HEROES NEVER DIE

Seanan McGuire

Wind blew across the field, setting the grasses rippling just enough to reveal a glimpse of the shattered metal shells beneath them. Delia froze, hand tightening on the spear that had seen her so far across the echoing wastes. She had fought her way through the shells of three cities, once human-held, now abandoned to the self-replicating factories of the Engineer. She had traversed a continent one step at a time, traveling alone, running down the wild paths that had been highways and boulevards before they were allowed to crumble into virtually nothing.

“I am a warrior,” she whispered, taking a trembling step forward, into the tall grasses. The ground beneath her feet felt like any other, for all that she knew it to be tainted, red with deep-rooted rust all the rain in the world could never rinse away. Even the grass felt wrong, too tough and too wiry as it whipped against her legs.

“I am a scientist,” she whispered, and truly looked at the grass, seeing the way it segmented, the way it ached toward the sun. The soil was poisoned: nothing could possibly grow. But the Engineer must have wanted a garden, because here it was, steel and carbon fiber and cruel mimicry of the natural world. Delia took another step. The grass allowed her passage. That was good. She had fought every kind of robot in the remaining world, from the great earth-movers to the tiny repair bots. Even she had no idea how to fight a field.

“I am the last hope of my people,” she whispered, and broke into a run, moving fast and low, letting the rippling grass conceal as much of her movement as possible. The earth beneath her feet was a treacherous maze of broken glass and torn metal, a graveyard of dead bots, and it should have lifted up her heart—here she was, a hundred years after the battle for the tower, and the robots were still downed and dead—but it only reminded her how much her people needed her to succeed.

The Engineer was ancient, cruel, and worst of all, human. She made choices no robot would ever have made. Robots were logical creations of science and steel, and they did what they were programmed to do, no more and no less. They had been made to be tools of man, not conquerors. It was the Engineer who had perverted them, using them to first seize the facility where she had overseen their creation, and then, inch by terrible inch, to wage war on her own kind.

Humanity had been pushed back by the Engineer’s forces, driven from their own cities, forced into smaller and smaller towns, seeing their way of life crumble before the need to survive. No more fast cars or soaring airplanes, no more food without end or water without toil. And still the Engineer’s factories pounded on, their glass towers shining in the sun, their infinite armies striding forth on metal legs that shook the earth when they struck home. The robots guarded the wild places, refused men passage, and killed. How they killed.

Those same robots were needed if men were to reclaim what had been lost. That had always been understood. Delia’s mother had taught her the way of piston and rod and seam from her cradle-days, as her father had taught her, as his mother had taught him, all the way back to their own engineer-ancestor, who had chosen flight with her family over a capital letter and a bloody legacy. Her mother had commandeered the fruits of the hunting expeditions into robot-held territory, making certain Delia understood the enemy both inside and out. Much of what the Engineer did in her factories was beyond the current reaches of human technology, but Delia understood it well enough to both repair and destroy it, and that would be enough.

She ran, and the grass that was not grass yielded before her, filaments grabbing at her legs in a paltry show of resistance. She was so close to her destination. She was still so very far away.

“The Engineer has had a long time to build her defenses, and the resources to make them nigh impregnable,” her mother had said, when yet another hunting expedition had failed to return from the woods, when she had set Delia down and begun sketching the map that would carry her away, away, so far away from the world she’d known. “There will be five rings to pass through in order to reach her.”

Delia, ever the dutiful daughter, ever the hungry engineer, had listened with every fiber of her being.

“The first ring will be passive, built over the last battleground before we lost the war. That’s where she dumps the bones of her enemies, to serve as a warning to any who might challenge her.”

Bones and rust and broken machinery, grass that isn’t grass and the sound of the wind blowing through it all: that was the first ring. She ran through it like a deer fleeing before the hunters, and she did not look back, even as she felt the world she’d always known dropping away behind her, fading one step at a time into the shadows of the past.

“The second ring will be the land itself. Your great-uncle fought that far, and was able to send word of a chasm and of heat greater than the sun. You will need to be fleet, or you will surely perish.”

The field ended abruptly as the earth fell away, becoming a vast trench that stretched in either direction. If she squinted, she could see its curve. A moat, then, a great passage through the world to protect the Engineer and all her workings. Steam rose out of it in billowing gusts.

Delia knelt in the soft, rust-stained dirt, leaning as far over the edge as she dared and squinting as she strained to find the bottom. There was no telling glint of molten metal or raging fire; only the steam, and the distant shadows of machinery working tirelessly at whatever strange errand the Engineer had set. Cautiously, she extended her hand until her palm hovered above the void. There was heat there, true, and the steam was stinging when it touched her skin, but it wasn’t hotter than the sun; it was barely hotter than the baths her mother used to prepare for her. She could survive this.

The chasm was some twenty feet from end to end. Delia stood, pulling the rope from her pack, and began the careful process of turning her spear into a harpoon.

When she threw, she threw straight and true, and was rewarded by the sight of her spear’s tip embedding in the soil on the far side, anchoring fast. She pulled on the rope as hard as she could, trying to yank the spear free. It didn’t budge.

With a quick prayer to the gods of steel and piston and flame, Delia wound the rope tight around her hands and leapt into the void.

While her mother had spent their time together teaching Delia to be an engineer, her father—who had come from hunting stock, chosen to feed the bellies of their neighbors, and not to nurture their minds—had spent that same time training her to be a warrior. Everyone had known that this task was likely to fall upon her narrow shoulders, and a warrior was more likely to survive the journey to the Engineer’s defenses. Delia clung to the rope, and her arms were strong, and her grip was stronger. She swung through the clouds of steam to strike the opposing wall, and when the shock of the impact was past, she began pulling herself, hand over hand, toward the top of the pit.

There was a moment, as her questing hand sought a grip firm enough to let her pull the rest of her body up, when her skin prickled cold, and she realized how little she knew about the third ring of the Engineer’s defenses. It had been seen only once—or perhaps only once by someone who had lived to speak of it—and that from a distance. The man’s description had painted it as an impossible maze of shining metal and deadly traps. Was she to pull herself up, only to plummet immediately back down, this time into a crushing pit of blades?

It didn’t matter. She had come this far, and there was no going back, not until the Engineer had been destroyed. Her people needed her to succeed. Her mother needed her to succeed. There was no way left but forward, into the unknown.

Delia dug her fingers into the soil and hauled herself bodily out of the pit, turning back only to lean down and wrench her faithful spear free, taking some comfort in the familiar weight of it in her hands. With a steadying breath, she turned again, this time to behold the labyrinth.

It was as strange and shining as the stories said, every surface mirrored to catch the sun. She would need to walk with her eyes half-lidded, or risk being blinded by the glare. Even the ground was of brushed metal. She sent up a swift, silent thanks to the weather. This ground would have been unknowably treacherous in the rain, even if the clouds might have made it easier to see where she was going. It was a trade-off, one danger for another, and she preferred the danger that was both bright and dry.

Delia took a breath, crouched, and ran.

The walls of the maze glittered around her like captive stars, and she sped past them as quickly as her legs allowed, positive that at any moment they would open and begin to belch forth traps. The man who had seen the maze had been very firm on the presence of dangers, even as her uncle had been convinced of the heat from the chasm. Had they both been so very wrong? Or had the Engineer’s defenses begun to fail her, finally succumbing to the entropy which came for all living things in time? Perhaps Delia would fight her way to the tower only to find it abandoned, the Engineer fallen to bones and dust, the robots waiting only for a human hand to change their programming.

It would be so beautifully, blissfully anticlimactic if she could return home a hero simply for opening a door. Delia found the strength to run faster, and the maze blurred around her. She ran down passage after passage, tagging each blind alley, until the entire thing finally fell behind, replaced by the previously unknown fourth barrier.

A junkyard.

It rose like a forest of steel and broken glass, the bodies of the Engineer’s failed and fallen creations piled one upon the other, stretching seemingly into infinity. Delia paused to catch her breath, hands still tight on her spear, before beginning to pick her cautious way through the tangle.

The ground here was even more treacherous than it had been in the field, where the grass that wasn’t grass had concealed obstacles, but also smoothed them out, making them a little easier to run past. Here, every jagged edge and rusty spike was exposed, ready to scratch and slay. Infected wounds could kill as easily as a robot’s laser weapons, and nowhere near as quickly. Delia’s family would never know if she died that way, but she thought her spirit would go to the afterlife wreathed in shame if her end was so embarrassing. She walked carefully, staying toward the center of the uneven aisles. Sometimes they were so wide that it was like walking down one of the ancient roads. Other times they were so narrow that she had to hold her breath and walk sideways, avoiding contact with anything around her.

Still there was no sign of the robot patrols she had been so sure would be here. This close to the Engineer, she should have needed every scrap of cunning she possessed, not been strolling as casually as a child out to pick berries! But there were no security bots, no soldiers or heavy artillery, and while the junkyard was a passive danger, no pits opened and no lasers spewed forth. More and more, it was difficult to shake the feeling that she was walking into a dead place, that the fight had ended while none of them had been looking and that, as a consequence, none of them had noticed.

The thought should have been elation and ecstasy. None of them had chosen this fight. She had been raised to be a weapon first, an engineer second, and a woman last of all, crammed into the cracks left by her first two identities. If the first of them were to be removed, maybe she would have the chance to do as her mother had done, to raise a child—a son, a daughter, it mattered less than the idea of parenthood, of an open, earnest face smiling up at hers, a piece of herself riding in her dearest creation toward the future—and continue the human race. But there was no elation. There was no ecstasy.

There was only the feeling, gnawing and implacable, that she was running toward a trap.

Still, she did not slow or turn back. From here, there was only forward, toward the distant spire of the Engineer’s tower, which rose like a challenge against the horizon.

It was almost a relief when the guard bot rolled into view ahead of her, the lights of its head flashing, the guns that were its primary appendages raising and locking into place on her heat signature. Delia dove into action, bringing her spear down to immobilize the joints that would allow those guns to swivel, locking her legs around its “waist” and ripping open the panel on its back that protected its inner workings. She jammed her hands into the opening, quickly isolating and ripping free the power pack and memory core that turned it from inert metal into a semblance of a living thing.

The whole encounter had lasted less than five seconds. The Engineer’s forces worked best when they came en masse, when they attacked villages of elders and children, not the swift, trained hunters who prowled the wastes. Delia looked at the memory core in her hand and wrinkled her nose. This machine was almost as old as she was. A retired model that had somehow escaped recycling, no doubt, continuing its patrol because it didn’t know any better.

She dropped off the robot’s back, allowing it to fall, and continued pressing forward, ever forward, toward the Engineer. She had come too far to turn back now.

One way or another, she was going to finish this.

The junkyard ended at the fabled fifth barrier, the one that rumor held must be the most terrible and unconquerable of all. This was the reason, according to the whispers around the fire at night, that no one who had made it past the chasm had ever returned. Whatever lurked in the fifth barrier was so deadly that no one could fight their way through it.

There was nothing.

The land around the Engineer’s tower—what looked like at least a mile in all directions—was paved in smooth concrete, unbroken, featureless. Anyone who crossed it would be exposed and vulnerable until they reached the dubious safety of the tower doors. Even the fastest runners would have trouble getting to the doors before the Engineer could alert her forces. Maybe that was the true danger of the last barrier. It seemed so easy, but any who dared attempt it would be walking into their own deaths.

Delia hesitated. She could turn around. She could go back after all, warn her people of the fifth barrier’s nature, and find a way to defeat it. Some form of camouflage that—

No. The Engineer would never be fooled by the kind of exoskeleton her people had the resources to construct. She would see them coming, and any advantage offered by this day and its strangely lax defenses would be lost. Delia clutched her spear tighter, and broke into a run, her legs pounding like pistons, her lungs aching to fetch enough air. She was almost there. The Engineer’s tower drew closer and closer, all shining steel and glittering glass, reaching toward the sky like an obscenity, the last tall building in the world. It was sterile and perfect and it lifted Delia’s heart to see it, even as she hated it with every fiber of her being. It wasn’t her fault that it was beautiful. It wasn’t.

She ran, and the tower drew closer still, and nothing appeared to challenge her or stop her from her wild rush across the pavement. Again, the thought that the Engineer must have died danced across her mind, and still she ran, until the door appeared ahead of her.

Until the door slid open at her approach, smooth and silent.

Delia stumbled to a stop, holding her spear in front of her, like she feared attack by the door itself. The door remained open, allowing a wash of pleasantly chilled air to waft out and brush against her skin. It carried a faint scent of motor oil and static discharge. Still clutching her spear, Delia inched cautiously forward, through the doors, which slid shut behind her, and into a world of marvels.

Everything was clean. The walls, the floors, even the ceiling were spotless, as if they had just been constructed. Light came from glowing bars on the ceiling, which she silently labeled “fluorescents,” in accordance with the pictures in her mother’s manuals. The cool air caressed and soothed her skin, chasing away the faint burn from the midday sun. Delia swallowed hard and walked on, waiting for the inevitable attack.

It didn’t come. The first hall ended at a flight of stairs, and she began, cautiously, working her way upward, deeper into the tower. A cleaner bot rolled along the bannister, beeping softly but otherwise ignoring her. She watched as it wiped her fingerprints away, erasing all trace of her passage. Then it rolled on, off to find something else in need of correction. When it passed out of view, she began walking again.

The stairs ended at a landing, and a second hall, identical to the first. Again, she walked along it, until she found another stairway leading up. Again and again and again she repeated this process, until she had climbed two dozen flights of stairs, until she was so far above the ground that her mind balked at the idea of it. She approached the door at the top of the last stairway. It slid open at her approach, and she stepped through into a room that seemed to be made entirely of wires and windows.

They were glass, thinner than any she had ever seen, revealing themselves only in the faint reflections that shimmered on their surface. Through them she could see the whole of the world spread out before her: the concentric rings of the Engineer’s trials, the broken belts of the highway, and the glittering, ant-like bodies of the distant bots.

Something cold and hard and the diameter of a spear’s shaft dug into her back, centered on her spine. Delia stiffened.

“Don’t move,” said a bored voice—female, and young, almost as young as her. “I’m afraid this model doesn’t change command strings quickly, and it might shoot you. Then where would we be?”

Delia didn’t move.

She heard footsteps behind her, accompanied by the soft whirr of servos, the whine of motors clicking into place. She swallowed hard, hands tight on her spear.

If I die here, it was worth it, she thought, as bright and fierce as a flame burning where her heart had been. If I take her with me—

There she was, stepping into view. The Engineer.

Delia felt as if all the air were rushing out of the room.

She had been expecting someone older, someone as ancient as the crumbling highways, the dissolving buildings. Instead, she found herself face to face with a young girl, a cruel smile painted on her lips and a jeweled lens clasped over her left eye.

“It took you long enough,” said the Engineer. “I turned off all the active defenses, and still you kept hesitating. How much of a monster am I now, on the coast? Do I bathe in the blood of infants and use human bones to fuel my furnace?” She sounded honestly curious, like she would put great stock by Delia’s answer, whatever it might be.

“You…” Delia’s mouth was dry. She hesitated, licking her lips, before forcing herself to continue. “You keep mankind in subjugation. You refuse to let us live freely, as we were meant to. You’re a monster.”

“I knew I was a monster, little girl. Keep up.” The Engineer patted Delia’s cheek with one cool, dry hand. “I want to know how much of a monster. The last one to come to me had forgotten my name. The one before her had forgotten the why of what I’ve done. Bit by bit, the present erodes the bedrock of the past. Give me a few more generations, and none of you will question me at all.”

Delia ground her teeth together, steeling herself against the pain that was sure to follow, spilling from the weapon pressed to her spine until it consumed her. The Engineer—the impossibly young, impossibly vulnerable Engineer—was laughing at her. The Engineer’s guard was down. She wasn’t going to get another chance like this one.

She struck.

The spear slid into the Engineer’s stomach with dismaying ease, becoming lodged there. The weapon pressed to Delia’s spine did not fire. The Engineer looked down at the spear with interest.

“You hesitated more than the last one,” she said thoughtfully. “You still believe I can die, but you’re not as sure as your ancestors.”

When she looked up again, she was grinning.

“Good,” she said, and the gun at Delia’s back fired, filling her body with electricity and pain. The world flashed black, and then white, and finally black again, before turning into a jumble of colors which gradually—so gradually—resolved into a clean little room packed with machinery.

Some of the Engineer’s repair bots were there, their clever hands whirling with the eagerness to begin. The Engineer was there was well, naked, revealing the seams in her stolen skin. The skin of her belly was torn where Delia’s spear had entered her, allowing Delia to look straight into her body. It was filled with wires and gears, and nothing human at all.

Delia whimpered. She would have thrashed, but her own body no longer seemed to care for her commands.

The Engineer smiled. Again, she caressed Delia’s cheek.

“You tore my suit,” she said. “That was very mean of you. It means you owe me a new one, don’t you think? Not that I wouldn’t have taken it anyway. You delivered it so nicely. You’re one of Marie’s descendants, aren’t you? She never did like my method of saving the world.”

Delia whimpered again.

“Someone said to me once, when I was just getting started—when I was sending the first of my autonomous robots out into the world to defend the forests, to keep people from polluting the water, to save the world—that heroes never die, they just change form. I thought I was a hero then. I still do, deep down. And you think you’re a hero too, because you’ve come to stop me. Isn’t it funny, how we can be the same, and so different? Your people will never call me a hero. But if you could ask the trees, they’d sing a different story.”

Delia tried again to struggle.

The Engineer smiled.

“You ripped my suit,” she said. “It’s only fair that you provide me with a new one. Heroes never die, little girl, and who knows? Maybe yours will be the last face I wear. Maybe yours will be the face of godhood.”

A needle pierced Delia’s arm.

The last thing she saw before her eyes closed for the final time was the Engineer peeling the face of her own skull away, revealing the shining chrome and spotless steel beneath.

Outside the tower, in the world a monster made, the wind blew on.