I shuddered and sat up, looking away from the “sky.” I brought my metal legs to my chest and pressed my face to them. The cloth of the long green kaftan spanning my legs was soft and smelled like Force. I inhaled the scent trying to let my angry memories of him overpower the thing I knew I’d seen fly by above. I was still angry with Force but this didn’t work. “You know you saw it, you know you saw it,” I muttered, pressing my face harder against my legs. “Shit.”
I’d just glimpsed one of the most disturbing facts everyone knew about the Red Eye. I’d always assumed it was urban legend designed to keep people away. But I know what I saw. Even if it was for a split second, I know that I saw a cluster of bones. Human bones. When one got caught in the winds of the Red Eye, the winds took you. First the storm thrashed you about until you were dead, then it stripped you of flesh and sinew. And then you flew forever.
The Red Eye’s winds were full of the dried tired bones of unlucky people who’d never find rest. Around and around they flew, the winds keeping the bones in their own clusters. I pressed my face to my legs and shut my eyes. Then I opened them because the pomegranate of eyes was looking back at me, and in looking at them, I felt the connection to everything else and this threatened to swallow me. I felt blood oozing into my nose as I took deep breaths to calm myself.
Something lightly kicked one of my metal feet. When I looked up, a young woman was grinning down at me. She was wearing a bright orange sari, no shoes, and her long braids were piled atop her head. “DNA is up already and went for a walk. We all thought you should sleep, but the sun’s been out for hours now. The day is going. You want some breakfast?”
I sniffed the blood back into my nose. “I . . . I . . . ugh.” I rubbed my head and hair and sighed, getting up. Dolapo was Force’s long-time girlfriend. I liked her. Her happy demeanor was its own sunshine, and I needed all the sunshine I could get. She was a coder who’d come to the Hour Glass out of pure curiosity and loved what she discovered so much she decided to stay. She also seemed to be my biggest fan, which was weird.
“I made some egusi soup, dodo, suya, or if you only want a snack, I have dates and groundnuts.”
“Thanks, Dolapo, but I’m not hungry.”
“Well, just tell me when you’re ready. I think you should eat, though. You need your strength.” She paused, staring at me with a grin on her face. “Anything you need. I’m over at the hearth for now.” Then she bustled off. I dragged myself up and, as I did, I saw Force emerge from between the field of high corn directly behind our sleeping area.
“Dolapo texted me you’re finally up,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Eat and get dressed, I want to show you something before your DNA returns.”
CHAPTER 16
Stone Hut
“What is that?” I asked. It was a soft but steady buzz that started the moment we stepped up to the building. We’d stepped into some sort of gentle electrical field, a feeling I was actually quite used to with all my cybernetic parts.
“You’re being scanned,” Force said. “I know, it feels weird. Some feel it more than others, but everyone feels it. It’s why we call them Mosquito Huts. They buzz in your ear and take a bit of your blood.”
“Ah, my ‘blood’ being my information.”
“Yep.” He had to really put his shoulder into shoving the heavy door open. I probably should have helped him. It was solid stone. And when it opened, warm air wafted out like the breath of a beast.
“They made these structures like apocalyptic fortresses in case there’s ever an anti-aejej outage,” he said.
I blinked, stepping in after him. “Oh goodness! Has that ever happened here?”
Inside the concrete hut was more concrete, except for the tree-trunk thick steel pole that ran through and out and up into the sky. It was surrounded by a chunky concrete spiral stair case.
“Yes, some years ago. I wasn’t here for it, thank goodness. There was some sort of breach. To this day no one knows who or what it was. I’ll always suspect Ultimate Corp because the Hour Glass had ended its business in this region not long before.”
“You mean The Reckoning? The outage happened right after that happened?”
He nodded.
“So what happened when the anti-aejej went off?”
He chuckled as we ascended the staircase. “What do you think? Deadly chaos. Thankfully there was about a minute warning, so most could get their asses inside, or switch on their own personal antis, but my God, so many were lost to the winds that day. Men, women, children. It’s the risk we all take living here.”
I followed him closely as we went up the stairs. “A risk worth taking?”
“Definitely.”
I gasped when I entered the room that was the small top floor of the hut. “But on the outside this place is . . .” I sighed and just stared. It wasn’t even like looking through windows. It was as if we’d stepped outside. I could see across the city, I could look up into the darkening turbulent sky. “I don’t understand.”
“You’re looking at screens,” he said.
I stepped up to what looked like the edge of the roof. My feet touched a barrier, but my eyes couldn’t tell that it was a screen. I reached out and pressed my fingertips to it. It was warm.
“And only the inside of this power hut has all these crazy screens It’s the Hour Glass’s main hub,” he said. “I not only built this, I run it. With a team, of course.”
“Really?”
“Yes. My skills have improved since we last talked.”
“Did you build the programming that resets and protects the Hour Glass, too?”
“Hell no,” he said, laughing hard. “That was built by Maiduguri, the low level AI who still runs this place. Maiduguri was created by one of the first groups to come here.” He sat on the well-worn couch in the center of the room. “Sit, AO.”
I walked around the room first. Touching the screen, marveling at its realism up close, thinking and ignoring the pounding in my ears and neck. In the back of my mind, I could see the pomegranate of eyes. This room was live with wifi. I sat beside him, staring at the pigeon sitting on the edge of the hut. So wildlife, at least the kind often referred to as “rats with wings,” lived in the Hour Glass, too. Had they been introduced here, or were they, too, refugees?
“What?”
He looked at me, and I looked at his face up close. I’d analyzed every detail of this face years ago when I couldn’t move, when I was in so much pain, when I didn’t know what I was or could be. His full lips with the delicate crease in the middle, his high cheekbones that showed off the power of his bloodline, and the brown spot in the white of his left eye, all had given me comfort. He looked the same, just older and more him.
“What did they do to you?” he asked.
I smiled and shook my head. “I did this to me,” I said. “It was all my choice.”
“Being born crippled and then being mangled by a damn car?”
“The part after all that,” I snapped.
“You have a twisted idea of what choice is,” he said. “My choice was dropping my whole life to be king of some small kingdom or being disowned.”
I wiped my face with my hands and groaned. I knew what he was asking. “I don’t know, Force.”
“Well, tell me about it, then.”
“I just said I don’t know.”
“You know. I know you.”