Chapter Four

When Heather trembled, MX moved closer and put his arm around her instinctively. Despite her fear, he was still surprised when she didn’t shove him away, but instead cuddled closer. Fear spread through him as well, and he quickly realized it was more for her than himself. He couldn’t keep her safe against all the synthetics below them. As soon as they realized MX and Heather were there, the synths would decimate them.

Not that he wouldn’t put up a fight, and he was certain Heather would do the same. He turned his head to reassure her of that, but found himself kissing her instead of speaking. She was stiff for a moment, her lips resistant to his, until she shuddered again—this time probably not from fear—and gave a small sigh of surrender before her lips softened to his.

Until that moment, he hadn’t realized just how much he wanted Heather. He’d been attracted to her, and the realization that she was attracted to him had been gratifying, but he hadn’t accepted the intensity of his interest in the human until that moment.

She was the first to pull away, looking dazed for a moment before the fear returned. She frowned, but didn’t chastise him for the kiss. Instead, she looked down at the synthetics, eyebrows knit with worry. “They haven’t moved.” Her voice was little more than a whisper. “Do you think the cave’s interference blocks their sensors as well?”

He shrugged a shoulder as he leaned forward just a bit more, wanting a better vantage point, but without tumbling into the sea of synthetics beneath him. The more he looked at them, the more convinced he was that they were inactive. A wave of relief shot through him as he scanned with his own internal processors and the sensor in his hand.

They were plugged into some sort of power source, but drawing only minimal input, and registering only a slight output. He turned his head and gave Heather a small smile of encouragement. “They’re asleep at the moment. I don’t know why, but they’re dormant. This must be a storage facility.”

Her eyes widened, and she let out a small sigh of her own. “They don’t know we’re here then.” She said it as a statement, squaring her shoulders in the process.

He nodded and opened his mouth to speak as she did the same.

“We need to explore—”

They had spoken simultaneously, and he was a little put off by how they shared a thought process, down to the same structure of their sentences. They’d even stopped speaking at the same time, as though they were far more in tune with each other than he’d realized. He wasn’t certain whether to be excited by the prospect, or to be apprehensive about their connection. At the moment, he didn’t have time to be either one. “Yeah, we need to check this out. Do you think you can belay down to the lower level if we run a line?”

Heather’s teeth sank into her lower lip, and she was clearly debating it before nodding hesitantly. “I think so.”

He nodded once before looking at her back. “Where’s your pack?”

She reached back to touch her shoulder and upper back, which was clearly an automatic response. A moment later, she frowned. “I was wearing it before I fell, but both of the straps had been repaired several times. It must have broken and fallen somewhere when the floor gave out beneath me.”

MX nodded, deciding not to waste the time it would require to find her backpack. Instead, he moved to the edge of the ledge, stood up before crouching, and jumped down twenty feet to the next level. He landed with a small thud, but there wasn’t a flicker of movement among the synthetics clustered in the room. This close, he could see they were lined up in precise order, and each one had a cable through the back of its head that led to a large machine in the corner. He intended to explore that more closely, but first he needed to get Heather down.

He opened his arms and stretched up his hands. “Jump.”

“Are you out of your mind?” Even from twenty feet above him, the horror was obvious in her expression. “If you can’t catch me, I’ll—”

“I will catch you. I’ll always catch you, Heather.” The intensity of his words surprised him, but he must’ve been successful in conveying his sincerity. A moment later, she sat down to scoot to the edge of the ledge, sitting there for a brief second before closing her eyes and launching herself forward.

He caught her as he’d promised, stumbling just slightly at the impact. A moment later, he slowly lowered her to her feet, admitting to himself that he was holding her longer than necessary, and much closer than he had to. Her gaze locked with his, and it was full of questions, along with an unspoken awareness that neither of them had time to acknowledge. MX wasn’t even certain he wanted to acknowledge what he was feeling, at least not until he had a chance to process it.

As soon as she was steady on her feet, he moved closer to the machine to which all the synthetics were plugged into and spent a moment examining it. He was far too aware of Heather’s presence when she came to stand beside him, though she didn’t touch him. She was just outside the range of touching, but he could still sense her proximity, and it distracted him for a moment.

With a stern mental scolding, he forced his attention back to the matter at hand. “I can’t be sure, but I think this machine is programming them, while also keeping them turned on at a low level. It makes sense to store them this way when they aren’t in use. It minimizes the necessary power output, but I have a feeling whatever controls these things can turn them on at a moment’s notice, if required.”

She swallowed audibly. “Which means we need to make sure they don’t realize we’re here.”

He nodded as he touched the device. He linked to it within milliseconds and started downloading the data that he could glean from the connection. When he released it, he turned to her. “The datalink is originating from another room in the area, so it can’t be far. I think we should see what it is that powers these things, so maybe we can figure out how to turn them off permanently.”

She was clearly frightened at the prospect, but all she did was nod and firm her shoulders while straightening her spine. He admired her resiliency and determination to proceed despite her fears.

Before leaving the room, he quickly inventoried the number stored there. “One hundred.”

“I’m sorry?”

He looked at Heather. “There are a hundred synths here. If this is just one of many rooms, this could be a disaster. I wonder how long they’ve been mass-producing these things?” He asked the question aloud, but certainly didn’t expect her to have an answer. “It seems like they’ve been going at full production for a while, doesn’t it? They’re putting them in this dormant state until they need them, but what do they need them for?” He was thinking aloud more than expecting any input from Heather.

She surprised him when she said, “They must be planning something big.”

“Like wiping out the last of the cyborgs.” He frowned, briefly wondering if they had discovered the location of the cyborg base before rejecting that theory. If they had, they would’ve already attacked. The synths were programmed to be excellent strategists, but no one had bothered to instill patience, since that was considered an emotion. At their core, synthetics were more animal than machine in that they reacted instead of acted.

Of course, that assumption was based purely on observations over the years. They had fought the things, and maybe they had underestimated the strategic abilities of the synthetics. That was something he hoped to discern before he and Heather made their way out of the facility—a prospect which he didn’t want to contemplate at the moment, since he didn’t have a plan for their extraction.

He walked closely beside her, telling himself it was to offer her reassurance while pretending like it didn’t soothe his own anxiety. Together, they stepped into the corridor, and he was certain she held her breath for a moment before exhaling raggedly when they discovered they had it to themselves.

He had a rough idea of the location of the central processing unit, thanks to having tapped into the machine in the synthetics’ storage room, so he immediately turned left. She turned with him, staying close to his side. He would have preferred she walked behind him, so he could protect her better, but he knew she wouldn’t agree to that. The urge to protect her was overwhelming for a moment, and he had to pause and clench his fists together. MX closed his eyes and set his attention to focus on the task at hand. He couldn’t afford to be distracted if he wanted to keep them both safe.

As they moved along what appeared to be a smooth-bored hallway that someone or something had clearly created, likely with a large-caliber laser, they glanced at rooms as they passed them. His stomach dropped each time they found a new storage room, and it was practically in his feet by the time they reached the end of the hallway and had discovered three more rooms.

He hadn’t bothered to suggest that they enter the other storage rooms, expecting to find the same information as they had in the first, so it was just a rough estimate that each room held a hundred synthetics, but that meant an additional four hundred was a likely estimate. If there were more storage rooms in this underground facility, the synthetics would vastly outnumber the cyborgs and the humans, even if the cyborgs recruited humans for fighting. Humans were weaker, and he wasn’t certain how useful they would be in a battle situation, so he hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

They had reached a T in the hallway, and he led her right. She didn’t question him as she followed behind, and he appreciated her show of confidence in him—though he suspected it was more because she was afraid to talk and alert anyone to their presence than because she truly trusted him to know what he was doing.

That stung, but he couldn’t entirely blame her. What had he done to earn her trust? Not much. He’d been so busy ensuring she knew he was a jerk that he hadn’t bothered with forming a bond of trust between them. Now, he knew why he had been even more abrasive than usual with her. It was in an attempt to stave off the attraction he felt for her, though he hadn’t consciously acknowledged it. The knowledge hadn’t been entirely unconscious either, but he had shied away from examining his attraction to her, let alone how she made him feel.

He halted abruptly when the sensor alerted him to the presence of approaching synthetics. He reached for Heather’s hand and pulled her in to the nearest room, which turned out to be yet another depository for dormant synthetics. The dots were still approaching, and he searched visually around the room, seeking a place to hide.

There was a small alcove in the corner of the room, formed naturally from the way the walls had been bored to form the cavern. He pulled her over to it, glad when she didn’t resist. He had barely managed to squeeze into the space, after having pushed her in first, when he heard the door open.

MX pressed himself tightly against her, doing his best to obscure their presence. He didn’t have a vantage point, so they had to rely on their hearing to figure out what was happening. There were a series of clicks, followed by a hydraulic depressurization sound that was amplified times at least a hundred. That was followed by a shrill beep that lasted only a second, and then a sound that sent a chill through him. It was caused by multiple sets of feet taking a step forward.

Heather trembled against him, clearly having arrived at the same conclusion as him—the synthetics that had entered the room were there to wake up their comrades.

The entire process took less than three minutes, and he was clinging tightly to Heather by the time they heard the group exiting the room. Even after they had left the cavern, MX could still feel the vibrations of their footsteps for another half-minute.

It was only when they were out of detectable range that he finally took a deep breath and allowed some of the tension in his shoulders to ease. He was dying from curiosity to find out what was going on, but was conflicted about taking Heather any deeper into the facility. “I need to get you out of here and bring back reinforcements.”

She frowned. “How are you going to do that?”

He shrugged a shoulder. “I don’t know, but we’ll find a way out. That has to be our main goal.”

She shook her head, which caused her hat to dislodge and flutter downward until it was wedged in the limited space remaining between their bodies. Her hair fell around her face, and it took every bit of strength he had to keep his hands fisted at his side rather than raising one to bury in the chestnut waves. They looked like they would be silky smooth and wrap easily around his hand. He didn’t know for sure that they were soft, but he was anxious to discover that.

She cleared her throat, as though reminding him to focus. “Even if we find a way out, we might not get help in time. We can’t send a transmission at the moment, but maybe there’s another area in here where we can. I think we need to find out what’s going on and transmit as much information back to the cyborgs and Leith as soon as possible. That’s what we need to do before they catch us.”

He frowned. “That’s why I want to get you out of here, so they don’t catch us.”

She looked pragmatic when she said, “There’s probably no way out anyway. They’re going to find us eventually, so we might as well discover what we can while we have the opportunity.” With those words, she gently pushed against his chest, urging him to move backward, so she could follow him out of the alcove.

MX stared at her for a moment as she moved around him, scurrying to the door. A range of emotions filled him, and he was struggling to process them all. He was annoyed that she was leaving without him, along with feeling displeased that she hadn’t agreed to leave without investigating. He was also feeling a strong streak of admiration for her continued bravery, although feeling irritation at her obstinacy.

Finally, the realization that she was going with or without him penetrated through the emotional onslaught, and his feet started moving. He caught up with her, quickly, inserting himself between her and the exit so that he was the first to enter the corridor.

She said something under her breath that sounded less than flattering, but he ignored it. Instead, he homed in on the location of the central unit and turned that way. It seemed only natural to reach out and take her hand as he did so, keeping her anchored against him so that they didn’t get lost. It was almost a shock when she didn’t pull away or resist the gesture. Instead, she just squeezed his hand in return as she matched his pace.