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People bustled into the room. I’d no idea how much time had passed since I last spoken to Corina. I know I spent it trying not to think, trying not to look at her on the bench, trying not to see how few sparkles were left. I knew my ribs ached again, and I was sweating. And I knew that the woman who had been looking after me warned me if I didn’t relax and calm down I would make myself worse.
The first one through the door was the man who had done the fiddling with the power cube, followed by Tara and another woman. Both carried boxes full of square things and draped with wires.
‘This better be worth it, boy,’ said Tara. ‘I wouldn’t normally move stuff around like this, but as you seem to be the only way of communicating with this, and we can’t move you... well, Mohammed, mountain and all that.’
I didn’t have a clue what she was saying, but I was grateful they were there. At least someone was going to try.
‘Is it still working?’
I shrugged. ‘She hasn’t spoken to me for a while, but it feels like she’s still there.’
Tara frowned. ‘Better than nothing, I suppose.’ She sat on the bed, half way down, and her expression was very serious. ‘I won’t lie to you, boy. This is seriously risky. In order for us to feed her energy from our equipment, we have to use the wire that goes to the device from the charger. If we can’t find a way to connect to it to our stuff, chances are we won’t be able to reconnect it to the original kit, and the device will run out of power. Even if we do connect, we only have minutes to make our feed match what the device needs. Understand?’
I nodded. ‘She’s going to die anyway if you do nothing.’
She rested her hand on my arm. ‘Exactly. Now, if you hear anything, you let us know, and if you can get a message to the device, ask it for any diagnostics it can give us.’
I nodded, even though I didn’t have a clue what she meant, and she moved over to the bench. I wanted to see what they were doing, but twisting my body to look made it ache more. I lay back and concentrated on the halo. There was lots of muttering from near the bench, more words I had never heard before.
‘Try scraping back the outside, maybe we can go for a vampire connection.’
‘We should just cut it and patch it’
‘Shit, is that fluid leaking out? Clamp it, clamp it!’
‘I can see something. Is that a wire?’
‘Warning. Charging unit efficiency approaching zero.’
I spoke up, trying to be clear and loud enough to get through the knot of heads. ‘I think you’re making it worse.’
‘No shit,’ muttered someone, and the knot of heads tightened again.
I heard the words ‘no option’ and everything went quiet for a handful of seconds. There were two sharp clicks and at the same time as the halo started yammering about a charger failure, somebody at the bench was cursing and yelling ‘I’m trying.’
Then Corina screamed.
‘Make them stop. It hurts. They’ll tear me apart.’
I started shouting, and a moment later Corina fell silent.
‘What was wrong?’ Tara demanded, her face white. ‘What needs to change?’
‘You have to help them, Corina,’ I pleaded. ‘They’re trying to help but they don’t know what to do.’
‘I can’t,’ she wailed. ‘I shut down diagnostics to save power. I don’t have enough to start it up again. Jax, I’ve only a couple of minutes left.’
‘What did it feel like?’ I asked, then relayed it exactly as she told me. ‘Like knives, sharp and jagged and tearing me apart.’
Tara looked blank, then hopeless. The man with the stubble was stroking his chin again, then his eyes opened wide. ‘Spikes? Tiny ones we can’t see, microsecond duration?’
Tara shrugged. ‘Could be. But what-‘
‘I need a quench. One of the old neodymium magnets.’
Tara snapped her fingers and pointed at the other woman. ‘Cable stores. Old telecom gear, biggest one you can find, quick as you can.’
The girl left the room at a run as the dry, not-Corina voice told me the unit would cease to function in five minutes. It seemed only a few seconds later it announced only sixty-seconds left, and then the link cut off. The halo slackened around my head and I hear someone start to scream ‘No,’ over and over again. There was a scratch on my arm and the world faded away.
I dreamed a dream of dark horror and loneliness, of stabbing pain and gnawing hunger. Blackness, an empty pit yawning under me but into which I never fell. Aching solitude. I had no body, no senses. There was just me and pain in eternal emptiness.
And then there was something. Not physical, that I could hold, or touch or hear. Just the suggestion there were boundaries to the emptiness. Then a grid of photon-thick green lines sprang up around me, and as though being built an atom at a time, a shiny ball floated in front of my eyes. I could see my face in it, but my face was looking out at me from a room I thought I recognised, yet somewhere I had never been and could never go.
Someone was standing behind my reflection, distorted, familiar. I reached out, touched the ball, and in an instant the universe swirled and I swapped consciousness with my reflection. I looked away from the mirror on the wall, turned, and saw Corina sitting on the couch in her lounge, and my first thought was how cruel my mind was to make me dream this.
Corina smiled, patted the space beside her. ‘Sit, Jax. It’s not as bad as you think.’
I sat next to her, took her hand in mine. It was warm, soft, smooth. I raised it to my mouth and kissed her palm. ‘Don’t we know this can’t happen?’ I asked.
She giggled. ‘It really is OK. They fixed it. Well, sort of. There’s a catch I’ll tell you about later, but I have power again. Look.’ She held out her hand and a glass appeared in it, a third full of some silvery liquid, and into which more was trickling from empty air. I realised she was making a symbol I could understand, but there was a warm tingle over every inch of my skin as I realised she was speaking the truth, and that this wasn’t a dream — or if it was I prayed I could stay in it forever.
‘So why am I here?’
‘I’m guessing you’ve been given medication to calm you.’
I remembered someone screaming and my face burned. ‘Oh.’
‘They think things are working, but they aren’t sure and they are waiting for you to wake up. I can hear through your ears.’ She giggled again. ‘One just said you had a stupid smile on your face and can she have some of whatever you were given.’
‘But why am I here, and why...?’ I lifted her hand, still in mine.
‘Because the drug affected that part of you that still doesn’t really accept me. With that out of the way, you... believe me more.’ She put her hand to my cheek and looked so deep into my eyes she had to be able to see right into my heart. ‘Did you mean it? The last thing you said?’
So she had heard. I had to lick my lips before I could answer. ‘Yes.’
And her hand slid behind my neck and she pulled me down to where our lips could touch and she smelt of flowers and tasted of spring.
They let me out of bed after three days, and gave me a bottle of tablets to take for the pain. Corina was with me all the time, awake and in my dreams, although it never again felt as real. But when Ward came to show me to somewhere I could sleep, I knew there was more.
The room was about the same size as the space I once shared with Aunt Trude and Jenny, but it had brick walls and a real door. I couldn’t see what the bed was made of, but there were two chairs and a tiny table crammed into the space too. Most important, there was a power hole on the wall. Ward motioned me to the bed, and he took one of the chairs. I heard it creak softly as his weight settled.
‘I’ll get straight to it, son-‘
‘Jax,’ I said, then felt myself blush for interrupting him.
‘Jax,’ he repeated. ‘Thing is, we’re glad to have been able to help you and... your friend, but nothing in the world comes for free. We expect something in return.’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Anything I can do.’
‘Not you, Jax. That.’ He was pointing at Corina. ‘I need to have a conversation with the Dagashi tech. We need to understand more about them; why they are here, their technology, history. And, yes, their strengths and weaknesses. They’ve told us so little about themselves that some of us don’t entirely trust them.’
‘But she can only talk through the halo.’
‘I have implants.’
That surprised me. He looked too old.
‘Will that work?’ I asked Corina.
‘Probably not.’ She appeared on my bed, sitting cross legged, bottom lip between her teeth as she thought. ‘I messed around a lot with your implants, and I had full access to the dataweb while I was doing it. I don’t think I can access standard implants anymore.’
I passed the message back to Ward, and I didn’t like the look on his face after. ‘Would it hurt me to try?’
‘It might,’ Corina answered through me. ‘It might kill him if his implants are too old.’
Ward was starting to look annoyed, as though we were crossing him deliberately. People that angry often made bad decisions. I tried to defuse him. ‘Corina wouldn’t lie, but she can exaggerate sometimes. You can try it if you like, but take it off if it hurts. Take it off very, very quick.’
I didn’t like the idea. If Corina wasn’t exaggerating, then I could be trying to explain his death to them and that would put me right back into Newton’s hands. But Ward had agreed to the work that had saved Corina, so I owed him that. He was looking at me, mouth pressed tight, but he didn’t look so angry now. Then the anger collapsed into a wry grimace.
‘I have to. The possibility of direct communication with an alien AI is too...’ He shrugged and held out his hands in helpless gesture, but I got his point. I reached up and tapped the release on the halo, and handed it to him as soon as it came free from my head. He stared it for a while, then raised it and dropped it into place. He winced, gasped, and then his face went slack.
That didn’t look right. I called his name, and when that didn’t work, shook his knee. He was as limp as his face, and it was only the way he was leaning against the wall that stopped him falling from the chair. This was going very wrong. I pushed myself up from the bed, stepped behind him, and searched for the release stud with my finger. It took forever to find, and even longer before the halo went slack. As I pulled it off his head, Ward drew in a deep, shuddering breath. I put the halo on my head and, while I waited for it to connect, I shook his shoulder. He was still limp, but at least now I could hear him breathing.
‘What happened?’ I asked Corina.
‘I have no idea. The link was there; I could see you and hear you. I was talking to him, but he said nothing back.’
I shifted until I could see Ward’s face. His mouth was still slack and his eyes stared at something that wasn’t there. I slapped him, hard. Calling for help was the obvious thing to do, but that would involve Newton. If I could wake him up myself, we could keep this between the three of us. I slapped him again, and this time his eyes moved to focus on me. Blinking, bleary, Ward sat up and looked around the room.
‘Wha?’
‘Are you all right?’ I put my hand on his shoulder and peered into his face. He still looked groggy. ‘You tried to talk to Corina. I don’t think it worked.’
He took a deep breath, shook his head, and then suddenly he was back. ‘It was the strangest thing. I could hear a voice, a girl’s voice, asking if I could hear her, but I was... disconnected, and drifting farther and farther away.’ He straightened in the chair. ‘Seems I should have listened to the two of you, and now I owe you for getting the halo off me. I was stupid to try, but... well, it’s done now.’ His eyes were sad, but his mouth firm.
He stood up and stepped over to the door. ‘I’d like you to talk to Tara and her techs. There may still be a way to talk directly to your friend. I’m sure we can do what we need to talking through you, but direct communication would be easier.’
He closed the door behind him, and we were alone.
Corina was sitting on the table in front of me, swinging her legs, and with a smug grin across her lips. ‘I have an idea.’