Page 10

Our Creator was different from the others. He hasn’t changed, but I swear Malice killed him when we escaped. Morbid saw it, too. I don’t understand how he’s still alive.

Quris did not want Mintaka to live. Not as a Titan. Not as a human. Quris was never a sympathetic man. “Why did you want her dead?”

By the pale glow of his milky, mechanical eyes, I know he’s even less human, reincarnated. I think he has used the technology of Sefina’s grandmother to replace his cells with nanos. It’s in the sheen of his translucent skin, the metallic tones.

“It was never about her. It was always about manipulating you lovesick boys and turning you into the perfect killers. But I see I didn’t quite burn it into your memories hard enough to leave females alone. They are your weakness.”

He hated her as a child. I remember as he drags his blade down my side like he did to her the last day she was in operation. The fiery pain crawls across my body, tensing every muscle. He peels me open and cuts an abdominal muscle in half.

“Heal yourself. Do it, or I will cut more,”

he seethes.

He will lance more of me open either way.

My ultro races in my chest as my nanosolution spills out on the floor like hers did.

“You were all orphans no one missed because there was no one left alive to miss you.”

He seethes.

We all died at his hands again and again until we joined the military and thought we were safe. Quris found us. Killed us then. Found a way into Titan. Became a Creator. And tortured us more as Titans.

He cuts me again, and I feel a muscle piston regulator shut down. My side begins to feel cold, dead, offline forever. And I want so badly to feel such numbness everywhere that I don’t care that he slices into me again.

Quris’ face screws up as he steps up to my front. He’s tall for a human but still has to look up at me, stretched out on his favorite raised workbench. “You don’t want to live?”

I’m gasping for breath, trying to seal my ports so I don’t drain everything I have into the floor.

“Answer me, or I’ll take a hand!”

Quris drags a large scimitar from a nearby table.

“I have never wanted to live.”

“That makes no sense. Explain!”

He rests the edge of the blade near my left wrist.

Even if he hacks it off, I will have an arm free. It might be enough for me to wrench myself out of the hex. But when he draws the blade back, I still crack.

“I wanted them to live.”

I rest my head back against the metal panel. “I just wanted to look over at my Brothers and not be alone.”

“You’re more pathetic than I thought. I guess none of you were strong enough.”

Quris jabs the blade through my stomach into the metal behind me and walks off. “I guess I picked the wrong orphan colony to test.”

I feel the pressure first and then the puncturing agony that worsens with every breath. Heat rushes into my face. I shudder from the maddening agony. “Fuck.”

Sweat beads on my forehead—wasted energy and water. I shut down my breathing. I simply switch it off. I close every port and stare at him because I have no energy for anything else.

“This is what it takes to get you under control, isn’t it?”

he challenges. “Immense pain. It always was. A blade, a bullet, or a beauty in disguise. But you always had to be at the edge of death to become your true self.”

He switches on a holoprojector that replays Mintaka’s final moments as her Titan body drains out onto the floor of the last facility he held us at on Hyperion.

“You’re a traitor to humans.”

The words come out as just air.

“And Solcrue.”

He says it with such pride. “She could’ve been like you. But she gave up.”

“She was like me,”

I tell him. “You killed our hope. She simply chose to not give you what you wanted any longer.”

He is quiet for once.

I study her kind face one more time. Her dark hair and dark eyes remind me so much of Sefina. “She won.”

“But you obey. Why?”

I glare at him. Because one day I will rip out your core.

“Well, it’s no matter. On to the next stage,”

Quris says like he’s already done, and all of that torture he just put me through is worthless to him now.

I wish Macabre was here with some demented joke or Malice to share ideas of torture for Quris. Morbid would know how we could kill him with what’s in the room. Maniac would probably try throwing something, even if it was one of his fingers. We each had our own treatment before we were returned to the general populace of Titan. He made us turn on each other to protect Mintaka. But in the end, we knew what we were doing was the same thing for the same reason. It’s why we united and broke free. I just wish I had stayed free.

He connects me to a nearby chamber. “You’re going to tell me what the Rogue is thinking, or I’m going to start cutting off parts.”

“I’m not telling you anything.”

“You can control their bodies. Now it’s time we level you up.”

He attaches a magnetic cable to the back of my skull.

“Amazing what we can set up in six months, isn’t it?”

I snarl at him.

He taps a button on a nearby screen, and I’m suddenly flooded with someone else’s thoughts.

My only cage is my mind. I am ice and water and ice and time. A temporary state will always end. I will break out and end him. I will be free.

The thoughts repeat. I strain to look over at the chamber. Fracture is a shifter. The way his thoughts blur and ripple suggests he’s in his fragmented form.

“Tell me what he says.”

I look down at Quris. He’s going to kill you when he gets free. So am I.

I have to free him. I have to find Sefina.

I lost myself in Quris’ surprise return from the dead. I will make sure he cannot rise this time.

Quris frees the blade from my body. The withdrawal evokes a sickening pang that makes me convulse. But it’s nothing compared to the piercing fire in my chest as he buries it not far from my ultromotor.

A wicked light fills his eyes. “What did he say?”

I wheeze through clenched teeth as I stare down at the blade that could take me away from my friends, make me unable to protect them, warn them, save them from him and any of the other bloodthirsty lunatics in this forsaken solar system. An inch to the left, and I’ll never see Sefina again.

“That he’s going to end you the moment he gets a chance.”

“Oh.”

He straightens and releases the scimitar, leaving it in my chest. “Wonderful. That’s just what I wanted.”

“I’m not fighting him. He’s already in pieces.”

“If you want your precious Brother Craze back, you will do whatever I want,”

Quris states. “I have his core.”

He holds up an object that looks like a Titan core. “Unless you’re not really interested in saving your kind like you said. In which case, I’ll just wipe his drives and make a new Titan. I have a body.”

“Whose?”

He grins. “Yours.”