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“I don’t want to hear about how they’ll just make another Rhys if he dies.”
“I wasn’t going to say that.”
Hannah sniffled.“I’m sorry, I know you wouldn’t try to tell me a bunch of bullshit about how RH104 would be the same person.”She dabbed at her eyes with her T-shirt’s hem.“I can’t deal with losing someone else.I’ve been bracing myself against it since the quake, afraid to be normal again in case we have another disaster.”
“Hannah...”
She forged on, cutting off Jasmine.“No, I need to say this.I’ve been working like a fucking dog in the fields because it’s easier than grieving.”Not that they’d had dogs on New Eden since she was a little girl, but that was irrelevant.“I’ve pushed away you and Rodelle because it would be easier to grieve if either of you died in another quake or from something that’s preventable everywhere else in the universe.I’ve had walls around me for years and couldn’t take them down.”
“Until Rhys showed up.”
She hated having to admit that.“Until he showed up, yeah.God, I’m terrible for that.”
“No, you aren’t.Rhys and the others represented the first shred of hope we’ve had in years, if not our lives.That’s why you felt it was okay to fall in love with him.”
“And you don’t represent hope?You’re my best friend!”
“I told you before, I’m not upset about that.Grief does weird things to people.Maybe now that we have a chance at actually rebuilding our society, we can pick up where we left off.You know where I live.”
That drew a small smile from Hannah.“Thank you.”
“Come here.”Before she could react, Jasmine reached across their seats to take her into an awkward hug.“He’ll get through this,” she said into her hair.“Darius said he has every faith that they can complete this surgery successfully.”
“Which one is Darius again, and how does Darius know?”
“The dark-haired cyborg who used to be DL16, the one with the great shoulders.SP29 told him through their mind link thing, then Darius told me what happened when we were sorting through chicken embryos, and I ran here as soon as I could.”
“Thank you.”She reached for Jasmine’s hand and squeezed it.“I missed you, you know.I’m glad you’re here.Rhys would be, too, if he could wake up.”
“In his way, I’m sure.”Jasmine squeezed back affectionately.“Now, do you want to wait here or go back to your house?Or mine?I’m sure someone will tell us as soon as Rhys is out of surgery.”
Whether that surgery would be successful or not remained to be seen.Hannah had never waited on tenterhooks like this before, and she wasn’t sure how to do that now.“I think I’d like to stay.”
Jasmine appeared unruffled by her words.“Then, that’s what we’ll do.”
The babbleof voices in his head, a cacophony of murmurs, shouts, and orders over Rhys’s condition as they tried to revive him, was maddening.Rhys wished for nothing more than to stand up and stretch, work the tension out of his muscles.
No, he realized.What he wanted to do most was hold Hannah again.
He wished he could tell his fellow cyborgs what was wrong—that the sensors implanted in his cerebellum and hippocampus needed to be replaced.His internal processors tallied up a list of everything that had gone wrong in his body, the reminders scrolling across his mind.He knew his eyes were open, but he couldn’t see anything.
A memory fragment crossed his mind, so fleeting he nearly missed it.He concentrated, trying to tune out the noise around him to focus on it.His cybernetic functions forced his lungs to breathe, a strange sensation for someone used to it being automatic.He hadn’t realized he’d been holding on to his breath until now.That had to be a good sign.He was still in charge of some of his bodily functions.
The memory bloomed in his mind in bright, ugly color.The original Rhys, preparing for...a battle?He saw himself strapping weaponry to his body and setting his cybernetic functions on high alert.Rhys saw the sterile room in which he was preparing, a few familiar faces around him as they did the same.“Not everyone will get through this alive,” his original said in the memory.A murmur of agreement sounded through the crowd.“Death is better than what we’re living now.”
The original stomped through the room to a corridor, then into an open field.If he could shudder in his pod, he would have.He recognized the field, surrounded by lights on tall poles.This was where the original Rhys was executed.
To his original’s surprise, he was greeted with a battalion of black-uniformed soldiers, weapons aimed squarely at him and his fellow cyborgs.It took a few seconds for Rhys to recognize the weapons were energy disruptors.Before he could call out a warning to his men, they were fired upon.His original fell to the ground as the pulse threw his systems offline.A familiar black shadow fell over him.This time, when Rhys looked up, he could see the face of a hard-edged man in his late fifties, quiet fury written across his features.He’d been cybernetically enhanced, too, but the tech in his skin looked older, as if he was a prototype.While Rhys couldn’t place a name to him, he instinctively knew this man was his commanding officer in a battalion from hell.“What you’re describing is a coup,” the man said, voice low and tinged with rage.
“I was not brought on to this project for these reasons.What you’re doing is inhumane.None of these people signed up for this,” his original said.His voice was strong, but there was an undercurrent of fear in it.Rhys knew his original understood that death was imminent for him.
Rhys desperately wanted to wake up, to never experience his own death again, but at the same time, he needed to know why he was cloned in the first place.His lungs whooshed out another rush of air.Dimly, he heard SP29’s panicked, “Sensors!”
“You signed up to do whatever you were told to.Today, that order was to mine the Darraugh Sector for darzanite.”
“There are colonists there already with intergalactic rights to the mines.”The original’s voice was still steady.
“They’re Pelossians.”The commanding officer’s voice held a note of disdain.
