by K. T. Hanna
“Including Marlena...” Aishke smiles tightly. “I wish I could be as confident as she is.”
“She knows what she has to do, she’s given herself a purpose. She’s a nurse, and now she actually gets to help people instead of harm them. It can take others forever to find their purpose. I know it took me a long time to figure it out once I got here.” She doesn’t add that she still hasn’t quite figured it out. The younger girl doesn’t need more to worry about.
Ash raises her eyebrows. “Really? You? I find that a little hard to believe. You always know everything that needs doing and do it. You find ways to make people understand their abilities even when they never could before. You make what we can do make sense, which is why...” Her words taper off and she looks away.
“Why what?” Sai prompts.
“Which is why I need you to watch me, to see what I can do. To explain it to me, Sai.”
“Show me, then.” Sai sits back and folds her arms. “It can’t be that bad. Certainly can’t be worse than anything I’ve ever done.” She spares a wry grin for the girl, regardless of how much the memory still hurts. The glimpses of the rubble, of the barely controlled blaze, of the acrid smell of smoke heightened by the burning tang of copper.
Aishke draws in a deep breath. “I think I can kill people.”
“We can all kill people, Ash,” Sai says gently.
“Not like that. I mean...I can kill people with a thought. Barely a thought, even.” Aishke’s expression becomes panicked. “I think all I have to do is think about something and it happens. Like think about how their hearts would stop or the air wouldn’t get to their lungs or their bones breaking. If they have no shields and no psionic protection, I can reach in and...and do anything.” Aishke’s voice rises slightly with every word, her body shaking visibly. Her gaze darts around the room, before finally focusing on Sai.
Sai takes a deep breath. “Why do you think this?”
Aishke gulps and looks away, obviously gathering up enough courage. “When you got hurt, I felt it. Somehow I knew, and I panicked. I got so angry. There were captives still around us. We hadn’t exited the complex completely. One of them scowled at me and told me to stop bumping into him... and I thought it right then and there. I thought that I wanted him to die, and I imagined squeezing his heart until it stopped.”
She takes another breath, tears streaming down her face. “My head hurt so bad, and he dropped to the ground and his eyes glazed over and blood came out of his mouth and nose. Mason checked him and said he was dead, that somehow his heart exploded.”
Aishke moves forward and takes Sai’s hand. “I did it. I know I did it. How could I?” Her breaths are coming in heaving sobs now, and her words jumble until she’s a sobbing mess.
Sai moves around the table and hugs her close, wracking her brains on how to give her the answer. She decides babbling is probably far better than silence. In Aishke’s current state, she’d probably take silence to mean Sai’s condemning her, and that’s just not going to work.
“That’s why you’ve been so cheery. You’re scared and trying to hide it.” She pats Aishke’s hair, trying to soothe her. She waits a few seconds; sure her Aishke is still there somewhere. “It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”
“It’s not okay...” Aishke buries her face in her arms on the table.
“No, really, and do you know why?”
Aishke shakes her head without looking up.
“Because Bastian can do the exact same thing. Always has been able to and always will be able to. And did you ever think he was a monster?”
Slowly, Aishke sits up and sniffs loudly. “No.”
Sai ruffles her hair, making it even more untidy that it originally was. “We can make sure you know how to control it and use it only when absolutely necessary. Maybe we can even limit it and make it possible to just shock them.”
“Do you really think that’s possible?” Hope shines in Aishke’s eyes.
“I think anything is possible. And our first order of business after my meeting in a couple of hours will be to go down to Kai’s lab and see if anyone confiscated some rabid rabbits on our raid.”
“A rabbit?” Aishke asks dubiously.
“Yes, a rabbit.” Sai laughs, but doesn’t tell her about the potential to explode them into a goopy mess. She can find that out later. “Now let me nap in my own bed for the first time in an age. I feel like I got hit by a steamroller.”
The knock on her door pulls Sai abruptly from her sleep. She rolls out of bed, wary, and momentarily forgets her legs don’t quite work like they used to yet. The roll and resulting crouch land her firmly on her butt, and she grimaces before realizing she’s actually in her own apartment and the person poking her head around the door is Aishke, trying in vain to stifle laughter.
“Just you remember who’s paying for your food.” With some effort, she pushes herself up and finds it a little easier than anticipated.
Aishke gestures at her legs as Sai pulls clothes out of the closet. “You’re adapting well.”
“This is called walking. I can’t run, kick, or jump yet, and phasing? That’s never going to happen if I don’t get my butt into gear, so... Adapting I may be. I wouldn’t call it well.”
“Complainer,” Aishke quips with a shrug and walks into the lounge room, calling back over her shoulder. “Hurry up. You’ll be late unless you want to take your wheelchair.”
Pulling a clean shirt over her head, Sai grabs a piece of bread on her way out of the apartment. “Haha, very funny. Make sure you get your studies finished. We have work to do when I get back.”
She doesn’t wait for an answer, but pulls the door closed firmly behind her and heads to the meeting room, glad of her balance exercises. Her legs feel stronger than they did when she started her rehab just over two weeks ago. She curses herself for not rubbing oil into the joints before she left, but that can wait for tonight. Sleep was more important than a little irritated skin.
This time the meeting room is refreshingly empty. Jeffries, Kayde, Iria, and Mason are already there. Mason seems more irritated than she’s ever seen him, and she frowns at him. “You okay?”
He glances at her and manages a tight smile. “Good to see you up and about without your cane.”
Sai glances down and belatedly realizes she left it behind. “Yeah, that was intentional.” She grins at him.
He smiles, easing a little of the tension in his shoulders. “I’d say you should take your time, but that’s probably not a good idea.”
Her first instinct is to scowl at him, perhaps snap something nasty. But it’s not his fault—it’s no one’s, not completely, not solely. Instead, she counts to three and nods. “Yeah. Time has a habit of running away from us.”
Mason grins, but his lips barely curl and it seems forced. On closer inspection, the lines around his eyes are deeper, more like gouges than wrinkles.
“Are you okay?” she asks him, suddenly needing to hear him say it, even if it’s not true. Just like Bastian, Mason has to be okay. Always.
“Tired. Worried. But I’m okay.” His smile doesn’t reach the rest of him, but Sai can’t figure out why he’s lying, and he changes the subject too fast for her to pursue it. “I have a gut feeling this news isn’t going to be good. We’ll probably need your fighting strength sooner than later.”
“You don’t know, then?” She lowers her voice to a whisper. “Retaliation?”
“I’m assuming.” Mason flicks his hair back out of his eyes. “I’m hoping that’s all it is, but Dom’s message only said he had news from the top and would be with us by eighteen hundred hours.”
Mention of Dom makes Sai’s gut twinge in a weird, confused anger, but she shoves it down and focuses on the matter at hand. “Dom won’t be late. I don’t think he’s capable of it.”
Mason nods and looks over at Mathur as the old man walks into the room. Sai sits herself between Iria and Kayde and waits along with the rest of the room for the stragglers. Jame
s is the last person to arrive but for Dom, who pretty much makes it into the room with one minute to spare.
Or, she decides, perhaps he’d been there all along because his slow reveal of himself is anything but obvious. It takes about a minute for him to revert back to his original color tones. Sai has to stop herself from gasping at his appearance. There’s something off about it, like he’s still not quite himself. If he were closer to her, she’d reach out—or maybe she wouldn’t. Conflicting feelings sit like lead in her stomach.
Dom nods at the room and declines the offered seat. His gaze briefly connects with everyone, but lingers just a second more on Sai before he looks away. Or, at least, that’s what she tells herself. Just like she tells herself she’s still angry at him for his role in her injuries, regardless that logic might dictate otherwise.
“I need you all to listen carefully and try to be logical in how we approach this.” He glances at Mathur and Mason, who nod.
“I’ve been scouting out Central and the actions of the GNW post-infiltration. Suffice it to say that anyone who is not myself or perhaps one of the other dominos will have no luck getting in to speak to Bastian. Which is what I was doing when Deign and Zach surprised him with a gathering of the board of directors.”
“Which ones?” Mason asks curtly, reader in his hand, ready to notate.
“Harlow and Selwyn.”
Mason raises an eyebrow. “Not Davis? He’s always been a golden child.”
Dom’s lips curl into a slight smirk that doesn’t suit his face. “Davis is nothing now. He’s deceased.”
A collective soft gasp goes around the room, fading into a heavy silence that hangs over the room and threatens to suffocate Sai.
Dom closes his eyes for a moment. “Deign has moved for the Damascus to be taken out of stasis.” He holds up a hand as Mathur stands up. “Please let me finish. We can’t afford for Bastian to reveal himself yet, so he has to go along with this. The plan is to program the Damascus in stasis with their directive before triggering them again. They’ll be programmed to eliminate the Exiled and retrieve the pure source.”
“Well, that’s terrifying.” Kayde’s voice is soft, and she pushes her chair back, pulling her lab coat around her. There’s no quip from her, no cocky grin, just a furrow to her brow while her free hand tugs at her disarrayed blonde hair.
“Oh no,” Sai says as the realization hits her. “The Hounds...”
Dom nods. “When the Damascus are reactivated, the Hounds will fall back in line with their original coding. Bastian believes he can give us days, perhaps a week at most. As soon as we have a course of action sorted out for the Exiled, I’ll head back to Central to see if I can prevent anything from the inside.”
Sai scans the room. No one speaks; they’re all far too busy deliberately not making eye contact. Kayde and Jeffries are as pale as the vampires of myth. Iria’s eyes brim with tears, and she gulps.
Finally, Mason stands. “Does Bastian have any solutions?”
“Nothing. It happened so fast.” Dom shrugs and angles his head from side to side in an eerie mimicry of cracking his neck.
Mason takes an audible breath. The first words shake as he speaks, but he gains confidence the more he puts out there. “There’s little we can do. All we can do is arm ourselves with the knowledge we have from previous encounters and plan accordingly.”
Mathur remains seated. His wrinkles suddenly appear heavy, like his age is weighing on him. “Direct psionic attacks will have little to no effect on them. The few human elements in the Damascus—they are long gone. So much that calling them part of the Domino Project is insulting. They have no compunctions, no consciences.”
“Is there any hope of fighting their physical strength?” Mason pinches the bridge of his nose, aging before Sai’s eyes.
“Perhaps with reinforced psionic attacks, but I cannot be sure.” Even Mathur’s voice is full of dejection, and he turns to face Dom. “I need your aid. Your siblings require that we adjust certain things. I will need your help, or we will have no chance.”
Dom’s eyes flicker through a myriad of colors before settling on a paler than usual silver. He inclines his head toward his maker. “Done.”
“Then we have to get to it!” Mathur claps his hands together, the energy in his words belying the apathy in his eyes. “Jeffries, designate another Mobile as a hospital—maybe Gamma.”
“Gamma?” Mason raises an eyebrow.
Mathur turns to him, his face somber. “I am sick of numbers. Iria, I need you to brief James and work with Sai to develop a type of martial psionics. Kayde, I need something to melt the crap out of those contraptions. Put Ebony on hold until you have something that will help us stay alive long enough to finish its development.”
Kayde rolls her eyes, but there’s a determined upturn to her lips when she answers. “Aye, sir.”
As the others begin to filter out, Mathur turns to Sai. “I need you to get back up to speed. Not in three weeks. We need you now.” He pauses and squeezes her forearm in what is probably supposed to be reassurance. “There is no more time to feel sorry for yourself.”
Sai sits in the meeting room once everyone leaves and studies her hands. She can stand, walk, sit, crouch, squat, and lie down. It’s more than most people who’ve lost their legs. But right now it’s not enough. She leans forward and rests her head on her hands.
“I need you to get back up to speed. Not in three weeks. We need you now.”
“There is no more time to feel sorry for yourself.”
“I’ll get right on that, boss,” she mutters under her breath and squeezes her eyes shut. The thing is, she’s not entirely sure how to get right on that or stop feeling that sense of niggling doubt that plagues the back of her mind whenever she sets her body weight down. She feels just a hair’s breadth away from collapse, from discovering there’s no way she can keep this up. Surely she can’t expect them to always work the way she needs them to?
Phasing saved the others, but ultimately, it failed her. She pushed herself too far, depleted her energy, and whether Dom had dropped an elevator on her or not didn’t matter. The fact was that the one person she’d trusted more than anyone else in the world had let her down: herself.
“Is it really that bad?”
Dom’s voice is so soft she thinks she’s hearing things at first. She looks up and scans the room, just barely locating him leaning against the wall. He’s not flickering, just slightly camouflaging with his surroundings.
“Is what that bad?” And no matter how hard she tries, keeping the bitterness from her voice is difficult.
“Is it really that bad to have non-human grafts?”
There’s a genuine tinge of curiosity in his voice, almost like the old Dom, before GNW switched him off and rebooted him. For a second, Sai wants to smile and tell him it’s not all bad, but her self-recrimination stops her lie. Instead she wants to yell that it is too that bad, to stop saying it isn’t.
She shrugs. He doesn’t deserve all her anger, even if he’s an easy target. “It’s different. Not bad-bad necessarily, but bad-inconvenient right now.”
“I can make...” But Dom pauses, checks himself, and stops what he was going to say.
“You can make?” Sai asks, curious despite herself, missing the easy camaraderie she’d had with him what seems like an age ago now.
He glances down, solidifying back to the black type of body armor he always wore around her, the same features, the complete lack of iridescence. “I know all the tricks. I’ve had this body a very long time.” His words are soft, as if he’s not sure he can really speak to her without her yelling at him to shut up.
Sai nods and feels a pang of guilt at his reaction, enough to make her want to go to him, to hug him, to rewind time and take away that day.
“If you have questions... perhaps I can answer them?” He ventures the question with a soft gaze.
The expression takes Sai aback. She’s so unused to him expressing himself in such
human ways. “I...” It’s hard to talk to him. It was never difficult before, and it’s frustrating. She tries to modulate her tone, to soften it and reflect his own. “I’ll remember that.”
He slides his chair back, standing stiffly. “I see.” They’re the last words he says before walking out of the room, activating his camouflage as he moves away from her.
But he doesn’t, he doesn’t see at all, and Sai can’t bring herself to say that yet.
The weight of Sai’s legs starts to drag against her as she makes her way back to her apartment. Her brain is overtired and a little overwhelmed as she pushes through the door and grips its frame to help a sudden wave of dizziness. Aishke sits at the kitchen table, a big grin on her face, her lips parted slightly. But whatever she was going to say dies on her lips as she sees Sai.
“Are you okay?” she asks, hurrying to help her sit down.
“I’m fine, I’m fine.” Sai waves the younger girl away, slightly annoyed at allowing herself to wear out so easily. “I’m a little drained right now.”
Aishke flops down on the couch, her shoulders drooping. “You want to sleep then?”
Sai glances at the clock and realizes it’s not all that late. Then she remembers Aishke’s problem. “We should still have some time. Sorry—I had a bit of shocking news.”
“About?” Aishke leans forward a grin on her face. “Did Kayde finally tell you she likes you?”
“What?” Sai stops short, baffled. “How...? I don’t think so!” But a few things click and she groans, stretching out on the couch. “Damn it, why did you have to tell me that?”
“I thought you knew.” Aishke grins impishly, proving that she definitely didn’t think Sai knew in the least.
“Minx. I really didn’t need something else to think about, you know. I have far too much on my plate as it is.”
“Dom?” This time Aishke looks serious.
“Dom and Dom’s news of doomsday. Dom and Dom’s sudden Mister Sensitivity act. Dom and Dom’s perfection and...just Dom everything!” Sai grabs the pillow and pulls it over her face.
