0x2
With that piece put in place, they pass the night by picking up some old vintage movies. Uzi fixes up a projector, and she selects some grisly horror movies which freak N out. But scooting up next Uzi and hugging one arm around her puts him at ease, and she tolerates only because otherwise he’d be spooked enough she’d either have to turn off the movie or feel cruel.
He falls asleep like that, and in his sleep he leans even closer, wrapping both arms around her, and she doesn’t wake him up, because he’d make a big deal out of this and that’d be even more annoying.
Uzi falls asleep next to a very warm presence.
She wakes up next to a terribly hot presence. Sun was setting, and they had some scavengers to catch, but N was definitely not alright. He shrugs off her concerns, eager or anxious to get started with Uzi’s plan, and there’s no much else she can do.
Uzi’s plan? She’d modified the body she gave the scavengers — installing a radio transmitter whose signal she could track from a distance. Like this, N flies after the scavengers.
Mid-flight, N catches the smell of oil. Fresh oil, and a lot of it. N’s visor is a cross and he’s spiralling in toward it before he even realizes what’s he’s doing. Uzi hops off before he lands and starts over to investigate the bodies first. Seeing Uzi in the way is what snaps N out of the hunger-trance.
Uzi’s tracker isn’t among the bodies, and none of them look like the scavengers anyway, which saves her a from a spike of guilt. N wonders who would leave such a trove of oil undrained. Which reminds Uzi that right, you guys need that stuff to live. That’s why N’s so hot.
N feels bad about it, which is why he waved off her concerns, but Uzi tells him to stop being stupid and just drink. “Doesn’t it hurt, getting so hot?” When N confirms, she smacks him. “I want you alive and not in crippling pain, dummy.”
Some time after they resume flight, N makes some remark to the effect of him not being used to people saying such nice things, or Uzi being the first to want that for him. It amounts to another stab of damn, his squadmates sucked.
N defends them, weakly. Uzi counters that one of them killed him and the other stood by and let it happen. Which is fair, but if N could rebel, surely V oculd be talked into it. If she apologizes, he’ll forgive her. Which Uzi thinks is stupid. But only if she apologizes, alright?
When N raises the possibility to contacting V, Uzi is quick to shoot it down. Absolutely no letting your squad know you’re alive yet. And N agrees.
The flight only continues a few more miles. They’re find an old backroad through the woods, and the scavengers clearly followed it.
So why can Uzi see a small drone standing by the side of the road? She nudges N to fly down and investigate.
It’s a crying child. He runs, but N is faster. Fast enough his pilot hat falls off in the chase, and once they’re done with the same old ‘this is actually a friendly murder drone’ song and dance, the child tells them his mother is malfunctioning and needs repair.
Uzi asks about the scavengers, and tearfully the child confirms that they passed by, looked on sadly, and claimed they didn’t have resources or time to spare and needed to be on their way.
N says Uzi’s great with tech stuff, she could totally help your mom. Uzi’s uncertain, but seeing N’s faith in her, she can’t bring herself to refuse. They follow the kid to a shack in the woods.
The door creaks open on darkness. When the shadows engulf them, they hear something above them. They glance up just in time to see magnets fall and then their world is all fuzz and distortion.
They wake up strapped to tables in the basement. The child is there wielding surgical tools and a wicked grin. Says something like: thank you for donating your bodies, I’m sure you’ll have all the parts my mother needs.
When the mother reveals herself, it’s a mutant core pulsating like a heart. It can synthesize broken speech, stuttering adoration for her son, but it can’t move. The room is littered with dead drones shells, each of them with a core scooped out and red residue in their place.
The mother reacts to both of the son’s new finds. A sky demon might be perfect, and is that… Nori’s kid? Uzi’s torn between anger at the whole betrayal and immenient torture deal and her desire to know more. But of course, this pair isn’t telling any stories either.
Uzi struggles, and is able to resist the magnets well enough to slip one arm out and start undoing her bindings — she gets a hand cut off for her troubles. N listens to her scream, and they only get louder as her chest is opened up, and the wires to her arms and legs are sliced open, leaving her limbs spasming.
With Uzi punished, he moves on to the more interesting specimen. It takes more time and strength to carve into N, work the knife to disable the more dangerous subsystems before getting to work hacking away at the core.
Even still, Uzi struggles, and tries to think of a way out, but between the pain and the magnets, it’s an impossible battle. She manages to slur a suggestion that hey, maybe it’s time to reach out to V for help.
But their torturers laugh. The basement is a faraday cage; no electromagnetic signals can escape. They won’t even hear you scream.
There’s something N wants to finally tell Uzi before it’s over, but he goes offline mid utterance.
But he regenerates. He comes and goes, it’s a cycle, and he never gets to finish the thought, and Uzi is left wondering.
Uzi doesn’t stop struggling — she wriggles against her bindings, but every inch she frees, every bit of slack fought for, is punished with more internal laceration.
She doesn’t know how many hours the agony continues for. Her clock was keeping count at first, but another magnet made the circuit misfire, and she didn’t try to remember the number she was at.
At some point, it stopped felt like she was counting up, and more like she was counting down. She wanted this to end — but she knew how it ended. So did she want to cling to the pain, if it meant clinging to life?
After N was gone, V thought she’d be next.
Next hunt, J had given V a smirk, remarked that the squad would be so much more efficient without a deadweight holding them back. Her high regard didn’t even last the rest of the night.
V was distracted. Whenever she executed her hunting subroutines, she just thought about the hole in their ranks that wouldn’t be filled, the extra bit of firepower she’d never be able to rely on again. They had hunted in pairs often enough to be used to it — would she have ever felt something was wrong before? — but J’s favorite triangle formation gave their prey no room to escape; and it was impossible without a third disassembler.
When it’s over, J is all scorn for V’s failure, a fist grabbing her jacket and pulling the drone off her pegs, that scowling face hissing invective inches away from her own.
The nights after that stretch on, and the general pattern repeats. V lays around in a slump until J can drag her onto another hunt. J kicks her to the ground, grinds her face into the ice with a peg while her tail-knife hangs inches away from sinking into her. The insults escalate. She’s disgraceful, pathetic, slovenly, just as bad as N.
V doesn’t stop her. Every time she thinks of fighting back, she visualizes a glitching face and voice. She remembers N. She doesn’t want to die, so she lets J do whatever she wants.
Hanging in for next night’s recharge, she realizes: this won’t stop, and there’s no ray of golden sunshine to brighten any of it.
When she does fight back, she’s thinking: whatever happens next, whichever way it goes, it’ll be the end of it, a relief.
V couldn’t beat her — J had kept her quotas, and V could barely bring herself to drink what she needed — but maybe she didn’t want to. She expected the fury on J’s face, her transformed arm moving with serpent swiftness, the fang a virus stake.
And then the fury falters and the arm does too. No viral payload enters V’s digitial veins. J can’t do it. (If she killed V, then she’d be all alone.)
V’s despair lifts into a empty smirk. “So. You’re stuck with me, and I’m stuck with you. Here’s how this is going to go. We hunt, and that’s it. You leave me alone. I don’t want to see you unless you have a mission for me. I don’t want talk to you unless it’s discussing our plans. I don’t want you to touch me.”
With gritted teeth, J accepts the contract renegotiation.
V hides away in the pod, and remembers N. This peace hardly lasts a day. J doesn’t touch her, but she doesn’t leave her alone. She asks for mission reports. She assigns V to guard the spire with her. She gives V missions to help her sort through the bodies in the mess pit.
It takes a few of these before V realizes J… wants to talk to her. To someone.
Sometimes, it’s even pleasant. J is polite, and her demands of V, her searching glances, her smirk that became more of a smile, it barely conceals a kind of desperation. But sometimes it’s the same insults and verbal abuse she’d endured so much of it, and the two of them argue till the sun rises. And yet the look on J’s face when it’s done isn’t exasperated — it’s hungry for more.
(V thought of those crystals that distort light, splitting it into two different, interfering images. What was the word? Where had she seen one of them before? Probably one of N’s rocks. But J had thrown them all out.)
Then one night, sitting under the stars on one of J’s “stand guard” missions, it happens. J leans over, and throws an arm around the other drone. V goes still, eyes hollow, and looks to find not the smirk or the hunger, but the searching glances, a smile wrapped so desperately brittle around an inner emptiness.
J’s other arm reaches out, and it’s a hug.
V reaches out with her tail, and then J is screaming, flinching back.
“I had one rule,” V hisses. “No touching.”
When V flies away, she wonders why the look on J’s face felt so much like looking into a cracked mirror.
She flies without particular purpose, and finds herself drawn back to where it all went wrong. The damned doors of Outpost-3. She perches outside and stares like her glaring could scrape away at it.
“You look like shit, girl.”
V startles to see a pink-eyed drone had crept up beside her. “Buzz off. You realize I kill you things, right?”
Lizzy rolls her eyes. “As if I’m the one who should be worried about getting killed. You look like you’re gonna take a bath.”
To which V scowls but can’t quite deny.
“Y’know, your hair’s a mess. I could straighten it out for you if you don’t like, kill me?”
V doesn’t care. So Lizzy gets to work, and like that, they get talking. When Lizzy asks what’s got V so bummed out, the disassembly drone is vague about it. “Just… thinking about someone I lost here.”
But Lizzy had heard about what had happened last week. Once the doors closed, V had assumed the workers disposed of N’s body, but it turns out they’d found neither the murder drone nor the purple loser.
N was alive.
If he was out there somewhere, V had to find him. Before J does.