Frantically, Chloe taps out an access code on the entry panel.
This time some of Jelza’s heatshot barrage actually connects with my mother, and it’s all I can do to keep my footing. I want to tackle Jelza to the floor. I want to pummel Chloe with my own bare hands. I want to be anywhere else,anyoneelse, than I am in this moment. I’ve suffered from flashbacks turned nightmares as long as I can remember, but this is by far the worst one. I can already feel that this moment—taking up arms against my own mother, with our entire world on the line—will haunt my sleep for the rest of my life.
When the firing stops, Jelza’s twin pistols reloading a fresh charge, all the breath goes out of my lungs.
Burns gleam brightly on Chloe’s back and shoulders, a few even on the nape of her neck, unprotected by her tightly bound hair. But they clearly didn’t pierce through to anything vital. Beneath her synthetic flesh, wires tangle like alien limbs, smoke hisses a foul black, and unnatural blue light flickers and simmers. Shots like that would’ve gone straight through a mortal limb. For the immortal, they simply reveal the sick science beneath.
I can only imagine how I would’ve reacted if I’d somehow been reckless enough to get a third-degree burn and discovered robot parts inside my limbs. Probably would’ve been convinced I imagined it. Probably would’ve been told that by everyone I trusted. Probably would’ve believed them.
Chloe wheels to face us, sneering, and Jelza desperately opens fire again. This time she aims for the face. I scream, reduced from language to noise. Chloe doesn’t even flinch, batting away all she can with freshly conjured shields.
It isn’t quite enough, though. When the guns fade out, a whole side of Chloe’s visage, from eyebrow to chin, is freed of synthetic flesh—just a quivering mass of sensors, wires, panels, programming. I expect to smell burnt hair, but it’s more like a scrap pile, like a malfunctioning forge. A rusty, smelting, mechanized rot of a stench.
It’s all somehow worse than gore. I struggle to time my breathing. How long has my mother been this … thisthing, so unlike herself? Or is this who she always was, before the body transfer, before Evolution—ever calculating, cold and unfeeling as metal, every system driven by a need for control?
Chloe brings one hand up to scrape the remaining synthetic flesh away, bits of face coming away like damp paper on her fingertips. She moans in obvious pain, and distantly I wonder why an Evolved would have pain receptors at all. Perhaps she thought it would keep her human. But her own pain is the only kind that really matters to her. Not anyone else’s.
A shrillbeep.Horrified, I watch the control room’s doors slide open.
The last barrier to Chloe’s genocidal plan is gone.
Click. Click-click.Heatshot cartridges need to be charged on the surface. Jelza raises both pistols, jaw slack. “I’m out.”
“Tell me you have spares,” I breathe.
“I’mout.”
Seizing the opportunity, Chloe breaks headlong for the farthest control panel.
My mouth tastes like rust and salt, my nostrils full of thick, choking mechanical smoke. My vision shimmers at the edges, absolute panic threatening to lock me in place, but I shove it down as far as I can, from my stomach to my legs to my feet, which rocket me forward in a blast of energy.
“Enough!” I scream as I tackle Chloe headlong from behind.
We roll across the metal flooring, a tangle of limbs and curses. Jelza must be close behind, but I can’t see her, the room spinning and flipping like a dreamscape around me.
The only things that stay in focus are Chloe’s eyes, one an elegant brown like my own, the other all machine—like an overly large pupil, buried in the wiring viscera of her face, blinking rapidly across the color spectrum, on and off, black and white and blue and red. Always unable to process that it’s her own daughter who finally pins her to the floor, chest heaving, heart in her throat.
I press my knees into Chloe’s ribs, holding her fast. “I said,enough.”
Chloe sighs. “You’re wasting your time,” she says, visible electric currents racing along her limbs.
But Jelza slides in behind me, beating her down with both spent pistols like blunt weapons. If they had any ammo, they’d probably explode from the energy overload. But empty, they absorb the charge as well as any protective Pagonian gear.
“You lose, Chloe,” I say, panting. Loose hair and sweat stings my eyes. My legs feel like rubber, my arms like empty weaponry. “Stand down.”
“You think that’s how this ends?” Chloe spits synthetic blood on the floor, then throws her whole body weight against me, flipping our positions. “You think I surrender to my owndaughter?”
I cry out, wrestling, but even stung with heatshot and with half her face torn apart, Chloe is terrifyingly strong. Her hands go for my throat.
Everything blurs. I think I see Jelza trying to pry Chloe’s hands off me, then Chloe hitting a heavy backhand into Jelza’s skull, and then Ican hardly see anything at all. There’s a fleshy thud that I think must be Jelza’s unconscious body hitting the floor. Weak wheezing noises that I think are me. The hands at my neck tighten, squeeze, then deliberately ease up just long enough for the half mother, half robot face to swim back into my vision. The exposed sight sensor is bloodred; the human eye is streaked with tears.
“I only wanted what was best for you, Kori,” my mother says, voice quivering, hands still squeezing the life from me. “Best for everyone.”
My voice barely slips through her tightening fingers. I have to choose these words—quite possibly mylastwords—with perfect precision. My world shimmering, my limbs going numb, I take a last desperate gamble and cough, “I … know.”
The stranglehold hesitates, loosens.
At once, Chloe drops me entirely.
