Hybrid (2 page)

“What?” Sai asks warily.

“Recognize what Mason said is true. Dom had no real choice in the matter until he saw you and triggered himself. If it was anyone’s fault, it was mine. I left that failsafe there and made the reset possible.”

“I’ll try.” With the confusion and anger inside her, it’s the best she can offer.

“It is enough for now. I simply ask that you do try.” Mathur moves to the door. “Sleep a bit. You need your rest.”

His request is easier said than done. All Sai sees as she lies there staring at the ceiling is the elevator the second before it falls. On repeat.

Sai moves her head from side to side and stretches the muscles in her neck. It’s late. She’s not sure what time, but that ethereal glow that surrounds most of the Mobiles during the day is gone. Her room is dimly lit, but she thinks that’s probably for the best, considering she’s about to try and uncover her legs.

It shouldn’t be so scary, but they’re no longer flesh, the adrium attached to her in ways she can’t even begin to fathom. Remembering Dom, his limbs are smooth and supple, but they’re all the part of one complete construct. Even picturing the memory smarts a little.

“I’m not going to know if I don’t look,” she murmurs softly, trying to lend herself courage she doesn’t feel. Before she can stop herself, she throws off the sheet, thinking to catch it before it tumbles to the ground. It hits the floor instead, and all she can do is stare at her legs. That is, what were once her legs...

Her whole left leg is adrium from the hip down, the iridescent black material connected to her pale skin, sparkling in the dim light of the room one second and blending with the sheets the next. It’s disconcerting.

Her right hip appears to still be intact, so the material begins about a fifth of the way down her thigh, completing the leg from there. Sai’s lip trembles and she’s tempted to throw back her head and scream or laugh so loud that it hurts, but she doesn’t. Adrium is supposed to be a camouflage material, apparently capable of taking on the texture and appearance of anything it’s directed to. Dom does it all the time.

“Is human flesh the same?” she whispers out loud, willing her legs to appear like the rest of her. And for a brief moment, they solidify in appearance and seem perfect and normal. A wave of dizziness hits her, and she fights passing out.

“Maybe this won’t be so bad after all,” she mutters. It’s a little cool in the room without the discarded sheet. Sai watches her feet and tries to wiggle the toes, but the response she gets is sluggish and unreliable. She sighs and collapses back down onto the bed. It’s not too cold, and losing the sheet is her own fault. Her scalp itches, and she has to fight the urge to raise her hand to the mass of soft stubble covering it like a broad headband. It’ll grow back in the end. Everything does, even her legs it would seem. Sort of.

For the first time since waking up, Sai thinks that maybe she was lucky. Again. Not everyone gets to have a second chance, and it seems she’s got a third.

She breathes in the clean, sterile scent, the undertones of faint lemon disturbing in their familiarity—for both her own and Johnson’s memories. The words comfort her as she breathes them back out.

“I will not be broken. I will not fail. I will succeed.”

On her third day of rehabilitation, Mathur walks through the door to her room and eyes the machine, which is no longer beeping. He blinks once and turns to look at her. “Did I say you could take the monitors off?”

Sai shakes her head.

“Put them back on then.”

Sai shakes her head.

Mathur sighs. “I need the data to make sure the legs are taking. You realize we had to operate on your brain too, correct? Normal human synapses will burn out far too quickly, so we reinforced them. You are still in danger. Wear the monitors.”

For a moment Sai wants to rebel, but she acquiesces and snaps the tiny monitors back in place on the four small pads around her skull scar just in time for Dom to walk through the door.

“What’s he doing here?” Sai keeps her voice as even as possible, despite the well of anger and fear that tries to rise up and out of her throat.

“He is helping me make sure the adrium is taking and not about to overrun your system. Dom was born this way. He knows how everything should function.” Mathur fiddles with the monitor next to her bed before turning back to her. “Today, I want to see if you can stand up with some assistance.”

Moving her toes is easier than the first time she tried it. Their responsiveness is more immediate. Straightening and bending her knees while sitting is difficult. Trying to stand up, even with Dom’s arm for assistance, is far harder than anything Sai has ever done.

Her legs support her for about three seconds before her brain blanks out on how the body is supposed to hold itself up. Something that was involuntary before now requires exact execution.

When Sai falls to the floor for the sixth time, she bats their hands away as they try to help her up. “This is ridiculous. We don’t have time for this. I need to help the people we rescued. You said they’re not dealing well with the changes.” It’s hard to keep the tears out of her eyes, and she’s pretty sure that even tone has vanished from her voice. “I can’t make them wait on my relearning the motor skills of a one-year-old.”

Dom crouches down to her level. His gorgeous silver-flecked eyes appear hollow, their usual warmth gone, relegated somewhere else. “Stop wallowing. I won’t be here soon, so you won’t need to throw a tantrum every time I’m near. Focus. You have to focus. If anyone can do this, it’s you.”

Sai recoils a little. His words feel like a slap. Part of her wants to hug him, like the hugs she got when he accompanied her on those horrible GNW missions, but the other part of her wants to run and put as much distance between them as she can manage because the line of trust they had is shattered.

“I’m not your responsibility anymore,” Sai snaps. Using mainly upper body strength, she levers herself up over the bed and wills her legs to obey, focusing completely on how they should be when standing. There’s a slight buzz and a click in her head and suddenly she
is
standing, with just a hand on the bed to steady her.

“What the...” Sudden drowsiness threatens to send her crashing to the ground again. Dom scoops a hand under her elbow and guides her to sit on the bed instead of revisiting the floor.

“Focus long enough for it to learn. There will be trial and error, but adrium isn’t stupid. It’ll learn if you let it. With some intelligence to guide it.” Dom shrugs and rolls his shoulders.

Sai snatches her elbow back from him. His face blanks over, expressionless.

“I wish I could take this back.” He gestures helplessly at her legs, gaze lingering momentarily, and pauses as he looks back up at her. “I really am sorry, Sai.”

She can hear the sincerity in his voice, but doesn’t feel the emptiness until he’s already gone. “Damn legs,” she mutters, pretending the cold in the room isn’t the sudden loss she feels at Dom leaving.

“That they are.” Mathur lays a hand on her shoulder. “But we will have you up and phasing in no time.” He glances at her pale face. “Or at least, in a few weeks. You do realize your own healing can help speed the process up a bit, right?”

Exhausted and wondering why she didn’t think of healing herself first, she clings to his words instead. “Do we have a few weeks?”

“Of course, little one,” Mathur says, his face crinkling into that fond smile he wears so well. His expression softens as he watches her maneuver herself back into bed, much more independently than the previous days. “We just won a victory, after all.”

Sai glares at her legs as she dangles them over the side of the bed. It’s taken a few days, but her reflexes are getting better, even though some things are still sluggish. Like deliberately swinging her legs back and forth. The reaction time is always a little off from what she wants.

She sighs and wiggles her toes, happy with their response. Her mobility is severely limited, and it irks her. They need her in this fight, for what she has the power to do, and the longer it takes her to adapt, the less time they have to prepare. She doesn’t blame Mathur for making himself scarce the last few days because her temper may be a wee bit erratic, but it might have been nice to have someone to talk things over with.

Even now the floor is impossibly far away, but the more she stands, the less it will exhaust her.

With a grimace, she lowers her shiny new feet gently to the ground and barely notices the now-familiar click in her head as her legs shift to support her. They not only look smooth, but feel it in her head. Yet at the same time, it’s a totally alien sensation. Sai admires them for a second, steadying her breath, and then she moves, slowly walking to the bed on the other side of the room. It’s only a few steps, but it drains her energy and it’s all she can do to cling to the bed and stay upright, careful to avoid any buttons or levers that might lower it accidentally.

“I told you she wouldn’t take this lying down.” Iria’s bright voice suffuses the room, and Sai groans at the pun.

“Really?” she mutters. She maneuvers her way around to leverage herself onto the bed but stops short. Iria isn’t the only one in the room. Sai checks her shield and frowns. Perhaps she’s just out of practice. A couple of weeks in a comatose state will do that.

“Hey, Sai.” Aishke smiles briefly and looks down at the floor, while Marlena, in a crisp white uniform, walks toward her.

“Remember me?” she asks, blonde curls bobbing gently as she moves.

Sai nods and tries not to be envious of those curls. Curls should be illegal.

Marlena’s eyes soften as her smile reaches them. “Time for me to patch you up.” She busies herself with the small monitor in her hands, and as she waves it around Sai’s head and chest, the numbers on the screen scroll from white to red, setting off a low rate of beeps that seem to berate Sai with their intensity.

The nurse frowns. “You’re exerting yourself too much. It shouldn’t be taking you this much energy to adjust to the grafts. I’ll go get Jeffries.”

Sai instinctively reaches out a hand, grabbing Marlena. “Jeffries? What does he have to do with this?”

Marlena blinks, her brow scrunching in confusion. “Jeffries operated on you. With Mathur’s help. He took the life-saving patch-up Dom did the rest of the way.”

“Jeffries.” Sai crosses her arms. “You’re trying to tell me he
helped
me live?”

“Yes.” Marlena shakes her head. “Why on earth wouldn’t he?”

“Long story there!” Iria pipes up, slapping the nurse on the shoulder. “You go get him if you need. I’ll help Sai walk a bit. Can’t have her down for too long now, can we?”

For once, Sai is grateful for Iria’s exuberance. It replaces the severe lack of her own. With Marlena gone, she breathes easier. “Was she joking? Did he really fix me?”

Iria shrugs and sits on a chair, her wide and ready grin gone. “He did what needed to be done. And don’t worry, I don’t think he sabotaged you.”

“Tell that to my legs.” Sai glares at them again for good measure.

Aishke walks toward her but stops off to the side. “They’re pretty.”

“Really?” Sai raises an eyebrow. “You think they’re pretty?

Aishke nods. “Yeah, they’re shiny. And you’ll never have to worry about lazering the hair.”

“Good girl, Aishke!” Iria laughs, but it sounds more forced than Sai remembers. “Find the bright side. Literally.”

Sai laughs despite her obstinate mood. It feels good to talk to friends she didn’t realize she’d missed until now. Though she knows they won’t be able to do anything if the tenuous connection to her legs fails, Aishke and Iria still make a show of helping her walk around the room slowly.

The more she walks, the easier it is for Sai to understand the movements she needs to encourage for her legs to function and use up as little of her energy as possible.

“Good to see you up and about.”

Jeffries voice startles Sai, and her legs lock up. She almost topples over, but Iria and Aishke anchor her.

Sai glances over at the doctor, trying to glean his true intentions. “Sure. Yeah. Need to get back on my feet.”

He nods and gestures to the bed. “Marlena mentioned you’re exhausting too quickly. Let me take a look.”

Sai’s cheeks suddenly flush hot. Even though she now knows he’s seen pretty much all there is to see of her, she doesn’t want to be awake when he inspects her legs.

“I’m fine, really.” She holds up her hands to wave him away as she leans against the bed.

Jeffries raises an eyebrow. “Really? You don’t seem fine. If you don’t take care of these fusion points, your cells will deteriorate. And if you don’t get control of your impulses and instructions, the synaptic functions we reinforced will fry out and you won’t have very much to say ever again.”

Sai gulps and runs through his words in her head, before maneuvering herself back onto the bed.

“Much better,” he says as he helps get her legs up on the end and pushes her to lie down.

It’s comforting not to be left alone with the man who hated her at first sight when she came over to the Exiled. She glances at Iria and the faint crease in her brow. At Aishke and the stubborn set of her jaw. Her friends have been worried, taking on who knows what sort of responsibilities while Sai was out. The guilt threatens to crush her chest, and Sai turns her attention back to Jeffries. He makes a few noises in the back of his throat as he examines the fusion joints. She has to fight the urge to scream at him, at the world.

Soon though, he’s done and straightens. “You’re tougher than you look. Has Mathur or Dom showed you how to adapt your own healing to the fusion spots?”

Sai shakes her head.

“I’ll get Mathur to come visit you then.” He jots some notes down on the reader at the side of her bed. “You have a long way to go, but your body is adapting better than I’d hoped.”

“Hoped?” Sai can’t stop herself from asking. Did he actually want her to survive?

Jeffries eyes her for a long moment before speaking. “I misjudged you, and you proved me wrong. Of course I hoped you’d adapt well, but I haven’t completed a procedure as complex as this before. I had no way of knowing for certain.”

Sai blinks at him, his words an echo of similar ones from Bastian that seem so long ago now. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me yet. You’ve got a long road. When you’re back to your tenacious self, you can thank me. But right now, I’d say we’re even.” He nods briefly and walks out the door before Sai can say another word.

“That’s a pleasant surprise,” Iria says, her dark hair swinging as she walks over to the bed. Her bounce is gone, and Sai frowns at her.

“Something you need to tell me?” she asks, irritated by the quiver in her voice that shows up on the last word.

Iria’s dark eyes rake over Sai without meeting her gaze. She tugs at a loose strand of hair and opens her mouth for a moment before shaking her head. “Not right now. Now, we should walk some more.”

The look of insistence Iria levels at her is so strong it lends a bronze overtone to her dark skin. Taken a little aback, Sai forces her own laugh. “Of course we should. The more I practice, the sooner it’ll click, right?

The next morning, a knock at her door rips Sai out of her sleep. She sits upright, blinking as the lights activate when Dom walks into the room. There’s a cold rush of air that follows on his heels and reaches her before he does. Sai pulls the blanket tight around her and notices even her legs have a chill to them.

She scowls, pushing the monitor wires on her head out of the way. “Why are you here at this hour?”

He watches her, his face expressionless. “Jeffries told me to go over the healing with you.”

“I’m sure he told you to do it in the middle of the night,” she snaps, her breath coming quicker, her head spinning slightly.

“It’s early morning, and I leave shortly. You can’t leave the hospital wing until you know how. Now or after I get back?”

That catches her attention, and Sai shrugs, her sudden anger washing away. There’s this cold feeling in the pit of her stomach every time she sees him now. “Now would probably be better.”

Dom almost smiles, but the expression freezes a fraction of the way there and Sai feels that same pang of emptiness at the lack of his emotions. “This won’t take long.”

Sai catches herself feeling disappointed and scowls again. “Just tell me what to do.”

He shakes his head. “It’s easier to show you...if you’ll let me.” The last few words are spoken so softly she strains to hear them, and for a moment she wants to scream that they—especially they—should not have this awkwardness. But they do. So, she just nods, and he takes her hands in his cool, smooth ones.

Though she’s tried to delve in to see just what makes adrium the compound that it is, not knowing where to start usually stops her before she can. But Dom knows exactly where to begin and how to guide her.

He begins with her legs, where the joints fuse with her skin—where the Adrium becomes a part of her body, latching onto her flesh and suffusing the connection with tendrils of life.

“Never give it too much. Never push it to be more than is necessary,” he cautions in a low voice that seems to echo through her mind. “Just the right balance.” He demonstrates a slow flow of her healing ability, encouraging it through the lines of connection, giving her legs a renewed energy. It trickles through the veins, connecting at the top and disappearing into the expanse that is now her lower body, leaving a trail of electricity that buzzes gently in her head, like the hum she’s heard so often before from Dom.

He follows the line of adrium up the rest of its connectors through her body. It weaves into small deposits along her spine, where she can feel the slight itch of what was once an incision. Then the power spirals up to her skull, where the shaved remnants of her hair surround the sealed cap. The reinforced synaptic connections to her brain are far more complex than Sai anticipated. They’re delicate, thin strands weaving through her sulci and are reinforced intrinsically with the strength of the alien metal. She can feel the sweat beading her brow as she learns from his deft examples.

Dom’s presence in her head has a subtle difference she can’t place. It’s something she’s never noticed in him before, a sort of void that winks in and out, like it’s trying not to be seen. As soon as she thinks it, though, he draws her attention away, pushing her gently to allow the power to flow through and heal, strengthen, and complete the tender links between adrium and synaptic connections. Something else tugs at her, something darker, like the determination that wells up when she’s feeling overwhelmed. Except this has a seductive pull that sends ominous chills down her spine. She backs off, unsure.

“Can I handle it?” She can feel him nod, though her eyes are closed.

“You can handle most anything, Sai.” He guides her awareness through all of it again. Encouraging her, teaching her. “Help it heal, help it fuse, but do not feed it.”

“Feed it?” She can hear the tremor in her voice.

“That darkness, that subtle beckoning you feel?”

She nods.

Dom pauses, a slight hesitance evident where his fingers press on her own. “Adrium is a parasite. It feeds off electricity—in this case, the electricity in your body. If you’re not careful, if you’re not wary, it will slowly take you over. Always remember that.”

Sai shudders as he says the words, suddenly feeling like maybe it’d be better not to have these legs. “Just how dangerous is it?” She opens her eyes as his hands fall from hers.

He shrugs. “It’s a parasite. It leeches off its host. You don’t share your whole presence, your whole being with it, so you should be okay. But it’s hungry, and it wants to survive. Sometimes your instincts might not be your own.”