Chapter 29: Wreckage

Vexana did not feel the change. She saw it by the violet glow the Enders gave off.

Her hair, black all her life, lay across her shoulder blue-lavender, fading to magenta. She wore a robe and boots cut like Ender armor. In her hand was a staff, and its orb was as black as the void around it.

The Enders ran at her sides, tall and gray. Not one touched her. They did not speak. They followed the Will’s orders through her, not Vexana.

The orders came from everywhere, in the giant’s voice from the vision. They never said why. They said where. The Will believed the vision had broken her, and it never checked again.

“East depot. Strike.”

She led the squad through a portal into Terrinia and chose what to break. A rail depot. A water tower. The blank side of a grain store, where nobody lived. She pointed her staff at walls, and the Enders hit walls.

A camera on a tower swung to follow her. She put one arrow through its mount, and it cracked. Let them see a girl with a staff, she thought. Not my face.

Between raids she searched the dark for the Control Core. She found more dark.

Once, unasked, the voice told her more.

“The gateway is nearly complete. The Mother Matrix will come through it. The Core comes with the Matrix.”

One door, she thought. One day. I will be standing at it.

On nights without orders she watched the Academy from a roof six streets off. She had once walked a rooftop five times with a straight face to hear how far a small gold star could beep. She stayed ten times that far.

Guinevere’s window stayed lit past midnight. Vexana had phoned every night to say go to bed. Now she could only watch.

“Go to bed,” she whispered. The light did not change.

Against her right wrist, inside her sleeve, the Emblem glowed. She had pinned it there so no Ender would see the light.

“For the sake of the Aspirant spirit, I will lie.”

VexanaVoice line

At three the window went dark. She waited ten minutes more, in case it lit again.

A suit that answered the Matrix could be turned on her. She needed one that answered only her.

Everyone in the Science Division knew Selena sold wreckage after dark. Vexana stepped out of a portal into the outskirts, alone. The squad stayed on the far side.

In a dry yard at the dome’s foot, one lamp swung over a stall. A big man was shouting over a crate of plating.

“Half price, or I take it!”

Selena sat on the lid, sucking a lollipop. “It’s not half price.”

He swung. She leaned, and the fist missed her ear. He swung again and hit the post. He kept swinging. Selena was never where the fists landed.

Then he saw the staff and ran.

Selena looked Vexana over from boots to hair. The lollipop moved to her other cheek.

“Nice hair.”

“I need plating for a full suit. Joints. A frame.”

“Sure. It all comes in anyone’s size.”

“You said that in class,” said Vexana. “‘For a price.’”

“I did.” Selena named a number.

Vexana counted it out in notes from the Academy stipend she had never spent.

“Genuine Ender plating.” She packed a sack. “The last owner didn’t complain.”

Vexana shouldered the sack. Selena waved the lollipop.

“Ahaha, bye-bye!”

SelenaVoice line

Vexana asked nothing. Selena had asked nothing. She stepped back through the portal.

In the dark of the void was a hollow no Ender entered. She laid the plates out there by the light of her staff.

Her hands knew the work. They had once mended a drone with a thumbnail and two fingers. Joint by joint, plate by plate, an Ender mecha suit stood up out of the wreckage.

It was dead, as all wreckage is. Aspirant suits began as wreckage too. Belief woke them.

Her palm went to its chest. She did not think of the Will. She thought of a rooftop, two gold stars and a hand pulling her up.

The suit’s eyes lit.

Nothing in the dark had ordered it. At her right wrist, the Emblem glowed.