucking Maya me.”
“Maya—”
“Fuck you,” Maya flips her the bird, storming closer, damn near suffocating on the memories: guts, screaming, smell of human flesh broiling in plasma. Johanna’s smile burned away; Elise tangled in that fucking box, coming to cauterized pieces. “Fuck you. Fuck it. Fuck both of you. Fuck. When the hell did you talk to the Merchant Mind anyway? Why the fuck did you even go to him? That piece of shit needs to be turned into scrap. It got Johanna killed. It nearly fucking got us all killed. Do you remember that, Rita? Do you remember? Also, while we’re at it, fuck that? If Elise’s alive, I’m not fucking handing her to it. If you think I’ll let you, you’re sorely mistaken.”
It takes exactly six steps for Maya to close the distance between them, six steps to grab Rita and beat her against a locker. But the bitch won’t be fazed, doesn’t even have the common decency to flinch when Maya grips her by the temples and starts pummeling her skull against the steel. Instead, she just stares at Maya, just stares at her like Maya’s something to pity, a little maimed pup dying of mange, its belly corded with worms.
And in that moment, Maya hates her.
The brutality becomes systematic, rhythmic, purely mechanical in its execution: head to locker, head to locker, never veering from the defined parabola, always the same swing and strength. There’s no grace to it, no imagination because fuck, Maya can’t be assed to think up new ways to hurt right now.
“Done yet?”
Maya climbs out of the fugue, panting, realizing it has been hours since she lost her shit. The salt-thick air is greasy with the smell of lubricant and cerebrospinal fluids, the latter thankfully synthetic. And there is Rita, still staring from behind the bars of Maya’s fingers, the back of her cranium blooming like an orchid. Light gleams along titanium, exposed beneath the maimed detritus of her 3D-printed steel skull.
“I said: are you done yet?”
A gasp. Maya steps back, wincing, recalibrating the ecosystem of hormones in her brain: adrenaline, cortisol, and other related chemicals diale
d down to non-issue. Her hand palsies into a fist. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. What did she just do?
She wants to give Elise to the Merchant Mind, hisses a voice in Maya’s head. What do you mean what the fuck did I just do? Rita deserves it.
What comes out of Maya’s mouth is:
“Yeah.”
“Yeah?” Rita says it, with the smile that she sometimes has when nothing is going right but she’s still got an ace between her teeth. Without looking back, she swans toward a cabinet and pulls out a knife, begins carving her flesh into some semblance of order. “Shit, Maya. Do you know how long it’s going to take for me to fix this?”
“Sorry.”
“Sorry isn’t going to mitigate the fact I need to do self-surgery. This is messy. You know how much I hate messes.” Spongy curls of synthetic muscle drop to the floor, Rita’s voice stays calculatedly mild throughout. Maya has always wondered how much human was left to Rita and standing there, watching as the latter lightly prunes her skull of its damage, paring skin with the insouciance of a woman gutting an orange, she realizes the answer is probably not fucking much at all.
“Anyway. If you’re done with your temper tantrum, we should talk about that. I never said I planned to actually give Elise to the Merchant Mind. I said I knew what he’d pay. Regardless, we are playing along whether you like it or not, because this plan cannot work any other way. The Merchant Mind knows how to get us safely to Dimmuborgir. It is the only entity who knows how.”
“I don’t fucking trust it.”
“You don’t need to. You just need to trust me.”
“How do you want me to trust you? You just told me that you’ve been lying to me for forty fucking years.”
“For your own good,” Rita insists, switching from scalpel to sutures. Holding Maya’s gaze, she begins, with a pianist’s grace, to lace her scalp together again. “Fuck, Maya. I know things have been . . . strange. But we’ve been together for decades now. Have I let you get hurt?”
Yes, says that mutinous voice inside of Maya, the one she won’t listen to because if she does, the infrastructure of her reality is forfeit.
“No.”
“Trust me to do what I’ve done for all these decades then: which is to make sure we survive. Make sure we get out. All of this is in service of that goal. You know that. That’s always been my goal. That’s always been the plan. That’s how it works.”
“Johanna . . .”
“I know,” says Rita. “And this is our chance to make it right.”
A silence drags between them.
“I need your faith right now, Maya. If you can’t give me your trust, I need you to give me your faith.”
And there, right there, in Rita’s delivery of her quiet entreaty, that strangeness Maya identified earlier: a disconnection, a little-girl-lost expression. Like Rita is waiting to be found, to be brought home. Like she has been waiting lifetimes to be saved.
“Please,” Rita whispers, setting her tools aside.
“Fine. But you have to tell me why it wants Elise.”
Rita bobs her head. Her stitching is perfect. In the mumbling light, it is barely visible, a tracery of silver at best, and only when Rita has her face slanted just so, her blackbird eyes opaque as space.
“Most traditions describe the dead as entities afflicted with, how should I say this, a general malaise, an existential ennui. Elise, though, is quite active. The Minds have words for entities like her: emergent malware, parasite. I guess you could describe her as an autonomous infection, traveling through the Conversation, altering it where she will. Small wonder they want her caught.” Rita smooths a palm over her fresh-pruned skull. Her fingertips come away black. “Can you imagine? Having a shared consciousness? A place where thought conjoins? Trusting in the sanctity of such, in the safety of such a communal space, and then having . . . a virus travel through it, wreaking havoc.”
And it is like ice being worked down Maya’s vertebrae, one disc at a time. Her eyes narrow, but she wisely keeps her trap shut because you’re only allowed one fuck-up a day. It is only when Rita tips her chin to say yes that Maya barks, good little mutt making amends. “I don’t get it still. If she’s trapped in that information superhighway or whatever that is, what does it have to do with us? Wouldn’t the Minds be able to get to her better than we can?”
“If they could, they would have resolved this problem forty years ago.”
Maya says nothing to this.
“It’s going to be rough. I’m not going to lie. This won’t be easy.” Rita’s voice attenuates. “But that’s why we’re getting the crew back. I don’t trust anyone else to pull this off. We’re going to get Elise. The Merchant Mind is going to think we will fulfill our side of the bargain. And then, we’re going to blow the hell out of that joint.”
“Fuck,” says Maya. “Just. Fuck. Why not just skip the whole process? Find Elise. Figure out, I don’t know, how to give her her life back. Something.”
“Then what?” says Rita, coming over to where Maya stands, hands cupping Maya’s own, the feel of them without their gloves—the callused fingertips on the nadirs of her wrists; Rita’s coarse palms—such a shock Maya fishmouths idiotically, gaze vacillating between Rita’s bare fingers and her oilslick eyes. “She spends the next few years dodging the Minds until they find every copy of her code, and she is properly destroyed. The Minds want us all dead. Forever. You want to bring her back into this world to die again?”
“Your gloves . . .”
“What?”
“You’re not wearing your gloves.” Maya loathes how it is the only thing she can think about, this prosaic little amity, so small, so ineffably banal, and yet, it has become the motherfucking spindle around which all her attention revolves. Her voice, she knows, is pinned between reverence and lovesick pre-teen, and that, too, pisses her off. But the heart is an unpretentious animal, instinct and no steerage.
“What are you talking about?” A flutter of irritation under the polish of Rita’s calm voice.
“You’re touching me without your gloves,” says Maya because it is the only thing she can say. Fuck being pithy. Fuck sense. More than anything right now, Maya just wants the words to describe the obliterating nature of Rita’s touch, how Rita’s thumb mapping the massif of Maya’s knuckles rewilds the rest of her, leaves her unmoored, reality now a country whose language she misplaced.
“I guess I am,” says Rita, her expression diffused. “Is that alright?”
Maya swallows around an ache she cannot taxonomize.
“You never do that.”
“Maybe it’s time we changed things up.” And she smiles with such sweetness, no saint or small god could steal Maya’s worship away.
“Yeah.” Maya’s eyes shutter. “Just tell me you have it all laid out. I can’t . . . not after what happened to Elise, to Johanna. I can’t do that again.”
“I have it all planned.”
“She died screaming in a glass box. I can still hear her. I still remember what she smelled like. Why the fuck do we have to get the Merchant Mind involved? For that matter, how the fuck did it find you? How did it break through our encryption? Did you let it in? Shit, does it know where we are? We’re going to fucking wake up to the Bethel burning us alive. I don’t know what to do, Rita. This is all weird. And you’re holding my hands. You don’t have your gloves on but you’re holding my hands and nothing is making any sense right now.”
“Stop.”
Maya stops.
So many words for what’s going on underneath, push-pull of subtext, and Maya can barely breathe around all the things she wants to say but can’t, won’t, shouldn’t. This on top of everything else that just happened, Maya’s fingers still viscous with whatever vascular fluid passes for blood in Rita’s veins. She’s smearing it all over Rita’s hands, but the scientist takes no notice.
Maya licks her lips and tries on a half-smile, the expression sitting awkward on the bones of her broken face.
“Do you trust m
e?”
“No.”
“Do you have faith in me?”
Maya’s breathing shallows to a hummingbird shiver. Is she panicking? Is this what it is? Pissed beyond all belief at the audacity of her body, its temerity, the insult of this sudden weakness, Maya looks inward, wrestling with herself to separate from all limbic malfunction. While she’s doing so, a hand creeps up to rest on the curve of her elbows. Thin fingers wrap about her forearm. Maya blinks, realizing how close Rita has curled up to her, the light finding the nacreous circuitry thinly laid beneath the dark waters of Rita’s eyes.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you love me?”
“I’d do fucking anything for you, Rita,” says Maya in lieu of answering directly. “Anything at all. You know I’ll kill for you. I’ve fucking died for you.”
“Then do this for me. One last time. Please.”
Such blatant manipulation, such mawkish behavior, an embarrassment of emotional blackmail, but it is all it takes. All it ever took, Maya thinks, as she bends her head to Rita’s touch, aware she’s being taken for the proverbial ride. But you can’t have a gun without a bullet, can’t take a shot without intent. Rita and her, they’re in this together. For good or for ill.
Until data corruption do them part.
Maya cracks a smile like the death of true love.
“Let’s go.”
Bethel
That the Bethel possess an actual temple, cast in the design of pre-FTL Grecian monuments, is something that will never cease to amuse Pimento. It is, as such religious edifices often were, removed from the bustle of the high-traffic space, sequestered instead in the gored-out belly of a planet dead for so long not even the Surveyors possess data on why the ageships blasted it into a ragged crescent in the first place.
Debris—bodies ossified by exposure to deep space, heat-warped satellites, the bones of whatever human superstructures once dotted the surface—mote the vacuum around this tellurian carcass, glittering subduedly. Taken as a whole, it is a funerary vision, testament to what happens when you put Minds together in petty vengeance.
The All-Consuming World Page 6