SILAS

It's a strange sensation. As if my right arm is plying itself apart. Re-arranging itself.

I watch as the metal parts shift, so many various joints and segments making subtle clinks and clanks. My fingers pull back. My palm splits, slides apart. My hand transforms into a short metal cylinder attached to the wrist. A yellow light glows within the cylinder—dim at first, becoming more intense by the second.

That seems to be Daimon's queue to rush me.

He runs toward me, legs and arms blurring with speed.

I aim my arm cannon directly at him. Bright light inside the cannon illuminates the room like a floodlight. The energy is focusing, building. It's almost ready.

I can read Daimon's movements. Or maybe I just know him. Because he's me.

He's about to feint to the right—his left. He'll loop around, deflect my arm cannon shot from the side.

Sure enough, at the exact moment I'd been planning to release the charged Blast, he ducks toward my right. He reaches out to push the arm cannon away.

But I'm already shifting in that direction, bringing my cannon up toward the left, over my shoulder.

I fire.

Intense burst of energized plasma just a hands-breadth from my ear.

WAP.

A sound like a laser shot.

An explosion directly behind me. A shower of concrete debris and dust flooding the air, falling in showers. At the same time, my elbow rockets forward with intense force, propelled by the Blast. The tip of my elbow slams into Daimon's face, putting a crack in his mask with a loud snap. Part of my upper arm smacks into his collarbone, denting some of the metal there.

Daimon's head snaps back as his feet go out from under him. He lands on his back on the floor. Cracks split out on the concrete floor from the impact.

My body keeps going, twisting with the momentum, turning me in a circle. I stomp down with one foot, sinking into the floor slightly, but managing to stop myself. Bits of concrete bounce, roll and slide across the floor. Dust falls, coating everything.

Daimon is still. And has been still. For the last split-second or so.

Standing over him, I point my arm cannon down, charging up another blast.

Daimon shifts into motion, like a statue coming to life. He kicks me in the leg at the knee joint, throwing me off balance. I move to dodge his next kick, still charging my next attack.

Sweeping his legs like something out of The Matrix, Daimon hops to his feet. He charges me.

I aim for his chest, but he slaps my arm cannon away, sending the blast into the wall. He aims a punch at my face. I block it with my forearm. The metal crashes and sings—the song of our armor plates colliding.

Daimon follows up his attack with a flurry of kicks and punches. I block. Block. Sidestep. Operating on reflex, and some forgotten, mechanical knowledge. I'm in the flow. Beyond thought.

One of his hits is too fast for me. I deflect the punch, but it still hits me in the shoulder, knocking me backward a couple steps, until my shoulder bumps the wall behind me.

Daimon quickly slides across the floor, transitioning into a sidekick, aimed at my gut.

I block, grabbing his foot.

He swivels in the air, striking out with his other foot, hitting me in the side of the head.

My face is knocked to one side, an electric shock of pain lancing up my neck. My ears ring. I fall sideways, toward the floor.

As I'm falling, Daimon lashes out at me with another kick. I block it with both arms, but the force still slams me back against the wall.

I hit the floor, and immediately use my arms to boost up onto my feet, scrambling to make some distance between us, around Daimon and back toward the hole in the wall.

Daimon doesn't slow, head down, moving at a full run. I can hear the jets opening up on his back and legs, propelling, going full bore, each footfall shattering chunks of the floor.

I aim my arm cannon and let off a quick shot, realizing—intuiting somehow—that I don't always need to charge it.

Daimon ducks under the projectile at the last millisecond—a yellow orb of energized plasma that parts a tuft of his thrashing hair as it goes past over his head—and slams into me, shoulder-to-chest, lifting me off the floor, arms making a vice around my torso.

We're a bullet, careening through the air. Wind rushes past my ears. I can hear jets screaming.

Collision. I feel it in the back of my head more than anywhere else, even as my entire body throbs with the impact of it. Multi-colored spots flood into my vision. Dissipating with merciful swiftness. Only to return with the next crash. And the next. One wall after another.

I'm a one-man...demolition crew...

My optics go dark. The vice-like pressure on my torso disappears. I drift and roll, airborne. No longer a guided missile, but a piece of falling debris.

My vision flickers, as if to match the disorientation of my airborne spin, the world rotating around me.

I hit the floor, rolling and sliding. Sliding. Sliding.

Stopping.

Not because I've crashed into something. Not this time. My momentum has run down. I'm a body at rest. Not that I can afford to be.

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I roll over, onto my back, and sit up.

This must be the Cargo Bay which Cade and Shiloh described to me. The big, open hangar, with its shipping containers. The giant crane. The big hole blasted in the wall is a giveaway as well, a giant portal leading directly to the outside.

I've been here before, when Gavin's crew dragged me through various parts of the complex. Part of their little victory tour. I was feigning unconsciousness at the time, waiting for some ideal moment to free myself. Maybe if I'd acted then, I could have prevented the rest of this. Maybe things could have been different.

But why waste time thinking about that?

I get to my feet. Daimon is standing a ways off, almost at the opposite end of the hangar, backlit by the setting light of the sun, through the hole behind him. He watches, arms clasped behind his back. Waiting on me.

"Well," he says, once I'm on my feet, ready to fight. "I can't say I haven't had fun. But I think it might be time to wrap this up."

"So soon?"

"Don't be cute. You have to know my ship's been keeping tabs. I know what you're up to. Trying to distract me while some of the in-breds make an escape. It won't work."

Outside, via the gap in the wall beyond Daimon, I hear the roar of a ship's engine.

No. No, wait....

"Wait," I say. "Daimon-"

"Too late," Daimon says, taking a wide stance. "The orders have already been given. The ship's en route. They might as well be desert carrion already."

That...that can't be. It can't already be too late.

The ship's engine revs. Screams. Then diminishes in volume as it lifts off.

It's already on its way.

Those people. We thought we were giving them a chance. We agreed on that. And we were wrong.

It's a death sentence. We literally sent them to their deaths.

I'm trying to imagine who might be on those dunebuggies. Mostly women and children, I have to assume. Evelyn would try to get as many of the innocent out as she could. That was the whole point.

The very people I've been trying to protect. Gone, in a hail of explosions and gunfire.

Unless...

I glance past Daimon, toward the opening in the wall. If I want to exit the bunker, quickly, this is the fastest route. And if I can get out in the open, I might have a shot at the ship, using my blast attack.

Daimon cocks his head at me. "Don't even think about it."

Whatever I do, it has to happen now. I have to move fast. There's only two people that can stop that ship at this point: Daimon, and me.

I brace, and begin charging up a blast shot.

Daimon reacts quickly, initiating his own Blast Protocol. One of his light-grey hands splits apart, turning his arm into a cannon, already building a charge of glowing yellow plasma. The mechanical sheath on his back, containing the special sword I was warned about, rotates into a diagonal position over the shoulder, ready for Daimon to draw it.

"Don't do it, Silas-"

I run toward him, leaning forward, every step leaving a dent in the floor.

Daimon runs toward me. He raises his arm cannon mid-run, squinting one eye as he aims down the length of his arm. He fires.

I fire back, aiming at the energy projectile. Our two plasma shots collide in the air.

And explode.

A wave of heated air rushes out from the point of the impact, pushing against my body, unsettling my—likely -already messy hair, and taking the air of my artificial lungs. I keep running. Toward the smoking cloud, roiling, sparking at the edges with plasmic flames. Toward-

Daimon bursts from the grey smoke like a specter from the fog. Airborne. One knee slightly tucked. One hand tightly gripping the hilt of his sword, drawing it.

Time seems to slow. The glowing, bladed edge of the sword incrementally growing in length as it emerges from its scabbard, like a bright orange line being drawn across my vision. Daimon's arm cannon flickering steadily with yellow light as he queues up another charged attack. We are in stasis, the two of us. On the precipice between life and death. Destruction and renewal. Me, and him.

Silas and Daimon.

His sword comes free of the scabbard. He swipes. A cut that will severe the upper half of my torso from the rest of my body.

I dodge, swaying my torso backward until it's near horizontal, while still keeping my feet on the ground. I see the arc of the blade pass over me, right in front of my face. The momentum carries Daimon past me, everything happening so fast that he doesn't have time to course correct the attack.

Still, he tucks the cannon under his other arm and against his abs, aiming for me as he flies past.

I pivot my body and kick off with my feet, rolling through the air. The blast misses me, but I can feel its static crackle as it passes, giving my senses a hair-on-end feeling.

I land on my feet. So does Daimon, just a few paces away. And time starts up again.

He comes toward me, swinging. I back away, dodging, trying to keep my footing.

We fall into a strange rhythm. A sort of dance. The kind you do on the razor's edge of a knife.

As the seconds pass, I have to wonder. How am doing this? How...how am I alive right now?

But to think too much is to lose focus. And if I stop, if I lose this rhythm, that's when he'll kill me.

It's not just that I have to keep moving, dodging, and counter-attacking just enough to keep him off-balance. I'm also keeping an eye on our placement within the hangar. I'm trying to maneuver Daimon, as best I can. I just hope he doesn't notice. With any luck, he interprets my erratic movements as panic-driven. As if I'm realizing I'm no match, and the walls are starting to close in. Which isn't far from the truth.

"You know, this is actually kind of depressing," Daimon says, making a swipe that misses me by a handsbreadth as I duck out of the way. "Seeing how far you've fallen. What makes it even worse is that it's your fault. You have no one to blame but yourself."

Using his supposed knowledge of my past to try and distract me, again. Taunting me.

"That's the real reason I'm better than you," Daimon goes on. "Not because you fell, but because I never did. You couldn't adapt. You couldn't accept the world for what it really is."

"Do you ever...shut...up!?"

"Nope."

I can't beat him. Not like this. There's no opening. Eventually, he'll grow tired of playing with me. Or I'll slip up. Or both. It's inevitable. Meanwhile, his ship is seconds away from gunning down that caravan. If it hasn't happened already.

It's time. To do what I couldn't. What I should have done before.

Because this I know, deep down. No matter what Shiloh or anyone else might tell me.

It should have been me, dead, in that water. I should have been the one to dive in, not mom. Even if it accomplished nothing. Even if it killed me. It should have been me.

And it will be me.

Daimon lunges at me with the sword, aiming for my midsection.

I dodge to one side. Slightly. Not entirely.

I reach out with one hand, catching the tip of the sword in my palm.

The tip of the blade pierces my hand easily. Exits out the back. Keeps going, into my forearm, my bicep, and a part of my shoulder.

The pain is...white shot. Razor sharp. mercilessly pulsating. Beyond anything I could have imagined up until this point.

But I have to keep going.

Daimon makes a grunt-like chuckle through his mask. Pleased.

For now.

I push forward, teeth grit, down the length of the sword, bright spots flickering in my eyes, as well as a blinking major damage notification in my HUD, which I ignore.

I clamp down on Daimon's sword-hand with my fingers.

At this point, he's gotta know something's up. He pulls back, but the hooked grip of my fingers around his palm is enough to stop him from extricating himself. In order to pull free, he'd have to let go of the sword. And given his death grip on the hilt, I don't think he wants to do that.

He turns, trying to position his body away from me. His arm cannon glows.

I could try shooting him before he shoots me. Potentially blowing both of us up in the process. But that's not the plan.

I deactivate Blast Protocol, retracting the arm cannon, and grab onto Daimon's, keeping it aimed off to the side.

"Shiloh!" I yell.

Shiloh darts out from behind a shipping container nearby. She has her Jacktech cord extended, and plugged into another longer cable, which she windmills like a whip, before tossing the end of the cable my way.

Daimon looks over in Shiloh's direction, distracted.

I let go of his arm cannon long enough to reach toward his collarbone, the spot I hit earlier with my arm. An armor plate that's dented, crumpled in. With a tiny gap.

I reach into the opening with a couple fingers, using the bionic strength of my hand to peel part of the metal back in one quick motion, revealing what looks like an AUX cable port.

Daimon's masked face turns back toward me. He brings his arm cannon up.

I grab it again, before he can target me. The charged blast goes off, hitting a shipping container somewhere behind me, shearing a giant hole through it and sending metal chunks flying.

I release his arm cannon again, just in time to grab the end of the flying cable. I plug the end into port.

And Daimon freezes.