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Marmeg showed Ardha the small device. “Cut this up. Strap on the sharp bits. Could get us over.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah.”

“You’d help me through the pass?”

“Sure. Splitsville after.”

“That’s . . . very sportsmanlike of you.”

“Got a prob, though.” Marmeg looked at the rest of the debris. “No metal cutters.”

Ardha held out zir left hand as if zie wanted to shake. A sharp, two-inch-long blade pushed out of zir palm, just below zir pinky finger. Blood welled around the base of the blade, then congealed quickly into a brown scab.

“It will cut through metal like butter, or so they promised me. I didn’t think I’d need it, but one of the engineers insisted. Give me the army knife.”

Marmeg placed the multi-tool into Ardha’s right hand and tried not to look envious. As the engineers had predicted, Arhda’s blade sheared the hinge off with no effort. The various tools slid out and fell to the ground.

“Got a drill, too?”

“Yes. Right here in my index finger.”

Ardha retracted the blade, and Marmeg watched in fascination as zir skin speed-healed over the wound. A small drill bit poked through zir right index finger. Marmeg pulled off her boots.

“Drill here and here,” she said, pointing.

The drill made the barest whine as Ardha punctured the reinforced carbon steel lining of her boots. Ardha’s boots were much thinner, and zie put holes in them to match hers. While zie worked on zir boots, Marmeg attached the tools—one screwdriver tip and one short blade for each foot. It was a poor substitute for crampons, but their enhanced balance could make up for it.

“The pass must have been in shadow for the latest satellite images,” Ardha grumbled as zie worked. “I don’t see how else we could have missed the ice. Do you?”

Marmeg nodded. “Sure. Image hack. Get a high-rater to post it. Fooled us, yeah?”

Ardha frowned. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

Marmeg pulled on her boots. Her toes were stiff with cold, and she wiggled them against the interior to get back some warmth.

“I should have asked them to include a routine for walking on ice. If only we were allowed grid access, I could download one.”

“Could code one.”

“Here? Now? Write an ice-walking routine?”

Marmeg had her screen out and was scanning the subroutine that handled slip and balance. “Needs a few adjustments. Tweak the numbers in here. Might help.” She blew on her fingers to warm them up and typed in an option to run with lower friction. If it didn’t work, she’d need a quick way to return to her normal settings.

“Can I use your software?”

“What chips you got?”

Ardha didn’t carry a screen—zie didn’t need one—so Marmeg waited for zir to read her the information. The verdict was a no. Ardha’s chips were a new design with a new instruction set. She didn’t carry compilers for it.

“Sorry,” she said, downloading the new routines into her legs. “You got a compiler?”

Zie shook zir head. “I don’t even have source code. It was worth a try, though. I can’t believe you can write code on the spot like this.”

“Did contests in school. Gotta work fast.”

Marmeg was happy to have come this far without having to fix any equipment. Her cuff showed three hours and eleven miles, well below the record-setting pace, but she wasn’t after a record. Even fifth place awarded enough cash to buy one semester’s tuition and Felix’s license.

“Are you ready?” Ardha said, standing gracefully on zir cobbled boots and holding out a hand.

Marmeg quirked an eyebrow and pointedly ignored zir as she pulled on her pack. She crawled over to the ice field and cautiously stood. She slipped a bit with the first few steps. Then her gyros, chips, and brain figured out how to dance on ice.

Ardha was now holding out both zir arms as if to catch her. It reminded her of a live ballet performance she’d seen years ago with her mother.

“Wanna dance?” she said with a wide grin.

Ardha laughed. “I’d rather race.” Zie took off up the snowbound slope with rapid but choppy steps.

“Cheat!” Marmeg called after zir.

Then she tried leaping, inspired by the thought of ballerinas. She reached down mid-jump to one leg, then the other, increasing the spring tension. In less than a minute, she leapt past Ardha. The software routine worked beautifully.

Exhilaration soared when she arrived at the top. A glance back showed Ardha jumping but also slipping and counterbalancing as zir smartskin failed to accommodate for rubed crampons. Zir face was drawn with concentration, eyes scanning the ice for the best course.

From the peak of the pass, Marmeg caught her first view of the vastness ahead. Waves upon waves of sharp, rocky peaks continued out to the horizon. Many were shrouded in clouds, and the valley itself was obscured by the haze of falling snow and rain. Somewhere, on the far side of it all, lay the striated columns of Devils Postpile and the finish line.

Ardha stopped next to her, admiration clear on zir face. “Thank you for the assistance. That saved me at least thirty minutes of rerouting.” Zie reached down and snapped off the blades from zir boots.

“Keep them.”

“I would, but I have no pockets.”

They both laughed. It was true: zir smartskin was smooth and almost featureless. Marmeg took the blades back, snapped off her own, and stowed them in her pack. When she straightened, Ardha wrapped her in a brief but gentle hug. Her friend—because it seemed that’s what they were now—had a warm, smooth cheek that smelled subtly of roses.

“See you on the other side. Good luck!”

“Luck,” Marmeg replied.

The embrace had startled her, but she didn’t mind it. As Ardha pulled away, Marmeg caught a flicker of motion in the corner of her eye.

“Did you see—” she said, but zie was already running down the slope.

Marmeg looked around but didn’t see any signs of life. Odd, she thought. Perhaps an animal, though anything big that was up this high was not something she wanted a good look at. She recalled the story about Mountain Mike. A tingle of fear ran through her. Then a sudden gust of wind almost knocked her over and loosed the feeling from her head.

There was no one there but her, and she had to move. Marmeg flicked her wrist and pulled up the route map on her cuff. It headed in a different direction from the way Ardha had run. Zir silver form shrank in the distance.
Good
. She didn’t want to spend too much time getting friendly with the competition.

* * *

The weather worsened as Marmeg traversed the undulating wilderness. Down she went into the quiet of trees, green and gloom, damp earth and soggy pine needles. Up, through scrub and rock, over a small rise with a local view. Down again. Her steps treacherous as ice crystallized in the shade. She climbed and descended until the repetition became mind-numbing.

Three hours and thirteen miles passed by with no company but an occasional squirrel dashing for shelter. Once in a while, Marmeg heard a rustling sound—usually when she’d stopped to catch her breath or tweak her leg settings—but she never spotted the source of the noise. Deer? Bear? She didn’t have any weapon but the broken multi-tool blades, and those would offer poor protection against an angry or hungry animal. Better that the creature stayed hidden.

She was leaping cautiously up a rock-strewn ridge, now speckled with patches of invisible ice, when her right arm froze in mid-swing. That threw off her already delicate balance. She came crashing down into a nearby bush.

Marmeg winced as she tried to stand. Her left hip was bruised, and her arm was locked into a right angle. She got up awkwardly and walked to a sheltered rock under a tree. Using her working arm, she tried to pull off the right sleeve. It was completely rigid. She took her screen out of the pack, unrolled it, and pulled up the diagnostic software.

A quick check of the sleeve showed everything reading normal. With a grimace of annoyance, Marmeg called up its controller chip next. Every register read back an ominous set of zeroes. She tried sending the reset code, but it made no difference. Either the chip or its communications was fried.

Marmeg looked up into the feathery dark-green needles and let out a stream of curse words that she’d learned from one of her stepfathers. Now what? She could try to keep running with a locked arm. She could cut the damn sleeve off, though it would be worthless forever after. Or she could give up, turn on her grid access, and quit.

The third option wasn’t a real choice. Not yet, though the likelihood of her placing in the top five was looking a lot lower than it had ten minutes before. Fixing the sleeve would take too much time, but she might as well preserve it as long as possible.

Her hip throbbed, probably from landing on a rock. Her right shoulder ached from the weight of the frozen arm. She chose the first option.

Marmeg grabbed the stim pills out of the backpack and downed two. Then she pulled out an old leg sleeve that she’d brought as backup gear and used it to make a sling. She shivered as she stood. The cold had seeped in quickly while she sat still. She headed onward in a slow jog, wary of every obstacle.

* * *

An hour later, the weather went from bad to worse as rain turned to sleet and intermittent hail. Marmeg’s plastic hood grew heavy with ice crystals. Her leg motions became sluggish. The temperature must have dropped low enough to thicken the hydraulic fluid.

She was halfway across a fallen tree over a raging stream when the leg exos stopped working. Marmeg was stuck like a horse rider in a glitched fantasy game, both legs completely immobile. She tried to warm up the pistons with her mobile hand, but that had no effect.

No way could she remove her exoskeletons while perched ten feet above frigid, frothing water. Instead she scooted, a painstaking few inches at a time, until she was on the other side. There, she swung one leg over the top and landed on her knees in a soggy clump of ferns.

“Are you testing me?” Marmeg said out loud.

Her mother’s God might or might not have been listening, but she was tired of being alone. And just plain tired. The cuff showed the time as five-thirty and her mileage at twenty-nine—less than four miles per hour and well under the four-point-two record, but not bad, either. Where was everyone else, she wondered, and how were they faring in this weather?

The background image on her cuff switched to a picture of her brothers. Seeing their faces made tears sting the backs of her eyes.

“Want to go home,” she whispered to the cuff.

Off-grid as she was, nobody would be listening.

“I’m cold. One of my chips is fried. Ice is falling from the sky. Forecast said rain. This isn’t rain! Okay, God? You got that? Want me to fail? Teaching me a lesson, like Ma always said you would? Well, screw you! I’m not a quitter.”

The words were a small comfort against the constant patter and crunch of frozen droplets making their way through the trees. Marmeg repeated the last few words like a chant while unscrewing and removing the leg braces. After they were off, it occurred to her to check the embedded chips in her legs.

All four were toast.

Marmeg’s scream ripped through the silence and faded into the gentle chatter of precipitation. She kicked viciously at one of the exos. It flew into the muddy, half-frozen stream bank. Her mind reeled. How could five of her embedded chips choose this day, this race, to stop working?

Virus
, whispered a voice in the back of her brain.

The chips had programmable boot codes, ones that Marmeg could access using the near-field emitter from her screen. The last time she’d been up close with other people was back at the race start. Someone must have planted the virus with a built-in delay, like a ticking time bomb.

She tested the core chip, the one lodged in her brain stem, and almost cried with relief when it responded correctly. She wiped its memory and reloaded clean code from her screen. That one, at least, wouldn’t fall victim to the virus. She did the same for her left arm.

What next? The sun wouldn’t set for three hours, but it was getting close to the mountain peaks in the west. The sky was dark with clouds, and the air wasn’t getting any warmer. She was facing down a long, cold night with ordinary legs, no heat, and no shelter.

Bail out,
she thought.
It’s over. You can’t win this. You’ll be lucky not to freeze to death
.

Then she remembered the spare chips, the last-minute gift from T’shawn, that she’d tucked into her gear bag.

“Crazy talk,” Marmeg whispered.

But her left hand moved, took the small blade from the broken-up multi-tool, sliced through the right sleeve. She wouldn’t attempt surgery with only one arm. With both arms free and mobile, she rummaged inside the pack until she found the box.

Four clear capsules nestled in dark gray foam. Inside them, tiny wafers of silicon and gold gleamed in the half-light of late afternoon. Delicate threads of wire lay coiled beside each capsule, the ends surrounded by a protective sheath.

Marmeg had been awake for the original surgeries. T’shawn had held her hand. They’d watched in fascination as Marmeg’s leg was numbed; as the surgeon sliced into the flesh of her calf; as he pulled up a quarter-inch flap of bloody skin and muscle. Then he’d tucked a capsule into the incision, threading the lead wires into the muscle fibers, and stitched it up neatly.

Marmeg rolled up one pant leg and traced the old scar with an icy finger. The stim pills ran through her veins, but they wouldn’t help much with this. She gritted her teeth, took a deep breath, and pushed the short, dull knife into the scar.

An agonized groan turned into a sob. Blood welled and fell onto the spring green leaves of the fern below like crimson rain. With a trembling hand, Marmeg reached into the cut. She whimpered as she felt for the capsule. When she touched something hard and slippery, she grabbed and yanked. The leads pulled free of the muscle. Adrenaline and endorphins surged. Her heart raced.

The sudden wrench of her stomach caught Marmeg by surprise. She bent over to the side and managed not to throw up on herself. Then, taking a few shaky breaths, she carefully removed a new capsule, unwound the leads, and pushed it into her leg. She shoved the leads apart as best as she could, and then stopped. There was nothing to suture with, not that she even knew how.