Feed the Machine (40 page)

The hazels crept closer and more fled, looking away from others, ashamed, as they ran out of the mine and through the hole in the fences.

Soon the beads on the string were far apart and the flow of stolen loot slowed.

Dia walked over to Silver and took one of the pecked sausages. It was cold but good—salty and rich. She drank some water from the hasdee and touched her daughter on her scarred back and knew that Silver didn’t hear or see any of it. The glowing screen reflected numbers and code into her eyes. She was talking to the sourcecube—what it was for she hadn’t said—and wasn’t here at all.

It was quiet down here—in this room with the message and the means to apparently carry it out. Silver was clacking away but behind that Dia could hear the distant snap of guns, the howls of the hazels and sometimes a fading shout on the wind. A raging storm had passed over Cago dumping its water and fury on the city before dissipating.

Ash was somewhere between the mouth of the mine and the warehouses, fighting hazels, looting Fat Man’s stores. Kin was spreading the word to all pets to get outside Cago if they wanted to live. Dia didn’t know where Nola was—somewhere in the battle, her fury a magnetic force that pulled others together around her.

Dia swiftly pushed her thoughts away from Nola. The streets were full of the dead, burned down by Fat Man’s guards and it was all too easy to imagine her daughter joining them.

So she was here with her youngest daughter’s body but not her mind. Protecting her? Dia didn’t know. The plan had crashed together with frightening speed and she could not keep her children together. As she did every day, she let the eldest two go.

The hasdee on the end beeped. Dia checked its display. It had enough gold now. The other two were still asking for more. She would tell the boy to pass the message to the top to get the other materials on the list for the EMP bomb. It was the most important according to Silver.

Dia straightened from looking at the hasdees and felt her back twinge in pain. She grimaced and rubbed it as she walked out the door and into the mine. Fat Man’s lights were still running—a separate power source from the fences and lights around Cago—but that was up the top of the tunnel that had been carved from the end of the mine to the mesh-covered room. Some of it reflected down, the rest of the light came from inside the room. Silver insisted the door be jammed open so she could do her work.

Dia stretched and shook her body, walking around the outside of the room. The floor and walls were smooth silver, like the tunnel, and surprisingly clean. They had tracked mud across the entranceway of the room but out here the floor glimmered, smooth and unmarked.

She completed two laps, the pain in her back easing. The tiredness was making another bid though, climbing her neck. The desire to sit down, to rest a moment was overwhelming.

Dia pushed it away, moving her feet, intending on another lap to keep her awake. She made it halfway around the room before she slowed and stopped, her energy fading. She leaned her face against the mesh and blinked, resting, just for a minute.

Somewhere between one blink and the next, marks in front of her face resolved themselves into letters.

DIA

A bug, dead, trapped behind the mesh, stuck between it and the wall. Her name written on its back.

She blinked the tiredness away and reached in to grab it, screamed when it twitched.

It was still alive.

She reached in, trying to get her fingers under to pull it out. The bug lit at the touch of her skin.

A crackle and a voice. She hadn’t heard it for seven long years.

“Dia I’m sorry I had to leave you but there was no other way. If this works it will be our final death. If you have found this, talk to Silver. She can explain.”

A pause, an eternity.

“I love you forever.”

The bug crackled again and died. Dia sank to the ground, her legs boneless.

She closed her eyes for a second and then Silver was standing in front of her.

“Hi baby,” Dia murmured. Silver stretched out her arms and Dia responded without thinking—although Silver never hugged.

Her daughter’s body was warm and small, light in her grasp.

Something pricked her side and she followed the relief rushing through her down into darkness.

Chapter 63

Ella

She grimaced as she walked down the stairs, her body aching with each step.

As good as the black heal was, it did little against the ravages of old age.

“Good morning!” Bug said. He was in his cat shell, his fur pure black and shiny. Ella would never tell him but she preferred he remained in that shell. When he used the bird shell he was too annoying with his pecking and obsession with shiny objects. His dog shell was even worse—too much licking and now dangerous given her age. If he accidentally knocked her over she might not get up and all her work would be for nothing. She’d hidden it away in one of the upper rooms and now pretended she didn’t know where it was.

Ella reached the bottom of the stairs before she answered him. She needed a lot more of her concentration these days even for simple tasks.

“Good morning,” she said, her voice cracking.

She glanced at the screen. Thank the universe her vision remained as sharp as ever. Hanlon was still marching his way across the Scour, heading for the Scab canyon.

Hanlon version three.

The voice sounded weary. She was eighty-nine by her reckoning and she supposed the voice was the same age. The last Feed was three years ago, the next in seven and if she made it that far she knew she wouldn’t see another.

The forever girl upstairs would awake.

Ella sat down at the table and ate her breakfast. Poached eggs on toast, a hash brown, a side of spinach and a glass of orange juice. She dripped spicy sauce on the eggs. It burned her tongue and sometimes produced a pain in her side but she didn’t care. There were a very limited number of breakfasts ahead and she was going to enjoy each and every one if she could.

She paged through her notes as she did. She was storing her findings where she could in the flow too but putting her thoughts down on paper was helpful. No doubt after she died the bugs would chew it down to nothing as they remade the mansion for the forever girl anew.

Bug leapt on the table and navigated his way around the strewn electronics only to then sit on a tablet to wash himself. Ella shooed him away with her hand and picked it up.

The program had found another ghost overnight. Ghost #217 if she was counting correctly. This one had hidden her fragments deep in the files about the reflective properties of different materials. The ghost numbers were in the order she found them—not in the order they lived. She could only determine that by references they made to previous ghosts.

Ella brought up her research and skimmed through it. The previous Ella convinced two Hanlons to leave their families but both had died upon reaching the Scabs. A failure but more verification of the trading strategy as a viable one.

“Nothing to trade, no reason to keep you alive,” she murmured. At least five of the other ghosts had come to the same conclusion which is why on this loop she’d convinced Hanlon to liquidate his entire fortune to buy two bottles of black heal. The leader of the cannibals had a granddaughter hovering on the brink of death. If Hanlon could reach him in time, perhaps he could trade the heal for passage through to the canyon and back again.

It killed two birds with one stone (an absurd phrase) because it also threw his remaining family into poverty and suffering. They were necessary ingredients to push the daughter into repair work. She had to be ill enough to want to escape this world but not so ill she died.

Ella changed the view to watch the mother. It had been ten days since her husband had vanished with all their wealth and she was still trying desperately to hold it together.

“She sold the vase,” Bug said from his chair. He licked a paw and wiped it over his ear.

“Hmm,” she said. She told the bugs to make her a cup of tea.

One hundred and four of the ghosts had focused on this family and the slow slide into desperation. Too quick and the daughter died. Too slow and they didn’t sell themselves to Gould Riley in time. It had to be at the perfect speed.

Tonight, Ella was sending a bug to chew through vital components of Dia’s refrigerator. She would replace it (seventy-two percent chance) but it would cost her enough to nudge the fall along.

Something beeped on the tablet and Ella looked down at it. She fell into the flow.

A blink and she was back again, sitting on the lounge this time. Three days gone swimming in the flow. She must have slept too because she felt rested enough. She reminded herself to turn off the sound on the tablet but then knew she wouldn’t. She always wanted to know the instant it found anything. Days lost swimming in the flow were dangerous but worth it.

Hanlon was descending into the canyon. Ella’s fingers ached but they were still nimble—she confirmed he’d traded the heal to the old cannibal (his granddaughter was alive and happy) in return for safe passage through and back. Some of the other Scabs were plotting to kill Hanlon as soon as he returned but Ella already had a plan for them—it involved poisonous bugs that were waiting for the right time to strike. It was all preprogrammed.

She checked the radiation level and saw it was climbing. Hanlon would need that second bottle of heal before he reached the hidden room outside Cago.

Another blink and she was watching him cough blood in a dark hole. He’d welded himself in. Ella had the fear that he hadn’t dropped the bomb and food where she’d told him. How did that slip her mind? She looked back in the files and relief flowed through her. He’d dug a hole no more than fifty centimeters deep and dropped the bomb and the supplies before covering it. Already the pile was inching the package towards its final destination. A precaution in case the boy fell down one of Fat Man’s trap holes (estimated eighty-eight percent of the time). The missile that dropped from the sky was predictable—whether Ash or Raj saw it wasn’t.

She checked his pack—it was full of the deadly silver bars that were killing him. She’d considered a layer of lead, almost to the last moment before ghost #122 advised it weighed too much, made him too slow. He either never made it to the Scabs or died on the way back.

“Must concentrate,” Ella admonished herself aloud. Bug raised his sleepy head from another chair to blink at her before returning to sleep.

Telling herself off was no use. She slipped again (some data about abnormal immune responses to nanites in the body) and when she next came out Hanlon was staggering around to the front of the mesh room, skinny as a rake, bleeding from his nose.

He’d drunk the black heal on the way back but there was little it could do against the poison irradiating his body.

Ella spun the time back a minute, saw him whispering into a bug, wedging it behind the mesh on the back of the room. She doubted the message would survive—it had been a false hope move. Give him something to fight for. She’d convinced him to leave his family with footage from previous loops and it had nearly destroyed him. He’d needed hope to cling to.

She dived back inside the room. Hanlon was feeding the bars into the middle hasdee, the front of his clothes stained with blood. He was swaying on his feet and as she watched, he dropped one of the bars. It clanged to the ground.

“Pick it up, put it in,” she whispered to the dying man. The processing time took years—if he didn’t get all the material in then it was all for nothing.

Hanlon fumbled the bar into the hasdee. It swallowed it down and began processing.

Then he staggered back and fell to the floor.

Ella couldn’t contain herself. She’d never reached this part before. One of the ghosts had come this far and delivered half the material to make the bomb. Now she’d fulfilled the other half. Even if she died, the next Ella wouldn’t have to send Hanlon out to his death.

Although they might, to push the family down so the girl still does her hacking.

The screen on the wall flickered and came to life. Ella gasped as a young blonde face filled the screen. Silver, looking worse for wear. She had bruises running up the side of her face and dried blood crusted around her nose.

“Dad, thank you for delivering what I need. I promise this will be the final death.”

She wiped her nose with her hand. Ella saw it was scarred, like she’d been in a fire.

“I love you Dad, forever.”

Ella didn’t know how much of the message Hanlon heard. He was on his side, his breaths short and quick, a puddle of blood around his face. She saw him look at the screen before all his numbers tipped out of alignment and the final cascade of death rushed through him.

The screen shut off, the blonde girl vanishing, and the bugs moved in to clean the mess of organic matter.

The door and lights were on an automatic timer. They room grew dark and the door closed. As soon as it did, the signal shut off. She couldn’t see in there.

Ella sat back on the sofa and swallowed, her mouth dry.

The bomb was nearly ready. But there was still much to do.