by Beth Revis
And then I can make out one word from our pursuers.
“Here.”
They’ve found us.
Jack slips his hand over my face, clamping my lips shut. And it’s not until then that I realize what voice I heard before, the person who said, “Here.”
Akilah.
I creep closer, shaking off Jack’s hand and moving toward the light. From the narrow crevice in the wall, hidden from view, I get a glimpse of Akilah’s face. This is my friend, my very best friend, my sister. My eyes are thrown wide open, drinking up Akilah’s image in the pale light of the lantern clipped to her side. She’s aged, just a little, some of the baby fat around her cheeks gone, replaced with sharper lines. Her eyes are deep brown, but hooded and shadowed. Her hair—she always used to wear it in twisty braids that snaked down her back, or in a poofy cloud around her head, but it’s shaved off now, nothing but curly black tufts close to her skull.
She looks different, but also exactly the same.
“She’s nearby,” Akilah says in a harsh, emotionless voice.
“A tracker,” Jack whispers.
My heart sinks. I quietly pat down the clothes I’m wearing—a simple tank top and jeans, no different from what I usually wear. And I can’t find a tracker on them. Just like Jack had a tracker on him that enabled me to find him, I must have something on me—something that led the enemy straight to me. Enemy… she’s the enemy now. My stomach sickens to know that I think of Akilah as a person to fear and avoid.
“But I can’t see her.” Akilah continues. She must be speaking to someone—whoever is issuing her orders. There’s a pause as she waits for commands, then I hear her say, “Yes, ma’am.”
I shut my eyes. Prime Administrator Young. She’s controlling Akilah; she’s sent her on a manhunt.
“Ella!” Akilah shouts. “Ella, where are you?”
And she sounds so much like my friend that I ache to call back. Jack’s grip around my mouth tightens so forcefully that my entire body is drawn back against his.
“Ella!” Akilah calls. “I escaped the military! I… I need your help!”
Her words sound sincere, but her face is utterly blank.
“I’m hurt!” Akilah says. If I shut my eyes, it sounds just like the Akilah I knew. But if I watch her, I can see—there is absolutely nothing left inside of her of the person I used to know.
She isn’t my friend. She isn’t Akilah. Not anymore.
“Ella, please!” Akilah’s voice breaks over my name, and it sounds as if she is in true pain.
I peel Jack’s hand from my mouth. He resists, but he has nothing to worry about.
I’m not going back to her. I’ve seen exactly what Akilah has become, and it’s not anything I recognize.
Akilah pauses—receiving new orders from PA Young after I don’t fall for her tactic. Akilah mutters her consent to something, then turns.
It’s only then that I remember that it was two people in the tunnel, two pursuers chasing us in the darkness. The second woman steps forward, and I see her through the sliver of rock we’re hiding behind.
Mom.
forty-seven
Akilah’s voice cuts through the dim tunnel. “Ella, we know you’re nearby. We don’t want to hurt you. We just want to take you home.”
I don’t move. My fingers curl into fists and my teeth clench, but I don’t move.
“You give us no choice,” Akilah says. “If you don’t come out or reveal your location in thirty seconds, I will kill your mother.”
I am stone. I am stone. That woman is not my mother and I will not move I will not go to this thing that wears my friend’s face I am stone I am silent I am immoveable.
Through the narrow slit in the tunnel wall, I see Akilah raise her gun and press the barrel to my mother’s head. Not my mother, not my mother, that thing isn’t my mother.
“Ten seconds,” Akilah says in a voice devoid of all emotion.
I am stone.
Akilah pulls the trigger.
My mother’s head bucks back—but doesn’t break. The flesh of her face splatters and shatters, revealing a glint of metal beneath.
Not bone.
Metal.
“Ella!” the thing with no face calls using my mother’s voice.
My heart thuds in my chest. I taste bile.
Akilah aims the gun again, pointing for my mother’s left eye. She pulls the trigger again, and I hear the bullet ricocheting around the solid metal of my mother’s skull. Her body convulses chaotically, the bullet pulling her head left and right. And then her body collapses, as empty as a rag doll. She falls to the stone ground of the tunnel, broken and gone and dead.
It’s not my mother, it’s not my mother, I know it’s not my mother—but I cannot choke back the sob of grief rising in me.
Akilah’s head whips around, her eyes falling on the hidden passage in the wall. She holsters her gun, then pulls another weapon from her hip.
It’s a small gun, and the bullets inside it glow like solar glass, glittering in shimmering gold.
“Shit!” Jack shouts. “Move! Move! Move!”
Behind us, Xavier and Julie scramble deeper into the cave, but it’s too late for Jack and me, so much closer to the wall. Jack throws me down and covers my body with his just as Akilah pulls the trigger, and the stone wall of the tunnel explodes in rubble. Dust clogs the air and debris rains down. A heavy rock slams into Jack’s back, so violent that I feel the force of it through him.
Akilah steps through the smoking rock.
“Hello, Ella,” she says. She lifts Jack bodily off me, and tosses him against the wall.
I cower at her feet. I do not understand what happened to her, all I know is fear.
Something—someone—Julie—slams into Akilah’s side, throwing her off-balance and forcing her to stumble back. Quick as lightning, Julie kicks Akilah in the side, then slams her fist into Akilah’s solar plexus. It doesn’t incapacitate her, but Akilah moves back, raising her arms warily in defense.
I scramble over the broken rock to Jack. “Are you okay?” I gasp, running my hands over his body. Between the rocks crashing on him and Akilah throwing him, I expected at least a broken bone, but while he’s dirty and grimy and his clothes are shredded, he is, thankfully, miraculously, fine.
I pull Jack deeper into the tunnel, out of the way. Akilah and Julie circle each other like starving wolves, each about to strike. Akilah tries to move toward me, but Julie blocks her, using her distraction to slam her elbow into Akilah’s collarbone. It is Julie, though, who screams in pain at the move—Akilah’s bones must be made of that same impenetrable metal as Mom’s.
I see the determination in Akilah’s eyes; I see the exact moment when she decides that she will end Julie quickly and get it over with.
I cry out a warning, but it’s too late—Akilah leaps at Julie with speed I didn’t think was humanly possible—it’s not humanly possible, she’s not human, I remind myself—and Julie crumples to the ground. But—not quite. Her leg sweeps out at the last moment, knocking Akilah off balance.
As soon as her body hits the ground, Xavier erupts from the shadows. He slams himself on top of Akilah, and in the dim light, I see a glint of something silver.
A needle.
He plunges it into Akilah’s skin. Akilah has just a moment to curse—and then she’s out.
I stand, half expecting her to jump up and attack again.
“Is she—?” I ask.
“Asleep,” Xavier grunts.
“It’s okay,” Jack says. “Xavier’s a med.”
Xavier shrugs. “Or I would be if I’d finished school.”
My eyes drift past the broken wall, to the tunnel with the magna-track and my mother’s body.
Jack reaches for me, but out of the corner of my eye, I see Julie hold him back. I stumble over the wall, and kneel beside my mother’s body.
Not my mother. I have to remind myself of that. Beneath her neck, where the bullets didn’t strike, she has eve
ry appearance of Mom. The tiny mole in the hollow space where her collarbone connects. The soft hands, the long fingers.
But her face was blown off by Akilah’s gun blast, and beneath it is metal.
There is blood—so much blood—or, at least, something red and sticky like blood. And there is flesh here, and skin, the skin feels real. But her skull is metal. Her eyes—her eye, there’s only one left now—looks like a human eye. It dangles from veins, like a human’s eye would. But there is an odd sheen to it, and I think I can see the edge of a lens embedded behind her pupil.
Sparks of electricity flicker, and through her skull, I can still see the small whirr of gears. She is not yet dead, even now.
“We have to go.” Jack’s voice cuts through all the dark, horrific thoughts cluttering my brain. “There will be more coming, now that these two are down.”
“Trackers,” Xavier says in his gruff voice.
“Where?” I ask. “I looked, I don’t have any on me.”
“Come here.” Xavier lifts the flap of one of the pockets on his cargo pants, and pulls out a flashlight and a small med-kit. He sets the flashlight on its end, illuminating a sphere around us. Snapping the med-aid kit open, he pulls out a small scanner and runs it over me.
“Damn,” he mutters, reading the scanner.
“What?” I ask. I try to look over his shoulder, but can’t see anything.
Xavier silently hands over the scanner to Jack.
“What?” I ask again, growing nervous.
“You have a significant proportion of bots,” he says. “I haven’t seen this high of a presence of nanobots since my time on the lunar warfront. I’m surprised you don’t have bot-brain, to have this many nanobots in your system.”
I bite my lip thinking about the way I injected myself with the extra dose of nanobots earlier. Maybe the nanobots I injected in myself were the result of the weird abilities I’ve been having, as well as the hallucinations. I had been so careless, just thinking of giving my mother some happy memories and time away from her disease. I glance down at the broken body of the thing that looked like Mom. How long has Mom been… this? Did I give myself a chance of bot-brain to make this robot have a reverie? No—that’s impossible. Robots don’t have memories; they can’t have reveries.
I rub my bare arm self-consciously, the movement becoming more anxious. My fingernails dig into the skin on my arms. I want to peel it away, rip the nanobots from my flesh and crush them under my heel. But of course, it doesn’t work that way. Nanobots can’t be seen, much less pulled out.
“And there are tracker bots in her system,” Xavier adds.
My eyes shoot to him. He nods. “You don’t have trackers on you,” he says, rummaging in the med-kit. “They’re in you.”
“How?” I gasp, holding back a gag of disgust. How could someone have injected nanobots into my system without my knowing? And who? Who would want to track me that way? I’m not important.
Xavier holds up a syringe he found in the med-kit. “I can’t get them out,” he says. “But I can kill them. This will only destroy any nanobots that are designed for tracking purposes—it kills any geo-locating signals, nothing more. The rest of the bots in your system… I’ll have to analyze them before we do anything else.”
I hate the idea of dead nanobots floating in my system, but I hold my arm out. Xavier slips the needle into my skin, and I gasp with pain—needles are almost never used now, and I’ve only seen them when Mom had an IV or something from the hospital. Xavier swipes the puncture mark with antiseptic and sprays it with Band-All before packing away the med-aid kit again.
“We should go,” Julie says. She pushes off from the wall she’d been leaning against. Her lip is split, and angry red marks already indicate the developing bruises all over her body. Even Xavier, caught in the debris, has not escaped unharmed. “They might not be able to track the princess over there now, but they know where these things were for sure, and now that we’ve taken them both offline, they’ll be sending in replacements.”
Jack nods. “Right,” he says. “Let’s split up. Xavier, can you carry Akilah?”
Xavier nods and picks my friend—the thing that looks like her—I don’t even know any more. But he picks her up easily.
“You and Julie go to war. I’ll take Ella, and we can go to sleep, then stay awake.”
“Sleep?” I ask.
“Code, stupid,” Julie says, already pushing Xavier further down the tunnel. “That thing is still alive, it might be recording.” She jerks her head to my mother. While the lens in her eye is shuttered and she is completely motionless, there is still electricity sparking in her gaping skull. It may not be beyond repair.
“Come on,” Jack says, pulling me back into the hidden cave that we’d been crouching in before Akilah and Mom arrived.
The darkness envelops us.
forty-eight
“Through here,” Jack says, pushing me into a narrow space. It’s not until I stumble over them that I realize there are steps. We’re not just in a small crevice in the tunnel system; we’re in a separate cavern, a whole new tunnel, far older than the ones the Zunzana used. As I inch my way up the uneven steps, Jack follows, near enough that I can feel his body heat in contrast to the cold, damp stone.
“They won’t be able to find us here,” Jack says, trudging up the steps behind me. “I think.”
“You think?”
Jack’s long strides make me pick up my pace as I follow him up. “I mean, I hope. But…”
“But…?”
“But we should keep going, that’s what I’m saying. Come on.”
The only sound in the cramped, narrow space is my and Jack’s footsteps on the slick stone. We slide on it every once in awhile, and my hands and knees are bruised and scratched by the time I climb the last stairs. This tunnel is ancient—so old it feels almost as if it were made by nature, not man, but the stairs we just climbed were clearly manufactured, albeit several centuries or more ago.
Jack grabs my arm and pulls me closer to him as he flicks on a small penlight I didn’t know he had.
“We’re finally here,” he says, his voice ragged from the exertion of climbing the steps.
“And where is here?”
“The cata—the exit,” he says quickly, but I already caught the word he was trying not to say. I take the flashlight from his hand and cast it around the tunnel.
It is filled with dead bodies.
Well, not bodies.
Skeletons.
Hundreds and hundreds of them.
“What is this place?” I whisper.
“Saint Paul’s catacombs,” Jack answers. He crosses the cavern and sets up his flashlight in the center of the room on a raised, circular dais. It casts light and shadow around the room. The entire area is carved directly from the rock. The smooth, slick floor, the low ceiling, the indentations in the walls filled with bones.
Through a stone window, I can see a long row of rectangular indentations carved into the rock, almost like narrow beds, each one filled with a skeleton. Many of the skeletons are too big for the indentations, and whoever laid the bodies there bent the arms and legs so they would fit.
“It was made in the Roman times,” Jack says. His voice is soft, but it bounces around the stone walls so that it sounds like each of the skeletons whispers to me. “The ancient bodies are long gone, but when the Secessionary War broke out, they started using the catacombs again, putting bodies in the loculi after they died.”
“They?” I ask.
“The poor. The ones who can’t afford cremation. When the bombs hit Valetta and the other towns, whole families were killed. But their friends and relatives didn’t have the proper materials or knowledge for preparing the bodies, and people who came here to entomb the dead started to get sick. The Zunzana closed off the catacombs again, fairly early on, and people had funerals at sea instead. That’s what the poor still do, the ones in the Foqra District.”
I’m reminded of what
Jack said about the Zunzana, that it had existed for years before him, an organization that worked silently, correcting the mistakes of the government. It had once been vast and influential enough to help people bury their dead in wartime—and now it was just three teenagers, struggling to show the world an unspeakable evil.
The skeletons here are all blank, devoid of any personal features, most of them wrapped in a thin linen cloth. Some are only bones, but there are still several that have a slimy, waxy sheen to them. It is dank and dark here, but also cool, and the bodies do not rot as quickly as they would above ground.
I’m starting to envision faces on the cadavers. They didn’t die that long ago. These are not bodies from the ancient days; these people could have been my relatives. My grandparents, the uncle I never met, the cousins I never had.
And then I see a small hole carved into the wall, no longer than my arm, and a tiny skeleton inside it, and my heart cries out in horror. My hand shakes as I raise it, resting on the damp stone wall just below the baby’s tiny, bone fingers.
Beneath it is a slightly smaller crevice, and inside, the skeleton of someone a bit younger than me. A glint of gold shines in the light—a tiny metal bumblebee like the pin Jack wears, resting where the kid’s heart should be. These bones belong to someone like Jack. Someone like Charlie, the kid who ran off and distracted the police so I could escape. I gasp, overwhelmed by the emotions I’ve been trying to hold back for so long. I swallow down the lump in my throat. I cannot cry. I cannot cry.
I cannot stop crying.
Jack rushes around the table and touches my shoulder, hesitantly. I jerk away from him. I don’t want his comfort. I don’t know him, even if he thinks he knows me. But my eyes are blurry and burning, and I can’t choke down the sob rising in my throat.
I don’t know what it is. Seeing the dead bodies of children who died before I was born, victims of a war they never had a chance of winning? Or knowing that, when my body is dead and I start to rot, maybe it won’t be a human skeleton that will rest in my grave. I might not rot at all. I might be nothing more than an android, and death is as simple as a kill switch behind a bypass panel. What else can I be, to have a nanobot count like I do, to be able to do the things I have done?