“Good point.” Noemi sighs. “I guess my great escape plan wasn’t so great.”
This is his chance to rub it in, but Abel doesn’t take the bait. “You showed considerable ingenuity and quick thinking. You couldn’t have known the water-circulation schedule would work against us to this extent.”
Abel saving her life is just one of those things a mech is programmed to do. A mech being nice to her is something else entirely. Once more, disquiet stirs within Noemi, but she’s too exhausted to dwell on it.
And one instant later, she sees what they need. “A platform! Roughly twenty meters ahead.”
He still keeps looking at the stone, making sure of each handhold. “On this side of the river or the opposite?”
“The opposite. Can you make it?”
“I think so.”
Noemi doesn’t like the sound of that. “Are you mentally coming up with the exact odds of your making it across the river, and not telling me because it’s too scary?”
“I find that humans rarely want to hear exact mathematical findings, at least in the course of casual conversation.”
“That’s mech for ‘yes,’ isn’t it?”
“… yes.”
“Fabulous.”
Abel adds, “I will specify this much: If the odds weren’t better than fifty-fifty, I wouldn’t tell you I thought I could make it.”
They’re not much above fifty-fifty, or he’d say so, Noemi thinks. But there’s nothing else for her to do but hang on.
When they’re about five meters short of the platform, Abel pushes off from the wall, hard, without warning. Noemi’s already clinging to him so tightly it makes no difference, but she still gasps when they’re back in the current, at the river’s mercy.
This time, however, the river loses. Abel’s greater strength has already propelled them more than halfway across, and he kicks so powerfully that they’re pushed sideways as strongly as they’re moving forward. She lets go of her grip on Abel’s shoulders to reach out with one hand, which means she’s the first to grab the platform railing.
They crawl onto the platform together. But the moment they’re out of the water, Noemi collapses on her back, breathing hard. Now that pure terror is no longer fueling her, she realizes she’s almost completely out of energy. Every muscle quivers and aches. The scrapes along her forearms and the many bruises on her body were temporarily dulled by the crisis; now she feels every single one of them. Her wet clothes stick to her body, sodden and heavy, one more reason she feels like she’ll never again be able to move.
Abel, of course, is fine. He gets to his feet, brushes back his damp hair, and looks up. Noemi realizes the tunnel goes much higher here—another fifty meters, at least. He says, “I think there’s an observation station above us. Currently deserted, to judge by the lack of illumination. If there’s no other point of entry, we should be able to break through one of the windows.”
Noemi cranes her neck to look up at Abel from her place flat on her back. Sure enough, there’s a black metal ladder leading up. But she shakes her head. “Abel, I can’t climb that ladder. Not now, not for a while.” It doesn’t even feel like she could sit up.
“I can carry you, if you have the strength to hold on.”
She takes a deep breath as she considers this. It isn’t a question of her will; this is about her literal, physical strength. Nothing saps energy as drastically as swimming for your life. There’s no point in trying to go up the ladder if she’s only going to fall halfway there and get herself killed.
Slowly she sits up. She flexes her arm muscles, then her legs. Finally she nods. “Let’s get started.”
Abel helps Noemi to her feet, then takes his position on the ladder. She wraps herself around him once more, now clinging to his back instead of his chest. As he starts climbing upward, she realizes how much more difficult this is out of the water; as overpowering as the current was, at least her buoyancy took some of her body weight. This way, her arms have to bear it all, and they can’t bear it for long.
“Abel?” she whispers. “Can you go any faster?”
He responds, not with words, but by speeding up so much it startles her. This is inhuman speed. The ride’s bumpier, but it hardly matters, because they reach the station within seconds. It’s a half hexagon of silvery metal sticking out from the rock wall, with thin mesh screens over the windows instead of glass. Just as Noemi’s wondering how easily the windows can be tugged from their frames, Abel punches through one of the mesh screens, pulls the whole thing out, and drops it in the river.
Noemi climbs in first and slumps into a chair as Abel joins her. Strands of his dark blond hair cling to his damp forehead, and his wet clothes drip onto the floor, yet he shows no signs of tiredness or alarm. She hasn’t begun to discover the limits of what he can do.
Abel has done all this for her, knowing that she has to destroy him.
“Thank you,” she whispers.
He looks down at her in surprise, then smiles. “It’s unnecessary to thank mechs.”
“I’m not thanking you because it’s necessary. I’m thanking you because you deserve it.”
The silence between them goes on for too long after that. Noemi doesn’t want to feel grateful to Abel; she doesn’t want to be awed by him. She’s letting herself get… confused, distracted. They need to concentrate on the mission.
“Okay,” she says. “From here can we figure out where we are? And where a thermomagnetic device might be?”
Abel moves toward the one computer console in this station. “Probably. We have adequate time to research this and be sure, and for you to rest.” He says the last part as easily as the first, but she still hears what sounds like genuine concern in his voice. “Your escape plan may have had unforeseen difficulties, but at least no one will find us here.”
The door bangs open. Noemi startles as she sees someone standing there—a tall girl about her age or a couple of years younger, with deep tan skin, long brown hair caught back in a ponytail and streaked with red, and a smug grin on her face. Behind her stand three other people roughly the same age, all of whom begin to cackle with laughter.
As Noemi stares at the newcomers, aghast, the girl folds her arms across her chest with pride. “See, Razers always find bugs in the system. And now we’ve found you.”
20
ABEL REMAINS SILENT AND STILL, ASSESSING THE SITUA-tion. He has protocols that would kick in if he and Noemi were being taken captive. But their discoverers—the “Razers,” as they call themselves—can’t make up their minds what to do next.
“We walk in there with these two and just watch the head of security have a complete meltdown.”
“If security figures out that we’re ahead of them, they’ll ask what we were doing down here. Do we really want that?”