24

ABEL’S BLASTER IS BACK IN HIS HAND BEFORE GILLIAN Shearer has finished saying his name. He reaches for Noemi—but she’s already on her feet, her own weapon at the ready. She looks down at the body of Riko Watanabe, and for a moment he thinks Noemi won’t be able to abandon her. Humans behave strangely around the dead.

Instead Noemi says only a single word: “Go.”

He runs for the far door, which leads into a badly damaged corridor. With one leap he’s in the door frame, able to pull Noemi with him. Behind them he hears somebody hoarsely shout, “He’s getting away!”

Are Fouda’s soldiers already after him? Irrelevant. If they aren’t, they will be, and he and Noemi have to run without looking back.

They take off through the long, dark corridor, debris crunching under their feet. Even the emergency lighting took damage here, meaning the small orange beacons are far apart. They dash through an area that must have briefly caught fire; the once-delicate murals on the walls have been charred black. Each breath smells of ash. Through the darkness he can barely make out Noemi, sometimes glimpsing only the glitter of her jumpsuit. With her limited vision, she must be running nearly blind.

“What do we do?” she says. “Literally everyone on this ship is trying to capture us. There’s no safe space.”

“We have to leave the Osiris, and Haven, as soon as possible. The corsair is approximately two kilometers away—”

“Okay, great. We get outside and run for that,” Noemi pants. “We have to find an air lock.”

Under such stress even an experienced fighter like Noemi can make an error in strategy. “They’ll check the air locks first. I believe there’s a breach in the hull not far from the theater. We stand a better chance of escaping through that breach than through any of the doors.”

Noemi is wise enough not to ask the exact probabilities of their success. “Let’s go.”

Abel calibrates his running speed to match Noemi’s. Once they’re on more even footing, he’ll simply pick her up and carry her. “If I’ve calculated Haven’s diurnal cycles correctly, it should be nighttime outside. We’ll have cover of darkness and should be able to get back to the corsair.”

“Without a scratch?” Noemi quips. “Promise?”

“We can take scratches. The corsair must not. I suspect Virginia would refuse to give us a ride back to the Gate. She’d take the Persephone as her bounty.” He means to joke, but the possibility is in fact plausible.

“Wait.” They pause at a sharper bend in the corridor. Abel thinks Noemi’s only catching her breath, but she asks a question. “Virginia Redbird came with you?”

“You know how she loves a mystery.”

She laughs in apparent surprise. She leans against the wall, clearly gathering her strength for their next run. Although Abel should be focusing nearly all his conscious attention on plotting their course, he nonetheless registers that her jumpsuit is extremely low-cut, revealing the curves of her breasts, which rise and fall with her rapid breathing. This should be irrelevant but somehow is not.

Swiftly he comes up with a reason for observing her wardrobe. “You’ll be inadequately protected against the cold.” He gestures at his own white hyperwarm parka. “Once we’re outside I’ll give you this.”

“I found a coat earlier and left it behind, like an idiot. Won’t you get cold, too?”

“I can endure it for considerably longer than a human, more than long enough to reach the corsair. The flight back to the Persephone will also be cold, but should take no more than twenty-nine minutes depending on Virginia’s orbital status.

“I’m calculating our path to the corsair,” he says quickly, turning his head to gaze at a broken light fixture instead of Noemi’s chest. “I should have it in another few seconds.”

Noemi glances at him sideways. “The Persephone? That’s what you renamed the ship?”

“Yes. In Greek mythology, she’s the wife of Hades, the daughter of Demeter. She spends half her time in one world, half in another. In each world she’s a goddess, but there’s no one place she will ever belong.”

“…Oh.”

When he turns to her again, Abel can see realization dawning in her eyes. He’s betrayed his feelings. When will he learn not to do this? Love has to be buried even deeper than he realized.

In a small voice, Noemi says, “You saw that.”

He doesn’t know how to reply except to say, “I know you.”

Noemi shakes her head—not denying him, but as if in wonder. “Sometimes I feel like I’ve gone my whole life just waiting for someone to see me. And you do, Abel. You might be the only person who ever has.”

“Now you know how I felt the day you told me I had a soul.”

Their gazes meet in the darkened room, and Abel realizes he’s holding his breath, which is highly counterintuitive. Yet the impulse is undeniable.

“Running,” Noemi says abruptly. “We should be running.”

“Agreed.” With that they resume their haste, Abel bewildered by his own reordering of priorities. Escape must be their first and only goal.

The ambient temperature drops a full degree Celsius, then lowers still further. Their destination must be within proximity. At last he makes out lighting at the end of one long corridor that has a blue tint rather than the orange of emergency lighting. When he magnifies this sector in his vision, he detects a few stray snowflakes.

In 3.6 seconds, Noemi sees it, too. “The hull breach. We’re almost there!”

Assent seems pointless. Abel runs faster, pushing ahead of Noemi to scout the area. Every meter brings more brightness and sharper cold, until he finally rounds the final turn—

—and stops just short of tumbling down a hundred meters, which even for Abel would be fatal.

He stretches out one arm, which Noemi runs into just after. She gasps in shock. “Oh, my God.”

Even for a soldier of Genesis, that’s only an expression. However, the physical devastation of the ship could well have been wrought by a vengeful deity. The entire Osiris hull has cracked—opening a sort of canyon almost forty meters wide, one that runs almost the length of the ship. From where they stand on the ragged edge, he and Noemi can see nearly an entire cross-section of the ship—each deck its own layer. Dangling sections of wall, flooring, and wires cover the side as though they were vines. Exposed above them is Haven’s night sky, brightened by six of its moons; below, at the floor of this artificial canyon, are drifts of freshly fallen snow.

“How exactly are we supposed to get out from here?” Noemi’s question is valid. What is now the top of the ship stands a solid eight meters above their head, and no uninterrupted framework for their climb readily presents itself.

Abel leans out, examines the wreckage, and comes to a conclusion. “First, we’ll need to climb down this”—he points to a nearby waterfall of dead cables, most of them as thick around as Noemi’s ankle—“to a level approximately fourteen meters below us. From there we can shift sideways and reach that piece of wreckage.” His gesture indicates a latticework of metal that leads very nearly to the top.

Even the most courageous humans are not entirely unafraid of extreme heights, especially in uncertain conditions like the ones they currently face. Noemi appears pale, but she nods. “That looks, um, doable.”

“It is.” At least, he believes so. Testing the weight capacity of that latticework is a task he’ll turn to later.

He slips off his white parka, which Noemi quickly dons. By mutual, silent assent, she prepares to go first—until, in the distance behind them, they hear a thump.

Turning his head to focus better on the sound, he makes out at least two sets of footsteps—still faraway, but heading in their direction.

“They’ve found us,” Noemi whispers.

“Not quite.” He gestures toward the cables leading downward. “You should go on alone.”

“What?”

“They’re only after me, Noemi. I can evade them for a time and escape the Osiris later. You and Virginia could retrieve me then.”

She shakes her head. “I’m not leaving you.”

This is enormously pleasing but poor strategy. “One of us has to go first regardless. It makes more sense for that to be you.”

Still Noemi hesitates. “You swear you’ll follow me? Right away?”

“I swear.” Oaths mean more to humans than to mechs; Abel sees little purpose in promising to do what future conditions may make impossible. But for Noemi’s sake, he will try to obey.

She begins shinnying down the cables, hand under hand, bracing her booted feet against fragments of wall. He watches her carefully until she’s out of sight and only then glances back.

In the darkness, he sees movement. Specifically, he sees a badly broken Tare, one eye missing so that the yellowish glow of her brain circuitry shows through. Behind her, an Oboe straightens, ignoring her shredded left arm and leg, and begins to hobble toward them.

“We have company,” Abel says, knowing Noemi’s still close enough to hear. “Some of Simon’s—playmates.”

She freezes in place; he is able to determine this from the way the cables stop moving. “Can they tell Simon we’re here?”

“They already have.” Abel knows this as surely as if he’d programmed the mechs himself.

“Come on,” she urges. “Hurry. Follow me.”

An altercation with Simon must be very close. Although Noemi wishes to avoid it due to her own fears and prejudices—understandable, if regrettable—Abel welcomes the chance.

He had been absolutely honest with Gillian; he believes he can get through to Simon. Calm him, reassure him, maybe even repair him. As long as that’s true, Abel has to try just as hard to save him as he tried to save Noemi.

She’s the first person who believed I have a soul, he thinks. I must be the person who believes in Simon.

“I’ll be right there,” he murmurs as he gets to his feet.

“Dammit, Abel—”

He ignores Noemi’s fury. The Tare staggers closer, her half-destroyed face more terrible in the brighter light. Abel doesn’t share the instinctive human revulsion at what looks like a life-threatening injury, but there is nonetheless something uncanny about the tilt of her head, the exposed illumination from the circuits of her mechanical brain. When she speaks, she reveals a damaged larynx, sounding more like an ancient type-to-speech reader than either mech or human: “Simon says stay.”

“Are you in contact with him right now?” The mechs seemed linked, before—to one another, and to Simon—which means Simon doesn’t have to be in the same room with the Tare to speak for her. Abel takes one step toward her, but the Tare points and stomps her intact foot.

“No! Simon says stay!”

Finally Abel remembers the game human children play, which for some unaccountable reason is attached to this name in particular. No doubt to a child called Simon, this game was even more appealing. “I’m staying. See? Am I speaking to Simon right now?”

“May-be,” singsongs the Oboe, who continues shuffling closer. Bloody wire hangs from some of the gashes in her leg.

From below Noemi calls, “Abel? What are you doing?” He doesn’t dare follow; at this point in the “game,” he shouldn’t be moving.

Simon is only a confused child, trapped in a mind he doesn’t understand. Abel may be the only individual who can ever help him make sense of it, the one native speaker of a language Simon must immediately learn.

The Tare and Oboe stand on either side of Abel, effectively pinning him with his back to the enormous crevasse. They’re not operating independently; they’re being controlled by Simon with a level of coordination that goes beyond any standard protocols. Queens and Charlies perform military procedures programmed into their circuits, or they can respond to combat cues independently. They can’t do both. Tares and Oboes lack any strategic functionality—one practices medicine, while the other provides entertainment, usually in the form of music. For them to behave as they are now, they have to be operating as though they are parts of Simon’s own body.

“How are you doing this?” Abel looks through the blank golden space of the Tare’s missing eye, hoping Simon is looking back at him. “How do you control the others?”

“Well,” the Tare says, in the suddenly serious way of small children, “it’s like there’s a machine part of me and a me part of me. I have to forget all about the me part of me and just be a machine. That part’s way more fun.”

Abel frowns. Virginia said something like this to him not long ago, that he should embrace his mechanical side more often. He’s always tried so hard to reach for his humanity. He’s not sure how to reverse that.

A skittering sound, then a thud tells him Noemi has successfully reached the lower level from which she might escape. Although he wishes she’d leave the Osiris without him, he understands she never would.

The Tare wobbles forward and puts one hand on Abel’s chest. “You’re like me, aren’t you?”

“In many ways.” Abel smiles in a way he hopes will read as reassuring. “We both synthesize the human and the machine.”

Frowning, the Tare steps back again. Abel curses his own precision; synthesize is too formal a word for a small boy. “You don’t look like me. You look right. I don’t look right. I look all messed up.”

“That can be fixed. Everything that’s wrong can be fixed. You just need to—”

To what? Abel realizes he doesn’t have an answer. The most logical outcome would be for Simon to return to Gillian, who understands both the body and the soul involved far better than anyone else. But Gillian is cut off from her usual resources; if she weren’t, Simon wouldn’t have been re-created so hastily and poorly. Abel would like to take Simon on as a project, to offer him guidance and friendship, and to figure out his inner workings over time, with the help of the excellent scientific equipment available there. But cooperation with Gillian is impossible. Taking charge of Simon would in effect mean kidnapping a little boy, promising to make him better without being certain that was even possible.

“Abel?” Noemi whispers. His sharp ears catch the sound, but responding is still inadvisable.

Through the Tare, Simon smiles. “You’re like me and you’re not like me. We’re alike and we’re different.” The Tare model’s hand fists in the folds of Abel’s shirt. “I want to see how you’re different.”

“I’m not sure that you—”

“I know! I’ll take you apart. Then I can see.”

Abel blocks the Tare’s forearm, breaking her grip on his clothing. He draws upon the few child-psychology texts in his databases and says, simply and firmly, “No.”

Both the Oboe and the Tare seize him, and the Oboe yells, “Simon says!”

With one shove, Abel pushes them both back—but not far. They’re mechs, even if not for combat, and they’re stronger than any human opponent. When they both rush at him, he jumps upward as high as he can, which is just high enough to grab the ridge above them. As he dangles there, the Tare and Oboe leap upward, too. The Oboe doesn’t make it—her broken leg keeps her off balance, and she clatters onto the floor and rolls off into the crevasse. A series of distant crashes makes it clear she’s being dashed to pieces.

One down, he thinks—the Tare is coming nearer, her blank golden light of an eye boring into him.

“Abel!” Noemi cries. “Will you get your metal butt down here?”

My butt is made of flesh and is designed to be pleasant both to see and to touch, he’d like to say, but this information can perhaps wait.

He lets himself drop, falling past the Tare to Noemi’s side, where he catches himself on the floor of her level. Noemi makes a half-strangled sound of fear before he pulls himself up, but the instant he’s next to her, she knows to start running.

They dash across the jagged edge of this broken ship, snow blowing through their hair, the deep fatal drop less than a meter to their left. Abel’s sharp vision and quick analysis allows him to identify the areas they’re running through—a broken-up Turkish bath, devastated living quarters, an upside-down pool—the other half of each mirrored on the opposite side of the ravine. When they run past a transparent wall separating two rooms, a Tare on the other side throws herself against it with such speed and force a human would be knocked unconscious. Noemi has the fortitude to keep going without even glancing sideways.

Abel does not. The Tare claws at the transparent material; there’s no way she could break it, but a Tare model isn’t programmed with that information, and Simon neither knows nor cares.

And it is Simon doing this. He cannot deny that.

“Come back!” the Tare shrieks, her voice saying Simon’s words. “Come back!”

The plea wrenches Abel to the core, but he can’t take the risk. He has to keep running.

They reach the framework he’d seen before, the one that provides a way for them to crawl to the top of the ship. Noemi pauses, panting and clutching at her arm. She must still be feeling intense pain from those cuts, but she says only, “Can we climb it before they get to us?”

“Possibly.” Abel readies himself. “But I can climb one-handed and shoot at the same time.”

“Bet I can shoot and climb, too, if it comes to it.” However, her focus remains above. She turns up her face to the moonlight and starts to climb. Abel follows her, dividing his attention between Noemi’s progress (will her injured arm continue to support her?) and the area below them (in case more of Simon’s “toys” pursue).

Their ascent doesn’t move as quickly as Abel would like. Noemi is undoubtedly wise to pace herself, conserving her lesser human strength, but he can’t forget that Simon or his mechs could reappear at any minute, wanting to play a very deadly game.

Perhaps I can still communicate effectively with him, Abel thinks. Once controlling the other mechs has lost its novelty, Simon will wish for other forms of amusement. I could structure the learning he needs as a series of puzzles he might find enjoyable. He doesn’t intend to give up on the boy yet.

But how is Simon controlling the other mechs?

A far-off glint of light at the edges of Abel’s peripheral vision draws his attention just in time for him to refocus and see the blaster in a broken Charlie’s hand, pointed straight at them.

“Noemi!” he shouts. She responds intelligently by hugging the metal framework, hard.

Charlies have intelligence, too. The blaster bolt is aimed not at them, but at the very top of the framework they’re climbing, and he hits his target. Abel feels the metal shudder, then tilt backward.

“Abel—” Noemi clutches the frame tighter. “We’re falling!”

He can do no more than watch as the framework gives way, toppling into the crevasse in the ship’s wreckage, taking him and Noemi down with it.