Stormblood, стр. 148
Heaving, I tore myself away from her. She took one, unhesitant step forward, and crumbled at my feet like a building falling into the sea.
Blue thrummed down my arms and legs as I scooped up the thin-gun and levelled the muzzle at the device transmitting the Surge, blasting it into a smoking pile of scrap.
On-screen, skinnies and Reapers stopped, one by one, looking around as if collectively awakening from a deep, deep sleep. They began collapsing in shock and horror at the things they’d done, the things they’d witnessed. The result stats showed the reports of chaos across Compass waning, dots vanishing.
My shoulders sagged.
It was done.
I lurched over to the second device intended to summon the Shenoi so I could shut it down …
… and felt something. A thud from the infinite depths of a cavern, echoing in the periphery of my senses like a ghostly shadow. Something too vast and terrible to be understood, brushing against me. My skin turned to ice and my muscles contracted, my breathing becoming slow and deep as if something else were breathing with me.
Slowly, slowly, I looked down. Every drop of stormtech inside my body was being drawn to my torso like magnets. It strained against the front of my body, held there to form one long, uneven shape, pushing out.
It looked like a claw.
I reached up to touch the veins in the asteroid rock, once filled with stormtech, now long mined-out. Compass had once been striated and honeycombed with stormtech, turning the asteroid into a Shenoi body. We’d entered through its pores to live among its organs, building structures between the geometries of its bones.
How many other places across the Common had once been like this?
I glanced past the viewport. The geometries of space peppered with glistening stars and celestial bodies and untapped worlds of wonder. And crawling and writhing among these worlds were horrific creatures of fury and rage, creatures that had consumed galaxies. Creatures trying to communicate.
Well, I had an answer for the vicious bastards.
I picked up the device and brought it crashing down, toppling over the signal booster, then gasped, sinking to my knees as if something had been ripped out of me. Slowly, the stormtech spread back across my body. My breathing returned to normal. I shrugged off the presence like a physical thing.
Then I remembered Artyom.
His body was cooler to the touch. I reached out and closed his empty eyes, once so full of fire and life. I’d brought down a cult, stopped a massacre and killed a tyrant. But I couldn’t do the one thing that mattered. I’d been unable to save my brother.
Tears smeared my vision as I held his hand and remembered our last moments before I’d departed New Vladi. Come back for me, he’d said as we’d hugged one last time, the snow blowing and whiplashing around us. He’d wrapped his arms tight around me, as if he could stop me from leaving.
I will, I remember saying, biting back tears. I swear I will. Dark wind howled across the mountains as we pulled apart. I remembered walking to the waiting chainship and not daring to turn around, because I knew I’d stay if I did.
Would Artyom have left me, if I’d been the one whose body was incompatible with stormtech? Or would he have been braver than me, and stayed? I would never know. All his love, all his dreams and all his mistakes, all his scars and wounds, everything we’d gone through together, was ash and blood lost in the wind.
I blinked. Sat up a little straighter.
No, no. It wouldn’t work. It couldn’t. The results had been absolute: Artyom Fukasawa’s body was incompatible with stormtech.
But what about Jae’s altered and improved stormtech?
I was at the desk before I could think it through. They’d packed everything up when they left. There was nothing here. But I couldn’t give up. I could almost feel my stormtech guiding me around the bench and between the crevices of the metal grating where a single jar of stormtech had fallen.
I picked it up. How much do you give someone with a hole in their chest? It was crazy to even think it could work. But me and common sense haven’t been friends for a long time. I found a hypodermic in an emergency med-pack and filled it with stormtech before kneeling over my brother’s body. My hands were shaking. I breathed deep and thought of snow drifting along the New Vladi mountains. The crisp air filling my lungs on the predawn streets. Lending me control.
I injected the stormtech into my dead brother’s veins.
Nothing.
Nothing.
I sagged on the floor, warmed by my own blood.
Nothing.
Nothing.
My little brother was dead.
I closed my eyes. Swallowed my tears as I slid my hand over his one last time.
A twitch. A muscle memory.
Artyom’s body jerked like it’d been electrocuted, his spine arching as his legs thrashed.
The stormtech was trying to jumpstart my brother back to life.
Artyom slammed down again, gasping and spluttering, his eyes bursting open as he clawed for air. I ripped his underskin open and saw the faintest sliver of blue curling under his chest, followed by more and more, like patches of bright-blue sky opening up as clouds evaporated, until a steady blue stream was cycling through his body. His eyes were wild and confused, entering a seizure. Cold sweat ran down his body as I wrapped my arms around him, rocking him back and forth. ‘It’s okay,’ I whispered through the tears, rubbing warmth back into his body. ‘You’re okay you’re okay you’re okay. I’m here. I’m here.’
I don’t know how much time had passed before he managed to croak out, ‘How?’ he rasped.
‘Jae’s little concoction,’ I said.
‘I couldn’t do it,’ he gurgled,