For Aminat, the first inkling is an excruciating pain, a headache to end all headaches, so exquisite that the AI notices.
Your vital signs show you to be in severe pain. Would you like me to deploy analgesia?
Kaaro is dead. She knows it. He died at home, with her half a mile out and unable to reach either him or Layi on the phone.
Aminat, you are crying from pain.
“No. I mean, yes, but it’s not my body that hurts.”
Would you like me to—
“Get me home as fast as possible. Code red.”
Confirm traffic ordinance override.
“Confirmed.”
He’s dead. He’s dead. I was supposed to protect him and he’s dead.
She takes the ring and slides it over her engagement finger.
The snot in her nose clogs up her breathing. She is cold and cannot get warm, no matter how high she turns up the climate control.
The car thunders along the roads, misses pedestrians by inches, arrives at the house. It’s surrounded by people and looks like it took a bomb hit, just like the houses next door.
Idle or park?
“Park, but alert. Radio for backup using my call sign.”
Purpose?
“Unknown at this time. Fatality involved. Go.”
Aminat bullies her way through the carnage, police jacket and badge being enough to command respect, although she is prepared to draw and use her sidearm if necessary. In the centre of destruction, Layi kneels, holding…
There’s no face. The upper jaw, a jagged part of the skull, an eye, some brain tissue holding on tenuously, the rest missing. And pyjamas that she recognises.
“Did you do this?” she asks Layi. “You’ve lost control before.”
Layi’s chest hitches and he shakes his head, but he cannot say anything.
“My darling…”
He is warm to the touch, and though it is a crime scene, and all her training screams otherwise, Aminat gathers him from Layi and weeps. She does not know how long she is there before a hush descends on the crowd around them.
“Sister.” Layi pokes her and she looks up.
Koriko.
“I have come for what is mine,” says Koriko. “I think you have mourned enough.”
“The shot took his brain out,” says Aminat.
“There’s still enough of it left,” says Koriko. “We can grow a full one from that.”
“You are not taking this body,” says Aminat. She stands, draws, and rests her gun against Koriko’s forehead, though her arm is not steady and her vision swims.
“I’m sorry. It amazes me that all of you, you humans, you all beg. Despite the fact that I have never once relented, despite the fact that you all know the agreement and reap the benefits thereof. I am sorry,” Koriko says. At this distance Aminat can smell her breath, which is like crushed jasmine. “All bodies are mine. That is the deal, and it was your idea in the first place, Aminat. There are no exceptions.”
“I’m sorry, which body were you talking about?” asks Layi.
The remnants of Kaaro’s skull glow with dazzling white heat, and the flame eats the neck, into the chest, and glows from within until, seconds later, all that remains is ash, this picked up by the night breeze and carried away to parts unknown.
Aminat could kiss him.
Koriko squints. “What manner of—”
Aminat pulls the trigger. A quarter of Koriko’s head bursts outwards and the crowd scatters, screaming at the blasphemy. She is about to fire again when a serpentine form wraps itself around her gun arm and stings her.
“You know this can’t hurt me,” says Koriko, disdainful of the missing parts of her head.
Layi steps in front of his sister. “Everything burns, says I.”
Koriko seems frozen to the spot, engulfed in blue flame, her flesh dropping off in sheets, then her skeleton blackening and falling, shattering.
“This won’t kill her,” says Aminat.
“No. But she has to build a new body, which takes time.”
“Go to the car. It’ll open for you.”
“What about you?”
“I have to get the dog,” says Aminat. “And one other thing.”
She finds everything she needs, changes into fresh armour, and they leave. She knows she will never again live in this house with Kaaro, yet she does not look back.