by Sparks,Cat
Star didn’t look. She only had eyes for the looming bunker, approximately the length of two thirteen-wagon Vans laid end to end away from where they stood, with its many small entrances and what looked to be a line of guards although they weren’t yet close enough to be sure.
“Right,” said Grieve, “so what happens next?”
“This is where we say goodbye,” said Star. “You’re going to find your seaside paradise and I’m going in alone.”
“Over my dead body!” he replied. It was supposed to be funny, but he stopped smirking when he caught the look on her face.
Grieve was older than her by a couple of years, but to her he seemed so young, despite the evident years of hardship etched upon his sunburned face. Bright blue eyes she’d once found so deceitful. So untrusting.
She didn’t want to lie to him. Didn’t want to do what needed to be done.
“I’m coming with you,” he said. “Not letting you score all the treasure, claim all the credit, find all the answers—”
“No you’re not.”
“I say we stick together—we made it this far, didn’t we?”
Words she knew he regretted as soon as they’d left his lips. Their making it had come at a heavy cost. The spectre of Iago and Iolani hung heavily between them.
“We go in together,” he continued firmly. “Shut that thing down—and then we go find the inland sea. I promise to build you a hut of your own. I never said we had to share, in case that’s what you were worried about.”
“That thing cannot be shut down. It’s old and smart, probably smarter than we are.”
He shrugged. “So we kill it.”
She paused, her throat parched and constricted, wanting water but equally not wanting to waste any of it—he’d be needing every drop where he was going. “You’re not listening to me. This is goodbye, Grieve.”
She grabbed him in a clumsy hug, pulling him close and hanging on tight. He hugged her back, reflexively at first, then properly, whispering into her ear, “How could I leave you now after all we’ve been through together? Besides, we haven’t even found the gold . . .”
She disengaged, pushing him gently away. “I have to go now.”
He grabbed her by the shoulders, chilled by her grim expression. “Wait—what is it you’re not telling me?”
She lifted her waterskin over her shoulder and loped it over his.
“You don’t understand, Grieve—I have to go in alone.” She stared walking.
“Why?” he jogged until he was a few steps ahead, then swung around to face her, playing up the limp from his wounded leg, trying to make her laugh. “Come on, Star, we’re almost there. So close—all we’ve got to do is—”
“I need to enter that bunker alone. You can’t help me, Grieve. Nobody can.”
He pulled an exaggerated face. “So who died and made you the saviour of the world?”
She stopped walking. “Quarrel did. You still don’t get it, do you?” She pushed up her filthy shirtsleeve, brandished her mesh-embedded arm. “Do you know what this is, what it means?”
He stared at the shiny metal and shrugged casually. “It means I gotta keep an eye on you?” he said with one eyebrow raised.
She let the sleeve fall down, pushed past him, and kept on walking.
He continued to follow alongside. “Okay, tell me. What does it really mean?”
“It means I’m like him. It means I’m one of them.” She pointed to the mindless, digging Templars and the pitiful monstrosities labouring beside them in the sun.
“So what? Star, I don’t care about that shit anymore. I did once and I’m sorry for that. I’m an idiot from a long line of idiots. Don’t know what I was thinking before. Like maybe you were dangerous.”
“I am dangerous.”
“Sister, out here everything is trying to kill us.”
She wiped a wet patch from her cheek with the heel of her palm. “I’m a bomb, Grieve. It’s wired all the way through me. That’s what the mesh is ultimately for.”
He stopped moving. “You’re a what?”
“You heard me. I’m just like Quarrel, only Quarrel didn’t make it. We were manufactured as weapons, supposed to fight until the last. To detonate if there was no other way. The Lotus Blue cannot be shut down, but if I can get in close to its core . . .”
Grieve uttered a dismissive snort.
“Get out of here, Grieve, while you still can. Get far away, to that abandoned seaside settlement you keep telling me about. Find yourself a better life while it’s still an option.” She grabbed his arm and squeezed it tight. “Remember me.”
His face went blank. “You’re not shitting me, are you?”
She swallowed dryly. “Don’t reckon I’m much of a bomb when it comes down to it, but if I can crawl inside its brain . . .”
“But it’s gonna know you’re in there!”
“No it won’t. Not if I’m quiet and careful. Not if I’m lucky and it remains distracted by all this digging.”
He gestured to her mesh arm, exaggerating wildly. “That thing connects you to the Blue, that’s what you told me. That Lotus is one big fat brain, yeah? For sure it’s gonna know you’re coming after it!”
“No it won’t. The connection’s weak. My mesh was never fully formed.”
“You don’t know that! You don’t know what it can hear and see and feel. Reckon if those tankers can sense you, it can sense you too.”
“Maybe. But I still have to try. I’m the only chance the Sand Road’s got.”
Grieve took a deep breath. He grabbed her hand and held it between his own. “Look, I followed you on this damn crazy mission. I’m not smart but I know that sky’s not right, that something big and bad is coming down. Bigger and badder than all of us—there’s nothing folks like us can do to stop it. Nothing—not even you can make a difference. Enough of us have died already, don’t you think?”
He stepped closer, pleading. “Don’t go in there on your own. Don’t!”
“But if I don’t, everybody will die—”
“Then let’s all die together.”
She tugged her hands free and stepped away from him. “No.”
He lunged at her, and took her fiercely in his arms. Held her so tight she could barely breathe. He stunk of fear and blood and sweat. Of Broken hearts and broken dreams, tears not cried and people long forgotten.
She had never felt so close to anyone. She hugged him back, tightly, for as long as she could bear, then gently pulled away. She turned her back on him and started running.
He ran after her, shouting, “These creatures, these mecha, they can’t even see us. They don’t care whether we live or die or run, so why don’t we do that last thing, Star? Make a clean getaway and run for cover. Nobody’s ever gonna know what we did or didn’t do.”
He was shouting at her back but she wasn’t stopping now, wouldn’t look back again. The dark mass of the bunker loomed large ahead. Star made for a rectangle of solid shadow set into its wall of steel grey granite. She paused to think on how she was going to get past the row of Templar soldiers guarding the way. They were battered, she saw as she got closer: bent and broken down, barely able to do much more than form a barrier. They stank like dead animals, and looked like the slightest breath of wind would knock them down.
The vortex swirling above the bunker was picking up speed and ferocity. Heavy, untethered objects sailed past, tossed around like leaves.
Star took a deep breath and ran again, straight for the darkened entranceway, aiming for a gap between two Templars. As she got near, the entire row of them moved as one, snapping sharply to attention, not attempting to block her but saluting her as she passed, all in perfect unison.
When she reached the entranc
eway she finally turned, looking back on Grieve, expecting to find him catching her up, still insisting that they ought to make a run for it. But Grieve was not following. He hung back, hovering uncertainly beyond the line of Templars, standing as still as they were, afraid to pass, staring at her, helpless.
= Seventy-one =
There wasn’t much light, just what bled in from the entranceway behind her: little slits and a doorway half choked up with sand that she’d crawled through on her hands and knees.
Star knew which way to go: the mesh guided her. Or maybe it was the Blue inside her head showing her way, or the resonance of Quarrel—maybe even the spirit of Lucius. It didn’t matter. Her mission was all that did now.
The corridor was long and straight. At the end of it was a turn, and then another. Her mouth was dry, and the further she went, the more strangely giddy she felt.
The walls glowed with a faint sickly hue—some form of green-grey lichen was stuck to the surface. After a long walk in semi-darkness, Star entered a central space with several corridors branching out from it. She picked one at random, trying to envision the bunker’s probable layout in her head. Her thoughts were becoming more and more clouded with whisperings and echoes of a voice that was not her own. Soon it would all be over.
The next floor down was the important one, according to the voice and the sense of calm washing over her when she made a move the voice approved of.
Deeper in, the corridors became longer and widened out. Peeling paint hung down in sheets. Broken glass crunched beneath her boots.
The spaces she passed through smelled of abandonment and dust. Many had locked doors that needed to be kicked down. It wasn’t difficult; their frames and hinges had been severely weakened with age.
The carpet underfoot had rotted. Swarms of bugs and other crawling things receded like a dark tide from her footfall, scurrying away.
She came upon a stairwell, dank and uninviting, and paused to listen, but by then even the scuttling of bugs had ceased.
Star stepped carefully onto stairs strewn with the crumbling detritus of whatever this place had once been. The sound of her own breathing, the tread of her boots. More doorways, more corridors, more rooms leading in to other rooms.
Eventually, something faintly glowing lay ahead. A rectangular cage, its wire door half open. She swallowed painfully and stepped inside, then spun around to face the way she’d come, but all she could see was darkness.
The cage shuddered, emitted a hideous screech, and began to sink, slowly at first, then faster and faster. She braced herself—there was nothing to hang on to. Her stomach heaved but she kept her gorge down as rattles and reverberations shook her bones and made her wobble unsteadily.
She had not expected to be plunged so deep underground. When the cage finally stopped, she leapt free of it, fearing it might start up again with her still trapped inside, might keep going until it reached the centre of the Earth.
Her eyes struggled to adjust to the darkness, but she was starting to discern long rows of shrouded shapes when the lights suddenly came on.
Star sucked in her breath and stared. She was in an enormous cavern as vast as a desert, stretching as far and wide as she could see. A high grey ceiling was held up by thick, cylindrical columns.
The sound of her footfall echoed loudly. Too loud—the Blue would hear her coming. Those “shrouded” things were actually sleeping tankers of different shapes and forms, some with eight thick-ridged wheels, some with twelve, dulled by dust and time and disuse, yet pristine: these mechabeasts had never spent a day on open sand. Some had circular ports and hatches, sleek cabins, and suspension arms. Gun turrets and tiny dishes like the one atop the old woman’s temple. So beautiful, unsullied by the desert’s rocky encrustations clinging to their polished metal skin. She wanted to touch them but knew better. Don’t touch, keep on walking, keep on moving.
She walked for what felt like forever, her footsteps growing louder and bolder, but as she went she knew she could not be in danger of waking the Blue: it already knew she was coming, it had turned the lights on. With mesh embedded, there were no secrets she could keep from it. The cavern was too impossibly vast, there seemed no end to it, no central control, no place where her detonation would make a difference. If she blew up here, at best she might take out a handful of tankers—but why would she when they slept so peacefully, when they weren’t hurting anything or anybody?
The code Quarrel had forced upon her sat heavy in her head, weighing her down, slowing her steps. A bringer of destruction, that’s what she’d become. A harbinger of death. But she kept on walking; she owed that much to Nene, despite the secrets she had kept from Star. She owed it to the Sand Road and to herself. To Lucius and the ones who’d lost their lives. To Quarrel, despite what he had done to her.
And what of Grieve? There would not be time enough for him to get away. He would never make it to his seaside paradise. He was every bit as dead as she was.
Each step she took made her feel smaller and smaller, insignificant, helpless. Useless. Somewhere in this incredible place lay the heart-and-mind of the Lotus Blue. But every inch of the cavern looked the same. Glancing back over her shoulder, she could no longer see the rectangular cage that had delivered her. There was nothing to see but shrouded tankers and open space, grey columns, grey cement, grey dust.
Any minute she expected to encounter a Templar soldier, one or many, pristine; all shiny-bright and healthy, waiting to greet her, fight her off or lead the way.
The last thing she ever expected to see was Nene. A small cry escaped her lips at the sight of her: Nene, her sister, but not the way she’d left her. Much younger, somewhere near Star’s own age, sixteen or seventeen. She was somehow standing under an open sky—which was impossible in itself, of course. A mirage. An incredulous vision being projected deep underground. Behind Nene, smoke now plumed from giant fissures in the ground. A sea of strange things jutted from the sand. A habitat: giant eggs of sand-speckled ivory plastic.
Something terrible had happened. Eggs were damaged, cracked and broken. Mounds of bodies were suddenly heaped one atop the other around the eggs. People who had appeared out of nowhere were pulling the bodies out of the cracked plastic shells, feet first, dragging them like salvage, the broken shells disintegrating before her eyes.
The Blue, of course. It had to be the Blue.
“Get out of my head,” said Star to the creature that had found a way to nestle itself inside her thoughts. To pinch and tweak, manipulate and drive her crazy. Make her see impossible things. Too late for that, she was far long gone, watching a vivid mirage play out in front of her. Watching Nene with a child clutched in her arms, ten years old, dripping wet with slime and ichor, and beside her, a man who resembled a younger Benhadeer shouting, covered in blood.
Not real. It could not be real, not any of it. Star rubbed her eyes and shook her head, kept on walking right through the thick of it, through smoke that was not really there, through cracked eggs that evaporated as she passed, the pile of bodies dissolving into a scattering of colours. Blue light mimicked the wide blue sky; now it was all around her, thick and viscous like algae-laden water. She tried to push on through, but it had become so hard to move her arms and legs, such a dragging weight. With the greatest effort she spun around but it was too late. It was all a trick. Star was trapped in a pillar of raw blue light. She could not move. There was nowhere for her to go.
= Seventy-two =
The row of frozen Templars was a fearsome sight to behold. The grizzly creatures had moved once to salute Star as she ran towards the bunker, but not since. Some bore intimidating grey ordnance slung across their broad torsos, others looked as though they were accustomed to killing with their bare hands.
Grieve had stood and watched as she went inside, too shit scared to follow. And now he was too scared to move. If those
Templars moved once, they could move again and if they noticed him, they would not likely salute.
Grieve stayed very still until he could stand it no more—for an hour, maybe more. It was hard to check the passage of time in a place as strange as this one. His injured leg was stiff and sore. Eventually he pivoted, turning slowly, gently, trying to make as little sound as possible—and no quick movement. But he yelped and almost leapt out of his skin when he found himself face-to-face with the old lady from the Temple, a battered leather satchel slung across her shoulder. Beside her stood the Templar from the aircraft boneyard, the one who’d been willing to leave him chained to a row of dead and dying mutineers. The one who’d forced Star to carry such a deadly burden.
But before he could say anything, the old lady spoke.
“Boy, I’ve seen your face before. You broke into my Sanctum.”
Grieve’s gut reaction was to deny everything and inch back out of striking range. The woman was ancient but sometimes the old ones could surprise you, and lash out with astonishing dexterity and force. Some of those old ones were trained up good, but in that moment, the lies and excuses that had trickled off his tongue like honey for years completely deserted him.
“Yes ma’am,” was the best he could manage. His gaze shifted uneasily back to her companion. The Templar stared off into the distance, his face blank of expression. Something had changed since Grieve had last seen him. Something had gutted this one, quelled its fire and churned its brains to mince.
“That young girl you were with—is she in there?” The old woman pointed with her chin beyond the row of frozen Templar guards, to the dark rectangle leading inside the bunker.
Once again, the lies that had come to Grieve as easily as breathing his whole life let him down, abandoned him on the spot to face the truth.
“Yep. I . . . I . . .”
What was he prepared to admit in front of this ancient creature—that he was a coward on top of everything else? That Star was on a suicide mission, that she’d gone inside alone to blow herself to pieces? Alone, because he’d been too scared to follow?