C.L. could not stop the running commentary. “Must have been traces of DNA in the vomit. Or some kind of amino acid? What do you think, Morehshin? I can’t wait to write a paper with ‘barf-activated interface’ in the title.” They emitted a weird giggle. “Everybody will call it BAI.”
“No.” Morehshin said it distractedly, half to C.L. and half to herself. “This is some kind of safety menu.” She plunged her hand all the way in, and the light prismed into rainbows. A tiny green bolt of lightning forked up Morehshin’s arm, following the contours of her elbow, reminding me of the way she’d interrogated Elliot. She sucked in her breath. “Oh… this explains a few things.”
“What did you do?” C.L. cocked their head. “I registered a bunch of high-energy particles. It’s like… you let in a bunch of cosmic radiation.”
Morehshin made a distracted noise and the light shut off. Her hand glowed yellow where it had touched the safety menu. “Those are the controls that prevent weapons from traveling in the Machine. They also filter—”
Before she could finish, Anita interrupted. “The Comstocker is climbing up here and he has a broadsword.”
By the time the man heaved himself over the lip of the cliff, we were ready. But when Morehshin hit him with green light from the multi-tool, he laughed.
“It’s you bitches again, is it?” Under the ragged hair and blisters, I recognized Elliot, at least fifteen years older than when we’d last seen him at Sherry’s. Morehshin threw a ball of lightning out of the multi-tool and it fizzled on contact with his chest. “Can’t fool me twice. I’m immune now.”
There were Neolithic ways to knock him out too. We circled Elliot warily, and C.L. picked up a flat rock from the ground. Anita tried to grab his arms from behind, but he drew the sword, whirling it dangerously close to her head. His aim was terrible and shaky. Still, at close range, he was dangerous. Broadswords are glorified clubs, and he was angling to break bones or smash skulls.
“You’re outnumbered, Elliot. We’ve destroyed Comstock’s political career and… we know how to repair the Machine.” I hoped he believed me. “If you come with us, nobody has to get hurt.”
“You are on the wrong side of history.” Elliot lunged forward with the sword and would have brought it down on my shoulder if Morehshin hadn’t yanked me out of the way. But that left a break in our circle, and he ran through it toward the interface.
Morehshin tackled him as he reached the levitated rocks, and they fell in a furious tangle of limbs on the Machine floor. Elliot wriggled away and levered himself upright by gripping the damaged stone, jamming his sword into one of the grooves. The sword in the stone. A black sphere materialized in the air beneath the canopy, and C.L. let out a howl. They charged head-first with the rock, knocking him and the sword away from the interface. Moving faster than a starving, sunstroked person had any right to, Elliot swept his legs under C.L., bringing them down hard. He scrambled up and planted a knee on their chest, holding the sword point-down over their face.
All of us froze. And then, behind me, a baby started to scream.
I turned to see the woman with no hands, the queen, elbows locked around her baby. She wore Morehshin’s face and snarled a rapid stream of words I couldn’t understand.
“No!” Morehshin held out a hand and stepped forward.
Elliot’s face was slack with shock, and his hands trembled on the sword. The woman positioned the baby’s neck near her mouth and bared her teeth as if she were going to bite through an artery. Then she screamed more words.
Morehshin answered in the same language. I caught a word that sounded like “sister,” but with the vowels shifted slightly. The woman narrowed her eyes and started to sink her teeth into the sobbing baby’s neck.
Elliot stood up, releasing C.L. but keeping the sword clutched tightly in both hands like a baseball bat. C.L. crawled away from him, panting.
“You have no idea how to use the interface,” he hissed. “When my brothers complete their edit, I’m going to shut it down for good. Comstock will stop your pathetic slut shows and the queens will rise.” He turned to the woman and said something in her language using an equally condescending tone.
Her face twisted in spite. She yelled something that was unmistakably a curse and threw the baby at his chest. It had to be one of the oldest tricks in the book, but it took all of us by surprise—especially Elliot. He dropped his sword to catch the infant, and in that moment my two histories resolved themselves into one. I was no longer holding myself back to honor the memory of a lost friend. I was nothing but a bloodthirsty animal. And I knew how to kill. I sprinted forward, grabbed Elliot’s weapon where it had fallen, and drove it into his spine. As the blade scraped against bone, there was a crunching noise. A bloody metal tongue stuck out of his belly. The man fell to his knees and a grin cut across my face as I watched him dying. C.L. snatched the baby out of his arms before he slumped over.
Elliot spoke to me through teeth covered in blood. “Doesn’t matter if you kill me. More will come. I’ve set up a colony here, with workers—”
I kicked him in the jaw. “Fuck off, drone.” It was a curse Morehshin used, and I liked the way it felt in my mouth. Elliot’s blood oozed into a preternaturally circular puddle under the curving stones of the interface.
The baby was hiccupping and gasping in C.L.’s arms, Morehshin and her twin were embracing, and I couldn’t stop looking at Elliot’s impaled body. I hadn’t killed anyone in a long time, but my feelings were different now. This wasn’t a chaotic spree murder, rash and wrong. I wasn’t trying to burn down Irvine, or get revenge on men and the stolen authority that sustained them. This time, it truly was defense. I had made a calculation: him or all of us. Queens or people. Maybe, sometimes, death was the only answer.
Anita came to stand beside me, looking silently at Elliot’s body. Now his blood was dribbling upward into the stone. It reminded me of what happened with Morehshin’s vomit. Were bodily fluids the secret key to operating higher levels of the interface?
“Thank you for saving my life.” C.L. held the infant out to Morehshin’s sister, who crossed her arms and shook her head. “Don’t you want your baby?”
Morehshin cut her eyes at C.L. “That man forced her to bear his worker. She’s done with that job.”
Disturbed, C.L. cuddled the baby close to their chest, buttoning the mewling bundle inside their data shirt.
After conferring with Morehshin, the woman led us to the beach down a twisting path cut through sandstone that glowed like cheap blush wine. In hundreds of millions of years, these rocks would form the valley walls at Raqmu. I wondered where the archive caves were in this era. “This is Kitty,” Morehshin said over her shoulder. “I can translate for her.”
“What does she know about the Comstockers’ mission?” Anita asked.
Morehshin and Kitty had an exchange in their shared language. “Kitty thinks Elliot has been here for several years, but she’s been here only eighteen months. She was sent from my present to grow workers born in this time, so they couldn’t escape into the future. This is the only one so far.” Morehshin gestured at the baby C.L. was cradling. “She knew Elliot would never let her kill the child, because his job was to set up a colony. After there were enough workers, she was going to be queen for a group of men who could turn the Machine on and off to preserve their rights.”
“Can you ask Kitty what he was doing, making those cuts in the stone?” C.L. asked.
Morehshin and Kitty got into a long conversation, and Morehshin didn’t bother to translate until we’d reached the dying embers of the cooking fire on the sand. “It’s what C.L. suspected. He had a theory that those rocks were the remains of a much larger structure, and he was trying to re-create part of it. Some kind of metal lever or button?”