The Chancellor doesn’t seem to mind that I’m not following her orders. She’s content to leave me crumpled on the ground, suffering under the weight of Scela metal. She doesn’t need me for her plans—her only plan where I’m concerned is to make me pay for who I am and what I’ve done. To make me relive the hell I’ve earned over and over again.
The exo, the thing they’ve strapped to my back, writhes against me like it did at the moment of integration. I feel my spine bending, my neck stretching as the machine flexes against it. My muscles are shredding in its hands. You are Scela, it insists—like a voice in the back of my head, like the whisper of a General Body agent against my ear as I struggle in her headlock. It slams that lie into my head over and over.
But I’m not Scela. I’m a human being trapped in the metal they made me wear. I never consented to any of this, never believed in it, never dreamed that the General Body would go so far. I’m not Scela. I’m the Archangel, the girl who started screaming and fighting when they threw me in a shuttle and shipped me to the Dread.
I’m the girl who never stopped.
My rage is perfect. Pure. Overwhelming. And as I turn it on the exo at my back, glee like no other rushes through me. Because it recoils. It doesn’t know what to make of me. It’s built for brains that are already a little bit Scela to begin with. Brains that consent, that embrace the metal with purpose. It helps shape them into perfect hosts. It got used to me being one of those perfect hosts.
But consent under duress isn’t consent at all. Even if I let the exo in when they strapped it to my back, I never chose this machine suckered onto my brainstem. They wiped the part of me that fought it.
Now she’s back.
And the exo doesn’t know what to make of the girl who’s suddenly appeared in its grasp.
Pleas for mercy fill my ears, and I grapple with my control of the machine’s cameras. The girl I was thirty seconds ago knew how to manage this body, but she was truly Scela, and I’m a human in Scela metal. Every extra second is a painful reminder of what they turned me into, but it’s also not a second I can afford when my people are on the line.
Time to show them I’m not just a Fractionist mouthpiece. Time to show them I’m not just a General Body weapon. Time to show them I came to fight. The hum on my neck fades.
I drive one fist into the floor next to the stunstick I dropped. The metal warps where my knuckles strike, and a shattering crunch judders up my arm. Bracing against it, I pull my feet under myself and rise.
My vision’s still swirling, disorienting me, but I manage to pick out the two women who aren’t running. One is the Chancellor, whose concentration is fixed on the Scela she commands. The other is Yasmin, who’s clutching her broken wrist and slumped against one of the control panels. Fury whites out my pain at the thought of what she’s done for the Fractionist cause. She’s every flaw I saw in the movement embodied. I never should have committed so much to the Fractionists with people like her calling the shots.
Yasmin must feel my stare, even with the headgear and cameras standing between my eyes and hers. Her gaze snaps to me, her eyes bulging wide. And maybe it’s just my silly human brain making things up, but I think she can tell exactly who’s looking back at her. Not the Scela girl with holes. The Archangel she knew. The herald of her cause.
I’m on unsteady legs, their length utterly foreign to me, but I think I can use my voice. The Scela machinery clamps down tight around me, but I manage to croak, “The cuff.”
Yasmin’s eyes widen. She hesitates. Of course she does—she’s used to giving the orders. Letting other people do the dirty work.
I don’t have time for that. I force my legs up, one foot in front of the other, teetering into a run. I point myself right at the Chancellor, my anger swatting back the exo as it tries to wrestle control away from me. If I can just get the device, I can stop all this.
But before I get there, the Chancellor turns and stops me. It takes just a flip of her wrist to bring me under her command, the uncomfortable hum settling back into my neck. In the strange, foreign system that weaves through my thoughts, I feel the Scela go still, then stagger back from what they’re doing. One of them, Woojin, has the sense to throw the stunstick he’s holding clear across the room.
But if Chancellor Vel cares that her extermination order got stopped in its tracks, she doesn’t show it. Her sole focus is on me, on how I managed to get five feet away from her before she noticed I had my legs under me.
None of the Fractionists on the other end of the room are moving. They’re trapped either way, no matter what happens next. I feel the horror of the Scela as they take in the bodies they’ve already felled.
“Impressive,” Chancellor Vel breathes. “You’re tough as hullmetal if you’re standing after that.”
Two more steps and I’d have been close enough. Two more steps and I could have crushed the manacle and her wrist along with it. I seethe. I burn. The longer she holds me still, the more the agony of this body etches itself into me. I think she sees what’s happening. Her smile grows wider. She must know how much I want to die.
She also probably sees how much I’d love to take her with me.
The machine on my spine forces me to my knees again. My hands twist behind my back as it presses me down, tilts my head back, bares my throat. “Your rebellion is over,” Vel says.
“Not while I’m still breathing,” Yasmin hisses from behind her, and brings my discarded stunstick down.
The Chancellor drops, crumpling on the floor as her intention evaporates. The will holding me in place dissolves, and my limbs go limp. I slump, my cheek pressing into the cool floor just two feet from where Chancellor Vel’s head rests. Across the bridge, I hear cries of relief and grief, as well as the approach of heavy footsteps.
I don’t care. All I can focus on is the metal forced into my body, the machine on my back, and the way I’ll never be free from any of it. My eyes burn, but no tears come. My mind wasn’t made for this. I never chose this. I can’t last in this mess of a body with my mess of a brain.
My gaze rolls, the cameras flashing confusingly. There has to be a stunstick somewhere within reach. Something I can turn on myself. Something that can make all this stop.
A shadow falls over me. Not on your life, Aisha Un-Haad says. She crouches at my side, winding her hands in my shoulder pieces and hauling me to my feet. I sway, but she props my body up against hers. We’ll set it right. She flipped a switch to take away your holes. There’s got to be a switch we can flip to get them back.
Her gaze roves from me to her aunt. Yasmin cowers, the stunstick in one hand, her other dangling at an uncanny angle at her side. “I didn’t make it lethal. I didn’t kill her,” she stammers, pointing the stunstick’s end at the Chancellor. As an afterthought, she lets the metal baton tumble from her fingers, laying her palm open for us to see. A moment later, she slams that same hand over her mouth as she bends over her stomach.
Now she gets nauseous. Now she grasps what it feels like to get your hands dirty.
Aisha shakes her head. She can’t find it in her to be furious anymore—she’s too exhausted. For now, her aunt’s shattered wrist is enough to satiate that burning rage that eats away at her heart with each beat. There’s no doubt in her mind that Yasmin will answer for her crimes in full. Just not with violence. Not with hurt. And not until we get the rest of this madness sorted out.
Her eyes flicker between her aunt and the Chancellor. One of them broken, the other a boneless heap on the floor. A bubble of mirth rises in her, the only logical reaction to seeing the woman who’s ruled us for a decade, that fearless, powerful leader, the untouchable Chancellor Vel, unconscious and slack-jawed.
I turn back across the bridge to my people. The Fractionist cause that used me up and got me welded into this metal suit. Praava and Woojin crouch among them, consoling the living and attending
to the people they felled. The rebellion’s methods—or the methods they went along with—were horrific, but their cause was right. I know that in my bones. Humanity can’t live under the General Body’s rule. This confinement, this Fleet, isn’t sustainable. We need room to spread, to flourish, to have our differences and work through them without resorting to destruction.
We need a planet. Not the promise of one and a future uncertain. We need dirt under our feet and a sky above our heads. A place to start building and growing, rather than somewhere to survive. I remember dreaming of it. The one thing a pampered life in First District could never give me. The thing a Fractionist victory might.
I want real air, real dirt, real sky. I want a world.
It won’t bring me peace in this body. I don’t know if anything ever could. But it makes it worth hanging on just a little bit longer if I can see this through to the end.
If I can take us home.
“Yasmin, the data jack,” I groan. Aisha has to take a little more of my weight. I can’t seem to focus on both the task at hand and keeping this monstrous body upright at the same time.
Yasmin holds up the little device with our entire future written into it. She doesn’t have to ask what I want done with it—she passes it off to one of the technicians climbing out from under a desk, who takes it and plugs it into the machines. “We’ll be needing the Chancellor’s handprint and retinal scan to authorize,” the technician says, glancing nervously up at us.
“Shouldn’t be a problem,” Marshal Jesuit replies. She crouches and picks up Vel’s unconscious body. The Chancellor looks so small and fragile in her massive arms, and for a moment I’m filled with envy for the human body I’ll never have again. The marshal carries her around to the instrumentation panel. A second later there’s a chime, and a smooth voice announces, “Authorization confirmed. Fleet redirection in progress.”
A distant rumble starts up as the ship’s engines roar to life. It will take minutes to spin them up before the FTL drives can fire. Across the Fleet, alarms are blaring for citizens to prepare. Shuttles are landing. Families are bracing. Decks are shutting down.
A slight tug pushes at me as the ship starts to accelerate, and Aisha tightens her grip to keep me from toppling over. It barely seems worth it to keep me upright when my mind’s control over my body is all but lost. My thoughts flick to Kellan, to the cell aboard the Lancelot. No one ever explained how I got caught in the first place, but there’s a wisp of memory—rootless and strange, from the parts of me that weren’t me—of him apologizing, and I think I know. There’s not enough fight left in me to hate him for it. I was spineless, soft, First District, just like him. I probably would have done the same, for a chance to avoid the Endymion. All the same, I’m glad he can’t see me like this. I hope he never does.
I’m not Scela. I never will be—not as long as my memories are whole and my humanity’s intact. Complete with my history, I can never survive in this body. I can barely even move it, and every twitch of my muscles brings a fresh wave of pain. The only way out is forward. Promise me, I think, trying my best to point my words at the Scela girl holding me up. Promise me you’ll put me right again. Flip that switch, make me the Key who can handle this. Otherwise…
I’ll do it, Aisha says with a nod. I’ve got you.
Relief rushes through me, mitigating some of the pain. I push my thoughts toward the window, and Aisha understands what I want. She steers me around so we’re both facing the stars. Even with the press of the ship’s acceleration, the distant sparks of light don’t seem to be getting any closer. The Pantheon starts a slow turn, pointing its nose toward our heading, and I know that behind us, the rest of the Fleet is orienting itself to match.
The acceleration doubles, then triples. The machine on my back shivers with excitement. I do my best to ignore it, leaning against Aisha. She grins, Scela-wide, and I share it.
We trip over the light-speed barrier, and the stars blur past us.
One month after we land, my little brother takes his first steps on the planet’s surface.
I crouch next to Amar in the hard-packed dirt, keeping one hand outstretched for him to hold as he totters on legs made unsteady both by illness and by the unfamiliar pull of the planet’s gravity. His skin bears the scars of the disease, red lines etched where the purple tracks once ran down his face, but his body is on the mend. The nurses have reassured me several times over that he’s beaten the wasting fever completely. Still, I keep my headpiece down and all my cameras fixed on him as he traces wobbly circles around me, pausing occasionally to kick a rock.
The wind tugs gently at the loose ends of my headscarf. It took some adjustments to make it lie comfortably under the headpiece, but those compromises were worth the comfort it gives me to properly mourn Malikah.
I let my eyes slide closed, sinking more comfortably onto my haunches. Moments like this have been few and far between in the tumult of the past weeks. The logistics of settling a new world don’t allow for much downtime, no matter what your place in it is. The General Body’s control dissolved when the Fleet did. With each starship uncoupled from the Pantheon’s direction and free to choose its own landing site, the human race has fractured from a nation among the stars to a scattering of loosely allied city-states on the ground. There’s enough cooperation still that supply lines have been established for our most critical resources, and ships that once floundered as underappreciated, overstuffed manufacturing cores now have the room they need to expand, finding themselves the jewels of our new infrastructure.
Which, granted, has not been a widely accepted transition. Nothing about the new order of things goes down smoothly, and more often than not, we Scela find ourselves standing between arguing factions, hoping it doesn’t get ugly.
So far, we haven’t even agreed on a name for our new planet.
But maybe that’s not such a bad thing. For every dispute, there’s a resolution that makes us even stronger. Slowly but surely, we’re piecing together what this new world is going to be. It would be stranger if it weren’t a complicated thing.
“How tall are you now?” Amar asks, his focus still on putting one foot in front of the other. He sways a little, and I adjust my grip on his hand so he can brace against me.
“Taller than you’ll ever be,” I reply, and he scowls. It’s actually a terrible thing to say—the illness will likely stunt his growth. In the exosystem, I feel the others start laughing at me. Quiet, I grumble.
Some Scela wanted to break from the system and live in their own heads. Others wanted to stay a part of the big group they’d grown used to having with them at all times. One of the easiest things for humanity to agree on so far has been this: no one should be able to control the Scela anymore. Our autonomous rights have been restored, and the choice lies in our hands. And our choice was to stick together.
I squint across the plain toward the massive bulk of the starship Orpheus, which has made its berth near the Panacea. At this distance, I can’t see Wooj and Praava, but I can feel them through the exosystem—their sweat, their exhaustion, and a little of their resentment that I’m on a break and they’re not. It’s slow, grueling work, peeling back the hullmetal from the habitat domes, but as far as applications of Scela strength go, it’s one of my favorites. We’re coaxing the starships into bloom, letting starlight touch the cities for the first time in three hundred years.
Across the plain, Wooj tips a little salute my way. Enjoy it while it lasts, Un-Haad, he thinks, grinning.
I scoff. “Hey, Amar, you ready to go back in?”
“No!” my brother shouts, then pulls out of my grip and takes off across the rocky plain. His knobby legs somehow fly, and I start after him at an easy jog, my enhanced strides closing the distance between us in seconds. I scoop him up, my touch feather-light. He shrieks and flails in my grip as I toss him over my shoulder and turn toward the Panacea.
As I approach the medical ship, I summon a nurse and pass my little brother off. He’s still being kept in his ward there until they’re absolutely sure he’s in the clear. At least today he hasn’t asked when he has to go back to Yasmin, so I don’t have to explain again that she’s in a jail tank for a good long while. I’m still not entirely sure how I’ll take care of him when he clears the ward, but I’ll figure something out. As the nurse walks him up the ramp and through the massive door, they pass two humans and one Scela making their way down.
He’s looking better, Key remarks when she reaches the end of the ramp. Her headpiece is cocked back, revealing the thick, spiky hair that’s grown in around her exo. Isaac hangs slightly behind her, keying information into his datapad as his eyes follow Key’s movements.
You are too, I tell her earnestly. The toll the Archangel took on her body was frightening. Her muscles essentially shredded themselves from the stress, and as soon as the memory blockers were reestablished in her head, Isaac swept her away for reconstruction. This time, they had to cut her open to stitch her back together, and her recovery’s been slow. But today she walks out onto the plain with barely any stiffness in her limbs.
Mostly she’s just showing off for Zaire, who trots alongside her. His hovering has been constant and his attempts to be casual about it have been the subject of numerous mental gossip sessions in the exosystem. But Key doesn’t mind it—doesn’t even discourage it.
They make a strange pair. He barely comes up to her chest when she’s in her full rig, but she doesn’t see him as anything but an equal. They’re deep in conversation as they approach, but I block it out to give them their privacy, waiting for the moment I’m invited in.
Hullmetal Girls Page 27