I Am Titanium (Pax Black Book 1) (30 page)

Julie’s wedding band was loose on her finger and slippery from the gel soap. She twined her fingers together, scrubbing at the cracks between them, and rubbed at her nail beds. She washed up to her forearms and used a paper towel to turn off the water. Her hands were pale from the cold water. She pushed the plain gold band of her wedding band as close to her palm as she could.

When she and Robert had married, she’d wanted to be a surgeon. She’d had nightmares about losing the ring inside someone and sewing them up before she realized. Never mind that she’d gone into cytopathology instead of surgery; every time she so much as
looked
at that ring she felt sick with the thought of losing it somewhere and not being able to get it back.

She moved toward one of the chairs against the plexiglass panels and rubbed her hands together, trying to warm them up. The ring spun on her finger every time she brushed it.

Ms. Jance’s teeth chattered and silvery sweat had sprung out on her forehead. Julie stumbled the last few steps to the chairs and sat down.

On the robot’s monitor, Julie watched a blue bubble of some kind bounce up the side of the volcano. The volcano was so steep it was like watching a ball fall down a set of stairs in reverse. Inside was a tiny humanoid figure, Pax’s double.

It paused at the place where part of the monster had exploded on itself.

“How are you getting all this?” Julie asked. “How can you have a camera there?”

“I have dropped multiple drones in the area,” the first robot said. “Several of them have failed due to accidental damage or exposure to radiation, but most are still operational. I have also taken over the planes to attack the monsters.”

“I didn’t know they were that… computerized.”

“Autopilot systems are often heavily computerized.”

“Ah.”

Ms. Jance began to weep. Julie glanced at the woman. Her head hung forward on her chest.

On the screen, the monster had begun to shift its weight, and the view from the camera switched from the bottom of the volcano to somewhere above the ocean, facing the island from the opposite direction.

Metal plates pushed out from the sides of the monster. The surfaces were all more or less smooth, like an egg that had been cracked but not yet broken open.

Pax’s blue bubble rose from behind the volcano and hesitated rather than attacked.

It’s not Pax,
Julie reminded herself sternly.
Pax is dead on the table. That is a monster.

“The girl seems to have been destroyed,” the robot said. “I am unable to locate her in the area.”

“Then the monster’s doing what you want,” said Julie.
And I injected Ms. Jance for nothing. “
It’s defeated one of them. Let it destroy the other one.”

The robots’ torsos rotated away from Ms. Jance. They aimed their chest screens and their head-cages full of cameras at Julie. “Any strategy that leaves this monster with the power of reproduction is a poor strategy.”

It’s not a robot,
Julie told herself. It was an artificial intelligence; it wore robots like skins. Thinking of it as a
robot
was no more accurate than thinking of a sweater as being the same as the woman who wore it.

Ms. Jance’s head went limp. Julie went to check, but the AIs raised their spindly arms in front of her. “The subject is not safe to approach at this time.”

“I need to check her.”

“The subject is not safe to approach at this time.”

Ms. Jance’s head flung backward on her bare shoulders and silver material began to pour out of her mouth, far more than she had been injected her. It bubbled in her throat and ran in silver streaks along the side of her neck. Silver tears ran from her eyes and drooled out of her nose, her ears.

All Julie could think was that the AI was shit at calculating odds.

The monster clung to the side of the crater, looking like some kind of dull disco ball.

The tentacles had all pulled inside. Pax could still feel their living energy radiating through the metal, along with a small amount of heat.

He had no idea what it was up to. The metal plates weren’t thick enough to defend the monster against any kind of bomb, or even conventional weapons. All he had to do to trap it was throw up a shield.

It was academic. He didn’t have the energy he needed to trap the monster. He barely had enough energy to lift it.

The jet was taking a long fucking time to circle back around. Almost as if it knew he wanted that fucking bomb. Or would, if necessary, blow up the jet and take what he needed, pilot or no pilot.

He reached out for Scarlett, but there was no answer.

Maybe she really was dead.

Too bad I can’t feel anything.
She probably deserved a couple of tears or
something
. But no. Nothing.

Correction; he felt drained. Tired of fighting this thing. Tired of digging himself in deeper. If it could consume Scarlett that easily, what was the point? There was
no fucking way
he was going to be able to beat this thing. Save the world? What a joke. He’d be lucky if he could slow the end down a little.

Terry, you asshole. What the fuck are you doing this for? And why the fuck don’t you make it stop?

He was so tired he could barely work up the energy for outrage.

Below him, the monster was moving again.

Great. Wonderful. Let’s see what tricks you play next.
Cracks appeared in the monster’s shell. The various pieces began protruding, rotating, lifting.

Four of the plates jutted upward and outward. Under the fragments of the shell were twisted tentacles like tree trunks—and claws. Two pairs of back legs dug into the crater of the volcano. What remained looked like some kind of beetle—dense central mass, armored back, armored torso, and front section. The front wasn’t so much a head as a kind of curved battering ram.

The monster shuddered, and heavy spikes lifted all along its back and head plates. Heavy spikes, glistening with a thick black liquid.

One of the monster’s claws flicked, and something shot out at Pax, wrapping itself around his stomach.

He had just long enough to realize the monster had wrapped a giant whip made of negative energy around him before the monster jerked him downward.

The AI’s cameras all turned back to Ms. Jance, watching the thick silver fluid ooze out of her. It had even started to leak out from under her fingernails. It glistened on her skin, just as it had done on Pax and the girl.

“Kill her,” Julie hissed. “Unless you want to face another astral being.”

But the AI didn’t respond. The two robots seemed frozen, like locked-up computers. The screens had stopped in the middle of changing from blue to orange and were an ugly brownish color.

“Hello?” Julie called. She got out of the chair, shuffled over to the robots, and knocked on the torso of the one nearer to her. Her fist made muffled clinking noises on the metal. She could see the seams where it had been roughly welded together. “Hello?”

No response.

She approached Ms. Jance. She was still securely taped to the chair.
That doesn’t mean anything. You saw what Pax’s double can do.
She should get out of here. As quickly as possible. But the door was locked—all the doors were locked—and there was nowhere else to go: where
could
she go, that a computer couldn’t get access to?

Which left her alone in a room with a body being possessed by astral material.

She circled Ms. Jance and the robots, walked over to the rolling cabinet, and took out a few things. She picked the sheet off the floor, covered the girl’s body, and placed the items on top of the sheet.

Ms. Jance was still leaking fluid. Copious amounts of it. It was pouring off the base of the office chair, no doubt leaking from her digestive system, as well as a few other handy orifices.

But she wasn’t moving.

Julie had been around a number of patients who had died while she was present. During her internship in the ER, most of the deaths had been self-inflicted, either through self-harm or blatant stupidity. She had lost a few herself, both because of her own inexperience—not many, but she had to admit it—and to circumstances beyond her control.

And one, a little boy who had been in a terrible car accident just after she’d found out about Pax’s scleroderma, she had let go herself. She could have saved him. But he would have lived in a wheelchair and in a hospital bed for the rest of his life, just like Pax.

Instead she had made a small, seemingly accidental cut to an artery in his thigh, and patched it just a little too slowly. Just a little bit too much of the boy’s life drained away. One nick. A few delays. And it was over.

A mercy killing.

She unwrapped the scalpel. This wasn’t going to be as subtle. But it was just as much of a mercy.

Pax fell farther than he was expecting, not just on top of the monster, but into the volcano’s open crater. He hit a pile of trash, junk so useless that not even the monster had wanted it. Plastic bags stuck to his skin.

He was too tired to fight anymore. Too tired to care. It felt like more than just a problem of needing more energy. It felt like he was out of ideas.

It had killed Scarlett. What good can I do?

He lay in the pile of trash and waited for something shitty to start happening. The same way he would have if he were still human.

As if he were still in the hospital.

Nothing had changed.

Julie, holding Ms. Jance’s head by the hair, leaned it first to one side, then the other. It was still stubbornly on the woman’s shoulders, attached by some piece of gristle back in the spine. Julie looked down at her blouse and sighed. She wished she’d thought to gown up before she’d started cutting; the silver material was all over her blouse and skirt, and she didn’t have spares.

Her knees felt weak. She was going to have to sit down in a moment.

She gave it a few more cuts between the third and fourth cervical vertebrae and felt the head come free.

She laid it and the scalpel on the sheet covering the girl. The sheet had slipped a little, revealing the girl’s face next to Ms. Jance’s. Both sets of eyes were closed, both sets of lips slack. It almost looked like the girl had two heads, one of them growing out of her chest.