“Jesus, Kira!” My eyes snapped up to see Liam standing over him, Oya looming over his shoulder, her hands raising as she readied herself to attack. He grabbed my hand and hauled me up, kicking and spitting, but his attention wasn’t on me. Connection, they’d said? I felt something click into place for me and Liam, something I wanted to fight just as hard, but we moved forward and threw our hands up in the air, pulling on a power we hadn’t used in this way for so long.
For a moment, I saw a child Liam, standing on a hilltop behind the derelict block of flats he’d lived, watching a storm rage, his arms going up as thunder rolled, ready to catch—
My focus jumped back to the present as a massive plume of air, fire, and lightning came raining down on us.
“Take the fire!” Liam shouted. “I can’t!”
This time I leant into the pain, not shying from a single nerve prick as it all came rushing into me. I pulled it inside me, her fire, her power, taking more, more, more. I watched Liam’s hair flutter, his eyes going wide as he absorbed what he could, riding the storm, just as he had before.
There was an odd kind of quiet when I pulled free, staggering back to Aen. I slammed my hands down on his chest, feeling all of it rise inside me and go into him—fire, need, pain, aggression, love… I snarled above him, pleading, demanding that he awaken.
“Kira.”
My eyes flicked up, my lips pulled back in a hiss when I saw Liam staring at me, his hands crackling with the lightning he’d absorbed, then I saw his eyes drop to Aen. He placed his hands beside mine and then let it all come out.
Aen’s body jerked, going completely rigid before collapsing back onto the ground.
“Love?” My question was plaintive, cajoling, begging. I smoothed his hair back from his face, then jumped when his eyes flicked open.
“Oh, my fucking god!” I yelped, surging in and wrapping my arms around him, my eyes closing when I felt his do the same to me. “Aen. What the fuck!”
“Kira…” he croaked in response, raising a shaking hand.
Oya-sim didn’t care about reunions or resurrections, she was here to follow her primary programming—decimate us. She roared her defiance, her storm clouds forming again, lightning crackling around her head like a halo.
“We’ve got to starve her of her power,” Liam said, his face pale as he regarded the two of us. “I can take some of her storm but…” His eyes landed on the whip I’d discarded.
I snatched it up as I heard Aen cough, trying to clear a chest that had been near lifeless moments before, wrapping my hands around the handle and standing over him as the sim attacked.
I faced down her fists and her screams and her writhing maelstrom this time, not moving as she postured, not even when she struck out. Liam looked at me wild eyed, bleeding away some of her power as he reached for the sky, making the clouds falter and clear before starting to boil again. But when a fist came slamming down towards me, I didn’t move an inch. My fingers flexed around the whip handle, tightening until she was in range.
I flicked the trailing length of flame out with all my might, seeming to watch its path in slow-mo, aware of the imminent danger I was in but not caring. The feel of Aen’s heartbeat, weak as the wings of a baby bird, pulsed inside me, pinning me to the spot. The fist loomed faster and faster until the whip made contact, wrapping around her throat. I jumped, swinging on the end of the whip like Tarzan, and heard the crackle of burning flesh as I careened through the air, adding momentum to the whip’s passage. It circled her neck, pulling tighter and tighter, her punch aborted in favour of trying to prise that off, but I wasn’t having that. I pulled on the fucking thing with all my might, to the sound of her strangled cries. She thrashed wildly, sending me swinging so erratically, I felt whatever I’d eaten for breakfast lurch. But her problems were much greater. The two of us went tumbling to the ground as she fell to her knees.
I expected to dash my brains out on the ground below, it rushed so fast to meet me, but weirdly, so did Liam. He sprinted out beneath me, gesturing with a sweep of his arm to create a buffer of air that slowed my fall, ending with me landing neatly on the ground before the simulation.
But it didn’t look like a simulation. It looked like a giant woman whose eyes bulged as she fought to take a breath in her severely restricted airway, tears rolling down her cheeks. I took a step forward, expecting a fist to raise, a hand to slap me down, but still, she fought it. The hoarse, truncated sound of her breathing was horrific, a frantic sucking sound.
She’s just a sim, I told myself. This isn’t real. But that’s not how it felt, not when she fought us, not when she choked slowly to death, the fire whip burning into her larynx.
My hand went up, unable to formulate a plan before I acted because common sense would have ruled it out. I drew the power of the fire whip back into me and off her neck, watching warily as the wounds there quickly healed.
What the fuck is happening? I thought, my mind racing to try and put it all together. How is this a trial? What is the point? Am I going to choke out some woman and for what? I looked behind me at Aen, who had rolled up into a partial sitting position, still obviously recovering, Liam crackling with the power of the storm he’d absorbed.
“Finish this, Kira,” he urged. “You’re not going to get a second chance.”
“I don’t want a second chance,” I said, mostly to myself as I turned around. I reached out a hand, devoid of power, to the sim and waited.
Mine wasn’t even the size of one of her fingertips, dwarfed into nothing when hers did the same. A light burst inside me at her touch, something golden travelling between the tiny point of contact. My mouth fell open, my eyes fluttering as it all came rushing in.
Fire, air, lightning, they weren’t her real power. They were just an external manifestation of this—women, everywhere, that’s what I saw, the incredible breadth of experience stilling me. Women sitting by the windows of classrooms, staring out, twiddling pens, dreaming of a golden future. Women hauling big jerry cans of water, back and forth, back and forth all day. Women holding babies, children, teenagers. Women striding into offices, briefcases in hand all around the world. Women in chains. Women in command. That was just the tiniest tip of a massive iceberg, the images starting to flicker, blending together into such a rapid slideshow, my brain could no longer process them.
Until I didn’t have to. I blinked, the sim fading away and the room reinstating itself, the occupants staring at me.
“Aen…” I whispered to myself, running over to him, dropping down by his side, but he rallied quickly, pulling me onto his lap and holding me close. He breathed me in as I did him, the stink of ashes mixing with his usual scent. “That was…”
My mouth clammed up, words drying up as he looked at me almost warily, dark smudges across his cheeks, his hair a rumpled mess. I reached over, trying to smooth it back down flat, and he shot me a tired smile. I kissed him because I could still see him lying on the ground, limp as a discarded doll, because the rapidly scudding heartbeat under my hand was twinned with that ghost of a pulse I could still hear inside my head. I kissed him too hard, a little whimper squeezing out, but when I tried to pull back, he held me where I was.
“That can’t happen again,” I said to his chest, my eyes aching with a growing pressure. I couldn’t look him in the eye, knowing what would come if I did. I got to my feet, turning to the rest of them. “How did that happen? She…that… We could have been killed!”