Guardian (4 page)

“I NEED A FULL
medical checkup,” Liam snapped at the medics as he stormed into the medical station, carrying Syd. Marie staggered in after him.

“And she could use some attention too,” he added.

“Thanks.” Marie gave Liam a sarcastic smile.

Three medics, all in the green uniform of the Reconciliation, jumped up to object and, seeing Syd, froze. There was a line of cots along the far wall of the metal container that they’d turned into a makeshift hospital. They’d cut out one wall of the container and used a tarp and mosquito netting to create space for two more rows of cots. All the cots, save one, were empty, as if they were waiting for an influx of patients that had yet to materialize.

“Stop!” A Purifier rushed in, breathless, and Liam’s hand went to the bolt gun on his belt. Marie waved the kid off.

“What happened to you?” he asked.

“An accident,” she said.

“Is that—?” The Purifier pointed at Syd, his voice cracking. “Yovel?”

Liam looked the boy over. The Purifiers were all young, but this one couldn’t have been more than thirteen years old. He had recognized Syd. He’d used the official name, the one Syd hated, and saying it too loudly would bring down more attention than Liam cared for at the moment.

The boy had a Mountain City accent, and had probably spent his whole life in the slums, a proxy taking the punishments for the crimes of the rich patron he’d been assigned. Just like Syd had. Just like so many anonymous thousands.

An accident of birth.

He could just as easily have been plucked from the womb and installed into the Guardian program, and now he’d be one of the nonoperatives, falling prey to some horror-show infection. Or he could have been born rich and ended up purged in the revolution after the networks fell. How he ended up all the way out here, pulling this duty twelve hundred miles from home, was anyone’s guess. The Reconciliation didn’t run its personnel choices by Liam.

He left his bolt gun in place and raised his metal index finger at the kid, whose eyes were wide blue marbles shining through the holes of his white face mask. “Get back to work and keep your mouth shut.”

“Yes, sir.” The kid nodded, then saluted—which was not something that was done. He must have seen too many holos before the day of the Jubilee deleted them all. He was a real-life soldier playing soldier from his memories of made-up soldiers. His spindly knees knocked as he ran back to stand guard outside.

Liam was the same way when he was that age, wasn’t he? He’d been a soldier for just about all of his seventeen years, but he hadn’t been born good at it. He had to be trained. Discipline took training. Proper procedure took training. Learning to kill took training.

The kid would learn, just like Liam had. All it took was the commitment to work hard and to forget your life before. Amnesia was a soldier’s best friend, and luckily, it could be taught. Missing limbs still ache, but missing memories never do.

Liam snapped his attention back inside the medical tent as a figure sat up from the one occupied cot, tossed a sheet off himself, and rose to his full height. He stood taller than the rest of the medics and wore a full dark beard, flecked with gray. His head was shaved and the skin around his eyes creased with wrinkles. He was at least thirty years older than the oldest of the other medics in the room and his uniform was white with a green collar, crisp and clean.

“Doctor Rahat,” one of the young medics spluttered at the man. “You sure you’re feeling well enough?”

The man, Dr. Rahat, stared at the young medic a moment. He opened his mouth and it looked like he was searching for words. “I . . . I . . .” He scratched red lines into the back of his hand, an action that seemed to focus him. “I’m fine,” he declared. “You three, take care of that one.” He nodded at Marie and then gestured for Liam to carry Syd to a curtained-off area at the rear of the container.

Syd stirred. He felt himself set down on a cot and then felt the cool metal of Liam’s hand slide out from under his neck, gently resting his head on a pillow. He opened his eyes and knew he’d passed out in the alley. His nose still held the faint smell of burning corpses.

He looked up at Liam’s pale face, the scattered freckles on the slightly crooked nose and the patchy red hair growing in uneven stubble on his chin. His dark red eyebrows were scrunched together with worry, the light blue eyes damp and searching. Memories flashed: Liam throwing the body of the would-be assassin over the railing; Liam holding Finch up in the air by one hand; Liam shooting Marie through the shoulder. How could a killer have such gentle eyes?

Beside Liam, the weathered face of the old doctor looked down curiously. The doctor’s eyes were ringed with dark circles, the exhaustion of any medical man in service of the Reconciliation. His face was drawn, pale; Syd made out the faintest traces of the blue of his veins running beneath his skin. Another memory flash. The nopes, the grotesque webbing of their bulging black veins, the silencing of their screams as they were hacked apart. Syd shut his eyes, cleared his head, opened them again to see Dr. Rahat looking to his side, to the spot behind his ear, where the four letters of his name were written. Yovel. Syd bent his neck to block the doctor’s view and pushed himself up onto his elbows.

“I’m okay,” he told Dr. Rahat.

Liam closed the curtain around the cot area and fixed his eyes on Dr. Rahat. The man wore the uniform of the Reconciliation, but Liam couldn’t trust anybody except himself when it came to Syd’s safety. No one had Syd’s best interests at heart, not like he did.

“What seems to be troubling you, son?” Dr. Rahat asked.

“He fainted,” Liam said.

“I can speak for myself.” Syd glared at Liam, then looked back at the doctor. “I passed out. I’m okay now. My bodyguard is just overcautious.”

“Well, that’s not a bad thing to be.” Dr. Rahat smiled kindly. “You are the hero of our revolution, after all. Without you, where would we be? Why don’t we give you a quick once-over, just to be on the safe side?”

“He came into contact with the blood of several nonoperatives, who were . . .” Liam didn’t know how to describe it.

“Infected,” the doctor finished for him.

“I swear, I’m fine,” said Syd. “It was just seeing . . . what happened to those Guard—the nonoperative entities. It made me sick.”

The doctor nodded, stroking his beard. “You’re a sensitive soul, Yovel—”

“Call me Syd,” he interrupted him.

The doctor nodded. “So many of the proxies have taken on new names, and you, being, well . . . I didn’t want to presume . . .”

“It’s fine,” Syd reassured him. “I prefer it, actually.”

“Very well,” the doctor said. “You needn’t worry about these nonoperatives. They do not suffer when they are put down. In fact, we are putting an end to their suffering.”

“By clubbing them to death?” Syd replied.

“Since the Reconciliation has wisely seen fit to restrict passive weaponry, we’ve found that the most ideologically consistent way to terminate them is through blunt force trauma. That way the labor and its object remain connected. The old ways—press a button, take a life—well, those won’t do, will they? If we are to kill, we must do so with absolute commitment. It may not be humane, but it is far more human.”

“You ever consider not killing them?” Syd suggested.

“They will die anyway.” He sighed. “You saw, I believe, that they are all dying.”

“They’re sick,” said Syd. “What’s wrong with them?”

“It appears to be an infection,” the doctor said. “Harmless to regular humans, I assure you, but just in case, for the public safety, we must contain their infection wherever we find it. There are too many of them wandering about for us to take chances.”

“If the infection can’t spread to regular humans,” Syd wondered, “then why put down the Guardians at all?”

“The nonoperative entities,” the doctor corrected again. “Our society must allocate its resources effectively. If we were to attempt the support of thousands of infected nonoperatives, while people starved, would that be humane? We must make choices.”

“This isn’t a choice,” Syd objected. “It’s a convenience. It’s easier to—”

“Ouch!” Marie yelled from the other side of the curtain. “You could warn me before you go poking your fingers into my wound!”

“Stop squirming and we’ll get this fixed!” the medic treating her grumbled. “Hold her down.”

They heard Marie grunt and exhale loudly. Whatever they were doing to fix her wound, they were not doing it gently. The doctor’s eyes darted once to the bolt gun on Liam’s belt. Then they went back to Syd. “Let’s get you checked out,” he said. “To be on the safe side.”

“Really, I’m fine,” Syd told him, sitting all the way up and dangling his legs off the cot. “I need to go talk to the Council.”

The doctor set a hand on his shoulder and stopped him from getting up. “Humor an old doctor. As long as you’re here, we might as well make sure everything’s in working order, no?”

Syd looked at him. The doctor looked back, unflinching. He was determined to examine Syd and Syd decided the easiest way to get out of here quickly would be to let him. He relented with a nod.

“Please remove your clothes,” the doctor instructed.

Syd looked at Liam, cleared his throat. “A little privacy?”

Liam hesitated. Syd pointed.

“I’ll be on the other side of the curtain,” Liam said.

“Oh, how will we ever bear to be apart?” Syd replied.

“Don’t run off again,” Liam added.

“Or what?” Syd asked.

An answer formed on Liam’s lips, but he didn’t say it. Staring at him, Syd could swear his bodyguard mouthed the word “waterfall” to himself, then turned and passed through the curtain.

Once Liam was gone, Syd peeled off his clothes and submitted to an entirely pointless medical exam.

He wasn’t sick and he knew it. He was disgusted.

For that, medicine had no cure.

• • •

On the other side of the curtain, Liam scanned the room. On the cot, Marie lay staring at the ceiling of the tent, while three medics worked on reconnecting the tissue of her shoulder that his bolt had severed. Although most tech had been banned by the Reconciliation to prevent the germs of greed, sloth, isolationism, and inequality from spreading, medics still had some more advanced items. Left without a little old tech, Marie would never have been able to use her arm again. Liam knew how to disable a person.

Through the medical tent, he saw the vague outlines of the Purifiers moving around as people began to gather. Word must have gotten out that Yovel himself was inside. Liam would have to get Syd away from here as soon as possible. The area wasn’t secure enough for his liking and this cadre of Purifiers wasn’t well trained enough to contain an overexcited crowd, even if there were no Machinists among them.

The people outside formed an indistinct mass. As the breeze blew the gauzy mosquito netting, it distorted their silhouettes. They bent and twisted, looked like a monstrous horde, like another wave of feral nopes shambling in from the wilderness.

The city was changing so much faster than Liam could process. All his life it had been little more than a military installation and Liam didn’t like all these new people coming in. Now that the revolution was the government, they saw fit to rebuild Old Detroit and evacuate Mountain City. The people came in as refugees by the tens of thousands. The streets were cleared of jungle debris and filled with human activity.

And with the people came the nopes.

He’d fought them when they were Guardians, of course. That was part of his job. He’d snuck into the Mountain City and tried to outsmart them, outrun them, and outfight them. They were fearsome opponents. Liam flexed his metal hand. He hadn’t always won those fights.

But now they weren’t Guardians anymore. They were basically dead already. He’d seen them hauling rocks or turning pistons to power spring loaders. He’d seen them fall from the dam construction project and not even make a sound as they fell. Now they were carrying some new disease. It didn’t bother Liam to see them put down. Good riddance.

But it bothered Syd, who had no doubt known them better than Liam ever did, who had suffered at their hands and the hands of the system they enforced far more than Liam ever had. Why should Syd care for them now? Was something wrong with Liam that he didn’t?

He glanced over his shoulder to a gap in the curtain. He saw through the sliver Syd’s broad brown back, its muscle tight as wire underneath the skin. Along the side of his rib cage, there were burns and scars from a young life that had been filled with wounds, but the untouched places were smooth and almost shone gold in the afternoon light.

Liam had a view of four letters behind Syd’s right ear that made the word “Yovel,” the mark that branded him the savior. The story was legend now: Syd’s long-dead father had implanted baby Syd with a computer virus and sent him off to the Mountain City, an anonymous orphan, his name assigned by a database. He was networked and tracked, his debt was purchased, and he was in the system. But hidden inside the official programming in his blood, his father’s virus grew.

When it was ready, when it was mature enough to tear apart the network, erase all the records, sever all connections, it showed a symbol on his skin, that four-letter word just behind his ear,
Yovel.
Jubilee: the day when all debts were forgiven. But Knox, Syd’s patron, had been infected too by a blood transfusion, and when they arrived in Old Detroit, he also bore the word behind his ear.

An accident of fate.

So Knox stepped into the machine that spread the virus from Old Detroit to Mountain City and all the wastelands in between. He let it irradiate him, vaporize him as that bit of code overwhelmed every transmitter, every datastream, and every system. The network went down.

When it was done, Knox was no more than a toxic bit of ash, and Syd’s symbol remained, a scar, an echo of the name he’d had and the future he’d been spared.

Liam could only imagine what it felt like to carry that mark and all the rest that went with it. He himself had never been networked, never had biodata installed. He’d been born apart and raised to fight. Having no data made it easier for him to slip in and out of Mountain City undetected. There were times he wondered what it might be like to have access to the datastream, but now it was gone; he was one of the few alive who didn’t miss it. He wondered whether Syd missed it.