Part 34 (1/2)

Alpha's fist clenched. ”He interfered with my life. Attempted reprogramming. Tried to teach me

betrayal.”

Nothing could disguise Charon's triumph as he turned to Thomas. ”Did you really think you could change the coding for an AI just by arguing with it? Especially one programmed by me, for loyalty? All you did was turn her against you.”

Thomas had no answer. He would die knowing he had been a fool.

Charon handed Alpha the gun. ”We should make sure he's dead anyway. When I signal, shoot.”

She sighted the EL-38 on Thomas. He tried not to care, tried to tell himself nothing mattered except that

this nightmare would finally be over, but he feared death as much as anyone. He searched her face for some hint of the humanity he had seen before. He looked for the woman who had made love to him and found only a machine. She met his probing gaze with no response. He might as well have been a broken stick.

Charon stood over Thomas. ”You should have given up. We could have shot you sooner and put you out of your misery. But you kept on. What do you call that? Stupidity? Is that what you call it?” Then he raised his hand to Alpha. And she fired.

XII: The Dark

Thomas instinctively snapped his eyes closed. The hammering bullets were so loud, he heard nothing else, not even his own breathing. Rock shards rained over him like shrapnel and the hammering went on and on and on-

And on.

And stopped.

He opened his eyes.

Alpha was standing with the EL-38 clenched in both hands, staring at the place where Charon had been

standing. She still had the gun aimed, but no longer at Thomas. Her impa.s.sive mask was gone and what she had hidden whenever she spoke of Charon showed clearly.

Hatred.

And she said, ”It's called courage.”

Thomas forced himself to look at Charon. Little remained but a smear of parts and blood on the rocks.

He couldn't even tell if most of it was tissue or synthetic. This time when bile rose in his throat, he couldn't hold it. He just barely managed to lean over before he lost what little he had eaten.

Alpha finally moved. She let the gun slide from her hand, and it fell next to Thomas with a clatter. Then, slowly, she knelt next to Charon and bowed her head.

She stayed that way for a long time.

Thomas wondered dully if he were hallucinating. Her shoulders were shaking. He pulled himself to his knees, groaning as agony flared in his leg. The cast had cracked open and the limb had probably broken again. He ignored it and slid over to Alpha on his knees. She didn't turn to him, but up close, he could see that, incredibly, her silence this time wasn't from lack of emotion.

She was crying.

Tears ran down her face. Her lashes were lowered, s.h.i.+elding her eyes. When he touched her shoulder, she shrugged off his hand. He hesitated, unsure whether or not to back off. Then she turned to him. She looked as if she were breaking inside in a way that had nothing to do with EIs and everything with

humanity. Staring at him, she made a strangled sound. He pulled her into his arms then, and they knelt together, the two of them shaking as they held each other.

”The game-I-” Alpha choked on the words. She pulled back so she could look into his face. ”I'm

sorry. It was the only way to convince him to let you live even a short time.”

”It was your idea?”

”Yes. He took the gun. He intended to shoot you that morning, when he first came.”

”Why did you tell him what we did?”

”He accessed my memory.” She drew in a ragged breath, a purely human response: she didn't need air. ”I

managed to keep a lot from him. My mesh isn't as simple as he thought. But I couldn't hide something as

big as the night we spent together.”

And he had thought it meant nothing to her. He wanted to protect his heart by refusing to believe her, but he wanted even more for it to be true. ”Alpha-” He didn't know how to go on.