Broken: A Plague Journal (44 page)

And the lifetimes we assemble into madness, the fragments of the departed we write into the days. He thought of Alina and knew that wasn’t her name at all, that the scrawl of their love couldn’t begin to emulate reality, that not even the Jud god inside of her or the Maire witch outside could approximate the feeling generated by staring across an antiques store in Lewes, making sure she’s not watching, stealthily jogging to the cashier to purchase a teacup with feet, wrapped into the football pages, secreted away in a drab green ruck, returning to the rows before she noticed, hands tracing over the dust of centuries, settling on misshapen birds that have vented the steam from a thousand meat pies, over photographs of people dead now, crumbling, the photographs and the people, from times before we were born. That we run to train stations and weave through the schoolchildren, our hands held, collapsing finally into seats jangling with our change and the day’s treasure, tiny old women sitting opposite, their accents thick and their skin thin like paper, speaking to each other but watching the two American kids pull out a bottle of water, a Yorkie bar, splitting it to share before dinner, curling together on the plastic bench, a head of curly hair, glasses, smiling eyes closed coming gently to rest under a stubbled chin, which lowers to rest, a tickled nose, a heart beating fast, knowing that this is heaven; this is all he needs.

Are you leaving?

Alina wretched as she felt herself break apart, the tangle of interface web sparking. Her vision doubled, trebled as she fell to the floor of the chamber, her form cleaving, new limbs flailing from the split of her form. Static and agony. Jud crackled to solidity and slumped from Alina, a glistening mess of wet silver and dried blood, chest grating over bitter air, hair dripping with something black and ancient.

“Get up,” she growled over loose vocal cords, her tongues reaching for better words. She rocked with the exhaustion of being whole again.

Alina’s hands splayed over a shattered cardiac shield. There were lifetimes of her missing. Two lines of tear fought through the slick of nervous sweat to bead out onto the floor.

“Get
up
.” Judith grasped her hands and seesawed her to standing. The severed souls supported each other’s stance. “Where’s the cache?”

Alina was looking past Jud, who turned to meet the direction of her desperate gaze. The glass, cracked and fading, showed

Maire’s army a whirlwind around her, the nightmare cacophony of the damned, the merged silver purpose. Paul could hear them, the collection of an eternity of broken tomorrows, the aggregate fury of the lost.

Maire paused in her flight, her claws a brilliant silver, garish strands of the machine ocean pouring from her eyes in a disconcerting ruin of a mask. Paul could hear her war cry spilling from between those horrible shimmering fangs. She was older than he’d ever written her, thick strands of white contrasting the black, dancing in the winds.

He ratcheted his wingtips, his nacelles forward, struggling against the gravity and drag of his descent.

And they collided.

West flickered to life and snapped to grid, a stumbling, confused landing. He was even more confused by the fact that Reynald and Hank were standing next to him, before a lifeboat’s glass, and Alina, and—

“Jud?”

Reynald’s hand went to West’s shoulder. His head shook an uncertain negative. His eyes directed a heartbroken look to the glass, and West followed just in time to see

Maire smashed through Paul’s central hub, a brilliant spray of fragmented armor and hemorrhaging silver racing after her exit wound. The vast planetship dived, Maire and Enemy vessels caught in its wake. As the imprisoned singularity at his center went critical, Maire and her horde tore at the air, attempting to escape the pull of his horizon. One by ten by thousands, the scrabbling silver forms collapsed into Paul, his edges red, melting away, great chapters of him rending away and bursting from existence.

He fell, the expanse of wailing souls spiraling after him.

The lifeboat was far enough away to pull stubbornly from the collapse, but the vessel veered a spinning retreat, its contents shifting savagely.

“We need a lock on his pattern,” Reynald barked.

“I’m on it.” Jud stood before the glass, her voice a whisper.

Alina touched the display, shaking. “Please, Paul. Don’t—”

All of Puget Sound was erased from existence as Paul impacted, the field of vision instantly blinded, a stark assault of silver light boiling across the planet’s surface. The cataclysmic deluge of liquid metal erupted from his savaged superstructure, dusting the sky, then drifting lazily down to blanket the world with argent. The Enemy forces not caught in his wake, neatly clipped from Maire’s mind essence, stippled the new surface in craters of shattered phase. All across the barren scar, new oceans of silver coalesced.

Paul’s chassis shuddered, grappled with its new foundation. Then stillness.

Alina screamed. She sobbed, throwing herself against the display until her tiny hands wilted. West heard flesh split, fingers crack. She kept beating against the glass, kept beating, kept screaming, even as he pulled her away, the stubs of fingers smearing that image with bloody letters; hers was a language written in despair.

West held her tightly, but she still struggled, her crumpled hands pressing against him only jarring loose more of that loss; she seeped through his shirt, and he felt warm copper run down through the hair on his chest, pause to circumvent his navel. She eventually relented, slumped into him, allowed herself to bury her eyes under his jawbone, anything to force away the screen, to erase that image.

West watched it all, even as he held Alina so she couldn’t.

Inhale: no lung, no mouth, but why the sensation of drowning, of choking, the scent of burning flesh when there was no nose, no body?

All around him, silver. Waves still came back to slap at his shallow corpse, near-corpse. It burned; it froze.

He struggled to sit up and remembered that things were no longer attached to him in the way he remembered. His starboard nacelle lazily rose, slammed back into the silver ocean, stirring the metal again, angering what sensors he had left operational.

The nacelle crawled through half-crystallized mercury slurry until it met his main chassis. He was disturbed but not surprised to find that his pelvic fin had been shattered on the impact, and his caudal fin was twisted into an array of broken metallish.

s

paul hughes((?))

come here ((?))

cover my feet ((?))

rupture rend rive split cleave

Maire had pierced through his chest, heavy silver armor cracking and splintering before it. Reflex forced his head back; agony kept it there as spasms wracked his entire form. The hole in his hub was slick with his blood, mechanicals, the shimmer of venting containment chamber exhaust. He finally settled in the shallow silver, nacelles digging into the flooding ground.

Too tired to move his port nacelle. Too broken.

Starboard nacelle feels around the hole. The wingtip snaps off, falls to his belly, slides into the silver.

Focus, but

It’s flooding, that alien, that lifeblood. Choking, gasping. Somewhere, a line of code reminds him that there’s a human buried inside that ruined sculpture of metal.

i’m sorry

i’m

His nacelle falls back into the ocean, the wingblades now useless.

i’m

Paul finds her in the exile city. He finds her sitting in the street, a young woman again, covering her face with clawless hands. A few tears have spilled between her fingers. She snuffles a few more to the back of her throat.

He sits down next to her.

The Cafe Bellona is a ruin, the detritus of the fire still smoldering. He can see bones under blackened beams. Maybe the bones are broken coffee cups. Tarnished metal stems poke up, twisted stools crushed under the collapsed roof. There is no wind. The city is silent except for popping knots and the slow burning deep down.

He thinks of cigarettes and inhales the smoke from one, passes it to Maire. She takes it. Her arms rest on her knees. Her body stretches toward the Bellona waste as her hair flops down, obscuring her face from him. Her eyes are blue now, and he looks away.

“Why didn’t you kill me?” Her brow works over the question, her face torn between thin probabilities of rage and despair. She shakes with it, a fading question, a veiled surrender.

“Tu crois être le doute et tu n’es que raison. Tu es le grand soleil qui me monte à la tête quand je suis sûr de moi,” he says.

“Comme on oublie,” she says.

“Je t’aime contre tout ce qui n’est qu’illusion.”

“I know.” She exhales smoke. She extends her hand. She offers him the three silver marbles rolling the folds of her palm.

He closes her fingers around them.

We are machines of a horrible beauty, and life is a collection of moments. Fundamental redefinitions of trust. The suffocating intersections of coincidence. Rejection mechanisms. We are forgotten as easily as the quiet desperations of our madness.

And it’s okay.

In the lifeboat’s command chamber, Reynald swiveled the targeting laser of the lesioning probe to a new position over Paul’s skull. They’d successfully downloaded his pattern from the dissolving devastation of his superstructure, but the final tendrils of silver had entrenched themselves in his mind, lacing, consuming.

“I—I can’t.” Reynald stepped away, kneading his temple. The code burns were gone.

“Please,” Alina sobbed. “Help him.”

“There’s too much of it. I can’t separate the silver from his brain without damaging him.”

West turned from the display. “There’s no sign of Maire. And the Enemy... They aren’t moving.”

“That’s good. Right?” Hank searched their faces.

“She’s not gone.” Jud said from the corner into which she’d hidden herself. Her eyes no longer glowed. “She’s in there.” She motioned at Paul, then tapped her head. “They’re together, somewhere in there.”

Alina held her arms tightly, shook her head.

“Better believe it, baby.” Jud stood and walked to the motionless author. “They’ve merged.”

“He wouldn’t—”

“It’s what he always fucking wanted.” Jud said through gritted teeth. “Can’t you see that?”

“But—He hated her.”

“And he loved you?” One side of Jud’s mouth upturned. “Life isn’t that simple, kid.”

Reynald cleared his throat. “If the silver spreads through his mind again—”

“That’s not gonna happen.” Jud swung the targeting laser into place above Paul’s forehead, the barrel’s glow intensifying.