Chapter 13 #2
He’d come for her, and now he was dying because of it and she couldn’t do anything but watch. The bay stank of machine coolant and hot metal, the overhead lights throwing everything into hard-edged shadows, and she could see every detail of him dying.
“No! Kellat, no!!”
Screaming, she yanked at the bars, trying to tear them free through sheer force of will as not twenty feet away machines were crushing the life out of the man she loved.
Horror filled her as three of them piled on top of him as he struggled beneath them.
One had a leg around his throat, and his face had gone a terrible, grey-purple color.
“No, no, no! Stop! I’ll do whatever you want!” She screamed at Z’Saai, desperate to save Kellat.
His struggles were growing weaker, his boots scraping at the deck.
Nobody was going to get here in time, and she screamed again, tears streaming down her cheeks. Then something broke inside her.
No.
The thought wasn’t from her head, from her brain.
It wasn’t even a thought so much as a feeling, from the place behind her breastbone where she’d felt a warmth back in the cell.
That small impossible warmth she’d told herself was nothing.
Just her brain trying to give her hope in the way people with hypothermia believed they were warm and safe.
She hadn’t let herself believe in it then, but it wasn’t small anymore, and she was desperate enough to grab for it.
As soon as she did, it rose and swelled. It was pressure. Light. A door she’d been leaning against her whole life to keep shut, and she hadn’t even known it was there.
NO!
Light cracked through the back of her skull, white and total. She gasped as her spine arched and her head went back. Every muscle in her body pulled tight at once, her knuckles white on the bars, and she heard herself make a sound that wasn’t a scream anymore.
For a second she was in two places at once.
One version of her was on her knees in the cage watching Kellat dying under the weight of the combat machines crushing him.
The other version of her was somewhere else, moving fast. She was huge.
Heavy and furious, with more legs than she should have.
And her eyes saw everything… heat, currents running through metal, and the small bright shape of her own body kneeling behind bars.
The wall came down.
The scream of metal plating tearing like paper was the first thing she ever heard with her second set of ears, echoed by the sound in her first set.
Dust and debris blasted across the bay, pinging off the bars of her cage, and somewhere overhead an alarm started shrieking.
She opened her eyes in the cage as a drakeen tore through the wreckage of the bulkhead and landed hard enough to buckle the deck, and she felt the impact in both her bodies.
She knew it.
Under all that size, under the rage and the armor and the legs like support columns, the warmth hummed.
She smiled. It was the same hum from her little robot, the one that had curled against her in the dark and vibrated under her palm like a purr.
The little lost thing that had played ball in a corridor and grieved beside a folded giant.
But the folded giant had been this all along.
Its real body. It had come back to it, and then it had come for her.
Okay, let’s get them off him.
She took a step, and the deck dented under her. Under it. Whatever. The weight should have terrified her, but it didn’t. It felt like putting on a coat that finally fit.
The prototype came away from Kellat like a scab.
She felt her hand close on it, except her hand was a forelimb the size of a girder.
The thing’s chassis crumpled inside her grip as she crushed it mercilessly.
Hot fluid sprayed the deck, and she tasted the chemical stink of it in her human throat behind the bars.
The second one turned toward her, but it was like it moved in slow motion.
It was no match for her. She slammed another limb down and drove it through the deck plating.
The crunch rattled through her teeth, but she didn’t stop.
The third one still had Kellat by the throat.
Her vision narrowed to that one point, where the other machine had him around the throat.
His lips moved, but no sound came out. Surging forward, she sank her front claws into the thing’s shoulder, tearing it backward and apart.
Cables and pieces of it flew away, spinning away across the deck in a shower of sparks.
The thing staggered away, bleeding fluids onto the deck before it collapsed, shuddering and jerking.
She ignored it. None of it mattered, because Kellat sucked in a breath.
The sound of it nearly took her legs out from under her. She skittered toward him, forelimbs raised as she looked around for any other machines coming for him.