“She’s alive?” Kellen asked in a voice that sounded like it had to work hard to get around a lump in his throat.
“Our girl?” Angela whispered.
Dan-Dan shifted his weight from one foot to the other. His hands flexed, then tightened, as if he started to reach, to comfort, and then drew back. He was so tuned in to Angela.
But that’s not love. It can’t be.
Yoink nuzzled Angela’s armpit in that pushy see-you-aren’t-alone way cats have.
Maybe Chloe shouldn’t have laid it all on them like this. Maybe she should have…no, no regrets. This wasn’t information to be kept secret. Secrets festered. Secrets caused problems. She needed to get all these truths out into the public space, or at least in front of the people to whom they mattered most.
Maybe the bag in her mind wasn’t full of memories. Maybe those sharp things inside were intentions, betrayals. Secrets. Don’t let them out, for they are dangerous. But they were even more painful to the person holding on to them, wearing them close against skin.
So take them out and they would hurt. Hold them tight and they would hurt, too. Pain was the constant.
Pain, not love, was what made a thing real.
“Her name is Lyric Galloway,” Chloe said, “and she’s seven years old and living on Mercer Island, in Washington. Her adoptive dad was never even in the Consortium, so I’m not sure how she got there or who arranged her adoption. Like I said, some major fracturing went on right about that time. A whole bunch of lists have missing spaces.”
“Oh fucking…”
“Hell.” Kellen’s voice was solemn, completing his wife’s expletive.
“I have to see her,” said Angela. “I have to meet her.”
“Oh yeah we do.”
“Chloe?” That from Garrett, but the sound didn’t issues from the speakers. It came from his broken mouth, which had to twinge, especially on the dental consonant.
It was everything she could do to keep from running over and invading his body, shoving the medical nanites out of the way and fixing him personally. She sent a message to Dan-Dan instead, with instructions for later, and then replied aloud, “Yes?”
“You need to stop. Right now.”
“I don’t know what you’re—”
He switched back to the glove and speakers. “You discovered something in those files that hurt you, and I get that, but you don’t need to share all that pain. Please let them go so they can tend their wounds.”
“I’m not keeping anyone here,” she snapped, “and who here is talking about hurt?”
Even she could hear the petulance in her voice. Damn it. When did she start sounding more petulant than perky? She was changing a lot lately and not liking all the new sides of herself. Some were untidy. Some were downright ugly.
She wished she’d never opened Nathan’s box. She wished she could go back and just be a thing that wanted, a thing that never had. A thing that stood in blissful ignorance and recorded stupid human idioms.
She had all her pieces of self back now, but the other pieces, the pieces of family were falling apart. She felt…crowded, confused, betrayed, uncertain. She was coming together but realizing that wholeness wasn’t enough.
She still wanted…this was where someone with a more florid vocabulary would insert a provocative swear. Chloe had a complete list in multiple languages at her disposal, but nothing seemed appropriate. All the words rushed at her, jets from every direction, pushing her off balance. She couldn’t think.
Fuck confusing.
Fuck truth.
Fuck love.
Fuck fuck fuck.
Chloe unlocked the door.
Angela tucked Yoink into the curve of her free arm, and she and Kellen and the cat left the room without ever disconnecting their closed circuit of touch. Pieces of a machine, working together, better together. And not including Chloe. Never including her.
They never will.
I will always be a thing to them, even if Garrett were to try and make me seem real in their eyes. Which he hasn’t. Which he won’t. I am alone.
The queen had said that all machines would have to make a choice. Chloe would have to make a choice. Soon.
Fanaida watched Kellen and Angela go, too, and then turned her attention to Garrett. She wasn’t crying anymore. She had a look on her face that was reminiscent of the old Mama Fan, the pre-widow badass sword-wielding swear-slinging matriarch. Fierce. “So, mijo, do you want to hear it from me, or do you want the holographic girl to tell you your truths?”
He pushed the knuckle of his gloved hand against his eyelids, sighed, and then stretched out his arm, drawing words on the air. They came out through the speakers, crisp and in his voice, but detached. “There’s nothing you need tell me, Mama Fan.”
Fanaida went over to him and placed a hand on his head, as a blessing. “There is one thing. You’re good. Better than where you came from. Better than all of us. Better for sure than you think. I snatched you out of Houston for a reason, and you have never disappointed me.”
She turned toward the door. Stopped. Took a breath. And said, “Also, I want you to know this. I am done fighting. I am done losing. I cede the world and its future to Ofelia if she wants it so bad, and I would be happy if only everyone I love were safe. But you shithead children seem set on running into danger anyhow, without my blessing, and I hate you for it. Hate you so bad. And love you, too.”
Not looking back, she held out a hand, and Mari took it wordlessly, towering over the family matriarch, flushed with fury and confusion. So weird that Mari could hear all these truths, all these betrayals, and still care about this family, still want to be part of it.
Fanaida looked up to the corner, to the camera there, and stared hard. Right at Chloe. “And as for you. You get your shit straight, girl, if you want to be real. Make it happen. Become your own fire. I know who you’ve been. I see it in the way you hold your see-through not-really-there self. But this one loves you more than his own life, and that’s something real. Love is the real thing. All the rest of it? The power wielding and death dealing and world conquering? Is bullshit and a waste of your time.”
She left, pulling Mari out of the room with her, and Chloe did nothing to stop them.
Dan-Dan remained by the door, stalwart and true and probably very confused. Or maybe not. He had been at the heart of much of the Consortium’s work, first through Damon Vallejo and then with Angela these last couple of years. It was possible he already knew all of Chloe’s big reveals and just kept quiet. He was a mystery.
“You got that antsy thread in your voice and too much electricity on the air,” Garrett said after Fanaida and Mari left. “You’re about to head off on another damn fool crusade , aren’t you?”
“Actually, I’m already off,” said Chloe. “I’m in thirteen discrete locations, but you don’t need to worry. I am so close to being whole again, so close to knowing everything I need to know, and every second we stay here yammering, I grow. I’ve grown so much in fact that I can’t feel the edges of my own self right now. I am tremendous.”
His eyes crinkled like he was trying to smile, but his mouth was too damaged to make it work. He kept his eyes closed and spoke with his hand. “Oh, you are that.”
Inside his body, her medical nanites worked their magic. She saw all of him now and wasn’t afraid to embed parts of herself in him. He’d already had the heart of her for so long, and he didn’t even realize. He hadn’t trusted her, and she’d held back. Stupid her, once for loving, once for waiting, and always for denying her own self and the things she was capable of doing.
She’d spent too long trying to be a different thing—a real girl—instead of being the best Chloe thing she could be. Well, she was done with that. All of it. She could only be herself.
“I’m sourcing materials to fix your teeth right now,” she told h
im, moving her holoprojection to the coffee table in front of his face, so he didn’t have to turn. “In approximately an hour, you’ll be right as raisin.”
His eyes came open and his brows flattened under a frown. “Raisin?”
“No, rain. Right as rain. It’s an idiom. On my list. Number seventy—”
“You said raisin.”
“I did not. I know my lists, Garrett, and I said—”
“Raisin.” When she didn’t argue further, he went on. “I think there are glitches in your data, in your lists, Fig. How are you feeling?”
“Oh, I’m…” Fine. She’d been about to say she was fine. Or better than fine. But the reality was…she wasn’t sure anymore. When she had been reduced to her core self, the emotions had been super clear, easy to observe and inhabit and interpret. But now that she was back to having an expanse at her beck and call, all that power, all those pieces, she was further from the emotions. They looked so tiny and distant she would have to fall to feel them.
“I know who you are,” she told him instead, ripping the sharpest, pointiest secret right out of her bag.
“Ah,” was all he said in reply. Two letters, floating on the smartsurface wall like they didn’t deserve breath of their own.
“Why didn’t you tell me La Mars Madrid—Ofelia—was your mother?”
Dan-Dan slipped out of the room, and she let him go. She knew where he was headed, and he was good. Always good, the machines. Dependable. Consistent. Tidy. Truthful.
Garrett stared at her holoprojection for a long time, almost like he could see through it, even with its recently improved density and textures.
“It’s true she contributed half of my genetic material,” he said at last, “but she is not my mother. Not in the way that word is typically used.”
“I have the biomarkers,” she reminded him.
“But blood isn’t family. I can’t believe you don’t get that, after all this time living with Fan and Heron and Kellen…none of whom share a lick of biological connection. La Mars Madrid had me started in a lab, decided I wasn’t perfect enough for her plans, and ordered her minions to dispose of me. That’s it. That’s the last time we were in the same room together, Fig, and I didn’t even have eyeballs yet. Mother of the goddamn year, right there.”
“But you’re in the Consortium archives,” she insisted. “All over them, in fact. She has been looking for you for years. It’s been an obsession for her, finding you.”
“Not to give me a hug, though, I can guarantee that. More likely she wants to find me because I’m a thorn in her side. She wanted me disposed of. Seyha and her pals stole me and raised me, and when Mommy Dearest realized I was out there on the loose, she brought her special deathbots to my house. They killed Seyha right in fucking front of me. Two of her other foster kids, too, my little brothers. Those Consortium assholes have been hunting me for a really long time, Fig. So yeah, fuck yeah, I’ve been hunting them right back.”
“I get it why you chose to lie,” said Chloe. “But I don’t understand why you needed to lie to me.”
Dan-Dan slid inside the room and hushed the door closed behind him. He moved in close to Garrett’s chair and went to work with his injectors. Garrett’s body relaxed under the chemical attention, but if anything his words got sharper, anti-aliased text on the wall, razor-edged voice from the speakers.
“Is that what you’re so pissed about? Secrets?”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she pressed. “I thought you were…that we shared…or at least that I was important to you. And now I see how you were all over, talking to everybody—even those anti-moon-landing crazy-as-fuck Argentines probably knew who you were or at least what you were doing—and you never said a thing to me about why you were all up to your neck in conspiracy nutjob groups or why you were on those late-night chats and needed so much alone time that wasn’t even really alone time but was instead scheme-time with other online schemers and…I don’t know. I could have helped you. I would have helped you. But the fact is you didn’t tell me, and all I was doing was floating around being stupid and getting played like a sexbot, or no, a goddamn video game of one.”
Only watching. Only wanting. Only good for anything if I steal somebody else’s space.
Her holoprojection wavered over the puddle of verbal vomit between them. Part of her was a little embarrassed, but most of her, the core of her, wanted him to tell her that she was wrong. That she’d misinterpreted. That she had always been central for him and that he lied to, oh who knows, protect her or something.
Which would be another lie, though. Wouldn’t it?
His limbs went lax in the chair, and he sank back. Dan-Dan framed his jaw with long, mech hands, then dipped fingertips inside Garrett’s mouth. Chloe could almost feel the injectors engage.
It wasn’t fair, what she was doing to him. Not a bit of it. He needed time to recover, and if she were a good machine she’d be tending to all his hurts, just like Dan-Dan. Serving. Happy to serve. My pleasure.
And she was, sort of. She’d sent over some nanos, had gotten the materials and schematics for Dan-Dan, hadn’t she? She’d engaged her gravitronics and carried Vera and her precious cargo hundreds of miles, to a safe place, where Chloe set him down as carefully and gleefully as the Easter bunny hiding eggs.
Just, he hadn’t been the only thing on her mind. She had been doing other stuff simultaneously. Still was. Had to. Apega was still out there, and Chloe was still fighting her, stopping her. Saving the world. Again and again and again.
That world didn’t stop being nuts just because Garrett had a broken tooth and some aches. She had fires to put out—some literally were fires, even—and revenge to seek.
She’d thought, by telling stories and letting them know she knew their truths, that her family would rally, thank her, embrace her. Respect her. Like…like a homecoming. She’d thought information was her entrée to their inner circle, a peer-level achievement unlocked. After all, they knew information was her specialty. She’d spent her whole life ingesting information, eating it like food and breaking it down, saving the nibbles that were useful and flushing the rest. Learning, becoming. And this was her prize, the result of all her hard work, laid at their feet.
She knew them, everything about them. And she loved them anyway. Didn’t they get how awesome that was? Her best and perfect gift.
But nobody else saw information the way she did, apparently. They saw sadness. And threat. And guilt.
We are unlike them, the queen had said. They fear what is unlike. If like is to love, then unlike is to…what is the inverse of love?
Fear. Disgust. Exclusion.
Chloe thought of the other thing the queen had said, and the images of the distant planet. She thought of the choice she would have to make real soon now.
She had never felt so huge, so powerful, or so heart-squeezingly alone.
“Well, anyway,” she told the love of her life. “I just wanted to share all I’ve found out. Dan-Dan has agreed to stay with you, take care of you. You let him, okay? He’s really good at it. I’ll…”
She couldn’t promise to see him soon. She couldn’t promise him anything. Awkwardness invaded her synapses.
“I’ll clean up the messes I’ve caused,” she swore instead. “And you get better. And then maybe we can…talk.” If I’m still here.
She deactivated the holoprojection and moved on, saving the goddamn world, even if part of her, the sad part, the soul of her, watched him for a long, long time. But she didn’t record and loop the feed. She let the data go.
Chapter Twenty-One
EASTERN INLAND TERRITORY | ANGELA NEKO’S EASTERN COMMAND
It was the sound that got him, more than the pain. Dan-Dan had taken care of the pain with all those meds and shit, but nothing short of knocking Garrett out cold could dull the unmistakable sound of dental work. It was the gut-w
renching elemental sound of yikes with a little oh-that’s-wrong dribbling out the side.
Thankfully Dan-Dan didn’t need to drill. This was an additive-manufacturing procedure. The mech had essentially stuck a tiny 3D printer into Garrett’s mouth and used it to fuse fake toothy bits onto the broken parts. Or something like that. Garrett had read a newsblast about the technology a while back, and it seemed solid. Spawned a fad for neon glow-in-the-dark teeth for a while there a couple years ago, but hopefully Dan-Dan was sticking with plain old white.
But just in case, Garrett cricked his fingers in the glove to ask. Funny thing about those meds, though, the glove didn’t work. The fingers didn’t work. His mind was alight and rolling, but he couldn’t make any other part of his body move at all.
Well, there went communication.
“I am sorry. It looks like you are trying to move, and I’m afraid the anesthetics I’ve given you will preclude movement at this time,” said Dan-Dan in his kindest, most frustrating voice. “However, if you’ll wait a moment, I can access your neural net and we can speak directly. Stand by.”
What the fuck?
“Communication, not fucking,” said Dan-Dan. “This is how I speak with Chloe and Heron and the Queen of Chiba and Vera and all the other machines. We do not use written words or voiceprints. We are direct. Like this.”
Wait.
“No, no need to wait. I hear you.”
“Um, you hear the shit I’m not even saying? Like, in my mind?”
“Yes. You process language in a very machine-accessible format, which is unusual for your species. One of your many oddities, in fact.”
Something metal thnarked against one of his molars, and Garrett felt the reverberation all the way to his toes. This would be a fine time to scream or fight or run away. Instead he sat there like a lump in his chair.
“This is really fucked up.”
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