Chapter 13 #2
A chill creeps down my spine as she continues, “You’ll exist as a Pranastock—a pilot.
Pranastocks go everywhere with the crew, unnoticed and, crucially, trusted.
You’ve met them before, in this form. They’ll integrate you into their plans.
You’ll follow them, listen to them, learn everything you can about these clones.
” She leans in, her breath ghosting against my cheek.
“And if you’re discovered, you know what to do. ”
A shudder runs through my chest, but I manage not to show it at all. I nod. “Yes, Prif.”
She gestures, and a Samarastock steps forward, holding a gleaming new eye and a mechanical arm.
“This will go some way to correcting your imperfections,” she says as my clone straps the metal arm tight against my truncated shoulder. It’s surprisingly light.
The Samarastock shifts into a Selthiastock and inspects the ruins of my shoulder. Meanwhile, Samara steps close to my chest, her warmth a mere handspan away from me. I can smell her clean, fresh scent of amber and linen and all the finest rare delicacies we can secure for females.
She touches my chin, turning my head to the left, baring the ruins of my face to her. She stands in my blind spot, but out of my left eye I can see the Samarastock standing behind her, holding the eye.
“I won’t fail you, Samara,” I promise her, searing these orders into my mind. If I try to deviate, I’ll be hit by massive headaches until I’m on the right path to satisfy her.
Samara shakes her head. “You already have. You were with those clones and did nothing to stamp out their uniqueness, despite knowing that’s a threat.”
Had I known that? Are unique clones truly a threat?
The very fact I’m questioning her orders means I’m not perfect, not yet. I add, “I’ll do better.”
“You won’t be able to fail with this.” Samara steps back and the Samarastock takes her place, the clone shifting to a Selthiastock.
The first clone working on my arm cuts into the stub of my shoulder with precise incisions, reawakening my flayed nerves and sending lightning shocks of pain across my chest. I stand firm, gritting my teeth.
The second lifts the mechanical eye, fitting it into my ruined socket.
The machine clamps on, metal seeping under my scales and deep into my skin, burrowing down my cheekbone and up to my temple.
The pain presses down, hooves frozen in time, crushing me forever.
My knees buckle, but they keep working, bearing down on me.
Through the blur of pain, I hear her. “You will forget everything you truly are, Arture. You’ll be a Pranastock through and through. The only thing you’ll keep is your name, a little… gift. From me to my sister. Forgetting yourself completely will mean you can’t fail.”
The eye activates, and a surge of pain radiates in my skull, vibrating through every nerve.
Her words echo in my mind, intertwining with the agony.
The instructions surging from the eye play on repeat, a relentless, torturous brainwashing.
It etches each command into the deepest recesses of my mind, warping and driving out every semblance of my own thoughts.
I gasp, the edges of my vision blurring as the pain threatens to consume me. Through it all, I see her smile—cold, merciless, satisfied. Whatever was left of me before, whatever spark of freedom Ilia and the others had kindled, it’s being extinguished, snuffed out under her iron command.
And all I can do is obey.
“Arture.”
I sit bolt upright, my hearts hammering as if I just tried to shift into three clones back-to-back. Swallowing hard, I try to bring them under control, as the memory burrows over me again and again.
“Arture, hey.” Nic-coal’s voice. She wasn’t there. This is the present. I’m not there, having my prosthetics installed. I’m not there.
I’m in Nic-coal’s bed, and she kneels next to me.
I must have woken her. The human sits back on her heels.
She wears a single layer of abaya robes; if the darkness was just a little lighter, I'd be seeing more of her than I ever had.
The idea sends a spark of desire shooting straight from my core to my cocks.
I suppress it. I'm only here to warm her bed, not… warm her bed.
“You had a nightmare,” she says softly, ripping my thoughts from carnal ones to the real reason my hearts are racing. “Are you okay? Do you want to talk about it?”
I curl my metal fist and thump my right temple, above my mechanical eye.
Talking feels awful while I’m doing it, as if I’m peeling back my scales to expose my raw underbelly to her.
But she doesn't belittle or challenge my words, nor does she seek to use them against me.
She helps me find the right ones, and makes them sit better in my mind.
“I… I remember how I got these mechanical aids. It was Samara. She gifted them to me as she programmed me to be a Pranastock, to forget ever being one of her special clones. To… to spy on Ilia and the others, because he was overreaching his station.”
It's easiest to fall into a cadence of reporting when I talk about the memories I've uncovered, as if this all happened to someone else. But it did happen, and it happened to me.
I scrunch up the blanket, the fabric bunching.
“I'm a spy, sent by Samara to report on Ilia.
But she didn't even trust me to do that, and wiped all my memories to make sure I couldn't fail.” My throat burns with bile, and then my head explodes with pain.
I can't question the Prif, I can only obey her.
A soft, small but strong human hand lies on top of mine. Not demanding. Not holding me down. She's here, with me.
“It wasn't me,” I manage to say at last. “The Pranastock, it was me… but not me.”
“How does it feel, knowing you were forced to spy on them?”
Why does she make me prod these raw areas? It's like flaying open a wound and rooting around inside for something interesting. She has to be looking for leverage, and if I give her my secrets, she will use them against me.
But she guided me through this last time, and she somehow made me feel lighter for talking to her.
I want to try.
"I feel… I don't know, confusion, anger." The words tumble out, unfiltered. A sharp pain stabs in the back of my head as I skirt close to a traitorous truth. Still, I try to sort through the emotions crowding my mind. "Relief."
Relief. Yes. It almost feels wrong to admit, but it's there, an undeniable whisper sitting in the pit of my stomach. Relief, because it wasn’t my choice to spy on Ilia.
Samara forced me to do it. Her commands, her expectations, they wound around me like chains, compelling my every action. I had no choice.
"It’s like… now I remember being a Samarastock first, with a clear mission, a set objective.
Everything was binary a few days ago, one or zero, right or wrong.
But with each memory unlocking… there are layers on top of that.
" I swallow hard. "All my memories of being with them on different planets and on Earth, they’re clouded by the constant, gnawing anxiety of being a Pranastock, of having to calculate every single thing just to survive.
When I shifted back to myself, I wanted nothing more than to escape that feeling.
“But when I look back at my time with them… they were close. They were a unit. They had… understanding with each other. And I… I didn’t deserve to be there with them. I still don’t." My voice breaks. Drok na, this is too much. I’m too exposed, it’s a huge risk.
“Samara’s the leader of the females, right? The one who’s anti-clone.”
“She’s anti-‘clones-who-commit-crimes,’ yes.” My jaw twitches.
Nic-coal tilts her head, watching me carefully. “How do you feel about Samara?”
The question hits me like a lash, snapping me upright. "She is our beloved leader, a paragon among the females," I declare, the words stiff and rote.
Nic-coal frowns, her brow knitting with that peculiar, questioning look she gets when she’s not satisfied with an answer.
She doesn't understand. Samara is perfection incarnate. She is everything.
I look at my arm anew. She gifted this to me, along with my eye, but in my memory, the metal additions made her curl her lip at me.
I need to cover them. I mutter, “Gara developed something related to CNULG rubber to help protect it from the Earth climate conditions, I need to replicate it.”
“Rubber? What for?”
“My arm and eye socket. To cover them.”
Nic-coal puts her hands on her hips and tilts her head, hair sliding over her shoulders as she contemplates my mechanics. “It would help protect the electronics from the water, yes.”
Getting up, I run into the main atrium of the ship and into the medical suite. I tip over a tower of bottles, which roll along the floor, but I have no time for them now. I have to hide my imperfection.
“Arture? What are you doing?”
Shifting into a Selthiastock, I pull out the CNULG tin with my newly steady hands, dispensing three of the small balls. Mashing them together, I prepare to spread them over the rounded circlets making up my arm.
“What is that stuff? Is it sensible to get all over your prosthetic?”
“Perhaps.” I shift into an Ingenistock and my stomach drops. CNULG directly applied onto a stellium construct could seize the joints. Growling, I shift into a Vestifax, sniffing at the substance. “Can I make something as flexible and watertight as CNULG whilst being easy to take on and off?”
“Arture, what's the rush? Are you suffering from the moisture here?” Nic-coal peers at my arm, fingers hovering over it. “Can I touch it, please? I don't know how much help I can be, but I want to try manual manipulation of the joints.”
I nod, mind racing as she moves my arm back and forth with practiced ease. I could eventually develop some kind of fabric, but it wouldn't change with me. My arm can swell or shrink when I tell it to, but how can I change a fabric color remotely?