Ymir, page 28
Yorick hears nothing. He keeps one forearm pressed hard against his gut, uses his free hand to drag himself to the smartglass. He thumps his fist against it, hoping his brother will feel the vibration. The hood doesn’t twitch, but Thello’s chest is rising, falling.
Yorick’s head tips forward against the smartglass and leaves a red smear.
“After you, Yorick.” Gausta undoes the manual locking bar and drags the cell open. “I believe you’re still able to crawl.”
Outside, Ymir howls.
CHAPTER 85
Gausta cuffs only one of his hands to the wall, so he can use the other to keep pressure on his split stomach. Then she slides the smartglass shut, eyes glimmering. Her way of moving has changed, live wires in her gait, no longer smooth and predatory. She moves like the holo children dancing through the dark forest.
“We should be safe down here,” she says. “The grendel has no electronic locks to manipulate. It has no seditious miners to help it burrow through concrete.”
He stares across the cell at his brother. Thello doesn’t know they’re here. He’s still slumped, chin notched to his chest. Yorick tries to guess, from the shallow breathing, the deep bruising, which drugs and tools Gausta has been using on him.
“He was far more loquacious earlier,” she says. “He told me all sorts of things. We spoke about the old days. About Subjugation. About your mother, at one point, though I believe he was hallucinating.”
Yorick can almost feel the cupped hand exploding across his face.
“He pleaded for her,” Gausta says. “Isn’t that strange? He pleaded for Fen, as well, and for other clanners by name, but not for you. Never for you.”
It might be lies. It might be true. Yorick tries to tell himself it doesn’t matter. Some things can be true and not matter at all. What matters is that the grendel must be somewhere above them in the dark house, searching for a way into the bunker. Fen and the clanners might have already made it around the rift. Thello is still whole.
“Despite everything you did to keep him safe, during the misery years. He taught himself to love Ymir, and the cold-bloods, and even your mother.” Gausta shakes her head. “But not you.”
“He was frightened of me,” Yorick says, buzzing through the mangled circuitry of his mandible. He feels a dying wasp spasm under his thumb. “I saw.”
“He was selfish.”
“He was a child.” Yorick chokes the word out. “He still was, when I left him with her. When I went to Shipfall.”
“We never stop being children.” Gausta steps back from Thello. She sits down, lotus-legged, with the needlegun cradled in her lap. “It doesn’t matter who pulled the trigger back then,” she says. “It really doesn’t. Because that”—she nods to his damaged mandible—“was only an extension of an earlier wound.”
Yorick takes a gurgling breath. Holds it. “Why the fuck do you care?”
“Because you could be so much happier,” Gausta says, face darkening. “And so much more effective. Thello is the reason you waste your violent talents on grendels. Thello is the reason you drink and drug yourself to oblivion. If you would only let him go, if you would only realize how little you mean to him, you would be an excellent company man.”
Yorick stares at her. “I have so much love to give,” he says.
“Your therapeutic mantra. Yes.” Gausta holsters the needlegun; it clings to the small of her bare back. “To be honest, Yorick, I thought you chose it ironically.” Her hand blade, the same one that slashed his belly back open, emerges from its subcutaneous sheath. “Do you recall the insurrectionists’ preferred execution method?”
A wave of nausea hits him. Yorick has never forgotten Canna, who bled out into the snow. He has dreamed about her. Now he watches as Gausta makes an adjustment to Thello’s cuffs, leaving them locked in place but deactivating the nematocysts.
“The reflex cascade makes delicate work impossible,” she says. “And this will be delicate. One hundred cuts. Cauterized and below the neck, naturally, leaving no significant evidence of mistreatment once he’s debodied.”
Yorick is desperate, plummeting. “Wait,” he rasps. “Wait. What do you want me to do?”
“Only to listen,” Gausta says. “While he begs and babbles. If he calls for you once, Yorick, even once—I’ll stop.” She gives her blue-stained smile. “He won’t, though. And when we get to one hundred, when he’s screamed every name but yours, he goes under the saw.”
CHAPTER 86
Gausta works in silence, and once Yorick gives up pleading he falls silent, too. The noises come from the blade—a small wet scrape of splitting skin—and from Thello, who moans and sometimes sobs when Gausta daubs hissing chlorine into flayed flesh. There is no gap to hide in. No safe spot. No way for Yorick to trade places with him.
So he counts the marks, watches their progress the way he watched the bodies dissolve in Laska’s Cradle. The tiny gashes glisten in the biolamp light, laddering up and down Thello’s legs and arms like puckered mouths, each one cauterized by a searing chemical kiss. Most are short and shallow, precise, but there is a ragged one on Thello’s ribs from when he still had the energy to flail.
Yorick remembers every vengeance he fantasized in the clinic, when they were putting in the nerve conduits and his entire world was pain Thello had caused him. The shameful things he buried later. All of them are back, and he realizes that like the sims, they had no smells.
Thello was different in them, too, snarling and defiant. This Thello is fluttering between conscious and unconscious. Gausta guides his nervous system along a tightrope, denying it the consensus that might slip him into shock.
She has done this before. The blade moves in a steady rhythm. She has planned her path across Thello’s body in advance, and Yorick can do nothing to interrupt it. His one sympathetic convulsion set the nematocysts stinging.
For a while he imagined the sound of the grendel far above them, hammering at the bunker door, swinging some xenocarbon club. But that receded, and now he has no illusions. The world is small. It contains three elements.
Thello, dying slow: each wound seeps only a few drops of blood before Gausta cauterizes it.
Him, dying quicker: the gashes in his stomach are too deep for even his modded platelets to dam. The seeping red puddle is sticky underneath him.
Gausta, pristine as one of her avatars: the holstered needlegun bobs up and down every time she slices, symbolic and malicious and far out of reach. Yorick is jarred when her blade finally hesitates, paused over Thello’s inner thigh.
“Seventy-six,” she says. “We’re approaching a significant number for you, Yorick.”
His count was off by one; he must have squeezed his eyes shut at some point.
“Laska’s Cradle was one of the primary reasons we gave the Cut a name,” she says, “instead of a simpler numeric company town designation. The company felt it was important to acknowledge distasteful acts committed on both sides. The name was a gesture of good faith. A willingness to move forward.”
She taps the tip of the blade against Thello’s leg.
“Those of us who know the north know the name is a fucking joke, of course,” she says. “Reconciliation is called Reconciliation for the same reason a utopia is called a utopia. There is no such place. No such thing.”
Her blade darts, comes away with a fresh slick of blood and one dark hair stuck to it. Thello squirms. Begs. She reaches for the chlorine.
“He’ll never know you were here, Yorick,” she says. “I suspect that is what galls you most. Reconciliation is a grand empty gesture, and he will never see yours. What you really want is not his life, but his gratitude.”
The old words churn back up and burn hot in his ruined belly: Thello will never know. Thello will never know. She cauterizes the new cut and Thello’s head lolls backward. He groans for Fen.
“All attachments of this kind are empty at their center,” Gausta says. “I learned that long ago. I had family once, Yorick.” Her gaze flicks upward, toward the ceiling of the bunker. “But by the time the company came to Anubis, by the time they ended the famine, I was the only one left.” Her eyes are ravenous. “I did very hard things. And it liberated me.”
Yorick sees her face on a child’s gaunt body, hears the disembodied laughter.
“Liberation is the best you can hope for,” Gausta says. “Even if love were worth this agony, there’s none to reclaim here. He never bore you any.”
The words bring back all his dread. Yorick forces it down. Forces air into his diaphragm. “I don’t need him to love me.” His voice is a buzzing wheeze. “I don’t need him to know.”
“I very much doubt that,” Gausta says. “But I’ll entertain it for a moment.” She sets the chlorine down. “Ask, and I’ll take his hood off. You can tell him of your desperate gambit to free him. You can detail your devotion to him. Perhaps, because there is no one else, he will finally cling to you.” Her hand strokes the needlegun at her back. “And then I kill him. No saw, no biotank. The painless void. Prisoners do go missing on Ymir.”
A small part of Yorick wails for it. He imagines Thello seeing his crushed mandible and mangled body, seeing how fucking hard he tried to make things right. Thello would die knowing Yorick loved him in every way he knows how to love. There would be no more pain. No more possibility.
He shakes his head.
Gausta blinks. “Very well. The cutting continues, then.”
She eyes her handiwork, searching for where she left off. She finds an untouched swathe of skin on Thello’s shoulder. The blade flexes from her hand, and Yorick’s chest aches. She cuts. Daubs. Cuts. Daubs. Thello wails, and shakes, and Yorick loses count but knows a hundred is close and the grendel and the clanners are far.
He chose wrong. The ballad ends badly, and Thello will never know. Gausta will make her hundredth cut with the teledoc’s saw. Thello will go into the biotank thinking Yorick put him there, then disappear into the dark and never emerge. Nothing will ever change. Not for them, not for Ymir, not for their mote-of-dust galaxy, all sliding along the invisible rail.
Gausta’s head cocks. “Ninety-four,” she says. “We’d better hurry. I hear the flyer.”
Her hearing must be amped. Yorick can hear nothing but the faint shriek of the storm.
“It’s quite flattering that they risked the winds,” she says. “They must be eager to test themselves against the grendel.”
Yorick hopes that the grendel has already fled. It’s damaged, and missing a limb, and the fresh squad in the flyer will have watched the cave raid and adjusted tactics. If it’s still prowling through the house above, they’ll make short work of it. Then they’ll hunt down Fen and her clanners on the ice, free the soldiers from the camp.
Yorick stares across the cell, trying to picture his brother’s face beneath the hood. He sees a boy sitting in a company fountain, cupping and pouring, staring up at the artificial stars. He sees the stoop, the drone, the needlegun Thello tried so hard to stop him from using.
Thello will never know. Yorick hears his own electric sob, but beneath it he hears the flyer, a pitched whine slowly gaining volume.
Louder than it should be. Closer than it should be.
Gausta’s shoulder blades go taut an instant before the impact. Yorick’s body jerks into the air; the nematocysts feast on his wrist as it wrenches against the cuff. He slams back against the cell wall and loses all his air at once.
The concrete shudders; the smartglass shatters. It sweeps through the cell, a shimmering echo of the blizzard outside. Gausta loses her balance, staggers sideways. Her bare foot slides on Yorick’s blood. She slips. Her marbled face is only a half meter from him. He tries to aim a kick but his muscles lock and spasm; the cuff is still jabbing, burning. He howls from it and hears Thello howling, too.
Gausta crabs out of reach, swings back to her feet. Her eyes trace the cracks in the concrete ceiling, calm, barely curious. She feels for the needlegun at the small of her spine.
The dregs of Yorick’s adrenaline freeze the scene for him: Gausta reaches and doesn’t find, because the needlegun was knocked loose from her back, because the needlegun skittered over the broken smartglass, halfway into the corridor.
The clanner from the other cell, the one whose wrists are mottled and overgrown, crouches above it. Her face is studded with globules of sweat. She moves her cuffed hands downward by increments, so slow, so smooth.
Gausta turns. “Genelocked,” she says, but he can see the fear again. “All company firearms are genelocked.”
The clanner’s face flickers with doubt.
“It’s on manual,” Yorick croaks.
Gausta moves in a blur, wired nerves hurtling her across the broken glass, but the clanner has already found the trigger. Behind his eyes Yorick sees the drone, the stoop. Then he hears the volcanic roar of a needlegun going off.
CHAPTER 87
Fen blows the bunker with a biobomb recovered from the company flyer they crashed through Gausta’s roof. Yorick is only half lucid when she comes down the stairs. The grendel clinging to her back makes her seem even more like a hallucination. He is still cuffed to the wall, but now the blood under his haunches is mixed with Gausta’s.
The needlegun blew her hip apart and punched a ragged hole through her thigh. She is alive—the clanner used the tattoo on her bony neck to unlock the cuffs—but only because of the company mods. Her luminous eyes flutter open and shut.
Thello is alive, too. The clanner is cradling his head and murmuring to him. The antisensory hood is off, but his eyes aren’t seeing things. Not yet.
Fen and the grendel and the other clanners go to their own. Yorick watches in a haze as they assess Thello’s wounds, as their faces contort. Someone drags the teledoc in from the corridor. Yorick feels hands on him, hands made for an instrument. Nocti is binding him shut again, slapping a swathe of gelflesh on his midsection.
“More frostswimmers breached,” the musician says. “We had to go back to the camp for the flyer. To get over the top of them.” Yorick sees he is glassy from his own sort of shock. “That grendel, you know, they can hack, and they can jack, but they don’t pilot so good.”
“It’s fine,” Yorick says. “Gausta has another one.”
He strains his ears, and hears Thello whispering names, asking after casualties. Yorick doesn’t hear his name, but the voice is enough.
CHAPTER 88
The blizzard is ending. Through the thinning veil of snow, Yorick can make out the glow of more frostswimmers at the surface. He imagines their palps tasting the air, finding the southerly wind. Gausta’s flyer cuts against it, angling north and west, as they head for the ansible. Her teledoc is still at work treating Thello’s many cuts.
Yorick stays by the window, watches from distance. Fen and the clanners are monitoring every twitch of the pneumatic limbs, as if the teledoc might revert to its more vicious functions at any moment, start slicing instead of stapling. Maybe that’s why they let Yorick go first: to check if Gausta had coded in some cruel backdoor or dormant instruction.
He noticed no bias. The teledoc gelfleshed his stomach shut with the same detached efficiency as last time, then did the new wounds on his foot and thigh. The phedrine filled his whole body with clouds. All the pain is down below them. His ruined mandible keeps rasping against itself because his face keeps twisting with the ghost of a smile.
Thello is alive. So is he. So’s the prisoner from the leftmost cell of Gausta’s bunker, so’s the grendel that found them there, so are Nocti and Fen and the eight clanners who carried them up the stairs. Even Gausta is alive, immobile but breathing while the grendel puppeteers her company implant to negotiate entrance to the ansible.
“Here you go.” Nocti joins him at the window, holding a small yellow tab between his fingertips. “Your damper.”
Yorick doesn’t like marring a phedrine high, but he takes the tab and pokes it down his mercifully numbed throat—the teledoc saw to that damage, too. Fen’s giant hand looks so gentle now that it’s enveloping Thello’s.
Nocti’s forehead creases. “I asked the grendel to send Linka a message,” he says, watching the membranous roof of the Cut pass beneath them. “To tell her we’re alive still. Heading for the ansible. Think they did it?”
“I think so.” Yorick remembers the conversation they had in his head. “I think the grendel likes her.”
“They have good taste, then. That grendel.”
Nocti departs to pass out the rest of the neuroleptics. Yorick looks through the window again. They’re soaring over the Polar Seven, high above the glowing yellow pylons that ring the Maw. The ansible is growing in the distance. The sight drives a spar of ice through his phedrine comfort. The ballad’s not over. Not yet.
Yorick turns and leans his back against the window, watches the small crowd ebb and flow around his brother. The teledoc is nearly finished. Thello is alive. He’s alive, too. He tries to hold on to that euphoria thought.
The cold smartglass has almost leached it away when Fen comes over. “Thello wants to talk,” she says, expressionless. “If you’re ready.”
Yorick gets to his feet.
CHAPTER 89
Even when Yorick hated his brother in the daytime, night was different. His subconscious would churn up small scenarios, some banal, some nonsensical, where he and Thello were together, and the anger had been expunged.
They built latticed snow sculptures outside their grandmother’s bubblefab, meant to somehow redirect the wind. They sat in a bar on Janus Station, the one where Yorick vomited to celebrate his first successful grendel hunt, and Thello agreed it was a good place to vomit. They forgave each other a hundred times, easily and with no words.
