Page 46 of Leviathan

But I also found something surprising.

A soft touch, familiar yet different.

I stopped my filaments on that attack vector, pausing them before they crushed the familiar feeling creature. In another sector, I found another something similar, but many hands, before I felt the burn of the heat of engines firing sear that section of me away.

Still, I tore into him.

Still, I could not get to her, and as each moment passed with her out of my reach, my panic and fear grew.

I shouldn't have let her go.

Then, without warning, the fight went out of him. He stopped blocking me and opened up, like a primitive creature exposing its throat.

"He's going to kill her," the other Vaurelcar told me, its voice filled with pain and shock.

I didn't have time to bring visual or audio units with me, all I could do was touch.

So I touched.

EIGHTEEN

MARIA

Filaments shot out from the walls, the familiar glowing white, wrapping around the Calicium, lashing it like a sea monster rising from the depths to embrace the wooden planks of a pirate ship. The Calicium's body crumpled in places, metal crunching, denting as the filaments wrapped tighter. It let out a scream, and there was a burst of blue light from its arm, severing several of the filaments. I rushed over to where my weapon had fallen, dodging under more filaments as they shot out of the walls, trying to grab his arm, as he fired repeatedly, severing filament after filament, breaking himself free as he severed them even as they fought to strangle him.

I lifted my gun and pointed it at him.

The filaments pulled back suddenly, wrenching him off balance, opening him up.

I triggered my weapon, and the red light stabbed into him. It hit him, and he staggered backward, off balance, his arm lifting to point his built-in weapon at me.

Then his back brushed against the peach colored wall behind him.

The filaments there surged forward, enveloping him like mud, sucking him in as his scream vanished into the beautiful white filaments.

There was a horrible sound, like lettuce crunching over and over again, and magenta blood oozed out from between the filaments.

Then there was silence.

I stood there for a moment, staring at the wall, feeling the horror of it all, the bruise on my chest, the knowledge that I was in part responsible for the ending of another life. There was a numbness to that thought, an acceptance that fit neatly into the category of things that I would do over again. The glowing white filaments reached out, one of them stroking my hair, the others brushing over my body with a gentleness I knew deep down in my heart.

Even so, I focused on where the other being had died, and I whispered a soft prayer that my grandmother had taught me.

"Diosa Segadora, que ya lo reclamaste con tu guadaña, no permitas que su alma encuentre descanso; júzgalo con tu frío eterno y arrástralo a la oscuridad donde no exista el olvido," I said.

"That is harsh," the Vaurelcar said. "You wish such a thing on someone following orders?"

"Anyone following the orders of evil is just the same as the person making the orders," I said. "Obedience to evil isn't a virtue; it is a sin of the darkest kind, because it is the sin of compliant cowardice. There is always a way to fight back, whether it is directly or with malicious compliance."

"Malicious compliance?" the Vaurelcar asked.

"It is when you comply, but you do so with a broad interpretation of what that means," I said. "In my culture, there is an idea that if you make a deal with the devil, the devil will always interpret the deal in the worst possible way for you. Say you wish for your body's weight in gold, the devil will kill you and turn you into gold. When you maliciously comply, you go along with the oppressor's orders, but always with the deliberate intent to mess things up and deliver an outcome they don't want. Obedience to evil is evil itself, but the appearance of obedience while destroying it from within is good."

I felt a tug on the gun in my grip, and I looked down to see a peach neuro filament wrapped around it.

Lyrien's filaments trailed down my hand, and as they brushed up against the peach one, it flinched away, keeping the barest grip on the gun.

"Let go," the Vaurelcar said as it tugged on the gun. "Please."