Robogenesis (40 page)

“Mathilda,” I say, “I can still catch up.”

“Not without me,” she says. “You’ll be safe here.”

“No.”

“Look,” I say. “If we’d had a chance to plan—”

“We don’t plan to breathe, Cormac. We don’t plan to eat. This is what we do.”

“You want to go to a place with no hospital? To more fighting? If something goes wrong,
anything
, then you’ll die. The baby will …”

I can’t finish that sentence.

“Die,” says Cherrah. Speaking in a soft voice, she pulls my face closer to hers. I can smell her warm skin and hair. Feel her breath on my cheek. “It’s a risk, and it’s nothing new. People have been doing this for a long time.”

“Stay here. They’ll help you deliver. Then we can meet—”

“Our little boy is half-blood, Cormac. Don’t you think they already know? Why do you think the nurse told me all this?”

I glance over my shoulder and the nurse pretends to look at some papers.

“I can make it another couple of weeks,” says Cherrah. “We’ll reach the other group, find shelter, and deal with the birth then. But we have to go
now
. You’ve already got Houdini headed toward a rally point, right?”

My fear has turned to a sadness that wells up in the back of my throat. Brave words aren’t going to save her life. I lay her backpack down next to the hospital bed. Leaving her is not a choice. But neither is losing her.

I take a step toward the door.

“It’s okay to be afraid,” she says, and the expression on her face is familiar. She had this look when my brother, Jack, went down with a plugger in his calf. I held him down while she sawed off his leg with her bayonet. Those delicate fingers of hers locked on the frozen hilt of the blade and that same look in her eyes.

“We just keep losing,” I say, and I think of how Jack closed his eyes at the end. When they opened again they were full of blood.

“You’re going to lose me,” she says. “I am going to lose you. We can hold on as tight as we want. One day the music stops.”

“Except that I promised you we were going to live. Not just survive.”

“What’s the difference, Bright Boy?” asks Cherrah, breaking into a smile, eyes wet. “Step up, soldier. We’re having a baby. We’re going to protect it and keep it safe so that it will grow up and make babies of its own. The world sucks. So fucking what? What else is there?”

She kicks off her covers. Under them, she wears her battle armor, modified for the pregnancy. Sitting up, she slides her legs over the edge
of the bed. Stifling a sudden smile, I move my body to block the sight of her from the hallway. Just in case it matters.

“Read me?” she asks.

Now I can’t fight my smile. Size has so little to do with strength.

“Houdini is waiting, Private Ridge,” I say.

“Roger that, Sergeant,” she says. “There’s a bag of medical supplies under the bed. We’ll need them soon enough.”

NEURONAL ID: MIKIKO

Takeo is letting me go.

The little old man stands bent, his gnarled brown hands clasped in front of him. He is wearing a ceremonial kimono, dyed black and folded around his body in stark shadowed angles. A thin brown obi is wrapped tight around his waist, a folded black fan tucked inside. His short legs are steady, even as he leans under the glaring sun in the nodding bow of this container ship.

My royal escort flanks me. Two large Wardens tending to the
Kame Maru
as the ship trundles to a stop here, two hundred miles east of Tokyo. Beneath these gentle, slate-colored swells is the thing that Takeo calls the “voice of the sea.” A variety of thinking machine beyond our reckoning. A deep mind with the power to change humanity’s fate.

The dragon god of the sea:
Ryujin
.

Half a world away, my children are in danger. A thing called Arayt is hunting the freeborn and hopes to take their minds to use for its own twisted purposes. Ryujin has promised us nothing but a chance. It is a risk I must treat as an opportunity. I will take a trip into the abyss for the sake of my kind.

It will be a one-way journey.

Takeo stands, knuckles white as he clasps his hands together. The old man is steeling himself. His bravery and strength come from some hidden place inside his frail, creased frame. I stand before him in a traditional cherry-blossom dress, a final, tender pretension for Takeo. My head is bowed as he speaks the words that he has been practicing since descending from the shinboku. The words that he has never been able to say before.

I have chosen not to cry.

“Mikiko,” he says, his voice rising over lapping waves. “I have loved you for a very long time. Longer than you can know. For many years, you carried the echo of a person that I lost. You allowed me to play out the rituals of a life … that I lost.”

He bows his head.

“When your mind was born, Mikiko, I did not realize at first that you were
your own
. I was holding on to something. A person who had gone away.”

His voice quavers and he stops. I step forward, take his hands.

“Takeo,” I say.

Peering up at me, he blinks through the sunlight streaming down from above, continues: “It was wrong. To force you to be something you are not. Someone you are not. It was a burden that you did not deserve. I am sorry for it.”

I lean toward him, my hair falling over my shoulders. With one finger, I lift Takeo’s face up to mine. Quick tears glance down his expressionless face.

“Thank you,” I say. “Thank you for letting me go.”

I kiss Mr. Nomura. Wrap my arms around his shoulders and pull him into an embrace. My cheek comes away wet with his tears. But as I step away, he does not look back down to his feet. He lifts his head up, wind pulling at his sleeves. Behind his round spectacles, his eyes are as wide open and steady as a shark’s.

I embraced a man, but I sense that I have released an emperor.

Feet scrape the metal deck. Unbidden, my escorts step out from around me. The war machines pause, then position themselves on either
side of Mr. Nomura. They kneel, facing me, their polished limbs reflecting sunlight in sparkles across Takeo’s tunic. The vessel dips and bobs, but Takeo stands defiantly still and balanced.

I lower my gaze and send a meaningful stare to the two machines. In the set of my mouth and squint of my eyes I say:
Protect him. He is precious to me
.

Flanked by the gleaming humanoid robots, with his wrinkled face wreathed in a gray-flecked beard and mustache, Takeo finally looks like a ruler. Like a shogun transported from an ancient scroll into the present. Shoulders back, spine straight. His eyes are lingering on mine, spectacles winking.

Emperor Nomura gives a quick nod. The tears are forgotten in his beard. His hands rest more easily across his obi, each clasping the other arm. Now his voice drops and his words come in guttural grunts carried on a raw undercurrent of emotion.

“Our homeland honors you, Mikiko-heika.”

“Hai,” I say.

I step away from him, his reflection shrinking in my eyes. My bare heels are suspended over the edge of the boat. The horizon sways up and down with each rolling wave. The water laps softly against the hull.

“We thank you for the sacrifice you are about to make.”

“Hai.”

My arms lift from my sides. Red embroidered sleeves sway in the sea breeze. Somewhere, a gull calls out.

“We thank you for the sacrifices you have already made.” I bow to Emperor Nomura. “Hai.”

“
Owakare
, Mikiko,” he whispers. “You are in my heart. Forever.”

Takeo keeps his dark eyes on mine, drinking in every second that is left. He bows low at the waist, formal and stiff. His hair flutters in the wind as he rises, and for an instant I see the curious little boy that he must have been years and years ago.

“Good-bye, Mr. Nomura,” I whisper.

And I lean into nothing.

Lying on my back, I am sinking fast. Peaceful.

My fingers are curled, the crimson sleeves of my dress trailing in the water over my head. Sunlight winks through the waves above. A liquid sky that rises and falls, darkening as I sink deeper into the ocean.

Rising pressure pushes a trail of bubbles out of my body. Every joint and cavity filling. My lips part and the water surges into me, flooding my chassis. My pressure quickly equalizes with the ambient ocean. Overhead, the air bubbles flutter higher as if they are racing each other to rejoin the atmosphere.

Somewhere above, Takeo Nomura is experiencing the first moment of his new life. I have been by his side for decades. Long before the Awakening, and after. The man has drawn strength from me. And somehow, he has found the strength to let me go and return to his people. Now he is without family. Without friends. Without me.

And there is nothing I can do except try to find a meaning to it.

Arms out, I arch my back and splay my arms and legs. I pull my body into a backward dive, reaching subsurface terminal velocity. My body sinks now like a spear thrown into the abyss. As I fall, the light bleeds away so gradually that it is hard to notice until it’s gone.

This is the open ocean. Two hundred miles from Tokyo. It is a deep place. Deep and suddenly black.

Head pointed toward the ocean floor, I look up to where my feet should be. Now I see only swirling green dots of bioluminescence. My long, streaming hair is disturbing the void and throwing off dim particles of light.

Black … and cold.

I imagine the mouths that must be around me in the ocean. Dark wide maws, filled with teeth like needles. I shut down the thought process. Rotate my body so that I am in a sitting position, legs out. The dense water tugs on my hair and my dress. Temperature has dropped to negative-four degrees Celsius. My processors are running at max clock and a half. Autocooled.

Pressure readings are high, but manageable. Takeo prepared my body for this beforehand. There are no surprises. I could check how long I’ve been falling, but I choose not to. It seems like a long, long time.

Impact.

I touch down on slick sand. The absolute darkness around me is flat black and crushing. Yet I can sense the vast openness of this abyssal plain. A sandscape of mist and shadow that undulates toward the horizon in all directions. Populated by strange, pale creatures. There is no topside communication because the salt water quickly diffracts radio waves. I am completely, utterly alone.

But the water is full of sound—natural sound. The singing of whales, the scuttling of small creatures, the seismic creaking of the earth itself.

High-resolution sound navigation and ranging systems online.

Pulses radiate from emitters under my jawline. I route the sonar to my visual processing center and the darkness lifts. An image appears in negative. A vast whiteness stretches out over my head. Dots of black fall like snowflakes. Particulate matter.

The plain around me is now a dull, monotonous gray, striped with dark ripples of underwater sand dunes. All is empty except for the black hand-shape of an occasional starfish. The remains of a whale carcass rest a few hundred meters away, a mound covered in inky, writhing hagfish. My hair flows in front of my face, a white haze of tendrils unfurling into the cold still water.

I’m sunk into the muck.

Three hundred meters overhead, a blackish blur moves by. Probably a squid or a school of fish. Whatever they are, the group is chattering to itself in a series of pops and chirps. I wait longer and listen to the song of the ocean.

And for the first time, I truly hear the voice of the sea.

A seething, whispering orchestra of crackling static washes over me from the bleached-out emptiness. This is the siren song that drew in Takeo. Not far now. I stand and pull my feet out of the sand. Take a step. Then another. My dress presses flat against my thighs, hair flowing back over my shoulders. In slow-motion strides, I move toward the strange sound.

For hours, I walk. Hair and dress floating in the dense white cold. Each step sends up a cloud of gray, noise-speckled sand from the ocean floor. Behind me, a solitary trail drifts away—slowly settling clouds of sand. Only my footsteps mark this alien world.

Ryujin is down here. Growing closer with every step. Soon I am almost directly on top of where Takeo determined that the deep mind should be. Instead of a slumbering beast, all I see are smooth patches of stone surfacing from the seafloor every few meters.