And it did it to get rid of the humans.
Norah looked down, expecting to see a thousand floating bloated corpses staring up at her, swaying and following them over currents that had a mind of their own.
“How are you holding up, love?”
Love?
She blinked the water from her lashes. “Painfully. But well,” it came out as a cough.
“Want me to stop?”
She lifted her head to see that they clung to a tree with only Stryker’s fingers holding them up.
“No.” Norah shook her head. Her curls were stretched out by water and plastered to her face.
Her snake. Her savior grunted and shifted under her butt to coil around the thick wood. She closed her eyes again as they swirled up and around the trunk.
She knew what a snake was even though they no longer existed in the wilds of Earth.
It took everything in herself, the part of her that had grown up on a dying planet, the part that had left her family behind so many years before, and the part that believed in improbable circumstances when she was a child to accept the bizarre creation that was ‘Stryker’.
Man-made.Regardless of what he was.He’s man-made.How could she love something so suddenly, in such an inopportune situation? Norah didn’t even think she felt love for her family.
It was her past.
Everything in her screamed at the absurdity of her feelings. A war raged inside her mind, and her heart was the sacrifice. If she survived this ordeal she would analyze her feelings for the Cyborg, write them down in a lab notebook, and check all the variables.
Her mouth filled with blood as her teeth sank into her lip after a rough jump. Norah licked the trail of it off of her lower lip.
“Stryker,” she whispered.I love you.
Thunder blared.
“Yeah?”
I love you…
She shook her head. “How much longer?”
His head leaned back and she rested her cheek against his metal band. “Not much,” the rain pinged over his mask. “Barring any more catastrophic surprises, we could be in the sky within an hour.” Stryker swung them up on a nearby ledge and perched to open his bag. He lifted out a ration and handed it to her.
“I’m not hungry.”Not in the least.
“Humans need to eat several times a day. It’s been over twelve hours for you. You need to eat it.”
“I would rather wait until I’m surrounded by the metal walls of the EonMed ship,” she sighed, but peeled back the plastic and took a bite of the ration in spite of herself.
“Rather than be surrounded by me?”
She heard him laugh as she swallowed.
“Yes,” she said as she chewed. “Obviously, although I’m pretty sure I was the one ‘surrounding’ you back there,” she shot back.
“You wound me, love,” he teased her. “I can’t blame you though.”
“Stop calling me that. Why are you calling me that?”I don’t like it.Norah stopped eating and tilted her head, shuffling over him despite the rope to look in the corner of his eye. “You can’t call me love.”
“It feels right.” He shrugged.
