“Helper,” she murmurs, collapsing against it. “Lights, for the goddess’s sake.”
“Hi, best friend!” blasts Helper’s voice from her ceiling. Her room lights erupt into their maximum intensity. “Good to be home, huh?”
Sarya cannot even respond to this. She lives in a world where coming home means almost dying at the front door. No, better: she lives in a world where nearly being murdered—at the blades and blind instincts of her own mother, no less—is not the greatest of her worries. No, right now she is actually thankful for those instincts. They’re out there now, protecting her against Hood. They must have awakened her mother, somehow informing her that her daughter was in danger from halfway across the station. Yes, thank the goddess for Widow instincts. If not for them, it would be worse. Not that it could be much worse, but still.
“I lit out as soon as that big guy grabbed your unit,” continues Helper, it’s obliviousness so unshakable it is almost comforting. “I didn’t report it because I didn’t know if it was supposed to be his unit now, but since I’m still technically your helper, I just decided I’d come back here and wait for you to come home after your trip. Which you did. Did I do it right? Where did you go, by the way? Somewhere exciting? Seems like it must have been really short, because it really hasn’t been that long. In fact I barely had time to get any work done at all on my project, but I do have some news on that front—”
But Sarya is no longer listening. She has collapsed into herself, destroyed. Today she has reached the highest high of her life…and she has now plunged to the lowest low. She didn’t realize how much hope she had put in this Observer, how deep her fantasies ran…until she was betrayed. He sent her to that monster in Dock A. He arranged for her to be kidnapped, to be placed with the other prisoners. And both of them are still out there, possibly searching for her. Which means that now, far from galaxy-spanning heroics, the absolute best-case scenario is what she would have called a nightmare a few hours ago.
A quiet, low-tier life.
“—and you’re never going to guess where they are. Go ahead, guess.”
Sarya looks up. Helper just said something important, she can feel it. “What was that?” she says.
“I said I found some new Human sightings!” says Helper. “And then I said you should try to—”
A prickling heat runs down her spine. “Where?”
“You’re not even going to guess?”
“Helper. Where?”
“Fine. They’re right on Watertower! And just a few minutes ago! Obviously it can’t actually be the first genuine Human sighting in a thousand years, but I mean come on—what are the chances? Don’t worry, I’ll keep collecting info as it comes. Exciting though, right? I mean, we’re right there. This is going to be a good story, I know it. Intrigue, sacrifice…yeah, I guarantee you that people are going to die.” And Helper makes that little sound that it makes when it’s so pleased it can’t even get the words out.
Sarya’s own instincts are screaming at her: this is not a coincidence. When someone goes unrecognized her entire life and then is identified multiple times in a day—well, something’s going on. Struck by a sudden intuition, she falls to her knees and yanks her old prosthetic out from under the bunk. “Helper,” she says, voice tight. “Show me the corridor.”
A rectangle shimmers into existence above the unit, transparent and shaky and far inferior to the unit she owned for a few hours today—damn you, Hood. The image hangs in the air like a portal into the corridor outside while a tinny audio feed filters out. The hallway is far more crowded than when she was out there a moment ago, but it doesn’t seem to be traffic. The shapes of a dozen different beings are making angry motions, and they surround a huge, lopsided figure—
“Goddess,” whispers Sarya.
“So, the public channel’s got a ton of conversation about the Human sightings,” says Helper. “Mostly angry stuff. That’s what tells me this is going to be a good story.” It sighs. “I just hope there are some survivors. You know, for variety.”
Sarya watches, filtering out Helper’s prattle. She recognizes Hood’s gigantic shape, but who are these people with him? Why do they look so familiar? Does she—yes, she knows these people. That’s old Baz, their neighbor, standing hunched in the back there. Next to her, is that—? It is. It’s the arboretum caretaker who offered her the interview, who used to give her rides on his old maintenance vehicle. And there’s her babysitter from the next residential over, whose apartment she would visit when Mother was sleeping. Sarya’s throat constricts, but her eyes are bone dry. These are the people from her life, but they are here with Hood. They are here for her, gathered outside like she’s some kind of dangerous animal, and she can’t say she’s frightened of them. She’s not even sad. This emotion…yes, this is becoming very familiar today. This is pure, unfiltered rage.
“Oh, guess what?” says Helper, “Now I don’t know if this is one hundred percent related, but all the docking queues got shuffled after the sightings. Most ships postponed, but there’s this big corporate interstellar that just got bumped to the front. It’s coming in super fast.” It makes that sound again, that little trill of pleasure. “This is so exciting! Don’t you think it’s exciting?”
Sarya is barely listening. She is breathing faster, and it’s not because of the mob out there. No, she is not afraid of them; because to get to her, they have to get through Shenya the Widow. This is different, a deeper and more fundamental dread, and it takes her a moment to pinpoint its source.
Mother.
A Widow’s primary weapon is fear, and right now Widow pheromones are drifting through the shared ventilation system and speaking directly to the lower regions of Sarya’s brain. Even across the species divide, even after spending her entire life in the loving embrace of a Widow, she has to keep a titanium grip on her own emotions. Those people out there…they should be terrified, and for good reason. They wouldn’t dare approach her now, and she’s almost disappointed that their betrayal will go unpunished.
“Show me the common room,” she says softly.
A second rectangle appears next to the first, and a second audio feed takes over from the chaos outside. This window is almost black and almost silent. Sarya can just barely hear a rhythmic chiming through the ancient Network prosthetic on the floor. The cadence is almost soothing in its softness. If not for the fear-smell, this would sound like bedtime to the daughter of a Widow. And then, in the black rectangle of the common room, a dim red light clicks on.
“What is that?” asks Helper.
“It’s Mother,” Sarya says simply.