Broken: A Plague Journal (38 page)

Suddenly you’re looking back and a week is gone, a month or a year, five, a decade, a lifetime, and it feels like a lifetime, a decade, five, a year or a month, a week, a day, hours, minutes, you’re here, seconds, you’re here and we’re together, instants, you’re here, moments, here, now, you’re here, now, here forever, here, walking together down thin paths into broken futures and todays and

They’d all left him, all ended up here eventually, and he knew why, now. The bleed was palpable, the merging of everything he’d tried to write, from the adolescent crap a decade on to his last book. There’s danger in writing reality into fiction. It was time for him to unravel it all.

Dregs. He still stirred. The rhythm and consistency of the sound just barely grounded him to that reality, a faint beacon as everything inside split apart and rewrote itself.

And it was gone, the people and cell phones and hissing machines, and again the Bellona was the silence it had been with his Omega. The wind picked up across the empty city outside, and something was in the back room, scratching and crashing and coming.

Everything he’d built, everything he’d erased, it’d all come down to this imperfect solitude. He thought of the poet and Alina, tried to separate the two, failed. He’d written her into fiction, or, worse, into nothing at all. Silences, silences. And in the perfect silence of the cafe, he knew how he’d end those universes of war.

An instant, a perfect moment of sound, the echoes of the dead, the enemy and the end, all those he’d let inside, all those who’d left. He heard their voices and knew that madness is beautiful.

Alina’s door spiraled open. She knew it was him.

“Can I come in?”

She walked from the door and slinked into her chaise. Paul could differentiate the habits of the women combined in Alina.

She looked on in silence.

“Let me talk to Jud.”

Alina looked hurt. “Something you don’t want me to hear?”

“Just let her out.”

Alina’s eyes narrowed a huff, but she relented. A static flash, and Paul knew she’d been buried under the god.

“Good to see you’re out of the pool, Paulywog.” Jud grinned with Al’s rabbit teeth.

“I need a pilot.”

Jud nodded slowly. “Well, thanks to your time taking a dip, pilots are in short supply.”

“I have one in mind.”

“Nobody’s been able to find Naught-Four or Simon.”

“Not Michael.”

“Hunter? And Lilith? Not exactly Judith
or
Judas material, kid.”

“Alina.”

Jud sat up at that. “Me?” She was suspicion and frown. “For why?”

“If we’re going after Maire, I need someone to pilot—”

“You’ll have your pick of the rides, Hughes.”

“—me.”

She let the statement soak in. Alina’s face broadcast Jud’s incredulity. “
Pilot
you? Pilot
you
?”

No sound, no motion.

“Unless I missed something being underneath Miss Becky Bananaboobs all this time, I don’t follow.”

He grabbed her hands. The shift was frigid and instant, the silver working out through his pores as it rolled behind his eyes. Jud hissed an inhalation as Alina’s hands grew colder, pins and needles, the screaming, reaching need of the machine sea. The silver latticed up his arms and paved his shoulders, neck. He was growing. Increasing. Multitudes. Plates of metallish slammed down to define lines and planes. His form melted into something shiny and terrible.

“I need a pilot.” His voice was static and distortion. It was still a growl.

“Paul...” Jud’s voice was calm, and he could feel pieces of Alina shouting through.

“I can use Sam’s shell. With Al in the pilot’s chair, with you there...”

Jud stood up, pulled her hands from his with a tacking slurp. Head shaking, arms wrapped securely around herself, she walked to the window that looked out on the vacant birthing fields.

“This is your chance to kill Maire.” He shifted back to skin and hair and scars.

Jud scoffed. She couldn’t look at him.

“You deserve that.”

Another bark of scorn, this time, the edge of a sob. “Deserve
what
?” Her hand swept out across the fields. “This? What kind of a life is this? Cycling through millions of bodies just to survive—” She wiped her hands on her sides and thighs. “Just to survive that fucking silver. And now you’ve let it in. I’ve already died once, kid.” She finally looked at him. “You’re killing yourself, and you know it. Nobody deserves this fucking life. And you’ve become everything we brought you here to destroy.”

“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
metal
?”

“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.
Continue the assault.
The willing enslaved populations of the Enemy mind-essence obeyed.

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
fucker
.” The bear sparked to static and disappeared back into Judith ME.

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.”