Machinations

Machinations
is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

A Hydra Ebook Original

Copyright © 2016 by Hayley Stone

Excerpt from
Counterpart
by Hayley Stone copyright © 2016 by Hayley Stone

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Hydra, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

H
YDRA
is a registered trademark and the
H
YDRA
colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book
Counterpart
by Hayley Stone. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

ebook ISBN 9780399594373

Cover design: David G. Stevenson

Cover images: Arcangel (woman), Shutterstock (background images)

randomhousebooks.com

v4.1

ep

There never were any refugees.

No gutsy survivors who finally discovered the trick to broadcasting a distress signal. No last-minute stragglers who escaped extermination in Skagway or Whitehorse. Around us, there's snow, ice, and the disemboweled city of Anchorage in the distance, its skyline mutilated and squashed, filled with the crushed leftovers of businesses and people's homes. I know from a previous visit that the sea is also slowly devouring the metropolitan area, making a Slurpee of downtown. But there were never any refugees.

This is a trap.

The realization drills through me seconds before the ground erupts and bullets slam into my chest, knocking me flat on my back. For the first few seconds, I think,
I'm okay. I'm okay.
Because that's the point of body armor, right?

I fight to make my legs work, make them obey my command to get up, get moving. But I can't feel them. An unexplained warmth slides up the back of my suit as my mouth fills with the taste of a dentist's office. That last detail stands out in my mind, looming over everything else with terrible precision—reality fashioned into a bloody spear, the tip driven into me.
This is what the inside of my lungs tastes like.

Nope. Not okay.

“Rhona!”
Camus screams. He crunches toward me, but the sound is muffled by the snow piled up around my ears.

“Camus,” I gasp. “Camus. Camus.” His name is a prayer. Like I'm calling on him to save me.

He drops to his knees. His features—the long, aquiline nose, the cheekbones as high and sharp as his eyes—have gone dark, thrust into shadow by the aureole of light behind his head, like a medieval icon in reverse. Maybe it's better this way. This way I can't see his face pinched with panic. I only feel the kiss of his dark hair tickling my cheek as he strains to lift me back onto my feet.

I cry out as I'm moved, spitting up dark blood onto his pristine, white snowsuit. The bloodstain is like a melting Rorschach pattern.
What do you see?

“Don't,” I mumble. “It's too late. Camus, it's too late.”

“No,” he says. Tries again.

And again I cry out. “Camus!” I press a weak hand against his shoulder. “Stop. Please.”

Blood continues to dribble from my mouth, and when I go to wipe it away—like ketchup, or mustard—it gets on my glove and leaves a long streak along the arm of my jacket. The gaping hole in my chest wheezes when I try to inhale. I feel like a balloon, except I don't want to float away.

“We have to get you out of here.” He smooths my hair back from my face with a gloved hand, and the reddened strands stick to the crusted ice. In the moment, I hate that glove. I want to feel his skin, his lips, the crush of his body, one more time. “The machines—”

“They've already done it.” I inhale sharply, but it's becoming more and more difficult to breathe. “Look at me, Camus. I'm a pincushion.”

A smile surfaces on my lips, like a corpse floating to the top of a lake. Apparently even dying can't diminish my sense of humor. Good for me.

The wind must be a northerly, because it's blowing smoke into our eyes, enveloping us in a shroud of pale gray. The smell of ash seems appropriate, like it's the end of the world. And the noise…I still hear the
whir-whir-whir
of machines nearby, explosions of electronic static, and also meatier sounds, the carnage of metal plunging into flesh.

They're dying. My team, my friends, they're dying.
Because of me.

“You have to leave me,” I tell Camus.

“Not going to happen.” Camus grabs my hands and places them firmly on the sucking chest wound to seal it and tells me to hold them there. “Exhale,” he orders, and tips me onto my side, trying to make it easier for me to breathe with the lung that isn't breached. When that doesn't seem to work, I complain, and he eases me back into a seated position. I slouch into the cavity of his chest.

And all I think is
He doesn't know.

My mind's unraveling like a spool of thread that's caught on the wing of a fighter jet.
I should tell him. I should…tell him. About what I've done.

Might be the last chance…

“I'll come back to you,” I murmur, head lolling against Camus's shoulder. My vision is beginning to blacken. He's disappearing—or I am. Either way, it's getting hard to see him, to see the face I love above all other faces.

“Rhona,” Camus says, and my eyes are pulled to his mouth as I try focusing on his words. “Rhona, stay with me. Keep awake. Keep your eyes open. Hold on. Help…” I know what he wants to say.
Help
is on the way.
He wants to reassure me, give me something to cling to. But help's not coming.
We
were the help.

His hand clutches mine, willing me to stay. I wish I could.

Oh, God, I don't want to die.

Tears spill onto my cheeks, warm. I don't know whether they're mine or his. “I love you,” I say, the words half-gargled in blood. He cradles me to him, leans down, and I taste the ash on his lips, dry and chapped from the wind. They bump and scrape against my own—so real, so tangible—and I struggle to rise back to consciousness like a princess awakened from a curse.

“I'll come back to you,” I repeat dumbly. “I won't—I won't leave you to fight alone.” The thought occurs to me that he won't understand what I mean, but I don't have the breath or energy to elaborate. Words clot in my throat like honey. My breath rattles around the metal in my chest, and it's impossible to organize my thoughts into a formation that makes sense.

At least the pain is beginning to ebb, which is nice, but also bad. Not like I needed another sign to tell me what I already know. What the taste of the inside of my lungs has already told me.

“Rhona! Fight it! Don't close your eyes!”

I'm sorry, Camus.

“Help! I need the medic here now! Where's the
goddamn medic
?” His voice cracks on the last word, hitting a high note.

“Commander!” someone answers him, a million miles away. “We have to go! Now!”

Way

ahead of

you

After I'm killed, I wake up inside a metal womb.

For the first few seconds, I'm relaxed, bobbing in a place where no thoughts reach me. Where no one—
nothing
—can touch me. Then an emotion hits me, so foreign that at first I can't put a name to it. Safety. That's it. Sweet freedom from the fear and anxiety that has been an ugly constant in my world for the past five years. Half a decade, nearly a fifth of my life.

The machines finally did it in the end. I'm dead. I must be dead, because I'm sure as hell not near Anchorage anymore. So they won; I lost. It's shameful how much of a relief that is.

And yet.

The fight hasn't left my body like I thought it would. My muscles tense, clenching against an occasional rocking sensation that just moments ago tempted me to curl up inside that word—
safety, such a soft word
—and go back to sleep.

Instead, more senses are returning every second—first comes the bleary, melting vision, followed by the sugary taste of plastic and a sharp bouquet of chemicals burning the inside of my nostrils.

Wrong.
Fear starts to hum inside me like a panicked hornet trapped in a house.
Wrong. Wrong. This is all wrong.

Except for my face, I'm submerged entirely in a clear liquid, and I watch it jostled back and forth by the muffled thunder. Through the opaque lid of my asylum, something flashes every few seconds, turning the water red. Just a trick of the light. Or is it? Before I'm sure that I'm not bleeding to death—
again
—I start to struggle.

Pain registers for the first time when I try to inhale and find something lodged in my throat. I choke, my gag reflex screaming, all while desperately yanking on the intubation tube. My fingers feel arthritic, stiff and new, as my hands fumble. Somehow I manage to get the thing out, gasping.

There are wires. I notice them now—dozens and dozens of wires like tiny varicose veins attached to my arms, and all along my naked body. They disappear into the walls of my three-by-six-foot purgatory. The real horror lies in its mystery.

How did I get here?

Where is
here
?

A sudden tightness seizes my chest: I can't
breathe.
Am I dying? No. Just hyperventilating. I flatten my hand against my chest—I swear my heart is trying to chisel through my ribs—and clamp down hard on my rising hysteria, doing my best to head it off.

Panicking won't help
, I tell myself. It'll only make the situation worse.

But that doesn't stop me from banging on the ceiling of my small prison, hoping the lid will open.

NOW!

I can just make out shapes through the haze, the blurry silhouette of someone—or multiple someones—rushing around.

“Help,” I yell, testing my voice. It comes out a broken whisper. Pathetic. I try again. “Help!” I pray it's loud enough, combined with the pounding of my fists, and that someone will notice.

A man's face appears, accompanied by palms pressed against the glass. If he's saying something, I can't hear him through the glass.

“Get me out!” I shout, and the terror in my own voice undoes what little dignity I had remaining. “Please! God, get me
out of here
! Get me out!”

Now I'm kicking at the glass dome with the soles of my feet as well. Hoping for some kind of leverage, I press my back to the bottom and push up. Mostly, I'm just thrashing around in the water. The wires tangle around my legs and arms, hindering my movement and, more importantly, preventing my escape.

When the man disappears from view, frustration converts my fear to anger. Which actually feels better. I can handle anger.

“Hey! Don't go! Where are you going?” I wonder if he even hears me. But I'm under the distinct impression that he's my last chance, whoever he is.

“Come back! I'm still in here!
I'm in here!
Don't. Go.
”

My fist beats against the roof with each word, even as my voice runs ragged, frayed by distress.

And then there's the sharp hiss of decompression, like a hundred people exhaling at once. The chamber opens and the lid slides back halfway before getting stuck. By now the man has returned, and with our combined strength, we manage to push the lid open completely.

Maybe it's delirium, but I throw my arms around this man, my nameless savior, grateful beyond words—although I do manage to find some.

“Thank you,” I say, over and over, stupidly. “Thank you, thank you.”

I don't know whether or not he's the one responsible for putting me in the capsule in the first place, but right now all that matters is he was the one who got me out of it.

“I'm sorry.” He expertly disconnects the electrodes from my body, removing the wires from my skin. “I'm so, so sorry.”

He helps me out and covers me with something that's more foil than fabric. Somewhere my brain registers that it's a shock blanket. And then, at once, everything is cold and harsh and unwelcoming. While he returns to a computer nearby, I blink against the artificial light that continues to fluctuate between white and red, occasionally flickering off entirely, whenever the room shakes. Sirens blare, crying danger. Danger. Danger, Will Robinson.

Wait. Where did that thought come from?

Around us, there are five more pods like the one I was in. I wonder what's inside them. Or who.

I'm so busy struggling to get a sense of what's going on, I don't notice the man trying to get my attention.

“Rhona?” He briefly pulls his fingers from the keys and snaps. “Rhona?”

I look at him only after he's said this word a couple times. It's familiar. A name, maybe? The man stares at me expectantly. I don't know what answer he wants. I don't even understand the question.

“How much do you remember?”

“Remember?”

Considering the circumstances, with chaos on all sides, he's showing a remarkable amount of patience with me.

His eyes jerk between me and the computer screen, fingers flying madly over the keys even when he's not watching the screen. “Do you know who I am?”
Clack clack clack clack.
Such loud keystrokes are distracting, and I squint, trying to focus around the sound. “Or where you are?”

Time is limited, I know it without needing to be told, but I still take a few seconds to study his profile. His face is thin and angular, and he can't be much older than me. Twenty-six, twenty-seven at most. Although his brown hair is short, it's messy and unkempt, sticking out in odd places. For a scientist or doctor or whatever he is, he's not very put together. Even though he's not smiling—whatever data he reads on the screen weighs his mouth down like an anchor—pronounced dimples frame his lips. The bottom one is pink and swollen, as though he's been biting it. It's a bad habit he has when he's nervous. I know this with certainty. I
know
I know him.

But something isn't right in my head. There are things missing, including his name and who he is to me.

“No.” My voice cracks. “What's the matter with me?”

His dark eyes are soft with understanding, with pity. They do nothing to quiet my mounting dread. He stops typing. “It's too soon,” he says, more to himself than to me.

“What?”

“I'm sorry.”

It's the fourth or fifth time he's apologized, and I'm beginning to think there's actually a good reason for it, that he's responsible in part for the shape I'm in. Yet I can't help but trust him. I don't know why exactly. It's more than his soft, bunny eyes or even the fact that he freed me. Whatever it is, my heart and my gut agree: He's a good person. Probably. And right now, he's all I have.

“There's no time to explain,” he says. “We have to leave.”

“Clothes?” I suggest, still clutching the shock blanket around myself.

He averts his eyes quickly. “Oh! Right.” He hits a few more keys, then goes to a nearby cabinet, opens it, and removes something similar to a full-body wetsuit, the only difference being it's white instead of black. After he hands it over to me, I notice tiny thermal grids in the material, intended to trap heat. We must be somewhere cold.

I don't wait for him to turn around. There's no time for modesty. But it doesn't matter, because he politely gives me his back as soon as I drop the blanket. I shimmy into the suit and zip it. I can't get the zipper all the way up, however, and clear my throat as a request for assistance. He does the rest.

“Quite the fashion statement,” I say, and he actually smiles. It's a beautiful smile. This is a man who's had practice smiling, I think, in another place, another time, maybe. Before the madness and machines.

“You'll need gloves, too.” He's already gotten some out for me. “To complete the ensemble.”

He catches me off guard by responding to my snark. It's so absurd, so utterly inappropriate given the circumstances, I have to laugh at us both.

As I begin to put the gloves on, the walls shake again. This time I recognize the tremors for what they are—mortar fire of some sort. The lights go out entirely for a long moment, and in between the stutter of the sirens, all I hear is our breathing. It's a sound I've always found comforting, especially in the dark. It's life whispering
I'm here, still here, still alive.
It's one more thing that sets us apart from the machines.

They were meant to be our salvation.
I realize this suddenly, brutally, with the clarity of one recently betrayed. We created the machines to make our lives more convenient, applied as a careful blind so no one would see how badly we were cannibalizing our planet. War, overpopulation, fracking, and carbon emissions—why not throw more technology at the problem and hope it all went away?

The machines were supposed to solve those crises for us, without demanding a change in lifestyle or culture. They could fight our conflicts, produce our food, heal our sick and wounded, even perform as simple a task as ferrying us from one destination to another, pollutant-free. Of course, they also manufactured themselves—and if anyone raised a stink about the pitfalls there, I can only assume they were shouted down by corporations and governments getting rich off their happy clientele.
Us.

When the generator kicks back in and the lights return, a door shudders open to my left and another man enters the room, causing me to jump back. My hand goes instinctively to a weapon at my waist—but there's nothing there. No gun, not even a holster. I feel more vulnerable than when I was naked.

“Samuel, we have to go,” says the newcomer, his harsh German accent adding further gravity to his order.
“Now.”

Images are slowly floating back into my mind's eye now, a swirl of memory.
Samuel,
I think. Finally, a name to go with the man's face. It feels like blood is rushing to my head as I attempt to concentrate. I briefly wonder if standing upside down would help. Probably not.

Samuel.

Yes! There's something. The faintest caress of remembrance.

Samuel
is laughter beneath warm rain. The source of answers in Chemistry class. Bad sci-fi movies. A funeral. Then later, a plan. He's a friend. He's
my
friend.

How could I forget?

And why can't I remember more?

“I just need a few more minutes,” Samuel says, back at the computer. “My latest data hasn't finished compiling. I'm also having issues with the local servers; they're not responding to my queries.” A careful pause. He glances at me. “And she's still…acclimating.”

The German's been staring at me from beneath thick beetle brows as if I'm a meal he's not sure he can easily digest. Once upon a time, he must have been blond, handsome even, but now he's all gray fatigue and grimaces. It's starting to unnerve me, his unblinking curiosity. It feels more like suspicion.
Fine.
I don't trust you, either.
There's nothing friendly about his tired face, rigid posture, or the automatic rifle resting against his shoulder.
But he's still human,
I remind myself. That counts for a lot more than it used to.

“Leave it,” he says to Samuel, but keeps his eyes on me. What does he expect me to do? I weigh about 125 pounds soaking wet, and I'm not soaking wet. Anymore.

“Seconds,” Samuel promises. “Just a few more seconds—”

A dull rumbling cuts him off and sets the overhead lights swaying. Our shadows lean against the wall, veer toward the ceiling, growing and shrinking, growing and shrinking. Glass beakers on the steel countertops tremble, making an entirely too cheerful sound, like the clinking of champagne flutes. The sirens cut out. Then a
whooshing
sound blows through the facility, like flame ejected from a dragon's throat—a loud and terrible inferno. Pieces of the ceiling begin to crumble, dusting us with plaster snowflakes.

“No,” barks the German whose name I still don't know. Even if he's shorter than Samuel by a few inches, he's certainly bulkier—a solid, square mass of muscle. He walks over and grabs Samuel by his dress shirt collar, giving him a hard shove toward what I assume must be the exit.
“Now.”

But Samuel won't be bullied into leaving. He pushes past him, back to the computer. “Hold on. I just have to…” After another moment of pounding the keyboard, including attacking the enter key repeatedly, he pinches his eyes shut. “The machines must have reached our server room. I keep trying to copy files onto this drive”—he nods to a portable hard drive on the desk, connected to the desktop by a simple USB cord—“but the computer's telling me they're in a location that doesn't exist.”

“What files?” I ask, though I think I already know the answer.

Samuel hesitates. “Important ones. Vital.” His gaze cuts to the German. “We have to go to the server room. Straight to the source. We have to—”