Guardian (21 page)

“
Got you!” That voice, it sounded so close.

The soldier recovered enough to hook himself into a far wall and hang there, scanning the crevasse. Kichlan held his breath.

A new noise filtered through the echoes, the impossible voices, and the hard sound of his own heartbeat loud in Kichlan’s ears. Faint, and deep inside the rubble pressed against his back. A rumble; a deep shifting of gears; a gathering of power.

“
Kichlan?” Natasha called. “What’s happening?”

He glanced down. Devich had deposited her on an outcrop—part of a hallway floor, stripped of its ceiling and walls but held in place by a strong network of steel bolsters—while he pressed his silver head against the stone, listening.

Kichlan allowed himself to drop again, reaching the outcrop in two terrifying bounds. He crouched beside Natasha, his back to Devich, and glanced up at the soldier. “I don’t know.”

<
Flare
>

Again, the soldier attacked. And again, doors snapped into existence in his path.

“A flash of light,” Natasha hissed. She peered over the ledge. “Coming from down there. It’s hitting the soldier. He’s being forced him back.”

Kichlan followed her gaze. The bottom of the great crevasse looked darker than it should have been, even for a hole so deep beneath an evening sky. And yet, something bright flashed in its depths. Like light, reflected on glass.

Behind them, Devich brought both fists to bear against the rubble. It cracked, cement and bricks and shattered tiles shifted. Then he crouched and dug at it, like a dog, throwing stones up behind him in a rabid display.

“
—coming through!” That voice again. But this time, right behind them. On the other side of the ruined wall.

Together, Kichlan and Natasha turned. Devich had dug a deep hole into the rubble. Light, and voices, winked out through the gaps he had made.

“They’re right on the other side!”

Kichlan curved his suit into a tool and helped Devich dig, while the doors held another attack at bay.

“Finally!”

Kichlan
’s heart leapt as he tore the last bricks and twisted metal away, and realised why that voice was so damned familiar.

“
It’s Kichlan, we’ve got him!” Mizra peered through at him, from what was left of a hallway on the other side.

“
Mizra?” Natasha gasped.

Mizra
’s smile only widened. “Thought I heard your voice, Natasha, screaming like that.”

“
What—” Kichlan couldn’t think—what were they doing here, looking so calm and pleased with themselves?

Mizra reached through the gap, even as Devich continued to widen it, and grabbed Kichlan
’s right hand. “Hurry,” he said, tugging. “We’ve been searching for ages to find you; if you let yourself get killed now and undo all that hard work I’ll be very, very annoyed. I don’t know how long we can keep that soldier at bay, so just get in here, will you?”

And even though he was stunned, and not at all sure what was happening, Kichlan pulled his hand free, collected Natasha, and followed Mizra into the hallway. Devich scuttled in after them, leaving the suited soldier, and the doors that fought him, behind.

“How do you keep doing this to yourself?” Lad whispered, close to my ear, as he smeared thick silex gloop into the cracks along my neck.

I stood in the centre of Lad
’s room, in one of the lower levels of the building. His room was full of boxes of the stuff he was using to patch me with, and baths, and dark, unused hubs.

I couldn
’t answer, just stared at the floor made from old fence posts, bed slats, and painted pieces that must once have been walls.

“
It’s been a long time since I was on Crust,” Lad talked, softly, as he worked. “And there’s been Fulcrum and Varsnia and Kichlan, in between. But I remember. One of the kids I used to run with, pretty good with silex too, thought he could sell used jacks on the side. Not tell the bosses. What they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them.”

I shuddered, slightly, at something in his voice.

“I found him. They filled him full of those jacks and wired him up to a massive Shard. Don’t know what happened first, whether he bled out or started to change, but when I found him he was half-dead, half—something else. And that something else was moving.”

I felt sick.

“You don’t get to be a gang boss unless you’re willing to do that kind of thing to poor, starving kids. Leola, Adeodatus and Urvan might not look it, but they are just the same. And that Meta woman is learning at their feet. These are very dangerous people. We have to get out of this place, Tan. Whatever it takes.”

“
But—”

He clipped the final bath over the cracks in my wrist, and turned me around so I was staring directly in his eyes.
“All of us, Tan.”

My heart leapt.
“All of us?” I glanced back over my shoulder at my son, floating in his tube and wrapped in his blankets, on the single narrow bed against the wall.

“
I thought you trusted me?” Lad pushed me gently towards the bed, and helped me sit. “You need to rest. I need to work something out.”

I nodded, peeled the blankets back and wrapped hands around the tube
’s surface. My heart was beating so strongly I was surprised it wasn’t causing fresh cracks.

I watched him for a moment, searching through the equipment he
’d gathered and muttering to himself. “Lad?” I said, eventually. “The Other? I—I don’t understand. I thought you said he was a hero?”

Lad paused, and sighed.
“You know the Hero was replaced by the Guardian program, but you don’t know why.”

I shrugged.
“Because he was human, and he was dying?”

“
Not quite.” Lad leaned back on his heels, one arm still stuck inside a box of wires and loose hubs. “He was replaced because he was human, yes, but not because his body had decayed. His mind would have lasted as long as the veil did, regardless of what was happening to his flesh and blood. No. The Hero—the Other—was replaced because he was cruel.”

I shivered, involuntarily.

“People are not designed for eternity,” Lad continued. “Particularly not as guardians of the fate of two worlds. He was a Hero, once. And he did sacrifice himself to save uncounted innocent lives. At first, the programmers were grateful. They relied on him, as their aid within the veil. For generations, he maintained his vigil.”

I nodded.

“I suppose we cannot blame them, for letting it go on as long as it did. But strange things were happening on the other side of the veil. Horrible things. And it took hundreds of years for the programmers to accept that it was the Hero—
their
Hero, remember, for he was one of them first—behind it.”

I frowned.
“But how did they know? I mean, the programmers are on this side, how did they know what was happening on the other?”

Lad rubbed his face.
“We were strong, then. Not limited to outposts flying above a dead world, nor restrained by the Legate. The data stream was strong too. The Hero, still so confident that what he was doing was necessary, was right, continued to funnel information back and forth across the veil. But more than that, we had…confirmation. As doubts began to surface, as data was interpreted and the programmers grew concerned about what they saw, the first Halves were uploaded. They worked in secret, hiding their presence from the Hero. Monitoring him. These Halves, they were different. Not the—” a hesitation, the licking of his lips “—not the simple and broken creatures you know. They were fully aware. They remembered their lives as programmers, they found each other and built hidden communities. Like us, they volunteered knowing full well they would die on the light world, but they were still able to pass on their experiences, their knowledge, back to this side of the veil.”

“
Then why—”

“
Tan.” Lad lifted a hand. “You cannot begin to understand how long ago this was. Thousands, tens of thousands of years. The world you see now is not the way it was then. It was a young world, strong enough to survive its own hubris and even profit from it, drawing on the power of the Flares. Do not look at the dust and the ash around you, and think this is the way we have always been. This is the dying of a world. But once, long ago, she was fresh and powerful.”

I swallowed my protests, and nodded.

“Together, the Halves and the data painted a picture of a Hero gone mad. He seemed to believe that, as the guardian of the light world, he should also be its ruler, and hold its people to account. After all, they did not know how close they had come to utter destruction, or how much he had sacrificed to protect them. So he tested them. He punished them. He committed atrocities, because he believed it was his right to do so. And because he could.”

Death, ever stalking in the darkness. The creeping trickster. The horrifying mask.

Yes, this was the Other as I knew him.

“
But how?” I whispered.

“
You remember the sewer, Tan.” Lad swallowed hard. And I realised that he too must remember the Other, the dark presence in the stories his parents and his brother told him as a child. How strange it must be for him, to balance Lad and Aladio now. To be both Half and programmer. To remember both the Other, and the Hero. “Now imagine if the Keeper was the kind of person who would open one of those doors—or, if you would prefer, draw back the veil—simply to impose his will.”

I shuddered. The Other truly had been death and destruction, unseen, unheralded, and impossible to fight.

Until the Keeper came.

“
Now you understand. The programmers drew the Other from the veil and shoved him back in a dead body because he was mad. Because eternity, and power, can do that to a person.”

“
But not a program,” I whispered.

Lad nodded.
“Exactly. They locked him in a Shard and left him there, while they uploaded the Guardian program in his place.”

I stood, cradling my wrist with its heavy silex bath against my chest and walked over to the window. Outside, the rippling flicker of Flare light cast wavering shadows across unremarkable, grey buildings. A small group of people walked along the street, dressed in light, loose clothing, perfect for the heat. They laughed—two young girls in small dresses and two older women in shirts and pants—they talked loudly. Unafraid of the Drones above them, of the world dying around them and the puppet men, on the other side of the veil, doing everything in their power to bring it down.

I turned to look at Lad. “We can’t trust any of them,” I said. “Not the bosses, and not their Hero.”

Lad nodded.
“I don’t believe the Hero has returned,” he said. “I believe he died millennia ago, somewhere between worlds. The Other is all that’s left, and he doesn’t care at all about the people of Crust. Liberate them from the Legate? He isn’t doing anything of the kind. With these cities, he’s building himself a vast and powerful network. How long before he starts testing the people of Crust the way he tested the people in the light world? Even if we could, by some miracle, free him from his Shard in the Legate heart that would only make him more powerful. I don’t want to be responsible for what he might do next.”

I glanced over at my son, floating in the soft light shining from his body. I met Lad
’s eyes, so serious and concerned. “So we pretend?” I asked.

He nodded.
“We have to convince the bosses, and the Other, that we’re desperate enough to follow through with this suicidal plan. We let them help us for just as long as it takes to get out of Core, and back to Crust, and then we get as far away as possible.”

A slow smile spread across my face.
“All of us.”

“
I just need to work out how to take your son with us,” Lad said, and went back to his searching. “A way to keep him alive, and safe, without them knowing.”

I returned to the bed, and held my son as best I could. His hands made little clutching movements in the silex liquid, and his face scrunched up for a second, nose wrinkled and closed eyes frowning. He was warm, pressed against my chest.

Kichlan was gone, and Devich, well, who knew. I had found Lad again but he wasn’t the same man I had loved, at least, not all of him was. My body was failing in the light of my Flare. The worlds were dying, in the face of the puppet men. And through it all, my son slept on. He was tough. He shouldn’t even exist, not after everything the puppet men had done to us. But he did. And who was to say he wouldn’t keep surviving? A life outside of a tube, a fully-grown body, and a mind that worked despite the crystal and the silver in his brain? Everyone kept telling me the same thing. That I’m impossible. That I shouldn’t exist.

We were so much the same.

“Use me,” I whispered, even as I realised I was shaking.

Lad turned to me, frowning.

“I kept him alive, once. And we’re the same, we’re Flare and silex and flesh. I can power a network, I can power him.”

“
I don’t—”

“
It’s possible isn’t it? My Flare is strong enough to support him.”

After a heavy moment of hesitation, Lad crouched in front of me. He rested a hand on the side of the tube. Our twin Flares washed over him like light reflected in ripples on the same pond. We had been torn apart too early. We belonged together.
“It will be hard,” he said. “And it might not work. And it might hurt you. Both of you.”

I nodded.
“I understand. But let me try, Lad. I’m supposed to be his mother, after all. I should be able to carry him.”

Damn, how that word shook through me.

Moving quickly, quietly, Lad closed the door. He collected one of the smaller baths he’d decided not to pack, and hefted it.

Meanwhile, I removed my son from his tube. It didn
’t take much, just the briefest of connections between my silex and the tube’s hub. The lid opened eagerly. When I plunged my hand inside the fine, solid silex crystals suspended in the liquid clung to my skin. They drilled their way into my own mineral like countless tiny insects. I gritted my teeth, wrapped my hand around his tiny torso, and drew him free.

He felt so delicate. Not only the thin skin, fine bones and fluttering of half-seen organs, but the brittle crystal, the bright veins and the constant pulse of his Flare.

“He won’t last long outside the tube,” Lad said, his voice so low. “Take off your shirt and lie back. Hurry.”

I shrugged myself out of my loose shirt and lifted the hem of my singlet as Lad grabbed the silex hub at the base of the tube and tore it free. It trailed golden wires and countless tiny jacks of a variety of colours.

My abdomen was a mess of silex and scars. Lad tapped the hard metal edge of the heavy bath against the silex lines across my belly until cracks formed. Just enough to loosen fresh light into the room. Then he pressed the tube’s hub against the cracks, while guiding its wires toward my son.

At once, my silex bubbled free. It wrapped itself around the hub and set to drilling. I gasped as it penetrated, as my Flare met the hub
’s Flare and for a moment, there was tension. The threading that had been keeping my son alive was powerful indeed. Everything it had once been was directed to the pumping of blood, the forming of skin, and the soft nurturing of another being. For a moment, I felt inadequate. Wasn’t that what I should have been, what my body should have done, all on its own?

But I shook my head, pushed my doubts aside, and allowed my own Flare to subsume the hub. Lad carefully scratched at my son
’s silex until it bubbled, and he could thread the long tangles of wire deep inside the tiny body.

I held my breath, waited for his presence against mine, wondering if he could weep—like the dead child had done—or whether he wouldn
’t know how to, having not yet experienced vocal chords. But I felt nothing, heard nothing.

Well, nothing wasn
’t right. I didn’t feel another being, another presence in the silex, sharing and competing with me. But the connection wasn’t empty either. Rather, I felt…right. I felt whole. Like this was the way we should have been, all along. Connected, once again. One.

Footsteps from the room above me jerked my awareness back out of the hub.