“Connection established…” Galatea told me, as soon as the world had stopped spinning. My insane idea had worked. Voltic’s lighting had caused the crystals to fail in the intended way, letting all the energy out at once and blowing the area sky high. I felt as if I had been through a blender and we had been in a blast-shadow Groaning, I looked around and managed to locate Sophia, she had been thrown around as well but looked alive. Sadly, some of my sensors were damaged but the x-ray still worked, showing me that she was alright.

Using the x-ray showed another problem. Galatea had been right, the plasma-cannon had sucked down an obscene amount of power, leaving me deep in the reserve power. Pulling a groaning Sophia up, I spoke. “We should leave. I’m not sure the League is really happy with the Guild right now, they lost people. I don’t want to rely on a possible Guild-retaliation to keep us safe right now.”

“Thanks for doing that. Never do that again!” Anath said with heat in her voice.

For the first time, I stopped to take in the surrounding area. It looked as if a bomb had gone off. Well, a bomb going off was not far from the truth. Trees had been uprooted and thrown around, some snapped like toothpicks. I didn’t see any fires in the area but we had created a large, new clearing.

Now, I truly wanted to get away from here.

Anath had to help me, in order to conserve energy and I wasn’t happy until Galatea had brought out a few extra drones to keep an eye on us but it worked. I felt bruised and beaten but we had won. It was an incredibly exhilarating feeling. When we got to the bunker, neither Sophia, nor I cared about getting into different rooms to change. Hell, we even shared the shower, bathing in our shared joy of victory. We didn’t quite have the nerve to wash each other, but there were quite a few heated kisses.

But even the best things had to come to an end and far too soon, we left, heading to our respective dwellings.

After leaving the bunker, my phone vibrated up a storm. My father was home. And he was looking for me.

There was a deep sense of dread settled into my stomach.

I entered a brightly lit house and was greeted by a scowling Martin King.

“Just where have you been at this time of the day?!” he asked in a tightly controlled voice.

“I have been with a friend. I needed some support after the events at school.”

“Events?! You embarrassed an important friend of the family and you call it an event?! Because of you, Clark is suspended for a week. It’s almost time for finals, did you think about anything but yourself when you pulled your stunt?” My father lost control of his voice, shouting at me.

“But he…” I tried to speak, explain what had happened.

“I don’t care!” he shouted in anger. “You will give me your mobile phone, you will go to your room, you will not communicate with anyone. Tomorrow, you will go to school and apologize to Clark. Afterwards, we will have a discussion about your future behaviour.”

I tried to speak again, only to be shouted down. I felt my heart break in my chest. All illusions I had entertained about my father died. Tears streaming down my face, I made my way up the stairs. My computer was gone, same with my tablet.

After closing the door, I got out a small prepared device. It only had a small button and an antenna but it was there. I laid down on my bed and cried, cried for my life, cried for innocence lost and the actions I had been forced to take. Sleep was impossible, but that was fine. I would have to do something I had dreaded for months and seriously prepared for weeks.

I waited until deep in the night, waited for the darkest hour. When I felt that the time was right, I pushed the small button, sending Galatea a prepared emergency signal. At first, it had been a joke. The signal simply said ‘Light the pyre.’

What I jokingly called pyre-option was a combination of prepared actions and resources that should allow me to fake my death. One part was on the way to me. Galatea would bring it to me. She also made sure that no cameras in the area made any incriminating records.

Another part had long since been prepared in the walls around my room. The insulation used in the walls was incredibly flammable, if it was doused with the right chemicals. Partially to get rid of its flame retardation properties, partially to increase the temperature it burned with. A lot of searching had shown me that a combination of female beauty-products, used excessively, could cause just that effect. Of course, I had never used those products but I doubted that anyone knew that. There were bottles of each used products in my room and the rest had been done with prepared chemicals, simulating a slow induation over years. I had also doused my bedding and mattress, both should burn hot and heavy.

But just because I had prepared fuel for the fire, didn’t mean I could light it up. For that, I had sabotaged a wall-socket, causing it to be on the verge of causing a brutal short-out, and a cable-fire in the walls. That would be my torch.

I heard a soft, scratching sound on the window. Outside, stood a hooded form, reminiscent of me in my armour. Of course, it was not. But almost. I had prepared the old exo-frame to work on remote, it was not able to do anything sophisticated and it was unsuited for fighting but it worked for a few things. One of those was jumping into the third floor or jumping down from the third floor, without breaking bones. But its main job was delivering the sacrifice to me.

The sacrifice was the key-part and the part that made me almost sick. Cloning. Growing tissue was not that hard. Growing bones was harder. Growing tissue over those bones and make it look human-like? Well, it worked more or less.

It was a genetically identical puppet. Optically, it was not. But if the prepared fire was just half as hot as I had calculated, it would be enough to reduce the puppet to ash and seared flesh. Could it fail? Possibly. But I doubted it. I scattered enough ash to make up for lacking weight of my puppet after putting the puppet in my night-clothes and my bed. I almost screwed everything up by throwing up, but I managed to keep myself from doing so.

After plugging a night-light into the wall-socket, I was on a random timer. Within the next minutes, a the light should short out and cause a fire. From then on, there was no more chance involved, my room would quickly become a crematorium.

I took the puppet’s place in the exo-frame, donned the hood and moved to the window. As I opened it, a dull roar sounded behind me, the wall rapidly catching fire. Relying on the frame around me, I pushed off and jumped down. The landing was jarring, but no bones were broken.

With tears in my eyes, I left the area.