by Zack Jordan
And fooled she was.
“You mark my words, Eleven,” she murmurs savagely, watching Hood disappear beneath the [Welcome to Watertower!] banner. “My mother—”
And then she is on the floor of the suit, boots above the level of her head. She struggles to a sitting position with a grunt. Every strap has retracted, leaving her completely free to move. The wall in front of her blossoms open with a hum of servos, revealing an empty Dock A. And then every holographic control flips off at the same time. Left glowing in the center of the cockpit is a single word.
[RUN]
And Sarya is shoved out of the hatch like garbage. She tumbles down the gangway and hits the floor hard enough to knock the wind out of her. From her back, mouth open, she watches the suit fold smoothly shut. Its huge arms relax, its running lights blink off, and around its middle a holographic banner begins orbiting.
THIS AIVVTECH UNIVERSAL AUTONOMOUS ENVIRONMENT IS OUT OF ORDER. PLEASE HAVE A WONDERFUL DAY ELSEWHERE.
Sarya staggers up, staring at the suit and adding yet another brand-new experience to a rapidly lengthening list. Did it just—? It did. A sub-legal intelligence just outsmarted this Hood character and her, and given literally any other circumstances it would be the weirdest thing she’d seen all day. She takes a step forward, watching her distorted reflection do the same in the curved front of the suit. Eleven stands there, colossal arms fixed to the floor as if bolted down, showing no sign that any of this just happened. And then for a split second the banner around its middle changes.
I SAID RUN, YOU IDIOT.
And Sarya is ripped back from the theoretical to the present. She has no time to be insulted. She has no more thoughts of finding Humans or escaping from a humdrum life. Right now she is not ashamed to admit that there is only one thought on her mind.
“Mother,” she whispers.
She turns and sprints for the maintenance hatch.
Better to wake the storm than the sleeping Widow.
The proverb repeats in Sarya’s head as she is practically thrown from an extremely unwilling engineering drone. Clearly her mood is affecting her persuasive abilities, because she’s never had such a time trying to get a ride. She’s never actually been rejected by a drone before, but it happened twice before she seized onto this one and refused to let go until it took her to Residential. That sort of thing certainly does not do much for your pride. But at the moment, as she lays a hand on the hatch that leads into her own corridor, the opinion of a sub-legal intelligence is the least of her worries. No, she has far bigger problems.
Like her mother.
She startles several passing intelligences when she emerges, blinking, from the darkness. She is aware of their gazes as she takes a breath and squares her shoulders, but she couldn’t care less. Her mouth dries and her palms dampen with every step she takes. Her stride slows, as if she is forcing her way through something physical. Somewhere behind her is a massive metal bounty hunter and ahead of her is the safest place on Watertower, and yet she is literally dragging her feet. But, honestly, anyone who knows anything about the life of a daughter would sympathize. Because to get to her room, Sarya has to do the most dangerous thing she can think of, the thing that multiple proverbs specifically warn never to do.
Wake a sleeping Widow.
This is why Sarya is barely moving at all by the time she comes in sight of her apartment. Her breath is coming in short gasps, and her heart is thumping in her ears. The hatch is orange, danger-colored, unlike every other residential hatch in the corridor. If she still had her Network unit—goddess damn you, Hood, by the way—she would see a large, high-contrast warning scrolling over the door. It would tell her, in extremely graphic terms, exactly what her mother is not responsible for should anyone be fool enough to open this door. This door and that warning are two of the concessions that a Widow must make, should she wish to reside in the company of other species. It’s not the Widow’s fault, after all, that her species has spent a billion years evolving into the fearsome hunters that they are. She can’t be blamed for possessing built-in weapons capable of killing any prey within ten meters within a fraction of a second. She is allowed to mingle with Network society because, like any other evolved complex individual, she is in control of her instincts. She has evolved higher brain function that keeps that sort of thing from happening unintentionally. But, of course, that only applies when the Widow is conscious. When that same Widow is sleeping, that higher brain function is dormant. It’s busy dreaming, fantasizing about hunts and battles and goddess knows what else while leaving the killer instincts in charge in its absence.
Which is why tragic accidental murders are a staple of Widow literature.
Thus, the last few steps to her apartment door are each, sequentially and respectively, the bravest thing Sarya has ever done. The few intelligences passing by steer around her and move on, and she would swear some of them move faster after they’ve seen her than before. They may be speaking to her, for all she knows, but without a Network unit she has no idea. Anyway, there is no room in her head for anything but what lies in her immediate future. And finally she is there, standing in front of the orange door, practically blind and mute. If a walking trash pile weren’t after her, she would turn around now. She would hide in the backstage areas, ride around in carts until the end of time or until she is sure her mother was awake, whichever comes first—
And then she shrieks and falls over backward when the door hisses open in her face. A nightmare crouches in a black room, every blade extended, razor mandibles a chittering blur.
“Oh,” says Sarya weakly, from the floor. “You’re awake.”
Shenya the Widow’s blades do not relax when she sees who is at her door. “You,” she hisses softly, pointing one at her daughter. “Room.”
It is the shortest possible command, the remnants of a ruthlessly butchered longer sentence. Some deep instinct has apparently awakened Shenya the Widow—which is better than Sarya doing it, and yet still bad news for someone. Sarya does not say another word, and not for a millisecond does she consider disobeying. She stumbles to her feet, then edges her way into the dark common room with her head bowed. She gives those trembling blades wide berth, then nearly runs the last few steps to the safety of her own room. She gropes in the darkness for the manual controls, not daring to say anything aloud in her mother’s hearing. And finally, the door hisses shut and she is alone.
“Helper,” she murmurs, collapsing against it. “Lights, for the goddess’s sake.”
“Hi, best friend!” blasts Helper’s voice from her ceiling. Her room lights erupt into their maximum intensity. “Good to be home, huh?”
Sarya cannot even respond to this. She lives in a world where coming home means almost dying at the front door. No, better: she lives in a world where nearly being murdered—at the blades and blind instincts of her own mother, no less—is not the greatest of her worries. No, right now she is actually thankful for those instincts. They’re out there now, protecting her against Hood. They must have awakened her mother, somehow informing her that her daughter was in danger from halfway across the station. Yes, thank the goddess for Widow instincts. If not for them, it would be worse. Not that it could be much worse, but still.
“I lit out as soon as that big guy grabbed your unit,” continues Helper, it’s obliviousness so unshakable it is almost comforting. “I didn’t report it because I didn’t know if it was supposed to be his unit now, but since I’m still technically your helper, I just decided I’d come back here and wait for you to come home after your trip. Which you did. Did I do it right? Where did you go, by the way? Somewhere exciting? Seems like it must have been really short, because it really hasn’t been that long. In fact I barely had time to get any work done at all on my project, but I do have some news on that front—”
But Sarya is no longer listening. She has collapsed into herself, destroye
d. Today she has reached the highest high of her life…and she has now plunged to the lowest low. She didn’t realize how much hope she had put in this Observer, how deep her fantasies ran…until she was betrayed. He sent her to that monster in Dock A. He arranged for her to be kidnapped, to be placed with the other prisoners. And both of them are still out there, possibly searching for her. Which means that now, far from galaxy-spanning heroics, the absolute best-case scenario is what she would have called a nightmare a few hours ago.
A quiet, low-tier life.
“—and you’re never going to guess where they are. Go ahead, guess.”
Sarya looks up. Helper just said something important, she can feel it. “What was that?” she says.
“I said I found some new Human sightings!” says Helper. “And then I said you should try to—”
A prickling heat runs down her spine. “Where?”
“You’re not even going to guess?”
“Helper. Where?”
“Fine. They’re right on Watertower! And just a few minutes ago! Obviously it can’t actually be the first genuine Human sighting in a thousand years, but I mean come on—what are the chances? Don’t worry, I’ll keep collecting info as it comes. Exciting though, right? I mean, we’re right there. This is going to be a good story, I know it. Intrigue, sacrifice…yeah, I guarantee you that people are going to die.” And Helper makes that little sound that it makes when it’s so pleased it can’t even get the words out.
Sarya’s own instincts are screaming at her: this is not a coincidence. When someone goes unrecognized her entire life and then is identified multiple times in a day—well, something’s going on. Struck by a sudden intuition, she falls to her knees and yanks her old prosthetic out from under the bunk. “Helper,” she says, voice tight. “Show me the corridor.”
A rectangle shimmers into existence above the unit, transparent and shaky and far inferior to the unit she owned for a few hours today—damn you, Hood. The image hangs in the air like a portal into the corridor outside while a tinny audio feed filters out. The hallway is far more crowded than when she was out there a moment ago, but it doesn’t seem to be traffic. The shapes of a dozen different beings are making angry motions, and they surround a huge, lopsided figure—
“Goddess,” whispers Sarya.
“So, the public channel’s got a ton of conversation about the Human sightings,” says Helper. “Mostly angry stuff. That’s what tells me this is going to be a good story.” It sighs. “I just hope there are some survivors. You know, for variety.”
Sarya watches, filtering out Helper’s prattle. She recognizes Hood’s gigantic shape, but who are these people with him? Why do they look so familiar? Does she—yes, she knows these people. That’s old Baz, their neighbor, standing hunched in the back there. Next to her, is that—? It is. It’s the arboretum caretaker who offered her the interview, who used to give her rides on his old maintenance vehicle. And there’s her babysitter from the next residential over, whose apartment she would visit when Mother was sleeping. Sarya’s throat constricts, but her eyes are bone dry. These are the people from her life, but they are here with Hood. They are here for her, gathered outside like she’s some kind of dangerous animal, and she can’t say she’s frightened of them. She’s not even sad. This emotion…yes, this is becoming very familiar today. This is pure, unfiltered rage.
“Oh, guess what?” says Helper, “Now I don’t know if this is one hundred percent related, but all the docking queues got shuffled after the sightings. Most ships postponed, but there’s this big corporate interstellar that just got bumped to the front. It’s coming in super fast.” It makes that sound again, that little trill of pleasure. “This is so exciting! Don’t you think it’s exciting?”
Sarya is barely listening. She is breathing faster, and it’s not because of the mob out there. No, she is not afraid of them; because to get to her, they have to get through Shenya the Widow. This is different, a deeper and more fundamental dread, and it takes her a moment to pinpoint its source.
Mother.
A Widow’s primary weapon is fear, and right now Widow pheromones are drifting through the shared ventilation system and speaking directly to the lower regions of Sarya’s brain. Even across the species divide, even after spending her entire life in the loving embrace of a Widow, she has to keep a titanium grip on her own emotions. Those people out there…they should be terrified, and for good reason. They wouldn’t dare approach her now, and she’s almost disappointed that their betrayal will go unpunished.
“Show me the common room,” she says softly.
A second rectangle appears next to the first, and a second audio feed takes over from the chaos outside. This window is almost black and almost silent. Sarya can just barely hear a rhythmic chiming through the ancient Network prosthetic on the floor. The cadence is almost soothing in its softness. If not for the fear-smell, this would sound like bedtime to the daughter of a Widow. And then, in the black rectangle of the common room, a dim red light clicks on.
“What is that?” asks Helper.
“It’s Mother,” Sarya says simply.
A dark and gleaming shape waits in the center of the room. One by one, limbs extend to their farthest extension. The shape sways, nine cubic meters of quivering and ringing blades surrounding a softly hissing nexus. This is it. This is what Mother has told her about in all those stories: the Widow battle stance. Whoever opens that hatch is a fool.
“Come,” whispers Shenya the Widow in a voice Sarya never wants to hear again.
The hatch slides open immediately, admitting the tense murmur of the corridor. Pale light slides across the swaying Widow, glinting on carapace and blade.
Sarya squints at the shaky video feeds floating above her prosthetic. Something metal and massive stands in the doorway—two such things, each one thicker than her torso and lit from behind. They flex backward with a whine, and four burning eyes in a dented faceplate descend into the frame. And then the odor rolls in, a piercing smell of chemicals and hot metal that clashes with the Widow scent in the room and makes Sarya’s eyes water.
Hood is so large he is forced to reconfigure and come through sideways. With a screech of metal on metal he unfolds and leans on his one massive arm, a tangle of cables and jointed pistons with warnings all over them. Even in her room Sarya can feel the impact. Crouched as he is, his head still brushes the three-meter ceiling. And then, so slightly that Sarya is not sure she detected it at all, those eyes brighten, and he draws back. If that is alarm, she is glad. He is, after all, within striking distance of a hissing and battle-ready Widow.
“Greetings,” says Shenya the Widow. Her voice is still quiet, made of a gentleness that sends a shudder through her own daughter. Helper, in one of its many stories, once described it as the voice of someone simultaneously tucking in her daughter and premeditating murder—and right now, Sarya cannot think of a better description.
The giant glowers in silence while several more figures squeeze out from behind him and take up stations in the corners. They, at least, have the decency to show some honest fear of this thing in front of them, this black void of a being who is keeping a slow and rhythmic time on her many chiming blades.
[I was hoping it would not come to this], says Hood.
“And yet here you are,” whispers Shenya the Widow.
Sarya watches Hood stare death in its many-faceted eyes. He’s clearly wavering behind his metal faceplate, and Sarya is almost disappointed. Something inside her wants him to go for it, wants to see her mother cut him down for daring to lay a limb on the daughter of a Widow. And then he straightens with resolution and the rasp of metal, and Sarya’s raging heart is glad. Come and get your Human, you kidnapper.
[And yet here I am], says Hood.
“Ah,” says Shenya the Widow, and her sigh fills the room. “And how may this humble warrior be of service to yo
u?”
To Sarya’s judging eyes, Hood’s every move proves that he knows nothing of Widows. He does not respond to the threat that Shenya the Widow just casually dropped. Instead, he makes a show of trust, a let’s be reasonable, as if Widows are ever reasonable where their daughters are concerned. With a click and a whirr, his dented faceplate splits and slides open to reveal a pale and wrinkled face in the red light. His four eyes are much larger than they appear through the slots of his mask, and they squint even in this dim illumination. His face is strangely vulnerable looking, embedded in the rest of the metal that makes up his body.
[I have come to relieve you of a burden], he says. His attitude is hesitant and respectful, far more so than it was in Dock A. Good.
Behind him, in the trembling tension of the corridor, the Network is supersaturated with fear and anger. There is so much sentiment being transferred from mind to mind that it is condensing out into spoken Standard. These are her neighbors, her fellow citizens, and they are speaking her name like it’s a curse. Maybe worse, there is another word tumbling through this flood of emotion. It’s said fearfully, hatefully, spat rather than spoken.
Human.
Sarya watches and listens, slowly flexing the fingers where her blades should be. She takes each statement into herself, quietly and methodically, and finds a place for it in her burning heart. I hear you, says Sarya the Daughter. I hear all of you.
[Your secret is out, Widow], says Hood. [It must go.]
“She,” hisses Shenya the Widow aloud, “has rights.”
Hood’s too-large eyes blink in sequence, first top and then bottom. [It is a non-Citizen with a false registration], he says. [Which means it does not, in fact, have rights. It also makes you a lawbreaker.]
And then with a motion too quick for Sarya to see, Hood goes for it. In an instant, his whiplike arm is wrapped around her mother’s gleaming thorax, and her mother is screaming at a frequency that Sarya can barely hear. Hood holds her up in the center of the room, her blades ricocheting, useless, off his metal surfaces. She slashes at his eyes, but they are just out of range. His legs take a step forward to support his weight as the heavy arm rises off the floor. A hand nearly as big as Shenya’s entire body cradles her head.
