Those who consider themselves enlightened often apologise for the actions of their ancestors during colonialism. In doing so, they ignore that the country and the people they are now exist because of these actions.

Kidnapping. Slavery. Mutilation. Torture. Genocide. All were tools of a more powerful race of people to control a less powerful one. To make things better for themselves and their own people.

Perfectly acceptable in those days.

And perfectly acceptable today.

The strong have the power to rule the weak; if the weak disagree, they should get the strength needed to overthrow the strong, making the weak the strong.

Until then, the weak exist to serve the strong.

― Excerpt from 'The New Ruling Class' by Joined "Sheer" #R42THM268142 - Cycle R42

***

Since we were teenagers, Jo and I went to the movies a least once a month. It was always just the two of us; nobody else was invited, regardless of whether we were dating others or single. Most people thought we were cheating on our partners and secretly dating, but it was just our thing. I think it was mainly so Jo could yell at the characters that the killer was behind them without annoying our dates.

And for the record, we never got together.

I bring it up because during the years we went to uni, Jo eventually changed her major to become a physical therapist, and after, she couldn't stand characters in the movies walking off being knocked unconscious.

I still remember some of her initial tame rants whenever it happened in the film we were watching; 'That is bleeding impossible! Your brain gets slammed around in your skull! It twists the brainstem every time it's bashed about. That's contusions at a minimum, so concussion. The way he got hit, no one's walking that off. Real people need weeks or months to recover, and this wanker gets up and beats the shit out of a dozen other wankers!'

As her studies progressed, she got more vocal about lazy writing, especially in semi-realistic flicks. Combined with her penchant for yelling at the screen, well, we were thrown out of theatres on more than one occasion when she started yelling at the screens.

Good times. I hope she's alright and not caught up in this mess.

The gist of Jo's peeve was that being knocked out was bad; at minimum, it meant brain bruising. Being knocked out repeatedly exponentially exacerbated that damage. And as should be obvious, any kind of brain damage is very bad.

So being knocked out at least twice in the last few days, more if you counted getting knocked out by using the abilities the spine machine gave me, was about as far away from healthy as I could get.

Still, I woke up in a semi-coherent state. Even if I quickly wished I hadn't.

My head felt like a full-blown drum and bass band had set up shop and wouldn't be leaving any time soon.

I groaned and twisted away from the light, which tried to force its way through my eyelids. My breathing hitched as soon as I moved. The left side of my chest felt on fire, with somebody using hot pokers to stab between my ribs. It got worse with every stuttered breath.

My eyes tried to open in shock, but only the one left did. Didn't help much anyway. What I saw in the dim light didn't register through the pulsing pain, except that I wasn't outside.

After I don't know how long of carefully getting my breathing under control while suffering the pounding in my skull, I slowly moved my hand to my right eye and felt slick pieces of something covering parts of my eye and cheek.

Tape?

When I touched the tape, I could feel very sensitive bumps and ridges underneath. The first thing that wormed its way past the pain was that whatever happened to my face; it wasn't good. The second was that it dawned on me that somebody had tried to patch me up.

New aches and pains started to announce their presence when I moved. I focused on breathing shallowly and not forcing anything that gave me even a twinge.

Waking up in pain was getting to be a habit and was definitely a habit I needed to kick. Fast.

"Mornin' princess. Thought you'd fucking never wake up," a woman's throaty voice spoke from over to my right, where my taped-up eye hid her.

Her accent had the distinctive sound of English used by numerous actors playing New Yorkers in films I'd seen. Thought became 'thaw-uht,' and the 'r' disappeared at the end of syllables: morning becoming 'mohning' and never becoming 'neveh.'

I turned my head slightly so my one eye could locate the woman who had spoken. It was the same black woman who had run past me.

Yesterday? Just before I went claw to Command ability with the insect man.

Putting a pin in the fact that I could apparently recognise an accent by hearing a single sentence and putting a boatload of pins in whatever the heck I had done to the Insect-thing and the horrendous state I was in, I took a beat to look at her and attempt to grasp the situation I'd woken up.

The woman's skin was a very dark chocolate brown. Intense brown eyes followed my every move and took me in while I was examining her. A short frizz of black hair had grown back after she'd lost it, as had her thin eyebrows.

She'd lost her hair, the same as I had, but it was probably longer ago.

She was wearing a full set of ski clothes. Dark ones instead of the usual bright colours. They looked warm and watertight.

Good choice. Wish I'd found something like that.

Her clothes covered her entirely from her wrists to her neck, but I could guess from her general shape that she was athletic. She looked just this side of butch. I've always been horrible at guessing ages, but I'd peg her at around thirty. Give or take a few years.

"Eyefucked me enough, Snow White?" Her abrasive tone, not to mention calling me Snow White and Princess, brought my hackles up even through my pounding headache. I immediately classified her in the bitch category.

I had the urge to reply in a similarly grating tone, but I was able to curb that instinct. Not without a hell of a lot of effort, though.

Her attitude reminded me of those who pride themselves on being schoolyard bullies. But getting into a pissing match with the first other Ironhide I met, who had quite probably saved my ass from the Insectman, seemed like a particularly stupid thing to do.

I tried to say something along the lines of 'hello', but as soon as I took a slightly deeper breath, the aches in my chest flared up again. I coughed, and every cough brought more pain spikes and another cough, turning into a vicious circle of agony.

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When I could bring it under control again minutes later, tears were streaming down my face. I strained to keep my breathing shallow and moved as little as possible.

"Fucking marvellous," the woman sighed, shaking her head and looking at me.

"You're fucking ribs are bruised or cracked. Can't do anything about it. Breathe fucking shallow. I duct-taped most of your face, but there was some shit in there. I got most out, but if you don't get some antibiotics, you're fucked," the woman shrugged, "Probably utterly fucked anyway."

The woman raised her voice above a whisper towards the end, and I panicked. Not because of what she said, that much was evident to anybody with half a brain, but the Insectmen would hear her and come.

I didn't think I could move, let alone run. If they came, I was dead.

"Shhh," I whispered fiercely, reflexively looking around for an exit in the gloom.

I finally noticed we were in a garage; an intact one even. It was about ten by five meters and filled with the things people often stored in their garages.

Workbench with a variety of tools. Shelves with a myriad of boxes and containers. A partially disassembled motorcycle. It had a door in the back, probably connecting to an adjacent house and a large garage door on the other side. One side had windows high up on the wall; this was where the only light came from. They didn't look like they could open.

I was lying on a collection of clothes in front of an open cupboard and was covered by a child's sleeping bag covered in unicorns.

The woman scoffed loudly, "I'm stopping the fucking sounds from leaving this room," then she breathed in deeply and shouted, "THE FUCKWADDLES CAN'T HEAR US!"

"How?!" I carefully looked around the garage in confusion. There wasn't any soundproofing that I could see.

"Fucking hell. You a fuckwit? Fucking stupid? Have an extra chromosome? I control air. I stop it from transferring sound. Simple when you use your thinkmeat. So what can you fucking do?"

"Wha?" I said intelligently.

The woman glared at me.

"We can all do fucking things," she pulled her collar down and tapped the metal spine in her neck, "Straight from a fucking comic book shit. You stopped the fucking cockgobbler cold. How did you do that?"

"The what?"

"The assknight. Fucking alien insect. You stopped it from ripping your guts out."

"Yea, wait. Can't you?"

"You fucking deaf as well? No, we all do different things. I do air stuff. What things can you do?"

I floundered at the information spewed at me, my pounding skull keeping me from placing it all quickly, so I continued to ask the first things to pop into my head.

"What? Who? The Ironbacks?"

"Ironbacks? That's a stupid fucking name. We're Implanted. And yes, everyone I've met can do 'things.' Now, are you going to fucking stop repeating shit like a drooler and tell me what you can fucking do?" She crossed her arms, looked down at me, and even tapped her foot several times.

Bitch.

I closed my eyes, doing my best to think past the throbbing in my head. To stall, I asked the only logical question I could come up with "Why do you want to know?"

"Because I need to fucking decide if I'm going to leave you here to get assplowed by the shitnozzles hunting you or if you're useful enough to waste my time on. Now how did you fucking stop the fucking Bug?" She replied bluntly. I opened my eye to look at the woman's annoyed face; there was no sign that she was lying or exaggerating there.

She'd leave me to die here without a second thought.

Actual, literal life or death. That's what it came down to, and it was like a bucket of cold water that muted my aches and pains. Unshackled, my mind went from zero to a hundred kilometres an hour in a second.

The woman looked like she could handle herself. She had handled herself for a while, judging from how much her hair had grown back. I think it grew slightly less than a centimetre per month, meaning she'd been here for about a month. Plus, she had met with others like us. Or at least claimed to.

I was a lab tech with no survival training and nothing but assumptions about what was happening to me. Alone I was 'fucked' as she put it anyway, so I might as well take the plunge.

"I Commanded him to stop. And he did. I don't know why or how."

"Like a mind-fucking psychic?" her eyes widened in surprise, and she stepped back from me.

I hesitated again, then stopped myself from shrugging. In for a penny…

"Well, no. I think the machinery in the Metallospine uses radio waves or maybe some form of pheromones that the insect men react to."

She gave me a flat stare.

I had to admit that hearing the names I'd made up for things out loud quickly proved that I shouldn't name things. Her face told me that she agreed with my self-assessment.

"Metallo… That's a stupid fucking retarded name," She shook her head again before latching onto what I'd said about the implant, "How are you so sure it's a fucking machine in there?"

"What else could it be?" I asked.

"The fucking Tesseract?" She answered, and reflexively I scoffed, "That's not something real. It's from some superhero comic movie."

She gave me another flat look and sniffed.

Yea, I knew that sniff. I used that sniff myself when people said something so unbelievably stupid I needed a moment to purge it from my brain before continuing the conversation.

"Okay. Yea. I guess it could be anything," I admitted before she was done purging, "But my money's on a machine. Arthur C. Clarke's third law and all."

She blinked at me, "What the actual fuck are you blabbering about?"

"Arthur C. Clarke's third law," I couldn't help taking on a lecturing tone with the foulmouthed woman, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. It's a cliché for a reason."

"Fucking hell. You a kick-up-the-cunt know-it-all?" She almost growled at me. I guess she liked me better when she thought I was stupid.

Closing my eye for a moment, I took a shallow breath, then breathed out again. I needed her. Without her, I was dead.

"No. Sorry. I'm a little off-kilter. My head feels like it's exploding. Can we start over? My name is Alana Kelly. Most people call me Lana. Thank you for saving my ass out there."

The woman sniffed again, then just stared at me before nodding.

"Clara Freemont."

"Nice to meet you, Clara," I lied, pushing myself up to extend my hand, gritting my teeth against the pain. She squeezed my hand a bit too hard while shaking it.

Bully.

"We'll see," She said, releasing my hand, "I don't want you to do your psychic fuckery on me. Do, and I'll fucking end you."

I took a moment to breathe through the pain in my ribs after settling back and shaking my head,

"I don't think it works like that. You'd have to be affected by radio waves or pheromones, which I don't think work on people... If it works that way. I'm not sure how it works. I've only used it a few times."

The woman looked at me, then nodded, "Do it then."

"Wha?" I was getting whiplash from this woman's every other sentence.

"There are things out there that aren't fucking Bugs. A few of the shitstains who used to live here are still around. They try to off every idiot they come across. A couple of the worst things out there are Implanted. If you can only fuck up Bugs…" She left the rest unspoken. At least her one-eighty was based on some sort of an actual reason and not something bipolar. Maybe.

Then again, what the hell was I going to do? She might be just as off-kilter as I was, but without her, I was dead; we both knew it, so that made her the one making the decisions.

For now.

"Alright, if you're sure…?" I asked uncertainly, and she gave me another flat look.

I grit my teeth, knowing this would make my skull explode in an even worse way. However, I didn't want to get on her wrong side, but she looked impatient, and I was pretty sure she'd leave me to die if I couldn't help her as well.

It wasn't as if I had a choice. I needed the woman's help to survive.

Breathing in shallowly, I tried to centre myself. The first times I did this, I was either angry beyond reason or scared out of my mind. The last time, however, I'd been scared, but I had taken the time to examine what I'd done.

Now, calmly, I leaned into the feeling I'd explored when I stopped the Bug.

Heat built up in the machinery in my back, and, like last time, I guided it towards my head. I think it was slightly easier to direct it the way I had before; as if there was a groove I was following instead of trying to draw a straight line on a flat pane of glass. Maybe like following an overgrown animal track through a thick forest.

But it was also a lot harder, the constant pounding in my head and feverish eyes making it more difficult, like a worn-out muscle being asked to do more.

I pushed as carefully as possible and shaped the heat -the energy, I guess- into an innocuous Command.

Then I screamed it at Clara silently.

[Jump]

It was easier but not easy by any stretch of the imagination. It took a lot of effort to concentrate the Command into a single cohesive entity, but hitting Cara was effortless.

That was where the most prominent difference occurred: instead of hitting a stream of high-pressure water, I ran face-first into a brick wall; immovable and entirely solid.

I squawked in surprise at the fierce resistance, followed by a groan when my quick intake of breath set my ribs on fire again, and my head-drums started pounding even more vigorously.

But I had gotten through, at least a tiny bit; I had seen Clara jump, and without the unbridled terror fueling my nascent survival instinct and pushing everything away, the realisation sunk in:

My Command worked on her.