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My eyes went wide in shocked doubt. What was Chris implying? And could he be right?

“I’m mad at you,” went on Chris in a strained voice, “because Jack deserves more and I deserve a better reason for not being able to have you.”

What? There’s that whiplash thing again.

My eyes filled and my throat felt thick. “You want me?”

Chris snorted his usual disgust at me. “See? You didn’t even hear the part about Jack deserving better. It’s like he doesn’t even feature inside your head.”

So not fair. I’d heard it. There was a perfectly valid reason I’d chosen to ignore it. “Well, considering JACK AND I ARE NO LONGER TOGETHER, he can go ahead and choose someone he does deserve.”

I was happy to take the blame for many things. For practically everything. But let’s be clear on one thing. Jack had dumped me. Cruelly and childishly, he had chosen a stupid fight over me.

“What about you kissing me, Chris? Did Jack deserve that more or less?”

See? I wasn’t a total airhead. Even I could figure out that Jack was obviously a third party in that kiss. I didn’t quite understand why. I just knew that it was.

Chris paled. “That wasn’t meant to happen.”

“But it did, Chris. You did kiss me,” I emphasised, just to see him squirm. The backlash of hot pain was not worth it. Why was that kiss not meant to happen? I couldn’t define the emotion choking up inside me, but it wasn’t nice and it wasn’t toasty warm.

“I did kiss you,” agreed Chris quietly. He sighed. A sigh torn between anger and anguish. “I’ve wanted to do that for so long. And...and I thought, I could be dead within a couple of hours, so why not?”

I stared at Chris. Not exactly a romantic declaration of undying love, but it had potential. Didn’t it? “How long?”

“What?”

“How long have you wanted to kiss me?”

Chris blinked. Then he frowned. And then he shrugged off my question. “It won’t ever happen again. I won’t take you from Jack.”

“I’m. No. Longer. With. Jack.”

“That’s even worse. I won’t let Jack think you broke up with him to be with me.”

I rolled my eyes in exasperation.

And froze.

My frigid gaze slid from Gale, hovering a few inches above the floor in powder blue, to Clarrie at her side.

Chris slowly followed my gaze, and froze on cue.

Oh, crap, crap, crap. How much had she heard? How long had she been standing in the doorway?

Long enough, apparently.

Clarrie turned and fled.

Chapter 18

I
was sitting up against the wall, my bottom on the Persian rug to where I’d slid amongst the clutter, my knees drawn in tight.

Chris had gone after Clarrie.

Gale was fluttering around, being a usual nuisance.

Some things do not change.

“Christian Wood likes you more than Clarrie.”

I blinked up at Gale, who’d turned blue for the occasion. What emotion was powder blue, anyway? Idiocy? Clueless? Irrelevance? Were any of those even an emotion? “It’s not a contest, Gale.”

Not exactly true, but contradicting Gale had become an enjoyable habit. And anyway, I’d had time to mull over Chris’s non-declaration of cul-de-sac love.

“I did kiss you. I’ve wanted to do that for so long.”

Good so far. Yeah, if it was a contest, that was score one for me.

“And I thought, I could be dead within a couple of hours, so why not?”

Now that was the part my brain kept spinning over. Chris liked me so much, he couldn’t keep his lips off Clarrie? Or he thought he wasn’t coming out of 2106 alive, so why not kiss as many girls as he could fit into the remaining hours?

Gale dropped from the air, landing on her feet with a clunk to stand in front of me. She was that short, our eyes met level.

“I’m sorry, Willow.”

I didn’t even want to know what she thought she was apologising for. “Um, okay.”

I glanced away, expecting her to flit off somewhere. When I looked back, she was still standing there. Three quivering eyes spotted on me.

“You have to forgive me,” she said.

My brows went up. My mouth turned down. Accepting an oblique apology I could do. Offering generic absolution to a machine? Not so much. What was I? The Pope of recyclable tin-ware? “No.”

“Please. I know I shouldn’t have done it, but I was so angry. And scared.”

Curiosity bit. “What have you done now?”

“I’m talking about the lob bar. You kept on and on about switching me off and I was frightened of losing everyone again and I wanted you to hurt as much as I had. But it was a terrible thing to do. I’d take it back if I could.” Her arms stretched and tangled. “I really am sorry. I’m sorry I let you think that Christian Wood had been shot.”

It had been a long day.

I was tired, miserable, and a whole lot scared without being reminded of that horrid moment.

My hands shot out.

Gale flew up in alarm, but I already had a grip on her. I unravelled her arms, then pulled her closer, bending the lower half of her tubing so that she curved into a sitting position.

“Turn your processors up to max and pay attention,” I told her. “You are a robot. I am human. You don’t understand the concept of sorry. I’d feel plain stupid trying to forgive you. You don’t think or feel. You react according to some pre-programmed software inside your head.”

“I do think,” protested Gale.

I relented. “Okay, maybe you do. Maybe there’s a fancy program that actually simulates proper thought. But you do not have a living, beating heart, Gale, and you do not have a soul. You do not have a conscience and you do not have emotions. So don’t apologise to me and don’t expect forgiveness.”

“You always have to be so hard and cruel. I just wanted to say sorry.”

“Save your batteries. You can’t be sorry without feeling remorse, and you can’t feel remorse—”

“You taught me to feel,” interrupted Gale in a shrilly voice. Her body was steadily deepening through the darker shades of blue and on to purple. “You taught me that emotion comes from the head and not the heart. Every feeling is a rational deduction from various combinations of actions, events and probable outcomes. Worry is a range of possible outcomes, good and bad, and no clear prediction or obvious choice to guide your decision. Fear is when you have no choice or influence over any of those outcomes. Terror is knowing the worst outcome is upon you. Every emotion is defined by a set of logical rules, Willow.”

I’ve never been an emotional fluff bunny, but seriously. “I don’t believe that.”

“You will believe.” Gale slid her body up into a standing position. “You’ll believe it so much, you ask Christian Wood to design a colour-coded method by which I can express my emotions. You made me as real as I could be, you taught me how to love even though I didn’t have a heart, and then you flipped the switch and shut me down.”

“Now wait just a minute—”

“That is why I wanted you to feel what losing Christian Wood is like, even for only a few minutes. I lost Christian Wood for 34 years. It would have been forever if Drustan hadn’t found me in the back of a closet.”

Oh, for goodness sake. “You honestly think you’re in love with Chris? You believe you’re capable of human love and I supposedly taught you that?”

“The spectrum of how you feel about every person is measured by their actions. Human love isn’t magic, it’s a calculated balance sheet of good actions versus bad. How much you like a guy depends on how that balance is stacked. If his looks fit the popular description of hottie, you really like him. If time passes with that stack growing on the right side, like slowly turns to love.”

Progressive sludgy knees.

Everything Gale was saying kind of made sense to me. It no longer seemed outrageous that I’d actually say something like that one day. That I’d teach Gale textbook emotion, no heart required.

It might even explain my sudden fascination with Chris. Maybe Caroline Mewlin and Clarrie had nothing to do with it after all. Maybe it had everything to do with suddenly discovering Chris was destined to a great, amazing future. Just how high would that particular stack tower on the right side of my heartless balance sheet?

I rose to my feet, my legs a little shaky.

What was I feeling?

Worry or terror?

I was apparently cynical enough to believe love was seeded in the brain and not sparked from the heart, but could I ever change?

Did I have any choice in my own outcome or was it already upon me? “God, no wonder I end up a lonely old spinster.”

I stared at Gale, but not really looking at her. I felt as if I were out of my own body, looking down on myself. I didn’t like what I saw. What was wrong me? Did I have a defective soul?

“Willow...?”

I jumped back into my body. Well, you know what I mean. And saw Gale was doing that twisty thing with her arms. Her colour had also returned to its normal lime.

“I’m sorry I switch you off, Gale.” I didn’t ask why I’d done it. I’d known Gale for less than 2 days, and my fingers had itched to turn her off a dozen times. I could only imagine what a couple of years of prime Gale time would have me doing. But I no longer felt okay with it. I know, she was still a machine, but if I was the one responsible for making her think otherwise, then I had to treat her as such.

“You don’t,” I thought I heard Gale mumble.

“What did you say?” I asked.

Gale’s arms were creeping around her thin body like a strangling vine. “You don’t end up a lonely spinster, Willow.”

My heart gave a wild kick. “But Wanda—”

“I know what Wanda told you. She shouldn’t have told you anything, of course, but what she said was incorrect.”

“Wanda lied to me?”

Gale shook her head. “I don’t think so. I think she just got it wrong.”

“She’s not a fortune teller with a crystal ball, Gale.”

“Once she had a virus, and any server she tried to access simply blocked her attempts. She had data gaps for weeks before Monty cleared the virus.”

“So, Wanda has a virus?”

“I doubt it.”

Was I particularly slow today, or was Gale particularly annoying?

I didn’t get the opportunity to find out.

The slightest scrap of sound, more a flicker of awareness than the sound itself, pulled my eyes to the doorway.

I was not seeing what I was seeing.

I wanted to blink the image away. I was too afraid to close my eyes for the micron that would require. Too afraid the Razok would move between one blink and the next; that I wouldn’t have time to run.

But the Razok was coming at me. Long legs taking easy, unhurried strides, those dark sunglasses trained on me. And I wasn’t running anywhere. My back pressed into the wall. My legs buckled. My fingers clawed the plaster behind me.

A million screams sprang from every nerve ending in my body, and they all froze in my throat.

“Run, Willow, run,” urged Gale in a small voice.

I blinked down at her. She was blimping orange terror. I blinked up as a hand clamped my wrist. Between one blink and the next.

The screams tore loose from my throat and filled the room. That didn’t stop the Razok. He was so damn strong, he used only one hand to pull me into him, lifting me completely off the ground and crushing me against his chest.

I screamed, kicked, cursed, fought. My breathing came so hard, my lungs pained. I couldn’t breathe. I had to breathe. I went limp and worked on controlling my breathing. The pain eased. Better.

My left arm was locked into the vice grip that kept me firmly plastered in place, but my other arm was free. I hit up and back, struck a fisted blow on something hard. One blow was all I got, for all the good it did. The Razok calmly trapped that arm as well. And then he was walking, carrying me across the room, not towards the door.

I tried to turn my head, looking for Gale. My cheek smashed the stone wall of his chest. Out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed a flash of orange streak out the room.

Gale.

My heart was racing, but my brain was starting to function again. Gale would get Chris and then they’d go for help. If the Razok had seen Gale, he didn’t seem too bothered. He was more concerned with carrying me around the room. What was he doing? Oh, God, what did he want with me? Wasn’t he supposed to be after Chris? Where was Chris?

“Let go. You can’t do this,” I screamed, squirming violently, trying to get an angle for a kick that’d do some damage. “What do you want?”

The Razok grunted, and set me down. His fingers remained clasped around my wrist. Long, slender fingers that were as strong and cold as metal. I struggled, trying to wriggle my wrist free. The effort chafed my skin. I aimed a violent kick at his shin. He didn’t even stagger.

My eyes shot up, and up. He was taller than I’d initially estimated, at least seven foot. But he was skinny. No way that slim-fitting tunic hid any muscle. The skin of his neck was so pale, it was almost translucent. Blue veins pulsed at the side of his throat and at his temple. He wasn’t looking at me. His attention was on the doorway.

His lips were a thin line with as little colour as the rest of his face, his nose not much more than a short, refined ridge. The rest of his face was sunglasses.

He seemed ethereal, delicate to the point of fragile. It just wasn’t possible that he could be so strong. I swung my leg out for another kick.

This time I got a reaction.

The fingers lacing my wrist tightened. His head tilted my way. I felt the eyes behind those black lenses on me.

“Desist your futile pecking, human.” The voice was bland, almost bored.

“Or what?” I blurted out. Full of false bravado at the sudden memory of what Chris had said. He couldn’t kill me. I couldn’t die in this time. I took a second to pray to God that Chris was right. “Gale has already gone for help.”

“The machine has gone for Christian Wood.”

“And Chris will bring help.”

“That would be the intelligent thing to do,” he agreed tonelessly. “In my opinion, humans rarely do the intelligent thing.”

He’d purposely let Gale escape. He’d assumed we were as predictable as a hamster on a wheel and all he had to do was wait for Chris to come to him. That’s what he wanted with me, why we’d been circling the room. We were simply waiting.

I couldn’t stop a small part of me from hoping he was right. Not my best part, I know, but I didn’t want to be left behind on my own with a Razok. That didn’t mean I wanted Chris or anyone else left behind with me. I’d much prefer all of us were on the next budgie out of here.

What were my odds at distracting him and making a dash for it? Not good, I thought. Then again, I wasn’t exactly standing at the crossroad of a million paths.

I gave him my fiercest scowl. “How did you find us?”

“I came looking for something.” The Razok smiled, a creepy thin-lipped smile that showed no teeth. “Imagine my amusement when I found you.”

“I’d rather not.”

He didn’t take offence. His grip actually loosened slightly.

“So, what were you looking for?” I asked, casually averting my gaze and turning my body into a natural slide away from him.

He gave me some slack. “Dr. Stanton’s Xylex.”

My eyes gaze whipped back to him. Big mistake. I swear he was carefully studying me from behind those sunglasses. “Oh, um, yeah.” I quickly glanced around again, flipped over a few journals with the toe of my shoe. Xylex. Xylex. What the hell was a Xylex? It sounded familiar, I’d heard it somewhere before. “You know, I think I saw it...”