The island's shore was rough and gritty, and the first thing Scout did upon reaching it was cut his hand trying to find a grip. He bit his tongue right after, and then nearly went under the surface when Pyro realized they had reached dry land and started scrambling over him to get to it. She narrowly missed kicking him in the face as she did.
By the time he managed to haul himself ashore, Pyro had already stumbled a few yards ahead. She was on her hands and knees in the dim glow of the single lamp he had seen from the bridge, water cascading off her to the dirt. There was nothing else on the island, he realized as he pulled his shirt off and began to wring it out. They stood on just a broad circle of earth in the middle of the water, roughly the size of a baseball diamond. The only thing of interest was the lamp. "This ain't where Esau was takin' us, was it?" he said, and found his voice ragged and breathless. "There's not—there's nothing here."
He got no answer from Pyro, who was frozen where she sat, shivering. He could see her shoulders heaving as the water slowed to a drip to muddy the ground, like he'd often seen her do when someone fished her out of the canals on the bases. More often than not she would be too shocked to move, and would get gunned down quickly enough. Scout had done it a few times himself. He pushed that memory aside with a grimace and instead gave her a last once-over to ensure his brother's tags were still wrapped around her wrist, and then headed toward the center of the island.
He checked the lamp first and foremost, which was just a steel pole jutting out of the ground with a caged light set on top. It had no other interesting qualities, so he circled the perimeter of the island after inspecting it, straining his eyes for anything of use as he felt the clammy air start to take its toll on his bare skin. The island itself was almost perfectly round, he realized; definitely artificial. It was a comfort that they had managed to run the right way, he supposed, but it wasn't much help until he could figure out where to go next.
Eventually he wound up at Pyro's side again. She had sat back on her calves, staring vacantly at her own grit-covered palms. "Hey," he said, slinging his wet shirt over his shoulder. "You still with me?"
Pyro shook herself, blinking hard. She closed and opened her hands, and looked up. Upon catching sight of Scout, some expression he couldn't quite read passed over her face. "I'm wet."
"Welcome to the club."
"I don't like it," she muttered, looking back down at her soggy clothes. Before Scout could say anything else she had shrugged out of her jacket and started pulling her shirt off, presumably to wring it out. Scout turned his back before she fully managed. "Where's—" She broke off, coughing, cleared her throat, and tried again. "We went under the ground. Right? Where's the robot?"
"I dunno," Scout said, suddenly wary. There was something off in the cadence of her voice, troublingly familiar. "Catchin', up, I hope. You okay?"
"I'm wet," she said again. "I'm wet and there was that monster."
"Yeah, uh, sure was. Listen, you ain't gone crazy again, yeah? Do you remember what happened?"
"Yes," she said absently. He heard the sound of water hitting the ground. "We went under the ground with the robot and a monster chased us."
"Okay, um, yeah. Yeah. Just, you don't … you're kinda talking different," he said, risking a glance over his shoulder. She had not moved, her soaked shirt still in her hands, with an equally soaked bra keeping her decent. In the faint light the wide swaths of scar tissue that laced her arms was surprisingly visible. "It's freakin' me out a little."
She met his gaze, brow knit and chewing her lip. "Oh," she said, a little hesitantly. "I guess the other Pyro is gone again."
"What? What, you mean the RED Pyro?"
"No," she said, shaking her head. "The other Pyro. I don't know where she is. She goes somewhere and then it's just me."
Scout felt his stomach drop. Not now. Not now. "And you're …?"
Surprise overtook her face. It took her a moment to recover, her brow furrowing as she thought. Eventually, she seemed to decide on something, and said:
"I'm Alice."
Across from her, looking at her from over his shoulder, Scout did not seem to know what to make of her. Alice was used to this expression, though it was usually not on Scout. Scout mostly just scowled at her. She had the sort of idea he'd stopped doing that, which was a nice thought, if true. She wasn't sure, though. Maybe. "Okay," he exhaled. "You're Alice. I don't figure you know how to get Pyro back?"
"No. Umm. I think it was the water. She doesn't like water. I don't mind it so much."
"Great. Cool. Do you remember me, at least?"
"You're Scout," she said. "We're teammates. We were in the woods for a while, with the robot."
"Yeah. Yeah, you got it. Look, just … just stay there, don't touch nothing, don't go down by the water," Scout said, getting up. "I'm gonna go try and find … you know what, I don't even know what I'm looking for, but whatever. Just stay there."
"Okay."
So Alice did. She wrung out her shirt again and poured the cold, slimy water out of her boots. As she did something swung down and clattered against the sole, something small and metal wrapped around her wrist: it looked like a necklace, and then it looked like the necklace Scout always wore. Upon further examination she decided that it must be Scout's. It looked very familiar, but in a way that kind of made her feel uneasy, which was a feeling she usually associated with Scout. She would have to give it back to him when he came back, she thought, and pocketed it before going back to scrubbing her hands through her hair to get it as dry as possible. It didn't help, not really. It left her still shivering and damp. Her bag was wet, too, but upon looking inside she discovered the interior was mostly dry. It mush have been waterproof. Her camera was still there. That was a nice thing. She found the paper bird Red had given her, too, but it didn't look much like a bird anymore. Just a crumpled sheet of torn green paper. She worried at it a little, trying and failing to put the magic back into it. In the end she just put it back into her bag, trying to piece together what had happened as she pulled her clothes back on.
Alice was coming to the conclusion that her memory was not very useful. Mostly this was due to the fact that there didn't seem to be much of it, and what was there was hard to find, scattered about like ash from a fire. Most of what she thought was probably useful to know were things that Pyro had done or seen, and a lot of that felt like it existed somewhere out of her reach; she could pull out memories of things Pyro had witnessed, but not put meaning to them for herself, much less what they had meant to Pyro. Pyro was better at knowing about things like feelings and reasons. Alice mostly remembered details, she was finding. Things like how Scout's hand had been cut up when he came back and talked to her, where it hadn't been before they went into the mines, or the way the faint glow of the cigarettes Spy had shared with her in the dry river-bed had made his masked face look even stranger as he told Pyro something she hadn't really wanted to hear. She could remember how many leaves had been floating in the bucket at the well where Pyro had copied the word onto her hand. Alice looked down at her hand again and found a smear of ink, but the action was enough to prompt the memory of Scout telling her what it . She thought about this for a moment, looking for the details around that word, and nodded to herself.
All this said, she thought she had an okay grasp of everything that had led Pyro here. The last little bit was fuzzy, with the running, and the water, but overall it gave her the idea that Pyro had come down here with a purpose. Alice could not discern the purpose. This was discouraging, and she wished Pyro would come back. It had not escaped her that most of the time people wanted Pyro around, not her. She wasn't thick.
But it was just Alice, now, and she didn't know where Pyro had gone, nor how to get her back. That was that.
Scout soon came wandering back. He stopped a short ways from her, his hands shoved into his pockets, looking damp and frustrated. "I dunno what in the hell it is I oughta be looking for," he said, sounding defeated. "Ain't nothing on this rock."
"What did we come down here for?" Alice asked. "We came here to do something, right? And then the monster came. It didn't eat the robot, did it?"
"No. I mean, probably not. We're here to smash up some computer stuff that makes the other robots work. Esau was taking us to find it."
"Esau's the robot?" Scout nodded. "Will it find us? If the monster didn't eat it?"
"I don't know, okay?" His voice was laden with frustration. "We're stuck on this rock and I don't know where Esau is, I dunno where that monster ran off to neither, and you've gone all crazy again, sayin', sayin' you're Alice, what the hell is that?"
"It's my name."
"Yeah, sure," Scout muttered, sitting down and folding his arms around his knees. "This double personality stuff you do is crazy."
So much for Scout being nicer to her. "I'm not as crazy as she is sometimes," Alice countered. "She forgets everything. She gets wrapped up in stuff that isn't important and forgets stuff that is."
"You just said you don't remember why we're down here."
"I didn't either. You sound like her. I said I didn't know why, not that I forgot. She knows some things and I know other things."
"What in the hell could you know that she doesn't?"
Alice thought about it. Her eyes fell on her hand again, with the smeared ink. "I know what kingbird means."
This, she noted with satisfaction, seemed to stop Scout in his tracks.
• Avatar system "3-5a-0" live.
• Timestamp 1633 28 10 1971.
• kldreload /vol/kld/aud_vis … loaded.
• kldreload /vol/kld/speech/jcb … loaded.
• Loaded routine "respawn." Re-verifying system integrity …
This will take some time.
The cavern was as dark as it had always been, for decades and centuries, before the men and the machines had come. Yet now dust floated through the air, stirred up from corners long untouched. Stones and earth were strewn over the ground, against the walls. A pillar of rock lay shattered, untold hundreds of years of erosion blasted apart by gunfire and the blow of a heavy tail.
When Esau's lights came flickering back on again, the first thing they illuminated was a heap of ash: fallen, burned fabric from Pyro's torch, and the only trace left of the two mercenaries.
• Stopping redundant daemons … done.
• _, error: : 0x00033204
• Critical damage detected. Output written to file /vol/kld/logs/110171.
• Balancing matrix failure. Front-starboard motor system damaged.
• Reallocating to compensate …
Esau levered itself upright, slow and heavy. It lurched hard to one side as soon as it got its feet under it, its balance compliances faltering as broken bits of its body failed under pressure. The machine could not feel pain, but the tentative first steps it took resembled nothing so much as a limp. Pieces of metal crunched and gave way to fall to the ground.
• Reallocation complete.
• Loaded routine "hitbox," scanning ... done.
• Scanning completed with errors.
• WARNING! Weapons systems offline!
• Loaded routine "spycheck," scanning … done.
• Scan returned the following positives: 0.
It was alone. Its cameras and heat-sensors picked up nothing, save the gouges in the rock where the devil had torn off after the fleeing humans. It had thrown the machine halfway across the room before that. The beam of Esau's flashlight lingered on the new scars in the earth for a long few seconds.
It shifted its position again, its system struggling to find the optimal way to carry itself. It took another step and something within its damaged left leg dislodged and clattered to the ground. The machine nearly fell, barely catching itself in time.
There was no one there for it to speak to, but it spoke anyway, after regaining its composure. Just a single, word, uttered with a distinctly frustrated inflection.
"Dammit."
The machine had never cursed before, though it was very aware of the concept and general purpose. It seemed like the most sensible response to its current situation.
"Damn it," it said to itself again, and started hobbling down the path the others had taken.
It knew the way, and the way was clear, though the monster's route through the passage had knocked a number of rocks loose that made its trek that much more difficult. A good twenty-five minutes had passed by the time it reached the natural cavern and its reservoir. It stopped, running its search routine again. Its grainy black-and-white cameras were as good as broken in these conditions, but its thermal register could be relied upon.
It thought about this, as the routine booted and ran, and wondered why the register had not picked up the monster that had attacked them.
Two pings, straight ahead. Directly on the island within the reservoir.
The glowing lights set into the dock on the shore greeted Esau as it crossed to them. They pulsed once as it set foot on the metal.
• Signature received.
As it made its slow, echoing way across the bridge, the hiss of unseen hydraulics stirred the air. The lake rippled and sloshed as the sunken remainder of the bridge rose up out of the black, water pouring off its edges.
Its audio input spiked. A voice, scratchy and of indeterminate sex. "Is that Esau?"
"Yeah," said another voice, decidedly male. The machine's thermography flared again as one of the two living figures on the shore got to their feet. "Esau! Hey!"
"Hello, Scout, Pyro," Esau said as its feet hit dirt instead of metal. "The monster. Where is it?"
"Dunno," said Scout, who had trotted up to meet it. "It was here, it chased us, but it wouldn't follow us into the water. We hadta swim. How'd you make the bridge come up like that? Can you—aw, hell, you maybe better make it go back down again in case that damn devil comes back. Can you do that?"
Esau could do that, and did, as Scout filled it in on the order of events after the devil had thrown it across the cavern and bolted off through the tunnel. "I dunno where it went," he finished as the bridge disappeared beneath the water again. "I guess it left. That, that was the thing that bit off our teammate's arm, before we got separated, did you know about that thing? I don't remember if you said."
• Accessing memory ...
"I've never seen it before," Esau said. "You and Pyro have mentioned it, and we came across a footprint that must have belonged to it before we got to Kewaunee. How did Pyro get across the water, anyway? My information says she can't swim."
Pyro was still standing where she had been upon Esau's arrival, watching them, or so Esau thought. It was up in the air whether she had heard it or not. "Yeah, about that," Scout answered, dropping his own voice. "She can't, she's scared of water, I hadta pull her across. But, listen, she—she's got, she has some kinda thing wrong with her head. She sometimes starts acting like somebody else when stuff gets too much for her." He stopped for breath, turning his head in his companion's direction. "Right now she wants to be called Alice."
"I see," Esau said after a moment. "I think I knew this, or some of it. Alice?"
"Hi, Esau," Pyro, or Alice, said. "Are you okay? You're limping."
"Just some minor damage," it told her, as she drew near. "Nothing that can't be fixed. Scout tells me you're having some trouble."
"Not really. That was Pyro. She doesn't like water so she left."
"I see. Well, Scout and I are going to go ahead with our plan to find and shut down the core server blocks. We won't be leaving the same way we came in, so you had better come with us."
"Okay. How are we going to get there?"
Esau took a few crooked steps toward the light set in the ground. It halted about ten feet in front of it. Its readings told it that Scout had followed, and then Alice, too.
• Signature received.
• Welcome back.
"Mind the gap," Esau said, and the ground began to pull away.
A four-foot section of the ground seemed to first sink down and then pull apart, a deep mechanical hum rattling its microphones. When they stopped they revealed a sloping metal ramp, spiraling into the earth. It was dark, but a faint yellow light could be seen at the first curve. "There we are," said Esau, stepping carefully onto the ramp. "Come along. We're almost through."
• Routine "respawn" complete. Result:
• _, error: : Integrity failure. Repair?
