Spirited (31 page)

The other guards moved in, swarming around me like giant, angry beetles and blocking most of my view. My eyes were so wide they ached, and I nearly lost sight of reality. The memory of the Mech uprising—of the military streaming by in riot gear, of the fighting, and the blood, and the fear bled across my vision.

It was Hel who brought me back.

She screamed, tears streaking down her face as she dropped to her knees, reaching for the guard, sparks stuttering across her fingertips. “This is not my way.”

“Get back,” his partner yelled, bringing the butt of his gun down on her hand.

Sobbing, Hel pulled back her mangled hand and cradled it against her chest.

The guard raised his gun again.

I choked down shouts of
No!
and
Stop!
and, stunned to silence, watched the gun crash into her upturned face. Hel tumbled to the ground, unconscious and bleeding, beneath the beautiful thing we’d created together.

“It’s deactivation for sure,” Silas said, turning to me. “Like I said. Destiny. Mech equals murder. No matter how much meat she has on her, under her skin she’s still part Mech.”

The smaller Shipper curled in a ball, whimpering, “Helvetica Gibson, I thank you for your sacrifice,” a moment before they dragged it away.

~*~*~

“Talk to me.”

Shadowed by the mesh of a Faraday cage, Hel raised her head, the sound of gears louder than ever. She was more grounded than a mama’s boy strangled by apron strings. Her systems worked sluggishly. She was harmless.

I’d come in off-shift, volunteering. The volunteer books were poorly kept when kept at all. Almost nobody volunteered to help Shippers. I was as unnoticed as I could be.

Hel pulled herself to a sitting position. Her cheekbone was bruised, and her hair was matted. It had been two days since they’d sentenced her to deactivation.

I’d done everything I could to fix things. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep.

At dinner one night Mother asked if I was lovesick. I just shook my head. I knew that couldn’t be it. I was a wreck because I’d failed. I wasn’t used to failure.

“Murder is murder,” Father had proclaimed. It didn’t matter that it was an accident or in defense of an innocent. All that mattered was what she was. At least to Luddites.

But she was more than we dared acknowledge. She wasn’t the result of a curse. She wasn’t some malfunctioning string of code. She was human and as perfectly flawed as any of us.

If she was human, she deserved human rights.

What had really happened when the Mechs turned on humanity—why had the Shippers joined the fight? Was it like what we’d been taught, or had history been rewritten by the winners? How would Luddites record
this
?

“I’m getting you out.”

She flopped down with a grunt. “I might have saved him. I failed. Deactivate me.”

“No. This can be fixed. We need time for them to see reason. I’ll get you somewhere safe, and then we’ll handle it all totally legally.”

“Break the law to mend it? I cannot.”

“You can.” I pulled out a stolen wrench and attacked the Faraday cage control panel. No alarm sounded—none was installed.

No one would salvage a Shipper.

“We’re going over the wall,” I said, dragging her out, her arm across my shoulders.

“Do not do this, Asa Gray,” she begged. “You sacrifice too much.”

“If you ever want to fly, you’ll do what I say.” I didn’t meet her eyes, understanding now I’d sacrifice anything for her even though I didn’t understand why. And I wouldn’t fail again. Instead I ordered, “Walk.”

Poppet that we’d made her, she obeyed.

We reached the only flawed part of the wall. Scaffolding rested against it and a piece of the plasticene hung open, exposing wires. Hel had been right—the wall was a lie. We projected what we wanted prisoners to see and allowed ourselves an unobstructed view of their misery.

No one cared. It had gone on for years.

I half-pulled half-pushed Hel up the scaffolding. “Listen,” I warned, “at the top there’s a current I’ll redirect, and then there’s a drop to the other side. It’s not as far as you’d think.” I dug into my pockets and pulled out a set of mirrors wrapped in cloth, carefully attaching them to the wall. “Smoke and mirrors,” I whispered.

She smiled against my shoulder.

“Here we go,” I straddled the wall between the deflecting mirrors and reached for her. “Up…”

I towed her to me, and for a moment we balanced above her world and mine. I pulled her closer, bringing her lips to mine, but her foot caught, sending a mirror shattering against the ground below.

The current reconnected. Hel became a living conductor. Dumb with shock, we tumbled to the ground together, stunned to a shuddering silence.

~*~*~

Sparks raced along her exposed circuits, lighting her as if fire bloomed below her skin. I shook her. “Snap out of it.”

Her eye rolled back in her head; her lips quivered.

“Hel, you’re out—free…” I pulled her onto my lap.

She trembled, her heart pounding out a staccato rhythm that raced, then stopped, then raced again.

“Hel…”

Her eye focused on me, and she forced her lips to cooperate, electricity pulsing around her and singeing the hair off my arms. Tugging her game key off, she awkwardly placed it around my neck, her mangled mechanical hand clutching it. “Asa Gray,” she said, “I thank you for your sacrifi—” Her words strangled into a string of clicks and beeps, and her head lolled to the side.

Power shot through her one last time, surging between her hand and the key dangling around my neck. I howled as the key branded me with a flash of heat. Then Hel convulsed, falling still in my arms.

Dead
.

~*~*~

I left her when the sentries approached. I made it to the transport hub and boarded, resting my forehead on the window but seeing nothing.

I staggered into the house on Girard Avenue. No one greeted me or asked about my disheveled clothes, the black staining my hands, or the burn that made me gasp whenever the key touched it.

Mother was probably kneeling before some Pulpit in prayer. And Father? Likely in a meeting.

Hel was… Where did a Shipper—an anomaly like Hel—go when she died? I stood before the mirror in my bathroom wiping at my eyes. Gently I removed the key, set it on the counter, and bandaged the welt it had left. The key hissed, electricity zipping around its perimeter and dancing across its surface.

The lights flickered.

Tucking the remaining bandages away, I retrieved the key. Energy pulsed through me at its touch. My vision swam, and I saw myself standing in front of the mural again, kissing Hel.

I gasped as the sensation faded, the key still sparking in my hand. Pushing out of the bathroom and into my bedroom, I yanked open my closet and shoved at its false back. The panel slid away, and my system, my Highway, beckoned from the dark.

I slid the key into the Highway’s game port, thinking two things simultaneously:
this is the dumbest idea ever
and
I am absolutely brilliant
. I hoped to the God the latter was correct.

Atchen Tan stuttered into view, running the opening sequence. I was in, but only as far as I’d gotten before. I leaned against the closet wall. My lights flickered off, and she ghosted onto the screen, untouchable and angelic in her gown and halo.

“Hel!” I shouted into the mic, but she turned away, disappearing. I typed a message:

Hel, if you’re there, respond!

All I got back was:

I thank you for your sacrifice.

But I wasn’t done sacrificing yet.

~*~*~

For two days with little sleep and less to eat, I hunted for Hel in the recesses of Atchen Tan’s opening sequence. Occasionally her image ghosted onscreen and then away, or a word or two that might be hers popped into the Comm Box.

But I was losing her. Because I couldn’t really reach her.

I did the only thing I could. I broke the rules.

Locking myself inside Camp 13’s gaming hub, I inserted Hel’s key. The cradle descended, hungry for a player. I sat awkwardly in the metal half-shell like some delicacy at a government buffet, but the Game allowed me in only a little farther than it had at home.

But
a little farther
was all I needed to see her again. A thin image of Hel stood at Atchen Tan’s entrance, looking my way. For a moment it seemed she saw me—a smile stretched her lips. Then her expression changed, and the Game shut down. But hope swelled inside me.

Hel was alive inside the Game. I just needed to get completely
in
to get her out.

A day later a g-nomer, with fingers tweaked to be extra long and slender, shaved off a patch of my hair and cut into my head while I held Hel’s key in my fist. I blacked out and woke hours later in an alley outside his questionable office, the illegal port throbbing against the raw edges of my skull, my neck sticky with my own drying blood.

My feet scrabbling, I pushed myself up and tumbled into a darkened doorway as my vision bled out and my stomach tried to leap free.

Back to a wall, I slipped the key into my head and hurtled into the Game. A string of ones and zeroes blurred my brain, and my body pixelated, tightened, and found form. I felt—heavy. Something clanked and rubbed near my ears. The gloss of polished metal threw light at my eyes.

I was wearing armor.

Ahead of me was the jump-point, a signpost comprising both entrance and exit. It bristled with wooden pointers scrawled with the names of destinations. There was Chingary: the site of Hel’s most recent quest. I headed that way, the weight of my armor and the bite of gravel through thin-soled boots pulling me fully into the reality of Atchen Tan.

Resting several kilometers down the trail, I nearly fell off the rock I’d perched on when Hel flickered into being.

She looked right through me, her halo sputtering. Something moved in the grass by her feet—a rabbit with antlers?

“Hel!” I cried.

The jackalope passed through her, and Hel’s image flitted away. Across the river something bellowed. Wind blasted me, blowing the hair back from my face. “Holy—” A huge dragon with glittering scales hung in midair, claws heavy and curved, teeth dripping saliva as its wings beat the air so fiercely trees bowed beneath it.

I looked around. Without Hel I was lost.

So I did what any lost knight would do.

I ran.

The beast tore through the woods behind me, trees creaking and splintering in its wake. My calves ached as I headed up an incline. Ahead boulders formed a mouth in the mountainside just large enough for me to slip inside.

I launched myself at the opening as the dragon shrieked. My vision sparked with red and orange as tongues of flame stroked the rocks, and the world stank like the brimstone Priests said awaited those who strayed from The Path.

I was so far off The Path…

Huddled in the cave I realized a flaw in my plan.
Another
flaw in my plan. I was at level nine with no experience. I had to exit and research the Game in safety. Maybe there was a manual back in the blockhouse.

I closed my eyes and visualized the jump-point: the bristling signpost. Nothing. I squeezed my eyes shut and carved the memory of the signpost into the empty air before me. Nothing. In desperation I screwed my eyes so tightly closed that my head hurt. Again I summoned the image of the signpost, begging to be booted out of the Game.

Again I failed.

~*~*~

What was happening to my body as I lay in the cave in Atchen Tan, stuck in a reality of someone else’s making? Armor chafed my collarbone and compressed my spine, and I struggled to see the allure of this world. Hel was right—there weren’t any flowers.

But there weren’t any flowers in Camp 13 other than the ones we’d created.

I pressed my eyelids shut with my fingertips. In my mind I saw Hel. My lips formed her name.

Something stirred in the air beside me.

My eyes opened. She was there, quietly beautiful, halo crackling around her head. I reached up to touch it, but pulled my finger back when electricity snapped against it. Hel’s eyes focused a moment. Her eye popped wide open, and then she disappeared.

I summoned her again, thinking of the look of her, the touch and smell of her.

She was there again, her back to me, this time even more substantial, her feet displacing the grit on the cave’s floor.

“Hel?” I whispered.

She turned, her brow wrinkling. She was definitely Hel, but she had two eyes set in a fully human face where, moments before, she’d had one and her scope. She evaporated again.

“Hel.” I said it like a prayer. “I need you.”

She appeared, her right hand all flesh, bone, and blood. Although I couldn’t see beneath her velvet and brocade gown to her foot or leg, I guessed she was what Luddites called “fully formed.”

Her hands balled in tight fists at her sides, eyes wide. She stepped back. “Asa Gray?! You cannot be here!”

“Wha—?” I grabbed her hands in my own, unfolding her fingers. “I came to find you. Free you. I’m not going anywhere.” My hand fell through hers as her image fuzzed.