by Shaun Barger
Maalouf took a seat across from her, sighing.
“Look, Jem . . .”
Her cool expression cracked, a violent bitterness leaking through. “Let me guess. Request denied.”
There was a tickle in Nikolai’s throat that accompanied the stinging. He fought the involuntary urge to clear his throat, to start coughing. He clamped a hand over his mouth, fist clenched around his Focal.
Maalouf leaned back in his chair, folding his arms.
“I’m so sorry, Jem, I—”
“Sorry?” She sneered. “Ohhhh, you’re sorry? Well then!”
He shifted, uncomfortable. “I know this isn’t easy for you. For someone like you, someone who grew up with enhancement-mods, there’ll be a period of . . . adjustment. Of rehabilitation. Speech, motor skills, memory—sometimes they . . .”
“After everything I’ve done for you people!” She slammed her fist down on the table, trembling with rage. “To give you children. A future. If you only knew what it cost. And this? This is how you repay me? With a lobotomy?”
“Our surgeons are incredible,” he said in a rush. “And the guys we got in rehab—you couldn’t ask for a better group. They’ll be with you every step. It won’t be easy, but . . . you’ll be home. You’ll be safe. You won’t have to run anymore. I’m sorry, I know the price is high, but . . .” He smiled with false cheer. “I pulled some strings in the kitchen. You won’t be having the usual slop for dinner. You won’t be able to eat for twelve hours before the operation, so I figured you’d better have a big dinner this evening. Steak—real steak, none of that vat shit. Mashed potatoes. Butter, churned this morning. String beans, fresh from our gardens . . .”
“Fuck your last meal bullshit,” Jem snarled, standing with an abrupt violence. “You know that my mods aren’t a danger to anyone. But rules are rules, right? Well fuck you, and fuck your rules. I could kill any dozen of your armed soldiers with my bare hands—but instead of letting me fight for you, you’re going to ruin me. Because you’re weak. Because you’re cowards.” She narrowed her eyes at him, seething with hatred. “I should have let you burn.”
Maalouf was on his feet, hand tensed on his sidearm. “Now Jem . . .”
She eyed his hand. Unafraid. Nikolai could tell that both she and Maalouf knew that if Jem wanted to take the chief’s weapon, there was nothing he could do to stop her.
Who the hell was this woman?
“I know this isn’t ideal,” Maalouf said, sweat beading on his forehead, “but we aren’t holding you prisoner here. You’re free to go back to the Resistance if our conditions are unacceptable. We’d be happy to supply you for the trek.”
Jem let out a long breath, seeming to deflate as her fury drained away.
“No,” she said, averting her gaze. “I can’t. I don’t have anywhere else to go. Don’t have . . . anyone.”
“Oh.” Maalouf blinked, taken aback by Jem’s sudden vulnerability. “I’m . . . sorry to hear that.”
She straightened her posture, composed. “Fine. I accept your conditions. Do what you have to do.”
“S—sure,” Maalouf said, his relief palpable. “Okay. Thank you for understanding. Let’s get you back to your quarters.”
Nikolai waited, watching them go. As the door slammed shut, he let out a ragged cough, hacking and wheezing into the crook of his arm. He felt like shit.
Once the coast was clear and his coughing had subsided, Nikolai followed Jem’s tracer to the women’s refugee intake cells.
A guard sat at the desk, sipping a mug of steaming coffee as she watched a live feed of a soccer game being played between other soldiers on a field at the center of the base.
Careful not to squeak his shoes on the floor, Nikolai crept past her to find Jem sitting on a bench in a cell that was locked, unlike his own. She was hugging her knees to her chest, eyes closed. Gentle pulses of emerald light flashed dimly through the skin of her eyelids, almost too dim to make out.
Sitting on the floor was the promised steak dinner. Cold and untouched.
She was humming softly. Nikolai recognizing the song. It was “Hey Jude” by the Beatles. He felt a thrill and got weirdly choked up, just for a second—remembering the briefest flash of him, Stokes, and Astor singing that very song up in Stokes’s tree house. Over and over, till they got it perfect.
Nikolai surveyed the cameras, black bubbles of plastic tucked into various corners.
The soldier jumped to her feet at her desk, arms in the air.
“GOOOOOAAAAAAALLLLLLL muthafucka!” she shouted, scaring the shit out of Nikolai.
Heart thumping in his chest, he went over to the soldier’s desk, waiting for her to sit down again.
“One more, just need one more goal, come onnnnn . . .” she said, taking a seat and chewing on her knuckles.
Leaning over the desk, he gave her mug of steaming hot coffee a gentle push, knocking it onto her lap.
“OW! Shit! Hot! Hothothot! Fuck, fucking goddamn, Sarah, you stupid, clumsy bitch. Fucking asshole coffee. Agh . . .”
Muttering and swearing, she told Jem that she’d be back in ten. When Jem didn’t reply, the soldier grunted and walked gingerly out of the room, door closing behind her.
Nikolai shot three controlled bursts of akro to block the cameras with a fine, opaque coating. Taking a deep breath, he leaned nonchalantly against the bars opposite from Jem’s cell and let his invisibility drop.
“Hey.”
Her eyes snapped open, and she turned to Nikolai, alarmed.
“You. What are you doing here?”
“You’re the only other person I’ve met so far who’s younger than thirty,” he said, shrugging. “Figure I’d come say hello.”
She looked him up and down, perplexed. “Your clothes are . . .?”
Nikolai flashed a bent smile and created a small disc of akro in his palm. He made it dance across his knuckles like a coin. “I’m a traveling Amish magician,” he said, flipping the coin in the air and catching it. He let it dissolve and held out his empty hand for her to see. “Ta-da!”
She eyed him warily.
“I’m Nik. I hope I’m not intruding.”
“Jem,” she said cautiously. “How did you get in here?”
“Snuck out of my cage!” He tapped his forehead. “No chips up here. Just a country bumpkin who lucked his way through the robot forest. So no lock on my door.” He glanced at the locking mechanism on the sliding bars to her cell. “Obviously they find you more menacing.”
“I haven’t been de-modded yet,” she said numbly. “They think I’m a threat. That I might have hidden programming or get hacked remotely by the Synth.”
The subdued contempt with which she explained their concerns made it clear how little she thought of them.
There was something slightly off about her mannerisms. Every look, every word, gesture—there was a strange precision to it. Her words were clipped, quick—but it still felt as if she was purposely slowing them down for him to understand.
“What’s it like?” he asked, leaning forward. “Having . . . mods, like yours? Lady who brought me to my cells, I asked her about you. She said you were . . . different. Enhanced.”
“You don’t look Amish,” Jem said, raising an eyebrow. “And there aren’t any Amish communities anywhere near here.”
“I said traveling, didn’t I?” Nikolai grinned, changing the subject. “I know that song you were humming. ‘Hey Jude,’ by the Beatles, right? It’s one of my favorites.”
She flinched as if he’d slapped her, staring at him wide-eyed. Frozen. Then she leaned back, shaking her head.
“My reactions are mechanically fast and accurate. It’s mostly a muscle memory thing, nothing conscious. Whenever I’m in a fight, my mods calculate my movements automatically—but it’s not like I’m giving up control. It’s more like dancing in a ballet I know by heart.”
Nikolai let out a breath, struggling to conceal his excitement. This human was a cyborg. A real motherfucking cyborg!
Jem closed her eyes, face tightening with sadness and ecstasy. Once again, Nikolai saw that faint pulsing of light. “Most Mods need to plug into networks for full sensory immersion—but I can build immersive environments in the closed systems within my mods. There’s a library in my head. The collected literary, musical, and visual works of mankind, from antiquity to the crash.”
She opened her eyes. “I could listen, read, and watch for every moment of every day for the rest of my life—all three at once since I’m good at multitasking like that—and never get to it all. But. More important than that. So much more important than that. I have every memory saved, in perfect immersive detail. Everyone I’ve ever loved. Everyone I’ve ever lost. They’re still here—” She tapped her forehead. “Always with me. But now I have one night. One more night—and they’ll be gone. Forever, this time.”
Her expression was cold. Numb. “Maybe I won’t forget them. And maybe the operation won’t leave me a drooling, crawling mess. Maybe I’ll even remember how to dance. But I probably won’t remember this conversation after tomorrow. They’re de-modding me in the morning. Downgrading me to the standard biological package. The slow zone, like you normals.”
She pulled her knees to her chest. Haunted. “Maybe it’s better this way. To forget about . . . everyone. Maybe . . . maybe I deserve it. But when I wake up . . . can you please remind me how much I like that song?” She lay down on her bench, closing her eyes and crossing her arms under the back of her head. “Now, if you don’t mind . . .”
“Sure, totally.” Fuck. That had been more of a bummer than Nikolai anticipated. “I’ll come visit after the operation tomorrow. I’m sure . . . I’m sure it won’t be that bad. That you’ll be okay.” But the lights were flickering again and she wasn’t listening.
Nikolai turned invisible and left the woman to her digital memories. He stopped at the door, wracked with a sudden fit of coughing.
He was exhausted, shivering, and feverish when he finally climbed back into bed—so tired that the hard pallet and scratchy blanket felt luxurious enough for the Mage King. The guard was still sitting sentry, nose stuck in his book, Nikolai’s absence completely unnoticed.
Nikolai lay there, trying not to cough, staring into the darkness of the cracked cement ceiling. He’d leave the following night once they placed him in his tent. Turn invisible, steal his blade Focal back from the colonel, then hop the fence at a different point from where he’d come. Cover himself in mud again. He had no idea how to hide his scent from those Synth hounds, but hopefully they wouldn’t be on full alert since they’d probably think he was still on the base. Maybe he could find a tributary that led to the lake, make a little raft, keep it invisible?
What was Nikolai even going to do if he managed to get back to Marblewood? He was practically punch drunk from the ceaseless bombardment of revelations he’d been struck by since tumbling into the human world, and had yet to really take a moment to decide what to make of it all.
Anger permeated the confused tangle of Nikolai’s deliberation at the scope of humanity’s suffering, of which he’d only witnessed a sliver. While magi enjoyed the luxuries of peace and abundance afforded by life within the Veils, humans were being tortured, murdered, and enslaved by the billions, just out of sight. The sheer injustice of it all was . . . breathtaking.
Joy overwhelmed the rage, however, humming like a song throughout Nikolai’s entire being.
The humans, though ruled by mechanical tyrants, were still alive. Were still human, instead of the tragic shadows of their formal selves they could have so easily been reduced to by the brutality they’d endured. The humans he’d met seemed just like their ancestors, whose books and music and movies had so often been all that stood between Nikolai and absolute despair.
More than still human, Nikolai had seen that they were still people. People who loved stories and music and dancing and sports. People who laughed, and loved, and fucked, and fucked up—but then picked themselves up again and kept striving for something better. To be better! Despite the atrocities and scientific advancements they’d experienced in seemingly equal measure.
But the terrestrial humans were dying. Was the mage king just going to . . . let them? They were aging, and childless, and if something wasn’t done soon, they’d be gone forever.
How had it come to this?
Extrapolating from what he’d been taught and what he now knew, Nikolai tried to infer what possible reasons the Mage King might have had to lie about the destruction of humanity.
The king had spent the first decade of his rule engaged in a bloody, global game of cat and mouse with the most viciously effective shadow magus in modern history. And he’d lost.
Vaillancourt had been defeated in the end, yes—his networks decimated, his monsters slain, the most dangerous of his magi-tech weaponry dismantled. But even though the magi had been spared the worst of Vaillancourt’s violence—their civilization bloodied and bruised, but intact—the corruption, chaos, and hideously advanced weaponry Vaillancourt had so deftly sown among the human nations must have turned out to be too deeply seeded for even the king to root out. The warheads had still fallen, and with them, the human world.
Nikolai struggled to imagine the depths of helpless despair the Mage King, a then-young arch magus named Julian Cosmus, had experienced while watching the trails of smoke from intercontinental ballistic missiles streaking across the sky in countless multitudes—the extremists who’d taken control of the most powerful human nations seeking to obliterate one another with nuclear warheads and hexbombs, as Vaillancourt must have intended.
Was it then that the king would have realized that he’d failed? That, even as his Battle Magi and enchanters moved to intercept the ballistic swarms, they’d never be able to stop enough of the missiles from striking to prevent the human world from collapsing into a dark age?
Nikolai could see it now—the Mage King numbly using the chaos of a nuclear war he’d failed to prevent as an excuse to temporarily seal off the Veils, already under martial law, so the magi forces could regroup and recuperate.
It would have been so easy, in the peace within the Veils that followed, to write humanity off as a lost cause—to lie about the extent of their annihilation, leaving the humans to deal with the remnants of their broken civilization on their own so the king could focus on rebuilding mage society with such stringently regulated access to magic, technology, and the human world that it might be impossible for a shadow magus such as Vaillancourt to rise again.
Try as he might, Nikolai was unable to muster even the smallest shred of sympathy for the king. Whatever the circumstances, whatever the reasons, Nik simply could neither comprehend nor forgive the enormity of callous indifference demonstrated by the regime’s lack of intervention.
Whatever action the crown might be covertly taking on behalf of the humans that Nikolai wasn’t aware of—it wasn’t enough.
The Edge Guard were powerful. The Moonwatch even more so. But there were so few of them—even counting the lowest ranking soldiers like Nikolai, there were only something like thirty or forty thousand trained Battle Magi, tops.
From what little Nikolai had seen of the Synth’s power, he imagined that anything short of full mobilization on the part of the magi populace might prove insufficient at dislodging the Synth’s metaphorical metallic boot from humanity’s throat.
But even if the magi learned of humanity’s plight—even if Nikolai found some way, somehow, to reveal the truth to them—would they care enough to intervene?
Nikolai wanted to believe they would, but this was all so impossibly big—so unfathomably complex and strange. Even with all that he had already learned from his brief foray into this brutal, alien world, there was still so much he didn’t know. So much that he couldn’t possibly understand without further context.
The only conclusion he could make with any certainty was that this was what his parents had died for. This was why his mother had so brutally trained him, st
arting thirteen years ago, when he was seven—right after the war between man and machine had begun. This was why she’d given the revolver instructions to teach Nikolai how to bend Veil, so that he might see humanity’s plight for himself, while there were still any humans left to save.
In that moment, his long held hatred toward his mother dwindled, ever so slightly. As did any sympathy he might have retained for Hazeal, who’d witnessed humanity’s plight and betrayed Nik’s mother anyway, even though she might have been the only mage in a position of power willing to do anything about it.
Despite Nikolai’s lingering uncertainty, a strange calm settled over him. A sense of peace—of purpose, unlike any he’d ever known. Ilyana’s silence. Astor’s hurt. Joseph’s pity. The contempt of his classmates. The loneliness, the depression, the anger. The gnawing hunger for something more. None of that was important. This was all that mattered.
Everything was going to be different now.
* * *
The world turned sideways around Nikolai. His eyes snapped open as he was dragged out of bed, onto the floor.
“Tie him up! Get his hands—get his hands!”
He was almost too shocked too fight back as he was turned onto his stomach, a knee digging into his back as his arms were wrenched behind him.
“The fuck?” Nikolai protested, coming to his senses.
Boots in the darkness—urgent shouts all around. More hands grabbed his legs as he kicked and struggled, trying to push free.
“And get that damn stick away from him!” a familiar voice boomed. Colonel Machado. “Who the hell knows what it actually does. Get it to the lab—tell them to look at it again!”
“What are you doing?” Nikolai screamed as they yanked away his baton. “Get the hell off me—”
He was lifted and slammed to the floor, pain exploding in his face as he struck the cement. His ankles were pulled up to his wrists and bound painfully with plastic ties. A black mesh bag was pulled over his head.
They dragged him roughly out into the hallway. None of them were speaking now—all Nikolai could hear was the clomping of urgent footfalls and the ringing in his ears. He was burning up, feverish. His stomach churned, boiling, and he fought to keep down what little he’d eaten. Nikolai was shivering and drenched with sweat. He hurt all over, his joints throbbing.