Broken: A Plague Journal (16 page)

Blinking confusion and fear. Red teeth, crusting and browning.

“Berlin and Maire. Where are they?”

Task clutched the finger tighter. “Elle..?”

“It’s dead. You know that. You saw it die. We need to know where the others are. What happened after the crash?”

Eyebrows furrow, a gasp, exhalation and drift into meds-induced coma.

“He’s out.”

“Dead?” Paul reached to check Task’s pulse.

“Metastasis for now. He’ll die if we stay here much longer. He’ll cross over with us, minimal damage.”

“Looks like we’re heading home early.”

Paul stood. “You prep him for exit. West, let’s check out the rest of the cave for signs of

silver erupted everywhere, that piercing brand of light that exists beyond our concept of vision.

The force of the blast was enough to knock Hope from her feet. She not-gently hit the stone and snow floor, her head snapping back in a sickly and palpable crack of shielding.

I saw Task’s limbs flutter in ways that human arms and legs shouldn’t. Now passed out, he couldn’t have realized that what had remained of his left leg had just sheared off.

The blast knocked me back against the cave wall, but I kept my footing. I immediately thought my shielding to its highest phase.

The mountain that was West bore the explosion the best of us all. He had his weapons drawn and was returning fire before I even realized what was happening.

Blocking the light with an outstretched hand, I looked into the white that the tunnel entrance had become to finally see somethings that had crawled behind my eyes for centuries.

I hadn’t imagined them that way.

Beyond simple words or concepts, the Enemy spidered along the cave walls, tens, dozens, fifteens of them, a flickering, sub-screaming mass of writhing silverblack silverthought.

Each of West’s shiver blasts, accompanied along its trajectory with a stream of profanity that only he could seem to muster with such aplomb during combat situations, struck home on its intended Enemy target. The intruding Judas timeline patterns shattered and were re-absorbed into the Enemy mind-essence.

More came.

Bent physics fucked my mind for an instant before realization, but I tore myself from the big picture and focused on smelling the roses instead: I lifted Hope from her crumple on the ground and snapped the emergency exit pin on my chestplate. I did the same to Hope’s. I reached down to grab hold of Task’s arm.

“West! We’re out!”

A few more kills, a dozen more new arrivals, the cave ceiling cracking and collapsing into dust and chunks. He walked backward, dodging silver tendrils, almost to us—

He tripped.

The uneven ground met his bottom and back with a rough slap, but still he fired, the shiver blasts echoing and rupturing rogue code from the ME. He slid back, kicking with his feet, trying to get as close to us as he could before the jog jerked us back into nowhere.

He’d almost reached us when a shot went wide, an Enemy got too close, a silver tendril snaked and severed his right arm from the elbow down.

The shiver fired once upon impact with the ground, taking out the Enemy’s legs. It snapped to grid.

West dropped his other shiver and tore the emergency exit release from his chest. When he was within reach, I helped him into what was supposed to be our exit bubble.

It wasn’t there.

I knew something was wrong. There was no tickle, no copper anticipation of jog or exit, no visible shimmer.

I was covered in other people’s blood.

The Enemy patterns stopped their advance. Silver snakes paused.

A fuzz of static, a shared mind, orders from beyond. I could seetastehear them speak as one: that horrible One, the Enemy mind-essence, that which had kept me awake for years as I’d attempted to unravel its intricacies, its secrets and horrors.

It spoke.

The voice was ancient. The magenta bib overalls looked brand-new.

Click.

She walked lazily around the still Enemy patterns, each leg she passed a veritable tree trunk in comparison to her five-year-old form. As she passed each pattern, the silverblack rippled, reached, retreated from her purity.

Maire wasn’t smiling.

“Ah, Author. You think too much.” She sat on the floor before the four where their exit bubble should have been. Her raven curls bounced and settled. “Let’s talk.”

The Enemy didn’t move.

Paul ignored the child for a moment, checked Benton’s vitals from her plate. She was stable. West held his cauterized stump with his good arm. “I’m fine,” to the silent question in Paul’s gaze.

“I’ve been watching you, Paulywog.” Her voice was playful, singsong. “Nice job with the bear. I never would have guessed that he was under the couch.”

“Thanks. It was a shining moment in literature.”

“So what should we do now? I could have my shiny dead soldiers back there kill all of you right now. That’d be the easiest solution.”

“I die, you die.”

“Unfortunate, that. You shouldn’t have written me so well.”

“You weren’t meant to be a main character.”

“Good thing I was, though. Brought credibility to an otherwise-sappy space soap.”

“I should’ve deleted you.”

“You never did like kids.” Her finger dragged through the slush of mixed blood on the floor. She stuck the tip in her mouth and smiled. Dimples. “How’s Judith?”

“You won’t find her.”

“I will.” She sculpted the child’s face into a scowl. “We will.” An adult gesture, that: the slight tilt backward of her head, indicating the Enemy patterns.

“A simple keystroke. You would never have happened.”

“Too late. I’m coming. I’m here. We’re here, and we’ll find her.” Maire’s eyes sparked silver.

Paul’s eyes sparked nothing in the mud of his gaze.

“This concept of ‘Delta Point’ as you so lovingly call it.. It’s—”

The space where her hearts had once been erupted with white

and I saw the Enemy patterns shatter one by one. All was fire and scream and shiver as

Alina shifted her weapon from where the girl had been and started taking out the Black. The cave crawled. Her troops surged forward, confident with the courage that new-Awake gives them. The Black patterns destabilized, crumbled, sunk into the rock of the ground, but the Judith forces didn’t let them get far; Alina tight-beamed orders up to Samayel, and he doused the hotzone with phased tethers, securing their codes in that When.

Alina charged through the still-dissembling patterns, throwing a few fuck-you shots into a few black skulls as they melted. She saw the author and his glorified bodyguard West scramble to their feet as they realized what was going on, that they were being rescued.

Alina’s kids cleaned up the cave in no time.

Benton wasn’t moving. Next to her, Task lay dying. West tried to hold his blood in.

“Alina!”

It was the first time Paul had said her name. She felt something.

“Judith ME picked up your exit request before the Enemy blocked the signal. They sent us in. Sam’s waiting above to take you back.”

“Good. We have serious wounded. Task’s critical, Benton—”

“Paul?”

He turned to meet West’s gaze.

“She’s—Hope’s—”

“No” and he fell to the floor, pulled off the girl’s helmet, placed his hand over her chestplate. He frantically tried to revive her, activating the shield suit’s recharge system, and when that didn’t work, he leaned over her and fisted his weight down into her chest. He stopped to check her breath, her pulse.

West gently placed his remaining hand on Paul’s shoulder. It fell, rose to the rhythm of the attempt to start her heart.

“Stop it, Paul.”

He kept going.

“Paul—”

The author threw West back and almost succeeded in tumbling the man over. West reached forward and one-armed Paul off of Benton.

“She’s dead.”

These systems of desire and ritual, silver lies and betrayal: what love could breathe in a world of such uncertainty and echo, what morning whisper or crawling dawn could ever replace that scent, that taste, that perfect moment in which we look into eyes not our own and realize that they are?

Paul again shrugged off West’s hand, walked past Alina and her troops as he studied the ground in front of him. As he passed Alina, he looked up, and in those eyes, she knew the fragments of him.

Alina thought she felt something in that moment.

Flatline.

affliction had been isolated and the source identified, it was far too late for the forward combat crews, who had been exposed to fatal levels of the alien metal as they

Do you know of blood? Of wind? Of loss, of ruin?

to the waft of black, bitter coffee and she followed them into the empty streets, finally moon-lit, finally casting aside the day’s embrace of mist and fog, the earlier downpour retreating into the

sound of their footsteps, his ancient black boots, her new black boots, a drift of laughter and conversation. She had hesitated before the cafe, finally allowing the door to swing shut to the bell’s call. The jingle brought the proprietress’s thin gaze from an emptying pack of Marlboros to the door. The jangle brought her customer’s thin gaze to his wife’s. Eyes locked as the bell settled; they would make love that

night that Hope was killed, West found Paul sitting alone in the construct. This time it wasn’t decorated with his typical college bar layout. It was gray and empty. Mostly empty. West thought most of the gray came from him. He thought in, saw Paul, and thought out. West knew the author needed time alone.

West talked to Jud, and she sent him back to a semblance of home. She’d handle the repairs.

Abbie was in bed already, the lights out. West had been downstairs reading a parenting magazine half-heartedly between paying bills and watching the game. She’d bought the magazine and many more like it and put them in a stack on the coffee table. West was younger, skinnier, his hands still callused. Before the war. Before she’d…