by Stan Lee
The Inventor’s head rolls from side to side.
“No,” he moans.
“Yes,” says Xal. “And it is far from finished. You may be grateful that I intend to kill you before I continue on. You”—she raises her eyes, smirking at Cameron—“will not be so lucky.”
“No!” Cameron struggles against Juaquo’s heavy grip and pitches forward, landing roughly on hands and knees. He locks eyes with the Inventor as Xal laughs and rears up, raising her muscled arms overhead, the flesh drawing back from her fingertips as her gleaming claws extend longer, larger. The crowd inhales as one, quivering with anticipation of the killing stroke. It is what they want. It is what they’ve been waiting for—not just tonight, but all their lives.
The Inventor gazes up at her. And then, something strange happens.
He smiles.
“You’re so very wrong,” he whispers. “And you will see. It has been my privilege to live among these people, and to learn . . . that what you disdain is what makes them special. Beautiful, even—that connection does not come easily to them. They must choose to reach out. You cannot force unity upon them, and yet, left to their own devices, they unite. They come together. They love each other. They choose that happiness.” He turns his head, looking at Cameron, the smile still on his lips.
“And they protect the ones they love, at all costs.”
The old man closes his eyes.
“Wait,” Cameron whispers.
Inside his head, buried deep beneath the frozen, silent landscape of dead machines, something awakens. He whispers again.
“Father.”
But too late. Too late.
Xal laughs, hissing triumphantly, and plunges her needle-sharp claws through the Inventor’s heart.
38
A Meeting of the Minds
Nia emerges from the darkness inside Cameron’s mind, and looks out through Cameron’s eyes as her father dies. With Cameron’s voice, she screams out her anguish, and the massive screen above her head—his head, their head—explodes in a shower of sparks. The anger she once felt at being restricted or scolded, those childish tantrums that lit up the sky, they are nothing compared to the storm building now, a maelstrom of rage and regret and searing loss. She is torn apart by grief.
But she is also held together by love.
She can feel Cameron all around her, holding her in place even as her emotions fight to burst in all directions. His consciousness intertwines with hers, their minds interlocked, beautiful and unbreakable. This must be what it’s like, she thinks, to be connected. To be embraced.
To be loved.
Finally, she understands.
This is what I was made for.
All around them, the crowd exhales as one, and sinks limply into their seats. Juaquo stumbles to one side and lands heavily on his knees, shaking his head slowly from side to side, then sitting back on his haunches and staring calmly into space. The hive is at rest.
A new queen is in command.
* * *
Xal stands shaking, her mandibles splayed, her teeth grinding against each other as blood and spittle run out from the narrow crevices between them. The network of scars on her face begins to glow, red and then gold, and then white-hot, as tears stream from her reptilian eyes and her claws scrabble helplessly at the sky. A high-pitched whine escapes from her mouth as she battles to regain control, to pull her own mind free of the force that now holds it with an iron grip. It cannot be, she thinks furiously, only to feel the thought bounced back, echoing in the empty darkness of her own mind.
It cannot be, cannot be, cannot be.
And then, a soft reply. A voice not her own. Gently mocking. Not one voice, but two.
Yes, it can.
Cameron advances on Xal as she stands rigid, holding tight to Nia with his mind as she holds tight to him. There is no pain this time, and no fear. They are equals: connected, united. With a purpose—and with so much power to wield.
Above the I-X Center, the lightning seems to contract, the branching electricity withdrawing until a crackling sphere of white-hot light hovers over the building. Nia’s energy is Cameron’s own now, their abilities combined. Their minds are ablaze with the force of their connection, pure and brilliant, and outside, the ball of white light glows brighter as the air fills with the sharp smell of ozone. A gasp ripples through the crowd as the tension builds, and builds.
The world seems to hold its breath.
Cameron can sense the pathways of Nia’s network unwinding all around him, gently laced into the brains of the hive, waiting to be unraveled. Thousands and thousands of threads.
It is easy to find the right one.
The lightning unfurls with a massive, soundless pulse, passing through the roof of the I-X Center as easily as if it were air. It narrows to a point as it reaches the floor, as it reaches its target. A spear made of light, of pure energy. Xal’s body convulses as it pierces her mind.
The door is open.
He keeps his eyes open as he crosses the threshold, walking the blazing tightrope of Nia’s cognition into the strange cavern of Xal’s alien brain. He stands face-to-face with his enemy and watches her expression change—from confusion to rage to terror as he slides into her mind like a virus. A single, strangled word bubbles from between her lips.
“Don’t.”
Do it, Nia whispers.
Cameron narrows his eyes, and goes deeper. He crawls down into the dark where Xal, the original Xal, is huddled like a spider in a hole, hacking the code of her DNA, peeling away the layers to see what’s underneath. Through Nia’s eyes he can see the way she’s put herself together; he can see her, underneath the augmentations that she wasn’t born with but stole, killed for.
He deletes them line by line. He takes her apart at the seams. The claws fall from her fingers like rotten teeth, leaving behind gangrenous dribbles of soggy tissue. Her reptilian eyes pop out, one and then the other, and roll loose across the floor, while her teeth spill from her gums in a brittle shower of ivory needles. The rippling muscles in her arms and back shrivel. Nadia Kapur’s skin flakes away.
Only Xal remains, hunched and shaking, her lidless eyes full of fury as she fights him for control—and loses. Cameron has hacked his way to her core; he has found her source code. He yanks it out by the roots.
Xal’s body falls to the floor. The scorched mess of tentacles on the side of her face is quivering furiously, and a hideous wet sound is coming from her mouth, a phlegmy guk guk guk. Cameron wonders if she’s trying to speak, or maybe if she’s choking. He hopes she’s choking. He leans in close to watch her die.
“What’s that?” he says. “Last words?”
Inside his head, Nia shouts a warning.
He understands too late that he’s made a mistake.
The tentacle wraps around his neck and burrows like a worm at the base of his skull, Xal jacking into his brain and into his mind. Hacking him as he hacked her, pulling him out of his own head and into the place where she lives. He feels himself slipping, feels his body slumping to the floor as his motor control evaporates. Xal’s memories rise around him like a swamp: her life flashing before her eyes as she dies. Inside her head, and inside his, he hears her last words.
I WILL TAKE YOU WITH ME.
Somewhere, he can hear the sound of screaming; the person screaming might be him. His heartbeat becomes frantic, arrhythmic, as electricity crackles inside his head. The tentacle wrapping his neck goes rigid as Xal takes her last breath.
Cameron can’t breathe at all. His teeth snap together, his lips peeling back in a grimace as his eyes squeeze closed. It’s a shame, he thinks—to save the world, to fall in love, and to die before he can enjoy any of it. His lips move silently, forming the words he wants to say aloud but can’t. He hopes she can hear them anyway.
I’m sorry, Nia.
By the time someone answers back, Cameron’s mind has gone dark.
39
Disconnect
“I’ll be th
ere when you wake up.”
That’s what Juaquo’s mother said. Only he never did wake up. Not really. The hours since then are all a blur; he feels like he’s been stumbling around drunk, or asleep. The first thing he remembers, the first memory that feels like it’s his and not something he conjured in a feverish dream, is of falling through a storm of white-hot electricity and finding himself on this stage—surrounded by strangers who all have the same bewildered look on their faces mirroring his own feelings.
But he feels better now. He feels like himself again—no longer being led this way and that by the coaxing, commanding chorus of Xal and her hive inside his head. The door has been closed. He takes a deep breath, savoring the sensation, and almost smiles.
Then his eyes fall on Cameron, and the smile disappears.
Cameron is lying nearby, his eyes closed and his face pale, practically forehead to forehead with a mangled creature that Juaquo recognizes as the one that ensnared his mind. Xal. He nearly retches remembering what it felt like to have her crawling around inside his brain. But what fills him with urgent horror isn’t Xal’s lifeless body; it’s the way one tentacle, still pulsing with the alien’s dying energy, is curled around Cameron’s neck, wriggling deeper into the skin at the base of his skull.
“Cameron!” he shouts, and plunges forward, reaching for the ropy tentacle, trying to pull it free. It writhes horribly under his hands, and Cameron’s features twitch, his lips peeling back in a hideous rictus.
He’s dying, Juaquo thinks, and suddenly freezes.
He can’t see her, but he can sense her. Watching, listening. Hovering at the outskirts of his thoughts, peering anxiously through the door into his mind that hasn’t quite closed all the way. Not yet. And if the door is open, then maybe there’s still time.
Nia, he thinks. If you’re there, help me. Help me help him.
The answer is barely there, a whisper so small, he has to strain to hear it.
I can’t, she says. There’s no way.
You CAN, he replies, sending the thought like a shot. You did it once. You can do it again. You changed Cameron, didn’t you? You enhanced him. You gave him a gift. Give me something!
She hesitates. I’ll hurt you, she whispers. I don’t know how much.
“Damn it!” he screams aloud. “There’s no time! Get inside my head and help me find a way to save him!”
Electricity is crackling at the corners of Juaquo’s vision. He grimaces at the sudden sense of the door inside his mind being kicked open wide, of Nia plunging through. His fingers splay at his sides, spasming; his eyes roll back in his head. A paralyzing jolt rushes the full length of his spine and he bites down hard on his own tongue, trying not to scream. The lightning is rolling in, rolling through him. Flooding his veins with pain, racing outward down both arms, burning and branching into every capillary.
And then, as quickly as it came, it goes.
Juaquo blinks with surprise as the burning electricity leaves him—and then gasps at what comes through in its place. A surge not of pain, but of power.
It is done, Nia says, inside his head. Hurry.
Juaquo raises his hands and feels no surprise to find them marked with scars, a raised, red fractal pattern that spreads from palms to fingers like the branches of a tree.
Hurry, Nia says again, but Juaquo is already in motion. He bends forward, cradling Cameron’s head with one hand, his brow furrowed in concentration.
“Hey, buddy,” he says, quietly. “Now, you hang in there. Okay?”
Cameron’s eyelids flutter open, fixing for a moment on Juaquo’s face.
“Brace yourself, ” Juaquo says, reaching around to grasp the tentacle where it enters his friend’s neck. “This is probably going to feel pretty weird.”
Don’t, Cameron tries to say, but no words come out.
A strange crawling sensation creeps over his skull.
Inside his head, he hears Nia’s whispered voice.
You’re not going anywhere.
This time, his only answer is a low, involuntary croak as a last breath whistles past his frozen vocal cords. There’s a tremendous pressure building behind his eyes, a sense of something with deep roots refusing to pull away.
He feels a tearing as it lets go.
Then he passes out.
* * *
Juaquo looks with disgust at the fat rope of dead alien flesh in his palm, then tosses it aside, switching his gaze to Cameron’s neck, still black and bleeding where Xal’s tentacle found its way in. He reaches for it instinctively, framing it with both hands—and then furrows his brow in concentration as a shimmering meshlike substance unspools from his fingertips, filling the wound, flushing out the infection that had begun to dismantle Cameron’s DNA.
He’d known exactly what to do. He’d known exactly what he could do, because of what he was now: enhanced. He looks at his hands again and fights the sudden urge to laugh. Only a person who’d started her life as a machine would look at Juaquo’s mechanic’s brain and see the potential to heal—but she’s not wrong. He’s always been good at putting things together; why shouldn’t his superpower be to patch people up?
Low moans begin to rise from around the room as the members of Xal’s hive come back to themselves, as the threads that bound them, mind to mind, gently disintegrate into nothing. Some people shuffle confusedly toward the exits, carrying children in their arms or clutching each other’s hands. Others fall sobbing into the arms of strangers, who embrace them without hesitation.
It’s okay, they murmur to each other. We’re okay. Everything’s okay.
At Juaquo’s feet, Cameron’s eyelids flutter open.
“Juaquo?”
“Take it easy, buddy.”
“I want to sit up,” Cameron says. Juaquo helps him, sliding a hand under his shoulders. Cameron blinks, looking blearily around the room.
“You okay?” Juaquo says.
“Oh yeah. I’m great. Everything is great.” Cameron pauses, concentrating. “Except that half the servers in the AV control room are on fire, everyone in this building is trying to dial 911 at the same time, and we’re about to get seriously reamed out by Ms. Bionic Asshole, who is standing right behind you and giving me the stink-eye as we speak.”
“As I’m sure you’re aware, that part of my body is not, in fact, bionic,” a voice says, and Juaquo turns to see Olivia Park standing beside the floor. She’s looking at everything and everyone with her mouth puckered up in distaste. “And I’m short on patience at the moment. One minute I was trying to track down a missing asset, and the next thing I know, I’m standing in the street with twenty people I’ve never met in my life, trying to flip over a police car.”
“Asset,” Cameron says, and Olivia rolls her eyes.
“Fine. Barry, or whatever you want to call him. The old man. I assume he’s with you.”
Cameron glares at her. “He was. He was with us until the end. But he’s dead.”
Olivia’s expression softens only a little as her gaze falls on the Inventor’s lifeless body.
“Damn it. I wanted to avoid that.”
“Why,” Cameron snaps. “Because you wanted to study him?”
Olivia doesn’t even blink, although Cameron, quietly interfacing with her biotech, notes with some satisfaction that her heart rate ticks up ever so slightly.
“He had a great deal of knowledge that would have been useful to us,” she says. She flicks her eyes toward the stage, where Six is standing over Xal’s dead body. “But perhaps . . .”
“This one is also dead, which is specifically not what I wanted,” Six says, glaring daggers at Cameron before crouching to get a closer look. He prods at the corpse disappointedly, then lifts the limp tentacle that had been wrapped around Cameron’s neck and peers at its frayed ends, frowning a little. “But there’s some circuitry here that might yield some information. Oh, yes, there’s definitely something. I’ll just take this one back to the lab, shall I?”
Six’s tone is pr
actically giddy, and Cameron shudders in spite of himself. Olivia sees it, and smirks.
“We’ll take it from here. I’ll be in touch. And just for the record”—she gestures toward the Inventor—“I liked the old man well enough. I had hoped we might come to an understanding, especially because . . .”
She trails off, narrowing her eyes, peering at Cameron, who gazes back impassively. The staring contest lasts several seconds, until finally Olivia shrugs.
“Well, we can discuss that later. After all, you have somewhere to be, don’t you? Someone you’re supposed to meet?”
Cameron blinks, and Olivia grins. He’s never seen her do that before, and he’s not sure he likes it; it makes her look like a shark.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says, and the grin disappears. She shakes her head.
“As always, Cameron, this will all go much more smoothly if we could agree not to insult each other’s intelligence. Your phone is going off, by the way. Again.”
She turns on her heel and strides away. Cameron watches her go, ignoring the buzz of his phone vibrating in his pocket. Olivia is right; he has several unread messages, but he doesn’t need to look at them. He felt them arrive from the ether. He already knows them by heart.
They all say the same thing: YOU KNOW WHERE TO FIND ME.
40
The Doctor Will See You Now
Six steps back from the table and pauses, observing his work with approval but no pride. It’s hardly his best; interrogating the dead is a grotesque and rudimentary business, nothing like his usual work. If not for his loyalty to Olivia—and her promise to let him keep the specimen afterward, no questions asked—he would never lend his gifts to such a distasteful endeavor. It’s more sideshow than surgery. It’s certainly not art.
