Goddess in the Machine Page 14

  “And now—”

  Maret’s voice got louder, drawing Zhade’s attention to him momentarilish. When Zhade looked back, the woman was gone. You’re growing paranoid, boyo. Zhade should be used to people staring at him. He was, after all, full charred.

  “—I would like to intro our Third Goddess.”

  Maret stepped aside, just bareish. The door in the vestibule opened, and the Goddess walked out.

  By the look on her face, Zhade imagined she was going to be sick, or at least trip. He recked she’d been shaking in the Yard that moren because of the dead women at her feet. But maybe it also had to do with every eye staring at her. She took a few steps forward, smiling politish at the people, and her eyes sought out Zhade. He’d have to put a stop to that. She couldn’t appear to rely on him. He held her gaze anyway.

  She looked regal in her new clothes and tiara, and though Zhade recked the bloodstains and tangled hair gave her a formidistic aura, he liked the glamourful Goddess as well.

  She stood awkwardish, but it didn’t meteor. The people were enamored with her mere presence.

  She startled when the priest appeared aside her to start the prayer. Zhade recked this one. It had been said at many of the First’s ceremonies. It was basicalish the phrase “worship the Goddess” over and over, with a few variations to hold things interesting. Zhade didn’t join in. Kiv, who nudged Zhade til he stood up straightish, wasn’t chanting either.

  Like Zhade had memory, the stardust shimmered in the air as the chanting gathered it, and slowish began to surround the Goddess, giving her an otherworldish glow. She looked more uncomfortistic than ever. As a fact, she looked scared.

  The prayer was almost at its end when Zhade caught movement out of the corner of his eye. Everything happened so fast. A thin mustached man rushed the stage; someone let out a scream.

  Instinct pushed Zhade toward the Goddess, but there was no march he would make it in time. There was a lightning dagger in the man’s hand, raised high, blue streaks of light crackling at its edges.

  Zhade’s heart stopped.

  He saw all his plans turn to sand. Another goddess killed. His own banishment (again) (or worse). Maret still on the throne. All the while Eerensedians kept dying and his final promises to his mother remained unfulfilled. And the poor Goddess, who didn’t even want to be here. She didn’t see it coming, didn’t see the man rushing toward her, didn’t see the glint of the dagger.

  It was over as quickish as it began.

  There was a sickening squelch. A spray of blood.

  The man stopped. The Goddess’s eyes widened, finalish aware of what was happening.

  An angel’s spear stuck cleanish through the attacker’s chest, in through his back, out right below his breastbone. With a jerk, the angel pulled the spear free, and the man fell face-first onto the platform. Dead.

  Leaving the Goddess whole and full well.

  There were screams and gasps, but the people were too enthralled to flee. A hectic thrill rushed through the crowd, along with disappointment for not seeing an assassination. Zhade recked they would turn on the Third in a tick for a bit of excitement.

  He watched as Maret stepped forward, Silver Crown gleaming in the light of the stained glass, and Zhade comped what had happened.

  Maret had used his magic to save the Goddess.

  The crowd realized a tick later and began to cheer, their disappointment vanishing. To them, this was better than witnessing the Goddess martyred. Their Guv saved their Goddess, and it charmed them.

  The Goddess looked as shocked as Zhade felt. Eyes flitting between the dead man and the Guv, she took a few stumbling steps back. Maret, an annoyed sneer on his face, helped her to a nearby chair.

  Zhade wound through the crowd, pushing past dignitaries and diplomats and peasants. He accidentalish jostled a woman, but didn’t stop, even when she cursed after him.

  He was vagueish aware of Maret speaking again, directing everyone out of the Rock, but he didn’t listen, focused soleish on his prey. He found the spot the night-skinned woman with the angelic eye had been standing, but she was gone. He turned in a circle, as citians rushed past him. It would be impossible to find her in this crowd, and she could have already left the cathedzal.

  A shine caught his eye, and he looked down. A small coin lay at his feet. He bent to pick it up, even as the people pushing past threatened to knock him over. It wasn’t a Gold First or a Silver Second. It would be worthless aboveground, but he recked exactish where someone could use this as currency. The symbol on either side gave it away.

  A ladder, twisting in on itself to form the shape of a half-moon.

  The symbol of the Schism.

  FIFTEEN

  duty, n.

  Definition:

  that which one is bound by moral obligation to perform.

  respect, regard, reverence.

  an obligation; any assigned service.

  a euphemism for defecation.

  Andra couldn’t feel her body.

  That was her first hint it was a dream.

  She was running.

  That was her second.

  She was nothing but thought and energy and time, but somehow she was running toward something. There was a clock beeping or a bomb ticking or her heart beating. Whatever it was, it was counting down. Something was almost over. Something was about to begin.

  As she ran, the scenery shifted, a swirl of colors and shapes and instinct. Everything was a blur until she focused on a single detail.

  A stack of books.

  The Griffin Statue.

  Her father’s dogs. Her mother’s disappointment.

  They nipped at her heels as she passed.

  She was flying.

  Something rose ahead of her. Something big and dark and important. She couldn’t see it. Not with her eyes. She was going to hit it. She was going too fast, flying too straight.

  She couldn’t slow, couldn’t swerve.

  She was a drone—the kind her brother raced when he could hide it from their mother. She was being controlled. Faster and faster she flew, drawn forward, pushed forward. By fate or kismet or predestination.

  She was going to crash.

  * * *

  Andra jerked awake to the scraping of metal against brass as the gauzy pink curtains were thrown wide. She groaned, squinting into the sudden beams of sunlight haloing Zhade’s silhouette. She couldn’t have gotten more than a few hours’ rest—if she could call it that. She’d almost been murdered yesterday.

  And that hadn’t even been the weirdest part of the day.

  She’d been introduced to the colonists’ descendants as their goddess and they’d worshipped her as she was submerged in a shimmering nano’swarm.

  It was so awkward.

  She’d never been religious, but she was sure that twenty-second-century holy rituals hadn’t been anything like this.

  The nanos had tickled, but they weren’t technically doing anything. The people looked at her like they expected her to perform some miracle with the nano’swarm, but there wasn’t anything she could do. Even if she could use her ’implant, she wouldn’t do so to impress the people. She’d use it to track down a mech’bot and AI.

  Andra had barely had time to take in the variety of skin tones and racial traits in the crowd. She’d glimpsed the red hair prevalent in her mother’s family, and even recognized some of the features she had inherited from her father’s side—though she wasn’t sure she could call them Southeast Asian, a thousand years in the future on a planet that had never had an Asia. In fact, so much time after colonization, she suspected the descendants had formed their own racial constructs, and not necessarily the ones she was familiar with.

  The diversity of the city was surprising considering Eerensed was a closed society. The city must not h
ave always been sealed off to the Wastes. It almost reminded Andra of Riverside—lots of races living together, though only certain ones had power. It didn’t escape her notice that Tsurina and Maret and the diplomats had much lighter skin that the average Eerensedian. Though looking at the crowd, it had been hard for Andra to pinpoint what the average Eerensedian would be. She hadn’t had time to ponder it before someone tried to kill her.

  The attempted assassination had shaken her, but only after the fact. She hadn’t even known what was happening until the man lay dead at her feet, slaughtered by a ’bot controlled by the Guv.

  Maret had killed again, with nothing more than a thought. But he’d also saved her. And when he’d helped her afterward, he seemed almost as shaken as she was. Zhade had been nowhere to be found. So much for him trying to keep her alive.

  She hadn’t seen Zhade again until she was back in her room. He’d been waiting for her, leaning against a marble wall and twirling a piece of metal between his fingers. There had also been a host of ’bots lined up, left there by Kiv or one of Tsurina’s other guards. They were all variations of models Andra recognized, altered just enough to be unfamiliar. She’d fallen face-first onto her bed, sinking into the mattress as she listened to Zhade ramble about how hard the piece of tech in his hand had been to find. In the end, they hadn’t started goddess lessons that night, because Andra had fallen asleep before Zhade had finished speaking.

  “Show the toe, Goddess,” Zhade said now. “The day happens.”

  “It can happen without me,” she grumbled, pulling the pillow from behind her head and throwing it at him. He caught it and tossed it back.

  “Not this day. Goddess duties await.” He tore away her covers and darted out of the room before she could retaliate.

  Lilibet brought in breakfast, narrowly dodging Zhade’s exit. She giggled and gave a knowing look. Andra scowled.

  * * *

  Andra used what little time she had to skim through the ’bots that had been left for her. Though none of them were mech’bots, she checked their programming anyway, and it quickly became obvious that not just any ’bot would do. Most of them ran on the upgraded Eerensedian tech that had been designed for battle, not manual labor. She needed something that still had colonial programs in its memory banks—something that still remembered how to construct a shuttle.

  She found no AI either. If the ’bots’ skullcaps were clear, Andra could easily see if they had the silicon CPU of a standard ’bot or the wetware brain of an AI. But most were opaque, so she was left with giving each a Neo-Turing Test. She’d gotten through half the ’bots by the time Kiv came to collect her.

  “Are you taking the angels too?” she asked, tugging at her silk clothing. Today, she was wearing a jumpsuit, but between the sheer material and the way the bodice wrapped around her torso, it was hardly practical.

  Kiv merely grunted and turned, expecting her to follow. She did, not wanting to be on the other side of that spear.

  They made their way down a number of stairways Andra hadn’t seen the day before and ended up in a small stone room on one of the lower floors of the Rock.

  Maret sat at the head of a long wooden table filled with various older men and women. Tsurina sat to his right, dressed in gold and black, her brown hair falling in waves over her shoulders. Behind them, two gleaming black mech’bots stood against a wall of windows, giving Andra a view of the courtyard below. Her stomach lurched, both from being near the site of her maids’ executions and from the surety that Tsurina wouldn’t give her access to these particular ’bots.

  “Goddess,” the man to Maret’s left said. He was balding, white tufts of hair sprouting above his ears. “We have so much honor for you to join us.”

  He stood, his chair scraping against the floor. The rest of the meeting attendees followed suit, all except for Maret.

  “Please, have a seat,” the man said.

  Maret rolled his eyes. “Firm, firm, sit so we can start this meeting.” He gestured to the empty seat at the far end of the table and added under his breath, “Finalish.”

  Andra sat, careful of her embroidered jumpsuit against the grain of the wood. The others sat too, a chorus of scraping chairs and groaning joints. Maret met her gaze, expression annoyed, and she couldn’t tell if it was directed at her, or a shared secret over the silliness of the decorum.

  As soon as everyone was seated, the man who had welcomed her spoke. “Firstish, Guv, is to convo security for the Goddess.”

  Maret sat slumped in his seat, forehead resting on his fingertips. “Certz, Prezdin. I’m disappointed. We’ve prepped for this for years, and yet the Goddess’s first day here, you’ve allowed an assassination attempt. It was at luck I was there. Must I do your job for you?” Again, he slid into his courtly speech patterns, his mother seated at his side, eyes narrowed.

  His fingertips grazed his crown as his gaze landed on a man halfway down the table with pale skin that turned blotchy under the Guv’s scrutiny. This must be the head of security. He visibly swallowed.

  “Firm, Guv,” he said, his voice strained. “Security will tighten. We will do better. The unforeseen event—”

  “It shouldn’t have been unforeseen,” Maret spat. “We can assume the Goddess’s life is at risk at every tick. But especialish during religiful ceremonies.”

  Andra bit her lip. She’d just started coming to terms with pretending to be a deity or else risking execution. She wasn’t ready to accept that she might be killed anyway. She couldn’t wrap her mind around the fact that people wanted to murder her. She’d barely been noticed in her previous life.

  Maret gave the head of security a dark look. “Sfin, are you so incompetent you didn’t even consider a possible threat?”

  The mech’bots behind Maret both raised their spears in Sfin’s direction. The movement happened so fast, Andra almost didn’t catch it. Maret lounged lazily, as though bringing two huge ’bots to attention cost him no effort.

  “I will do everything in my power to protect the Goddess, Guv,” the man said, bowing his head meekly, a visible tremor in his hand.

  Tsurina cleared her throat and seemed to communicate something to her son.

  “Good,” Maret said, and the ’bots relaxed their weapons. “Now, assuming that these attempts on the Goddess’s life will be numerful and frequent, what are your plans to prevent them?”

  Despite his insistence that Andra not be assassinated, Maret didn’t seem actually interested in the suggestions. Andra, on the other hand, listened intently, itching to take notes. The advisors provided strategies, all in the dialect Zhade had called High Goddess. It was easy for Andra to pick apart the sounds and meanings, and she found herself almost slipping into the accent—even if she didn’t use the slang itself—as she responded to the proposals, most of which required her to be escorted at all times. She was beginning to wonder if she was even going to be able to go to the bathroom by herself.

  “Um, excuse me?” She raised her hand.

  Maret drummed his fingers against the wooden table. “Firm?”

  “This is all fine for during, you know, business hours, but I’m not comfortable being followed around twenty-four seven.”

  Maret sighed and pinched the space between his eyes. “Scuze?”

  “I don’t want someone following me around all the time. I want . . . alone time. Time to myself. Surely I don’t need an escort every moment of the day. It’s a waste of resources. As long as you make sure the palace is secure, then there’s no reason to have someone tailing me.”

  Maret gritted his teeth, his eyes heavy-lidded. “But what bout threats from inside the palace?”

  The room was silent, all eyes directed at her. It was a good question, and one she didn’t want to ponder. Any person in this room could want her dead—would want her dead if they discovered she had no godly powers. She couldn’t replicate whatever magic the fi
rst two goddesses somehow had. People had already tried to kill her, and Maret was talking about it happening again as inevitable.

  She took a deep breath. She just needed to survive long enough to get out of here. Find a mech’bot, find an AI, build a shuttle, and return to the Ark. She’d get back to Earth, where—even though it was a thousand-years changed—people wouldn’t actively try to assassinate her. She couldn’t do all that if she was being followed all day, every day.

  She met Maret’s gaze. “I assure you. I can deal with any threats that come from within the palace.”

  She wasn’t sure she’d been convincing. She’d never delivered an ominous threat before. But a shiver went through the room. Even Maret looked taken aback, before his bored/annoyed expression slid back into place.

  “Evens,” he said, then turned to the man at his left. “What’s next to convo?”

  * * *

  The meetings lasted all day. Andra survived by giving vague answers and repeating lines from the wisest characters in her favorite sims. The one tricky moment was when someone asked about the ’dome and what she planned on doing. Since Maret had brought it up at the ceremony yesterday, Andra had paid extra close attention to the skin of the ’dome. It was true about the ley lines, though they weren’t called that. They were just rotting nanos. The connection between the individual panes of glass was breaking, the seams becoming more visible. If she stared long enough, and the light was just right, she could make out each hexagonal link in the ’dome. That wasn’t good, and she definitely didn’t know how to fix it. In Andra’s time, whenever nanos began to rot, you would just run an update, or they would automatically be replaced by nearby nanos. Andra couldn’t run the update manually, and she didn’t know why the ’dome wasn’t healing on its own. She’d smiled tensely and said she was working on it.