Ify squints, focusing on the half-beast’s circuitry. The green glow at its core changes to blue. It stops. The girl swings and catches it right on the jaw and sends it toppling onto its side. She staggers forward, too tired to raise her weapon for another strike. The beast rises on its haunches, straightens, then gallops in the opposite direction.
Chike puts a hand to Ify’s shoulder and leans in close. “What did you do?”
“I can hack them,” Ify says back.
“But . . . but how?”
There’s no time to explain the Accent, the tech she had dreamed up and put together, the tech she used behind Onyii’s back to surf signals and ride wireless connections and see the insides of things, of people. “It’s complicated.”
“Can you do more than one at a time?”
“What do you mean?”
“The Terminal.”
Then it hits Ify just what Chike is suggesting. The Terminal. If she can find a way to amplify her Accent, she can control bigger machines. She can hack them. “The Terminal . . .”
“Let’s go!” Chike pulls Ify along. Ify scoops up a fallen pistol and tries to keep pace with Chike as they cut a line through the camp. Chike leads the way, firing at enemy soldiers while Ify sweeps behind them, firing at whatever may try to cut them off from retreat.
Then the platform rises before them. A console station set up on a small dais, a staircase winding around it to the center, where the control panel stands. The Terminal.
“I’ll cover you,” says Chike, spinning around to fire at beasts and soldiers approaching from behind.
Each boom in the sky nearly throws Ify to the ground. She can barely keep her feet under her, but she makes it to the staircase and, holding the railing, climbs her way up. When she looks at the keys on the touchboard, though, she frowns. The characters. She doesn’t recognize them.
“What is taking so long?” Chike shouts from below, her rifle letting off small bursts of fire. She’s trying to conserve ammo, Ify realizes. She’s running low.
Ify squints at the touchboard, then, tentatively, puts her fingers to it. It hums beneath her, then she feels it. She doesn’t have to look at the keys in the board. She can feel them. Her brain knows. Suddenly, she’s filled with muscle memory, as though she’s done this a million times before. Her fingers blaze over the keys, faster than she’s ever typed in her life. And then it’s like all the doors in her mind, one after the other, open. Looking at the touchboard, she can see it all. Can see inside the mechs, the crabtanks, all of it. The connection pathways are as broad as rivers.
She jumps from one node to the next, powering down their cores so that all around her, enemy mechs fall from the sky. The cries of their confused pilots are a whisper in her ears. But she can hear the cheers of her comrades as clear as morning birdsong. The crabtank stomping through the greenhouse stops in mid-attack, its top sizzling and sparking before it lets out a fiery puff. Then the thing collapses onto the remains of their garden. Ify scans in a wide circle around her, touching each node she comes across. Then she closes her eyes, inputs a key sequence into the touchboard, and feels a massive wave of energy pulse out of her. Like an ocean tide with her at its center. The wave expands and expands and expands, and each enemy mech it hits sizzles and sparks before collapsing. A wave of command inputs to alter their coding in mid-operation. They drop like mosquitoes sprayed with antiseptic.
We’re winning, Ify says to herself. And all because of her. Because of her tech. Her Accent. She swims through the wireless network she can see in her mind. Dances through it, leaping from comms system to comms system until she stops at one. Onyii. She is inside Onyii’s mech. She can hear her. Issuing commands, naming formations. Laughing. Sister, I am saving us—
An explosion rips the ground out from under Ify and sends her arcing through the sky, limbs flailing, until she hits the earth. Bones crack. She screams out in pain, clutching her ribs. Her head is a thunderstorm of static and machine-whine. Pain swallows her whole. When she manages to turn around, her eyes widen with shock. The Terminal. Fire gobbles it. The console melts in the flames.
Three soldiers make their way carefully toward her with large rifles Ify has never seen before. Sleek, black, almost plastic-looking. They have masks over their faces, and their eyes glow green beneath them. Night-vision lenses. Ify tries to get away but can’t even move. She tries to claw her way back, but they’re gaining on her.
Tears leak down Ify’s cheeks. They’re going to get her. She looks around, wildly, for anything, anyone. But then she realizes why everything seems so different. Her Accent. It’s disabled. But how . . .
She has no time to figure it out.
The soldier in the center fires a net out of his gun that wraps Ify and pins her to the ground with magnetic charges. She has no breath in her lungs to scream. Otherwise, she would cry out for Onyii, whose face is still fresh in her mind. And whose laughter still rings between her ears.
They cinch the net with a collar around her throat.
CHAPTER
7
Swallowed by fire, Onyii’s mech spins and strikes. Pressing down on pedals and pushing and pulling her gearshift, she feels as though she’s become one with the metal encasing her. Her mech rams its fist into the body of an enemy mech and hurls it in a wide arc at several others, ripping out its core. Her mech headbutts another mech. Closes its fist around the rifle barrel of another and crushes her free fist into the enemy’s cockpit. Charging forward, she gets her hands on another mech and, in one swift motion, rips it in half. The armor on her own mech shrieks. Pieces of it fall away. A blast hits her from behind. One of her engines cuts out. She turns, and someone’s spear sticks her. A volley of gunfire pits her windshield with bullet holes. Then, suddenly, it all goes dark.
Onyii hears nothing. Her console stops glowing. Her comms are dead.
Suddenly, her weight shifts. Something pins her back to her seat. Her controls slip out of her hands. Everything’s sliding.
She’s falling.
No no no no no.
She can’t remember how far up she was or what position she’s falling in. But she must be facing down. She fumbles behind her for a cord, praying it’ll be where she needs it to be. Her seat straps dig into her chest. The velocity keeps pinning her arms back. She doesn’t have much time left.
She fumbles with her human hand. Can feel the bones close to snapping, the joints already popping. New tears spring to her eyes. Pain needles every inch of her body. Her mech catches on something, throwing her whole body forward, then back. Her thumb jams against a button and snaps. But a panel bursts loose behind her head, and a wire uncoils. She grabs one end through the pain and jams it into a socket on her Augmented forearm, turning herself into her mech’s battery. It might kill her. But then, so might the fall.