by Jay Allan
Tanner frowned. "If you say so."
"You're a pessimist, that's what you are."
Tanner shrugged. Inside that suit it looked more like he bobbed up on his toes. "I'm a realist."
"There's always a way. Always. Hoodwink put his trust in you." Ari bit her lip. The pain distracted her from the sorrow. "Said you knew what to do. Guess he was wrong."
She untied herself from the rack, and approached the shattered window, intending to go out there on her own. Even with the leg clamps aiding her, that bulky suit made it seem like she waded through deep snow.
Most of the desks had been sucked outside, and a couple of them lay smashed beneath the window. She avoided the thick cords that protruded from the floor where the desks had been. The cord ends were severed, and some sparked visibly. Interesting. Did that mean vitra flowed through the lifeless veins of this place?
When she neared the windowsill, she climbed the debris, and just stared out across the landscape. It looked as barren and lifeless as she felt inside. Going out there didn't seem like such a good idea just then.
Tanner's voice spoke in her ear. "When Hoodwink said I knew what to do, he meant the mission Inside. Not this." Tanner was on the other side of the room, still at the cabinet. "And I haven't given up, you know. There's a chance Stanson and the others will find a way to reach us."
"Relying on others is a bad business," Ari said. "Especially when your life is in their hands. They probably think we're dead already." She was becoming hopeless now, too. The sorrow was spreading inside her like a poison, and it threatened to overwhelm her.
"Maybe I can send the children a message from one of the terminals." Tanner waded across the room, toward one of the few surviving desks. The legs of the desk had shifted so that the black cord anchoring it to the floor was visible.
Ari gazed out across the moonscape one last time. Hoodwink was out there, somewhere. I'll find you again, dad. I promise.
Ari hopped down the debris pile. It was slow-going in that suit. When she reached him, Tanner was already swiping his fingers across the desk pad, causing words and images to come and go in rapid succession.
"Mm," he said. "No answer. I guess they haven't reached Beta Station yet. I'll set it on ping, and they'll get the message when they arrive." He pressed more buttons below the pad. "Don't worry. They'll save us."
"Assuming the iron golems don't reach us first."
"Who's the pessimist now?" Tanner said.
"Well, you did say the ship dispatches 'repair units,' didn't you?"
"Yes." He glanced at her from inside his helmet. "But this isn't a critical section, and the inside door's already sealed off. Repair units won't swing by here for a long time, if ever."
"How did you learn all this?" Ari said.
Tanner returned his attention to the pad, apparently eager to show off his knowledge. "There are manuals in the system. Here, I'll show you."
He pressed a button labeled Help on the pad. New words appeared.
Hercules XIXV System Guide.
A sudden, more urgent thought occurred to her. "How much air do we have in these things?"
"About two days I think," Tanner said.
But she knew the answer just as Tanner spoke it, because her words had triggered something in the suit, and a sentence now overlaid her vision.
Estimated Oxygen: 48 Hours.
The green letters faded, leaving only clear glass once more.
Tanner was still playing with that pad. "Guess I have time to teach you a few things."
"Later," she said. She wanted to give up. Wanted to lie down and just cry. But she couldn't. Focus, Ari. "So. Can we get back to the Inside from here? And complete the mission father planned?"
"Back to the simulation?" Tanner considered this. "There should be an input on the suit." He examined his belly, and found a small aperture in the fabric. "There." Hers had a similar opening.
"Good," Ari said. "Then that's what we'll do. Forty-eight hours of air? Is that enough time to complete father's plan?"
Tanner studied her a moment, then he nodded slowly. "Forty-eight hours is about three weeks on the Inside, so yes, that should be more than enough time." He reached behind the terminal and unraveled a cord with a pronged end. "I'm not sure if Hoodwink told you, but the only way to go back Inside is as a gol. Going in as A.I.s lets us bypass the whole human birthing mechanism. You won't have any actual nutrients when you descend this way though, so you'll be starving on the Inside after about three days of simulation time, no matter how much you think you're eating."
She stopped him before he plugged the cord into her suit. "What about you?"
He glanced across the room, toward the other remaining desk. "I'll use the tether on that terminal."
She nodded, and let him continue. When the cord connected with her suit, she heard an audible beep. Tanner pressed something on the desk pad, and a spoken message played inside her helmet.
"External Connect Initiated." She recognized the female voice that had droned on about imminent decompression. "Simulator Access Requested. Allow?"
Two options appeared on the inside of the helmet, yes and no. She focused on yes.
The word flashed.
"Access Granted," the female voice said.
Inside the suit, she felt a metal prong extend from the navel region, and she winced as it pressed into the fabric of her clothing. The metal fastened painfully onto her umbilical cord, and a sudden current flowed through her—for a moment she thought she'd found vitra again.
And then a jab of incredible, body-wide pain blocked out all thought.
Her head fell forward on the globe, and darkness consumed her vision.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Ari lay on a wooden floor. Above her, a lone beam of sunlight lanced through a frosty window. The ray touched her forehead, but held no warmth. She sat up groggily.
She recognized her shack of a house. The make-up desk. The table. The bookshelf. The mirror. Everything was as she remembered. Only an hour had passed on the Outside. That was what, a day or two on the Inside?
She noted that no collar, fake or otherwise, burdened her neck. Even so, the spark of vitra was completely gone inside her.
She clambered upright, blinked the stars from her vision, and stumbled to the mirror.
She gasped.
She had no reflection.
She looked down at herself. Her body was very much there. Odd.
She noticed that her arms and legs were no longer bone thin, and the backs of her hands were free of wrinkles and liver spots. So she was still young at least. And well-nourished this time.
Looking down at herself, she thought her skin-tight blue shirt accentuated her breasts a little more than she was comfortable with. Damn that Tanner. The sleeves reached to her wrists, where the cuffs seemed to meld into her flesh just as if the fabric were tattooed into it. She tried to lift the too-tight shirt off, but she found no collar to grip. She slid her arms across her chest, scrabbling at the thin cloth, but she succeeded only in pinching and folding her own skin.
She glanced at the vacant mirror once more. It reminded her that she wasn't really here in this world, but resided in another.
Though it sure felt like she existed here.
"What am I?" She stumbled over to the chair beside the window, and sat down heavily. The same chair she'd used countless times as an old woman, waiting for her life to end. Waiting for her father.
"So what do you think, Nine?" Tanner said from behind her.
She started. "Don't ever do that again." She forced herself to be mad, when all she wanted to do was bawl her eyes out. She had to remain focused. In charge. "Why did you call me Nine?"
Tanner was wearing a goatee now, matched to a flourishing mustache. It didn't really suit him. "It's written on your chest in binary. 1001. Supposed to mark you as one of the main A.I.s of the system. In theory the gols will give us more respect because of it." He touched his own chest, which had the number 1010 embossed
into the tight fabric. "Ten."
"Tell me father's plan," she said. "He wants a utopia, does he?" It was hard not to sound bitter. He'd died for this utopia of his. And right now, Ari didn't care if this false world stayed a cold pit of ice for all eternity. In fact, she almost preferred it that way.
"First of all," Tanner said. "We have to seize the Control Room from the mayor."
Tanner went on to detail the plan, but she was scarcely listening.
Seize the Control Room from the mayor.
Hoodwink had mentioned that before, but the words hadn't registered. They did now, however, and stirred something deep inside Ari, the memory of payback long ago given up.
She momentarily forgot her grief.
Jeremy. Good old Mayor Jeremy. She had a score to settle with that one.
More than a score.
She smiled inside.
Her ex-husband would certainly be in for a little shock when he saw her.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Ari marched across the snowpack, ermine cloak worn high to conceal the numbers written into her chest. At her neck was a fake bronze bitch, taken from the headquarters of the New Users. Though her breath misted, she didn't feel cold. She was a gol now, after all.
She made for Jeremy's estate. Tanner accompanied her on the right, and gray-haired Marks, one of the New Users, took her left. Jeremy owned the largest estate in the city, nestled near the heart of Highbrow District. As a rule, the elected mayor always ran the city out of his or her home. Men and women of high office were expected to live and breathe their jobs, eating and sleeping and defecating in the same building where they made the big decisions. He'd bought out three portal traders to secure the land, and blackmailed a fourth. The son of a portal trader himself, Jeremy had grown his wealth by taking advantage of the price spreads between cities. They say absolute power corrupts absolutely. The same can be said about wealth. So what did it mean then, when Jeremy had both?
The latest rumor among the New Users was that Jeremy had found a way to replicate gols, and that he was surrounding himself with a new type that fed on the fears of the common people. He was building an army, according to the New User scouts, though for what purpose no one knew. Ari was looking forward to having Jeremy at the tip of her sword, begging to reveal all his secrets.
Her sword. She reverently fingered the hilt at her waist. Tanner had stashed two special swords in the system before he came Inside, blades crafted specifically for just such a mission. The weapons worked similar to vitra once you gripped the haft, but unlike vitra, the charge was unlimited, and the swords spat flame, not electricity.
The children couldn't just make a Control Room, like they had the swords. According to Tanner, the children had found the "source" to vitra, swords, and fire, so creating the weapons had been relatively easy. But making something like the special Box that, when opened, would expand to fill up a room and turn it into the coveted control center that they so badly needed, well, that was something the children couldn't do without the "source."
"Why can't you just inject us into the Control Room directly?" she'd asked Tanner. "The same way you sent us back to my house?"
"Can't," Tanner had said. "The only reason we could go back to your house in the first place was because Hoodwink placed a tracker there."
Three days had passed since that conversation. Three days of planning, scouting, and meetings with the New Users. In the end, she'd elected to throw away most of those plans, and wing it. Any plan that called for her to lick the boots of her ex-husband was no plan at all as far as she was concerned. Too bad she hadn't informed Tanner of that decision yet.
Her boots crunched in the snow, and the sound seemed an intrusion into a night that was all too calm. Roughly half of the street lamps were out, and no one was about, giving the street an eerie, dead feel. Three years ago, the streets of Highbrow District would have been shoveled to the cobblestone. But because of gol neglect, today the ground was covered in snowpack. The houses on either side were dark—the rumors of unnatural things roaming in the night had apparently caused more than a few residents to move away.
Ahead, two sentries flanked the iron gate to Jeremy's manor. The sentries wore long black coats, and capes that flared at the top. She had almost expected human sentries, given that ordinary gols couldn't be trusted for this kind of work these days, but the image stamped into their chests definitely marked them gol. She didn't recognize the symbol though—a curved tooth, dripping blood. The new gols her scouts had reported?
As she approached, the sentries swept back their capes and rested their hands on the hilts of their swords. An action meant to be menacing, she supposed, but her thoughts only registered annoyance.
The first sentry, fashioned as a man just short of the middle years, planted itself in front of Ari. The gol had an angular nose and a sneering mouth. When it smiled, it revealed a set of finger-long canines.
"Direwalkers," Ari said. "Jeremy's gone and made Direwalkers."
Direwalkers were imaginary creatures from myth and folklore that were used to frighten little children into doing what their mothers' wanted. According to the legends, Direwalkers looked like ordinary human beings except for one distinguishing feature: their overly long canines, which they used to drain blood from potential victims. Their nails could elongate and slurp up your blood too, and their eyes could pop out of their heads a few centimeters, which was supposed to scare you into not moving. In the stories Direwalkers didn't have reflections in mirrors, were afraid of garlic and cinnamon, and could unhinge their jaws and swallow you whole if they wanted. Some Direwalkers even had more than two arms.
None of that scared Ari in the least.
"State your business," the Direwalker demanded.
Ari lowered the collar of her ermine cloak so that the number inscribed on her chest was visible.
The two Direwalkers looked at one another, and then stepped aside. One made to open the gate.
She casually drew her sword and beheaded the first Direwalker in a blur of flame. The second had time only to half-draw its weapon before its own head bounced on the ground.
"Haven't seen you do something like that in years," Marks said with a grin.
"Ari!" The shock was plain in Tanner's voice. "I thought we'd decided—"
She rammed the flaming sword into the gate lock, and the metal melted around her blade. She kicked the gate open.
Damn it felt good to be young again.
"So much for our well-laid plans!" Tanner cursed.
Ari led the way forward, sword at the ready. Pines flanked the shoveled walkway that led to the mansion. Deer lay beyond those trees—Jeremy preferred his food fresh, raw. With pricked ears and upright tails, the motionless animals watched the intruders. Something seemed a bit off about the animals. She couldn't quite place it.
When Ari reached the middle of that tree-lined walkway, she realized what it was. The animals weren't staring at her, but above her.
Swords drawn, seven black-coated Direwalkers leapt down from the pines in an avalanche of loose snow.
She and Tanner set to work. They weaved among the Direwalkers, creating art out of the gols, painting the white canvas of snow around them with blood, bone and flesh.
Marks stayed back, conserving his charge. When no more Direwalkers faced her, Ari turned to Tanner and almost struck him down too—he was nearly unrecognizable beneath all that gore, his hair no longer curly but matted and streaked, his mustache plastered to his cheeks. She doubted she looked much better herself, face smeared in gol blood, ermine cloak splashed with the juices of opened intestines.
"Five gols," Ari said. "Including the gate guards. What's your count?"
"Four," Tanner said, rather curtly. He pressed his lips together. "I think we should go back. None of this was in the plan. It's only going to get worse."
She grinned. "You're just pissed because I'm winning."
"I'm pissed because we're going to die."
Ari ignored hi
m. She was young, powerful, at the peak of her womanhood, and wreaking vengeance for the crime done to her ten years ago. She led her companions from the tree-lined path and out onto the terrace before the mansion. Two rows of windows fronted the house, and four columns supported the triangular portico that draped the entrance. The red flag of office dangled limply from a pole at the mansion's highest point.
Ari paused beside the frozen fountain at the center of the terrace. The same fountain had stood here when she lived in this place ten years ago, its water imprisoned by the unending winter.
Just as she had been imprisoned.
She jabbed her sword into the fountain and the ice shattered.
Three more Direwalkers clambered headfirst down the portico columns.
"Mine!" Ari rushed them, intending to add the Direwalkers to her count before Tanner had a chance.
But she was sloppy. The first Direwalker went down smoothly, but as the second fell, she slipped in its blood and dropped the sword. Before she could retrieve the weapon, the third Direwalker hauled her upright and pressed its teeth to her throat.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Ari waited for those teeth to penetrate, but the Direwalker made no further move.
Tanner and Marks approached warily.
"Another step and I tear out her jugular!" the Direwalker told Tanner. "Drop the weapon, krub. Now!" It licked the blood of its brethren from her neck.
Tanner looked at her, unsure what to do.
"This is where you save my life." She slammed her foot down on the Direwalker's boot and wrenched sideways, slipping from its grip.
Tanner's sword was there instantly, and he staked the Direwalker through the heart.
"Five!" he said grimly.
She retrieved her sword. "Well I'm at seven now."
"Next time it's probably best if you don't go rushing in alone. In fact, next time let's stick to the plan okay?"
Ari shrugged. "Sore loser." She gave him a sly smile over her shoulder. Sly, and just a little flirtatious. Though how flirtatious could you be, covered in blood?
Tanner rested a hand on her shoulder, and his voice softened. "Ari. Hoodwink put you in my care. I don't want to see you hurt."