Mike Allen - Clockwork Phoenix

Vegar refused to leave the hillside while a gun was pointed at Akhila, so a medic was dispatched to bring him warmer clothes and treat him where he sat. He also refused pain medication, which would have encouraged sleep. For a while, he hoped she might get up from where he left her, but she remained supine for the rest of the night. She didn’t speak again either, but her eyes continued to roll left and right, up and down until she had cooled enough that ice gathered on their surfaces. Then she stopped moving altogether. After a time the monk with the weapon relaxed, and Vegar withdrew to a place within where there was no weariness and no pain.

Akhila began to transform again when the sun rose. Her rocket body split into a head, torso and limbs while her silvery skin grew caramel-colored and soft. By mid-morning she looked like the person she claimed she was, a full-hipped, brown-eyed woman with black hair cropped short. “Thank you for saving me,” she said to Vegar when she was done.

He stood up from the place where he had kept vigil and began to pace. “I’m not doing this for you.”

“I didn’t think you were, but thank you, nonetheless.” Her voice was low and soft.

Vegar’s wounds were still blistering; he could feel the puffy pockets of fluid ballooning against his bandages. His eyelids felt heavy, and his limbs were weak. The muscles in his jaw knotted. “What kind of refuge do you expect us to provide while your people are butchering ours?”

“I don’t know what I expected, and it’s war, not butchery.” She wrapped her arms around her knees and looked up at him. Her eyes were full of ghosts. “Even so, I’ve done some terrible things.”

Vegar stopped pacing, and his lip lifted back from his teeth. “The Valfather counsels us that the path of strength is to atone for our mistakes, not run from them. I won’t be your confessor.”

“What would you have me do, go back to the worlds I’ve blighted and make amends with the dead?”

“Is that why you’re really here, to ‘blight’ us?”

“Don’t be stupid. I took refuge in good faith. If I had wanted to kill you, you would be dead.” She glanced at the other monk, who had lifted Sigurd’s weapon, and smirked. “Good luck with that. I’m not so vulnerable in the sunlight.”

“I should have let our Godman shoot you when he had the chance.”

“Well, I’ve certainly earned it. Would you like to see how?” Before he could answer, her body began to stretch, thin, and re-shape into a pair of figures; a smaller replica of herself and a small boy dangling in her grip over a rocky outcropping.

The stone under the replica’s feet melted away, and as it dissolved, it was drawn up through her legs and torso, which pulsed in a slow but steady rhythm. Then her mouth opened wide, and a flood of tiny, transformed particles poured from her nose and lips onto the face of the terrified child.

“Little boys go to school,” Akhila said. “Little boys go home. And everywhere this one goes, I go too, forever. Let me show you something else.” She morphed again. This time she became the boy, a few years older now. He was half silver and half skin. His wrists and ankles were bound, and his ears trickled blood. “He was a good carrier, and he’s still alive somewhere in a small, dark place I can’t find. But his people are dead; my nanoparticles bled from his pores and burned their flesh away. I went back and collected them before the bones were buried.” She resumed her human shape. “It was easier than making new ones.”

“Why?” Vegar’s vocal cords constricted as he spoke, and his vision blurred. He thought he might vomit bile out of his empty stomach.

“How can you call yourself a holy man and not know why? Were you born on this moon? Have you never left? How could your Godman identify me by my profession, point a weapon at me, refuse to use gender-specific pronouns when he talked about me and never have told you why?” Her voice was growing mechanical, resonant. It whined like metal on metal.

Then Akhila froze and swung her head to the left. “Three people are coming. They want to take me indoors.” She surged upward until her body was tall, thin and bulbous at the top. Her caramel-colored skin melted to silver, and the bulb widened.

“For later,” some indistinct part of her said, “when I can’t see the sun.”

Sigurd came over the rise with a pair of armed nuns. As Akhila morphed back, he watched her, a rarified hatred on his face. Two bowls of steaming food smelling of grains and honey shook in his tight grip. “I’ve been on the line with the Councilor all night,” he told Vegar. “She agrees the bomb can’t be trusted, but she asked me not to destroy it. Says it might be useful to study. I think she’s putting the hospital at risk, but I’ve told her we’ll keep it here until the military arrives from off-moon.”

Vegar watched Akhila stare back at him as she was led down the hill. “Can we really hold her with three guns? She didn’t seem afraid of the one you gave to Clautho.”

“Those weapons are mine, and they are sufficient, but the Councilor is sending a militia detachment over with a little more firepower. We’ll be all right for a few days.” He handed the bowls to Vegar and his companion. “Here, I’ve brought you something to eat. I can’t believe nobody remembered to feed you.”

Vegar wondered for a moment how the elder monk could be so certain of his guns, but the bowl in his hands was warm, fragrant and distracting. His mouth watered, and his stomach growled.

“Vegar…” Sigurd began, and then sighed.

“You were right. I’m sorry I stood in your way.”

“What happened?”

Vegar shook his head. “It’s not important.”

Sigurd nodded. “You tried to do a good thing. I’m just glad it didn’t cost you more than a bad burn.”

Vegar began to walk down the hillside while he ate. Sigurd followed. Akhila’s back was long, straight and brown in front of them, and her hips swayed back and forth like a copper bell when she walked. She looks human, he thought, and remembered what she had said of his mentor.

“Are you all right?” Sigurd put his hand on Vegar’s shoulder.

Vegar blinked and realized he had stopped. “I’m glad too,” he said, and started walking again.

They shut Akhila in a root cellar and posted the nuns outside. Vegar slept the rest of the day and most of the night in the monastery’s infirmary, where his bandages were changed at regular intervals and ointment was applied to his burns. While he slept, he dreamed Akhila was sitting in the dark, statue-still to conserve energy. He woke wondering what she thought he should know that he didn’t.

In the early pre-dawn light, he went to the arboretum and paced the Stages of the Pentacle, pausing at each elemental shrine to remember its place in the natural world, its place in his body. The winterbound trees creaked above him in the wind, and a flock of sleepy birds hooted down at him from their icy perches. He closed his eyes at the southern shrine and listened awhile as the perpetual flame warmed his face and hands.

The sky brightened. Vegar left the flame and approached the crest of the star where an empty stone vessel represented the human spirit. He usually offered a prayer here, of gratitude or charity, but this morning he felt as hollow as the bowl itself. He had prevented his Godman from protecting the people in his care and had saved a torturer of children, a mass murderer. Then Akhila the rocket and Akhila the woman blended together like watercolor paint in his thoughts, and he remembered she’d said she didn’t do those things anymore.

Vegar wondered for a moment if Akhila’s nanobody made her less human, less worthy of redemption. He’d heard of radical augments, machines with human minds, and believed she could have killed them if she had wanted to in spite of Sigurd’s powerful guns. There was something about the tone of her anger that sounded old, deep, and unhealed, some wound that seeped and poisoned. Did she hope to cleanse it here?