Page 25 of Secrets of the Void
He struck her with a surprising amount of weight. For one moment, she was airborne. Then Ellie's back struck the floor hard enough to force all the air out of her lungs. She lay there with him on top of her, staring up into a massive mouth full of teeth.
To her horror, his mouth split open. The sides of his mouth, the area from his chin and down his throat, dropped open to reveal rows and rows of teeth. Not just one set, not just the ones she'd seen when he smiled, but at least ten rows of sharp teeth going all the way down his throat.
She had the insane thought for a moment that it almost looked like a flower blooming until those teeth closed around her arm.
Before she remembered herself, she screamed. Ellie tilted her head back and let out a sound of pain that bounced against the walls of this strange facility in the sea. But then she remembered that pain wasn't something she was supposed to feel. She wasn't allowed to cry out like that because she wasn't really a person. Not a real one.
So instead, she ground her teeth and forced herself to get through the pain. She'd be fine. It didn't matter if he bit her arm off and ate it. There was nothing and no one who would care if she died. At least she had helped him a bit. She had figured out the binary code that would have stood in his way for a very long time.
Ellie's existence was to serve, and she had done so well. That would be her memory.
The teeth sawed through her arm, and she could feel it ripping and tearing through her flesh. Against her palm, she could feel his tongue moving against her, swallowing her blood and flesh. He intended to eat her. Eat her arm. Why would he stop at the limb, though? He was going to devour her whole, and that...
Made her sad.
She whimpered, trying hard not to make a sound. But then Pilot threw himself against the clear lid of her pod, and the loud bang seemed to be the only thing that got through to Proteus. He froze, his teeth embedded in her flesh.
Something cleared in his gaze. She suddenly saw more of him. The god who had been so haughty and yet so confident that she was a real person. She watched as he realized what he was doing, that her arm was jammed down his throat and that Pilot was locked away. That they were sitting in a pool of Ellie's blood that was growing more and more concerning.
He lurched away from her. Her arm slid out of his throat with a wet sound, flopping down at her side, completely useless. She couldn't even feel her fingers, but with that amount of blood it really wasn't surprising.
The horror on his expression was, though. His eyes had widened. His breath came in rapid pants. Proteus closed his mouth, becoming the man she knew once again.
"Ellie?" he whispered, clearly horrified by what he had done.
"It's fine," she said, trying to make it a little easier on him. "I'll be okay."
"What do I do?" Clearly he wanted to come to her, but he worried it would scare her. His hands stretched out, those long, eerie fingers stretching like shadows across the floor toward her. "What do I do to help you, Ellie?"
"It's all right." Her vision was skewed. Everything was a little blurry, and she swore she might be seeing double. "I'm just a doll. I'm sorry you broke me, but a broken doll can still be played with."
Everything in her wanted to tell him not to kill her. Even without an arm, she could still be useful. Her mind was what Malcolm had honed. She could still read the code. She could still help him figure out his plan. She could still argue with Pilot and be the person she had been learning how to be.
"Ellie, what do I do?"
Why was he repeating the same question over and over again?
She blinked, and he was leaning over her. Or no, she was lying down now. Had she fallen? That was embarrassing. She'd been hurt before, and Malcolm had been so angry that she had reacted to the injury at all. He'd told her she needed to pull it together and then put her right back in her pod to heal immediately.
Oh right. Her pod.
"The... The..." Why couldn't she talk? That was so ridiculous. She pointed to the pod with her only good hand, which was somehow also covered in blood.
He scooped her up in his arms and moved toward the pod so quickly it made her head spin. Or maybe that was the blood loss. It could have been that too.
He shoved the lid off and Pilot almost flew out of it, but laid her down gently. She almost didn't feel it when her back hit the soft cushioning within.
"Now what?" he asked, his voice clearly worried. "What do I do, Ellie?"
She tried weakly to reach for the lid. He needed to close that, or she was going to die. She wasn't entirely sure that there was away to fix a dead body, although she was a clone. A lot of things could be done to someone like her. She hadn't tried it personally.
He seemed to understand what she needed, at least. The lid closed over her head, sealing her into the pod that would know what to do.
Already she could feel it whirring on. The strange sensation of the metal skeleton moving beneath her, shifting to prep her for surgery. A prick on the side of her neck warned that she was about to go to sleep.
Her last sight was him looming over her pod, a dark smudge with his hand on the clear surface. He looked worried.
She hadn't thought he would look so worried.
