All around us on this side was immediate movement and battle. Zero’s soldiers attacked us at once, using hand-to-hand combat in favor of weaponry.
Lucas hugged me even tighter and tucked down to run ahead as everyone else automatically took up defensive positions. I felt like we were in a game of American football; Lucas was the quarterback with the ball racing to the end zone, and everyone else had to keep his path clear.
Up ahead on the tarmac, a black SUV with darkly tinted windows screeched to a halt directly in Luke’s path. I knew in my gut it was Nicholas. My suspicions were confirmed when he jumped out of the vehicle and opened the back door. He grabbed several guns from the back seat and left the door open for Lucas.
We had about fifty meters to go before reaching it.
I looked over to my right just in time to see Daniel kick a soldier in the chest, pinning him briefly to the truck behind him before the soldier’s core processor exploded beneath the impact and Vulcan blood sprayed wildly. The soldier dropped to the ground and Daniel spun to face his next opponent.
A few paces away, Shawn was grappling with another of Zero’s men. The soldier had a thick arm wrapped around Shawn’s throat, but Shawn elbowed the soldier in the side, gripped the man’s forearm where it was pressed against him, and suddenly dropped down, yanking the soldier over his head to send him flying. As if the two had timed it, Daniel spun again, a Vector Fifteen gun in his hand, and fired two rounds into the soldier’s head.
Not far away, Sonia pulled the trigger on her own weapon, dropping a soldier who’d had her pinned beneath his boot. She rolled furiously out of the way in time to keep him from falling on her, but was still covered in copious amounts of Vulcan blood in the process. An equally blood-covered Cole offered her an arm up as he ran by, firing at an oncoming enemy. She took the offered assistance, leaping gracefully to her feet before she raised her gun and added her bullets to his.
Lucas and I reached the SUV. As he gently sat me inside, I caught the sound of police sirens in the distance.
“Lucas, hurry,” I said softly. We were down to the wire. How Cole was going to explain this mess to his superiors was beyond me. But a lot was beyond me just then. I wasn’t feeling so good. Exhaustion was creeping in super fast. I was fading.
I rested my head back against the seat as Lucas returned to the fray to help the other members of Prometheus finish off the contingent of Zero’s men. I watched my android duck beneath a swung machine gun, grab the gun, rip it from its owner’s grip, and spin it around to slam it into the soldier’s head so fast, Luke’s movements literally blurred.
And my tired body pulled me a little closer to sleepy town.
The Prometheus team picked off their enemy stragglers, and one by one gathered together inside the appropriated Vector Fifteen vehicle. Just before the last door was slammed shut and Nicholas shoved the SUV into drive, I peered under half-closed lids at the war zone outside.
A caravan of blue and whites flashed at the far end of the street, red alarm lights were pulsing above the hospital doors, and bodies decorated the ground.
As the world began to gray out and sleep overtook me, my gaze fell on the darkness between two buildings. There stood a solitary figure, tall and dark. His posture was erect, strong, and composed as ever, despite the thick blood decorating his chest and dripping from his hands.
The last thing I saw before oblivion was the glowing red, but quietly calculating gaze that watched me slip once more through his blood-drenched fingers.
Chapter Twenty-One
The next few days passed in a kind of blur.
Charlotte, Mabel, and Nanuk did indeed meet up with us at the predestined location. I couldn’t have explained how happy I was to see the people I considered my family still alive and together in one place, even if it was a new and strange place.
Cole had taken a flesh wound shot to his side during the firefight, but the bullet had entered and exited cleanly. However, Shawn had suffered a bullet wound as well, this one through the thigh. Though it wasn’t particularly disabling, the bullet was still lodged in his leg and would need to be removed before it shifted and wound up blocking necessary functions.
Both injuries needed medical attention, if different kinds of medical attention.
With Lilith apparently back in Pittsburgh relocating Prometheus to a secure location once again, I knew it was up to me to tend to the wounded. Charlotte was very caring and had amazing bedside manner, but she didn’t have the biomechanical knowledge needed to repair android injuries. And no one in the group at all had the knowledge to tend to a human bullet wound. Except me.
So I made a list of supplies I needed and handed it to Cole’s boxing coach, a man in his fifties by the name of Charles Clanton. Cole simply referred to him as Coach C.
Coach C was an incredibly good sport. He was a little rough in the voice from smoking in his youth, and he didn’t have much to offer in the way of modern comfort in his rather worn out two-bedroom apartment. But he had plenty of warm and soft blankets, he had a Televise monitor with four hundred channels, and he had a microwave. Funny how those hadn’t changed in the last hundred or so years. Anyway, those were three of our favorite things at Prometheus.
Most importantly, Coach C had a viable credit code – which proved useful in getting the supplies I needed. I knew I couldn’t use my own. Zero seemed to have eyes everywhere, even here in Columbus. If my credit number popped up as being used anywhere at all, he would know immediately.
Of that, I had absolutely no doubts.
I made sure to tell the coach to buy the supplies from different stores, breaking them up into no fewer than five separate purchases. I also instructed him to attempt to do so at locations a few miles apart at the very least. I did this because I also knew Zero would be on the lookout for anyone procuring provisions and materials used to repair both humans and androids.
Coach followed my instructions to the letter, and returned with an added bonus – a lollipop for Mabel. Mabel may have been an android, but among other things, the child androids had been programmed for a taste for sweets just like human children. She happily popped the sucker into her mouth, bringing a truly pleased smile to the old man’s face.
After about a week, it was obvious Coach C was getting comfortable with the rather crowded living conditions, because he smiled like that most of the time, and he laughed quite a lot. His apartment underwent a bit of a restorative transformation as well, since several of Prometheus’s androids decided that one of the ways they wanted to pay him back for his hospitality was by fixing up the place.
While he was out teaching boxing lessons, they did everything from replace his blinds to shampoo the carpet to re-caulk his bathroom tub, tiles, and sink. They re-did his plumbing, installed a new – well, refurbished anyway – washer and dryer so he wouldn’t have to make any more trips to the laundromat, and as a special treat, we all worked together to make an enormous Christmas dinner.
And that was where we spent it – Christmas. We spent it as a family with Coach C.
I missed the other members at Prometheus: Lilith, Finn, the other children, and of course the Eddie’s. And I missed Saxon.
But I tried not to think about it. And at around nine o’clock on a snowy Columbus, Ohio Christmas morning, Prometheus awoke in a small two-bedroom apartment and left their borrowed bedrooms to enter the living room, where they found a brightly lit Christmas tree with a plethora of wrapped presents beneath it.
Mabel screamed a high-pitched scream of absolute delight. But she wasn’t alone. Pretty much everyone let out hoots and hollers, oohs and ahhs, and I smiled quietly to myself. I’d pulled it off. I’d done it. Despite everything – we were having Christmas.
I’d sold the clothes I’d stolen from Zero’s underground mansion for cash and used the cash to buy the gifts, a pre-lit tree, and wrapping paper. Lucky for me, Lex had thought to take those clothes from the hospital room and tuck them into his coat, which I was convinced was a Dungeon
s and Dragons coat-of-holding.
I had to get Coach C to help me hide the gifts in his lockers at the gym where he taught, and use his office for wrapping them. He helped me with that too since one of my arms was in a cast.
Cole, being the lieutenant that he was, found us out. But like a true friend, he’d kept his smirking mouth shut. And I’d had to confide in Lex so that he could help us get the tree inside the apartment the night before and plug it in.
But it had all been worth it. Despite the little bits and pieces of it all that each person knew about, the surprise as a whole was still unexpected.
Now I stepped back as everyone knelt beside the piles of presents and forgot themselves for a while. Even Daniel sat cross-legged on the carpet and pulled Mabel into his lap as she tore through the wrapping paper of her gift. I listened to the laughter and slowly backed out of the room to make my way onto the balcony, still smiling to myself.
I closed the sliding glass door behind me and turned around to take in the world around me.
Like some fairy tale out of a Disney movie, it was snowing. This wasn’t some piddly frozen dribble, either. Big, fat, glorious flakes fell heavy from the heavens. And it was quiet. This was one of my favorite things about snow. The quiet.
White coated the world and painted it clean. Even garbage dumps looked like winter fantasy worlds in freshly fallen snow. But nothing could compare to the absolute silence that permeated the whole world in a snow storm. Sound was distilled here in this ivory palace, as if the cosmos had turned to it and gently placed its fingers to its lips in the universal sign for, “Shhhh.”
Coach C’s apartment was on the fourteenth floor of his building. I stared out over the neighboring complexes and the street below and took in the rare and precious peace. I filled my mind and soul with it as if I would never have another moment of peace again and needed to store it up for later.
It was as I stood there gazing and listening to the wonder of nothing that I heard the glass door slide open, and footsteps gently sound behind me on the iron balcony.
“Samantha.”
I smiled.
I turned to face Lucas as he stepped outside and closed the glass sliding door behind him to keep the warmth in the apartment. He seemed reluctant to disturb my solitude, and at the same time, eager to speak to me.
“Merry Christmas Lucas,” I said. Neither of us were religious, and Christmas could have been replaced with Solstice or Winter or Holidays – it didn’t really matter. But for the sake of ease, we’d settled on “Christmas” and stuck with it.
He smiled that small but purely happy smile of his and returned the greeting. “Merry Christmas Samantha, ” he said, with a head tilt and a slight nod. Then he pulled his right hand out from behind his back and I saw that it was holding a small, wrapped box.
“For you,” he said, a little uncertainly. “I… hope you like it.”
I stared at it for a long moment. Then I blinked in surprise. I wasn’t supposed to receive any gifts. Lucas wasn’t supposed to know I was doing this. I hadn’t wanted anyone to feel like they had to return the gesture, and no one would have had the time to purchase anything anyway.
I touched my face with my casted hand, tentatively reaching the fingers of my other hand out toward the gift as I shook my head. “You knew I was doing this all along, didn’t you?”
His smile spread and he laughed. “I had my suspicions,” he said. “I found a price tag stuck to the bottom of your boot two nights ago. It was for a plush bear. I decided to more closely observe your comings and goings.” He had the decency to look a little guilty, but his eyes were shining.
I laughed as he took my hand, turned it over so it was palm-up, and pressed the box gently into it. But he didn’t let me go just yet.
“However,” he said, “I’ve had this for some time. I… was waiting for the right moment to give it to you.” He shrugged, looking up to the snow and the lit up tree beyond the glass, and the day in general. “This seems appropriate.”
Slowly he let me go, leaving the box in my hand. I turned it over and marveled at the precise perfection of the wrapping job. The paper was a shimmering white, and the ribbon he had meticulously wrapped around it was gold. The wrapping was so flawless, it was literally a mathematical marvel.
“The paper reminds me of the color of your hair,” he told me. “Like this snow.”
He caught a flake in his hand and stared down at it. In his hand, it didn’t melt. Androids could control the temperature of their bodies, and Lucas specifically could control the temperature of different parts of his body. I found myself transfixed staring at that intricate crystal design. More perfection.
But then he lowered his hand. “And the ribbon is like the gold of your eyes.”
I looked up. His gaze caught mine and held it.
I felt myself beginning to tremble a little, and I wasn’t sure it was from the cold. I had a feeling it was just in that moment – there in that frosted magic, alone with Lucas in this rare and beautiful peace – I felt truly overwhelmed.
“Luke, I don’t know what to say,” I whispered. There was no way in hell I was going to ruin the moment by crying. But there was so much uncertain yet, there were so many people I was worried about, and we were not yet safe. I wasn’t ready. This gift deserved a more perfect moment for its unveiling.
“I can’t… I don’t think I can open this yet,” I admitted. I wasn’t sure he’d understand, and when I laughed it was nervous. But his eyes moved to my lips when I licked and then ran my teeth over them just as nervously.
I watched his pupils suddenly dilate. His EED flashed yellow.
I felt my heart skip and held my breath.
“It’s…” I swallowed slowly. “It’s too perfect….” My voice trailed off for good as Lucas gently moved forward, cupped my face with his warm hands, and leaned over me. I felt dwarfed by his size and strength that he held so carefully in check, by his height that towered above me, by his nearness that made me dizzy and weak-kneed.
“There’s only one perfect thing on this balcony,” he said, his words whispering across my lips. “She has been my gift all along.”
I shivered violently, either at his words or the look in his eyes, and Luke’s lips touched down on mine. I almost dropped his gift. A wash of pleasure rushed through me, so hot and hard, it flushed my body and ripped the softest sound of surrender from my throat. Lucas deepened the kiss, sliding a strong hand behind my back to pull me against him. His lips parted mine and I gave myself over at last – to the kiss, to the magic of this impossible moment – and finally, to Lucas.
Chapter Twenty-Two
When Lucas broke the kiss, he retreated hesitantly and as his hands held me tighter, as if he really didn’t want to let me go. But we were standing on a balcony in the snow, and despite the bliss of the moment, we couldn’t stay there forever. He might not freeze to death, but I would and he knew it.
When I opened my eyes, I found him staring down at me in a way he never had before. The storms in his eyes swam with untold emotion. “Open the present now,” he said softly. It was a request, edged by the slightest bit of command. “And then let me take you back inside before you freeze.”
I was flushed and dizzy, so I managed a shaky nod and that was about it. Then my shaking fingers pulled the ribbon loose. Like a magic Rubik’s Cube, the wrapping paper fell away, nearly mechanical in how precisely it had been cut. Inside it was a jeweler’s box, but one made of black wood. I knew that wood. It was very rare. The tree it had once come from had gone extinct almost a hundred years ago.
I was already impressed, but when I opened the box to the sound of another mechanical click, I realized the wood had an internal mechanical working all but invisible to the outside world. Much like an android. However, I saw no seams; whoever had crafted it was most definitely an expert.
Most impressive of all however was what waited inside, shining with impossible light on its pillowed casing.
With what fe
lt like clumsy fingers, I lifted the shimmering gold pendant out of the box and held it up to the snow-white light. “How…”
It was frankly stunning in beauty. It had been designed and crafted with the same expertise as the box, a perfect pure gold replica of one of my favorite things in the… galaxy.
The Millennium Falcon.
The gold working was breathtaking, and the pendant was heavy in my hand. Gold had nearly gone the way of helium somewhere in the middle of the twenty-first century, becoming so verifiably rare, new and strict laws had gone into effect to curb any further mining and dictate what the precious, conductive metal could and could not be used for.
Gold jewelry sky-rocketed in price, its production grinding to a nearly absolute halt.
But more impressive than the metal and the goldsmithing was the fact that the subspace hyperdrive – that blue part in the back – was actually glowing. And despite the gold I could see it was crafted from, it was glowing blue.
There’s no way, I thought. Before me, Lucas laughed softly. “I’m pleased you like it.”
But I barely heard him. Again, I tried asking him how this was possible. “How… how is it glowing?” I managed to get out. There was no light source. The metal itself was glowing.
Now, what I should have said if I’d had any social graces whatsoever, was something along the lines of, “Jesus Christ, this is stunning,” or “Holy shit, this is beautiful,” minus the bad language. But I’d never been good at social niceties when I was blown away by the mechanics of something seemingly impossible.
And everything about this pendant seemed impossible, from the African Blackwood that had been wiped out due to unstoppable forest and brush fires decades ago to the heavy, worked, and polished gold, which was now almost as expensive and difficult to acquire as Californium-252, a lab-created synthetic metal used in everything from treating cancer to bone research. I happened to know personally how hard it was to come by Californium because it was one of the things I’d used to create my antidote for Anthrocore, or “Bone Breaker.”
I, Android: A Different Model Page 21