Woven

by Elle E. Ire

  Sometimes I wonder if there’s anything Vick’s AI doesn’t know. “Are you okay? You feel off to me.” I don’t want to be more specific than that. Until I can touch her, I can’t be certain.

  The longer pause gives me all the confirmation I need. “I’m better than I was,” she admits.

  I take a deep breath. “Are you redlining?” Are you in overload? I want to ask, but I’m afraid of her answer.

  “Three out of ten systems. Was worse before. I’m stabilizing. Things were bad for a while. VC1’s taking care of me. I… I took care of Jacks.”

  Ah, so that’s it. She’s killed him. Likely in some very aggressive, more so than necessary, way. That would explain her guilt. She always worries about me too, how I’ll perceive the things she does, and I admit, her methods are sometimes shocking to me. However, anything she’s done to that bastard isn’t going to make me judge her. “It’ll be okay. Whatever happened, I’ll help you work through it.”

  There’s a catch in her voice when she says, “I know you’ll try.”

  Okay, I don’t like that response at all.

  I’m coming up with encouragements when Vick’s raft moves fully into the range of the lights around the dock. Movement above and behind her catches my attention, small shadows flickering against the darker ones. It doesn’t take me long to figure out the source. “Vick, watch out!” I shout into the comm. My cry echoes across the expanse of water, howling “out—out—out” until it fades away.

  Vick’s head jerks up, redirecting her eye lamps, the beams finding a dozen or more glittery flying bodies in reds, greens, and golds. She throws her arms over her head, protecting herself as best she can, as the entire flock of them swarms down in one swoop, talons extended, wings pulled back.

  To all of our horrors, they latch on, digging into her clothing, skin, hair, whatever they can grasp.

  Then they lift her.

  There’s no one to hold her down. No Lyle with his powerful arms to grab her and pull her back to the raft. She manages to draw a pistol, and gets off a couple of shots, but I can see the damage they’re inflicting, streams of red on her hands and face and scalp, torn flesh that makes me want to turn away, but I can’t look from the terrifying scene before me.

  The raft rocks as Vick’s boot hits the railing. She’s trying to get a toe around it, but she misses by inches. Her wild shots strike two or three of the lizard-dragons, their shrieks piercing like screaming banshees. Her struggling twists and turns shake one loose, then another, the injured no longer able to maintain their hold.

  They drop her. Into the murky water of the underground lake.

  Chapter 23: Vick—Depths of Despair

  I am well and truly fucked.

  I HIT the water with a splash that cuts off when my head goes beneath the surface. But that doesn’t mean it’s as silent and calm as it should be. Kelly’s muffled screams carry in distorted echoes to my enhanced hearing. An odd crawling sensation like pins and needles on steroids prickles over my face, neck, and hands—every inch not covered by my tactical bodysuit. Where the lizard-dragons have torn my skin, the water stings, then burns, and I swear I detect a hissing from each and every injury like someone’s pouring acid into the wounds.

  That is essentially correct. As I explained when we first crossed this lake, the water is corrosive. You need to get out of it as quickly as possible. VC1’s got my bioscanner on my heads-up display, showing my systems that weren’t already taxed creeping into the red zones.

  A snarky reply comes to mind, but I’m too busy flailing and kicking for the surface to think it at her. The ravenous little beasties followed me into the lake, and they’re tearing at me still. Who knew the fucking things could swim? My clothes, thin as they are, weigh me down, my heavy boots pushing at the water that seems thicker than what I’m used to. But it’s also more buoyant, and my efforts bring me up fast.

  The lake is mineral rich.

  Is a science lesson going to help me? I ask, gasping when my head is above the surface again. It’s psychological. The breather mask kept feeding me oxygen even underwater.

  Likely not.

  Then shut up.

  I swim for the raft, a few feet away. The lizards pursue me under the water, biting at my feet and torso. I shove at them with one hand while reaching for the edge of the raft with the other, my legs churning to tread water. When my fingers wrap around the wooden flooring of the watercraft, I get my first glimpse of the damage to myself.

  Muscles, tendons, even the white of bone in a couple of tiny patches are visible through the eaten-away skin on the back of my hand.

  “Oh… holy fuck,” I breathe, feeling the blood drain from my face.

  My face.

  Oh my God.

  It’s really just my left cheek that I feel. The other side is numb. Is that VC1 blocking my ability to feel the pain, or is the entire right side just… gone?

  No input from my AI counterpart. You’ve picked a helluva time to master the difference between a thought question and an actual inquiry, I grumble at her.

  I believe mastering when it would be harmful to answer such questions is a worthier goal.

  Under the circumstances, that’s an ominous response. No time to think about the ramifications just yet. My right hand is no better than my left, but they both obey my commands for now, and I claw my way onto the raft, which hasn’t moved from when the flying terrors lifted me off it. Some kind of deadman switch that brought it to a halt without its operator. I lie on the uneven wood surface, panting, the lizards circling in the water, preparing for another strike.

  Give me octosharks any day.

  Something lies dark and coiled on the deck in front of me. I stretch out a hand, wincing at the ragged strips of flesh hanging from it, and wrap bony fingers around the handle of the electrowhip. With my thumb, I flip the switch to the weapon’s highest setting. Blue sparks crackle up and down its length. I can’t manage my feet, but I rise to my knees, swing the whip backward, and smack it against the lake’s surface as hard as I am able.

  Flash. Blue-white concentric rings of electrical energy expand outward from the point of contact. They pop and sizzle, catching the remaining dragon-lizards in their increasingly widening spiral. The acrid scent of ozone assails my nostrils, along with a not unpleasant aroma of cooking meat—a cross between gator bites and frogs’ legs, the memory of which I pull up from some high school Spring Break Florida trip. A moment later, seven charred reptilian bodies float to the surface. The few that survived take flight and flee into the darkness of the caverns. I flop back onto the wood floor of the raft.

  You need medical treatment, VC1’s voice intrudes on my semiconscious drifting. My internal comm buzzes and buzzes in my skull like angry bees about to sting. It’s Kelly, trying to reach me. I want to open the connection. I can’t remember how.

  Can’t concentrate, I tell my AI counterpart.

  You are in shock. You must focus.

  Am I in overload? I don’t think I am. The heads-up display shows me redlining in a number of my systems, but nothing life-threatening.

  The damage is extreme… but for the most part cosmetic in nature. Still, it will have an impact if left untreated. Your reactions are primarily psychological, which I have had much practice at balancing. However—

  I’m losing it.

  Indeed.

  Why doesn’t it hurt? There’s no pain. I’m tired. Really tired. And cold. I was shivering, but not anymore, and something tells me that’s a really bad sign. The numbness I noted earlier is spreading across my face and up my arms from my damaged hands, but from what I saw, I should be screaming in agony.

  As with your broken rib, for the organic injuries, I have blocked your pain receptors. With regard to the synthetic flesh that covers portions or your skull, the simulated nerve endings have been destroyed.

  Destroyed. As in… what? I lift my arm from the deck, my hand at the end of it like an aftermarket addition—I can see it, tendons and bones and sem
ishredded muscle, but it might as well be a Halloween decoration for all I recognize it as part of me. It responds to my commands, but I can’t feel it at all. Regardless, I raise the semiskeletal fingers toward my face—

  You do not want to do that, VC1 warns.

  No monotone this time. Her internal voice promises dire consequences if I explore any further. A primal instinct responds to that warning. I slowly change the direction of my hand, instead letting it lower to a foot pedal beside my head. The weight of my limb presses the pedal down. The raft’s idling engines rev higher, propelling it once more toward the shore where my team waits to rescue me.

  Background noise resolves into shouting, which clarifies further into words of encouragement and concern. “Come on, Vick!” “Just a little farther!” “That’s it. You’ve got it. Don’t let up on the pressure.”

  I close my eyes, the raft rocking from side to side until a dull thud tells me I’ve hit the dock. Hollow footfalls pound toward me, then stop. Everyone’s talking at once, Lyle calling over his comm for a status report from topside, Alex asking to be let through since he has the medkit, Kelly, upset because what she’s feeling from me doesn’t make sense, Robert running his usual stream of imaginative expletives.

  The raft rocks harder while my team steps aboard.

  My friends fall silent.

  My eyes are closed, but I can feel them around me, staring down at what must be gruesome damage.

  Kelly breaks first, uttering a half gasp, half sob. There’s a thud when she hits the deck on her knees, her hands finding my arm and holding on tight. Someone’s gagging. I think it’s Lyle. There are several wet plops as he vomits into the lake over the side of the raft.

  “Oh… fuck me now,” Robert breathes from my opposite side, too shocked to be creative. “Is that metal? Is she a robot, then? That wasn’t what our intel said. Does she feel pain?”

  “Shut up,” Kelly snaps. “No, she’s not a robot. Of course she feels pain… only… she isn’t right now. I don’t know why.”

  The beep of a mediscanner sounds close to my left ear. “VC1’s got her receptors turned off. Good thing,” Alex says. “This looks a lot worse than it is.”

  “Well that’s a relief, because she looks like fucking roadkill,” Robert mutters. There’s a loud slap.

  “I told you to shut up,” Kelly says.

  Go, Kelly.

  “Can it, or I’ll throw you overboard and we’ll see how your body handles the acid lake,” Lyle adds.

  “Actually,” Alex says, moving the scanner up and down the length of my body, making the beeping move farther away, then closer to my head again, “her organic tissue is more resilient to the corrosives. It’s the… bioengineered flesh that’s breaking down. We need to get her out of here, and we need to do it discreetly.”

  Right. Because while most members of the Storm have a general impression of what I am, few know the extent of it, and almost no one outside of our mercenary organization has any clue at all about me. Even I haven’t seen what I look like beneath the pretty trappings. All photoscans taken during my initial surgeries have been blocked by security tight enough that my AI can’t get through it.

  I have a feeling I’m going to see it soon, though.

  A shiver runs from the back of my neck down my spine.

  “We’ll have to put her in stasis. We can’t let any medical teams but hers work on her. No one else knows… her eccentricities,” Alex adds.

  Meaning that I’m a clone, an entirely illegal lifeform, and that if anyone beyond my inner circle figures that out, I’ll be put to death. Of course, if that happens, I’ll probably wake up again in another cloned body in the Storm’s hidden research facility, and this whole process will begin anew. Knowing what I know about dying, it isn’t all that comforting a thought. I return my limited attention to my more immediate issues.

  I don’t want to, but I’m overwhelmed by a sudden morbid curiosity. I reach for my face again. Kelly applies more pressure on my arm, holding it down. “Don’t, Vick,” she says, voice full of sympathy. “Let us help you first.”

  I force my eyes open, the right one whirring a bit in the socket, the cushioning tissue having been eaten away. It takes some effort to focus on her strained smile and tearstained cheeks. She’s holding it together, but it’s a fight and she’s losing. I hate that I’m putting her through this. When she looks me in the face, she flinches.

  She catches herself and schools her expression, but it’s too late. I saw it. She’s horrified and disgusted by whatever I’ve become.

  No. What I’ve always been, just buried beneath a pleasing façade.

  I close my eyes and turn away.

  Shut me down, I tell VC1. Put me under. Whatever you need to do to knock me out. It’ll make things easier to maintain anyway.

  Seconds later, the world falls away.

  Chapter 24: Kelly—Horrors

  Vick is terrifying.

  VICK’S BODY slumps against the raft flooring, her taut muscles slackening as she loses consciousness. I shoot a concerned glance at Alex, but he isn’t paying attention to me, all his focus on the mediscanner in his hands. Since he’s not panicking, I take a deep breath and let it out, seeking internal calm.

  I’m not finding it.

  The damage to her exterior is extreme, mostly to her face and head, though her hands have suffered as well. The entire right side of her skull is now uncovered burnished metal, a protrusion of circuitry where the ear had been, crossing forward over her right cheek, then patchy bits of fake skin that eventually rejoin organic flesh slightly more than halfway across her nose and mouth. Her right eye has no lid, no covering at all, but it’s dulled like a faint haze covers the lens, indicating its inactivity. The left one is closed. She must not have been able to tell the difference, that one could actually close and the other couldn’t, or she would have been reaching for that too.

  Thank God I didn’t allow her to touch her face.

  A few remaining strands of hair have dropped to cover the mechanism of her right eye. When I go to brush them away, they tear off in my hand, along with a swath of artificial scalp, revealing even more metal replacing the crown of her skull as well. I stare at the fake flesh, then with an involuntary cry, hurl it away from me into the lake.

  Lyle’s hand falls on my shoulder. “Steady, Kelly,” he says. “They’ll fix her.”

  Fix, not heal. Staring at the atrocity of humanity lying before me, I can’t bring myself to correct him.

  No. This is Vick. No matter what she looks like on the outside, it’s her heart, her spirit, her soul. And she’s going to need more convincing of that than ever before, especially if she catches a glimpse of her current condition.

  I push to my feet. “Let’s get moving.” To punctuate my statement, more rumbling crashes sound from across the lake, closer than before.

  Robert and Lyle lift Vick’s unconscious form, Robert taking the feet and Lyle the shoulders. I note that the OWL keeps his eyes on her undamaged legs the entire time.

  “They’re prosthetics,” I admonish him as we step from the raft and plod down the dock. “Her eye, her ear. If it were an arm or foot, you wouldn’t think twice about it.”

  Robert frowns. “It’s her entire bloody skull, and from what I understand, most of her brain. And yes, I’m thinking twice. At what point does she become something other? She wants basic human rights. What if she’s no longer basically human?”

  “If you weren’t helping to carry her, I’d punch you,” Alex mutters.

  “If I really didn’t give a damn, I wouldn’t be helping to carry her,” Robert shoots back. “Look,” he continues as we tromp toward the guest elevator, “I’m not saying she isn’t entitled to rights. I’m just questioning her status.” He glances at me. “Don’t think I didn’t see you flinch away when you looked her full-on in the face. It’s not an easy thing to take.”

  Damn. I’d hoped he hadn’t noticed, that Vick hadn’t noticed, that her losing consciousness at th
at precise moment had been a necessity, not an avoidance tactic.

  “It was a human reaction,” Alex says to me. “You couldn’t help it. No one could have. She’ll understand. She’ll forgive you.”

  Vick will. But she won’t forget it. She’ll add it to her ever-growing list of reasons why she isn’t good enough for me. I rub the inside of my ring finger with my thumb, the absence of the engagement ring even more palpable. Vick’s questions about a soul, and now this. I worry she’ll talk herself right out of marrying me.

  I need to reconvince her, and I need to get her through this.

  We reach the lift and file aboard, the interior lights coming on and the doors sealing behind us. This is much more comfortable than the freight cage I went up in earlier. Sensing the endless walls passing on either side and knowing just how far down we were was an unnerving experience I don’t wish to repeat. But when Alex hits the controls, nothing happens.

  “Um…,” he says, pocketing the mediscanner and pulling a diagnostic device in its place. A moment passes, then he’s using a multitool to strip off the metal panel and toss it aside.

  The car rattles with another not-distant-enough cave-in. Lyle’s comm unit buzzes. He balances Vick’s upper body on one knee and answers it. Several terse grunts later, he clicks off. “Five minutes. We’ve got five minutes to get the hell out of here before the whole thing collapses.”

  “No way I can get this thing moving in five minutes,” Alex warns. He laughs without humor. “It’s on a safety override. Seems its onboard systems think the mine shaft is too unstable to ascend.”

  “We’re all gonna die if it doesn’t,” Lyle says.

  “It’s not sophisticated enough to convince.”

  “No, but VC1 is.” I move closer to Vick’s inert figure. Lyle has a firm grip on her now, he and Robert holding her flat and even. “VC1,” I address her, feeling foolish. “Can you take control of the lift?”

  Robert blinks at me. “Who are you talking to?”