Part of it is the hope that Cabal’s duty to the army will prevent him from returning. His presumed departure is like a shadow lifted from my eyes. When it’s gone, I see that the whole world is suddenly open to us. I mean, I guess I could have left the Library any time, and travelling will be hard and dangerous, but the morning’s clear blue sky fills me with a sense of freedom I haven’t felt in–ever. Is this how Conan felt when he first left Cimmeria?
Then there’s the fact that there’s an us. Excluding Lectric, Toyota was the closest friend I’ve had in three years, and I only saw him a handful of times. Sure, I like being alone, and I’m not entirely positive travelling with Annabel-Echo is a good thing–but it’s an interesting thing, an unusual thing, a new experience, and there’s something to be said about that.
I spend a few minutes sitting against a crumbling stone block, watching Echo sleep, feeling flashes of desire … tempered by thoughts of Ballard and how quickly she turned on him. Do I even know this person? Not at all. She’s incomprehensible. But do I have to know her to hold her down and–
No. She doesn’t want that. Annabel used to be my friend. She’s the girl who waits in the desert. Then why the arm in the night? She was cold, no doubt.
While waiting, I take out Volume Seven and, very slowly, read a few pages, trying to ignore the gnawing question of whether or not the rest of my collection survived the fire. Of course it survived–I won’t believe otherwise. I’ll go back for it one day. The alternative is unthinkable. Still Echo sleeps. I drink and desalinate more water. Finally she wakes, does what’s necessary, and it’s time to move on.
Echo is in a better mood too. Maybe the disaster, the killing, the hiding is behind us. In the daylight, I can almost believe it. The sun infuses her hair with a brilliance bordering on absurd. It’s like she’s giving off light. Lectric trots happily alongside us, his solar cells absorbing all they can.
Past noon, the ruins thin out. The desert is sparsely covered with knee-high shrubs. With this much plant life, there’s bound to be game. I miss the first kill–something squirrel-like that darts into a hole as my bolt skids in the dust–but the second chance comes soon, and I nail a fox through the ribs.
With the electric sparker in my bag, the fire is easy to build. The meat fills our bellies. Echo is more talkative. She tells me about an older woman who helps manage the supplies for Foundry’s army, frail in body but iron in will. The woman had a soft spot for Echo, and Echo misses her.
As we continue north, she talks about Fin and Ballard now and then, though nothing with any direct connection to our fatal encounter. I don’t talk much. Toward dusk, we bag a snake and a large scavenging bird. There’s still no sign of Cabal. Maybe he really has moved on. Again we camp. Again Echo cuddles up to me. It’s weird having someone this close. I’m hyper-sensitive to every movement. I can’t get used to it.
The next morning, we decide it should be okay to walk along Big Road again. I keep an eye on passing debris, shrubs and other potential cover, just in case we hear the bikes. I haven’t tried to persuade Echo again, but I’m thinking it’s probably about time we turned west. I’m about to broach the subject when something catches my eye.
We’re still in shrub-desert. To our right, maybe ten feet ahead, is the rusted wreck of a long-dead car. We’ve passed a number of its brothers along the road. The part of my mind monitoring potential cover has already noted it. The car, however, is not what has caught my attention.
Just left of Big Road, at the top of a slight hill about two hundred feet ahead, sits an odd boulder about as tall as my waist. I can’t say exactly why it’s “odd.” It’s a sand-colored rock. But the paranoid part of my brain knows something doesn’t fit. The boulder is a bit too cylindrical, perhaps, or the surface too smooth.
Then the top shifts.
I have a split second to react. By all rights, we should be dead. But I’ve seen this thing on some other level. Listening for the bikes with constant paranoia, I’ve synced with our environment, and I act before I know what’s coming. My arm catches Echo beneath the ribs as I tackle her toward the car. A staccato of bright red flashes burst from a recess in the top of the boulder. A feather brushes my left ear, tickles my left bicep. Echo makes a sound of slight surprise. We hit the ground hard, crashing through a shrub behind the abandoned car. She grunts as the air is pushed from her lungs. Lectric scurries around us, barking madly.
Echo’s eyes go wide. There’s a fresh four-inch burn running along her left collarbone. Two tiny holes are not far from the scar, in her upper left shoulder.
“Your ear,” she says.
“Stay down.”
“What’s happening?”
“A mine. Pulse laser. I saw the barrel pop. Don’t even peek out. It’ll put holes through your eyes.”
Echo nods. I recovered a mine like this once–a dead one, in the desert. I brought it back to my grandfather, and he disassembled it for parts. He told me about them as he worked. They operate on a low-power standby mode for years at a time. The notion has terrified me ever since. Cabal must’ve left this one. Carried it on the back of his bike. He didn’t need to find us. We’re in for it now. The car is our only cover. I’m amazed we survived the first barrage. If it had waited until we were just a little closer, we’d be dead already. Something wet leaks down the back of my pants–Crom, is it blood? But my hand comes back with water. Must’ve hit the canteen or the desalinator. Great. Not that we’ll need water much longer.
Tin popping sounds reach my ears. A hot metal shard bursts from a hole in the car beside me. Echo yelps. It’s trying to shoot us through the vehicle. Most of the shots only penetrate one side. Most.
Echo’s face grows pained. She pulls up her pant-leg and stares. Her left calf is swelling around a small hole in the muscle. Little metal shards have peppered her skin. Blood is leaking out of the hole, though not much, as the flesh is mostly cauterized. Her shoulder is having similar issues, minus the shards. Her hands tremble uncontrollably.
There’s a growing throb in my left ear and bicep, but our immediate peril leaves no room for such worries. The pinging stops. Another sound grows in the silence, however. The whir of a small motor. Wheels rumble over the crumbling road, crunching pebbles beneath the treads.
The mine is mobile.
I wriggle out of my pack and check the crossbow–it’s loaded.
“Echo, your gun loaded? Echo!”
The pain distracts her. She un-holsters the machine-pistol and slides it over to me. The wheels are still moving. I lie down and peer under the car. It’s low to the ground because the tires are flat, but I manage to see the robot wheeling toward us. It’ll come around my side of the car soon. We have less than ten seconds to live. Lectric is low to the ground, growling terribly. His metal claws are out.
Can we hide in the car? No. We’d just die inside. We can’t run, obviously. It would hit us the instant we were visible. I’ll have to try shooting it as it comes into view, but I’m pretty certain it will kill me before I can do much damage. It has cameras for sensors. If I could only blind it…
But I can–maybe.
I whip off my jacket. The mine is on the other side of the car. It’s coming around. I motion to Echo–go that way! But she can’t push off her left leg. She’s crawling too slowly. There are tears on her cheeks. Great. We’re going to die here.
Lectric pounces forward with a demonic sound. He rounds the front bumper and attacks. I’m shouting, or trying to shout. I’m springing onto the hood and throwing the jacket, but it’s too late. Lectric is peppered with invisible packets of high-energy light. His hull sparks and leaks fluids as his claws rake the faux boulder once without effect. Once–and he collapses. Yet he’s drawn the fire just long enough for my jacket to land.
The robot wheels backwards, blinded. It rotates one way, then the other, trying to free its sensors. It’
s not sentient, but it’s well-programmed. I dive to the ground and snatch up the pistol and crossbow. The robot fires at random. The heat lights my coat on fire. I spray the thing with bullets. I put a heavy bolt right through the fire. Something shatters in a shadowy recess. I drop the crossbow and grip the gun with both hands, emptying almost a whole clip into the top of the machine, where the barrel came out. It’s not firing anymore. I shove it hard with my boot. The robot topples. The wheels spin, stop, spin, stop. It may still have battery power, but it’s effectively dead.
And so is Lectric.
I drop to my knees. He’s twitching uncontrollably, making soft whining sounds. A capacitor blew somewhere in his flanks. Smoke leaks through the holes in his hull. A puddle of coolant spreads beneath him, seeping into the parched earth in a singular parody of his carbon-based cousins. Perhaps it’s just a universal rule: things leak when they die. Worst of all are the holes in his head, where my grandfather helped me implant his Spark 2100 neural embryo in some other life.
This can’t be happening. It happens anyway. Lectric’s twitching slows. I cradle his head. He won’t look up at me. He can’t.
“You’ll be okay,” I tell him.
Lies are better than pain. He twitches again. Then he doesn’t.
His hull can be repaired. His Spark 2100 cannot. Not even the people who designed neural embryos fully understood how consciousness arose from the complexity within. They had simply experimented, modeling electronic subsystems on studies of the human brain until a working model was achieved. My grandfather had books about it. As the host develops, the embryo’s complexity is gradually nested to a deep level, interwoven throughout the electronic brain, the illusion of ego building as the brain learns and relearns and adapts to the chaos of life. Once functionality is lost, it can never be restored.
There will be pain now. I wait for it to come. But the speed of these events has confounded my own brain’s adaptive processes. Lectric is dead–here he lies with his head lolling in my lap–but the knowledge is so strange as to feel unreal. Certainly this didn’t just happen? The universe doesn’t work that way. I’ll forget about it and things will be the same as always. A piece of me probes the truth from a great distance, spying on it as through a telescope, but there’s a sea of anguish there, so I cover the view back up and set it aside.
Echo, unheard, is shouting my name. She comes crawling around the side of the car, pale and scared. She drags herself close and rests her head on my shoulder, but I wince away because she puts pressure on my injured bicep. She’s shaking badly.
“I thought you were dead,” she says.
“Lectric…”
“I’m sorry, Tristan. I’m so sorry. He saved our lives. He saved us. God, your ear. We need to bandage you. We need to bandage me. Do you think there’s another one? They might have left another…”
She talks aimlessly, non-stop, almost in a whisper. Words tumble out, and suddenly it’s intolerable. Doesn’t she understand? I want to yell at her. But she’s close to fainting. I touch my left ear. An electric pain stabs out from my finger and radiates through my head, as if I shocked myself. My entire earlobe has been burned away. Now that I’m aware of it, the pain grows worse. Squeezing the muscle in my left arm also brings instant wooziness. Still, I made out better than Lectric. Better than Echo too, with two holes in her shoulder and shrapnel in her calf.
We do what must be done. Gather the pack, prepare to leave. But I can’t leave my old friend lying in the desert. I haul up his body. Echo can’t walk on her left leg. She supports herself on my right. I’m not conscious of the journey to New Sea. I only know it’s hell.