After the Winter (The Silent Earth, Book 1) (29 page)

She smiled broadly and she gave me a sidelong glance. “Yes. The seeds are still viable. And they’re not the only things I’ve been growing.”

“Well, what else?” I said eagerly.

She turned her body and gestured toward the archway on the edge of the hill. “Why don’t you come back to the workshop? We have a lot to talk about.”

“Sure. I was just there.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. It looks like you’ve changed a few things.”

She shrugged. “I guess.”

We reached the archway, the stone steps curving away below us. She stopped suddenly and lightly placed her hand on my chest, halting my progress.

“I just want to know - is everything okay with you?” she said soberly, her eyes boring into me.

I took a moment to frame my response. “Yeah. The danger has passed. I’m just glad to be back.”

“What danger?” she said, alarmed.

“The Marauders. They’ve been driven away. Don’t you remember?”

She watched me for a few seconds, her countenance unreadable. Then her hand dropped away and a pensive look came across her face. She forced the corners of her lips upward unconvincingly.

“Yeah.”

With that, she turned and began making her way down the stairs toward the darkening monoliths of the city.

32

“You sure have taken a beating out there,” Arsha remarked as we wound our way through the deserted city streets. I probed at the gash on my neck and she observed with that cool, watchful manner she adopted so often.

“You can say that again.” I could only imagine the cuts, scratches and abrasions that covered me. My body was worn and tarnished, but through all the hardships it had never let me down. It had borne me across every challenge, refusing to give in.

“I’ve had a few scrapes myself,” she said.

“What? Really?” I said, surprised.

“Yeah,
really
,” she said, sounding mildly offended at my response. She held out her right arm where a small patch of skin was missing. I could see her synthetic muscles stirring beneath. “This one I picked up trying to haul generators around M-Corp. I was a little over-ambitious that day.”

“Well, if we’re comparing scars, I think I’ve got you covered.” I stopped and lifted my trouser leg to show the gash above my ankle. “How about that?”

She gasped. “Brant, what on earth did you do to yourself?”

I dropped the fabric back in place and kept walking. “Y’know, I’m not sure I remember how this one happened. It probably wasn’t any one incident. It just got worn away over the course of the year.”

“The course of the year? What do you mean?”

“I mean the year I’ve been gone.”

She stopped abruptly. “Brant....”

Her face clouded with concern. “What?” I said.

“I don’t keep an exact calendar anymore, but I follow the seasons and... you’ve been gone more than a decade.”

I gave her a doubtful look. “No. No way.”

“It’s true.” She gave me a worried look.

“Arsha, I’m sure it’s been a year, maybe a bit more. That’s all.”

“Look around you, Brant. You must see a lot of changes in this city. Do you really think it all happened so quickly?”

The vines creeping up buildings and the weeds and grass poking out of cracks in the asphalt and old garden beds seemed to reinforce what she was telling me.

“I don’t understand,” I said, lifting a hand to my brow.

“Did something happen to you out there?”

“There’s a lot that happened to me. I don’t understand how I could have lost all those years, though.”

“Try to think. Did you take a knock? Something that might have damaged your memory?”

“Maybe. I had plenty of tussles out there.”

“Well, don’t worry about it for now. Try to relax. You need to get those wounds patched up. You’re going to have complications with the bearings in your knee and ankle if you don’t. Come on.”

We started walking again.  “I know.  I just haven’t had much luck finding anything to patch it
with
.”

“I should have something we can use,” she said. “I’ll get you fixed up once we’re inside.” We made the last turn and the M-Corp building appeared on the street before us. “Here it is. Home sweet home.”

She quickened her pace and surged on ahead of me. Dressed in a collared, black cotton blouse with frayed edges, I noted that one or two buttons were missing, causing the fabric to flap about in her haste. Her dark grey cargo pants showed signs of age, with small holes causing her skin to poke through at the knees. A tawny hat was neatly tucked in her back pocket, and I remembered she’d carried it around often. She was always conscious of sun damage, even with her more resilient synthetic skin.

All things considered, Arsha was a beautiful woman, even though these days she did little to maintain her appearance. Her fine features, pale skin, the athletic arch of her back and slim build would have once set the pulses of men racing, despite her aloof demeanour.

For me, I'd always just regarded her as a colleague. We'd developed a closeness over the years, a bond forged through the hardship of our predicament, but any affection I held toward her was more of a sisterly nature than anything romantic.

I felt a pang of loss for Jenn, and how I would never feel about a woman the same way I had once felt about her.

The clap of Arsha’s shoes on the pavement brought me back to reality. She sounded like a businesswoman late for a meeting, always walking at that one, bustling pace.

“Here,” she said, approaching the dumpster that blocked the alleyway beside M-Corp. Opening the hatch, she indicated to it with her hand. “After you.”

I crawled through. Arsha followed, pausing at the hatch to pull some debris back in place, disguising the entrance. Then she eased it shut and stepped through.

“What instigated the barricade? Did you see Marauders come through here?”

She twisted her mouth as we walked down the alleyway. “Not exactly. It was more of a scare.”

We proceeded through the steel door and into the stairwell, taking cautious steps upward, boots thudding dully in the confined space.

“So tell me about this scare,” I said.

“Well, it was a while ago,” she began.  “I was here in the workshop up on five and heard something out in the street.  I have no idea what it was, but it was something that sounded
big
.  It made this kinda scraping noise,” she said, dragging her foot along the concrete step in imitation.  The stairwell reverberated with the slow rasp of her boot.  “Creepy. 
Real
creepy. I didn’t want to poke my head out the window just in case it looked up and saw me. So I sat hunkered down while it moved around in the street. I think I heard it push at the foyer doors, like it intended to bump its way around down on the ground floor, but it didn’t go in. Who knows, it might have been my imagination. Not sure. In the end it went on its way.”

“I wonder what it was.”

“No idea. A big clank, I guess, maybe an industrial. They made some of those pretty huge.”

“Yeah, I just saw some very recently.” I retold of my close encounter with the Marauders earlier, and how Ascension had intervened.

“It’s great to hear someone is finally standing up to those bastards,” she said.

“Yeah, I’ll say.”

“But anyway, that was when I decided I didn’t want to take the chance of another one coming along. I hauled everything I could out to the foyer and stacked it up against the glass.”

There was light coming in from above, and up the stairwell I could see a door wedged open, leading to the interior of the building.

“Come on in,” she said amiably as she reached it, and she led me through a familiar corridor and down to the workshop.

I took my time to look around on this occasion, and Arsha stood in the doorway, carefully watching me reacquaint myself with my old workspace.

“The changes I made were out of necessity,” she said. “I tried to move as much as I could away from the windows. Plus, we don’t have the power resources we once had. The old generators down below don’t give out much juice anymore. In fact, they’re almost dead. I use power very, very carefully. The main objective is to keep the cryotanks running. Keep the embryos in stasis.”

“What about the solar framework from the roof? That should give you a bit more juice.”

“Well, I’m going to need your help with that. Those stopped providing charge a few years ago. I’m hoping it’s just a frayed conduit on the roof, but I haven’t been able to gain access up there. Something is blocking the door on the roof from opening out, so I’m going to need to climb up from the outside.”

I looked at her quizzically. “You’re going to climb outside the roof a couple of hundred stories up?”

She shrugged. “What choice do I have? We need this power. Like I said, the generators don’t have much life left in them.”

“How do you intend to get up there?”

She waved dismissively. “We’ll sort that out soon. Here,” she said, moving past me. She approached a glass doorway embedded in the wall. It was the entrance to the inner lab, which was sealed away from outside contaminants and thankfully still intact. “Come and have a look.”

I followed her in through the outer door. We both shrugged into white cleanroom suits that hung on the wall and proceeded into the inner lab.

Inside the dimly lit interior sat the familiar bulk of the laboratory enclosure. A large rectangle of grey steel and blue glass windows, it seemed just as immaculate as the day I had left. Wedged in the gloom underneath was the rounded shape of a cryotank that had been specially fitted into the enclosure. Arsha bent and keyed in a few digits on the control panel and a small sliver of casing popped out. Reaching for a pair of laboratory tongs from the enclosure, she secured the sliver between the pincers and lifted it out, delicately carrying it over to a microscope on a bench by the wall. The sublimation of chemicals on the sliver left a thin trail of steam behind her. She activated a lamp and slid the specimen onto the microscope stage, pausing briefly to centre it and adjust the focus. Then she stepped back, allowing me room to move in.

“Take a look,” she said, almost sounding like a proud mother showing off her baby to a visitor.

I dropped my face to the eyepiece and studied the round blob of tissue. The centre of it was nebulous and bumpy in texture, but instantly recognisable.

“Five day human blastocyst?” I said without looking up.

“Mmm-hmm,” she said, the pride and satisfaction thick in her voice.

“No sign of ice crystal formation.  Cells look good.”  I stood and turned to her.  “Cells look
great.
”

She nodded, grinning, and reached for the sample again with the tongs. “They’re doing fine so far. Just the way we planned it.”

She returned the embryo carefully to the cryotank, replaced the tongs and then stood and took me by the elbow. “Now. Let’s have a look at those wounds.”

We removed the cleanroom suits and proceeded back through the glass doors. Out in the workshop, she sat me down in a chair and propped my leg up on the bench, carefully rolling my trousers out the way so she could work on my ankle. As she fussed around gathering materials and equipment I gazed out through the smashed windows at the bleak forms of skyscrapers along the street.

“Do you ever get sandstorms here?” I mused.

She stopped, thoughtfully adjusting the transparent safety glasses she had donned. “No,” she said slowly. “Can’t say I’ve seen them here.” She placed a couple of plastic bottles on the bench in front of me. “I take it you have?”

“Yeah, I’ve seen my fair share.”

“You get caught in any?” She kept her eyes on me, fascinated, as she rang her fingers through a long thin cleaning brush to remove any existing residue.

“A couple.  Tried my best to keep out of their way.  The sand just gets
everywhere
. If I got caught in one, I had to scrape sand out of my eye sockets, my ears, my mouth for weeks. There’s probably some of it still in there.”

“I’d say there’s a fair chance of that,” she jibed as she tied her hair behind her head with a band. “In fact, I’d probably just grab you by the ankles right now and shake you upside down if I wasn’t scared of what might fall out.”

I grinned. “Don’t even think about it.”

“All right now,” she went on, bending and carefully inserting the brush into my ankle wound. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.” She initially scraped carefully around the edges of the gash, then proceeded to insert it further up the inside of my leg, squeezing it between bone and muscle and sinew. It felt incredibly awkward and unnatural and I tensed. She paused and looked up at me. “Does it hurt?”

“No, not anymore. When I first injured it, yeah, it hurt like hell for a few days. But the nerve endings went dead and now it’s just numb.” I flicked a finger down at the brush. “That thing feels weird, is all.”