It paused at the place where part of the monster had exploded on itself.
“How are you getting all this?” Julie asked. “How can you have a camera there?”
“I have dropped multiple drones in the area,” the first robot said. “Several of them have failed due to accidental damage or exposure to radiation, but most are still operational. I have also taken over the planes to attack the monsters.”
“I didn’t know they were that… computerized.”
“Autopilot systems are often heavily computerized.”
“Ah.”
Ms. Jance began to weep. Julie glanced at the woman. Her head hung forward on her chest.
On the screen, the monster had begun to shift its weight, and the view from the camera switched from the bottom of the volcano to somewhere above the ocean, facing the island from the opposite direction.
Metal plates pushed out from the sides of the monster. The surfaces were all more or less smooth, like an egg that had been cracked but not yet broken open.
Pax’s blue bubble rose from behind the volcano and hesitated rather than attacked.
It’s not Pax, Julie reminded herself sternly. Pax is dead on the table. That is a monster.
“The girl seems to have been destroyed,” the robot said. “I am unable to locate her in the area.”
“Then the monster’s doing what you want,” said Julie. And I injected Ms. Jance for nothing. “It’s defeated one of them. Let it destroy the other one.”
The robots’ torsos rotated away from Ms. Jance. They aimed their chest screens and their head-cages full of cameras at Julie. “Any strategy that leaves this monster with the power of reproduction is a poor strategy.”
It’s not a robot, Julie told herself. It was an artificial intelligence; it wore robots like skins. Thinking of it as a robot was no more accurate than thinking of a sweater as being the same as the woman who wore it.
Ms. Jance’s head went limp. Julie went to check, but the AIs raised their spindly arms in front of her. “The subject is not safe to approach at this time.”
“I need to check her.”
“The subject is not safe to approach at this time.”
Ms. Jance’s head flung backward on her bare shoulders and silver material began to pour out of her mouth, far more than she had been injected her. It bubbled in her throat and ran in silver streaks along the side of her neck. Silver tears ran from her eyes and drooled out of her nose, her ears.
All Julie could think was that the AI was shit at calculating odds.
The monster clung to the side of the crater, looking like some kind of dull disco ball.
The tentacles had all pulled inside. Pax could still feel their living energy radiating through the metal, along with a small amount of heat.
He had no idea what it was up to. The metal plates weren’t thick enough to defend the monster against any kind of bomb, or even conventional weapons. All he had to do to trap it was throw up a shield.
It was academic. He didn’t have the energy he needed to trap the monster. He barely had enough energy to lift it.
The jet was taking a long fucking time to circle back around. Almost as if it knew he wanted that fucking bomb. Or would, if necessary, blow up the jet and take what he needed, pilot or no pilot.
He reached out for Scarlett, but there was no answer.
Maybe she really was dead.
Too bad I can’t feel anything. She probably deserved a couple of tears or something. But no. Nothing.
Correction; he felt drained. Tired of fighting this thing. Tired of digging himself in deeper. If it could consume Scarlett that easily, what was the point? There was no fucking way he was going to be able to beat this thing. Save the world? What a joke. He’d be lucky if he could slow the end down a little.
Terry, you asshole. What the fuck are you doing this for? And why the fuck don’t you make it stop?
He was so tired he could barely work up the energy for outrage.
Below him, the monster was moving again.
Great. Wonderful. Let’s see what tricks you play next. Cracks appeared in the monster’s shell. The various pieces began protruding, rotating, lifting.
Four of the plates jutted upward and outward. Under the fragments of the shell were twisted tentacles like tree trunks—and claws. Two pairs of back legs dug into the crater of the volcano. What remained looked like some kind of beetle—dense central mass, armored back, armored torso, and front section. The front wasn’t so much a head as a kind of curved battering ram.
The monster shuddered, and heavy spikes lifted all along its back and head plates. Heavy spikes, glistening with a thick black liquid.
One of the monster’s claws flicked, and something shot out at Pax, wrapping itself around his stomach.
He had just long enough to realize the monster had wrapped a giant whip made of negative energy around him before the monster jerked him downward.
The AI’s cameras all turned back to Ms. Jance, watching the thick silver fluid ooze out of her. It had even started to leak out from under her fingernails. It glistened on her skin, just as it had done on Pax and the girl.
“Kill her,” Julie hissed. “Unless you want to face another astral being.”
But the AI didn’t respond. The two robots seemed frozen, like locked-up computers. The screens had stopped in the middle of changing from blue to orange and were an ugly brownish color.
“Hello?” Julie called. She got out of the chair, shuffled over to the robots, and knocked on the torso of the one nearer to her. Her fist made muffled clinking noises on the metal. She could see the seams where it had been roughly welded together. “Hello?”
No response.
She approached Ms. Jance. She was still securely taped to the chair. That doesn’t mean anything. You saw what Pax’s double can do. She should get out of here. As quickly as possible. But the door was locked—all the doors were locked—and there was nowhere else to go: where could she go, that a computer couldn’t get access to?
Which left her alone in a room with a body being possessed by astral material.
She circled Ms. Jance and the robots, walked over to the rolling cabinet, and took out a few things. She picked the sheet off the floor, covered the girl’s body, and placed the items on top of the sheet.
Ms. Jance was still leaking fluid. Copious amounts of it. It was pouring off the base of the office chair, no doubt leaking from her digestive system, as well as a few other handy orifices.
But she wasn’t moving.
Julie had been around a number of patients who had died while she was present. During her internship in the ER, most of the deaths had been self-inflicted, either through self-harm or blatant stupidity. She had lost a few herself, both because of her own inexperience—not many, but she had to admit it—and to circumstances beyond her control.
And one, a little boy who had been in a terrible car accident just after she’d found out about Pax’s scleroderma, she had let go herself. She could have saved him. But he would have lived in a wheelchair and in a hospital bed for the rest of his life, just like Pax.
Instead she had made a small, seemingly accidental cut to an artery in his thigh, and patched it just a little too slowly. Just a little bit too much of the boy’s life drained away. One nick. A few delays. And it was over.
A mercy killing.
She unwrapped the scalpel. This wasn’t going to be as subtle. But it was just as much of a mercy.
Pax fell farther than he was expecting, not just on top of the monster, but into the volcano’s open crater. He hit a pile of trash, junk so useless that not even the monster had wanted it. Plastic bags stuck to his skin.
He was too tired to fight anymore. Too tired to care. It felt like more than just a problem of n
eeding more energy. It felt like he was out of ideas.
It had killed Scarlett. What good can I do?
He lay in the pile of trash and waited for something shitty to start happening. The same way he would have if he were still human.
As if he were still in the hospital.
Nothing had changed.
Julie, holding Ms. Jance’s head by the hair, leaned it first to one side, then the other. It was still stubbornly on the woman’s shoulders, attached by some piece of gristle back in the spine. Julie looked down at her blouse and sighed. She wished she’d thought to gown up before she’d started cutting; the silver material was all over her blouse and skirt, and she didn’t have spares.
Her knees felt weak. She was going to have to sit down in a moment.
She gave it a few more cuts between the third and fourth cervical vertebrae and felt the head come free.
She laid it and the scalpel on the sheet covering the girl. The sheet had slipped a little, revealing the girl’s face next to Ms. Jance’s. Both sets of eyes were closed, both sets of lips slack. It almost looked like the girl had two heads, one of them growing out of her chest.
Julie was reminded of playing with dolls as a girl and pulling the head off one of her cousin’s dolls, making her cousin cry. “It’s not real,” she’d said. “Dolls aren’t the same as people.” Her cousin had run away, sobbing about her broken doll, even after Julie had fixed it. Julie’s father took her to the side to have a talk with her about it.
Was that when my father said I’d grow up to be a doctor?
She really ought to move the head—no telling what it might do, given that the girl’s body lay under it—but she was too tired to keep standing. She limped back to the row of chairs and sat gratefully. She had cut Ms. Jance’s neck so cleanly that it looked like it belonged on an anatomy model. The thought passed through her mind that perhaps she should wash her fingerprints off the scalpel, allow herself deniability, just in case the world wasn’t ending after all. But it didn’t seem important, somehow.
The robots still hadn’t moved.
Scarlett looked down at Pax and knelt beside him. Pax’s eyes were closed, his arms spread out like a sacrificial offering. The bluish tinge to his skin had vanished. He looked like a big, dull hunk of metal in the dark. Something cheap, made in China. She tried to poke him, but her hand passed through him.
She was dead, after all, although it didn’t seem to mean as much as it used to.
Get up, she sent toward him. People need you. You don’t get to give up.
He must be really out of it if she couldn’t even get a “fuck off” out of him.
Pax always liked to think he was immortal, invulnerable, and infinitely smart. And that was before he got turned into an astral being.
But there had been bad days, too, when he’d almost given up. Mostly these came after Julie would talk Pax into some new fucking experimental treatment. He’d go for it because of course he had to help advance science. Fuck science. What had science ever done for him?
When it didn’t work, he’d lie in bed and say things like, “A negative result is still a useful result” and “No sacrifice for science is truly wasted, as long as the data is preserved.”
Until he stopped talking and just lay there, usually in horrible pain, trying not to cry.
Pax had made Julie’s career—she was the world’s top scleroderma researcher. Even Wikipedia said so.
But she’d never once said thank you. Not something over the top, like an apology or an, I love you. Just a simple thanks. A Good job, kid. Maybe even, Your dad would have been proud of you.
Without the negative energy all twisted around Scarlett’s soul, it was easier to see how lost he was. Easier not to hate herself. Easier to see that, yeah, she and Pax… were not meant to be together. Not so much. But they’d been friends for too long for her not to love him.
Her dirty-ass soul was still, when you got right down to it, loyal to him. She hated seeing him like this.
And the monster was throwing rocks at them.
That, at least, I can do something about.
Negative energy was running off Pax in big, dripping globs that welled up on his skin and rolled down into the trash below him. When Pax set his mind to it, he could work up some real, out-of-proportion darkness.
She grabbed a loop of energy and smashed the nearest rock into bits against the wall. Gravel scattered all over Pax’s skin.
He blinked.
Scarlett grabbed another rock as it was falling and smashed it against the wall. More to get his attention than anything else. She said, Hey, remember me? Your girlfriend?
You are not my girlfriend.
Great! So that means we’re engaged now, right?
Fuck off, Scarlett.
She laughed at him, making sure it sounded as insulting as possible. All right. Here’s the deal. You stop lying there like you’re still a kid dying in a hospital bed in Manhattan and I’ll break up with you. I might even forgive you for cheating on me.
We were never dating, Scarlett.
Get up, or I am never going to leave you in peace, fuckwad. I’m going to haunt you and tell you that I love you, like, fifty times a day and appear over your shoulder in mirrors with, like, spiritual cupcakes that I baked just for you.
You don’t know how to cook.
So? I didn’t know how to turn into a puddle of black ooze either. But I learned!
I know what you’re trying to do. Stop it.
What, trying to get into your pants?
Stop trying to cheer me up.
Pfft. I’m the queen of negative energy, bubba. I love it when you’re like this. Hey, you know what? I think there are some tests Julie wants you to do for her that we totally forgot to go do. That’ll bring you right down to suicidal levels. Score!
That almost got a mental laugh out of him. His throat twitched.
It knows how to use negative energy, Scarlett. I can’t beat it.
So?
I can’t win, Scarlett.
Who said fighting’s your only option?
Pax closed his eyes, deliberately shutting out Scarlett’s ghostlike body and the sound of rocks being smashed into pebbles and sand against the walls of the volcano. What was he supposed to do, offer the monster the olive branch of peace? It’d just eat it. His only options were to fight, or lay here and get nagged.
Pax sat up, pushing against the pile of trash under his back. So worthless that even the monster that consumes everything except bare rock can’t eat it or use it for armor. Like me. The plastic crunched under his hands and tried to slide out from under him. Fuck this. He threw up a hamster ball and bounced lightly on the surface of the trash.
It was pointless. Even if he made it out of the volcano, he’d still have to—
Oh, for fuck’s sake, Scarlett said.
A cord of negative energy stuck itself to the side of his hamster ball and jerked him into the air.
His ball slammed against the wall of the crater and bounced upward, jiggling against the sides of the volcano, until it was balanced on the edge. A reverse rim shot.
The monster, still as big as a mid-rise building in Manhattan, was waiting for him. It leaped at him, knocked him off the rim of the volcano, and bounded after Pax like a puppy after its toy ball. Pax rolled backward and watched it chase him for a second or two and then flipped around and started running. Building up speed.
He bounced across the rocks, leading the monster forward. He had to trap it somewhere until he had the energy to destroy it. Maybe drop it down a hole and cover it with rock or something.
He looked up. The eastern edge of the sky had turned from black to the deepest blue.
I just need to trap it long enough for the sun to rise.
> “That was rather unpleasant,” said Ms. Jance.
Julie started herself awake, her hands scrabbling on the molded plastic of the two chairs on either side of her. She stared around the room. Nothing had changed since she’d closed her eyes. The robots still hadn’t moved and were making no sounds at all. She had gotten used to the sound of their small servomotors and cooling fans so now the lack of sound seemed unnaturally loud.
Of all the skills she’d learned as an intern, being able to sleep sitting upright—or, sometimes, standing against a wall—had proven one of the most valuable. Her neck was sore and the sides of her mouth were sticky, but she’d slept.
She raised a tissue to wipe her mouth and froze; she was still wearing the surgical gloves. The last thing she needed was to get any of the astral material in her mouth. She stripped off the gloves and stood up. Her legs still felt weak but at least they weren’t as exhausted as they had been. She hobbled over to the sharps container and stuffed the gloves in.
“What time is it?” she said aloud, hoping the AI would answer over the speakers, but it didn’t. The computer screen was dark, too. She shook the mouse, but it didn’t waken—the AI was too busy to function as her watch, apparently.
“I haven’t a clue,” Ms. Jance said, making Julie freeze in place. “Probably not yet dawn. For the most part, engineers aren’t early risers, but there are always a few who come in and use the gym.”
Julie turned slowly away from the computer screen. Ms. Jance’s head was still on top of the sheet covering the girl. Its eyes were open now and were made of that same flat, white silvery material that had been oozing out of Pax’s body when he’d died.
The soft, somewhat-British accent was perfect. “We have a gym, you know. In the basement. I would think anything after six-thirty would be problematic, wouldn’t you?”
I Am Titanium (Pax Black Book 1) Page 26
