CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX—SURVIVORS 

The bell on the door to the convenience store clanged like a startled bird as James staggered in.

He lurched straight up to the counter. The cashier jumped and stepped away.

“Can I use your phone?” he gasped.

Pressed up against the shelves on the opposite wall of the counter, the frightened cashier looked him up and down. Shirtless and shoeless, with only singed joggers to his name, James’ entire sweating, shaking body was burnt clean from the waist up. Black marks tangled across his skin, and his eyes glowed neon yellow like something out of a bad alien movie.

“Please,” he pressed. He buckled under a wave of pain, hooking an arm across his ribs with a stifled, frustrated groan. “It’s an emergency!”

Stunned, the cashier fumbled for the cordless phone. She passed it to him across the counter, and backed up again as he snatched it and started pushing buttons with clumsy, weak fingers.

He called the emergency number and described how to get to Empetrum. When the dispatcher confirmed, James thanked them and hung up despite their direction to stay on the line. Swearing repeatedly under his breath, he dialed the number Heather had given Erika—who had memorized it and written it down for him again.

The line connected and the voice that answered made him go weak at the knees. He hadn’t physically heard Richard’s voice since the night of the transfer.

“Hello?”

“Richard?” James caught the cashier’s nervous gaze. He raised a stained hand to run through his hair out of habit, but stopped, startled at the reminder of only cold skin. “It’s James.”

“James? Oh my god what happened? We thought you were dead! Is Heather with you?”

James took a shaky, painful breath. “No, she—I don’t even know where to begin. I’m at a gas station down the hill from Empetrum. We got out but she’s not with me right now. She, uh…” He paced away from the cashier’s counter. He winced, his body stiff and head pounding. “She overloaded Empetrum’s generator to force an evacuation and destroy the facility—” He faltered, lifting a hand to his mouth, trying to curb the surge of emotion clawing up his throat. “It’s bad,” he managed, his voice warbling. “I—I haven’t had a chance to find her yet. I’m going back to look for her. EMTs and the fire department are on their way. Come meet me at Empetrum. Be careful, though. I don’t know how many Empetrum people stuck around.”

“Leaving now,” Richard said.

“See you soon.” Trying not to make any sudden moves, he approached the counter. He carefully set the phone down, thanked the cashier, and headed for the door. He barely made it outside before leaning hard against the wall. He struggled to steady himself, pulling in fitful draughts of the rural air. The sudden quiet of his surroundings tugged at his equilibrium. He felt as if he’d been locked in a cellar with a chainsaw over his neck for weeks, and had just abruptly clipped out of that reality to this one, where birds and grass and sleepy roadside convenience stores existed.

He thought maybe he was hallucinating all this, still strapped into the mindwipe machine, his brain’s last futile rebellion as Benson purged him from his own nervous system. But if this were a dream where they had escaped, Heather would have been there too. The sheer, screaming unfairness of her absence kept him loosely convinced the last thirty minutes had really happened.

He realized another employee sat on the curb outside on their break, watching him gasp and weep in tandem, holding his head in his hands like it was too heavy for his neck. Embarrassed, James painstakingly dragged himself back to Yeun’s car. He pulled open the door with difficulty.

As he collapsed into the passenger seat, Erika’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. “Did he pick up?”

James nodded. “He’s going to meet us there.” He pressed an aching hand against his face and felt something wet. His nose was bleeding black again.

“Good,” she said, starting the engine. “You okay?”

“Vaguely.” James opened Yeun’s glovebox, looking for something to catch the discharge.

+

The emergency responders made it back to Empetrum shortly after James and Erika, and had already extinguished the fire by the time the Knights arrived. James thought Benson might have lingered, but the Empetrum campus was effectively deserted, likely to preserve the identities of its personnel.

James sat on the ground with Erika next to Yeun’s car, swaddled in a blanket one of the EMTs had given him as they had tried to figure out what on earth had happened to them. Law enforcement had arrived too. They took his and Erika’s statements, in which the two tried to be honest, then they conferred with the other emergency personnel, and left.

They’d soon have the matter buried, James thought bitterly as he scanned the scene, looking for traces of his friend in the monstrous pile of rubble.

His throat ached. Finding her looked hopeless from this distance.

Richard parked along the side of the path, out of the way. In the passenger seat, James spotted Heather’s mother, Su. A virtual face peered out from the back.

James uneasily dragged himself to his feet as the newcomers started getting out. Richard said something to the android and it stayed put, grudgingly. James felt like his heart was going to stop as he looked at it, knowing who it must be.

“I’ll talk to the first responders, if they have any more questions,” Erika said. “Go find Heather.”

“Thank you.” James attempted to swallow his terror as he ventured forward to meet Heather’s parents.

Richard’s face flooded with worry long before he saw him up close. Even Su paused, and James couldn’t help but glance behind him. Their shock and concern had to be directed at someone else.

But they were looking at him.

He turned, directing himself toward the remains of the Empetrum facility.

Only shards stood of their prison. The blast had decimated the rest, blowing debris in all directions. James tried to trace where Heather could have been standing and where the explosion would have thrown her.

The moment the detonation hit still throbbed in his head. It had thundered suddenly from behind the car, jogging him back to tortured wakefulness. He had twisted back to look out the rear window just in time to watch the facility behind them erupt. Speechless, spent, he had helplessly watched the mountain of smoke and flame climb into the atmosphere.

Heather’s parents walked beside him, silent. James wished he knew what to say. He soon had to stop to catch his breath, and the Knights paused to wait for him. He heard a car door shut. He glanced over his bent shoulders.

An android trotted across the grounds toward them. James shied away in a flash of panic. A painful twinge pulled from his scars, and his breath caught. He hunched his shoulders, gripping his arms and ducking his chin into the blanket.

“Sesame, wait a second—” Richard stepped between them. “He may not be ready—”

“I want to help,” the android said. It stopped before Richard, gazing up at the Knights. It lowered its volume carefully, “Please, let me help.”

Richard glanced at James, who stared at the childlike android with wide eyes.

This was the creature he’d watched trundle along his kitchen floor the night after its transfer, whom Heather had held in her arms, talked to, petted, trained, named. James had purchased the ailing animal housing its soul from a pet store on his lunch break.

Now it was humanoid. Communicating, emoting, and carrying itself as smoothly as if it had been born into the body it now possessed.

“Okay,” Richard said finally, watching James, who nodded numb approval.

“Where should we search first?” Sesame looked around.

James slowly straightened up, gesturing stiffly toward the northern edge of the debris. “The generator was over there…so…” He fell silent. Further words wouldn’t come.

“Okay.” Sesame considered its plan of action. Finally, it offered James a furtive virtual smile. “I’m glad you made it, James.” Then it was off, running ahead, calling Heather’s name.

James’ gaze followed it.

“So, Heather blew up the generator,” Richard said quietly.

James nodded. He took a step forward, and his leg faltered. He grimaced in pain.

“Maybe you should rest,” Richard said. “We can search.”

Su was watching him. She kept close to her spouse, slightly forward, as if ready to position herself between him and James.

James shook his head and forced himself to keep moving. His whole body felt burnt and arthritic. “I’m fine.”

Richard and Su picked around the ruins a hundred feet from where Sesame searched. They didn’t let James follow. He was far too decrepit. So James remained along the edge, looking for movement. Heather had used her energy core to overload the generator, but it was possible she had been able to reserve enough to maintain consciousness.

Suddenly, Sesame cried out. “I found her! Richard! Su!”

“Is she—” Su couldn’t finish her question. She and Richard ran Sesame’s direction, tripping over rubble in their haste. James slowly made his way around, looking for an opening he could utilize.

He was doing well just to keep pressing forward.

Squeezing through a narrow channel between two chunks of burnt wall, he found Sesame crouched by where a scorched robotic arm stuck out from the wreckage.

Sesame dropped to its hands and knees and ducked its head down to try to see her face.

“Heather? Can you hear me? Hello?” It shot the Knights a worried expression.
Richard helped it pull debris off the top. They struggled with a bent metal crossbeam. James drew nearer, gingerly kneading his hands.

“I can get her out,” James said. He carefully shed the blanket from around his shoulders. The breeze was awful. “Please, if you could stand back…”

Su opened her mouth to protest, but at a pleading look from Richard, she relented, and stepped away with him. The android followed their lead and backed off as well.

James crept up to examine the crossbeam, looking for weak points, tracing regions of leverage.

After asking Richard to check his calculations, he nervously steadied himself.

Then he summoned it. The flames came a little too easily.

He ignored the Knights’ fearful stares as he fought to keep the Q-13 under control. He methodically pushed his hands through the metal like knives, lopping off the bulk of the weight.

The sides of the beam slipped on either side of the target beneath. James glimpsed Heather’s charred robotic face and closed eyes before he stepped back.

Sesame was able to lift up the remaining obstruction while Richard pulled her free.

The flames left James with a cruel jolt. He fell to his knees, doubling over and gasping raggedly for breath.

“Heather.” Richard sat back on his heels, drawing his daughter into his lap. Su kneeled beside him.

Heather’s mechanical head was badly dented, her body blackened. Her left arm appeared to have been blown clear out of its socket, and only a fraction of her other hand remained. The blast had ripped off half her left leg at the knee. The polymer supporting her chest dangled loosely in cracked, melted shards. No light beamed from her shoulder.

“Heather? Can you hear me?” Richard tried to pry open the panels in her head to check her neural network, but it wouldn’t budge. His movements became increasingly frantic as he tried to bypass the dent. He checked where the light should have been, touched her face, pulled an eyelid up to reveal a dilated mechanical pupil. “Heather please…” He hugged her close, dipping his face to hers. “Please be okay.”

James hung back, half bent over, the more excruciating edge of his physical pain beginning to subside. Black spots plagued his vision and the sound of his irregular breathing dragged dully through his ears. Maybe the Q-13 would finally kill him.

“She uh…” James felt too wretched to speak, though he tried. “She wanted me to tell you that she loves you…that what she did with the generator was her decision. And—and that she was sorry.”

He hugged himself tighter, bowing his head as he talked well beyond his ability to keep composure. “I tried to talk her out of it, but she was dead set on it and I—I didn’t want to let her down again. I should have listened to you, Richard. I should have forgotten about that project when I had the chance.” His voice broke softly, “I never meant to hurt her. I never meant to hurt anyone. I just—”

He shook his head. Tears came, and the liquid hatred and shame burned across the tender black mark on his cheek. He clutched his face in his hands and curled forward with a sob. “I’m so sorry.” The phrase was overused, empty. It couldn’t change anything. “I’m so sorry, Richard, Su-Wei. I’m so sorry…”

After a long silence, Richard said, “I know.” He heard the shuffle of footsteps as he came and stood over him. James didn’t dare look up. He felt the blanket lower onto his quivering shoulders.

“But you looked out for her as best as you could. You tried to get her out.” Richard knelt down and gently laid a hand on his back. “You tried very hard to make amends.”

“It wasn’t enough,” James choked. His skin needled and smarted at Richard’s touch. “I failed all of you.” He pressed the heels of his hands into his sunken eye sockets. Tears squeezed out his burning, golden eyes into his stained palms.

“You were both forced into impossible positions,” Richard said softly.

“Of course, but that’s not—”

“You just wanted to help your dad.”

“But it was more than that,” James lowered his hands, shoulders drooped. “I needed to see if I could pull it off. I thought it would fix everything. I thought Empetrum was going to help me.”

“But now you’re free.”

“No.” James slowly straightened up. Richard’s hand lifted, and James dragged himself to his feet, pulling the edges of the blanket further around his shoulders. “I’ll never be free of this. And not just because Benson branded his signature into my genetic code.” He looked at the debris around him. “No one can just walk away from something like this.” His spiritless, tear-swollen gaze found

Heather’s body, and his heart gave a painful twist inside his chest.

Sesame managed to pry open Heather’s chest panel. The escaped energy had utterly fried whole swathes of the internal machinery, her power core burnt and broken.

“Su and I have decided not to press charges,” Richard said quietly, getting to his feet as well. “We’re releasing you from responsibility.”

“You can’t do that.” James turned on him in dismay.

“It’s what Heather would want.”

“But you can’t—I mean I—”

“What do you want me to do, James?” Richard snapped, startling him. “Say ‘I told you so?’ Try to punish you further for all the hell you wrought on my family? Believe me, there is so much rage in me right now, but I just—” He cut himself off, rubbed his hand up under his glasses.

After a long, heavy silence, he said, “Heather sent us a visual feed of your infusion as she witnessed it.” James stiffened, but Richard continued, “I saw what Benson did to you that night, and when he told her you had died, she passed along the message. We were all devastated. We thought you were dead, yet here we are. Don’t you understand, James?” Richard was starting to cry too. “We all know you tore our hearts out, but you tried to make it right. You took responsibility for your choices. You came back to face us.”

He looked at James, his eyes intense and full of tears. His brow furrowed. He drew himself up, and James braced himself for a fist to the nose, but before he realized what was happening, Richard was hugging him.

Richard was soft and warm. James was taller, all sharp edges that didn’t know how to be held. He stood still, arms pinned to his sides as Richard clung to him like a lifeline, and it felt like Richard was claiming him, somehow. He didn’t understand.

“You’ve suffered far too much already,” Richard said quietly, resolutely. “I refuse to put you through any more.”

James couldn’t even begin to process Richard’s words. “You can’t possibly—”

“No more, James.”

Richard’s words rippled through him like calm waves knocking a battered dingy against a dock. Gentle, devastating. And something in him broke loose. He deflated. He wrapped his arms around his former boss, bowed his forehead to his shoulder, and began to weep. He wasn’t relieved. He didn’t know what he was.

“I wanted to keep you and Heather away from this,” James sobbed into Richard’s shoulder. “But he wouldn’t let me.” He felt himself buckling, Richard held him up. His voice waned to a futile, broken whimper, “He wouldn’t let me…”

“I know,” Richard said. “You’re among friends now.” After a long moment, Richard made sure James could stand on his own before carefully letting him go. “And don’t give up on Heather just yet.” He looked over to where Su gently took Heather in her arms, preparing to lift her up, to take her home. “If her neural network is undamaged, she should be fine, right?”
James studied the dent in her head, the extensive charring in her chest cavity.

“Yes,” he rasped, brushing at his eyes. He hadn’t designed the internal supports to handle what she had put them through, and there was a high chance the electrical discharge—either from her own conduit or the backlash upon detonation—had melted her neural network.
But he wanted to hope too.

+

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN—HOME 

Heather’s eyes opened.

Her vision was a dark, scattered blur. She heard the rain through only one ear. She blinked groggily, and finally, her eyes began to focus. The haziness sharpened to the advanced visual clarity she’d since grown accustomed to, with some pixelation as her eyes struggled to maintain focus. She remembered her body. Inorganic.

She was staring up at a ceiling, painted a quiet, sunny yellow, lit by soft light. Not cold concrete, or the gray tiles and fluorescent panels like the ceilings of Empetrum. She tried to place it.

A mass of spliced wires and extension cords bloomed from her chest. She carefully turned her head and traced them to where they plugged into the wall. She lay on a yoga mat on someone’s kitchen floor. Gradually, she recognized the vintage counters, a familiar dent in the edge of the table at the border of her vision.

She was home.

“Mom? Dad?” Her electronic voice box managed a weary, fizzling croak. She looked down at her mangled robotic body, impressed. She could feel a gap in her electromagnetic field on her cranium. She lifted what remained of her hand to the upper left side of it, finding electrical tape over where one of the parietal panels had been removed.

“Heather!” An unfamiliar voice piped up from the living room and a smallish android with a smiling screen for a face vaulted over the side of the couch. He wore purple athletic shorts and an oversized sweater she recognized as one of her own. “You’re alive!”

The door to her parents’ bedroom upstairs burst open, and then her mom and dad were hurrying down. For a split second, Empetrum felt like only a nightmare, and she had just woken up.

Heather slowly tilted herself toward her right arm—her only arm, now— and pushed herself to a sitting position, just as Sesame dropped to his knees and wrapped his arms around her head.

“Careful!” Richard gasped. “Watch the cords.”

“They’re fine,” Sesame insisted. He turned his beaming virtual smile on her, very close to her face.

“Do you know who I am?”

“Sesame, right?” Heather said. She was tired. The electrical socket was a poor substitute for her boundless energy core, but the electricity felt like standing over the heater vents in the early morning. “Thanks for your help.”

Sesame grudgingly moved aside so her parents could kneel down and hug her as well.

“Watch the cords,” Sesame teased.
 “They’re fine.” Richard shot him a breaking smile and hugged Heather tighter. “Heather,” he squeaked. “Heather, you’re okay. You’re home.”

Heather brought her hand to her mother’s arm. She pressed her face against it. “I missed you both so much.”

Heather found her heat sensor still worked. She watched their thermal signatures, felt their touch through her electromagnetic field. Her parents. Her family. She was finally with them again. She closed her eyes and tightened her hand. “I thought I’d never see you again.”

Even though they all knew it was coming if they were to be reunited, she was still ashamed they had to see her like this. Robotic, severely damaged. Still their daughter, somehow, but not the kid they knew and loved before.

Another person emerged from the living room. Heather glanced up. “Erika, you’re here too.”

“Yeah.” She shyly stepped closer. “I wanted to make sure you were all right.”

Heather smiled. “Thanks.”

“It’s so good to have you back,” Su managed, her face flushed with tears. “What do you remember?”

“Everything, I think.” Heather’s gaze roved what she could see of the other part of the house as her parents released her. “Where’s James?”

“Resting, in the guest room,” Richard said. Both her parents’ faces and shirts were smeared with soot from their contact with her. “He’s in bad shape.”

Fear stirred in Heather’s broken chest. “Can I see him?”

A door opened down the hallway and Erika’s attention turned. “Woah, hold on, Siles—You shouldn’t be up and about.”

“James?” Heather shifted toward the hallway, forgetting she lacked a few parts. Richard caught her before she fell onto her side and helped her stand. Her remaining foot was damaged, but functional.

“I’m okay,” James said hoarsely. A jet black hand gripped the edge of the wall, and he emerged painfully into the kitchen. He wore one of Richard’s sweatshirts, and a gray beanie on his bald head. After a wince, James’ eyes met hers, and emotional relief inundated his humbled, scarecrow-like countenance.

Leaning heavily on Richard, Heather smiled and extended her arm. James shuffled forward, and she wrapped it around him. She buried her face into his sweatshirt.

James’ arms enveloped her while Richard held them steady.

At close range, Heather could detect the heat circulating in James’ veins, could hear his beating heart and the respiration in his lungs—whole, organic, living. James’ breath faltered and his arms tightened, cradling the back of her head and his shoulders caving over her as he broke down.

Richard hugged them both at once and Heather nestled into the shelter of their bodies.
Even though she would never see her organic body again, and her mechanical one was in pieces, she was finally home, with the people she loved. For that fact, she felt like they could be all right someday.

“I’m so glad you’re safe,” James rasped, shattered, relieved.

“Thank you for trusting me,” Heather said.

“Took that explosion like a champ.” Erika offered a wry smile. “You completely destroyed Benson’s research building.”

Heather grinned back. “Good. It was so satisfying to finally stick it to that monster. Someone had to knock his god complex down a few notches.”

James scoffed unsteadily, rubbing at his eyes. His face went pale, and both Richard and Erika reached out to catch him as he swooned. Su stepped in to support Heather while Richard wrapped an arm around James’ back.

“You really need to go to a hospital,” Richard said it like they had already spent some time arguing about this. 
 “No.” James pulled away, stumbling right into Erika, who managed to keep him standing. “No hospitals. There’s nothing they can do about this. Plus, they’ll send me straight back to Empetrum and I have to be here, to try to strike a deal with Benson if he shows up.”

“You’re a person, James,” Su said impatiently. “Not a bargaining chip.”

“Not to him,” James insisted.

“He’s not gonna bargain with us,” Su snapped. Heather felt her mother tense beside her, as Su’s expression darkened in anger, in hatred. “He’ll just kill us and take you and Erika anyway. If you’re so set on crawling back to him, why shouldn’t we just dump you at a hospital and go into fucking witness protection? Not that witness protection would help us.”

“I don’t want to go back—” James started. He suddenly clutched his mouth in one hand, hanging off Erika with the other as his body spasmed and black bile dripped between his fingers.

“Fuck fuck fuck not on the carpet!” Su cried.

James blearily hung his face over the linoleum, as Richard hurried over to grab a bowl and paper towels. He barely got the former in front of him before he retched again. Erika, to her credit, kept ahold of him.

Heather wanted to cry, watching everything unfold with wide eyes. How quickly the relief and warmth of reunion had given way to the very real dangers still looming over them all. She had landed a deep cut on their enemies, but now Benson would be back for revenge.

Over and over at the back of her mind, she felt the sting in her arm from the tiny dart that had ended her life. Benson didn’t need his facility to visit devastation on her family. He didn’t even need to announce himself.

Su clung to Heather as she watched Richard and Erika try to convince James to go lie down, while he wiped clumsily at his face. Sesame stood up on his toes by the kitchen sink running water over a paper towel. That worked better.

“I have to fix this,” Heather said.

Su reacted like she had startled her. “Sweetie, you don’t have to fix anything, okay? You’ve already done far more than anyone should have asked of you.”

Heather shook her head. “Nobody asked me to go after the generator. And I didn’t ask to be going through this.” She shifted position, trying to stand up straighter. “James.”

He looked at her, exhausted and embarrassed and definitely not in any condition to be upright. His watering eyes glowed yellow, bloodshot with black.

“Rest,” Heather said, with gravity. “Mom is right, Benson won’t be bargaining if we see him again.

You’ve done everything you can, now it’s time to recover. We’ll take it from here.”

His lips tightened, but he managed a nod. He let Erika guide him painstakingly back down the hallway to the guest room. He moved like a man four times his age.

Su helped Heather back down to the floor while they waited for Erika to return.

“How long was I out?” Heather asked.

“Six hours,” Su said. “It took some time to get you back here and replace enough parts to get your body to accept power. You woke up within an hour after that.”

“Have you heard anything from Empetrum since then? What conversations have you had?”
 Su hesitated. “Heather, you need to rest too. You almost died again—”

“I don’t care about that right now,” Heather said. “Please, for once in my life, don’t shelter me. I know what we’re up against, and I’m not letting Benson hurt you too.”

Her parents exchanged a glance. Sesame busied himself with cleaning the floor. The inky substance was already staining the linoleum.

“We haven’t heard from Empetrum,” Richard said finally. “We’ve been talking about leaving, trying to figure out what might be coming: Empetrum, police, or both. We’ve considered asking the Conxence for protection…And we’ve been wondering just how complicit the Bureau is, whether they’ll be after us too.”

“And fighting with James,” Sesame piped up in a curt monotone. Richard winced.

“He’s in dire need of medical support,” Richard said, helplessly. “But he’s right, Benson will have easier access to him if he goes to a hospital.”

“But we can’t just let him die,” Heather agreed.

Richard nodded.

“Even though that’s what he seems determined to do,” Su said. “He keeps switching between begging us to abandon him for our own safety, and demanding he stay here like he’ll be able to stop whatever’s coming. It’s unintelligible.”

“Of course it is,” Heather said, sorrow blooming across her chest. “Please be kind with him, Mom. He’s been through a lot.”

“You have too, because of him.”

“I know.”

Su sighed. “Every time he asks us to leave him, I want to.” She looked away, pain etched across her face, her voice nearly a whisper. “I really want to.”

Heather lay back, staring resolutely at the ceiling. “We’re protecting him.”

Erika emerged from the hallway, then. “I’ve been thinking,” she said. “Benson’s already hurting quite a bit from everything blowing up in his face. The Conxence has much more information about Empetrum than they ever would have gotten if he hadn’t messed with your family. His attempts to cover it up, and to later take revenge on James cost him his research facility, and put a huge crack in the loyalty of another one of his scientists—the one who was heading up the next generation of what I understand was the money-maker project for the company.”

“The whole reason James was brought to Empetrum in the first place,” Heather said.

“Exactly,” Erika said. “Benson might still be out for blood, but he’s been burned by you at every turn. If he hasn’t already had enough, we need to figure out how to make sure he has, and will leave us alone by his own choice.”

“Do we try to contact Yeun, then?” Heather asked.

“No,” Richard said, as it dawned on him. “We contact Dhar.”

+

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT—CONSEQUENCES

Michael Benson strode impatiently down a wide polished corridor at the Federal Bureau of Science and Innovation headquarters, headed for a conference room whose vaulted ceiling and frequent disinfecting always made him feel like he was under a microscope. He tugged irritably at the bandage across his left hand. He hadn’t slept much, fielding an eternal barrage of crises in the aftermath of a vengeful teenager given a self-contained nuclear core for a battery.

He should have barred Siles from transferring her. At the time, it seemed like a useful concession, opportunistically leveraging Siles’ emotional turbulence to secure his cooperation. Now, he found himself reexamining every decision he had ever made.

Employees were resigning left and right after the explosion, and the mindwipe machine was still buried under the wreckage so every single one got to dodge protocol. Yeun tendered his resignation by letter, not in person. That one hurt.

Now, Dhar had requested an urgent meeting with no notice—probably to talk about what had happened— and despite his deep resentment for Dhar’s strange combination of corporate ruthlessness and inscrutable taproot of a conscience, it was never a good idea to tell Dhar no.

“Can we make this brief?” Benson sighed as he pushed open the door to the conference room, wincing at the predictable sting of disinfectant in his nose. “I don’t have much—” He stopped dead. “—time.”

Dhar sat at the frosted glass conference table, but he wasn’t alone. Knight and Delva were there too.

Benson felt his body language closing. He forced his shoulders square, his eyes narrowing. “What the hell is this?”

Dhar held a hand out across the table. “Take a seat, Benson.”

Benson stayed where he was, gazing first at Knight, who stared back with something like disbelief and utter hatred, then at Delva, unflinching, her hands folded on the table.

“Hello, Michael,” Delva said. “Remember me?”

“How could I not?” Benson said. “You ruined my family.”
 “That’s not how I remember it.”

Benson looked at Dhar. “Why are they here?”

“You’re running your lab like an empire, and it needs to stop,” Dhar said. “I’m putting you on probation.”

“What? You don’t have that kind of power.”

“Twenty years ago, your grandfather made some steep compromises to overcome the blacklist on his head and get the resources to build Empetrum,” Dhar said. “When you took over the company, you inherited that contract. And as you well know, the kill clause is absolute. There is no Empetrum outside of that contract.” Dhar gestured to the chair across from them again. “So please, let’s talk terms.”

Benson stood frozen, calculating, heat rising in his chest. Finally, he strode to the table, pulled out the chair and sat down. “And we’re just going to get into it with a couple of outsiders listening in?”

“Knight and Delva are representatives of Larkspur,” Dhar said. “Which you’ve been treating as some kind of rival gang. Your actions have had devastating consequences for them and their families. Understandably, they want to make sure you’ll pursue no further action against them.”

“I’ve left them alone thus far after ‘the accident,’ haven’t I?” he glared at Knight. That’s what the Bureau was telling anyone who needed to know—an A.I. experiment gone rogue, destroyed in the explosion.

“We need a guarantee,” Knight said. His shoulders were tense nearly up to his ears, a shaking in his hands and voice. Benson noted all three with a wan smile, as a small dose of satisfaction dipped into the encroaching humiliation.

Knight was terrified.

“Fine, I’ll leave you alone,” Benson said, disdainfully. “I’m sick of dealing with you people anyway,

Siles and your daughter especially. Are either of them still alive?”

Knight’s jaw clenched, and his chest expanded in a deep breath as if he were preparing to fight.

Benson stared coldly at him, waiting for that. If he was lucky, the meeting would devolve into emotional chaos on account of Knight’s hatred for him, and Benson would be in a better position to sidestep Dhar’s attempts at retribution.

But Delva touched her colleague’s arm, giving him a meaningful look. To Benson’s annoyance, Knight left the bait.

“Is that all you wanted?” Benson brought out a bored tone. He tried to ignore how hard his heart was beating, as Dhar’s threat of removing him from his position loomed over the back of his neck like a ready blade. “I’ll even put it in writing, under penalty of whatever threats you had lined up. I have much more pressing things to deal with now, thanks to you.”

Dhar shook his head. “Probation wasn’t a threat. That’s happening. You’re out of control.”

“In what way?”

“Where to begin…” Dhar said. “The destruction of Larkspur’s other facility—which was a blatant act of war on the Bureau itself—harming and endangering civilians, including the kidnapping and murder of a child—”

Benson scoffed harshly. “And what is the ICNS? A day care? I don’t think you understand what it takes to produce resources like modulator technology. You can’t get it guiltlessly, and you can’t punish the people who get blood on their hands so you can sit here and pretend you’re above it all.”

“I didn’t recommend Siles to you so you could torture and kill him if Empetrum wasn’t a good fit,” Dhar said. “Not to mention the murder of an additional colleague, Olsson, a year and a half prior.”
Knight and Delva seemed surprised to hear that one.

Benson bristled. “The ICNS would not exist if she had succeeded! Our contract stipulates that so long as Empetrum delivers results, I’m allowed to run my lab how I want. And we’ve delivered, haven’t we?”

“Within reason!” Dhar cried. “You destroyed Larkspur’s other facility. We’re supposed to be on the same team here.”

“I was only trying to set back their prototype, not destroy the—”

“Yes, but why?” Dhar said. “This was an obsessive and one-sided feud. Larkspur is focused on infrastructure! They didn’t even know your lab existed. Siles would have benefited from being approached as an equal, and allowed to choose.”

“New hires so often become whistleblowers,” Benson said. “It’s a wasteful process, I had to create some leverage—”

“Your personal vendettas have exposed highly sensitive information to private citizens, and potentially to a very dangerous rogue militia.”

“It wasn’t me hemorrhaging secrets.” Benson stared Knight down across the table, trying to read any amount of guilt in his expression, trying to get whom he had decided was the weaker of the two intruders to break. “I’m sure Knight’s already taken all the information he has to the Conxence. And we’re not going to talk about how Alice blatantly broke NDA?”

“I’ve already spoken with her. She was helping the Knights,” Dhar said. “She only told them what was relevant to their dilemma. If you had just stopped while you were ahead, none of this would have happened.”

“You’re framing this in the worst possible way.”

Dhar stared at him, tiredly. It reminded Benson of an expression his grandfather used to give him, when his timid, bespectacled grandson wasn’t living up to his expectations for eventually succeeding him to the directorship. He’d gotten too many genes from his paternal line, soft where his grandfather was severe, anxious where he was assured. Benson had purged all of that, pinched every weak nerve until it died.

To have to sit there and be treated like a failure and a liability filled him with white hot rage, but he couldn’t do anything with it here. If he lashed out, Dhar would consider his criticisms confirmed, humiliating him even more in front of his enemies.

“You killed a child,” Dhar emphasized. “In what world is there a better framing for that?”

Benson’s brows tightened, exasperated. He briefly considered throwing Alder under the bus for Heather’s death, though Alder had been acting within Empetrum protocol. Alder was overzealous, perhaps, but extremely loyal—He had been a former death row inmate, a participant in an early trial of Compatible MBE, and afterwards given the choice of a total neural reset or a job.
It was more useful to Benson to maintain that loyalty. Trying to pin the responsibility on him wouldn’t work with Dhar anyway.

“Do you have any regrets at all?” Dhar asked.

Benson’s gaze flicked to Knight’s, as the latter waited. For a brief moment, the doubts crept in—maybe he’d gone too far. Maybe he’d destroyed countless lives chasing ghosts.

He glared at Knight. “None.”

Dhar took a breath. “As part of your probation,” he said. “Your role as director will be temporarily suspended. To even have a shot at reinstatement, you’ll need to undergo a psychological evaluation, and meet with a therapist to help you avoid a repeat of all this.”

“Are you serious?” Benson felt his demeanor go absolutely frigid. “There’s nothing wrong with me.”

“Of course there’s not.” Dhar stood up and calmly motioned the Larkspur engineers to follow suit.

“Please take the steps I’ve prescribed, and leave Siles, the Knights, Hodgson, and anyone connected with them or Larkspur alone, or I’ll have you removed from Empetrum permanently, and report the national security infractions to the authorities—offenses which would mean jail time. Those are the terms. I’m being very generous.”

Benson got up, while Dhar walked Knight and Delva to the door. Neither of them seemed particularly happy about how the conversation had gone—they probably wanted to see Benson burned at the stake, he thought—but they also didn’t seem surprised. Expectations managed.
Dhar closed the door once Knight and Delva had departed the room, turning back to face him.

“You’ll thank me for this, someday,” Dhar said solemnly. “You’ve terrorized and irreversibly devastated innocent people. They just want to be left alone to pick up the pieces, and you need to stop setting wildfires.”

“And who’s supposed to rebuild Empetrum while I’m demoted?” Benson snapped. Exhaustion squeezed like a rubber band around his temples, as he watched everything slipping through his fingers, and for once couldn’t think of a single thing to do about it. “Yeun and Jones resigned, and Hill’s busy with the Compatibles at the ICNS.”

“Hill will also act as interim director, with your personal assistant, Walker, taking over most of the administrative duties,” Dhar said. “You can continue your research in the meantime. Upon review of your notes, it doesn’t sound like Siles had any special affinity to the Q-13 or modulator compatibility, so you won’t need him to continue your work. I’ll personally attend to hiring new talent to build Empetrum back up. I think it became a little too…insular. Addressing your concerns of whistleblowers, we can delegate and outsource parts of the process so no one has enough information to raise any red flags.”
 Benson crossed his arms, staring at the ground. Dhar’s even voice grated on his ears. He just wanted him to stop talking.

“I’ll email the terms for you to sign by the end of today,” Dhar added.

According to Dhar’s plan, Empetrum would continue to exist only in name, the spirit of it dumbed down and domesticated. Dhar was just putting out fires, while he fenced Benson in to go up in flames. That was his job. The public relations guillotine, ever ravenous. The inertia of charisma and political opinion made him sick.

“I suppose it was Hill that backed up whatever Knight and Delva told you?” Benson groused.

“It was.”

“Figures,” Benson said. “This is nothing but a coup. Hill is bitter because he didn’t get the directorship when Lawrence died. He’s always been vocal about that. He doesn’t care about any of this, only that he finally gets what he wants.”

“They’ve all had enough,” Dhar said, opening the door to leave. “It’s time to stop burning your bridges at both ends, Dr. Benson.”

+

The morning after Heather’s return home was a busy day in the Knight household. Erika made phone calls to her family, and to her allies in the Conxence, who wanted a full report. From the kitchen floor, Heather listened to her pacing in the other room, trying falteringly to explain her disappearance to her dad. From the way the conversation went, Heather guessed she hadn’t been open with him about her activities in the resistance movement. When she called the latter, she got an earful from somebody on the other line.

While Su and Sesame monitored James’ increasingly fragile health, Chelo had volunteered to come over and help Heather with some temporary repairs, to at least get her ambulatory until they could do more. Richard and Eve had left for the capital that morning to meet with the Bureau.

Contacting Dhar about the situation had been a dangerous gamble—Heather feared Dhar was secretly as evil and conniving as Benson. But, supposing he had a soft spot for Eve because they were friends despite the ethical shadows that had recently come to light, they decided to play it straight.

It had surprised Heather how little it took to expose Benson’s behavior as unhinged, and far beyond any hands-off relationship Dhar may have tried to maintain with the lab. While in Empetrum’s grip, it had felt like Benson controlled the whole world.

Benson had stalked, sabotaged, and destroyed Larkspur and its members for his own ends, which was action against the Bureau—its source of funding—as well as the government and its interest in keeping human weaponry research quiet.

Heather would have liked to explode the whole thing, reducing all the politics to a barren crater, but this would at least buy them some time to regroup, and to get James help.

Heather stared up at the ceiling while Chelo worked on her leg, her circuits buzzing with impatience to be mobile again. It galled her to watch her family and friends disappear and reappear down the hallway with little to report on James’ condition, unable to participate.

Despite his youthful personality, Sesame dutifully helped without complaint. Nobody had to explain to him what it meant to be terminally ill. He remembered.

He filled his daylight hours trotting around being useful as needed, and at night played video games on Heather’s handheld console while recharging his battery. Heather had spent the night before alternating between hibernating out of habit, and asking Sesame to check on James.

“Have you seen James yet?” Heather asked Chelo.

“I poked my head in,” she said, working on the knee socket from which she’d managed to dislodge Heather’s mangled robotic calf. “He was sleeping.” She whistled softly through her teeth and shook her head. “I can’t believe what you all have been through.”

Heather buzzed a sigh. “I can’t believe it myself most of the time.” She raised her remaining hand, missing half its fingers. The other arm was just an empty, shredded socket. “Yet here I am.”

Chelo gripped above her metal knee and pushed up, connecting a peg-like prosthetic with a curved metal foot into the lower half of the hinged joint. She measured the end of both legs, working the temporary peg out to lengthen it, and measured again. Finally, she reached in with a wrench and started tightening bolts.

“Is there any way we can get me set up with some kind of battery before Dad comes back?” Heather asked. “If their meeting goes well, we’re taking James straight to the hospital, and I’m not being left here.”

She had no idea how to tackle being in spaces where others could see her, robotic and half-destroyed, her chest cavity stuffed with cords. But after four weeks of threats, confinement, and devastation, she was determined to keep her hard won autonomy.

“I’ll see what I can do, kiddo,” Chelo said.

Soon, Heather had a reasonably stable foot placeholder, and Chelo was ready to at least give her more length on the extension cords keeping her conscious.

“Ready?” she asked.

Heather nodded.

Chelo pulled the plug and immediately jammed it into the end of the ready extension cords strung out from the wall outlet. Heather’s vision blacked out briefly.

“You okay?” Chelo asked..

Heather confirmed, relieved. She tried to stand. Chelo helped her.

“How does the leg feel?”

“Good,” Heather said. Her knee was a little stiff, and the cadence was awkward without a foot that actually moved, but she was mobile. “Thanks.” She took a step toward the guest room, her hand keeping the wires in her chest steady.

Chelo made sure the extension cords didn’t tangle or unplug as she ventured into the shadows of the hallway. It was so quiet, Heather could hear her system thrumming in her chest, the hum of her moving joints.

The door was open a crack. Heather carefully peeked in. James had haphazardly pushed the covers down, betraying the black snaking up his arms, and a sweat-drenched t-shirt. Her heat sensor clicked on. He was still alive, thankfully. Though he had a high fever.

The nightstand by the bed was crowded with a large bowl, a box of tissues, a glass of water, and a pile of towels, the latter of which were stained with black. An electric heating pad lay forgotten on the floor. James’ long, dark hand rested limp at his side. His nose was raw and smudged black from the unsettling discharge.

From what she had gleaned, he had been taking fluids a few hours earlier, but rousing him was getting harder. His fever continued to tick up, and he was losing weight at an alarming rate. He was already even thinner than when she’d seen him the evening before—his closed eyes sunken in dark sockets, his cheekbones standing out sharply in his face. It was as if the Q-13 were sapping his life force, consuming him from the inside out.

Carefully, she crept into the room, up to the bed.

“James?” she said, the volume of her voice very low. She hoped he could hear her at least a little, though she feared claiming any more of his energy. “Dad and Eve went to talk to Dhar. They’re going to see if they can get Benson to back off.”

James stirred, slightly. He took a slow breath, then his eyes cracked open, unfocused. His irises glowed with an ominous, animal iridescence, and she hated it. Hated the Q-13. Hated what Benson had done to them.

She stood by his bed, contemplating the weight in her chest. She had no heart or blood or chemical signals—any of the things she might have attributed to this feeling before.

This pain, this terror of being alive. The grief of not yet knowing what to do with that.

She and James were both still alive, but time plowed forward, crushing them beneath its weight.

She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t tread water in the swelling waves. She couldn’t protect him from the battle he fought. She just wanted all this to stop, to go back to when she was just an intern at Larkspur, making friends and feeling included. Why had that simple, innocent need for companionship brought them here?

She carefully kneeled down, putting her hand over his. His eyes rolled her direction, made brief contact, then drooped closed.

“Keep fighting,” she said softly. “Please.”

+