Marmeg groaned and hit the ground with a fist. The faces of her brothers stared at her from the cuff.
“What should I do, Jeffy?”
The image was still, silent, accusatory.
You started this, it seemed to say. Finish it! Don’t be a whiny little girl. You’ve already done enough to be disqualified. You might as well go for the kill.
Marmeg shuddered with cold. Too much time sitting still. Her calves stung at the incisions. She could feel warm blood as it seeped through the bandages and froze against the frigid air. Would bloody ice crystals look like rubies?
Red gems dripped from her legs and fell to the ground, forming a carpet around her. The crystals caught the starlight, sparked with their own internal fire. A thousand tiny flames surrounded Marmeg with their warmth.
She woke with a start. The forest was black. Nothing but chilled dirt and melting snow lay beneath her.
“Wake up,” she told herself, slapping her cheeks.
Her cuff said she’d been asleep for twenty minutes, and her body felt heavy from the weight of it. The stim pills had begun their work, though. With a soft groan, Marmeg stood and forced herself to walk, step by slow, dull step.
A quick check showed the leg exos and one remaining sleeve functioning correctly. The heating elements on the torso shell remained broken—no surprise—but the heart and lung monitors read correctly, and the abdominal boosters were doing their job. So, why couldn’t she move faster?
You’re tired.
She put one foot in front of the next, following the path set out for her. What else could she do? Around one o’clock, the moon rose above the eastern peaks. Its light showed breaks in the cloud cover. Marmeg couldn’t see the stars she’d hoped for, but the moonbeams made for better company than the storm-clouded blackness. The snow had stopped falling. The ground crunched under her steps and glimmered from the faint light.
The pain pills started kicking in, and Marmeg picked up her pace. No matter what prize money she won, she wouldn’t be out for another solitary moonlit hike any time soon. She’d caught a snowflake on her tongue. She’d heard ice crackle under her boots, mimicking the sound of broken glass that had been stepped on too many times. Or the sound facial bones made when your mom’s boyfriend didn’t much like your mom’s kid.
She wished she could have a do-over, a second chance to prove that she was as good as the legit embeds and moots; that she could beat them at their own game; that she deserved to be at a university with people who were born licensed, who never had to worry about food or medicine or shots. But that kind of thinking trapped her in the dark corners of her mind, where bad ideas looped infinitely.
Maybe Mountain Mike was right. Life was never fair. Winning by cheating was okay if you used the money for the right reasons. In her case, she wanted to buy little Felix’s license so he could get his shots and go to school. She wanted a full degree, which ultimately meant a better life for her and her family. Those goals were noble enough to let the ends justify the means, weren’t they?
A figure loomed up out of the darkness. Marmeg gasped and nearly lost her footing. She stumbled to a halt a few feet away, breathing hard. When she looked at the person, she saw a face hidden under bushy hair that glinted in the moonlight.
“The hell?” Marmeg demanded, heart hammering. “No tunnels for miles yet!”
“You’re this girl? The one with the leg cuts and all?” The muffled voice was high-pitched.
Marmeg peered at the Mountain Mike. “You a lady?”
The bundle of hair nodded. “We wear beards to fool the cameras. As long as we don’t come too far into the open, they can’t tell us apart. Follow me.”
“But—”
“Come on!”
Marmeg bit back an irritated reply. This Mike plowed straight through the underbrush. Marmeg followed, small branches smacking into the backs of her calves and making the incisions sting. Her cuff said she’d been on the correct path to the next tunnel. Now they headed toward an overland route that she’d considered before the race. It was direct, but it required rock climbing skills and equipment that she didn’t have.
They arrived at a tumble of boulders. Mountain Mike scrambled up on her hands and knees. Marmeg decided that she might as well take it easy and use all four limbs too. There wasn’t much point in jumping like a goat when she had no idea where to go. What would they put her through next?
A light breeze blew over them and grew stronger as they climbed higher. Broken clouds outlined by ghostly white moonlight hung behind the ridge’s saw-toothed silhouette. As she and Mike neared the top, the wind blew so hard that they were forced to lean into it. The bare rock was mostly free of snow and ice, though a few wind-sheltered pockets glittered like treasure. She scooped a handful into her mouth. Only a few drops of cold liquid, but the relief to her throat was immeasurable.
Mountain Mike tapped her on the shoulder and then pointed down—into the wind and a steep, rocky slope. She put her bristly face next to Marmeg’s ear, and Marmeg fought the urge to pull away.
“There’s someone down there who’s hurt. Another contestant. I think you might be able to help me with him. Follow me very carefully. He went down this scree and got trapped under a rockfall. I don’t want the same thing to happen to us.”
Marmeg peered down, trying to see the other person. The nearer rocks reflected the moon’s glow, but nothing else was visible. Her attention locked onto her footing once they transitioned to the down slope. Stones littered the ground, ranging in size from pebbles to boulders wider than her arm span. Each step sent a few of them skittering away. The rattle reminded her of gunfire, a sound that accompanied many nights at home.
Mountain Mike was doing a respectable job of the climb, though she ended up on her ass after half of her steps. Marmeg managed to keep her balance. The lack of full leg exos made the job more difficult than it should have been. She wondered how another race contestant had screwed this up.
Then she saw the massive vertical scar of pale gray against darker rock. At its base lay a jumble of boulders, and under that, the lower half of a body. She winced and turned away for a second, imagining what it must feel like to be crushed beneath that kind of weight. Her legs would be pulp.
Marmeg and Mike inched sideways, perpendicular to the slope, until they stood near the injured contestant. One look at the pale, unconscious face and Marmeg identified zir as Ardha. You got what you deserved, said the vengeful part of Marmeg’s mind. Shut up. Nobody deserves this, said another.
Marmeg bent to lift a rock from Ardha’s body.
“No!” Mike said. “Don’t touch those rocks! I don’t know how stable they are, and they’re saving his life right now by keeping him from bleeding out.”
“What you want from me, then?”
“I want you to enable his grid access. That way the race organizers or his support team will know he’s in trouble. They’ll come get his body, and you can keep going.”
Marmeg shook her head. “Can’t do.”
“Why not? We’ll make sure you still place. Don’t worry about that.”
“Can’t. Not won’t. Can’t access zir cuff.”
“But you’re a hacker.” Mountain Mike sounded confused.
“Not so easy. Could hack it, yeah, but takes time. Like hours time, not minutes time.”
Mike blew out a frustrated breath and carefully sat down next to Ardha’s body. She held a hand on zir wrist, checking zir pulse, Marmeg guessed. Then Mike felt Ardha’s forehead and cheeks. She reached into a pocket, pulled out an old phone, and held it up to her head.
“His pulse is weak, and he’s clammy,” she said, speaking into the handset.
Marmeg could barely hear the words over the wind.
“Maybe another hour or so to live, best guess. Not long enough for her to run to the finish line and inform them.” A pause. “No, that won’t work. What story could she give them?” A longer pause, then louder: “Are you kidding? Just leave him here?”
>
Mike snapped the phone closed in anger and stood. “If you idiots didn’t think you were invincible, you wouldn’t get us into situations like this. Let’s go!”
“What about zir?”
“We have to leave him. You need to win this race more than we need to help him. So says our leadership. He lives or dies on his support team. That’s a risk all of you take, right? You sign the damn waivers when you enter.”
“Nobody’s ever died.”
“Then he won’t either. Now, come on!”
“No.”
“What do you mean?”
“Not leaving zir. Not like this.”
Mike flapped her arms like she was trying to fly off the mountain. “I thought you said you couldn’t do anything?”
“Got my own grid access.”
“You can’t use that. Then we all lose. We’ll get nothing for helping you, and once they realize you’ve been working with us, they’ll ban you from races forever. Is that what you want?”
Marmeg was certainly happy to see Ardha lose the race after what zie had done to her. But to potentially let a person die over money? She would despise herself for it.
She’d pulled herself from the precipice of self-hatred once before, when the glow of being a prodigy had worn off. Marmeg had lived the high school party circuit for a year. Jeffy left for the service, and she had no one to remind her of her worth. Contest money that Amihan didn’t take was burned on pills. Spare time—and she had plenty of that—was lost in the haze of self-loathing.
If she hadn’t met T’shawn, if he hadn’t remembered Marmeg from the old days, she might never have crawled out of her head hole and back into life. This race, the prize money, her dream future: none of these was worth the risk of returning to that ugly corner of her mind.
“Race not the be-all. Zie might die.”
“I know. That’s why I brought you here. Look, this situation is crap, but we have to put the greater good first. If you won’t change your mind . . . well, I can’t blame you, but I can’t help you, either.”
She turned and started walking up the scree.
“That’s it?” Marmeg called after her. “Buncha nats think you’re the stuff! Let a kid die on money? Some things not worth being.”
Marmeg took out her screen, enabled her grid access, and sent a message to the race organizers. She took some photos of Ardha’s situation, too—so they’d know what to bring—and sent a capture of her map with the GPS coordinates displayed. She made sure to disable her grid access again after seeing the send confirmation.
Minerva Corporation did good work. Maybe they’d be decent and not disqualify her for trying to save another contestant’s life. They could check her system log for proof—she accessed the grid only to help Ardha.
“Better live, asshole,” Marmeg whispered to the unmoving body. Ardha’s face was beautiful in spite of its half-bloodied, pale state.
She stood, flexed her calves, and ran up the rocky slope. Pebbles flew behind her, drawn by gravity to whatever waited at the bottom. The Mike’s figure was a shadow crawling along the scree and struggling for purchase. Marmeg continued her swift ascent without giving it a second look.
• • • •
Marmeg got enough of a lead on Mountain Mike that she was well out of sight before taking her bearings. Once she had her location, she pulled up her original route. It was only two miles away, which wasn’t bad considering how completely she had put herself in the hands of the Mikes.
The moon shone overhead. The clouds had fractured into patches of fluffy gray across the sky. Stars twinkled in the gaps, crystal clear even with the lunar glare for competition. Hundreds of diamond pinpoints—more than Marmeg had ever seen. Cold settled into her, a now-familiar friend, and her spirits lightened.
Win or lose, she’d made the only right decision. Losing wouldn’t be so bad. Then she wouldn’t have to share the contest money with people who valued an agenda over a human being. Or maybe they were only indifferent when an embed’s life was at risk. What would they have said if it had been a Mike under the crush of rock? How many Mikes died out there with no one the wiser?
The land felt emptier with that last thought. Running into Ardha the first time had been a coincidence. If the Mountain Mikes hadn’t sought her out, she might have finished the race without seeing anyone else. The lack of humanity was strange, like an empty street with no cop cars to explain it—wrong but not frightening.
Marmeg’s cuff alerted her to the upcoming pass. This one would take her to the finish line. She found the trail marked by cairns and followed it up an uneven set of steps carved out of the granite mountainside. The footing wasn’t difficult, but she chafed at having to climb the steps rather than simply leaping up them. That would have required functional thigh-control chips.
She walked between looming masses of rock. The faintest trace of purplish blue colored the eastern sky. She checked her cuff: three thirty in the morning. The sun would rise in two hours, but she would reach the finish line long before then.
The rushing noise of Rainbow Falls told her she was close. Next came fences made of rough wood to guide people and keep them on the trail, away from the cliff. And then, at last, the striated columns of Devils Postpile rose into the sky. Artificial lights illuminated the natural formation, a beacon to the contestants: the end of the race.
The thrum of an electric generator greeted Marmeg as she loped into the staging area. She squinted against the flood of light triggered by her motion. Drone-cams perched on tree branches. The nearest ones launched and pointed their lenses at her. Zippered tents littered the area. Silhouettes stirred inside some of them, probably alerted by their drones.
Marmeg flicked on her cuff and saw that it was three minutes past four o’clock. She hadn’t beaten the record. Apparently, no one else had either, given the lack of a welcoming committee. A shadowy figure emerged from the trees on the far side of the camp and walked toward her. Zie came into the lit area, and Marmeg recognized the blond moot from the registration booth.
“I’m so sorry,” zie said. “I had to, you know, answer the call of nature. So, you’re the first! Congratulations on winning this year’s race!”
The drone-cams buzzed closer, recording and transmitting the conversation. Marmeg attempted a smile as they walked to a nondescript brown tent.
Zie unzipped the opening and called into it, “Jer, wake up! We have a winner.”
Within minutes, all the tents had opened. People and drones spilled out into the darkness. Groggy journos snapped pictures of Marmeg. She waved away their questions while she ate an energy bar and huddled in a scratchy blanket someone handed her.
Meanwhile, the blond—whose name turned out to be Larlou—and Jer were rapidly setting up the official Minerva booth. Ten minutes after Marmeg’s arrival, the second race contestant ran in. Keni Matsuki, last year’s third-place winner, held an arm swathed in bloody smartsuit fabric. The medical team immediately looked to zir injury.
Marmeg’s tired mind snapped to attention at the sight of blood.
“Hey, Larlou,” she said. “Ardha—zie okay?”
Larlou looked up from the equipment rack.
“Who? What are you talking about?”
“Ardha! Sent you a message. Zie was hurt bad.”
Larlou looked at Jer in bewilderment. “Did you hear about this from any of the support teams?”
“No,” Jer said. He frowned and turned to Marmeg. “You said you pinged them?”
“Not them. You. Message to race org.”
“Well, shit, kid, why didn’t you inform zir support team?”
“Didn’t know their address. Why didn’t you get my message?”
“I see it now,” Larlou said. “Zie looks bad. We weren’t expecting anything urgent, so we weren’t looking at messages. I’ll go find zir team’s tent.”
“Zie doesn’t make it, it’s on you.”
She closed her eyes against a surge of frustration and fear. So much time
had elapsed. What if they were too late? She had assumed that Ardha would be taken care of and gone by the time she arrived. Stupid and selfish not to ask about zir condition sooner.
“Wait a minute,” Jer said.
Marmeg opened her heavy eyelids.
“You sent us a message. That means you accessed grid data.”
She nodded. “Had to. Zie was unconscious. Couldn’t access through zir cuff. Turned mine off after sending.”
Jer’s pale lips pressed into a thin line.
Marmeg’s blood surged in anger. “What? Was I wrong? Leave zir to die out there?”
Her stomach sank at Jer’s expression. They’d declared her the winner. Would they take it back? Could they? Most of her wanted nothing more than a hot shower and a soft bed, but her sense of justice couldn’t rest. Minerva had to do the right thing, make the compassionate call. Didn’t they?
Jer walked away, murmuring into his cuff. Dawn had arrived in full effect. Marmeg could see his lips move, but she couldn’t read the words. Adrenaline, pills, pain-induced endorphins: all of them crashed with the break of day. The energy to worry or rage evaporated. She collapsed into the blanket on the ground and fell asleep.
When she woke, rays of sunlight shone through the tree branches at a steep angle. Dust motes danced in the beams, and the aroma of frying eggs, bacon, and pancakes filled the air. She breathed in deeply and stretched. The cuts in her calves tugged uncomfortably, reminding Marmeg that she needed to see the medics.
The site swarmed with people. Contestants, supporters, and journos stood everywhere, eating and talking. Drone cameras buzzed in any available air space. Someone must have noticed that Marmeg was awake, because several cams moved to circle above her, swooping down to near face level and being annoying. Worse, three actual people surrounded her.
“How does it feel?” one of them asked.
“Congratulations! And condolences,” said another. “For what it’s worth, plenty of people on the grid think you did the right thing.”
The Long List Anthology Volume 3 Page 57