Guardian (15 page)

The tube was heavy. It pulled at the muscles in my back, and the makeshift straps dug into my shoulders and rubbed at my waist. It sloshed. That motion, perhaps, was the worst part of it. If I wasn
’t careful my gait started up a movement of silex liquid, a roll inside the tube that knocked my son’s small, delicate body repeatedly against the side of the glass. So all I could manage was a tedious shuffle, feet scuffing against the ground.

The ruins stretched into eternity. I couldn
’t imagine how big the cities of Crust must once have been, to have bones this large. Silence stretched on with the road, never ending, never breaking, smothering me.

I had never felt so alone.

“Wonderful idea, Tanyana,” I muttered.

I was glowing again. I wasn
’t sure how far I had walked before the moon-soft light waving through my silex began to regain its strength. I still had no way of telling the time. But one short rest, and three fully-grown blisters later, it was shining a rainbow into the darkness.

“
Step through the door, that’ll help. I mean sure, it got you away from the puppet men.” I stopped, and slowly bent forward—twisting at the back, bending ungainly at the knees—to rest the base of the tube on the ground. Then I shrugged myself out of the straps, dropped the bag, and sagged to the floor beside them. “But only so you could wander aimlessly across a dying world. Brilliant.”

With a sigh, I leaned back, and stared up through the holes in the roof of the ruined house that sheltered us. Shards shone against the torn clouds, and my Flare strengthened in response.

“Lad,” I whispered. “Where are you?” Every breath hurt, not just from the weight of my child and the newly formed cracks in my silex, but with fear. Lad had said he was coming back. He had to be. But now, he wouldn’t find me waiting.

Something skittered across the roof.

I blinked, and held my breath.

Nothing. I released the breath, began to relax and—there it was again. A shape, dark against the light of distant Shards. It paused half way across a gap in the roof and twisted. Then two lights blinked on. Silex-hazy, one blue, one red. I stared at them, they blinked, rhythmically, and I couldn
’t help but think of eyes.

I struggled to my feet. The red light blared brighter, and then disappeared as the creature scuttled away, hard feet clinking over tiles and iron and wood, above my head then down a nearby wall.

A shudder wound its way up my spine.

I moved as quickly as I could, heart beating rapidly and hard against my ribs while the Flare pulsed in time. I slung the bag over my shoulder. The tube was difficult to collect. I knelt, began tying the straps around my waist when those two lights—eyes, curse it, they were eyes—reappeared in the corner of the room.

I stood, wrapped arms around the tube, and dragged it with me as I backed away.

“
Not yours,” I hissed. “You can’t have him.”

The eyes approached. Slowly bobbing, low to the ground, hesitant.

I couldn’t see it, not properly, with its eyes so bright and the world around them so dimly monotone. Only the faint outlines of a shape resolved itself. Six legs, maybe more, segmented and arching like a spider. The eyes were lopsided, the red angling away from the body mass, the blue high and centred. It didn’t attack, didn’t start waving a gun around and demanding to use me.

“
Stop,” I whispered, when I could back away no further. Could it hear me? Could it understand? “Get away. I will hurt you, if I have to.” I scanned the nearby walls and floor for loose wiring. The only weapon I had.

Then three wide beams of light swept into the building, travelling over cracks in the floor, revealing holes in the walls and finally settling on the spider-creature.

And it was all I could do not to scream.

The creature
’s legs were metal, black like iron, mottled with rust and clumps of ugly orange fungus. They arched and bobbed on hinges, they rolled and lifted around gears. A body balanced at their centre. Half metal, wires and bulging silex that bled, constantly, a thick and pus-like ooze. The red eye sprung from that side, held out on a metal arm with a rotating hinge.

The other half of that body was human. Or, it had been once. And even worse than that, it had once been a child. At least, a child
’s head, shoulders and upper torso, fused to the metal and the silex and carried around on those metallic spider legs. A blank face, small mouth hanging open. One eye had been replaced with a hub of blue-glowing silex and countless wires that crawled out over forehead, cheeks and chin before embedding in its skin. The other eye was gone. Just gone. This poor child was so obviously dead, long dead, skin sagging and dry, flesh hollowed out and bones too apparent, too sharp.

The red eye swivelled between me and the beams of light, while the blue silex hub brightened, flickering in an odd pattern. It reminded me of something, but I couldn
’t place it.

Then three sharp cracks, so loud I pressed hands to my ears, and three tight explosions. Two of the spider creature
’s legs tore apart; it staggered, almost falling before righting itself, balancing on its remaining four.

“
Got it!” A cry from outside the building.

A frightful scream rose from the creature, made all the worse for that dead, open mouth. It scuttled to the wall and climbed at terrible speed, up into the ruined floors above me.

“Not enough to stop it!” another voice shouted.

Three people ran into the building. They carried bright silex hubs in one hand—the source of those beams of light—and guns in the other. When those lights, and the guns, trained on me, they skidded to a halt.

“You—?”

“
It’s got to be.”

“
I don’t believe it. We actually found her.”

I drew myself up.
“You can’t have him,” I said. “And you can’t have me. I killed the last two of you that tried to wire me, so get out of here, now. You—you useless piece of shit junkies!”

Stunned silence, and slowly, the lights lowered. I blinked, trying to clear my vision. Two men, one woman, all dressed in dark clothes, faces hidden behind masks. For a moment, we stared at each other.

Then the woman lowered her gun as well, and peeled back her mask. “Junkies?” she snapped. “Listen, we’re not—”

The spider-creature dropped from the ceiling. It crashed between us, sharp legs biting deep into cement, red eye swivelling to focus on the woman even as she leapt to the side.

“Replace your mask!” One of her companions shouted. “Quickly, before the Drone sees you!”

She fumbled, dropped her gun, swore as she leapt for it only to send it spinning across the floor.

“Meta, watch out!”

Two more shots rang out, but the spider swerved, skirting them with an agility I would not have believed if I hadn
’t seen it myself. It ran at the woman—Meta—smashing more cement.

“
Too late, it’s locked on.” She grabbed her gun, rolled to her back and fired, wildly.

Explosions against the ground, close to my feet. One in the wall just behind me, another in the ceiling.

“I’m out!” Meta screamed, finger clicking against a gun that would not fire. “Hit it!
Hit it
!”

But the spider swerved as it ran, eye spinning, the entirety of its dead body-mass pivoting to face me.

“Mother fucker.” The two men had split up, dimmed their lights, and crept around the outside of the room, guns trained on the creature. “She’s the one the Drone is after.”

“
That’s even worse!” Meta cried. “Fucking shoot it, will you?”

Two more shots, but the Drone was moving again, speeding across the floor toward me, eye bright and hub flickering. One bullet caught it just below the shoulder, splattering blood and rot and tiny pieces of bone. It didn
’t stop. Another hit metal, but did not penetrate, rather it exploded in a blinding flash of light on the surface of the Drone. Didn’t even slow it down.

Then the Drone was in front of me, its terrible face in mine, mouth gaping, eye flashing red and clicking. And I couldn
’t run, because I was the only thing between it and my son. So as it jabbed a sharp and curious leg at me, as two more bullets took it in the back but made no difference to its long-dead body, I did the only thing I could think of.

I plunged my hand inside the Drone, where skin and metal met in a mess of silex and cables. The Flare inside me surged. My silex wrapped itself around the protruding wires, and connected us.

Like an abandoned building, like a desperate junkie, I flooded it with the strength of my Pionic Flare.

The Drone screamed again, and tried to scramble away. But I grabbed its wires and held on, so all it managed was to drag me with it. I fought to stay on my feet as it reared up, red eye twirling, blue hub pulsing madly.

“It’s signalling the Legate.” Meta was standing again. She replaced her mask, and caught something small and black that one of her companions threw at her. She opened her gun, the way I had seen Lad open his, and used it to replace the bullets she had spent. “We need to get out of here, fast. More will come.”

“
The Legate?” I whispered. I thought of satellites and pods and lights in the sky, and braced my feet as strongly against the floor as I could manage. “No. I can’t let it do that.”

“
Damn right we can’t,” Meta hissed. She pointed her gun at the Drone again.

I couldn
’t control it, not the same way I had controlled the building’s silex systems. But I could still feel inside of it, and it was crowded. Two presences batted against my Flare, as I overrode the weaker energy systems of unthreaded silex. One rattled numbers and random letters at me, a language I couldn’t understand. And the other…the other wept. Such a small voice, so lonely and scared.

“
It’s the child,” I gasped.

The Drone was weakening. It sunk to the ground, one leg kicking, the rest going limp. Slowly, I began to understand. My Flare was just too strong. Its internals were old, recycled from dead children and ancient machinery. It simply couldn
’t contain me. I felt every shattering hub, each wire that snapped, the tiny flames taking root in dry bones. The Drone was telling me things, through our connection. Its primary AI couldn’t keep up with the damage I was doing, couldn’t repair in time. Secondary processing going offline. Backups engaged. Signal loss. Protocols wiped.

“
Whatever you’re doing there, just keep it up.” Meta approached the Drone, slowly and crouched low. She placed the end of her gun right against the red eye—camera, the Drone told me—and pulled the trigger.

I felt it, as the camera shattered, and flinched back, lifting an involuntary hand to cover my eyes. Silex and shards of metal and glass spilled across the floor, and inside the Drone the child screamed. The second presence faltered, its rambling drowning in a single, high-pitched tone.

“Don’t,” I gasped. “You’re hurting him.”

Meta and the two men encircled me. All three removed their masks, and for the first time I could see Meta properly. Her hair was cut very short, so it hugged her head like a tight, curly cap, and was pure white. She didn
’t seem old enough for hair like that, though her dark eyes were world-weary and suspicious. She had complicated patterns of scar tissue at her temples, with a few lines running down to the peaks of her eyebrows.

“
The Drone is a thing,” one of the men said. “A very dangerous thing. But not a he.” His skin was dark, whites of his eyes stark in his face. His cheeks were heavily scarred by countless, tiny marks, all slightly paler.

“
It was once a he,” I said. “And still, some of him remains.” The boy, I was certain. Kept alive by the silex inside him, even as his body decayed.

It was terrible, unnatural. Something the puppet men might do. The thought filled me with horror. The puppet men were programs, created in this world, twisted when they were rejected and discarded into the veil. But what was this Legate?

“It’s summoning more Drones,” Meta said. She waved the tip of her gun toward the flickering blue hub. “See that?”

I realised what the hub reminded me of. The Specialist, the head programmer. The way he had touched his temples, and the silex embedded there had flared into life, while screens turned themselves on and words scrawled across them. A form of communication, then, between silex hubs. Like pions carrying messages across a city.

“We need to put it down as quickly as possible,” one of them men said. “Then run. Run like hell.”

The dead child inside the Drone was afraid. He hurt, he felt the blow of each bullet, the shattering of his legs and puncturing of his body. There was no longer a distinction, in what was left of his mind, between metal and flesh. So even though the program controlled him, the dead boy felt everything it did. Or that was done to it.

“How would you kill him?” I whispered. Death was a strange idea to the boy. He had, after all, been dead for so long, just never allowed to leave. So he feared it, and yearned for it, all at once.