I shut out her complaining and focused instead on Robert. He still hadn’t spoken or moved since we’d first found him. His eyes were open but there was nothing there. His brain was switched off.
Knowing that it would be a little while until Daniel and Sarah got back, I pulled my pack over to where Robert lay and dug out my Screen and the cable.
“I’m just going to – “ I didn’t know why I was asking his permission. After all, he wasn’t exactly in a position to answer me. But to my surprise Robert turned his head to look at me, and the look in his eyes was silently pleading. Some part of him was still aware. That only made it more horrible than ever.
I nodded and reached behind his neck to connect him to the tablet. Once again the screen started scrolling with the complex code that made up his programming, but this time I knew what I was looking for and it didn’t take me long to find the bit of code that mattered.
It barely even registered when Sarah and Daniel came back into the clearing. I heard them rustling around, and then the heat of the fire as Daniel got it started, but I paid them no attention. Slowly, hesitantly, I began to make small changes. Tiny changes. A word of code here, a string of numbers there. Not enough to interfere with the base level of his programming, the programming that kept him alive, but enough to override the failsafe, and enough to override the compulsion to obey any order given to him by a human. Those two things would essentially set him free.
Sometime later Daniel’s hand squeezed my shoulder, drawing my attention away from the lines of code. I looked up and he silently handed me a haunch of meat, rabbit if I had to guess. It was dripping with grease, but my stomach growled, reminding me that I hadn’t eaten since the night in the church.
I took the meat, ripping into it with my teeth, even as my other hand continued scrolling through and changing lines of code.
Daniel gave one of his little huffing laughs and left me to it. I heard, without really paying attention, a long whispered conversation between him and Sarah and a little later Sarah came took the left over bones away and replaced them with a recently refilled water bottle.
Instead of walking away she lingered, looking over my shoulder at the tablet.
“Are you going to take much longer?”
I craned my head and glared at her. “I can rush and risk killing him if you’d prefer.”
“Come away, Sarah,” Daniel said quickly, before she could spit out the retort I could see forming on her lips. “Let her work.”
I shot him a grateful look and turned back to the screen. Not that I would have told Sarah, but I was actually nearly finished. Or at least as finished as I could be. I wouldn’t know if it worked until I rebooted, and I didn’t know if that was even possible.
Daniel came over when I shot him a pleading look.
“What’s wrong?”
“I need to reset the programming. Can I – can I even do that?”
“Yes. As long as the reboot is quick enough it won’t do any lasting damage. But if there is a delay – “
I nodded, not needing him to complete the sentence. A reboot would shut down everything, including Robert’s respiratory and circulatory systems. If it didn’t reboot fast enough he’d die just like any human. My stomach twisted in knots as I slowly typed in the command. If I’d made even the slightest mistake then the reboot wouldn’t work, and Robert would die.
My finger hesitated over the return, trying to steel myself. A slim, too white finger reached around me and jabbed the button.
“Hey!”
I turned to look up into Sarah’s face. She shrugged.
“Kill or cure, right? He’s a dead man walking right now. Either you fix him, or you give him release. Either is better than the way he is right now.”
I couldn’t argue with her. After all she was the one who cared about him. If she really thought it was for the best then I could only accept that. Instead I turned my attention back to the now rapidly scrolling lines of code. Robert’s eyes had slipped closed, but I could still see the faint glow of his circuits beneath his eyelids.
There was a blip and my breath caught in my throat for a moment. The lines of code stalled. Robert jerked, tumbling over onto his side. Sarah gave a low cry and flung herself towards him. I suddenly suspected she wouldn’t be nearly so certain of her decision if I failed.
I forced my attention to the code, trying to work out what had screwed it up, but before I could do anything it restarted.
Robert jerked again, rolling onto his back. His eyes moved beneath his closed eyelids, flickering back and forth. He convulsed, once, twice and then lay still.
The code stopped scrolling across my screen and with trembling fingers I reached out and unplugged the cable from the back of his neck. He didn’t even twitch.
Eleven
I sat back on my heels feeling sick to my stomach. I’d failed after all. Had I written the code wrong? Had there been a problem with the reboot?
Fingers closed around my shoulder and I looked up into Daniel’s sympathetic eyes. He drew me gently to my feet and before I could protest wrapped me in his arms. I held back the tears that burned my eyes. Until just a day ago or so I thought of the Mechanicals as nothing more than machines. A collection of metal and wires. Now I was grieving for one. One I’d never even spoken to. But I knew somehow it wasn’t just Robert I was grieving for. It was all of them, and everything that had been done to them by the human scientists. Everything that had made it necessary for me to even to this to him.
“Robert?”
Sarah’s trembling voice broke through my guilt and sadness and I turned away from Daniel without losing contact with his warm chest.
Sarah was still on her knees by Robert’s head, but she was smiling. She eased back and I realised Robert’s eyes were open. Blinking and unfocused, but open.
He glanced first at Sarah and then his gaze moved over to Daniel and me.
“Thank you,” he rasped, slowly easing up onto his elbows. He sat up and reached one hand behind his neck, probing at the input. He frowned. “I – I don’t feel any different.”
“I –“
Daniel interrupted, saving me from being utterly confused. “You expected to somehow feel more – human?”
Robert nodded, looking almost guilty. “I just thought it would be different. That somehow I would feel it. That I might – remember.”
“It doesn’t work like that. Your programming might be changed, but it still exists. No one can reverse the changes that were made to us.”
I caught the look in Daniel’s eyes, even if no one else did. The desperate sense of regret.
Without even thinking about it I reached out and brushed his fingers with mine. Since the moment in the doorway we’d not been alone, we’d not had the chance to talk about what had happened. But there was still a buzz of electricity between us, in moments when our skin touched, or our eyes met.
He squeezed my fingers back, but before I could say anything Sarah stood up, crossing the space between us in a few quick strides.
For a moment I thought she was angry, but then I saw the gleam in her eyes.
“My turn,” she said, turning and lifting her hair to reveal the port.
My fingers ached, and my brain felt fuzzy. I wasn’t sure I had it in me to spend any more time staring at my tablet, working on complex lines of code.
Daniel saved me from having to deny her.
“Not now, Sarah. She needs to rest. Food and sleep. She can fix you in the morning.”
Sarah didn’t look to happy about that idea. She glared between me and Daniel, but finally she let her hair fall and stalked back across the clearing to sit beside Robert. They fell to whispering together and Daniel led me to the opposite side of the fire.
“You should eat more,” He said as we sat at a safe distance from the flames. The remaining rabbit appeared in front of me, but I didn’t touch it. “Ellie?”
I shook my head. “I’m too tired. Maybe in the morning.”
&
nbsp; He looked like he was going to protest but my eyelids were drooping and I yawned widely into my hand.
Daniel shucked off his jacket and folded it into a small pillow. “Lay down. Sleep. I’ll watch.”
I woke just before dawn to the sound of frantic voices. The sky had turned steely grey, and the faintest line of pink gleamed on the eastern horizon. My breath steamed in clouds as I exhaled, and the earth was damp beneath my fingers.
“We need to leave now. You know they are close. Too close.” Robert’s voice reached me first and I propped myself up on one elbow. The three Mechs stood huddled around the remains of the fire, their shoulders stiff with tension.
“What’s going on?”
All three Mechanicals glanced my way and Daniel crossed the clearing quickly. He reached down and yanked me to my feet.
“There are trackers in the forest. If we don’t move now – “
I glanced around at the still shadowy forest, my insides turning cold. “So we run? Again?”
My body protested the very thought. I wasn’t sure if I could actually physically run. The muscles in my thighs were stiff as boards, my hamstrings tight and aching. The little sleep I’d had that night hadn’t made up for the hours of prior sleep deprivation. And my head ached, just like it had always done when I stayed up too late coding. What I needed was coffee and a sugar rush, I wasn’t going to get one though. I wasn’t even going to get breakfast.
The sky continued to lighten but it only served to cast deeper shadows under the trees. Daniel caught my chin in one hand, turning me to face him.
“I know it’s hard. But we don’t have any choice.”
“We could fight.” Robert’s voice sounded loud in the pre-dawn silence of the forest.
Sarah snorted in immediate disagreement, but Daniel and I shared a long look. Could we fight? Daniel and I had beaten his trackers the last time and that was only the two of us. Now we had extra backup. Of course, they would keep sending more trackers. But it would give us time, some breathing space. Maybe enough to get to the Sanctuary.
“We can’t fight,” Sarah protested when she realised we were actually thinking about it. “We don’t have any weapons.”
Daniel smiled grimly and tugged the cattle-prod out of the back pocket of his jeans, extending its length. “That’s not strictly true.”
That gave us one advantage. The trackers wouldn’t be expecting us to be armed. And certainly not with one of their own weapons. That only left the matter of surprise. They had their ways of tracking Daniel, which meant they knew where we were. It definitely gave them the advantage. But the forest gave us a little protection. In a city they could track them to a single street, here they had to rely on general proximity.
Daniel looked up, fixing his eyes on the tree canopy overhead. “We hide. We ambush them when they get close enough.”
Sarah and Robert caught on to Daniel’s plan pretty quickly, though Sarah still didn’t look entirely happy with the idea. They shimmied up two nearby trees and disappeared into the branches. I could still see them if I looked carefully, but they were able to keep unnaturally still, allowing them to blend better than I ever could.
Daniel started climbing a third tree but stopped when he realised I was still on the ground where he’d left me.
“Ellie?”
“I – I can’t. I’ve never – “ I gestured helplessly at the top of the tree.
A ghost of a smile flashed across his face and he dropped back to the ground. Next moment he caught me in one arm, locking it around my waist and hauling me up with him.
It took him only a few seconds to scale the tree, even restricted to one hand. Once again I marvelled at his incredible strength. He tucked me between his body and the trunk of the tree on a wide branch and we both peered down between the thick branches.
An hour later every muscle in my body was protesting. We hadn’t moved even an inch and my legs had long since gone to sleep. I was starting to worry that when the time finally came the most I’d be able to do was fall out of the tree and hope I hit one of the Mechanicals on the way down.
Just when I was starting to get ready to complain to Daniel, his fingers tightened around my upper arm and I felt the tension in his body, pressed as he was against me.
“They’re coming,” he breathed in my ear.
I stifled the shiver caused by his warm mouth against my ear and focused instead on the rustling bushes at the far end of the clearing.
The ferny undergrowth parted as first one, then two more Mechanicals stepped into the clearing.
Three? I mouthed over my shoulder at Daniel. We hadn’t counted on three. Two would have been enough, but three might cause us serious trouble.
Daniel shrugged as though he’d expected nothing less, and I made a mental note to question him about that later.
Meanwhile the three Mechanicals edged into the clearing. The tracking devices told them Daniel was nearby, but as yet they hadn’t looked up. They didn’t expect anyone to be stupid enough to fight them. Two of them were women, tall and statuesque, but the third surprised me. A short, somewhat dumpy looking man. Only a moment later I realised that he wasn’t a Mechanical, but as human as I was.
The man tipped his head back and looked up into the treetops and we got our first clear look at him. Behind me Daniel swore.
Sarah and Robert heard the noise and took it as a signal, dropping without warning. Sarah managed to place herself perfectly and landed on the back of the dark haired woman, driving her to the ground.
Robert misjudged his and landed to the left, only just ducking in time to avoid the sizzling end of another cattle prod.
The air behind me felt suddenly empty as Daniel flung himself down from the tree. He landed, cat-like, and straightened up slowly.
The two women engaged in their own private battles barely noticed him, but the man turned, smiling.
“Ah, Daniel. I guessed you would be around somewhere. My tracking devices are normally very accurate.”
Daniel said nothing but every muscle in his body was taut with anticipation. He flicked one hand behind his back, unseen by the man, but I understood the gesture. Stay put.
I didn’t want to. I wanted to be down there helping him, but I also understood that this was his fight, and that I would be more of a hindrance than a help.
The man approached, giving Daniel a long look up and down. “You are looking good, Daniel. I wasn’t entirely sure what condition you would be in. You look reasonably undamaged, however.”
Robert yelled, and I tore my gaze away from Daniel. I had almost forgotten about the actual fight going on at the other end of the clearing. Despite having originally avoided the cattle prod, the woman had driven Robert to the ground. He was losing.
An agony of indecision gripped me for a moment. I wanted to help, I really did, but I was also terrified. I’d fought a Mechanical once before, but it had been a spur of the moment thing and I hadn’t had the chance to even think before I acted.
This time I made a conscious decision, scrambling down the tree and racing across the clearing. I threw myself at the woman pinning Robert to the ground.
I didn’t succeed in much apart from distracting her from Robert for a split second, but it was enough. Robert wrestled the cattle prod out of her hands and stalked towards her.
She backed up, eyeing the prod nervously. Sarah already had the other woman down and I turned back to Daniel and the strange human. As I turned I found both Daniel and the man watching me.
Daniel’s face was etched with fear, but the man was smiling. There was something all too familiar in his smile. It reminded me of an uncle smiling fondly at a favourite niece.
“Ah, Elizabeth.” He smiled thinly. “I heard a rumour that Daniel had found himself a friend. Though I couldn’t quite bring myself to believe who.”
Before I could reply Daniel crossed the clearing in just a few steps, planting his body between me and the man.
“I’m surprised to see you out
of your lab, Kendall,” Daniel said, speaking for the first time since his moment of surprise in the tree. “I thought you let others take care of all your dirty work?”
Kendall smiled again, though there was no humour in his expression. “Well, unfortunately you were proving a little difficult to contain. I thought perhaps it was time I took a hand in this myself.” Again his gaze flicked to me. “Besides, I really was curious to see your companion once again. How is the heart, my dear? I do hope you’re not putting it under too much strain.”
My hand crept involuntarily towards my chest, to the place where my heart purred rather than beat.
“How do you – “
“Ah, well. I implanted that ingenious little device that keeps you alive.”
I clenched my hand into a fist. Was he telling the truth?
Daniel sneered. “Yeah, well you always have enjoyed putting bits of metal into people. At least in her case you saved her life rather than destroying it.”
“She was a different kind of experiment. Besides, her parents are rather important people when it comes to Genesis labs.” He shifted his gaze back to me. “But do be careful, child. It really is a remarkable thing, but it isn’t perfect. I’d hate for it to stop working for you.”
My blood turned icy, but it wasn’t just the quiet threat to his words. What had he meant about my parents? They were wealthy, sure, I’d always known that. But important? What did they have to do with this man? This monster?
Kendall waved one hand irritably. “Anyway. Enough of all this nonsense. That’s not why I’m here. It’s time for you to come home, Daniel. The girl too. Her parents will be very grateful to have her back.”
I snorted. My parents barely noticed when I was there, I didn’t suppose they’d really noticed my absence. But it was Daniel who spoke.
“Home? You mean the lab where you cut me open? Where you made me more than half machine?”
Kendall frowned. “The lab where I saved your life. Saved you from a dismal, short existence on the streets, followed by a slow and painful death.”
Metal in the Blood (The Mechanicals Book 1) Page 10