Chapter Text
Even knowing an ambush was likely, they hadn’t been ready.
Nori ran through the blinding snow, precious cargo safely stowed in the bag on her back, and tried to make sense of her surroundings. She couldn’t hear anything past the wind, not even the screams of her companions or the blast of weaponry. She didn’t know if that meant she’d run far enough to escape the fight or if the battle was already lost.
It’d been a mistake, and she berated herself harshly as she forged onward. Small groups were best, she knew that. Too many drones attracted the monsters’ attention, the hum of their cores magnifying with increased numbers.
But desperation made fools of them all. And the search for a new home for the colony had indeed been growing desperate as the monsters slowly closed in on their current hideaway.
Nori looked back over her shoulder, but she could barely see her own footprints in the dark storm. She wouldn’t ever be able to tell if she was being followed. Not until it was too late.
She cursed in her head, not daring to speak aloud, and pinged Khan. He wouldn’t be able to help her, not this time, but it was all she had. He pinged back, and that at least gave her strength. He wasn’t dead.
The monster appeared out of nowhere.
It slammed to the ground within arm’s reach of her, yellow X bright in the dark, and she barely stopped in time to avoid running into it. Powdered snow exploded around them from the impact, blinding her.
Its talons flashed, slicing through the straps of her bag as they raked across her front. The monster twisted while she stumbled, frantically trying to catch the bag even as she was losing her balance. Its wing smashed into her, sending her flying.
Nori crashed to the ground hard enough to make her vision glitch wildly. She barely had time to move before it had pounced on her, fanged grin split gruesomely wide. Its tail flicked up, and a scream was punched from her voice box as its syringe pierced through her torso.
The burning sting of its nanite acid was immediate and all-consuming. Her voice went choppy as her system overloaded from the pain.
Gritting her teeth, she summoned her solver. The damn thing never worked on the monsters, so she didn’t waste her time trying again. Instead, she latched on to a large piece of debris and pulled.
At the same moment, the monster ripped her other arm off with its teeth.
She choked as her makeshift projectile hurtled toward them, catching the monster’s attention just in time for it to shoot upward, wings flaring wide. The ground trembled as the rubble landed and went skidding away. She fought past her body’s attempt to shut down, desperation clawing at her core.
Heaving for breath, Nori tried and failed to push herself up. Warnings about a potential head wound flashed over her visor. It took her too long to register the monster’s absence as odd. She weakly turned her head.
It was crouched in the snow a short ways away, where it had initially intercepted her. Leaning forward and down, her arm dangling from its mouth like a forgotten chew toy, it tilted its head.
Directly beneath it, her baby laughed and reached up at its brightly glowing tail. It bobbed just beyond her tiny fingers, the syringe’s sharp point nearly brushing her hand.
The ripped bag waved in the wind before tumbling away. Uzi, who didn’t even reach Nori’s waist and wasn’t yet a full month into having her first body past her newborn stage, was left laying in the snow at the mercy of a monster.
Fear unlike any Nori had known before shot through her. She gasped, fighting past the pain of her wounds, and reached out. Her solver appeared in front of her fingers, glitched, then fizzed away before she could grasp anything with it. Her arm dropped limply back to the ground, and she released a bitten-off cry of despair.
But, though she might have failed to kill the monster, she had at least drawn its attention back to her.
It lifted its head and faced her again, that horrible X unwavering. Her arm dropped from its mouth. Its smile had vanished, leaving something almost like a confused pout behind.
“Come back here and fight me, you coward!” she yelled as loud as she could. She tried again to pull her solver up, but she could barely feel her hand. “Leave my daughter alone!”
Unmoving, the monster considered her. It was unusual to see one so still. It wore a long coat belted at its waist and a dark hat, yellow sensor nodes tucked beneath its brim. This was the largest of the three, she realized. It loomed in a way the other two simply could not, even though they were still taller than any worker drone.
Uzi giggled again, not yet at the age where she spoke beyond simple single words. In the monster’s distraction, its tail seemed to have lowered enough for her to grab it. She pulled it closer, and Nori’s core just about stopped.
But—but the monster’s hand shot out and intercepted the needle before her baby could stab herself. The tail slipped free and flicked up behind it, where it settled into a hypnotic sway. The monster shifted, lowering itself so close that Uzi didn’t even care about having her toy taken, because she was too distracted with reaching up and smacking her little palm against the monster’s face, right over its closed mouth.
“No,” Nori choked. “No, no, not her, please.”
The monster showed no indication it’d heard her. It held still, X focused on Uzi as she patted it.
Nori’s vision started to darken. Her torso was alight with agony. She couldn’t feel any of her remaining limbs.
“Uzi,” she whispered. “Please, no… take me instead…”
Error popups flashed past, but she could barely read them. She didn’t need to; she knew what was happening.
The darkness receded slightly, enough for her to realize the monster had moved again and was crouched over her now. Her eyes trailed down and landed on her daughter, caught in the monster’s grasp.
She jolted with panicked fear, as much as she could while paralyzed.
Uzi peered down at her with wide, confused eyes. “Mama,” she said, reaching out with one hand. The other was tightly gripping the fuzzy collar of the monster’s coat.
Nori’s hand twitched. “Uzi,” she murmured. Tears swelled in her visor.
The monster shuffled closer and—and gently set Uzi down beside Nori’s head. She started to tip backward, not quite having learned to keep her balance yet. The monster caught her, one of its massive hands spanning her entire back and then some. It nudged her upright, and when Uzi started to topple sideways, toward Nori, it pulled back.
Leaning against Nori’s shoulder, Uzi patted her face. “Mama,” she said.
“Hey, baby,” she whispered. It was about all she was capable of. She wanted to reach for her daughter, to sweep her up and curl around her just one more time. To cradle her precious little girl and feel the hum of her core. To tell her it’d be all right.
She almost missed the monster moving, ducking closer to the glowing wound in her torso. It pushed her shirt up and opened its mouth, wicked fangs gleaming.
“Look at me, baby, that’s right,” Nori rasped. She refused to let Uzi watch it tear into her. She shuddered as its overly warm body brushed against her. “I love you, I love you, I love—”
It didn’t bite her, or rip her in half, or tear out her innards. It… licked her. She could feel its saliva dripping into the puncture wound, its tongue probing the hole it’d made.
She choked at the sensation, her fear taking a backseat to bewilderment and disgust. “What the hell are you—?”
It sat up a bit, oil smeared across its face. Its X glitched, and for a split second, a pair of furrowed eyes were looking back at her. But then the X returned, so fast she wasn’t entirely sure she didn’t imagine it.
The monster returned to the wound, and Nori realized with shock that she could feel her feet again. Some of the warnings clogging up her visor flickered away, her body… stabilizing.
Having lost her mother’s attention, Uzi twisted and laughed. She leaned out, reaching for the monster. She started to lose her balance again, and despite her best attempts, Nori couldn’t move to catch her.
The monster’s tail whipped around, the smooth side of the glass canister catching Uzi across her chest. It hadn’t even looked up. She giggled and let herself be guided back into leaning against Nori.
Another minute passed like this before the monster raised its head and crawled forward on all fours. Her breath hitched as it came closer; it felt so large hovering over her like that.
Her wires tingled and a brief shiver traveled up her spine, and she startled at the realization that it was scanning her the way a medic drone would. The pain from the stab wound was gone.
She held her breath, hardly daring to move as it examined her, then Uzi. Her daughter beamed happily up at it, reaching out yet again. It reached back, one blunt finger barely fitting into her grasp. It stayed hunched over Nori for a long moment, simply letting Uzi hold its finger, before it slowly withdrew. Uzi grumbled, not fully throwing a tantrum but certainly unhappy with this turn of events.
The monster stood to its full height and backed up from them. Its wings flared, and it bent its knees, preparing to take off.
Nori gaped at it. This—this wasn’t just unusual behavior. Something like this had never happened before. Not in the year since the monsters first arrived.
Pausing, the monster… waved. It waved at Uzi, and Uzi waved back. “Bye!” she said. “Bye, bye!”
The monster smiled, fangless and utterly unthreatening, and then with a great whoosh, it vanished into the storm.
Nori lay unmoving in the snow, body aching and arm missing, her infant daughter sitting beside her, and wondered what the hell had just happened.
She still hadn’t found the strength to get up when shouts reached her over the wind. She could barely hear them, but that seemed to be a side effect of her head wound, because Uzi perked up and happily babbled, “Hi, hi!”
Khan emerged from the darkness, frantic, and Nori sagged in relief as he spotted them. Other drones hurried after him, Yeva right on his heels.
“Nori,” he gasped, skidding to his knees beside her. “You’re alive.” He scooped Uzi up with one arm and leaned over Nori, hugging them both to his chest.
Yeva knelt on her other side, frowning as she scanned Nori. {You are badly injured,} she said. {What did this?}
Because surely, Nori knew she was thinking, it could not have been one of the monsters. For the monsters never left a victim alive.
“It was one of them,” Nori breathed. Khan sat up, eyes hollow with horror. “The big one.”
He, too, took in her missing arm and the slash marks and the puncture wound on her torso. Her shirt was wet with oil, practically shredded. “But you’re…”
“It let us live,” Nori whispered. Her vision started to darken again, and she knew that despite the miraculous recovery from the nanite acid, she was still in need of medical care. “It let us…”
“Nori!” Khan and Yeva both cried, and that was all she knew.
• • •
Three nights later, the colony was quiet, its occupants all in sleep mode. They still had not found a better, safer, more secure home, but the search was on pause as Nori healed and everyone tried to make sense of what she claimed had happened. Clips from the memory she shared were still being passed around and whispered over.
The scanner at the door marking the somewhat hidden entrance beeped, reading a worker drone’s identification chip. The door swooshed open, and there, standing silhouetted against the hallway lights behind it, was a monster. The big one.
No one was there to see it slowly step inside the entrance hall. The door slid shut behind it, and the monster lowered Nori’s severed arm.
Near silent, it crept into the colony’s shelter. It passed empty rooms, wandered empty hallways. It paused outside every door with a sleeping occupant behind it, only to move on after a moment. Until the Doormans’ home.
It didn’t even need her hand to gain access. It entered into their living room, having to duck slightly beneath the doorframe. It ventured deeper, searching.
Had Khan or Nori been awake, they would have seen a yellow X shine out of the darkness at them from the foot of their bed. The monster stood there a while, scanning them both. It came around to Nori’s side and carefully lifted the bottom of her nightshirt. The puncture wound from its tail had healed well, its saliva doing its job. No one would have been able to tell she’d been injected with nanite acid.
The monster turned and left them alone.
The faint tap of its footsteps stopped outside a different door. It slid open at the monster’s touch, and it ducked into the nursery.
Little Uzi was curled up around her favorite stuffed animal, a floppy-winged black bird. The monster stared down at her for a few minutes, inching closer every so often.
It bent over the crib, washing Uzi with yellow light. It paused, and its visor dimmed.
Nearly half an hour passed with it standing there, motionless, before Uzi stirred. She had not yet grown out of waking up several times through the night, though she was getting better at rolling over and slipping back into sleep mode without disturbing her parents.
She blinked and yawned and looked up at the monster watching her. It backed up a little.
“Hi,” Uzi said.
The monster waved at her. She raised her arms toward it with a demanding grunt. It hesitated, then slowly reached down and picked her up.
She patted its face and yawned again. Gripping its coat in her little hands, she leaned her head against its shoulder and closed her eyes. Her visor flickered to display [Sleep Mode].
The monster’s X blinked a few times. It looked around, almost but not quite panicked at having a baby fall asleep on it. Finally, it carefully sat down on the floor, one hand supporting Uzi.
With a bit of a stutter to start, the monster began to purr.
It examined the nursery, and eventually its gaze landed on a pile of blocks in the corner. It tilted its head, glanced at Uzi to make sure she was still asleep, and then began to scoot over to them.
• • •
In the morning, Nori opened the door to Uzi’s room and pinged Khan so harshly that he nearly collapsed in their kitchen. He rushed to join her, and he froze at her back.
On the floor in the middle of the room was Uzi, curled up in a little nest made from a large, dark coat with a fuzzy collar. And beside her, facing the door, were twelve wooden blocks with painted letters on them.
I AM STILL HERE