More Than Stardust

by Vivien Jackson

  Vallejo spent such a long time thinking that Garrett wondered if the satellite had passed. But then, “I’m afraid that’s not possible. I have received messages from Kellen. There are things going on in the world, on the Isla Luz specifically, that might preclude a rescue at the moment.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Natural disasters. Dozens of them. Weather events, mostly. They had to evacuate the island a few hours ago.”

  He and his people were trying to make more me’s, she had said, only ones they could control better. And what had her original programming been? Back when she was Heron’s vat, at the university. It was all there in her memories, to be mined. To be used.

  Weather control, at first. But also, she was made to destroy things.

  Like islands. Like people. And if pieces of her were scattered, stripped-down programming without the conscience of Chloe, good lord. Those drone strikes a couple months ago were small change beside the havoc she could wreak.

  “Fucking hell,” he said into the com. “I think that might be Chloe.”

  “How?”

  “They took… listen, I’ll explain as soon as I can. I’m gonna try to repair the inflatable, but I need you to get on thinking up a different exit plan, quickest you can come up with.”

  “Of course,” said Vallejo, and then in a gentler tone, “Garret, you hang in there.”

  As if he had a choice.

  • • •

  Both bracer-type things on Garrett’s suit had those little built-in organic LEDs, and he’d left one behind with her when he’d gone, so she wouldn’t be in the dark. As if he understood without her having to say so that her eyes were different now. Limited. And that darkness might be weird.

  But oddly enough, having light to see by made this all harder, not easier. See, part of her wanted to go exploring, forage for supplies. She even got so far as shrugging into one of those monster-sized parkas. It swamped her. If she pressed the seam closed, she wouldn’t be able to put her arms down, though it did keep her core body toasty warm.

  She compromised, draping a synthfur-lined coat over her shoulders instead and picking up the lighted armband. She took a deep breath and stared at the door Garrett had disappeared through a couple of minutes ago.

  But she did not move toward it. In fact, she turned away, retreated deeper into their little room.

  Because there was that other part of her, the one who did not want to see. The one who remembered comfort in blindness. Specifically, she did not want to see her prison again. The place where she had been deconstructed.

  The doll kitchen.

  She’d touched it twice to make her map, but touch was still new. Touch still wasn’t completely her. Seeing a thing, though, that would be too intensely her. Chloe, after all, was a thing that watched.

  And also, knew.

  On this floor, in this place, in the doll kitchen, there was a tube filled with chemical preservatives and cables. It would be empty now that she lived in the body that once stood there.

  Also in that chamber was a cage, and a box, both wrapped in fresh, seeping memory, the kind she could not excise or scoop out.

  She set the armband light on the floor and crouched over her bare feet. She told herself that she wasn’t a coward. She just needed socks. Because extremities, right? Cold feet were a bad sign for thermal regulation and circulation. Hadn’t Garrett said just such a…

  Bullshit. Being scared is all bullshit. Limontour’s gone. He had old bioalterations, unshielded, first-generation, shitty, shitty alts. The E1 EMP would have crisped him in seconds.

  He can’t hurt me anymore. The bad stuff is done.

  So why was she sitting on the floor? Why wasn’t she going in search of a galley or provisions, making their little deep-freeze hideout more comfortable?

  Stand. Move. Get out of your own head.

  But she couldn’t. Not if she could see. That made it all real.

  “Tell me a thing, Chloe.”

  Said with too much tongue, almost adding an extra syllable.

  Her skin replied by prickling, chilling between her shoulder blades.

  See? She was imagining things again. Stupid, stupid. And it wasn’t even the cold this time, couldn’t blame incipient hypothermia. The last time she’d imagined a voice in the dark, she had magically conjured Garrett, and that had been the single most amazing moment of her life.

  Okay, second.

  “You may speak. I allow this.” Words again. Limontour’s voice. Out loud.

  From the doorway.

  A scuff against the smooth metal floor. Soft-soled shoes.

  Tiny monster teeth bit her spine. She focused on the light.

  “Listen, self. Limontour is not here,” she said out loud, her noncalibrated voice warbly and thin. “I am just going a little crazy, which is not unexpected considering the changes to my organizational hierarchy and the missing…”

  “Be still, or this will hurt.”

  Frozen. Not cold, but still frozen. Unable to move. Like when he’d stilled her borrowed mech-clone bodies in the cage. When Limontour had removed her will.

  She couldn’t pull in enough air. Breath was supposed to be autonomic, but her body sucked and blew alarmingly fast now and still there wasn’t enough oxygen. Dizzy. Cold. Rapid pants through parted lips. She couldn’t turn. Couldn’t run.

  He liked arranging them thus, looming his long body over hers, making her feel small.

  It was the cold, the eddies in the room moving her hair aside, ringing her throat. Not his hands.

  And there was no pressure. Not really.

  No air.

  “He isn’t here,” she said again, pushing her voice louder, defiant. Tears rolled down her face. She couldn’t stop them. She was going crazy. “You can’t be here. I disabled electronics on the mountain. Disabled them all for miles. And yours were old. You said so. Defective. First generation alterations, unshielded against EMP. I killed you.”

  “Those weren’t my only alterations,” Limontour murmured, slipping in close behind her, “simply the first ones. Later, I acquired medical nanites, in case of injury. Ironic you never identified them, no? Considering what you are.”

  “No,” said Chloe. “That’s not true. I would have known. I would have stolen them. I would have grown. I would have kicked your ass.”

  “Shielded nanites. Builders, sleeping at first, and later repairing, after your little fit. La Mars Madrid warned me that you were a danger, but she did not warn you properly, against me.”

  Chloe focused on the light. Armband. Lasers in it, too. A revelation and a weapon, all in one. She could reach it. She could turn. She could win.

  She could kill.

  Again.

  No. Please. I don’t want to hurt anybody. Not again. I just want to live.

  Breath on the back of her neck. His teeth on the corner of the press seam that tracked along her spine.

  She lurched, reached for the armband, for the LED. It slipped through her fingers, and she fell hard against the metal floor, and not alone. Weight pressed her flailing body, too big, too strong. Limontour blotted out the light, but she did not stop reaching for it.

  There was a sound.

  Loud. Humongous.

  Explosion?

  Gun.

  Pain.

  Dark?

  No please, no darkness. I am a thing that sees.

  • • •

  Garrett was halfway down the ramp, heading back to her, when he heard the gunshot.

  Like territory disputes from his childhood. He knew that sound.

  “Chloe!” His own hoarse yell preceded him down the hallway, chased by the lighted vambrace. He charged the laser in it as he ran.

  He hadn’t seen any fresh footprints at the dugout where he’d come in. Yet she had not been alone.
Someone had been here with her before.

  Had hurt her. Captor. Kidnapper. Why, why, why hadn’t hunted that fucker down before, if only to kick its corpse?

  “Chloe!”

  She wasn’t answering. Not like her. Not like her to stay quiet. His Chloe never stopped talking.

  Long hall. Many doors. Tight spaces. He thundered through it, chasing his light.

  Halfway there, and he heard her voice. Finally. But small. So small. Too small.

  “No,” she was saying. A hiss of an indrawn breath and, “Oh no, it hurts.”

  And another voice, lower, softer. Garrett stormed through the doorway just as the tall man said, “I will heal you, and you will thank me for it. My adoring art...”

  It didn’t occur to Garrett to ask what had happened or who this was or what the villain’s plans might be. He took in the tableau in one sliced second, reacting before his brain could even catch up. Grasping the figure by its soft-cloth collar, hauling it away from her.

  She was stained red, and the floor was slippy with it.

  Her blood.

  Garrett did not ask questions. He was vengeance and terror and pain, feeling in his own body what losing all that blood must have felt like for her. The instant knowledge charged him with fury as the laser charged with heat.

  Glasses clattered to the metal floor, obsolete tech crushed beneath Garrett’s boot.

  “What is—”

  Class 4 high-energy lasers are like fire knives. They don’t inflict death all at once. When they burn into flesh, they explosively vaporize surrounding tissue, killing slowly over several seconds. Long seconds. To effect a sufficiently deep and fatal cut, a wielder must clamp his subject, hold it immobile or targeted if the beam is on a rail mount, while the laser does its work.

  Garrett set one forearm across the longer man’s neck, hauled his subject tight against his own body, hard, and let the laser bore its way through, from liver to guts, cooking Limontour inside out. Sizzle and heat and meat burning and desperate gargling sounds from the dying man’s throat. Reek billowed from the body evacuating its bowels.

  Chloe had stopped talking again. She was on her hands and knees in the crimson pool, a gun on the floor beside her. She turned, slipping first and then settling. She looked up at him with wide dark eyes. Old eyes. Deep eyes. Chloe eyes.

  Crying. His Chloe was crying.

  “Don’t watch,” he told her. Shit. His voice was full of tears, too.

  “I have to.”

  So she watched him kill her captor, her enemy, the person who had broken her. And who had also made her. She watched without emotion, her face set as if someone had carved it of stone and then washed it with water.

  No. With tears.

  But her gaze was not on the dying man, no matter how he flailed or howled or smoked. It was Garrett she watched, carefully. Persistently.

  She saw him. All of him. At his very worst.

  The air between them formed a solid thread along their gaze, tying them together as they wove this moment into memory, holding them both up. He might have wilted if she hadn’t been there. He might have faltered. God knew he didn’t want to be himself right now, to be doing the thing he was doing.

  Dealing death was the antithesis of him, his opposite and nemesis. He knew what death did, not to the body that died, but to all the bodies left behind. And the souls they contained. Death rejected them, abandoned them.

  And though he’d never explained this, any of this, to Chloe, that connection, the thread between them swore he needed no words. Not for her. She just understood.

  I would do anything, become anything, for you. Even this. Even death.

  The fiend in his grasp stopped moving. Stopped breathing. He let it slip to the floor.

  Her mouth made the shape of his name.

  And then she closed her eyes, and she fell.

  Chapter Twelve

  ANTARCTICA. AT THE END OF ALL THINGS.

  He couldn’t stay in that room. He needed to contact Vallejo again. Maybe the satellite was still over them, within com range? He had to try.

  But also he couldn’t leave her behind, alone.

  So he packed her wound against further blood loss, ripping bits from her skirt and the liner from a coat. He wrapped her in synthetic fur, with a nuclear device at her feet for warmth, and carried her up to the entrance, to that little coat closet by the door. If there was a satellite signal to be snagged, it ought to come through clearly up there.

  She wasn’t conscious, but she breathed. So for a lifetime, Garrett held her, the wrapped-up bundle of her, and told her stories.

  Not good ones. He wasn’t a storyteller. Shitty late-night binge-watch stories. Long thready comic book arcs. Origin stories and apocalyptic stories and conspiracy stories and tragic redemptive tales where the superhero gets shit right with his dad. Why did none of the stories Garrett loved have happy endings? They all ended in fire and ash.

  He would never get this smell out of his nose. It clung to the fine hairs there, the smell of a man dying. Fire and ash.

  But also, his arms would never forget the way it felt to hold Chloe. And to hoard the memory of the one, he would endure the memory of the other.

  Always.

  “I promise you,” he told her. “I promise you all the things. Whatever you want. Bodies or chocolate or living right out in the open just the way you are. It’s all fine. The zealots can come for you, the free-fae and their Machine Rebellion, too. Fuck ‘em all. I’ll keep you safe. I promise. Just please don’t leave me. I can’t…”

  “Oh yes you can,” whispered the woman in his arms. “You can do anything. My. Amazing.” She tested her too-pale lips, moistened them with her tongue. “You.”

  Her eyes came open slowly, like moving the lids took too much effort.

  “Fig…”

  “You used to do that a lot, you know.”

  “Do what?”

  “Tell me stories. When I was new. When we were alone. You told me beautiful stories, and I believed them all.”

  “I will tell you every story I know, I swear to God, Chloe, but right now I need you to tell me… What can I do? What hurts? I packed the wound and applied pressure but I don’t…Don’t you have some emergency medical training or something, from back when you embedded in Mari? She got shot and you fixed her up. Tell me what to do.”

  “Oh, right. I did. But Mari’s body is better.” Her eyelids looked heavy, like they wanted to close. “Infused with nanocytes, self-repairing body. This one, not so much. I’ve been fixing it. On the inside. You human people are so complicated. Many systems. And they each need so much…love. No, not love. Energy. Circulation. Why did I say love?”

  Because he was thinking it? Because she was made of it? Because of all the promises and possibilities that swirled between them, fragile frozen things, and he couldn’t let them break.

  “I talked to Vallejo,” he said, checking her swaddle of coats, checking the heater at her feet. Holding. Holding her. “They’re coming for us. We just have to hang on.”

  “Fibber.”

  “Now wait, didn’t you say I always come through on promises? That I’ve spoiled you?”

  She smiled, parted lips, but her breath was coming way too fast. Moisture beaded her forehead. “Completely spoilt.” Holding the smile. Holding. But the eyelids fell, and her smile slid off.

  She went on in small, breath-filled bursts, “Remember when I asked you what naked felt like, and you said, it was raw and painful, like getting a cut but not having any bandages or glue or medics around, and you just stand there watching the blood pour out of your body and you’re too stunned to do anything.’ You remember that? You were so right. I mean, now that I have experienced both naked and blood loss, I confirm the parallel.”

  “It really doesn’t surprise me that you can remember every word I’v
e ever said.”

  A tiny crease formed between her brows. “Only I can’t. Remember, I mean. There are holes in me, big black spaces of memory. But you…your words. Permanent memory, I guess. You are hard-coded at the core of me.”

  Something huge expanded inside him, filled every space, an affirmation-filled balloon. That’s totally what you are for me, too, he wanted to say, but something blocked his throat. It tasted like tears.

  “Garrett,” she whispered, “This body is too big, too complicated. I’m losing it.”

  Terror strummed his limbs. “No you aren’t. You shielded a whole continent, Fig. You—“

  “I was in the plane then, though,” she reminded him. “I was many. Now I am so few, and there isn’t a bigger system for me to hook into. I can reprogram nanites for medical repair, but there just aren’t any available. No remnants here, nothing. This is the quietest place in the cosmos. Like deep space and…dark.”

  Her eyelids lost their fight. Closed.

  “Hold on, honey,” he said, the words cracking on their way past his lips.

  “Yes, good idea. Hold on,” she repeated in a wisp of a voice. “I’ll be right back.” He felt the moment that she went away, but he would not believe it was forever. She wasn’t dying. Couldn’t be. He knew what death looked like, and there was no way Chloe would ever get to such a state. She was beyond such things.

  He shook with…hell if he knew. Fear? Anger? Cold?

  But he held on, by a thread, tethered by the certainty that Chloe remained inside this strange body, casting her nanotechnological magic.

  He forced himself to wait. To trust. She would come back. She would open her eyes again.

  So long as she breathed, he could hope.

  • • •

  Chloe had never done so much with so little. With its blood volume reduced to below twenty percent, the body had entered hypovolemic shock some time ago. She’d been plugging fissures, coagulating as fast as her peripherals could function. But when she focused too hard on repairing one organ, closing one wound, other processes suffered. She’d dropped the body into a coma initially, to give herself space to work. And that had been good.

  For a while, it had been good.