Unity by Elly Bangs (free e reader txt) 📕

DANAE

The boom rang through the metal substructure and resonated tangibly in the pit of my stomach, but then there was nothing. I sat up and silenced my breath. I listened for an eternal minute, but no more sounds came—and this deep in the city, everything was always clanking and hissing and flexing under the pressure. It could have been a random airlock failure, the ping of a misdirected active sonar, ordinary metal fatigue. When I lay back down, Naoto’s eyes were open, two pools of reflected holographic light in the black.

His fingers softly traced the length of my forearm, stopping at the place where the bones had knitted a few degrees crooked. I’d had to treat it myself when I first came here: I couldn’t trust any Medusan doctor to keep my secret, if some casual medical scan were to reveal what was woven into my nervous system.

“I never noticed that before,” Naoto whispered. “How’d you break it?”

The answer to that question was the last thing on earth I wanted to remember. I sighed and asked, “Can’t sleep?”

His silhouette nodded. “I’ve been thinking about the surface. I keep trying to imagine that much empty space. What’s it like?”

I glanced around at the tight plastic walls. “It’s different.”

He chuckled. “All those lifetimes of experience, and that’s all you can say about it? It’s ‘different?’” He propped himself up on his elbow and said “Tell me something. Tell me a story. Since this is our last day together. Since neither of us can sleep.”

“What about?”

Lost in thought, he scratched the fine hairs running down the middle of his belly. “Tell me about one of the times you saved humanity. Tell me again about Blood Rain.”

I winced. “That’s a horrific story. Why would you want to hear that?”

“Yesterday I thought Epak and Norpak were finally going to annihilate each other, and all of us with them. Today I have to say goodbye to you. I’m a giant knot of stress in the shape of a man. A horrific story is exactly what I need to get me through it. Because . . . in the end, you won, right? You cured it. You survived.”

“Did I?” I whispered, maybe too quietly for him to hear.

When I didn’t say more, he continued, “Okay then, something else. Lighter-hearted. Tell me about your first life.”

I stared. “Which one do you mean by first, exactly? You mean this body before unity, or the first person who ever unified, or—?”

“Chronologically. I know, I know, twelve thousand years old. I meant your oldest life. What’s your earliest birthday?”

I stared into the darkness for a long time before answering. “September 12, 1998.”

I could feel him listening intently. “What was your first memory?”

I sighed. “A video screen. It was a huge, heavy box. Low-rez, two-dimensional. Cathode-ray tubes.”

I breathed slowly and let the memory move through me. I didn’t want to admit it to Naoto, but it was calming. Maybe it was what I needed, too—to take shelter in a deeper corner of my mind.

“It showed a city at night,” I continued, “with small lights stretching flat out to the horizon. Lamps glinting along a river or a canal. Then there were missile blasts. Clouds of fire, mushrooming up and disappearing quickly. March, 2003. That’s my first memory.” I clarified, “Chronologically.”

Naoto nodded. “That was the nuclear war?”

“No. That was decades later. It was—” Another sound rang out through the night, but this time we didn’t just hear it. The vibration was tangible in the walls around us, followed immediately by an audible creak of metal fatigue through the substructure.

He scrambled out of bed and crawled through the low space to call up the video pane; I stayed frozen. A jumble of text burned into focus, everything throbbing red with urgency, garbled with fear. The stinging light traced Naoto’s hunched, nude outline as he read.

“Explosions,” he said, but I had to read it for myself. “Near the keep. Conflicting reports. Dahlia—” He swallowed visibly. He didn’t need to say it. Whatever had happened, whoever had started it, it meant civil war.

I only managed to pull my coveralls halfway up my torso. My hands were shaking too much to work the zipper. My bags were packed at the foot of the bed, but I could only stare at them.

“That’s it, then.” He responded the last way I would have expected: he laughed, loudly. Then he took a deep breath and gathered his clothes. “I guess the decision’s been made for me. We have to make our run for the surface right now. Immediately.”

I barely heard a word he was saying, least of all the ‘we.’ “No. This changes everything. I didn’t plan for this. There’s no way out now.”

“There’s always a way out.”

“This isn’t the job I hired the mercenary to do, and even if I could reach him—”

“Then forget him. It was a huge risk to trust him anyway. This could be our best shot, Danae. We don’t need anyone to smuggle us anymore. We don’t have to worry about being seen. The Clan will be much too busy tearing itself apart to worry about a couple of runaways.”

I was still only marginally processing anything he said. My mind was fixated on the pressure. The ocean squeezing the module around us like a can in a fist was as much an engineering challenge as it was a wicked blessing for Medusa clan: we were all captives of the dissolved gasses in our own bodies. As long as I stayed down here at four atmospheres, those gasses remained harmless—but if I tried to leave too quickly, they would boil blood, burst arteries, necrotize bone. To work for Medusa Clan and live under its protection was as much a medical condition as a social one.

“There’s nothing to do but bolt the door and wait this out—” I started, but I choked on my own words. I’d never make