Engines of Oblivion Read online

  Natalie was.

  Each step toward Sharma and Solano felt like fire, like thick oil at her ankles and fingers. They both saw her immediately—it made sense, if they were all code.

  “Remind me to ask Aulander to chain you to the medbay,” he said.

  Sharma stared at her, and Natalie had never seen anything like it, never seen that kind of fear. “Natalie, no, run—”

  Natalie tried to move her feet, but she couldn’t, she couldn’t even wiggle her toes, but the same affliction that kept Sharma a statue held on to her as well. Her eyes flickered over to Reva. Frying pan or fire, devil or demon, the indenture’s choice. She cleared her throat, going for the confidence she did not feel.

  “Step back,” she said.

  Solano considered her for a moment. “You’re in the direct-jack rig near Ingest. You think you’re breathing. You think you’re breathing in here because you think all of this”—he gulped in a long, heaving breath, then started laughing—“is air. It’s not.”

  Fluid filled her lungs, and this time, it felt worse than Tribulation, than a desert, than acid. She was drowning. Seconds later it felt like there hadn’t even been any air around to begin with. She wanted to fight it, but her body couldn’t move. She couldn’t even claw at her throat, couldn’t even cry out, and as quickly as it began, what was left of the fight was over. Even now, her surroundings were changing in small, almost imperceptible ways, from Sharma’s memories to Solano’s—the night darkened around them, the murals on the stone walls grew brighter, the golden constellations in the halls bloomed and branched like metal flowers and chains. Even the air smelled different, like burned coffee, like the bruised petals of broken flowers.

  A light flickered in Solano’s eyes. “Stop trying. It’s over.”

  “The Society will come for you. It will never be over.” Sharma’s chest forced breath in and out. “And if you ever knew anything about me, you would know that.”

  “A few scientists? I’m not worried.”

  “You have no idea.”

  “Goodbye, Reva,” Solano said.

  “Natalie, you need to know something, you need to know—” Sharma said, gasping, but she wasn’t able to finish; Solano’s fingers twisted in the air, and she clawed at her throat. Her hair had started to go brilliant with golden light, and her hands started to glow with an incandescent purple Heartlight so bright and heavy that even Natalie could feel its power.

  And she felt its intention in the air, clear as a kinetic whining into kill mode; her body was subject to it, like gravity, like the wind, like love. Solano’s own hands slipped razor-sharp into the wind, his own intentions clear.

  “You forgot me, Reva,” he said.

  Solano closed his fist.

  It wasn’t even a fight. It was over in seconds like any effective fight, swirling in sheer light, in blacks and purples and silvers. Sharma fell to the floor like a wadded tissue, and Solano squatted next to her body, his hands searching, a hunter’s knowledge of the liver, the carotid, the heart. He popped off her rings, one by one, loosened the gems, each beautiful singing treasure on her god’s gown, and devoured them, the soft silver song, death-brother, gulped into silence in his stomach.

  Natalie struggled, her heart beating so hard she thought it might burst; he noticed, walked over, slid his large, blood-silvered hand around her wrist, and pulled her closer. She felt hot breath in her ear, and then she was in so much pain she couldn’t even wince.

  “Are you going to kill me, too?” she said.

  “Of course not,” he responded, and the words came out like light, scrambled around her wrists and feet, tied her like stone to the ground upon which she lay, tilted her own body to face the sky, the stars, the amber sunset, the midnight-blue sky, the traceries of home. “You have a contract to sign.”

  She felt sick. “You can’t expect me to be your Defender now. To be a birthright.”

  “My dear,” the CEO said, “you don’t really have any other choice.”

  Solano looked back at Sharma—an engineer checking his work—then turned, sweeping out of the party with the gravitas of a chief executive who had places to be, of a master node who knew his secondaries could make no moves without his express authorization. His boots rang against the stones as the ghosts walked endlessly to the city below.

  She stared at Sharma’s body. It was like so many other bodies she’d seen, the face relaxed beyond relaxation, less a husk than a stone. She stared at it long enough that she expected it to evaporate, to slip away like the ghosts into the city below. But this was Solano’s world now, and in Solano’s world, dead meant dead.

  Remember like the Vai remember.

  She wasn’t exactly sure what kind of code made up a Vai memory, what kind of brilliant wild magic, but she knew exactly how Vai consciousness was passed between Vai and human in any world. She grabbed a knife off the buffet table and crawled toward Sharma’s body. She was getting the practice of this—the flip of the hilt into her hand, the quick painful parting of skin on living soldier and dead scientist. The place might be almost entirely a metaphor, but she doubted Solano knew about this.

  The older woman was fading at the edges. She grabbed the dead arm, pumped it for blood, gasped as Sharma’s cooling blood crossed the border of her own skin. It was almost completely silver, almost completely gone to the nanotech, and full of slivering mysteries, full of whispering ghosts, and a memory that hit her in the face like a brick in the hand of a terrible god.

  She could see herself from the outside: her silver capillaries, her beating heart, her machine at work, her system. There was a vine at her heart, growing dark and dismal around her spine, its roots in her heart and her mind. It glistened, too, almost as if it were an experiment in Tribulation’s dark cathedral, some sick experiment wired into the heart of humanity.

  At the same time, Natalie could see Ashlan Jackson in a small, quiet room on Twenty-Five, tied in golden chains, goose bumps on bare arms. She could see a small child running up State Street on a too-bright, choking-hot Albany afternoon. She could see a memory stored within a memory, could see the half-finished code Sharma had promised her, the code to open the gate for her to walk through.

  She reached out to touch it—and the world shook inside her like a parting of lips and took a very long breath. She felt her heartbeat loud in her ears, echoing in her chest, her immersion skipping for a moment, hearing Ward’s voice, smelling an acrid and smoky somnolence—

  —and she tumbled back onto half-drowned State Street.

  24

  Natalie was no longer in her own body.

  She’d become a small child for some reason, all limbs and legs and arms and skinny wild energy, fed on vat rations and code. She barely remembered what it had been like to be this person, this wild creature who wasn’t aware of the vast internecine battles over which faction was responsible for the decomposing post-oligarchic coast and its desperate hangers-on, for whom the heat of the winter had always been normal and the northern mountains almost completely brown.

  None of that was as real as the summer outside, as the rattle of shoes on the road, of games on the plaza, of shooting lessons with her father from the top of the old Tower One, staring down on the grand white plaza Verdict held by its fingernails at the center of the city. On the Egg that held the leader that kept them safe, the ancient rowhouses ripped open like broken teeth, and the spindly new towers rising from the drowned downtown.

  She wondered why she wasn’t seeing Sharma’s memory.

  Why she was seeing her own.

  The memory had the juddering shiver of dream-logic, moving from one important moment to the next, crushing the unnecessary lagniappes between. This particular remembrance was certainly one of the many forgotten afternoons, with the child playing with the coding toys in the corner of her family’s fourteenth-floor lab and living space, the stink of allspice and rot slipping through a cracked window. One moment her father Xie was standing at the door, and the next he stood, fing
ering the grip of his holstered gun, in front of her mother’s desk.

  Her mother’s desk—

  A woman sat behind the white expanse. Natalie may not have known her smooth, young face, but she knew it was her mother with the barrelling certainty of the very young. Her mother was bathed in the light of old interfaces, wires loose and twisted at her feet, surrounded by pieces of glass and light and eviscerated machinery. At work, like she always was.

  The air between her parents had decayed to poison, even now, and even a child as innocent as Natalie could taste it.

  Natalie remembered.

  “You’re really going to do it,” he said.

  “I told you from the very beginning that I wasn’t going to stay with Verdict for more than five years. I told you the night we met.” Her mother bent over a set of half-finished server cards, holding a soldering gun. Sparks flew, illuminating her face. She was young, with only the hint of a crease at the corner of her mouth.

  “I thought, after the baby—”

  Her mother lifted her eyes from her work, lifting the goggles slightly. “The reprocontrol failed. I told you the deal when you pressed me to go forward with this.”

  “And I told you where I stand.”

  She flipped down her protective goggles again. “Then it’s settled.”

  Xie’s body tightened like a bomb about to explode. “You won’t stay even for her? You’re really going to do it? The long walk to the harbor? Stealing our life’s work for a fucking contract, Iris? What’s so important on the other side of five fucking years that you’d miss her grow up?”

  Her mother’s eyes flickered over to where the child sat, controller in hand. “For one, my name isn’t Iris.”

  The world crackled. Re-rendered. Shock, as only a child could feel it. “What?” Xie whispers.

  “It’s Reva,” she said.

  Natalie went numb all at once; it exploded in her chest and blasted like a rocket to her fingers. Her ears rang, and for a moment she lost track of the conversation.

  No, she thought. It can’t be.

  But the memory jumped forward again, until the memory-mother finished whatever it was she had come to do. She lifted the finished chip in the air, letting it catch the light, then folded it in a cloth, which she put in a bag by the window. Natalie could see her surgeon’s control, the tilt of her refined fingers, even two decades younger, as familiar as Len’s smile. “Don’t be sad. I’m still leaving you the plans.”

  Xie moved to block the door. The gun was in his hand. It gleamed like the crescent moon. “How much have you stolen from us?”

  Reva sighed. “You’d understand, if I could take you with me. If I could show you why.”

  “I wouldn’t go for all the money in the world.” His hand made a fist, then released it. “And if you think you’re taking Nati—”

  “I’m not taking Nati. I can’t explain her. It puts everything I’ve done up to this point in jeopardy.” Sharma yanked up the bag and moved toward the door.

  He flashed the gun again. “Iris, I told you a long time ago that I’d never let a Verdict secret fall into corporate hands.”

  “You’re not going to shoot me in front of Nati.”

  The gun shook in her father’s hand. “She’s young enough that she won’t remember.”

  “Verdict’s memory technology will help people, Xie.”

  “It’s not meant for you!”

  Reva frowned. “You’re not doing anything with it!”

  “We’re perfecting it!” He spat the words like nails. “You corpses, you don’t understand that sometimes you do something just because it’s beautiful! Because it’s kind! Because it helps other people! For you, everything’s exploitable, everything’s on sale, even me, even her—”

  And with those words, Natalie-the-child realized that this fight wasn’t the same as the others, that something jagged and inevitable was coming over the horizon to gobble up her entire world. Her folded, gangly legs clambered up in a frightened second, and the dread made her entire little body shake with fear. She rushed across the room, tumbled into her mother’s unwilling, clammy hands. Everything was wrong. Her mother’s back was too straight. Her smile was made of tight, tilted lips and hidden teeth. She held the hug, shaky and strong, then pushed the child away with a soft palm to her sternum.

  “Don’t go,” the child wailed.

  “I have to, baby,” her mother said. “I can’t take you back with me. You’re not a part of the line. You’ll be better off here. You’ll understand, someday. When you’re older.”

  “Don’t want to be older.”

  The child struggled for another hug, and the mother’s hands clamped on her shoulders, keeping her from moving. She made a sad half attempt at a smile. “Yes, you do. And someday, you’ll realize what really matters and take the long walk, just like me.”

  “Jesus,” Xie whispered, barely holding himself up in the doorjamb. He folded. Stepped aside. It was only now, seeing all of this as an adult, that Natalie heard the anguish in it. “All right. Just stop. Just go.”

  Was this what ruined him, Natalie wondered, this, Reva’s receding back and the secrets she stole?

  Mama doesn’t love me, the child thought, and her world tilted to the side and shattered. The young Sharma rose, hoisted her bag, and headed for the staircase outside. Natalie wanted to tell her to stop, that everything from here will be death and violence and terror, but this was just a memory, a record of old wounds, unchangeable as drought. The child tried to pass her father and run, but he grabbed her wrist and dragged her back. “Don’t, baby,” he said. “Forget her.”

  Sharma stopped where she was. “Stop crying, Nati,” she snapped, staring straight ahead. Her eyes filled with water, but she blinked it away. “Where I’m from, people don’t cry.”

  And then she was gone, and Xie was dragging the child back into the room and Natalie could do nothing but watch from inside that flailing, feeling body, her little animal heart pounding, fighting her lockjaw brain. Like the logic of a dream, Natalie found herself in her adult body, the door clicked closed, and she was standing in the stairwell. She understood now, in some sort of stabbing, inchoate way, the blank space inside her body.

  This time, she followed Sharma.

  The two of them clattered down the stairs of the old white tower out into the plaza, past the ancient statues and white marble to State Street and the crumbling remains of a cathedral made of red sandstone. Only this time it was midnight and dark and gleaming, the moon bright on the pavement, the air full of ozone, the road a river. Sharma walked down the hill, wearing her Twenty-Five outfit now, a blue shirt and pants and a white jacket. Blue-feathered birds wheeled overhead, birds, not that Natalie had ever seen a real bird.

  She caught up, breathing heavy—

  “You didn’t remember me,” Natalie said. “On Twenty-Five. Over six months, at least two meals a day, and not even once—”

  The dream-Sharma closed her fist on the bag she stole from Tower One. Tight. Her heels echoed against the plasteel and brick edges of the grand walls of the plaza and the crumbling sandstone cathedral to her right. Natalie hadn’t realized until now how much the ancient, broken space reminded her of the lab under Tribulation. “When she realized her experiments with the Heart were erasing her memories, she wrote code to stop it. It might have been too late by then. She only remembered a month ago—through the memories Ash unearthed in your mind during the end of the battle.”

  “How the fuck did she think I would be up for reconciliation, knowing what she did to my father and me?”

  Sharma shrugged. “I don’t know. She is dead. I can only interact with your memory now. With you.”

  “So she honestly didn’t know.”

  “I am unsure. The code she wrote in the last moments of her life has no answer to that question. Instead, it was meant to give you a defense against Joseph Solano. Whatever you saw up there”—the Sharma-thing’s eyes flickered up to the tower, the dark sky above—�
�was your memoria’s response to that request.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. I don’t understand how remembering this would do anything more than—” She didn’t finish the sentence, instead using the moment to shove down a lump in her throat. Crying. Crying was shameful. “And her other family? The real one, the one in the Sharma line? There were pictures on Tribulation. They existed, right?”

  “They did. They were on Gethsemane when the Vai arrived.”

  Natalie felt a tight little curl of ghastly satisfaction. “Where they died.”

  “Except for the granddaughter, who was at boardschool. She perished in a completely unrelated accident. Reva mourned, I suppose. In her way. I know she often blamed Solano for many things. She believed that if he hadn’t reacted that badly to her request to pursue her own dreams, she would have become CEO. She had a lot of regrets.” The Sharma-thing turned away from her, staring down the long, laboring hill to the water below, the improvised, guttering harbor that rose around the spires of crumbling office buildings.

  “Are you her ghost?”

  The shade shrugged. It had begun to rain again, misting slightly against her cheek. “Her unsorted notes, mostly.”

  “I—” Natalie rubbed her eyes.“She left us, she left them, and she reaches out to me? What changed?”

  “We can’t explain the darkest parts of the human connection,” said the ghost. “It’s possible that people can change.”

  “Fuck that.”

  “She thought so.”

  Natalie’s tone was acid. “Was it in her notes?”

  “She certainly tried to change. She was different from the others in her class at medical school—she expressed her discomfort with the practice of using indentures for experimentation many times—”

  “Which is rich, considering that her Society was so into human sacrifice—”

  The doctor tipped her chin toward the sky, then reached inside her jacket, removing a cigarette, of all things. She turned the front and it lit; Natalie recognized the old, unbelievable scent of tobacco. What a world, she thought, remembering the searing pain of her own lung reconstruction, where people can afford to just fuck up their lungs like that because they can just get it fixed.