Sandy blinks something.
“Okay, hold on,” says Ace. “I think she said something about…no. Wait…yeah, no. I’m getting absolutely nothing.”
“I’m going to let go of you now,” Sarya continues. “I know you can run to your dad over there and he can kill me in a half second. But instead of doing that, I would like you to…help me. Again.” She swallows and looks away, for just a second. “I’ll explain, I swear. I would just like to…live long enough to do it.”
Sandy blinks something.
“Yeah, nothing,” says Ace. “I really don’t think I’m the one for this job, not without a Network connection.”
Sarya hesitates for one more second, then releases Sandy. She sits back on her heels, her eyes on the small figure in the grass. There’s no point in saying more, and there’s even less point in trying to defend herself. Sandy and Mer both far outmatch her; one in mind and the other in body. There is no manipulating Sandy, and there is no stopping Mer. There is asking for forgiveness, and then there is waiting to see if you still have a throat.
Sandy clambers to her small feet. She blinks something, a wave of eyelid movement that circles her furry face twice, then turns and begins creeping toward the snoring mountain next to the fire. Her trepidation is not strange to Sarya. She, too, grew up with a terrifyingly violent parent.
“What happens next?” whispers Right.
“Either Mer says good morning,” answers Sarya from the side of her mouth, “or we all die.”
“Wait,” says Left in what can barely be called a whisper. “Why would we die? We just—”
“Quiet,” says Sarya.
“But—”
“Quiet,” she hisses again. “Or I’ll kill you myself.”
The threat rolls off her tongue before she realizes it, and she is shocked to realize that she doesn’t know how serious it is. Something has changed in her, and she doesn’t know when it happened. Was it when she realized she was responsible for untold numbers of deaths? Was it before that, when she saw how little regard Observer had for the individuals that made up His mind? Was it before that, when she crammed half a Widow into her head, with all the accompanying memories and fantasies of slaughter? Or is it even more fundamental than that? She’s seen what Humans do: is that piece of her nature finally floating to the surface? Is this the Widow or the Human, the Daughter or the Destroyer?
Or is it just…Sarya?
Mer is not the only one sleeping; in fact, Sarya and her two pre-Observers seem to be the only conscious individuals in this entire filthy clearing. Around dozens of fires burning down to coals, lit by the destruction of a trillion living minds, Observer’s many bodies snore the night away.
Sandy scampers around her father, eyeing him from all sides, before deciding on an approach. Sarya watches, completely understanding the challenge of waking an instinct-filled killer without getting oneself instantly ripped apart. And then, with the tiniest of startled squeaks, Sandy disappears. Sarya blinks, just as startled. Even with liters of drink in his system, Mer is faster than anything she has ever seen. She watches, with rising apprehension, as nothing further seems to happen. Sandy is on Mer’s far side—hopefully still living—and Sarya is not about to circle him to see what’s going on over there. If all is going well, the two are having a nice silent father-daughter blinkfest. Sandy—hopefully—is convincing her inebriated killer of a father that he should not eviscerate this Human here and now. If all is not going well, Sandy is dead and Mer doesn’t even know it yet. Or she is alive and telling her gigantic father how she woke up with a Human’s fingers wrapped around her windpipe. If either is the case, Sarya should be heading off into the dark forest right now, at a dead sprint.
She almost laughs. Like it would matter.
So she doesn’t run. She waits, repeatedly using her one good hand to close the other, then opening both. This will be her new nervous tic—if she survives the next few seconds, obviously. She hadn’t realized how much she depended on Roche’s hand until it was taken from her. Even so, Roche is next—again, assuming she survives this. Roche may be cold and irritating, he may be completely indifferent to her, and maybe everyone, but she needs all the help she can get.
She starts violently when Mer’s bulk shifts in the hard light of the sky. He sits up and turns in one smooth, sinuous movement, his talons ripping deep furrows in what’s left of the grass. Sandy peeks around one of his massive arms as he stares at Sarya, eyes shining above glistening teeth. It’s amazing that Sarya could have spent so many days in his presence without realizing what an obvious killer he is. Now, when she is frozen in his predator gaze, it couldn’t be clearer. But Sarya is the child of a Widow—and a killer herself, whether she wants to admit it or not—and so she clenches the only hand she can clench and stares back into those eyes. She swallows as a host of potential sentences run through her mind: explanations and blame, mitigating circumstances, the whole story. But when she takes a breath, none of them come out.
“I’m sorry,” she says softly.
Mer stares at her, his eyes gleaming in the light of a burning sky.
“You too, Roche,” she says, a little louder. She doesn’t know when she became aware that the android was standing behind her, but she is as certain as if he had tapped her on the shoulder. “I’m…sorry.”
Roche stalks around her on slim black legs, in his customary cloud of cold ozone, and folds himself up next to Mer. He pays no attention to his companions—but why would he? Sarya is the target of Mer’s potential rage. Sarya is the one who will be torn limb from limb in a few seconds—or not. “This I must hear,” says Roche, his lenses reflecting the flickering chaos above.
Sarya’s eyes flick from one gaze to the next, among the three intelligences staring at her. To her left and right, she feels Left and Right. They should hear this too, even if they don’t understand it, because they should know who they are dealing with. “I made a choice,” says Sarya. “I made a lot of choices. And a lot of them were the wrong choice. I broke the Network…and that’s not something I can fix. But things can get a lot worse if I don’t do something right now. If we don’t do something.” Without breaking eye contact, she gestures toward the fiery sky with her head. “In eight hundred star systems, this kind of chaos is happening. Because of me. And even when this is over, when those systems have figured out how to deal without the Network, they’re going to be alone for a long time. Generations. Centuries. Maybe even—maybe even millennia.” She draws a breath, waiting for someone to interrupt, but no one does. “And that would be bad enough,” she continues, “but Observer’s got a species ready to go on a rampage. To build the whole sector into an empire, then turn it on the rest of the Network. The last time, they had ships that could destroy solar systems, they had technology beyond anything that Network has ever allowed. If they get a foothold here—” She stops, allowing them to fill in the blanks with their imaginations.