“With your calligraphy, I would have thought your right was dominant.”
Cressida turned her shoulder slightly away. “No.”
“Hmm.” Zenya dunked the cookie in her tea and tapped the extra on the rim. “Pity if something happened to it.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Your hand.”
Xan stiffened. Cressida turned white.
Yves studied Zenya as though trying to identify something hidden inside her.
“This tastes like shit,” the robot woman said idly.
Mercury lost it.
The entire room lit in the same brilliant death as the flash-grenade that had rendered them unconscious in the kitchen. Raw fury whipped through her body. Only this time, it flashed nuclear in Mercury’s heart.
Mercury threw down the remains of her cookie. It bounced off her plate and skidded across the table. “What’s the point of this?”
Everyone else froze.
The robot woman chewed slowly.
“You’re getting a sick satisfaction out of torturing us. For what? I thought we”—she thumped herself on the chest—“were the emotional ones and you robots had the oh-so-perfect logic. But this is stupid. Why are you keeping us here like this?”
“I wouldn’t expect an idiot like you to understand,” the robot woman said.
“No, I don’t! I’ve been on your stupid Kill List for a couple weeks. There’s nothing wrong with me, but there’s definitely something wrong with you.”
The hangar dropped completely silent.
She finished her bite and set her cookie down with a clack. Her cold, dead eyes worked over Mercury like sticky barbed wool. “You are incorrect.”
“Oh, yeah?” Mercury bit the words. “Which part?”
“There is something wrong with you.”
Cressida shifted in her seat. Xan, too, looked surprised. Yves studied the hangar, ignoring them.
The robot woman picked up her cookie again. “It’s your genes. You’re sick, and the rogue happened to find it. She marked you all.”
Mercury stabbed a finger at the woman. “You’re the ones trying to kill us.”
“Because sick things need to be culled.”
“Mercury’s right, you know,” Yves said.
Confidence strengthened her. He believed in her. Even though he had returned to the control of the Faction, he confirmed she was right.
And it pissed the robot woman off.
The woman’s eyes stared through Mercury. Then, without looking at Yves, her smile turned malicious. “You’re so corrupted, little bot.”
“She’s still right.” He rested his hand on his chin. “Since when does the Faction care about the health of human populations?”
“When sick humans infect the androids assigned to assassinate them.”
“Funny then that you’re the one showing illogical behavior.”
She gritted her teeth. “The zero class cannot be corrupted.”
“Are you sure? Because the Faction ordered you to turn us in to their facilities, not conduct your own tests.” He tapped his head. “And as we all know, I’m still connected to the Faction. Since you’re already defying them, why don’t you take it all the way? Let the women go.”
“Lies.” A tiny muscle below her right eye twitched. “I’m not corrupted. I’m going to kill everyone.”
“Listen to him,” Xan said. “He’s on your side, right? Go to the next target and leave us alone.”
The woman stared at Xan for one long minute. “Shall I conclude the test? If I’m corrupted, I shouldn’t be able to hurt one of your precious humans.”
She whipped a gun from her thigh and fired.
Cressida’s tightly clenched left fist disappeared into a white mist. Electricity crackled and burned a black spot on the table where it had rested. The air smelled of ozone.
The hangar swung into horror.
Cressida stared at the fleshy stump in shock, clenched it to her chest, and keened.
Xan flexed against the restraints, every muscle in his body straining. He jerked one way and the other. His neck muscles bulged.
Mercury’s stomach lunged for her throat. She choked on the bitter bile. Tears burned in her eyes.
They were all going to die.
The robot woman placed the white gun in the center of the table as though daring someone else to take it. Give her an excuse to cause pain. Xan stared at it, chest heaving, as though he could will it into his hands. Yves already had a gun, so he didn’t need hers.
Cressida rocked back and forth. Tears squeezed out the corners of her eyes. Her high-pitched sob hissed as she gasped for breath and struggled to control the pain.
“Oops. It must be a little more complicated. And I am not the one who’s corrupted.” The robot woman fixed her evil smile on Mercury. “I did that because of you.”
Guilt sank into Mercury, red as the color of the skin that had once swelled on her forehead.
“Now, if you were smarter and more talented, like your sister, you wouldn’t have aggravated me. But my temper is short, because of you. Because of your whole family, actually.”
The evil woman shook her head.
“First, your sister. Now you. You can’t wait for the next target, Aris, to die.”
No. Mercury shook her head. Everything jumbled. “You’re lying.”
“I’ll tell your hateful half-brother you cursed his name screaming as you suicided.”
Cressida made a sound.
Mercury gritted her teeth. “Leave us alone!”
“I want to. But you went and corrupted Yves. The only value he has is being logical, and you’ve gone and screwed all that up. We have no choice but to disassemble him. All because of you.”
Everything clarified.
Yves, watching Zenya coldly. Inhumanly. Robotically.
A few days with Mercury and she had caused him to almost be human. Was she supposed to feel guilty?
No.
She was generous and she was kind. She tried to take responsibility for everything plausibly her fault and for plenty of things implausibly too. Yves had taught her that.
But she had taught him that not everything could be explained by logic.
If the Faction couldn’t take him back, good. Great.
She was worth it.
The words unraveled from her like an ugly sweater returning to the original, strong yarn.
“If he’s corrupted because of me, good. I hope he never gets fixed. Although, you want to know the truth?”
“No,” Zenya said.
Mercury spoke right over her. “When two people are perfect for each other, then falling in perfect, unconditional, no-holds-barred love is completely logical.”
~*~*~*~
If he’s corrupted because of me, good. I hope he never gets fixed.
It wasn’t so much the words she used as the expression on Mercury’s face that seemed to catapult Yves to a higher level of awareness.
The problem was that he had experienced something he couldn’t explain. Their love made no sense. She called, and his heart responded, cutting out his brain. That was why he kept trying to get data. But all the data in the world couldn’t explain the experience as succinctly as Mercury did.
When two people were perfect for each other, then love is logical.
The long-standing confusion forced on him by the Faction swept clear of his brain. For the first time, it all made sense.
“You’re so special, hmm?” The zero class. Her finger twitched for the gun.
He saw it all now.
“Yes.” Mercury. So pale, so frightened, and yet so determined. Her heart burned with protective fire. Always a protector of her loves. And she had finally found her strength, deep inside. “Ten seconds with me, in love, is better than ten thousand years as an emotionless robot shell like you.”
“You have an undeservedly high opinion of yourself for a person who isn’t even her proper identity most of the time.” The zero class. Already
reaching for her gun in her own mind.
He reached out to the Robotics Faction. The connection in his brain that had awoken him in the beginning, had grounded him through assignment after assignment, and had given him a cold, logical center from which to analyze the universe.
The Faction had used him. Withheld the information about how Xan had been turned so they could set him up to be severed. Ignored his analyses and twisted his conclusions. Fed him false odds, odds he had relied upon and which had crumbled beneath their lies.
He had trusted himself to them and run away from the woman who evoked in him a passion that defied logic. Now, with her strength of conviction, he saw the truth.
He could only trust emotions. Illogical, crazy emotions.
“I am a sensitive, feeling, passionate woman a hundred billion times better than you.”
He took in the whole situation in one hard, ultra-logical snap. The Faction telling him to obey the zero class and allow her to do as she wished. Their false order led to a false conclusion that made oh-so-much sense.
His emotion told him to save Mercury. Save her, and he would see the rogue again.
Save her, and he would save himself.
“I’m a hundred billion times better than an insensitive, unfeeling, passionless stick of metal like you.”
The zero class clearly weighed her assignment from the Faction against the satisfaction she would receive from murdering Mercury. Since her selfishness was a foregone conclusion, Yves moved well before she did.
She snatched the shatter-pistol from the table.
Her eyes flashed to his.
Fuck. He’d miscalculated. He’d thought she was going to shoot Mercury, and she moved too fast for him to change to defend his own head—
Her gaze flicked past him.
Fuck, fuck.
Now he hit the wrong angle—
He managed to curve his palm and turn the skin reflective at the last possible instant. The laser melted the top layers of his skin before they could change to clear.
The pistol blast burned hotter than anything he had ever attempted to deflect. The first few micro-fractions of rays bounced off reflective layers and singed Xan’s ear as they flew past him and smashed into a pair of shears on the wall. Most melted the handle, and a micro-fraction bounced off the reflective metal at an angle to sever Xan’s chains between the wrists.
So, Xan was free.
The rest of the shot obliterated his titanium through the bone, destroying muscle and severing tendons, and super-heating the back of his hand. As the outer skin visibly melted, the shot ended.
Holy fuck. He could not handle another shot from that gun. Not on any part of his body.
And neither could the rest of them.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Xan jiggle the chains at the same moment the women jumped, disguising the movement. He stared at Yves as though unsure.
Yves held his gaze, willing Xan not to move.
The zero class narrowed her eyes. “Are we playing games?”
He didn’t know how to answer. Without the Faction…
…without the Faction, what?
Zenya set out the machinist’s drill, unplugged the laser attachment, and altered the voltage. “This looks like a stupid weapon.” She pointed it at Mercury. “Shall I test it?”
Fear leapt into his throat.
She raised a brow. “Still think I’m corrupted?”
And suddenly, he saw the entire table from a new perspective. Shut off from the Faction, able to perceive everything from a wider angle, he understood his fundamental mistake.
“I miscalculated,” he said.
The zero class blinked. “What?”
“You are corrupted.” He had said she was, but he hadn’t truly believed it until this moment. “You feel emotions.”
Zenya’s nostrils flared and true rage flashed in her eyes. “I feel nothing.” She intimated her next shot, baiting him in reverse. “And neither will any of you, ever again.”
Okay.
Mercury and Cressida were both vulnerable, and the zero currently wielded enough firepower to end them all before he took his next breath. If she didn’t want to blast them, she could simply activate the airlock and blow them all out into space.
No one could stop her. Not him, not the Faction, and not the four of them.
But she wasn’t going to do that.
“You don’t want to hurt them.”
Mercury made a noise in her throat. Cressida held the stump of her hand to her chest, eyes red.
He stood by his statement. “And you’re not going to kill any of them.”
She flicked past him. She looked at the enforcers ringing their position. Each one of them could end Mercury while they were having this casual conversation. Her hand flexed on the trigger, sweeping over Mercury and deliberately taunting him. “Are you really so sure?”
Fuck.
He turned to her target.
Ignored, for the sake of her life, that Mercury was the woman he loved. That she had set him free. That she was so beautiful, defiant in the face of death, determined in the face of fear. She would protect her sister and her family and him. Even though she thought he didn’t care about her anymore. She lit with a truthful fire.
She was worth it. All of it.
He told it to her straight. “Mercury, I need you to do something for me.”
Despite every muscle in her body tensing, she braved a smile. “Don’t move?”
Fuck.
He couldn’t do this.
But he had to.
The zero class gave him no choice.
To save Mercury’s life, Yves had to kill her.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“No.”
Yves took Mercury’s hand in his charred palm. Although he could barely sense her, the damage too extensive, he craved to feel her. To tell her, somehow, that it would be okay. Even though this brief hesitation could cost her life.
Yves lifted the hand with the machinist’s drill and stroked her cheek with his index finger.
Beyond her, Xan flicked a glance over his shoulder, following Yves’s direction. The airlock controls. He focused on Yves again. Uncertain.
They only had one shot. Yves gritted his teeth. “I need you to run like hell.”
“What?” Mercury stilled to absolute motionless. Finally.
The zero class stirred behind him. Reacting to his words.
No more hesitation.
He jerked his thumb at the armed android. “She’s not going to hurt you—”
The machinist’s laser vaporized Mercury’s smooth facial skin, so intense her nerve endings disappeared before they could register a sensation, and charred her skull bone to ash-powder. Electricity poured into Mercury’s brain. Her chip made a popping sound as it absorbed the bulk of the charge. Her eyes rolled into her head. Sparks arced out, snapping from her electrified hair.
Just when it would have turned deadly, the electrocution ended.
Mercury slumped in his arms.
Thank goodness.
Cressida gasped in a long breath and screamed.
Yves dropped Mercury’s lifeless body, grabbed her older sister, and shoved her—gently—onto the table. He covered her mouth and nose, cutting off her scream at a hiss.
The zero class frowned at him. The machinist’s drill smoked in her hands. “What are you doing?”
“Making your predictions come true.” He avoided Cressida’s frantic eyes and the way she clawed at his iron hand with her fingers and her stump. “You said I would kill them. And since you pulled away at the last moment, ensuring that Mercury stayed alive, apparently it falls to me to stop them from breathing.”
“Not you.” She flicked her gaze at Xan. “You.”
Fuck. She knew Yves had severed his chains.
“You can’t hurt us,” Xan said, testing out the theory. “We’re corrupted too.”
“Wrong,” she said. “I can’t seem to kill your stupid infectious hu
mans, or let the stupid enforcers do it either. Don’t worry, I will figure out a way around it. In the meantime,” her scowl lightened to a deadly impassivity, “you are just ridiculous androids, and I will end you both.”
Yves let go of Cressida, leaving her gasping, coughing, and vulnerable on the table, as he ran for the airlock controls. Behind him, Xan whipped his burned chains at the two enforcers and roared.
Focus.
Yves slammed the airlock opening programs one-handed. A warning siren sounded as the air began to pump out and the hangar depressurized for imminent hard vacuum exposure. The doors slammed shut on the backup enforcers in the hall. Behind him, Xan fought the zero class, alternating between roaring in fury and screaming in the worst heights of pain. Mostly it was screaming. Yves didn’t turn around. It wouldn’t help his ability to program to see Xan losing all of his appendages.
Yves woke up the mini dog-sized maintenance drones—all of them—and ordered them to suicide on the zero class.
The keys beneath his fingers melted.
He jumped up. Blasts melted holes in his arm and shoulder.
The zero class played with them. First, she baited Xan, and when he tried to hook her with his chains, she casually ducked under and feinted at Yves. Meanwhile, the air pumped out. Cressida rolled from the table onto the floor, gasping. Her skin turned blue, and her eyes began to bug as she clawed at her throat. The zero class laughed at her agony.
They needed to end this.
He crawled back to the melted keyboard. Useless. With the shears, he pried open the lower access panel and rewired the drone commands to the last undestroyed screen.
Behind him, choking sounded. The zero class strangled Xan with his own chains while he grappled for the pistol. A pure, malevolent fury twisted her skeletal face.
“I haven’t killed an x-class in years,” she said.
Xan’s lips opened and closed. His face reddened. The metal pierced his skin. Blood pooled and seeped out.
Yves tapped in the final command. “Keep waiting.”
She looked up.
The drones surrounded her in sticky, white biohazard tape. The more she fought, the more the tape ensnared her in its gummy, puffy mess.
The last of the air leaked out and gravity abruptly quit. The table and chairs magnetized to the floor, and the tools magnetized to the walls as intended. Humans and robots lifted.
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