Chapter Text
Tucked against N’s chest, Tessa flinched at the crash of the drone hitting the ground just a few feet from their hiding place. Her ears rang from the distant screams, growing fewer by the minute, and the sharp gunfire that seemed to explode all around them.
“I think they’re moving away,” N whispered. His remaining arm stayed tight across her back.
She squeezed her eyes shut and nodded. She didn’t cry, but only because she’d completely cried herself out over the last ten days. Her throat was scratchy, not just from the plumes of dust and smoke that blanketed the earth now, but from how little she’d been talking.
It felt terrible to keep it all inside, but there were some days when she thought if she opened her mouth to speak, she’d only end up screaming.
And they couldn’t afford to draw attention like that.
N curled further over her. A drone rushed by overhead, all wild cackling and sharp snicks of metal on metal. Something in these twisted, monstrous versions was attuned to human heartbeats. They had discovered, through luck and trial and error, that in close enough proximity, N’s core drowned her pulse out.
She curled closer into his warmth. When she pressed her ear to his chest, she could hear its faint hum. She couldn’t sleep without it now.
It—it was jarring at times. Her survival, in so many ways, relied entirely on one of the very drones who should have been out there with the rest, devouring any human he came across. Catching sight of him in the corner of her eye, especially when she hadn’t been expecting to, had led to more than one panic attack.
(Tessa still couldn’t sleep without dreaming of the moment she saw J for the first time since the manor, blood smeared across her face, human flesh disappearing into her fanged mouth like a delicious delicacy.)
But it was N. N. The most lovable, kind, cheerful person she’d ever known (it was irrelevant that the majority of her interactions had been with her parents or people her parents knew, which were usually a specific sort of person). She couldn’t imagine a world where N would hurt her. That first night, when Cyn had tried to—had almost—
Tessa didn’t think he’d stayed himself that night for so long because Cyn had forgotten about him. No, she was sure Cyn had been pinging him relentlessly from the moment the massacre started.
And instead of falling under her control, he had gently taken Tessa’s hand and led her as far away as she could go before her knees buckled beneath her.
“They’re gone,” N said, nearly at a normal volume, snapping her out of her head before she could get too lost in the horror again.
An eerie silence, broken only by the crackling of burning debris, settled over them. Tessa sat up, stiff and shivering. She looked around.
Nothing but ruin and corpses as far as the eye could see. The battle, if the humans hadn’t already miserably lost, had moved elsewhere.
She turned to offer N a wobbly smile, but she couldn’t even manage that. He… he didn’t look good.
The tragic reality was that N had nothing on whatever robo-steroids Cyn had put in those murder drones of hers. That he’d held his own enough to still be alive—for both of them to still be alive—was miraculous.
Beneath the dirt and ash and smears of oil were injuries that just kept piling up.
A spiderweb of cracks surrounded a puncture in his visor. The claw that had slid through his head like a hot knife through butter had damaged his optical array, he’d admitted. He’d been functionally half blind for four days now.
His left arm had been ripped off when he shoved himself between Tessa and one of Cyn’s lackeys. In shock, Tessa herself had all but shut down, but N had held on long enough to jab Tessa’s EMP-taser into the drone’s head. One-armed, he’d half-carried her a mile away and into the relative safety of a toppled dumpster before overloading and passing out for the rest of the day and most of the following night.
No amount of scavenged fabric strips could stop his torso from leaking. The slashes crisscrossing his body were too deep, too numerous. His neck was generously wrapped in duct tape after he’d nearly been decapitated by a drone’s fangs.
And all from protecting Tessa. The murder drones took little notice of their own kind, even to kill them. He’d have been safe, whole, if not for her.
She wouldn’t have pegged N as a defender sort, but to say he’d risen to the occasion was an understatement. Maybe she shouldn’t have been surprised. He’d taken his big brother role to Cyn very seriously.
The irony was nearly enough to make her snicker.
Tessa looked up from the stump of his arm, an apology for gawking on her tongue, only to realize he hadn’t noticed her lapse. She twisted and found he was staring at the fallen drone on the street.
It wasn’t repairing itself, which was the best indication that it’d received a truly lethal blow. Nothing to worry about from that one, then.
“N?” she croaked. “What’s wrong?”
He turned to her slowly. He looked so worried, so frightened, that she half expected a blade to suddenly explode out of her chest from behind.
“Tessa,” he said quietly.
She worried the fabric of her stolen shirt between her hands, silent, waiting.
“I don’t think I can keep this up much longer…” He laughed weakly, like it was even a little bit funny, but the furrow of his brow didn’t ease. “I mean, I’m kinda falling apart.”
Well maybe if you weren’t so self-sacrificial, she didn’t nag, because she’d have been dead half a dozen times over if not for him.
“And even if I wasn’t, I—I’m really not much compared to them.” He nodded down at his standard worker drone body. Thin, fragile arms and legs, short stature, subpar plastic casing. No sturdy metal or wings or talons or fangs or needle-tail or self-regeneration.
Tessa bit her lip. Her eyes burned; maybe she wasn’t as wrung-out as she’d thought.
Because he was right. He probably wouldn’t make it through another encounter with a murder drone, and there was no chance they’d be able to avoid them forever. He wasn’t as strong as them, wasn’t as durable, wasn’t designed for surviving—for winning—brutal fights.
To lose him—oh god, to lose him would destroy her. She wouldn’t survive it. Not just for the loss of his protection, but because she wasn’t strong enough to keep going alone.
He’d been her friend and brother for years—and now he was literally her everything, all she had left in the world. She thought she’d loved him before, but this new depth of care and need and affection and warmth and companionship had taught her that she’d known nothing of love before.
His hand gently squeezed her wrist. “Breathe, Tessa,” N said, leaning closer. “You’ve gotta breathe. Like this.”
He exaggerated measured inhales and exhales, and Tessa, vision tunneling, did her best to follow along.
“I can’t—you—” she wheezed. “Please don’t leave me.”
“I wouldn’t, I won’t,” N cooed, scooting closer. She plunked her forehead against his narrow shoulder. “I’m sorry, Tessa, that wasn’t where I was going with this.”
“Then what…?”
He cleared his throat, or at least did the endearing robot equivalent. His voice box fizzled briefly. “I think—I want you to transfer me. My core, and, I guess my processor?”
She sat up. “I don’t… what are you talking about?”
His good eye slid to the side again. “I can’t protect you like this, Tessa. Not from them. So I was thinking, maybe, y’know? Fight fire with fire?”
The dread that rose up her throat was comparable to when the screams from the manor died off, leaving a chilling silence. She looked over her shoulder.
At the murder drone’s dead body.
Tessa would have collapsed if she hadn’t already been sitting. She wanted to shake her head. Shake N. Ask him if he was crazy. Refuse, and demand he never suggest such a thing again.
But it—it was logical. His body couldn’t go on, and there was a perfectly good one just sitting there. Ripe for the taking.
“What if I mess up? What if I kill you?”
“You won’t.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t—”
“Yeah I do.” He smiled at her, genuine and fond and soft in a way that was unique to him.
She fell silent, bludgeoned by his confidence in her. He creaked to his feet and limped from the shadowy safety of the overturned box van they’d been huddled in. The limp murder drone scrapped across the pavement, N dragging it over to her by its foot.
A fist-sized hole had been blasted through its chest, decimating its core while leaving the rest of the body almost entirely intact. If it hadn’t left her sick to her stomach, she might have said it was fate.
Tessa let out a shuddery breath and pulled her tool belt closer. “I—”
“I’ll see you on the other side,” N interrupted, clumsily plopping back down across from her. His eyes did the happy squint. “Relax, Tessa. I couldn’t be in better hands.”
And then he shut himself—and her attempt to say a precautionary goodbye—down.
• • •
Knees pulled to her chest, Tessa watched the rhythmic pulse of the murder drone’s visor light. The poison-yellow she’d forever associate with Cyn stared back at her. Her vision was swimming with tears too much to read the information scrolling beneath the progress bar.
She didn’t know if it worked. She didn’t know if N would wake up in this new body as himself.
She’d done her best, not just with the transfer, but with making him less terrifying. She’d unearthed an overlarge t-shirt that was only slightly bloody, which helped. Swapping over N’s hair did too—so long as she didn’t think about how it was like this body had latched on and made his hair part of it, like it was growing from his head.
She rocked back and forth, breath unsteady; she reckoned she’d dream about the too squishy, too alive insides of his body—both of them—for a while.
But what she really needed was for his visor color to not be yellow. That specific yellow.
“Please,” she whispered. “Please, N. Come back.”
Pressing her eyes into her knees until they ached, Tessa thought about J and V. About what Cyn had done to them, what she had changed them into. And she hoped, desperately, that she hadn’t just given N to Cyn on a silver platter.
She must have dozed off, exhausted and emotionally drained, because she jerked into awareness at the sudden sound of metal on concrete. Her head snapped up. Her heart missed two beats before racing hard enough to hurt.
Just outside the snapped-off doors of the broken van, backlit by the smoke-hazed setting sun, was the body. It loomed, tall and lean, and made worse as she was sitting. It examined its bulky legs and arms. Flexed its reinforced hands—the talons unfolded, clicked together, then vanished. It tilted its head and cracked its neck. In profile, she watched it test its fangs with its tongue.
A true murder machine.
She was dead. She’d killed N, and she was dead. Her friend’s empty body lay cold at her side, and she was dead.
The drone turned around, haloed, and—
Beneath his fluffy blond bangs, N’s white eyes crinkled at her. He smiled, somehow no less endearing for the sharpness of his teeth. “Told ya you could do it.”
The tension strung through her entire body vanished, leaving her aching all over. She smiled back, broken, and her shoulders started shaking.
Tessa was too tired to flinch when N ducked into the van and knelt in front of her. His hand raised to squeeze her shoulder, warm and larger than before.
“Hey,” he said, “I’m sorry. It’s gonna be okay, Tessa.”
She collapsed forward, and he caught her. He settled down fully, pulling her closer, into the dip of his crisscrossed legs. For the first time in years, she was smaller than him.
She shuddered through dry heaves and sobs, ear pressed to the t-shirt over his chest. His core hummed away, stronger, louder, and for as aware as she was that it was a murder drone holding her, the sound of N’s heart lulled her to sleep as it always did.