34
A persistent transmission originating in the colony warped through Roav”s sensors, bringing him out of sentinel mode. He punched one of the pistons in his chest in a rhythm like a marine mammal, letting the sonar echo through Jharim with one sentence.
She is here.
For the first time in days, Roav and Jharim”s lenses glowed to life beneath the current of the Saphed River. They turned their heads towards each other, assessing as their cold, watery interiors warmed up, vibrating the water sluicing through their vents. Fish rushed by as their joints thunked and calibrated, sending shockwaves through the riverbed that kicked up debris and rotting plant matter.
Their heads emerged from the water, the glow of their stares reflected off its racing surface as they marched up the bank, dripping in the late morning light. A call and response sounded out over the trees: an unknown yiwreni buck and Sizzle, making their locations known.
Making it easy for the biognostics to find their target.
”Systems check.”
”All systems clear.”
”Jettison on mark,” Jharim said with the practice of a leader. Both men synced, opened every vent, and whirred to a deafening roar. The vibration blurred their figures as water exploded off their casings, out of their interiors, peppering the jungle foliage like buckshot from a shotgun. Instantly, they were dry.
And then they were ghosts, their heavy footprints disappearing into the jungle.
?
Fásach whined, clutching his antlers in a panic. Roz was gone. Just gone. He lifted his nose to the air and took a deep breath. The jungle had such a strong scent that it was hard to track her—
There. He just caught it. The smell of burning plastic and lubricant. Roz was hurt.
He sprinted in the direction of the gut-wrenching odor, so desperate that he didn”t notice the thundering gait catching up to him until it was too late.
A black and red blur bowled him over, rolling over and over, hitting trees and tangling in underbrush. He ripped himself out of a clawed grasp and roared down at a snarl of a thousand teeth.
Scocite.
There was no beating Sizzle”s size. The bilong was a maelstrom of chaos and horror, standing seven feet tall when all four legs were on the ground, let alone when he stood on two. His y-shaped mouth opened all the way down his neck to his sternum as if the bisected jaw of a python had been combined with that of a dissection scar. And when his claw whipped out and threw Fásach down, he nearly engulfed the buck”s waist in a single palm. He was a massive killing machine, and his saliva was dripping into Fásach”s fur as he wrestled to get free.
Sizzle smashed him into the ground and dislocated his shoulder like he was a doll. He bared down on Fásach until there was no air left in his lungs, and the yiwren pounded his fist against his guildmate”s forearm in a grimace of painful surrender. A gesture that he ignored entirely.
”Who the fuck are you?” the bilong hissed, his teeth clicking as they zipped opened and closed with impatience. Fásach”s hackles rose, and Sizzle”s returned the gesture, shivering with menace.
” Fás,” he croaked between failed gulps of air. ”F- fás ”g.”
”Bullshi—” Sizzle”s holotab binged and his ears perked as he rotated to see the notification. Just like that, the animosity flipped on a dime. ”Ooo, just got your message.” Then he squinted at the snap of Fásach”s family. ”Is that Rosy Turner? I thought she kicked it.”
A familiar red venandi crashed through the trees, skidding to a stop with wide eyes, his hands up in the air.
”Ay, don”t eat ”em!” he yelled at Sizzle. ”That”s Fás!”
Sizzle huffed smoke from his nostrils. ”I know. I”m movin”, I”m movin”.”
Fásach coughed, pulling air into his lungs with a painful gasp. He rolled to his knees, gathering his strength as Vin knelt in front of him.
”Hey, man. Good to see you! Weird to see you. But, ah, still good.”
Fásach shook his head, tresses waving wildly. His limbs shook as he tried to calm down enough to smell Roz again, one arm limp in his lap. ”My thuais,” he panted. ”She ran. Please, help me find her.”
He looked up at Vin and Sizzle, his vision shaking. Whether it was from exertion or fear, he couldn”t say. He gripped the soil at the skepticism on his friends” faces, the way Vin”s mandibles were unusually still.
” Fás, is she... Is it really, you know.” He rubbed the back of his neck. ”Fuck, man, you know what I”m asking, right?”
His lip lifted in a snarl that he worked hard to repress, shaking out the violent reaction. ”Yes, she was one of the dolls at the Conrad. But she has living code. She”s a person, Vin. C”mon, please.” He hung his head. ”Please. I can”t—” Live without him.
His mother”s tired and broke voice gave him chills, remembering when his tadau fell to the rot.
Vin hauled him up and he winced. ”Alright. Girls secure somewhere?”
Fásach nodded as Vin reset his rotary cuff with a sickening crack that made him yelp.
”Good. Let”s go.”
Sizzle breathed in the air, clicked his teeth together, then led them into the dense foliage.
?
Roav and Jharim barreled through the underbrush, swift and efficient. They jumped small palms and downed trees like hurdles, leapt with a burst of charge across pitfalls and ditches left by rotted, softened tree roots, following Roav”s locator.
Following it to the burst of light brown skin crossing a patrol path and disappearing into the ferns.
She was right in front of them. This panting, gasping human that looked exactly like the doll he”d cobbled together for Councilwoman Guei”s schemes. When she looked back though, her eyes were wide and intelligent. She pushed her speed and didn”t look back again.
”Halt!” Jharim bellowed, imbuing his voice with authority. But the doll paid no heed, actually gaining ground on them, stretching the distance.
It was a futile exercise. Her charge was depleting abnormally fast, followed by a wake of acidic, sulfuric odors that suggested she was badly overheating. There were other things about her that were strange. Critical system interruptions. Data halos that scattered as they burst through them, showing ignored update notifications and transmissions. He located her parumauxi swarm, which was holding back from live repairs, instead pushing her to run.
To run away from the colony.
”Jharim,” he called as they closed in. His partner withdrew the baton from his forearm and aimed it at her legs. He calculated his aim to perfection, and the doll tripped on the bar with a gasp of pain. Her ankle, knee, and cheek cracked as she fell to the ground.
He and Jharim both reduced speed to a stalking gait, but his partner picked up the baton with intent, snapping it to its full length. As he raised it above his head, she turned and shuffled back, terrified tears leaving tracks in the dirt on her face.
But she didn”t ask for him to stop.
Jharim whipped his baton towards her head.
And Roav stopped him with a firm grip on his wrist. ”Wait—”
A snarling yiwreni buck burst from the trees with an amber flash of fur, aiming his fully fanged jaws at Jharim”s arm. The bogs split apart in shock, but neither had prepared their protocols for a confrontation with a yiwren. A venandi, yes. A bilong, yes. But not a buck in rut. His agility outmatched theirs as the balls of his feet hit the ground cover and he twisted over himself, backing Jharim against a tree. Saliva dripped from his teeth as his jaws echoed, thunk, thunk, thunk, aiming to sever Jharim”s spine and rip out his throat.
Jharim”s arms whirred in protest, an equal match for the yiwren”s strength, and all Roav heard was the sound of Guei”s auto-garrote.
”No!” he yelled.
”Please don”t hurt him,” the doll trembled, holding onto the roots of a tree so hard that her body quaked. Her feet propelled her backwards, but her grip stayed strong. ”I said don”t hurt him!” Bloody oil oozed from her nose and filled the waterline of her eyes.
It took effort for Roav to turn away from his partner. To trust that he could take care of himself, as decrepit as he was inside. He knelt next to the doll, a Roz-02 by the looks of it. She shook her head, those oily, bloody tears racing along the divot of her nostrils, pooling in a mess along the seam of her mouth.
”Take him to the col1o0n0ny. Leav3e mee-e-e-e-e. D-d-do000n”t let 01101101 01100101 see-e-e-e-e Imani.”
Roav realized what she was doing a split second too late, lunging for her bare arm. He yelled and grabbed her shoulder to mitigate the massive bolt of electricity that drained her battery, but even a moderate jolt would have been enough to short out her systems.
”I love-love-love—” And then her eyes glazed over, staring at the yiwren.
?
Fásach stumbled, the howling tempest of his symphony raging to a bloody shriek. He fell to the ground thinking it was up and the trees were sideways, unable to see clearly, but to know with unerring certainty that Roz was—
She was—
The biognostic he”d had in his claws decked him, and he hit the ground with a resounding crack, pain rolling through him in waves.
”Roz,” he panted. A panicked whine constricted his throat. ”Roz!”
When he found her form, he fell over himself like a man at sea. There was no way. This couldn”t be real. She wasn”t—She couldn”t—
The other man”s hand stopped him from touching her, and he snapped at it ineffectually.
”Don”t touch her, she”s still coursing,” the man warned in a smooth tone.
”But she”s...” He whined again. ”She”s alive. She”s mine.” He grabbed the man”s knee for strength, pleading with his gods, his other hand smashed against his ear as if to dampen a noise. ”No, no, no.” A horrible moan of loss rose in the yiwren”s throat as Vindilus and Sizzle trotted to a halt. Vin had his hand cannons trained on both bogs, a murderous set to his mandibles.
”Yes,” Roav admitted, holding the yiwren up by his hackles so he would not fall on her. ”She is human.”
Jharim”s facial facets stirred with skeptical aggravation, and he turned away, dusting himself off. He leaned his shoulders against the tree and held his hands up where Vin could see them.
”She is more than human,” Roav continued, unsure if the man at his feet could hear him. ”If you permit me, I can resuscitate her.”
Jharim”s stare locked on his. ”Do not allow that doll to awake.”
”Shut it,” Vin snapped as Sizzle loomed over the biognostic”s shoulder with a hungry lap of his tongue. ”You”re on thin fuckin” ice.”
”Please!” The buck reached for her, but Roav yanked him back. He snarled, sinking his claws into the bog”s forearm, all the way through his casing to the wires. The yiwren”s fur stood on end with static; the protective shock of Roav”s dermal mesh triggered. It couldn’t have been comfortable, but the man was violently desperate. ”Let me the fuck go, you fucking—”
”If you want him to save your thuais, you let him work,” Jharim interjected, unintimidated by Sizzle”s breath on his shoulder. ”Roav is an expeditionary maintenance unit, tactical evolution strain. He built himself for acute response.”
Roav regarded his partner. ”You are... helping.”
Jharim vented air from his neck in a quick huff that softened the set of his shoulders. ”It is important to you.”
”Enough of the lovey dovey!” Vin yelled. ”You”re gonna get that girl on her feet, Roav, or I”m gonna pop an EMP round in both of your skull casings, ya dig? She”s the only reason you”re not dead already.”
Roav nodded once, his tone level. ”Understood.”
Satisfied that Jharim was under Sizzle”s watchful eye, Vin hauled the yiwren back by the scruff, and Roav knelt beside the burnt shell of the woman who defied his logic core. Under normal circumstances, he”d have said she was beyond repair.
Luckily for her, he knew where to get spare parts.