CHAPTER 31 KORI
CHAPTER
KORI
Guided by Jelza, fueled by pure terror, I find reserves of strength in this body that I never knew I had. My feet and ankles crackle electric blue, every step like a miniature rocket, propelling me forward to intercept my mother before one press of a button ends the world as I knew it.
As we gain on Chloe, Jelza nods in the direction of my pistol. “At least give that thing to someone who can use it.”
Throat dry, I toss her the weapon. I know full well that it needs to be fired. I simply don’t know how.
We all collide again at the control room. Realizing she can’t outrun us, Chloe whirls at the closed door and launches a blast of electric energy from one palm into my chest. I collapse in on myself, teeth rattling in my jaw, a curse caught halfway between my lungs and my tongue.
Jelza darts past me, firing heatshot once again, this time with twin pistols. Chloe claps both hands together with a crack, causing more energy to erupt in a clean circle of protective shielding, conjured by her fingertips. Jelza’s heatshot dissolves into the barrier like it was nothing.
Distantly, in some small part of my brain that hasn’t yet joined the rest in screaming into the void, I’m not sure what was worse: my mother not telling me I’m a synthetic life-form, or my mother not filling me in on all her improvements.
“How many enhancements can you seriously have?” I half shout, half laugh as I haul myself up from the floor. If I don’t laugh at this point, I will sob until I split myself in two. “What was next on the features? Laser eyes? Chest that doubles as a microwave?”
“Insolent girl.” Chloe sighs, launching an utterly terrifying stream of energy from both narrowed eyes.
Jelza cleanly slides under the assault, breathing hard, and lands so that we’re back-to-back again. “Damn it, Kori, now you’re just giving her ideas.” She lifts both pistols, short of breath. “She’s going for the door!”
Frantically, Chloe taps out an access code on the entry panel.
This time some of Jelza’s heatshot barrage actually connects with my mother, and it’s all I can do to keep my footing.
I want to tackle Jelza to the floor. I want to pummel Chloe with my own bare hands.
I want to be anywhere else, anyone else, than I am in this moment.
I’ve suffered from flashbacks turned nightmares as long as I can remember, but this is by far the worst one.
I can already feel that this moment—taking up arms against my own mother, with our entire world on the line—will haunt my sleep for the rest of my life.
When the firing stops, Jelza’s twin pistols reloading a fresh charge, all the breath goes out of my lungs.
Burns gleam brightly on Chloe’s back and shoulders, a few even on the nape of her neck, unprotected by her tightly bound hair.
But they clearly didn’t pierce through to anything vital.
Beneath her synthetic flesh, wires tangle like alien limbs, smoke hisses a foul black, and unnatural blue light flickers and simmers.
Shots like that would’ve gone straight through a mortal limb.
For the immortal, they simply reveal the sick science beneath.
I can only imagine how I would’ve reacted if I’d somehow been reckless enough to get a third-degree burn and discovered robot parts inside my limbs. Probably would’ve been convinced I imagined it. Probably would’ve been told that by everyone I trusted. Probably would’ve believed them.
Chloe wheels to face us, sneering, and Jelza desperately opens fire again. This time she aims for the face. I scream, reduced from language to noise. Chloe doesn’t even flinch, batting away all she can with freshly conjured shields.
It isn’t quite enough, though. When the guns fade out, a whole side of Chloe’s visage, from eyebrow to chin, is freed of synthetic flesh—just a quivering mass of sensors, wires, panels, programming.
I expect to smell burnt hair, but it’s more like a scrap pile, like a malfunctioning forge.
A rusty, smelting, mechanized rot of a stench.
It’s all somehow worse than gore. I struggle to time my breathing. How long has my mother been this … this thing, so unlike herself? Or is this who she always was, before the body transfer, before Evolution—ever calculating, cold and unfeeling as metal, every system driven by a need for control?
Chloe brings one hand up to scrape the remaining synthetic flesh away, bits of face coming away like damp paper on her fingertips.
She moans in obvious pain, and distantly I wonder why an Evolved would have pain receptors at all.
Perhaps she thought it would keep her human.
But her own pain is the only kind that really matters to her. Not anyone else’s.
A shrill beep. Horrified, I watch the control room’s doors slide open.
The last barrier to Chloe’s genocidal plan is gone.
Click. Click-click. Heatshot cartridges need to be charged on the surface. Jelza raises both pistols, jaw slack. “I’m out.”
“Tell me you have spares,” I breathe.
“I’m out.”
Seizing the opportunity, Chloe breaks headlong for the farthest control panel.
My mouth tastes like rust and salt, my nostrils full of thick, choking mechanical smoke. My vision shimmers at the edges, absolute panic threatening to lock me in place, but I shove it down as far as I can, from my stomach to my legs to my feet, which rocket me forward in a blast of energy.
“Enough!” I scream as I tackle Chloe headlong from behind.
We roll across the metal flooring, a tangle of limbs and curses. Jelza must be close behind, but I can’t see her, the room spinning and flipping like a dreamscape around me.
The only things that stay in focus are Chloe’s eyes, one an elegant brown like my own, the other all machine—like an overly large pupil, buried in the wiring viscera of her face, blinking rapidly across the color spectrum, on and off, black and white and blue and red.
Always unable to process that it’s her own daughter who finally pins her to the floor, chest heaving, heart in her throat.
I press my knees into Chloe’s ribs, holding her fast. “I said, enough.”
Chloe sighs. “You’re wasting your time,” she says, visible electric currents racing along her limbs.
But Jelza slides in behind me, beating her down with both spent pistols like blunt weapons. If they had any ammo, they’d probably explode from the energy overload. But empty, they absorb the charge as well as any protective Pagonian gear.
“You lose, Chloe,” I say, panting. Loose hair and sweat stings my eyes. My legs feel like rubber, my arms like empty weaponry. “Stand down.”
“You think that’s how this ends?” Chloe spits synthetic blood on the floor, then throws her whole body weight against me, flipping our positions. “You think I surrender to my own daughter?”
I cry out, wrestling, but even stung with heatshot and with half her face torn apart, Chloe is terrifyingly strong. Her hands go for my throat.
Everything blurs. I think I see Jelza trying to pry Chloe’s hands off me, then Chloe hitting a heavy backhand into Jelza’s skull, and then I
can hardly see anything at all. There’s a fleshy thud that I think must be Jelza’s unconscious body hitting the floor.
Weak wheezing noises that I think are me.
The hands at my neck tighten, squeeze, then deliberately ease up just long enough for the half mother, half robot face to swim back into my vision.
The exposed sight sensor is bloodred; the human eye is streaked with tears.
“I only wanted what was best for you, Kori,” my mother says, voice quivering, hands still squeezing the life from me. “Best for everyone.”
My voice barely slips through her tightening fingers. I have to choose these words—quite possibly my last words—with perfect precision. My world shimmering, my limbs going numb, I take a last desperate gamble and cough, “I … know.”
The stranglehold hesitates, loosens.
At once, Chloe drops me entirely.
“Kori, Kori …” Her palms cup my face, pull it close to her mangled mess of wires.
“My darling, my daughter, I knew deep down you had to understand.” She strokes my hair with burn-pricked fingers, smothering me with the stench of rising smoke.
I’m limp and raw and shuddering in her embrace.
“When it’s all over, when the new world is born, it’ll be everything you wanted,” she says, almost singing in her reverie, almost laughing in her depraved hope. “I only want what’s best.”
“I … know,” I breathe into her neck. “I know.” I force one hand’s fingers to curl into a fist, squeezing every ounce of my pain and fear and rage and hope into energy that shimmers along the knuckles. “But you don’t get … to decide that … for everyone else.”
I launch the punch with everything I am.
It drives directly into Chloe’s damaged skull, leaving a visible indent, scattering loose gears and wires and sparks.
She screams like starships colliding, metal on metal, grating.
She collapses at my feet, some critical sensor damaged, trying and failing to stand again.
My entire right arm glows blue, imbued with the same radioactive power that once terrified me in the nightfolk. All along, the planet
Pagomènos was fueling me, too. All along, who we were was never about whether we’d been raised in light or darkness, birthed frail or strong, deemed royal or rebel. The choice was always ours.
I look down at my mother—broken, sputtering—and rage fills me from head to toe.
My shining arm slowly transfers the light entirely to my fist, synthetic muscle and bone and tendon all craving justice for everything that’s been done here.
For all the lies and control Chloe imposed on me.
For all that she tried to inflict upon her own citizens, her own neighbors.
I could finish it here.
“Kori!”
The shout came from the doorway.
I spin on my heels to meet Adria’s terrified gaze as she barrels through the entryway, both wings clearly straining, tearing both the doors clean off their hinges in her haste. Her robes are dipped in blood, her muscles soaked in sweat, but all she seems to see is me.
“I’m all right,” I breathe, before turning back to where Chloe lies defeated. “She’s lost.”
I don’t know when I raised my fist, but sparks leap between the knuckles now, my hand like a cluster of brilliant starlight. I could drive it through Chloe’s already-wrecked face. I could end the life that aging ought to take from her anyway.
Chloe glowers at both of us, lip curled in disgust. “So finish it.”
Adria’s bulk at my back casts me into shadow again.
Slowly, she drops to one knee, her breaths tickling the shell of my ear.
Gently, hardly putting any pressure at all on my exhausted bones, she lays one hand on each of my shoulders.
“I can’t be the one to stop you.” She sighs against me.
“But if you do this, Kori … Take it from someone who knows—you will never be the same.”
I swallow. Set my jaw, square my shoulders, push a stray hair out of a tearful eye. I look from Chloe’s fury, demanding I gratify her with a death, to Adria’s deliberate softness—touching me just enough to
promise her presence, loosely enough to let me decide for myself what’s right.
We are not our mothers. My final insult to Chloe, my greatest victory since I first dared to leave home, is that I’ll turn every knife she plunged into my chest into a chisel.
From this sun-scorched, shadow-cursed planet, torn apart by its own people, I’ll carve out something new. I’ll mold a place for possibilities.
Heart steady, stomach settled, I lower my fist.
My radioactive energy blinks out. The red glare of Chloe’s exposed eye doesn’t—and on my watch, it never will.
“We’ll lock her in the Shadowlands,” I whisper, stepping away, “where you’re equipped to contain an Evolved. When the time is right, she’ll stand trial here—before the very people she tried to kill. And they’ll decide what righteous law demands.”
Chloe’s lower lip (or what’s left of it) quivers violently. “Pathetic child. You will never have the strength to lead.”
“Not like you,” I say.
“You ally yourself with monsters.”
“I see only one monster here.”
“Kori, that’s enough,” Adria says. It’s almost a snarl, but she holds it back, tethers her rage, anything but the monster I once believed the nightfolk to be.
“You’re better than her. The best of all of us.
” I feel her smiling mouth against my ear when she adds wistfully, “And the Daylands are going to need you.”
“And what then?” I ask.
Adria presses her lips to the nape of my neck, a promise without words. She smiles and says, “Then we build something new.”