So You Want to be a Robot and Other Stories Read online

  Bishop’s pulse jacked. “Shit. Don’t—”

  Grace fired. The primary barrel was loaded with high-volt stun nets. The net looped ’round the sunspawn’s horns and covered its face. One strand of netting zipped farther, wires targeting heat, and snared Bishop’s wrist.

  Searing pain wracked Bishop, shorting out his breath before he could scream. Dampeners absorbed the brunt of the energy before it electrocuted him. Not much he could do but endure. The pulse-shock made the sunspawn shriek. It dropped atop him. The horns deflected most of the surge. Best to aim for the trunk or legs.

  [Calculation: odds of survival approaching 0%.]

  Fuck, but didn’t he know.

  The sunspawn pinned his wrists with its talons. It repeated his name until the sound sickened him worse than the barbels writhing at his waist.

  “Bishop…Bishop…Bishop…”

  He twisted and levered his left arm against the demon’s strength. Sweat sluiced into the hollow of his throat, bile hot in his mouth.

  The sunspawn bent its neck, mandibles wide. At two handspans, they could slice through his spinal column in one snap. Except it wouldn’t bite his head off until it finished eating his softer flesh.

  Bishop’s heart quavered. He stared into the blind eyes, the glazed scar-shells. Dust itched against his open wounds. He struggled to raise his modified arm, Mercy still gripped in his fist. Should have expected this—the nightmare he’d relived in sleep for ten years.

  “Bishop.”

  One of the sunspawn’s thin feeder tendrils wormed through his shirt and probed the wireweave vest. It found the seam and burrowed against his skin. Bishop thrashed, trying to pull himself free.

  “Bishop…Bishop…”

  There weren’t any rocks this time.

  Muscles bulged in his arm and shoulder; he lifted his wrist, vambrace protecting his tendons and metal bones from the talon edges. A little farther—

  The tendril stroked the scar tissue along his hip. No, not this again. Bishop tried to gain purchases with his legs, lever himself free, but his boots slipped on the smooth ground. A tiny stinger injected paralytic toxin into his vein. Bishop hissed. The touch, like memory, incapacitated him quicker than a firemoth’s venom. His Wire-modified body would neutralize the toxin, but not fast enough.

  [Status: internal systems at 34% percent efficiency. Caution: antitoxin reserves critical.]

  Wispy golden threads branched from the sunspawn’s head—the neural tendrils that would feed on a victim’s thoughts and emotional energy, then drink his soul.

  Bishop twitched, helpless.

  Grace’s silhouette appeared over the sunspawn’s flattening spines. “I’m your tithe, demon.” He grabbed the sunspawn’s sharp horns and wrenched its head ’round.

  The antitoxin worked its way through Bishop’s veins, hot as fire. Still too slow, too fucking slow.

  Grace heaved against the demon’s weight, pulling it toward him. “Do what you will, shiny. No one else will die because of me.”

  Mandibles clicked and the shredded net fell away. Grace’s face contorted, his bloodied hands slipping on the horns. The sunspawn twisted toward Grace in one fluid movement, flung him to the ground, and crouched over him.

  [Status: sunvenom neutralized. Internal systems stabilized.]

  Bishop swore and freed his left arm with effort. He rolled sideways and came up in a squat as he struggled to tamp down panic. Grace had stopped fighting. He’d given Bishop exactly the distraction needed.

  The sunspawn’s skin rippled, releasing a hallucinogenic pheromone. Once it began feeding, it’d look like whatever the offering most wanted to love.

  “Bishop!” Grace cried. “Bishop, oh Lord—kill it!”

  Bishop heaved himself up. “Shut your eyes, Grace.”

  He drove Peace and Mercy into the demon’s softened skull. Its shriek echoed across the territory, its talons flailing. Grace screamed.

  [Record: seventeen sunspawn eradicated.]

  Make it eighteen.

  Bishop grunted and sliced the blades deeper, all his fury behind it—a vertical cut, then a horizontal one. He wrenched the blades free in a mist of pale blood. The demon arched back, spines fluttering as light dimmed and the golden skin burned darker red and into black.

  It crumpled. Bishop pinned his knee against the demon’s back. He sliced the undersides of the spines, peeling them away in thick patches. Blood stained his gloves. When the demon’s back was stripped, he flipped the husk over and gutted its barbels.

  [Record: eighteen sunspawn eradicated.]

  Didn’t he fucking know it.

  He left the pieces where they lay. His lungs ached as he struggled to catch his breath. Purple-gray twilight deepened the shadows around him, the landscape still muted after the demon’s death-cry.

  [Warning: deacons’ presence detected. Estimated time of arrival: five point two minutes.]

  Well, shit. They must’ve gotten trigger reports that something had gone wrong. Bishop dragged himself upright and looked for Grace.

  The man lay curled on the ground, cupping his face. Blood dripped between his fingers and pooled on the ground in a widening stain. Bishop knelt and pried Grace’s lacerated hands away. Grace moaned. Talon marks raked Grace’s face across his forehead and cheek, bone laid bare. The eye was lost. Witch-breath had saved him from having his skull split open; it’d keep infection from taking root, for now.

  Grace pulled away and Bishop let him go.

  [Estimate: offering’s odds of survival 45%.]

  Bishop silenced the Wire-sense updates. Only his thoughts mattered now. He held Mercy at his side.

  “Don’t.” Blood and spit clogged Grace’s words. “Please. D-don’t leave me like this.”

  Bishop couldn’t stop himself trembling. “I know people who can fix that, in the Wire Circles.” If Grace wanted to survive. The Wire-techs couldn’t fix a broken will. Just bodies.

  Grace shook harder.

  “No one’ll know if you leave,” Bishop said. Truth couldn’t hide his desperation. “Your blood’s still on the sunspawn’s talons. They don’t leave bodies, you know that. Your brothers won’t suffer if you’re dead in the eyes of man.”

  Bishop held out both hands, Mercy in one, the other empty. Lord help him, but he wanted to save Grace.

  “You deserve to live.” Bishop had been told he didn’t. He’d believed it for a long time, too.

  Grace shuddered, blood still dribbling down his jaw and throat.

  But he took Bishop’s hand. Not Mercy.

  Bishop sheathed his blade. He hauled Grace to his feet, tugged off his shredded duster, and draped it over the Grace’s shoulders. His back ached from the claw wounds. He found the last of his gauze-patches, ripped the package open, and adhered the sterilized cloth and wire mesh to Grace’s face and cut hands. It’d hold until they found a surgeon.

  “Thanks,” Grace said, barely audible.

  Bishop nodded. He scooped up his rifle and led Grace toward the road. They could reach the rails and one of the cyclone trains by dawn, ride to the sanctuary of the Wire Cities. Deacons wouldn’t follow them.

  The true challenge would come later, when the physical wounds had healed or scarred. Surviving the nightmares and memories and guilt.

  “You’re still wrong.” Bishop’s voice cracked, and he cleared his throat. “Don’t repent for caring about someone. I reckon I can speak from experience there. I lost the one I loved to the gallows. His name was Prudence.”

  Grace tilted his head away, his blind side toward Bishop.

  The ghost whippoorwill struck up its eerie tune again, joined by crickets and the far-off howl of a razor-wolf. But there wouldn’t be a demon song this night.

  Bishop took a breath. “I’ll help you if I can.” He stared at the road lit with the wildseed blossoms’ faint yellow glow. Ten years and counting, he’d been walking it. He was too tired to keep going alone. “If you want.”

  Grace pulled the duster tighter about his ch
est. “Do I get five seconds to choose?”

  “Take all the time you need.”

  He thought he saw Grace half-smile in the dark.

  “Yes,” Grace whispered at last. “I’d like that, Bishop.”

  Bishop blinked hard behind the mask, his throat tight, and with Grace at his side he walked away from the cross and Blessed Servitude.

  WHEN GRACE OPENS his newly crafted eye, the first thing he sees is wire. Thick cords of braided wire snaking like old veins up the walls. It’s dim inside the surgical unit, but for all the black metal and mesh shelves, it feels clean, even in the heat. The air still has the unfamiliar taste of crude oil. Sweat sticks the borrowed clothes to his skin. He blinks, a flicker of pain in his head as the left eyelid slides down over cool metal buried in the socket.

  He’s awake and he’s alive.

  The anesthetic hasn’t worn off. It’s sluggish in his blood, an unpleasant burn at the back of his throat. It blurs the edges of his thoughts like too much bad wine. But it doesn’t dull the deep-etched fear still unspooling through his gut. He survived the demon, survived his own execution. It’s a hard thing to accept, even days later. He wants to touch the new eye, this machine part of his body, the forever-reminder of what happened. Doesn’t dare, yet.

  “Back with us, eh?” says a raspy voice muffled by a respirator.

  Grace turns his head, slow and careful. He dimly recalls the wire-tech mumbling about whiplash in his neck and the horrific bruising along his ribs and back where the welts are still healing. “Guess so.”

  The tech is a small man dressed in heavy surgical leathers that are studded with metal sheeting. Old blood speckles the apron and gloves; the metal and rivets are spotless. Only the skin on his forehead is visible under thick embedded glasses and a breather covering nose and mouth. “Nearly died on us, you did. Venom went right into the blood.”

  The demon’s venom. Grace doesn’t reach to touch his face where the sunspawn’s claws took out his eye and split flesh to bone. He doesn’t look down, either. A new shirt and worn jeans cover whatever scars the demon left on his belly and thighs. He shivers in the heat. He doesn’t know if he can ever look at himself again; what will Humility think—

  Humility.

  Grace trembles harder. Humility will never see him again.

  Don’t think. Harder a self-command than it should be. Don’t go back there.

  “He’s tough.”

  The second voice jerks Grace’s attention back to where he is. He turns his head again, wincing. He craves more anesthetic, and hates that he wants it. Numbness is just another way to hide.

  Bishop stands near the narrow doorway, leaning against corded wire that bunches like supports along the wall. He’s tall, broad-shouldered, dressed in travel-worn leathers with a breather mask over the lower part of his face. His mechanical eyes gleam dull green in the surgical bay’s weak florescent glow.

  Bishop—the man who saved his life. Bishop brought him here to this city, to the medical bay tucked somewhere in one of the vast districts that has no name Grace can recall. Grace’s throat tightens. He ought to say something in greeting, or acknowledgement. All words feel hollow.

  Bishop looks at Grace, unblinking, though he speaks to the tech. “Appreciate your help, Dee,” Bishop says. “Your skill’s always sharp.”

  “I do my best.” The tech bobs his head. “Better if some of us live.”

  Grace flinches. He braces his hands on the metal gurney, gripping the edge until he can’t feel the tips of his fingers. He should be dead—worse, even. Should, and isn’t.

  Bishop straightens. “Grace, we need to go.”

  Grace shuts his eyes—the new optic sensor makes details too sharp, too real. He shoves himself to his feet. The world tilts.

  Bishop’s shoulder is under his arm before he falls. He can’t recall if he walked into the Wire City or if he was carried. Not that he’ll ask. Forgive us our sins, oh Lord, forgive us—keep us safe from the Sun, from the Dark, and from our own—our own…

  He can’t remember the rest of the litany, so he leans on Bishop and swallows down the shame of needing such help even to stand. His wrists carry the memory-weight of the heavy manacles that held him bound to the cross.

  “Sorry about your boy,” Bishop says to Dee in an undertone as he pivots towards the door. “Heard Jackob mention that.”

  Dee’s throat clicks. “We can’t save them all.”

  Grace tries not to flinch again. God doesn’t save the ones He should. “How’d he die?” Grace asks, hoping that Dee’s boy wasn’t crossed and left as tribute to the demons that walk out from the sun.

  “He didn’t,” Bishop says.

  Outside, the air is heat-dried and dirtier. Grace slits one eye—his old one, his real one. He faces a wide, paved street flanked by banks of windowless buildings, worn things built of metal and stone. They’re so big, Grace can’t see the rooftops. He can’t see the sky through the atmosphere dome above the city, or the stars beyond. The noise is the worst of it, though, the hum of great engines, machines grinding. The air vibrates against his teeth as a vehicle big as one of the faithful’s houses back home rumbles past. Grace stumbles backwards. A gust of hot air from a passing carriage stings his face.

  He can feel the space around him, despite the compact grid-like structure of the buildings. His home, Blessed Servitude, was a large town. But he was never lost inside the walls. Here, Grace has no reference points. It’s a cavernous space that his senses are adrift in. Panic edges into him, sideways like it always does.

  He needs to get away from here, but when last he tried to run, he was caught.

  Bishop nudges him. Grace stumbles along, down a narrow alley.

  Grace braces his legs and breathes deep. The city is too big to focus on, its massive presence overwhelming his senses. He needs something smaller, something saner. “What happened to the boy?” he asks, jaw gritted so his voice doesn’t break.

  Bishop shrugs. “The cityheart took him.”

  Grace grinds his teeth. “He’s alive?”

  Bishop’s arm is tense. “Yeah, more’s the pity. The cityheart takes easy targets. Kids, mostly. They’re somewhere down inside, but the fumes kill them eventually.”

  Grace presses his spine against the alley wall. The metal is warm like sunbaked earth. He stares at Bishop, not hiding his anger. It’s ingrained like fear into his heart. “No one does anything?”

  Bishop’s tone is flat. “There’s nothing we can do.”

  “Nothing?” Grace should drop it. He’s always been like this—clinging to the questions he shouldn’t ask. Wanting what he can’t have.

  Bishop rubs his temple above the cluster of thin black-cased wires that trail from the corner of his eye down under his mask. “The cityheart shorts out Wired tech. Anyone dependent on it who goes down dies sure as not.”

  Grace digs his fingertips against the wall, the heat winding up his arms. “You’re telling me everyone’s going to leave the boy to die.”

  “Don’t be so surprised,” Bishop says. “No one intervenes in the offerings, either.”

  “Except you.”

  Bishop was once an offering and he escaped alive. Then he returned to Blessed Servitude, years later, faced down a demon and killed it to save a stranger. Grace doesn’t know where that kind of strength comes from.

  “I can’t go into the cityheart.” Bishop sighs. “Neither can Dee.”

  “Then let me,” Grace says, before he turns coward.

  Bishop shakes his head. “You’d—”

  “Die?” Grace sets his jaw. “We’d not lose much, would we?”

  Bishop is silent.

  Grace turns his face away. He didn’t mean it as a jab. He’s shaking and can’t make his body stop.

  He was tried in Blessed Servitude and condemned to death; he was shackled to a steel cross as an offering for the demon. He deserved to die, and he was so fucking afraid of it. But then Bishop appeared from the wastelands, freed him and challeng
ed the demon for Grace’s sake. Grace fought at Bishop’s side, unwilling to see someone else die because of him.

  You deserve to live, Bishop told him when the fight was over, when Grace lay wounded, poisoned. Bishop offered him a choice between survival and mercy-killing. Grace knew he should have taken the knife, not Bishop’s outstretched hand.

  He still isn’t sure he can believe Bishop’s words. It’s because of him Humility is dead.

  “You gave me a chance,” Grace says. He can’t exist like this: breathing and walking and possessing space, all the while knowing that someone who aided him has lost family and no one else will help. “Dee should have that.”

  “I already paid Dee with credit,” Bishop says. “You owe him nothing.”

  Grace jerks his head side to side and points at his implanted eye. Fuck the pain. “You paid him for parts.”

  Bishop grunts. “He stitched you up. It’s his job.”

  “He saved my life.” Grace can’t meet Bishop’s gaze again, or look up. There will be only steel and the glow of the dome above. He stares past Bishop at the seemingly endless line of flat doors set in the alley wall. “So did you.”

  Bishop is quiet again.

  Grace swallows hard. “I need to make that matter, Bishop.”

  “It already does.”

  Grace concentrates on his breath. Stay steady. “I know.” He doesn’t believe it, and he hopes Bishop can’t see that. “But if I can help that boy, I have to try.”

  Like his little brothers he left behind, like his friends and neighbors, his weakness will punish them more than it will ever hurt him. And he cannot endure that again.

  Bishop turns his back on Grace. “If that’s what you want, I’ll show you where the access hatch is.” His voice is tired. “You know you’ll be on your own.”

  “I know,” Grace says, and this time it’s true.

  “HIS NAME’S DAS,” Bishop says.

  The two of them stand by an open grate in a shallow circular indent between a crisscross of alleys. A few city workers in rubberized contamination suits watch. Musty air gusts up from the tunnel opening. Grace wonders how many willing suicides go down there.