Chapter Two
Chapter Two
They had barely made it half a block before fatigue had overruled Kathrin's initial surge of adrenalin, robbing the injured girl’s legs of strength. Most of the journey since that collapse had been a jarring blur, clinging to Sarah’s emaciated back as the tras-human kept an exhaustive pace though the mute city.
Whilst they had long since shaken their pursuers, the unusual pair remained wary of well travelled byways after their narrow escape. Instead the Doll woman had followed the distinctive red warning signs around the walled off warehouse district, carrying her charge through deserted trash filled streets. Only a few residents still remained in this alcove of the living city, an occasional curtain smothered light flagging the abode of someone too stubborn or foolish to heed the evacuation order.
An oppressive sting of ozone lingered in the air, coupled with an ever present prickling sensation that gnawed at the senses. All of this belied an area saturated with Thaumic radiation. Now and then, between thin gaps in the hastily erected barriers, she would catch a glimpse of the strange world beyond. Iridescent colours danced even in the failing daylight, casting bright halos around every object in the abandoned streets. Metre long cracks spread out across the once flawless tarmac roads, torn asunder by the thick roots of plants long thought extinct, now racing one another towards the contested airspace.
Eventually their unceasing progress had hit a snag. Without reliable street lights to guide their way, the tepid shadows of night were threatening to steal the path from under them. Sarah continued for as long as she could, but eventually things became too dangerous to risk its precious cargo. Abandoning the graffiti covered barriers that had been their guide thus far, Sarah strode across an empty parking lot towards a long flat roofed edifice that stuck out in what remained of the skyline. An old fire escape clung to its ageing walls, rising out of the ally as a beacon of respite picked out in sharp edged shadows. Steadily, testing each firm rung and iron step as though it would crumble beneath their tread, the companions ascended into the brief sanctuary the isolated rooftop would bring.
With little ceremony, Kat’s folded onto her knees and clutched an arm to her sore chest, rubbing the ribs battered once again by their foray across the urban wilderness.
“You know, it might just be me,” She wheezed, gingerly laying down the pebble strewn surface, “but I’m sure your back didn’t used to be that lumpy. Gods my chest.”
Remaining mute as she finished appraising their temporary lodgings, Sarah marched up to where Kathrin had collapsed and knelt down. “Inspect damage.”
Mentally applying the missing question mark, Kat lay back and grudgingly raising her tattered shirt, thankful at least for the even surface.
A touch colder than a doctor’s stethoscope carefully traced the course of the girl’s suffering chest, never pressing too hard as they explored the extent of her injury. For her part Kathrin tried not to flinch or retreat from the icy probing, though something else caught her attention long enough to dispel the unpleasant memories. Reaching down, the girl dabbed at a spot Sarah had passed over, feeling a slimy residue that stuck to the tips of her fingers.
Finished with her inspection, the doll lent away and delivered her verdict.
“Single fracture. Sub dermal bruising.”
Kathrin’s hand shot out and grabbed the woman’s thin wrist before she could move away, the same slick ooze coating the skin beneath her week grasp. “Eww. So much for self repairing. Hold on, stay right where you are.”
Rolling onto her side, Kat leaned over to where the cloth backpack lay in waiting and tugged it towards her. Practically blind in the darkness, she dumped out its contents and rummaged around until her questing hand closed around a palm sized oblong, lifting it clear of the entangling clothes. Awakened by her touch the cracked screen flickered into life, casting glistening shadows across Sarah’s open wounds. With a gentle tap the brightness increased, catching the edge of glass shards still embedded in the doll woman’s hands.
Though their flight had been uneventful, Sarah’s chosen escape route had required hastily breaking the bathroom window. Whilst she had torn out most of the larger shards, several were imbedded too deeply beneath slowly healing plastic skin. For any normal human this would have been immobilising painful, requiring a Clinic or street doctor to suture and disinfecting the wounds. From the look of Sarah’s hands though, the digits elongated and palm shrunken where the flesh had begun to retreat, it was clear this was no ‘normal’ human. Every twitch of hidden sinews caused the fragments to move within their jelly cocoons, clear biological fluid oozing from their edges and preventing the faux skin from sealing the breach.
“I suppose you weren’t going to bother fixing that?” she asked lightly, raising an unseen eyebrow at her mechanical companion.
“Unnecessary.” Replied the tinny speaker, her face oddly placid in the eerie glow. “Self repair.”
Idly laying setting down the featureless phone as a dim lantern, Kathrin rolled over and slid up to her knees facing the still frozen manikin. A brief dip into the sack brought forth another silvery packet of false oats, one the hungry youth quickly opened and bit into. Swallowing the first bite immediately, she packed a second into her cheek before turning back to her companion.
“Give me your knife.” Chewed the girl, hardly blinking as a battered kitchen utensil suddenly materialised from god only knows where.
Tarnished as it was, the edge had been lovingly honed to perfection and would have likely sunk through a table under its own weight. But (and this was an important definition) it was not a weapon. Limited as her emotional range was, Sarah would not have allowed such a label upon what was clearly a thing of utility. After all, get close enough to use a knife and you had done something wrong.
Furrowing her brow in concentration, Kat carefully guided the sharp metal along the plastic like coating that was trying to grow over the protruding splinter. Cutting the faux flesh wasn’t the problem; it was avoiding any healthy skin on either side that posed the challenge, especially when your hands trembled from malnutrition. Hooking it with the knife edge, the teen carefully worked the intrusive shard loose until it could be gripped with forefinger and thumb. Jauntily tossing aside the offending object, her focus turned to the creeping edges of the pallid flesh, a rosy tint to its edges belying the sinews of real muscle just below the surface. A deeper cut unveiled the meaty strata running close to jet black bones, ripe for cultivating.
Chewing for a moment in thoughtful calculation, Kat waited for the clear gel ooze to seep from the split’s edges before reaching into her mouth for a chunk of nano-bar. With an air of workman’s pride, she thumbed the reconstituted foodstuff into the fresh lesion and pressed down hard.
Satisfied, she straightened the crick in her neck before turning her attention to the next splinter, choosing to ignore a telltale glint of movement in her peripheral vision. This close to her companion, the younger could see the green eyes twitching and blinking as they navigated some crude internal menu.
Given that, with such a longwinded method of communication, Sarah rarely said anything unless it was necessary, Kat would have normally waited attentively if it looked like her mute partner was about to speak. Today however, she didn’t feel like debating her decision with someone who had all the charisma of a half brick and even less tact.
“You are troubled Do you want to talk about it.” Crackled the artificial voice, emanating from beneath the barber coat. “I am here and am very good at listening.”
Pulling rather harder than necessary, Kat discarded the last of the bloody shards and set to work removing the dead flesh from the glistening arm. “No, my mind’s made up. I’m going and that’s final.”
Again the eyes flickered in the pallid light, though the girl paid it little attention, busying herself with tearing the stolen clothing into long strips while Sarah’s next sentence assembled itself. True, her sister couldn’t get infections, but the protean rich food bar would be rejected unless held closely to the wound.
“Not what I meant.” Sarah replied at last, watching with indifference as her charge bound up the wounded limbs in a thin layer of cloth. “Kathrin what you have been through is terrible and I am sorry I couldn’t find you sooner. I know it must hurt but you are safe now.”
For a while the troubled youth simply stared at the automaton, the statement weighted with false compassion of the kind lifted straight from a poorly written drama.
“That was awfully quick, Sis.” Chimed the youth, narrowing her bitter smile at the hollow emotionless words, “Do I smell a pre-prepared response? No, wait that would require you to know the subject matter, right? A Quote then.”
‘You want me to think you care?’ She continued in the privacy of her own head. ‘The only reason you’re even asking me at all is to find out whether I’m going to slow us down.’
Aloud she sighed and queried; “Source?”, speaking the command as though the demi-human before her were a drink’s dispenser.
There was a brief pause while the eyes flitted through their menu and constructed a reference. “Q.Kostof, Retrospective; A Councillor’s Journey’, second edition, oxford university press, published twenty thirteen…”
“Did it mention anything in there about ‘knowing when not to speak?”
“Page one twenty two.” Replied the metallic voice, loyally.
Clenching her fists for a moment, Kat felt a little surge of indignation rise in her breast before being swallowed by the icy numbness that pressed against the back of her eyes. Still averting her gaze from the android, she shifted around and sat back on her knees.
“Okay, you want to talk? Fine, let’s talk then. How about numbers? Let’s talk about the number forty seven. Forty Seven days to be exact, I worked it out from the date on the announcement board.”
practically chin to chest with Sarah’s looming figure, Kat glared up at the unchanging expression. “Two months ago, you wandered in to that place I’d been sold too and took a seat in the back. Were you there to watch the ‘performance’, or just to socialize?”
Nothing. Silence was the machine’s only response to a question that had made the young girl’s life a living hell. To be shown salvation only for rescue never to materialise, she had simply broken.
Slowly, like a bronze statue unfolding from its plinth, the woman stood and turned her gaze towards the edge of the roof top. Neon signs rose above its crest, long darkened and providing ample cover to watch the street below.
“Four oh four on that one, eh?” Grimaced the shaking youngster as her guard stalked towards a choice vantage point.
She hadn’t expected an answer beyond ‘tactical advantage’, but the machine’s reluctance to so much as comment made her chest burn with a squall of emotions. At its heart was an icy void, forged by guilt and the sure knowledge that her own suffering was somehow insignificant.
Crawling towards an old ventilation shaft, Kathrin dragged the thin clothes into a rough pillow and slumped down against the cold floor. Already exhaustion had trooped in and was demanding payment with menaces, her eyes lids growing heavy as the cooling night air embraced her frail form. One last glance towards the hazy shadows let her pick out the slight glow from Sarah’s jade eyes as the bodyguard scanned the darkness for signs of danger.
“The sooner I’m away from you the better.”
--
Come the light of morning, Kathrin awoke stiff and uncomfortable under a grey featureless sky, a thumping headache pulsing in time with her heartbeat. Though the unbroken cloud cover served to trap the heat of the day, it must have still been a bitter night out in the open. Despite her aversion to the mechanical bodyguard, she seemed to have gained the android’s coat during her blessedly dreamless sleep…
No, not entirely dreamless.
Rubbing sleep from her eyes, she recalled the barest phantom of the nightmares that had chased her into the waking world. There had been the moment when the shadows of the rooftop had been filled with attackers and leering onlookers before the scream had fled her lips, ignorant to the very real danger this could bring. She recalled the grip, arms like iron bonds rapping around and restraining her, fuelling the hallucinations that taunted and jeered and touched and – and then she had woken up here. That horror filled world had slipped away suddenly into a black void.
The back of her head throbbed with the bruise that had risen overnight. Now that she came to think about it, she was laying quite a ways from the steel vent where she had bedded down the night before, her limbs tucked under one another in a manner akin to the recovery position. Rubbing the swelling on the back of her head, the groggy girl realised the stiffness in her neck was not due to her awkward posture.
Even after tending its wounds, the clockwork soldier still treated her like an object, just another machine that could be switched off with a swift blow. Away from her previous captors, she was still a prisoner. Perhaps it would have been more poetic if Sarah had kept the unconscious girl cuddled up to her skeletal form, like they were acting out some cliché hollovid. Truly though, the harsh pebble dash ground was softer, not to mention that her young charge was already livid enough as it was.
Shoving aside the heavy coat, Kathrin scanned the rooftop for her companion and cracked a wild smile as she sighted the figure stood at opposite end of the rooftop. She could do it. Cut the leash and run.
To the untrained eye the machine appeared totally unawares, focused entirely on a distant trail of dust rising from between the tall buildings of downtown. It was thus a complete shock to Kathrin when Sarah’s arm swung around through some very unnatural angles and deftly caught the heavy rebar mid swing. Stunned, the young assailant was lifted slightly off her feet as she refused to relinquish her weapon of opportunity to the iron bound grip. As though mounted on a turn table, the bald head turned slowly around to set an accusing gaze upon the foolhardy girl.
“Awake.” Observed the grinding voice, its owner tossing the cudgel aside.
Kathrin rallied magnificently with a pouty scowl, her first truly negative expression in days.
“You. Knocked. Me. Out.” She said plainly, making sure to annunciate each word as its own little sentence.
Unmoved, the woman turned back to the grey cityscape. “Risk of discovery high. Action taken.”
“And that’s another thing." Kat sighed, rubbing the throbbing lump on the back of her neck "First open medical terminal we come across, get your voice fixed. Bad enough that you look like a wax manikin without sounding like a kitchen utensil.”
Without so much as glancing at her cybernetic ‘sibling’, Kat carefully stood up and walked to the edge of the rooftop, observing the neat rooftops marking the edge of an abandoned high street. They must have made some serious tracks the night before, for the old gambling hall upon which they had taken roost stood barely a stone’s throw from the banks of the river. Following its course with a careful turn of the head, Kathrin saw that their vantage neatly capped off the old shopping district, its street side entrance standing between the open air mall and the dockyards that had once been the heart of city life.
Poking above the heavy morning mist, she could just make out the cargo cranes through the yellow haze. That was something else too; the colours here were far brighter than the rest of the otherwise grey cityscape. Old brick buildings had a definite ‘redness’ about their walls, rusted lampposts had a brown gloss to their mottled surface and the smog had a vividly poisonous tint.
During the progressive emergence of the Equestrian universe, ambient energy that radiated from the boundary of the two worlds swirled in unpredictable storms across the globe. Salem had been one of the first cities to experience hotspots of lethal Thaumic radiation.
Had the youngster been familiar with the history of the once infamous town, she would have appreciated the irony. As it was, the only thing that concerned Kat was avoiding any places where the colours of the world became so bright that they melted away anything foreign to Equestria, human flesh included. Thalamic radiation was present throughout the whole city to some degree, but the true hotspots meandered unseen through the streets, generally giving the unwary a few seconds notice before their skin began to blister and burn.
Squinting back along the rows of boarded up shops, Kat’s eyes narrowed at the distant riverbank. Something large was moving up the road, sending up a ripple through the smog before it.
“What are you watching anyway?” She asked aloud, not taking her eyes from the disturbance.
“Convoy.” Replied the still figure beside her, its next sentence rattled off as though dumping a text file through the rough speaker. “Civilian transport vehicles. Slow moving. Wide course indicates evading detection. Likely threat minimal.”
“A convoy?” parroted the youth with a hint of confusion. This close to the towering walls of Massituset, the first mega city to be constructed in America, people rarely deviated the public freeways if they needed to travel. A convoy this deep within the old city was unusual to say the least. BlackMesh securities had a hands-off policy to any area outside of their contacted patrol zones, making abandoned suburbs like the one’s boarding Salem a bloody nightmare for your average Lawful citizen.
Foul mood suddenly abandoned, Kathrin squinted against the languid morning light and sought any disturbance in the skyline. For a moment she thought there was a thin heat haze rising above some of the buildings, rippling the chilly morning smog a few streets away.
“Wonder if they’re looking for me too?” She muttered, absentmindedly rubbing her sore neck again, “They’ve got to have come through Dog’s Town. Gods they could even be from the place, it’s big enough.”
“Negative.” Sarah’s rusty voice resonated, “Tracking river. Seeking dockyard access to public interstate road.”
Raising an eyebrow conspiratorially, Kathrin turned back to the scattered clothes she been sleeping upon and began packing away. “Well then, there’s our ticket out of the city. If they’re following the river they should drive right past us”
With a last glance around the empty roof space, the scrawny youngster slung the pack and strode towards the awaiting fire escape, followed closely by the oddly mute Sarah.
Even under this sickly light it was clear to see just how dangerous their assent up the rough scaffold had actually been. Though built to outlast the building it was attached too, the frame of the rusty tower was gradually peeling away from a breezeblock wall that hadn’t seen maintenance in over forty years. Heck, the last time this area of town drew a decent crowd was probably when the mobs had raided its glass fronted shops during the austerity war.
By the time they had reached the ground and set out back across the abandoned parking lot, the almost none existent thrum of hybrid vehicles was playing a merry rhythm on Kat’s aching skull.
Practically collapsing onto the heap of debris that blocked the parking entrance, Kathrin took a moment to gather herself before peaking around the edge of her cover. Emerging from the thickening smog was a slow preseason of trucks and salvage covered busses, led by a solitary figure some fifty paces in front.
“Okay,” she whispered, rummaging around in the rucksack and withdrawing a crime against fashion, “Put this on. Let me do the talking and try not to look so… scary.”
Taking the abomination, Sarah remained silent as her charge ascended the rubble heap and sat waiting to be noticed. If someone were observing from afar the actions of this half-human, they would have assumed her utterly incompetent as a bodyguard. They were being approached by an unknown contact, yet not once had the supposed protector sought to defend her vulnerable charge from this blatant danger.
Perhapse their heated interaction over the last hour had left her addled, genuinely upset over her sister’s open rejection? Yet this could not be the case. With implants limiting her emotional range, the doll-woman felt little more than voids labelled with the socially correct response. Useful for following orders without question, but utterly useless for any real human empathy.
What was bothering her was far more physical. Visibility was failing rapidly, the damp morning mists so thick as to hide the opposite side of the street from view. Something wasn’t quite right with her biological system too. What little remained of her original unscarred skin was tingling, itching like a dermal disease had managed to evade the billions of nanites constantly repairing her body.
Had she still been human (and willing to tempt fate) Sarah might have openly said ‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this’.
As it was, she cycled her radiation scrubbers and joined Kathrin just as the convoy leader braught his rifle to bear.
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1225285
still not sure how it sneeked back in.
YAY Homa-nima-nims
Yeah, they are truly my Achilles heel in all aspects of writing. It’s mostly because I rely so heavily on MSword’s spell checker to pickup my innumerable mistakes and, though I know the difference between the words, can’t actually tell them apart without applying the thesaurus to each.
I'm sure I changed that bit that mentioned her breading too
I really appreciate this though hun, and please feel free to drop any other suggestions you might have to improve on things, I’m learning a lot just from these checks you’re providing
Will set to work ASAP applying what you've caught so far!
1225270
In an attempt to rescue that particular segment, dose this sound better?
I've chopped out the middle section, seeing as I can easily use it in another character's observation. What do you think?
An impressive improvement to an already great story!
Glad to see you posting again Cherry, though miss you around the IRC
1223195
I hat to nit-pick on a nit-pickers nit-pick, but its "Anti-personnel" there is a difference between personal and personnel.
And depending on where you said something like the (tm) would show up, if its internal to a computer, that might not necessarily be there, it all depends on the programmer doing that. Anyways...
Gapy would be better replaced by gaping.
I could keep this up all night, but as has been said before, "two heads are better than one."
I'm not a particularly good writer, but I can edit really well if I put my mind to it. And even then I prefer to have a second editor alongside me to make sure that its all correct. My obsessiveness over detail in my writing makes writing computer code much easier for me, so if you need any pointers just ask.
~Mines5
~Vivat STULTUS~
After publishing, my comments became visible. GOOD TO KNOW.
1601884
I wouldn't worry hun. I trust your opinion and that should be enough for anyone.
1602926 Kinda funny, though. I mean, people seeing them were probably thinking, "Woah, what an ass." and not not, "Woah, what a pre-reader." XD KNOW THE DIFFERENCE *star*