24
[WARNING] Fire scorched my lungs like they were lined in salt crystals as I awoke with a violent, agonizing gasp of air.
Everything hurt. Everything burned. My hands shook from the need to get away from my own skin, so painful was the heat.
Then I noticed the cold. Bone-deep, as if my muscle tissue had turned to ice, stiffening every tendon and ligament, wiring my jaw shut. A jaw that ached so badly at the hinges that I wondered if my mouth pooled with blood from torn cheeks and dislocated joints.
But the fire. I couldn’t stop the shaking. Couldn’t stop the burning. I was burning up, burning from the inside. I needed out of my clothes. I needed the snow.
Great arms bundled me up in a vice grip against a knit sweater and fur-lined collarbones. Deep humming breaths accompanied a rocking rhythm. Back and forth, tightening the embrace, then letting it loose. Over and over until the panic made room for a fraction of clarity.
I was sitting on the floor of a dark room, the wind howling outside, huddled on the lap of a familiar warmth.
No, the room wasn’t dark, I just couldn’t see.
Why wasn’t my advanced optics system online?
“F-fás?” I questioned with a slurring tongue. A velvety chin rested on the top of my silk. A claw cradled the back of my head. His chest stuttered with a low chuckle meant to soothe me. When I tried to hug him back, I couldn’t lift my arms because I couldn’t feel them. “Where are we?”
He trilled his tongue to quiet me, just a little patter of breath that rolled in my ear. “You’re hypothermic, Roz. You need to kick on your emergency life support. Do dolls— Do you have that?”
I buried my face in his chest as the burning heat rolled through me again. When I pulled up my vitals deck, it had been silenced. As I turned it back on, dozens of warnings blared to life.
[Stage 1 hypothermia]
[Organ failure imminent]
[Heart rate irregular]
[Limb integrity compromised]
[LMem distortion]
[Sensory corruption]
[Range of motion overextended]
I didn’t have time to investigate. Instead, I devoted one of the s-ion slabs housed in my charging port to bodily repair and instructed my parumauxi swarm to address the misfiring of heart tissue first. The responsive net embedded in my unit’s skin whirred as heat distributed through my extremities like dousing myself in boiling water. I hissed, shaking and mewling in pain as my vitals deck went to work trying to save my fingers and toes.
[Rebooting…] My optional systems shut down. A digital monotone listed off tasks and system status notifications as it worked. Fás held me through it all, humming songs he would sing to Misila and Safia before bedtime.
“Compromised tissues scraped. Preparing to expel dead tissue,” my mouth said. Then I threw up black, oily grizzle right on Fásach’s chest. And even though my non-vital systems were down, I felt ashamed that I didn’t have the control to move my head to the side and avoid him. He seemed to understand, rubbing his claws through the fine silk around my charging port, cleaning us both up, whispering encouragements as I did it again.
Once my temperature and heart rate were stable, my sight kicked back on. We were sitting on the floor of a medbay the size of a closet with a compact surgical arm bolted into one corner and three bunks lining the opposite side of the room. Fásach had his back to a Murphy desk still locked against the wall. When our eyes met, his were haunted and tired. He fit his socks and boots on my feet, picked me up, and carried me out into the cold, dark wind without a word.
We were standing on a flat cement courtyard covered in drifts of snow, like sand on the landing strip of a desert airport. I curled my hands into fists to keep my fingers warm and hid them inside Fásach’s unzipped coveralls, my ear pressed against the fur poking out over his sweater. I synced myself to the rhythm of his heart because it made me feel more secure listening to them beat in time.
It wasn’t until we reached the lift on the side of the cliff that I realized we were on the roof of the relay station.
As we descended to the cove in silence, Fásach’s shoulders buffeted the wind coming in over the ice sea, turning me towards the warmth of the horizon. I stared at where the glow of daylight bled across the curvature of the moon with a blackened anvil of foreboding in my chest. The back of my neck prickled, and I swallowed hard. The relay station I’d been enjoying since our arrival now seemed like a tombstone, silently overlooking the graves of hundreds or thousands of people. I curled my fingers tighter into Fásach’s clothing, trying to ignore the serpents of unease winding around my guts, warning me of… what?
Termination,something whispered at the back of my mind. A buzzing itched under my skin that something was wrong.
With me.
The Buoy entrance was jammed open when we returned. As Fásach cleared the doorway of snow, the wall of controls and meters pulsed with lights. Blue blinks and pulses littered the system, some emitted transmissions into the ceiling. [Warning] I approached the wall on jittery legs, hugging myself.
I couldn’t read all of them, but many produced messy halos that dribbled out into the air. Loss of operator comms. Door obstruction. Relay lift breach. Remote distress signal. SOS transmission on repeat…
Fásach grunted and pulled on the lip of the door still stuck in its side rail within the wall. It flew closed, and he stepped back as the lights glowed awake and life-support systems kicked back on, just like our first night.
“Welcome to the Buoy—” SVAPAN began.
“Cancel,” Fásach interrupted. The AI faded to a stop without comment.
“Clear all control notifications and transmissions,” I directed, my voice tremulous with uncertainty. Fásach watched me, but my gaze was fixed on the wall of meters. Several blinked out, but a few remained.
“Operator biometrics required for emergency transmission override.”
[Warning] I bit my lip and took a deep breath as Fásach rubbed his palm into my shoulder.
“Where is Gilladh?” I asked, afraid of the answer.
“They—” He cut off, holding onto me harder. “They shot that wound in your side with a harpoon gun. I tried to explain that you’re you, but they wouldn’t listen.”
“I see.” Tears sprang to my eyes. “So they’re… gone.”
“Yes.”
I glanced out the window at the relay antenna from beneath my lashes. What had I been doing up there? [Priority] Maybe… Maybe after I recovered a little, I could go back up and find out.
It felt like a reasonable thought. Acknowledging it lightened my spirits a little bit.
But it shouldn’t have. Going up there was all wrong. How could I feel something was so right when I knew it wasn’t? That buzzing kept up in my mind, getting louder as I creased my brow. A terrible pitter patter washed over me, like someone chasing my heels in a dark room.
[Warning] I didn’t want to go back up there. Ever.
I told myself that I hated heights, even if I liked looking at them. I told myself that the relay station wasn’t beautiful, even as I admired its engineering. Whatever was happening in my brain, in my LMem, it wasn’t all me.
[Warni–Analysis] There was something in my coding, the parts that skirted around the edges. Something inevitable that made me feel calm despite all of the danger and pain and uncertainty. A flash of pink on Fásach”s neck caught my attention. His dewlap had been sliced open, leaving a rip in his skin like a tear in a pair of tights.
What if Gilladh had killed him first?
Thinking about the possibility physically pained me. My eyes stung and my skin tingled as if in shock.
But my vitals deck? My LMem? No discernible change.
Fásach knelt at my feet and took off my boots as the ventilation system pumped hot air into the dome. He removed my coveralls, careful of the parts that were shredded and bloody. Then he sat me down near the charging port and clasped my cheek with a shaking palm.
“Your arm, I—”
“It doesn’t hurt yet,” I assured him. His nostrils flared as he looked down at my hands, my side. “And whatever happened, it’s okay.” I swallowed the fear that I had deserved it. Stilldeserved it. He lifted my injured arm with care, examining the slashes in my flesh with a chirp of relief.
“I had to grab for you with my claws when you fell off the antenna,” he gulped, his throat working the words with difficulty. “It’s not as bad as I thought. You don’t even need stitches.”
“I was on the antenna?”
Our eyes met, and Fásach’s ears swiveled back with confusion. He licked the corner of his mouth, a crease forming across the bridge of his nose as one ear turned back towards me.
“You don’t remember?” he asked.
I shook my head.
He closed his eyes. “I need you to say it out loud, Roz.”
“I don’t remember how I got to the relay station.”
“Do you remember why?”
I paused as Fásach wavered before me, not sure how to respond. I didn’t remember, but part of me knew, didn’t it?
A look of hurt flashed across Fás’s eyes before he brushed his shaking palm up the short horns growing from his forehead, then picked up a cross bag stuffed with supplies. The words Gil. Sharef, P03 Op II glowed across a nameplate near the shoulder buckle. When Fásach pried open one of the pouches, several aero-syringes tumbled out, tinkling as they rolled off the edge of one tier and onto the next.
“Shit!”he hissed, his nerves fraying. He bared his fangs in a grimace, took a deep breath, then got on his hands and knees, picking the vials up one by one.
“Fás?”
“Just,” he snapped, holding out a hand, “stay there. Please. I need to take care of you before—”
I didn’t need to see his data halo to know he was struggling. So I took the meds from his hands and laid them on his sleeping bag. Then I slid my arms around his neck, careful of both our injuries, and cradled the thick band of his tresses growing down the back of his head. I massaged the base of his wiry fur, brushing the tips of my fingers against the shell of one of his large ears and breathed in a slow rhythm. Just like he’d taught me.
“Does waking up always feel like the day you were born?” I asked. His ear twitched. “One minute you don’t exist, and then the next you do.”
“Most people don’t remember being born,” he answered.
“I do. It was exactly the same as sleeping.”
Fásach’s hand slowly wrapped around my shoulders, his other palm braced against the floor.
“Does mediplasma work on you?”
I nodded into his pelt, and he pressed the aerosyringe to my bicep. Relief washed through me like applying aloe to a sunburn. I did the same for him, pressing one to the back of his neck, swallowing hard.
“When I woke up, I heard an echo. The important one from the mountain pass. I started dressing and then decided that I didn’t need so many layers because I only had one task and it wouldn’t take me long. I silenced my vitals deck, and I don’t remember after that,” I told him, then shook my head. “No, there’s more, ah… The echo was a deep, calm voice. Quantum speech in the background, maybe? On repeat, like a distress signal. And I don’t remember the task, it was just something priority, you know? Well, I guess you don’t.” I sat back on my heels with a self-disappointed sigh. “That’s it. I’m so sorry.”
The haunted look in Fásach’s stare faded some as he took the mediplasma from my palm and chucked both syringes into the trash with a shake of his head. “I believe you.”
“Yeah?”
His jaw ticked. “You were climbing the antenna when we found you. You wouldn’t respond when I tried to wake you up, either. You just opened your mouth and stared at the jungle. You didn’t make any sound, but it gave me symphonic vertigo.”
“Maybe I was saying something, but it was just too high or low for you to hear,” I wondered out loud. As soon as I said it, it rang true. “I have a line-of-sight transmitter. The higher you are, the further the frequency can travel! It makes sense that I would want to climb the cliff or the antenna. This could be important—”
Fás dragged me back into a battered hug without a word. He nuzzled my shoulder, the points of his claws pricking my thermal shirt. His horns dragged across my jaw as his muscles tensed.
“I thought you were dying, Roz.”
I breathed a laugh against his ear, petting his hackles to coax them flat beneath his sweater. “If that ever happens, you can just rebuild me from the Mummer. It’s okay.”
“No,” Fás snapped. “I can’t.” He grabbed my cheeks in both palms, staring me hard in the face. “It doesn’t matter if there are other units that look like you or have the same name or origin code. None of them are you, Roz. You’re one of a kind like the rest of us.”
Heat lanced my face, riveted. Fásach was right.
[Analysis] There had been only one Gilladh too.
And now they were gone. Forever.
[Warni–Priority] No matter what had compelled me to chase that echo, I needed to find a way to stop it.
Or risk putting Fásach, Safia, and Misila in grave danger.