Unity, Elly Bangs [best mobile ebook reader txt] 📗

rapidly coming to fruition. For one fleeting moment I had even seen her through the crowd. After seventy-two years, I had seen my own beloved Sybil with my own eyes. That alone was nearly worth the price.

I picked the shard out of my coat pocket. I had to spit on it and wipe it off thoroughly before I’d removed enough red crust that it would respond to my touch commands.

Accomplished, I typed. She’s on the surface. On the train. Number 892 to Crossroads Station.

While I waited for a response, I applied pressure to the wound in my abdomen. I inspected its severity. The knife that Medusa man had stabbed me with before I’d knocked him out had been at least ten centimeters long; I suspected he’d perforated one of my kidneys. I should have been in agony, but I was as numb as ever, or I couldn’t feel pain in the conventional sense. In all the time I’d been having this problem, I had never gotten used to it. The sensory dissociation was still so unsettling.

Nearly failed, I typed. Did not expect so much infighting. Medusa factions tried to destroy city. I thought she was dead. Despaired. But then I saw her.

My body writhed against the fence as I typed that again for emphasis: Saw her.

Why haven’t you followed her? was the response from the alpha copy.

I responded, Flesh immobilized by wounds. Will not survive.

Another wave of refugees fleeing Bloom City shuffled past the spot where I huddled. Some only glanced down at my wrecked flesh. Some stopped long enough to grimace at the pool of blood gathering beneath me. Most of them simply stumbled on, tracking it along under their shoes.

And the bounty hunters? asked the beta copy.

Four confirmed employed. Only one made it aboard train. Outcome uncertain. Do not suggest employing more. Unacceptably careless. Do it ourselves.

We cannot risk damage to her flesh, beta agreed.

I saw her, I typed again. I saw her myself.

The other two copies ignored my words again—and I knew exactly what they were thinking and feeling while that delay stretched out. I knew perfectly well how much they envied me. It was paradoxical—how can one envy oneself?—and yet I knew how I would have burned with envy had one of them told me he had seen her. If all went well, one of them would be the one to speak to her. To touch her. To do so much more than merely touch her.

I knew I would gladly sacrifice myself many times over for the sake of that moment. I would willingly submit to far more than two real deaths if I could know for certain that my third and final self would be the one to reach her.

This is it, I felt my throat chanting again.

Find her, I commanded the other two. At any cost.

We will, the alpha copy responded. Any cost.

Nothing can be permitted to stop us, the beta typed. Everything depends on it.

Everything, alpha agreed.

Everything, I echoed.

I am moving to intercept the train, said the beta.

On my way to Crossroads from Camp Fresno, said the alpha. ETA six hours.

Nothing more I can do, I typed. Dying. Good luck.

Another one of the Medusa men was standing over me. He was shouting something, but I couldn’t hear him. I knew what was happening: he knew I’d bombed the keep, and he wanted to know why. He would want to take me alive, but it was too late for that.

More Medusa men and women came shoving through the crowd. Eventually they brought a stretcher and lifted me onto it. They stabbed a new needle into the same vein that had just accepted the lethal dose of Pascalex and began to feed me synthetic blood.

“I am so sorry,” I found myself saying to them, sincerely. I couldn’t hear my own voice, but I felt my way through the words as best I could. I turned my head toward the passing crowds of refugees and repeated, “I’m sorry to all of you.”

The plan required all this strife. There had been no other way to call Sybil forth. Still, I found myself itching to tell them that this was not me. What I had done was not in my nature, I yearned to say aloud. I had never been a killer or a destroyer, only a borrower.

Already my vision was blurring. The Medusas would not be saving this flesh. No one would.

But as I died, I felt a great swell of hope. The plan was in motion. One of the other copies would finish what I had succeeded in starting. One of them would find her.

The chase had just begun.

ALEXEI

Whatever Danae had done had taken a heavy toll on her, though I could only guess whether the damage was mainly psychological, or physical, or something else. Naoto and I could barely get her off the train once we reached Crossroads Station. She stared past us with a blank, withered expression and only seemed to register a fraction of anything said to her. We gently lifted her off the cot and stood her up, and from there Naoto was able to walk her along, down the makeshift station’s rusty steps and on into the relative anonymity of the crowds. I put on my goggles and tugged my scarf over my nose, as much to guard against the blowing sand as to hide my cringing; with every step I took, the waver burn at the bottom of my ribs provided a drumbeat of pain to remind me of my newfound inability to kill.

A scuffed media pane projected Duke’s glowering visage out over the crowd; he’d already cemented his power and taken the throne. I was astonished he’d crushed all his competition so quickly. We all were.

“Your meds,” Naoto kept saying. “Danae? Did you pack your meds?”

She gave a barely visible nod.

“Where are they?” he asked.

She squinted up at the naked sky and mouthed the word, “Backpack.”

“The backpack you lost