“I’m sorry, Javier,” Powell said. “But I have to get rid of the girl, too. She's the last one. We know where all the others are. I have to get her before she iterates.”
The blade left his body. It had inhabited an awkward place on his body; he couldn’t hold the wound shut without dislocating his shoulder. He rose to his feet as smoothly as he could manage. Xavier was crying around a gag. Powell had hit him. His nose was still crooked. Javier winked at him, but the boy just stared at the floor and moaned.
Powell kicked Anza in the ribs to flip her over. He wiped the multitool on the leg of his jeans. “Don’t look at me that way,” he said. “You know, I’m doing you a favour. You know how hard it is, being different from the others. Having something they don’t. Knowing they’ll never understand it. Is that really how you want to live the rest of your life? Do you really want to hand that problem down?”
She didn’t whimper. She didn’t beg. She spat at him. And then she pinned her gaze on Javier. It was his turn.
“Stop,” he said. “Stop. It’s me you want, right?”
Powell threw his head back and laughed. “You’d love that, wouldn’t you? You’d love to be special to me. You’re not. You’re a great little cocksucker, Javier, but you’re nothing special.”
He could run with that. “You’re right.” He limped over to Powell. “I want to be special to you.”
He watched Powell’s pupils dilate. It really was going to be this easy. He had no idea why he had even bothered wondering how he might accomplish this final task. The solution was so patently obvious. They really were just meat puppets on hormone strings. This whole situation – the boy on his knees, the girl prone and helpless, the man offering himself so completely – obviously did something for him. Something unique and wonderful, something precious. Something he’d never get in regular life. That was what most humans wanted vN for. They were the stuff that dreams were made of.
“I want you, Mitch,” Javier heard himself say. “I keep thinking about you.”
Mostly, he kept thinking of the way Anza wasn’t moving, and how Amy’s feet had drummed the bed, and how she’d howled, and how she’d gone silent and slipped away. That silence was familiar. Javier barely heard the sounds of the city, any longer. His vision narrowed to Powell and only Powell. Powell turned into old graphics, into something blocky and ugly and hard.
“You opened my eyes, on the island. You showed me that I was living the wrong way. I couldn’t ever really love another vN. I knew I had to be defective, somehow, to try.”
Powell smirked. “You just miss my dick.”
Javier glanced at his children. His daughter looked furious. His son was terrified. A chilly winter wind howled through the tower, stirring their bloody hair. They had been just fine, until he came along. And they would be just as fine, without him. Javier was going to kill this man. He was going to die, killing this man. He was fine with that. Sad, but fine.
Javier looked down, pointedly. He dug out his best smile. He made his seem like nothing was wrong. He made his mouth hungry, his eyes wide, his body open and vulnerable and ready. “Is that so bad?” He looked back up. “Don’t tell me you didn’t miss your chance at mine.”
Javier raised his hands to Powell’s face. He held it in his hands. He drew him in. He kissed him. Powell stiffened at first, and then melted into him like some romantic heroine. It was an act of love, Javier realized. Maybe this was the secret the Rory had known all along, as they quietly sacrificed their numbers to rid the world of depravity. Maybe this was why Amy had never bothered with humans, had simply removed herself from them. You had to love them, to kill them. Powell was right about what he’d told Anza. But he’d been talking about himself. He’d been confessing his own inability to live as himself. His own self-loathing. And Javier, who still loved humans, even when they were broken, could put him out of that misery. This last thing, this best thing, could be also be a loving thing.
Javier wrapped his arms around Powell, and jumped free of the tower.
EPILOGUE: We Can Build You
An odyssey.
To the final frontier.
Where no one could hear them scream.
Except for me, sweetie. I can always hear you.
All the research said it would be cold. That it would be airless. That you couldn’t really live out there. And you really couldn’t. Not with an organic body. And even a synthetic body would have problems – moving about would still be hard, and even if you did grow a leaded skin for radiation shielding, you’d still be stuck listening to the tidal flow of it across your body, like an organic child with an ear infection who suddenly hears the steady march of blood through her veins for the first time. They imagined that it would be rather like feeling an asphalt compactor rolling over them, over and over and over, until they reached some equally hellish destination.