CHAPTER 28 ADRIA #2
“Now the whole settlement knows who you really are,” Kori says, arms crossed. “A liar. An Evolved. And a megalomaniac who would sacrifice them all without a hint of remorse.”
Chloe whirls and advances on the cowering Ednit. “You absolute buffoon,” she snarls, “you were standing here this entire time. Why didn’t you say something? Signal to me? Anything but sit there sniffling like a pathetic child?”
With a heavy exhale, Ednit collapses his own helmet, revealing his face (and that he, too, is among the Evolved).
He’s a small brown man, with a soft but serious visage, a bit of gray beginning to pepper his hair.
“I could say it was because Kori would’ve shot me, but that’s not the entire truth.
” He wipes snot bubbles from his nose with the back of one gloved hand.
“It’s gone too far, Chloe. Threatening the Shadowlands.
Sacrificing our own people to their soldiers. ”
“You sniveling fool. Don’t pretend you didn’t want this,” Chloe says. “You proposed the Evolution Project to me, Ednit. It was your baby. Your vision of the future. I’ve simply embraced the possibilities.”
Tears streak Ednit’s cheeks. “I started the Evolution Project … to preserve life, to honor it. But you would sacrifice innumerable lives to
maintain your own power.” He half sobs, shaking his head. “I never wanted this.”
A muscle twitches in Chloe’s jaw. Slowly, as the reality of her situation dawns, all the synthetic color drains from her face, leaving a husk of the cruelly regal visage that was there mere moments ago.
“How dare you, Kori,” she says in a voice balanced on a freezeblade’s edge. “Your own mother, giver of your own life, and you would paint me in such an ugly light without a hint of remorse?”
“I only broadcast your own words,” Kori says, retrieving a comms tablet from her pocket. She must have pilfered it from Ednit. “And if my comms are anything to go by right now, the public is extremely unhappy with what they’ve just learned.”
The twin enforcers have retrieved comms tablets of their own, visibly shrinking away at the sight of their notifications. “My lady,” says one, reaching to lay a hand on Chloe’s shoulder. She shrugs it roughly away. “She’s telling the truth. The people are in an uproar.”
Aspect chimes in: “Aspect’s broadcast—making many people—big mad. But not at Aspect.” They bobble lightly on their heels. “Only Kori—gets mad at Aspect.”
Kori trembles a little now as the force of what she’s done comes crashing down. Again I resist the urge to pull her into me, to hold her until the shaking stills and the center of gravity is simply us.
“You have no one to blame but yourself, Chloe,” Kori says.
She crosses her arms, ever the defiant daughter.
I’ve never been prouder of her than I am right now.
“The whole settlement knows the truth now. What you’ve done.
What you are. The attack that’s coming for all of us.
So are you going to save what you can of your reputation and defend your citizens from the nightfolk?
Or are you just going to keep looking at me like you’ve tasted something sour? ”
Chloe’s teeth worry away at her lip amidst her total loss of control. “You’ve made a much bigger mistake than you know, Kori,” she says,
sauntering toward her with clenched fists. “Let the nightfolk come! Let the settlement run red. And let the superior life-forms be the ones to battle for this planet.”
It’s Ednit, not Kori, who is next to raise his voice—a trembling, nasal, snot-stricken voice, the last plea of a man realizing he was a primary accomplice in the impending apocalypse. “Chloe, what would even be left to rule?”
“Only the worthy. Only the strong. Evolution at its zenith, Ednit. And if what’s left is not enough, our lives have no limit now. We could relearn the helical engine, given enough time. We could go back to Earth. Purge it, too, of the weak—”
“Monster!” It’s more animal scream than it is protest. In a fit of emotion, Kori lunges, her fist upraised even before she’s moved.
Chloe effortlessly sidesteps the blow, her daughter crashing painfully to the metal floor instead in a shower of sand. The enforcers finally pull their pistols, merely waiting for an order to open fire.
“Kori …” I extend a hand to her, to pull her back up, but she only looks at me with tearful, baleful eyes, not yet having the will to stand.
“You can’t do this!” Kori sobs. “All those people. Our people. Chloe, please, you can’t just—”
“Let them come?” Chloe interrupts, eyes nearly afire.
“I’ll let everyone say their goodbyes before they end with dignity.
My Evolved alone will take down this nightfolk assault.
And when the dust settles, we’ll be the dominant humans on this planet.
No more dayfolk. And what nightfolk remain, if they can even be called human, will serve us or suffer for it.
” She spits blood on the ground. “Broadcast that.”
On the ground, Kori pushes herself up on her elbows. She’s so pale that the sun seems to shine straight through her like gossamer.
Chloe looks to her enforcers. “None of this,” she says, gesturing to their pistols. “Not for her. A bullet in her brain won’t undo what she’s done. But she’s throwing a tantrum, and children will have those when it comes to their mothers. When all is said and done, she’ll see that I was
right all along. But as for you …” And here she looks to sniffling Ednit. “Your usefulness has expired, Doctor. If you refuse to embrace the true potential of Evolution, I can continue it without you.” She turns away, idly flicking a hand in his direction. “Kill him.”
The enforcers pivot their guns from Kori to her doctor.
“No!” Kori screams, guttural, and lunges to cover his body with her own.
Aspect shrieks. “KORI!”
As heatshot pistols fire off blazing rounds, I do what my body knows best. I go for the kill. I tackle one enforcer directly into the other, both their bodies crashing to the artificially metal floor beneath me. Both drop their weapons, which skid across the ground, out of reach.
If these people were merely human, their spines might already be broken from the blow. But these are Evolved.
So, instead, a flickering web of electric-blue energy leaps directly from their fingers to my chest. I swear, recoiling, momentarily blinded from shock and pain.
Two more blasts of heatshot go off, close by, and my ears ring from the volume, my skin burning from the proximity of the concentrated heat.
When I come back to myself, Ednit is standing over one of the enforcers, holding a stolen heatshot pistol, having blown a hole clean through said enforcer’s artificial skull.
The gore still looks horrifyingly real. The other enforcer curses, moving to sweep the doctor’s legs out from under him, but Kori has drawn her own pistol and dispatches the attacker with a rapid series of equally ugly heatshot to the chest.
Ednit wails. “I never wanted this. I never wanted this …”
“Save it for after the apocalypse,” Kori spits, but that doesn’t change the fact she just saved his life.
Panting, I push myself up to my knees and glance frantically around. Both enforcers dead. Ednit armed, but clearly not about to turn his weapon on us. Kori breathing hard; Aspect running to her side. But Chloe?
“Kori, your mother … she’s gone,” I gasp. In the chaos, she must have taken the elevator back down into the settlement.
Aspect interjects, “Aspect—does not—miss Kori’s mother.”
Kori swallows hard, fingers tense on her weapon’s trigger. “She’ll let Thaane’s army just … walk in,” she says. “Let them slaughter everyone.”
“Worse,” hisses a voice at her waist. Kori scrambles for her comms tablet with her free hand. An unfamiliar voice cuts through the static.
“Jelza,” Kori says, every muscle pulled taut, “please elaborate on how this could possibly get worse.”
“The planet itself is already primed with radiation,” says someone, apparently Jelza, “capable of killing every dayfolk who isn’t prepared with protective gear.”
Kori’s knuckles are white around the tablet. “Spit it out.”
I lay both hands on my love’s shoulders, gently squeezing to draw her attention without hurting her. “Kori.”
“There’s a filtration system all throughout the settlement.
The order’s just come over the comms, to the entire network of Evolved,” Jelza says.
“Chloe’s shutting it down. As soon as she reaches the primary control room on the west side, she’ll use her monarch access to override the security measures.
They’re letting the planet have its way. With everyone.”
Kori is frozen, a statue. Numbly, she says, “Everyone who isn’t Evolved will die.”
Jelza continues talking, though Kori’s vacant stare would seem to indicate that she isn’t hearing her.
“Not everyone who received that network message is okay with this. There’s a small resistance group of Evolved already.
I’ve made us a separate channel, broken it off for secure comms. They’re prepared to fight back.
But whatever we’re going to do, we need to do it fast.”
“Kori,” I say again, a little more forcefully this time.
Her eyes are wild and faraway. “I have to tail Chloe,” she says between pants, already hooking the comms tablet back into her belt. “Have to pin her down before she gets anywhere near that control room. Jelza, pincer strategy. Can you cut her off on the other side?”
“Gladly.”
“Kori!” I give her shoulders a rattle, and this time, her eyes seem to see me. “Let me come with you. Let me fight for you, for your people.”
Gaze darting away, she shakes her head firmly.
“No. This is my mother, my people, my fight. Your fight is rapidly closing the sky distance between us,” she says, gesturing to the closing wall of weapons and wings.
“I’ll send what good dayfolk soldiers I can.
But you have to help them hold the line.
You have to stop Thaane, once and for all.
” She pauses, another thought occurring to her. “And what about Azarii?”
“For all the violence he’s thrown my way, Azarii always said he wanted peace.
I can’t imagine he’ll join Thaane deliberately instigating a war.
As for whether he’ll intervene in what’s already begun …
when it means fighting alongside me, the epitome of everything he hates … ” I close my eyes. “I don’t know.”
Kori takes a deep breath in, then lets it out in a rush. “So it all comes down to this,” she says.
My wings tighten against my spine, a chill sliding through my veins. Overcome, I drop to one knee and reach out one hand to cup Kori’s face, tracing the gentle curve of her cheekbone with one claw, trying to memorize the placement of every fleck of green in her gorgeous brown eyes.
“And then you come back to me, Kori.”
She leans into my touch, eyes drifting shut, momentarily absent from the pressures of panic and time. “And you come back to me.”
“Now go,” I order, every muscle in my arm screaming as I withdraw my touch and rise. “Stop your mother. I’ll hold off Thaane.”
With a final nod, Kori sprints like lightning, every step on the metal floor thunderous as she returns to the elevator. Back down into the living space that will soon be a mass metallic grave if she doesn’t succeed. My heart pulses in my throat.
What if that was goodbye? How could it possibly be enough?
“And—Aspect?” I almost forgot the robot was here, limbs pulled tightly into themself like makeshift armor, joints now visibly smoking
from the stress of it all. Planetary collapse is a hell of an introduction to sentient thought, I suppose. What is a mining mech possibly supposed to do at the end of all things?
“Aspect sends another broadcast,” I manage. “Warns everyone to get to their anti-radiation gear as soon as they can, in case Kori and Jelza can’t hold Chloe off. We save as many as possible.”
“And then?” Aspect persists, their voice rising to a terribly high pitch.
“Then Aspect hides.”
“Aspect can do more—than hide.”
I take a sharp breath. “Then Aspect keeps filming, if you want,” I say, prompting a squeaky nod from the frightened robot. “And if we don’t make it … then at least whoever survives will know we stood our ground at the end of the world.”