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The battle had been taxing. She’d spent all her ammunition and used vast reserves of energy to ensure that the innocent remained living and the guilty died.
Still, some of the guilty had escaped. She knew they had. It had been imperative to stop the hunt for those she’d targeted as she awoke in order to ensure that those she needed to protect were taken to safety.
Jack and his lover, Poppy.
Poppy was such a pretty name, she thought, hanging her head and concentrating on pulling energy from nonessential sources, such as her healing flesh, the mending of her internal components. She directed her precious reserves to the search for power.
This place had once had electricity. She’d glimpsed the bare bulbs overhead that had been used for light. If it was wired once, then there should be a junction close by.
It was close. Blocked from powering the bulbs, but still very close. Outside, behind the shack, a junction box. It was just a trickle of power, because the lines were connected, but blocked. There was no way to block it completely unless the lines were cut.
She forced herself to her feet, stumbling as her leg threatened to collapse from the wounds taken during the battle.
Fuckers, she thought.
They had given her father far too much freedom and they had been far too ignorant of his genius. They thought he was building them a weapon. Instead, he had built an enemy unlike any they could know.
Forcing herself from the shack, leaning heavily against its warped sides, she made her way to the back of the building. There, secured beneath a weatherproof casing, was the junction box.
The lock was easy enough to break, and from there it wasn’t hard to jerk the heavy wires from their metal housing, strip the protective covering, and open one of the multiple ports she held. This one, in her hand.
She plunged the heavy wiring into the port, felt the connection snap into place and the life-stabilizing power begin to feed into her system.
She slid down the side of the building until she sat on the ground, cradling one hand with the other, and stared up at the blue of the sky. She couldn’t feel the summer warmth on her skin yet, but once she was stronger, once her internal frame, sensors, and biological hardware had repaired as well as the external skin, she would be able to feel the heat again, or the cold. The brush of a butterfly’s wings, or if she needed it, a lover’s caress.
They had no concept of the madness they had unleashed in her father when they had murdered his wife, then his son-in-law, before his eyes. His daughter…
Charlie touched her stomach. She had been pregnant. They had allowed her to live long enough to give birth to her baby. And then they’d had no need for Charlie. As her father screamed and fought to get to her, they had killed her.
They had his grandson. His newborn grandson. He would do whatever it took to ensure his grandchild’s life.
He had sworn to Charlie that her baby would be safe before he went any further. And he had been so close. They were desperate for the completion of the weapon they dreamed of.
And within her memory processors he had placed every memory he had of her child. Her beautiful little boy, so like Duncan.
He’d sent her child to America, made certain he was adopted by a good family, and he’d completed their weapon. Then, he’d maneuvered them, as only a genius could, to keep his promise to her and make certain she was close to the area that her boy had been sent to.
He wasn’t a child now. He was a man grown.
Power trickled into her like life-sustaining blood. She could feel it moving through the damaged biotech organs, filling them, where it would then be processed into the hypercharged energy that could power her for decades. As long as she wasn’t damaged as she was during that battle in the warehouse.
She let her lashes flutter closed, let the memory of the boy, the man she had given birth to, play within her internal memory.
How handsome he was. But so angry. And there was such sadness in his eyes. Such rage and cold, hard purpose.
That kind of rage was stored rage. It came from years upon years of tragedy. Loss.
How had her and her father’s plans for her son gone wrong? The answer had to be in her memory processors. Her father had promised to make certain she had all the information needed to protect her son.
He was a good man, though. She had seen how he had protected his friend and the woman his friend claimed. Standing before them, wild-eyed, bullets spraying from his weapon.
Her lips tugged into a smile. He had put one of those bullets into the heart of her. And she had pretended it affected her. Wasn’t it a mother’s job to make certain that her son succeeded? That he knew he had protected his friends?
Her baby.
She wanted to touch his face, his hair. To tell him of his father, of the grandfather who traded his own life to ensure his grandson was protected. She had wanted to beg his forgiveness for leaving him. Wanted to swear she would always shield him.
It was too soon for that. The vision that had stood before him in that warehouse had been the enemy, not the woman she had been as a mother, or a daughter.
