I Am Titanium (Pax Black Book 1) (31 page)

Julie was reminded of playing with dolls as a girl and pulling the head off one of her cousin’s dolls, making her cousin cry. “It’s not real,” she’d said. “Dolls aren’t the same as people.” Her cousin had run away, sobbing about her broken doll, even after Julie had fixed it. Julie’s father took her to the side to have a talk with her about it.

Was that when my father said I’d grow up to be a doctor?

She really ought to move the head—no telling what it might do, given that the girl’s body lay under it—but she was too tired to keep standing. She limped back to the row of chairs and sat gratefully. She had cut Ms. Jance’s neck so cleanly that it looked like it belonged on an anatomy model. The thought passed through her mind that perhaps she should wash her fingerprints off the scalpel, allow herself deniability, just in case the world wasn’t ending after all. But it didn’t seem important, somehow.

The robots still hadn’t moved.

Scarlett looked down at Pax and knelt beside him. Pax’s eyes were closed, his arms spread out like a sacrificial offering. The bluish tinge to his skin had vanished. He looked like a big, dull hunk of metal in the dark. Something cheap, made in China. She tried to poke him, but her hand passed through him.

She
was
dead, after all, although it didn’t seem to mean as much as it used to.

Get up
, she sent toward him.
People need you. You don’t get to give up.

He must be
really
out of it if she couldn’t even get a “
fuck off”
out of him.

Pax always liked to think he was immortal, invulnerable, and infinitely smart. And that was
before
he got turned into an astral being.

But there had been bad days, too, when he’d almost given up. Mostly these came after Julie would talk Pax into some new fucking experimental treatment. He’d go for it because
of course
he had to help advance science. Fuck science. What had science ever done for him?

When it didn’t work, he’d lie in bed and say things like, “A negative result is still a useful result” and “No sacrifice for science is truly wasted, as long as the data is preserved.”

Until he stopped talking and just lay there, usually in horrible pain, trying not to cry.

Pax had made Julie’s career—she was the world’s top scleroderma researcher. Even Wikipedia said so.

But she’d never once said
thank you
. Not something over the top, like an apology or an,
I love you
. Just a simple
thanks.
A
Good job, kid.
Maybe even,
Your dad would have been proud of you.

Without the negative energy all twisted around Scarlett’s soul, it was easier to see how lost he was. Easier not to hate herself. Easier to see that, yeah, she and Pax… were not meant to be together. Not so much. But they’d been friends for too long for her not to love him.

Her dirty-ass soul was still, when you got right down to it, loyal to him. She hated seeing him like this.

And the monster was throwing rocks at them.

That, at least, I can do something about.

Negative energy was running off Pax in big, dripping globs that welled up on his skin and rolled down into the trash below him. When Pax set his mind to it, he could work up some real, out-of-proportion darkness.

She grabbed a loop of energy and smashed the nearest rock into bits against the wall. Gravel scattered all over Pax’s skin.

He blinked.

Scarlett grabbed another rock as it was falling and smashed it against the wall. More to get his attention than anything else. She said,
Hey, remember me? Your girlfriend?

You are not my girlfriend.

Great! So that means we’re engaged now, right?

Fuck off, Scarlett.

She laughed at him, making sure it sounded as insulting as possible.
All right. Here’s the deal. You stop lying there like you’re still a kid dying in a hospital bed in Manhattan and I’ll break up with you. I
might
even forgive you for cheating on me.

We were never dating, Scarlett.

Get up, or I am
never
going to leave you in peace, fuckwad. I’m going to haunt you and tell you that I love you, like, fifty times a day and appear over your shoulder in mirrors with, like, spiritual cupcakes that I baked just for you.

You don’t know how to cook.

So? I didn’t know how to turn into a puddle of black ooze either. But I learned!

I know what you’re trying to do. Stop it.

What, trying to get into your pants?

Stop trying to cheer me up.

Pfft. I’m the queen of negative energy, bubba. I
love
it when you’re like this. Hey, you know what? I think there are some tests Julie wants you to do for her that we totally forgot to go do. That’ll bring you right down to suicidal levels. Score!

That almost got a mental laugh out of him. His throat twitched.

It knows how to use negative energy, Scarlett. I can’t beat it.

So?

I can’t win, Scarlett.

Who said fighting’s your only option?

Pax closed his eyes, deliberately shutting out Scarlett’s ghostlike body and the sound of rocks being smashed into pebbles and sand against the walls of the volcano. What was he supposed to do, offer the monster the olive branch of peace? It’d just eat it. His only options were to fight, or lay here and get nagged.

Pax sat up, pushing against the pile of trash under his back.
So worthless that even the monster that consumes everything except bare rock can’t eat it or use it for armor. Like me.
The plastic crunched under his hands and tried to slide out from under him.
Fuck this.
He threw up a hamster ball and bounced lightly on the surface of the trash.

It was pointless. Even if he made it out of the volcano, he’d still have to—

Oh, for fuck’s sake,
Scarlett said.

A cord of negative energy stuck itself to the side of his hamster ball and jerked him into the air.

His ball slammed against the wall of the crater and bounced upward, jiggling against the sides of the volcano, until it was balanced on the edge. A reverse rim shot.

The monster, still as big as a mid-rise building in Manhattan, was waiting for him. It leaped at him, knocked him off the rim of the volcano, and bounded after Pax like a puppy after its toy ball. Pax rolled backward and watched it chase him for a second or two and then flipped around and started running. Building up speed.

He bounced across the rocks, leading the monster forward. He had to trap it somewhere until he had the energy to destroy it. Maybe drop it down a hole and cover it with rock or something.

He looked up. The eastern edge of the sky had turned from black to the deepest blue.

I just need to trap it long enough for the sun to rise.

“That was rather unpleasant,” said Ms. Jance.

Julie started herself awake, her hands scrabbling on the molded plastic of the two chairs on either side of her. She stared around the room. Nothing had changed since she’d closed her eyes. The robots still hadn’t moved and were making no sounds at all. She had gotten used to the sound of their small servomotors and cooling fans so now the lack of sound seemed unnaturally loud.

Of all the skills she’d learned as an intern, being able to sleep sitting upright—or, sometimes, standing against a wall—had proven one of the most valuable. Her neck was sore and the sides of her mouth were sticky, but she’d slept.

She raised a tissue to wipe her mouth and froze; she was still wearing the surgical gloves. The last thing she needed was to get any of the astral material in her mouth. She stripped off the gloves and stood up. Her legs still felt weak but at least they weren’t as exhausted as they had been. She hobbled over to the sharps container and stuffed the gloves in.

“What time is it?” she said aloud, hoping the AI would answer over the speakers, but it didn’t. The computer screen was dark, too. She shook the mouse, but it didn’t waken—the AI was too busy to function as her watch, apparently.

“I haven’t a clue,” Ms. Jance said, making Julie freeze in place. “Probably not yet dawn. For the most part, engineers aren’t early risers, but there are always a few who come in and use the gym.”

Julie turned slowly away from the computer screen. Ms. Jance’s head was still on top of the sheet covering the girl. Its eyes were open now and were made of that same flat, white silvery material that had been oozing out of Pax’s body when he’d died.

The soft, somewhat-British accent was perfect. “We have a gym, you know. In the basement. I would think anything after six-thirty would be problematic, wouldn’t you?”

It felt as if the boundaries of the real and the imaginary had been moved so they lay across each other like tangled sheets. Julie forced herself to breathe, forced her heartbeat to slow down.
I can’t have another heart attack. Not here.

“Feel better?” asked Ms. Jance.

Julie’s lips tightened. She wasn’t about to give the head the satisfaction of seeing her panic. So she simply said, “Did I sleep long?”

“Several hours.”

“Good.”

“Why did you inject me with that material?”

It was you or me.
“We needed a test subject.”

“I see.” The corners of the head’s lips turned down a little. “Did you find out what you needed to know?”

“No. The robots have shut down.”

“What’s that got to do with the experiment?”

“They—” Julie looked down at her hands. They were shaking.
I’m only forty years old.
The skin seemed splotchy and translucent in places, the opposite of liver spots. “It was their experiment. To see how the astral material would affect you.”

Damn it. It never was an experiment. Only a way of saving my own skin. So I didn’t end up a… talking head. Oh, God.
“They were supposed to observe and question you, to see if you… were under control of the astral beings. It was…”

She shook her head. It hadn’t made sense then, and it still wasn’t making sense now.

Ms. Jance cleared what was left of her throat. “Well, if it’s any comfort, I don’t feel as though I’m under my own control, let alone anyone else’s.”

Julie walked back to her chair, briefly leaning on Scarlett’s table to keep her balance. Ms. Jance’s body slumped in the computer chair, apparently not animated by the same force that controlled the head. Julie wondered what would happen if the head were destroyed. Would the body move then?

Ms. Jance cleared her throat again. A very polite sort of noise.
Ahem.
“Ms. Black, you couldn’t see your way to… put my head back on the stump of my neck, could you?”

“That’s exactly the kind of thing the astral beings would want me to do,” Julie said. “It took a great deal of effort to get your head cut off in the first place, you know.”

“Well, yes, I suppose. You were afraid of what I might do. Perfectly understandable.”

“Stop being so polite.”

“Mmmm,” said Ms. Jance’s head. It pressed its lips together, as though to prevent a smile. “So you’d rather trust an artificial intelligence than a black woman.”

“It has nothing to do with your being black.”

Ms. Jance sighed. “You have no idea how many times I’ve heard that sentence.”

Julie circled the robots, keeping what she hoped was a safe distance. She had absolutely no sense of any kind of presence from them; they were less alive than the two bodies under the sheets, as far as her goose-bumped flesh was concerned. Ms. Jance, however, made the hair on Julie’s arms and the back of her neck stand on end.

“You’re not black anymore, Ms. Jance. You’re not
human
.”

Ms. Jance lifted an eyebrow. “Even if I conceded that argument—and I don’t— it’s a matter of one type of pseudo-human intelligence versus another. And only one of them, if I may remind you, is out to destroy the human race.”