Chapter 32
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Ronin lay with Lara until dawn before extracting himself from her side and leaving the bed. Despite his care, the springs and frame creaked with his movements.
She stirred, lashes lifting, and peered at him with groggy eyes. Her fingers closed gently around his forearm. “Ronin?”
“Need to go to the clinic,” he said. “The sooner I’m repaired, the sooner we can leave.”
“Okay.” Her eyelids fluttered shut. “I’ll be…waiting.”
Her grip, already weak, slackened, and her hand slipped off his arm.
Faint tingles coursed along his casing. He couldn’t be sure if he’d truly felt her delicate touch or if the sensation was a simulation of what his destroyed sensors might’ve detected.
Gradually, her breathing evened out. Even now, knowing how important it was to repair the damage he’d sustained, it was difficult to leave her.
Leaning down, he pulled on his boots, lacing them loosely. They’d be off again soon enough. He stood, easing his weight onto his right leg to test the strength of his knee as he ran diagnostics.
Partial mobility restored. Actuator operating at 32% functionality, with 140% of normal power draw. Power leak probable.
Though his pants were also damaged, he pulled them up and fastened them.
His steps were slow as he crossed the room to the closet.
Each time he shifted his weight onto his right leg, his knee buckled, but the joint locks initiated before it could collapse.
Not ideal, but he didn’t have far to go. Just another one point six kilometers.
Within the closet, he selected a clean pair of pants and found the shirt Lara had made for him, folding both articles of clothing together. He would determine if his current pants were salvageable after he was repaired.
Tucking the bundle under his arm, he walked back into the bedroom, shifting his optic to the handgun on the chest. Even within the bot district, he never traveled unarmed. But what good would it do him?
Limping to the bedside, he stared down at Lara. Her breathing was soft, her body relaxed, her expression untroubled. She’d spoken of hearts and love, and what did he know about either? Humans often used the former term figuratively, and the latter…
I love you.
He replayed her words again and again.
Careful not to lean on his damaged leg, he bent forward and drew the blanket over Lara’s body. She slid her arms up, taking hold of the covering, and wrapped it around herself snugly without opening her eyes. A long, satisfied sigh escaped her.
Love.
Despite his caution, he descended the steps in a third of the time it had taken to mount them the night before.
He walked straight to the door, not allowing himself to hesitate, refusing to succumb to the desire to go look at her again, to contemplate the serenity on her face and listen to the soothing sound of her breathing.
His internal clock had accounted for every year, every day, every hour, minute, and microsecond since his reactivation.
It was one of his core processes, albeit a relatively simple one, as natural to him as breathing was to a human.
Without fail, every second had been exactly as long as those preceding and following it.
Until Lara. She had changed everything.
Every minute of his journey back to Cheyenne had felt longer than a year of his life before. Each step had been an unfathomable distance for his damaged stride. The possibility of never seeing Lara again had altered his perception of…everything.
Stepping outside, he closed and locked the door behind him. The merest hint of dawn left the sky a dark, smudgy gray. He walked north toward Warlord’s pieced-together wall.
Love.
He understood the word, at its most basic level. It was a deep, affectionate attachment to someone or something. How could a seemingly simple term carry so much weight, so much depth?
To his left, leaves rustled in the wind, a reminder that life always found a way, even if it needed help from time to time.
Curiosity had taken root in him that first night, and it had sprouted into fascination.
Now, it was a tree tall enough to put all others in its shade.
Lara was part of his existence. Every simulation he ran regarding his future invariably included her, and he dismissed any that didn’t, because he knew he could never let her go.
Despite her loathing in the beginning, Lara had come to see him not as a casing housing a collection of parts, not as a bot, but as Ronin. She saw him. The change in her perspective was clear, and it had been highlighted by how fiercely she’d struggled against it.
She’d told him she loved him. That was no small admission, and she hadn’t made it carelessly. They both knew words could be cheap, even meaningless, that they could be spoken without conviction, uttered with duplicity, or hurled with cruelty. But she had proven her words through her actions.
This was all too new to him, too difficult to sort out in a mind operating on logic and mathematics, but…he thought he loved her too.
Ronin turned the corner and proceeded east, parallel to the wall. The man who’d written the attic journal had undoubtedly walked this same road years ago. The writer had loved his family, had been loved by them, and had lived before Warlord tore his already damaged world apart.
Despite the powerful storms, lack of resources, and sharp contrasts between hot and cold, the Dust wasn’t the true danger of this world. It was a force of nature, incapable of malice.
The true danger, the true tragedy, was wrought by the Creators’ children, who destroyed each other without thought.
People like Warlord were what Lara needed to be protected from.
Amidst all this indifference, death, and devastation, had Ronin really found love?
Why else would he be so ready and willing to give up everything he’d known for decades? Why else would he be so eager to embrace change? He was about to cast logic aside in pursuit of an emotion he should never have experienced.
The clinic was quiet as he turned off the main street and approached it.
The gearheads on guard outside stared at him, making no comment as he passed.
Only the glass entry doors were illuminated.
Inside, the place was as white and sterile as ever, so unchanged that when Mercy looked up at him from her usual spot at the front desk he wondered if he’d lapsed into a full-sensory memory.
His stride was suddenly weightless, and everything moved too slowly.
Mercy’s lips parted, but she didn’t smile, didn’t greet him. Following her gaze, he glanced down at his ruined torso.
“Just need some reskinning,” he said.
She didn’t seem to appreciate the humor.