Counterpart (24 page)

The machine's LED eyes move toward me, the smile sliding off its face. While there isn't anything hostile about its curiosity, I sense definite suspicion. Apparently its mother warned it about strangers. It tilts its head. “Who are you?” When I don't immediately answer, machine-Rhona looks at Zelda. “Who is she?”

“It doesn't remember me?”

“Why would it?” Zelda responds. “What kid would recognize themself as an adult? Plus, I may have erased some knowledge of what happened the other day in the IC lab.”

“You did what now?”

“She's me?” the machine cuts in, electronic eyes widening.

“Good job, Long. Now I'm going to have to roll her back again.”

“You can't just
erase
the machine's memories,” I say, bristling. For some reason, this bothers me more than anything else Zelda's done. Either the machine is some kind of hybrid—part human, part machine, worthy of consideration and care—or it's just another machine. She doesn't get to have it both ways, and it's obvious she's leaning toward the former. Regardless of my personal feelings toward the thing, removing its memories and reducing it to this infantile state strikes me as a violation.

Zelda waves me off. “Don't worry. I made copies of its original state. Ulrich, relax.”

Ulrich turns around, and around, trying to see the machine and forcibly remove it.

“That's not the only issue here…” I say, but I'm distracted by Ulrich's struggle, too. Machine-Rhona doesn't seem to understand this isn't a game. She—
it
—smiles as he inadvertently twirls it around. “Zelda, would you just help him?”

With a roll of her eyes and a heaving sigh, she moves toward Ulrich, stopping only when she's blasted with red, strobing light—the training room alarm going off. The klaxons start a moment later, with only a second squeezed between the light and sound, like someone taking a breath to scream.

I can barely concentrate with the alarm drilling into my ears, but I manage to stagger toward the door, anyway. I'm just about to palm the panel when I feel a hand on my arm. Expecting to see Zelda or Ulrich, I'm confused to find the machine standing there, its skeletal fingers clutching my bicep. There's strength there, more than enough to do some serious damage if it wanted to.

I rip my arm back, battling the urge to gun down the machine, this despite the fact it hasn't actually displayed any aggression toward me. Today. It releases me without a fight.

“You shouldn't go out there,” it tells me. The expression on its unreal face is one of concern—or is trying to be. It looks smug more than anything, like it knows better.

“Why?” I shout. “What's out there?”

Local comms have been restored for most of the military level, its repair having been prioritized ahead of the other levels. It's strange there hasn't been any announcement yet over the loudspeaker, or any instructions given. Just the alarm blaring, and a vague, prickling sense of danger.

Machine-Rhona doesn't answer. I'm not sure whether it's out of rebellion, a kid resisting authority the only way they can, or because it simply doesn't know. I'm willing to bet the latter. The machine shrinks back toward Zelda, who is quickly packing her laptop into a heavy black case that looks like it could withstand an atomic bomb. Freed from his unwanted rider, Ulrich backtracks toward his gun, resting upright against Zelda's desk. He doesn't check to see whether it's loaded. I'm guessing it is.

I don't wait for them to discuss what's going on. I suspect they don't know either, and even if they did, I'm not sure they would tell me. Ulrich would keep me in the dark if it made a difference to my safety. Zelda might be more candid, but she's clearly distracted trying to save her precious computer. Best to go straight to the source.

Before I've opened the door, however, another thought stops me cold.

Am I being careless? Isn't this exactly the sort of behavior I swore to myself I would give up?

My hesitation allows Ulrich enough time to reach me. He grabs my shoulder and forces me backward, away from the door and any potential danger outside it. It irritates me, but what annoys me even more is the fact that his overprotective behavior isn't overprotective at all. It's just the right amount of caution—because McKinley isn't safe anymore. Maybe it never was, but I could largely ignore that fact until a week ago. Now I know the truth; the machines wrote it on the walls of my home in blood.
This place is not safe.
You are not safe. The ones you love are not safe.
Sometimes it takes moments like these, rudely barging into my delusions, to remind me.

“Wait here,” Ulrich orders. “I'll find out what is happening.” He exits into the hall.

Before the door has even closed, Zelda is pushing past me, her briefcase against her chest, protected by both arms. “Hey! Where are you going?” I ask her.

She pauses on the threshold, and the door, sensing her presence, slides back open all the way. “If there's another bomb, I'm sure as hell not getting trapped in some training room, left to suffocate to death,” she says.

“That won't happen. The emergency protocols for the air-conditioning units will kick in.”

“Just like they did last time, you mean?” My hands go clammy, while my mouth dries to a desert. She's right. Those protocols failed Rankin; they could fail us, too. Zelda shouts at someone to watch where they're going, after they barrel past her in the hall, before regarding me again. “I'll take my chances with the machines. Now, are you coming?”

“Fine.” I take two steps toward the door, then stop. “Wait. What about…it?” I crook my thumb toward machine-Rhona, who is anxiously dancing from foot to foot.

Zelda curses, and to her credit, looks genuinely torn about abandoning the machine. “I'll lock the door behind us. We can deal with her later. Come on.”

“Don't leave me,” the machine pleads. “I don't want to be alone.”

Its words yank at something primal swimming around in my chest, but I don't have time to dwell on it. With a push of a button, Zelda closes the door, and quickly types in a code to lock it. There are a few thumps on the other side—the machine banging—then silence. Well, except for the alarm, of course, which continues to blare, pushing panicked soldiers down the hall.

I spot Ulrich several feet away, conversing with another man. Because of the noise, they have to put their heads together in order to hear one another. Keeping an eye on them proves challenging as men and women race between us; it's like peering between the boxcars of a moving train. The stranger is gesticulating wildly to help convey some sort of important information—
is he miming an explosion, or indicating the enemy number?
—while Ulrich's hands remain clenched on his gun. The German's eyebrows bunch the skin above his nose into three neat lines, and I don't think it's possible for him to frown any deeper. Guess this isn't a drill.

“Don't just stand there,” Zelda snaps. “Let's move.”

“What about Ulrich?” I say, but I'm already following her down the hall.

She looks uncertainly back at her lover, then presses forward. “He's fine. He's coming.”

I glance behind us. “He looks pissed.”

“You should know him better than that by now. That's his resting combat face.”

I barely move aside in time to avoid getting mowed down by a line of soldiers going in the opposite direction. In all the pandemonium, they don't recognize me. The possibility of engaging the enemy has their complete attention. A giant, pink gorilla could start swinging from the ceiling and I doubt any of them would notice, let alone spare it another thought. As long as the gorilla wasn't interfering with their duty, of course.

“Where are we going?” I ask Zelda, struggling to keep up with her.

It's been days since I tussled with my clone—
and killed her, don't forget about that
—but I still don't feel quite myself. Along with the occasional racing thoughts and pounding heart, I'm dragging, like every muscle in my body has doubled in weight and my poor bones are incapable of lugging them around. It's not just the harmless bruises on my head and neck, or the shallow cuts on my arms, which the doctors tell me won't leave scars. The weariness goes deeper. I'm irritable. I'm not sleeping. Binge eating candy probably isn't helping. At the end of every sugar rush is a solid wall, and I don't know how long I can keep running into it before something snaps.

To make matters worse, Camus and I have barely spoken since our fight, and then coolly. It feels like we're orbiting one another, on the path to another collision. I'm not sure where he's sleeping at night, or if he's sleeping; he only returned to our quarters for a change of clothes the morning after the killing, shuffling through his bag in condemning silence, before disappearing out the door. In his way, I think he's trying to create space where our feelings can cool, but I also suspect he's off tending his own wounds. I'm a little familiar with the devastation of having the person you love not believe in you.

“Stairs,” Zelda answers.

Grabbing her arm, I jerk us both to a stop. “No.”

She must see something firm and dangerous in my eyes, because she doesn't make a gibe, doesn't accuse me of cowardice or stupidity. Zelda swings her gaze left, then right, toward opposing corridors. “You have a better plan?”

I think quickly. “The hangar.”

“In case you haven't noticed, that's where most of the soldiers are headed. Safe bet that's where the trouble is.”

“Not the main hangar. There's a secondary hangar. It's…smaller.” My breath is coming short and fast, and we've only been running for a minute. What the hell's wrong with me? “If necessary, we should be able to get outside from there.” Outside sounds good. Inside hasn't been very much fun lately.

“Long, are you okay?”

Great. Even Zelda's noticed I'm lagging.

“Fine. I'm fine.”
Say something enough times, it becomes true. Right?
Of course, there's another reason I brush off her concern: to do otherwise would be opening the door, acknowledging the possibility of a reason for it. “I know a shortcut. Follow me—”

“What is unclear about ‘Wait here'?” Ulrich demands from behind me.

“Did you find out what's going on?” I ask, sidestepping the issue altogether.

More soldiers tromp past, pressing the three of us to one side of the hall. I realize these soldiers aren't wearing the usual McKinley fatigues. They're not ours. At a guess, I'd say they were New Soviets. It must be bad if we've already asked them to come down and help.

“Machines,” Ulrich says, watching the soldiers marching away. “They have infiltrated the level.”

“
Again?
How?”

He shakes his head. He doesn't know.

“What kind of numbers are we talking?”

Again, Ulrich doesn't know specifics, but he says the man told him at least six were spotted emerging from training room B ten minutes ago, and another six were reported near the doors to the military level's only emergency-exit tunnel. As of a minute ago, there were no casualties, or none that the man knew about. That was no guarantee that death wouldn't come; only that, for some reason, it was presently delayed.

Ulrich starts hustling me and Zelda in the direction I was already planning on heading in, maybe because he has the same idea I do. Get us somewhere out of the way, with access to freedom, if needed.

“I thought you said all the machines were accounted for!” I shout at Zelda.

“They are!” she yells back. “At least all the machines that participated in the attack.”

“You're saying these are ours?”

“They have to be. There's no way others managed to infiltrate McKinley.”

Unless they were helped,
I think, but don't say. After all, who would be left to help them? No one. No one's left who can hurt McKinley again. I made sure of that. “So, what are we doing about all this?” I lob the question at Ulrich's bobbing shoulders as he forges ahead of us. “Do we have everything under control or not? Has Military been locked down? Did he say anything about our response?”

“No.” I'm about to ask him why he didn't ask, when he clips me with a withering look. “There was no time to ask. My ward was not listening.”

Right. The whole not-staying-put thing. Oops.

“Hey, don't look at me like that. It was her idea.” I hook my thumb at Zelda.

“Thanks, Long.”

I hold up my hands. “Just saying.”

We make our way down the left corridor, and eventually the traffic begins to thin. I'm still panting, and need to take a moment to lean against the wall, catch my breath. At the same time, I don't want to stop and slow us down. The machines could be right behind us—or ahead of us, for that matter. They could be on top of us in seconds. They could burst from the next room like fire ants exploding from a hill, and we'd be trapped. Helpless.

I lean a hand against the wall, wheezing. Something else has already snuck up on us—or at least me. Panic.

“I'm fine,” I repeat before either Zelda or Ulrich has a chance to ask me if I'm all right. “Just…out of shape.”

“Pull it together, Long,” Zelda says.

Can't she see I'm
trying
to? “Right. Let me just snap my fingers and be totally restored.”

The alarm continues to wail, and I swear the walls
pulse
with the sound.
Oh, God. It's happening again.
McKinley's under attack and there's nothing I can do. Nothing…

Beneath my fingertips, the world shivers, disintegrating into something distant and surreal. Maybe I'm imagining it. I shut my eyes, trying to push back against the overwhelming desire to crouch down into a ball. I'm better than this. I'm stronger, dammit. I'm Commander Rhona freaking Long, and I wasn't resurrected to die a simpering coward.

I send my name up as a flare to my brain, signaling it for help—a burst of courage or something.
Rhona Long Rhona Long Rhona Long.
But in the end, all repeating it accomplishes is reminding me of who else shares the name. Two dead women: one whose death happened before me, and one whose death happened
because
of me.

The truth circles my mind like a vulture, waiting to pick me clean.

Don't think about it

don't think

don't

please

But the terror of the moment unlocks every narrow, paranoid, self-flagellating thought I've been suppressing with Jolly Ranchers and NyQuil.

It wasn't an accident. I might have been able to stop her some other way. I stabbed her because I wanted to stab her. Because I wanted her to die. Because I couldn't handle the thought of competition—for leading the resistance, for the love of the people, for Camus. Because I was scared.

I'm scared now, too. Only instead of a knife, I'm holding a gun, ready to pull the trigger on whatever or whoever gets in my way. Survival. That's what matters. Everything else is peripheral, secondary.

“Ulrich. Do something. She's losing it.”

“What am I to do?”

“I don't know. Snap her out of it.”

“I cannot protect her from her own mind.”

Their voices float underneath the wail of the alarm like oxygen hanging beneath smoke. I hunch down, taking deep breaths, try to come back to the present.

“Fine, I'll do it,” Zelda snaps, setting her computer case down with a plastic clatter. “Long!” She reaches for me, and it takes everything not to jerk away from her. Especially when she starts shaking me. Once, twice. Large, rough hands around my shoulders that remind me of another time, when those hands came for my throat. “Get a hold of yourself. You want to fall apart? Do it when we're not fleeing for our lives.”

“Oh, yeah,” I mutter. “That's helping.”

Even when she crouches to be at eye level with me, I can barely stand to look at her. The floor is a safer prospect. The floor isn't trying to make me throw up from guilt. “This isn't you,” Zelda says, the first person to suggest a separation between my willing spirit and unwilling body. I'm also taken aback by the gentleness in her tone, like she understands. But how could she? “It's just your mind playing tricks on you.”

“Some trick.”

“Yeah. It's a bitch.” Her lips flex into a small smile, then rebound into a frown. “I knew a guy shortly after the Machinations began. Some of the machines he helped program turned on his friends and colleagues, killed them outright. He blamed himself. But instead of dealing with it, he let the mistakes take over his life. Work turned to obsession. Obsession to self-neglect. He let it feel good to feel bad, and you know who all his martyrdom helped? Not a damn person.”

How much of this story matches Zelda's own experience, I wonder? How wide is the view into her own life from this tiny window she's opening for me?

I take another breath, feeling a small amount of calm return. “What happened to this guy?”

“I don't know.” I think she does know, but doesn't want to say. Something bad, then. “My point is, you can kill yourself over what happened in the past, and worry yourself into an early grave over what
might
happen in the future—or you can steal a page from the machines' playbook. Take a breath. Reset. Stop overanalyzing every goddamn thing and move forward.”

As I stand back up, still a little unsteady, I catch Ulrich's gaze, to see if he has any words of wisdom, too. “Good advice” is all he has to add, but there's gruff affection in his gaze when he looks over at Zelda.

“Okay.” I inhale through my nose, exhale through my mouth, waiting for the shaking to subside. “Thanks, Zelda.” She pretends she doesn't hear me, or maybe she genuinely doesn't, but her back is to me as she retrieves her computer. “Just give me another second…”

Ulrich shakes his head. “No time.”

We continue down the corridor.

We're halfway to the secondary hangar when I hear it. The alarm obscures most noise—Ulrich's gun rattling against his chest, my shallow breathing, our boots beating their frantic rhythm on the hard, concrete floor—but my subconscious must pick up on it all the same. My hands slicken, growing cold and clammy around the EMP-G I'm holding, and my heart revs like a Ferrari at a stoplight seconds before my ears register the sound.

Whir-whir-whir.

No. No. No.

Stuck at another intersection, I can't judge where they're coming from with the sound echoing off the walls. I pick a hall at random and grab Ulrich's shoulder, gesturing for him to follow. He and Zelda pick up the rear—but naturally I choose wrong. The pair crash to a halt behind me, almost literally into my back, as I spot the machines no farther than a hundred feet ahead of us and freeze.

The enemy's metal skin glints black between the streaks of red light, though whether due to some new material they're made of or a thin coat of onyx paint, I can't tell. I think I spot an insignia on the shoulder blade of the predator model, but it could just as easily be blood. Behind the trio are bodies.
Unconscious, dead, or dying?
Impossible to tell from this distance, with all the surrounding distractions—not the least being the dwindling group of soldiers ahead of us, falling one by one. I don't see flashes indicating gunfire, at least from the machines, which makes me wonder how they're dropping my people like flies.

Wonder later
.
Act now.

Ulrich and I raise our weapons, but the remaining soldiers—one man and two women—are in the way. We both perform a small shuffle, trying to get clear of them, but neither of us has a clean shot. In that moment, instinct finally sidesteps fear. I know what I have to do. Which is exactly why, as Ulrich tries vainly to shepherd me behind him, using his gun as a crook, I move around him instead, dashing toward the nearest alcove a few feet toward the action. In the inset, just as I expected, is a door I hope will open. I slam my palm on the ID scanner, loudly muttering “Come on, come on” as it takes its sweet time to work. A small blade of light slides up and down like an old copy machine as the scanner assesses everything from the lines of my hand to the whorls on my fingers.
“Come on,”
I urge it.