Chapter Twelve
The safehouse was a shithole with unfinished walls, rotten floorboards, and a colony of fat roaches that scurried from the light. Faded LED strips ran along the cornices that cast the place in a dull orange glow, and layers of dust and cobwebs dominated the shadows. Malory heard the thudding bass from the upstairs neighbor’s entertainment system playing an old western shootout, and every window was barred with corrugated prison steel. Only one opened to the fire escape, and it served as a way out if the worst case came to pass. She fastened the many door locks and chains behind her and knew they’d never withstand a tactical door ram. The stench of mildew and mold hung thick in the air and reminded her of the orphanage, of home. The place hadn’t hosted another soul in decades. The cabinets were barren, and the fridge had nothing but a can of motor oil that leaked black goo onto the shelves; it was as fitting a place as any to await an executioner’s blade. At least no one else would suffer when they came for her. She made her way to the bed and collapsed into dirty sheets—there wasn’t a shred of energy left to undress, and she fell asleep in seconds.
She dreamed of a plaza packed with so many bodies, of a megaphone speech about disease, suffering children, and the boots of oppression. The crowd roiled under clouds of tear gas and the swinging of bloodied batons. There were broken bones and sweat, Molotov cocktails exploding in beautiful swirls on the concrete, and then it all morphed into a monument built from stacks of corpses meant to reach the sky and further beyond. Andromeda, and all its sparkling stars, waited. It was patient. And then there was a car, an arm tied off, plump veins penetrated by a needle and the desire to forget the sadness of a sister’s features—ones that held all the paintings of people without a face, the fists of an abusive father, a melting snowman on a hill. The drugs never helped, never erased the memory of the lake beneath the moon the way it used to be. The damp wood of the deck, the noise of insects, the water and its eternal churn. There was a secret hidden there, of a forbidden love, of hands on the divots of hips, of a pair swimming naked in the cold. A promise, a kiss that overdosing could never erase. The disjointed images spread thin, quaked, and faded back into the depths.
Malory woke up pissed off. She booted the implant to find dozens of memories that weren’t hers had glitched their way into the upper layers of the network. The interface wouldn’t let her delete them, so she shoved them into quarantine with the others. She had enough trauma to work through without someone else’s thrusting its way into her head. She sat up, her muscles stiff and screaming, and headed for the bathroom. The shower was a disgusting mix of accumulated dirt, ancient soap scum, and hard water deposits, but the tap still ran, and she didn’t care. She stripped down and climbed in. The heat burned her skin and Malory revelled in the way it soothed the aches of her battered mind. She used a desiccated sponge to scrub her body raw, to be free of her friend’s dried blood and the scent of spent gunpowder. The drain swallowed it all without complaint. She swayed there until the water ran cold and drip-dried. She focused on each droplet, the way it rolled from her skin, to keep herself grounded, to keep the carnage of the aquarium at bay. Her feet were bare against the slimy tiles, and she wiggled her toes, clenched her fists over and over, and breathed in a steady motion.
Mal left her clothes discarded and ordered a brand new set from the network. A delivery drone delivered them right to the fire escape in the alley—black cargo pants, new boots, a patchwork sweatshirt, and a dark windbreaker emblazoned with a biohazard symbol. It was a decent first step to feeling like herself again, but it wasn’t enough. When she sat on the ripped sofa in what passed for the living room, the ghost materialized in front of her again.
They could never climb their way to heaven. So many dead dreams left discarded.
“What the fuck is happening to me?” Malory demanded. Her boots were untied, and she couldn’t be bothered. She wanted to hug her sister, to go back in time to when her mother was alive and she deserved love.
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You have inherited two lives, forever entwined. The eye can show the way.
“What does that even mean?” Mal asked. The memories, the headaches, she wanted it all to end. Her friends were dead, and the ghost never gave straight answers.
There is mine. Mine. MINE. And another. Blended code, synapses tangled in a giant field of purple flowers. Can’t you smell them on the breeze?
“Just leave me the fuck alone already,” Mal said. She turned the implant off and watched the woman fade back into the ether.
Alone again, Malory pulled up her hood, yanked on the strings until it was tight around her, and slumped over. The torn leather edges of the sofa dug into her shoulder, and she ignored it. It was okay to feel sorry for herself, to wallow like a dried up slug, but the longer she did, the more it morphed into a profound rage that threatened to undo her. After a few hours, her stomach growled. She sighed, flopped her arms out in frustration, and turned the implant back on. She braced for the intrusion and more whispered mysteries, but it didn’t come, so she ordered a pizza and a six pack. When it arrived, she stuffed her face and savored the grease that coated her tongue. It was a half-step above damp cardboard, but that was the point; the unhealthier the food, the more it tickled at her fried dopamine receptors. She washed it down with one beer after another until she was good and sloshed and then wandered around the place. She found a piece of rusted rebar in one of the corners and went around smashing it into the walls and furniture until her arms ached. She knew it was an irrational desire to make something as miserable as she felt, but she didn’t care.
She wasn’t given a counselor when her mom died in front of her, and there was no one to teach her how to handle such complicated emotions, so she improvised. If a few busted holes walked her back from the ledge, then so be it. The damage wasn’t her problem, anyway. As she wandered, she found herself wishing for the hit squad to come so she could graduate from petty vandalism to smashing their heads like rotten fruit. She tossed the rebar back into the corner where she found it and stumbled. When she hit the ground, she didn’t get back up. Instead, she rolled onto her back and found herself replaying the colony ship launch the Doc had shared with her. All that metal ascending into the sky. Almost every passenger onboard left a loved one behind, and Mal didn’t think she had it in her to abandon the people she cared about for the possibility of a better life. She’d never trade Nadia’s warm embrace, or her sister’s crooked smile for a lifetime spent in cryosleep if what awaited her when she decanted was a mystery. She wondered what had to happen to a person for them to take that gamble as she passed out.
Malory woke to a ray of sunrise peeking through the bars of the bedroom window.She had been trapped there for days, and was bored of binge-watching shows on the net. On the third day, she found a box under the mattress filled with schematics and plans for robotic parts, and she recognized a few from the catalogues of Aeon Automotive Implementations and wondered how the ghost that haunted her was related—if the ethereal woman had moved across other networks to drive forward the inventions of an entire corporation, or if the safehouse had been used by one of the company’s defecting techies. When Mal wasn’t drinking herself into a stupor, she delved into advanced programming tutorials and did her best to learn; she had found the tracing program that infected her hack on day five, buried in the lines the Doc had added, and realized the disaster at the aquarium was her fault from beginning to end. She deleted the affected parts and migrated the entire thing to her network. She set about making improvements, and in a small effort to atone, promised to turn it into a skeleton key that opened anything and everything. She considered nested matrices run by an algorithm, and the sheer complexity kept her sane.
A good wind-up soldier needs a gun to fight their battles.
// NEW COORDINATES RECEIVED
// LOADING…
//
// PROCEED TO THE ROUTE
“You want to arm me? For what? And is it even safe to go out now?” Mal asked. She was doing sit-ups while scrolling through the mess of her hack. She wiped the sweat from her brow and looked around for the ghost woman. No one was there, and no answers came.
