“You’re not going to shoot me,” she says.
“And you’re not going to shoot me.” Akide looks disappointed, the same way adults look at little children who have let them down. “We’re only going through these motions because you’ve never accepted what Abel really is. What he’s for.”
She wishes she could shake him. “Did you happen to notice that we just won the biggest battle of the Liberty War? That we have a brand-new war fleet, one Abel helped bring here?”
“We’re grateful for that. But gratitude isn’t worth much, compared with the safety of our world.”
Noemi doesn’t agree, but that’s beside the point. “We don’t have to destroy the Gate. Don’t you see? We can use that Gate now. Make contact with the other worlds of the Loop, force Earth to be the one on the defense for a while. Everything’s changed. We can turn this uprising into victory.”
“You don’t understand war.” Akide sounds sorrowful, but his expression is hard. “They’ll send humans after us this time, and the fighters of Genesis will have to take the sin of murder on their souls. And in the end, if Earth doesn’t succeed in taking our planet, the other colony worlds will decide to claim it themselves. They’ve seen our prosperity now; they won’t be content to merely help us. No, they’ll come after us next—unless we destroy the Gate now.”
“We don’t know that.” She thinks Darius Akide has a lot of nerve telling her—someone who’s trained to fight for almost a third of her young life, who’s gone into countless battles—that she doesn’t understand war. He’s the one who’s forgotten. “Are you really going to strand all the Vagabonds here, and all the Remedy members who came to help us?”
If he cares about their volunteer fleet, he gives no sign. “I’m willing to sacrifice one mech to ensure that Genesis remains safe. You’re willing to endanger millions in the hopes the war has changed. That’s not enough, Noemi. We have one more chance at ensuring the security of Genesis forever, and we’re not going to waste it.”
Hasn’t he heard anything she’s said? Noemi wants to scream. The Elders don’t want to win this war, she thinks. They only see two ways to end this war—through death or isolation.
“I can’t make you believe in victory,” she says. “And I can’t make you believe in Abel’s soul. But I’m not going to let you hurt him, ever, so you can just—”
Noemi doesn’t hear the energy bolt. She only feels it. Heat beyond imagining erupts in her chest, sears outward along every nerve. Her muscles lock up, and her weapon falls uselessly to the floor. For one instant she sees the horror on Akide’s face, the way he looks from her to the blaster he just fired and back again in disbelief.
He meant to do it, she thinks in a daze. He just didn’t know what it would feel like to kill someone.
Then she falls.
36
HEARING RETURNS TO ABEL FIRST. HE PROCESSES THE input automatically, then consciously: It is the sound of a man crying.
Next he regains proprioception, the awareness of his own limbs and physical body. Then touch, which reveals that he’s lying on a flat, hard surface. Smell he finds with his next inhalation—
—and his receptors identify the scent of blood.
Abel opens his eyes and snaps back to full consciousness. He sits up quickly to take stock of his new situation and then realizes, no, he can’t be conscious yet. What he sees can only be a nightmare; therefore he is still asleep. But most dreams dissolve upon recognition, nightmares especially, and Abel’s still here, on a table, looking down at Noemi lying on the floor, unconscious or…
He looks toward the sound of weeping and sees Darius Akide on his knees, hands pressed together in the traditional shape of prayer. “Forgive me, Lord. Forgive your unworthy servant.”
On the floor next to Akide lies a blaster. The scent of ozone tangles with that of blood in the air.
Abel stares again at Noemi and sees the scorch marks on her exosuit. The faint spattering of blood around her on the floor from the few capillaries not instantly cauterized by a blaster wound. And the very slight rise and fall of her breath, which tells him that as seriously hurt as she is, she’s still alive.
This is no dream. This is reality, and he still has a chance to shape it.
He leaps from the table, landing between Akide and Noemi. Akide stares up in astonishment; apparently he didn’t know how long the stunner’s effects would last. Abel says nothing, just seizes Akide’s head in one hand and his throat in the other, then snaps them in opposite directions. His sharp hearing picks up the faint pop of the spine before the corpse drops to the ground.
There is deep inner programming meant to keep non-warrior mechs from hurting human beings, and that programming now throbs within Abel, one brief pulse of pain, and then it’s forgotten. Maybe it will trouble him later. Nothing matters at this moment except for Noemi.
He kneels beside her and brushes his fingers along her cheek. “Can you hear me?” Being stunned is a poor analogue of death, but he knows that in both cases, hearing is the last sense to go.
Noemi’s eyes flutter open. Abel rolls her into his arms, cradling her shoulders in the crook of one elbow. Her pupils are slightly dilated and both her pulse and respiration are dangerously low. She opens her mouth, closes it again, then manages to whisper, “Abel?”
“Yes. I’m here. I’m going to take care of you.”
With that he pulls her into his arms and dashes to the nearest biobed. He’s able to keep her steady in his embrace, without a single jolt to hurt her more, and once he’s reached his destination he lays her gently on one of the biobeds. Immediately readings light up on the monitors, each one of them more dire than
