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By Root 238 0

a clang. I thought, Wait a minute, that didn’t even hurt, then a second battery hit me in the head and I screamed, because some of that was flesh. I staggered in a circle. Red waves poured from my shoulder, not exactly pain but rather a logical outrage. My ringlike abdomen rotated. I brought the gun arm around. But Carl was already on top of me, his elephant arms swinging. His fist contracted into a solid punching block and connected with my stomach. Lola screamed. I staggered backward and sat down on the hood of a car. Its windshield cracked. But the surprising thing was the weakness of his punch. I had tried to ride what I expected to be a huge transfer of momentum but totally overcompensated. Sitting on the hood of a red sports car, I realized that compared with me, Carl’s arms were not very strong. Of course they weren’t. He was mostly organic. Despite his exostructure, he couldn’t carry around my kind of hardware. For that you needed to be metal all the way through. I didn’t want to let his fists near my face. But he was not a big problem.

The Contours bent in three places, levering me upright. I swung my claw arm, aiming for his head. Carl not only deflected it but had time to first give me a patronizing look. He got his other fist beneath my arms and red waves blossomed around the side of my chest. “You want her,” I said. “Don’t you.” His block hands began to open, splitting into thick digits. One clamped on the forearm of my gun arm. The other closed on the thinner biceps. He strained. Red washed through me. I wailed, Stop stop he is ripping me.

“She understands me,” said Carl.

My tripod claw fired and locked on to Carl’s arm. His eyes widened. I pulled. Carl’s metal fingers squealed along my titanium arm, losing grip. I could hardly feel my gun arm. But it was there. It was functional. I tried to back up, pushing Carl away with the claw. All I wanted in the world was to get my gun arm on him and insert a lot more metal into his body than he already had.

My heels hit the car I had sat on earlier. I pushed and it shrieked, metal on concrete, folding up against the low retaining wall behind me. I raised my gun arm and Carl knocked it aside. The car behind me popped and banged. Suddenly there was less resistance and I staggered momentarily. I didn’t know what had happened but it created a gap between me and Carl and I swung the gun arm up. He ducked beneath it and punched the barrel upward. I kept walking backward, trying to find the distance I needed to finish this, and I discovered the reason the car was no longer pushing back on me: I had forced it completely over the retaining wall, sending it tumbling end-over-end through the air. The way I discovered this was all of a sudden so was I.

Night sky revolved. Something bright and white passed before me. I was spinning head over hooves, feeling the terrible mass of my body swell with kinetic energy. I caught a glimpse of Carl, framed by the punctured concrete wall of the garage. The next time I revolved I was ready and my claw hand fired, trailing metal cable. It snapped around Carl’s exoskeleton and yanked him off his feet. Another revolution. The brightness was blotted by a shape I finally recognized as the car I had kicked backward out of the lot. It hit the brightness and broke it into a thousand winking pieces, because the brightness was a lattice of frosted windows. The world slipped by. The sky rose. Carl fell toward me. I heard but did not see the car burst against the floor of whatever building was down there. Then it became visible again as a crater of scattered glass and metal. It was a live preview of coming events. I tried to twist my body into a posture that made it less likely that I would land with the many tons of my body above my biological head. But it didn’t respond. I screamed at my body’s betrayal.

My ringed abdomen swiveled. My legs extended. My hooves splayed, the toes extending. I hit the car like a bomb. The Threes retracted, eating momentum. The locking pins fired. I felt my left hoof grip the floor and my right hoof slide. It had come