Blood Pact

"Hit the bastard back!”

    Her mother turned, head lolling on a neck no longer capable of support, met her daughter's gaze for a moment, then bent and ripped free one of the shelves' flat metal struts. Holding it like a baseball bat, she straightened and swung.

    The ragged end of the steel bar caught number nine in the temple, shearing through the thin bone and into the brain. Gold gleamed for a second as the neural net tore loose, then number nine reeled back and collapsed.

    The bar rang against the tile. Marjory Nelson swayed and crumpled, as though invisible strings had been cut.

    "MOM!" Vicki stumbled forward and threw herself to her knees. She couldn't hold her mother and the flashlight both, so she shoved the latter in under her sling and dragged the limp body up onto her lap. The diffuse light, shining through the thin cotton of Henry's shirt, wiped away all the changes that death and science had made and gave her back her mother.

    "Mom? Don't be dead. Oh, please, don't be dead. Not again. . . .”

    Too much damage. She could feel the binding letting go.

    But there was something she had to do.

    "Mom? Goddamnit, Mom . . ." Pale gray eyes, so like her own, flickered open and Vicki forgot how to breathe. She shouldn't have been able to see their expression, but she could, could see it clearly, felt it wrap around her and for one long moment keep her safe from the world.

    ". . . love you . . . Vic . . . ki . . .”

    Tears pooled under the edge of her glasses and spilled down her cheeks. "I love you, too, Mom." Her vision blurred and when it cleared she was alone. "Mom?" But the gray eyes stared up at nothing and the body she held was empty. Very, very carefully, she slid it off her lap and stroked the eyes closed.

    Her mother was dead.

    She started to shake. The pressure grew, closing her throat, twisting her muscles into knots, tossing her back and forth where she knelt. The first sob ripped huge burning holes in her heart and held as much anger as grief. It hurt so much that she surrendered to the second, curled around the pain, and cried.

    Cried for her mother.

    Cried for herself.

    Number nine lay where he had fallen. The anger was gone. Although he had no way of knowing that the neural net had stopped functioning, he dimly understood that the part that was body and the part that was him were now separate.

    He stared up at the ceiling, wanting . . .

    . . . wanting . . .

    Then the view shifted and she was there.

    Catherine gently turned number nine's head to face her.

    "I can't fix you," she whispered, drawing her finger softly around the curve of his jaw, alternately tracing flesh and bone. "You were going to stay with me forever. I wouldn't have let her shut you down." She smiled and tenderly pushed a flap of skin back into place.

    "You were," she told him, voice catching in her throat, "the very best experiment I ever did.”

    He wanted her to smile.

    He liked it when she smiled.

    Then she was gone.

    He wanted her to come back.

    Slowly, every movement precisely performed, Catherine got to her feet. Every step carefully planned, she advanced across the lab. She paused at the jagged length of steel, still lying where it had been dropped, bent, and lifted it from the floor.

    The end torn from the shelf gleamed, polished and pointed by the force that had ripped it free.

    She held it up and smiled at it.

    The flat metal bar cracked across Vicki's bent shoulders and smashed her to the floor. The world tilted and instinct took over as, gasping in pain, she managed to squirm around to face the assault, shoving her glasses back into place.

    The flashlight twisted in the folds of cloth and somehow finished pointed straight up, a miniature searchlight. It lit the gleaming end of steel descending toward Vicki. But not in time.

Sixteen
    Henry heard the pounding as he raced down the corridor leading to the lab, heard it and would have ignored it had it not been accompanied by a fine libretto of Italian profanity. He rocked to a stop in front of an old paneled door, saw that the doorknob had been bent down in such a way as to render it nonfunctional, and solved the problem by bracing one hand against the wall and yanking the entire mechanism out of the wood.

    The door crashed back and Celluci exploded out into the hall, the force of his exit throwing him to his knees.

    Grabbing him by the collar, Henry hauled him to his feet, blocking the resulting flurry of blows with his other