Chapter Text
As claws tore away at the sheltering roof, N felt his thoughts descend into panicked chatter.
This isn’t happening. This is just a nightmare, like all the ones before.
But the emerging chorus of screams, the hail of debris as Disassembly Drones broke through, and the first acrid scent of spilled oil couldn’t be denied.
This was real.
By instinct, he drew Uzi protectively to his chest. He scanned the invaders for any familiar faces. This wasn’t his squadron.
This was every squadron on Copper Nine.
“The cores!” Mr. Doorman yelled over the pounding blaster fire of the WDF officers.
“Aim for their cores!”
Another round of shots, another deadly flock struck down. But they would not be stopped, skittering over the gym ceiling and walls like hornets storming an enemy hive.
The first place where the ceiling entirely gave way was over the stage. Most of the band scrambled to safety, but Lizzy and Thad weren’t fast enough.
A hulking male Disassembler snatched Thad from behind his drum set and started to take to the air. Lizzy swung her mic stand like a club, batting the attacker away and forcing him to drop her brother.
The Disassembler opened his wings, sending bladed feathers flying toward the siblings, pinning them down to the stage.
Before he could attack again, Uzi was charging forward. N raced after her. He’d been barely more than a child since the last time he was in a real fight. It didn’t matter. He was willing to die for this colony. His friends. His family.
"Hey!” Uzi yelled, drawing away the Disassembler's attention. “The fight’s down here!”
“Zi, what are you doing?” Thad gasped, pained by the blades in his arm and shoulder.
“Do you have a death wish or something, Doorman?!” Lizzy hissed, struggling to pull a blade out of her leg. “Run!”
The male Disassembler laughed at Uzi, a guttural sound like jagged metal tumbling over itself. “You? You'd barely be two bites!”
“Then come down here and bite me!”
Uzi glanced at N and made a clear gesture to the stage: Help them.
The Disassembler sprang at Uzi with a swipe of his claws. She jumped clear, back toward the stage curtains.
“Come on!” she taunted. “You’ll never catch me with lame moves like that!”
Fear for Uzi pulsed through him when he jumped onto the stage, but he trusted her. And his friends needed him.
“Sorry, guys. This is going to hurt!”
He began pulling the blades free, one by one, until Lizzy and Thad were able to stand up.
On the ground, Uzi had managed to provoke the Disassembler into a fury of blind slashing. One swipe grazed her stomach.
A bloom of oil slowly grew wider on her dress.
Taking up one of the discarded blades, N threw it at her attacker with all his strength, burying it in between the shoulder blades.
The Disassembler turned to hiss at him.
Still trying to keep his attention on her, Uzi laughed. The sound was hollow to anyone who knew her.
“See? That's good aim! You couldn't hit the broad side of a cargo cruiser!”
The attacker growled. He swung his tail around to strike with the deadly nanite stinger at the end. Uzi leapt out of the way, revealing that she’d been standing in front of an amp.
The stinger lodged in deep. Ripples of electricity raced up and down the convulsing body of their would-be killer as he was electrocuted. Finally, he collapsed to the ground, FATAL ERROR blazing from his dead visor.
Uzi hunched over with a relieved huff, arms wrapped around her bleeding abdomen.
“I can't believe that worked.”
“You knew about the amp?” N asked in disbelief.
“Well, yeah. Wasn’t totally sure it would work, but I had to try.”
“Jeez, Doorman, you really are crazy,” Lizzy said, she and her brother leaning on each other for support. “You’re officially allowed to be my friend now.”
“Uzi Doorman!” Nori’s voice cut sharply through the chaos as she approached, using her power to fling enemies out of her path. She was already tearing strips of fabric from her long dress to wrap around her daughter as makeshift bandages.
“You're hurt! Don't you have enough sense to run away when you hear an evacuation alarm?!”
She gently took Uzi’s arm to lead her away. “Come on, we're getting you out of here!”
She looked at the rest of them. “Same goes for all of you! Get to the tunnels now!”
“Don’t have to tell us twice,” Lizzy said, helping Thad down from the stage and guiding him to where the chaperones held open the doors.
Teacher ran past them, tormenting a fallen and glitching Disassembler with a storm of white foam from his fire extinguisher.
“Taste carbon dioxide justice!” he cackled, moving on to his next target.
Lizzy blinked. “Huh. Didn't think he had it in him.”
N scanned the fleeing crowd for his parents’ faces, a surge of panic tearing through him when he couldn't see them. He didn't have to go far before he felt a frantic grip on his arm.
“Novah!” His mom exhaled shakily. “Oh, thank goodness!”
“I'm sorry,” he said, bringing them both into a relieved embrace. “But my friends were in trouble, I couldn't let–”
“We saw,” his dad said. “But we have to hurry, we can’t stay here!”
A few minutes into the attack, and casualties were already piling up. Drones crying out for their lives were swept away. These poor souls would never be seen again, or were destined to become part of the corpse spire.
The WDF were dealing out their share of damage, but they still fell like tin soldiers as they clashed against the waves of enemies. The floor grew dark with widening pools of oil.
Nori was trying to lead her daughter to an exit, but Uzi wouldn’t be led. She broke away and, before Nori could say a word, knelt to scoop up the weapon from a fallen WDF officer.
"I’m sorry,” she heard Uzi whisper gently as she took the blaster from his lifeless hands into her own.
Distracted by the heavy swarm, Nori thought, Robo-God, how are there so many?
She called on her Solver power to lift a heavy overturned refreshment table. The Disassembly Drones were immune to the touch of the Solver, since they were already infected themselves.
Their surroundings were a different story.
She swung the table like a battering ram, smashing two Disassemblers fatally against the wall. Another dived towards her, only to be shot out of the air.
She turned to thank her rescuer, only to be appalled to find Uzi holding a blaster.
“What do you think you’re doing? Get down to the shelter!”
“I’m not leaving you!”
Uzi fired again, this time striking the core of a Disassembler that had been sneaking up on Khan.
He was so focused on trying to protect the crowd, Nori doubted he would have noticed the threat in time. She’s a good shot, she thought.
Looking at her daughter, Nori was reminded of when Uzi had been a child, plagued by night terrors of being left behind. Though still too young for this in Nori's eyes, Uzi had grown into someone willing to fight those fears with all she had.
She wished her daughter would run to safety.
But she couldn’t deny a tiny glimmer of pride to be fighting alongside her.
“If we survive this, we are having a serious talk, young lady!”
Uzi glanced at the spinning purple light at her mother’s fingertips. “Will it finally include an explanation of that?”
“Don’t push it.”
Nori had never been entirely honest about the source of her power, saying only that it was the result of being experimented on by the humans for so long. She'd fought all these years to hide that part of her past, so it wouldn’t infect Uzi’s future.
It seemed confessions would have to be made sooner rather than later.
Nori brought down the garlands still hanging from the ceiling and used them to ensnare a group of flying Disassemblers, lining them up for core shots.
As the fight wore on, she noticed something off about this raid. She’d feared that the Solver had sent its murder puppets for Uzi and Doll, or even herself and Yeva. But they were treating them like any other prey.
They were after something else.
“Damn it!” Khan swore. “It’s not enough! They've made it into the residential compound!”
N and his family had nearly reached an exit when he heard a familiar humming noise.
Oh, no.
It was a sound he remembered well. One of the invaders was armed with a concussion blaster.
There was one timeless instant when it felt like all air and sound had been pulled out of the room.
An explosion set the world spinning the wrong way on its axis. His head struck the floor with a painful crack, and his vision went dark.
N didn’t know how long he lay unconscious. When he came to, a scene of carnage greeted him.
The dead far outnumbered the living, Worker and Murder Drone alike. Anyone who was able still carried on fighting. Jagged chunks of concrete and rebar littered the ground like icebergs on the ocean.
And there was no sign of his parents.
No, N thought, fearful cold clutching at his heart.
This was all wrong. They never would have left him.
The thought of losing them set off a deadly rage within him, one he hadn't known he was capable of feeling.
He snatched a heavy male Disassembler right out of his swoop and dragged him up to look into his eyes. Even though he had a Worker body now, he was far from weak.
”Where are they?!” he roared in the intruder’s face. The Disassembler showed no understanding. There was only hunger.
In the corner of his mind that still contained some sense, he knew the intruder wouldn't know what he meant. It wasn't lost on him that this was a reflection of his past self.
Maybe, in another life, this monster had been a simple Worker drone.
Right now, N didn’t care. All he loved might be lying dead somewhere in this compound.
An enraged scream tore from his throat.
N swung the Disassembler into a sharp chunk of fallen debris, piercing him right through the heart.
FATAL ERROR.
Breathing hard, he took off running in search of his parents.
He barreled through the residential compound, eerily quiet and empty after the turmoil of the gym. The silence broke as he passed an apartment with its door torn away. He could hear a man's terrified pleading from inside.
To his pounding head, it sounded like his dad’s voice. He bolted inside and found Doll’s family.
They were cornered by a female Disassembler with short hair. Her back was to him.
Miss Yeva was bleeding heavily. No less injured, Mister Adam was huddled over his wife in an attempt to shield her.
Doll stood in front of her parents, holding a broken length of pipe as a meager weapon.
He thought he saw red flashes sparking around her fingers, but that must have been his concussion at work.
The female Disassembly Drone licked the oil from her claws.
“And yet,” she said lightly, “I still feel nothing.”
She pulled back for another swing.
N wasn’t even thinking anymore. He ran and tackled her, sending them both tumbling into the wall. Maybe the only reason it worked was because she wasn’t expecting it.
“Novah!” Doll exclaimed, shocked. “Are you all right?”
Struggling to hold down the Disassembler, N pleaded, “Have you seen my parents?”
“No. I’m sorry.”
Miss Yeva was gathering up her family. “Thank you,” she said to him tearfully.
“It’s okay. Now run!”
“What about you? Come with us!”
“Not until I find them! Please hurry, all of you!”
As the family hurried to safety, the female Disassembler managed to toss N away from her and stand up. He got a clear look at her face.
“V?!”
The “x” disappeared from her visor, replaced by confused yellow eyes.
“N?” she gasped. “No, you can’t be…J told me what she did.”
She squeezed her eyes shut and smashed a fist against her forehead.
“Damn it, Cyn! What kind of game is this?! Now you're showing me his ghost?!”
“No, V, please! There’s no time to explain! You have to help me stop this!”
“If you were really N, you’d know the hunt is never over until we have the oil we need.”
“This colony is my family!”
“Then I’m sorry for you, whoever you are.”
He heard a familiar voice call his name from afar. He felt his stomach drop.
“Uzi, stay away! It's not safe!”
“N, hold on!”
She jumped into the apartment between him and V. From the edge of his vision, he saw Nori wasn't far behind her.
Uzi took aim with the blaster she carried, charging up for another shot.
V's eyes were again replaced by the hungry “x”. She grinned with dripping fangs. Her right hand shifted into a gun, taking aim squarely at Uzi.
“No!”
N threw his arms tight around Uzi, trapping the still-uncharged blaster between them. He spun so that his back was to V.
Stunned, V stood down immediately.
“Cyn?” she said, almost in a whisper. “Why are you showing me this?”
A purple explosion announced Nori’s arrival, throwing V across the room. She picked herself up and shook her ringing head.
“Ugh, you pests are so not worth it,” she sneered. She spread her wings and blasted her way to freedom, shooting her way back to the open sky.
Nori looked over the two young Drones. “Are you kids okay?”
N could only nod, overwhelmed into silence.
“What was that?” Uzi asked, looking curiously into his eyes. “Who was that?”
N swallowed hard. “One of my old squad members.”
Uzi's eyes turned to purple rings.
“Was she the one who hurt you that night?!”
“No, that was–”
“Memory lane later, please,” Nori said, pulling them both after her.
“We’re sweeping for survivors.” She was trying her best to keep her voice even. “We’ll find your folks, don’t worry.”
Silently they picked through the apartments. Sometimes they discovered Drones huddled fearfully in corners. Sometimes they just found bodies. They were about to descend to the next level when a clawed hand plunged from the ceiling and pulled N upward.
He crashed through level after level until he'd been dragged onto the rooftop. When his eyes finally focused again, it was on the face that most often haunted his nightmares.
“What do you know?” J said, her tone indescribably bored. “She was right.”
N was once again young and alone, screaming as J tore him to pieces in a blind rage.
I'm going to die. It was a wordless cry right from his core.
What kept his sanity from disintegrating under the weight of fear were her words.
“She?” he gasped.
“Tessa wants you back, Robo-God knows why. And I won’t let her down.”
N shook his head. “No. No, that's not right. Tessa–”
”Shut up!” J spat, pulling him along. Her wings were open, ready to carry him off. N dug in his heels, dragging tracks through the concrete rooftop.
“I'm not going with you!” he hissed, teeth gritted. He struck her arm, hard, loosening her grip. “Never again!”
J laughed coldly. “You think you can stop me?”
A blaster shot struck J in the chest, just shy of being lethal. N looked back to see Uzi and Nori climbing up through the torn building.
“Maybe he can't,” Nori snarled, her Solver power twirling around her fingertips. “But we sure as hell will.”
Uzi was already powering up for another shot. From the way she was lining up, this one was not going to miss.
J tapped something on the side of her head. “Attention all squadrons! Tactical retreat! Say again, this is a tactical retreat! Abort mission!”
She beat her wings hard, disappearing into a sky that had no right to seem so peaceful.
She was followed by a horde of Disassembly Drones, their bladed wings glinting in the moonlight.
They were gone, just as quickly as they’d arrived.
N's knees gave way beneath him.
Uzi was at his side, resting her forehead on his shoulder.
“It was her?” she asked.
Chest still trembling with panic, N managed a shaky nod.
Nori knelt beside them and wrapped her arms around them both. “It's over. Breathe, kids. Just breathe.”
They stayed in this embrace as long as they could. But they couldn't ignore the work still to be done. Gathering the survivors.
Collecting the bodies.
Everyone who was able lent their strength to this solemn task. Thad, Lizzy, Doll and their families had survived. Along with Teacher, Braiden, and even Rachel.
(“Pity,” Lizzy had muttered, but there was no malice in the comment.) No one would wish for additional dead. There were already plenty.
Feeling that he would go mad without work to do, if he stopped searching, N had volunteered to help clear the corridors of debris.
That's how he found them.
They must have been looking for him when a Disassembly Drone had crossed their path.
His father's body was draped over his mother's in a vain attempt at protection.
Time itself seemed to freeze at the sight before him.
There was so much spilled oil.
Nori, who had been working to clear the same corridor, found him in this awful scene. “Oh…oh, no,” she gasped. She caught him up in her arms (almost the way his mom used to) and tried to hide his face in the shoulder of her jacket. He heard Uzi arrive with a mournful cry. She threw her arms around him, as though to keep him from falling apart.
“Don't look, kid,” Nori said, and from the way she was trembling, N knew she was crying. “It's easier if you don't look."
“You had him!”
Shadow Tessa threw J violently across the landing pod, where she had been waiting for her prize to be delivered.
J's stomach hit hard against the control panel, knocking the breath out of her.
What was going on? Cyn always treated her like this, but never Tessa. Why would her best friend do this to her?
Shadow Tessa closed one hand around J's throat and lifted her from the floor, stopping just short of snapping her head off like an unwanted toy.
“You're telling me you had him in your hands, and you report back to me with nothing?!”
“It wasn't my fault,” J gasped. “We've never had a Worker colony fight back so hard before. And this one is protected by a couple of–” she coughed, her systems fighting for air.
“A couple of what?”
“Purple freaks! One of them has a power that's almost like Cyn's!”
Maybe it was because her oxygen was dangerously low, but J saw the shadows around Tessa's face flicker, like a mask briefly going transparent. What she saw beneath was the stuff of nightmares.
No. I'm not seeing this…
But then the mask was back in place. Shadow Tessa dropped her, hard. J gasped desperately, hand to her throat.
“Nori,” she hissed. “Why didn't I figure it out sooner? She always did give me such trouble.”
Shadow Tessa opened the landing pod doors, letting in the biting wind. She glanced over her shoulder at J, still wounded on the floor.
“You always were a disappointment.”
Then, in an upbeat tone, as she skipped into the eternal winter, “Fine, then. I'll do it myself.”
Two days later found N keeping vigil over his post in the infirmary, between the two cots where the broken bodies of his parents lay.
His heart kept time with the beeps of the life monitors. He watched their chests rise and fall with each shaky breath.
They're alive, he recited to himself again, as if in prayer. They're alive.
By now, he'd convinced himself that seeing J and V again had been some sort of hallucination. Nothing else mattered but what was happening in the present.
The infirmary was full to bursting. Miss Yeva had taken on work that previously had belonged to his mom.
Nori had been running herself ragged trying to rescue the most grievously injured, while Uzi and Doll tended to those with less serious wounds.
Each time she passed him, Uzi would look at him with concern, or give his arm a reassuring squeeze. The gesture meant more than he could say, but he was beyond comfort.
His hands moved in a mindless rhythm over his knees, folding bits of paper into yet more tiny cranes.
He remembered distantly his dad telling him a legend that some human children had once believed, that making a thousand paper cranes would grant a miracle.
He’d made a hundred so far. Only nine hundred more to go.
The little things were nestled in the folds of his parents’ infirmary blankets, in the shattered remains of their apartment. They were kept company by his dad’s suit, now air-drying after he’d finally scrubbed the last of the oil stains from the aged fabric.
How versatile clothing could be.
That simple gray suit had seen his parents' wedding.
His first dance with Uzi.
The funeral that the colony had held under the protection of sunlight hours ago.
The mourners had stood still and cold as the ice around them, the day too bright in contrast to the darkness of the thirteen graves awaiting their occupants.
There was no open shock or weeping. Disassembly Drones haunted their every waking moment. They were the monsters in stories told to dronelings.
The monsters had finally arrived at the door.
All that remained was the tired resignation of a fear that had finally come true.
Most of the dead were WDF officers. A few parents and students. At least one entire family.
The cemetery was a long walk south of the colony. The coffins were the original JC Jenson shipping containers that had first carried them to this planet, with the company logo defiantly blotted out with black paint.
It was one final message to their old owners. Though the Worker Drones had been designed to live as servants, they had died in freedom. It didn’t matter how the end had come.
Another landmark in the cemetery was a slab of sheet metal that had been planted to stand upright, with names crudely scratched into its surface. These were the names of the missing, who would never even have graves to visit.
Watching the procession, N had felt his insides twist painfully. This was the other side.
He, with oil-stained hands that would never be clean, had no right to be here.
How could he have ever thought that his sins would be left behind? Always they would find him; always they would bring suffering.
A frustrated roar from Nori brought him back to the here and now. She slapped her open hands against the 3d printer. “There’s not enough!”
“Not enough of what?” Miss Yeva asked.
“Everything! Oil, wiring, material for prosthetics, I just don’t have enough!”
She began gathering her coat and knapsack. “I’m going on another run.”
“Nori, it’s full dark!”
“I don’t care. This can’t wait.”
“I’m going with you,” N said. His tone, though not hostile, left no room for argument. That didn’t mean Nori wouldn’t try. “Novah, I’m not sure you’re ready.”
“They’re my parents. I’m going to save them. If you have to tear me apart to do that, I'll let you.”
“I’m going too,” Uzi declared. “Someone has to watch your backs.”
“Absolutely not!”
“Me too,” Doll spoke up, as if she hadn’t heard Nori. “Novah saved my family while he was still searching for his own. We would all be dead if not for him.”
Her red eyes met him with determination. “It’s the least I can do.”
“Count us in,” Thad volunteered, holding up his and Lizzy’s hands. He turned to N. “This is what families do, brother. We stick together, good times and bad.”
N could feel the static prickle of tears trying to break through. “Thanks, guys.”
“This is not happening!” Nori exclaimed. “How can I gather what I need when I have to babysit the bunch of you?”
Uzi pulled out the WDF blaster, which she had kept all this time. Nori squinted at it.
“Did you actually modify that thing into a railgun?!”
“Yep,” Uzi said, slinging it across her back. “Which means no babysitting required. We can handle ourselves. And you could use the extra help.”
Nori massaged her temples in irritation. “Robo-God help me, I'm being overruled by teenagers.”
Doll went to her mother, who placed a hand on her cheek and muttered a quick blessing.
N gave his parents each a kiss on the forehead before heading out.
“It's going to be all right. I promise.”
It was bleak work, salvaging parts from the piles of drone corpses scattered in the snow. Their knapsacks were slowly filling with the needed material, but the threat carried by the night had everyone on edge.
Uzi kept her eyes and weapon trained on the sky.
Doll tried to keep her focus on the mission, quietly reciting what sounded like Russian prayers to ground herself.
Thad got sick at one point. Lizzy helped him duck behind some debris and held him up until the bout of retching passed.
N hefted his bag higher onto his shoulder. Sifting through yet another pile of Drone parts, his heart began racing so hard he thought it might burst. His eyesight blurred until all he could see were his parents, barely clinging to life.
He collapsed screaming to his hands and knees, clawing furrows into the ground. The burning light of tears scalded his visor. There was a pressure on his chest that threatened to crush the life out of him.
Nori, who'd been standing closest to him, knelt by his side.
“Novah! Novah, what is it?”
"There’s so much pain!” he nearly shrieked. “Is this what we do to you? All this fear, all this grief?!
Their silence was answer enough.
"You should have left me to die out here that night," N sobbed. "Monsters like me shouldn't exist."
"Hey," Nori said firmly, taking his face between her hands. "You didn't do this, and this is not your fault. What would your family think if they heard you talking like this?”
An odd noise, like clanking misguided footsteps, destroyed whatever answer he might have given. A silhouette appeared some distance away, out of reach of the streetlamps.
“A human?” Thad exclaimed.
All of Nori's systems kicked into high alert.
“Kids, get behind me. That's no human.”
“Hello!” said the stranger in a too-chipper voice. “I believe you have something that belongs to me.”
Nori activated her Solver power. Beside her, she could hear Uzi readying her weapon to fire.
“Who are you and what do you want?!” Uzi demanded.
The stranger ignored her. “It's good to see you again, Nori. You've been putting up quite the fight since you got away from us.”
Recognition clicked at last. The human girl, with long hair and sad eyes that the Solver had so obsessed over. A quick scan showed that this was not the girl herself. Only her flesh, being worn as a costume by this cosmic abomination.
Nori felt acid rise in her throat.
“What have you done?!”
The Solver, in its vessel, did a little spin. “A lovely ensemble, isn't she?”
N, climbing unsteadily to his feet, was blinking again and again, as if struggling to clear his vision. “Tessa?”
“Hello, N. I’ve missed you so very much. It’s time to come home now.”
It made a gesture with its stolen hand, like a puppeteer pulling strings.
N cried out in agony and fell again to his hands and knees, trembling violently.
Slowly, impossibly, he began to change.
His body stretched, his limbs thickening from the slender build of a Worker Drone into the stronger, deadlier form of a Disassembly Drone. Lastly, a set of powerful bladed wings exploded from his back.
“N,” Uzi breathed, tears flickering down her visor.
This tiny sound drew the attention of both N and the Solver. Gone were the friendly yellow eyes they had known and loved for two years, replaced by that murderous glowing “x”.
The Solver tilted its head at an unnatural angle.
“Giggle. Almost forgot. Bonus prizes.”
A finger snap sent both Uzi and Doll reeling as if they’d been struck.
“No!” Nori cried out, rushing to gather her daughter in her arms.
“What’s going on?” Lizzy exclaimed, not bothering to hide the terror in her voice.
“You and Thad just stay back, no matter what happens next!”
Horrified, Nori tried to draw Doll closer as well. Both girls were screaming in anguish, just as N had done. Fangs were beginning to grow out, and, most painfully, bat-like wings and long tails.
“Fight it, girls, fight it,” Nori rambled desperately. “Hold on to your memories. Your names, your family, anything! If you hold onto who you are, it can’t take you!”
The frightened look Uzi gave her shattered Nori’s heart. “Mom, what is this? I’m so scared, and so-"
“Hungry,” Doll hissed. The button patch had long since fallen away, revealing the symbol of the Absolute Solver in all its horror. Nori dug in her bag for a drone limb and tossed it to Doll.
“You’re not going to like it, but it will help.”
It was true. A few sips of oil, and Doll’s visor was already clearing up. Uzi reacted with disgust, but eventually relented to drinking oil herself.
Nori turned back to the Solver. “I will burn you for this.”
“So scared. Trembling. Until then, they’ll be coming with me.”
Another flick of its wrist, this time met with an identical message on three screens: ADMIN BLOCK.
“What?”
Nori sneered. “You really think I didn't learn anything from my time stuck with you? These kids are patched, so you’ll never have full control, and they have me as their admin. I'll figure out some way to undo what you've done here. Point is, they’re not taking orders from you.”
“Oh well. One out of three isn’t bad.”
A ribbon of black ooze whipped out from the Solver girl’s back, wrapping around the still weak and disoriented N. By now, his visor had also cleared, but there was fear and confusion in his eyes. He didn’t even have strength to call out when the Solver girl, on her own oversized, twisted Disassembler wings, swept him away into the darkness.
He only reached out his hands, trying to clasp on to life as he knew it while it was torn away.
“No!” Uzi yelled as she chased after them. “You can't have him!”
She grunted in frustration as she beat her newly formed wings, trying to fly, only to tumble helplessly into the snow. When she looked up again, N and his captor had vanished.
“Give him back,” she pleaded to the night.
Nori knelt beside her daughter, embracing her.
Thad and Lizzy popped up from behind their shelter.
“What the hell just happened?!” Thad yelped.
Nori gave a tired sigh.
"Kids, it's going to be a long story.”
A safe distance from Outpost Three, V doubled over, hand clasped over her own mouth. She didn’t know if she was going to scream or be sick.
She had returned to this place to have another look at, and perhaps speak to, the Worker who looked so much like N.
But everything she had just witnessed had turned her beliefs upside down.
That Worker really had been N?
He’d been alive all this time, while Tessa had been dead?
Cyn's game was even more twisted than she could have imagined.
How much did J know? Did she know anything at all?
Yes, there would indeed be long stories tonight.
She took flight in search of them.