CHAPTER 29 KORI
CHAPTER
KORI
The elevator ride back into the settlement has never seemed longer. It feels like trying to wade through congealed blood, barely moving at all compared to my racing heart against my rib cage.
I miss Aspect already. Even when they worsened my anxiety, they also kept me tethered to the moment, watching over them even at my own expense.
Far above my head, the ground rumbles and shudders, old dust falling down the elevator shaft in sheets.
Likely Thaane’s army landing. The beginning of the end.
I fight to inhale, to exhale, counting out each motion in my head, dark splotches threatening to overtake my vision.
Not now. Can’t panic now, with everything and everyone I’ve ever known on the line (despite that being a very valid reason to panic).
I really never knew how good I had it. Homework, tinkering with Aspect, more homework, sleep, Morpheus Market run, homework.
Monotonous, to be certain. A lie through and through, supposedly preparing me to replace my mother someday when she had already exited the aging process altogether. But it was so much simpler than
this—the whole planet on my shoulders, and the truth my last and most desperate weapon, light and dark colliding in heatshot and blood.
The comms tablet I pilfered from Ednit vibrates against my hip.
I snatch it just in time to hear Jelza saying, in scattered snatches through the vertical tunnel’s poor reception, “I’m sending you GPS coordinates for the west-side control room.
If you follow the optimal path, and move fast, you should be able to overtake your mother.
Tell me when you find her, and I’ll cut her off the other way around. ”
“On it,” I manage to say through heavy breaths.
As the elevator nears stopping, a distant broadcast booms through the settlement’s halls. “Aspect says—everyone must—wear armor! Armor—holds back—doom!”
I can fathom approximately eighty-seven better ways to pitch that message right now, but at least Adria found a way to warn the settlement. “Jelza, are you hearing this broadcast?”
“Yep, I’m keeping them patched in,” she replies, followed by an audible thunk somewhere close by. “Damn it, there’s another Evolved coming for the broadcast station. I can hold them off, at least long enough for—” But that’s where her voice cuts off.
“Jelza,” I pant. “Jelza.” The comms tablet produces only static. I swear through my teeth. “Let’s hope you can still hear me when I find Chloe.”
Aspect’s broadcast grows louder as the elevator descends. “And big, strong people—with guns—report to planet’s surface—with Aspect—and fight bad guys—PEW PEW!”
At long last, with a rough shriek of overworked metal, the elevator stops. Unfortunately, so do its doors. I wait, and wait, for the doors to reopen, but they seem practically welded shut. I punch and kick, half screaming, as all the lights in the elevator also proceed to fizzle off.
Chloe must’ve cut the power to my only way back in.
Panic threatens to overwhelm me again. But this time I let it surge, rising high enough for me to seize it by the throat, twist it into a weapon. Desperate fury roars through my every circuit.
Shouting, I dig my fingers into the door seam and pry the elevator open by force, fingers shooting sparks at the effort, the metal caving and bending before me. Perhaps, now that I know what my body is truly capable of, it does include a few new tricks.
I look down. It’s impossible to tell how much farther there is to fall, all the lights in the elevator shaft blown out. But I don’t have time for a careful climb. Sucking as much air as I can into my lungs, ordering terror to become adrenaline, I hurl myself through the busted elevator doors.
When I land, it’s in another shower of sparks. There’s a horrible, reverberating crack, but it’s the floor nearly caving beneath me, not my legs giving way. I’m stronger than anything in this settlement. Stronger than my mother, even. I have to be.
The comms tablet at my waist happily intones directions toward the control room. Heart in my throat, I move through the decontamination chamber and then take off at a full sprint.
Rows of armored ordinary dayfolk rush past me, answering Aspect’s call for armed support on the surface. Briefly, I’m afraid that with the elevator shut down, they’ll never find a way back to the air lock and subsequently the surface.
But even as I turn to warn them, the first dayfolk soldier raises her heatshot rifle and launches a grappling line straight up into the inky dark, all the way to the distant ceiling.
The others follow and run vertically full throttle up the walls.
It’ll take more than a broken elevator to stop the settlement’s last stand.
“Turn left,” the comms tablet chimes, even though I’m already swerving around the corner.
Just past the next one, I spot a blur that I’m barely able to identify as Chloe, on the run. Not fast enough to stop me.
“Stay where you are!” I shout, heatshot pistol already raised.
But my fingertip quivers on the trigger, my whole wrist rattling like Aspect when they need more oil. My mind is set, determined to
protect the dayfolk, but even in this foreign body, my heart calls out to my mother.
I can’t fire on her. To save my people, I have to; to vent my fury, I want to. But my finger on the trigger stays there, unable to draw it home.
Breathing hard, legs pumping faster than would ever be possible for a regular human, Chloe picks up her pace. Somehow, I match her speed, even nearly overtake it. I can see the sheen of sweat on the nape of her neck, her tightly tied hair beginning to come undone.
She could’ve programmed a fail-safe to force me to stand down, but my body plunges after her.
She could’ve included a damn kill switch if she wanted to command my beginning and end so badly, but I’m still breathing.
Maybe it wasn’t enough for her to make an heir programmed to obey, every corner hewn with machine precision to fit her ideal.
No, my mother wanted to hand mold me, to feel me crumble and reshape beneath her like a raw lump of clay.
And when it came down to it, when she finally breathed life into my lungs of both flesh and metal—she wanted me, in all sincerity, to love her back.
And I do, even now.
Even now, faced with an extinction-level planetary event at her command, staring down the barrel of her full unfeeling force unfurled, I see my own stubbornness in her sprint, my own shape in the arch of her shoulders—my own wild soul, but twisted and mutated into something evil.
My arm lowers the heatshot pistol of its own accord. She’s my mother. Even when I hate her, I don’t know how to let her go.
“Kori,” chimes Jelza at my waist, snapping me sharply back to the present. “Can you see her?”
“Yes.” I pant between footsteps. “Yes, I can see her.”
“Do you have a clear shot?”
“I—I don’t …” My throat burns, words melting before they reach my tongue. “I don’t know how.”
Jelza would have every right to tear into me right now. The fate of my whole world rests on my shoulders, and I’m bending and breaking under sentiment.
Instead Jelza says, “Kori, it’s okay. I’ll cut her off the other way if you keep driving her forward. Can you do that?”
Swallowing hard, I push my legs even harder. “Yeah, I can.”
I wish I could submerge myself in my rage, like Adria in the heart of battle, overcome with battle lust, lost even to myself.
But I simply don’t know how. And perhaps, in a cruel twist of fate, that’s why Adria hesitated the first time we collided, her claws poised to slice out my heart but never descending.
I am bound and chained to mercy, even at the end of the world.
And it reminded Adria, even amidst her newfound flood of impossible power, that she could still choose the same.
That realization grounds me, keeps me tethered to the floor just long enough for Jelza to swing around the corner and tackle Chloe headlong. My mother screeches as she slides across the metal floor, kicking and punching wildly at Jelza, but the other woman pins her firmly with her knees.
“Stay down, Chloe.” Jelza swings the butt of her heatshot pistol, cracking against Chloe’s skull. “And maybe this won’t hurt the way that you deserve.”
Chloe spits an ugly curse, eyes flashing electric-bright blue.
A current races down Chloe’s spine, into her arms, and subsequently into Jelza. Limbs twitching, Jelza screams and lurches away as Chloe resumes her frenzied dash to the control room entrance.
“Kori, f-fire!” Jelza stammers through her spasms. “FIRE!”
I can’t even lift the gun. Every breath feels like lead in my lungs. “She’s my mom,” I say, unable to vocalize anything else. “My mom.”
“And she’s going to be your killer.” Standing, Jelza seizes both my shoulders and shakes me, my brain rattling around in my skull. “We can still catch her. We’re as Evolved as she is, and there’s two of us and one of her. But I can’t do this by myself, Kori. I need you with me. Even if it
hurts.” Her dark eyes bore into mine with desperate purpose. “Are you with me, Kori?”
My stomach feels like a giant knot. I manage a stiff nod.
“Say it.”
“I’m with you.”
“Then start running,” Jelza says, and we lose ourselves together in the rush of wind and pounding boots on metal.