Broken Pixels (The Chronicles of Mara Lantern, Book 4) (36 page)

But he was gone. Behind her, in the path she’d just taken, was a disorganized mass of glowing specks dancing in the air mingling with the plaster dust. The specks floated toward her like moths to a flame. Or maybe fireflies. Waving a hand in the air, she expected to stir them up, watch them dance more frenetically, but instead the glowing flecks streamed toward her, glommed onto her palm and fingers—where they shimmered more brightly for a second and then sank into her skin, absorbed into her body. That gave her a little buzz.

Strange. Must be that they are made of light and my skin—

“Mara!” It was Cam, and he wasn’t signaling this time. It was a scream.

Across the room, he crouched next to her body covered in a bedsheet. The other shimmer was just a couple feet away, heading toward him. Mara reflexively tried to freeze Time, but the man just kept moving.

Extending her arms toward him, her first thought was to pixelate him, but she remembered what happened in the atrium of the transceiver building. Instead, she visualized the tiny sparks of light bobbing in the air toward her skin. Focusing on the man across the room, she imagined
that
light swarming to her, willed it to her, called it to her.

The man stopped two feet from Cam and shuddered. The back of his head began to dissolve, breaking apart into tiny sparkling flecks that floated in Mara’s direction. His neck and shoulders dissolved, followed by his torso and legs. At first, an iridescent cloud hung in the air with pieces of its glittering edges peeling off and flying at Mara. Holding up her arm, she watched them stick to her skin and then get absorbed.
A buzz again
.

The shimmering cloud coalesced into an orb. Initially she thought the man would reconstitute himself somehow, but then the ball suddenly hurled toward her. She instinctively crouched, getting out of its way, but the small meteor jogged lower as it flew and struck her in the chest in a burst of brilliance, sending her staggering several steps as the energy poured into her. Her eyes rolled into the back of her head, and, for a moment, she forgot where she was.

“Dude, you’re a frickin’ robot. I can’t believe you let them transition you,” Abby said.

Mara’s head cleared in what felt like mental whiplash. Her eyes took a second or two longer to focus. Next to her body on the floor, Abby stood behind Cam, with one hand on his arm and another on his neck.

“Don’t call me
dude
. That’s what my friend Abby calls me,” Mara said.

She smiled and cocked her head the mocking way Abby always did when she knew she’d been caught doing something bad. In the disconcerting, lisping baritone of Juaquin Prado, she said, “She chooses to be a part of us now.”

The hair rose on Mara’s synthetic neck.

“She does not approve of the choices you’ve made. Should never have brought his head back. Thinks you should have gone home when you had the chance.” More baritone. Now with her gaze sliding sideways to rest on Cam, she slipped back into Abby’s voice. “You’ve always been a sucker for your gadgets, a real bleeding-heart geek. It’ll cost you dearly.”

Releasing her grip on Cam’s neck, she stepped behind him and dug a knuckle into his spine. His knees buckled, and he fell to the ground, kneeling, facing Mara.

“You see? It really is just a robot, a piece of machinery, with a piece of meat stored in its head to convince it that it is still human,” Abby said. She placed her hands on each side of his head, pressing her fingers under his nose and earlobes.

“Don’t—” Mara said, raising her hands.

Abby looked amused. “Go ahead. Let’s see if you can get me before I get him.” Cam groaned, and his neck and jaw stiffened as tiny arcs of electricity danced across Abby’s knuckles.

Without looking down, she applied just a little pressure with her fingers, and, with a slight twist, she lifted Cam’s head off his neck. His body slumped to the ground. She held it up and said, “Imagine. I could do this to you now—turn your head into a hood ornament.”

“What do you want?”

“To win. To defeat you,” she said. “You don’t realize it, but you’ve already lost the war before it ever got started.” She grinned playfully, an expression Mara found incongruous, distasteful. Slapping Cam’s head between her hands like a basketball, she shoved it toward Mara, as if she were making a pass. “Wanna shoot some hoops?”

Mara frowned, didn’t reach out.

Abby laughed and said, “That’s all right. You can go for the rebound.” She jumped and lobbed Cam’s head into the air toward the far side of the firehouse. As it reached the top of its arc near the ceiling, Mara gasped and froze Time. Cam’s head stopped mid-flight and hung unmoving more than thirty feet from the floor. Without the ambient light of the shimmers, it was too dark to make out his expression, but she could see his eyes and mouth were wide open. She felt a pang of pity for all that he had gone through since they had met.

Lifting up her hands, Mara watched the head disappear in a flash of light. A moment later, it reappeared in a second flash in her upturned hands. Cam’s eyes rolled, as if he were dizzy or confused.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

It took effort for him to focus on her. “I think so. Just some motion sickness.”

“Just close your eyes for a moment. You’re about to take another short trip,” she said.

She extended her arms toward his body, and the head disappeared in a flash again. A second flash erupted above the shoulders of his body, and his head appeared, attached to his torso. His arms and legs jerked outward as if he’d received a shock.

“You know what your problem is?” Abby said matter-of-factly.

Mara looked up from Cam. Abby now stood over Mara’s original body with her arms extended over it, palms down. “You took your eye off the ball.”

Abby’s hands shot forth bolts of lightning, striking the torso of the body. The bedsheet covering her burst into flames that shot halfway to the ceiling, masking Mara’s view of Abby.

“No!” Mara screamed and reached out with both hands. A cold, violent gust of wind howled from behind her, swept across the open firehouse with a loud roar that shook the floor and walls. It snuffed the flames.

But Abby was gone.

Mara ran to the blackened form lying on the floor and crouched there. Most of the bedsheet was ashes, as were the bandages around her head and those holding together the splints on her arm and leg. She looked into her own face. Her cheeks and nose were blistered, her jawline and lips smeared with soot. Mara reached toward her neck to check for a pulse, but the skin there looked too cracked, too fragile to touch. Her gaze slid to the chest, to check for movement, for breathing. She strained to see her diaphragm rise, willed it to rise. But she wasn’t sure if it moved. Wiping tears from her own face, she mumbled to herself, noticed her other arm, that had not been splinted, appeared to be relatively unharmed. She grabbed for the wrist and felt for a pulse. Nothing. She felt nothing. She slid her thumb over a half inch, pressed harder.
There it was
.

Looking up, she had to blink away soot and tears to see Cam staggering toward her. He had been blown into a far wall by the gust of wind. As soon as he kneeled next to her, they were enveloped in light.

* * *

They reappeared in the room where Mara’s body had been treated. Cam straightened with a start, but Mara remained crouched next to the bed where her biological body lay. Without looking up to him, Mara said, “Go get Dr. Canfield. Hurry please.”

Cam left the room.

Mara reached out and took her own wrist again, placing a thumb over a prominent vein visible under the skin. But she couldn’t feel anything, no blood coursing under the thumb. She gritted her teeth and yelled, “Come on! You cannot die. You are me, not just another version of me!” She held up the body’s wrist. “Look, we are touching and no explosion. We are the same Mara. You are my body.”

She needed more Time. That’s what she needed. Mara tried to push away the panic in her head and concentrate. She could do this. Just like she did at the bridge in Oregon City.
Just roll it back. Just focus
.

But nothing happened. Time did not spin backward.
Perhaps she needed to return to the firehouse. Maybe moving the body pulled her out of sync somehow
.

Mara’s vision blurred. She was having trouble breathing.
Did she even need to breathe anymore? Focus!

Dr. Canfield walked into the room and put her hands on Mara’s shoulders. Pulling them gently, she said, “Step back and let me have a look at her.”

For a moment, Mara resisted, then relented. “Please help her, doctor.” Mara moved toward the door, where Cam waited. He extended an arm to her, and she leaned into him.

The doctor leaned over the bed and gasped when she got her first look. She grabbed the wrist Mara had just dropped, paused for a second, then laid it on the bed. Turning around to face Mara and Cam with a solemn expression, she said, “I’m sorry. There’s nothing we can do for her now.”

Mara began to shake. She pulled away from Cam and backed into the door. “What do you mean? I felt her pulse just a second ago.” She wiped tears from her cheeks with a trembling hand.

“I’m sorry, Mara. She’s dead.”

Cam had to take Mara by the arm and guide her away from the bed so that the attendants could maneuver the gurney into the room. He and Dr. Canfield had tried to talk her into leaving, but she just stared ahead, unresponsive, looking catatonic. After the attendants lifted the body, transferred it to the gurney and rolled it from the room, Mara looked at the doctor expressionlessly and said, “What will they do with her?”

“We have a facility for deceased people in the basement of the repository facility. We can keep her there until you decide what you want to do with her,” the doctor said.

“You mean a morgue,” Mara said.

The doctor nodded.

Mara walked over to the bed and sat on its edge. She placed her elbows on her knees and her face in her hands.

“You’ve been through a lot in the past day or so,” the doctor said. “Why don’t we get you settled in another room, and you can get some rest.”

“That sounds like a great idea,” Cam said. “Mara?”

Mara didn’t look up but growled with frustration into her hands. “How could I have been so stupid? How will I explain this to my mother? Sorry, Mom, the body you gave birth to wasn’t good enough, so I upgraded to this model instead.”

Cam sat beside her and put an arm over her shoulders. “I’m sorry. If you hadn’t been trying to save me, this would have never happened.”

Mara turned to face him, and her face was so red with anger that he was taken aback. “It wasn’t your fault,” she said. “It was hers.”

“Listen, I know you probably don’t want to hear this right now, but you can still have a good life, a productive life with this body,” Cam said. “Your transition has been a little rocky, because you weren’t properly prepared, and it happened all of a sudden—”

“It was her fault. She’s the one who should be sorry,” Mara said, seething.

Cam glanced at the doctor, concerned. To Mara he said, “Of course, but I think—”

“I’ve held back too much, doubted myself too often and let that thing use my friend as a shield to hurt too many people. If it’s a battle she wants, then that’s what she’ll get. It’s time to end this once and for all, while I still can.”

Alarmed, Dr. Canfield said, “You should consider the consequences here.” When Mara didn’t look at the doctor when she spoke, Dr. Canfield stepped up to the side of the bed and grabbed Mara’s chin and turned it up to face hers. “Look at me when I’m talking to you.” Pointing to Mara’s chest, she said, “This is the last body you will ever have. You need to take care of it. If something happens to you, we don’t have a biological body from which to harvest new engrams. When this body dies, you die. Do you understand?”

Mara yanked her chin away. “I understand, but that doesn’t change anything. I have to stop the Aphotis before she can transfigure everyone in this realm.”

“Please listen to what she’s saying,” Cam said.

“Perhaps Mr. Ping can talk some sense into you,” the doctor said. “I’ll bring the holographic platform and initiate the repository interface again.”

“I thought you needed to conserve your power,” Mara said. Part of her really needed to talk to him.

“Strangely enough, our energy reserves jumped from 40 percent to full capacity about an hour ago. The engineers haven’t been able to track the source yet, but they confirmed it’s there, so we can afford a few minutes, if Mr. Ping can talk some sense into you.”

“I think I know where that power came from,” Cam said.

“Really?” the doctor said.

He nodded toward Mara. “She did it. She absorbed those two shimmers and must have still been synced with the repository power supply. She turned them into energy.”

Mara looked at him confused.
Is that what happened to them?

The doctor looked doubtful. “We’ve had no reports of our photosynthetic skin being able to do such a thing to these shimmers. I’m not even sure it’s physically possible for our systems to handle that much light and energy.”

“It might not be physically possible, but it might be metaphysically possible,” he said.

She shook her head. “Highly unlikely.”

“As unlikely as turning people into living night-lights?” He then asked Mara, “Do you think it’s possible?”

“I don’t know. Sounds far-fetched to me. Might be something we can ask Ping about. Could we still do that?” she asked the doctor.

Dr. Canfield nodded and crossed to the door. “I’ll be back with the platform in about ten minutes.”

Cam stood up and walked to a chair in the corner and sat down. “I saw you absorb those people. They didn’t just blow up or disappear or something. They went into your skin.”

Though tired, Mara smiled at him and said, “I know. I think you’re right.”

“So you just want to confirm it with Mr. Ping.”

“No, I don’t need to talk to him. I think I know what to do,” she said.

Cam straightened in his chair. “Mara, don’t!”