A child, a half-grown girl, sat in the middle of the street, the side of her face and one exposed arm a raw pink, weeping lymphatic fluid. Yatima approached her. She was shivering.
'You can leave all this behind. Come into the polises. Is that what you want?' She stared back, uncomprehending. One of her ears was bleeding; the thunder might have deafened her. Yatima delved into the instructions for the gleisner's maintenance nanoware, and had it rebuild the lost delivery system in vis left forefinger. Then ve commanded the surviving Introdus doses to move into place.
Ve raised vis arm and aimed the delivery system at the girl, shouting 'Introdus? Is that what you want?' She cried out and covered her face. Did that mean no, or was she just bracing herself for the shock?
The child began sobbing. Yatima backed away, defeated. Ve could save fifteen lives, ve could drag fifteen people out of this senseless inferno, but who could ve be sure even understood what ve was offering?
Francesca. Orlando. Liana.
Orlando and Liana's house wasn't far. Yatima steeled verself and pushed on through the chaos, past the shattered buildings and the terrified fleshers. The lightning was finally dying away—and the fireproof buildings had only burnt when directly hit—but the city had been transformed into a scene from the age of barbarism, when bombs had rained from the sky.
The house was partly standing, but unrecognizable; Yatima only knew ve'd found the right place because of the gleisner's navigation system. The top story was gutted, and there were holes in the ceiling and walls of the ground floor.
Someone was kneeling in the shadows, picking away debris at the edge of a vast heap where the ashes of most of the top story seemed to have landed. 'Liana?' Yatima broke into a run. The figure turned toward ver.
It was Inoshiro.
Inoshiro had half-exposed a corpse, all black dessicated flesh and white bone. Yatima looked down at it, then recoiled, disoriented. This charred skull was not a symbol in some jaded work of polis art; it was proof of the involuntary erasure of a living mind. The physical world could do that. The death of a cosmic mayfly could do that.
Inoshiro said, 'It's Liana.'
Yatima tried to absorb this, but ve felt nothing, the idea meant nothing.
'Have you found-?'
'Not yet.' Inoshiro's voice was expressionless.
Yatima left ver, and began scanning the rubble in IR, wondering how long a corpse would remain warmer than its surroundings. Then ve heard a faint sound from the front of the house.
Orlando was buried beneath pieces of the ruptured ceiling. Yatima called Inoshiro, and they quickly uncovered him. He was badly injured; both his legs and one arm had been crushed, and a gash in his thigh was spurting blood. Yatima checked the link to Konishi—ve couldn't even guess how to treat such wounds—but either the stratosphere was still ionized, or one of the drones had been lost in the storm.
Orlando stared up at them, ashen but conscious, eyes pleading for something. Inoshiro said flatly, 'She's dead.' Orlando's face contorted silently.
Yatima looked away and spoke to Inoshiro in IR. 'What do we do? Carry him to a place where they can treat him? Fetch someone? I don't know how this works.'
'There are thousands of injured people. No one's going to treat him; he's not going to live that long.'
Yatima was outraged. 'They can't leave him to die!'
Inoshiro shrugged. 'You want to try finding a communications link and calling for a doctor?' Ve peered out through the broken wall. 'Or do you want to try carrying him to the hospital, and see if he survives the trip?'
Yatima knelt beside Orlando. 'What do we do? There are a lot of people hurt, I don't know how long it will take to get help.'
Orlando bellowed with pain. A weak shaft of sunlight had appeared, coming through a hole in the ceiling and illuminating the skin of his broken right arm. Yatima glanced up; the storm was over, the clouds were beginning to thin and drift away.
Ve moved to block the light, while Inoshiro crouched behind Orlando, half-lifted him under the arms, and dragged him over the rubble into the shade. The wound in his thigh left a thick trail of blood.
Yatima knelt beside him again. 'I still have the Introdus nanoware. I can use it, if that's what you want.'
Orlando said clearly, 'I want to talk to Liana. Take me to Liana.'
'Liana's dead.'
'I don't believe you. Take me to her.' He was struggling for breath, but he forced the words out defiantly.
Yatima stepped back beneath the hole in the ceiling. In ordinary light the sun appeared as a meek orange disk through the stratosphere's brown haze, but in UV it shone fiercely amidst a blaze of scattered radiation.
Ve left the room, and returned carrying Liana's body one-handed by the collarbone. Orlando covered his face with his unbroken arm and wept loudly.
Inoshiro took the corpse away. Yatima knelt by Orlando a third time, and put vis hand on his shoulder clumsily. 'I'm sorry she's dead. I'm sorry that hurt you.' Ve could feel Orlando's body shaking with each sob. 'What do you want? Do you want to die?'
Inoshiro spoke in IR. 'You should have left when you had the chance.'
'Yeah? So why did you come hack?'
Inoshiro didn't reply. Yatima swung around to face ver. 'You knew about the storm, didn't you? You knew how bad it would be!'
'Yes.' Inoshiro made a gesture of helplessness. 'But if I'd said anything when we arrived, we might not have had a chance to speak to the other fleshers. And after the convocation, it was too late. It would have just caused panic.'
The front wall creaked and lurched forward, breaking loose from the ceiling in a shower of black dust. Yatima sprang to vis feet and backed away, then fired the Introdus into Orlando.
Ve froze. The wall had struck an obstacle; it was tilted precariously, but holding. Waves of nanoware were sweeping through Orlando's body, shutting down nerves and sealing off blood vessels to minimize the shock of invasion, leaving a moist pink residue on the rubble as flesh was read and then cannibalized for energy. Within seconds, all the waves converged to form a gray mask over his face, which bored down to the skull and then ate through it. The shrinking core of nanoware spat fluid and steam, reading and encoding crucial synaptic properties, compressing the brain into an ever-tighter description of itself, discarding redundancies as waste.
Inoshiro stooped down and picked up the end product: a crystalline sphere, a molecular memory containing a snapshot of everything Orlando had been.
'What now? How many do you have left?'
Yatima stared at the snapshot, dazed. Ve had violated Orlando's autonomy. Like a lightning bolt, like a blast of ultraviolet, ve had ruptured someone else's skin.
'How many?'
Yatima replied, 'Fourteen.'
'Then we'd better go use them while we can.'
Inoshiro led ver out of the ruins. Yatima shot everyone they came across who looked close to death, and had no one to care for them—reading the snapshots immediately, piping the data in IR into vis gleisner's memory. They'd taken twelve more bridgers when a mob led by the border guards found them.
They started cutting up Yatima first. Ve passed the snapshot data to Inoshiro, then followed.
Before they'd finished destroying vis old body, the link to Konishi returned. The drones had survived the storm.
6
