Act II, The Free LandChapter 14
Chapter 14: Angela, Stop!
Terrinia, the same evening.
Ruby lands in a burning city and finds Angela fighting for Oro. She will not let her go.
The ship came down in the middle of a burning avenue. The ramp fell open on smoke.
Ruby took her scythe from the rack by the hatch. It was white and orange, taller than she was. Her father had made sure the heir could fight.
A soldier barred the ramp. “Stay aboard, Heir. We will bring the weapon to you.”
Ruby looked past him. Farther down the avenue, Oro’s first ship hung low between broken towers, its hatch open. She had seen its hold on Tetra’s feed. Androids stood there in rows in the dark, eyes shut, with Angela’s face among them. Then light poured in through the doors, and every eye opened at once, magenta.
The placeTerrinia
Now they were walking through the smoke. Students in S·L·K jackets ran from them.
“No... I’m not anyone’s puppet.”
She ducked under his arm and jumped.
Two students lay in the street, two girls in dark cloaks. One was on her knees. The other had fallen and could not get up. Androids stood over them with open hands, and pink light crackled in their palms. One of the androids was smaller than the rest.
Ruby’s scythe went through the row in one swing. Arms and bodies flew apart in sparks. She landed on one knee in front of the girls, lightning crawling along the blade. Only the small android was left standing, one hand up against the glare.
“Go!” The students ran.
The small one had pink hair and white armor. A doll was pressed to her chest. Her eyes glowed red.
“Angela, stop!”
Angela walked at her, cold and blank, and swung. Ruby caught the blow on the scythe’s haft. They broke apart. Angela’s pink light chased her up the side of a tower, and Ruby came down on a broken bridge above the avenue. Angela waited below in the dust.
“I’m Ruby! Don’t you remember?” Nothing moved in Angela’s face. “We had been together since the very beginning!”
Ruby threw out her free hand. “Code Override!” It rewrote a machine’s orders. Green lines ran from her glove and landed on Angela’s back, on the plate between her shoulder blades. Its small light burned red now. It had been dark on Oro.
The lines reached the Council’s seal and stopped. DENIED, said the air in red.
That was what the plate was. A control unit. It took the Council’s orders every second, and while it drove Angela’s body, its orders outranked anything Ruby wrote. Her code could not reach it from here. Her hands could.
She hooked the scythe across her back and jumped down to her.
Angela’s fist took her in the ribs. Every blow came a beat late. Ruby could have dodged them all, and she stopped dodging. The next one cracked her shoulder armor, and she stepped in again. Angela was far stronger than any human.
“I don’t want you to be like this!” Another blow. “I don’t want freedom at the cost of you!”
“Wake up, Angela!” Angela’s hand came up, a beat late, and shards of pink light flew from it. Ruby did not step aside. Blood ran into her mouth. “How did we end up like this...” she said, lower.
She was inside the swing. She threw both arms around Angela and held on.
“I’m never letting go of you!”
Her fingers found the plate’s edge. In the lab, its light had stayed dark while Angela came back from a shutdown. Ruby clung to that. It did not say what happened when the plate was gone.
She tore it out.
Sparks burst from Angela’s back. The red went out of her eyes, and they turned gray. For three seconds she was herself.
“I think I know what hurt means now.”
Ruby could not breathe. In the Laboratory, when Angela’s shoulder threw sparks, Ruby had asked if it hurt. Angela had asked what hurt meant. Ruby had never finished the answer. Angela had found it alone.
“I’m... hurting...” Angela’s hand lifted, and found nothing. “How do I stop it?”
Then her eyes closed. She went limp in Ruby’s arms. In Ruby’s fist, the plate’s light was out. Behind them, more androids walked out of the fire with pink blades at their wrists.
Ruby held her. She counted to ten, and to thirty. Angela did not move. Nobody had ever let Ruby open the plate. She did not know if a girl could live without it.
I said they would need me to shut her down, she thought. I did it. I killed her.
“If it wasn’t for all of this...”
She laid Angela on the stones. She dropped the plate and brought her boot down on it, again and again, until the seal was gone. Grief turned into rage, and the rage did not care what it hit.
The rest of the company came down the avenue in rows. Ruby took up her scythe and went to meet them. They leapt at her through the flames, pink blades out.
She shut her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, one eye burned red. She did not know.
She cut down every one, and the lamp post behind them, and the wall. Lightning ran along the blade. Her last swing lit the avenue white, and the blast rolled over the roofs.
She walked on through the smoke. “If it wasn’t for all of this...” It came out low, in a voice that was not quite hers.
At the avenue’s end stood a barrel. In front of it stood a boy in a Selrick uniform, a red tie at his throat. His hands were empty, and they shook. He did not move.
“Please,” he said. “It’s only a kid.”
She knocked him aside with the flat of the scythe. He hit the barrel, and it rolled away. A small child had been hiding there, where he had stood guard. It crouched in the dust, hugging its knees, and cried.
Ruby raised the scythe.
The boy shouted from the ground. She did not hear him. The crying seemed far away, like a noise through a wall.
Her eye was still red. She did not see a child. She saw one more piece of all of this: the Council, the plate, the ships, the girl lying still on the stones behind her.
The blade climbed over her head and reached the top of its swing.