Chapter Twenty-One

Wrath floated in a darkness that didn’t end. Everything around him was a contradiction. His body seemed weightless, but his arms and legs were too heavy to move. He touched nothing and everything at the same time. He wanted his feet to be on solid ground again.

A flash of brilliant light assaulted his eyes. Wrath couldn’t raise his hand to protect his face. The ball of luminescence zoomed toward his face at an incredible speed. He could not avoid colliding with it.

When the light reached him, it didn’t stop. It went directly into his eyes, burning its way through his pupils and burrowing into his brain. Wrath opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came out.

Inside his head, the flare coalesced into something new.

He suddenly saw long rows of LED bulbs recessed into a ceiling. Wrath was staring at the lights of a hospital. Everyone around him had green masks covering their faces. They were doing something to his body.

Even though Wrath wasn’t moving, he could feel sharp pricks from the instruments. The doctors sliced through his skin with knives, manipulating and evaluating his organs. They removed some and shoved others aside while they put in new ones.

“This is a good specimen,” someone said as he made a small incision over the top of Wrath’s ear. The doctor wore a magnifying device over one eye, and his mask moved when he spoke. “We have complete access to all his pathways. It should be easy to reroute his neural networks.”

“Good,” replied another man without looking up. He was fiddling around in Wrath’s chest cavity, but the cyborg couldn’t see what he was doing. “The body is relatively unscathed, considering what happened to it. I bet we’ll have this one up in the barracks by the end of the week.”

“It’s getting easier. I’ve performed so many of these surgeries that I stopped counting them. Someone refresh my memory. What happened to this guy again?”

The doctor near his feet had been slowly stabbing a needle into his leg before leisurely pulling it out again with a pair of pliers. He set his tool down and consulted a computer screen mounted on a nearby wall. “Shrapnel,” he replied. “It looks like he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. A mortar hit nearby, and several pieces of metal pierced vital organs.” The doctor shrugged as he went back to his stitching. “Good thing the hospital preserved the body for us.”

Wrath seemed to fall through his memory. The doctors above him slowly shrank and faded away as he plummeted into nothingness. It was an unpleasant sensation, but he preferred it to lying down and watching the humans work on his lifeless body. Instead of tumbling back into blackness, the cyborg discovered he was passing through scenes. As soon as one location came into focus in front of him, it dissolved into something new.

He was inside a vehicle. His hands were on the wheel, guiding it expertly. Rachel sat next to him, her green eyes batting innocently before the scene dissolved.

A young, familiar-looking man stood next to Wrath. He wore his dark blonde hair long, gathered back into a ponytail that lay over the collar of a leather jacket. “You can shove it up your ass, big brother,” the young man said with a sneer. “Don’t try to put the blame for all your problems on me.” His face shimmered and sunk in on itself, blue eyes sliding past his mouth before Wrath had a chance to reply.

Rachel was in front of him again, naked and laying back on the bed. She had her ass on the very edge of the mattress, legs dangling down and spread wide. Wrath had his cock buried inside her. He watched her breasts bounce as he pounded into her. Rachel put her hands on them to keep them from shaking.

“No.” He pulled her hands away and cupped each of her perky globes himself, feeling the vibration in her soft flesh with each thrust. He rejoiced in the wet heat of her around his erection. Small moans escaped Rachel’s lips as she built up to a climax.

Her hands, freed from her chest, slid down to her pussy. She ran her finger around her clit in tiny, quick circles until Wrath felt the walls of her sex clench around his cock. He was about to cum inside her when the scene folded on itself like a sheet of paper.

Wrath was standing in a desert. It was a different place than his home for the past year, full of sand and the sun instead of bushy plants and craggy mountains. He wore his uniform and felt confident. The enemy could not stop him. There were other soldiers around him as well, but they needed prodding. They marched beside him with terrified eyes, wildly swinging their guns as they watched for enemies rising from the dunes.

“We’re okay, everyone,” Wrath assured them. “We’ve been through territory just like this before.”

“Don’t you think that’s a problem?” asked the soldier on his left. He had dark skin that glistened with sweat in the sun. “They know our tactics and what to expect from us. We should have planned a different approach.”

Wrath blew him off with a wave of his hand. “Jack, I can’t wait until we go back home so I can tell everyone you’re afraid to fight.”

An explosion rocked the ground underneath his feet. The noise around him was a dull roar and so big that he couldn’t hear anything else. Everyone started running, and he turned to follow them. Whatever had hit them was too big to fend off by themselves.

The ground moved underneath him again, and Wrath fell forward onto his face. He had been deployed for months but was feeling the chill of fear for the first time. It traveled up his spine and wrapped all the way around to his stomach. He seemed to be looking at another person as he watched his blood drip onto the sand. It flowed down between the grains, leaving his body forever.

The sand and the blood swirled together in his vision, creating a dark red whirlpool that sucked him in headfirst. In the blackness, he heard the melodious voice from before. His eyes darted back and forth as he searched for the source.

“Wrath, come back to me,” the voice begged. “I need you here with me. I want you to be better even if it’s only temporary.”

The next scene appeared slowly. The darkness lifted like a dark fog, gently revealing Wrath’s surroundings. He could feel the desert sand against his back. A woman’s hands were on him, giving support but not preventing him from getting up. Wrath focused on her face, wondering who she was.

“You did it,” she murmured as she ran cold fingers across his cheeks. “I was starting to worry that you weren’t going to make it. Now we have a chance to get you on your feet and find the help you need.”

Wrath suddenly remembered the voice as blood started to rush to his head. Rachel was speaking to him. He remembered with startling clarity everything she had said. She was trying to convince him to go to Cyborg Sector again. He looked around the room. Judging by the looks on the faces of his comrades, she had convinced everyone else already.

The cyborg pushed himself to a sitting position. “Don’t try to take advantage of my weakness. I already told you how I feel about Cyborg Sector.”

Rachel ran her hands through her hair, shaking angrily in frustration. “I’m not trying to trick you into anything. Can’t you tell that your biochip is malfunctioning? It’s beginning to degrade. You can’t fix it yourself if the problem is inside your brain. If you want assistance, we’ve got to get you to the right people, and they’re all at Cyborg Sector.”

Wrath almost agreed with her but managed to stop himself. “Don’t talk to me about what I should or shouldn’t do. I can think for myself. I don’t know what Cyborg Sector trained you to do or how you’re getting information into my head, but I plan on finding out.”

“No,” she blurted out. “I didn’t do any of that.”

Wrath knew that he could wring Rachel’s neck if he wanted to. His training told him to eliminate any threats. Something was stopping him, and he didn’t know what it was. What he did know was that he didn’t want Rachel to get hurt.

He put his arms behind his back, trying to fight off the urge to wrap them around Rachel and take away her pain. Wrath felt like he might fall over, but he didn’t want to show any weakness in front of his men.

“Tie her up again,” he commanded, motioning toward the wheezing woman on the ground. “If she tries to run away, bind her feet and carry her. Don’t listen to what she says. Gag her if you have to.”

Weapon moved quickly to follow his leader’s orders, but Wrath noticed that the scarred warrior didn’t act with the same zeal he had shown before. He needed to have a talk with each cyborg. He didn’t know what Rachel had said to them while he had been out. He couldn’t risk a mutiny.

“Let’s move out!” he bellowed, sending the cyborgs scrambling. They placed Rachel in the middle of the party near Clayton. She watched Wrath with concern. He almost went up to her. Part of him wanted to take her aside and talk to her so he could understand what was happening to his mind. Instead, he assumed the lead in front of the double line and led a march into the night.