“Mekkra?” I yell, pushing my head through the gap. My lip is already swelling, and the words comes out wrong. “What’th happening?”
Great. Now I sound ridiculous.
The alarm keeps screaming. Underneath it, Ihear grunts, the unmistakable hiss-pop of blaster fire, and something heavy slamming into a wall hard enough that I feel it through my spine.
I should hide.
I should crawl back into my room and wedge myself under the bed and let warlords deal with warlord problems.
Instead, my chest is tight with one awful, singular thought:
What if he’s hurt?
I hate that my brain goes there. I hate that I care.
But I fucking do.
I drag myself upright, one hand glued to the doorframe, then flatten against the hallway wall. My legs are shaking too hard to trust, so I sidle, inch by inch, toward the sound of the fight.
“Mekkra? What’th happening?” I shout again, louder this time, closer.
There’s a roar ahead—low and furious and absolutely his.
Then a body hits something. Hard.
I’m almost to the atrium—the big open space where I first arrived—when something flashes in my peripheral vision.
Silver.
Too fast.
A metal arm shoots out of the smoke and clamps around my throat.
Cold. Unyielding. Mechanical fingers dig into the sides of my neck and lift me clean off the ground. My toes scrape uselessly against the floor as I claw at polished alloy that doesn’t give an inch.
A featureless chrome face swings into view, optic sensors glowing an icy blue.
“Target acquired, alert Lord Quldo,” it says in a clippedsynthetic voice.
Its grip tightens as smoke plumes behind him.
And somewhere beyond the smoke, I hear that same roar.
"Unhand my mate!"
Mekkra’s clawed hand plunges from the smoke and beheads the bot currently choking the shit out of me.
The metal hand doesn’t release right away, like there’s some buffering delay between his body and recently removed head. When it does, my knees hit the floor right as a swarm of robots crawl up Mekkra’s back.
A flurry of silver hands stab at his sides with lethal-looking blades. I cover my head with my hands as the bright laser trail of a blast clips his forearm. My nostrils fill with the scent of burning hair.
Mekkra bellows again, grabbing each of the mechanical soldiers and flinging them against the wall. They smash into pieces as if they were made of porcelain.
His eyes almost glow with red rage as he decimates each and every one of his attackers, the last of which he holds between his two humongous hands as he drags it apart. The bot glitches and makes a noise so close to a scream that I’m not sure it isn’t as the last of his circuits and wires snap apart, sparks flying.
I can hear Mekkra's ragged breaths even over the noise of the station’s alarm. With a clatter, he drops the bot to the floor. His wild eyes find me, and for a moment they soften. He reaches out to my face, thumb brushing my damaged lip, before he crumples into himself, collapsing to the floor.
“No, no, no…” I crawl over to him, using all my strength to turn him to his side. “Wake up!” I scream, slapping his cheek. “You can’t leave me here alone!” I thump my fist to his chest. “What do I do?”
