Page 4 of Ghoul Huntress (Maelstrom Duology #2)

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They’d been unpacking all the stuff from Big Daddy, again. The hasty decision to put everything back into him had been rescinded once they’d had a small conference with the remaining Worshippers. This bastardium-shielded room might seem safer than elsewhere, but it wasn’t necessarily so. Besides, how could anyone study the material stored inside Big D if they went up to the higher stories? It would take a day to climb up, a day down, and you’d be at risk of some stray creature trying to eat you.

Cyn hefted a box of documents and marched out to where they’d stacked everything beyond the blue walls.

A foot soldier put a box on top of hers, and she watched as others unpacked the boxes and shoved things into backpacks, methodically, taking notes of what went where, as much as possible.

“Rest time!” someone sang.

They were almost done, but for a single vehicle, Big D held mountains.

She searched for Vargr and Rutger and took a folding seat beside them, swigged some water. Rutger stayed seated on the ground—mistrusting any seat, she assumed. They’d likely fail under his weight.

Maura, Locke, and Little Mo also arrived. The five of them, six counting Mo, made a small circle, before Maura leaned forward in her chair.

“Things need doing. New things.” A spark of eagerness in her eyes, her small smile, these intrigued.

Those were her kind of words. “Keep going.” She raised her canteen.

Locke ran his hand through his thick hair, tugged his beard, something she’d noticed he and Kiko did often. She had been wondering if dwarfs and beards were obligatory pairs, but so far hadn’t been courageous enough to ask.

“I’ve conferred with Little Mo.” Locke indicated the bot hiding under his chair. “We’ve been looking for the drone procedure in Big Daddy, and I think we’ve got a new idea. Big D is not the sort of computer I thought he was. He’s quantum, filled with so many interconnection possibilities it’s almost infinite. This makes a difference. After he backs himself up, I can insert Mo into the system, and I think he can take over what’s left of Big D.”

“Say that again?” Vargr scratched his graying serrated hair, only to stop as if he’d remembered you can’t scratch what’s close to being stone.

The red in his eyes was muted compared to before. That made her wonder too.

“Big D isn’t gone, he’s just lost. We think?”

“We?” It amused her how Mo was considered a person by Locke.

Mo scuttled over to Cyn and halted. She peered down at him. If backed up, she presumed that meant he could be in two places at once, which was novel, and it meant he wasn’t going to die if this didn’t work. Didn’t it?

“So you’re going to upload him.” Rutger waved a snack bar at Mo. “What if it only screws up the system even more? What do we gain if it does work?”

“A functioning vehicle that should be able to move. Unless we fuck up the Big Daddy system entirely.” His thick eyebrows waggling, Locke regarded Mo. “Is that a possibility?”

Mo sat back on his rear limbs, raised a front one. “I solemnly swear I will not fuck up.”

“Well,” Cyn said. “Sounds good to me.” She had no real grasp of what this entailed. “It can’t hurt you, Mo?”

“No, Cyn. I will still be present in the back-up, though if this insertion works, I will be something different in Big Daddy. I will alter. This is inevitable.”

“I see.”

But he would survive. All her friends had been dying. All the people around her—Tom, Orm, Mads, Willow. She was having a bad effect on the beasters. Before her, everything had been… quieter.

She looked around at them as they continued to talk, appreciating this, that she had friends, lovers, even if she was a demon—part-demon? She had this inkling that part might become full with time—because look at Vincent. A demon forgot what friends were, and that would be tragic. She’d already shot Vargr.

What might her future hold?

Doing things, acting, was in her blood. Maybe she should think about doing them alone, except how could she when the Lure grabbed her if she didn’t fuck her lovers regularly?

Maybe being demon would fix that part of her. What if she could boost herself to be more demon; what if waiting would make her so anyway? And what if she could get strong enough to kill off the Ghoul Lords above this quarter, at the minimum?

She tapped the fronts of her boots on the floor, impatient to get going, to do .

Nothing was happening now. Packing, unpacking, shifting boxes. Blah.

They knew what they were—fae, demon, dwarf, and gargoyle, and it had changed nothing. She wasn’t even sure fae or demon could have fucking DNA. It fitted though—fitted what they were supposed to be. Whatever Dr. Nietz had dug up had led to them being this—horned, scaled, rocklike, and so on. Even so, it was only pinning labels on themselves. It wasn’t action.

They needed to get up Top and kill the Ghoul Lords . They couldn’t even rescue Willow, for god’s sake.

Tears stung her eye and she attempted to ignore them. The other’s voices shuffled through the back of her consciousness.

Too many dead friends. Everyone was dying, and it was her fault.

“So that’s settled.” Maura pursed her lips. “We figured it best to run it by you, Cyn. Since he is a bot programmed to be with you. We’ll do this before we travel upward.”

“Sure.” She nodded. “Go for it.”