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“Your name is guilt, human. You are guilty. Declared so by the authority vested in me to dispatch you and rid Megaris of your criminal instincts. Humans have always needed to be dominated and controlled. You have to be weeded out, thinned from the herd. You are poison.”
Does he still know who I am? Does he recognize me from all the many bounties I’ve handled for him?
“Please, Mr. K’zar. I’m innocent!”
His golden eye flashes and dashes any notion of clemency. “There is no innocence in you. You infiltrated the highest echelons of justice to peddle the secrets of the korabi. You are more than a petty thief. You are a traitor. A bold, brash traitor. I will break you, and I will take your broken body to be paraded before the others.”
He’s evil. I can feel his energy coursing through me. We are connected at the skin so intensely I feel pulses ticking through him. That’s the augmentations at work, taking feedback, monitoring my responses, getting to know me with a chemical intimacy.
His golden eye gleams with fire. He has me in a simple physical grasp which seems inescapable, but a thought is forcing its way through my terrified synapses. He glows because he is augmented. His augmentations make him stronger and more deadly than almost any other korabi I know. But they also make him vulnerable.
By his neck, there is a thin line of raised nodes that would go unnoticed by most prey. They might think it is part of his unique biology. But I know what they are. They’re his augment nodes, ports that can be jacked into—buttons that can be manipulated. I reach out, my fingers tapping a quick beat across the top of them. I know his stop codes like I know my own name. I use them daily in my job. And maybe, being a little bit of a stalker, I memorized Rath’s. Maybe I practiced them over and over because it felt like an intimacy that meant something.
I see the light go out of his golden eye. He drops me and slumps to the ground, cross-legged. I am free! I let out a hysterical half-giggle at the realization that I am no longer about to die. That worked! That actually worked! No human has ever bested Rath. I doubt he thought it was possible. Now he knows better.
He cannot move a muscle, but he’s still fully active mentally. Physically, there is nothing wrong with him. It’s just that every single augmentation he has embedded in his body is rebooting right now, and it has to shut his movement down so it can be done in the right order. I’ve bricked him, turned him into a four-hundred-pound muscle paperweight.
“You can hear me, can’t you,” I say. “I’m sorry I had to do that, but you really should have changed your augmentation codes if you didn’t want to be hacked.”
I shouldn’t be wasting time talking to him. He won’t be offline for long. But this might be the last opportunity I ever get. My life is still very much forfeit, and there’s every chance he’ll kill me next time he finds me. Maybe this isn’t about surviving so much as it is about grabbing one last chance at living.
I can only imagine what he wants to do to me. He wanted to kill me already. Actually, it sounds like he wanted to torment me. He wanted to make me pay for my crimes. Death wasn’t enough for him. He wanted there to be pain and humiliation as well. He wanted me to beg and cry and plead. He is a sadist, this korabi hunter. I should loathe him. I should fear him. But I feel only one of those very natural emotions.
I can’t stop staring at him. When I shut him down, it was like I shut part of me down too. I’ve never seen him so still. I’ve also never been able to observe him this closely before. He’s so very handsome. Built for domination and killing. Even glowering at me with his jaw frozen by an augmentation glitch, he’s sexy. I’m still afraid of him, of course. But the draw I feel toward him is too powerful for fear to stop me.
“I know you probably want to kill me, and I get that. It’s what you do. But I didn’t take those secrets. I’ve been set up. Or it’s a mistake. And I know that doesn’t matter to you, but it matters quite a lot to me. Because I like being alive and having all my limbs, so I’d appreciate it greatly if you’d….” I shrug. “I don’t know. Come up with some way of not killing me or turning me in to be killed once you do catch me? Because we both know that’s inevitable. You’re not the best bounty hunter in Megaris for nothing. I’m going to try to run away now. So. Okay. It’s like that old game. Hide and seek. Except I won’t be mad if you don’t seek. You know what? There’s candy under the bed. Have some. Okay. Bye. Right. See you. Okay. Bye. Bye now.”
