The gears and pistons in the beast hiss. Ify dropped her weapon. She has nothing.
The beast struggles to stand upright in the tight enclosure, banging its head against the tunnel roof and stumbling sideways as it tries to right itself. It’s stuck.
Ify lets herself breathe a half-nervous laugh, then turns to climb out of the tunnel. She stops when she hears the animal make a whining noise. Its legs retract. It frees itself, then springs forward, metal fangs glistening and ready to rip her chest open. She screams, and a blue light flashes over the beast. Time slows. Ify can see its insides, how every wire connects to every gear and every processing unit. How its drives work, how its optic nerves braid each other. Where its command functions are based.
It’s only an instant, then the thing crashes into her, knocking the wind out of her. Then, all at once, it’s still. Its green core fades. Ify struggles against the thing’s bulk. Her legs swing and push at the ground below her. She grits her teeth. It’s too heavy. But it’s dead. Or off, at least. It won’t eat her.
How?
Ify’s mind races. One second, the thing was getting ready to rip her heart out, then it was in the air, and now it’s turned off, though stuck on top of her. She tries to wriggle free, but it doesn’t budge.
The Accent.
Maybe if she can turn the animal back on . . . She doesn’t finish the thought. The idea of this thing alive again and glowering at her with those red eyes nearly stops her heart. What if she can’t control it? What if the tech is too different? She’s only ridden other connections.
Then she remembers the girls who waited for her outside of class to make fun of her. To torment her and throw dirt and stones at her. She remembers what she wanted to do to them. It all comes back to her like a gust of wind in a storm, and she gets that feeling she always gets before she’s about to fight. The rush of blood to the head. The warming in her chest. The way her fists clench. And before she knows what she’s doing, she’s peering at the beast’s metal organs and CPUs.
Her Accent is on. The wireless network is a tangle of noise and activity. She tries to ride waves of connection, but they thin down to tightropes. So many devices wink out of existence around her like dying stars that explode before vanishing. She runs along the network’s lines, jumping and sliding from node to node until she finds what she’s looking for.
Gears whirr against her chest. The beast wakes up and looks around the small cave for a few moments before pushing off of Ify. Ify coughs and holds her ribs. Luckily, nothing seems broken. Still, it hurts to breathe.
The beast walks backward. Ify lowers herself into a crouch. An explosion outside tosses her to the ground. When she looks up, the beast stands utterly still. She shakes the dirt off of her face before getting back into her crouch. “Okay,” she says to herself, quietly. “Okay. Let’s try this.” She takes one small step toward it, her hand out as though to pet its snout. “Okay, okay, okay. Onyii will surely think me mad for this. But if I can do this . . .” She waits for the thing to lash out and rip her hand off, but it doesn’t move an inch.
She scoots forward again. “Okay. Now, sit!”
A moment passes where nothing happens, then it sits. It cocks its head to one side, considering her. But now it no longer looks like it wants to turn her into goat stew.
“Okay. Um. Fetch me that stick.” And she points to a tree branch behind it. It retracts its legs to get into the smaller part of the cave, then grabs the branch in its teeth before returning to Ify. It’s working. She can barely get a laugh out before another blast collapses the tunnel’s ceiling where the branch had been. The ground above her continues to shake.
It’s going to cave in.
The beast glows green again, then charges toward Ify. She wraps her arms around its neck and swings herself up onto its back just as the cave crumbles behind them. They crash through what had been the entrance in a splash of dirt and brush and metal, and suddenly, the world is louder than Ify has ever heard it before.
With her Accent on, all the camp structures glow with blue outlines. Ify looks up to see mechs, also threaded through with strands of blue light, streak through the sky like stars. The only things that don’t shine are the explosions when missiles hit a mech and blow it right out of the sky, when a crabtank smashes through the mess hall and sets off the generator, knocking one of its own legs out but setting the whole building on fire. When enemy Green-and-Whites accidentally step onto a gravity mine that swirls them into the air in a burst of energy before splitting their mechanized bodies apart.
Ify’s beast gallops through the katakata. She looks behind her to find other mechanized half-beasts chasing her. With greater confidence than last time, she twists on her animal’s back, then zeros in on the CPUs of the beasts chasing her. A few tweaks to their coding, and they break away to attack their former masters.
Hooves thunder in the distance, getting closer. A shorthorn smashes through a stack of crates, swinging its head back and forth. The crates splinter. Food supplies and rations spray through the air. Stray metal dings Ify right in the head, hurling her from her beast. The world spins around her before she finally comes to a stop. The shorthorn is a mass of meat and metal. Plates and circuitry screwed into it, wires disappearing in its rotting flesh. A corrupted thing poisoned even further by the Green-and-Whites. Kept alive by tech and coded to kill. It looms over Ify, nearly as tall as the Obelisk, then charges forward again.
She narrowly dodges its hooves.
Gunfire from just over Ify’s shoulder pings against the shorthorn’s armor. Ify turns to find Chike firing with her rifle. Those bullets can’t do any damage, even though they draw blood from the shorthorn. It’s ping-ping-ping until Chike detaches a launcher from her waist and screws it onto the bottom of her rifle. With practiced motion, she slips a grenade out of her chest pouch, then loads the launcher and aims.
“Down!” she shouts, then fires.
The shorthorn’s head disappears in a mass of blood and smoke. Ify dashes out of the way just as it falls onto its side.
“Chike!” Ify barely knows the girl, has only seen her from time to time acting as a sentinel for the camp, a guard. She has sometimes seen Chike on the beach in warmer weather, practicing the moves Onyii had taught her and the other girls earlier. But now Ify squeezes Chike in an embrace. “Thank you.”
Chike breaks away and nods.
“Onyii,” Ify breathes. “Where is she? Is she safe?”
“None of us are safe.” Chike whirls around and shoots down another mechanized jungle cat. “They have colonized the animals, even.”
A mech swoops down and riddles the ground with machine gun fire. Chike grabs Ify, and they dive for cover. The grass shoots up in chunks with each volley. When Ify looks up, through the crack in a set of fallen crates, she sees one of the girls who had tormented her earlier swinging a metal beam at one of the beasts. It snaps its fangs at her. Each of her swings misses. Emotions duel inside of Ify. That girl has hurt her so much. Has beaten her when Onyii wasn’t looking. Has demeaned her. Has made her feel like she could never belong here. But Ify can’t watch her die. Not like this.