saying, but the other part, a larger part, worried that this was about her Flaw. What if Kinok did know and was now revealing it to her father?
How would he react?
Would she be terminated?
It had happened before—young Automae with Flawed Designs, assigned early termination. That was back before Hesod’s rule, but it didn’t mean it couldn’t happen again.
She slipped out from behind the seaflower bush and moved to the next one, and the next, careful to remain hidden.
Her father and Kinok, their backs turned, were maybe fifty or sixty paces away.
If she just darted from this row to the next, maybe she could get closer. She would be visible for less than a second. She set her shoulders and continued, reaching the end of the row. The moonlight was pale on her skin.
“—this will be more fruitful than I had ever hoped,” Hesod said, but his next words were lost as the sea wind howled. Crier leaned forward, straining to hear.
She was right on the edge of the bluffs.
And then the ground beneath her feet fell away.
There was a split second in which Crier simply pitched forward, frozen, mind whirring—why am I off-balance—why am I slipping—and then she realized the bluff was crumbling. Her weight had been a catalyst, the rocks were breaking and sliding off the cliff face and she was sliding with them—down down down. She twisted wildly, fingers scrabbling for anything solid, and found nothing but broken rock and slippery yellowish grass and—
A jut of rock. Solid. She grabbed it with both hands right as the Crier-sized chunk of cliff fell. She heard it crack and shatter against one of the jagged black rocks that stuck up out of the water and tried not to think about her own body hitting that rock. How she would have cracked and shattered.
How she still might. She was dangling off the edge of the bluff with nothing but air beneath her feet.
The Design papers slipped from her sleeve, like an afterthought, and fluttered down into the darkness, flapping, birdlike, until she could no longer see them.
She was going to fall, she knew it. The jut of rock that had saved her was smooth and slick. There was a twinge of sensation in her wrist, and she realized her flesh had torn open. A deep three-inch gash, skin peeling away to reveal strips of finely Made muscle and bone. Dark purplish fluid dripping from the wound, running down her arm.
“Help,” she said, but it came out hoarse, weak, pathetic; Kinok and her father would never hear her over the crashing waves. “Help—please—I, I need—please.” Her fingers slipped another half inch. Another. She was going to fall. Crier was ten times stronger than any human and she was created to be perfect and she was going to fall and crack and shatter against the wet black rocks and spill her perfect insides into the sea. And be swallowed.
No. No no no please no—
A hand grabbed her wrist, holding her up as she dangled off the cliff’s edge.
“Oh—”
Crier looked up and into a pair of dark eyes.
It was not Kinok who had saved her. Not her father.
It was a human.
For a moment Crier was frozen. She forgot the ocean and the rocks below.
She had never really seen a pair of eyes like this. It was like standing in the doorway to a dark room, like balancing on the threshold, holding a lantern up and watching how it kissed some things gold and left other things in shadow. It was the kind of dark that hid and held a lot of things. A hot fluid dark, a summer tide pool dark, a wild breathless dark.
A hand on Crier’s wrist, holding her up. A thumb digging into the tear in her flesh.
A face, moon-shaped, with thick, arched eyebrows and a mass of tangled dark hair. Red uniform, dark like dried blood.
This human girl’s eyes were wide. Her grip shifted on Crier’s wounded wrist.
Crier realized that she had not yet been saved.
The girl’s breaths were coming fast. Her mouth twisted, her grip loosened—
A necklace fell out of her shirt and dangled between them. Crier’s gaze flicked from the girl’s face to her necklace, a split second of winking gold in the moonlight, a pendant carved with an eight-point star—the all-too-familiar symbol of the Makers—and then the girl gave a low wrenching noise and pulled Crier up up up, back over the edge of the bluff, and then they were both scrambling away from the edge, collapsing