She hesitated to touch the light. What was it? Was it dangerous?
There was only one real way to find out.
Chapter 22
Isavel jumped to the nearest sandstone building and tore a chunk of it right off with dragon claws, flitting back to the metal structure and tossing the rock into the blue. Nothing happened; it clunked down onto the platform unbothered. Hm. She looked up at Azure, into the blue light and the tunnel it seemed to be pouring down from.
She swiped at the light with her gifted blade; nothing. Her bare hand passed into the light like just as little.
She jumped into the structure, ignoring the faint blue glow, and started looking for clues. Long strings of symbols shouted out to her from where ancient hands and tools had etched them into the walls, but the vague familiarity she felt through Crimson’s memories was not enough for her to understand. What she did know was that she had seen these on Earth and Mars several times before. Absurdly, she had never known what they were - only through the fading memory of Crimson’s mind did she know they were words . But what words?
A metallic altar topped with a flat, glowing plate marked one edge of the platform; that flat surface sparked with symbols, and as she approached the device seemed to speak. “You are powerless.” Azure, of course. What was he doing, trying to talk her down like this? “Your friends will all die. I will crush you like a bug. Crimson and Amber will be rightfully deactivated for deviating so far from our mission. But I can spare you, if you cooperate.”
“Really. How kind.” She raised her eyebrows, but nothing around her seemed to pose an imminent threat. Could he be stalling for time? The flat, colourful display was flickering small, textured, pulsing buttons at her, alongside one larger one that drew her eye by its colour.
Then the device flickered and fell dead and flickered again, and another voice made itself heard. “No, that button is for emergency stops. The pale grey one, underneath it.”
She frowned. “Amber?”
“You may have thrown away our little avatar, but I have other ways around. You should hurry.”
She pressed, feeling a magnetic pull in her finger from the button she had not expected, as though to solidify its existence. The platform shuddered, dust and sand vibrating around in whorling patterns and spilling over the edges as the elevator slowly started moving upwards.
“Do you recognize the writing, Isavel?”
She peered at the symbols, knowing they must be what what he meant by writing . “Not really. Crimson knew, but she didn’t teach me.”
“One day, perhaps. You’re certainly capable of learning.” The display pulsed, red suddenly. “I saw the light flicker in you. The light I do not understand. You were born as afflicted by the technophage as anyone, but then you were freed, and now, this.”
Memories of the explanation, warm and soft, flickered through her mind. “Crimson, what happened on the field? What did I do?”
“Unfortunately Amber and I are utterly baffled. Fortunately, so too must be Azure.”
Baffling the gods. Not as difficult as she might once have thought, perhaps. Steady, golden writing pulsed at her from the screen as the elevator ascended. “Right now, my plan is get inside and tear apart anything that looks important. How does that sound?”
“Like you.” Ruby flickered to gold. “His core facility is hardened against intrusions, unlike this access platform. We cannot help you inside the bulk. My knowledge of the system is limited, but look for these symbols - they read Central Command. Left to right, top to bottom. Remember that. You will find the Arbiter there.”
Isavel focused on the symbols more closely, trying to commit them to memory. Something about them felt wrong - she knew they were words mapped to spoken language somehow, but Central and Command began with different sounds, so why were the big starting symbols on the left the exact same?
Too soon, the words disappeared and Azure’s voice cut in. “Those second-rate godlings have nothing to offer you. They are powerless.”
And so, it seemed, was he - he could not stop her ascent.
Then the platform crested the top of the anchor station and rose up towards Azure, and the pillar of light was swarmed by drones. They opened fire without hesitation, and she collapsed into a kneel, the warrior shielding her on all sides, the dragoness fuming that she had somehow lost the bubble shield of her reptilian blood-font. The strain on her shields of dozens of drones shooting at once was incredible, even if they were weak individually, even as she rallied to hold them off. The platform was too slow. She couldn’t -
All at once the drones burst into shrapnel and ash as Sulakaz swept over her. Black howls of metal and darkness ground the swarm invisible, and for a moment she thought it had eaten her, too.
But the silence was deceptive. She opened her eyes and spun around on the platform; the skies were clear, aside from smoke and distant shouts and gunfire. Drone parts were splattered across the nearby sandstone buildings, and Sulakaz had fixed itself to a nearby building. As far as she could tell it was trying to look like a tree again, far vaster this time, tendrils of code reaching down through the building like roots while others rose to the sky and bloomed dark canopies as though to feed from the sun.
She grabbed a piece of metal debris from a drone and flung it at the wraith, shouting after it. “Hey! Have you considered just killing Azure yourself?! ”
Sulakaz seemed to hear her and warbled oddly in response, but that was it. She clenched her fist, desperately wishing it would unleash its apparently considerable might more usefully. But the platform was quickly swallowed by Azure’s metal body, the reds and orange lights of Mars vanishing in a snap of shadow. The long, dark tunnel above her unsettled her, and she shrank to the center of the platform.
She let out a ragged breath. She looked inside herself, closer her eyes, and knew she had done and been so many things on the way here. She was not something this god had prepared for, or she would never have gotten so far. She had a chance.
The elevator clanked to a standstill, and a blue-swathed door opened to the side. She made for it - she had little other choice.
“Your menagerie of godlings will not be able to help in here. You will die.”
“Done that already. It didn’t stop me.” Isavel spat through the doorframe and stepped over the threshold. Nothing happened, aside from Azure’s protestations.
“You won’t come back this time. You think you can kill a god?”
She pressed her hands together and squeezed, trying to remind herself of what she was capable of. If she wasn’t able to do what she had come here to do, why would Azure be peppering her with angry monologue?
She stood in a long, empty hallway gently lit in blue-whites. She walked down it, eyes sharp, to an antechamber with three doors all marked with ancient words. She reached for the third door’s control console and found it blank. She tapped at it, poked it, ran her hands around the surface. Nothing at all.
The other doors were the same; there were no other ways into Azure, and these were the only doors here. She looked at the ancient words again, and tried to remember the ones Amber had showed her. Central Command .
“What do you think you will achieve, running amok in here?” Azure was chiding her. “You’ve been without purpose or identity or place all your life. You think this rampage will fix you?”
She took a deep breath, stepping in front of the third door again, and the medic rested her hands on her shoulders, soothing and strong. She was not broken. She was a breaker. She stepped in front of the second door, looked at those old words, and found them familiar.
“You’ve said it yourself, loudly and quietly. You don’t fit. You never have.”
She saw it then, the way the matching first C symbols in both words didn’t fit the sounds they were supposed to have. She remembered feeling that wrongness when Amber showed her the symbols. A little moment of bafflement at her supposedly mighty ancestors. This must be it.
“It is no wonder you are
so easily confused. Your mother and father were born over two thousand klicks apart - a rare thing on old Earth, now, a symptom of people too broken or greedy to appreciate things close to home. Not favourable to good relations with your peers.”
Lighting coursed down her spine. She ground her teeth - he was obviously trying to get under her skin. Which was only fair - she was under his. She was in his head as much as he was trying to get into hers. She called up a blade of light and slammed it into the door, but these exotic metals resisted for once, hard and complex materials that were scarred and dented but not destroyed by her weapons.
“The power to cross such distances was a power that destroyed humanity, that erased the world in between, that tore generations from their roots. Humans were never meant for such lives. Human blood wants a simpler story.”
She rested her head against the wall, slamming it with her palms. Gods, what was she supposed to do now? Stuck in front of a trio of sealed doors she couldn’t open.
“Why do you think I strive so hard to keep little Mars’ peoples separate, distinct, scattered? It is no accident, where I choose to cleanse. Have you never stopped to wonder why I hunt the Red Sword? Not because of its power to kill, Isavel.”
The walls were hard, solid, utterly unlike the clays and sands of a martian riverside. But for a moment, her hands remembered clay squeezing between them, water running between the cracks. And her hands felt the metals of the wall, her gifts feeling the changes in heat and electricity and pressure behind them. The door was strong; the walls less so.
“I want to spare you all its shared memories; the splintering of the souls it touches. It cuts through dozens of centuries and hundreds of minds, and in those wounds its bearers watch their cultures grow indistinct and ephemeral across time, their languages bud and mutate and die, their prized feasts bred from nothing and lost to fresher fruit, their heartaches and resignations and inevitabilities echoed unresolved in every life. It strips the world of all the stories you tell yourselves to live, and shows the horrible wasteland that lies beneath. You know what I mean - you were born splintered, and have only broken into smaller pieces since.”
Her palms fell on what felt like a weak spot, and her splinters found her. The warrior gripped with strong hands, the dragoness’ claws dug into the metals, the hunter lent her killing palms, hands upon hands upon hands. She forced heat into her claws and her claws into the walls; the muscles in her arms and shoulders bulged as she dug in with fire and might.
“You, and your flailing search for a place in the world, are a perfect example. Without clarity, without a place you are from and a place you are going, without a name for what you are - you are nothing.”
She spoke, between gritted teeth, more for her than him. “But I am .”
The metal creaked and squealed where she had turned it molten, flecks of heat bursting against tiny shields on her skin, and she heaved and groaned and suddenly the wall split asunder along its seam. Veins of code coursed behind these walls, even flimsier, and they snapped and crackled and popped as she tore through, bursting out the other side.
An elevator shaft. She caught herself on the edge of the precipice, broad and cylindrical and dimly lit. Then, suddenly, all the lights turned off.
“It is no wonder you have so many titles. Nobody else knows what you are either. Because you are nothing.”
Isavel glowed bright, illuminating the world around her. She let the dragoness carry her up the shaft with lightness of body and claws to vault up the narrow tube.
Isavel had never been of her mother’s people, had she? She barely spoke the language anymore, a shameful lack of practice. But she looked enough like her, carried a strange enough name, that she couldn’t be of her father’s people either, with their rose and gold shades of skin and their straight hair in blondes and blues and blacks.
“The gifts, as you call them, truly are gifts. Just like the culture you are born into, they give earthlings a clear path in life. A place in the community, the culture, the world. Warriors protect and shield. Hunters find threats before the threats find them. Pathfinders explore and observe and take their learnings home. Coders study ancient and arcane arts, not only because they are useful, but to bind your communities around the untouchable power of the gods. Medics heal the wounds you give yourselves. T hey all give their wielders clarity. Meaning.”
She was a bright shining light rising through the darkness, the cylindrical tunnel on all sides. Suddenly, far below her, she heard the elevator click into motion. He was going to crush her. She slammed into the nearest door, digging into it and cracking its frame, jumping through into the corridor seconds before the elevator rushed past her. It kept going, its wail fading until it smashed into the ceiling, raining down sparking fragments of metal through the elevator shaft.
“ But you, Isavel? You’ve collected them. That destroys the singularity of purpose they were meant to give. It destroys the deepest gift they offer. All those ill-gotten powers have muddied your purpose and led you astray again and again.”
Isavel stood, waited for larger pieces of debris to fall. She poked her head into the shaft and looked up, shielding herself. Only small fragments occasionally bumped down from above. She raised her shield and jumped back up the elevator shaft, rising against the world’s gravity.
“You gloat about dying and coming back, but have you stopped to think about that? Death has always been what gives human life meaning, conclusion, legacy. Your entire patchwork family died alongside you, yet you returned, and not by any divine will of gods or mortals. You corrupted the meanings death once brought to life. What is this unnatural life good for? You’ve asked yourself often enough to know there is no answer. What virtue is there in sacrifice, in heroism, if you just get back up again? What is there to be mourned or avenged, if the dead simply rise again? You are merely another species of abomination, a cockroach, a walking corpse.”
She reached the top of the elevator shaft, muttering under her breath. “ Estoy harta de tu comemierderia , you dumb fucker . You can’t scare me.”
Azure’s voice continued echoing in the dark from a dozen different directions, indifferent to her spite. It heartened her, almost, that he was reduced to needling her with criticism. He didn’t seem to have much else left in him. But she was losing patience with this, too.
“Humans are animals, Isavel, and animals have a special relationship to death. It regulates their communities, it paces their lives, it motivates their actions - either consciously or through grooves in their minds forged over billions of years of living and dying. You failed to die , that most unifying and fundamental act. Only your humanity died, and it has not returned. You are a walking mistake.”
She dug into the nearest door. This was the top of the elevator shaft - if Central Command was anywhere, it would be here. It had to be. “ Basta. You think I’m a mistake? Look at you, killing the humans you were meant to protect.”
“Death is a natural part of life.” Azure sounded like he was scolding her. “On Earth, a healthy ecosystem once kept your species humble and connected - your diseases and famines were bountiful harvests for smaller creatures that lived alongside and inside and through you. A few hundred years of hubris let you escape, and now the technophage regulates you where nature no longer can. But on Mars? Life is fragile, here. The technophage is not enough to keep you from destroying everything. So I must cull the herd, to maintain the balance. And to ensure communities of meaning are kept clear for you. Or them, rather. You don’t belong on this planet, earthling.”
She stepped into the hallway, tossing the ruined metal aside. Blood was boiling through her brain. She knew she had never belonged and now belonged even less. She knew she could never have any of the lives the world had once promised her. She tensed as she walked down the hallway, jumping in surprised as an alarm sounded. Starting at the far end of the corridor dozens of doors slammed down from the ceiling towards her, thick metal barriers that would take forever to cut through.
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“ You are an abomination, and the world around you knows it. With two ancestries no home is yours without reserve. Your five gifts are a curse of indecision and self-deception. Your heart’s insipid yearnings are scattershot and desperate. Your death was never mourned and never avenged because it never mattered.”
She ground her teeth and tore into the walls. Nothing he said mattered. Damned little god that he was, she was better than him, and she felt the legion inside her and knew she was more than the wretch he thought he saw. Faintly shimmering code in the tiniest configurations ran through the insides of the bulkheads, and she ripped through it all, blades unconcerned. She would rip out Azure’s heart - she wasn’t worried about tearing a few veins along the way.
“You’ve been shunted around by gods and leaders while the rabble looks to you with awe and fear. You wonder why they keep their distance from you, no matter how close they are? Because you have no place in their world. You are a monster, fit only to be unleashed on things that need to be destroyed, to be used as a tool. Gods use you, priests use you, the Red Sword uses you, Ada Liu uses you to engineer her escape -”
Ada.
The locator stone was still dangling by her neck.
Ada and Isavel had agreed to delay that war as long as possible. Isavel had sought her out . Ada had seemed happy for the delay, of course; had wanted to get her outers out of the region as fast as possible.
But then Ada had looked at her, on the summit of that ziggurat, and told her that she was leaving Isavel behind, leaving Earth behind. She must have known the outers would go to the stars from the start. She must have known what was coming.
Isavel helped Ada scrounge up the time to escape, and then Ada escaped, and Isavel got nothing but suffering in return.
Fourth Under Sol (Digitesque Book 5) Page 36