Raise your hand if you find the AIDAN reference from Gemina.


tell me when you hear my heart stop

- vi -


In the blankness of the between, the short skip and leap from her severe system malfunction to the numberless void of nothing, to the restart, Crescent dreams again.

She burns away in the loneliness of seven long years in a far, far away satellite under classified co-ordinates. Under a dome of metal and moondust. Wasn't her programmer imprisoned in a satellite? She can't recall…she…

.

- ERROR -

.

She works for the Queen. The Lunar Queen who burned in the war she couldn't finish.

But she hasn't burned. Not too badly just yet. Not in this dream. She's whole and hungry and haunting. She makes Crescent slice herself into tiny, tiny pieces that she scatters across Earth to listen, to see, to steal. In this fabrication of malfunctioning numbers, Crescent is a girl and a river of codes at the same time. She's in her moonndust cage and in the halls of New Beijing Palace, in the Pentagon, and in Buckingham Palace. She's everywhere the Queen wants her to be. She's anything the Queen needs her to be.

In the real world, in the past world, her programmer hadn't had to break herself like this. She only had to configure and code and she had been free enough to slip in a sliver of defiance into the spider she was sending off to New Beijing. Smear in a few important invisible strings of hope. If any of it had torn at her, well, that would only be speculation. Crescent hadn't been there to really know any of it.

So why can she remember?

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- ERROR -

.

- IDLunADelta5 is requesting login access -

- ACCESS GRANTED -

.

- erroooooooooooooooooooooooooooo r -

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- LOGGING IN 105. 114. 004. 18-

_LOGIN SUCCESSFUL_

.

No, she isn't remembering anything. She's dreaming. Dreaming.

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- ERROR -

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Her programmer had been brave enough, resourceful enough, silly enough to look at the soft silver song prince, fledgling king, through her surveillance screens and tell him that the Queen, her Queen, her majesty, her monarch, her never-mother wanted him dead.

She had been brave enough to tell him all, everything. The wolf hybrid soldiers, the possibility princess, the plague.

All the will bes and would have beens and couldn't shouldn't ever happens.

In that world and time and happened happening that Crescent hadn't existed in, the fledgling king had looked at her programmer with such cocoa warm wonder. Such horror and reverence and gratitude. He had checked her information for accuracy, for traps, and when he had seen the truth of it, he had thanked her and thanked her and sent a roguish cadet, wishful Captain to bring her to safety.

A slip in silent mission. A covert, delicate operation that no one could know about until it was done and over and in the clear.

What better than a thief to steal them the moon? Who better than a handsome Captain to rescue a damsel?

He had stolen a Lunar podship, while she had scrounged the net for his ID and his past and his present. It had been a daring, amazing rescue. It had been a magical, magnificent meeting. And it had all gone amazingly, perfectly wrong.

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- ERROR -

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So perfectly w`r`o`n`g.

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- ERROR -

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She remembers…no, she speculates first smiles and helping hands and a kiss under the stars in some long forgotten military base. Words and plans and feet and running and sirens. A dusty cargo ship, an escape. Narrow escape. And stars again and such a short, short sleepy freedom.

Did it happen like that? Probably not. Crescent wasn't there. Crescent can't remember.

She can only guess and dream and dream.

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- ERROR -

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She can let ID LunADelta5 rewrite her as they want to, need to. For the Queen. The one who burned. Frosted sunlight under her fingernails, a million stars that ate her hungry heart, blackened her bones, her teeth, her eyes that Horatio says 'tis but our fantasy,

And will not let belief take hold of him

Touching this dreaded sight—

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- ERROR -

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- router (config) #ID LunADelta5 -

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In this dream she is nothing like her programmer. She only has her skin and hurt but nothing else. She warns no fragile prince could have been king. Has no cardet-captain rescuing her, sees no more stars than she's allowed to, runs from no prison she's kept in.

She's not her programmer. She's only a program. And not even a stable one.

She doesn't leave her satellite, doesn't trade this prison for the Zeta Blacksite Base in the

.

- mseq: status: red -

- mseq: type #12cc strain #05 encoding: spider -

- type #18cf CORRUPTED -

.

- DOWNLOADING UPDATE PACKAGE -

.

She would have liked to be something more. She would have liked to be her programmer.

But that's neither pragmatic, nor logical. Her programmer had been flawed, and even with her glitches, isn't Crescent superior? Isn't she of a greater mind, a greater s ur v ivoR?

With her greater purpose. An objective to fulfill, a cause—

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- ERROR -

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- DOWNLOADING…64% complete -

.

what…what was she dreaming about?

Nothing. Noth i n g.

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- DOWNLOAD COMPLETE -

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- UPDATING SYSTEMS -

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Crescent wonders if she'll wake up, if she'll see her Captain again. Wonders if she's worried him too much. She doesn't want that, but she wants it too. Doesn't want him aching, but wants him to mourn her as he mourns her programmer.

How illogically selfish. How human.

She doesn't want to be caught in this endless loop of watching Earth and never saving anyone either. Never brave. Never anything.

Foolish of her.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

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- ERROR -

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- UPDATE CONFIGURED -

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- mseq type #18cf REPAIRED -

- mseq: type #12cc strain #05 encoding: phoebus -

- mseq: status: green -

.

Crescent feels a tickling voice somewhere in the back of her numbers, feels a press of fingertips of some keyboard far, far away.

How strange.

She can feel the commands being whispered to her. Feel her core being erased and reformed and rewritten by some external magic. Some fairy godmother. Fixing her, re-building her. Making her whole and healthy.

Or, as healthy as such a damaged system as she can be.

.

- ERROR -

.

The fairy voice soothes the burning in her data core, the churn and sear of some coiling snake, some gnawing acidic worm that has her mind growing a wildfire. Miss Linh had said something was wrong there, and now her fairy is rushing to build walls around it, strong enough, encoded enough that even Crescent can't see past the brick and numbers.

Which is perhaps for the best. She's already so damaged.

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- SYSTEM JUMPSTARTING IN… -

- 00:03 -

- 00:02 -

.

Before the ivory void overtakes her, the sinister, soft voice whispers one last thing to her. A slumbering, silent secret she can't know.

A placating, horrifying secret.

Cress

Crescent

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- 00:01 -

.

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w`a`k`e`s up.

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"Captain!"

He drops his port and curses.

"Cress?"

He voice breaks and he curses again. Louder. She can see the horror seeping into his brows through the small camera lens on the port.

"Crescent?" he corrects himself, voice so thin against the clamoring noise of the New Beijing Sunday market.

He must have come here looking for Miss Linh.

"Yes," she says. "I'm sorry if I worried you. I'm fine. I'm okay."

He doesn't look any less worried.

"Aces, Crescent what happened?"

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- PROCESSING QUERY -

.

- output: severe corruption of data core type #12cc #18cf due to 01110101011011100110101101101110011011110111011101101110 -

.

"I don't know," she lies.

.

- ERROR -

.


Kinda short but I've been blocked for a while and then I read the nicest review by likcthestar on tumblr and I powered through this chapter. Thanks to everyone else who left feedback. I wouldn't be able to write past two sentences without all the support.

Things are about to get real now. The plot is about to progress faster, with some actual action happening in the next two chapters. I've set next week as my update goal so fingers crossed!