“I know.”
I understood then that she hadn’t just been meant to host me. Of course they didn’t trust me, appearing suddenly years later. So, they’d asked the assassin to take me, to watch me. To try to figure out what kind of bomb I was, and to destroy me before I could cause them harm.
“I tried to undo it,” she said. “But I can’t work with machines. And what they did, it’s too integrated. The machine and your biology.”
“You’d have to kill me.”
“Yes,” she conceded.
So do it, I wanted to say. But I couldn’t. I had killed men and women with these hands, people whose only crime had been to avoid volunteering as one of the government’s monsters. And I had slaughtered confused and panicked animals just so my re-creators could see what sort of destruction I could wreak. But I couldn’t tell the rebellion assassin to end me. Did that make me a coward?
“You were able to do something though,” I said. “I have my memories back.” And, as if my body had been a hibernating computer, I’d turned on, the machine part of me coming alive. All systems on.
“I think I tripped something while I was working on you,” she said. “It felt like something turned on.”
The echo of my own thoughts from her disturbed me. Now that I thought about it, I could feel where she had used her shaping ability on the tiniest of wires in my brain, like someone had riffled through them. I said, “Sometimes they programmed us to forget something. Sometimes to forget what we were, or who we were. So even we didn’t know we were a danger, until…”
Until they sprang us like traps, on people with whom we’d become friends. I knew this. I remembered this, but I did not react emotionally to this knowledge. I felt it like some dry fact, like learning of a historical massacre. It might have been part of the programming, or maybe the emotions had shut off on their own in the face of horror too immense.
“I think maybe you sprang the trap,” I said. “I think you…defused me.”
She met my gaze with her red eyes for a long moment, unblinking.
Defused or not, I was still a bomb. I stood there just inside the doorway. The room smelled of green things and animal things, and I realized that the collection of organisms on the shelves was alive—every creature, every plant, as still as a statue but still living, each captured and frozen in a single moment. She’d done this. I didn’t know how. But in that instant I understood the depth of her skill at manipulating living things.
I said, “You can’t let me leave; they’ll only find me again. You can’t let me stay; I’m a danger.”
“I know.”
A silence between us.
“Anyway,” she said suddenly, as if responding to some argument. “There’s nothing to say that the machine will be killed if the flesh is.”
Excuses. She was retired from killing, or maybe she just wouldn’t kill me. So that was her vulnerability, as much as my cowardice was mine.
I had no idea what to do. I sat down beside her on the floor, as I sometimes had at home. There was only one solution to this problem, no matter my fear or her reservations. I realized it in that moment. With the realization came a peace.
Nat was beautiful in her grief. Raw and…striking. Her eyes glittered. The tears washed something away, left something humblingly human and true. I felt bad for her; I knew what it was to kill and have that on your conscience. My compassion was wrapped up with the affection I’d had for her, a feeling that had changed, because I’d changed. I no longer looked at her as a larger-than-life figure. She was as lost as I.
“Your dad was an informant for us,” she said quietly. “I don’t know if you knew that. He was worried about your brother. He thought he might be a shaper. Danny showed some signs early on. So I came to watch him and also keep an eye on him.”
She didn’t look at me while she talked. She stared off at the far wall, her gaze turned inward.
“We could have taken your whole family into safety, but we needed you to live as normal a life as possible or we would lose your dad’s place in the government. So I was there to watch over things.”
Into her pause, I reviewed and rewrote my memories of that time, framing them from this new perspective. My dad, a part of the rebellion. Maybe my mom, too. And Natalia, not simply friend or babysitter, but an agent of the rebellion, a protector.
Again, as if echoing my thoughts, she said, “I promised your parents I would protect you.” She closed her beautiful eyes.
“It’s my fault,” I said.
She shook her head. A frightening stillness came over her, all emotion and all life sucked from her body. Then her expression cracked and more tears spilled. She didn’t try to cover them.
“My family?” I was afraid to ask but had to know.
“They’re safe,” she said. “We helped them off the planet. They took your brother to safety.”
That relieved me. Of course it did. Years had passed, so they would have given me up for lost. That freed me. I had no ties left, no obligations except this one here—to make sure I did not become a danger to the rebels who fought the people who would have enslaved my brother and tortured my parents.
She looked at me. “How much do you remember?”
“Everything,” I said, a little uncertain at her intent look.
“Of your time with the government?”
“Yes.” It dawned on me what she asked. “Oh! Yes. I do.”
I sat up a little straighter. I had information for them. I wasn’t privy to state secrets, of course—our captors had kept a lot from us—but I’d had enough experiences the rebellion would find useful. They would find me useful.
I told myself it wasn’t cowardice that made me want this chance to stay alive. It was a sense of duty.
“I think they put some kind of lock on my memories,” I said. “So I don’t think memory extraction will work. But I can talk. I can tell as much as I know.”
Nat’s expression shifted. She regarded me with deep affection and sadness. I wasn’t sure what inspired that or what it meant. It was bigger than our conversation, meant something greater. But before I could try to fathom that, she looked up.
“I wondered if they would come,” she said.
I looked up, too. I didn’t hear anything at first, but then it reached me: the sudden racket of the birds in the cages, the sounds of voices, of someone upstairs at the door. Not knocking.
We were both on our feet. “They tracked me,” I said.
Natalia read my thoughts in my expression and interpreted my fear correctly. “The enclosure is masked, so I don’t know… But everyone is fine. Don’t worry. But we have to go.”
I hesitated. I looked around at all of the animals and plants, a collection that had probably taken her years to amass, creatures I didn’t recognize, so who knew how rare they were. “But…”
“It’s all right,” she said. “They weren’t meant to last, anyway.” She looked at me and gave an odd smile. “Nothing is.”
She held out her hand.
I went with her.
We passed through another door in the basement level, through a room that housed the water heater and pipes, through another door, and up a set of stairs. We jogged through an empty building that might have been an apartment complex at some point but now had a long-vacant feel.
Sunlight came in through windows above the door. Odd, somehow, to see that. I had the weird feeling of returning to the world from some kind of dream or underworld.
We emerged into daylight. We stood in Shapertown, on the same stretch of darkened street I had run down. Now here I was a third time, fleeing.
Shapertown was no longer empty or quiet. Lights flashed from official vehicles. Voices bounced from the high walls of the buildings and tangled into discordance.
A ship skimmed by overhead. Nat pulled me back to stand flush with the wall and we waited for it to pass. The agents down the street hadn’t seen us yet.
“Run,” she said.
I ran wit
h her, but it was futile. They’d pick my trail up in a heartbeat.
“Wait,” I said. “You have to go on without me.”
“What? No.” She grasped my wrist, urging me to keep up with her.
“You have to. They’re going to follow me, not you.”
She didn’t respond, didn’t look at me, intent on running. She made an extraordinary leap, caught a low balcony, swung up. I followed easily. I didn’t need shaping for that. My body just responded, doing things no normal human could.
“Listen,” she said as we dashed through another empty building and pounded down stairs. “I’m not going to let you go this time. What you have is way too important to us to give you back up. Right?”
My lack of response didn’t faze her. “We’ll lose them,” she said. “We’ve been doing this for years. We’ve got masks and shields all over this place.”
I could run all afternoon if I had to, all day, all night. But I stopped. “No. I can’t. I can’t just keep running. They’ll always find me. How did they find me?”
She looked at me with fierce blue eyes and seemed to calculate something. Then she turned. “Hold on.”
I’m not sure if she meant me to follow, but I came after her. She passed through a door and onto a high balcony that looked over Shapertown, including her building and the cloud of government officers surrounding it.
Nat closed her eyes and tilted her chin up as if enjoying the breeze that flowed over us, but I sensed some deeper activity. I heard an odd commotion from the near distance. For a moment, I couldn’t identify it. Then an explosion of birds burst from her building. Their wings beat the air. There were other sounds, too: animal cries, the thud of many feet. Men and women shouted.
She opened her eyes and met my gaze, her irises the blue of the sky. She looked a little dazed. Her focus sharpened, and she almost seemed to smile.
“Come on,” she said.
We went down more flights of stairs, one after the other, a dizzying descent. I didn’t break a sweat. Natalia ran as effortlessly.
“I’m thinking you have a positioning system,” she said. “And they’ve also got some open link with you. The shields should deal with that, but they’re all built differently, by different people. They don’t all work the same. Probably all your agents need is a blip on their map and they’ve got you. We’ve got warrens of halls and safe houses with layers of protection. Most of them aren’t used for anything but losing tails.”
We made it to the bottom of the stairs. We might have been underground again, though I couldn’t tell.
“Nat,” I said. She whirled, and I took her hands with mine. She looked wild, eyes gleaming. Any lingering redness from tears had disappeared into the flush of her face. “You’re guessing. We have no idea how they actually found me. You can’t just bring me deeper into the rebellion’s shelter. It’s too big a risk.”
“I know,” she said. “We’re not just running. I’m bringing you to help. There are other shapers, shapers who can work with machines. They’ll be able to work with you in a way I can’t.”
I shook my head. “No. I tried.”
She stared at me, uncomprehending. And then I realized: This was it. Here was the thing I’d never told anyone, ever.
I squeezed her fingers gently. “They specifically chose non-shapers for their experiments. They didn’t want anyone who could easily undo any of their work. But of course they couldn’t stop other shapers from manipulating us, if we ever did escape. They put safeguards in. They made it so that even experienced shapers couldn’t do anything with us without basically destroying us. I know because…I tried.”
I paused, giving her a moment to get my meaning. Her brows furrowed. Her lips pursed, like she’d form a word. You…
“I’m a shaper,” I agreed. “I shape.” It was so weird to say that aloud. It almost seemed false to say the words. Yet I felt something on a very deep level, like unbinding a bird’s wings and letting it spread them for the first time.
Her eyes widened. Her grip went slack on mine. I brushed her hands open and pressed mine flat to hers. Hand to hand, shaper to shaper, my hands just like hers.
“I work with machines,” I said. “That was always my talent. But what they did to us… They integrated machine and biology too well. It’s too complicated, and almost the same thing in places. I tried to undo some of what they did to me, but I couldn’t without causing damage.”
And I had caused damage, in the beginning. The results weren’t pleasant. But we’d all been so sick at the time adjusting to these new bodies that our captors hadn’t suspected my tinkering.
“I managed a few changes, here and there. Glitches that would bring some memories back, a lot like you did.”
Natalia was speechless. I shook my head. “No one knew. No one. Not even the government, when I was in the deepest pit of its bowels.”
She shook her head in wonder. “I sure didn’t. We suspected your brother, but…”
I smiled a little sadly. I dropped my hands from hers. “So that’s how I know there’s no way to fix this. I tried. Every moment that I had alone and could remember myself, I explored the circuits they buried in me. I might know them better than the engineers who’d designed them. But they can’t be altered. A shaper who knows biology is rare enough, but one who knows machines just as well? They have shapers working for them. They know that’s nearly impossible. And even if that person exists, they would have to have amazing powers of focus, to keep the two separate, and just…work with them both.”
The light in her eyes dimmed. She’d tried to shape me, so understood firsthand what I said.
She sat on the bottom few stairs and got that look of gazing off and inward, her arms draped over her knees.
I felt tired. Not body tired, but spirit tired. The part of me that had not been altered from the original, that could never be changed by machine—call it core personality or soul—which also must have been connected to my ability to shape: that part of me was tired. It was the kind of tired I’d felt while huddling in the crumbling building. This time, I had a home of a sort, a haven. People to be safe with, someone to trust. But this time I knew that they were not safe with me. I’d come full circle, in a way.
I sat down beside her on the stairs. Maybe the agents tracked me even now. Better to end it here before moving any deeper into the rebellion’s stronghold. I folded my arms over my knees and took a long breath, looking at the wall. Once upon a time, someone had taken the time to decorate this stairwell with intricate blue-and-white tile work. Just a back stairway that few people would have traveled through, but a lot of detail had been put into the flower-spiral patterns. I couldn’t say why, but this brought tears to my eyes.
“I’d like to try something,” she said. “Are you really very good with machines?”
I blinked, and moisture filmed my lashes. “I think so.”
“It might cause damage. But it might also work. I think it’s the only thing that might.”
She shared a long, serious look with me.
I wanted to tell her No and Thank you, but I think I need to end here. Please do it quickly, but under the force of that look, I couldn’t say anything but “We’ll try it.”
The lines in her face relaxed. “All right. I’ll take your hands, just because contact makes it easier.”
We turned to face each other on the stair and scooted close enough to lace our fingers together. Her fingers were warm and dry against my cool ones.
“I want you to concentrate on the parts of you that are machine. If you can kill whatever connection the government has with you, that should make you safe, at least for now. Trust me?”
I nodded, even as my heart sped in my chest. Trust. Yes. I trusted Natalia, trusted her to do what was right—even if this didn’t work, even if this were a lie to relax me while she did what she had to so that the rebellion remained safe.
“Good,” she whispered. She closed her eyes and stroked my palms with her fingertips. She let out
a breath as if sighing into me.
I closed my own eyes and focused like she’d asked. I sank down into awareness, spreading feelers over the trillions of microscopic circuits that bound with my cells, like a trillion fingers on a trillion wires, poised to pluck any or all of them.
This was what shapers did. The primary substance of the universe was information. Here, close to the center of the universe where reality was more flexible, we could change that information. We’d been called witches, wizards, mages. There was definitely something magical about the ability to reprogram the world with a thought. Indistinguishable from magic, really. Some shapers found it easier to manipulate their own bodies. Others, minerals or the basic elements, or—like me—machines. Fewer knew and could shape the bodies of others.
A flush broke over my skin as if every capillary popped with warm blood in a wave from my fingers to my toes. Natalia’s hands were suddenly cool below mine as she increased my metabolism. She did it like whispering a command to a thermostat. Just as simply, she could have pinched off an artery, inspired my pancreas to release a flood of insulin, or tripped the electrical impulses of my heart, and I’d have been dead. Even my machines, with all their repair work and enhancements, would not have been able to counter that kind of instant demise. I was still fundamentally a biological being.
Every one of my cells burned like a furnace stoked high, but not the machinery. That lay dormant, cool, and dead, unresponsive to her touch. And like that, I could sense just where it joined with my biology, could feel where flesh became the nonliving material that only mimicked it.
The engineers who re-created me had nearly succeeded in their goal: to produce a hybrid of anatomy and technology that no single shaper could disentangle. But two shapers with just the right set of skills, working together?
They’d buried a lot of circuits in the base of my skull, a real rat’s nest of balance, positioning, and outside communication. I could feel the pulse of my link with the government’s computers, nested with my positioning device.
I focused my attention here and braced myself. It was worth a try. I could borrow some of Natalia’s heat—my own heat, stoked up by Natalia—to burn out those tiny connections. This would be as precise as I could get it. Maybe with some practice… But we didn’t have time.
Shaper (The Mi'hani Wars Book 1) Page 4