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The server racks stretch almost endlessly into the distance, blinking intermittently as Jihoon strolls past, pistol casually dangled from her left hand. She aims the gun off into the distance, arm swinging up to eye level, and tilts her head, in that curious fashion that means nothing good—for the mission, or for Kiin.
Kiin clears her throat pointedly into her headset, knees tucked to her chest as she glowers at the screens surrounding her, and Jihoon turns, eyes searching for the cameras.
They aren’t hard to find, Kiin’s consciousness slotted easily into the heart of Kingdom’s surveillance system, and she shifts into the closest one to blink at Jihoon from the ceiling, the indicator’s violet glow starting to pulse irregularly.
“Stick to the plan,” she says, voice an odd echo, before pulling herself from the camera entirely and shredding its connection to the network.
Jihoon grins, turning on her heel to lock her eyes on another camera. “How’s the ship, Kiinie? Having fun up there without me?”
Kiin turns her down to near silence, and exhales a soft breath as her nanoswarms skitter along the exposed gridlines of the data center. She doesn’t need to collect much. She has no use for the outdated blueprints and forgotten protocols stored in this particular facility.
Kiin already knows their weaponry—after all, it used to be her own. She’s just here to gather intel that would lead them to other research centers, to search for any mention of the mysterious vault that produces Kingdom’s mechanical armies, and to keep the dropship undetected as it hovers over the facility.
And, probably, to make sure that Jihoon gets out alive.
Kiin lets her eyes slip shut, awareness settling back into one of her bots, and her many legs tap against cold steel as she clambers up a shelf to peer at the console in front of her. She can’t imagine there’s anything of value stored in yet another standard unit, but Jihoon hasn’t found the mainframe yet, and Kiin’s getting bored. One of her legs whirs, and she stabs through the metal casing with a loud crunch, reaching down until she touches wiring. She chews through files as she scans them, numbers and crude diagrams and abandoned experiments purged from the database with barely a thought, and quickly yanks her leg free again with a dissatisfied sigh at the clutter.
Beside her, Jihoon’s hand reaches down, and Kiin can’t leap away in time.
“Kiinie,” Jihoon chirps happily, voice echoing through the facility. “What a nice surprise.”
Jihoon has her bot pinched carefully between her thumb and forefinger, close enough that the light from the sensors casts an indigo glow over her face, and the gold in her eyes shimmers with her smile.
Kiin’s nanoswarms aren’t built for combat, but the radianite-mutated spiders she had modeled them after had needle-like limbs they would use to skewer their prey, and Kiin had always rather liked the design.
Her systems hum a warning—smoke detected, they beep, unusual temperature readings along outer framework—and Kiin curls her legs up, stabbing for Jihoon’s exposed palm.
Jihoon’s eyes spark with that volatile light, the air around her fingers snap igniting into flame, and Kiin opens her eyes in another bot, the metal fragments of her previous nanoswarm smoking steadily on the floor. Somewhere in the distance, an alarm starts to sound, and Kiin gazes dispassionately at Jihoon as she pouts up towards Kiin’s new perch on the shelf.
“Kiinie, that’s loud.”
“Two minutes,” Kiin says, shuffling through the facility’s cameras until she finds the source of the commotion, and sees the FORCE ATLAS soldiers already swarming through the halls. “I’m not landing the ship for you.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t dream of it.” Jihoon stretches, fingers laced over her head as she lets her back arch, muscles tensing with every slow movement. She hops up onto a nearby crate, legs swinging, and her hands drift to her ears, carefully adjusting her headphones. “You got everything you needed here, yeah?”
She smiles at Kiin’s responding exasperated scoff, fingers still pressed over her ears, head bobbing lightly to the beat of an imaginary song. No matter how much she complains, Kiin doesn’t let her listen to music on missions, and her headphones are still Kiin’s creation.
“Blow up my headphones again and you’re fixing them yourself,” Kiin announces, and Jihoon just blinks at her innocently.
It’s a lost cause. Jihoon knows it grates on Kiin, that though every new model she finalizes is that much more blast-resistant than the last, Jihoon still manages to find the chink in the armor. Kiin has half a mind to just offer her a chunk of reinforced titanium next, curious to see how fast Jihoon could shatter through solid metal.
“You planning on helping, Kiinie?”
Honestly, Jihoon’s lucky enough that she’s even sticking around to watch.
Kiin rolls to her back, and the steel plates of her belly open to send a tiny anchor straight up into the cracked tiles of the ceiling. The hooks burrow into the metal, connected to the body of the nanobot by a thin tether, and Kiin reels herself up into the air, spinning lazily past Jihoon’s head. Her legs tuck in close to the monofilament as Jihoon pokes curiously at the fiber, and Kiin sends a quick burst of static arcing from the metal.
Jihoon yanks her finger back at the shock. “Owie.”
“No whining,” Kiin says monotonously, legs uncurling to splay out against the ceiling, and she adjusts the camera of the bot until the entire room is in her view. Her sensors cycle, dropping visible light detection as she sends a low pulse of energy through the nearby rooms, and receives only blurry outlines of the soldiers in response.
“Twenty seconds, Jihoonie.”
Jihoon’s leg bounces on the crate, the only sign of acknowledgement she offers, and she pulls the pistol from her hip, fingers tracing experimentally over the barrel.
It’s disgustingly performative. Jihoon’s a terrible shot.
Still, when the soldiers pile into the room, they see the ghost in her hands, and their immediate shouts overlap in Kiin’s audio detectors.
“Weapons down,” one of the soldiers barks, and Kiin lets her nanoswarm go still and silent on the ceiling as she wiggles her consciousness easily into his earpiece.
Someone else’s voice, grainy and distorted over the comms, buzzes in her ears.
Fly in a web, Kiin thinks to herself, and clips the bulk of the recording for later, static popping loudly through the earpiece. The soldier stiffens. Across the room, Jihoon’s smile only widens.
“They want you dead,” Kiin informs her, and Jihoon tilts her head at the soldiers, fingers still petting over the pistol in her lap.
“Weapons down, or we shoot,” the soldier orders again, and Kiin sighs, reawakening in the nanobot just in time for Jihoon to toss her a questioning look, neck craning back to stare at the ceiling.
“Kingdom wants you alive. Because they’re all idiots.”
Jihoon coughs delicately, movements unhurried as she lifts the gun in her palms and tosses it to the floor. It cracks against the floor, sliding along the tiles, and Jihoon raises her hands again, a mockery of surrender.
Kiin’s job would be easier if Jihoon wasn’t such a show-off. Kiin’s made for stealth, for quiet recon missions and clean extractions, not babysitting duties for a ticking time bomb.
Still, as Kiin settles back flush against the ceiling, camera sharpening on Jihoon as she sits alone on the crate, regal and as unbothered as ever—still, Kiin finds herself somewhat entertained.
“Anyone else in the building?” Jihoon asks, fingers wiggling in the air as she keeps her hands by her head. The faint light of the terminals behind her highlights all the dust in the air, kicked up by Jihoon’s casual hop onto the splintered crate, by her legs, crossed at the ankle so she can grind the heel of her boot into the peeling wood. The haze had long since settled over the facility in a fine layer, and already it recollects itself on Jihoon’s shoulders.
“No,” Kiin says, just as the soldiers tell Jihoon to shut up, they’re taking her in, and thin tendrils of smoke start to curl up from her fingertips.
It bleeds out from her fingers in a silvery stream, Kiin’s sensors picking up a faint hiss starting to sizzle in the background, and Jihoon drifts a hand down to her mouth, lips parting as she brings her fingers close, tucked together as if pinched around an invisible cigarette. The smoke coils loosely around her, thinning as she inhales. She’s looking at Kiin, but her eyes are the first to leave, sliding away to fix themselves somewhere behind the soldiers. They burn golden as Kiin watches, sees her head tilt a fraction further, and then the smoke ghosts back out from her lips as she purses them together, presses a kiss to her fingertips, and flicks it outward. Tiny sparks crackle in the silver clouds, leaping between her fingers for barely a moment before igniting, and the room detonates around her.
Back in the dropship, Kiin pulls herself upright in her seat, straightening her posture and wincing at the dull ache that pulses at the back of her neck. She blinks at the spots in her vision. Fire blooms across the surface of her retinas, a memory of incineration, consumed in a flash by the swelling sun in Jihoon’s eyes.
She rolls her shoulders back, shaking the stiffness from her joints. Her fingers flex around the curved handles of the throttles—Kiin doesn’t need them to control the ship, but she likes how they hum in her grasp, their warmth vibrating through her palms.
Kiinie, Jihoon’s voice lilts in her ears, crackling at the edges. She’s broken Kiin’s headphones again.
Kiin lets the cloaking field stutter for a second, the ship phasing into view, and the air pops under the open hatch, the scattered explosions rattling in her ears. Jihoon sails up through the entryway at the bottom of the ship and instantly sprawls somewhat ungracefully on the floor of the bay.
Kiin flicks the switch for the hatch, shifting the thrusters into gear with one easy press of the lever, and studiously ignores Jihoon’s quiet grumbling behind her. “Seatbelt.”
Jihoon’s head thunks back to the floor. “Mmkay.”
Kiin tugs at the seatbelt with a stray thought, sending the material winding down to prod at Jihoon’s back as she sets a course for home. Clouds smudge across her vision, silver filling the sky, and Kiin feels them settle around her as she casts her mind into the ship for a moment, loses herself in the rhythmic purr of her engines.
A light touch to her shoulder brings her back, the pads of Jihoon’s fingers warm and dry as they slide to rest against the back of her neck, and Jihoon leans over her seat to press her cheek to Kiin’s hair.
“I brought her back for you,” she says, nodding steadily, just so she can tuck herself even closer to Kiin and nuzzle against her like a cat.
Kiin sinks into her seat. There’s nowhere else for her to go, but she can feel her bangs growing limper by the second.
“Brought who back?”
Jihoon holds her nanoswarm out, waits for Kiin to turn her palms up to receive it, and places the bug gently in her hands. The metal is warped, heat fusing some of the delicate limbs together, but Kiin nudges the bot experimentally, and feels its systems stir at her prodding.
“She’s just like you,” Jihoon says, voice gone all distant and dreamy, and Kiin doesn’t bother to ask her to clarify.
“She is me,” Kiin simply corrects her, head turning instinctively to search for Jihoon as she pulls away.
Jihoon yawns, eyes squeezing shut. When she opens them again, the radiant glow is gone, burnt out and quiet even as she offers Kiin a cheerful smile.
Kiin looks away, busies her hands with the control panel of the ship, and waits for the lingering heat of Jihoon’s gaze to lift.