Once she’s through the narrow passage, Noemi gets to her feet and brushes dust and grit from her forearms and knees. She grimaces as she realizes some of it got down the absurdly low front of her jumpsuit. Why would anyone design an outfit this impractical, much less…
Noemi pauses, one hand still on the cowl-neck of her jumpsuit, when she hears a faint electronic beeping. Grabbing the scanner from her makeshift utility belt, she sees a small red light pulsing on its screen.
Military training brings her hand to the holt of her blaster before she stops herself. If this is Simon, he’s unarmed. He needs to be approached as a friend.
If it isn’t Simon—well, any other intact mechs probably aren’t a threat.
“Simon?” she calls softly as she takes a step forward. Crushed iridescent ceiling tiles crunch under her boot. “Simon, we met earlier. Do you remember me?”
Movement farther down the corridor makes her go still. Her eyes discern the shape of a little boy sitting on the floor, as if playing with toys. When she creeps forward, one orange beam of emergency lighting turns on; the glow falls across Simon’s face, revealing his unfinished features; it’s worse than she remembered, although it’s hard to say how. Something about the contrast between the blank, masklike visage and the anguish in his eyes makes it terrible. He sits amid a ghoulish display of destroyed mechs, at the center of severed heads and limbs that look all too human in the dim, eerie light.
But Simon’s steadier than before. Somewhere he found a gray mech coverall and put that on, rolling up the sleeves and legs almost comically. That part, at least, really seems like what a little kid would do, and when he speaks, he sounds less panicked. “I remember you.”
“My name’s Noemi. Your mom sent me here to look for you.”
That makes him frown. “Mummy did this to me.” He paws once at the side of his head. “She put the voices in here.”
“She was only trying to make you better, after you were sick,” Noemi says, which is the kindest way she knows to put it. “You had Cobweb. I’ve had Cobweb, too. I know how terrible it feels.”
He doesn’t care. Little kids forget about feeling sick after they’re well—though maybe well isn’t the word for what Simon is now. “It helps if I talk back to the voices.”
“Okay,” Noemi says. She just needs to agree with him, to keep agreeing until he calms down enough to return with her to his mother. “What do you tell them?”
“I tell them I’m mad. That I’m mad at the whole world. They want to help me.”
Her skin prickles with fear as she hears motion. Noemi hurls herself toward the nearest corner, grabbing her blaster, prepared for Remedy fighters—
—and instead sees mechs. More than a dozen of them, all standing there vacantly, apparently at Simon’s command.
Only one Charlie is fully intact. The others are fragments of their former selves: a Zebra with one arm torn off at the elbow, a Jig with half of her face burned away to a metal skull, a Peter who hobbles along on legs stripped almost entirely free of flesh. Real blood and pale coolant spatter their blank faces and ripped clothing. These are only machines—not like Simon, nothing at all like Abel—but that doesn’t help. In some ways it’s worse. Noemi would feel compassion for wounded humans but these twisted, grotesque figures only horrify her. Every instinct tells her these things are wrong.
The stripped skin, the blood—that’s just the damage she can see. How badly broken are they on the inside?
Simon’s plastic face twitches, rapid spasms at his half-formed eyebrows and too-narrow mouth, until he manages something like a smile. “They’re my friends,” he says, and his voice is breaking up, frequencies missing from the sound, making it all too clear he’s a machine. “They like to play chase. Watch.”
As one, every single mech lunges toward Noemi.
There’s nowhere to run. She throws herself back into the collapsed tunnel and wriggles through as fast as she can. Bare metal fingers close around her ankle, dragging her back, and she screams. One kick and that’s one off her, she’s through the tunnel, but they’re ripping through the wreckage after her.
Go go go go go. Noemi races down the corridor, leaping over a crushed chandelier, one hand on her blaster. When she gets to a corner, she turns and fires. Green blaster bolts slice through the air, taking out one of the Bakers, but the other mechs pay no attention. They continue on, single-minded in their pursuit.
Noemi runs even faster, pushing herself to her limit. Ahead she sees an upside-down sign proclaiming that the theater lies ahead. Okay, a theater, that’s a large space, maybe I can put some distance between us there.
The theater is the closest thing to a safe space she can find.
A glance over her shoulder reveals the mechs still gaining ground. There ought to be differences in the way each model moves—Noemi knows this from battle—but there aren’t. Every single mech is coming after her in precisely the same way: with Simon’s off-kilter, shambling, too-fast walk.
They’re moving as one, she thinks amid her fright. They’re behaving almost like—like an extension of Simon’s mind.
20
THE PATROL ABEL LEADS TOWARD THE THEATER ISN’T large—only six Remedy fighters, five of whom show signs of discontent at being asked to follow a mech. The sixth fighter, however, is Riko, and he hopes their trust in her will translate into a modicum of trust for him.
He can’t stop thinking about the force fields throughout the ship, the ways they may be booby-trapped, and how every single one of them is helping to hold Noemi hostage. She’d attempt to escape if possible—he remembers the cruel way she was suspended in
