DN - Laser Chest

Utopia is there, chestplate open, firing her glittering beam straight through my chest.

There’s no pain, not at first. No, it’s more like a sense of wrongness. There’s something missing, or maybe something where it doesn’t belong. There’s a detonation from far behind me where the inversion beam is carving a tunnel through the building. Hot wind presses my cape to my back and makes dust devils out of rubble.

When I look down at my chest, I see a neat little hole about the size of a golf ball. It’s charred around the edges, and I think it goes all the way through. I open my mouth to scream, and the wound whistles as my scorched, punctured lung begins to leak. The scream dies as a horrified gasp.

Then the pain comes. It comes in crashing tsunami waves, endless and heavy, drowning all thought, obliterating all sense. Something jolts my knees, and I realize I’m falling around the time the floor smacks me in the face. I writhe and gasp.

“Very good, Danielle,” says Utopia. “You almost made it.”

She shoots me again.

***

The world peels away and leaves behind a scarlet haze. Someone is dragging me by my ankle. My head is knocking against stairs. The pain is everywhere, everything. A white bar of agony is punched through my chest. Another through my gut. With my eyes closed, I peer into the lattice and examine myself. If I could, I’d scream.

I’m unraveling.

The lattice is a hard white net against absolute black. The strings of reality are infinitely thin and infinitely bright. Everything is a knot or a twist in the lattice. Every bird in the sky, every song on the radio, it’s all in the lattice. I’m not different. My body is a pattern of twists and ties and wraps and bindings. But now there are two holes punched straight through. And at the edges, the lines have snapped. They drift and wave in a current that isn’t there, and as they shift, they unkink, untie, unknit themselves. My pattern is growing loose, a cascade of reactions spreading out from the wound. This line is slack so that knot comes undone. These twists are slashed, so those tangles start to slide apart. And every shift, every unraveling, is agony.

“Danielle, can you hear me?” someone asks from far away. A moan is the best reply I can manage. “Please try. I may have overdone it.”

It’s Utopia. That’s right. I was supposed to fight her. I drag my eyes open, and shove them into focus. We’re in the main computer core. A vaulted ceiling above a deep pit with catwalks around the edges. And in the center, a computer that’s made as much of glass as it is of metal. Utopia steps up to a console, lifts a crown of wires tethered by a cable to the main core, and places it on her head.

I’m propped up against a console, a few yards away from her. My tongue is thick and dry. It takes me a few swallows, but I croak out a “Stop.”

“I’m afraid that’s not going to happen. You have delayed, but not prevented my ascension. If you can hold on, however, I might be able to save you.”

“What?” Something gives way inside me, and I clench against a horrible sensation of draining, like someone has pulled a stopper from a jug and glug, glug, glug, there goes my life. The sensation passes and I sag. My skin has gone clammy and tight.

“I was serious when I said I try to avoid unneeded killings.” Utopia really seems to believe that.

“You tried to shoot Calamity. You tried to shoot her in her bed.”

Utopia is quiet for a moment. “Yes. Well. Your presence here shows it would have been better for me if I had.” The lights in the core begin to blink, and holographic screens project images of her brain. The nanomachines are swarming inside her skull, mapping all the connections.

“You’re Mistress Malice.” I try to get my arm under me and push myself to my feet. If I can get to my feet, I might be able to…I don’t know. Something. I’ve got to do something before I die. She killed Valkyrja, and Magma, and all the others. She has to be punished for that. I can’t let her win. My shoulder erupts with pinching, tearing, slicing pain when I put weight on it. It feels like there’s a colony of carnivorous termites carving their way into my joints, chewing on the sinews. I cry out, a feeble squeak. Strongest girl in the world, yep. That’s me.

- Dreadnought, Chapters 35-36