The Mainframe Awakens

Jarrah's POV

"Ten minutes," said Marcus's voice from the dark above us, "and I'm a man of my word."

I let my head drop back against the stone. Every rib on my left side felt like it had been put in with a hammer. Beside me, Malia let out a breath that was half a sob and half a curse, and I would have laughed if I could have afforded the air.

"You took your time," I called.

"You told me twenty. She told me ten." The torch beam shifted, and I made out his face, grim and sweating, with a coil of rope over his shoulder. "I split the difference with myself and came early."

"Thank you," Malia said, with feeling.

"Don't thank me yet, miss. Water's coming up fast. I can hear it from the stairwell."

He was right. In the short while we'd been lying there, the dark line on the pillar had crept another hand's breadth. Cold lapped at the lowest edge of our shelf. I tried to sit up, and the world tipped sideways. A small, practical thought arrived: you are not climbing a rope tonight.

"Jarrah." Malia's hand was on my chest. "Look at me."

"I'm looking."

"You're not climbing."

"I know."

"Then you'll let me tie you in."

"I'll let you tie me in."

She stared at me. I think she had braced for an argument, and I watched her not know what to do with the absence of one. Something in her face softened, and I loved her so much that in that moment it hurt more than the ribs.

It took Marcus and one of his men ten minutes to haul me up, and Malia refused to leave the shelf until I was out. She came up last, soaked to the knees, shaking with cold and temper. On the far side of the chamber, a narrow service gantry ran along the wall, rusted but whole. Marcus had found it on his way in.

"Maintenance route," he said. "Stays clear of the floor ring. Whoever built this place wasn't stupid enough to walk across their own trap."

"Someone told us to walk across it," I said.

"Aye. And I've been wondering about that."

So had I. A message that arrived on a dead drive, a token that woke from nothing, a floor that opened exactly under the first heavy footfall. The tidy cruelty of it was familiar. But there was a quieter thing under suspicion, a thing I didn't say aloud, because I couldn't make sense of it yet. Alastair would have wanted us dead in that cistern. He hadn't made the water rise slowly.

Someone wanted us to survive long enough to reach the machine.

I filed it away and stepped onto the gantry.

The mainframe was larger up close, and quieter than I'd expected. No fans, no glowing panels. It was a plain black cabinet with a dull steel faceplate and a slot at its centre exactly the size of the token. A film of dust lay over everything. The only clean place on the whole machine was that slot.

"Somebody's been here," Malia said, wiping her torch across it.

"Recently," I agreed. "And carefully. They cleaned it, left everything else."

I'd stopped feeling the pain by then. That's a thing about me I've never liked. When something matters enough, I go through a kind of door in my head where the body can't follow. My father used to do the same. I used to think it was strength.

I took the token out of my jacket. It still glowed green, a patient little light.

"If this is a mistake," I said, "it's mine."

"If it's a mistake, it's ours." Malia stepped in beside me. She didn't touch the machine. She reached for my free hand and laced her fingers into mine. "Together. On three?"

"On three."

I pushed the token home.

For a moment nothing happened. Then a deep mechanical sound rose from inside the cabinet, a long, slow turning of something that hadn't turned in two decades. The dust shivered along the faceplate. Somewhere behind the steel, a switch snapped, and light spilled from a small recessed screen that had been black a heartbeat before.

Green text began to scroll. Lines, hundreds of them, too quick to read. Then they stopped, and a single block of white appeared, steady in the middle of the glass.

FINAL DECRYPTION INITIATED. FILE: CALLAN.

REMAINING: 23:59:58.

"Twenty-four hours," Marcus said behind us. His voice was flat. "It's a countdown."

"Twenty-four hours until everything is unredacted," I said. My throat was thick. The numbers ticked down. 23:59:55. 23:59:54. "Callan's whole file. What he saw. What he was going to say."

I realised that I was holding Malia's hand hard enough to hurt her, and I let go. She turned my palm over without a word and rubbed her thumb across the marks my own fingers had left.

"You all right?" she asked.

"No," I said honestly.

"Good. I'd be worried if you said yes."

Marcus took the others up to secure the stairwell, and he gave us what he called a decent half hour before he'd come back down and be a nuisance. We didn't have to say what it was for. He'd already seen my colour.

We found a place along the wall of the chamber where the stone was dry, and the worst of the cold hadn't reached. Malia dragged a folded tarp from a corner and made me sit. She sat beside me, close, her shoulder tucked under my arm in a way that avoided my ribs without either of us discussing it. The machine ticked softly across the room. A pale light from the screen lay across our boots.

For a while we just breathed.

"You said something," I said finally. "Down there."

She went still. "I did."

"I told you I wanted to be standing."

"You're not standing, Jarrah."

"I'm making an exception." I turned my head so I could see her. She was looking straight ahead, the line of her jaw very firm, which was how Malia looked when she was terrified. "I love you. I've loved you for longer than I've had the nerve to say it. I think I knew in the garage, the night you refused to leave and told me I was a bad liar."

"You were."

"I'm still bad. That's why I keep saying it plainly." I swallowed. "I love you."

She turned and kissed me. It was short, and clumsy with exhaustion, and tasted of cold water and salt. When she drew back, her eyes were closed. I felt her forehead against my cheek, and her breath shake.

"I didn't think I'd get to hear it," she whispered. "Not in a place like this. Not in a life like this."

"What would you have wanted?"

"What?"

"If this were over." I hadn't known I was going to ask until I did. "If Alastair were done and nobody was hunting us. What would a regular day look like?"

She laughed, startled, and looked at me properly. I saw the idea cross her face, shy, a little disbelieving, like a child being offered the one toy she hadn't dared ask for.

"A kitchen," she said slowly. "With a window. Somewhere that gets morning sun, which is a ridiculous thing to want, but it's true. I'd make bad coffee, and you'd say it was fine, and we'd both know you were lying."

"I'm a poor liar."

"Dreadful. And there'd be a dog."

"A dog?"

"A big stupid one. That sleeps across the doorway." She was smiling now, wet-eyed. "And nobody would ever call before six unless someone had died. And I'd have my mother's photo on the wall. Finally, where I could look at it."

My chest ached in a way that had nothing to do with broken bones. "I want that."

"Do you?"

"More than the port. More than the name." I took her hand. "Tell me more."

She did. She told me about the house she imagined, the books she'd never been allowed to keep, the little things, the sort of dreams that only survive in people who've been frightened for a long time. I listened. I let myself picture it, the sun on a worn counter and her bare feet on the floor. It was the first time in years I had thought of a future that wasn't a defensive position.

I should have known better than to hold it that tightly.

The radio on Marcus's belt had gone quiet an hour before. That was the first thing I noticed when he came back down the gantry, taking the steps two at a time, and the second was his face, which had lost every trace of the easy cheer he'd carried all night.

"Boss." He didn't use my name. He never did when it was bad. "It's the network. Every channel, every handset in the port, and the old family line nobody's touched since your father. All of it lit up at once."

"What is it?"

"A message." He held the radio out to me with a hand that wasn't quite steady. "It's coded to your key. Nobody else can open it, but it's already playing on a loop, and I swear to my mother, Jarrah, it knows we're down here."

The speaker crackled. A voice came out of it, smooth, cultured, and unhurried, and beside me, Malia's whole body turned to stone.

"Good evening, Jarrah," her father said. "I understand congratulations are in order."