“Stunning,” says Roche, touching—almost caressing—the machinery that now frames her forearm. “Phil says this is my best work this lifetime.”
“Phil?” asks Sarya. She weaves on the bunk, burning an embarrassing amount of effort to remain upright.
“My helper intelligence,” says Roche, tapping his chest with his remaining hand. “He’s better at being objective than I am.”
“Ah.” She can feel an unfamiliar weight where her forearm lies on her leg. Her hand is closed, her flesh almost invisible under its layers of black metal and synthetics, but not for long. She concentrates. She pictures that hand open, imagines the fingers spreading like a Widow’s blades—and after a moment the pistons contract with a hiss. Her fingers open like a blossom, and there’s her skin, her sweating palm warm and organic amidst the gleaming artificiality of its frame. But opening the hand is easy; she still has those tendons. Now comes the hard part. She focuses. She imagines her hand closed, imagines grasping, imagines strangling—and then, for the first time since she burned out half her forearm and shoved a Widow into her brain, her fingers curl on their own.
“I did it,” she breathes.
“I’m afraid you didn’t,” says Roche. He taps his chest. “I did.”
“Oh,” says Sarya softly. She watches, resigned, as her fingers do a little dance on their own. Great.
“I am about to turn control over to you,” Roche says. “You are fortunate, because it is a good hand. It will learn to respond to you…eventually. But please remember one thing: you are only borrowing it. I will know if it is abused.” He pats the mass of hardware on her lap. “We’ve been through much together, haven’t we?” he says tenderly.
Sarya watches her hand twitch, unsure if she’s watching a fond goodbye or something stranger.
“Yes, we have,” Roche answers himself in a singsong, scratching the hand below its row of black pistons. “Yes we have indeed.”
“Um,” says Sarya, watching her own hand gently squeeze her leg. Definitely something stranger.
And so begins day two, counting since Mer found her screaming and bleeding out in her room. Yet another day relearning how to live in this soft and bladeless Human body—and that’s not even the worst part. No, there are far worse things than having to learn how to walk again. In fact, there are worse things than seeing your own mother doing horrible things. For instance: remembering doing those things yourself. She didn’t just witness her mother’s burning hatred toward the tiny Human she would one day call her Daughter; she experienced that hatred for herself. Sarya herself now recalls committing multiple murders, feeling the hot blood of her own biological parents running down her blades, their flesh ripping in her mandibles—
Stop.
And that is the worst part: that objection was intellectual, not visceral. Sarya doesn’t feel horror at what she’s done; the best she can do is recognize that she should. She can only theorize, intellectually, about what that would be like. She has become her mother, in the worst possible way. And yet, she is herself as well. Her original drive—fine, obsession—is still there, larger and more powerful than ever. Human ambition has been amplified by Widow intensity, and now only one thought burns in the mind of Sarya the Daughter.
Her people.
The thought is electrifying. She has seen them, and with her own eyes—even if those eyes belonged to her mother at the time. And she’s seen more besides. She’s seen Him, the caretaker of what remains of her species. She can see His golden eyes just as clearly as if He were here now. I’m on every Network Station in the sector, He told her. In her mind, He tells her over and over. It’s almost like He’s inviting her to find Him, like He’s keeping her people safe until she gets there. And for that invitation, she would trade a hell of a lot more than a few tendons and the ability to feel guilt.
“Look at you, sitting up by yourself,” thunders a voice from the hatch. “Good for you.”
She looks up from her reflections to see a doorway completely filled with fur and teeth. Here is Mer, his parenting instincts apparently rendering him completely unable to leave her the hell alone for eight minutes. She meets his gaze evenly as she reaches up with her undamaged arm to grip the upper bunk. She hauls herself up by brute strength and holds herself upright, by that so-called good arm, while her trembling legs work their way underneath her. They’re not blades, but they’ll do. See this, Mer? Does this look like a helpless hatchling who can’t take care of herself? She is Sarya the Daughter, she is standing, and there’s nothing the universe can do about it.
And then a knee buckles. She reaches for the upper bunk with Roche’s hand and it seizes the edge with such violence that she cries out. Her legs collapse entirely and now she is left dangling—struggling and clicking a particularly gruesome Widow obscenity—from someone else’s titanium grip.
“Is that your hand, Roche?” asks Mer.
“It is,” says Roche. “She’s borrowing it.”
And then the hand releases and Sarya collapses to the bunk, then slithers off it onto the floor. She lies on her back and takes a deep breath. That could have gone better.
“Something I’ve noticed about her,” says Mer as if she were not lying on her back in front of him. “She may make dumb decisions, but once she’s made them she’s all in.”
“Phil said the same thing,” says Roche. “That it’s refreshing to see reckless action without premeditation.”
“Phil?”
“My helper intelligence.”
“Ah. I never got around to naming mine. Maybe that’s why it hates me.”
Sarya grits her teeth and glares at the ceiling as this friendly conversation continues above her, held across her body as if she were nothing more than a floor mat. This is not how she saw this going. But she is Sarya the Daughter, and she is a Human with goddess-damned places to be. Her fury pushes her off the floor before she realizes it, and now she is sitting again.
“Sure you’re okay there, champ?” asks Mer, watching her wobble. “Need anything?”
Yes, actually. Their attention. She’s had a lot of time to think about her next step, and now she’s got both of them in her room. What better time than now? “So,” she says, as if she called them here, as if she were sitting on her floor by choice and not because she’s damaged her brain with a Memory Vault. “Who wants to talk business?”
“See that?” says Mer, pointing at her with a long talon. “Even when she can’t even walk—”
“Business?” says Roche. He leans forward, lenses gleaming. “I like business.”