Project LOSS

Chapter 24

After a hundred-mile sprint at top speed, Onaiah relished the unfamiliar sensation of burning and tingling caused by extra blood flow to her leg muscles. After taking her brother’s pill she retained the strength and agility, but the PAVE standard mechanical upgrade that switched off pain and fatigue signals was no longer active. She was alive for the first time in decades as she cut through the desert; a dynamo amidst a cloud of dust that rose to engulf her in a dull red whirlwind.

Coming to a stop just shy of the city, she brushed the dust from her hair and garments as adequately as possible with sweaty palms, before proceeding along her favoured route to Vrethie’s apartment. She passed through scenic farmland, rolling green fields and thorny overgrown brush land that wasn’t yet utilised.

Her heart raced as she neared her destination, for the first time filled with hope, anticipation and the sickening anxiety that accompanied hope. For the first time in her life she had a cause, a will to succeed in her mission for the sake of all the sacrifices made to bring her to this point. Now her enemy had made himself known, and although her allies were yet to be commissioned, she knew that she must somehow recruit the aid of the very people she had been pitted against while under the control of PAVE. These were the people her enemy feared most. But it was more than that. She knew Vrethie was a force for good. Since she had possessed a mind, he had been on it, possessing her, his image ingrained on her thoughts and burnt into her retinas.

Since deciding to requisition Vrethie’s help, she’d mentally visualised all the ways their second ever conversation could play out, from the more pleasing to the most crushing of outcomes. Of all the ways she had imagined it might go down, she hadn’t once thought to factor his brother into the equation. The idea that he might pose an issue was not absent but had been pushed to the back of her mind; stuffed into a file labelled ‘Deal with later’. Unfortunately, later came sooner than expected. Kai was upon her before she could think of an exit strategy, his rage-twisted face a few inches from hers in less time than it took to blink.

“You killed my friend?” It was a question and a statement, but she could see in his eyes he knew of her guilt. His face changed completely and terrifyingly on becoming enraged. Blood rushed toward his eyes, turning them a deep red and engorging the veins in his face to the point where he looked less human and more like the thing PAVE described him as: a monster.

“I… I,” she stammered. She felt a pressure in her chest before a sense of weightlessness and finally a crack to the back of her head. Onaiah ricocheted heavily off a brick wall and landed in a heap at Kai’s feet, as though he had calculated the trajectory of her fall with pinpoint accuracy. He pulled her up roughly by her hair before she could react and stuck the top of her head with his elbow, sending her crashing straight back to the pavement. Onaiah felt blood dribble from her forehead down to her chin as Kai dragged her like a rag doll into an upright position, head rolling lifelessly until gripped in place by cheeks that puckered and leaked a mixture of blood and spittle.

 “Nothing to say for yourself?” The question must have been rhetorical, for he surely knew she had lost the ability to form words and gave her no opportunity to do so before planting a punch square on her nose. Pain radiated from the centre of her face; an agony that danced along neurons like a mass of spiderlings fleeing a web. Bone and cartilage shattered like glass, shearing through soft tissue and working its way back into her brain. Her superior healing abilities would have normally gotten to work, immediately re-sculpting bone and knitting flesh, repairing the most drastic of injuries under a hazy blanket of dulled pain receptors, but her innate abilities were null and void against Kai.

It was a common rumour that one’s life flashes before one’s eyes as they die, but for Onaiah it was not the case. Whether this was because she was special in some way, she didn’t know, but what passed before her eyes was the future. Her future. And although she couldn’t understand most of it, she knew what was important. The machine. The dreadfully terrifying yet somehow wonderful machine. Onaiah would never survive another hit to share her epiphany, and that realisation hurt more than the loss of her life. This way, Keith would win. She was strong—almost impossible to kill, as much as PAVE had tried, but Kai was a whole other level of strength and power. Through ears that were ringing and slick with blood, Onaiah faintly heard a woman screaming before everything faded to black.