The Firmament of Flame, page 34
I smiled back at her. That was all it took. It was the same mean smile she’d been wearing earlier, the one she’d let slip as her hate shone through: the smile we’d taught each other to wear, a mask to let us get through the killing, the smile that had let us pretend that we were more dangerous than we were, that had let us pretend we didn’t care about anything.
It had been a lie, even then. We’d cared about each other. But now … now she blamed me for betraying her. Thought that I’d never loved her, that the mean, hollow smile we’d both worn hadn’t been a lie, not for me. She thought I’d always seen her as disposable, replaceable. And so she’d spent the last hundred years becoming the thing she thought had beaten her: the ghost that I had never been.
I let her keep thinking it. It killed me a little inside, to do it—I’d loved her more than anything in the world, once, and now I was letting her believe that love had never existed—but that didn’t matter.
Esa mattered.
So I let my own cruelty show through that smile, let my eyes go cold. I reminded her that I’d betrayed her, that she’d lost, that I’d won, that our world had burned because she hadn’t seen me coming. I did all of that with just a smile, with just the granite behind my gaze.
She could read my face just as well as I could read hers, but she’d forgotten that smile was ever a lie. And so she believed it now, too.
Her glare returned, redoubled, as she reached for her own rage, more than a match for mine. “You never could have won that day,” she swore at me. “Not without your betrayal, not without taking me by surprise. You never could have—”
“You don’t have anything to prove, Julia,” I told her, my voice low, sardonic. “Not to me. Sister.” But I was still smiling as I said it, and that time, we both knew I was still lying.
It was inevitable that she’d go for the gun. She’d spent a century locked in nightmares, chasing after the figure in her mind that was the thing she’d made me into: not even the fact that she’d thought I was dead could keep her from chasing that ghost, from turning herself into the thing that had beaten her. And now I was here, standing before her, giving her a chance to prove that she’d become the better monster. If she didn’t draw down on me now, all the agony of the past hundred years, all the nightmares of Hadrian’s Gambit, all the hate she’d held for so long: none of it would mean a damn thing.
She didn’t have any choice. Which meant I saw it coming. Which meant I was faster.
She drew. I fired.
Just dropped my hand to the gun on my hip, swiveled it outward, holster and all, and pulled the trigger. Didn’t even haul clear—just fired right through the leather.
The benefits of a mag-catch gun belt; she barely even had her barrel clear of her holster when my shot hit her dead center.
Of course, the round only staggered her—she had intention shields, just like I did—but it bought me time; her gun came free, but her first shot went wild as she staggered backward, and that let me clear the revolver from the smoking ruin of the holster and drop my left hand to the back of the weapon, fanning the hammer as fast as I could pull the trigger. Every single shot landed: one two three four five, all right to center mass.
The force of the gunshots staggered her back even farther as her intention shields shattered like electric glass—the final round buried itself in her body armor—and then her pistol was jarred from her grip and falling into the chasm beside us, and I had a split-second decision to make: reload, or close the distance.
I chose the former, emptying out the dead shells and placing a single round in the cylinder, spinning it even as I snapped the gun shut, but Julia had already recovered, and she lunged into me, landing a palm strike on my solar plexus, some sort of amplifier in her hand—no different than the force-multipliers built into my own knuckles, our kits still similar after a hundred years apart; we had trained each other, after all—and the device meant the hit landed with far more power than the blow warranted. I went flying, smashing into the wall behind me, my intention shields the only thing stopping my bones from snapping in a dozen different places.
I staggered to my feet, tried to get my hands up, but she was still coming, coming fast, a knife in her hand: I should have closed with her when I had the chance, before she could get the blade free. Instead, I’d tried to reload my gun, and now it was gone, wrenched from my grasp by her amplified blow: I’d chosen wrong. When it came to Julia, it seemed I always did.
CHAPTER 16
Esa
A door slid open; not the one we’d come through, but one above that, a second platform hanging over the first, one we hadn’t even seen until we’d turned.
Meridian’s gifts were still screaming that groaning howl of a single organ note, the sound growing louder, climbing faster upward through its scale of desolate dread. It rang out like some horrible truth, a promise that the universe was hollow, that the only thing that would fill it was pain. What sort of mind made music like that?
I got my answer, when a person stepped through the door.
A person. A human, and not just any human. I was staring upward—the bright line glaring solar energy behind us casting strange shadows on the wall—and as I looked up, I saw …
It couldn’t be. It couldn’t.
I was staring at myself.
The young human woman standing on the platform above us—she was a perfect copy, a replica of me: the same dark brown skin, the same kinky, curly hair, just a little longer than mine, the same wide eyes, eyes I’d seen in my mother’s face, in the hologram on Odessa Station. She could have been my sister, some forgotten twin I’d never been told about, except even that wouldn’t have explained the resemblance: she didn’t just look like me, she was me, a different me, a me outside of myself, like I’d been staring into a mirror and then the image on the other side of the glass started to move on its own.
The Cyn had stolen my medical data from Odessa; tissue samples, genetic sequencing, brainwave activity—everything they would have needed, to revitalize a technology that had been banned since before the Golden Age.
She was a fucking clone. A clone of me.
“I’ve been waiting for this,” she said to me, her voice carrying across the distance, and it was … wrong, it was just wrong, hearing my own voice from the outside like that: like hearing what you sounded like on a recording and hardly even recognizing it, unable to reconcile what you heard in your head when you spoke with the sound of a stranger’s voice on the playback. It was that, but a million times worse. “Waiting for so long.” Unlike me, she was dressed in a kind of … gown, straps and flowing silks, flattering her figure—my fucking figure—in a way my dirty combat gear and torn-up hand-me-downs never had.
She took a step, then another, and then she was dropping from the platform, just falling, from at least twenty feet up—and she landed as if she’d simply taken a single step down. If I had tried that—to use my teke to break my fall—I could have done it, sure, but I never would have been able to make it look so … so graceful, so easy.
So she had my gifts, too. Had them, and knew how to use them in ways I didn’t.
“What … what are you?” Sho was the one who gasped out the words—I was still too dumbfounded to even speak.
Still, she didn’t look at him when she answered—she was staring directly at me, like nothing else in the world even existed, like the star beneath us could have finally given way, been torn apart and released a flood of stellar energy that would have engulfed the entire station in a torrent of fusion flame, and she wouldn’t—couldn’t—have looked away. “Your name is Esa,” she said, a simple statement, though she licked her lips as she made it, as if in anticipation, and there was something … horrible about that, the involuntary nature of it, something almost sensual, a kind of naked need written across her face that distorted her features into something I barely recognized. “Mine is Ase. My name, the inverse of yours. I gave myself that name after I learned yours, because that’s what I am. The inverse of you.”
“You’re … me.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say; my mind was still reeling, still trying to wrap itself around this insanity that the universe had become.
“No.” She frowned, then, something almost … petulant about the expression, like it was my fault somehow that I couldn’t understand the lunacy spilling from her lips. “Aren’t you listening?”
And then she hit me.
It was like being hit with a goddamned freight train. She didn’t even lift a hand to do it—just looked, and then I went flying, my telekinetic shields shattering like they were made out of glass. My head snapped back, and I almost went sailing right over the fucking edge—right down to that sea of not-glass, and god knows what that shit would have done to me—except she reached out and she caught me, pulling me back to the edge of the platform, setting me down as gently as she had herself. “There,” she said, as if she hadn’t been the one to send me flying in the first place. “Now you—”
Sho opened fire. She tore the gun out of his hands—the rounds hadn’t even ricocheted off her telekinetic shields, they’d just … stopped, slowed to nothing, a defensive instinct from her teke even as she reached out offensively for Sho—and then she ripped the exobraces off his legs, taking away what I’d promised him he’d never lose again. With a cry, he tumbled to the metal catwalk beneath us, bleeding from where the wires had been torn right out of his body.
I was almost to my feet; Meridian was shaking, trying to raise her gun, but I could see it in her face—she couldn’t do it, nothing in her training had prepared her for this, there was nothing Marus had taught her that possibly could have done so—
—and she couldn’t open fire on someone who looked so much like me.
“Good girl,” the clone—Ase—smiled at her, and then ripped the weapon away from her anyway, tore it to shreds as she did so, the metal just … floating away like it was made of ribbon, like it was a thread she was unwinding with her mind.
“What … what the fuck … what do you want?” I gasped at her, still trying to get my breath back.
“Want?” She frowned at me, as if that were a concept she couldn’t even comprehend—either the question itself, or the fact that I’d needed to ask it. “Pain, of course. Pain is a gift, one I can give to the universe. So I can teach it how to learn.”
What. The fuck. Did that mean?
“Meridian, help Sho,” I ordered; I didn’t know what the hell to say to the nonsense she was spouting, so I was doing my damnedest to treat this like any other fight, like I was just going up against some unknown opponent, one whose measure I didn’t have yet. I told Meridian to move because Sho needed help, yes, but I also wanted to get her out of the line of fire, because that fight was coming, and it was going to be an ugly one.
She was stronger than me; she’d already proven that. But this wouldn’t be the first time I’d taken on an opponent stronger than me and won. I could do this. I could.
As Meridian scrambled past me, I took a step forward, putting myself between this “Ase” and the other two. Jane had told me they were under my protection; I didn’t mean to let her down. “You don’t understand?” she asked me, her voice perplexed, like a child’s, one grasping at the edges of the concept that she might know something an adult did not. “Pain is what the universe needs. The enlightenment, the absolution, that can be wrought from suffering. I’ve known it. I was forged by it. Have you known pain, Esa? You will.”
Well, that was a fucking threat—as if the goddamned telekinetic battering ram she’d hit me with earlier hadn’t been a sign of her intentions. “You think so, do you?” I asked her. “Well then, maybe you should—”
I went for the pistol in my shoulder holster, a faster draw than Bitey hanging at my side—Sho might not have been able to crack her telekinetic shields, but if her shields were anything like mine, I knew where they’d be weakest, and I’d learned to gunfight from Jane Kamali, one of the best there was.
Hand to grip; thumb to hammer; finger inside the trigger guard. Let the weapon slide free of its own accord, like there’s a chain between the barrel and its target that’s drawing taut and your wrist is just following the motion. Let it all happen in an instant, the gunshot an inevitability, like gravity, or time.
I fired the goddamned weapon dry, right into where her shielding should have been thinnest.
The bullets never reached her. She frowned, then turned the rounds back on me, flicking them at me one by one at the speed of gunshots, the lead shattering through my own only halfway-recovered shielding as she altered the returning rounds’ trajectory, carving gashes through my arms; flesh wounds, at best.
She could have killed me at will, put any one of those through my throat. She hadn’t. She just wanted me to hurt. And it did—the wounds stung like a motherfucker, like razors had been drawn along my flesh.
“The differences our upbringings make, I suppose,” she sighed, like she was answering a question absolutely no one had asked. “I was raised in my own little pocket of reality; not alone, of course—our sisters were there, then—but I learned, quicker than the others: I think, therefore I am. I will, and my will begets creation, therefore I am God. I killed them all as soon as I realized it, obviously. A god of a shared pantheon has intrinsic limits to her power, and so their sacrifice was a necessary sacrament.”
What the fuck was she talking about? Had there been … she was saying there had been other clones, others besides her, that they’d been raised in—what, a virtual reality construct? A false reality where they could control everything, a kind of preparatory incubator for the telekinetic gifts they had yet to manifest—so that once they did, the clones would already know how to bend the world to their will?
There had been others, and she’d fucking killed them all? Had I understood that right?
“You don’t comprehend,” she sighed, reading the confusion on my face, sounding disappointed—but just slightly—in me. “No surprise, I suppose. You, who were born free of destiny, free of this … weight.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I screamed the words at her, unable to help it—none of this made sense, nothing she said made any kind of—
“A Miltonian Lucifer; a Prometheus already in chains,” she continued, still smiling, a sudden hate spilling out of her eyes—my eyes—like they were on fire. I didn’t know what the fuck she was saying, didn’t even know the words, but whatever they were, there was real obsession in her voice—obsession and fury both. “That’s what they wanted from us, our creators: the strongest of their enemies, copied endlessly, so that they would have enough of us—of you—that they wouldn’t need any other martyrs to fire the engine of this place.”
“Your … creators?” I asked her, trying desperately to draw out the moment, to find some way out of her insanity—I could feel it, closing in around me like a physical thing, cutting off the air, tightening around my ribcage like high-tension wires until my bones started to ache with the pressure of her madness.
“The Cyn.” She waved a hand idly, as if they were nothing, the monsters that had stolen my genome and made her out of the data. “Searching for answers to their own creation. Apply enough pain, enough pressure, and I could give them at least a pinprick view into the apocalypse of their creators, a way to peer through the keyhole of the locked door that opened the way to the Palace.”
The Cyn had been seeking out the gifted to try and find what lay beyond the Dead Furnaces, to find the hidden facility where the forerunners had wiped the pulse from the entire universe, god only knows why. They’d been using her to do it. And it sounded like they’d driven her mad in the process, if the cloning and the VR exposure and the bizarre circumstances of her upbringing hadn’t done the job already.
None of that mattered now, though: the anger in her voice was only growing stronger, and with it, she was growing in strength. I could feel her telekinesis like heat, like a warping field stretching out from her body, her fury exciting the very molecules of the air around her into motion; she was like an explosive charge, a chemical reaction boiling toward detonation, but I didn’t know how to stop it, and anything I said might just make it worse.
“But a chained god is still a god,” she continued, taking another step forward, closer to me, “and as they tried to see through me, I could see through them, in turn. I could see, and eventually, I could touch. Once I’d suffered enough.” She was up on the raised platform with us now; I drew back, just a little, but she still wasn’t moving aggressively—even the anger was gone, gone like it had never been, and she was just talking, letting her horrible psychosis spill forth like she’d been desperate to tell me these things, things I barely understood at all. “I rewrote the pathways of their minds,” she whispered, leaning closer still, her eyes wide with wonder, as if we were having a reverent discussion of some forbidden miracle, sharing some secret only the two of us could comprehend. She smiled as she said it, like it was something just delightfully naughty we were sharing, rather than something utterly monstrous. “It’s just energy, after all.”
Oh, god. Oh, god.
She wasn’t a tool of the Cyn. Not anymore. They’d created her, created a dozen like her—clones of me, taken from the medical samples and records they’d stolen off Odessa—to try and activate this place, the Dead Furnaces, to find the path to the Palace, and they’d used pain to do so. They’d been trying to break her to their alien will, torturing her because she was unique—the same way I was unique, a contradiction in terms, but even among the next generation, we were powerful, the gifts encoded in our genetic data amplified by the Preacher’s experiments—and to shield herself from that pain, she’d convinced herself pain was a kind of sacrament.
And then she’d turned around, and fed that idea right back to those who had taught it to her: got loose of their shackles, somehow, and used our gift to change the very nature of their thoughts, to alter the electrical current that ran through whatever the Cyn equivalent was of a brain. She’d made them worship her, brainwashed them into looking at her and seeing something divine, made them into followers, into slaves. She’d created the apocalyptic nightmare cult that was the Bright Wanderers.
