Sooner Dead (Gamma World) - Mel Odom [59]
Flames reflected from Riley’s face shield when he stopped in front of her. “How did you do that?”
“It’s what I do.” Hella kept her voice level even though she wanted to scream. She felt the nanobots buzzing around her thoughts, demanding to have more control again. “All part of the service.”
“I’ve never seen anything like that.”
Ignoring the man, wanting to be away from the questions and the fears, Hella went to Daisy. She talked to the mountain boomer in a soothing tone and got past the panic the sudden blindness had caused in her. She morphed her hands back to human and stroked Daisy’s hide, taking as much comfort from the lizard as she gave.
“You all right?” Stampede spoke low and gentle as he stood behind Hella.
“I’m fine.” Outside the perimeter of the camp, in the privacy afforded by the darkness, Hella took off her blouse then unfastened the chain-mail shirt. She wet a towel from her pack with water and cleaned as much of the blood, smoke, and machine fluids as she could from the armor.
“You went pretty far into it, Red. Maybe Riley was really surprised by what he saw, but I’ve never seen you move like that.” He paused and she dried the chain mail.
“I know. I was me but I was more than me.”
“I shouldn’t have asked you to do that.”
“If you hadn’t, I’d have told you I was going to do it.”
Stampede growled angrily. “I was thinking.”
“Bad things happen when you do that.”
“These people are scientists. They know more about things than we’ve ever seen. Maybe they could—”
Hella pulled the cold chain mail back on and turned to face Stampede, interrupting him. “What? Lie to us some more? They’ve lied to us about everything so far. Or kept us in the dark. We’re supposed to suddenly start trusting these people?”
Stampede looked at her with his liquid brown eyes. Tenderly he drew her to him and hugged her. His massive heart beat deeply within his body, and he felt warm and reassuring.
“I don’t want to lose you, Red. Not to anything out here in the wilderness, and not to anything that’s lurking around inside your mind.”
“You won’t.” Hella curled her fingers in his fur and wished she were that little girl Stampede had found years before. Back then she hadn’t known much about the nanobots, hadn’t realized they had different thoughts than she did, and hadn’t known that they wanted to control her. “It surprised me tonight.”
“What?”
“How easy it was to let them slip into me. I was still in control. I was still me. But I felt like I was standing at the precipice of being someone else.”
“Who?”
Hella didn’t answer right away. “I don’t know.”
“You’re going to be okay, Red. I promise.”
“You can’t make that promise.”
“I just did.”
“You can’t keep it.”
“Try me.”
Hella pushed back from him and looked him in the eye. “I do want you to make me a promise.”
“Sure.”
“Remember how those ’Chine died? The way their flesh died but the hive mind kept their bodies running?”
Stampede’s face hardened and from the sadness in his eyes, she knew he suspected what she was going to ask. “Don’t.” His whisper was almost lost in the darkness.
“If something happens to me.” Hella could barely get the words out of her mouth, but she had let them go too long unsaid. “If something happens and I’m not me anymore … don’t let the nanobots take what’s left of me.”
Stampede looked away from her. “That’s never going to happen.”
“You know it could. So did Faust. I think that’s one of the reasons that Faust didn’t stay with us.”
“Faust was looking for an easy job. He was a slacker.”
Hella managed a laugh, but her vision was blurry with tears. “Faust works hard. He’s chief of security at Blossom Heat, and trade camps come with their own dangers. He just didn’t want to be around to see me slip away.” She knew that was true. “He made his decision to leave us only a few weeks after the first time I linked with the nanobots.”
That time she’d managed to save their lives as well, and the merging had been necessary if they were going to live. At times