Ecko Endgame (50 page)

“Shhh.” The chill touch was back, this time on his shoulder. “You’ve been out for seventy-six hours, give or take. You’re still wired to your nerve receptors, and your cortical plug is still powered. So hold still, or you’ll tangle yourself in knots.” The touch produced a cool cloth, wiped his face. “Okay. Can you open your eyes, now?”

Under him, the bed – chair? – moved smoothly, lifting him to a sitting position. The motion was glidingly eerie, familiar enough to creep his skin and make that audible heart rate wobble with tension. Swallowing nausea, he squeezed open his eyes, let his antidaz filter the glare.

“Oh, futhkh.”

Frankly, the truck might’ve been the better option.

He was caught, fly-like, in clinical steel and wires and white light – trapped in its centre as if it were some vast web made for him alone. Around him, the walls were alive with a pulse of electronics.

And he was… alight, he strove to focus.

Jesus Harry, he was
alight.

What—?

Anxiety sparked, causing a resulting surge in his surroundings. Reflexively thinking,
Fuck, fuck
, he tried to sit up, cycling ocular modes to clear his head. His digital readout said 5:05:43, 5:05:44, 5:05:45…

Time.

As his vision cleared, he saw he was covered with a sea of tiny, acupuncture-like needles, thousands of them in star-system clusters, each one ending in the minute gleam of an LED. Some of the clusters were hardlined, wires delicate and alive, others simply flickered at him, amused by his wakefulness.

His whole damn body was a pattern of lights.

Panic rose, closing his throat. Somewhere he could hear the heart-rate monitor picking up speed. He tried to move, to scrabble backwards, away from the needles and the prodding and the poking and the electronic web, right back out of the seat, but that chill hand hadn’t left his shoulder. It rested harder, order rather than request.

He turned to look up at the woman.

Wondered who the hell she was.

She was slight and earnest, too young for her frown. Her white coat was pristine, her mass of dark hair pulled neatly back. She had two steel-rimmed sockets, one under each ear – looked kinda like she’d had her restraining bolt removed.

But that wasn’t the freaky thing.

Nope, the freak show was her hands, the touch on his shoulder, the gentle chill that had opened his eyes… They were graceful, perfect surgical steel; there were too many fingers and all of them with too many joints. They were fingers that ended in needles and blades and gauges and other shit he didn’t even want to think about. They were arachnid, beautiful and horrifying. Christ, they were almost like something Mom would’ve made.

Mom…

Memories shivered in the back of his head, but he wasn’t ready for them. He searched the woman’s face, said, “Who’re you? Esme Scissorhands?”

She smiled, stretched out her fingers. As he watched, they folded carefully down to normal sizes, each one sliding over and together with minute precision. She pulled on flesh-covered gloves. They settled into place, and the line between glove and skin faded into nothing.

Perfect.

“I’m Elizabeth,” she said, flexing her new fingers. “Elizabeth Hope Shakespeare, no relation. You can call me Eliza.”

* * *

Eliza.

The word was a shock of reality, a glass tumbling slowly to the clean and tiled floor.

Eliza.

Flickers and phantoms, a rush of dream-imagery. Flashes of fragments as the glass detonated. Splinters, shining in the light.

Bloody handprints across a shattered wall.

One-hand-then-two.

But he wasn’t facing that shit – no way, no how, not yet.

Instead, he shoved the images aside and pulled himself further upright. He felt the tug at his brainstem, the nerve needles twitching in his skin. There was a surgical robot lurking to one side of his chair, quiescent and sinister. Behind it, a projection screen hung in the empty air. It was curved, half transparent, and it fizzed silently with a mosaic of white noise.

It revolted and compelled him – like seeing his own body opened in autopsy.

Eliza.

She handed him a steel beaker – water. “Don’t worry if your memory’s a little unsteady,” she said. “We can help you unscramble it all, put everything back in order, that’s why we’re here. Do you… what’s the last thing you remember?”

Falling down, down into the screaming and the dark.

Ignoring her question, he took a lukewarm sip and felt his mouth ulcers sting. The pain was good, real. It cleared his head.

“Where the hell am I?” His voice ground, metal and rust. He jerked his chin at the screen. “An’ what the fuck’s
that
?”

“Don’t worry about that for the moment.” She took the beaker back and patted his arm. “For now, you need to gather your thoughts, recover. Piecing everything back together can be a bit… strange, but we’ve sourced some core triggers to help you through it.” She reached into a pocket of her coat, pulled something free. “Do you recognise this?”

Triggers.

Alexander David Eastermann.

Lugan’s lighter.

And the memory was clear as a slap, as a glass splinter in the face – he was flicking the lid, spinning the wheel. “Outta gas.” There was a man speaking to him, tall and lean, “The Wanderer finds many things… just like it found you. It’s a portent, I think.”

Roderick.

And now the surge rose, shattering the floodgates. The rush swamped him, bore him down. It tumbled him over and over. It robbed him of breath, pulled him under, left him gagging for bare life.

The Wanderer, the ruins of Tusien, the moss in Amethea’s skin, Redlock fighting with flashing axes, monsters of stone and creatures of flame, Maugrim taunting them all. The mad old man in the corridors of Amos. Nivrotar, monochrome perfection. The stone walls of Aeona, creatures created, Amal cutting into his chest. Roderick’s steel throat, Khamsin, writhing with savage power. Triqueta, glowing like opal and sunshine.

It was too much, too intense. He was shuddering with an overload of comprehension. He spread his fingers, tried to catch this image, that one. He tried to cry out but the ulcers were hurting and he’d no words to form what was—

Still, they kept coming.

Warfare before the walls of Tusien, Sical, Rhan blazing righteous. Warriors and monsters and dying children. And then dust, desolation endless, the barren and empty plain. Rural dystopia, everything dead. Those final moments as they faced Vahl across the fissure that had riven the world.

A single image, stark and jagged: The Wanderer, in ruins.

And then, rising like some deity over the tavern’s broken roof, Doctor Slater Grey himself, the needle marks in his arms all puckering in invitation. He grew to huge size, his mouth widening—

No!

Grey made Ecko angry, reflexive, unavoidable. He fought the image back. But he was caught in Grey’s bolt-hole, passive and obedient, he was drudging to work, empty and content; he was falling from the roof with the ’bot loosing a volley after him, hi-explosive detonations that shook the London night.

The drizzle sparkled like shrapnel.

Lugan?

The maelstrom of images passed him and was gone, burbling into the distance. He sat still, shaking, his breathing ragged, and tried to work out what the hell had just happened.

Luge?

But no, there was no Lugan. Not here.

There never had been.

In his head, the colours were gone. There was only the steel room, the steel chair, the steel lighter. Even as the memories faded, he understood that they’d been somehow false, no more than some vast and complex dream.

And as he blinked at the wires and the lights, so their cold reality sank its blade all the way home, right into his heart, grinning as it did so. All those memories, hopes, fears, lives, deaths, everything he’d seen and felt and learned and loved and hated…

Gone.

None of it… Jesus…
none
of it had ever really happened.

No.

He couldn’t wrap his brain round it. It was too powerful, too recent. Too
big
. It made his brain fizz like the screen. Even as he tried to unscramble what had happened, where it all began and ended, he was trying to encompass… No, it was too much.

You can’t do that… you can’t’ve just done that… just taken it all away…

He stared at the curved screen, his own, now-blank Fourth Wall. He wanted to see something, someone, wanted to reach out for it all. Prove it had happened. That everything he’d lived through, friends and fights and foes and fuck-ups, all of it…

It was just so much Unreality TV.

His mouthful of bitterness was tangible, so strong his expression contorted.

He’d been programmed. Fucking
puppeteered.
Up on that screen like a porn star.
Daaaance.
Chrissakes, talk about a violation – boots in his brain, kicking into places that were private. Teasing him with images, people, places that hurt, that made him
feel.
Rearranging his shit, his personal shit, that was no one else’s damned business.
Displaying
it. Forcing him to game, to dance at the end of a chain…

Dance, Ecko, daaaaaance—

The patterns of needles winked at him like some vast and fractal joke.

Oh, you motherfucking bitch!

Eliza’s voice came faintly through a distant, tinnitus hum. Now, more of it was coming back: he was remembering
layers
. Not just the story itself, but its curses and doubts.
Eliza. Creator. World Goddess.
His clamours to be free, his determination to win through. His capitulation. His freedom, and his lack of it.

His
anger.

Daaaaaaance, Ecko…

It made his stomach lurch. He brought up the water, puked it onto the floor. He felt unsteady enough to tumble sideways, to drown in the gleam of bile in the lights. He clung to the chair, thought of falling, of Grey, of worlds within worlds, of mirrors that reflected only mirrors. Of fractal patterns, endless. Of Lugan in The Wanderer, of Roderick in London…

Shit!

The room was spinning, now. Edges of images whispered into being, vanished again.

Too much to process. He was losing his goddamned fucking
mind.

And hadn’t she been supposed to fix it?

Hadn’t that been the
point
?

He found himself laughing, rising into hysteria, and he strangled the noise to a stop.

“Ecko,” Eliza said, warm and calm, as if to a child. “It’s all right. Sometimes, these recollections can be… very powerful. But the shock will pass, if you give it a moment, everything will settle into its proper place. You’ve achieved… something phenomenal.” She dropped the lighter back into her pocket. “It might help to know how it ends. Maybe give you some closure?”

Ends?

The word brought him up short, and he stared at her.
Ends?
All of those memories, everywhere he’d just been, the whole world and story that had surrounded him. He was still resonating with it, and struggling with it not being real. How could it just…?

He looked back at the screen, then back at her face. “What?”

“In fact,” Eliza said, “we should take that step now. Then we can concentrate on a proper recovery.”

There was a throb in his brainstem.

And the phantoms started to move.

* * *

There!

In one place, to the far right, a city. He recognised it as Roviarath, her Great Fayre rotting and ruinous. The river was empty and the wharves broken, the soil was cracked and bare. The city’s people were gathering at her outskirts, stood with cart and wagon and emaciated beastie.

Roviarath was being evacuated.

Ecko stared, transfixed, biting his lower lip. There was a tiny figure on a black horse standing in his stirrups and gesturing orders. Ecko could almost hear him barking commands and rounding up the city’s survivors. He watched as the people, small as toys, formed into a refugee column and headed out across the dead plain.

He’d no clue how they’d cross the intervening ground – or how many of them would survive.

Behind them, the cracks in the ground reached the lighthouse tower. It sagged sideways and fell with
Koyaanisqatsi
slowness, its great rocklight tumbling, extinguished at last.

He found a lump in his throat and he swallowed, blinking.

Ends.

There, in another place, Tusien – the great ruin black against a burning sunset. The force there was moving out, leaving its dead and its debris, and mustering to go home. Ecko saw centaurs. He saw Nivrotar, her hands full of knotted bits of cord, gesturing to the columns of warriors, all of them laden with packs. As the image moved, out through the open holes in the walls to the long staircase at the back of the ruin, he saw a slender golden figure stood alone, her gold hair blowing.

Triqueta.

Ecko found himself lifting a hand. His oculars strove to bring her closer. He realised what had happened, though he still couldn’t see it clearly. There, under the great wall of the ruin, was the long barrow that was the grave of Tusien’s Lord. Beside it were marks of newly dug long pits, each one headed with a cairn of broken stones. At one end stood the grave of Tan Commander Mostak, and at the other…

Before it, his axes in her hands, Triqueta stood silent and tearless. The lines in her face were somehow tempered, lean and strong, and her brassard caught the last of the light. She had a long task ahead of her, but she no longer had any fear.

And he understood, on some level, that what she had given him was the very last night of the youth she’d lost.

Triq.

He tasted her name, remembered her words…

When all this is over, is it you who fades out of existence? Or is it us? Or do we?

Another view – another grave. This one unmarked, alone amidst the death that surrounded the great fissure, and he knew before looking whose it was. Over it, Rhan was huddled on his knees, racked by sobbing, crying from heart and soul, his face contorted with the force of it. He was saying, “Thea. Little priestess. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”
Humility is the hardest lesson of all.
The Bard stood by him, hand in his hair, and Rhan’s head rested on the man’s lean, black-clad hip.