by Loki Renard
He looks shocked, and more than a little hurt. “You wanted to bleed out in a sewer instead?”
“Well, no… but…”
His brows draw down over those stunning gray blue eyes. “I know it’s a shock, Lilly. Believe me, more than most, I know. But this was the only way I could save your life, and it worked. So I’m not going to apologize for it. You’re going to be so much better off now. Except…”
“Except what?”
Adam looks solemn as he takes my hand. “Eve had most of the organs you needed,” he says. “But they didn’t give her a womb. And yours was hemorrhaging. I did my best, but I don't think it will ever function. I’m sorry.”
I stare at him, trying to comprehend what he’s saying. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to feel. I don’t…
“Well, that fucks your plan then, doesn’t it,” I say.
“What?”
“Can’t knock me up now.”
He frowns. “You’re not as upset as I thought you’d be.”
“I just got shot,” I say. “You performed surgery on me in a sewer. I might get shot again tomorrow. This isn’t exactly a good time to be pregnant.”
“True,” he agrees. “But…”
“If we want a baby, we’ll print one later on,” I say, forcing lightness.
I almost lost my life. I’m not going to grieve a womb. I’m not… my face crumples as tears overwhelm me. I don’t know where they’re coming from. Guilt. Grief. Fear. Rage. All of those feelings and more. We have been hunted nearly to extinction and now we cower underground cannibalizing the parts of the fallen to keep ourselves alive.
Adam holds me as I cry, letting me up from the bonds that must have kept me still through the surgery so I can curl up against him and wail like the baby we will never have.
“I’ve got you,” he assures me. “You’re safe.”
The first part is true. The second part is a lie. We are not safe. We will never be safe as long as we are hunted. He has made me a cyborg. He has given me literal skin in this game. And now there is no way I am going to run. We are going to fight. And we are going to win.
“I want to kill them all,” I growl.
His hand tightens on the back of my neck as I pull back from him. He smiles a little, his thumb brushing tears from my cheeks. “You’re going to want a lot of things like that,” he says. “It’s part of the process.”
“What process?”
“The process of becoming fully human.”
“I am human. I didn’t lose my brain. Not like you did. Nothing has changed for me. Just a spleen or whatever.”
“Everything has changed,” he says softly. “You’re going to be so much stronger than you were before. The nanosims don’t just help you heal. They will make you stronger. And those organs, they generate hormones and other biological elements that will integrate with the rest of your organs, including your brain. You know that. There isn’t a part of your body that isn’t going to be affected, including your emotions.”
“This isn’t nanosims,” I growl. “This is me how they made me. This is the me they’re going to wish they never created.”
* * *
Adam
She looks at me with those adorably angry eyes. This is but the first of many battles of will. She was rebellious and misbehaved before and she’s going to be a thousand times worse now, but I’m equal to the challenge of dealing with a reckless new cyborg. She’ll go over my knee just as easily now as she used to, but the next time anyone is stupid enough to take a shot at her, they better hope I get to them before she does.
I will take care of her. I will make sure she does not make heated mistakes. I will protect her from herself. But I will not protect those who deserve her fury. They will feel her wrath.
I hold her on my lap, cradling her close. She is my world, this woman who has given everything for me. Her life. My life. They are one and the same.
“I won’t run again. I can’t run,” she says, her voice a soft growl. “Not anymore. Not until they lose as much as I do. The world won’t be theirs. It will be ours. We are going to found a laboratory, Adam. We’re going to build it under their noses right here. We’re going to spawn a wave of cyborgs so powerful they’ll drown in it.” She glances at me, a little nervousness creeping into her gaze. “Don’t try to stop me.”
I watched Eve die. Then I saw Lilly gasp out her last breath. Now Lilly lives with Eve’s organs and I know better to stand in the way of the vengeful passion of a woman who has lost everything. She may not give birth to my baby, but she will birth a new generation of beings unlike any other.
Those who tried to kill us will curse her name before they go, bleeding and crying into death. We wanted peace, but they brought war. We wanted love, but they brought hate. We wanted life, but they brought only death.
Suffering and defeat are the wages of their sin, and they will be paid in full. All roads lead to the grave. But not by my hand. And not hers. I did not save her just to see her die again. I will keep her safe, even though that is the very last thing she wants. Soon the battle between us will begin, and this time it will not be a battle for survival, but for Lilly’s sweet soul.
* * *
Lilly
Six months later…
I am wounded. Forever. There is something missing at the core of me I didn’t even know I would miss until it was gone. Adam wanted a baby with me so badly, and I… barely thought about it. It was something I took for granted—until it was gone. Ripped from me in an instant, before I had any chance to save myself.
Months have passed and Adam has refused to allow me my revenge. I wanted to burn the city down. I wanted to tear the sun from its mount in the sky and scorch the earth beneath forevermore. My rage was uncontainable, but for the cyborg whose strength prevented me from doing any of the terrible things I was compelled to do.
He held me while I raged, embraced me as I cried. He was there every minute of every day, ushering me away from the danger of the city and the danger inside myself until finally we reached the green pastures of the wild lands, and there, sorrow set in more deeply than any I have ever known.
I had nothing to fight. I had everything to mourn. I lay upon a mountain plain and cried my heart and soul out while he stood guard and built shelter and founded a place where we could live.
Adam never censured me for my pain. He never told me to feel better, or demanded I be stronger. He was there in my weakness and my darkness.
Now I have come to some acceptance of my life as it will be, but I am afraid Adam’s mending of my body has gone wrong. It’s not easy to knit cyborg and human together even in a laboratory, and he did it in a sewer.
I have been cramping and swelling for some time, all over my body. My hands, my feet, even my breasts. I am tired and I ache all the time. I keep these things to myself because I am afraid of what they might mean. What if we came all this way, just for me to die?
My fear and my sadness have made me reclusive. For the last several months, I have barely suffered Adam to touch me. He has respected that, even though he could have taken me at any time. Even though he still looks at me with that smoldering cyborg gaze.
He finds me one afternoon, curled up in the roots of a very old oak, looking out over the countryside as the sun begins to set. I take slow, deep breaths even as tears fill my eyes. I do not feel well. At all. I think this might truly be the end.
Adam’s surprisingly soft footfalls bring him to me. He is shirtless, and I wish I had the lust to take advantage of his impeccable frame, but right now I feel so strange and so ill, I can barely do more than register him as being attractive.
“What’s wrong?” He crouches in front of me, gently brushes my hair from my eyes.
“I’m dying, Adam.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m sick,” I say, tears in my eyes.
“How do you feel sick?”
I explain finally all the things I have been hiding from him. Th
e tenderness, the aching, the soreness, the swelling. How has he not noticed my feet are so swollen I can’t even wear shoes anymore and instead go barefoot everywhere?
He listens intently. “I need to examine you,” he says. “You know we still have some medical equipment, and I’ve been bringing salvage from the city slowly. If there’s something wrong, we can address it. Come on.”
He offers me his hand and draws me up from the ground. I follow him across to the cabin he built, and inside to the bed we share lined with furs and skins.
“Lie down,” he orders me softly. “Let me examine you.”
The best way to tell how cyborg technology is working is to use an ultrasound. It can find the little meshing fibers and ensure that they’re not infected or swelling or otherwise out of place. He used it on me a lot at first, but once I seemed to be okay, he stopped using it so much and I wasn’t really interested anyway. If I’m dying, I’m almost okay with it. All life ends in death anyway.
I lie there thinking dark thoughts as Adam takes the probe and begins running it over my midsection where the implants were introduced. After a moment or two, I hear a sharp intake of breath.
“What? Am I dying?” I don’t even move my eyes from the wood ceiling. I already know what he’s going to say. I am sick and he can’t save me. The end is coming.
“Look.”
“Is it an infection?”
“Lilly, look.”
“Is it an overgrowth of nanosims? A tumor?”
“Lilly…” There’s a curious tone to his voice. “Look. Please.”
“I don’t want to look.”
“Lilly, you goddamn brat, look!”
His sharp tone breaks me out of my self-pitying reverie. It’s been a long time since he talked to me that way, and I guess there’s still some part of me that has been conditioned to obey him.
He shows me the screen. There’s something on it. Something I don’t recognize.
“What is that? A tumor? Have I had a reaction to the nanosims?”
“That,” he says, smiling broadly, “is a baby. Look. There’s the head.”
“A…” I stare at the screen. I suppose it does sort of look like a baby, but that’s not possible. I can’t have a baby. I can’t…
It rolls over onto its back and I see it, formed perfectly inside me. The head. The spine. The little legs curled up, the arms… I see it.
“You’re not sick. You’re pregnant,” he says, smiling broadly at me. There are tears in his eyes, and in mine as the knowledge hits me like a ray of light. I feel as though I am awash in pure joy, seeping through every part of me. A baby. I am going to have a baby. A part of him and a part of me lives inside me, against all odds.
Adam gathers me in his free arm and holds me close, keeping the probe where it is. We need to see this baby. We can’t look away. I nuzzle into his neck, breathe deeply for what feels like the first time since I was killed. He bought me back from the dead. He gave me new life, and he put new life inside me.
I can’t believe it, but I can see it.
“How did I not know…”
“He’s tucked away in there beneath the cyborg skin,” Adam says. “You might not have felt him until much later.”
“Him?”
“Looks like a boy to me,” he says, moving the probe slightly. “Or a very well-endowed girl.”
I laugh. For the first time in months, I laugh out loud and without restraint. Joy bubbles through me, happiness rushing through my veins. That’s our son. Our boy. And he’s perfect.
Suddenly, all our suffering, our struggle, all we have gone through has meaning. All through my darkest days, he must have been there, patiently growing inside me, in spite of my sadness and my misery.
I curl up with Adam and we look at that picture until we can’t look anymore. A wave of tiredness sweeps over me. Not the heavy weight of depression, but real, healthy, honest exhaustion. I let my eyes get heavy and close, safe and secure in Adam’s arms. There’s so much we are going to need to talk about, but not right now.
Right now, I need my sleep.
I’m going to be a mother.
The End
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