Page 53 of Alliance
I swallowed the words in my throat as my parumauxi swarm clumped back together in a sluggish way, trying to focus. They gathered around my spine, checking for singed circuits and damaged tissue. I needed them to do something else though. Something I’d never used them for.
I rolled onto my stomach and shoved myself off the bedroll. I had difficulty controlling my elbows and wrists as I drunkenly pushed myself across the cave, crushing shells and old tin rations.
“Sorry,” I said with a wince to the dead shilpakaar.
I reached the vital pods panting for breath, then stuck my finger into Misila’s charging port and closed my eyes. I coaxed my parumauxi away from their task, forced them into my racing blood stream, and they collected in my hand.
I wasn’t a biognostic. I couldn’t interface directly with tech and speak to it. Buttechnically,my parumauxi could. My brow creased as I pressed them against the ridges of my fingerprint, causing my finger to thump with my pulse as if I were wearing a bandage that was too tight.
[Override] The swarm continued to push, becoming more and more frenetic. My cuticles stung around the nail bed, and I took a deep breath and pushed again. My finger felt hot and covered in papercuts. Rosy had hated those. I remembered sucking on my finger in a college library. The scent of paper, the sounds of turning pages and coughing. Shuffling shoes on short carpet…
Then a wealth of warm, calm data flooded my LMem. My parumauxi had broken through my cuticle, linking themdirectly with Misila’s vital pod. It stung, and the little bots were frustrated that I wouldn’t let them repair the damage, but Misila was fine. Her heart was steady. Safia’s too. I smiled, blinking wet eyes open.
The incessant little swarm repaired my finger, then I dropped my hand to my thigh and leaned back against the wall. Fásach crawled into the low cave on all fours, his coveralls still around his waist, flat nose flexing in the air.
“Over here,” I said, more myself than machine, than Rosy.
He shuffled to us, and I nodded with an exhausted smile.
“They’re okay.”
He blinked, and panic dilated his horizontal pupils, eyes as chilled as the snow outside. “They’re okay? What, why? What happened?”
“Electrical surge. No one was hurt,” I assured him without telling him just how close I’d come to blowing my core. He lowered his forehead to Misila’s vital pod with a shudder. “Did you see anything outside?”
He nodded, still hunched over his daughters. “Yeah,” he rasped. “Powerlines. Couldn’t see them in the whiteout before.”
I lolled my head towards the entrance to the cave and noticed for the first time that halos now flirted with the edge of the snow. I read them as they dissipated, fluttery little winter butterfly wings. “The relay station… They shocked the lines to dislodge the ice.”
“That’s what happened? I thought—” His jaw ticked and he squeezed my hand, pressing his cheek against Misila’s viewing port, staring at me with timid eyes so different from the feral man with his hands in my clothes. “You good? Hurt?”
“I’m good.”
“I can carry you, but we shouldn’t stay.”
“Just let me rest while you pack up. Then I’ll be fine.”
He gathered our things while I worked through the itchy, hot ends of the pain. The ringing in my ears quieted, making room for me to think.
Making room for me to fixate.
[Priority] The halos outside of the cave werewhispering.
I stared at them as they licked in and out of the dim green light of night like little hands tempting me their way. They pulled on me until I was latching up my coveralls and crawling towards the blizzard.
“I put most of your stuff in my pack,” Fásach said over his shoulder. “Can you carry the rest?”
I mumbled in response, unblinking as I got closer to the echoes of voices. More and more of them. Old, young, mostly shilpakaari. Secure comms, newsfeeds, music... But there was something else underneath, a voice just for me.
I shimmied out of the cave.
New snow tumbled away from me in thick drifts as I pushed it back with bare hands. The cold bit into my palms as I stood, my face to the sky.
Not the sky.
The cables.
Cables thicker than my forearm climbed the mountain pass like massive black pythons wound together. Metal rings bolted straight into the stone kept them climbing into the whiteout of the storm. Up and up and up…
