Feed the Machine (12 page)

“What do you want?”

“We need your help. Can you let us inside to see some of the artifacts?”

“You are out of your mind if you think I’d ever let you set foot on this property.”

“But… we need your help. It’s important. Can’t you help us again?”

Gress stopped bathing himself.

“Again? When did I help
you
before?”

“Yesterday, when—”

He doesn’t remember, something strange is happening, quiet!

Silver stuttered to a stop. The side of her face where chair man had struck her was throbbing and she could still taste blood in her mouth. She didn’t know what she would do if Gress didn’t help her. Maybe she could show him the tablet. The screen was cracked but it still worked.

“Yesterday I found footprints inside my house. Someone had broken in and then escaped with something valuable.”

Silver stared at Gress, trying to understand the tone in his voice.

Contempt plus anger plus disgust.

“Are you… angry?”

“Street filth like you always wants what it doesn’t deserve. Wants what it didn’t earn.”

“Shut up cat before I drop you from a high place,” Hello said in a low tone.

Gress extended his paw and examined his claws.

“Come closer to say that,” he remarked to the air.

“Shush Hello.”

Hello gave an indignant caw and fluttered to the guttering of the neighboring house.

Give him something he wants.

“I have created a device that allows me to find any object in the world. I can help Ijira find more books written in Arabic or doorknobs or—”

Gress hissed at her and stood, his tail puffed out.

“How do you know he has these things? Are you the intruder?”

Get out of here.

“No, I’m… I’ve seen Ijira trading near the Machine and—”

“Liar! He hasn’t left the house for seven years!”

“I
remember
him trading and I saw—”

“When you were a small child? You remember?”

He’s getting angrier.

Silver’s heart was thudding and anxiety pooled around her feet, rising to her knees. But she couldn’t stop. Ijira had a house full of valuable things. She only had to touch some gold or platinum, something old and valuable and she’d be able to find more of them. Ijira would surely pay enough for them to get free of the quota just for her to create a map of dig sites for him.

“I have an excellent memory and—”

“Yet you say I helped you yesterday when the only thing I remember is finding footprints inside my house and the smell of street filth wafting.”

Stop talking before he summons the law.

“Sorry,” Silver muttered, thinking that was perhaps the appropriate thing to say. She turned and walked away.

“I ever see you again I’m calling the law!” Gress yelled before turning tail and stalking inside.

Hello fluttered down to land on her shoulder.

“Want me to shit on him?” he asked.

Chapter 19

Silver sat in the cool dark of her workroom trying to surf the waves of information. They lifted her, pulled her along until they crashed into a froth of bubbles that smelled of blood and dirt.

There were too many questions, not enough answers and far too much flooding from the hasdee chip. Gress who had set them free with their stolen tablet and then didn’t remember them. A guard supernaturally fast who had defended himself.

The ache in her cheek had deepened, spiking into her head, summoning old and new pains with it. Silver tried to dive deeper into the information but failed—her body was holding her to this plane, this place of suffering. She coughed and lost five minutes, her body trying to expel something but failing. She sipped water tasting like mud, her throat filled with broken glass.

She was getting sick again. A sick that should be in all capitals. SICK. A sick that should be shouted from the roof, a sick that in a better world would bring immediate aid, bottles of cool blue heal or better to fix her.

That was the best she could hope for. A temporary fix. Never a cure.

She was heating, her body trying to cook the invading force to death. Again, pointless. Especially since it appeared the illness came from within.

It would come in waves now, each growing higher and only in the brief respite between them would she be able to think, to move, to change the variables of the world around her.

Soon she would sink under completely, lost from the world, the only hope a bottle of heal that may never come.

Silver looked at the fractured screen, her mind chasing solutions but none were caught. She could find anyone—but how could she turn that to money? There was no time to collect bounties, to hunt down criminals across the Scour. She could find gold if only she was allowed to touch gold but the wealthy kept their precious things guarded away. She had a device that could tell you a million things about your body but none of them were of any use. She looked at her own file. The vast majority of the numbers were meaningless. Was there a number determining how likely she was to murder?

The voice had been quiet on the topic of the guard. A move she knew well. It was pretending it never happened, hoping Silver would not dare to question its urging to kill the man.

“Hello, could you check if the hasdee can make any pap for me?” Silver asked, the pain in her lower left side flaring. Food sometimes made it better.

He fluttered out his small hinged door and over to the house.

“Why did you tell me to kill the guard?”

Silence.

“Answer me! There are many storerooms with different guards. There are mansions we could sneak into, maybe even people on the streets who might help us!”

Nothing.

“I could have been killed!”

Are you done?

“Please answer me. Please.”

No.

“Why?”

It doesn’t matter if you found all the gold. It’s over in sixteen days anyway.

Hello flew back and pushed through the door. He held three pap cubes in his beak. He deposited them on the bench.

“That’s all there is.”

“Thanks.”

Silver forced herself to eat one. Her appetite was gone and wouldn’t return unless she had some heal.

“What is happening in sixteen days?” she said.

Look.

Silver closed her eyes. When she opened them again she was standing on a field of green synthetic grass. The sky above was blue with the occasional fluffy white cloud. The horizon was a flat line.

In a blink she was no longer alone. Cold marble statues appeared on both sides. Her brother Ash carved in cool white lines, dressed in his exploring gear, their father’s pack slung over one shoulder. Nola, one hand on hip, scowling. Their mother, bent double, exhausted. Their father, his features a blur, his statue carved in the deepest black, a man of shadow.

Another blink and she saw they were in a line of thousands. The people of Cago and other towns. Smaller statues appeared ahead of them. Children and babies.

It was easy to understand. Birthdates and times represented.

A rumble and a black wall a hundred kilometers high shot out of the ground. It blocked out the sun, casting them into deep shadow.

Then the grass jerked them forward, a conveyor belt ending at the wall.

The small newborn statues went first, bursting apart, breaking down into dust with an unholy crunch. Then the toddlers, their small frozen faces contorted with fear. The young children crying silent marble tears.

Before the wall hit, Silver turned around and saw another behind her, a hundred kilometers high.

A scream from a woman. Her voice was joined by thousands more. Men terrified, gasping as though they’d been running, sobbing, pleading.

Silver shot up into the sky, above the two walls, so high they were only black lines. Hundreds more shimmered into existence behind their start point, like the colored bands sometimes found in wood.

“Black line, ten years and twelve days, another black line,” Silver said. She counted lines.

Seven hundred and thirty-four of them.

From her high vantage point she saw tens of thousands of statues appear in white streaks next to each wall. Then they slid forward until they were pulverized to dust against the wall ahead. The dust sucked away and formed the statues in the next band.

The image vanished and left Silver facing the raw numbers. Anyone older than ten had the same number recorded against their file. For anyone younger that variable was blank. Another number appeared. It was identical for every single person and it was counting down.

In sixteen days it would reach zero.

The world returned and so did the pain. The heat of her fever, the deep ache in her bones. Silver wiped her nose, the red welts on her hand stinging.

See? It is counting down. Something terrible will happen when it reaches zero.

“I don’t understand.”

Yes you do.

Chapter 20

Silver snapped back to reality when Hello dug his beak into her hand. She’d slipped away from the world, her fever spiking, her mind going hazy.

“Ouch! What are you—”

His wing was wet with blood.

“I found you gold! Hurry!”

Sitting at his feet was a gold ring, gleaming warm and a small nugget.

“What happened?”

He pecked her again and then the table.

“People may be coming so you need to hurry,” he said.

Silver touched the tablet and cleared away all her settings. The infinite ocean returned. She pressed a virtual button she’d programmed and “found” her hand. Then she picked up the nugget, making sure it touched the healing wound.

The tablet began questioning the hasdee and as the answers flowed back, the temperature on the screen began to climb.

“Can you tell me what happened?” Silver asked, watching the temp rise past ninety degrees.

“I found a gold ring and a nugget. Then a cat scratched me.”

“Did you find these things inside someone’s house?”

“I don’t know,” Hello mumbled.

“If this works, do you need to take these back to where you found them?”

“Not a good idea. You need to throw them in the Machine or down a hole.”

The temperature hit ninety-five. The flood of answers from the hasdee was cutting down.

Three more degrees and she found the gold nugget. Most of its variables were static—it had no heart to beat.

Designate gold.

Silver picked up the tablet and blew underneath it, trying to speed the cooling process. It had jumped from eighty-two to ninety-eight finding the nugget.

Fifteen tense minutes passed, Silver blowing air on the tablet, Hello glancing at the door and back to the stolen gold.

It hit eighty-two again and Silver ran the search on the ring. This time it was much faster, only taking a few minutes and breaking ninety degrees.

Silver dropped the ring on the tablet and started typing code, comparing the gold nugget and gold ring entries.

The ring wasn’t solid gold but rather a cheap common metal plated with a thin shell.

Silver sorted through the variables, finding those that were the same. There were many of them however. Which one was gold?

She selected one variable at random and searched within one meter of her for it. It found only the ring.

She searched again on another variable. The ring again.

And again. The ring. Again. The ring.

Silver had no idea what the variables meant. Things that were round? Things that were jewelry? Things stolen by crows?

“We need to hurry,” Hello said, stepping from foot to foot.

“I am,” Silver replied, searching again.

It found the ring and the gold nugget. Only one way to test out if it was finding gold.

Silver took a pair of snips and cut the gold nugget in two. She moved the pieces apart on the table and ran the search again.

Ring, nugget, nugget.

“It works!”

“We’re dead,” Hello replied.

Someone bashed on the door, a thunderous echoing sound. They opened it without waiting for a reply.

It was Sheriff Toll.

He looked at the gold ring, the two golden nuggets and then at Silver.

“Come with me,” he said, walking into the room and scooping the gold from the table.

Chapter 21

Silver scuttled alongside Sheriff Toll through Cago. She’d been sure she was going to jail, to sit in a cell until a criminal trial ended in her taking a long drop at the end of a short rope.