had no idea how hot it actually got inside a hydrogen-processing factory. She’d never been inside one.
Hopefully, the robots hadn’t either.
She hurtled toward the first door she saw, ignoring the signs plastered over it that screamed “danger” and “authorized personnel only.” It was alarmed and scan-locked, but she shot the seam in the doorway with her sidearm and pried the door open into a dark crack. The bugs were on her heels, but she shoved her way in and got off another jet from the riot gun to scatter them back from the opening.
An alarm blared into the night from the broken door, but that was fine—it would tell Ekrem where she was.
Asala’s injured side stabbed, and she doubled over and almost retched.
Keep moving. Keep moving or you’re dead.
It was already hot inside the building, even here near the door. Asala forced her feet to propel her forward and ran. It was almost too dark to see, with only a few dim strips of safety lighting glowing along the floor in places. Pipes laced the space above her head, so low she had to keep ducking, and the first time she brushed up against one of them, it was so hot she yelled aloud.
The spiders had been slowed climbing through the door, but they were catching up. The warmth didn’t seem to be bothering them yet, even as it dragged at Asala and made her feet heavy.
Hotter. I need to make it hotter . . .
She almost ran face-first into a ladder. The metal of the rungs burned to the touch, but she pulled the plast of her jacket over her hands and climbed. Bugs’ll have a harder time with a ladder. Maybe . . . can’t follow . . .
Wishful thinking. She could hear them chittering up after her. Or was that in her head? Her covered hands slipped on the rungs. Sweat sheeted into her eyes.
She rolled out onto a grating and immediately flinched away from the floor, trying to stagger onto the soles of her boots. The acrid scent of burning seared the air. Her clothes, or her skin? She staggered back, away from the ladder.
The first spider clattered over the top of it, and Asala almost despaired.
Then it listed drunkenly to the side, half its legs crumpled, and it fell through the grating.
More spiders made it over. A few more fell. A few kept coming . . .
Asala lurched into a hobble. It’s who falls first . . . them or me . . .
She could hear some of the spiders falling from the ladder, chinks and chunks as they clattered to the floor below. One made it lethargically to only a meter in front of her and then simply stopped. She raised her stinging eyes—between her and the top of the ladder was an increasingly sparse robot graveyard.
I did it, she thought. I outlasted . . .
But tThen something was burning her, and she tried to get away from it, but she was sitting and she couldn’t get up, and then she wasn’t sitting anymore, either .
Her nostrils stung with that same seared, scorched smell, stronger now. She couldn’t breathe. The air cooked her from the inside out.
Everything hurt, everywhere, and she couldn’t move to make it stop. Maybe, she thought, she hadn’t outlasted the robots after all.
Before the heat wavered into darkness, the last thing she was aware of was hallucinating Niko’s face, pouring sweat and panting and calling her name.
• • •
Dayo locked Asala in a hug so tight she couldn’t breathe, their foreheads together. “Don’t forget me, little sister.”
“I don’t want to go,” Asala said.
“You have to. One more person safe means they work on the next person. The Elders will send me after you soon, right? Maybe even before this window closes.”
It was a kind lie. Even Asala knew that, young as she was.
“We’ll be together again on Gan-De,” Dayo whispered. “I’ll write you a poem for every day we’re apart and send them to you whenever we have the power. Remember, ‘my heart collects the ice of years, stored to melt when next we meet.’ Right?”
But somehow the girl then knew with the hindsight of a woman three and a half decades older that the poems would never come. That girl would wait, and wait, and wait, and then, finally, she would force herself to stop waiting and close those memories away.
• • •
Asala jerked awake to the smell of sterilization and medicants. A hospital. She was in a hospital, and Dayo wasn’t here.
Her eyes went to the chair next to the bed. For some reason, for a split second she had expected to see Niko, but the chair was empty.
A medical assistant puttered in and clicked the consciousness monitor at the side of Asala’s bed before glancing down at the readouts. “Ah, we thought you’d wake up soon. You took some nasty damage, but a few more hours should be all it takes to get you back together. Your friend who pulled you out is fine too, by the way. Minor burns only.”
Niko. She hadn’t dreamt it.
“What about the general?” Asala said. The words came out scratched and croaked.
“You mean General Cynwrig?” The assistant frowned. “I’ve heard she’s leaving today to go back to Gan-De, is that what you mean? I think she’s in with the president right now, concluding the trade talks. Anything else would be above the level they tell me, I’m afraid.”
Asala relaxed into the bed. The general was alive, then. That was all she needed to know. She closed her eyes.
My heart collects the ice of years, stored to melt when next we meet.
She snapped back awake.
“Excuse me,” she said to the assistant. “Could you find me my handheld? I need to send a message to the president.”
• • •
President Ekrem stood at the window, staring in pretended abstraction as the magline zinged by on its elevated track. Khayyam had warring regional governors in the canyons, a massive water pipeline collapse in its third-largest city, and now these suicides by desiccation driving the news cycles into a frenzy—as if they expected him to solve the looming environmental crisis with a clap of his hands. Yet he’d spent his entire afternoon mollifying and playing nice, all with a woman who barely acknowledged the concept of human rights.
He turned back to face his visitor. “It’s to our great shame that these attacks happened here on Khayyami soil. I hope, General, that you can accept our gravest apologies, and our assurances that we will do everything in our power to find and apprehend whoever was behind them.”
“I look forward to your updates,” answered Cynwrig.
