Every mile the ghost truck chews up, drawing me farther from that stretch of broken rock and broken people, is confirmation I didn’t need that Pac-At had changed something in me before they sent me out there. Built me to love that place, to sync with it, to feel the dry suck of the land over my skin and the skitter of insect legs in my heart.
The farther I get, the thinner the connection. A single strand of spider’s silk, stretched across the desert, and I’m holding my breath without thinking, dreading the final snap.
Probably they’d altered me so I’d be a better hunter. Feel the heavy footfalls of the pirates, know which way the wind was shifting before it moved, know the ground beneath my feet with every eating stride. They’d done that, no mistake. They’d made of me exactly what they wanted.
Guess they hadn’t counted on me loving it. Or maybe they had, and they just didn’t understand love. Wouldn’t surprise me, I’m not sure I do, either. What I feel for that land—it’s more like what Alpha felt for Omega. Not love. Possession.
But I’m dying, and sentimental, so I’m going to call it love, and pretend I don’t feel hollow when the thread breaks. When there’s nothing in me but what there’d always been before I’d found myself out there. No more grit or sky or vultures’ talons dripping my scraps.
Just the fire, and the will to use it.
The ghost truck sways me to sleep. I wake again when it shudders to a stop, well-oiled mechanisms whispering to each other as the door slides open. There’s coughing and swearing and a stomping of boots, rattle of machinery being moved into place. I let my eyes stay shut, feigning death, which ain’t hard to do, considering the state I’m in.
Without looking, I can’t be sure, but my legs have stopped answering my call, and the searing agony that rode the arm Alpha touched has gone—the nerves dead or missing. I’m no operative. Not now. I’m a sack of old meat rotting on the floor. The air’s febrile, what skin I’ve got left sticky with sweat, and I almost laugh, thinking about the real fire that lives in me, and how there’s nothing my immune system can do to fight what’s coming.
Alpha’d been deft, true to her word, and I can feel my fire waiting, ready, beneath the surface of the one hand I know I’ve got left.
“Shit,” a man says, close enough to the door his voice echoes in the cab, then he turns away to vomit.
Right. I’m rotting and Alpha’s bone and ash. Wonder when I lost the ability to smell.
“Pull it together,” Perez says, and I’m alert again, sharp as anything, listening to her small steps crunch up the walkway. “We have to clean up this fucking mess.”
I get the feeling she’s not talking about the corpses.
“That one has to be Alpha,” Perez says. A crunch. Human ash underfoot. Her bracelets clatter against each other and then she’s crouched down next to me, and I don’t need to see her to know she’s staring into my face. “This is Delta. I’m sure of it.”
“Guess it worked out, after all,” the man says. He’s got the fake-cheery sound of a person trying to talk a pot into not boiling over, when it’s already been on the flame too long.
“It was a disaster. We’re not sending two again. I don’t care how many we have that need to be brought into line. Next time the ledgers don’t balance for too long, it’s one-on-one, same as always.”
The man makes a small, grunting sound of agreement that says it wasn’t his idea anyway, it was Perez’s, but she’s more than likely his boss, and while he’s thinking it’s her own damn fault everything nearly turned to ash, he likes his job too much to say the truth. I can relate.
“Get the gurneys and the bags,” she says, and she’s turning away, her bracelets shifting, and though I want to hear more I’m not gonna have the chance. There’s only so much longer my augments are going to keep my heart beating.
I’m not as quick as I used to be, but Perez has already turned her head, dismissed the corpse on the ground, so she doesn’t see me crack an eye open, doesn’t see me reach what I’ve got left of a hand until I close it around her, around her wrist, stilling that clatter of gold.
She looks at her arm, first, like she can’t believe it. Like it’s a joke or a phantom and all she has to do is blink and my hand’s gone and she’s back to being safe again. Her eyes slide down to meet mine, and there’s a scream in her, I can see it building, feel the tension ratcheting up her forearm as she prepares to jerk away, to cry out.
The fire in me has always been an eager thing.
It pours out in a hot rush, and maybe Perez has a chance to die screaming, maybe she dies silent, that shock still writ on her face, I don’t know, because the fire’s taking me, too, and that’s all right. That’s how it was always going to be.
My vengeance, Alpha’s vengeance, it probably won’t change anything. It’s small and petty and ours, and there’s always another Pac-At administrator in the wings, waiting to take control.
But maybe the next one might think twice. Might change the way they do things, just a little, if they know that the next time they open that cab door it might be their death waiting inside. Maybe Pac-At scraps the whole fucking program, or cracks down harder. I don’t know.
What happens next, that’s Riley’s business. I’m just flame and dust.