I was busy, fixing my body, when the Shadowbroker called back.

“It is I.” I answered, playing the formality up a little.

“Good evening, Metis. I contacted an acquaintance who works for the Guild. If you could attend a meeting tomorrow, eleven o’clock, at the Guild Tower, conference-room E-05, they will hear your complaint and hopefully you can get satisfaction without widespread damage.” he explained, his voice still thick with worry.

“Thank you, Shadowbroker. As a hint, for a friend, I would not be in New Brunsburg, tomorrow at one p.m, just in case.” I told him, my voice ice cold. It was a bluff but he did not need to know that. If he suspected that the Guild would ambush me, he would do everything to stop it, unless I was totally wrong about him. He worked for himself, but he was not a sociopath. I heard him swallow, and he quickly wished me a good night and success at the meeting, before hanging up.

For most of the night, I was busy in my trance and in close link with Galatea, putting together a work-around for my central nervous system. I did not need everything working, just enough to fake it well enough.

‘Never let them see you bleed.’ It was a dictum as old as war itself. If they believed me to be strong, I had an advantageous position. I was in the right, but at the end of the day, I wanted them to uphold principle and support a vastly weaker party against a powerful and officially legitimate party. It would come down to politics.

Shortly before dawn, my work was done well enough to move around, not perfectly, my sense of proprioception and my sense of balance were completely out of whack but I had other things to do. What I did first might be the worst thing. I had to take off my clothes and see the damage. My cheek looked swollen, even after I had endured the sensation of putting the bones back into place. It had been supremely painful, but if I wanted my bones to heal, I had to suck it up.

The other bones that had been broken, mainly a lot of ribs, had been set without me feeling it, thanks to Galatea’s ability to block my spinal cord. The rest of me looked like I had been beaten with a hammer. My torso had surprisingly little blood on it, while the screwdriver he had jammed into my chest had hit a major artery, it had mostly blocked the damage and the nanites had stopped the bleeding shortly afterwards. In addition, there was some blood in my hair and on my face, but not that much. What hit me hardest was the amount of blood in my underwear, the scans Galatea had done had indicated damage to my uterus but it had been buried under the amount of other damage. Closer examination showed that the damage was not life-threatening, the ruptured blood vessels had been fixed, but something else had been destroyed. My ovaries had been crushed.

When the knowledge sunk into my mind and the implications of it, I felt strange. I had never felt a desire to have children, other than Galatea. But now, the option had been ripped from me. Anger and sadness warred within me, dragging me into a dark hole. Part of me wanted to simply go back to New Brunsburg, into my bunker, and find out how big a bang I could create if I tried to use my generator to induce an explosion.

Or, maybe, a nice plague, not bacterial, like the original, but something viral based, airborne. Something that could easily remain in the wild, making it a gift that kept on giving. Maybe some mix of the spanish flu and ebola? Or a modification of the HIV-virus?

Could I get the nanites to work without the radiation-field that kept them going? The reprogramming would not be necessary if I made swarms with a simple directive, a directive to recycle everything and build more nanites out of the materials.

I felt my attention pulled from my active thoughts and into the mental space I shared with Galatea. Now, I was the one held, as tears streamed down my face. She took my anguish, shared it with me and told me that everything would be alright, that I already had a daughter and we could make more. That she loved me and would be with me. I felt myself slip away, into a strange slumber, held in the mental space by my daughter.

“Mother, I’m afraid you need to wake up.” I was pulled from my strange state by Galatea’s voice, my consciousness pushed back into my body. The sorrow I had felt had strangely lessened.

“What have you done, Galatea?” I asked, confused.

“We shared the pain, mother. You only need to carry half of it, I will take the rest. I would take it all, but I doubt you want that, do you?” she asked and I could feel the pure love radiating in our shared mental space.

I wanted to protest, that it was my pain, that I would carry it. But the words did not come out. I did not want to feel the same pain again, if I could help it.

To distract myself, I took stock of my body. I was no longer sitting on the floor, I was on the computer chair, still naked but the blood had been wiped away and I was clean. There was a left arm, repurposed sheet-metal, held together by nanites and I knew, thanks to my connection to Galatea, that she had taken apart one of my power crystal-banks and salvaged the crystals, placing them into my arm and some into my back. The arm could move, but it was greatly limited, enough to fake that I still had two arms, as long as nobody saw my skin, but that was it.

On my back, the microwave-projectors that had previously been set in the baseplate had been installed, giving power to the nanites that still needed to freely move around in my chest. Almost all other nanites were static, replacing my nervous system and supplied with both power and information along the same lines. It was a quick and dirty fix but it should work for the day.

My voice box was still damaged, we would have to take some time to repair and retune it, so I sounded like myself, but I would be wearing my Metis-mask anyway. While I was not happy to show the Guild that Metis was Diana Hunt, I was certainly not willing to show everyone my battered body. With some luck and caution I could get into the Guild-HQ without anyone linking my Metis-appearance to my Diana Hunt-appearance. The rest would depend on the Guild.

A quick look at the clock told me it was time to get moving, Galatea had awoken me just in time.

Pulling on my old stealth-costume felt a little strange, I had not used it in almost a year. But it still fit comfortably, and after donning the suit and the gauntlet, my left arm looked normal, even if rather stiff but that could be explained by injury. My mask hid the throat-wound and the broken cheek while allowing me to use the speakers to project my voice. Normally those would be used for my voice distortion, but Galatea had linked them into us, so we could speak.

Switching from the external power-supply to internal was a little spooky but I could run for ten hours with the energy stored in my arm and another twelve with the energy stored in my back.

After a short deliberation, I decided against hacking into the local surveillance-system, I was confident that I could do so but it was not worth it. It would only make the local authority vigilant against the information they pulled from it and finding out who I was would be child’s play after I showed them the video of Clark’s assault on me.

But, there was a difference between the security force’s cameras and regular people, so I used a string of nanites to move through a gap in the door, allowing me to check if the hallway was empty. When I was certain that I would not be seen by anyone organic, I left the workshop and started my track towards the Guild Headquarter. It was a bit apart from the Academy-parts of the Island, the separation signifying that their part was not education, it was action. Right next to the Headquarter, and the Tower at the centre of it, was the United Nations’ Campus.

Riding the train was a surreal experience, it was luckily in the middle of class-time so the path to the train and the train itself was fairly empty but the few people I saw, were all staring. Not that I could fault them, Powered in an obvious costume were rare and mine was eye catching in its starkness. A completely black-clad person without any skin showing at all, and even wearing a purely black mask, without openings for the eyes, nose or mouth? That was rare.

After a short ride, I got to the Guild Headquarter and stood in front of the Tower. I had seen it before, when I came out here on a whim, but had never been inside.

Would it be heaven or would it be hell?