Emberclaw Protocol

Chapter 8: Quantum Cry

Cole was pulling his tail out of the incubation chamber for the eighth time when the alarm suddenly buzzed with a dying sound. Erin, her scalpel dangling above a slice of quantum embryo, looked up to see her three-year-old son playing with the tip of his glowing tail poking at his sister's sacred tattoo.

“Cole Black!” Erin's tweezers pinpointed the mechanical flea her husband had smuggled in, “Explain why a Federation tracker is in a child's toy?”

The Silver Wolf leapt from the ceiling beams, the military chip glowing blue at his spine as he landed, “It's to teach them about danger...” Before the words left her mouth, little Erin suddenly giggled and grabbed the levitating tweezers, and the city's electrical system went out in response.

The darkness was like a flowing river of stars in the Holy Stripes. As Erin touched her husband's taut back muscles, she heard the alarm rolling down his throat, “Quantum fluctuation values breaching critical threshold, children are rewriting board base codes.”

“Use my blood as a buffer.” She bit her fingertip and pressed it to her daughter's brow, her other hand tugging at the collar of Cole's shirt, “Tune your military chip to...”

The sound of glass popping interrupts the command. Cole rolled towards the corner with his wife and daughter curled around his tail as three tranquilizer darts nailed into the spot they had just been. Moonlight illuminated the intruder's white lab coat with “Federal Pediatric Specialist” emblazoned on the badge.

“Mrs. Black, please cooperate with the neonatal quarantine.” The fake doctor's pupils glowed a mechanical red, “Your child is triggering...”

Little Cole suddenly stood up from his crib, his tail slapping the night vision device. Erin saw in the infrared scan the piece of metal her son's milk teeth were biting down on - the very remains of Kaiden's mechanical heart from three years ago.

“Back off!” She whipped out her scalpel and nailed the intruder in the cuff, “You guys don't know how to hold a quantum baby.”

Cole had beasted into his silver wolf form, but his right eye suddenly burst into an unusual red light. Erin smelled the sweet, fishy odor oozing from his wound - a sign of the fusion of the holy blood with the mechanical virus, a mutation that last week's genetic mapping had shown to erode nerve synapses.

“Get the kids into the blast bay!” Cole crashed through the floor-to-ceiling windows, using his torso to block the pulse wave that shot toward the crib. Instead, Erin picked up her daughter and rushed toward the quantum microscope, “I need to synchronize their brainwave frequencies!”

Little Erin's cries suddenly shrill like a quantum whine. The metal of the entire treehouse began to liquefy, the masks of the federal agents melting into silver goo. Erin touched her husband's cracked mechanical heart amidst the tremors, and holy blood was seeping iridescence from the cracks.

“It won't stop...” Cole's human form flickered between reality and reality, “The military chip is manipulating me in reverse...”

Erin suddenly kissed his bleeding lips, the tip of her tongue pushing into a nanocapsule. Cole's pupils plummeted, “This is... A souvenir of our first kiss?”

“A modified version of the nerve blocker.” She bit through his lower lip to draw holy blood, “Now wrap your tail around my waist on the count of three...”

The quantum storm erupted with the crib at its center. Erin leapt up by her husband's robotic arm and hurled the test tube mixing the two men's blood into the eye of the storm. As the federal agent vaporized in the glare, she saw her son playing with the remnants of Kayden's mechanical heart - the coding on it was being reorganized.

When the lights came back on, Cole gasped as he slumped on the melted titanium floor. Erin sat straddling his waist stitching up his wounds as the children slept soundly in the blast pod.

“Their holy tattoos are absorbing Kayden's datastream.” She slapped the bloodstained stitches against her husband's chest, “Is this the danger awareness class you taught?”

Cole curled the tip of his tail around the vaporized remains of his mask, “At least learn to tell the Federation's bionic skins apart.” He suddenly rolled over and pinned her underneath him, “But the way the lady just fed her...”

The alarm blew again. The blast pod's monitor screen automatically broadcast emergency news: a third of the city's mechanical prosthetics were suddenly functioning in reverse, and the GPS of all the out-of-control devices was last located at the coordinates of their treehouse.

Erin tugged her blood-stained white coat over her husband's restless tail, “Congratulations, Mr. Blake, you've managed to get all the humans in the city to do the mechanical dance en masse on Valentine's Day.”

Cole picked up her fallen hairpin, the metal surface reflecting the silhouettes of the two interlocking, “Maybe it's time to teach the kids what a Romantic crime is?”

Little Erin's cries suddenly turned to laughter as the melted metal re-coalesced into the shape of a heart. As the swarm of federal drones surrounded the treehouse, Erin noticed that each wing glowed with an iridescent light - a spectrum unique to the fusion of her holy blood with Cole's mechanical virus.

“Looks like someone sent a valentine.” Cole licked away the bloodstain at the nape of her neck, “Want to unwrap it?”

Erin's silver crossbow transformed into a quantum cutter in the moonlight, “Teach the kids to write thank you cards first.”

As the first drone crashed, Cole Jr. was drawing family pictures on the blast bay glass with his tail. Erin looked at the added quantum patterns in her husband's bestial form and suddenly shoved a pregnancy test into his combat belt - the iridescent light on it stung more than the sirens.

“You better learn to deliver quantum babies this time.” She kissed his startled lips in the smoke, “With her tail.”