"Except I don't know how to do it," I say, "you're talking about this guy."
I point to the assassin's torn body lying behind us, his blood drying in the augmented EMR bay. King Ruin lies in another bay beside him, looking so wan and feeble I almost feel sorry for him.
"Who is he?" I ask, looking around my team. "Does anybody have anything?"
"Nothing," says Ti, "no bonds lead to him and none lead out, and there's nothing in his head but what we've all seen."
"Us," I say.
"Exactly. He was researching Ritry Goligh, pulling everything he could from King Ruin's mind. From the pattern of extensive damage in the King's Solid and Molten Cores I'd say he's been doing it since we half-killed him."
We all go quiet. It's no consolation to learn that the King has been tortured all this time. Instead it sends a thrill of fear shooting through me. In that muddled heap of papers I saw the six of us, with many details of our shared existence before Becoming. The assassin tortured it out of the King Ruin, who tortured it first out of Me.
Maybe this is how he learned to cross the bridge. Maybe he's been building to this moment since we Became, secretly marshaling the brood across the world.
It's an enemy we never even knew existed.
"So we can't kill him," Ray says, spelling it out, "and he's got all King Ruin's brood waiting at his call, desperate for a new leader. What's to stop him teaching them to jack the bridge too, wiping us out? What does that make him, then?"
Nobody answers. There is no answer.
"The new King," Ti says. Her hand has turned pale. "King of us all."
"More than that," I say, "he'll be a god."
Yena spins to me, anger on her face. She was always religious, and will take this as blasphemy. "What are you talking about?"
I turn to Far. I've heard him preparing through the bridge, setting in place a strategy I can't ignore. He takes a breath and says it. "Apotheosis."
Yena looks at him blankly.
"It's an ancient Greek word meaning 'ascension to godhood'," he goes on. "In my research I found ancient records that tell of a secret door into enormous power. The Greeks believed it could be entered through Avernus, the mouth into hell. The Vikings told of Yggdrasil, a giant nine-branched tree that reached into worlds beyond. The pharaohs of King Ruin's era believed in a hole through the sun god's eye which led into a timeless emptiness, from which any part of life could be altered. There are countless stories of those who walked through one of these doors and came back empowered."
"That could just be the bridge in the Solid Core," says Ray, though he doesn't sound so certain. "We do that every day."
"Perhaps," Far allows, "but I think there's something beyond that, a further bridge that leads beyond the aether to a place where all fates collide and all dead Souls return." He pauses. "I've been looking for it, and I think this brood-King is looking for it too. After harnessing his own Disjunct, maybe he's already found it."
This silences us all for a moment, until Ray grunts. "So you have to die to become a god?"
"In mythology, yes. It has to be total Soul-death though, not just a fragment. Only true self-sacrifice can lead to godhood."
Ti speaks up. "What would it even mean, to become a god? What could a god do that we can't?"
Far turns. "I can only imagine. Think about what we do every day, Ti. We speak to each other instantaneously across vast distances, we flit in and out of other bodies at will, able to kill with only a thought. We can't die either, as long as I'm there to catch us. So what can we not do? We can't change the past. We can't raise up a tsunami with a thought. Perhaps a god could do all of that."
Ray gives a low whistle.
"If such an inner bridge exists, we have to find it first."
I nod. This is one step we can take.
"We have to change," I say, taking command. "We don't have the luxury of time anymore; we have to go after this new King before he comes for us. Far?"
Far nods and picks up the thread, bringing up the map of Iquliat with the aether overlaid. He's been leading us here all along, and is about to begin the mission brief when Yena interrupts again. I can feel her emotions roiling on the bonds.
"How are you going to attack?"
Far looks at her. All the chord look at her. This is not her area and she knows it., but she doesn't care. "How? Me, I can see it in your eyes. Tell me how, when Ray said you can't get there any physical way. No Dactyls. No subglacics. So how?"
"Through the bridge," Far answers flatly. Making no excuses. "We core people in Iquliat and we use them as hands for an instant strike. It's the only way to take the brood-King out."
Silence falls for a moment as this sinks in like rain into dry sand. Yena's uncertainty hardens to anger. She looks to Far then back to me. "Is that true, Me? You're saying you intend to core innocents for this attack? It means killing them, you know that."
"We know it," Far says, "it's what we've-"
"Let him speak for himself," Yena snaps without looking. "Me, coring is what King Ruin did, and there's no going back from it. You're talking about mass murder. Tell me this is not your plan."
She must know from my face that it is.
"Innocents will die," Far answers for me. "You're right; we'll kill them and use them. It's terrible, it's something the old King would have done, but how else can we stop him? There is no other way. Would you rather millions become servants of an actual god?"
Yena rounds on Far, on us all. "You're talking about becoming gods yourselves! You're already acting like it. Me, I can't accept this. I forbid it."
She whirls back to me, all her love burning in her eyes. She went through such awful things in the glass menagerie, and for a time I was her savior, but I think not anymore. Maybe I don't deserve to be.
"It's already begun," I say. "I'm sorry, Yena. Far's already selected fifty target hands in Iquliat; solitary, lonely Souls whose loss won't cause too much pain to others. I don't see any other way."
Yena stares at me in disbelief for a long moment, then does something I hadn't expected. She slaps me. It cracks my head to the side, and the clapping sound of her open palm on my cheek rings out around the Wall deck. I turn back to see her finger stabbed at my face.
"You are not a god, Me!" she says with cold certainty in her voice. "You don't get to decide this. People are not your playthings, not pieces on a board you get to throw into any battle you want. This is not the way we win!"
"This is the only way we win," I say. "If you have another I want to hear it. What else can we do? Tell me, Yena, what else can we do?"
Her eyes blaze on mine, and I feel the bonds of love between us gradually burn away. We won't sleep together any more, I see that. We won't love anymore. It's too much. "Not this," she says. "I didn't fight for this, Me, for the war to be reduced to gods hurling people like ammunition at each other, using up the whole world to find a winner. It's not our war anymore, it's yours. You fight it out alone!"
"I would lose, Yena," I say softly. My cheek stings where she slapped me. "We would all lose. Do you think he'd be a fair and equitable god?"
"I don't want any god! Not him and not you. You don't get to decide for me. None of you fragments do!"
Her eyes shine with tears now and I feel King Ruin's menagerie uppermost in her thoughts, where every Soul was replaceable and instantly replaced. King Ruin kept them as entertainment and used them as fuel.
"It's not the same," I try to explain, "it's not because I want to, Yena, it's what has to be done."
She blinks the tears away and I feel the final cog in her mind turn against me. How could it be any other way? "So would you core Loralena? Would you core Art and Mem and use them as fuel if you had to? Or do they get special dispensation, the most favored of your toys?"
It stings worse than the slap. We've never talked about Loralena before. "That isn't fair. We won't core children or families-"
"So you get to judge!" she shouts. "You decide who gets to live or die
?"
Now I give a gentle smile. This, then, is the difference, and why it has to be me. I never had a mother or a father, I was never wanted, and now I get to judge the whole of the world. I watch as Yena's beautiful, damaged Soul turns against me for it. She'll hate me now, and that is the last thing I want. I love her and I don't want this, but I'm powerless to change it. What kind of god would be so weak?
"I'm sorry," I say.
She almost starts to argue more, but I can feel her spirit cracking. It's a betrayal too far, showing me how deeply I have hurt her. Her eyes brim with tears as she sees me changing before her. I am the one on the path to godhood, after all, not her. I am the one who will choose who lives and who dies.
"Would you core me too?"
Now the tears come to my eyes. I owe her the truth, even as it comes to me in the moment. Once I've started dow this path, I can't stop at innocents. I can't stop at children or families or people I love. I have to take it to the end.
"Yes," I say, then Lag her intent before she can strike me again, and rage, and plead any longer. There is no time. The pain falls from her eyes and she wilts, caught gently by Ray.
She is just the first. I see I've run this war like a democracy for too long, and that has to change. I want nothing more than to hold Yena myself and take it all back, to apologize and say it's not who I really am, but it would do no good. It's said, it's done, and this is our world now.
9. YENA
We plan the strike for the morning, four hours away, and I send the chord to rest and prepare.
I cannot rest.
Yena breathes somewhere far off, in and out, steady as a metronome. I listen to her through many decks of the suprarene, like a voyeur. In sleep her anger is faded; she is the same bittersweet I fell in love with, though that is changing already.
I will miss her, when this is over. I already know she will never be mine again, and I commit to memory every detail of how this feels. I lie in the narrow alcove of my bed, where once she would have rested by my side, and let myself drift on the surface of her dreams.
They are not nightmares, but fantasies. Good things are happening inside her Molten Core, perhaps sparked by her freedom from me. Chimes tolling out with her mother's pulse spell healing and regrowth. I can only guess that rejecting me has led her to some deeper confidence and understanding. I could jack deeper into her mind and know for certain, see the images as her unconscious mind brings them to life and even insert myself into them, but I never would.
To lie here and drift on her deep-wave patterns is more than I have a right to. I think back on our nights of skinship, complex chemical exchanges taken for granted, indulging our body's hormones in a blur of healing. We brought comfort to each other through proximity for a time. It wasn't the horrors King Ruin created of oppressive, caged intimacy; all those bodies piled atop each other in skyscrapers and glass tombs and seaforts in Courts all around the world, slowly going mad.
It was something good. It helped teach us both that people are not the real horror. Bonds between people are what make us strong, not what destroy us. Now our bond is severed.
Rising from the surface of Yena's thoughts, I reach out further, taking the mood of the chord. Ray is asleep, and I have no problem peering into his dreams. Curiously they're not about sex, but about me and Doe. We're arguing about something; the words are indistinct so only the mime of it comes through.
Doe, so brilliant and so white, is shouting at me with her hands raised in fists. I'm shouting back. It's a disturbing image, one I'm tempted to Lag, but that's not for me to do. We agreed early on when we discovered the strange voyeurism of dreaming separate dreams we were all aware of, that while watching would be acceptable, intervention would not.
I let myself drift wider, untangling myself from the angry ghost-bonds of that dream argument, and envelop the suprarene tank with my thoughts. So is on the mapping floor, as always, and grunts in my direction. She's staring at her map as ever, hunting for better information. There are men and women on patrol on the suprarene top deck, looking out over the dunes. Further out, on the three tanks standing in diamond formation nearby, I feel the slow pattern of our hands in their bays, sleeping in unison without dreams.
La is below, her subthonic's screw paused just below the surface; a metal can enclosed in sand and shale. Ti is far off to the north, harbored underwater near Calico, taking on fuel and supplies in secret in preparation to assist our raid on Iquliat. Far, I can't feel. I reach into the bridge after him and find the track marks of his trail, but little more. He's jacking deep, searching again for the path to godhood.
I pull back, allowing this swirl of thoughts to suffuse me. A day ago I was plowing onward and now I am at a crossroads with only terrible options before me. Will I truly sacrifice innocents to bring down the brood-King? Will I truly lose Yena to achieve it?
The answer is yes, I already have.
I long to nestle closer to her, this strange, angry woman I have come to love. I imagine her hair in my face, smelling of desert orchids she must have gone out to fetch from rugged cacti on the desert floor. The flowers bloom once in twenty years, but she would always find them, some kind of reminder that she had control over her life and body. I think of an ancient history where Loralena once loved Ritry Goligh this way, loved our children this way, and wonder if this moment is the echo, or that was.
Thinking of ripples spreading in a pond that never ends, I sleep.
10. BROOD-KING
I wake to an explosion that floods the bonds. I lurch upright as further explosions erupt all around me, physical impacts that rock the suprarene itself and tell me everything I need to know.
We are under attack.
I flash to guards on patrol at the suprarene top, and through them see the night sky swarming with incoming craft. There are hundreds; all manner of helicopters hoving in low over the dune-line, their lights dark but the acrid flare of missile trails lighting up under their bellies.
"So, report," I call.
"I don't understand it, Me," she shouts back, "they crept up on us somehow." I hear chaos through her ears, see flashing red alarm lights everywhere across her the map. "We didn't see them on radar, there was no warning."
More missiles explode on the suprarene's outer hull, sending violent quakes through the superstructure. I reach down to Yena, on her feet now and staring out of her angular porthole window with wide eyes, waiting for me to take command.
This is what I do.
"Ray," I call, sensing him already sprinting up to the helicopter deck, "get our Dactyls up and protect this tank. Ti take out all their craft that come anywhere near, I want the night sky lit up like a supernova. La, you're coming up right now, this instant, to the base of the last borehole, am I understood?"
I know that I am. I start running. At the same time I wake a dozen hands and start them running through the tank like ants in a hive, collecting every living Soul they can find and ushering them down.
"Far, where are you?" I call into the aether, but he's not there, not in Calico or any place this side of the bridge. I reach through the bridge and catch some trace of his passage, gone faint now with the depth, while at the same time I see the one thing that changed everything yesterday, repeated countless times.
The brood are jacking the bridge. Blast waves wash out everywhere I look; bursts of energy that mean we're too late. Their Souls swarm toward us directed by the new King's guiding hand, dozenss of them launched like missiles across the aether; rising up out of the Iquliat cluster, out of neo-Armorica, out of the Arctic fringe and proto-Rusk, from a hundred different points encircling us.
"They're everywhere, Me!" So shouts. "They're coming from everywhere."
The force of their bridge-dives crashes against my consciousness like a flurry of mindbombs, even as the first of them land against my golden shield within the aether, against So's and Ray's and everyone's, where they stab blades into their own hearts and explode.
Disjunct energy
rocks out; unparalleled energy from suicide unleashes upon us, like the moment Doe killed King Ruin but repeated ten times, twenty, one hundred.
I stagger under the weight of it. Every blast against my golden shield shakes me more, and I realize this is the real attack. If anything the physical strike against our tanks is just a cover for this suicidal onslaught, like a rain of meteors flung through the darkness beyond the bridge.
"Help us!" I shout for Far into the aether, but no answer comes, then another missile blast yanks me back into the suprarene and descending stairs madly. I run half-clothed along a smoke-filled corridor until I come up to Yena, staring wild and filled with crippling terror.
"Me," she says, and I feel the glass menagerie foremost in her mind, the fear that she will be put back and tortured forever; I Lag the worst of it with what strength I can muster. I squeeze her arm so tight I know I'm bruising her and run with her back to the stairwell and down, metal-runged steps cutting welts into our bare feet.
More explosions rock the tank, there is the crackle of howitzer fire raking our hull and in the midst of it I send a hand racing sideways to fetch shoes. He meets us at the Wall deck where forty-seven minds remain, still locked into a protective cycle and shielding us on the bonds.
I grab the shoes and put them in Yena's hands. "Put these on and follow the hand," I tell her, while I start pulling soldiers out of the Wall in batches. They all deserve a chance to live.
"Me," says Yena, and I can see she's emerged from shock and can comprehend what's going on. She's been raided before, captured before, but still she's strong. "I'm sorry for what I said. I believe in you."
"I love you," I tell her, for the first time. "I won't let him take you. They won't take any of us again, I promise. Now run."
Soul Jacker Box Set Page 46