Rearranged

Aloy held her breath for a moment. Should she prepare to fight? It was a nonsense thought of course, Paige had not been hostile so far, and right now she looked terrified not angry. Also, she was hardly in a shape to pose a threat.

So she took a deep breath, and stepped towards Paige again.

“Let me help you.” She said.

Paige backed off. “I’m sorry.” She said. “You weren’t supposed to know that.”

“Are you afraid of me?” Aloy asked. She thought of the countless machines, she had hunted, and decided it would not be exactly surprising, if she scared the girl to death. But then: Could machines feel fear? Cyan had convinced her that machines were capable of being lonely, so that was a possibility. Right now, she needed to play it safe. Paige needed her help.

“I mean you no harm.” She said. “Just let me have a look.”

“No!” Paige pleaded. “Don’t touch me!”

She turned her head to the side, and it dawned on Aloy.

“Oh, All-Mother!” She thought. “She’s not scared, she’s embarrassed.”

Aloud, she said: “The place will be crawling with machines very soon, and from what I’ve seen so far they don’t care much if your a sister or not. They’ll attack you, just as they’d attack me.”

“Can you even repair my leg?” Paige asked.

“If your muscles work like those in the strider legs, then yes. I’ve done it before.”

Reluctantly, Paige allowed Aloy to come closer and inspect the damage. It was not as bad as it first looked, and when rummaging through her satchel, Aloy found some machine fibre she could use to stitch the muscles back together. She had done this with machines she had overridden, so she new that, by whatever magic the machines worked, once reattached the artificial muscles could repair themselves just like real muscles would.

“So far, I have only met one machine that could actually talk.” Aloy began. “And she is build into a volcano. You’re pretty unique.”

Paige stared at the boulders in front of her. “I’m not a machine.” She said defensively. “Not really.”

Aloy stopped working on the leg momentarily and looked at the girl quizzically. “What are you then?”

“It’s hard to explain.” Paige returned. “A lot of me, most even, is machine. But inside here,” she tipped her temple with a finger, “is a human brain.”

Aloy resumed stitching the broken fibres in Paige’s leg.

“But I’ve seen machine brains. They are made from small chips and have not much in common with a human.”

“In this way I probably am unique. At least in this time.”

Aloy finished repairing the muscles and closed the artificial skin over the wound. If it worked anything like the materials any other machine was made of, it too would mend itself over time, if it was kept in place. Unlike the rubbery material that covered the more delicate parts of a machine, this machine skin looked exactly like human tissue from the outside, although it had a different texture when touched, and it felt cool to the touch. Aloy took some clean bandages from her satchel, and made a mental note to get new ones in the next settlement she’d come across.

“OK, done.” She finally said. “Now let’s get out of here as quickly as possible.”

“Agreed.” Paige said, got to her feet and enjoyed the full movement of her leg. She tested putting her weight on it and to her surprise, it held. The sensors in her leg still told her, that it was not fully intact, but the leg worked perfectly.

“Thank you, Aloy.” She said with a shy smile.

“Don’t mention it. I can hardly leave you with the stalkers, can I?” Aloy shouldered her satchel, picked up her weapons and began the climb.

Paige was right behind her. “Do you know this area?” She asked.

“Well enough, why?”

“I just don’t want another nasty surprise, like glinthawks on the top, that’s all.”

“I’ve never seen glinthawks up here, so I guess we’re safe. But there is a small cave, where we can spend the night.”

They climbed in silence for a while, with Aloy looking over to Paige every few feet, to check if she was all right.

“I’m good.You did an excellent job on my leg. I’m not going to fall!”

Aloy raised her brow. “If you say so.”

She pulled herself over the last ledge and reached out her hand to help Paige up.

Paige reluctantly took Aloy’s hand, but then pulled herself up the ledge. The ledge opened into wider area, which was covered in grass and some trees of the same variety as a few hundred feet below. Surrounded by rocks and the steep walls that led to the summit, the place was protected from the cold wind and reasonably safe. Although it was hard to see deep into it, as the sun was beginning to disappear behind the mountain ridges.

“The cave is over there.” Aloy pointed into the plateau, where Paige could just make out the maw of a cave covered by the mountains shadow. Her vision was sensitive to more frequencies of light than a regular human’s, so she could make out details by detecting the heat they radiated, but the cave was as cold as the surrounding rocks, so she could not peer inside. But it also meant, it was probably unoccupied, because Paige would have seen the glow of a machine heart or the body heat of an animal.

“Hey,” Aloy interrupted her train of thoughts. “how about you gather some firewood, and I get us dinner?”

“Ah, well…sure.” Paige was caught a bit off guard, but Aloy was right. It was a good idea to have a fire burning, before it was dark. So she nodded to Aloy and went into the trees to collect wood and dry grass. Aloy went deeper into the plateau, with her bow and arrow in hand. Paige resisted the urge to follow her. Aloy was quite capable of taking care of herself.

“She’ll call me, if she’ll needed help”, she thought. Somehow Aloy was not what she had expected. Sure, ever since she woke up in that underground facility, she had been looking for the girl. And she had half expected to find a child, helpless in surviving outside her tribe and completely ignorant of the history around her and her role in it. Of course that was nonsense: Twenty years had passed and Aloy was a grown woman. Of course she was capable of taking care of herself. And she had been smart enough to figure everything out on her own. No surprise there either: If she had anything at all in common with Dr. Sobek, Paige knew that she was simply no match for Aloy’s sharp mind. The huntress probably knew more about the ancient world than Paige herself. Most likely when it came to the details of what had happened, and why. Paige had not seen Faro or any of the generals for Operation Enduring Victory. She had only seen the Battlefields.

When the fire was on she stared into the flames and listened to any sign from Aloy. She didn’t have to wait long until Aloy appeared, carrying two squirrels.

“Not the biggest feast”, she said grinning, “but they’ll fill our stomachs.”

“You can have them both.” Paige said. “I don’t eat. I only need a little bit of water every now and then and a handful of nutrients for keeping the brain alive.”

“Are you serious?” Aloy looked at her in surprise. “But you need something to keep you going!”

“Radionuclide battery. Lasts for hundreds of years.” Paige tipped her chest.

Aloy started flaying and gutting her game with the swiftness of a seasoned hunter.

“What exactly are you?” She asked without taking a break in her work.

“In my time, we called it a cyborg.” Paige explained. “That’s when you replace parts of a human body with machine parts. Or –in my case– remove the brain from the body, and put it into a machine.”

Now Aloy looked up from her work and sought Paige’s gaze. “No offence, but that sounds like a horrible thing to do to a person.”

“It is.” Paige confirmed. “And I didn’t volunteer for it, believe me.”

Aloy sat in silence for a moment, holding her knife to the squirrel without cutting.

“Who did this to you?” She asked. “Who put you into that machine body?”

Paige looked away.

“Dr. Sobek did.” She finally said.

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