Unnaturals (31 page)

"Please look at me," she said when Nicolas and she were alone. "Please. I want to see eyes that have
something
in them."

Then she hated herself for asking this. Was she so weak as to already be unable to take it? She had a village to save. Besides, she'd told him that she hated him. She did hate him, no matter any cannons, artificial flowers, trains, and broken ancient computers.

He did look at her. He even smiled at her. "Cheer up, Mel. We are almost at the butcher's."

Great. Exactly what she needed to hear. But she returned his smile.

Then she tried the door and discovered it wasn't locked.

There was a woman at the end of the corridor before the elevator's door.

"I am sure you want to get in and explore, and there are people who'd like to meet you," she said, "but there is a condition. You can't go together. Each of you must go alone."

"And if we don't?" Nicolas said.

The woman shrugged. "You're free to remain in your apartment. It is equipped with a cookingstat, medstat, and other city conveniences for the duration of your stay. You may remain there for as long as you wish."

"At what price?" Meliora said.

The woman shrugged again. "Price? We, of all people in the world, don't require payment for anything."

"And what if we want to leave this place entirely?" Nicolas said.

The woman shrugged again. "You may. But you may not come back ever again."

It was like the Academy. Only, Meliora didn't expect to find Eryn here, or Adelaide, Ivan, or Theodore.

However, one person she expected.

"So where is he? Where is the old bastard? Oh, don't look at me as if you don't understand! Where is
Jerome?
"

"So you figured it out. I knew you would." She'd recognize that wheezing everywhere.

"Took me some time,
Doctor.
"

He laughed, that annoying laughter of his that told you he'd looked inside you and saw everything there was—everything worth it—and found just enough to entertain him. "But here you both are, the sweet unnatural doctor, and the boy who stops networks. Tried to stop ours already?" He winked.

Nicolas looked at him with the coldest glare he had. "Don't you know already? That would be disappointing, Jerome34523."

"Ah, so you remember the address of an old man you met only once. How cute. How rancorous." The wheezing again. "I like it. And yes, I do know everything you have tried so far, Nic. I was trying to make
smalltalk.
Polite, civilized conversation. Can't an old man try to be pleasant?"

Taunting him, aren't you. He's been in an impolite, primitive, cruel place for so long
.

"An old man? Perhaps." Meliora said. "But not you."

Jerome smiled at her. "So don't you want to see? Both of you? Don't you want to know where you have brought yourselves—where the journey truly ends?"

"Where it ends? Somehow," Meliora whispered, "I don't believe that my mom is here. Or old Nicolas, or Melanie and her brother, or Arisa's baby."

"Heh, girl, what you're talking about is called dying. If it's a journey"—he shrugged—"who knows. We haven't gotten there yet. Here is just the place where the highest of the high of living humans get. Humans like you, Mel. It was high time you came." He wheezed again. "I was getting worried that you'd get stuck in a village forever. You had options, you know. If only you'd climbed to the ceiling of the dark room in the Academy—there were airtrains on that roof. If only you'd seen a witch's cave behind a waterfall. But I suppose a train still works."

A
village, he'd said.

"So why don't you, my girl, come with me now? Boy Nic—well, he can go, too. He can go with Susie here."

He hadn't included Nic in the
highest humans.

You know, Nic, don't you? He's trying to make you angry. Or—do you know? Do men do the same to other men in the village
?

No, they didn't. They were too busy hunting, cutting wood and sowing seeds. Too busy surviving. If one had an account to settle with another, he'd go at him straight with fists or a knife.

"Can't deal with two of us at once, can you, Jerome?" She smiled. "Have you lost shape? Once you could deal with Eryn herself. Let's go then, you and I. I'll try to be easy on you. See you later, Nic." She didn't look at Nicolas. Why should she? To give Jerome the pleasure? Or Nicolas himself?

We only ended up in the same pot of soup by chance. The boy who stops networks, the girl who breaks computers and fixes humans. He hates me, and I'll never forgive him for what he did in the village. He's not better than Jerome, all right? I don't want to deal with the two of them at once
.

Not that she'd have to deal with Jerome. He brought her to a room full of screens and unfamiliar people and left.

She was used to screens. She'd grown up with them; they had been everywhere.

She wasn't used to seeing herself on screens—and she wasn't used to
others
watching her on screens, their eyes focused and cold.

Clouds being torn apart slowly, gently, by the suddenly calm winds in the aftermath of a storm. A medstat's stiff body lying by a boulder. A waterfall, rushing, sparkling, laughing as if nothing at all has happened—or as if a good thing has happened. A girl, wet and miserable, searching for food for her mother and finding an old witch.

The girl does not look up. This day she has learned that it is of no use to admonish nature. The girl does not yet know that there might be other things in the sky worth admonishing.

Spy satellites. Meliora remembered them from old feeds. They had been like fairytales. Until now.

The screen flickered.

Lucasta, city of happiness and light, of pretty pictures and beautiful fashions. A little girl exchanging pills for candy in a doctor's office.

Flicker. So this wasn't even going to be sequential.

The girl and the mother are walking on a path. They are using a path made by animals, but they don't yet know that nearby there are monsters.

The watchers in the sky know. The mother wavers and the girl holds her up, then gives her their last food and water.

The mother doesn't recognize the danger when a monster comes.

The watchers in the sky do—but they do nothing.

Flicker.

The chief of the Village of Life is alone in the temple. A little boy rushes in—and this time is excused for interruption without permission, because he is bringing urgent news. It is not every day that refugees arrive from one of the decayed cities.

"Two women, both look young, but one says she is the daughter of the other! Their names are Meliora and Erika!
the boy shouts."

The boy's eyes are full of wonder at what, to those in the Village of Life, is a discrepancy in appearances. The chief's eyes, on the other hand, are for a moment—just for a moment, before he puts them under control—full of such wild hope, happiness, and fear that if a look were a punch, it would break a girl.

Flicker.

The chief of the Village of Life has just beaten his daughter. Inside his cottage, the chief steps on a chair. A boy—the future chief—rushes inside and drags him down, then drags the noose away from his neck. Other men come. They tie the chief to the bed.

Flicker.

The girl Meliora is sitting in a room full of screens and cold-eyed strangers who watch them. She is watching one of the screens herself. Her eyes are dry, her face is still.

The girl Meliora slowly stands up and slowly lifts her chair in her hands—then she smashes the screens into pieces.

Wonderful Experiences

Of course, no one beat her. This wasn't the Village of Life. This was the City of Death, and it was so worn-down and broken that death must have leaked through the holes in whatever crooked parts still held together, and spread.

"Broken?" Nicolas said back in their apartment, where her custodians had simply brought her, without even bothering to lock her up. "Mel, what is down there is broken"—he waved towards the window and the jagged, empty-eyed ancient buildings outside—"but the towers up here are more alive than anything you and I have ever seen. The technology they possess is mind-blowing. Space travel, spy satellites—I have always known that they are possible because I have long ago invented them in my own mind—but it is different to see them implemented."

They had shown him the same as her. Oh, not literally the same—what would the use of that be? They had shown him train crashes and old Nicolas dying.

"I knew about spy satellites, too, Nic," Mel said softy. "I didn't have to invent them, even if for some strange reason I would have wanted to. They are there, in the feeds of decades ago. How they work is even explained in detail—if you'd care to dig that deep, and if you'd care to read it all word by word and sift through the inconsistencies and contradictions in order to build the truth."

"To build
the concept.
There is no way you could have built the real thing without tools. Couldn't you have waited before breaking anything here? Waited until you knew more? They seem willing to give us the knowledge! They did nothing this time, just showed you—"

"This is the damn problem! They did nothing! All this time they have watched, and they did nothing! Why—"

It wasn't Nicolas who answered.

"Because, young lady," a strange man's voice said, "they have learned that sometimes the best you can do is nothing. No matter how hard this might be." The man smiled sadly. "And, no, I didn't watch or listen to you through the monitors. We have also learned that a person must sometimes have privacy in order to fulfill their full potential. Indeed these rooms are unwatched. You two were simply shouting so loud that I heard you through the door."

"So, with full respect for our privacy you let yourself in," Nicolas answered in a voice now calm and cold. Mel didn't know if Nic even realized he'd stepped between her and the man, as if the man would at any moment now attack her. "You look young," Mel told the man, "like my mom used to look young—but your eyes are much older than hers. Somehow age shows, in the eyes. Even in Lucasta, if you bothered to watch, you could tell if a person was sixteen or thirty. I can tell, now. So is this how it goes? Death at thirty-something for the likes of my mom and decades of pain and frailty, and in the end death again, for Great-Granddad Nicolas. But not for you."

"Not for me," the old-eyed man said. "Not yet. Because the world needs watchers."

She saw Nicolas nod as if to himself, and she wanted to break things again—but what use was that, ever?

It might be. It might be of use if you knew what exactly to break, and when. So how did one break a city that was already dead?

"You must be wondering," Benedict said, "why we keep death around us."

Meliora shrugged. "You tell me. You're the ones who read minds."

The old man neither laughed nor got angry. He smiled at her a bit sadly, and the old eyes watched her kindly and with patience. Old eyes, kind eyes. Unlike the eyes of the other people here.

"This is not death, old man," Nicolas said. "This is an enormous pile of old buildings and machines. You haven't ever seen the death of something living, have you, except on those screens of yours? You haven't caused death with your own hands.
Have you?
"

Meliora looked at Nicolas' hands. The fresh bruises from fighting, glass making, and escaping artificial flowers shot by cannons had faded after the medstat's treatment, but the longstanding calluses from spears and stones and snares hadn't.

You don't like hunting. I never knew that about you
.

Meliora's hands were also bruised and callused. She looked at her broken nails, and then at Benedict's own soft, white hands, not even wrinkled with age. He raised them in the air.

"Peace! Peace! Sit back down, all right? Listen to me." Nicolas did sit back down. He'd clasped his hands before himself and his knuckles were white. Meliora didn't hate him too much just now.

Benedict sighed. "The thing is, I have killed with my own hands—and with everything else my own—and so has everyone. Do you know about microorganisms?"

Nicolas glared at him. Probably he didn't know. Meliora did. Jerome had told her as a part of her Doctor of Nature education. Invisible creatures lived everywhere. They were in the air, food, water. They lived even inside people; a person carried ten times the number of these as their own cells.

Microorganisms could bring you disease. That, Jerome hadn't told her. She'd made her own conclusions after learning that disease could jump from person to person, after seeing old Codes wash her hands every time before treating the sick. You didn't have to wash your hands in Lucasta, unless you wanted to. Nothing you put in your mouth could kill you.

"I know about microorganisms." Nic was still glaring. "My grandfather told me about them. Told me sometimes that these tiny creatures, which even
they
couldn't see, might get to them one day. '
The not seeing is the key,
' he said. Though at other times he thought something completely different would get to you. Yes, I had a grandfather. Yes, he believed in strange things. Don't you know about him? Didn't you watch him die with only a strange girl for company? He told me that I would die if I stayed. That
they
would get me soon enough. He begged me to go to a place about which none of us knew anything but the name I had once found. It could have been a fairytale—But certainly you know all that!"

"Your grandfather was a wise man," Benedict said gently.

Another voice replied. "Wise or not, he was just a man. Can
you,
boy, be something different, or are you a waste of time?" Jerome, of course. Nicolas didn't react. Neither did he seem surprised to see him. Of course. He was the hunter, he must know for how long exactly her teacher had stood outside that open door.