Defy the Worlds (Defy the Stars #2)(74)
“How are you doing this?” Abel looks through the blank golden space of the Tare’s missing eye, hoping Simon is looking back at him. “How do you control the others?”
“Well,” the Tare says, in the suddenly serious way of small children, “it’s like there’s a machine part of me and a me part of me. I have to forget all about the me part of me and just be a machine. That part’s way more fun.”
Abel frowns. Virginia said something like this to him not long ago, that he should embrace his mechanical side more often. He’s always tried so hard to reach for his humanity. He’s not sure how to reverse that.
A skittering sound, then a thud tells him Noemi has successfully reached the lower level from which she might escape. Although he wishes she’d leave the Osiris without him, he understands she never would.
The Tare wobbles forward and puts one hand on Abel’s chest. “You’re like me, aren’t you?”
“In many ways.” Abel smiles in a way he hopes will read as reassuring. “We both synthesize the human and the machine.”
Frowning, the Tare steps back again. Abel curses his own precision; synthesize is too formal a word for a small boy. “You don’t look like me. You look right. I don’t look right. I look all messed up.”
“That can be fixed. Everything that’s wrong can be fixed. You just need to—”
To what? Abel realizes he doesn’t have an answer. The most logical outcome would be for Simon to return to Gillian, who understands both the body and the soul involved far better than anyone else. But Gillian is cut off from her usual resources; if she weren’t, Simon wouldn’t have been re-created so hastily and poorly. Abel would like to take Simon on as a project, to offer him guidance and friendship, and to figure out his inner workings over time, with the help of the excellent scientific equipment available there. But cooperation with Gillian is impossible. Taking charge of Simon would in effect mean kidnapping a little boy, promising to make him better without being certain that was even possible.
“Abel?” Noemi whispers. His sharp ears catch the sound, but responding is still inadvisable.
Through the Tare, Simon smiles. “You’re like me and you’re not like me. We’re alike and we’re different.” The Tare model’s hand fists in the folds of Abel’s shirt. “I want to see how you’re different.”
“I’m not sure that you—”
“I know! I’ll take you apart. Then I can see.”
Abel blocks the Tare’s forearm, breaking her grip on his clothing. He draws upon the few child-psychology texts in his databases and says, simply and firmly, “No.”
Both the Oboe and the Tare seize him, and the Oboe yells, “Simon says!”
With one shove, Abel pushes them both back—but not far. They’re mechs, even if not for combat, and they’re stronger than any human opponent. When they both rush at him, he jumps upward as high as he can, which is just high enough to grab the ridge above them. As he dangles there, the Tare and Oboe leap upward, too. The Oboe doesn’t make it—her broken leg keeps her off balance, and she clatters onto the floor and rolls off into the crevasse. A series of distant crashes makes it clear she’s being dashed to pieces.
One down, he thinks—the Tare is coming nearer, her blank golden light of an eye boring into him.
“Abel!” Noemi cries. “Will you get your metal butt down here?”
My butt is made of flesh and is designed to be pleasant both to see and to touch, he’d like to say, but this information can perhaps wait.
He lets himself drop, falling past the Tare to Noemi’s side, where he catches himself on the floor of her level. Noemi makes a half-strangled sound of fear before he pulls himself up, but the instant he’s next to her, she knows to start running.
They dash across the jagged edge of this broken ship, snow blowing through their hair, the deep fatal drop less than a meter to their left. Abel’s sharp vision and quick analysis allows him to identify the areas they’re running through—a broken-up Turkish bath, devastated living quarters, an upside-down pool—the other half of each mirrored on the opposite side of the ravine. When they run past a transparent wall separating two rooms, a Tare on the other side throws herself against it with such speed and force a human would be knocked unconscious. Noemi has the fortitude to keep going without even glancing sideways.
Abel does not. The Tare claws at the transparent material; there’s no way she could break it, but a Tare model isn’t programmed with that information, and Simon neither knows nor cares.
And it is Simon doing this. He cannot deny that.
“Come back!” the Tare shrieks, her voice saying Simon’s words. “Come back!”
The plea wrenches Abel to the core, but he can’t take the risk. He has to keep running.
They reach the framework he’d seen before, the one that provides a way for them to crawl to the top of the ship. Noemi pauses, panting and clutching at her arm. She must still be feeling intense pain from those cuts, but she says only, “Can we climb it before they get to us?”
“Possibly.” Abel readies himself. “But I can climb one-handed and shoot at the same time.”
“Bet I can shoot and climb, too, if it comes to it.” However, her focus remains above. She turns up her face to the moonlight and starts to climb. Abel follows her, dividing his attention between Noemi’s progress (will her injured arm continue to support her?) and the area below them (in case more of Simon’s “toys” pursue).