Spirited (32 page)

“Go!” Her form flickered, became solid only when she seemed to focus. “This is level nine. You are ill-equipped.”

The cave quaked beneath the dragon’s bellow. Bits of granite crumbled from the walls and bounced across the floor.

Hel twisted toward the noise. “Your arrival triggered it. You must leave, Asa Gray.”

“Equip me,” I demanded. “I’ll save you. I have armor.”

“Armor does not a knight make,” Hel snapped, halo hissing.

The dragon howled. The ground shook.

“I am not ready.” She peered out the narrow cave’s opening. “I do not have the power…”

“You do.” I grabbed her hand, letting the current that flew along her fingertips sing through me. “You always had the power. Harness it. This
is
your world.”

The roof caved in with a groan. The dragon’s claws raked through the wreckage, brushing past me as Hel screamed.

I was so
very
ill-equipped.

~*~*~

“Look at yourself,” I shouted above the dragon’s roar, scrambling away from the beast’s grasping talons and ducking behind a huge rock.

Standing in the rubble of the cave, Hel looked down. She stumbled back, blinking.

“That’s who you want to be, right?”

Mute, she stared at me. Her halo flared and screamed, throwing her shadow against clouds that gathered so low their guts scraped the mountaintop and shrouded the valley. Light trembled up from her halo to become lightning that crawled across the sky.

“Atchen Tan is
your
world. Make it your reality! Control it!”

She squeezed her eyes shut. By her feet, strings of binary code bled free, blurring to become stems that stumbled along cracks in the mountain—cracks in the code—and blossomed into flowers, Hel’s anomaly finding the Game’s seams and tugging them apart. Other Shippers stuttered into view and then whisked away.

Hel was connecting to more than just the world of Atchen Tan.

Claws clicked closed around me, dragging me into the air.

“That’s great, but—maybe something more useful?”

With eyes like twin Red Giants, the dragon glared at me, its breath scalding my face.

“Equip me!” I shouted.

Hel spread her feet and her arms, fingers splayed as current wove around and through her. Other Shippers ghosted in again—Shippers jacked-in at the same time—their faces familiar and glimmering like ghosts. Their energies merged, code flowing like water between them. Power built and burst free from Hel’s fingers, arcing toward my outstretched arm as the others twitched away again, leaving only twisting bits of binary behind.

A sword manifested in my hand. I swung it at the beast’s snout with all my strength.

The blade bounced back, and the dragon went shrill with rage.

“Dig deeper!” I screamed, gathering my fading courage.

Hel’s face twisted in concentration. Thunder snarled across the thickening sky. Bracing herself, she sucked in the air, breathed deep the code, and spooled it back out in her own shimmering design of blue and white light.

It fell short, ones and zeroes solidifying and tumbling to the ground like bits of ice before they melted, seeping back into the ground, stitching up the tears in the code and strangling the flowers.

Hel shuddered, doubling over.

“Connect!” I shouted. “To the others! To the world! Ground yourself in it!”

Rolling back up to her full height, she raised quivering arms as the dragon reared. More Shippers manifested, stunned but substantial. Shippers I’d never seen before. Shippers from other Camps. A ring of meat and metal in medieval garb, adventurers of all levels sucked into Hel’s vortex of power. The cracks in the ground reopened, multiplied, and widened, life pouring free in a riot of colors and forms.

Hel nodded at the Shippers. “We can end this quest. Connect with me. Meld together.”

Static rumbled between a thousand outstretched fingers and built to a roar. Hel bent her head, thrusting her arms forward to again become a conduit of power, aiming the combined powers of their wills at my sword.

Lit from inside, the metal molecules hummed, and with all my strength, I aimed for the dragon’s throat.

The blade ripped through scaly flesh. The dragon shrieked, ichor bubbling thickly from the gaping wound. Its head rolled and it stumbled. Claws trembling open, it hurled me into the rocks.

Pain burned from the base of my skull through my backbone. Atchen Tan faded into a dark, whirling blend of binary code as Hel’s scream became nothing but a distant buzz.

~*~*~

“Misguided bastard.” Silas’s voice assaulted me. “He let her get inside him—as far as they can.” A hand pressed against my head. “Look. He’s augmented.”

Someone gasped, and I willed my eyes open.

“Why would anyone…?” Jared gaped at me, his eyes full of horror.

Around the cylindrical screen, Shippers roused, faces familiar from the Game.

I swallowed. “Is she…?”

“Hel’s there,” one replied.

“I’m sure Hell’s waiting for you.” Silas dragged me from the cradle. “Gotta process you.”

Before Silas towed me outside, a Shipper grabbed my arm. “Asa Gray, I welcome you. I am Bodoni Gibson.”

Silas growled, “What? Now there’s a Gibson
family
?”

“More than a family,” Bodoni corrected. “A clan. Open to new members.”

~*~*~

That night Silas processed me. I was fine in every way that mattered, except I had no marker—no appropriate identification.

Shippers received markers at their Final Fitting—after the growth spurts of adolescence. It was a time of celebration. Not for me. My parents wouldn’t watch me get branded the way Shippers watched their children get etched.

“You’re nearsighted,” I pointed out to Silas after watching him work. “You could get that corrected. A little augmentation or a g-nome tweak…”

He raised his hand, but I blocked the blow.

“None of us is truly perfect, eh?”

He readied the brand that would surround my Blunted Star with a thick square and make me just another Shipper.

Cherry hot, the brand sank into my flesh, and I blacked out thinking:
Some welcome
.

~*~*~

I woke in Atchen Tan, Hel kneeling at my side, her halo a diadem of faceted crystals. “You are here,” she soothed.

“You look—” Different? Subdued? “Beautiful,” I said finally.

“I am all those things and more,” she said, a smile twitched at the corner of her lips.

“What?
All
those?”

“I am no longer just
your
Hel, but I am also H.E.L.: the Human Electronic Link. I connect Shippers everywhere with the Binary Mind,” she explained. “Listen. Do you hear them?”

I closed my eyes. Her breath brushed my ear, and I heard a buzz like bees working a hive.

“We are all connected,” she whispered. “Whenever you jack-in, I hear you—know you. Every thing about you. Words and thoughts.”

“Amazing.”

“You will never be alone again, Asa Gray. Even when you exit, you will carry a small part of me like a ghost in your heart.”

“No,” I corrected. “Not a ghost. A hope.”

“I like that better,” she agreed. “Now go. They are celebrating you.” She leaned down, and with a kiss, kicked me out of the Game.

Hel might never fly or burn bridges, but she was building an entire world instead.

That night we celebrated until the guards ordered us back to our blockhouses.

They couldn’t imagine we had anything worth celebrating, but, when it seems you have nothing, hope is most worthy of celebration.

In Camp 13, Shippers who were once zombie-like became animated—inspired. Murals like the ones Hel and I had created covered every wall and walkway. Their beauty grew too quickly for the guards to cover up.

Although we remained prisoners, we hoped our prison might evolve into something of our own design.

And maybe if we designed it, we could control it.

Then it would be no prison at all. Someday we might even bring down all the walls that stood between us and true freedom.

Together we’d been to Hel and back. Was there anything we couldn’t do?

The Story of Late

In the Sacred Soil—the Dark City where all the unclaimed Dead went—he was given life. The first child who was not born in the Sunlit Lands. He had never seen the world outside the Gates, and never took a breath of air into his lungs. He was special, this one was.

Other children had been born here in the necropolis, but every one of them had been conceived in the outside, which, to be honest, so had he. Some had seen their mothers’ faces before dying. Some had only known their warmth. That was the difference. Every one of the other children had lived for a time. No one knew if this child had. This boy was an anomaly. No one but the Caretaker knew how he came to be there, and the Caretaker chose not to tell anyone, not even the boy, when he grew older. One does not question the Caretaker, if one expects to have peace in one’s eternal rest.

The boy was alive though, that much was clear. His skin was pink and warm. His heart beat. He grew older, though here in this place he did not need to eat or sleep. Sometimes when he was very young, he attempted those things, but really there was no need, and so eventually he just stopped trying. The Dead were his tutors, teaching him to speak and to walk, and no less a personage than the Caretaker himself taught the boy to drive the carriages that came to the Bone Gate, carrying new citizenry to the Dark City from the outskirts of the land. It helped to have the boy meet the new arrivals, for sometimes they were wild and afraid at the colorless place in which they found themselves.

In these unusual surroundings, he grew to be a young man, never knowing that his life was not normal.

Late was the name he gave himself, for the Dead were in the habit of addressing themselves as “The
Late
John Smith,” or “The
Late
Jane Jones.” When the boy began to talk, he mimicked this way of introduction. But because he had never been named, he had nothing to follow “The Late…” So the name stuck and was eventually shortened to
Late
.

He liked his name. He liked his life.

Until the day came, after eighteen years had passed in the Sunlit Lands, that Late accidentally cut himself on the sharp spines that made the Bone Gate, and he bled bright red.

Not much color exists in the Sacred Soil, and the Dead came from all over the city to see the red. It made some happy to remember their own lives. It made others sad. It frightened most…

…but one dared to taste it.

He found he liked the taste.

~*~*~

Late dwelt in the hollow skull of a dragon that had been dead long enough to become part of the city. The boy liked to watch the people below as he rested in the empty eye sockets that served as windows, and this was how he spent much of his time. He talked to the Dead and, because he knew nothing else, he was not alarmed by their pallor, their chilly touch, their echoing voices. In fact, he thought himself too pink and warm, and he had a peculiar glow about him that only he could see.

But he also had the smell of the living about him, and it drew darkness to Dragon’s Skull.

The dead man who had sampled Late’s blood decided he would take it all. He had been dead long enough to have forgotten that he was ever a man at all, and now all he had become was this crawling, corrupted thing craving the sweetness of Late’s life. In the darkness of the perpetual night, he crept to where Late sat amusing a child newly arrived in the city by tossing knucklebones to one of the rotting ravens who filled the leafless trees.

Danger, my master
, whispered the echo, which was all that remained of the dragon besides the bones.
Evil comes for you
.

Not knowing what evil was, but knowing that the Dragon’s warning was nothing to disregard, Late stepped into the shadows and bid the child to be still.

As the dead man climbed the bone pile that was Late’s front steps, he moved like an animal, sniffing the air.
Blood… blood… blood
, he whispered. He glanced toward the child and the raven, but he could not see the glow that marked the carefully hidden Late.
Where… is… the… blood?