Alita: Battle Angel E-Book

Pat Cadigan

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 424

Beschreibung

The official novelization to the highly anticipated movie, Alita: Battle Angel. A young woman with no memory of her past uncovers her incredible destiny in Alita, a groundbreaking new experience from visionary filmmakers James Cameron and Robert Rodriguez.From visionary filmmakers James Cameron (Avatar) and Robert Rodriguez (Sin City), comes Alita: Battle Angel, an epic adventure of hope and empowerment.When Alita (Rosa Salazar) awakens with no memory of who she is in a future world she does not recognize, she is taken in by Ido (Christoph Waltz), a compassionate doctor who realizes that somewhere in this abandoned cyborg shell is the heart and soul of a young woman with an extraordinary past. As Alita learns to navigate her new life and the treacherous streets of Iron City, Ido tries to shield her from her mysterious history while her street-smart new friend Hugo (Keean Johnson) offers instead to help trigger her memories.But it is only when the deadly and corrupt forces that run the city come after Alita that she discovers a clue to her past – she has unique fighting abilities that those in power will stop at nothing to control. If she can stay out of their grasp, she could be the key to saving her friends, her family and the world she's grown to love.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Also available from Titan Books

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also available from Titan Books

THE OFFICIAL MOVIENOVELIZATION

Also available from Titan Books

Alita: Battle Angel – Iron City (The Official Movie Prequel)

THE OFFICIAL MOVIE NOVELIZATION

BY PAT CADIGAN

BASED UPON THE GRAPHIC NOVEL (“MANGA”) SERIES “GUNNM” BY YUKITO KISHIROSCREENPLAY BY JAMES CAMERON AND LAETA KALOGRIDIS

TITAN BOOKS

Alita: Battle Angel – The Official Movie NovelizationHardback edition ISBN: 9781785658389E-book edition ISBN: 9781785658396

Published byTitan BooksA division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd144 Southwark StreetLondonSE1 0UP

First edition: February 20191 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Alita: Battle Angel TM & © 2019 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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In Memory of:

Susan CasperGeorgina Hawtrey-WooreGeri Jeter

Battle Angels live forever

And as always for The Original Chris Fowler,whose kind, loving, generous heartmakes everything possible

CHAPTER 1

The floating city of Zalem was most beautiful at sunset, or so most people said. Or so most people thought most people said. In fact, Zalem was impressive at any hour of the day or night, hanging in mid-air like a good magician’s best trick. It could have been some mythical realm—El Dorado maybe, or the Kingdom of Prester John, distant Thule or Camelot—except it wasn’t lost. Everyone in Iron City could find it. All they had to do was look up and there it was: a perfect circle five miles across, wearing its skyline like a crown, ever present and ever out of reach.

Other than that, there were only three things the ground-level population knew for certain about the place: 1) the Factory in Iron City existed to support Zalem, sending food and manufactured goods up through long tubes that extended from it like graceful spiders’ legs; 2) you couldn’t get there from here—only supplies went up, never people; and 3) you never stood directly below the centre of Zalem unless you wanted to be crushed under the trash, junk and general refuse that suddenly and without warning rained down from the large, ragged hole in the underside of the disc.

This was just how the world worked, and no one now alive remembered anything different. A very long time ago there had been a War against an Enemy, and it had left the world in its current sorry state, where people on the ground had to scrounge around for whatever they could repair, revamp or remake, while Zalem sucked up anything worth having. No one had the time or inclination to wonder how people had lived before the War; the daily effort of survival kept them too busy for history.

Dr Dyson Ido, Cyber-Surgeon, MD, was one of the very few people in Iron City with a detailed knowledge of the past—the War, the Fall, and why Zalem was the only one of the original twelve floating cities to remain aloft. Right now, however, as the sun set on another long day of treating patients at the clinic, he wasn’t thinking about history. He was picking his way through the sprawling pile of Zalem’s refuse in search of anything salvageable, taking a circular path halfway between the centre and the edge.

The continual addition of new rubbish and regular scavenger activity meant the contents of the mound were always shifting; things buried deep in the centre were eventually pushed outwards and upwards. The area Ido was searching often yielded items that could be repaired or rebuilt, or sometimes just cleaned—Zalem’s people were a wasteful bunch—while being far enough from ground zero to let him hunt without risk of being flattened by new arrivals. Assuming no one flushed a house down the chute, of course; so far no one had, or at least not all at once.

Ido spent the end of many days on the trash pile, using a hand-scanner to catch any stray electronic or biochemical signals from some bit of rechargeable tech. An observer with an especially sharp eye would have noted that although his long coat had seen a lot of wear, it had been nice once, too nice for Iron City. Then there was that old-fashioned hat—on anyone else it would have been a sad affectation, but it belonged on him, mostly because of his bearing. The way he carried himself suggested he was an educated man of some importance who’d taken a wrong turn off the open road and ended up in Iron City. But no observer would know he had once lived a life of privilege and gentility and, after losing everything, was now reduced to picking through the dregs and dross of a better world.

His previous existence felt as distant to him as the War nobody knew very much about any more. Nobody knew very much about him, either, except that he was a highly skilled cyber-surgeon who offered his services to Iron City’s cyborgs at whatever price they could pay. For them, this was as miraculous as a floating city, only a hell of a lot more useful. They were grateful for his skills and he was grateful they never asked how he had come by them, or where he was from, or even how he’d got the small pale scar on his forehead. Everybody in Iron City had scars, as well as a past they didn’t want to talk about.

Ido stooped to pick up a corroded metal hand, peering at it through his round spectacles. As he dropped the hand into the bag slung across the front of his body, he caught sight of a single glass eye nestled in the socket of a burned metal skull. The eye was perfect, without even a small crack. How had it escaped damage when the skull had been fried? Ido bent down to have a closer look and decided the eye didn’t belong to this skull but had rolled into it by chance. All sorts of things happened by chance. If he hadn’t come along at the right moment both the eye and skull might have sunk back down into Zalem’s broken, unwanted crap, never to resurface. Or some nearby movement might have caused the eye to roll out of the skull as accidentally as it had rolled in and, unnoticed, would be mashed underfoot by an endless parade of scavengers.

Ido pushed himself to his feet and looked around, trying to decide whether he should continue while there was still enough daylight for him to see where he was going or quit while there was still enough night ahead for a few hours of sleep. Most of the other scavengers had given up and gone home, leaving only the desperate and the hardcore, the ones who were secretly hoping to find a real treasure. It was possible, for example, that a diamond ring had fallen off some Zalem aristocrat’s hand into the trash by accident. Highly improbable, yes, but not physically impossible.

Selling it in Iron City for even half its worth—that was impossible.

Ido permitted himself a small chuckle and turned his thoughts back to the question of where to go next. Zalem had dumped a load about fifteen minutes ago; while there was no set schedule, there was usually at least twenty minutes between deliveries. Usually, however, didn’t mean always. He was trying to decide whether to tempt fate in ten-minute increments—scavenge for five minutes, then stand back for another five. Normally he didn’t take chances—he was the only doctor most of Iron City’s cyborgs could afford and he took his duty of care seriously. That, however, was why he was weighing the risk. The centre hadn’t already been picked over, which gave him a better chance of finding something usable, particularly servos. He needed more servos. He always needed more servos.

He was still deliberating when two things happened at once: his gaze fell on something half buried in the slope about three metres ahead of him, and he felt the scanner in his hand pulse ever so slightly. For a moment, he didn’t dare move. If his eyes weren’t playing wish-fulfilment tricks on him in the dying daylight, and if the scanner wasn’t reacting to the last gasp of a dying circuit under his feet, he was looking at something worth more than a thousand diamond rings.

Keeping his eyes fixed on the shape, he moved towards it slowly, willing it to stay real and not turn into an illusion produced by a chance arrangement of junk. Then he was standing over it and, no, it wasn’t a scrapyard mirage, it was a real thing that was really there, and he had found it by chance. But as any self-respecting, if outcast, scientist knew, chance favoured the prepared mind.

He knelt down and began gently excavating it from the trash, working as carefully as an archaeologist who had come across the find of the century. After a few minutes he sat back on his heels and stared at what he had uncovered. It was the face of a young girl: beautiful, angelic and completely impossible except in dreams of an especially pleasant, magical kind. He could tell he wasn’t dreaming now by the sharp edges and lumps poking into his knees and lower legs, and the ache in his back.

This wasn’t her face, either, not the one he wished so intensely to see again, but it could have been. She looked so utterly serene with her eyes closed and her mouth on the verge of a smile, as if she were dreaming of something wonderful. Only the rips in her skin—at the base of her neck, along the right side of her jaw, above her left eye—gave her away as synthetic.

Ido leaned forward and began clearing away the detritus below her neck. The work progressed more slowly because his hands were trembling now and he had to stop sometimes to steady himself. After what might have been a minute or an eternity, he had uncovered her cyber-core: upper chest, one shoulder, her metal spine and the ribs caging her perfect white heart, which shuddered with each slow beat.

Hesitantly he put the scanner to her temple and watched, mesmerised, as the waveform on the readout confirmed that a person was still present.

“You’re alive,” Ido said, unaware that he’d spoken aloud.

He couldn’t let her lie there a moment longer. He manoeuvred his hands around the broken fragment of her form and lifted her out of the trash, holding her up in the fading daylight, wondering how anyone could discard her as if she were no more than a broken doll, and feeling something he had not felt since the birth of his daughter, and had thought he would never feel again when she’d died.

CHAPTER 2

Nurse Gerhad had swapped the surgical instruments on her cyber-arm for a normal hand in preparation for going home when she heard the basement entrance open and close. After a busy day treating patients and trading for parts, Ido had insisted on going out to see what he could find in the trash heap and hadn’t minded when Gerhad said she was too tired to go with him. She wasn’t as good at it as he was anyway, even when she wasn’t tired, because of her personal feelings. The mere idea of picking through the discards of some unattainable and supposedly better world made her lose the will to live; actually doing it made her want to die.

Not that she’d ever known anything different. Her family had always lived in Iron City and most of them still did. One or two adventurous sorts had taken off in search of something better in parts unknown, and had never been heard of since. Gerhad didn’t think this meant anything good. She had never considered doing anything like that herself; as far as she knew, the Badlands weren’t hiring nurses, or anyone else for that matter. And even if they were, she doubted there were any other Dyson Idos out there. There sure weren’t any others in Iron City, unless you counted the ice queen, and Gerhad most certainly did not.

Thinking of Ido’s ex was something she preferred not to do, ever, and she wouldn’t have, if it wasn’t for what Ido had brought back. The way he’d come running up the stairs, Gerhad thought he had a bag full of servos. They needed more servos. They always needed more servos. But instead—

The cyber-core now locked into the stereotactic frame was the last thing she had expected him to bring back, right after a bag full of diamond rings. Well, if she’d found a discarded cyber-core showing the existence of a person, she’d have done the same. But she recognised the face; it was impossible, it could not be. And yet it was, big as life, and a heartbreak for sure. She wasn’t certain how that would work since the doc’s heart was already well and truly broken, but life could be very inventive.

After securing the cyber-core in the frame, he’d run back down to the basement for something. She’d known what he was after but she still caught her breath when he reappeared, carrying what looked like a child’s body in his arms. In fact, it was a child’s body, one that Ido had made. But the child had never used it and Ido had put it into storage, all those heartbroken years ago. Gerhad’s feelings were mixed as she watched him lay it gently on the operating table next to the cyber-core in the frame.

It was beautiful, a work of art and an expression of profound love. She understood why Ido had packed it away unused, but she had also felt there was something inherently wrong about letting something so extraordinary go to waste. For a while, she’d hoped he might someday reach a place where he could let someone else benefit from his creation. But that would have meant he was healing, and healing was the one thing Ido would never, ever allow himself to do.

Ido had been jumping around the room, making preparations for surgery, shooing Gerhad away when she tried to do anything more than sterilise her own instruments. He was in the midst of recalibrating the micro-surgical robot arms when he suddenly turned to look at the slumbering cyber-core. After two hours of soaking up a pre-op infusion of brain nutrients, the cyber-core’s eyes were now moving restlessly back and forth beneath the closed lids. Correction: her eyes, her closed lids; as the revival process went on, she looked more and more like the girl in the holo that Ido stared at countless times a day, every day.

Now he went over to the frame and reached out to touch her cheek. “What are you dreaming, little angel?” he asked with a tenderness Gerhad hadn’t heard in a long time. He turned to her and she was shocked to see tears in his eyes.

Abruptly, he was jumping around again, setting up the micro-surgery workstation, running diagnostics, rechecking the robotic arms. He never said a word to her but he didn’t have to. Gerhad was a registered nurse trained in cyber-surgery. She always knew what to do.

* * *

It wasn’t the longest twenty-four hours Gerhad had ever spent in an OR but it was definitely the most intense. Ido had been a man in a fever, or a man possessed, working the micro-surgery arms and demanding she read data outputs from half a dozen different screens to him continuously, only because he didn’t have six extra pairs of eyeballs to read them himself. She had no idea how he kept all the figures straight while he guided the micro-surgery instruments through all the tiny connections. He was just that brilliant—there were still times when she was awestruck by the breadth and depth of his intellect.

Like now, she thought as she watched the spidery surgical arms dancing in a delicate ballet choreographed by Ido. He didn’t have to hover over the instruments while they worked—he’d designed and built them himself and his surgical machines never malfunctioned unless you hit them with a hammer, and sometimes not even then. But it was more than his making sure nothing went wrong. The micro-surgery instruments carried out procedures that his own steady and practiced hands were simply too big to accomplish; as such, they were extensions of himself, and he had to witness every connection of every blood vessel, every muscle fibre, every nerve.

Ido turned to her, nodded almost imperceptibly. She fetched two bags from the fridge. One was filled with standard biological human blood, heart’s-blood; the other, twice as large, contained iridescent celestial-blue cyber-blood. The term “blood” wasn’t quite accurate, as the latter had a lot more to do in a cyborg body, using nano-machines instead of white or red blood cells. Having only one cyber arm, Gerhad didn’t need as much as this girl would require for a Total Replacement body, even one smaller than an average mature adult.

Gerhad placed the bags in the transfusers and set the rate of flow for each; all Ido had to do was trigger them. He grunted his thanks and dismissed her by way of a head jerk, though only temporarily; he expected her to remain handy and alert until further notice. At one time, Gerhad wouldn’t have tolerated grunts and head jerks from a doctor. She still wouldn’t, except for Ido.

* * *

The day Gerhad met Dyson Ido, she had been lying in a bed in post-op, mourning for the career she had lost along with her arm. She’d known who he was—everyone at the hospital knew Dr Ido for his work with cyborg patients. Gerhad herself had referred people to his clinic.

When Ido had told her he could not only save her nursing career but enhance and improve it, she’d thought he was a hallucination generated by some rather iffy painkillers—not an unreasonable assumption. She was on staff at the hospital, and the Factory had been shorting their supply of meds. The pharmacy had become desperate enough to seek out alternative sources; as a result, in the last couple of weeks, people who came in with broken bones went out tripping balls, and migraine sufferers spent their nights going to raves and kissing everyone. Oddly enough, there wasn’t a single complaint from anyone, but it was no solution.

The Factory had promised to make things right, but they’d taken their sweet-ass time about it. The Head Nurse told them there was nothing any of them could do except pray for rain and, For God’s sake, don’t get hurt.

Three hours later, her shift over, Gerhad walked out of the front door of the hospital just in time for an out-of-control gyro-lorry to sideswipe the front of the building, taking out all the windows, half a dozen newly installed hanging plants, a few No-Parking signs, and her left arm.

Somehow, she had remained conscious, although there were a few bad splices in her memory. One moment, she’d been stepping out on the sidewalk with the door of the hospital closing behind her; the next, she was lying on the ground amid broken glass, chunks of cement, clots of damp, dark dirt and torn-up flowers. She remembered knowing her arm was gone and, with it, her nursing career, such as it was.

Nursing wasn’t always everything she’d hoped it would be—there was an awful lot of repeatedly patching up people who couldn’t stop making the same mistakes, feet that hurt all the way up to her hips, and more vomit than she could ever have imagined. But there were good days, too, when she encountered someone who refused to be beaten down by circumstance, or at least weren’t their own worst enemy. And there were the kids, the ones who had not yet begun to grow up too fast.

The pay was crap and sometimes it got crappier. They couldn’t lay anyone off because they needed every warm body they had, so there were pay cuts. Always with the Factory’s sincere apologies, played over the background noise of shipments travelling up to Zalem via the tube that arced right over the hospital from a nearby distribution annexe. Making ends meet required a lot of double shifts—not at overtime rates but at regular pay, sometimes less.

But being a nurse wasn’t a job, it wasn’t just a way to make a living while you looked for something better, it was a profession—a vocation. Nurses wanted to be nurses; it was the only thing Gerhad had ever wanted to be. Nursing had given her focus and discipline, which she discovered were crucial to surviving in a world that was shambolic and uninspiring at best and, at worst, pitiless and corrupt.

And now, thanks to a lorry driver who hadn’t been qualified for a commercial vehicle heavier than half a ton, it was all gone. Compensation? She could whistle for it. The truck had been Factory-owned, and it hadn’t been a kingpin like Vector behind the wheel, just some poor shlub who vanished without leaving a name. And that was the state of the nation, thank you and good night.

The next time she woke up, her upper body was locked into a stereotactic frame; Ido had her positioned so the nerves in her shoulder could most easily make the acquaintance of those in the cyber-arm. Ido was hovering over the robotic arms, his face set in an expression of intense concentration, as if Gerhad were the most important person in the world and he were performing the micro-surgery with his own hands.

She’d drifted in and out of consciousness, feeling no pain and seeing nothing psychedelic—later she found out he made his own medications, including anaesthesia—until she finally woke up completely and got her first good look at the work of art that was now part of her body.

“I don’t know if I’m safe having an arm like this,” she told him, admiring the designs etched into the metal. It made her think of an antique silver tea service. “I might get jacked the minute I step outside.”

His smile had been knowing and even a little gleeful. “This town isn’t full of geniuses but pretty much everybody knows better than to mess with my work.”

She nodded, still admiring her arm. “I’ve treated more than a few patients who had parts they couldn’t possibly afford. And now I’m one of them.”

“Oh, there’s no charge,” he said, enjoying the look on her face. “Of course, there is something you can do for me that none of my other patients can.”

That would have rung alarm bells except he didn’t sound sleazy. “What?” she asked, more curious than wary.

“Work for me. I need a nurse and I can pay better than the hospital.”

To her surprise, she’d said yes immediately. Then she’d waited for that moment, when he put his hand where it didn’t belong and she had to break his nose or dislocate his shoulder, but it never came. She had accepted purely for the money, thinking she could build up a nest egg and if the job sucked, go back to the hospital. But before long, she decided it would be just plain stupid to give up an opportunity to work with a genuine, no-foolin’ medical genius.

She had gone to work for Ido shortly after his heart had been well and truly broken, but other than that, she knew very little about him. He wasn’t from around here, but you only had to talk to him to know that. He wasn’t just bright, he was educated far beyond anything available at ground level, unless there was an ivory tower in some faraway land beyond the Factory’s reach.

But Gerhad was certain Dyson Ido had not travelled from some far-off land to fetch up in the dead end of Iron City. No, he was from somewhere much closer, a place everybody in Iron City saw all the time but was more remote than the moon and just as unattainable.

Travel from ground level to Zalem was strictly forbidden, a law the Factory’s Centurians enforced by lethal means. No heavier-than-air flight of any kind was permitted, for any reason; just flying a kite could get you killed. The Centurians weren’t programmed to distinguish between machines and living creatures; as a result, whole generations of Iron City residents had lived and died without ever seeing a bird except in photos.

No one knew if Zalem’s residents were equally restricted or whether the view from on high convinced them to stay where they were. Gerhad suspected it was the latter. Not that it made any difference—there was no way for anyone in the floating city to get to the surface.

Well, no way save one, and that was one hell of a long fall.

Gerhad didn’t think many people could survive something like that. A parachute was out of the question—the Centurians would blast it into confetti and make mincemeat out of the person attached to it. The trash heap below would hardly provide a soft landing; at terminal velocity, a person was likely to pile-drive through several layers of accumulation, and the scrap metal would be like shrapnel.

You’d have to be some kind of batshit genius to figure out how to come out of that alive—and not just you but your wife and kid, too. And if the kid was kind of fragile, say, disabled—Gerhad had thought about it for years and she was still baffled.

Nonetheless, all three of them had survived. The girl had died a few years after that, in circumstances that were as brutal as they were pointless. Which, in Iron City, was unremarkable.

The real puzzler, though, was why Zalem had let someone so brilliant leave. Or had they? Gerhad wondered. They might grow the population a lot smarter up there but she doubted there was anyone who’d have made the doc seem dull by comparison. He was—she looked for a word other than intense and came up empty. Because that was what he was: intense. Everything he did for his patients mattered as much to him as it did to them, and she was sure he had always been this way. By all rights he should have gone crazy long ago but somehow he’d stayed sane. Or just sane enough.

Maybe Zalem hadn’t let him go, Gerhad thought. Maybe leaving had been his idea. He certainly hadn’t tripped and fallen over the edge by accident.

* * *

Ido turned to Gerhad, about to say something, and saw she had fallen asleep in the chair, head resting on her cyborg hand. He considered waking her, then decided not to. The embodying procedure was almost finished. He turned back to the girl on the table, to the white ceramic-and-titanium heart in her open chest. It was beating more quickly now, at a rate normal for a girl fast asleep and lost in her dreams.

She was alive.

CHAPTER 3

Waking was like drifting up from the depths of a warm, dark ocean. It was gradual, requiring no effort on her part, proceeding at its own rate. Time passed, or maybe it didn’t, or it stopped and then started again. After a while—an hour or a week or a century—she opened her eyes.

The ceiling above her was blank except for a few cracks. There was nothing distinctive about it or even familiar—it could have been any ceiling anywhere. She was certain, however, that it wasn’t the same ceiling she’d gone to sleep under. If there’d been a ceiling at all.

She yawned, enormously and deeply, her eyes squeezing shut as her lungs expanded to their limit. She had half a second to think her chest felt a little strange before she opened her eyes again and saw the hand she had reflexively covered her mouth with.

The hand wasn’t hers. It wasn’t even human.

Like that, she was awake; looking at the hand, turning it this way and that, wiggling the fingers. This wasn’t just a hand. Someone had envisioned this hand, then brought it into existence, made it something that could move, that could touch and be touched.

And it was beautiful, decorated with designs of flowers and leaves and curlicues rendered in perfect, delicate lines. The metal inlay in the centre of her palm was etched with similar designs, only much smaller. She closed her hand slowly, then opened it again, watching the way all the sections worked; it had the same range of movement as a flesh-and-blood hand. Where there would have been pads at the base of each finger, she had small rounded sections, each one decorated with an exquisitely intricate sunburst. The metal shining in her finger joints was the same as that inlaid in her palm.

She even had fingerprints—but, oh, what fingerprints! The curved lines etched into the top two joints of each finger were a glorious riot of crashing waves that morphed into impossible flowers, clouds, arcs and spirals, dancing and swirling in a way that was exultant, even defiant.

On the back of her hand was a flower so complex she would have to study it at length to see all of its details. The thought that someone would give her something so beautiful was a surge of light and warmth inside her.

Her wrist was mechanical, its articulation and segments even more complex than her hand. Past that, more flowers blossomed in symmetry along her outer forearm, the lines delicate and perfect, some of them spilling onto her inner arm, right up to her mechanical elbow. The design resumed all the way up her bicep to a gold inlay etched with lines very much like her fingerprints. The segments that made up her shoulder were outlined in silver and gold. She’d never seen anything like this. If she had, she’d have wanted it immediately.

And her left arm?

She pulled it out from under the covers and was relieved to see that, yes, she had the set. She stretched her arms out so she could admire them both. With arms this beautiful, she might never wear long sleeves again.

The rest of her—what was that like?

Nervously she pulled the covers back. For a long moment she could only stare at herself in wonder. The whole body—her whole body—every bit of it, was a work of art. She stared at the—at her—creamy pinkish “skin” and the beautifully etched silver and gold inlays. How long had she been asleep?

And while she was at it, where had she woken up?

The bedroom was no place she knew, but she got the impression from the funny little figures on the shelves, the pictures on the walls and the stuffed bunny on her pillow that it belonged to a young girl. A smart young girl who loved to read—there were shelves and shelves of hardcopy books. But other things in the room didn’t seem to belong—a shabby briefcase bundled with a stack of old file folders, for instance. Young girls didn’t go for briefcases, not even smart young girls. A stuffed animal maybe—she picked up the bunny and ran a finger along its floppy ears. The fur was soft with comfort under her fingertips; she could practically feel the pattern of how the little-girl hands had petted and stroked it countless times. The bunny was old, too, just like pretty much everything else she could see. The very smart young girl who’d lived here must have been long gone by the time Alita had been tucked into her bed.

Who had brought her here and how had they done it without waking her? Because she had the strong feeling she had gone to sleep in a place far away. She couldn’t remember where that had been, or what she had been doing there, or, now that she thought of it, anything at all.

But even if she didn’t know where she was now, she was sure of one thing: it was safe. The place was old and a bit shabby, but it was intact. There was no visible damage from heavy munitions or explosives. Nor could she see any weapons stashed in convenient spots where they’d be easy to grab in an emergency, not even—she checked—under the bed.

She didn’t wonder why that last thought had crossed her mind. It seemed only natural to think about safety after waking up in a strange place, not to mention in an unfamiliar body. Yes, the body was pretty, but was it useful? Was it able enough, fast enough, tough enough?

Her gaze fell on the full-length mirror across the room. She walked over to it on her unfamiliar but very beautiful legs and stood holding her arms slightly away from her body so she could see everything: the silver and gold inlays at her collarbone and the ornate but delicate artwork just below them and in the centre of her chest; the complexity of her segmented torso; the etched gold inlays at the tops of her thighs and the designs that curled along the front and sides of her legs above her complicated knees; the perfect symmetry of the fantasy flowers on her calves, mirror images of each other. She could actually imagine the work in progress, someone bending over each part in turn, working under a bright light, never looking up until it was perfect. The person in question was a dark blurry shadow with an impossibly steady hand and eyes that didn’t see only surfaces—they saw all the way through the world, into its essence.

But the beauty she was admiring was a doll’s beauty. The realisation brought her back down to earth with a thump. She was a toy girl, lacking the crucial anatomical features of a real person. There were pretty flowers along the line of collarbone, and gold and silver inlays just above the place on her chest where her breasts began, and more inlays below them. But her breasts were blank, featureless.

She pressed a finger to one of them, expecting it to be as hard as the rest of her, and was surprised to feel it give. Her body wasn’t completely hard metal; there were some soft places.

Moving closer to the mirror, she touched her face. That was soft, too, but she was certain it was her own, not something that had come with the body. She looked down at herself and made a slow turn, looking over one shoulder and then the other. She was pretty in back, too; her behind also had some give, though it wasn’t as soft as her breasts. But like her breasts, it wasn’t real. She moved closer to the mirror, looking into her own eyes, but the toy girl in the mirror didn’t seem to know anything more than she did. Some impulse made her tap the mirror with her fingers. She heard a quiet tik, metal on glass.

“Well, hell,” she said, just to hear her own voice. It didn’t sound strange to her. Whoever had given her this work-of-art doll body hadn’t messed with anything above her neck. Or so she hoped.

As she turned away from the mirror, her gaze fell on some clothing folded up on a chair. She picked them up—a sweatshirt and some cargo pants.

Cargo pants were back in style? She must have been asleep for a really long time.

* * *

The door of her room wasn’t locked, she discovered, and it was an immense relief to know she wasn’t a prisoner. Of course, a young girl’s room made a very unlikely prison cell, but as she didn’t know where she was, she couldn’t be sure of what was unlikely and what wasn’t. Plus, cargo pants were back in style; all bets were off.

Careful to move soundlessly, she stepped into a short hallway, where she saw a flight of stairs. This was a private home. Did it come with her new body? If so, it didn’t match; the place was clean but it was as old and shabby as the room where she’d awakened.

As she moved to the top of the stairs, she heard voices from below. Listening for a few seconds, she determined there was one woman and at least two men down there, although she couldn’t make out the conversation. The voices didn’t sound hostile, though. Time to see what she had landed in, she thought, and crept down the stairs, still moving silently, listening as the voices grew clearer.

When she got to the bottom, she found herself looking into a room that seemed to be some kind of clinic or laboratory. Was this place actually a hospital?

“Well, that’s the best I can do for now,” one of the men said. He was bending over something on a tray in front of him while a tall, dark-skinned woman in blue scrubs stood nearby; a nurse. “They don’t make parts for this model any more.”

The man moved back and she saw he’d been working on a piece of machinery that had obviously seen a lot of use. The metal was scratched and dented, with a few parts clearly taken from something else and adapted to fit. It looked heavy and clumsy and it was attached to the shoulder of a second man sitting in a chair beside the tray.

“I’m real grateful, Doc,” the second man said, lifting the thing off the tray and testing its movements. “I’ll be getting some overtime next week.” He got to his feet and pulled up the top half of a greasy coverall, zipping it with his machine arm.

“Pay me when you can,” said the first man in a kind voice.

The second man picked up a sack lying on the floor beside the chair. “Here, I got these for ya. My wife works out at Farm Twenty-two.”

The woman chuckled. “Keep getting paid in fruit and we’ll be pickin’ these ourselves.”

Just as she was thinking that she should look for a way out, the woman spotted her.

“Well, hello, sleepyhead.” The woman smiled at her and she automatically smiled back. You couldn’t assume someone was okay just because they smiled at you, but something told her this woman meant her no harm.

The man with the mechanical arm also smiled at her, but the doctor was startled. Maybe he’d thought she would still be asleep. He was pale with blond hair and round spectacles that gave him the appearance of a man who’d just been interrupted in the middle of reading something long and complicated. The woman—the nurse—ushered the man with the mechanical arm to a door across the room while she and the pale man stared at each other.

This was the man responsible for her beautiful work-of-art body, she realised. He had long fingers that seemed to move in a precise way even when they were just fidgeting with his lab coat and the small parts and tools in the pockets. Now that the surprise of her appearance had worn off, he was looking her over with the sharp, alert eyes of someone who knew so many things, far more than most people. She could also see he was a bit haggard, like he’d had a lot of long days and not enough sleep.

Unsure of what to do or say, she took a step forward and was briefly blinded by a shaft of sunlight coming in from a high window. The warmth felt good on her face.

“How do you feel?” the man asked her.

She sat down in the chair where the man with the heavy arm had been. “Okay.”

Abruptly he reverted to his role as a doctor, grabbing a small flashlight so he could look into her eyes, then her mouth. He felt the area under her jawline and then the length of her neck, his long fingers expert and gentle.

“Any pain anywhere?” he asked, feeling her hands and bending each finger. “Numbness? Motor dysfunction?”

When he went into doctor mode, he went all the way, she thought. “Well, I’m a little… hungry.”

He ushered her out of the laboratory or whatever it was and into a small kitchen. Seating her at the table, he reached into the bag his patient had given him and held out a round orange thing.

“Eat this,” he said. “Get your sugar levels up.”

She took it from him and examined it. The colour was pretty but she didn’t think it looked terribly promising as food. A doctor wouldn’t give her anything bad, she reasoned. She took a bite and immediately spat it out on the table.

“Taste receptors are working.” Now he was an amused doctor. “You’ll like that a lot better with the peel off.” He took it from her and began removing the outer covering.

She watched him for a few moments, then decided it was as good a time as any to ask questions. “Um… I don’t mean to be rude,” she said, “but… am I supposed to know you?”

As if someone had flipped a switch, the doctor was gone and he was staring at her again, like he didn’t know what to do. Finally, he said, “Actually, we’ve never met. I’m Doctor Dyson Ido.” He nodded at the woman, who had just come in from the laboratory. “This is Nurse Gerhad.” The woman’s warm smile made her feel a bit less anxious about asking her next question.

“Okay, I don’t quite know how to say this—” She took a steadying breath. “Do you happen to know who I am?”

The doctor and nurse looked at each other, taken aback by the question. Her heart sank a little.

“I was hoping you’d fill in that part. Since you’re a Total Replacement cyborg, and most of your cyber body was destroyed, I can’t find any records.”

They looked at each other again, and this time she had the distinct impression Nurse Gerhad was displeased about something.

“But your very human brain was miraculously intact,” Dr Ido went on after a moment. “Theoretically, you should remember something.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, uh…” She thought for a moment. “It’s pretty blank.” They were looking at her expectantly. Her heart—or whatever she had as a Total Replacement cyborg—sank a little more. “It’s completely blank, actually.”

She didn’t have to be a doctor herself to know that wasn’t right at all. There should have been something, even if it was only a vague image: someone she knew or a place where she’d been, or a few words someone had spoken to her—whoever that was, or had been. All at once she felt like the world was becoming less solid, like she was about to fall through it into nothing.

“I don’t even know my name!” Tears welled up in her eyes and spilled down her face.

“I know this is all very new and strange,” the doctor said in the warm, kindly voice she was already growing to love. “But you’re not alone—I’m here with you. I’m going to protect you and everything is going to be okay. And let’s look on the bright side.” The doctor dabbed at her face with a napkin as he handed her the thing he had finished peeling. “Your tear ducts are working.”

She couldn’t help smiling a little. That was just the sort of thing a very kind doctor would say. Although how she could know that but not her own name made no sense at all. She bit into the thing he’d given her. This time, there was an explosion of taste in her mouth; the feel of the pulp between her teeth and a flood of liquid that overflowed and ran down her chin was delightful. Suddenly she no longer felt like crying, about anything.

“This is good!” she said, looking from Ido to Gerhad and back again. “What do you call this?”

She saw the nurse give Ido a wry half-smile. “It’s your fee, you tell her. And make sure she knows it’s not money anywhere else in town.”

CHAPTER 4

“YEEEOOOW!”

Ido ran out onto the porch, thinking the little cyborg had managed to put her foot through a loose board and then torn off a finger trying to free herself. But she was completely unhurt. Nothing wrong with her yelling function, he thought as she grabbed his arm and pointed at the sky. “What’s that?”

Gerhad, who had followed more slowly, gave him a knowing smile that told him he’d be answering a whole lot of questions and he’d better get used to it. He pretended not to notice.

“That’s Zalem,” Ido told the cyborg girl. “It’s the last of the great sky cities.”

She turned back to look at it. “What holds it up—magic?”

Ido thought if her eyes got any wider, they might fall out. “No, something much stronger. Engineering.”

The girl ran down off the porch and into the street, where she stood gazing up at it and the low clouds sailing slowly underneath the disc, unaware of the two-wheeled gyro truck honking its horn madly as it bore down on her. Ido yanked her out of the way just in time. As the truck blew past, the driver made an angry gesture, yelling “Pinche cabrón!”

Ido was about to scold her, then thought better of it. She hadn’t even known what an orange was, so of course she didn’t know better than to play in traffic. “And down here,” he said, turning her to face the direction in which the gyro-truck had gone, “this is Iron City, with all its charms.”

The girl gaped as if it were an exotic wonderland filled with the promise of adventure and excitement rather than a sad, dirty town that Zalem used as a toilet.

That last thought was a bit dark even for him, Ido thought and blinked, trying to see Iron City’s street life through the eyes of a girl who had never seen a city before. At the moment, however, she was looking at the sign on the front of the house: DR DYSON IDO CMD, CYBER-SURGEON. She could read, it seemed, yet she’d never seen an orange before; one more thing to add to the growing list of oddities.

“While I’m learning names,” she said, touching his arm tentatively, “do you have one for me?”

It was out of his mouth before he could think better of it. “Alita. Alita is a nice name.”

The girl beamed up at him as if he’d just given her the best present in the world. “I like it!” she declared, and he knew it would be no use suggesting anything else. “Let’s keep it, at least until I can remember my real name. Thank you!” She threw her arms around him and gave him a hug that took his breath away.

Ido gazed down at the top of her head, which came to the centre of his breastbone, then looked to see how Gerhad was taking it, but she had already gone back inside. She’d heard him, though—Gerhad heard everything—and she’d make him answer for it later. As if he’d ever stopped answering for Alita.

Alita. He stroked her beautiful dark hair and held her tight. Of course, Alita—that face, those eyes. No other name would do. “Well, then, Alita, let’s get you back inside for some tests. I need another brain scan now that you’re conscious, and a full neuro-motor calibration and—”

She looked up at him with an eager smile. “No, let’s take a walk! Can we? Please?” Without waiting for an answer, she started pulling him down the street.

Gerhad reappeared on the porch. “Go on. She looks pretty calibrated to me,” she said, laughing a little. “Shoes! You should get shoes!”

* * *

As soon as she had a name, the floodgates opened and she deluged him with questions. What was engineering and why didn’t anyone use it to make Iron City float? How big was Iron City? Had there always been so many people? Who’d named it Iron City and why? What was outside the city? Who lived there, and what did they do?

Ido gave her a potted history of the last three hundred years, including the War and the Fall, thinking she would be distracted while she digested new information. Fat chance—apparently he had forgotten what a bright fourteen-year-old girl was like. Well, it had been a while; he was out of practice. He decided to take her for a walk through the city so she could goggle at all the street life. He just had to make sure she didn’t wander into traffic.

Alita trotted along beside him, her wide eyes taking in everything and everyone—the standard, un-enhanced humans; cyborgs of all kinds, from those with only one or two machine limbs like Gerhad to Total Replacements like herself; as well as the kids weaving among the crowds, some running barefoot, others on motorised rollerblades. Even the street signs fascinated her, including the ones she couldn’t read. Ido made another mental note: she was fluent only in English.

As if she had somehow caught the flavour of what he’d been thinking, she turned to him and said, “Why so many languages?”