Unity by Elly Bangs (free e reader txt) 📕

my way to an airlock and welcoming the black Pacific into my lungs—but my blurry reflection in the black mirror looked too much like the Major, and I knew what he would say if he could see me. I could hear his voice, dripping with disdain: Any weapon must be kept in proper repair. The mind is no different, Alexei. His ghost had never left me. It wouldn’t allow me to simply kill myself.

So I slid into the frayed seat of an autopharmacy booth and closed the plastic door behind me. Before it finally, mercifully slid its needle into my vein, the machine asked me where my troubles began. I didn’t know how to answer. I wondered if the algorithm asked everyone the same absurd question before dispensing the anti-depressants and anti-agoraphobia and anti-suicidal-ideation drugs that likely kept all of Bloom City on its feet. In 2159 AD, who on this Earth could remember the moment their troubles began? No one remembers being born.

My shard rang in my pocket again as I stumbled back into the crowd and let it carry me. It was Kat calling again. I imagined her in her self-contained pod somewhere in the ocean, in her nest of holograms and cables and interfaces, knowing something was terribly wrong with me, but not what—and until I knew myself, I couldn’t find the will to answer her. I could only keep walking and try to give the drugs time to work.

“Stop,” barked a voice from behind me. “Pay the toll.”

I looked up to find the crowds gone, replaced by two boys no more than fifteen, brandishing sharpened rebar. Their armbands told me they were new recruits into Medusa Clan. It took me a look around to understand I’d been walking a long time in my daze; I’d unthinkingly stumbled into the blacklight district.

“Pay the toll!” the kids shouted, louder, in case I was hard of hearing; the pressure changes ruptured a lot of eardrums in this town. “Empty your pockets! That shiny necklace thing. Give it. Now!”

“I can’t,” I heard myself mutter. “It . . . means too much to me.”

“Pay the toll! Last warning!”

I could all but see the gears turning in their minds. They’d only planned to intimidate me, but it wasn’t working—and now that they were close enough to see the rifle hanging under my coat, they’d realized their own dilemma: if they took even one step backward, I’d be too far away to stab, but I might still shoot. They could only retain control of the situation now by going in for the kill.

I watched them work it out. Watched them brace themselves to lunge. Saw, in my mind’s eye, the rusty metal popping through the flimsy material of my electromagnetic armor and sliding wetly out the other side of me, and in that image, so suddenly—

I exhaled. My mind stilled. The fire in my chest dimmed. For the first time since Antarka, I was at peace.

“Little polyps,” said a third voice, melodic and resonant, stopping the kids in their tracks and banishing my moment of clarity. Rebar clattered to the ground. Duke, second-in-command of all Medusa Clan, asked, “Who’s this you’re bothering?”

The recruits stood frozen at attention, shivering in the humid heat.

“Who?” Duke barked. The horrid leather of his jacket creaked audibly with his every step closer. He stomped his boot on the steel floor, making them jump.

“Don’t know.”

“You don’t know,” Duke echoed. “You stalked without knowing the prey. He could be dear to the Clan, for all you know. A beloved friend to Dahlia herself. You don’t even know you’re face to face with the most efficient human killing machine in your Empress’s entire arsenal, do you? You’re lucky I was here to save you.”

He wrapped one oversized, gene-hacked hand around the back of each of the kids’ necks and squeezed, lifting them onto their toes like kittens. Then he tossed them down the corridor to his underlings, muttering, “Cage. Four days.” He turned back to me, squeezed my shoulder in his huge palm, and said, “Alexei, Alexei. You were due in Dahlia’s keep over an hour ago. It’s not like you to miss such an invitation. When surveillance picked you up, I thought I’d better come find you myself. See if you had your head on straight.”

He crackled his knuckles, loud as a snapping spine.

“I’m fine,” I said.

“You’re superb, is what you are. Antarka was your finest work yet.” He smacked me hard on the back and started walking me forcefully back down the corridor.

“Oh,” I heard myself say.

“But I know that look. Something in here—” he stabbed a thick finger into my ribs above my heart— “is giving you pain all of a sudden, isn’t it? As if you were a little child again. It happens to even to the strong, now and then. Lucky for you I know every cure there is, and you’ve come to the right part of town to receive treatment. Remind me: you swing both ways, don’t you?”

“Not tonight,” I said, outside of myself.

He squeezed me tighter and made some hand-signs to one of his underlings as we approached the plastic flap at the door of the love hotel. “Cheer up, Alexei! Thanks to you, Norpak has no first-strike capability. There is to be no war, you understand? No Gray Day. Not one city will be reduced to nanobot pudding tonight, and in the morning you’ll wake up and realize forty-six lives is such a small price to pay for one good move in this game.”

I managed to meet his eyes. “Is that true? Is this peace real?”

He lowered his voice to say, “There was never going to be a war. The nanoweapons race, the brinksmanship, it’s all the game we play to keep the other side in check. Dahlia’s great Pax Epak.”

“Then what was it all for?”

But his boots were already pounding away down the corridor behind me, his human-leather jacket changing color in the passing ultraviolet. His underling was parting the plastic flap