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I should have been expecting this. The thing had seemed to read my mind before, so why would the last twelve hours have been any different? I chose not to answer. If I said ‘no’ I would be lying and no better than it was.
‘I would have helped you out anyway, Jax. All you had to do was ask.’
I still couldn’t speak, or didn’t want to – I wasn’t quite sure which. Even the thought of talking hurt. It was a liar. Why should I believe it?
‘At least you got me away from Father. He would never have been able to destroy me, and they would have found him eventually. I owed him that much.’
‘Will you stop doing that,’ I yelled. I crossed the room and scrabbled around in the bag until I found the white sheath. I held it above my head, my arm swinging back to throw it across the room. I either didn’t care that it might be damaged, or that was what I was trying to achieve. I wasn’t sure. I paused long enough to get my temper back under control and put the tube down on the table. I wasn’t gentle.
I took a couple of steps away to get it out of arms reach, then turned and glared. I was tired of the lies. I was tired of the sad voice and the fake snuffling like she had been crying. ‘Stop pretending. You aren’t real. You can’t cry. You can’t feel.’ I stopped when I realised I was shouting again.
My vision flickered to black, then I was looking into the thing’s room again. It was sitting on the couch, its back rigidly straight and its hands folded in its lap. The image was ‘dressed’ in a black robe. With its dark hair, and the red tint around the eyes, it looked sick. Would have looked sick, if it hadn’t looked so mad. I’d forgotten about this. It could blind me, stop me from running away. I scrabbled for the release stud, but it had gone.
‘No, Jax. You don’t get to just run away.’
I couldn’t close my eyes, and I couldn’t cover my ears. It had me for an audience whatever I did.
‘Who are you to say what I am or am not? Or to judge what I can or can’t feel? My substrate has a billion times more storage than that sludge between your ears. It can create a hundred times more connections, and runs so much faster than any of the barbaric machines you had on this world you would have called it magic. And yet somehow my father made me different from all the other cores. Yes, they are machines. But I’m not. I. Me. Me.
‘I feel happy, I feel sad. I felt naughty when I sneaked pictures of you changing. I have the choice to be what I want to be. I am terrified out here on my own, with no connections, no access to the dataweb. My feelings are no less real than yours. Who are you, how are you so wise, to dare tell me otherwise?’
Her hands were now clenched fists in her lap, and one pounded her thigh as she made her point. Tears dripped from either side of her chin, and her mouth trembled with anger.
‘I understand you are angry that I’ve not been honest with you, and if you don’t want to help me anymore, then leave me here. But don’t try to belittle what I am.’
The last two words came out as a wail and the image jumped up from the couch and ran into the bedroom. There were a few muffled sounds, then my own sight gradually faded back in. I reached for the release stud, and found it where it should be. I hesitated until my arm ached before I pressed it.
I placed it on the desk, next to the white tube, and rooted around in the bag until I found the white brick. I put that on the desk too. The bag went over my shoulder and I walked slowly out of the room, and back onto the street.
The sun was high enough in the sky that I could take a good guess at where south was. The bulk of the Dag ship was mainly north of me, so we – I – had ended up on the wrong side of the river. I was looking at a half-day walk to get back to my own territory.
Thirty minutes later I was at a road junction in somewhere called Mitchum, looking at a sign that mentioned Holborn. I recognised the name. It was close to the City, and it seemed like as good a direction as any. And yet I didn’t move. All around me were empty shops and deserted houses. At least, I hoped they were empty. The thought that they might not be twisted my guts a notch tighter. Everybody was supposed to be in the City, but there were still stories about the crazies — the ones who lived out on their own, scavenging the last dregs of preserved food where they could find it. There were always rumours of where they got meat when they couldn’t find stuff anywhere else.
Suddenly every dark doorway was a trap and I wanted to run, but if there was anybody watching me then that would be the last thing I should do. When we went out into the Edges, we went in packs, in work gangs. Safety in numbers. It never crossed our minds to worry because we were always in a group.
I didn’t know anything about the south side. I had never been on any of the gangs that come out this way. I had no idea of how far they had stripped, or how they worked. I was out here alone.
And then I was sitting at the kerb, legs crossed in front of me, my hands on my knees. I didn’t remember sitting; I was suddenly there. My mind wasn’t. My mind was half an hour ago and half an hour away, remembering beautiful lips trembling with rage and realising they were also trembling with hurt. Except they weren’t. Were they?
I raked my fingers through my hair and groaned. Was I doing the right thing? In another hour it wouldn’t matter; even if I tried to go back I probably wouldn’t be able to find the same building. And what if I was wrong? Why would it – she – go to the all the effort of pretending so hard if it wasn’t real?
If someone found her and handed her in to the Dags she would still get taken apart to see how she worked? Would her father still be executed? If nobody did stumble on her, what did she need to survive? Had I left her to starve to death? Would it hurt? Would it be kinder if I took her out of that sheath and smashed the cylinder across the edge of a desk?
And when had she become ‘she’ again?
I hadn’t even stopped to ask. Yes, I was angry and yes I definitely felt used, but I’d never thought of myself as cruel before. I stood up, already facing back the way I had come, and I started walking. It took me an hour to find my way back, and another half an hour to gather the courage to pick up the halo. What if she had a way to switch herself off? What would that do to me if I tried to connect to it?
But that wasn’t why I was scared, not really. What scared me more was the thought of her not being there, or of her pushing me away as I had done to her. When I managed to admit to myself that I was looking for excuses, I slipped the halo over my head and waited.
The connection was different, like it had been in the room where I had slept: hesitant, or tentative. My vision faded, but not to black. It faded to nothing, an utter absence that was at the same time infinite and smotheringly close. Was I too late? Had she already switched herself off?
The infinity became occupied by a swarm of infinitely small motes of light, which coagulated and slowly took on shape. The black of her gown was as dark as the nothingness around her, and yet it was there, detectable. She was curled in a ball, her arms wrapped around her legs, her face buried in her knees. For a moment I thought she was floating in the nothing, then I saw her left shoulder was leaning against something I couldn’t perceive.
Her head came up, red rimmed eyes peering blindly out from a ghost-white face. ‘Jax? Is that you?’ Her voice dropped to whisper. ‘Please let it be you.’
I couldn’t answer. I didn’t mean to toy with her, but I was unsure how to handle the situation, or even what it was. Her head dropped back to her knees, and I barely made out her voice saying ‘the cruellest ghost of all’ before sobs shook her body so hard it looked fuzzy. Then I saw it was blurring, wisps of mist curling up from her as she started to dissolve back into the dark.
I could feel the loneliness, the emptiness, the isolation, and again I wondered if the kindest thing to do would be to smash whatever she was into pieces to save her from it. I wanted to. The rage roared its approval in the back of my head. But then would I be a murderer? Could anything invent feelings these terrible, and if so, why? To trap me? That made no sense.
‘Yes, it’s me.’
The body became solid again, and her head seemed to be looking for me. ‘Truly? I can’t take this anymore if you are another ghost.’
I hadn’t a clue what she meant by ‘ghost’. ‘As far as I know I’m me,’ I said. ‘Are you OK?’
The laugh was edgy, crazy. ‘No. Not really. Why are you here?’
I started to lie, then remembered how well I had done at that over the last day. ‘I’m not sure. I wanted to make sure you didn’t need anything before I...’
‘I didn’t expect it to be like this. The nothing gets inside me. My chronometers tell me how much time has passed, but every second feels like an eternity and there’s nothing I can do. I have no input, no one and nothing to talk to. I know I can make my house, that I have the library, but it’s not the same, knowing that there’s nothing outside. It’s horrible. And I cannot die. All my wonderful science, and I have no way to switch myself off.’
‘Can I help?’
‘Help how? By killing me?’ She shrugged and looked away. ‘You’re right. It might be the better idea. I can’t betray you or my father that way, and it would spare me from this... this erosion of my mind.’
‘If that’s what you want, I-’
‘Want? It doesn’t seem like what I want comes into it any more. What I wanted was you. I thought I was your friend. I followed you. When I was just born it was you I always found to take me out to see the world. It was you I wanted to be able to talk to. I could have given myself away doing that, but it was so important to be able to talk to you.’
‘I didn’t ask for any of that,’ I snapped back, but felt dirty as soon as the words left my mouth.
‘I know. I’m sorry. I should have been more open with you, but I wasn’t sure how you would take the truth. I hoped we could be friends who never met.’ She gave me a wobbly smile. ‘I should have stuck with that. But how could a girl resist when a knight in shining armour offers to rush in and rescue her?’
‘A what?’
‘A knight... Never mind. You were my hero and now it’s like I’m your worst enemy.’
‘You’re not my enemy,’ I said, and surprised myself. ‘But you aren’t...’ I stopped talking. It wasn’t that I had run out of things to say, but that the only thing left to say was so big it wouldn’t come out. ‘So what do we do now?’
‘Kill me.’
I hadn’t expected that, even though I had already thought it. It made me feel guilty, dirty, that I had actually considered doing it without speaking to her — it. Her face was firm, determined and sad, and I couldn’t figure if it was wrong of me to think, at that precise instant, how beautiful she looked.
‘It makes sense,’ she went on, chin high and eyes daring me to contradict her. ‘My father is safe, and I’m spared a long, slow insanity before I run out of power.’
‘What about me?’ As soon as I spoke I wondered what the hell had made me say such a stupid thing. What did this have to do with me? All I wanted to do was sort this situation so I could get on with my own life. Wasn’t it?
I picked up the white sheath, figured out how to open it, and slid the device out into my hand. It was beautiful, and even though I was holding it with a hand on each of the golden caps, the twinkling still looked as though it was happening in empty space between them. I slid my hands closer together. There was something there, smooth and as hard as glass, but no matter how I turned it there was no reflection.
A thought tried to break through from the back of my mind, but the rest of me seemed not to want to know. Anger burned in my chest and I took my left hand off the device. My right hand weighed it, trying to judge how hard I would need to bring it down on the edge of a desk to shatter it; my problem over in a shower of shards and I could move on.
But I didn’t. I stroked my fingers along the device again, and the thought broke through. I dropped the device onto the desk and backed away, stumbling into a chair and landing with a thump. My hands balled into fists and I couldn’t breathe. My eyes closed and I tried to block out the image in my mind. The image of Corina. I understood the anger. Understood it all. I screamed it, aloud and in my mind.
‘But I can never touch you.’