Another bark of scorn, this time, the edge of a sob. “Deserve
“I never meant for—”
“I know.” She swallowed back the rest of her words.
“Help me.”
“How? Follow you on this crusade? Watch you lose yourself in that
“If that’s what it takes.”
“She loved you.”
He didn’t have a response.
“And a part of her still does.”
“She was never mine.” The heart is unable to unravel memory from lie.
“She was yours, but the silver got you.”
“You got her.”
Jud bit back disappointment. “We merged so I could protect her.”
“From me?”
“From you. And the silver. Should have never learned to swim. She’s safe with me. It’s always been there, the silver, and it’s always worked its way through you. Writing people together. Should have kept her safe. You had a god damned obligation to keep her out of your head.”
“I tried.”
“Not fucking hard enough. Couldn’t you have seen her for who she is, just Alina? Such a sweet, kind girl. Half- crazy, sure, but. Maybe not much to look at, but beautiful. But the second you started merging her with others, that’s when you really lost her.”
“Then give her back. Come with me. Be my pilot.”
Jud stood silent. A billion empty birth chambers, a billion lives now impossible and fading. She’d been a god once, buried at the center of a planet. She’d been a god once, consumed by the silver contagion. She’d never felt so helpless.
“Come with me.” Paul put his hand on her shoulder.
Jud nodded.
The Judith Mara smashed lazily into the winter plain, shearing both nacelles from its superstructure. The control hub bounced twice, three times, came to rest in a mile of drifted snow.
Maire smiled.
Her war was big. Across the solar system, galaxy, across the entire universe of the Alpha line, Enemy forces spidered on silver webs, consuming every soul that had been left behind. She had been hoping to catch one of Jud’s inner circle, but this kill would taste just as delicious.
A dozen Enemy were already on the hub, cutting, prying apart the smooth black of it. They stood aside so she could clamber in. The hole was tight; she ungrew a decade until she was in the command chamber. She smoothed her jet black swathe of hair behind her ears.
Sapphire West lay half crushed underneath the gauntlet interface chandelier. Loops of sputtering silver web draped her.
“Children waging wars,” Maire said as she walked closer to the mess and grew back to her choice age. “They’re really running out of options, aren’t they?”
“Fuck you.” Sapphire coughed a mist of blood. Her chest was crumpled under metallish black. Her left hand still hung in the air, suspended by her gauntlet. Maire tenderly released the mechanism and helped Sapphire’s arm to the floor. The girl was tangled in interface web.
She reached immediately to her cardiac shield, fingers skittering over the surface, trying to pause and log out. Maire swiftly crunched down on Sapphire’s hand, feeling the bones of her break beneath. The girl didn’t scream, but two lines of tear were coaxed to the surface and out.
“He’s sending little girls to do his job for him.” Maire bared her silver fangs as she crouched down to Sapphire’s tangled pieces. “Don’t cry, child. You’ll be with your sister soon.”
“Don’t you fucking—”
“Too late. Jade’s droptroops were among the first to go.”
“You motherf—”
Maire tore into the girl, her claws slicing into the cardiac shield and cleaving her breast into halves. Sapphire lurched, but she was trapped under the weight of the dead Mara’s umbilicals. She tried to scream, but a simple flick, and her vocal cords were split. Maire gutted her, the foul internals steaming out into the frigid air. She reached into Sapphire’s chest, groped around, and plucked a tiny silver marble from its resting place. She admired its design and saw movement from the corner of her
Honeybear Brown smashed the side of Maire’s head with a hanging interface line, but teddy bears don’t have much strength. The impact elicited a quick jolt of pain and a bark of surprise from Maire, who whirled on the toy. He jumped at her throat and clawed there, but his paws were plush. Before she could throw him off, he scrambled down between her breasts and wrenched Sapphire’s marble from her hand. He landed on the floor with not much of a sound at all, tumbling to rights and activating his shield.
“You mother
Maire howled with rage.
Children and toys.
The war continued.
“Does Adam know?”
Paul nodded.
Sam sipped tea, replaced the cup and leaned forward, hunched with arms hanging limply over his knees. “Did you ever think it’d come to this? That it’d all fall apart?”
Paul didn’t have an answer.
“You had to have some idea that this was coming. That Maire would use everything Hope knew. That she’d incorporate it into whatever Program the Enemy’s on now— Seven? Fourteen? Fifty-fucking-three?”
“I wasn’t thinking.”
“Neither was Alina.” He hadn’t meant it to cut, but it did.
“I should have known, but…We forget the basics when we’re broken. Maybe a part of me knew that Maire’d upload Hope’s ME. Maybe I was afraid to think of what could happen when she did. That everything Hope knew, about our forts and maths and Judith Command, all of it would suddenly be crystal-clear. Maybe I didn’t want to believe that Hope could be the end of us.”
“Maybe you were too busy locked in your chamber with Al to notice.”
“I’m sorry, Sam. Sorry that I took her away from you for so long.”
“You don’t need to apologize for—”
“But I do. It wasn’t fair. We got tangled up in each other. But now, well, she’s all yours.”
“I don’t understand.”
“She’s yours for the assault on the Delta bleed. I want her to be your pilot. Our pilot.”
“Am I missing something, Mr. Hughes?”
Paul’s face was caverned and ancient. His eyes looked nowhere. “You know I’ve looked up to you for as long as I can remember.”
“I assumed that’s why you brought me in.”
“You’ve been a mentor, an inspiration. You listened even when you didn’t know I was talking to you.”
“Go on.”
Paul’s right hand shuddered violently. He put it under the table. “If we’re going to end this, we need to merge.”
