by Jeff Somers
“This doesn’t fucking matter,” I hissed, unable to stop myself from vocalizing. “Unless you think I’m going to stand up and shout fucking hex code at him while he shoots me to death.”
For two seconds, there was blessed silence in my head. Then, Marin was back.
Dolores, your people designed these augments poor Avery’s got rotting in his head. They transmit, yes?
For a second I thought Salgado wasn’t going to answer. I’d never had all three acknowledging each other before—never had them having a three-way conversation without me. Having them all talking to each other was maddening, like tiny people living in my head, eating my brain one tiny bite at a time, tunneling.
Yes. Short range, but they had to ping back to their CO’s implant.
Any way we can use Avery’s augments to transmit Dennis’s shutdown codes?
I went still. Years. I’d had these assholes in my head for years, and the thought that they might actually be m>Aul was fucking astonishing. It made me think, for a moment, that the cosmos did have a fucking plan for me after all.
Ye-es, Dolores whispered, sounding hesitant. I doubt Avery received the level of training required to customize his beacon. There was silence. Avery… perhaps I could take direct control over your augment interface in order to accomplish this.
I opened my eyes. I could still hear Orel muttering; only a few seconds had passed. “You can do that?” I hadn’t meant to speak out loud, and froze up instantly, horrified.
We’re you, Avery, she responded. Immediately, my HUD began flickering and a stream of text prompts began scrolling by in a tiny corner of my vision, too fast for me to pay attention to.
I chose to ignore “we’re you.” If I started thinking about things like that, my list of people I needed revenge against would get so fucking long I’d have to Monk-up myself to get to them all, end of the fucking world or not.
You’ll need to buy us some time, Marin added.
“I’ve bought you all years, dammit,” I hissed before I could catch myself. “You’re all dead.” In the silence that answered me, I realized Orel had stopped his crazy whispering to himself.
I launched myself to my left a second before the heavy Monk body landed right where I’d been huddled. I threw myself down and rolled, letting gravity pull me down toward the dark pit of the collapsed basement and the elevator shaft, hoping it took me out of view fast enough to prevent Mickey from snatching me up in his little invisible hands; when I was in shadow again I scissored my legs manically and turned myself around without rising up, putting the Roon on the upward slope I’d just traversed.
A second later, Orel landed almost perfectly between where I’d been and where I was and paused for an angelic moment, looking for me, and I could pick my shot. You could penetrate the armoring around a Monk’s abdomen but it wasn’t easy, and anything but a head shot was usually just an inconvenience for them. I’d had plenty of experience gunning with Monks, and I was aiming to slow the motherfucker down, make him less mobile. If I could stop him from leaping and running, it was a start.
I aimed for his feet, filled with delicate hydraulics and servos, tiny parts giving him balance and speed. Trying to stop my hands from shaking, I squeezed off four rapid shots, kicking up dust around him and then finally, in one perfect moment, shattering the hard outer casing of his right ankle. He made a strangely subdued, almost calm noise as he lost balance and fell over.
I struggled up, trying to race. When I finally got my legs under me and looked up, the bastard was gone again. I stood for just a second, looking around, and found him again by the easiest method possible: He landed on me, cackling, the Monk’s fake voice box struggling hard to approximate the braying laughter of Canny Orel. The impact pushed me down a few inches into the ground, suffocating me, but before I could ponder where I’d place “strangling on sand at Chengara while Canny Orel stood on your back” on my list of worst ways to die his cold, dead hands took hold of my arms, bending them back behine and lifting me easily out of the shallow trench we’d created. Blood, warm and gritty, ran down my chin, and I poked my tongue through the new gap in my mouth where my front teeth had once been.
Handsome as ever, Avery, Dolores whispered. We’re almost there.
Orel lifted me up, holding me in front of him like I weighed nothing. His bright white face was cocked in a blank, soulless smile, his eyes just pools of shadow. Monks in the moonlight were fucking terrifying—they glowed.
“This was too fucking easy,” he said, making it sound like aisy and cocking his head the other way and smoothly putting his auto against my temple. “Avery, I had higher hopes for ya. Maybe Wallace was right about you.”
I managed to jam the Roon into his belly, but his gun flashed down instantly, knocking it away as I fired, the shot going wild, my hand going numb as the gun fell away. Just as quickly, his gun was back against my head.
“G’bye, Avery.”
I shut my eyes, my mind racing, and suddenly my HUD filled with angry red text, scrolling along so fast it was a blur, and Dennis Squalor, long dead but still a tiny god in his own way, spoke silently inside me.
You are cast out.
Still grinning, Orel went still, and then collapsed, dragging me down with him.
XXXXIX
HAD MET ME BEFORE AND HAD A GRUDGE
I pushed myself up and stared down at Orel. His face was still frozen in a grin, the gun was still clutched in his hand. But he was absolutely still.
Looks like you’re a genius, Dennis, Marin whispered cheerfully.
I am implacable and absolute. I am the guardian of that which I have created.
“You are boring as fucking hell,” I said hoarsely, my throat filled with sand. I broke into shuddering coughs and dragged myself over to Orel. Numbness had spread up my arm and I dragged it behind me, useless. I tried to breathe deeply, but my chest kept clenching up and twisting me into fits of dry, joyless coughing, my HUD—back to normal now—flickering with each blast.
I pulled myself up onto the Monk chassis and straddled it, staring down at its head. Still glowing, still smiling. I had a sudden moment of panic, certain that Orel was playing with me, that this was yet another extended joke—I half expected Belling, not really dead, not really maimed, maybe younger and even more improved than ever to step out from behind a rock, or rise up out of the elevator shaft just a few feet away from us.
Nothing happened.
Awkwardly, I reached across myself and pulled my second gun with my left hand. It felt strange and heavthere as I slipped off the safety.
Nothing happened.
Dreamily, my own breathing loud and harsh in my ears, I pushed the auto down at Orel’s face, pushing the barrel into one of its eye sockets, pushing and pushing until I was leaning on it, supporting myself on the gun. Still, nothing happened. The wind scattered sand around us. I wondered if I was the last of us left alive. I stared down at my hand, the gun, Orel’s inert face, feeling empty.
“If you can hear me, Mickey,” I whispered hoarsely, feeling like I’d never catch my breath again, “and I fucking hope you can, I hope, for the first time in forever, you’re fucking terrified.”
I spent a second or so trying to jam the gun’s barrel even farther into the socket, concentrating too hard, forgetting my own basic rules of survival. I heard the steps a second before I got hit, and then I was on my ass and Grisha was on top of me, pinning my arms with his.
“No!” he hissed, his rasp echoed in my earbud. “It is too dangerous. We need him alive.”
I opened my mouth to shout at him, but as I did so he was torn from me and sailed up and over the old dorm wall, completely silent, his face just a pale expression of shock. Then he was gone, like he’d never been there.
Orel was moving.
I take it back, Marin hissed. You’re a hack and a fruitcake, Dennis.
The unit remains off-line, Squalor whispered back serenely. He is manipulating himself using his ersatz mental abilities.
> The monk jerked, first this way, then that, twitching itself into an upright position. I watched, mesmerized, as he puppeted himself erect, swaying and jerking, overbalancing and then overcorrecting. When he suddenly steadied and raised one arm in a familiar, in-control gesture, I decided I’d seen enough of the magic act. I put the gun on him, couldn’t think of anything clever to say, and squeezed the trigger. And got a dry click as my reward.
He turned his head and looked at me. After a second, the smile on his face broadened by thick degrees, and I tried to imagine the level of telekinetic control required to tug every tiny fake tendon, every microscopic bit of that face into the exact expression he wanted. I wondered if he was running the whole unit, pumping the coolant and greasing the gears. I wondered how long his brain would survive in there with the juice cut off.
Too long, I figured, was just about my luck.
I started backing away as I dropped the spent clip and tucked the gun under my armpit, my right hand still hanging limp at my side. It was prickling with pins and needles, pain bleeding back into it, and I could move the fingers a little—coming back to unfortunate life bit by bit. Reaching back across myself, I felt in my coat pocket for a fresh clip just as Orel leaped toward me in a sudden, viciously fast move—landing a foot short and falling over onto his side. He didn’t say anything, or grunt, or make any noise at all, and was back up on his knees immediately, and then back on his feet, wobbling a littled toathered himself for another spring. He was off kilter and rough, though, and I timed him pretty easily—he was so fucking fast he almost clipped me anyway, but I managed to duck down and roll under him as he sailed through the air. I rolled to a crouching position and slapped the clip home. Orel popped up just in front of the elevator shaft and I realized I’d put him between me and my final retreat. Before I could do more than blink at this dumbly, the invisible fist I was so fond of mushroomed out of thin air and slammed into me, knocking me back on my ass.
I forced myself to sit up, gun ready, but Orel was sprawled on the ground again. As I watched, he jerked upright, startling me, and I wasted two shots that came nowhere near him.
“What’s the matter, Canny,” I muttered to myself. The silence was creeping me out—he wasn’t giving me the needle like Mickey always did, and he wasn’t making any noise at all. “Can’t puppet yourself and smack me around at the same time?”
I steadied myself and took careful aim at his head. He shot toward me, crashing into me like a cannonball—the motherfucker had thrown himself at me. For a second he was on me, pushing me back down into the sand, and then he rocketed away before I could pull out the gun on him again. I’d managed to push myself halfway up onto my elbows when he smacked into me again, just hurling himself like a fucking boulder, taking me square in the chest and knocking the breath out of me, then zooming off. I stared up at the dark sky above, thinking that this was never how I thought I’d go, pummeled to death by Canny Orel using himself as a battering ram.
Every nerve screaming, my heart pounding as I thought about him being out there somewhere, silent and floating, driven by the power of his mind, I forced myself to stay down, listening. My HUD, still bright and clear, dialed up my hearing suddenly, a minor blessing as my old rotting augments suddenly worked as intended for a change. Above the hiss and spit of ambient nothing, I heard him—a quick scrape, the fluttering noise of something moving through the air. My hand was tight and white on the butt of my gun. I counted in my head, using instinct to time him—and sat up suddenly, back complaining, raising the gun, as he was still ten feet away, and firing twice.
In midair, Orel veered and spun awkwardly, lost balance, and tumbled backward, skidding into the loose ground like an undetonated shell. He bounced once, twice, and then sailed over the slight lip and into the elevator shaft like something had yanked at it from below.
I sat there, gasping, the cold air burning my throat as it went down. I closed my eyes and dropped the clip, fumbling with a shaking hand for a fresh one and slamming it into place. As I pulled the slide, I felt a hint of an invisible touch, and then a giant iron fist made of nothing at all grabbed me and yanked, and the elevator shaft came at me like it had met me before and had a grudge.
XL
SIT ON THIS ROCK FOREVER NOW PLAYING WITH OUR BONES
I banged up against the side of the shaft and pinged off it, slamming into the other side and repeating the process twice more, my teeth jumping in my head each time,my HUD dimming and brightening up like a loose wire was being knocked back into place. The air rushed by me with a sizzling noise, like hungry static eating me alive.
I shut my eyes and stretched out my arms, letting my gun drop away. The ladder rungs slapped into my left hand, and I flexed it, my fingers slipping through three, ten, fifteen rungs before I got some purchase. I clamped my hand as hard as I could, and with a searing, tearing pain my arm was dislocated and I slammed into the wall like I’d been fired from a cannon at short distance, smashing my nose on the ladder as an extra kiss from the cosmos. My HUD flickered and was gone again, giving me a split-second of red across the board before fading away completely.
As fresh sweat popped up all over me, I thought, Well, shit, this feels like just about the right level of fucking nightmare for my jobs. If Remy were alive—or Glee—I could have told them that nothing ever went as planned, and you had better expect to be hanging from an access ladder at least once.
Thinking of Remy and Gleason, I gritted my remaining aching teeth and sucked in the dank, black air. My face was hot and swollen, slick with blood and sweat. Anger bloomed in the pit of my stomach, a sour infection—everything had been swept into the past and there was not a fucking thing I could do to change any of it, and I wanted to just tear down the whole fucking shaft, pull it down with me and bury me and Orel forever. With effort, I moved my right arm, still feeling weak and numb. Gritting my teeth against the strange, numb pain—like pain from my future, reverberating backward along time—that spiked down from my shoulder and into the rest of my body, I swallowed blood and felt around my pocket until I found the thin little grenades Grisha had provided us. I pulled two free and toggled them active awkwardly, my fingers feeling thick and stiff. I counted to three in my head and let them drop, grabbing onto the ladder with both arms and hooking one elbow into the rungs.
I counted to three again in weird, cold silence, just my own wet, ragged breathing and the creak of the rusty ladder for company.
There was a silent, bright flash below me, the whole bottom of the shaft lit up and outlined perfectly, kind of pretty. The ladder began trembling and I swung gently from side to side, sweating and breathing hard, concentrating on keeping my grip. When the blast of hot air smacked into me, it felt kind of good for a split-second and then turned into a searing agony, hotter and hotter as air rushed past me. I shut my eyes and clamped my mouth shut, unable to breathe through my nose as heat and air roared past me, pushing at me, making me regret just about every decision I’d ever made in my entire fucking life, each one wrapped up in the complex tapestry that had brought me to this fucking spot in the time-space continuum. I hated my past selves intensely as I felt my skin blistering, melting, and running off my face like wax.
With a faint, sudden popping noise, it was over and the air felt ice-cold again, just like that. My HUD came on bright as day as my vision began to dim and—
I was still falling, so I knew I’d been unconscious for only a split second. Then the floor came up to say hello; I ducked my head under my functioning arm at the last second and tried to twist myself around. I landed on my side and my teeth jumped in my mouth again, my gun biting into my side and leaving, from what I could tell, a permanent impression of an automatic in my skin. Scissoring my legs, I pushed myself up into a sitting position and slid my hand into my pocket, seeking a gun, my eyes everywhere, blind in the gloom. My augments, it appeared, had finally shit the bed for good.
I could see Orel pretty easily, though. He was on fire.
His
clothes had burned away, leaving just the sickly white skin of your standard Monk chassis. It burned with a blue-orange flame that licked and caressed him, his whole body and his face—eyes, nose, mouth—outlined in flames, everything else perfect shadows. I stared for a second. I remembered I’d dropped my gun on the way down, and I thrashed around the scorched, debris-littered floor feverishly trying to locate it, until I realized I was on fire too—at least my coat was. The yellowish flames licked at me lazily, like they had nothing better to do, jumping and creeping along the synthetic fibers.
The hallway was charred and filled with thick, black smoke. Patches of fire clung to the walls, everything burned down to the clean metal. I looked at Orel’s fiery outline as I backed away on my ass, sweeping my hands around me as my legs pushed me along. My hand miraculously found the butt of my gun, and I grasped it weakly, unable to close my fist very well or very firmly. I wondered if my hair was on fire, and I decided I didn’t need to check. I’d know soon enough.
Orel stood with his hands in front of him curled into fists, his elbows bent. The Psionic fist slammed into me without warning and knocked me backward, my finger spasming and sending a bullet into the air as I traveled. I hit the wall of the elevator shaft and was pinned there as if someone was holding a thick log against my chest—my arms and legs dangled free.
I stared at Orel’s silent, burning outline. My hand tightened as best it could on the butt of my gun; my other arm dangled numb and useless at my side, the arm slightly longer than it should be as it hung free from the socket. Anger filled me up and spilled over into my blood, my heart pounding its crazy, off-beat rhythm in my chest, all the pain suddenly burned away. Orel had fucked me a million times over, pushing me around like a piece on a board—I’d thought I was on the cosmos’s Rail all these years, trapped on a path, but it had been Orel’s rail. Remy’s death was on Orel’s hands. Glee’s death. Kev Gatz, Rose Harper, Krajian, millions of fucking people in the Plague—all because Orel had pushed me onto the board, pointed my toes in a direction, and then awaited results.