Scorpion, page 17
“Why you doing this?” Lady says to Athena. “You already perfect.”
“I get periodic Reboots,” Athena says. “I’ve had several.”
“How old are you?” Lady says.
“I don’t know. We don’t count our years here,” Athena says.
They don’t count their years here. Lady has never heard of a kid who doesn’t know exactly how old she is. She likes the sound of it.
Brian K takes two needles and tries to insert them into Lady’s arm. She’s never had someone stab her who wasn’t trying to kill her. She jerks away. “For the chemicals,” he says, and slides them into her skin without much pain.
He starts to clamp down the leather straps on the chair, and she moves her arms away. “No,” she says. She still has nightmares of Jemma being strapped to the hospital table.
“You’re going to want it,” Brian K says. “You’ll be in a lot of pain.”
At first she feels a cool sensation under her skin, spreading from her arm to her lungs. And then it starts to burn.
“Jesucristo,” Lady says.
“It will subside in five minutes,” Athena says. “You’ll be fine.”
“My friends think I’m crazy. I think maybe I’m a coward for not just accepting myself,” Lady says.
Athena regards her. Lady imagines how she would look if she looked like Athena, with the same hair but muscle and reach and power. “There’s no cowardice in wanting to be perfect,” Athena says.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
THE SIEGE OF THE HOLY WOOD
“We can’t just march up to Heather’s front gate,” Trina says. “She gets scared enough, she gonna start killing her own Holy Wood kids.”
She’s in the stadio dugout with the other Angeleno leaders, planning the attack on the Holy Wood. Trina thinks about Pablo’s Rebellion so many years ago, when voices in his head told him to attack the Zervatory. Did he think he was rescuing the Holy Wood, too?
Even a leader like Heather will have watches facing the eastward and southward approaches to the Holy Wood, the ones that look out over the wastes of Ell Aye.
“Can’t we sneak up?” La Madre says.
“There just ain’t that many ways up the hill,” Pilar says. “The hidden ones won’t handle this many people.” They will have 150 Muscle to attack, including some of Apple’s friends who were Exiled after Apple’s Harsh.
“We attack from our side of the hill,” Tala says. “We gotta join up with my Muscle there anyway.”
“God, I hate goin to the valley,” La Madre says.
“It’s a good idea,” Trina says, ignoring La Madre. “But we still gonna be exposed for a long time going up that slope.”
“We go underground,” the Half Holy says.
* * *
That night they start up tunnels from the valley. The tunnels have been under the ground for hundreds of years, closed off and abandoned. They used to carry trains, trains that used Lectrics to see in the dark. Only the Half Holy has found them.
Trina is no longer surprised at what he knows. If Ell Aye were a body, the Half Holy would know the bones beneath the skin.
She falls in behind some of her old Muscle: Jamie, Hector, Shiloh the Archer. She nods at them. They don’t nod back. They blame Trina for what happened to Apple. They should.
They travel three by three up the tracks, lit by torches. Pilar and the Half Holy, stumbling from time to time, touching each other’s arms when they do. The air feels heavy and old. But next to Trina is the scent of cinnamon from La Madre. She breathes that in instead.
La Madre carries an ax over her shoulders, a yellow plastic handle that’s starting to fray. Tala had offered her a spear but La Madre shook her head. “I wanna get in close,” she said.
It feels like hours in the tunnel. Trina has become used to just the space in front of their torches, the rustle of clothing and the clang of feet. It feels like they’re walking wrapped in a bubble. Finally, the Half Holy taps her sleeve. He points at the blurred frame of a door. Through it are steps, and through them are up and up and up.
“They musta needed a tunnel up. To get in and fix it if everything gone wrong,” the Half Holy says.
Trina labors to breathe. She hasn’t had this much exercise in months. Her throat tightens. She pauses.
And suddenly, the breathing gets better. Her bruised ribs ease. She feels strength surge into her legs. She could run up these stairs.
Gold flecks of dust float in front of her. “Oh shit,” she says.
“What?” La Madre says.
“I’m getting better,” Trina says.
Everyone freezes. They know what it means. The Betterment, the beginning of the End. They step away from Trina as if it’s catching. As if the End could be breathed in like a flu.
Except Pilar and Tala and La Madre, who step closer. They each touch her arm. Trina feels the gold dust coming by, lets it start to drag her away. She wants to go with it. The touches hold her down. She struggles against them.
“It’s gonna take me soon,” Trina says.
“The fuck it is,” Tala says. “I got eighty of my people going up to help solve your problems up there. You gonna stay around long enough to fix it.”
“The fuck it is,” Trina echoes, nodding. She might as well use the Betterment to help her in the fight. Go out in style. So she pushes back the desire to float away, and energy seems to fill her body.
She almost sprints the last ten minutes up the staircase, and when they reach the top the Muscle are struggling to keep pace with her. She lets the sense of wellness take her right up to the Holy Wood gates, to flow through the high fence toward her people. Her Holy Wood.
They’ve planned how to get in. Archers flank her and the other leaders, protecting her from the one or two kids left on the other side of the gate who still know how to use a bow. Metalsmiths from the San Fernandos come forward to cut the gate open, but Trina doesn’t need them. She just needs her voice.
“Hello, mi Hermanas,” she says to the Hermanas who are shouting in fear on the other side of the wall. “I think I understand you now. I thought you wanted power. But you didn’t. You wanted to freeze time, didn’t you, mijas? There’s too much out there waiting for us, and all of it’s scary. You gotta be Mamas. You gotta lead. You gotta End. Better just to dress up with your sticks and pretend none of this’s gonna happen. You get to live outside the order of the world.”
The wall has fallen silent. She imagines her voice in each of the girls’ ears, traveling along golden threads. “I wanted time to freeze, too,” she says. “I didn’t want to be a Mama, and then I didn’t want to be an Older. At every turn, there was just more stuff to carry.
“But there’s something coming that’s scarier than having a baby, scarier than Ending, even. There’s an army of Palos and Last Lifers coming for us, and they won’t leave until we their slaves. I want to stop them, but I’m gonna need you to open that gate.”
She steps forward, presses her hands against the steel. They could End her right now—but she’s Ending anyway, isn’t she?
The gate swings open.
Inside are a dozen Hermanas. Their eyes are wide and shining. They look like Tweens again. They start to lay their staffs on the ground, and Trina stops them. “You gonna need them,” she says. “Go find me Heather.”
Trina turns to her Muscle, who’ve followed her back to her home. “Go wake up the Holy Wood,” she says.
CHAPTER FORTY
THE HARSH
Trina is trying to trace the history of the Holy Wood buried under the pink paint of the Casa de las Casas when they bring in Heather, sleep-tousled and spitting. The rest of the Holy Wood are already here. They don’t look angry, like when Trina had to pass the Harsh on Apple. They look frightened. Hopeful?
“You got no right to be here,” Heather says. “You ran. You just come back with your new friends to take what ain’t yours.”
“At least I got friends,” Trina says, softly. It’s clear that Heather is alone in the room. Even the idiots have gotten tired of being played.
Heather’s voice catches in her throat, too angry to produce sound.
“There ain’t no more Olders,” Trina says. “They traded their places to Heather for promises. So the leaders of the Angelenos will help me pass the Harsh.” She nods to Pilar, La Madre, Tala, and the Half Holy. They are the leaders of the Angelenos now, aren’t they?
Trina lays out the case against Heather. No one reacts until she tells them how Heather threatened the death of the Children if Trina and Pilar didn’t side with her. Then the room starts to turn ugly. Even the Hermanas once closest to Heather look murderous.
“What do you wanna do with her?” Trina says to her jury.
“Death,” Pilar says. There could be no other answer for her.
“Exile,” the Half Holy says.
“Exile,” La Madre says.
“Death,” Tala says.
It rests on Trina now. The weight presses down on her as it always does, until something pushes back, up and out and growing lighter. She had forgotten about the Betterment. But it isn’t done with her. How is it that lightness has become the Children’s final enemy?
“I think…,” she says, so dreamily that Pilar and La Madre notice. She feels their hands on her as the room fades. She seems to lift off the ground. “I think I’m Ending.”
“Hold yourself together in your mind,” Pilar says. “Stay.”
“I don’t want to,” Trina says. But then she’s not sure.
“I think you do,” Pilar says. Trina feels Pilar’s hands reaching into the gold dust, scooping it up and packing it close to Trina’s body, like an extra-thick sweater. It holds Trina together, keeps her cells from floating away. It’s not enough, though. Trina feels the Betterment tugging at the seams, beginning to unravel her.
“Find something to hold,” Pilar says.
La Madre says, “I’m solid enough. Grab onto me.”
Trina pushes away from their hands for a moment, but the smell of cinnamon brings her back. It makes her think of foods untasted, of life unlived. She thinks of new friends who care for life, who tend it the way she does. Of her Holy Wood, looking for her to save them from a danger they don’t understand yet. She thinks: I’m gonna stay for this.
She reaches out into the gold, pulling it into her orbit. The kids of the Holy Wood are connected to her with golden ropes. She reaches out to them and forms a webbed center, an anchor, and uses it to reel herself back in. Each cluster of the golden haze trying to escape is a fragment of her life, a memory or a choice. She finds the girl who dug in the dirt just to feel life under her fingerprints, and tells her: You should stay. She finds the Kinder who loved to hold babies not much smaller than herself, who smelled their scalp under her chin and sighed. You should stay. She finds the girl who grieved the boy she never rolled with, about to escape into the stars, and nudges her back in place.
She can feel Pilar and Tala and La Madre in there with her, welcoming the pieces of Trina-self that come back in. She finds the bicycle rider and the Oldest and the girl who snuck plantains from the kitchen, and leads them into her old self. They seem to form dots around the perimeter of her soul, making her secure and steady. All she has to do is draw new lines between them.
She breathes in and starts to connect the dots of her new self. The golden haze pauses on its outward journey and floats back toward her more urgently than when it left. As if it realizes it loves life as much as she does. The Haze carries pieces of her soul, some of them pieces she lost long ago: Trina the compassionate, Trina the warrior, Trina the dreamer. She adds them in like she’s expanding the walls of her house to accommodate more.
She looks at the pieces she doesn’t want anymore, the darkness and weakness in her. She hesitates over her guilt for Lady and Jemma and Apple, and decides to keep it. The only cluster of haze left is pulsing, bloodthirsty and red gold. Her anger. The anger she carried with her because anger was more kind than sadness. She keeps the sadness, the desire still to give life, and she lets the anger go.
The last of the golden haze fades away, and when it leaves, Trina is intact. Her ribs are healed, but she is breathing, whole and new. She blinks and takes in La Madre, Pilar, the Holy Wood, her own two hands.
“I’m better,” she says. “Truly.”
Whether the Harsh is passed or not, Trina doesn’t know. She just sees the way the Holy Wood look at her, in awe and welcome.
“Can this happen?” Trina says to Pilar. “Can someone really hold off the End?”
“It happened to you,” Pilar says.
Trina leans against the wall of the Casa de las Casas and thinks about what she just experienced, and about what the Holy Wood now believe. She Ended. She Ended but didn’t. If Trina didn’t End, even for a minute—it means the End isn’t what she thinks it was. It’s something they can control.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
THE HAND ON THE TRIGGER
The logic of the machines calms Grease’s mind. He’s been studying the schematics of the Long Life Machine for the past two days, and today he is starting to trace the path the Lectrics are supposed to follow. This box receives the genetic footprint of an individual brain. This one translates those details into the language of the Haze. This one feeds medical logic. This one imprints a subset of Haze on the subject so that portion of the Haze is Paired with that person for life.
Now this is a machine, he thinks. It’s trying to decode life.
He’s already detected a few places where the modules aren’t working as they’re supposed to, and so he opens up the panels to repair a few stray circuits. He loves watching the silver wire melt under the soldering iron’s tip, molten raindrops that harden in place.
Pico is a few feet away, trying to understand how the brain maps to the Machine. The Machine makes connections to the brain at two different times: when it’s conducting its analysis of the current state of the body, and when it brings the Haze and the subject together. “It seems to be reading the brain okay,” Pico says, without looking up. “But it can’t ‘write’ to the brain. We should focus on that piece.”
Grease nods. He’s just grateful Pico is talking to him now. He had no business bringing up the nonsense about the boys. He can bury himself into the machinery, like he did in the Kingdom when he realized that he didn’t fit. It’s more important to be indispensable than to be happy. It only matters that he matters.
Brian K walks in and watches the two boys calling instructions out to each other. Grease updates him on what they’ve found so far.
“Unbelievable,” Brian K says.
“What?” Pico says.
“Do you realize there are a dozen people on this ship with a combined 1,500 years of experience working with machines? Hell, we helped design it. And you are up to speed in two days.”
“Cuz of the Haze, I suppose,” Grease says. But he wonders. A month ago, he and Pico didn’t even really know what a brain was. They didn’t know about nanotech or the Long Life Treatment or puters, and here they are trying to break down why the most sophisticated puter in the world wasn’t working. It’s as if the moment they met, a fuse was lit and is racing before them.
Pico looks up and says, “Be right back.”
When he leaves, Brian K says, “I wanted to tell you about this at the Camp,” Brian K says. “About the Haze. It was so obvious that it was working through you. No one could have that kind of inherent understanding of machines.” He seems to mean it as a compliment, and that irritates Grease.
“I fixed my first bike at three,” Grease says. “You saying the Haze has been looking out for me all that time?”
“It seems to have been,” Brian K says.
“What if the Haze is coming to us because of our gifts, instead of being the thing that gave them to us?” Grease was given his name because of his gift for machines. Now they want to give the Haze credit for it?
“What if it’s a little bit of both?” Brian K says. “Would that cheapen what you’ve done?”
“A little,” Grease says. “You don’t know what it means to be different in this world, how much harder you have to work at everything.”
“I really do, though,” Brian K says carefully. “I think we went through some of the same things.”
Grease studies his face. Brian K knows, somehow. It would be such a relief to tell someone, wouldn’t it? But the moment he says it, he realizes: He doesn’t want to tell Brian K. He wants to tell Pico. If he can’t tell Pico, he can’t tell anyone.
“If you ever want to talk about it…,” Brian K says.
“It’s not that kind of world,” Grease says.
* * *
“This ain’t gonna make me lose my memory, too, is it?” Jemma says. She squirms in the white Reboot chair.
“Not in these doses,” Isaac says. “This is just the first injection. It should attack the damaged and decaying cells in your temporal lobe so your brain can regain regular function. So you can talk to the Haze.”
He leans over her and attaches two wires on each temple. The pads attached to the wires are damp and cool, and Isaac’s fingers brush her skin longer than probably necessary as he presses on them. Jemma shivers. It feels like a long time since she’s been touched.
“Shouldn’t you ask a Grown-Up for permission to do this?” she says, using Grease’s word for it to needle Isaac.
“Funny,” Isaac says. “I actually perfected this part. As the most frequent Reboot, I had a lot to say about it.”
James walks in. “She ready to go?”
“Yeah, she is,” Jemma says. “This ain’t going to melt any Lectrics, is it?”
“There aren’t any electrical elements at this stage,” Isaac says. “Just chemicals. But it’s still gonna hurt.”
“How much?” she says.
“Depends. With me, it hurt a lot,” Isaac says. “Lady didn’t seem to mind.” The mention of Lady stings more than the pain Jemma’s imagining. Lady has refused to see them.
