“Suspend. Nanites.”
Suspend nanites? Isn’t that what Váli is doing to Rictus?
“Sera,” Enoch whispered back. “What do you mean? You want me to help—?”
But Váli was now lifting him into the air, drawing Enoch to a mouth still spotted with Rictus’s remains.
“Don’t worry, I will only bite off your limbs—nothing vital. Like your specter friend, I can help you suffer for ages—nearly as long as him, in fact. I’ll have to connect you to my circulatory system so that you don’t bleed to death every time I peel the skin from your body.”
Sera spoke from the sand underneath him now, her voice strained. “You . . . you’re just a troll. A freak tumor of uncontrolled cancer cells. You were made to match the Pensanden. But you’ll never be more than an ugly shadow. A shadow smart enough to understand what he can never be!”
Enoch knew what she was trying to do—stall Váli to give him time. Time to figure out what she had meant by suspend nanites. Enoch’s head still ached from pushing the specters. He couldn’t focus, couldn’t . . .
And then he understood. Suspend nanites! She wanted me to realize what those words meant when the monster said them. Váli wouldn’t have to create this special bile of his, he wouldn’t have to take any of these crude measures with the specters if he could do what I do. He has my ability to see and create patterns—but cannot see with the afila nubla! That is where he is helpless!
Enoch knew what he had to do now. He just needed Sera to keep stalling Váli. Just a little longer . . .
Luckily, Sera had hit a nerve. Váli tightened his grip around her, and she let out a gasp. His voices were burning hotter.
“Ah, the trained bird finally speaks! Even in death, you sing the praises of your false god. You, my dear, are the saddest of this lot. An entire race of beings bred as decorative messengers in a world where communication is fast as light. A people made dependent on silly metal wings—in an age when man could fly around the world in hours aboard vessels that matched the speed of sound.”
Váli focused his attention on Sera now. Enoch fought to keep his focus, pushed away his fear for Sera by holding to his afila nubla with ferocious determination. This is why Master Gershom trained me, he thought. So that I could keep my mind in focus when it mattered most.
The monster lifted Sera into the air and used another tentacle to pull her broken wing free, extended to its quivering limit.
Sera screamed. “Can’t you feel the insult done to your kind just by the Pensanden? To be born a decoration. A useless, archaic decoration.”
He lifted her high and opened his monstrous jaws, this time meaning to bite her in half. Váli did not care to keep the angel alive.
Enoch’s will crumbled, and he screamed the last air from his lungs.
“Sera!”
There was a roar, and something large flew through the air, landing on Váli’s twisted face with a heavy thump and knocking Sera to the ground. Gasping for breath, Enoch blinked the tears from his eyes.
G’Nor crouched on Váli’s face, thick claws deep in the tentacled monster’s flesh. With another roar, the beast tore into Váli with a flurry of powerful swipes that sent torn flesh and blood into the air.
Váli was screaming and roaring back, cursing in fear and rage at this unexpected intruder. The monster rolled to shake G’Nor from his face, but couldn’t loose the beast’s predatory grip. The tentacle around Enoch shivered loose and whipped around to beat at his attacker. With deadly feline reflexes, G’Nor twisted his head back to snap the tentacle between long dagger fangs and then shook the prize with feral violence. The bucking tentacle was torn to shreds between the beast’s razor teeth, and G’Nor turned back to sink his fangs into Váli’s jaw. G’Nor ripped the monster’s jawbone from its mouth in a shower of blood, and Enoch couldn’t help but process the contrast between the two beasts—the blunt clumsiness of twisted human creativity against millions of years of predatory evolution.
Váli was screaming now. More tentacles erupted from his torso, wrapping around G’Nor’s powerful body—and being flayed to ribbons by the beast’s ebony claws. But they were growing heavily tangled around G’Nor, and Enoch saw Váli’s strategy: the tentacles were a distraction to the beast, much like the pattern had been to him. As the wildly flailing limbs kept G’Nor preoccupied, Váli was detaching his vital organs from the bloody mess. A slug-like portion of the monster extended from behind the bleeding torso—a featureless lozenge of pulsing flesh half the size of the original creature. It sprouted thin, finlike limbs and started to burrow into the sand beyond the reach of G’Nor.
* * * *
Sera saw and stumbled to her feet, casting around for Enoch’s sword. “G’Nor! He’s escaping! If he gets away, he’ll heal and come back again!”
G’Nor heard her, but he was so wrapped in dying, constricting tentacles that he could not break free. Váli detached completely, slid into the blood-soaked sand and disappeared.
Sera turned to Enoch, desperate. He was standing, one hand at his temple, the other extended forward in the direction Váli had gone. Again, blood was running from his ears.
“Enoch! We’ve lost Váli. We need to leave here. Now. If he can heal even half as quickly as the trolls, then we . . .” Her voice drifted off.
Enoch was trembling.
“Enoch?”
G’Nor had freed himself from the tentacles and left the convulsing mess to check on Sera. He signed to her with blood-soaked paws. Sera waved him away and stumbled towards Mesha, who stirred at her touch.
“Oh . . . oh, good. She is alive. Just knocked out for a bit. But we need to go! That . . . that thing will be back soon. We need to grab Enoch and . . .”
G’Nor roared, and Sera spun to see the sand shifting, boiling up from the spot where Váli had disappeared only moments earlier. She took a step back, hand weary against G’Nor’s wet fur.
“N-no. No. We can’t fight him again, not like this.”
The sand parted, and a hand reached into the air. Sera screamed.
Enoch scrambled forward and, against Sera’s protests, reached down to wrap his hand around the wrist. He leaned back—and pulled a man from the ground in a cascade of sand. The man was tall and slender, and he was dressed in some dark material that was . . . glowing. He was glowing. Glowing with a strange blue light that seemed to course through his frame, trickling from his fingers, down his wrists, along his arms, streaming into his torso—and culminating in the almost piercing light emanating from his chest. The light beat in time to a low, thudding sound that vibrated across the sand like an elemental heartbeat.
Sera watched as the man steadied himself against Enoch and then stood straight. He flicked the sand from his shoulders and made a vain attempt at straightening his hair . . . and then caught sight of his hands.
Turning to Enoch, the man crumpled to his knees and began to weep. Enoch stumbled forward, blood running from his ears, and put his arm around the crying figure.
“It’s ok, Rictus. It’s ok.”
Chapter 23
“So we can’t imitate their technopathy, fine.
We will do what clever men have always done—build tools that will render their advantage obsolete.”
—Joseph Chabran, Commander of the EurAsian Rebellion
Mosk left the dying draconfly where it lay—the creature had more than fulfilled its purpose, and its last, shuddering breaths were crumpled against the muffling immensity of the surrounding shadows. He was grateful the draconfly had lived long enough to navigate the final descent, using its antennae to weave through monolithic limbs of dead machinery in the blind drop that had ended here. But Mosk was here, that was the important thing. His destination was near, a prize that his prey would not be able to resist. This Pensanden Enoch would not be trapped by the Arkángel’s plan, would not fall to Kai and her awakened sisters. He would not be heading to Tenocht without the tools created by some of his people’s earliest enemies. It would be a prize too te
mpting for him to resist.
Somewhere above him, machinery whispered in soft and sand-brushed motion.
* * * *
There was water at Váli’s den. Under the ersatz shade of five broken towers, beneath the dry webbing of dead cables and the fluttering silver leaves of metallic cloth, there was a modest lake, still and cool and surprisingly deep. Nothing grew in the wet gray sand surrounding the water, and G’Nor had signed to them that the water was safe, but “smelled of old metal.” Váli had obviously spent some time shaping this ruined facility into something comfortable for his unfathomable needs—indeed, he had been the one to stretch the strange silvery tarp between the jagged antenna towers surrounding the facility to provide a simulacrum of oasis here. Enoch imagined the twisted creature sighing from its mouths as it took a leisurely swim in the cool waters, and the thought turned his stomach.
Rictus had taken some time to walk along the shore, noting the oddly circular perimeter. He returned with a theory that the floor of this lake had originally been used for listening—listening to messages from the stars. Before Váli had rerouted the facility’s plumbing for his own personal bathtub, this giant dish could be angled towards any section of the sky. Enoch had been fascinated, both by the concept of communicating at such distance and by the powerful-yet-delicate machinery that would be required for such a feat.
He winced as the pain in his head flared up again. It was a sharp, driving pain that seemed to penetrate his skull just above his right eye and then lance all the way through his head. The pain had faded over the past few weeks, only surging whenever Enoch thought in numbers or patterns—something he hoped would heal in time. Apparently the loop that Váli had used to break his mind had left some shrapnel.
He felt a cool hand on his shoulder.
“Is your head bothering you again?”
It was Sera, leaning down over him with her brow furrowed in worry.
“You make a face when it bothers you—like you’re angry at something.”
Enoch smiled and reached out his hand to touch Sera’s. The two had grown closer as they had been laid up healing. The confrontation with the monster had been traumatic, and finding this odd, synthetic oasis was an unexpected reprieve. Enoch felt guilty for bringing them here, and helpless about their current situation. Once he was fully healed, they could make another attempt to strike out north . . . but how would they get past the Swampmen after another tiring journey through the desert? Even with G’Nor’s claws, it would be a short fight.
Enoch sighed and sat up, pushing his blankets aside. Mesha, who had been napping on his legs, scowled at the interruption and sauntered off towards the lake. The shadowcat had made a full recovery since the attack but seemed more jumpy. At any loud noise or unexpected movement, she would shift to a gray that made her disappear against the sand.
Enoch smiled. He was safe, they had food and water, and his friends were here. Rictus and Sera had constructed a bower just inside the entrance to the den using the same odd, silvery cloth which Váli had stretched across the towers outside. It was tissue thin, but strong and surprisingly warm once wrapped around your body. G’Nor used the nights to patrol the area, returning each morning with meat from some swamp creature which had wandered into the desert. Unremarkable fare, but sufficient for their flagging appetites.
The thought made Enoch’s stomach growl. He grinned sheepishly and got to his feet. The motion made his head ache, and he rubbed his brow gingerly. Sera handed him a bit of venison from G’Nor’s most recent hunt.
“How are your wings feeling today?” Enoch said between bites.
She shook her head and made a strained smile.
Enoch frowned, and motioned to her bandaged wings with his scrap of meat.
“You know, I’ve already set up the repair protocols with the nanites in Ric’s blood to help to realign your bones. Maybe we could try and have his LifeBeat generate some more for us. Even a few drops could help you feel less pain—”
Sera’s face went cold, and Enoch knew immediately that he had said something wrong.
“I will be fine, thank you.” She stood and brushed her hands off. “Besides, Rictus needs them all to keep him from reverting back into a monster. You said so earlier. I wouldn’t want to take that from him to cure my own monstrosity.”
She walked out of the room, ignoring Enoch’s sputters: “No, I meant we could just generate more of them . . .”
There was a chuckle from the corner.
“I know I shouldn’t expect you to be smooth with the ladies, but that was surprisingly bad, kid.”
Enoch turned to see Rictus sitting against the wall behind him, half in shadow. The sunlight streaming through the doorway revealed a tall, lean man in his mid-thirties, long cobweb hair with dark roots swept back behind narrow, muscular shoulders.
“No woman wants to know that you’ve got plans to fix her, Enoch.”
Even though Enoch knew at a microscopic level what had taken place, he was still taken back by Rictus’s new look . . . or, I suppose this is actually his old look.
He had seen Rictus bitten into pieces, chewed apart, and ground under the monster’s teeth. It was hard to believe that this vigorous, handsome man had recently been a dismembered specter.
“Stop staring at your handiwork, Enoch,” Rictus said, eyebrow raised. “I’m not going to thank you any more than I already have.”
Rictus pulled at the sleeves of his leather jacket, and a few blue lights sparkled from the folds. The lights had been dimming since he emerged from the sand.
This had been a major topic—the miracle Enoch had performed—ever since he’d regained consciousness. The worst part was that Enoch himself couldn’t fully describe what he had done; much of it had happened on instinct. As far as Rictus could gather, the etherwalker had rebooted and supercharged the LifeBeat reactor, tapping into the bioelectrical energy of the host—Rictus—as normal, but also into the monster that had ingested him as well. That was a serious power boost.
Then, Rictus surmised, Enoch had cleared out what he called “the redundant code” and “set the box to factory defaults.” But that wasn’t all—Enoch had modified Rictus’s aging nanites to shift into high gear as well, tearing down the lining of Váli’s digestive system and transplanting the regenerative cells into the specter’s body. But unlike Váli’s barely-controlled cellular growth, the nanites kept Rictus’s new cellular activity within the confines of the original blueprint contained in his dusty old DNA strands.
Enoch scratched his head, still unclear on most of it.
“I still don’t understand how you got out of its stomach, Rictus. After charging your LifeBeat, I was just hoping you’d have enough strength to survive until we found it and killed it. I didn’t think that I could—”
“Don’t know your own strength, kid?” said Rictus with a grin. “Whatever you set my blood bots to do didn’t agree with Váli’s tummy. When they revamped his stomach lining, the poor bastard’s own bile ate through his unprotected guts. By then, I was whole enough to do the rest. I tore him apart from the inside out. It was a vengeance fitting for that ancient, vile monster.
“I’m still not sure how you got his cells to shake hands with mine. That sort of cellular manipulation should be well outside of your wheelhouse . . . at least by any description that I ever heard of the jier’anden.”
Enoch leaned back, chewing thoughtfully.
“I’ve been thinking about that a lot, actually. It was all on instinct, like I said—” Here, Rictus raised his eyebrows and motioned for Enoch to go on. “But,” said Enoch, “I never felt like I could actually see or feel that part. It felt more like the nanites knew what to do with those cells, and I just had to clear away the noise in their instructions so that they could follow them. Does that make sense?”
Rictus held out his hands—long, strong, fleshy fingers.
“It does, in a way,” said the one-time specter. “It was a lovely reboot.
“The LifeBeat
was top-of-the-line hardware back then,” continued Rictus, “a learning micro factory that produced and refined iterative generations of nanites that would keep its owner alive—a customizable army that could handle aging cells, inefficient cells, cancerous cells. Even adapt to new diseases. But, like any complex machine, it can build up . . . sediment over time. Wasteful data, inefficient processes, fuzzy layers of binary gunk. I’ve been needing a good scrub for a few hundred years now.”
Rictus smiled. “I’d been debating about whether to ask you about poking your head in and clearing out the cobwebs, but was worried that your inexperience with software this complex might end up breaking the only thing keeping me alive.
“Guess all you really needed was the threat of my death to kick you into high gear.”
Enoch shook his head.
“It wasn’t that I would have been unwilling before . . .” he said. “I think that I would have been too focused on thinking my way through the problem rather than feeling it. It seems like trying to reason my way through algorithms I have never been trained in is less effective than just allowing my instincts to set things in order.
“All this talk about rebooting and setting protocols for your system is beyond me. But when I looked into your LifeBeat, I could see some messy tangles in the numbers, some loops that were wasting energy. I straightened them out and then found the emergency commands that are meant to save your life. They had been buried under a lot of muck.”
Rictus shrugged. “Emergency commands that I wasn’t even aware of. Enoch, you resurrected some wickedly complex code that tricked my nanites into thinking that Váli’s tissue was my own severed flesh. They went into full transplant mode. And then they did what good little nanites do—they reigned in the growing cells and made sure that they stayed in the right place.”
Enoch shrugged. “Whether she wants to hear it or not, I think Sera should take some of your blood—if we can get your LifeBeat to generate more nanites, that is. It wasn’t hard for me to give them the patterns that she needs . . .” And here Enoch looked up at Rictus, knowing this didn’t sound right “. . .Or that I think she needs. They’re supercharged right now, saturated with the bioelectrical energy from Váli and set into restorative mode on your tissue. You can’t spare any, but I’m sure I could figure out how to trigger your factory confab to build some more.”
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