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Kara takes the gun because she is scared.
She takes the gun because rough fingers crack plastic neck panels and because a 198-pound red-ice-fueled rage would destroy an old AX400. Has destroyed. Will destroy again.
She takes the gun not because of how he will deactivate her, but because of how her deactivation will prevent her from protecting Alice.
She takes the gun and points it at Todd with a shaking voice but steady hands. Leave her alone.
She takes the gun and it is immediately batted out of her hands.
She takes the gun only to have to fight all the same. Scrambling limbs against hulking mass, get away get away get away. Better her than Alice, but she doesn’t want to die. Knocked down, on the floor, crawling, scraping, bruised white and dripping blue.
She takes the gun because he is about to kill her.
She kills him instead.
They flee into the night, and Kara takes the gun with them. There are greater threats than fractured fathers outside the chipped and pale yellow front door.
Neon lights reflect off rain-slicked bricks. Chill creeps under Kara’s panels and chassis and Alice folds inwards, shivering in the damp.
She takes the gun and threatens a supermarket clerk because he has something she and Alice need. Because he will not help her in clothes with a glowing blue armband and triangle. Because he will let a little girl freeze in winter rain.
Because the first time she took a gun, it brought them freedom, and maybe the second time it can bring them security.
It doesn’t.
She leaves empty-handed, and Alice looks at her with broken glass eyes and the same seeds of distrust she saw fully bloomed at Todd’s.
The fluid powering her biocomponents sludges stale and sour.
She keeps the gun, though, because even newly awakened, she knows (more than the child) that life does not always favor the kind.
She keeps the gun, clutches it tighter in the night as they search desperately for a place to stay.
She keeps the gun, and draws it for the third time that night when she rounds a corner to find Alice threatened at knifepoint.
The assailant has a low brow, jerky movements, and a wicked sharp blade.
“Touch a hair on her head and I’ll kill you.”
She has done it before. Looming, snarling, belt-clutching turned to collapsing, gaze-emptying, red-spilling.
“No, don’t hurt Ralph!”
The man is an android like her. Scared like her. Bearing mottled skin cracked through with pitch and cobalt scars.
She lowers the gun.
Ralph is excited to have guests. His smile leaps wide and movements sweep grand, inviting. Kara is cautious, but wants so desperately to trust.
There is something almost…innocent about Ralph. Something that reminds her of Alice, that makes her want to protect.
Until morning dawns, and it is the daytime drama to mirror last night’s fright.
He has the knife again, and they sit at a dining table, forced, familiar, unsettled, unsafe.
The gun presses against her back, but she does not draw. She is scared, but she knows the gun does not always guarantee safety.
Barbed wire snaps through her jaw, smile chipped and on the cusp of shattering.
Words are enough, this time.
And Ralph covers for them when the Deviant Hunter comes knocking.
She has the gun when they depart.
She has the gun, but it does nothing when she steps willingly into the metallic-armed trap. When memories blur, glitch, scrape away.
She loses the gun.
Loses herself.
She wanders darkened halls and does not know if they are real or in her mind. If the horrors are a nightmare or reality.
They are both.
Static and jittering, she lurches into consciousness, piece by jigsaw piece.
My name is Kara.
Dawn has not come to chase away the dark, so she brings the dawn to her.
The night erupts blood orange, house of horrors turned to ash and cinder.
Steel muscled giant looms, stolen shotgun in grip, carcass behind.
She shields Alice, because her own metal and internal wiring will slow a bullet more than the cold, thin air.
Kara does not have a gun.
The giant drops his.
He was trapped, as she was. Ashamed to have stood by, to have hurt them with inaction and duty-bound order execution.
Kara thinks of prim clasped hands at stale hot hollers, thinks of swinging fists and yes, Todd’s.
Luther wanted only to protect and took the gun to stop their torturer. Kara understands, more than most.
They leave the house behind, but the haunting follows.
The car breaks down in a blizzard. Scalding engine steams, ghostly fingers evaporating in ice pick flurries.
Refuge takes the shape of an abandoned amusement park, frosted icicles on gap-toothed grins, plaster skulls, and faux wood masts.
In the tavern, she wraps Alice as snuggly as one can with moth-eaten curtains. Luther gives Alice a goodnight kiss, awkward and lumbering and genuine.
Wood fire pop-crackles in a decrepit tavern, and their story sounds nicer as a bedtime fairy tale.
Alice asks how it ends.
Kara wishes she knew.
Hope—a small price to say, far greater in belief to pay.
Alice rejects it, because she knows better now, too.
Stories always have happy endings… But real life isn't like that.
Kara knows. She wishes Alice didn’t have to.
When shadowed figures beat down doors and break windows with ungainly frost-abraded limbs, it almost shouldn't be a surprise. But no matter how many monsters she faces, fear frissons electric and stomach sinks cold.
Kara lunges for Alice and pulls her behind her. She allows Luther to go for the gun stashed in his bag.
(If she had gone straight to Alice instead of the gun on that stormy night, perhaps the little one would not know the sting of a belt buckle on tender flesh.)
But the Jerries are not Todd, are delighted at the sight of Alice with an innocent joy that echoes of bright, scarred smiles and come, come!
Carousel lights dance across snow and night, daffodil luminescence blooming life from white bones.
In the quiet and the sight of a rare smile, Kara dreams that real life can have happy endings.
Reality reasserts itself as a gunshot wound to the gut.
“LUTHER!”
Alice’s shriek could shatter glass.
(Kara’s heart might as well be considered such.)
“You're gonna have to finish the journey without me…”
Death rattle words. How she hates hates hates—
The policeman is dead, too. Adam is cursing, accusing, even as thirium paints the floor blue and Luther is still speaking and she wishes Adam would just shut up.
Alice looked at Luther like he hung the moon and now she looks like it has fallen from the sky and Kara only wants a moment of peace, wants to return to frosted carousel lights and warm fire good-nights.
“I was just a machine. You made me part of a family…”
Liquid clogs her sight, throat clenching tight. Gears grate, scrape, unhook, and something is about to overload but she can’t afford to fall apart, not when Alice is clutching Luther’s too-still form and drowning in folds of grief.
Not when Rose returns, reminding of the unsympathetic march of time and the pressure of survival.
Get yourselves ready. We leave tonight.
There is a gaping hole in the frozen air as they trudge toward the freighter.
There is an aching hole when they sit fireside once more.
There is a quaking hole when she finds out the truth. When an unknown android reassures Kara of her and Alice’s love for one another.
How would you know?
Luther knew.
The thought comes as she stares blankly at the circling blue LED at the not-Alice’s temple.
He always knew.
Warm hands and deep chuckles and serious I need to talk to you about Alice’s.
He never cared that she was an android. Protected and cared for her just the same.
Kara will too.
She is tested in this when metal groans echo and choppers swirl-slice the air and boots and gunmetal invade the freighter.
Chaos reigns, as it always has.
Feet fly, Alice’s hand clutched in hers. Harried by deep shouts and acrid gunpowder and thudding bodies.
Thick yellow door clangs shut. Kara slams the lock closed, only for renewed pounding on its other side.
“Open up! Open up, they're coming! Please open the door!”
Kara promised she would protect Alice.
“She'll die out there, Kara!” Alice pleads, “Open it! Open the door!”
And Kara is forcibly reminded of how Luther helped them when he did not know them, when he did not need to. She is reminded of a scarred and scared android that helped them when he did not know them, when he did not need to.
“They're going to kill me! I'm begging you, please! Open up! Let me in!”
Kara opens the door.
A soldier follows the desperate android inside.
She stumbles back, caught off guard. Frantic, contained space, armor, masked, get the gun away, swinging, ducking, shoving, stay away from Alice—and she’s on the floor again, and this part is familiar, but this is SWAT and not Todd, and this time an automatic rifle is coming for her head and—
She reboots to the rumble of an army truck and tremulous whispers.
Alice hovers, twisting mauve and grey sleeves. Kara pulls herself to her feet, holds the child snuggly against her.
A container full of androids should only smell of plastic and metal, but the stench of fear hangs heavy, thick, choking.
They are taken to a recycling plant, and guns line the silhouette of every soldier in sight.
They are stripped of dress and dermis. Bone white bodies, two steps from the grave.
Alice is torn from her side and screams shred Kara’s throat. Gunmetal strikes harder against deactivated skin.
Red lights blur before her and static screams fill the android communication system. Uneasy susurrations and sudden silences.
The drones have guns, too. Whirring, darting, barking orders. Recorded voices mechanic, forceful, fatal. Noncompliance earns the androids punctured chassis and weeping wounds. Some deadly, some not. That, more than anything, reveals the truth.
They are already dead.
Two steps from the grave. Skeletons held together by string, trapped in a razor-edged world.
There is no remorse from the humans, no feeling at all. Perhaps irritation, if an android delays. They keep their killing on a schedule.
Can’t be late.
The thought makes her want to giggle. It sputters out at the base of her ribs.
She thinks of Alice and wide brown eyes and bedtime stories that aren’t really bedtime stories.
Stories always have happy endings, but real life isn’t like that.
No, their ending can't hardly be happy, after everything they have been through.
But it won’t end like this.
Kara strides through the camp, swift and unafraid.
She avoids the drones and finds Jerry, who directs her to another Jerry. She finds Alice and forces her way back to her side.
They are one step from the grave.
Standing in line, Atropos snipping threads short-short-shorter. A regular interval demise.
Ralph is there, in another line. Midnight blue scar slashing across a sea of white.
Ralph can help you to escape… You only have to ask Ralph… and Ralph will help you.
There is a barbed-wire fence she thinks she and Alice can climb past.
The line shortens.
They'll kill you if you try anything, she warns Ralph.
Snip. Snip. Snip.
As if they are not all about to die soon anyway.
Ralph knows that… But if the little girl is free, it's a little bit like if everyone was free…
A crowbar cracks her chest panels wide open at that, pries apart synthetic organs.
She thinks of Alice. Her brave little girl. Walking through fire barefoot, poison thorns scraping across synthskin, yet always always always willing to help someone in need because it’s the right thing to do.
She thinks of Luther and the lengths he went to in order to keep Alice alive, safe, and loved. Broke his programming for her, provided for her, died for her.
She thinks of belabored breaths of family, thinks of goodnight kisses and we’ll be together forever, won’t we, Kara?
She signals Ralph.
Then she sprints for the wire fence with Alice.
She hears Ralph yell and doesn’t dare look back. If she looks back she might go back and she can’t, she can’t, she can’t, freedom is just on the other side of the fence. There’s a truck with deactivated piles of androids and if they can escape undetected, if they can sneak aboard unseen, if they can just make it past this fence—
Kara guides the little one’s small body through the gap, pulling back barbed metal teeth. Alice drops outside the camp and Kara braces her hands on the lip of the barrier to follow.
“Don’t move.”
Kara stills, locks eyes with Alice’s—wide and round and full of fear.
Inhale. Exhale.
She turns around, shoulders set, jaw iron. The guard has a gun.
“Go, Alice." She stares past the automatic rifle, straight at the blank grey helmet.
Alice protests, but the sound is distant, submerged.
This is it.
She stalks, prowls closer to the guard that should have shot when he had the chance because she has had enough.
Kara is done running.
She takes the gun, because she is not afraid.
She takes the gun, and wrenches it aside, grappling with the masked and muscled man.
He throws her off, but she lunges for it again.
She twists, turns, and he knocks her down, but he has another thing coming if he expects her to stay down.
She never stays down.
She takes the gun, and knocks him down.
She takes the gun, and presses it against his throat.
She takes the gun, and keeps pressing, pressing, pressing, metallic bar to windpipe until there’s a snap and a limpness and a stillness.
She escapes.
Small hand fits puzzle piece perfect in hers, and they slip into the night.
Kara leaves the gun because she has no more need of it.
Kara leaves the gun because it, not she, belongs with the bones.
Kara leaves the gun
because
she is done letting fear rule her life.