Watching From Afar

There was pain. So much pain. It didn’t seem possible that there could be that much of it.

But it was possible. Because the pain was real. Horrifyingly real.  

On a cold metal table was a man and the horrible agony belonged solely to him. He was screaming so loudly he lost his voice and his body was thrashing and convulsing. Wires spilled out of him in a thick cascade. They fell to the floor and then rose into and around the entire room, making it difficult for the men in pale green scrubs and masks to move around.

The loud buzzing of a bonesaw suddenly filled the room which intensified harshly a second later as it grinded into flesh and bone.

The man on the table screamed even louder as his right arm was severed from his body. It now ended just past his elbow and the stump was bleeding. He felt his blood pour out of him, taking his strength with it. It soaked the cold table he was lying on.

One of the doctors, if they could even be called that, now hovered over the man’s torso. He carefully made a deep cut and then grabbed a silver object that a nurse handed him. He placed the object into the cut and used it to spread the skin and muscle apart. There was a lot of blood, but it was being carefully suctioned and monitored. Then the doctor took a small, matte black cube from a table next to him and placed it inside the abdominal cavity. As soon as he took his fingers off it, the cube started twitching. A second later, slender wires that looked more like questing tentacles burst out of it. They slithered through tissue and muscle and anchored themselves into the nervous system.

The doctor repeated the process again at least half a dozen times with several other cubes. Each one was placed inside the patient’s body in very specific spots. One cube’s wires exploded out and stabbed into the patient’s still beating heart. Then they wrapped around it until the heart was entirely encased. Soon after that, it started glowing with green light that pulsed in time to the heart’s beats.

Every time one of the cube’s wires exploded out and quested into the man’s body, he would jerk and twist in pain.

When the doctor was finished, he slid out of his blood-soaked, latex gloves and took up a glowing tablet. On it was a representation of the man on the table. The image was exact, showing his vascular and muscular systems as well as his neurological systems in perfect detail. There were several little squares on the figure, each one glowing in a spot where he had placed one of the cubes. He looked at the man on the table for a second and then pressed his finger to one of the glowing squares.

The man’s body immediately arched in renewed agony and his skin rippled and pulsed. The doctor didn’t hesitate. He pushed his finger to the rest of the glowing squares. The reaction was…hard to watch. The pulsing in the skin became more pronounced, like something was squirming beneath the surface trying to get out. The already well-developed muscles of the patient’s body contorted and swelled grotesquely. They doubled and then tripled in size before smoothing out.

Up by the man’s head, his bright green eyes bulged. They were filled with terror. He had no idea what was happening. He had no idea where he was or why these people were hurting him. The only thing he knew was pain and it was too much for him. He wanted it to be over. He wanted to die. Despite the blood he felt flowing freely from his broken body, he didn’t lose consciousness. He didn’t die, even though he should’ve. There was no escape.

The pain shattered his mind. It broke him. 

That was the point. 

After he was broken, they broke him some more. They popped out his left eyeball (which made a disgusting squelchy sound as it came free of its socket). When there was nothing but a raw, red hole, they fitted a bionic eye into it. It looked like a simple, silver ball. When it was inside and secure, the thing moved on its own, swirling with dizzying speed. It would stop at certain points, focusing on random spots inside the room. 

Suddenly, the doors to the operating room opened and a woman in a sleek, grey pantsuit strode forward. She had beautiful features with slate grey eyes and blonde hair that was pulled up into a tight bun. Her stark cheekbones showed up clearly in the harsh lighting of the room and her bright red lips were pressed firmly together as she surveyed the horrific scene in front of her. Those cold, grey eyes didn’t even flinch at the sight. There was no remorse or pity. She was completely emotionless. 

In her right hand was a metal briefcase. The top of it was fitted with a state-of-the-art security system. The only way it would unlock was with a genetic key that was coded to the woman’s DNA. She placed it on a table to one side and quietly opened it. Inside was another piece of biomech technology. It was about the length of a grown man’s forearm. Two shiny, metallic rings were positioned on either end and between them was a cylinder made of metal. Four protuberances filled with bluish-green liquid sprouted off the central tube with each protuberance ending in a wide barrel. The metal ring on one end had elongated spikes coming off it. They were obviously meant to be drilled into whatever they encircled. The other end resembled something like the barrel of a large laser cannon, but four slender needles (which closely resembled the legs of an insect) sprouted off the end. They were each about six inches long and looked extremely deadly. 

The woman picked up the complex biomech machine with infinite care and handed it to one of the doctors milling around. 

The doctor brought it over to the man’s severed arm and rammed it onto the raw, bleeding flesh.

The man let out a loud, pain-filled scream.

The doctor didn’t even blink at the sound. Instead, he just turned back to his tablet. The biomech cannon showed up on his screen now. The doctor touched his finger to the icon and a high-pitched, whirring sound filled the room. He turned back to the patient and watched as the spikes inside the cannon drilled themselves into the flesh of the severed arm. Then they buried and anchored themselves into the reinforced bone matrix of the patient’s residual limb. There was yet another wailing sound of pain, but nobody in that room cared at all. None of them cared about the man’s agony.

The doctors operating on him barely batted an eye. To them, he was just another Augment in an endless supply of them. Another for the Collection. 

The agony went on as more and more of the man’s humanity was ripped away from him. 

A mech-chip was implanted onto the base of the man’s skull and a micro-tracking chip was affixed directly beneath the other so that the ones in control could keep a careful eye on their tool. They drilled into his spine and implanted another piece of biomech that altered the molecular structure of the skin so that it changed his weak flesh to something as hard and impenetrable as titanium.  

They outfitted him with all kinds of scary upgrades and enhancements, all of them meant to do harm in the most horrifying fashion imaginable. When the augmentation process was over, they let him finally sink into a blissful, unconscious oblivion. 

He woke up sometime later. The pain was still enormous. 

[You serve the Collection. You obey the Collection,] a voice said in his mind. It was loud, and he thrust his remaining hand up to his head. 

“NO!” he yelled. Tears streamed down his eye. The silver one just swirled inside its socket. The sensation was slightly sickening and made him feel nauseous. He turned his head to the side, causing several bursts of pain to ravage his damaged body, and threw up. He had time to wipe his hand across his mouth and then there was a pulsing shockwave that ripped into him from some unknown source. He jerked and convulsed wildly. 

[You serve the Collection.] The voice was insistent and extremely loud. It felt like his head was vibrating from its intensity. 

“NO!” he screamed back, putting all his defiance and rage into it. 

There was another shockwave of electric-like pain that emanated from his bionic eyeball. He tried to fight it but ended up flopping around until he fell off the bed and hit the floor. His body exploded with more pain. The only thing he could do was whimper and cry. He curled himself into a fetal position as he did and just laid on the bare, cold tiles.  

[You obey the Collection.] More flaring pain. He flinched slightly, but it was weak and feeble. 

He wanted to fight against it. Every fiber inside him demanded that, but the pain was too much. The pain was too intense. 

“I obey the Collection,” he said, his voice quiet and harsh. “I serve the Collection.” 
 
Two Years Later 
 
He stood in a block of fifty other Augments of the Collection, his mind shut down. For all intents and purposes, they were all in sleep mode, although they didn’t sleep nor were they awake. They were assimilating. Each one was downloading specific missions via the data-jack they had all been surgically implanted with. 

The information sped across the left field of his vision. This time the target was a woman. Her name was Fiona Rosburg, age twenty-five. A picture of her showed a woman of outstanding health. Her lean frame spoke of raw power and strength. She looked like a highly trained fighter. She had a beautiful, rounded face, with short-cut brown hair and bright green eyes. There was a long, thin scar traveling the length of her left cheek.  

Fiona Rosburg. 

Something about her made him feel…he didn’t quite know what he felt. The unknown emotion boiled up from a place that had forgotten how to feel. He blinked, studying the picture of her some more. She felt…familiar. It felt…good?…to see her face. He was confused. Unsure. 

[She is your target,] a voice whispered in his mind. 

[She is a…friend?] he asked, confused. The swirling feelings rushing up from that forgotten part of himself made it hard to think. 

[She is your target,] the voice insisted, followed by a brief surge of pain. 

[She is my target,] he answered quickly. It was far easier to obey that voice than it was to contradict it in any way. Sometimes the pain was really bad. He didn’t like it when they made him hurt like that. 

Fiona Rosburg. 

He would find her. And he would kill her. 

[Augments. Disembark on your missions. Terminate your targets. Report here when you have completed your assignments.] 

There was no need to answer. The voice never expected any. The block of fifty Augments, including himself, began marching at the same time. Their feet fell at precisely the same instant. Everything about them was (even down to their breathing) synchronized.

As they approached a large, hangar-style door, it split down the middle and rumbled on its tracks. It let the Augments into the outside world to so they could deal death to the unlucky people that crossed the Collection. 

As soon as they were all outside, everyone broke off from the main body. Some bounded over the earth like leaping frogs. Others just raced across it, swifter than a running cheetah. He was the only one that walked. He wasn’t in any particular rush, and truth be told, the familiarity of his target made him want to procrastinate as much as possible anyway. 

Rain pelted him out of a dreary, steel grey sky. In a couple of seconds, he was drenched. His black hair hung in ropy tendrils across his face. He didn’t bother brushing it aside. There was no need. 

He came to the gate that encircled the perimeter of their compound and jumped over it with ease. Once he was on the other side, he made his way up the muddy dirt road. It was an uphill walk and the mud made his footing treacherous. His balance, however, was on a level far surpassing normal humans and he didn’t so much as slip.

He walked for a couple of hours, the rain still coming down in a torrent. That’s all the weather ever seemed to be these days. Rain. Rain and dark, grey clouds. He looked up at the sky, stopping for a moment to peer at in childlike curiosity. The target and his mission were momentarily forgotten as he gazed up into that eternally dark, stormy sky. His eye tracked individual raindrops as they fell, watching them until they hit the earth. It was mesmerizing. He didn’t realize that he was the only Augment left standing there. All the others were gone, ready to pursue their targets with the ruthlessness that was forced into them. He decided that he didn’t much care. He thought it was…nice?…standing there and watching the clouds roil across the sky. 

[Alpha-1.] That voice again. He hated that voice. [Do you require some form of assistance?] 

[No. I am undamaged,] he responded. 

There was another, tiny surge of pain. It struck him at the base of his skull. That’s where it always seemed to come from. He had fantasized a number of times about ripping whatever was planted there right out of his skin. 

[If you do not require assistance then you must continue on your objective. Find your target and terminate her.] 

Pain again. Always pain. It was their favorite tool. 

[I understand,] he replied again. [I serve the Collection.] 

The voice didn’t respond. 

He continued up the hill. When he came to the top, he found himself overlooking the desolate shantytown called Little 5. Off in the distance was Zone 5. Little 5 was huddled up against its massive titanium walls.

Zone 5 was a massive, militaristic compound made up of hundreds of high-rise buildings. Clustered around those were smaller, less overwhelming structures. In the direct center of the compound was a massive tower that rose up from the ground and dwarfed every other building inside Zone 5. It was known simply as the Citadel. Inside that building was the Boards’ offices. They ran the show. They were the ones that created Zone 5, the Collection, and pretty much everything else. The myth and legend surrounding them was crazy. Some even said they were immortal.

Zoners had it made. Protection, luxurious housing, food, medicine. The compound itself was compulsively clean and elegant and the contrast between its shining silver walls and the dilapidated shantytown was enormous. The inhabitants of Little 5 served as a cheap labor force for the Zone’s military leaders. They were forced to work the hardest, nastiest or most dangerous jobs. Construction, cleaning, farming, carpentry, recycling, factories. All of it. There was a literal mountain of dead Little 5 denizens that perished inside Zone 5.

Men, women, and even children. 

And there was no gain for them. 

They squeezed out a meager life filled with poverty and destitution and no hope of ever attaining any status higher than a serf. They were the bottom feeders. The trash. The filth. They were nothing but bugs to be squashed. He knew this. He’d seen it time and time again. It was, after all, why the Collection and the Augments were created. The Board needed an army of genetically enhanced monsters that obey without question to absolutely squash and annihilate resistance.  

The conditions of that hellhole inevitably bred people willing to stand up and force change, so the Augments were sent in to destroy whatever uprisings they were able to organize and policed them the rest of the time. Augments were the enforcers. They were the monsters that gave little children nightmares and the shadow that was an ever-present fear lurking in the backs of all their minds. 

Despite that fear, however, they still tried again and again to fight. Freedom from that kind of life was too tempting to pass up, he figured. 

He swept those thoughts out of his mind. They were too big for it to handle anyway. He continued on his way, keeping the picture of his target up in the left field of his vision.

A lump of dread had settled into his mind whenever he saw that woman’s face. He picked up his speed and stopped trying to delay his task, deciding that if he hurried up and killed her, then the unfamiliar emotions would vanish as well. 

He came to the edge of Little 5 and saw corpses littering the streets. His brothers and sisters had gotten there before him, leaving their various targets in the dirty streets. Several of the bodies bore large, gaping holes through their torsos. Some of them had various body parts melted off. Others were nothing but dried up husks, all the blood and fluids inside them drained away (the biomech cannons attached to all Augments used the blood as fuel and the resulting high-intensity beam was hot enough to instantly vaporize or melt any material known to man). They were highly effective weapons. 

He walked down the street and took care to step over the bodies of the dead. A part of him thought it wouldn’t be right if he stepped on them.  

Desecrated them, you mean! his mind shouted at him. The words surged out from somewhere deep inside his head like an erupting volcano. They were confusing words though. He didn’t even know what they meant. 

He brushed his inner voice aside and kept walking. His senses were kicked into high gear. The millions of minuscule and minute details were all taken in and filtered through all his various augmentations. He noted breathing a few dozen feet away in one if the desolate homes of Little 5. He heard a slight rustling sound thirty yards behind him and to the left. He smelled the urine of someone whom had just evacuated their bladder in fear. He saw, heard, smelled, touched, and even tasted it all but everything came back telling him that his target was nowhere close. 

He kept walking. He didn’t see anyone living. They probably fled in terror after the first wave of Augments fell on them. Now the little shanty houses were empty. 

He stopped in place and stood completely still. The bionic silver eye switched from the normal, visual spectrum to infrared. He scanned the buildings around him. They were all empty. The only thing he picked up were the heat signatures of rats and other small rodents. 

A sudden noise, like the whisper of cloth on cloth, caught his attention. His reflexes kicked into high gear. He turned around and raised his biomech cannon at the same time. He leveled it at the stealthy intruder trying to sneak up on him. 

It didn’t take him long to see that the person was actually his target, Fiona Rosburg. She had a mask covering her nose and mouth. She wore black military fatigues and had several pieces of military grade armor on.

The second he saw her, his mind and body seized up. He couldn’t do a thing. All he did was stare at her. 

She had a fierce warrior’s look on her face that was full of rage. She slashed at him with a silver blade. It sliced through the air as it sped toward his head. 

The enhancements made to his flesh had one weakness. A blade. It was a flaw that whoever created the Augments in the first place never fixed. The razor-sharp thinness of a sword was the only thing that could actually cut through his titanium-like skin. His reflexes were more than enough to handle the attack though.  

He was impressed that the woman learned about the flaw and now used it ruthlessly against him. It spoke to her intelligence and resilience. However, he was still far superior to a normal human. 

He could’ve killed her easily about seven different way in that first pass alone. 

He’d been poised to do just that, but something stopped him. Instead, he merely sidestepped the downswing and watched her stumble past him.

What is happening to me? he asked himself, but no answer would come. 

Meanwhile, the woman rushed him again. Her fighting style and attacks were amazing for someone with just honest-to-God human capability to work with.

The blade she used was a razor-edged machete. It came sweeping toward him again. He deflected it with his biomech cannon, and the blow caused a ringing chime to fill the air. He spun away from her, but he left her untouched and unhurt yet again. Eventually, even she became confused. 

“What’s the matter, you murdering freak!?” she screamed at him. “I just watched all your buddies come in here and slaughter my friends and family! You gonna tell me you got a weak stomach for killing?” 

He didn’t answer. He couldn’t give her one anyway. He wasn’t sure why he couldn’t bring himself to kill her. He hadn’t had any such hesitation in the past. 

Angered by his silence, she renewed her attacks. There was a beautiful sort of violence to them and their awesome strength surprised him. She kept it up too, distracting him thoroughly. 

He knew she wouldn’t be able to keep it up forever. She would eventually tire but he would be able to go on for several hours more without fatigue. 

He fought inwardly with himself to quit letting her live and to just end it but that other part of himself wouldn’t let him. 

The woman screamed in rage and fury. She renewed her attacks with increased vigor, but she was visibly slower now. It would be over soon. 

Of course, that was assuming he could actually bring himself to kill her. 

He dodged and blocked more blows. They just kept coming at him and he thought it was strange to see her waste so much energy when she ultimately knew her attacks were pointless. There was fury in her eyes as he watched her come at him but he caught a glimpse of something else as well. It was in the slight smirk to her mouth. It was a tiny micro-expression, but it denoted some kind of hidden knowledge. Something that made her more confident than she had a right to be. 

His eyes widened in shock when he finally realized what she was actually doing. 

She was distracting him. 

She was keeping his focus on her and away from whatever was behind him. The whole time she was engaging him she was doing it in a way that his back was always turned. There was something or someone behind him that she was trying to keep hidden. 

As if to confirm it, he caught the sound of breathing behind him. Before he could react, there was a soft phhtt sound. A second later he felt the sharp sting of a tranquilizer dart (needles were also thin enough to break through his skin).

The dosage in the dart was strong. His head started to swim almost instantly but he stayed on his feet. The tranquilizer was strong, but it was still too weak to put him down completely. It was enough to slow his movements, however, and he was just as powerless to stop the next dart as he was the first. The second dosage, combined with the first, was enough to tunnel his vision. The third and fourth darts caused a blanket of darkness to overwhelm him. 

He fell to one knee and then the other one. There was a moment when he struggled to get back up. His head swam sickeningly though. 

The fifth and final dart hit him, and he finally did go down. He fell face first onto the dirt road. 

“Get him back to my house,” Fiona commanded. 

It was the last thing he heard before that blackness closed in on him completely.

The darkness gave way to a series of images that cascaded through his battered mind. They were memories from another person’s life. At first, he didn’t know who the memories belonged to. It was a man. The man was a soldier. He was also a father. And a friend. The man was gentle, but he was also what looked like an enforcer of some type. 

It took some time, but he finally started to piece together why the memories seemed so familiar to him. 

It was because he was the man. He was the father. The soldier. The friend. These memories were his. They were who he’d been before...before who he was now. 

They confused him at first. Then the images stopped, and flashes of a singular, more detailed memory floated to the surface of his mind. In this new memory he saw himself with both hands on the wheel of a large military transport truck. It rumbled and rattled along the blacktop inside Zone 5. Up ahead, he could see the massive titanium gates that led to the outside world.

He turned to look at his daughter sitting beside him. He brought her with him today because she’d insisted. She said she wanted to see what Little 5 was really like. She was eighteen and stubborn. No matter what he said, she flat out refused to let him turn her down. In the end, he gave in. He couldn’t help himself.  

It was against protocol, but he made sure to clear it with his commanding officer beforehand. 

“Thanks, daddy,” she told him, her voice artfully sweet and innocent. When he looked at her though, her expression didn’t match her voice. There was a serious, drawn look on her face. “Thanks for letting me come.” 

“You’re welcome, button,” he told her.  

“Dad!” she yelled. She folded her arms across her chest and glared at him. “I told you to stop calling me that. I’m not a little girl anymore. I’m eighteen.” 

“Sorry,” he shrugged, a small smile on his face. “Force of habit.” 

She sighed dramatically and he turned back to focus on the road in front of him. 

The massive wall surrounding Zone 5 rose up to a height of forty feet. It loomed closer and closer as they drove.

The walls caging the entire population of Zone 5 in its protective embrace had a certain ominous look to it, he decided. He didn’t care for it much. It was like a giant contradiction. It was supposed to keep them safe but he thought it looked more like prison walls.

He rolled to a stop about fifteen feet in front of it. There was a guard station the size of a small house to his immediate left. 

He rolled down his window. A second later, a soldier came out and leaned a hand against the door. He peered inside the truck’s cab, getting a good look at the two inside. 

“Hey, Milo,” the soldier said. He leaned slightly into the vehicle as he spied the girl sitting in the passenger seat. “Hey there, kiddo.” 

“Hi, Uncle Drew,” his daughter replied with a faint smile. 

“You headed into Little 5?” Drew asked. 

“Yeah, got some goods to deliver.” He hooked a thumb at the back of the transport. There were a few meager supplies inside meant to sustain the massive population of Little 5 for an entire year. Suffice it to say, there was nowhere near enough stuff to get the job done. “It’s not a lot, but it’ll have to do.” 

“Same story, different day, huh?” Drew asked, a slight smile on his face. 

“Yeah,” Milo responded. “Not sure that’s gonna mean much to the people out there.” 

Drew nodded but stayed silent. Little 5 and Zone 5 politics were a touchy subject with a lot of people. 

Drew turned to a different soldier manning the gate’s controls. He flipped him the okay signal and backed away. There was a loud whirring hum as the gigantic gates trundled along their tracks, creating an opening to the world outside Zone 5. 

“Be careful out there, Milo,” Drew said. “Things can get pretty crazy sometimes.” 

“Don’t worry about us,” he said with a grin. “I think we’ll be all right.” 

Drew smiled and waved him through. Milo shifted into gear and eased the lumbering vehicle out of Zone 5 and into Little 5. The gate closed behind them.

He looked over at his daughter. She was looking around with avid interest. There was an almost outraged look on her face as she saw the dirty streets and dilapidated shanties.

Milo heard the gates close with a loud clank!

As soon as they did, all hell broke loose. Men and women jumped out of nowhere, clad in shoddy, ragged clothes. Each one was armed with heavy weapons. Machine guns, assault rifles, and even a grenade launcher. They were all primitive throwbacks to earlier days, but still just as deadly. Milo wasn’t even a sure how or where these renegades got them. He thought most of the older weapons had been destroyed a long time ago. 

Milo’s instincts kicked in automatically. 

“Get down!” he yelled, throwing himself on top of his daughter. 

She screamed, terrified. Bullets ripped into the windshield, shattering it to bits of jagged glass that rained down on them. He could smell his daughter’s hair. It smelled like the strawberry scented shampoo she used all the time. 

The barrage of gunfire went on for what seemed like an eternity. He waited, still shielding his daughter.

The sounds of gunfire eventually faded to clicking noises. 

Milo grabbed his own firearm, an HIL-250. It was a highly advanced weapon that fired concentrated blasts of high-intensity laser bursts.

He popped up and fired out the broken windshield in one fluid motion. He’d been trained rigorously to track threats in a matter of seconds. He fired four bursts and watched as four of his attackers went down. They didn’t get back up.

He saw a Little 5 rebel toting an old, rusty grenade launcher and wearing some kind of primitive armor plating take a few steps toward his truck.

Milo adjusted his weapon to where it would shoot out a broader, thinner beam. He fired three times and watched as the laser beams sliced through an arm, a leg, and then completely through the man’s torso.

Milo turned back to his daughter.

“You need to stay down, okay?” he said, his eyes desperate.

His daughter looked up at him. One side of her face was bleeding from a long cut to her cheek. He saw the cut and his anger boiled up even hotter.

He gave her a quick kiss on the forehead and then shoved her back onto the floorboards. Then he shot back up. 

The rebels had reinforcements now, about five more to be exact. They all pointed their guns at the truck. They held them up to their cheeks with steady, calm hands.

Milo took a second to glance at the top of the wall, wondering where his own men were. He saw them though. The top of the wall was manned by Zone 5 soldiers. Not only that but each one had their weapon trained on the rebels firing on his truck. Not one of them, however, was doing a damn thing to stop the attack.

Not one of them was trying to help. 

In frustrated rage at the betrayal, he fired more shots and watched as more rebels crumpled to the ground. He even took a shot at the soldiers lining the top of the wall out of anger, but it just bounced off the polished metal harmlessly.

Then his gun started beeping at him loudly. He looked down. There was a red warning light on top that was flashing insistently. Under the flashing light was the word battery. 

“God dammit!” he shouted angrily.

“Dad?” his daughter said.

“Just stay down!” he yelled at her.

He saw her flinch in fear and felt guilty for yelling at her, but he pushed that aside for now.

He struggled to pull out a replacement battery pack, but before he could, faces filled the windows on both sides of his vehicle.

The minute he saw them, he knew something was wrong. The faces weren’t nameless Little 5 rebels. They were Zone 5 soldiers dressed down in rags. He even trained beside some of them.

“What the hell?” he asked, confused. “What’s going on h...”

“Stay where you are and drop your weapon!” one of them commanded. She cut him off abruptly. It was a woman. He saw her clearly and had no trouble recognizing her.

Her name was Tessa. 

He glanced at his daughter and then back at her, wondering what the hell was going on. 

“What are you doing?” he asked her angrily. “You could’ve gotten her killed you psychotic bitch!” 

Tessa didn’t respond. She just brought up a pistol and fired into his chest three times. The pain was immense, but his bulletproof vest stopped all the bullets from actually killing him. 

He was thrown against his car door and as soon as he hit it, an arm reached through the shattered window and pinned him in place. He struggled to get away, but the arm was too strong. All he could do was watch what happened next.

Tessa calmly opened the passenger side door and found his daughter curled into a tight ball and whimpering slightly. With an empty smirk, she reached in and grabbed her, taking her away from him. 

“NO!” he shouted, enraged. He struggled harder, even resorting to biting, but he couldn’t get free. He couldn’t stop them. “Give her back to me!” 

There was a sharp, stinging pain in the side of his neck and then everything went black. 

He woke up again several hours later. He was slouched on the steering wheel like he just took a nap. His head felt groggy and it thumped painfully right around his temple areas. 

There were a lot of gaps in his memory, so he wasn’t sure what happened. Flashes of combat invaded the fog, but he couldn’t really pin them down for details. Every time he tried the vague memory would vanish.

Then his heart lurched with sudden, uncontrollable fear. He looked to the passenger side seat where his daughter was supposed to be but found her missing. 

Seeing the empty seat sent a gut-wrenching feeling of desperation and fear to spread through his whole body. 

He got out of the truck. He stumbled slightly because of a wave of dizziness. He brushed it off though and started running anywhere and everywhere in a mad attempt to find his daughter. He ran through the shanty town, his HIL fully charged now.

He stormed inside one of the barely stable buildings and found a family huddled fearfully inside. 

“Where is she!?” he screamed at them.  

All he remembered was that the people of Little 5 had her. They had his daughter. That was the only possible explanation. They ambushed him after all. 

“Who are you talking about?” the father asked, his face smeared with dirt and grime. There was fear in his eyes, but also anger. “Get out!” 

“Where is my daughter?” Milo yelled again, this time aiming his weapon at the man’s forehead. 

The man quailed in fear, but despite that, he still maneuvered himself into a protective position in front of his wife and children. 

“We don’t know,” he answered. He was frantic and insistent. He was trying to convince the man of their innocence. 

He failed. 

“Liar!” Milo yelled back. 

And then something inside him snapped. 

He shot them all, including the children, and continued onto the next residence without even blinking an eye. He went through the same routine there and when he didn’t get the answer he wanted, he pulled the trigger again. Then he went on to the next and then the next and so on and so on. Before he was stopped by a squad of Zone 5 soldiers, he ended up murdering more than two dozen Little 5 citizens.

His memory suddenly switched to a new one. Now he sat in a dark cell, crying profusely. The light of the moon filtered inside through barred windows. He fought the soldiers that eventually stopped his rampage through Little 5. He fought them hard too. There were several cuts to his face and body, several broken bones and bruised ribs, and his left eye was nothing but a raised puff of swollen flesh. 

He didn’t care about the pain, though. 

All he cared about was his daughter. All he wanted was to find her and bring her back safe. 

It was several days, however, before he was brought before the Council (the committee that dealt with soldiers that strayed from the Board’s vision and plan for the world). 

“Sgt. Milo Archibald Rosburg, you are on trial for the unsanctioned murders of more than two dozen Little 5 citizens. How plead you?” the Magistrate of the Council asked. She was an old, nearly ancient woman of snow-white hair and dry, wrinkled skin. She looked at him with brown eyes that still had the intelligence from her youth. 

“Guilty,” Milo responded. He wasn’t fighting the charge. He wasn’t sorry for what he did either. They deserved what they got. They deserved all of it. They kidnapped and (more than likely) murdered his daughter. 

A door opened at the far end of the cavernous room. He turned to look. A woman was walking toward him. Her face bobbed up and down in the odd lighting. When she came closer, he recognized her. 

Tessa. Tessa Harrison. 

He shook his head. A flash of memory hit him suddenly in that moment. It was an image of her face hanging above the shattered window to his transport vehicle the day his daughter was kidnapped. 

-Stay where you are and drop your weapon!- 

The voice came out of a distant, haze filled memory, but it brought all the others crashing into him. The gunfight. The ones who really took his daughter. They’d been soldiers he fought side by side with for years. Some of them had even been his friends. People he’d fought with and trusted like family. 

Seeing Tessa brought with it the devastating truth. 

Little 5 had nothing to do with his daughter’s abduction. 

His own people were to blame. They were the ones that took her. 

When the full realization of that hit him, he snarled and struggled against his restraints like a rabid animal. 

Tessa took it all in without so much as a glimmer of emotion. 

“You,” he snarled, spit flinging out of the corner of his mouth. “You took her!” 

She didn’t say a word, but he saw it in her eyes. The malice. The glee. She reveled in the fact that she had tricked him so thoroughly. He couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t believe her, of all people, would put his daughter in that kind of danger.

After all, she was her child too.

“Magistrate.” Tessa nodded to the ancient woman sitting at the bench. The Magistrate nodded back. 

“Major Harrison. Have the preparations been made?” 

“They have,” Tessa answered. 

“Thank you and I would also like to congratulate you on your promotion. I understand you are now a full corporate member in charge of the Collection,” the Magistrate said with a very slight smile. 

“Thank you. I am,” Tessa replied with a nod. 

“What are you talking about?” Milo asked, so angry he could barely stand it. “Why did you kidnap her? Where is she? If you hurt her I’ll kill you.” 

Tessa slowly turned to face him; her eyes cold. She smiled at him and then walked a little closer, leaning in so that she could whisper quietly into his ear. 

“Save your breath, Rosburg. Fiona is fine, not that you’ll care much longer.” She smiled at him then. It was a quick, cruel smile. “Not after what we do to you.” 

He whirled back to the Magistrate just as she slammed her gavel down. 

“Sgt. Rosburg, you have been proven guilty of mass murder. The penalty for such a vicious act is to be executed at once. However, Major Harrison has convinced the Board that you are too valuable to be put to death, therefore your sentence has been reduced. You are to be conscripted into service as an Augment for the Collection. May God have mercy on your soul.” 

With that, she rose, along with the six other members of the Council. 

“NO!” he yelled, terrified. That was a fate worse than death and he knew it. 

Hands seized him then. Dozens of them and all at once. There were too many to fight, but he still tried. He fought as hard as he could. He thought he might’ve broken someone’s nose right before something hard and extremely heavy collided with the back of his head, knocking him out instantly. 

When he woke up again, he did so screaming with half his right arm missing. 
 

******

 
He woke up with a start, the memories and the dream fading again behind a wall inside his mind (a wall the people that turned him into a monster put there). 

There was a steady tink…tink…tink sound as the rain pelted the corrugated metal roof of Fiona’s dingy little shack. He glanced around. The place was empty. It was small too (probably more hut than actual home) so there wasn’t a lot of places a person could hide. 

He was definitely alone. He found that strange. Why would she leave him by himself? 

He got off the rusted little cot Fiona put him on and took a couple of steps. An intense and massive current of electricity speared into him. It came from a rather simplistic shock collar around his throat. 

His muscles jerked and he lost his balance, which sent him crashing to the dirt floor. The needles of his biomech cannon dug into the ground when he tried to brace his fall with it. He was lucky he hadn’t accidentally discharged it. That would’ve left a sizable crater that he didn’t think Fiona would appreciate much. He didn’t want to upset her which was a completely foreign concept to him. Why would it matter what the woman thought or if she was angry? More importantly, why did he care? 

“I...don’t…know,” he struggled to say. The words left his throat feeling sore and it ached with a dull, flat pain. It was understandable. He hadn’t used his voice in a long, long time after all. As an Augment, he had no need for a voice. There was no need to talk at all. 

He struggled with the hundreds of tiny, maddening emotions circling inside his head like buzzards come to feed on a carcass. Only the carcass in this case was his mind.

Finally giving up, he sat back down on the cot and waited. 

He didn’t have to wait long. About ten minutes later, Fiona walked in carrying an old M60 machine gun. She held it with the barrel pointing at the floor. He thought that maybe…maybe that might be a good sign. 

“Who were you sent to kill?” she asked, her voice filled with hatred. 

“Y…you,” he stuttered. 

“Why?” she asked. 

“I d…don’t…know,” he answered, watching her with his real eye. The other eye read her body language, everything from the muscles of her face to the way her eyes moved. It told him she was angry although he didn’t need that bit of tech to figure that out. He could’ve done that himself. It was practically written on the woman’s face, clear as day. 

“W…why…why are you so…angry?” he asked. 

“Why?” she asked, disbelievingly. “Why? How about because you monsters came in here and slaughtered all my friends. They were the only people I had left.” 

“I’m sorry…w-we…d-don’t have much…ch-choice,” he explained. He was looking at the floor like a child that’s been caught doing something they shouldn’t. “W-we…are…given orders. We h-have to o-obey…th-them.” 

“All the same,” Fiona replied. “Your kind are murderers and abominations.” 

“I’m so-sorry...” he said. He struggled with the conversation. The words came to his mind easily enough, it was pushing them past his vocal cords that seemed to be the problem. Another word popped up, out of the blue. He didn’t know its origin, just that it seemed like the right thing to say. Not only that, but it felt important and something that needed to be said. “B-button.” 

There was a moment where Fiona looked taken aback. Her voice locked up and her mind started spinning. He saw a look of complete denial cross her pretty features. 

Finally, she was able to talk again. She looked at him. If it were possible, she seemed even more furious than before. 

“What did you call me?” she asked, her eyes wide. She got up and came closer to him. She bent down so she could look into his eye. “Why did you call me that?” 

He shrugged. “I don’t…don’t really know. It…just felt…right.” 

She put the gun down and edged even closer, her hand coming to rest on his cheek. 

The longer she looked at him the more her anger seemed to dwindle away. It was like she was seeing something she never thought she’d see again. 

“Who are you?” 

“Al…alpha-1,” he answered. 

“Not that name. Not the name they gave you. Your real name,” she whispered gently.

The bionic eye read the signs her body gave off. This time, her anger was gone. Now it was replaced by cautious hope. 

“I…don’t…,” he was about to say, but something blasted through the wall in his mind. 

It was an image of a man outside his truck. The face was familiar, but he couldn’t recall the man’s name. 

-Hey, Milo- 

Hey, Milo. That echoed in his mind over and over again. It grew larger and as it did, pieces of who he really was started coming back to him. Bit by bit, those pieces of himself tore at the wall inside his mind until it crumbled.  

“My name…is…,” he half-whispered, his eye catching hers. “Is Milo.” 

She gasped and her eyes started to spill tears. They ran down her somewhat dirty cheeks. She put her other hand up to his face now and started brushing back thick strands of his black hair. She started crying so much that her body was shaking. 

“It can’t be. They killed you. That’s what everybody told me. They killed you.” She paused for a long time and hesitated to ask her next question. Finally, a couple minutes later, she did. “Daddy?” she asked. 

The wall collapsed completely now, and everything came back to him. All of his broken memories from his shattered life. His childhood, his school years, his training days. Something still lurked behind that wall. He didn’t know what it was, and he didn’t want to struggle with it, so he let it go. The memories of his daughter had driven that concern out of his head. All the memories of his Fiona. He stared at her; at the strong, capable woman she’d become. 

“Fiona,” he said, his voice still hard to use, but growing stronger. A father’s love swelled up in him and he started crying too. “F-Fiona…I thought y-you were gone f-forever.” 

“What did they do to you?” she asked. “Why did they turn you into…into this?” She gestured with her hands, encompassing his entire body.  

“Wh-when they s-stole y-you from me...,” he started to say. His breathing became labored and heavy as if he were doing intensive physical labor instead of simply talking. “I th-thought L-little 5 p-people d-did it. I d-didn’t k-know that…that it was my o-own people. I we-went on a ra-rampage…k-killed a l-lot of in-inno-innocent pe-people.” 

“And then they turned you into this instead of executing you like everyone said?” 

He nodded. He couldn’t hide the shame he felt. Shame at letting her be taken and shame at being so thoroughly manipulated. 

“Wh-what happened to y-you?” he asked. “What d-did they d-do to you?” 

“There was a woman. She took me from the truck and then dumped me in Little 5. A family kind of took me in and I’ve been living here ever since,” she answered. “They were nice. They treated me like I was one of their own, even though I was eighteen and withdrawn. I didn’t want anything to do with them. Especially after they told me you’d been executed. I…I knew about those people you killed. Of course, I didn’t want to believe it, but they said it was you. Then they told me they executed you for what you did. I was devastated. It took me a long time to get over it.”

“I…I th-thought they k-kidnapped you,” he told her. 

“I know,” she replied. She looked at him and smiled sadly. “I blamed the Board for everything that happened, for everything wrong with the world. I couldn’t take what they were doing anymore. I couldn’t watch everyone around me waste away because they take everything and leave us with scraps. I couldn’t stand knowing that you’d worked for them once. That they murdered you. So I spoke out. I rose up and others followed me. I suppose that’s why they sent you here to kill me. They think I’m a threat to their precious feudal system. They’re probably afraid I’ll lead a revolution against them.” 

“A-are you?” he asked, concerned. When his masters inside the Collection realized he’d not only disobeyed direct orders, but his target was still alive, they were going to send every Augment after him and his daughter. He needed to get her somewhere safe and he needed to hurry. 

“Well...yeah. It might fail but the Board doesn’t leave us much choice. I have to at least try and change things. You can’t even begin to understand how bad things inside Little 5 are. You’ve no idea how many people I’ve had to bury because they caught the sickness or just plain starved to death.”

He felt the passion in her words and the courage in her soul. They were qualities that every great leader had, and he understood why people followed her. 

He knew what he had to do. He didn’t like it and it killed him just thinking it, but there was no other choice. She had to find somewhere safe and never come back or they wouldn’t stop hunting her. They wouldn’t stop until she was dead. It broke him all over again thinking about it. He finally managed to fight free of the Collection and on top of that he’d even found his daughter. Now he was going to lose her again. But he had to protect her. He had to make sure nothing would ever hurt her. 

“You have to l-leave,” he commanded, grabbing her hand forcefully with his good one. “N-now.” 

“Why?” she asked, confused. “I just found out you were alive and now you want me to leave?” 

“Yes,” he stated, fear showing in his face and body language. “You need to h-hide. When they find out I f-failed, they’ll s-send someone else. Go n-now!” 

He pushed her out the door, not even letting her gather any of her belongings. She stumbled outside while trying to stop him from physically removing her. 

“I can’t go. They need me here,” she protested. “And there’s nowhere else to go. Outside Zone 5 and Little 5 there’s nothing but the Devastation. No one can survive there.” 

He was about to say something else, but his instincts flared up. He pushed Fiona roughly, accidentally sending her crashing through a wall and back into her house. She bounced along the ground until she hit the far wall.

She was dazed, but unhurt.

As soon as he was sure she was fine, he whirled around and swept his arm up. He blocked an Augment’s needles from burying themselves in his flesh. He looked up into his attacker’s face and met only the blank, deadened eye of a woman that looked barely over thirty. 

He lashed out with his own cannon before she fell and watched one of the needles split her cheek open. Blood rushed out. She fell to the ground and rolled away from him, springing back up a few feet away.

She had her cannon pointed at him, but he dived out of the way just in the nick of time. She fired her weapon and the beam exploded into the ground. There was a loud explosion and then he felt the concussive force of it plow into his back. It threw him through the air, and he fell into the abandoned, rusted husk of an old car. It crumpled around him and it took a minute or two for him to climb back out. 

The Augment rushed him as he finally cleared the car. She grabbed a fistful of his hair and yanked him up, holding him two or three inches off the ground. She drew back her biomech cannon. He saw the points of her needles as she readied the strike that was about to kill him.  Just as she went to plunge them into his body, she was struck in the back by gunfire. 

The Augment flinched, jerking slightly. 

Milo looked over and found Fiona in the distance, the M60 held up to her cheek. She pulled the trigger again and the Augment jerked several more times. The bullets didn’t actually hurt the thing, but it did distract her long enough for Milo to plunge the needles of his own biomech cannon into the flesh just below her breasts. 

There was a piercing scream as unfamiliar pain filled the Augment. Then there was a loud gurgling sound and the weapons’ process of sucking in the blood and fluids of its victims began.

The woman gasped and her eye widened in shock. Her body collapsed in on itself and her suddenly nerveless fingers released their grip on his hair. He dropped to the ground and as he did, the needles of his cannon were yanked out. 

What was left of the Augment’s body slumped to the ground. A small cloud of dust puffed up into the air as it did. 

“Dad!” Fiona screamed. 

He watched as she ran up to him. 

[Alpha-1. You are in violation of your direct orders!] a voice screamed in his mind. He fell to his knees against the crushing pain of it. [You will carry out your assignment or you will be terminated!] 

[My name…is…Milo!] he yelled back. He struggled back to his feet, fighting the nausea that enveloped him. [My name is Milo! And I remember everything!] 

Pure agony speared the back of his skull. It sent waves and waves of pain coursing through his body. He staggered again, falling against a wall and howling like a madman. Once again, however, he managed to get to his feet. 

He could see Fiona trying to ask him what was wrong. He could see the concern in her eyes, but he couldn’t really hear her over the roar of pain inside his own head. 

He took in a searing breath. His lungs felt like they were on fire and he felt like every nerve ending he had was being slowly yanked out one by one.  

[You serve the Collection,] the voice yelled, followed by another surge of nauseating pain.  

[You obey the Collection.] More pain. 

The part of him that had been conditioned to bow down to that pain and just do what the voice said was overruled. For the first time in the two years since they turned him, he thought for himself. He had his own desires. His own will. 

He stared at the long needles of his cannon and desperate thoughts entered his head. He took a deep breath and then clumsily positioned his cannon and one of its needles to where it was lined up (mostly) with the base of his skull. 

“What are you doing?” Fiona asked. She made a move toward him to try and stop him but before she could, he jammed the needle into his flesh. 

He had to work fast, or his own weapon was going to kill him. He quickly searched for the node implanted inside. It wasn’t hard to find where the waves of pain were originating from, and in a couple seconds he speared the damned thing with the tip of a needle. 

He jerked his weapon back out. 

As soon as he destroyed the node, the pain stopped. It felt good too. It felt good to finally be rid of the dehumanizing thing. His neck hurt from the needle he stuck in there, but it was nothing compared to what they used to do to him with the node. 

Next, he managed to make a slit in his skin. Then he reached inside the cut with his fingers and pulled what remained of the device off the base of his skull. That was a different kind of agony altogether. It felt like he was pulling out a piece of his skull with it but when he finally yanked it free of his skin, there were no bone fragments It was just the tech they implanted him with. The tiny piece of biomech that had caused him so much agony over the years was gone. He threw it on the ground and stomped it flat. 

“Are you okay?” Fiona asked, cautiously.  

“I’ll b-be fine,” he responded, ripping pieces of the dead Augment’s shirt off her dried-out corpse. He padded the material as thickly as he could and then pressed it to the back of his neck where he was still bleeding. “You still have to get o-out of here.” 

“I can’t,” she explained. “I can’t leave. Not like this. Whatever they send at us, we’ll deal with it together, okay?” 

“No,” he snapped at her, firmly. “I’m sorry b-but I c-can’t let them h-hurt you.” 

“Dad,” she tried to say, but he stopped her. 

“No. You w-want the B-board gone? Well, I want them d-dead for what they did to me. For what they s-stole from me. I’m the o-only one here that can even stand a ch-chance and you know it. Look what we d-did to your people without even br-breaking a sweat. If you face off against th-their Augments again, they’ll kill you.” 

“But they’ll destroy you. There’s too many of them,” she said, trying to reason with him. 

“Don’t w-worry about m-me,” he said.

He tried to smile reassuringly at her, but the unused muscles of his face turned it somewhat lopsided. Instead, he simply leaned forward and kissed her lightly on the forehead. Then he turned and walked away from her, trusting her to go underground somewhere and not come back. 

He made his way through Little 5’s dirty streets and eventually found himself face to face with that oppressive, thirty-foot wall that kept Zone 5 guarded against the outside world. There was a nervous excitement that raced through him. One way or the other, it was all coming to an end. He was going to make sure of that. 

He spread his feet shoulder width apart and lifted his biomech cannon, feeling it somewhere deep inside him as he gathered power at the end of its barrel. When that feeling grew to where he couldn’t stand it anymore, he fired it. The beam was a steady, concentrated force of power that instantly heated the metal. In moments, it was a bright fiery orange. Seconds after that, the beam melted through, creating a hole ten feet in diameter. 

Zone 5 soldiers tried to stop him. The ones positioned on top of the wall fired their HILs, but the lasers did nothing to him. He shrugged them off like they were nothing but annoying flies to be batted away. 

When the hole opened up enough to let him through, he ran at it. The soldiers on the other side didn’t stand a chance. He went through them all like they were stalks of corn, cutting them down ten, sometimes even twenty, at a time. 

His rage fueled him. 

The fact that his whole life had been taken from him was motivation. 

But above all else, he wanted them to pay for taking Fiona. For making her feel the pain of losing her father and having to live in the wasteland of Little 5. 

He heard the screams of the dying he left behind and a part of him reveled in that. He normally didn’t like that part of himself, the part that loved killing, but today was a different sort of day. Today, he thought, it was all right to let that part have its fun. 

Off in the distance, he heard the rumble of a heavily armored tank navigating its way through Zone 5 toward his position. 

He waited for it out in the open with no fear. More soldiers tried to take him down while he waited, but like the ones before them, they all died. Some of them horribly. 

He went around to some of the corpses littering the ground and sucked them dry, adding more fuel for his cannon. Then he judged about when the tank would show up and started gathering power again. The tank trundled into view at precisely the same instant the power couldn’t be contained anymore. 

Milo unleashed the weapon’s powerful attack. 

The beam cut entirely through the tank, causing a big, exploding fireball to puff into existence. He watched the giant, fiery orb reach up toward the sky. Pieces of tank rained down all around him, some of them bouncing off his head and shoulders. When the noise of the explosion was gone, he continued on his trek toward the Citadel, the Board, and the ones responsible for what was done to him. He traveled directly through the burned wreckage of the tank, ignoring the somewhat disgusting smell of charred human meat. 

Eyes on the prize, he told himself. The thought brought out a harsh chuckle from his aching throat. 

His rampage continued. Soldiers were rushing him. Some were attempting to kill him with their sniper rifle while others lobbed grenades. Then there were the ones with their HILs and light knives. Neither weapon so match as scratched him. 

Hours later and with hundreds of dead, he found himself facing the impressive doors of the Citadel. It was awesome in its sheer architectural splendor. The thing rose over three hundred feet into the air. Not only that, but it spiraled, getting narrower the higher up it went. The bottom of the building was made from the same metal compound as the wall, but the top was a mix of a twisting metal framework and molded, reinforced glass windows. The apex of the building had a large terrace that jutted out.

He focused on that terrace. On the top floor. That was where the Board’s offices were which meant that was where he was headed. 

But there was a problem now. 

In front of the Citadel, there was an army. 

An army of Augments. 

They stood in motionless rows, guarding the doors to the Board’s Citadel. There were so many he couldn’t even count them all. However, he was pretty confident he was facing at least 90% of the entire Augment forces. 

He would’ve been afraid. He would’ve been terrified at the sight of so many of the monsters, but all he felt was a renewed fury and a rock-solid determination to kill every last one of them. 

He watched them silently, waiting to see what they would do. 

The answer was nothing. They just stood there. They stared at him blankly. There was no emotion on any of their faces. 

Then they all suddenly shifted as one, splitting into two groups. This left a nearly six-foot-wide aisle between them. A solitary figure strode out of the Citadel.

It didn’t take him long to recognize her. 

It was Tessa. 

She stopped about two feet in front of the Augment army and thirty yards away from him. 

“I can’t say I’m sad you’re finally going to die, Milo,” she said with a demeaning sneer. Despite the distance between them, her words were crystal clear. 

“Y-you,” he snarled, his rage flaring out of control. It took a massive effort of will not to vaporize her on sight. “You t-took her from me. Why w-would you take our da-daughter and just toss her out l-like tr-ash?” 

“I didn’t decide that. Not really anyway,” Tessa said with that cruel smirk on her face again. “It was the Board’s decision to take her from us. They decreed it and so I did my job. I did what I was trained to do and made sure it would happen.” 

“Why?” he asked. “W-why would they even care?” 

“You needed a shove and they knew where to push. I was commanded to set that push in motion,” she replied, shrugging nonchalantly. “You were easily the best soldier the Board has ever had, past or present. After Fiona was born, however, you got soft. All you cared about was her. They didn’t like that and frankly, neither did I. It was like watching an angel fall from grace.” 

There was something wistful in her tone, a sadness brought on by long lost memories. 

“I’m g-gonna make sure I pay you back for everything you did to me, T-tessa. You and the Board.” 

“Milo. Come on. Let’s be reasonable here.” She looked at him with that same half-smile that made him want to rip her head from her shoulders. “You can’t hope to defeat all my Augments. Sooner or later, one will bring you down for good. The Board doesn’t want that. They’re offering you a second chance. They want to bring you back into the fold.” 

“Go to h-hell!” he shouted. 

“I told them you’d say that. Oh well. Like I said, I can’t say I’m sad about it. I was attracted to your greatness in the beginning, but you let me down. You became weak.” She turned and walked away, heading back into the building. Before she got through the doors, she looked to her army. “Kill him.” 

Then she was gone, swallowed by the giant building again. 

As soon as the doors closed, the Augments came at him. He was ready for that, however. He fired his cannon, taking out ten of them in one sweeping arc before he was forced to move. Craters erupted in the smooth black asphalt of the road where he’d been. He felt pieces of broken road pelt his body, but he didn’t feel any pain. Like everything else, they had no effect on him. He rolled to the side in a blur and fired the cannon again. This time he picked precise targets from the forward element of the advancing army. Thirty or forty of them simply dropped dead on the street with vital parts of their bodies destroyed. Other than blades and super thin needles, the only other weakness his reinforced body had was a direct blast from another Augment’s weapon. 

Those nearest to the fallen Augments got tripped up and fell unceremoniously to the ground (which in turn caused even more to get tripped up and fall). This left them vulnerable to another blast of cannon-fire from Milo. 

This strategy worked for a little bit, but the Augments farther back eventually caught on and took steps to evade the large dog pile Milo caused. Instead of dumbly surging forward, most of the Augments left jumped over the pile and continued their attacks. 

He kept firing his cannon, but Tessa was right. Eventually, the crushing number of Augments was going to get him killed. He tried to think. He needed a way out. 

He tried to force his damaged brain to come up with some kind of a plan, but it was hard to focus his mind. Whatever they did to him during the initiation process was hard to come back from. 

Then he smiled as he realized the significance of something. 

If there was one thing he knew about the Augments, it was their inability to think for themselves. Everything that made them thinking, feeling creatures was carefully destroyed in the process that spawned them. 

He was sure he could use that knowledge against them. Somehow. 

He took some time to glance around, trying to figure out the best way to decimate the majority of the Augments, but he was quickly running out of time. They were practically trampling each other in their crazed attempts to get at him. Fortunately for him, it was also slowing their progress. He fired six more times and six more Augments went down, then he dove for cover. He got back up and fired some more. 

That time a dozen of them died. 

He was readying to shoot again but the glowing blue lights on his cannon abruptly blinked off. Milo realized that his most powerful weapon had spent itself and now he was a sitting duck. 

He was out of options and he still couldn’t think of a way to take them out in bigger numbers. 

Fortunately, he didn’t have to. 

A blood-red beam of pure light shot through the air, about two feet to his right. He watched as it barreled into the ranks of Augments left standing, vaporizing them to piles of ash. Then, about ten other beams flashed all around him and that terrifying army was shattered. The beams seemed to stutter and then winked out. When they did, he turned around to look at his saviors. The most prominent one was Fiona, a weapon similar to his own cannon but far larger was strapped to her torso by a grey harness. Its wide-mouthed barrel jutted out in front of her. Ten others stood with her and each one toted the same weapon. 

They walked up to him with wide smiles on each of their faces. 

“They work!” one of them shouted. She was a young girl that looked no more than sixteen. She was rail thin and her face looked sunken from malnutrition. “I can’t believe they actually work.” 

“Quiet down, Piper,” Fiona scolded, but not too hard he noticed. 

“What are th-those things?” he asked, although he had a pretty good idea. 

“Cannons that work on the same principals as your own weapon. We took down an Augment a month or so back and were able to reverse-engineer it. It runs on fusion power instead of blood, though. We figured they’d be more useful to us if we didn’t have to kill our own people to make them work.” She looked proud of herself but then faltered when she saw that he was angry with her. 

“I t-told you to leave,” he said. “What are you doing h-here?” 

“Letting you come in here by yourself was a suicide mission, sir,” another one of Fiona’s rebel buddies said to him.

When Milo looked at him, he quailed in fear and quickly averted his eyes to a less hostile location. 

“I don’t c-care. You need to leave. That…” He looked back at the wasted remnants of the Augment army. “Wasn’t even their entire supply of th-those things. They have more and they’re probably sending them here as we sp-speak.” 

“What are you going to do, fight everyone in Zone 5?” Fiona asked, her own anger starting to show now. 

“Let me w-worry about that. Just get out of here,” he commanded.  

Before she could respond, he pushed his way past her and started rushing toward the citadel’s main doors. He turned to look back at his daughter, to see if she went like he told her to, but he found her sarcastically waving at him. He muttered something about stubborn children who don’t do what they’re told. Then he stopped and turned around. He was on his way back to their position, ready to force her out of the Zone by physical force if necessary, when the next wave of Augments attacked. They literally exploded onto the scene, swarming out of every nook and alley in view. Fiona’s team was bogged down, and their heavy weaponry didn’t make it easy for them to maneuver. Despite the advantages those guns gave them, they weren’t enough. Some of her people were already down. 

Milo waded into the fight by literally tearing into every Augment he got his hands on. He might’ve been only one man, but he was a certifiable killing machine. It was what the Board created him for. 

He killed them in droves, at first by letting his cannon suck them dry and then (once his weapon was fully recharged) by leaving smoking holes in them. He managed to blast his way to the besieged rebels, stopping next to Fiona. 

“Let’s m-move!” he shouted. The noise was unbelievable. Even yelling as loud as possible, he could barely hear his own voice. “Your team can’t hold this position! We need to r-retreat!” 

“To where?!” she screamed back. 

He nodded toward the Citadel and its waiting doors. 

“All right! You clear the way and we’ll follow!” Fiona yelled back. 

He nodded to her and then she turned to explain the plan to the others. When everyone was ready, Milo calmly turned around and faced the Augments. He started blasting his way back to the Citadel. Fiona and the other rebels helped, but they had to constantly shift positions to take down the Augments that came at them.

A grueling twenty to twenty-five minutes later, they made it to the Citadel and managed to get inside. The effort to get to the massive building wasn’t without its price. Another one of Fiona’s rebel soldiers was killed. The girl named Piper, Milo recalled. Just as they were coming up to the Citadel, an Augment came out of nowhere and stabbed her in the back. It drained her right in front of everyone. 

The scream she uttered as she died was one of the most horrific sounds Milo could ever remember hearing. 

He fired his cannon and vaporized the still alive girl along with the Augment. 

Now, they were huddled in the massive lobby of the Board’s headquarters. They did what they could to barricade the doors. They used whatever bits of furniture they could find, piling it up as thick as they could get it. Milo knew it was a futile gesture. The Augments could get in wherever and whenever they wanted to. It was just a stall tactic at best. 

“We’ll hold them here,” Fiona told him. “Get up there and kill those miserable bastards.” 

He nodded to her, uneasy. He didn’t want to leave her there. It was suicide to stay, but he knew she wouldn’t go with him. She would kill them all or die trying. He could read that truth in her eyes as plain as day. 

“Don’t try to f-fight them all,” he said, trying to warn her anyway. “If they get in, just run.” 

“Sure,” Fiona told him with a sarcastic smile.

He saw the crazed gleam in her eyes that told him the only thing she was going to do was fight till she couldn’t fight anymore.

He let out a long sigh of resignation.

Fiona gave him a quick hug and then shoved him in the direction of the stairs. She was smart enough to know that the Board would’ve shut down the elevators to make it harder for Milo to reach them.

He hesitated a moment more, but Fiona was insistent. She pushed him again and shooed him off like he was a fly.

With feelings of unease and anxiousness, he managed to turn away from her and walk toward a hallway off to the left. He passed several people that cowered away from him. There was some soldiers too but they were easily dealt with. 

Eventually, Milo came to an innocuous metal door. He went up to it and sank his fingers into the metal, gripped it tight, and tore it off its hinges. He threw it down the hall and watched with satisfaction as it buried itself into a wall on the far end. He stepped into the stairwell and started climbing them. It was a long trek, but his body was built for speed and strength, so the effort was nothing to him.

He met more resistance about twenty floors up, but he dealt with them with the same brutal efficiency as the ones downstairs. He tore them apart (literally in some cases) and flung the still bleeding corpses behind him as he went. The soldiers never stood a chance.

He fought his way past five more improvised guard stations with each one being more heavily manned than the last. 

He kept pushing himself to go faster the whole time. Speed was essential. The sooner he dealt with the assholes in control of Zone 5, the sooner he’d be able to get back to his daughter so he could help her, help them all, survive the rest of the day. 

Before long, he found himself at the very top floor. 

Thirty soldiers were stationed there, and they fired on him as soon as they saw him. Their weapons had no effect on him. With a yell of rage, he slaughtered all of them and then stepped through blood and bodies to the door that would lead him to the Board.

He stepped up to it and assessed it. It resembled the door of a bank vault and looked extremely thick.

He smiled to himself and placed his cannon directly in front of it. Then he fired it. The resulting blast ripped the door from its frame and sent it tumbling end over end into a wide hallway. It ripped into expensive marble floors, luxurious walls, priceless antiques, and furniture. Then it thudded into the wall at the end of the hall. 

Milo stepped through the smoke and bits of flame and walked into the hall beyond the door. It was wide but short. When he got to its end, he turned the corner and walked steadily and calmly into a gigantic and grandiose room. The floor was onyx colored granite with bits of mica in it. The walls were stark white with solid gold accents in floral patterns. 

Across the enormous room was a raised dais with a wooden bench on it. Sitting behind the bench were twelve men and women that stared back at him. They were the most powerful governing body around. The most feared. The most unforgiving. 

Milo strode purposefully toward them, his cannon leveled at the bench.  

“Sgt. Rosburg,” one of them said, an older man with silver hair. His face, however, still held a youthful aspect to it. Not a wrinkle in sight. He stared at Milo with sea green eyes. “What brings you here?’ 

“You kn-know why I’m h-here,” he stuttered, his voice quiet but intimidating. 

“Ah yes,” another chimed in. This was one of the few women present. She looked young too, although her eyes spoke of the wisdom that comes with long years. He was starting to find their contradictory appearances disquieting. “The matter of your current...state. You feel wronged.” 

“I feel be-betrayed. I feel ch-cheated. And I feel like making all of you p-pay.” He aimed at one of the figures sitting at the far left and fired. The blast disintegrated half his victim’s head. 

The other Board members watched in shock as one of their number was murdered so suddenly. 

“There is no need to destroy us!” a different woman yelled. 

Milo recognized her, but barely. The last time he’d seen her she was sitting on a bench not unlike the one she currently sat at, slamming her gavel down as she sentenced him to something far worse than death. She didn’t look ancient anymore. Her hair had grown out thicker and had darkened to an ebony color. Her face held none of the traces of old age. Instead, the skin there had smoothed itself out and now resemble the skin of a woman in the prime of her life. But there was no mistaking those eyes. They were the same unforgiving eyes that had condemned him so long ago. Apparently, the Board managed to reverse the aging process. It would’ve been fascinating to him, if he wasn’t so preoccupied with wanting to kill them all. 

“You killed twenty-eight people. Some of them were children. Did you honestly think that would go unpunished?” the Magistrate asked.

“I was ma-manipulated, and you kn-knew it,” he yelled back, swinging the cannon to another target and killing her just as effectively. There were more protests. “I was made to b-believe citizens of Little 5 kidnapped my daughter, but it was never them. My own people did it. Your people. Your soldiers. You ordered it!” 

He emphasized his point by killing yet another Board member. Things were getting frantic now. They were used to being the most powerful people around, but their faces were full of fear now...and he savored that terror. 

“I hope all of you rot in H-hell,” he yelled. Then he killed the rest, save for one. 

“I assure you that we never sanctioned any such action,” the former Magistrate tried to explain. Her voice was quivering with terror. She looked around at her dead compatriots. Her hands were held up in surrender and her eyes were wide as she looked around in horror at what Milo had done. 

“Liar!” he screamed, his voice causing the ex-Magistrate to flinch severely. “You people th-think you can take wh-whatever you want. That you can stomp over anybody and get away with it. That you can force me to f-forfeit my life. My mind. My fr-free will. Up here in your ivory tower, you think you’re invincible. S-safe. Nobody can touch you up here, r-right? Well I’m telling you, you’re wrong. You created me to kill, so that’s what I’m going to d-do. I’m going to finish you mis-miserable sons of bitches off and the world will be a better place f-for it.” 

The Magistrate tried to protest, but she never stood a chance. Milo sent a blast of cannon fire at her. She tried to move out of the way, but she was too slow. The cannon fire hit her on the upper left side of her body. A chunk of her shoulder, neck, and head vanished and her body slid to the floor to join the rest of the dead. When it was all done, he turned to leave. A weight he hadn’t even known existed suddenly lifted. 

Applause suddenly broke out and he whirled around in a flash with his cannon extended in front of him. Tessa emerged from a hidden doorway, looking as elegant and beautiful as ever. That same wicked-looking grin was still on her face. She made a show of looking around the wrecked office. 

“My, my,” she said, a thoughtful frown on her face. “What a mess you made, Milo.” 

“You got a lot of guts showing your f-face,” he responded. He started gathering power in his cannon, but something went wrong. 

Nothing was happening. 

He looked down at the weapon, confused. 

Tessa laughed riotously. 

“Oh…oh…that look on your ignorant face is so priceless,” she managed to say between fits of laughter. “I thought I would enjoy it when I finally got to see it, but it’s more beautiful than I ever imagined.” 

“What are you ta-alking about?” he asked but then he felt a spike of dread hit him when he remembered the promotion Tessa received after setting him up. She’d been put in charge of all Augments. “What’d you do to my g-gear?” 

“Did you honestly think that we would allow Augments to run around without fail-safes in place?” She brought out a small tablet with a glowing screen and touched her finger to a portion of it. 

Agony immediately lanced through his left arm. There was a mechanical whirring sound and the spikes that held his cannon in place suddenly drilled themselves out of his flesh. There was a hollow clang as his cannon hit the granite floor. He glanced at it in shock. 

“We’re not that stupid,” Tessa told him. She looked at the dead Board members and then back at Milo. “Well they kind of were but that’s beside the point.” 

Rage flared up inside Milo like a violent tornado.  Without thinking, he ran at her. He pushed himself to be as fast as possible. He pushed himself to the point where he was a just blur, but despite that, Tessa was still quicker. Her finger touched another button and Milo crashed to ground as painful seizures completely wracked his enormous body.  There must’ve been another node implanted that came online if the other was destroyed. 

Of course there would be, he said to himself. He felt stupid for not realizing that sooner. 

Tessa came up to him and kicked him in the face as hard as she could. It didn’t hurt him, but the gesture still felt good to her.

She bent down and leaned toward his ear. 

“You’re such a pathetic creature,” she whispered. “So easily manipulated. So easily pointed in the right direction. I hardly had to do much.” 

“Wh-what are y-you talking about?” he asked through gritted teeth. 

She jumped back up, obviously pleased with herself.  

“I’m so glad you asked. I’ve been waiting for this day a long time,” she said. Then she turned to the doorway she just came out of. “Come on out.” 

A figure walked out of the shadows behind the door and into the big room. The minute Milo saw who it was, he felt his heart split in two. It was Fiona. She walked toward Tessa with barely a glance at her father. 

“Fi-Fiona?” he asked, not willing to believe what he was seeing. 

“I swear,” Tessa said in mock exasperation. She rolled her eyes, pulled out a simple, old-fashioned pistol and pointed it at the woman beside her. 

Before Milo could even scream a warning, Tessa pulled the trigger. Fiona went down in a lifeless slump. 

Milo wailed. His huge body shook with the force of his sobs. 

“I’m going to k-kill you,” he promised. He fought against the ever-increasing waves of pain Tessa sent into him. 

“You just aren’t getting this are you?” Tessa shot him a disgusted look. She looked down at the dead woman.  “This woman is not Fiona. Did you really think I would allow my daughter anywhere near you?” 

“Not F-Fiona?” he asked, convulsing violently when another maddening swell of pain invaded his body. He tried to block it out so he could think. 

“That’s right. I may be a monster, but I wouldn’t harm my own child,” she replied. “Do you remember that night? The night you got me pregnant. No? Oh well. Guess not all of those memories of yours came back, did they?” 

But the words brought them back all the same. That one night. Their heated passion. He could see it now in all its vivid details. It was the last thing that had been left behind that wall. He groaned, but this time, it wasn’t because of the pain she was forcing on him. 

“That was the first part. You see, I knew you’d be perfect for what I needed. A great soldier. Skilled. Talented. Stubborn. I slept with you. I got pregnant because I wanted leverage on you. And I was right. From the minute she was born, all you cared about was her, so I let her go. I let you take care of her so I could reinforce all those feelings inside you. When the time was right, I took her back and made you think the people of Little 5 were the ones that did it. I needed you to fly off the handle and you didn’t disappoint. I have to admit though, I never thought you’d kill any kids. That was a pleasant little bonus and I think it was what really pushed you over the edge.” 

“W-why?” he asked. “What in the world w-would make y-you do all this to m-me?” 

“Why? I would think that part was perfectly obvious,” she scolded. “To get rid of them.” 

She pointed to the dead members of the Board. 

“They have been in power for way too long. I mean seriously, didn’t you notice how young they all looked? That’s because they found a way to turn back the biological clock. That one over there is at least three-hundred and fifty years old.” She looked over at Milo. He tried to look at her, but his eyes refused to focus. “It’s time for some new blood.” 

“You d-did all this just so you could manipulate me into ki-killing th-them?” he asked her. He couldn’t believe someone would be that crazy and yet here they all were. 

“To put it simply, yes. I planned it all so I would have the chance to turn you into one of their pet Augments. I found this fraud, sliced her cheek in the same spot our real daughter has her scar, and then implanted the mission to kill her. A father’s love for his long-lost daughter was what manipulated you into killing them. This girl played her part well, I will say that. She knew all the right things to say and how to act. It was ridiculously easy fooling you, but then again, that’s never really been an issue. Everything just came together so nicely. The pseudo-Augment cannons. Having you take on the Board. All of it. I admit though, I never thought it would go this well. I mean, I always hoped, but plans can go wrong so quickly.” 

“You s-sadistic b-bitch!” Milo screamed, pushing all his rage and anger out with it. 

Tessa laughed again and pushed another button on her glowing pad. The pain in his body tripled. He could feel the node hurting him. It felt like an insect was drilling directly into his lower back. He wanted to rip it out like the other one, but he couldn’t reach it and had no way of getting it out even if he could. 

“Well, this has been fun, Milo,” she said, walking away from him. He lost sight of her, but she wasn’t gone long. When she came back, she had a long, wicked looking sword held loosely in her right hand. “But I’m afraid I have more important matters to attend to. I do have a city to run now, thanks to your help.” 

She lifted the blade above her head and brought it down with all of her considerable strength. 

The pain in his body was still there and still just as bad as before, but if there was one thing Tessa was right about, it was the fact that he was stubborn. He refused to let her win. He managed to roll to the side, avoiding the blow that would’ve ended him and staggered to his feet. 

“Why make this difficult?” she taunted. “Why not just die? Get it over with. It’s not like you have anything to live for.” 

She laughed cruelly and then sped toward him. 

Milo was stunned at what he saw. 

Tessa was just as fast as he was, maybe even faster. 

Her blade whistled through the air, but he was a trained fighter. He dodged all her deadly blows and backed up, trying to put some space between them. He was struggling and Tessa knew it. The pain she sent coursing through his body was too distracting. If he didn’t think of something fast, he was going to die. 

She didn’t give him long to recover. The next round brought even faster, heavier strikes. One of them landed and sliced through the bicep muscle of his left arm in a long cut. He felt the pain of the blow, but it merely blended into all the other millions of different pains he was already feeling. Blood gushed out of the wound, falling down his arm and dripping off the stump. 

“I w-want my d-daughter!” he roared.  

“Don’t worry about that,” Tessa told him. “You’ll be dead soon and then you won’t have to worry about it. Or anything else for that matter.” 

He gritted his teeth, watching her through narrowed eyes. A low, rumbling growl burst out of his throat, but she merely laughed it off. 

“How long do you think you can keep this up?” she asked, blurring toward him again as she was talking. 

Milo sidestepped her advance, watching as her blade came within a centimeter of shaving off the end of his nose. He shoved her roughly in the back and watched her stumble away. Her balance, however, was just as flawless as the rest of her. She recovered without problems and came back at him. 

He needed to end this. He couldn’t keep it up, not with his body feeling the way it did. He looked around for any kind of weapon available. The only thing he found was his biomech cannon. 

That will have to do, he thought to himself. 

He took a deep breath and then pushed through all the pain, fighting it inside him like he was fighting Tessa outside. He gave one last, titanic effort. Every muscle in his body felt like it was ripping itself apart. Ever organ felt like it was rupturing. His remaining eye bulged in his head and threatened to burst, but he ignored all of it. The sole, burning point of focus in his mind was killing the woman that had destroyed him. 

He took a breath and then charged Tessa with his inhuman speed, but again, she was just as fast. He would throw a punch at her with the strength of a charging rhino, but she would just as easily deflect it. 

She laughed in his face, enraging him even more, but his berserker attacks just weren’t enough. He’d figured she’d augmented herself with some of the same biomech he had, but that was fine with him. He knew all about that kind of hardware.  

And he knew their limitations.

She came at him again, but he let her come this time. He waited patiently, making sure to time things just right. When Tessa was within a foot of where he was, he dived to the side and rolled across the floor just as she brought her sword down on where he’d been just a second ago. When he came to a stop, his back was to her. She flung herself at him in a rage almost as blinding as his own, but he rolled out of the way again. 

He did this almost half a dozen more times 

“Stay still you bastard!” Tessa screamed hysterically. 

She lunged at him one last time. 

Milo whirled around suddenly. He ducked beneath Tessa’s blade and then rammed something directly into her chest. 

Tessa’s eyes widened and she screamed out in pain. Her hands gripped the object and she tried to push it out of her, but she was rapidly losing strength. She looked down at what it was that impaled her, and her eyes filled with fear. 

Sticking out of her was Milo’s discarded biotech cannon. In all the rolls he’d done across the floor, he’d managed to discreetly pick it back up. 

Now he stood in front of her, his own anger burning in his eye. 

“Where is she?” he asked. He pushed on the cannon harder and enjoying her sharp gasp of pain. 

“You’ll never find her,” she told him. Little runnels of blood flowed down the corners of her mouth. She laughed again but it was mostly a wheezy-sounding cough. He must’ve punctured one or both lungs. “You’ll never see her again.” 

Milo’s rage whirled inside him when he realized that she was telling the truth. No matter what he did to her, she would never tell him. She would do it just to spite him. With a shout, he jammed the stump of his right arm back into the waiting port at the end of the biomech cannon and then reached around with his left hand until he was able to grope in the pockets of Tessa’s suit jacket. 

She jerked around in sudden fear, knowing what he was looking for and why, but being pinned to the needles of the cannon made any movement excruciating. In a second or two, he had what he was looking for...the tablet that controlled his gear. He fumbled with it one-handed until he was able to manipulate the controls with his thumb. 

He looked back into Tessa’s hate-filled eyes. 

“Last chance,” he said. 

“Go to hell,” she replied.  

Milo pressed the button on the screen. 

“Die!” he screamed. 

The pain that was crippling his body abruptly vanished, only to be replaced by a new mind-numbing agony concentrated around his arm. The cannon made a high-pitched whirring sound and sprang to life again, only this time the spikes drilled themselves back into his flesh and bone. Soon, the biomech cannon came back online. 

He looked back at her without any traces of guilt or remorse. Milo connected with the weapon’s internal systems and then watched with satisfaction as his cannon drained the life out of the psychotic bitch. The muscles and skin of her body withered in on themselves and the flesh around her face shriveled and turned a dusky brown color. In a second, maybe two, Tessa Harrison was gone with nothing but her mummified remains left behind. 

He dropped her body and watched as it hit the ground with a satisfying thump. He turned around and surveyed the damage he’d done and then simply sank to the ground, exhausted. 
 

******

A month passed since he took down the Board and most of their military. He had taken all of the remaining Augments offline using Tessa’s tablet. He didn’t really know what they were going to do from now on and he didn’t really care, so long as they didn’t go around killing everyone they came in contact with. He thought most of them would be able to recover their minds and leave. The rest would probably crawl into some deep, dark hole and stay there. 

He didn’t really care. He didn’t care about them or anything else. The only thing he cared about now was Fiona. 

He stood outside a residential apartment building near Zone 5’s western border. He could see the huge wall looming up behind the building, massive and foreboding. It would take some time for it to be torn down completely, but at the moment it served as a symbol of the dangers when too much power was given to a single group of people. He hoped that those who came next learned from the mistakes committed by those that came before.  

He let those thoughts slide out of his mind and focused again on the doors leading into the apartment. He found it less than a week ago. It had been brutally hard to get the information he needed, but in the end he did it. 

However, after all that work, all he did was watch. 

The doors to the building opened and she came out. 

Fiona.

Milo smiled broadly. She had a perfect blending of both his features and her mother’s, and he could see the thin scar she’d gotten from a bike lesson mishap. There was no denying the physical resemblance between his daughter and the woman Tessa got to pretend to be her. It was easy to see how Milo was fooled. 

However, if he’d been himself from the beginning instead of barely more than a Neanderthal, the fake wouldn’t have lasted long. The minute he saw Fiona again, he knew deep down that was his daughter. 

She was just as beautiful as he remembered. Her hair was long instead of short. Also, there was a softness to her that the impostor lacked. Her face didn’t show any signs of a hard life in Little 5. She was graceful too. He could tell that much. She looked as if she glided down the street when she walked. All calm poise and elegant sophistication. 

He thought about going up to her, as he did every night, but he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. He didn’t know what to say to her or how to explain everything that happened. There were so many things to say too, and it saddened him to think that he might never get the courage to talk to her. It saddened him to think that the words he needed would never come to him. 

Instead, he had to be content with watching from afar and protecting her from the shadows. 

It was the best he could give her. 

It was the best he could do.