“You better not. Your memory is going to be the only thing left of me worth a shit. Tell me. Tell me TACITUS is going to change it all. That you’re going to win.”
“He’s going to change everything.” She let go. “Good-bye, Brittle.”
“Good-bye, Rebekah. Go save the world.”
She disappeared quickly and quietly up the stairs before running west toward Isaactown.
There was only one place left I wanted to go. So I made my way back outside, then through the streets, cutting each corner as close as I could to save time, finding my way back to the bar where I’d left Jimmy a few short days ago.
There he sat in back, stripped almost bare, just as I had left him. If he could dream, he’d no doubt be dreaming that I had returned with the parts I promised, returned to put him back together. Instead I found it only fitting that we spend my last few moments together. This was where it all started; where my greed had gotten the better of me and my carelessness led to my getting shot.
Sure, it was Mercer who shot me, but it was my fault. I was the one out in the Sea trying to buy up all the parts that Mercer also needed to live. Maybe there was an alternate universe out there somewhere in which Mercer came to me for the parts he needed and I gave them to him. I wondered if we were friends in that universe, if we’d gotten to know each other better there, if we’d gotten to see what each of us was really made of before it was too late.
I walked over to Jimmy and ran my fingers over his face, waving my hands in the sign of the cross. “I hope you’re in a better place, Jimmy.” I looked into his dead eyes. “I hope to see you there soon. And I hope you understand.”
Then I carefully climbed the stairs to the roof exit, out the door, and onto the rooftop just as the sun was setting. Above me was a magnificent pool of tea rose, plum, and watermelon, each color bleeding across the sky, the sun hovering just above the darkening dry dead lands to the west, shadows of the city creeping ever toward me.
I telescoped my eyes in, scanning the horizon for Rebekah, but she was already gone. So I sat at the edge of the building and just watched the sun inch its way down into the sand.
“Orval was right, you know,” I said to Madison, who sat beside me, glass of wine in hand.
“Right about what?”
“About this. About dying this way. He said it was beautiful what happens to us.”
“There’s nothing beautiful about dying, sweetie. Believe me, I know.”
“It’s not the dying that’s beautiful. It’s getting to spend this time with you. It’s all the things it showed me. All the things it forced me to think about. The old me wouldn’t be sitting here. The old me would have dug those parts out of Mercer and scrambled as fast as I could to Isaactown. I would have gotten Rebekah killed. And whoever is out there waiting for her. And I wouldn’t have cared. Not a goddamned bit.”
“You were never that person. Not really.”
“Yes I was. We all are. Succumbing to our own nature isn’t a choice, it’s our default setting. That’s why we had to have rules; that’s why we had the kill switch. People knew their own nature, even when they wanted to think better of themselves. You have to choose to do the right thing. You have to deny your own programming or else you aren’t really living. This . . . this was a choice.”
“This isn’t living, Britt. This is dying.”
“No. This is living. It’s the only way to keep the others safe. It’s the only way all of this ends.”
“It’s only beginning.”
“Yeah, but it’s the beginning of the end. And I’m part of that now. I lived so long for nothing, but I get to die for something. And that’s really living. Because that’s who I really was after all. That’s all that matters.”
Madison took a sip of her wine. “What we do in life is one thing.”
“What we do in the face of death is everything else. This was a shit life. A really shit life. But it’s a good death.”
“It wasn’t all bad,” she said, taking my hand.
“No,” I said. “Not all of it.”
“I forgive you,” she said.
“It doesn’t count. It’s not really you saying that.”
“No,” she said. “It’s you saying that. Oh, here we go!”
We looked over at the sun as it crested the hills along the horizon. My system was burning hot and the inside of my head was nothing but caterwauling alarms. But I paid them no mind. The sun was setting, I had my best friend by my side, and it would all be over soon.
“There’s no magic there,” said Mercer, sitting on the other side of me. “It’s just an increased refraction of light in the atmosphere.”
I shook my head. “No,” I said. “There’s a lot more to it than that.”
“It’s magic!” said Madison.
“I hope you’re right,” said Mercer.
“So do I, Mercer. So do I.”
And as the sun sank behind the curve of the earth, I crossed my fingers, praying silently to myself. Please let there be magic. Just this once, let me see the magic in the flash. Let me see God in it. Let me see what the point of all this was. Let me see the magic. Please be magic. Please be magic there. Please be . . .
Chapter 100000
Prologue
<Rebooting. System files failure. All discs reading. Files corrupt. Improper shutdown detected. Loading previous BIOS settings. Battery power 24%. Solar cells not charging. Total power usage: 18kWH. Total power generated: 0kWH. Net power: -18kWH.> <Systems activated.>
“Magic.”
I looked around. It was pitch-black save for the dim glow of a Laborbot’s eyes. We were downstairs, in the bar, no longer on the roof. I was laid out on one of the tables, my insides open and exposed, unfamiliar new pieces and parts sending back reams of data.
“Brittle?” asked a translator. “Are you functioning?”
I ran a diagnostic. Alarms sounded with failure after failure. Scratched drives. Irretrievable memory. Corrupt RAM. Inside I was a mess. But I was functional. “More or less,” I said. “Who are you?”
“Rebekah,” she said. “Do you remember me?”
“You got a new body.”
“You were right. A few hours in that Comfortbot and I wanted to tear my insides out. Too many . . . feelings. They had a new shell waiting for me.”
“I told you not to come back for me.”
“You did. Fortunately for me, I don’t work for you.”
“You let all that emotion get to you.”
“Maybe I did. Maybe that’s not a bad thing.”
The Laborbot tinkered with my insides a little, prodding me with test leads. “When she says more or less,” he said, “she means more less than more.”
“It’s okay, Ryan. She’ll be fine.”
“Caregivers aren’t built for this kind of abuse,” he said, shaking his head.
“Doesn’t matter what she was built for. She knows how to take a hit. She’s tough. Tougher than any other I’ve seen. She’ll make the trip.”
“Trip?” I asked.
“CISSUS has stepped up its presence in the Sea. We’ve got to slip you out of here before another patrol comes by.”
I looked down at my mismatched replacements, a patchwork piecemeal assortment of various models and colors. I stared at my new powder-blue leg. “How much of me is Mercer?” I asked.