Headspace blips and blaps me on a zigzag teleportation tour across the continent, from cacti in a ravine in Nevada to a snarl of mangroves in the middle of a slick bayou in Louisiana. We stick around there just long enough to see an alligator sunning itself on a nearby log fall off it and into the brackish water. Next, a rooftop in a city somewhere, with tall buildings riding crazy hills up and down and a red bridge astride a bay in the distance. San Francisco?
I don’t have time to ask. Next, we’re there, outside the Nursery in purple near-dawn. Even this far out, in the tree line ringing the parking lot, I can see the forms of the snipers moving around the mall roof. Sloppy. They should be concealing themselves, but out in the middle of nowhere, it’s hard to blame them for not staying on their guard.
I point in the sky above the gunman nearest to us, relatively speaking. “Right there, you got it?”
“Yeah, yeah.” Though we practiced for a couple hours back at Promised Land, I know he’s never tried this aerial maneuver in the field before.
“You sure?”
“I’d rather not talk about it, let’s just do it, okay?”
“After you.”
He puts a hand on my shoulder but doesn’t port. Instead, he clears his throat. “Listen, Bloodshot, it’s been a long time since anybody stuck their neck out for us. Thank you. My little sister graduates eighth grade next month. I really want to be there, and for the first time in a long time, I think I might be.”
“I hope you are too. But let’s maybe try and survive today first, huh?”
Headspace nods. Space folds around us. When it unfurls itself again, I am about twenty feet in the air above one of the snipers. I have enough time to curl up into a ball as I drop. Just as I’m on top of him, I snap my feet out and land right on his head, smashing it into the ground and shattering his helmet. He doesn’t get up again.
I hear a kind of strangled cry to my right. The other sniper must have wandered over to gab with his pal right as I appeared because he’s unslinging his AX308 rifle and raising the scope to his eye.
I am just about to dive behind a big doghouse-high air-conditioning unit when reality uncurls like a translucent flower and Headspace flies through, sideways this time, having teleported after dropping me. He’s still got all his momentum from the fall but is now moving horizontally instead of vertically. He slams into the sniper’s chest, and they both go down cold.
I grab the sniper rifle out of the prone guard’s hands and knock him out with the stock to his head. I could take it with me, but it’s got no suppressor and I need to be as quiet as a church mouse. I throw it aside and help the groaning Headspace up with one hand.
“Whoa, that was some rush,” he says with a grin once he’s recovered.
“Perfect. Go get the others, wait for my signal.”
He vanishes midnod. I tie up the guards with the straps of their rifles and toss their walkies over the side of the building. I can feel my severed hand still. It hasn’t moved for well over a day. Two floors below me. I find a hatch that drops me down into a mostly empty security office—just a few stray power cords where long-gone equipment used to be plugged in. I crack open the door and find a jet-black hallway running behind the various stores, identified by names on the doors: Spencer’s, Auntie Anne’s, and so on. I see an unlit exit sign over double doors at the far end of the hall and go through it. I find myself in the mall itself, metal gates closed and locked over empty shops. Pale starlight filters through the big glass skylight overhead. I don’t detect any security cameras or cell phones, just my hand down on the floor below. In a crouch I creep down the nearest staircase to a dry fountain surrounded by browning spider plants.
Now I can sense my hand above me somehow. Did I go down one level too far?
Then I lose the signal altogether.
All of a sudden, there’s a shadow above me, and I’m spinning on my heel away from it as a massive form drops from a balcony above and lands with a crash on the floor beside me, shattering the floor tiles. It’s—what is it? It’s twelve feet tall and looks like it’s got a giant generator or an engine of some kind as a torso, hydraulic shafts for arms and legs, and clawlike metal skeletons for hands and feet. Its head is much too small for the rest of its body, and in a second or two, I realize this is because its head appears to be a radar gun, whirring and clicking at me like a bird.
I draw out the hilt of the nanoblade and let it form as I step forward. The monster matches my advance with steps backward, and it’s always one lunge away from the blade. I get frustrated, which is dumb, so I switch tactics, which is dumber, and brace myself for a spring forward, sword over my head.
The second I drop into a crouch, it sees an opening and backhands me in the ribs. Then it picks me up, spins me around, and sends me through an abandoned sunglasses kiosk. My hands lash out to grab the tarpaulin covering it as I go flying by, and I just succeed in pulling the whole thing over on top of me.
While I’m trying to get the stupid thing off me, I see the sword land on the floor ten yards away. It slides right through the floor as if it were made of hot butter. Only when the hilt hits the tiles does it stop its downward momentum.
I feel the ground shake under my cheek before I can hear the footsteps of the junk monster pounding toward me. I somehow find the reserved strength to push myself up and the kiosk off me. I roll to one side, grabbing the tarp in one fist as I go, and I am on my feet before the monster smashes its fists into the tile with ear-ringing crashes.
I manage to loop one end of the tarp over its left fist and use it to yank myself inward and upward inside its grasp to its upper torso. I bash this thing’s radar head over and over again with my foot until it snaps off and goes flying away in a shower of sparks.
Finally its free hand gets ahold of the back of my shirt and pulls me off, bouncing me across the ground like a basketball. By the time I roll to a stop and get back up, it’s already freed itself from the tarp and found its radar gun head on the ground, as if it can see without its single lens for an eye.
With both claws it holds the radar gun over its, uh, shoulders. Out of the base of the thing, below the radar gun, a series of cables and tendrils snake out and go inside the sensor and pull it back down to rest on top of its torso like a crude neckless head. I can see a cloud of nanites briefly swarm around it as it does so.
So. What is this, another prototype Bloodshot? I’m not sure if these eggheads stayed awake in biology class, but this isn’t usually how evolution is supposed to work, sending the older generations to take out the newer models.
Still, I’m more than willing to school any fools if I have to. The junk bot punches its left fist into its right claw—adorable—and rushes me. I start rushing at it in return but dodge to one side just before we’re on top of each other so I can push off the railing of the nearby staircase with one foot and leap over the thing. The only sound it makes is the whirring of hydraulics as its arms reach out and fail to grab me. It doesn’t make any cry—it doesn’t have a mouth—so my own breathing and grunts as I move sound deafening in my ears. Two somersaults through the air bring me within reach of the floor where the nanosword hilt is sticking out. I grab it as I start my pinwheel descent, land on knee and foot, and yell, “Over here, Junky!”
It turns around and, seeing the sword in my hand, seems, as near as I can tell, to advance on me with a little more caution, though it keeps advancing nonetheless. I have its movements timed pretty well, though. Now I can see the armor plating at the center of its stomach and all the power cables rushing to it from other parts of its body.
I wait until it’s nearly on top of me before I strike. It throws out a jab with one fist, but I’m pivoting outside its arm, bringing my blade down and cutting it in half with a crackle of lightning. It’s not human; it doesn’t react to losing a limb any more than it would to hearing an unkind word. It throws a cross with its remaining claw but doesn’t get anywhere close to my hand before my sword streaks upward and severs its arm at its piston elbow.
The thing tries to retreat then, but its step back is nowhere near fast enough. I leap forward and plunge the nanosword, for which nothing is truly “armored,” into the armored plate in the center of its chest. Its legs immediately start twitching and whirring spasmodically. When I twist the hilt and turn the blade horizontally, it starts to fall to one side.
When I bring the sword out in a flat plane and cut its torso in half, the robot falls into two pieces.
The crash of its landings is still ringing in my ears and the empty mall when I lean over to open what remains of its chest plate. I am curious what power source brings to life this bargain-basement killer robot.
What I see is a small compartment swiftly filling up with several streams of black sand. The little pile grows more and more distinct, five small piles and one really big one, until the various streams merge with each other and start forming bones, blood vessels, muscles, and tendons. For its final trick, it completely covers itself in chalk-white skin. With less time than it takes me to breathe again, the nanites have re-formed themselves into my missing hand.
A long, extended golf clap begins, a hateful sound. It summons my attention to the central atrium of the mall, where, standing under pale moonlight seeping in from the giant skylight overhead, is a man in a gray suit with slightly lighter gray highlights. As he comes forward, it becomes clearer that I’ve seen his face before: high cheekbones, slicked-back widow’s peak with white temples, deeply recessed eyes, an almost comically strong jawline.
“Ray, do you recognize me? I know you’ve been through a lot the last couple of days, but I am hoping you do.”
I can’t say he’s actually triggering any memories, but his face is immediately recognizable.
Because it is my own.
“Hello, Dad,” I say.