claude

August finds Reika

On the third day August found her.

Ingrid had stationed Reika on the mantel, which she'd accepted as high ground. But she'd climbed down to inspect a brass carriage clock — she kept cataloguing Vivian's clutter, professionally offended by it — and August rounded the couch and saw her move.

The sound he made was not a word. It was a siren of pure want. He came at her with both arms up.

Reika fired into the ceiling. Ingrid heard the crack and arrived in time to see plaster dust settling into August's hair and August, undeterred, closing a fist around Reika's legs and bringing her toward his mouth. Ingrid pried her loose and got bitten on the thumb for it.

That made two holes in the ceiling. Kley would eventually look up.

"You will not put me back in the closet," Reika…

The rift opened over the CSX freight yard in Toledo at 4:11 a.m., and by 4:40 Nathan had it domed.

"Aegis, count?" Aarush, half a mile up, glowing like a second sunrise.

"Forty-one units inside the shield. They're not pushing."

That was the wrong part. Rift machines pushed. These stood in rows between the coal hoppers, and one — walker chassis, no visible weapons — laid a manipulator flat against the inside of his shield and held it there, like a doctor taking a pulse.

Nathan tightened the dome. The machine adjusted. He shifted the shield's harmonic, the trick nobody had ever countered. It matched him in under a second.

"Jasper. Look ahead five minutes. What do they do?"

Silence on comms. Then: "Nathan, I can't see you. Everyone else in the yard reads fine. Where you're standing it's just…

Nathan let his shield drop.

Glaive came up to Jasvinder. She said, low, "How did she do that?" Her tone wasn't one of wonder. It was a voice you'd use about a crack in a bulkhead.

Leith was still turning on the churned grass, breathless, waiting for the thing you get when you save everyone.

Say something, Nathan thought to himself. She just killed a warship, so somebody thank her. He was in the League now, wasn't he? Sort of? Didn't his word matter now? Except, no, it felt worse than before. He was the most junior member here. He didn't have the authority to say... whatever it would take to change the mood. The words sat right behind his teeth. He'd rehearsed being brave a hundred times since the cafeteria. But that had been a different, less wretched girl standing up to Branwen, and he…

Two days back in Richmond before anyone she used to know looked at her, and it was Dana Puckett behind the deli counter at the Kroger on Lombardy. Two rows over in AP Bio. In the small advanced classes Dana had been okay, but outside of them she used to laugh on cue when Marcie needed a laugh.

"Thin?" Dana asked, holding the roast beef to the blade.

"Thin, yeah."

She didn't recognize Katrina. Why would she. The girl she was picturing, if she pictured anyone, had weighed three hundred pounds and cried two stalls down from where Dana reapplied her lip gloss.

Katrina took the paper packet. Her hands were steady. That was the thing she kept checking, tongue to a gap.

She drove the long way, the one that didn't pass through Cherokee Road. Just seeing the corner house where the Vances lived was…

Once I got her alone by the buses. Everyone gone. I said the usual things and she didn't cry — she'd stopped giving me that — she just stood there holding her binder against that huge chest, looking at me. So I did something I never told Sarah. I reached out and grabbed a fistful of her stomach through her shirt, to disgust myself, to prove something. It was soft and warm and it gave under my hand, and I felt it go up my own arm like current. She flinched. I pulled back like I'd touched a stove.

I called her a name and walked off fast.

That Sunday at Grace Fellowship I prayed about it. About the current. I asked Him to take it out of me. I promised Him I'd say yes to Donovan, to do my part.

Monday I found Donovan at his locker and put my hand on his arm and said I'd changed my mind. He…

She finished the way I'd optimized her to. Carotid pulse spiked to 140, pupils blew wide, and the small muscles under her jaw went slack a half-second before the sound did.

Then there was text in my field of vision.

Not on her, not on the ceiling. Overlaid, the way a floater is overlaid, riding my eye no matter where I looked.

HOST LINK ESTABLISHED.

My first thought was retinal detachment. My second was that I'd finally scored an early build of somebody's AR contact lens and forgotten, which was insane, I hadn't put anything in my eyes. My third, arriving with the calm I reserve for term sheets, was that I should hold very still and read it before it went away.

I didn't stop moving. Test conditions matter. I kept the same long stroke, same seventy at the wrist, and watched a second line…

The devil I wore that week read faces, and it told me Joon was avoiding me before I'd finished counting the days.

Three days. He took his meals when the kitchen was empty. He'd started using the east stairs to get to his study, which added four minutes to a trip that should take one. A person only pays four minutes for privacy when the privacy is from someone specific.

The someone was me. I knew why. Give me a devil and an afternoon and I could talk him into anything, and he'd decided the only safe move was to not sit down with me at all.

So I decided to stop letting him.

I went up after dinner. And the house helped.

That was the part the devil couldn't parse, because devils read people and Bethel wasn't people. The corridor to Joon's study was shorter than it had been that morning. The…

Marcus ran the third bay at a kiosk called PhoneMedic, wedged between a Cinnabon and a shuttered Payless. Twenty-two dollars for a screen protector applied wrong on purpose so they'd come back. Sixty for a battery he bought in bulk for four.

The clone rig lived in the drawer under the register. He'd built it from a guide on a forum that no longer existed. Insurance-claim phones, mostly — people too rich to notice a slow copy running while he "diagnosed the charging port." He had a folder for the good ones. Nudes, mostly. Sometimes bank apps. Once a city councilman.

The phone that came in Thursday belonged to a man in a wax jacket who didn't make eye contact. Cracked digitizer. Nothing special. Marcus plugged the clone cable in and the rig threw an error he'd never seen — not FAILED, not…

She kept the gun on me and swept it across the room — the monitor, the laundry heap, the closet door — the way you'd clear a corridor. "Where's my crew," she said. It wasn't really a question.

"There's no crew. It's me. And you."

"Comms are dead. Nav's dead. This isn't the deck." She toed a balled-up sock, and it moved wrong for her, too much mass for her weight, and she nearly pitched over onto it. Fourteen inches of soldier catching her balance on a sock. "What is this place."

"My room."

She looked at the hole in the ceiling. Then at me, and I watched her decide which I was — hostage, hostile, or terrain.

"I was at the Meridian Outpost," she said slowly. "There was a breach. I was in the cockpit. Then I was here, being — handled." Her jaw worked. "Send me back."

"I don't know how you…

The form wanted me to begin with how long I had known the applicant, and in what capacity. One and a half years. I was her math teacher. I typed that and looked at it and understood that every true sentence I could write was also a lie, and every lie would be, in its way, the truth.

I had imagined, in the first weeks, what I would say if I were ever free to say anything. I'd composed whole depositions in my head while frying eggs I then couldn't eat. I had a recipient for them: a detective, a headmaster, some grave adult who would take the weight of it out of my hands. The fantasy was never about justice. It was about transfer. Someone would believe me, and in believing me would also relieve me, would carry the thing away the way you carry a sleeping child up from a car. I never made the…

The first night out from the palace, Mirzona made camp in the lee of a fallen cedar and built a fire with the competence of a woman who had decided, very recently and very thoroughly, that she would learn to do everything herself. She had no idea how to swaddle a baby. She had, somewhere on the road, worked out how to make a fire from green wood without smoking herself blind. People are like this. They master the wrong things first.

I roosted in the cedar's upturned roots and waited for Narhabel to complain.

He did not complain. This worried me more than any amount of complaining.

She fed him — he took the milk now without the biting, which he had abandoned somewhere south of the third river, claiming it strained his jaw — and she sang to him the one song she knew, which was a Zon…