A Perfect Machine(55)

“You can fucking see me?”

I will try to make them see you. Adelina had said.

Fuck me, Milo thought. Whatever Adelina did, it worked.

“I’m Milo. Pleased to meet you and all that shit. Look, no time,” he said, rapidfire. “We need to get you out of here. Henry’s… unable to help. Cops and fire trucks will be here very soon, and we need to not be here when they arrive. I’m going to try to lift you, take you out of here. I know somewhere we can go. Not far from here.”

“Henry…”

“I’ll tell him where we’re going, but I don’t know if he can understand me anymore. He’s entirely lost his marbles and is approaching the size of a school bus. He’s…”

Faye was losing consciousness again, her eyelids drooping as Milo spoke. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Screw it, let’s go.”

He moved his arms under her, concentrating as hard as he could on the feel of her body – aware at the same time that it was an incredibly bad idea to move an injured person, but what choice did he have? If he left her here, she would die. When his arms touched flesh and bone, he breathed a huge sigh of relief, said, “Thank fuck,” and hoisted her up.

The sirens were louder now, and the fire alarm was still going, but the sounds of panic in the hallway had receded.

No shit, Milo thought as he made his way toward the hallway, feeling the strange sensation of gravity again for the first time in a long while. Apparently, a massive rampaging metal monster will clear a building pretty goddamn quick.

Before leaving the apartment, he turned and yelled up to Henry, who was – for the moment – no longer roaring and twisting about in fury, destroying everything in his path. “Henry! I’m taking Faye to the tunnels! She’s hurt badly, needs help! I don’t know if you’ll understand this, but you know the tunnels I mean! Underground! The old subway line!”

He coughed from the dust in the air, and from shouting everything as loudly as possible in hopes that up in the next apartment, his friend would hear him, and understand.

Hey, I’m coughing from shouting and from dust in the air. I am a real boy, after all.

He picked his way through the rubble, careful to watch his step, trying desperately to remember how legs that touched the ground worked.



* * *



On the top floor of Faye’s apartment building, Henry Kyllo’s mind tried to reboot itself. It remembered the last ten minutes as a flashing haze of violence – only portions of the events remained in his head. Some of it had been purged, and only later would he learn exactly what he’d done.

For now, all his brain could latch onto was the sound of sirens, a fire alarm, what those things meant, and what he had to do about it.

He stood in an apartment he had no previous memory of being in, surrounded by rubble, blood, scraps of brain, bone, skin, and – directly behind him, near the front door – a half-dressed, unconscious, middle-aged woman. Something had happened to the living room window. It was smashed. Cold wind blew inside, stirring up the rest of the damage.

Damaged, he thought. Like my mind. What have I done? Where is Milo? Where is Faye?

He knew the names of these people, but couldn’t put faces to those names in his head. He couldn’t picture either of them.

And weren’t there other people, too? Where had they gone?

He gazed down at himself, then, for the first time aware that his legs were somehow in the apartment below. He didn’t know how to process that, so his brain ignored it for the moment. But he recognized that something substantial in his head had changed with his last insane growth spurt. Where before he felt he was losing control of his body, was having trouble operating it, he now felt like he’d “grown into it,” for lack of a better term. It felt more comfortable. More… him.

Sirens again, now very close. Perhaps stopping somewhere nearby.

Probably come here to stop me. Clearly, I’ve done something awful. That feels like a distinct possibility. Just look around.

He thought again of his friend, Milo. Dead, but not dead. Invisible. And Faye. Wasn’t there something about them both? Something–

Then the words replayed in his head in snippets, dredged up from whatever murky depths now constituted his memory:

Faye.

Injured.

Tunnels.

Subway.

These words meant something to him. Tough to know for sure right now, though. Dribbles of information were all that seemed to be allowed through. Everything else just sort of remained… over there somewhere. Too far for him to see, to grasp.

And now firemen were coming. He heard shouting nearby. Smelled smoke, wondered if a fire had started somewhere.

As his chest rose and fell with an efficiency he had never felt before – air filtering in and out of his (metal?) lungs so crisp and clean, he imagined his head as a fat steel balloon, drifting far above the clouds.

He closed his eyes, envisioned in great detail this trip above the earth, the scent of the breeze, the sun glinting off the metal of his arms, his legs…

His thoughts drifted back to the woman lying nearby.

Where shall we go, she and I? he thought. He knew his mind wasn’t functioning properly. More clearly, yes, but not properly. Everything seemed slower. Nothing seemed to make much sense.

He imagined himself and the woman together this time, floating above the clouds. Maybe they were in a hot air balloon, he didn’t know. The method of flight was not important. What was important was –