Page 174 of Godslayer
I don’t take her hand because it feels like the end. “I can’t,” I tell her. “I can’t join you, Haryet. I’m not done here.”
She’s begging now.Please, please, please…
I shake my head. “Not yet,” I explain, more forcefully. “Tyse. I can’t just leave him. We’re partners now, Haryet. He’s depending on me.”
“Clara.”
My name comes out of Haryet’s mouth, but it’s not her voice.
“You can wake up now.”
The god’s voice is low, and calm, and steady. And I suddenly have the urge to cry because it reminds me of that first time I woke up in Delta City and the god was trying to have a conversation.
I would go back to that moment. Not any moment in Tau City, but that one I would. Because Tyse and I were safe. Life was getting better.
But all these memories are nothing but a stupid fantasy. You can’t go back in time. The real world doesn’t have do-overs.
You get one shot. One chance. And that’s it.
“Come now, Clara. I’m bored. I would like for us to have a conversation.”
My eyes open. I’m strapped to a wall plate made of cold, hard metal. My eyes have rolled up into my head, so I find myself staring at a cement ceiling that has been sloppily painted white. For a moment, I mix up the timeline and I see the tower, and the banner, and the words, ‘Sparktopia Was Here’ splashed across it.
But I sigh. That’s not where I am. I’m not in Tyse’s room in the God’s Tower.
I’m in some factory lab where a psychopathic machine, passing itself off as a living creature, is making mutant augments and using the man I love to test them in fights.
I lower my gaze and find myself staring straight at a harvesting cage on the opposite wall. “What is going on?” I whisper.
“Ahhhh, good. There you are.”
I turn my head and find the melted-faced god staring back at me. He’s so many kinds of wrong, I don’t even know where to begin. “What do you want? What the hell do you want from us?”
The god laughs, his eyes shining red.
It’s so wrong.
“I want to push the limits, obviously. It’s not every day an authentic Sweep Augment gets dropped into my lap with his very own rechargeable power source.”
So he knows.
“Oh, yes, Clara. I know. I caught him, you know. I caught him in between worlds. Right after he spooled you back up.”
I barely understand what that means, but an image of Haryet making dresses out of spark comes to mind.
“That’s why you’re fine and he’s dying.” He juts his chin to the other side of the room, and when I turn my head, I see Tyse, also lying on a medical bed, wires coming out of him, a cage of needle-thread wires hanging from the ceiling above him. But he’s naked—creepy, sculpted armor gone—and his skin, once golden and inked with tattoos, now pulses in strange places. Thin lines of orange and green leave glowing trails across his chest and arms, like veins of light under the surface.
He doesn’t look broken.
He looks rebuilt.
On top of his chest is his weapon. The VersiStrike.
“Isn’t it poetic?” Epsilon asks. “What a picture this paints. The great Tyse Saarinen. You know they get buried with those weapons, right? They’re biological. I thought it be fitting to place it there. Since… he’s dying.”
My eyes linger on the weapon as Tyse continues to breathe erratically. Watching it shake a bit with each breath.
“Don’t bother,” Epsilon says.
