Defy the Worlds

by Claudia Gray

  She goes through the door, weapon raised, to see Abel lying flat on one of the biobeds and Akide above him, frowning at a scanner. “Back off!” she shouts. “Get away from Abel this second, or I swear to God I’ll fire.”

  “No, you won’t,” Akide answers. He doesn’t budge.

  “Do you think I don’t believe in God? So the promise doesn’t count?” Noemi feels like her stare alone could kill him where he stands. “Trust me, I do, and it does.”

  “I believe in God, too.” With that—quick as a flash—Akide pulls a weapon of his own.

  No mech would ever have gotten away with that. She would’ve blown it to bits before it could even get its hand on its blaster. But she’s so used to thinking of this man as a member of the Elder Council—as her protector, even her friend. Her fighting instincts didn’t kick in fast enough.

  “Noemi?” Abel turns his head toward her. He’s visibly weak and dazed, even more than he was in his exhaustion on Haven. Whatever Akide did has turned him into a shadow of himself.

  With his free hand, Akide activates some small device. Instantly Abel goes unconscious. Noemi remembers the fail-safe used to capture him months ago; Akide must have his own methods of shutting Abel down.

  “You’re not going to shoot me,” she says.

  “And you’re not going to shoot me.” Akide looks disappointed, the same way adults look at little children who have let them down. “We’re only going through these motions because you’ve never accepted what Abel really is. What he’s for.”

  She wishes she could shake him. “Did you happen to notice that we just won the biggest battle of the Liberty War? That we have a brand-new war fleet, one Abel helped bring here?”

  “We’re grateful for that. But gratitude isn’t worth much, compared with the safety of our world.”

  Noemi doesn’t agree, but that’s beside the point. “We don’t have to destroy the Gate. Don’t you see? We can use that Gate now. Make contact with the other worlds of the Loop, force Earth to be the one on the defense for a while. Everything’s changed. We can turn this uprising into victory.”

  “You don’t understand war.” Akide sounds sorrowful, but his expression is hard. “They’ll send humans after us this time, and the fighters of Genesis will have to take the sin of murder on their souls. And in the end, if Earth doesn’t succeed in taking our planet, the other colony worlds will decide to claim it themselves. They’ve seen our prosperity now; they won’t be content to merely help us. No, they’ll come after us next—unless we destroy the Gate now.”

  “We don’t know that.” She thinks Darius Akide has a lot of nerve telling her—someone who’s trained to fight for almost a third of her young life, who’s gone into countless battles—that she doesn’t understand war. He’s the one who’s forgotten. “Are you really going to strand all the Vagabonds here, and all the Remedy members who came to help us?”

  If he cares about their volunteer fleet, he gives no sign. “I’m willing to sacrifice one mech to ensure that Genesis remains safe. You’re willing to endanger millions in the hopes the war has changed. That’s not enough, Noemi. We have one more chance at ensuring the security of Genesis forever, and we’re not going to waste it.”

  Hasn’t he heard anything she’s said? Noemi wants to scream. The Elders don’t want to win this war, she thinks. They only see two ways to end this war—through death or isolation.

  “I can’t make you believe in victory,” she says. “And I can’t make you believe in Abel’s soul. But I’m not going to let you hurt him, ever, so you can just—”

  Noemi doesn’t hear the energy bolt. She only feels it. Heat beyond imagining erupts in her chest, sears outward along every nerve. Her muscles lock up, and her weapon falls uselessly to the floor. For one instant she sees the horror on Akide’s face, the way he looks from her to the blaster he just fired and back again in disbelief.

  He meant to do it, she thinks in a daze. He just didn’t know what it would feel like to kill someone.

  Then she falls.

  36

  HEARING RETURNS TO ABEL FIRST. HE PROCESSES THE input automatically, then consciously: It is the sound of a man crying.

  Next he regains proprioception, the awareness of his own limbs and physical body. Then touch, which reveals that he’s lying on a flat, hard surface. Smell he finds with his next inhalation—

  —and his receptors identify the scent of blood.

  Abel opens his eyes and snaps back to full consciousness. He sits up quickly to take stock of his new situation and then realizes, no, he can’t be conscious yet. What he sees can only be a nightmare; therefore he is still asleep. But most dreams dissolve upon recognition, nightmares especially, and Abel’s still here, on a table, looking down at Noemi lying on the floor, unconscious or…

  He looks toward the sound of weeping and sees Darius Akide on his knees, hands pressed together in the traditional shape of prayer. “Forgive me, Lord. Forgive your unworthy servant.”

  On the floor next to Akide lies a blaster. The scent of ozone tangles with that of blood in the air.

  Abel stares again at Noemi and sees the scorch marks on her exosuit. The faint spattering of blood around her on the floor from the few capillaries not instantly cauterized by a blaster wound. And the very slight rise and fall of her breath, which tells him that as seriously hurt as she is, she’s still alive.

  This is no dream. This is reality, and he still has a chance to shape it.

  He leaps from the table, landing between Akide and Noemi. Akide stares up in astonishment; apparently he didn’t know how long the stunner’s effects would last. Abel says nothing, just seizes Akide’s head in one hand and his throat in the other, then snaps them in opposite directions. His sharp hearing picks up the faint pop of the spine before the corpse drops to the ground.

  There is deep inner programming meant to keep non-warrior mechs from hurting human beings, and that programming now throbs within Abel, one brief pulse of pain, and then it’s forgotten. Maybe it will trouble him later. Nothing matters at this moment except for Noemi.

  He kneels beside her and brushes his fingers along her cheek. “Can you hear me?” Being stunned is a poor analogue of death, but he knows that in both cases, hearing is the last sense to go.

  Noemi’s eyes flutter open. Abel rolls her into his arms, cradling her shoulders in the crook of one elbow. Her pupils are slightly dilated and both her pulse and respiration are dangerously low. She opens her mouth, closes it again, then manages to whisper, “Abel?”

  “Yes. I’m here. I’m going to take care of you.”

  With that he pulls her into his arms and dashes to the nearest biobed. He’s able to keep her steady in his embrace, without a single jolt to hurt her more, and once he’s reached his destination he lays her gently on one of the biobeds. Immediately readings light up on the monitors, each one of them more dire than the last.

  Abel knows how a biobed functions. These readings are consistent with the injury Noemi has received. Yet he cannot believe them. Never before has he understood the human emotional response called “denial.”

  “Where’s Akide?” she murmurs.

  Hopefully in hell, Abel thinks, but he says only, “He’s not a danger anymore.”

  “…Did he hurt you…?”

  How can she worry about him while she lies on the biobed with a burned-out crater in her chest? “No. I’m all right, Noemi, I’m fine, and I’m going to make you well.”

  “Liar,” she says softly, and somehow it sounds like the kindest name she’s ever called him.

  The heart remains intact, he thinks, looking up at the readings. The lungs are badly compromised, significantly past recommended regeneration limits but not absolutely beyond the range of possibility. Liver, spleen, and gallbladder destroyed, but only the liver is critical and could in time be regenerated.

  Time. He needs time to save her, and all his intelligence and ability can’t give it to him.

  “It’s starting,” she m
urmurs. “You can feel it a little… like your body isn’t yours really….”

  “Try to remain conscious.” Why does he feel such a strong need to say this to her when he knows it’s beyond her power to obey? He wants to believe it’s up to her. He hates even the idea of heaven, because if she has faith in some better place she’ll want to go there. “Stay with me.”

  “Wish I could.” Noemi’s eyes close for a moment; when she opens them again, it’s obvious she’s fighting for even that. “…I’m going to find Esther’s star.”

  “Noemi—”

  “Come to me there someday,” she whispers. “A long time from now.”

  Then her head leans to one side as her eyes fall shut again.

  Abel stares up at the biobed monitor. Her heart’s still beating; her shallow lungs are processing what oxygen they can. But she’s no longer conscious, and if this were any other human patient, he would judge it unlikely that she’d ever wake again.

  This isn’t any other patient. This is Noemi, and he will not endure this.

  She deserves her life. He’s going to give it to her.

  Swiftly he gathers her back into his arms and crosses the sick bay in three long strides, which take him to the cryosleep pods. He hits the activator with his elbow. One of the pods slides from its place on the wall onto the floor; its translucent panels fold open like the petals of a flower. Abel settles Noemi onto the pale green interior, and the soft, elastic substance gives slightly under her weight.

  Maximum skin contact is recommended for optimal results. The words from the cryosleep training manual are right there in his memory bank; they’ve waited there all these years for the moment when he’d need this knowledge. He gets to the surgical tools, pulls a scalpel from its robotic arm, and uses it to slash away as much of the exosuit as possible.

  But her life signals are now in the red zone. Further delay means failure. Abel steps back and hits the activator again. The panels fold around Noemi, and he stares down at her face as the pod fills first with vapor, then with liquid. Her features blur; her black hair floats around her in an uncertain halo.

  A light on the control panel blinks green as an automated voice says, “Cryosleep activated.”

  Abel feels as though he can breathe again. While the cryosleep pod rotates back into standing position, he watches the readouts to monitor her life signals. Already they’re slowing as the chill settles into marrow, blood, and brain. That’s entirely normal. But he also knows that she was so weak when he put her in that, even preserved this way, she might not survive any attempts to replace or regenerate her damaged organs. All this has bought her is a chance.

  Abel will take what he can.

  He waits until the process is complete, watching her the entire time. She seems to be floating in mist like some ethereal spirit in a fairy tale. His imagination is normally not so given to metaphor and simile; he has to gentle the truth of Noemi’s condition to come to terms with it. She is suspended between life and death.

  In a fairy tale, the hero would have to face great trials to bring the heroine back to life: slaying dragons, undoing spells. Abel only has to remember where he came from, and what the future generations of his people will become.

  The Inheritors won’t be equal parts man and machine; they’ll be far more organic. More powerful than even Abel himself. And they’ll live even longer. Gillian Shearer can’t transfer a human consciousness yet. But what if Noemi’s consciousness remains in her body, and then that body can be changed?

  There must be ways to add organic mech components to a human body. The new transhumanism Gillian Shearer dabbles in—those technologies would be linked, too. It would be possible to synthesize both real and artificial DNA to make Noemi… not an Inheritor. Something else. A mech and yet not a mech. Something entirely new, but not someone new. It will still be her.

  Abel’s cheeks feel oddly stiff—salt from the tears he must have shed without realizing it. He can tell that now because he’s begun to smile. The pain he feels is even greater than what he felt in the moment when he parted from Noemi before, greater than what he felt in the instant when he realized Mansfield had abandoned him alone in space, in an imprisonment that would last for thirty years. But he now possesses what he didn’t have back then: hope. This pain is endurable because it points him in the direction he needs to go.

  The pain will lead him back to Haven. To Gillian Shearer. And possibly to his own doom.

  He can’t do this without Gillian’s help. The price of that help can only be one thing: Abel’s surrender. She’ll want to replace his soul with the stored consciousness of Burton Mansfield. If it comes to that, Abel will agree. His life for Noemi’s—it’s a simple exchange, one he doesn’t have to question.

  Maybe it won’t come to that. There are always possibilities. Always variables. Abel will do whatever it takes to save Noemi, but he refuses to admit defeat.

  His entire body feels weak, and his chest aches as though he were the one who had been wounded. Still he presses on, transferring auxiliary control to a nearby console, so he can steer them away from the battlefield and toward the Genesis Gate.

  Beyond that lies Noemi’s last hope.

  He walks back to her cryosleep pod again to double-check the readings; it helps to be absolutely sure she’s in complete stasis. As he gets closer, he sees that one of her hands has drifted close to the outer shell. He presses his against it, feeling the burn of the cold against his skin. As he looks up at her face, Abel whispers the word that nearly destroyed him, Mansfield’s old fail-safe code. It’s the same word that will bring Noemi back to him again.

  “Resurrection.”

  Looking for the latest news on your favorite YA authors?

  Want early access to new books and the chance to win advance copies?

  Bring the (book) party to your in-box with the NOVL e-newsletter:

  theNOVL.com/enewsletter

  Join the NOVL community:

  theNOVL.com

  Twitter.com/TheNovl

  Instagram.com/TheNovl

  Facebook.com/TheNovl

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  As always, I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude toward my agent, Diana Fox; my valiant assistant, Sarah Simpson Weiss; and above all to the guidance and patience of my editor, Pam Gruber. Thanks also go to Stephanie Stoecker and Marti Dumas for sitting through brainstorming sessions; to Paul Christian, aka the “Word Cop,” for making sure I got things done; to Tom and Judith at Octavia Books for all their help; and to the Peauxdunque Writers’ Alliance for camaraderie and support.

  About the Author

  is the New York Times bestselling author of many science fiction and paranormal fantasy books for young adults, including Defy the Stars, Defy the Worlds, the Firebird series, the Evernight series, the Spellcaster series, and Fateful. She’s also had a chance to work in a galaxy far, far away as the author of the Star Wars novels Lost Stars, Bloodline, and Leia, Princess of Alderaan. Born a fangirl, she loves obsessing over geeky movies and TV shows, as well as reading and occasionally writing fanfiction; however, she periodically leaves the house to go kayaking, do a little hiking, or travel the world. She will take your Jane Austen trivia challenge any day, anytime. Currently she lives in New Orleans.