Chapter 34
Thirty-Four
Ellie
She woke hours later, in the darkest part of the night, uncertain of where she was. A strange clicking sound had woken her. Something that she knew wasn't the quiet sounds of Alexia, who had fallen asleep next to the bed.
Ellie wasn't a very deep sleeper. She was always waking up at some sound, from shifts in Proteus’s breathing, to a rumble of thunder overhead. But then she heard the sound again, and she knew it wasn't a natural noise in this room. The slight tapping was too rhythmic.
Finally, rolling onto her back after scanning the entire room for anything out of the ordinary, she almost screamed when she saw the crab-like creature on the glass above her.
Clapping her hands over her mouth, she froze as she waited for Alexia to wake up.
But maybe the big woman could use some rest too, because she only shifted a bit before falling back into a deep slumber.
Ellie waited for her breathing to even out before she took her hands off her mouth and glared up at Pilot.
The little droid pointed with a leg, clearly indicating for Ellie to leave the room.
The door was loud, though. The hissing sound was bound to wake someone up. She gestured with her hands, trying to show that it was a manual door that would be loud. Again, Pilot pointed at it. This time, he did so with a little more sass than was necessary.
Grumbling under her breath, she eased out of the bed and stepped over Alexia. The other woman didn't wake up, not even when she pressed the button and the door hissed open. Maybe it wasn't as loud as she remembered, but it still made her flinch and freeze.
Alexia snorted in her sleep and threw an arm over her eyes. Clearly, the light from the hallway was too bright.
A softness burned in Ellie's chest. In another life, perhaps, she would have met Alexia under very different circumstances. They might have spoken more regularly, and maybe even Alexia would have helped Ellie not be such a people pleaser. They'd have become fast friends. She was certain of that.
But maybe every clone felt that way when they met the giant of a woman.
More taps sounded from above her head as Pilot led her somewhere in this labyrinth of a domed city.
She followed along from hallway to hallway, tip toeing through what looked like a kitchen, then into a garden that was so lush it was almost mind boggling to see.
Ellie got a little distracted in there before Pilot led her into a workshop.
This was the messiest place she'd seen in this small city thus far. Scraps of metal, large and small, were littered all over the floor. There were bolts and hammers, tools strewn about in a way that she was certain wasn't smart to store that way.
But she could also see there was a moon pool in this room. Hopefully, this wouldn't wake anyone up.
Ellie walked over to the button and hit it, wincing as the grinding sound of metal filled the room. No one shouted, and no one came running in, so she assumed that meant the bedrooms were far away from this area. Which made sense, considering how much noise was likely generated in this room.
Pilot came in from the bottom, shaking himself off and letting out a disgruntled noise. "Do you know how long it took me to get here?"
"Really not that long. Considering I've only been here for a day." She leaned against the wall, crossing her arms over her chest and looking him over. "Why are you here?"
"Because you've been kidnapped!" He flicked a leg at her. "You are ungrateful to be saved."
"How did you even know I'd be here?"
She wouldn't put it past the droid to know what everyone in the sea was doing. He conferred with the drones that had been all over the ocean floor, throughout the waves, and even the ones that had ventured out onto the land. Still, his arrival was rather perfect.
"The humans were all talking about it as soon as you left," Pilot replied.
He clambered over one of the metal pieces near her, seemingly to get enough height to look her over.
"They must have believed I was a droid that could only follow orders.
They packed up almost as soon as you were gone.
Took everything they could in the facility, and quite a few pieces of equipment they had been fixing. Thieves."
She tried very hard not to laugh at that. "Well, they did fix them."
"That doesn't give them the right to raid Sanctuary for anything useful!
It all needs to stay there, so we have a centralized location to control the land inhabitants.
That was always the plan, and Proteus is always right.
" Grumbling under his breath, Pilot reached out a single leg and gently moved a strand of her hair to the side.
He was looking at her neck, she realized. The droid even let out a little beam of light to scan her from head to toe, making sure that she wasn’t injured. "They haven't harmed you, I see."
"I'm fine, Pilot."
"You never know what humans are going to do. They experiment on everything they can get their hands on. And you are a very interesting specimen, Miss Ellie."
Tears burned in her eyes. "I think that might be the nicest thing you've ever said to me, Pilot."
"Don't get emotional. Come on now. I can breathe for you, and there's probably enough oxygen to get us on land. From there, I can guide you back to the facility."
"Land?" Ellie repeated. "I can't travel on land."
"Sure, you can. It won't be entirely safe, but I can keep breathing for you, and there are plenty of caves. If we can keep to those, then we should be able to survive. You might not get back in one piece, but you'll get back. No time to waste."
Droids. They didn't understand that her parts weren't as replaceable as his. Although she supposed she'd already replaced an arm. The experience might have confused him a little.
She took a step back from Pilot, readying herself to prepare him for the fact that she couldn't leave, but another voice interrupted before she could.
"Droid," Alexia said, her tall shadow entering the room long before she did. "She'll be staying here. Just what kind of protocol did they install in you to be able to travel this far?"
"Uh..." A gear whirred in Pilot's body. "I'll be taking the girl."
"No, you will both stay here, and you will submit to a full inspection." Alexia's arms were crossed as she paused in the doorway. "What kind of droid even are you?"
Something popped out of Pilot. A string, Ellie realized, until it crackled in the air with a sound of electricity so loud that it made her cover her ears. Not a string, then. A weapon. Had Pilot had that all along?
It almost reached Alexia, but the big woman stepped aside before it could latch onto her and likely kill her with the amount of power surging through that thing. In one smooth movement, the old guard stooped down, grabbed a metal scrap that looked about the size of a plate, and flung it at Pilot.
The droid wasn't meant for battle. It slammed into him and pinned him to the wall. His legs gave one more angry twitch before it looked like all his electronics turned off.
"Pilot!" she gasped, running to the wall and trying to yank the metal out of it. But she couldn't. She wasn't strong enough to pull it out of him, and he was just hanging there. Limp.
"He's fine," Alexia said. "It takes a lot more than that to kill a droid. I'll have Mira take a look at him, or Ace, I suppose. She's off in Beta right now, but I'm sure Maketes would take any excuse to go get her and bring her back here. He hates it when she's gone for too long."
Ellie whirled around, balling her hands into fists. "You killed him."
"I told you, he's going to be fine."
"He was my friend."
Alexia's expression softened. There it was again, that one emotion that Ellie hadn’t been able to name. But this time she could tell it was pity.
And that made her stomach churn. She lifted a hand, pointing at the other woman. "Don't look at me like that. He was a friend."
"Droids are complicated. I'm sure he considers you a friend too, but they aren't like people.
Killing them requires a lot more effort than a metal scrap through him.
Wires can be replaced. Hard drives are a bit trickier, but even those can be recovered.
He's going to be fine, Ellie. But we can't have him taking you out of here before Proteus returns.
That sea god will kill us all if you aren't here, and we don't know where you are. "
The doors opened behind Alexia, and two other droids came in.
One looked like a little box on wheels. The other, a strange spider-like creation with a glass body.
She thought the latter might have been the one attached to Anya’s head.
The two of them froze, and then eyes popped out of the top of the box.
"Ah, perfect," Alexia said. "Byte and Bitsy will take care of him.
In the meantime, will you come with me? We just got word that Proteus has already woken up.
Looks like you aren't going to be helping us as much as we hoped, but we were wondering if you wouldn't mind bypassing the firewalls and getting us into the mainframe of Sanctuary?
That way, we can look over the rest of the experimental documentation. Yeah?"
Her mind was spinning. Too many details all flew at her at the same time.
Proteus was coming? She was thrilled to hear that.
He was alive, and she could breathe a little easier.
But Pilot was right there, and the droids were clearly doing something to pull his remains from behind the metal stuck in the wall.
And they wanted her to do even more, when Alexia had killed her best friend.
But she had been so kind last night. The two of them had talked about so many things, and Alexia had seemed like she could be a friend as well.
Overwhelmed, she allowed herself to be led from the room into another.
There were more people now. A man with glasses, a woman with a shaved head, and a few others she recognized who had been working at the facility.
There were a lot of them, and none of them even looked at her as Alexia sat her down and put a tablet in her hands.
"Here," Alexia said, leaning over her and taking up all the oxygen in the room.
"This is the coding all our best are struggling with.
It looks like someone designed it in Tau, and unfortunately, we don't have a lot of great minds left from Tau.
Just you. Now we can break through this.
There are many people here with a lot of knowledge.
But it sure would be a lot faster if you could do it for us. "
She was breathing too hard. Even Ellie could hear her breath as though it were sawing in and out of her lungs. It was foolish how nervous she was. These people hadn't hurt her. But everyone was rushing her.
Mira marched into the room like a soldier, a rebreather in her hands. Her red hair stood up in all directions, and the black shirt she wore billowed around her body as it was tucked into the tightest black pants Ellie had ever seen. "Time's up. He's almost here."
"She can do this," Alexia replied.
"We don't have time for whatever coding you need her to do. She needs to be in the water now for all our sakes."
Alexia's hand came down on her shoulder and squeezed. "I believe in her, Mira."
Those words sparked a fire in her chest. Because she could do this. She had done worse in much shorter amounts of time. "Do you have a... a..."
Ellie was waggling her fingers in the air as if she were typing and someone had already brought her a keyboard.
The man with the glasses hooked it up to the tablet that Alexia held in front of her as Ellie let the code flow out of her.
It was a language that Tau had created, after all.
She knew how to read this. She was probably one of the few people left alive who could.
She let all of her worries drop out of her head. This was her last gift to them. This was the last bit of help she would give the humans so they could prepare. A single generation was left in Beta. That's all the time they had. She would give them everything she could to prepare them.
And next, she would take on a sea god because he was going to be furious with her.
"Done," she said, lifting her hands up like she was on a timer, and the team in the room whisked away the tablet. Mira placed the rebreather over her face, and she was jerked in the direction of a moon pool.
Everything was happening so fast that she almost couldn't see straight, but then Alexia framed her face with her big hands and made Ellie focus on her and not the people running through the room.
"You stay safe," Alexia said. "You hear me? That creature out there doesn't get to tell you how to live your life, or what is right or wrong. You've got a good head on these shoulders. You can choose for yourself."
"I can't swim," Ellie whimpered.
Again, pity darkened Alexia's expression before she took a deep breath. "Your man's out there, sweetheart. You won't have to."
Cold metal touched the inside of her wrist. A knife?
Why did Alexia have a knife against her wrist?
The metal pressed down hard enough to part the flesh, a strange stinging sensation as red bloomed down her forearm.
Not enough to kill, just enough to really hurt.
And then Alexia planted a hand in the center of Ellie's chest and shoved her out into the water.
The icy cold stole her breath for a moment before she remembered that she could breathe with the device attached to her face.
Sucking in a deep, startled breath, she stared up at the dome that was slowly disappearing.
Blood streamed from her arm, like a red ribbon reaching up for the dome that was getting farther and farther away.
A cliff's edge, Ellie realized. The rock rushed up in front of her, but not close enough for her to touch or grab onto. That dome had been over a steep drop off and she was slowly sinking beyond it.
They'd killed her.
She'd told them that she couldn't swim. Even the stinging ache of her wounded arm wasn't helping her gain enough adrenaline to try to swim harder, faster. They'd thrown her over the edge because she wasn't useful any longer.
Until a long, echoing snarl made the water around her shake. She could feel the sound of his anger and rage as he barreled toward her. A dark creature illuminated the entire sea with his skeleton glowing so brightly it almost hurt to look at him.
And then...
Impact.