Guardian (16 page)

Meta placed her gun against the flashing blue light.
“Shot to the silex hub?” She glanced at her companions.

The dark skinned man shook his head.
“Not enough. Tried it many times under test conditions. Mother fucker looks dead, but soon as we turn around it’ll be up again, ready to stab us in the back.”

“
Damn it, Adrian, that’s not helpful.” Meta tapped the steel edge of her gun against crystal. “I thought you were supposed to specialise in Legate tech?”

The third man shrugged.
“He does, but that really doesn’t make a difference when it comes to Drones. These bastards are built to survive multiple attacks. Every Drone has secondary hubs all over the body, but they’re never in the same place. Some as few as six, but I’ve seen one with twenty. You got to blow them to bits, burn them, chop them up. Even then, I wouldn’t turn my back on it. Not ever.”

The child whimpered. Death was one thing, but pain was entirely different. He showed me the tracks inside of him, the connections of wire and silex, of flesh and nervous system. I told him I understood, a little, what that was like. I shared images of the suit
’s wires, wigging in my blood, and the silver drilled into my bones. We understood each other, a little at least. However horrifying and terrifying it was, to understand such a tortured and unnatural creature. To empathise with him.

“
But why bother?” the third man continued. Bald, and also scarred, this man seemed to be older than the other two. I wouldn’t have felt out of place here, if I’d retained the scars
Grandeur
had given me. I wasn’t used to seeing scars on others. A cap, slightly darker than his skin, wrapped around half of his head, and most of the scarring stretched out in cruel lines from beneath it. It appeared to be riveted there. Into the bone. “He didn’t say the Legate was after her. And obviously, it is. Not worth it, to my mind. I say we leave her here, and get the fuck out.”

“
Don’t be an idiot, Kasen,” Meta snapped, scowled. “We were sent to find her. So we’re going to take her back with us.”

“
There are other ways to extract his cooperation—”

“
I said no.”

A moment of silence. Kasen frowned, but Adrian nodded.
“Meta’s right.” He crouched beside me, staring intently at my hand and the connections there. “And I’d really like to get a better look at what she’s doing here.”

“
If we’re going to do this, we’d better do it fast!” Meta held up a screen, a small version of the ones the programmers worked on. Red dots flashed all over it. “Company’s on its way.”

“
We have to destroy the Drone,” Adrian told me. “Do you understand that?” When I didn’t answer he stood, and levelled his gun at the Drone’s head. “Empty your cartridges, all of them, do as much damage as you can do. It might be enough.”

“
Wait!” I cried out as the child—inside the Drone, inside of me—wailed.

“
We can’t—”

“
I said wait!” Because I already knew what to do. “I think you should step back.”

Inside me, the Flare surged again. The same power I had summoned to destroy a building, but this time with no lights to overload, no heaters to set on fire, no ancient and rotting frame to absorb it all, and fall. So all of the power of the pions rushing through me flowed right into the Drone.

The Flare smashed a multicoloured path through silex, along wires, down metal and up into the dead boy. Crystal shattered, fluid splattered, and a rainbow arched out of the gaps. The metal glowed a fierce red before melting into the concrete, and skin burned. I closed my eyes and leaned away. I felt the fire as though it was coiling through my body too. I listened as the program rattled through its emergency protocols, instructing me to contact the Legate and find the nearest fire escape, before dissolving into more random numbers and letters and a buzzing mess of sound as it collapsed.

The boy was surprised, at first. It didn
’t hurt as much as he thought it would. In fact, he couldn’t feel anything, anymore. And then he was thanking me, and flashing images of the few faces he could remember—that was his brother, there, with the scar on his chin, and the little dog he’d found and cared for and named some long-lost name—and gradually, like an echo, he faded away.

Finally, when nothing remained—nothing but ash and molten metal—and no more presences batted themselves against my light, I withdrew. The connections my silex had made were strong, and the wires had all fused in the heat and sunk into the cracked ground. So I could not even break them, and Meta had to use the butt of her gun to smash the hardened mineral and free my hand.

“What did you do to it?” Adrian asked, as Meta helped me to my feet. I could barely stand. My colours were weak again, and my silex cracked. But so much worse, this time. I hadn’t even allowed the last break to heal.

“
My Pionic Flare is strong,” I gasped. “Too strong for the Drone. I—I overloaded it. I think.”

He nodded.
“Yes, I can see that. But how? You’re, what, carrying a Flare around inside of you?”

I swallowed hard. My neck hurt, and my mouth tasted strange. Like blood, and something else. Something, that if I didn
’t know better, I would have described as the tingle of silver suit-metal on my tongue. “Yes.”

Meta leaned away from me, horrified. I shook my head.
“It’s isolated,” I told her. “Has to eat through me first before it can wander out into your world and destroy you. So while I’m still here, you’ve got nothing to fear.”

Strangely, that didn
’t seem to reassure her.

“
Another little detail he decided not to tell us,” Kasen muttered. “This list is getting longer by the moment.”

He
? Hope flickered within me like my Flare, but I didn’t dare let it shine. Not yet. Instead, I turned to Adrian. “Look, I know everything you want to say. I’m impossible, dangerous, all that. So let’s not go over that again. She said more Drones are on the way. I suggest, instead of standing around here discussing the obvious, that we leave.”

Kasen nodded,
“Sounds like the most sensible thing I’ve heard all day. Apart from the bit where you come with us, that is.”

“
We have already discussed this,” Meta said. “She comes.”

“
Yes,” Adrian said. “We will fulfil our mission. That’s what we do, after all.”

I held Kasen
’s gaze. His expression wasn’t overtly hostile, rather it was strangely unemotional. I could almost read sarcasm in the slight twist of his lips and the carefully blank look in his eyes. Almost. He reminded me of Natasha, and I immediately promised myself not to trust him. “I’m hardly thrilled with the idea either,” I said. “Trust me, if I could keep going alone I would much prefer to do so.” I released a deep breath. “But I don’t think I have a choice. If more of these Drones are coming, I won’t get far, not on my own.”

“
Well, I can hardly argue with that.” Kasen’s expression didn’t change.

“
Great. Now, just two things before we go.” I tried leaning away from Meta but still couldn’t support my own weight. “First: you’re not going to wire us, are you?”

Adrian made a disgusted face.
“We’re guards, not junkies.”

“
Good to know.” I gestured to the blanket-wrapped tube behind me. “Second: could you carry my bag, please? And my baby?”

Kichlan turned, slowly.

Devich stood behind him. With his limbs lengthened, he had grown impossibly tall, and loomed several heads above Kichlan. But his awkward body was not stable, and he swayed and stumbled, even as he stood in one spot, struggling just to maintain his balance.

“
How?” Kichlan whispered.

Devich
’s mouth moved again. His metallic teeth were too large for his jaw, he drooled as he attempted to speak. “—is—”

Kichlan backed against the street sign. He held up his metal-capped arm, and struggled to extend it into a short, ugly-looking sword. He did a pretty bad job of it too, ending up with something notched, and at an angle. Voices whispered in the back of his head, and his stomach clenched with an exhausted ache.

But Devich did not attack. He just stood, wobbling, drooling and said “—ana? Wh—? Where…is…she?”

Slowly, Kichlan lowered his arm.
“Tanyana?”

Devich nodded. He crouched again, back to Kichlan
’s height and shuffled close, so close that Kichlan could see the lines of silver embedded beneath the skin around his eyes. “What have they done to you?” he gasped.

“
—yana!” Devich growled, forced the word out with spittle and a scent like the pion-haze around a metalworks factory. “Where?”

“
Gone. She is gone.”

“
Go—”

“
Dead, Devich. Drowned. In the river. Gone.” His stomach eased, and suddenly, he was angry. Angry at Devich, this pathetic ghoul of a half-man who had hurt Tan so badly, but now drooled and wobbled in such a twisted, heart-breaking display. Angry at himself, for hating the man so much and feeling so much guilt about it now. Angry at the puppet men who played with them all like dolls. Like puppets.

But most of all, he was angry at Tan. Damn her. Damn her for leaving him to deal with the silver, with the doors and now this. Her ex-lover, the man Kichlan had loathed so righteously, warped into a piteous tool. The fool had played the puppet men
’s game, and now he was suffering the consequences. They all did.

“
Dead?”

“
So what are you going to do?” Kichlan advanced, and this time Devich retreated, what was left of his face frozen in disbelief and fear. Fear. What did such a creature have to fear from Kichlan? “Take me to the veche men, will you? Let them experiment on me, the way they have done to you? Is that your new role? Moved on from traitor to pet dog, have you? Fetch, Devich. Retrieve.”

But Devich sunk to the ground, at the centre of the ruined street. He pressed his silver-coated stomach to the broken flagstones and shook his head, long neck weaving side to side.
“Dead?” He rolled the word, over and over, through his mutilated mouth.

“
Go on!” Kichlan stood above him and held out arms. “Take me to them. You hated me, I know that. So you’ll love it, I’m sure. Maybe, if you’re a good little dog, they’ll let you watch.”

Devich looked up. He was crying, his tears thick with silver filings.
“Dead?”

“
Yes!” Kichlan screamed. “She’s dead! Can’t you understand me? Dead!”

Devich leapt up, knocking Kichlan to the ground. But again, he did not attack. Instead, he tipped back his elongated head, opened his metallic mouth, and howled. Like a creature born from the Other
’s nightmare, he howled grief into the sky, to echo through the ruins of Movoc-under-Keeper.

“
And still, some of him remains
,” Tan’s ghost whispered in Kichlan’s ear. He leaned back against the broken stone, wrapped a hand around the silver she had given him, and let Devich’s animal loss wash over him.

We ran. Down through a complex labyrinth of ruined buildings and into a crumbling sewer.

“Where are we going?” I gasped, struggling to match their pace, fighting even to breathe. “And why does it have to be underground? I’m sick of being underground. I hate sewers.” Talking kept my mind off the broken crystal that ground together at every joint, with every hurried step.

Meta led, helping me when I needed it. Kasen carried my child on one shoulder, and I watched his ever step. Adrian carried my bag.

“Where are you taking me?”

Meta paused long enough to check her small dark screen. So many red, flashing dots, and a constant, urgent beeping.
“They’re closing,” she snapped. “We have to hurry.”

“
Why were you looking for me? How’d you recognise me? Who sent you?”

None of them answered.

Scraping behind us, the clatter of many metal feet and Meta pulled me back into the closest thing to a run that I could manage. I peered behind us, between Kasen and Adrian. Blue lights winked from the darkness. The red of camera lenses. So many of them.

So we ran. Down two more levels, and I realised we weren
’t in a sewer after all. The channels were almost perfectly round: the floor curved, the ceiling curved, and only the path we were walking—an indent almost halfway up the wall, on both sides, wide enough and only just high enough for two people to walk side-by-side—broke up the regularity.

“
Do pods fly through here?” I asked, between breaths.

Thunder above us, so many heavy feet in dead flesh and metal. The screen
’s warning beep split into a panicking scream.

“
Not any more,” Meta answered. I almost couldn’t hear her.

The tunnel opened up to two platforms of cracked, stained, scorched tiles. The remnants of screens still hung on the walls, their crystalline surfaces smashed, wires and silex hanging loose like broken body parts. More stairs wound up from the centre of one of the platforms and would have led back to the levels above us, the way we just came. But a Shard had been built in the middle of them, and it cast the whole room in bright light.

“The Legate must really want to find you,” Adrian said, close behind me. “Why is that?”

My turn not to answer.

“Doesn’t matter,” Meta said. “They’re too late.”

She stopped at a small, metallic door in the tunnel wall. It was well hidden, almost the same colour as stone, the same texture, and curved to fit. She tapped an odd beat against it, one that rang sharply in the closed space. A low whirring noise started up. Then the door opened, and I found myself staring at the end of a gun, pointed directly at my head.

“Put that thing down and get out of my way!” Meta, still holding my hand, brushed the gun aside and pushed past its owner. “There are Drones right behind us. Lock the door and initiate primary defences.”

A young man, half of his face and most of his neck intricately tattooed, saluted. Adrian and Kasen followed us inside, and the young man tapped on a keyboard to close the door.

Not fast enough. Just before it closed a segmented, metallic Drone-leg wedged into the gap. A whir and a cry and two more legs joined it, together forcing the door open.

“
They’re here!” The young man shouted, fist mashing at the keyboard.

And the sharp tip of a spider leg pierced him through the stomach. He folded forward, screaming. Three more took him: leg, and neck. This time, he fell in silence.

“I said
initiate primary defences
!” Meta roared and spun us around, as more footsteps and bodies surged up behind us in the tight and dimly lit tunnel.

I caught sight of three dead faces on the other side of the door—two of them were girls, this time, with long, straggly hair—before Meta and Kasen, between them, blasted six shots to heads, torso, legs.

“Away from the entrance!” Adrian grabbed Kasen by the elbow and dragged him back, as Meta retreated, and three of the unseen people fired another half dozen shots, shattering the legs of the closest Drone so it fell in the path of its fellows and tangled their tracks.

“
Primary defences initiating!” someone called from behind us.

“
Kasen,” Meta snapped, “get away from the line!”

Something was happening in the walls of the tunnel. I could feel them warming, hear a great rattling inside them. Then light flashed out of the stonework, through little glass windows, gaps I hadn
’t even realised where there. What was that, a Flare?

“
Kasen!”

A shocked glance at the walls and Kasen dropped his gun, wrapped both hands around the tube he still carried on his shoulder and leapt away from the entrance, knocking into Adrian and almost sending them both sprawling.

For a moment I had a terrible vision of my son falling from his perch on Kasen’s shoulder, to smash against the ground. “Other’s hell, be careful!”

But Kasen kept his footing, and Adrian clung to him, and together they got out of the way, just in time, as a Flare tore across the entrance to the tunnel. A flash of light, a tear in the air. The light faded and what remained of the Drones collapsed. They were twisted, changed. Skin to stone, metal to stunted roots. Some melted, some bubbled like the surface of a hot mud lake. One fell into countless tiny wiggling creatures that squirmed away. Another dispersed in a cloud of shining dust.

Then the light behind the tunnel walls died. “Clear!” another voice called.

“
Get rid of them, and seal the entrance.” Meta turned us around and continued into the tunnel. I had to watch my feet to keep my balance, and was glad for the excuse not to meet the curious expressions of more faces, half-hidden in the dim underground. They saluted, and hurried past Meta, careful not to get in her way. “Kasen, Adrian, don’t fall behind again. The rest of you, recharge primary and ready secondary. There are more Drones on the way.”

“
That was a Flare, wasn’t it?” I gasped, as she helped me into a pod, so small that the four of us were forced to squeeze against each other just to fit inside. “You used a Pionic Flare to undo the Drones.”

“
Yes.”

A clanking noise above us, and the pod shifted, then dropped. Meta
’s hands, Kasen’s shoulder pressed into mine and Adrian’s back up against my face, was all that kept me upright.

“
Isn’t that dangerous?” I murmured against his tight, dark clothing. Leather, it felt like, but it smelled like poly and ash. “I thought Flares had to be contained in silex. Opening one up like that, you could have killed us all.”

“
The programmers would like us to believe that, yes,” Adrian answered. He vibrated against my cheek as he spoke. “And their Legate masters. But He has taught us the truth. The energy within a Flare can be controlled. To some extent.”

Control the pions? But I
’d tried that, and it hadn’t worked. “He?”

“
Adrian,” Kasen rumbled, his tone a warning.

“
The Hero,” Adrian answered anyway.

The Hero?

But then the pod rattled to a stop, its door slid open, and cast all questions from my mind. Meta helped me over the slight step up to a wide platform as I stared, stunned, almost afraid to breathe.

“
By all the Other’s darkest dreams,” I gasped.

For a moment, the light around us flickered, the platform seemed to rattle, and even the stationary pod creaked. Meta and Adrian cast each other alarmed glances, but nothing else moved, the noises eased, and the light steadied, so they relaxed.

Crust had only seemed so empty because most of its inhabitants actually lived underground. A second city spread out in front of me, growing like bright fungus in a wide network of caverns.

The bottom tips of enormous Shards peeked down from the reinforced ceiling, many yards above. Their points were capped with large bird nests of wire, all shining copper in the bright, crystal-filtered light. There must have been scores of them, and they continued off into the distance. Their wires wound long tracks along the ceiling, dotted with silex like dew drops in a spider
’s web, thinning as individual cables split from the mass to connect to every single building in the place. They reminded me strongly of the bright threads of pions that powered Movoc-under-Keeper, when I had been able to see them.

Two more guards, dressed in black like Meta, Kasen and Adrian, saluted as we disembarked. Behind us, the pod door closed, and it shot back up with a sharp whine and a trail of silver. I craned my neck to watch it go, ignoring the dangerous grinding of silex at my movement. It did not fly free like the pod Lad had used to escape Fulcrum; rather it followed an indented path in the wall similar to the channels I had initially mistaken for sewers. There were dozens more tracks, just like this one, spread out along the wall. Some went straight up, others had bends and turns, one even travelled up the ceiling to follow the path of the wires, further into the cavern. They all stopped at the platform, however, which was riddled with guards, all dressed in black, all carrying guns—of various sizes, I noticed—and all watching me.

“Another programmer, like the last one?” one of the new guards asked Meta, and my heart leapt. Lad?

Meta shook her head.
“Not even close.”

She helped me along the platform, to a set of stairs that moved on its own, so all we had to do was stand still and the steps carried us down.

“That programmer,” I whispered, conscious of the eyes still on me. “Is he alright? You didn’t hurt him, did you?”

No answer. Again.

The underground city looked like a smaller replica of the one above. Densely packed buildings—all straight lines, few windows, and flat roofs—rose above thin streets. Planned without an eye for beauty, built out of necessity. Street lamps of silex hubs were dotted between the structures, casting steady blue-tinged light into shadowed nooks where the radiance from the Shards above could not reach. If I could have commanded the pions inside me I would have added order to this place. Patterns. Spaced the lights evenly, smoothed the random rooftop heights, added consistency and design to the materials used. Done something to beautify the wire that connected everything.

It was even hotter than the world above. Heat and humidity clung to my clothes with heavy, wet hands, and slicked over everything with a faintly moist membrane. Faces peered at us, as my guards helped me along the city
’s tight streets. From open windows, through doorways, or just standing on the side of the street, distracted from the workings of their day-to-day lives. None had the gaunt and hungry look of the junkies that had attacked me. These people looked healthy. Their streets were clean, free of the ash and rot in the world above. There were a lot of people doing the cleaning too, sweeping, or wiping down a thick layer of mould that seemed to be trying to grow on everything.

Despite this, the city felt wrong. The constant unnatural light, and wires and silex hanging everywhere. The unearthly quiet, and stillness. Where were the sellers shouting out their wares at stalls in wide market places? Where the cafes, the carriages, the constant movement of people rushing between home and work? Could you buy good coffee in this place? Where would you sit to drink it?

Comparing the Movoc-under-Keeper that was to this underground huddle of survivors on an ancient and dying planet might have been a little unfair. But Movoc was my city, it was my yardstick, it was the home all other cities—even those of other worlds—must compare themselves to.

Surviving. That was the difference, wasn
’t it? In Movoc, the people lived. Here, they merely survived. In safety, yes, free from murderous junkies and horrific Drones. But that was all they could do. Was that what I had done to Movoc-under-Keeper, when I destroyed the puppet men’s lair? Would its people now huddle, in their makeshift refugee camps, below hordes of Strikers filling the sky, and just survive? That was the way I imagined the city now, and the way it appeared in my dreams.

“
Where are we going?” I whispered, as we travelled deep into the city. The streets were mostly empty, and sound seemed to carry so far.

“
To see the bosses,” Adrian answered, his voice just as soft as mine.

The bosses lived in a building just the same as the rest that made up this city. That surprised me. No veche-like chambers, nothing grand, not even signs or ornaments to set them apart. What kind of bosses were these, who lived so close to their people? And it certainly wasn
’t what I had in mind when Lad had talked of gangs of criminals selling drugs to a fearful populace. I thought Crust was a hard teacher. Where were these so-called lessons?

Two more guards waited at the door to the bosses
’ building. They saluted Meta, who saluted back, and asked, “Do you have word of the Drone attack?”

Neither of these guards—a woman, her skin as dark as Adrian
’s, and another young man—looked at me. They held Meta’s gaze and stood straight, arms tight by their sides and guns held loose, but ready, fingers only inches from triggers.