Defy the Worlds (Defy the Stars #2)(106)

“Noemi—”

“Come to me there someday,” she whispers. “A long time from now.”

Then her head leans to one side as her eyes fall shut again.

Abel stares up at the biobed monitor. Her heart’s still beating; her shallow lungs are processing what oxygen they can. But she’s no longer conscious, and if this were any other human patient, he would judge it unlikely that she’d ever wake again.

This isn’t any other patient. This is Noemi, and he will not endure this.

She deserves her life. He’s going to give it to her.

Swiftly he gathers her back into his arms and crosses the sick bay in three long strides, which take him to the cryosleep pods. He hits the activator with his elbow. One of the pods slides from its place on the wall onto the floor; its translucent panels fold open like the petals of a flower. Abel settles Noemi onto the pale green interior, and the soft, elastic substance gives slightly under her weight.

Maximum skin contact is recommended for optimal results. The words from the cryosleep training manual are right there in his memory bank; they’ve waited there all these years for the moment when he’d need this knowledge. He gets to the surgical tools, pulls a scalpel from its robotic arm, and uses it to slash away as much of the exosuit as possible.

But her life signals are now in the red zone. Further delay means failure. Abel steps back and hits the activator again. The panels fold around Noemi, and he stares down at her face as the pod fills first with vapor, then with liquid. Her features blur; her black hair floats around her in an uncertain halo.

A light on the control panel blinks green as an automated voice says, “Cryosleep activated.”

Abel feels as though he can breathe again. While the cryosleep pod rotates back into standing position, he watches the readouts to monitor her life signals. Already they’re slowing as the chill settles into marrow, blood, and brain. That’s entirely normal. But he also knows that she was so weak when he put her in that, even preserved this way, she might not survive any attempts to replace or regenerate her damaged organs. All this has bought her is a chance.

Abel will take what he can.

He waits until the process is complete, watching her the entire time. She seems to be floating in mist like some ethereal spirit in a fairy tale. His imagination is normally not so given to metaphor and simile; he has to gentle the truth of Noemi’s condition to come to terms with it. She is suspended between life and death.

In a fairy tale, the hero would have to face great trials to bring the heroine back to life: slaying dragons, undoing spells. Abel only has to remember where he came from, and what the future generations of his people will become.

The Inheritors won’t be equal parts man and machine; they’ll be far more organic. More powerful than even Abel himself. And they’ll live even longer. Gillian Shearer can’t transfer a human consciousness yet. But what if Noemi’s consciousness remains in her body, and then that body can be changed?

There must be ways to add organic mech components to a human body. The new transhumanism Gillian Shearer dabbles in—those technologies would be linked, too. It would be possible to synthesize both real and artificial DNA to make Noemi… not an Inheritor. Something else. A mech and yet not a mech. Something entirely new, but not someone new. It will still be her.

Abel’s cheeks feel oddly stiff—salt from the tears he must have shed without realizing it. He can tell that now because he’s begun to smile. The pain he feels is even greater than what he felt in the moment when he parted from Noemi before, greater than what he felt in the instant when he realized Mansfield had abandoned him alone in space, in an imprisonment that would last for thirty years. But he now possesses what he didn’t have back then: hope. This pain is endurable because it points him in the direction he needs to go.

The pain will lead him back to Haven. To Gillian Shearer. And possibly to his own doom.

He can’t do this without Gillian’s help. The price of that help can only be one thing: Abel’s surrender. She’ll want to replace his soul with the stored consciousness of Burton Mansfield. If it comes to that, Abel will agree. His life for Noemi’s—it’s a simple exchange, one he doesn’t have to question.

Maybe it won’t come to that. There are always possibilities. Always variables. Abel will do whatever it takes to save Noemi, but he refuses to admit defeat.

His entire body feels weak, and his chest aches as though he were the one who had been wounded. Still he presses on, transferring auxiliary control to a nearby console, so he can steer them away from the battlefield and toward the Genesis Gate.

Beyond that lies Noemi’s last hope.

He walks back to her cryosleep pod again to double-check the readings; it helps to be absolutely sure she’s in complete stasis. As he gets closer, he sees that one of her hands has drifted close to the outer shell. He presses his against it, feeling the burn of the cold against his skin. As he looks up at her face, Abel whispers the word that nearly destroyed him, Mansfield’s old fail-safe code. It’s the same word that will bring Noemi back to him again.

“Resurrection.”