Guardian (22 page)

“We can’t be found like this,” Lad hissed. He was sweating, the moisture on his upper lip shining in the light from my Flare.

I cradled my child in the crook of one arm, as he replaced the lid on the tube. Without the hub it was dull, the liquid rapidly thickening. He wrapped it in blankets and tucked it into the bedding.
“Hopefully, Meta and the bosses will just think you’re slightly mad,” he said. “And won’t look beneath them. Not, at least, until we were gone.”

“
I can’t carry him around,” I whispered.

Lad nodded, and helped me searched through the clothing the bosses had provided us, until we found a shirt that looked far too small for either of us. We ripped off its sleeves and tore the seams around its neck.

His fingers were shaking as he helped me strip off my singlet and tug the shirt down over my head, around shoulders and arms, until it wrapped me tightly across the middle. Then I pressed my baby and his hub against my silex and skin, and Lad pulled the shirt down so it held them both in place. He looked extremely uncomfortable through the entire process.

Slowly, I stood. I experimented with walking. The hub
’s hard edges were uncomfortable where they poked into me, but my boy was light and the shirt seemed to be able to hold him. As I dragged the singlet back over the lot, I could feel my silex moving. It continued to spread out from the cracks, wrapping further around the hub and the wires. I had created a strange replacement for my womb, but it was certainly a womb of a kind.

The whole process sent countless shards of fine silex scattering across the blankets and the nearby floor. Lad swept them up as I dressed in the loosest clothes I could find: shirt too big and probably too thick for the heat of Crust, and wide pants.

I had no mirror, no way of knowing if my attempt to hide my child had failed, terribly. Lad offered no opinion, and we ended up just staring at each other in silence. Then footsteps sounded in the stairway and in a flash I was sitting on the bed, one hand patting the empty tube, when the door opened.

“
Time to go,” Meta said, glancing inside the room. I hoped she couldn’t feel the tension, or see the odd-looking bulge around my waist.

Lad strapped one bag to his back, slung another on each shoulder, and struggled out of the doorway.

I stood on shaky legs and left the room, closing the door behind me. And with every breath, the tiny body wired and strapped into mine breathed with me.

Core-1 West ended in a tangle of twisted steel, the torn edges of ancient wiring, and a solid wall that hid the shattered hub and leaking hull of a once-great Shard. The Pionic energy from its Flare had seeped unchecked for centuries, rendering the area dangerously unstable. The walls routinely changed consistency, from stone to sand to glass, then back to stone in their twisted new shapes. Shadows grew into wiggling slug-like creatures whose touch was death. The excavators who had found the place had been changed by it in deeper, subtler ways. Some of them took moons to die, others days, with their organs turned to mud, or their blood to air, or they simply fell to sand.

This had forced a stop to Core’s further expansion—at least in this direction. Even with the Hero’s knowledge and the silex the bosses had gathered on his instruction, they could not stop the flow. So they sealed it off, as best they could, and went another way.

Meta and the extra guards who had escorted us through Core climbed and prodded their way around the tangle, all careful to keep clear of the solid stone wall and the broken Shard on the other side. There was a path, apparently, to Crust through here. Unused and fragile, but clear of Legate Drones, according to the bounceback. Meta wondered if it was because the area was too unsound for their heavy metallic legs. Adrian believed they hunted by following something called
pheromones
and heat signatures, and had lost ours among Core’s throng. He had talked a lot, during the pod-ride here, his words coming faster and faster the further we flew, until they all ran into each other and I couldn’t understand any of it. He sweated, as he spoke, and tapped at his bright screen, even though the pod was so small and crowded that it was difficult to move. Finally, Meta had placed a hand on his shoulder, and his fast-paced, incoherent ramblings trailed away, and he stuttered, “Sorry, Meta. Sorry. It’s Crust, you know. I don’t—you know.”

She said,
“We’re bound to find tech on the journey. Hope you have room of carry some of it back. Would be a waste, to leave it up there to rust.”

Adrian nodded, and breathed deeply, slowly, until his fingers stopped tapping, and he seemed calm again. Kasen didn
’t offer any theories about the Drones. Neither did he offer Adrian any comfort.

I hunched as I sat, curving my shoulders over to hide the unusual bulge across my belly. The hardest thing was resisting the need to touch the body strapped against my skin, to check on his wellbeing.

“You could stem that, if you wanted,” Lad murmured in my ear.

“
Stem what?” I asked Lad.

“
The Pionic Flare, of course.” Lad seemed almost as grateful as I was to be sitting again. He leaned back against the warm tunnel, his legs stretched along the ground and his large bags arranged out in front of him. They reminded me of a wall, or a child’s make-believe fort, between us and the guards. “You’d have to access it remotely, of course. Don’t want to get too close. But once you were wired up it should be easy. Use your own Flare to counter the flow, then destabilise and then re-create the silex mesh—the program that determines and maintains the Shard form.”

I glanced over at the wall.
“I could?”

“
I’d guide you, of course.” Lad smiled. “The Shard in there must be an old design. Probably why it’s failed. Before we got the form algorithm down, Shards relied on hubs and—would you believe it?—solar panels to maintain solidity.”

I stared at him, blankly.

He chuckled. “Shards have to stand against Pionic Flares, don’t they? But Flares have this tendency to undo everything close by. So Shards need to be able to withstand that. Initially that was done with power sourced from hubs, and the sun. They would drive a constant refreshing of the silex—a program that basically reforms the silex as quickly as the Flare can dissolve it. But that method relies on the stability of external energy sources. All you need is a break in the hub, or a crack in a solar panel, and the Shard will weaken. Like this one, it will eventually leak. Now we use a self-replicating code that draws on the energy from the Flare itself—that way, the Shard never loses a source of power to maintain solidity.”

“
If you say so.”

Above us, Meta called to her guards. Apparently, she
’d found what they were looking for.

“
Here!” Kasen tossed a small, shining hub up to Meta. Even though she clung to jagged rubble half way up the tunnel wall with one hand, she caught it cleanly with the other. Then she slotted the crystal into a crack in the stone of the same shape and size.

“
Connecting,” Adrian said, typing at his pad again—this time, however, without the undercurrent of sweat-heavy panic. “Here we go. Activating.”

As Meta and the escort scrambled down, something whirred on the other side of the rubble. Another pod? The trip out of Core-1 West had so far consisted of several cramped pod rides. I
’d grown to hate them—with so many people in such a small space it was difficult to hide the new protrusion from my abdomen—but that was before we’d walked, and walked, and walked uncounted bells down the tunnels and shafts where pod tracks had not yet been laid. Now, I rather liked the idea.

The whirring spread, rolled down from the wall to the stone beneath us. Lad and I hurried to our feet, collected the bags and staggered back along the corridor. The ground shook.

Meta dropped easily from the wall, moving with enviable agility. She grinned at us. “Perfectly safe,” she said.

A few yards back from the end of the tunnel the shaking disturbed a layer of earth and thin stone, revealing a large metallic and glass door in the floor. I baulked at it, for an instant, because with its rusting edges and cracked glass, it was hauntingly familiar. It looked just like the puppet men
’s doors.

Adrian crouched at its edge and began typing on a keyboard inserted in the metal. It did not brush into bright life with the touch of his fingers, the way the keyboards did on Fulcrum. Rather it ground and squeaked against the rough sand wedged into its lines. But even so, it seemed to work, for the whirring started up again, and the door jerked slowly open.

“In you go,” Meta said, still grinning and far too smug.

At least it wasn
’t climbing. Rusted metallic stairs stretched down from the doorway, shaking on flimsy supports beneath our weight. Silex hubs burned bright from the walls, revealing a long room with a low ceiling, and tight walls lined with cots. The rotten remnants of ancient mattresses sagged through the holes of their wire frames.

“
What is this place?” I whispered. Even a whisper felt too loud, as my voice echoed from the perpetual metallic surfaces. Warmth wafted up from the floor, condensation and mould clung to every surface. A faintly sweet, over-ripe smell teased its way through the heavy, close air.

“
It’s a bunker,” Lad said, just as softly. He followed me closely. “Constructed deep within the earth. Thousands of these were built when the Flares first appeared, in an attempt to protect the population. But no amount of lead can hold them back, and they were soon abandoned. Useless.”

“
Deep in the earth?” I turned, lifted my eyebrows at Meta. “I thought we were going back to Crust, not further away from it.”

“
You have no faith in us,” Adrian said, as he pushed past, tapping at his pad.

“
Breathable?” Meta asked. She stood at the top of the stairs, poised between bunker below and tunnel above. Kasen threw down the remaining bags, and swung himself onto the stairs beside her.

“
Yes ma’am,” Adrian said. “Good enough.”

She nodded, turned back to the escort guards the bosses had insisted accompany us to the very edge of Core-1 West.
“Close the door,” she said. “And remove the hub. The Legate doesn’t know about this entrance, and I want to keep it that way. But in case they find us, in case they follow us, I want it locked tight. They must not get through.”

Meta leapt down the rickety stairs with two long, light strides. Above her, the door squealed shut. Then all the lights went out.

For a moment, I breathed in the heavy darkness and listened to the creaks and groans of the metal and earth surrounding us. Then Meta, Adrian and Kasen lit silex torches. They passed one to Lad and me, and the five sharp beams cast the bunker back into harsh, colourless relief.

“
This way.” Meta slung one of the packs onto her back, and pushed on ahead. “Bunkers were built with several different exits, so in case of an emergency its occupants wouldn’t be locked in. One of them was always manual—powered by muscle and old-fashioned gears, not hubs—and they all lead to Crust, one way or the other. That is how we will get out.”

I helped Lad lift his three, silex-heavy bags, and we followed.

The bunker was enormous, and split into different sections: rows of cots to sleep on, long tables and metallic benches to eat and prepare food, and large empty spaces apparently for recreation. It stretched on for bells. Mould and strange, phosphorescent fungi were the only signs of life, growing in the heat, drinking in the condensation, and feeding on anything from the rotten bedding to swollen and split cans of what had once been food. At places the air was so thick with their dust and faintly glowing spores that we were forced to wrap cloth across our faces and fumble forward, almost blind.

“
Crust is very full, isn’t it?” I said, when Meta allowed us to pause long enough to drink short sips of precious water from the bottles she and the other guards carried. I found I was about as thirsty as I had been hungry, but drank anyway. My silex body needed only the strength of its Pionic Flare. “Well, beneath it is. Obviously, the outside is empty, apart from ruins.” I fumbled for the right words. My legs and my back ached with the added, unusually balanced weight. I could feel fresh cracks in the silex around my ankles, the crystal jarred uncomfortably when I walked. “I mean, between Cores and bunkers and tunnels like the ones the Drones followed us down, there hardly seems much earth, any more.”

“
How is Movoc-under-Keeper any different?” Lad asked. He drooped against the wall, bags gratefully deposited at his feet, clothes drenched in sweat. I wasn’t sure how much longer he could keep this up. “The old city streets we found, the storage vats drilled beneath factories. Hardly any better, I’d say.”

“
It’s not a competition,” I muttered. “I wasn’t criticising your world, Lad. It was just a comment.”

“
Well, that’s what I was doing too. Just commenting.”

I looked away from him, wondering at his defensiveness.

“How long do you think you can keep carrying those bags?” Kasen asked, eyeing Lad with concern. None of the guards sat, like I did, or leaned as Lad was doing. They stood, eased and stretched muscles, while they drank. I had to wonder where they found the strength.

“
As long as I have to.” He pinned me with sharp eyes. “And every time we stop to sleep, they will get lighter, as I patch Tan back together.” He paused. “We will be sleeping, won’t we?”

Meta chuckled, somewhere ahead of us. She had switched her torch off, and even seemed to prefer the dark and the faint fungal haze.
“Only briefly, and only when we must.”

“
Well, unless you want a freeforming Flare right in the middle of—”

“
Don’t worry, we’re here to look after you. Both of you. That’s just what we will do.” She switched her light back on. It cast hard shadows across her face. “Time to keep moving. There shouldn’t be too much further to go.”

More bells of walking. I gave up any pretence and held my baby and his hub against my stomach with one hand. It eased the strain on my shoulders and back slightly. Lad cast me concerned
glances, but none of the others seemed to notice. Finally Meta stopped at another large metallic and glass door, this one in the bunker wall. The bunker itself continued on.

“
How much further does it go?” I whispered, as Adrian and his pad opened a nook close the door, connected to a mess of ancient wiring and hubs, and started typing.

Meta glanced over her shoulder, peered deeper into the long, metallic corridor. It felt so empty, down here. The groaning ghosts of all those people who were supposed to be sheltering in here were all that remained.

“We don’t know,” she said, at last. “We do know that a freeform breached the walls of a reactor, further down, and the only thing that makes this bunker usable is six feet of emergency, lead-insulated automatic doors, about half a mile on.”

“
Poison,” Lad said, with a grunt behind me, before I could even voice my confusion. “Think of it like poison in the air. If not for those six feet of lead, the poison would have spread to the entire bunker.”

“
Fair enough,” I said.

“
Here we go,” Adrian said, satisfied, as he tapped a final few determined keys.

The large door began to shudder, then rise.

“This is as far as the bunker can take us,” Meta continued, as we watched the door’s slow and grinding ascent, “but the Hero tells us that they were created to house thousands of people, even tens of thousands of people, and keep them fed, watered and safe, for years. So it must be bigger, much bigger than what we have access to. Another city beneath the city.” She smiled at me. “Just like you said, Tan. Crust is crowded.”