Right there is where this foggy memory had always ended for me, patched together in a quilt of pain made from a year of my life. It’s been almost ten years since then, and all I’ve remembered about that time is shattered fragments.
Until now.
Memories reverse like a broken stained-glass window, divergent shards pulling back together in a mosaic suddenly made whole. The picture is complete. The now-me screams. I can hear myself in the memory of past-me. But there is no escaping. No looking away.
All I can do is watch.
But it’s worse than that. Because I’m not watching. I’m reliving.
I’ve heard the sound of a shotgun being pumped enough times to recognize the sound without actually seeing the source. Howie knows it, too, and he turns around like he’s expecting danger. Then he sees Jenny and relaxes. “Gah-damn, Jennybird, you...” He snarls at her. “You testing me, girl?”
Jenny takes one hand off the weapon to point at me and the barrel sags toward the floor. “We need her, How. Ain’t no point in roughing her up. There are plenty of other people in the world you can—”
Howie’s hands snap out, clutch the shotgun and twist. The weapon turns Jenny’s arm until she cries out and lets go. Before Howie can turn the weapon around on her, she lunges, scratching at his face. Screaming. She’s gone mad. Like a feral cat set upon another.
Red streaks appear on his cheek.
Howie stumbles back from the assault, mumbling a string of curses together. Then he spins the butt of the shotgun around and catches Jenny in the side of the head. She falls hard, striking my thin mattress and the sheet of plywood holding it atop four milk crates.
He points the shotgun down at Jenny.
I know what’s coming next. He’ll do the dance. The one he always does when things get nuts. When they lose control. He’ll shake around to music only he can hear, then stop and shout, “Pow!” making everyone jump. Then Jenny will get up and leave, and we’ll be back on course, except things will be even worse for me now.
He does the dance.
Jenny looks at me. She doesn’t look afraid now. More relieved. “Don’t run,” she says. “You can’t.”
I’m crying now. Jenny knows this is different. So do I.
“You have to fight, Effie,” she says. “You have to—”
“Pow,” Howard whispers, and then he pulls the trigger.
Fight.
There isn’t enough left of Jenny to speak the word, but I hear it.
Fight...
“Euphoria.”
I blink. What? Jenny is gone. My project is on the floor. The scissors.
“Euphoria. Hey.”
“Hey!”
The memory repeats. I relive it again.
It cripples me.
“Don’t run. You can’t.”
“You have to fight, Effie. You have to—”
Pow.
“Euphoria.”
I crumble inward, gripped by despair.
“Hey!”
No...
“You have to fight, Effie. You have to—”
Fight!
The memory trembles. I hear my mock name called again, “Euphoria,” but the reset fails.
The memory continues.
I see Jenny, who isn’t even a person now.
Howard is laughing. Pumps the shotgun. Turns it to where I was, but am no longer. Pulls the trigger.
My mattress explodes.
Something bigger than myself propels me. Faster than I can think. Faster than Howard can move.
He pumps the shotgun again, but that’s as far as he gets.
That’s where his life ends.
My last memory of Howard is him looking down at the scissors in his chest, and then falling over on top of them.
I gasp out of the memory, curled in a fetal ball on the floor of Operations. Hutch lays beside me, twitching, eyes rolled back. Sig is slumped over her console, whimpering, shaking. Every single person in Operations has come undone. The enemy is crippling us with our worst fears, projected into our minds. That’s why all those people stopped running.
And there is no escaping it. On the display screens, I see the Strikers, spinning away. They’re not crashing, but they’re not being controlled, either.
Berg’s Shugoten is on its back in the sand, motionless.
Vegas is in the water, fallen to his hands and knees, shaking, perhaps fighting, but losing.
And then there is the daikaiju, tendrils writhing, stomping a path straight toward Vegas’s Shugoten. The robot has its head bowed down, ready for execution.
I feel the memory slam back into my head, trying to restart, but failing.
The monster made a mistake.
My worst fear isn’t some imagined phobia, it’s a memory, walled up by my seven-year-old subconscious until just now. But it’s also the day I discovered my strength, the reason I don’t wait to be punched first, why I could kill Mack and Bear and why I could stand up to Quinlan. By showing me Uncle Howard, the monster outside simply revealed its true self to me, and reminded me that I’m strong enough to stand and fight in the face of abject terror.
I push myself up with shaky arms, defying the fear.
Fighting my past.
I rebel against it, beat it down and climb to my feet again.
I look up at the daikaiju, name it Howard in my heart, and think, I’m coming for you.
Then I turn to Hutch and say, “And you’re going to help.”
38
Denying fear’s cold grip is one thing, but pushing past very physical pain is another. There are very real limits that no amount of determination can push you past. Bleed too much, you die. Hurt too much, you pass out. Look at an injury, you go into shock. These are biological functions no person can overcome by strength of will alone.
But I’m trying anyway.
Hutch is heavier than he looks, and in his limp, twitchy state, he’s not helping at all. I’ve got him under his arms, pulling him through the broad hangar, his heels squeaking against the metal floor. His weight pulls on my arms and core, straining my vast array of wounds and putting Hutch’s assurances—that the glue will hold and the wrap around my chest will keep my ribs in place—to the test. Without the armored flight suit recovered from a locker that had ‘F-B0MB’ stenciled on it, I don’t think I would have made it this far. The suit is a perfect fit, probably made in the past few weeks during my Unity training. Like Hutch’s, it glows with power, the pattern of stripes converging at my chest where there is a luminous Point symbol. While it’s not really a mechanized battle suit, I can feel it augmenting my strength and stabilizing my body. Unfortunately, it’s not dulling the agony of my injuries.
The pain pushes tears from my eyes.
My legs weaken.
You’re almost there, I tell myself. You can do this. You have to do this.
Then I look and nearly fall to my knees.
I’m only halfway across the hangar, with several hundred feet still between me and Hutch’s Striker. My bare feet slap the cold floor as I stumble, catching myself and Hutch at the last moment. The pain nearly drops me. My arms quiver from the effort. And then I feel it. A gentle squeeze on my hand.
I look down at Hutch’s upside down face. He’s covered in sweat. His jaw trembles. But his eyes, for the moment, are lucid. He looks up at me, freed from his nightmare long enough to say, “You...can make it.”
He glances back at the Striker. At the Shugoten. Without our minds being connected by a psy-net or any words spoken between us, he knows what I’m planning. “You are our strength, Euphemia.”
His use of my full name has a strange effect. I don’t want to punch him. I want to embrace him. To save him. To stand at his defense and shout into the raging tempest consuming the world, ‘You cannot have him.’
I have never felt these things before. They confuse, but also empower me.
Hutch. Sig. Gwen. And all the others who have now become my friends—my family—are going to die if
I can’t push past this pain.
Hutch squeezes my hand again, tighter this time. “Hurry—”
His body seizes. Eyes roll back. He’s trapped in the daikaiju’s psychological prison once more.
But his brief visit galvanizes me. I drag him, grunting and screaming until we reach the Striker. When we approach the front of the vehicle, the badge on his chest glows for a moment and a hatch opens up, lowering to the floor, mocking me with its many steps. But I’m not about to stop now. I haul him up one step at a time, sounding like an aggressive tennis player. The space inside the Striker’s cockpit is limited, and I struggle to get Hutch in the seat. But his unconscious state lets me shove him around and manipulate his limbs until he’s seated and strapped in place. I get his psy-control headset in place and...what next? The Striker sits quietly.
How do you start one of these things?
Then I see it. A triangle shaped depression on the console, the same size as the Support badge on Hutch’s chest. I pull the badge free and hold it over the console, feeling a magnetic pull. When I let it go, the badge snaps into place and the console lights up. The hum of electronics fills the cabin, and a vibration tickles my feet. It’s the hatch, retracting. I hurry to the still-open hatch and half stumble down the stairs, while they’re pulled back up inside. At the bottom, I have to jump the final four feet to the solid floor.
I land on my feet, but my knees buckle. My fall ends with my hands on the floor, like I’m bowing, prostrate before some god. But when I look up, there is no deity, just F-B0MB, the black and orange Shugoten, standing nobly and impossibly tall, awaiting its Operator.
Once I’m inside, the weakness of my body won’t matter anymore. Psy-controls mean that even a quadriplegic could operate one of the giant robots. I just need to reach its head...four hundred feet above me. One shaky leg at I time, I get back to my feet and hobble to the lift that rises up toward the ceiling. There’s only one button, so I give it a punch and am carried aloft. The rapid ascent twists my stomach for just a moment, and then I’m four hundred feet up, telling myself not to look down. The catwalk clangs against my feet, sounding not nearly solid enough, but then the side of F-B0MB’s head opens up, and I forget all about the height, and my pain.
I step over the threshold and into another world. The cockpit, if that’s what it can be called, is sparse, but very different from anything I’ve seen. There’s a chair, but it’s not attached to the floor. Instead, it’s held in the center of the dodecahedron-shaped space by a network of shock absorbers. Will I even feel the robot moving?
A psy-control helmet hangs down over the chair, and that’s about it. No manual controls. No gauges. No lights. No view through the robot’s eyes. Just a flat console with an empty spot awaiting the placement of a Point’s Unity badge.
My Unity badge.
Will this Shugoten work with anyone’s badge? I wonder, and I pull the Point symbol from my chest. It was in my go-pack from the beginning, its purpose unclear at the time. But I was always meant to find myself standing here, with this badge. It wasn’t fate that brought me here, it was my mother. Who left me. Who risked my soul, and then my life. Who in her very hands-off way, allowed me to endure tortures that gave me the strength to make it this far. And if she hadn’t? What then? Would I be out in the world, dying with the rest of them? With my parents?
Despite the anger I have for the woman I met via Featherlight recording, I hope she and my father are alive. I have questions for them. Things to say.
But that’s only going to happen if I survive. And that’s only going to be possible, if I focus. So I push thoughts of my parents and the entire outside world—past, present and future—from my mind. I hold the badge out over the console. It snaps into place, and I feel the Shugoten come to life beneath me. It doesn’t move, but I can feel its powerful potential. And it brings a smile to my face.
I turn around as the chair lowers to the floor. F-B0MB is offering herself to me. And I accept, sliding into the cushiony chair. I look for straps as the chair lifts back into place, but find none. Instead, they find me. Hard, padded restraints snap out from the backside of the chair, wrapping around my waist and chest, slowly tightening until I can’t move, but not enough to hurt my broken ribs. When that’s done, the same thing happens to my arms and legs in two places. When it’s done, I’m completely immobilized. I’m seized by a moment of panic, which nearly lets the daikaiju back inside my head, but then the psy-controls lower down over my head, and my consciousness is set free. I can no longer feel the chair beneath me, my body’s pain or the straps holding me in place.
I feel a tingling, like I’ve bent over for five minutes and stood up too fast. And then, nightmares.
Two of them.
One involves spiders.
The other features me, dead.
I can’t tell whose nightmare belongs to whom, but I know I’m feeling what the daikaiju is doing to Sig and Hutch, thanks to the psy-controls I put on both of them. Our unit is connected, which means they can feel me, too.
So I invade their nightmares.
I lend them my strength.
The spiders scurry for cover.
And dead me stands living and unharmed.
Can you hear me? I think at them.
Effie? Sig replies. How?
Psy-controls. We’re all together now. And then no explanation is needed. They know what I know and I know that they know. Information flows freely between us, our minds networked.
Hutch is already lifting off.
Through Sig, I know that the daikaiju has nearly reached Vegas.
I need to get out of here fast, I think, and then I know the solution, information on how to operate the Shugoten appearing in my mind like I’ve always known it, like memories recalled in perfect clarity.
And then, all at once, my body returns. I can feel and see and hear the outside world again. But everything is sharper. Layered. And...smaller. The once enormous hangar now feels like it’s closer to a school gymnasium. I lift my hands, my strong, metal hands, and I understand. I’m experiencing the world through the Shugoten. Through its sensitive microphones. Its high-def vision that strangely has a perfect clarity and a one-hundred-and-eighty degree field-of-view. I can even feel the temperature of the air. I place my right hand on my left wrist and trace my fingers across the network of octagonal cells. I can feel the touch, like it was my own arm.
F-B0MB is not a robot I’m controlling.
I am F-B0MB.
Knowledge flows to me from Sig. I can’t see through her eyes, but she must be speed-reading everything Unity has on the Shugoten, because I suddenly know how to extend the blade. How to fire its rocket pods. Control its repulse engines. And...I look down at my hips. They open to reveal halves of a large weapon, like an oversized version of the gun Doli used to kill Quinlan.
A railgun. It fires tungsten rounds accelerated by electromagnets. The 18-inch-long, 23-pound projectiles fire at 5600 miles per hour, with an effective range up to 250 miles, and they deliver a kinetic punch comparable to a five ton bus moving at three-hundred-and-twenty miles per hour.
I leave the weapon parts inside my legs, which feel completely normal when they open and close. The knowledge of how everything works and how my senses are integrated into the Shugoten’s makes all of this feel, well, normal. Even though I know it isn’t.
Hutch’s Striker rises up in front of me, slowly spinning around, so we’re facing each other. I can’t see him. Can’t even see where the cockpit is. But we’re connected, and I know he’s watching me, just as I’m watching him.
Want to see what you look like? he thinks, and then I’m seeing things through his eyes...or sensors...or whatever. F-B0MB is alive with color, orange lines tracing a complicated course around its body, merging at the Point symbol on its chest. The pattern of hexagonal cells shifts over the body as I move, revealing active sensors. The Shugoten looks powerful, and deadly. If I’m honest, it projects the kind of image I’ve worked hard to cultivate
for myself, the kind of look that says if you mess with me, pain awaits you.
I like it.
Are you ready? he thinks.
Not quite born ready, I respond, but made ready, yeah. I step forward as he flies back and up, our movements effortlessly coordinated.
The Striker rises up through the open Volcano and peels away, heading around the mountain, where the daikaiju can’t see him. I stand atop the circle of the hangar floor that can rise up beneath me and carry me to the surface. But I saw how slow it moves, and we don’t have that kind of time. The daikaiju has reached Vegas. It’s lifting its massive arm to strike, claws extended.
Eyes turned to the sky overhead, I jump, shoving first with my limbs and then with the repulse engines in my feet and back. The Shugoten can’t fly, but it sure as hell can jump.
In the time it takes me to rise several thousand feet in the air, the daikaiju brings its arm down.
No time.
There’s no time!
‘Five thousand six hundred miles per hour.’ The reminder comes from Sig, along with her instantaneous breakdown of the numbers. Five thousand, two hundred and eighty feet in a mile. Twenty-nine million, five hundred sixty eight thousand feet per hour. Eight thousand, two hundred thirteen feet per second. Vegas is three point seven four miles—nineteen thousand, seven hundred forty-seven point two feet—from the exit. It will take a railgun round just 2.4 seconds to reach the daikaiju, a full second before its downward swing removes Vegas’s head. If my aim is right.
My thighs open as I rise, giving me access to the rail rifle stored inside, in two parts.
I lift the weapon’s two halves in both hands, slamming them together, activating the weapon, its barrel crackling with energy. I take aim at where I know the target is standing, thanks to knowledge fed to me by both Sig and Hutch. When I crest the top of the volcano, emerging like expelled magma, I pull the trigger.
39
Despite all the knowledge appearing in my mind, on how to use everything from the Shugoten to the massive rifle in my hands, it’s still possible to overlook simple things, like physics. The Shugoten can fire a railgun, no problem, but like a human being with a high powered weapon, you have to lean into it so it doesn’t knock you back. You also need to have your feet on the ground.
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