I smiled. “We’ve exposed them.”
He nodded. “Long overdue. For the herdsman, nomad culture, the people of the Hour Glass, and all those the company has crippled, including you.” He reached out and took my good hand and drew me close. As we embraced and I lay my head on his shoulder and he lay his on mine. Two minutes later, the forcefield grew smaller with us.
“They own everything,” I said.
“So they thought.”
I laughed. “Until I started glitching.” And I swear in that moment, if all of them could laugh, they did. I pressed my body to him, and smelled his sweaty dusty skin, and it was then that I had an idea. It wouldn’t save our lives. We were going to die. But that was okay if this idea worked. It would be more than worth it. I reached out and there I was before the pomegranate of eyes. Millions of them. Attentive. They started looking the moment I had the thought. And then I had my answer. I stood back from DNA and took his hand with my flesh and bone hand. “Come on. We have to move fast.”
“Where?” But he let me lead him.
“We’re close and we have just enough time if we move now.”
We put our heads down and we shuffled. Paying close attention to the border of the anti-aejej. As its strength weakened, it shrunk and our feet got closer and closer to stepping over the edge. We could see nothing with our eyes, but they showed me by other means and I could see it clearly. We were so close. One of the turbines. A Noor.
* * *
—
When I was a small child, I thought a lot about dying. What it would feel like. The last thing I would say. The last thing I would think. Where I would be when it happened. I knew I didn’t want to be in a hospital room or in the bedroom where I’d spent so much of my miserable life in pain. I wanted to be in the light, basking in the cleansing spirit of the sun. To be in sunlight was to dance. I couldn’t dance now, and the sun above was blocked by a chaos of roiling dust and sand and wind. I’d never see the sun again.
I wanted to sit down and wallow in this fact before the anti-aejej quit. Instead, I focused everything I had left on putting one foot in front of the next while holding DNA’s hand so tightly it had probably gone numb. “Hurry,” I said. We were shuffling now, the dome of the anti-aejej so close that this was all we could do. The tips of DNA’s feet were bloody from stepping the tiniest bit into the storm. Not for the first time I was glad to be made of metal in parts that counted.
DNA never asked where we were going. I didn’t have the breath to explain. Let him understand if there was time and reason to understand. The anti-aejej was beeping three minutes when we reached the base of the Noor. The end of the great horizontal helix, where it blasted out accelerated wind and harnessed the power, was not far to the left. But we were at a safe distance. If we’d walked a tenth of a mile to the left, we’d have walked right into the near silent stream and been gloriously obliterated.
We sat with our backs to it. I turned around and touched its surface. Sand-colored and smooth, and cool. I knocked at it with my knuckles. “So solid,” I breathed. Even in the noise, I could feel more than hear it, a deep hum.
“Had to be or it would blow away,” DNA said, leaning his head back. His face was wet with sweat. The closeness of the dome left the air dusty and hot.
“Why do you think you weren’t shot?” I asked. The question had suddenly popped into my mind. When DNA’s cattle and friends had been killed in that farmer town, he’d stood there out in the open, in shock, yet no bullet reached him.
“I have wondered, AO,” he said. “It was all happening around me, and I willed it and, maybe, something gave my will power.”
“Maybe,” I said. If there was something I had learned, it was that sometimes, will could be very very powerful. “Two minutes,” I whispered. We were still holding hands and I squeezed his tighter.
“AO,” he said, looking hard at me. “Do what you came here to do. I won’t die until I’ve seen it done.”
I stared at him and he stared back. We’d had so little time together and that time had been spent running for our lives, yet, somehow he knew me so well. He knew what I was. A man my family would see as a mere herdsman who knew so little beyond his patch of desert. One minute and ten seconds.
“Do it,” DNA repeated. He laughed and then coughed. The dome had just shrunken some more and the air was foggy with dust. The anti-aejej began to beep the last sixty seconds away. I could already feel the grains of sand getting through as they pelted my face.
“It will hurt, reaching out to so much,” I said.
“It’s about to hurt a lot more,” he said.
I looked up into the chaos above, knowing the Noor was there, near silent and sleek. I turned to DNA. He took me in his arms, and I rested my head on his chest. “It will hurt.”
“I know.”
“I’m glad I met you.”
“I love you,” he said, pressing his lips to my ear. I thought about what the sorcerer Baba Sola had said, “The world isn’t all about you, AO.” Had he known it would come to this? Probably. Maybe that’s why he’d wanted to see us with his own eyes. As DNA held me, I reached out. I stepped out, remembering my dream from only days ago. The one with the eyes, so many red eyes. The pomegranate of eyes. I looked back and reached to them and I told them. I did not request. I did not inform. I just acted. I shut them down. Not one by one, all at the same time. I could do that. It was like pressing one button, pulling one plug, sending two commands.
SHUT DOWN. DISCONNECT.
I squeezed my eyes shut as pain like I’d never felt washed over me, flooding my head first. In that spot where they’d placed the chip, where I wasn’t supposed to feel pain because there were no nerves. Like fire, like ice, like being torn apart. Into DNA’s chest, I screamed and screamed and he held me tighter. I asked for death. I asked for it, then I reached out even further.
Every
Single
Fucking
Noor.
SHUT DOWN. DISCONNECT. SHUT DOWN. DISCONNECT. SHUT DOWN. DISCONNECT. SHUT DOWN. DISCONNECT. “KEEP GOING!” I shouted. “ALL OF YOU, OFF OFF OFF!” I tasted blood in my mouth, felt it fill my ears. My brother’s drum beat was wild and beautiful. I would be free of all of it soon. Let my bones, metal and carbon, fly. I coughed, as my heart beat strong and steady in my chest despite the blood dribbling down my nose, from my ears, flooding my mouth. I was crying tears of blood. For myself, for what I should have been, for DNA, his cattle, everyone Ultimate Corp had stunted, deformed, exterminated, and displaced. “Today, you know us.”
The Noor we leaned against stopped. The hum was there, then it was not. DNA and I looked at each other as the anti-aejej died, then we hugged tightly, pressing our faces into each other’s chests as the sand whipped into us. Both of us had just wanted to be left alone to be what we were. Now they had all left us alone to die.