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There was a buzzing in her body. It’d been there for days now. Not quite since their attack on N’s worker drones had gone so badly, but close.
He’d fired on her. He’d fired on her.
She tried to think back to their last interaction before N disappeared, but it was all blurred with intentional ignorance. Don’t look at him, don’t respond to him, don’t let him close. If he gets close, he remembers, and if he remembers—
(“I will not give him another chance, V.”)
V stared at the metal box in front of her. It was haphazardly welded together. It had no door, no way to open it. A faint, furious clacking and scratching came from inside.
It hadn’t always been… like this. After the first time he fought past the mental blocks—after Cyn muted N—V had tried. She tried to stay close, tried to keep being his friend even when she was a stranger to him. How could she not? He was all she had left. He was the only bright spot in this damn world and the next.
But he had squinted at her one day, as much as he could with the X branded into him, and made circles with his fingers over his visor. And he had tilted his head and gestured to her face. Where are your glasses?
(“You’ll make sure he doesn’t hurt himself by remembering, won’t you? It would be a shame if I had to erase N entirely.”)
V had shot a missile point-blank into his head and made sure she wasn’t there when he woke up.
The encoded amnesia wasn’t perfect. The memories had to exist somewhere inside him to provide the basis for his personality. If Cyn found out familiarity was dredging up the memories she’d buried… she’d either separate him from V, from anything that that might trigger his recall, or she’d wipe the memories entirely—and the rest of N in the process.
She would kill him in the only way that mattered to monsters whose bodies would not let them die.
(Did V not kill part of him anyway every time she ignored him and pretended she didn’t know his name and stood by in silence while J tore into him?)
The buzzing had started before she ripped J’s core from her healing body and shoved it in the box. The buzzing was maybe why she did it.
Everything was wrong. Everything had gone wrong. It was all upside down and inside out, and V twitched with the urge to break something.
She needed time to think. To consider things. To figure out where N stood. Where V herself stood—alone, in relation to him, any which way. (Where V wanted to stand. As if the answer had ever been anything other than “beside him.”) Cyn would know of N’s betrayal the moment J had working thumbs again, so for now, no thumbs for her. No body.
Because—because if N remembered. In any capacity. Then that changed things. Because the first time N regained himself, his reaction had been… a lot.
(J had been the one to alert Cyn to his little rebellion.)
N was soft. N was kind. And he’d blinked awake to blood soaking his hands and then he threw up, ripped three disassembly drones apart, and nearly leveled a city in a bid to allow a group of humans the chance to escape Earth. He’d succeeded; somewhere out there, presuming Cyn hadn’t found them, was a spaceship carrying over a hundred humans who owed their lives to N.
He fought long and hard to break free of Cyn’s control. It had probably been painful. Hopeless, at times. He must have considered that it’d be easier to give in. Sink into Cyn’s cold embrace and let himself be a weapon. Just like the rest of them. But in him, a war had waged. By the end, a dozen battles won. V only noticed it in retrospect. The seizures, the soft reboots, the way he’d flinch and twitch. His processor actively leaking fluid from cracks in his visor. Barely being able to look V in the eyes.
And when it was over, when he’d done what he could and Cyn was coming for him, he’d tried to gouge his own core out.
If Cyn didn’t destroy him, he would do it himself. He was too soft, too kind, he couldn’t handle the weight of guilt and grief. Remembering would be the death of him. That had been her mantra every time, every damn time, that she had to pretend he didn’t exist. That she didn’t care.
(She cared too much. Her care was a weapon turned against her.)
So, logically, he couldn’t remember. If he remembered, he’d be dead. The parts of him that Cyn had taken, the parts V had mourned and longed for and remembered in his stead, couldn’t have resurfaced. N had to be that obedient, awful shadow of himself that physically hurt V to even look at.
Except he’d stared down at her, J’s body broken in the snow, and past the burning protective anger had been something. J would sneer at her for her sentimentality, would call it nonsense.
V would call it disappointment. It felt like a door slamming shut.
N couldn’t remember. N had to remember. It could only be N, whole and present and himself and just as damn rebellious, who got between his squad and those workers. He was alive either way, and Cyn was across the damn solar system, none the wiser. J the tattletale, J the bootlicker, J the cruel was out of the picture until V decided otherwise.
So where did that leave V?
It left her staring at a box, buzzing and buzzing and buzzing.
• • •
One of the first things V had come to terms with was that there was no hope. There was survival, and there was Cyn’s too-wide smile, and there was an empty space where Earth had been. It was like the human saying: the only sure things in the world were death and taxes.
Though. There weren’t exactly taxes around anymore. No humans to pay them.
Which just left death. And funny thing about that.
J had been right about one thing in a long-ago argument, the only time V tried to push back—there was no escape, not even in death.
So the humans had been wrong about both.
There was survival, and there was Cyn, and there was an empty space. Those were the things V was sure about now.
(And there was N. Impossibly, there was N.)
V stood at the edge of the incomplete spire’s shadow, watching the harsh light of day spread across the snow. Just in front of the entrance was the scattered gray ash that had once been J’s body.
There was a ringing like a flatline in her head. Nothing made sense. New things, different things. Changes. It was a shock to her system. She’d spent so long just existing under orders, always caught beneath someone’s thumb, that the lifting of the veil of apathetic obedience was—it hurt. Routine had been as comfortable a place to hide as she could manage in the wasteland hell of a planet.
Some of those ashes were hers.
Why had N chosen the workers—it was a stupid question. For all her disbelief, she knew that much. She’d given him no reason to stay, and if he did remember everything, then he wouldn’t have been under any illusions as to what J would have done to him.
The better question: why had the workers chosen him in return?
• • •
She buried the box.
• • •
V went still as her unnatural instincts kicked in. She was being watched.
She turned, talons flexing, wondering what stupid worker was pressing their luck—
Across the street, a yellow X stared at her from a darkened, blown-out window. Her casing crawled.
She wasn’t being watched. No. She was being hunted.
N wasn’t someone she’d ever feared in any capacity. Words like intimidating or dangerous didn’t belong in the same sentence as his name. Sure, he killed workers when he was told to, and he did it just as well as her or J, but workers were wimpy. V would know; she used to be one.
She felt like prey now, in a way she hadn’t during their confrontation. Their fight had been a rush, and beyond the panic of what his betrayal would earn him, she’d only been pissed and impressed in turns. He’d held his own, essentially with one arm out of commission. Even when he’d turned his laser on her, her muddled emotions had been dominated by disbelieving confusion.
It hadn’t felt real. She was still surprised sometimes that she hadn’t woken up yet from this nightmare.
Like prey, V didn’t dare move, even though she’d already caught a predator’s attention. If he’d beaten her and J, then what chance in hell did she have against him if he really wanted her dead?
(Did he?)
The problem was twofold: N had bothered to come find her, even this far out of their territory. And V… didn’t want to fight him.
Deep in the ground, the box was still welded shut. Quantum mechanics, right? That guy’s cat or whatever. J was both a massive problem and no problem at all.
The buzzing still hadn’t stopped. She was hyperaware of every snowflake melting on her casing, of the pump and rush of not-quite-oil running through her veins, of the twitching of her core. There was a flatline and there was screaming and there was a tick, tick, tick, like a bomb counting down except she didn’t know which of them would explode when it reached zero.
Dead and alive all at once. That was how V felt.
N’s X vanished. Not like he’d pulled back into the shadows. Like he’d gone dark.
He had a million and one reasons to pop her head from her shoulders and toss her core into the approaching sunrise. She wouldn’t even blame him for it. She didn’t move, didn’t take cover, didn’t engage any of her weapons.
(She’d rather it be N, if she could choose. She didn’t want to give Cyn the satisfaction.)
V’s eyes flicked around the city street. The snow blew in gentle drifts that night. The stars were almost clear overhead. There were no worker outposts here; this was no squad’s territory. It was as dead as Earth had become.
A whisper of sound.
She saw his tail canister first, drifting almost lazily beside her head. She followed the cord up, slowly turning as it retracted. He was still as a statue on the windowsill just above her. Crouched, more lazy than ready to pounce.
For a stupid moment, V almost expected him to say something. Break the tension. Idiot. The last time she’d heard his voice outside of her dreams, he’d been screaming.
When had he stopped smiling at her? Waving? Opening his arms for a hug?
(Had he been asking for one? Or offering?)
He was with the workers. That was the part she kept coming back to. Striped of his ability to communicate, and yet—they hadn’t feared him. The ankle-biter J almost killed had called for him. Like the brat knew N as a protector, not an unnatural monster designed to eat her.
How. How.
How had he gone, virtually overnight, from eating them without hesitation or guilt or any higher thought to being part of them. How had they allowed it. What knocked the memory blocks loose, what made the workers toss aside the animosity they had to have.
(And did it mean there was hope for V—)
She wouldn’t get answers to her questions. If Cyn hadn’t made sure of that, then V had finished the job by burning every bridge between them.
(Every inch of her these days was designed to destroy.)
V had gone out of her way to ignore and avoid N. Not just to keep him from remembering. Not just to spare herself the pain. But because, even without his voice, without words, he was so damn expressive, and the only way to keep herself from responding to him was to make sure she never saw him making faces at her.
She saw him now.
There was disinterest in the set of his mouth. He looked at her, his head almost more tilted up than down, like she wasn’t worth his full focus. His hands rested loosely on the sill, no weapon in sight. She was a blip to him.
It was just as much a gut punch as the laser.
But it was fair, wasn’t it? She’d washed her hands of him first.
He had hunted her down, watched her until she noticed him, then moved in for a kill he would not make. Message received; V wouldn’t survive a second attack on his worker drones.
(Cyn had done her damndest to rip N apart and put him back together the way she wanted him. She had failed twice over.)
N dropped to the ground with a little poof of snow. Expressionless, he reached out and grabbed her wrist. Lifting it between them, he pressed something into her palm and curled her fingers over it.
What could she say? Sorry wasn’t even halfway enough for the crap she’d put him through. And anything else… who was N anymore? She had outdone herself; V had wanted to put distance between them, and the drone before her was a stranger.
Worse, he was a ghost. An echo of someone she’d loved in secret and shadow.
N let go and turned away. Without a second glance, his wings extended and he shot into the sky, vanishing quickly into the darkness.
N had a million and one reasons to kill V.
(He had one reason not to.)
Left alone, V exhaled. She unfurled her fingers.
It was a bracelet.
A lifetime ago, Tessa had smuggled a kit for making friendship bracelets into her bedroom. It was the sort of cheap, childish thing her parents would have scoffed at and tossed into the incinerator if they’d found it.
It was before Cyn’s arrival, so the four of them—three misfit drones and their beloved human—had crowded onto Tessa’s too-big, too-empty, too-cold bed and fumbled their way through the craft. J had tried to adhere to the instructions to the letter. Tessa, they discovered later, had accidentally skipped a few steps. N had been a little too enamored with the brightly colored plastic beads, and though he denied it vehemently, they’d all been sure he was eating them.
V’s bracelet had come out okay. The thread was maybe loose in places, and she’d messed the pattern up a little in the beginning. She’d used two different shades of blue and green each, following the instructions for a wiggly sort of woven pattern. More or less in the middle, she’d added a white box bead with an N.
Head ducked, she’d given it to him afterwards, and in the years between then and the gala, there hadn’t been a day she hadn’t seen it tucked beneath his shirt sleeve.
The original was probably either space debris from Earth’s final explosive moments or was lost inside Cyn’s abyssal stomach.
But this was a damn good replica.
V stumbled forward, vision blurring. She caught the wall and thumped her shoulder into it. She slid down to the ground, graceless, unable to look away from the neat weaving of thread in her hand.
He still cared. About her.
He shouldn’t, but N was N, was soft and kind, had taken his freedom and used it to save others without a thought for himself, and not even Cyn had been able to change that. She pressed her jacket sleeve to her visor like that would do anything to stop the tears in her eyes. He cared, and that was all the reason he needed to give her a second chance.
A broken laugh creaked its way out of her voice box. Cyn had tried to silence him. His message couldn’t be louder.
She would need to work to see this bracelet on his arm again. Or she could destroy it and be done with it. With him.
A choice. A fork in the road. The rest of her life, one way or another. N or Cyn.
V carefully tucked the bracelet into one of her hidden compartments. Safe. Sealed away. Like J, or that cat. A friendship, a love, that was both dead and alive.