Kori’s face is streaked with stubborn tears. She wipes them away with the back of a glove. “You’d sacrifice your own citizens to ensure you stay in power?”
“Oh, Kori, darling, you always were such a damned idealist.” Shaking her head, Chloe clicks her tongue as if speaking to a petulant toddler. “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”
“Aspect does not—approve this message,” the mech chimes in before promptly being cut off by a raging Kori, whose veins are practically popping out of her neck.
“This isn’t about the needs of the many. This is aboutyou, whatyouwant, that you want to rule everything,owneveryone, cheat death with your twisted science—”
“I have suffered so much for my people!” Chloe raises a defiant fist. “Is it not time that some of them begin to pay me back?”
Everything in me longs to pull Kori into my chest, gently running my fingers through her lustrous hair and down the curve of her spine, reassuring her that no matter what happens next, I’ll fight with her and for her even if it kills us. But abruptly, as if a switch were flipped, hertears are gone, her rage swallowed up as if by a black hole. Her lips press into a tight line.
Chloe blinks, confused, as Kori breathes, “Please do say that again.”
All at once, I notice a tiny, almost-imperceptible yellowish light on Aspect’s forehead, like a speck of forgotten stardust, blinking in and out.
“Aspect ends—their broadcast here!” they declare, raising both their arms to honor an invisible audience. “Thank yourself for watching!”
The twin enforcers glance between Chloe and each other, hands hovering over their weapons, not knowing what to do about a threat they can’t simply riddle with heatshot—the truth fully unleashed.
Chloe balks. “What is the mech talking about?”
“Now the whole settlement knows who you really are,” Kori says, arms crossed. “A liar. An Evolved. And a megalomaniac who would sacrifice them all without a hint of remorse.”
Chloe whirls and advances on the cowering Ednit. “You absolutebuffoon,” she snarls, “you were standing here this entire time. Why didn’t you say something? Signal to me?Anythingbut sit there sniffling like a pathetic child?”
With a heavy exhale, Ednit collapses his own helmet, revealing his face (and that he, too, is among the Evolved). He’s a small brown man, with a soft but serious visage, a bit of gray beginning to pepper his hair. “I could say it was because Kori would’ve shot me, but that’s not the entire truth.” He wipes snot bubbles from his nose with the back of one gloved hand. “It’s gone too far, Chloe. Threatening the Shadowlands. Sacrificing our own people to their soldiers.”
“You sniveling fool. Don’t pretend you didn’t want this,” Chloe says. “You proposed the Evolution Project tome, Ednit. It was your baby. Your vision of the future. I’ve simply embraced the possibilities.”
Tears streak Ednit’s cheeks. “I started the Evolution Project … to preserve life, to honor it. But you would sacrifice innumerable lives tomaintain your own power.” He half sobs, shaking his head. “I never wanted this.”
A muscle twitches in Chloe’s jaw. Slowly, as the reality of her situation dawns, all the synthetic color drains from her face, leaving a husk of the cruelly regal visage that was there mere moments ago.
“Howdare you, Kori,” she says in a voice balanced on a freezeblade’s edge. “Your own mother, giver of your own life, and you would paint me in such an ugly light without a hint of remorse?”
“I only broadcast your own words,” Kori says, retrieving a comms tablet from her pocket. She must have pilfered it from Ednit. “And if my comms are anything to go by right now, the public is extremely unhappy with what they’ve just learned.”
The twin enforcers have retrieved comms tablets of their own, visibly shrinking away at the sight of their notifications. “My lady,” says one, reaching to lay a hand on Chloe’s shoulder. She shrugs it roughly away. “She’s telling the truth. The people are in an uproar.”
Aspect chimes in: “Aspect’s broadcast—making many people—big mad. But not at Aspect.” They bobble lightly on their heels. “Only Kori—gets mad at Aspect.”
Kori trembles a little now as the force of what she’s done comes crashing down. Again I resist the urge to pull her into me, to hold her until the shaking stills and the center of gravity is simply us.
“You have no one to blame but yourself, Chloe,” Kori says. She crosses her arms, ever the defiant daughter. I’ve never been prouder of her than I am right now. “The whole settlement knows the truth now. What you’ve done. What you are. The attack that’s coming for all of us. So are you going to save what you can of your reputation and defend your citizens from the nightfolk? Or are you just going to keep looking at me like you’ve tasted something sour?”
Chloe’s teeth worry away at her lip amidst her total loss of control. “You’ve made a much bigger mistake than you know, Kori,” she says,sauntering toward her with clenched fists. “Let the nightfolk come! Let the settlement run red. And let the superior life-forms be the ones to battle for this planet.”
It’s Ednit, not Kori, who is next to raise his voice—a trembling, nasal, snot-stricken voice, the last plea of a man realizing he was a primary accomplice in the impending apocalypse. “Chloe, what would even be left to rule?”
“Only the worthy. Only the strong. Evolution at its zenith, Ednit. And if what’s left is not enough, our lives have no limit now. We could relearn the helical engine, given enough time. We could go back to Earth. Purge it, too, of the weak—”
“Monster!”It’s more animal scream than it is protest. In a fit of emotion, Kori lunges, her fist upraised even before she’s moved.
Chloe effortlessly sidesteps the blow, her daughter crashing painfully to the metal floor instead in a shower of sand. The enforcers finally pull their pistols, merely waiting for an order to open fire.
“Kori …” I extend a hand to her, to pull her back up, but she only looks at me with tearful, baleful eyes, not yet having the will to stand.
“You can’t do this!” Kori sobs. “All those people.Ourpeople. Chloe, please, you can’t just—”
