Guardian (27 page)

“
Perhaps.”

Natasha
’s eyelids flickered open. “Kichlan.” She even smiled. “The pain is gone, can you believe that?”

“
Your dog is getting restless.” Fedor entered the house, sneering as Devich danced away from him, dexterous and low on all fours. “Shouldn’t you feed him, or something?”

Kichlan swallowed his disgust, and did not respond. Now was hardly the time to start picking fights.

“Amazing, isn’t it,” Fedor said. “Now, look at this.”

Valya pushed herself to her feet, and Lev helped her out of the room. Kichlan watched them go, but Fedor didn
’t even seem to notice. He gathered the wires from one of the crystals on Natasha’s legs and dipped their frayed edges in the debris across the small screen he carried. The symbols immediately disappeared beneath its surface. “I’ve been experimenting.”

Experimenting
? Kichlan tightened his hand into a fist. He hated that word.

The debris rippled, softly, then light flickered across its taut black surface. Kichlan gasped, and drew back as an image appeared. A rough body-shape in mottled, strange colours from bright red to a deep, almost-hidden blue.

“Didn’t I tell you?” Fedor grinned. “Miracles. I tried this on Sofia first. Shows what’s going on in a body. At least, I think it does. Because her eyes weren’t on the image, and her arms were gone too, and there’s lots of green where the crystal is working, and red is your blood, I think.” He paused, frowned at Natasha. “Your body is odd. Too red. Hers wasn’t like that at all.”

“
You tried it on Sofia first?” Kichlan spat the words out and the light of Tan’s suit strengthened. It fought with the flickering glow of the crystals and the debris screen. “How dare you—”

Fedor didn
’t even seem to hear him. He wiggled the wires, tapped the crystal and even poked at Natasha’s leg, until she hissed a short and angry warning. “Why is it—?”

“
Maybe my body is different than hers,” Natasha said, between gritted teeth. “Ever think of that?”

“
Different? How—?”

Kichlan grabbed Fedor
’s shoulder and spun him around. “You experimented on Sofia?” Anger rose through him with a flush of silver. The cap on his elbow liquefied, and suit-metal dripped into a long, sharp-looking blade.

“
Kichlan?” Natasha struggled to touch him.

But Kichlan pushed Fedor out of the house.

Devich clutched at Kichlan’s ankles. “They they they they—” he slobbered, until Kichlan kicked him off.

“
What are you doing?” Fedor demanded, expression horrified, affronted. Lev and Valya stopped at the entrance to one of the other houses, and turned. Volski and Zecholas still stood opposite the small group of Unbound men, and watched Kichlan with apprehension. Even Mizra left his brother’s side.

“
She is not yours to use!” Kichlan snarled. Anger bubbled up from his mutilated arm, an anger he was coming to know so well.

<
Integrate core directives with the primary hub to override lockdowns one through sixty. Unable to access full connectivity. Increase in signal strength would
—>

And he knew, now, that he could control it. His suit might be strange, it might talk to him in an impossible, nonsensical voice, but it was powerful. And Tan had made it a part of him. Kichlan squared his jaw, straightened his back, and flexed his silver blade into a second hand. After everything he
’d suffered through—Tan’s death, Natasha’s Mob, Devich and now Sofia—here was Fedor, experimenting. Pathetic debris collector had no idea how strong Kichlan could be.

“
Kichlan?” Mizra approached. “What are you—” and froze “—what’s wrong with your arm?”

“
My experiments saved Sofia’s life!” Fedor spat right back. He lifted his small screen. All the crystal symbols suddenly returned to its surface at once, beaming bright with fiercely colourful light, rolling and dipping in complicated patterns.

With a frown, Fedor lowered his hands and blinked down at the device. The Unbound behind him glanced at each other.

“What have you done, Fedor?” Lev called from across the street. “Why is it glowing?”

“
I—I don’t know.” He hovered an uncertain finger above its surface, not ready to touch it.

“
I told you,” Zecholas said. “This is more dangerous than any of us could possibly understand.”

“
You’re an idiot!” Kichlan snapped at Fedor, not ready to let go of his anger yet. “You don’t know what that actually does, and you dared to test it on my friends? Living or dead—”

But when Kichlan glanced at Uzdal
’s coffin, all the crystals and the screens were gone. In their place: doors. Wood and iron spreading, like a disease. And his suit was doing the same, sliding up from his arm, resisting all the control he thought he had.

<
Emergency protocols activating, system reset initiated
>

“
No,” he whispered.

Devich grasped at his ankles again.
“They!” he howled. “They!”

<
Warning! Flare generator suffering external attack. Countermeasures offline. Warning!
>

Behind him, Natasha stumbled out onto the street. She carried her crystals, still attached to her body.

Then the suit wrapped his face in silver. And from the darkness and the rolling doors, the puppet men emerged.

<
Compromised! Overrides unsuccessful. Reboot inoperative
>

Three solid men, with countless hazy faces floating in a mist at their back.

The first one smiled down at Devich, that terrible fake-skin stretch. “Well done,” he said.

The second lifted a hand, and when he ran his fingers through the air the very darkness seemed to ripple.
“This place has been hidden from us for too long.”

The third laughed, and the doors rattled with him.
“Finally, we have found a way in.”

The Legate heart was a city, the first true city I had seen above ground. No ruins here. But still, there was something not quite right about it. Even though it was locked inside a great metal-sided mountain, there was a wall around the city. Tall, with guard posts manned by crimson-lit silex hubs. The city itself was a bizarre mix of spires, small hovel-like homes, and towering glass-sided apartment blocks. It was a city built by someone who had never lived in one, and merely followed the diagrams and descriptions history left him.

Everything was black, metallic, and there were lights everywhere. There seemed to be a lamp every few yards along the unruly, winding streets. A candle-like glow flickered in every window, on every doorstep, but as far as I could tell, the city was empty.

“
Where are the people?” I asked.

The Other
’s pod had deposited us somewhere beneath these empty streets and Adrian had used his tablet to guide us through the warren of ancient tunnels to the surface. The city was silent, our footsteps echoing loudly off the smooth surfaces. Every so often he waved us against the walls, and we waited, tense, as something large and mechanical scuttled by.

Meta sighed.
“You still do not understand.”

“
Tan,” Lad squeezed my shoulders. “There are no people.” He was helping me walk. My silex ground along cracks in my ankles and doors nibbled at the edges of my vision. They made it difficult to see where I was going, sometimes.

“
Then why is there a city?”

“
Because the Legate remembers.” Lad glanced at Adrian as he paused, and checked the screen he carried. He seemed to be following directions, and I could only imagine where they were coming from. “After the incident with the Other,” he said, slowly, carefully choosing his words, “concerns were raised about the roles played by humanity in the tearing of reality, and the, ah, episodes on the other side.”

Adrian seemed too busy with his directions to pay us much attention. Meta was too
busy helping Kasen walk, and didn’t object. Despite his injuries and the blood still seeping through his bandages, Kasen had refused to be left behind.

Lad ploughed on.
“Programmers came to believe that we could not be trusted. And so, the Legate was created.”

“
Just get to the point,” Kasen grunted. He gripped the side of the wall with one arm, the other wrapped around Meta’s shoulders. He still managed to hold his big gun though. “He’s trying to tell you that the Legate isn’t human.”

“
Well,” Lad shrugged. “Not entirely, not any more. The Legate is—”

“
—dead.”

“
Dead?” I whispered. We were getting slowly closer to an enormous structure in the centre of the city. A strange amalgamation of a castle, complete with towers and an arching bridge, with a building like Fulcrum slotted right in the middle, all tied together with black lattice and trails of heavy wire. A Shard poked out from beneath the bridge, casting the lot in a wavering, rainbow haze.

“
Memories, to be more accurate. The Legate is the combined memory of countless dead. All uploaded and tampered with to create programs. It was supposed to be the perfect compromise. Humanity and data, emotion and fact, anger and calm, compassion and—”

“
But it wasn’t,” Meta interrupted. “It created a monster, instead. A heartless freakish government happy to watch its people burn.”

“
The Legate only does what it was created to do,” Lad continued. “It governs the world in such a way to ensure constant maintenance of the veil. That is the reason for its creation, and the purpose that still drives it. The programmers in their floating prisons, the Halves destined to lose their lives, and the experimentation on the living. It is all done to protect two worlds.”

“
Are you actually justifying the Legate?” Adrian scowled over his shoulder, even as he pointed us down a narrow side street.

“
I didn’t say I endorsed their methods. But no matter how obscene they seem, the Legate is certainly efficient.”

“
And it’s holding the Other right in the middle of its bloody city,” I muttered, under my breath.

“
This way,” Adrian said. “We’re getting closer.”

We hurried further down the city
’s strange, reflective streets, past windows full of light but empty of people. Around infrastructure like markets, fountains, even rows of shiny pods that no one would ever use. It was so false it made me shiver, and reminded me strangely of the ruined Movoc-under-Keeper I’d left behind. The deeper we went the more we were forced to hide from Drones and other machines I couldn’t name and didn’t want to look at. I wondered if they were doing all the cleaning, because someone was definitely keeping this place polished.

Eventually, Adrian led us to a dead end, up against the smooth dark wall of the city
’s giant, central building. We were squeezed into an alleyway too narrow for two people to walk abreast. “In here,” he whispered, and crouched where the wall and the floor joined at a seam of thick solder. He passed his tablet to Kasen, dug into his bag and pulled out something that looked like a silex torch. He shone it at the metal, and I quickly realised it produced heat as well as light.

Meta waited, gun ready, at the end of the alleyway as Adrian cut a small square in the wall.

“You have to be ready,” Lad whispered in my ear, as we both watched. All I could feel was dread.

“
Ready for what?” I whispered back.

“
To do whatever we can,” he said. Lad’s jaw was set, his hands tight on my shoulder and upper arm. “After everything we’ve been through, all we’ve seen and lost, I am not about to be undone by Favian, the first programmer, the mad Hero, the Other. Whatever he was and whatever he has become. We’re stronger than that, Tan.” He looked down, met my gaze. “
You’re
stronger. You have to believe me. Together, we can do anything.”

I swallowed hard, nodded, and cupped a supporting hand beneath my baby
’s bulge. I wasn’t so sure I believed him, but we were together, all three of us. And Kichlan, somewhere, in my impossible dreams.

Adrian lifted the square he had cut clean from the wall, and dug out handfuls of wiring and silex hubs from the hole. Then he opened a section of his tablet and did the same, so he could join them. Symbols in red and green scrawled across its surface.

Lad sucked in a sharp breath. “What are you doing?”

“
Getting us inside,” Adrian answered. His fingers flew across the screen, rearranging symbols faster than I had any hope of following. Not that I could have understood what he was doing, one way or the other. “And locating the Hero. He gave us the map to get this far. The rest is up to us.”

“
Can you stand?” Las asked me, voice tense. I nodded, and he released me to elbow his way beside Adrian. “Be careful!” Lad tried to take the tablet from Adrian, and Kasen quickly drew his weapon. “You’ll alert them to our presence! The Legate and the network are—”

The wall rumbled, and a door slid free.

“There.” Adrian grinned. “See? You should have faith—”

The tablet screen suddenly wiped black. Adrian paused for a moment, shook it, knocked it slightly against his knee.

“They noticed you,” Lad pushed himself to his feet. “They’ve locked you out.” He grabbed my arm and pushed me forward, back up the alley. “We have to go, now. How long before you think Drones will be here? We do not want to be caught.”

Meta refused to budge. She pointed the gun at us until we edged back, to the door Adrian had opened.
“Then we’d better get inside,” she said.

“
But—” Lad tried, but Meta remained implacable.

“
The Hero is waiting.”

We squeezed through the narrow doorway, one by one. The walls were close, and riddled with warm wiring that pulsed, sometimes, as though the building had a heartbeat. I shuffled carefully, trying not to touch them. Kasen
’s struggling, laboured breathing was loud in the tight, metallic space. Inside the building was dark, too dark to see without the light from Adrian’s screen. My Flare remained dim, subdued, and didn’t offer much relief.

“
I don’t know where we’re going,” Adrian whispered. “The Hero could only give me directions through the city. Without a connection to the Legate network, we’re blind here.”

Something scratched above us, and we froze. A sound like metallic footsteps. Slow, halting. Searching for us?

Lad squeezed my hand. “Tan can do it,” he breathed the words.

“
What?” I frowned up at him, even though he couldn’t see my expression. I was sure he could hear it in my voice. “I’m not doing anything to help this ridiculous idea. And neither should you!”

“
Shhh,” Kasen hissed. “Not so loud.”

“
We have to,” Lad replied, quiet and calm. “It’s too late to argue. The Legate knows we’re here; it’s probably looking for us, right now. There must be Drones on our tail. We don’t know where we are, we can’t turn around. If you don’t take over, they’re going to catch us.
All
of us.”

I gripped my baby tighter.

“Remember, you’re strong on the network. We need you. I need you.
He
needs you, to find a way out of here.”

He hadn
’t actually mentioned the Other. That was possibly the only reason I nodded. “Fine,” I said, and stuck my hand out in the direction I hoped Adrian was. “Then give me the tablet.”

Lad took my hand instead.
“Tan,” he said. “You don’t need an interface. Access is all around you.”

I shuddered as he guided my fingers to the wall. Gingerly, I touched wiring, hubs, thick tubes pumping some kind of cool liquid.
“It—” I stammered. “It feels like it’s alive.”

“
It’s the Legate,” Lad said. “All of it. This building, this city. Everything is part of the heart.”

Silex dripped free of the ever-present cracks in my wrist. It snaked slow and smooth around the writing. My Flare flickered, still weakened from
my battle with the Other.

“
Just remember what you’re here to do,” Meta said, and rattled her gun.

My silex sealed the connection, and we slipped quietly into the network.

Instantly, the Legate stopped me. As though I was no bigger than a fly, whining around its head, it slapped me back into my own body. My Flare was just too small, compared to its combined might.

No wonder the Other was so arrogant that he would put my life, and the lives of Lad, Meta, Adrian and Kasen, at risk just to get what he wanted. It might have taken him generations, but he had still managed to not only bypass the Legate, but also use its network to his own ends. The Other—the Hero—must be strong despite what the programmers had done to him, and far more skilled than I.

“Come on, Tan,” Lad said. “I know you can do this. Remember what I said. And do it together.”

I frowned. Together. Lad was here, but what could he do to help me?
“What do you mean?”

Lad
’s grip on my arm was steady. Supporting me, always supporting me. “Remember what happened before the dog pack,” he said. “That dump of data on your Flare. When you saw Bro.”

I nodded, realised he might not be able to see me, and whispered,
“Of course.” My dreams of Kichlan, which might not be dreams at all.

“
I’ve been thinking about it,” he continued. “And I think it’s because of your son. Do you remember on Fulcrum too? How perfect his connection to the veil is? How clean his stream?”

I swallowed hard.
“Of course. That’s why they want him in the first place. That’s why they want to make him the Guardian.” There was no way I’d let that happen.

“
Your Flare is strong, Tan, but his is stronger. His connection to the veil is pure. I’m still not sure why, but it definitely has something to do with your suit. The puppet men had to force your body to integrate with debris—you were changed into code. But he has been that way from conception. Debris is one of the very building blocks of his life, it’s in his cells, it’s coded into his DNA.”

I pushed down the guilt Lad
’s words sparked within me. I was supposed to a mother, wasn’t I? But I still couldn’t protect my son, not from the things my suit-altered body had done to him.

“
You and your son share the same programming. Now that we have reconnected you, you share the same Flare too. Your son’s Flare is powerful, Tan. Use it.”

It wasn
’t fair, it wasn’t his fault. How could I—?

A sound like laughter trickled through the connection. Joyful, haunting. I glimpsed the strangest, faintest image—a small, smiling face; a child silhouetted against the setting sun; the peak of the Keeper Mountain shining in the distance.

My son.

I felt no resentment from him. Just amusement, and a wistful longing for a life I wasn
’t sure I’d ever be able to give him.