It's not as simple as: the things we own end up owning us.

In truth it's more like: the things we desire define us.

Ava's strange powers—the things she ostensibly owns—have made her feel like a hero.

But the abilities she's observed the others using—the powers she's desired—have possibly done even more to define who she is lately. The feeling that she lacks some critical aspect of her character. The feeling that she's inadequate and something's missing.

Comparing herself to her companions has fueled desires which seem unquenchable.

Or at least they did before she found the [Random Access Medallion].

Because now she's a Cryptomancer. Her mere passive abilities have already proven indispensable, let alone those unknown powers she looks forward to exploring when next she sleeps and can assign a new active ability loadout. She's finally complete. Finally whole.

Finally who she's meant to be.

But there's another pithy phrase which might apply here:

Be careful what you wish for.

Sitting up on their surgical tables, the Slaps squeak and whir like mechanical toys. But they're not toys. They can hardly be called children. They are in fact high-tech killing machines.

“Darby.” Ostby wraps his son in a tight hug. “I'm so sorry.”

“What?” The younger Channing twists and pulls free. “Why?”

“I tried. We all did. But we're too late.” He touches his son on his cheek, just below the freshly-installed cybernetic eye with its telescoping base and mechanical aperture. “I'm sorry I couldn't stop them from forcing these implants upon you. Maybe Markus knows someone who can safely remove them.” Tears bulge in his eyes.

Darby looks at his father. He frowns. And then he laughs.

“But Dad, don't you see?” He flexes each finger on his robotic hand, a gesture Ava has performed multiple times but which she has never before seen as quite so obscene. “We're strong now. We can fight the dragons now. We can defeat Horst.”

“Slayers have mods,” says Cobra, his eyes flaring red from some sinister implant. “Now we have mods.”

“Now we're Slayers,” drones another Slap, sitting up on his slab.

“Bach,” Ostby pleads for him to talk some sense into the kids but Bach just shrugs and smiles his same-old shit-eating bullet-grin.

“Look,” Darby argues, “now we can take care of ourselves. H.R. stole us once but we won't be taken again. Now we can fight back.”

“You don't have to fight,” Ostby pleads, “you're still kids.”

“Being cute little kids didn't keep us from being stolen,” says Cobra. “It only made us weak.”

“Our adults couldn't protect us.” Another child cyborg chimes in, testing his wrist-mounted flamethrower with a bright orange burst. “So now we'll do the job ourselves.”

“We'll talk about this later,” says Ostby, “right now we just need to get out of here.”

“No,” says Bach. He looks at Ava with such intensity that she instinctively shrinks back, anticipating an attack. “We're not leaving yet. We're not done.”

The machinery here is unlike anything she has ever seen. This technology might be more advanced than what was present within Sara's lab, even. By all appearances this machinery fabricates brand new cybernetics, assembling custom implants automatically.

There's only the one scientist-type left alive, and Bach holds his submachine gun to his head.

“Ava,” he says, “this is it. I need you to summon the parts required for Acid Spray Mark Four and Sanguine Extraction.”

“What?”

“I need the parts!” He stares at her hard and says, “this is it, Ava. This is how we win. This is how I beat the game.”

She flashes back to the office – her so-called Heaven. The sticky-notes plastered around Bach's monitor. They said the only way for him to escape is to beat the game. This is what she's here for.

This is the whole damned thing, isn't it? This is what it's all been building up to.

She holds her palm out flat. Concentrating, she summons the components he desires: the [Thoracic Replacement Pump]. The [Maxillofacial Vacuum Modification] and [Fuel Conversion: Blood]. The parts are nothing more than weird mechanical bits. She hands them over.

Bach's eyes gleam. He's delirious; obsessed. He cracks Doctor Hostage with the butt of his gun. It's gratuitous violence and the trembling scientist bleeds from a gash on his hairline.

“Get over here.” Bach drags him to one of the machines while the others can only watch.

“Bach!” Ostby shouts, “come on! We don't have time for any of this!”

But Bach simply ignores him. He's singularly focused.

Suddenly the alarms start going off again. Blaring and deafeningly so. But this time Bach doesn't seem to care in the least.

“Combine them.” He shoves the modification components hard against the hostage's gut, doubling him over. “And make me a new hand.”

The scientist takes the parts and he feeds them one-by-one into a compartment in the machine. He calibrates some settings after each insertion. Then he looks at Bach with wide eyes.

“I don't know if this will work.” He flinches as though he expects to be struck again. “And I still need a basis for the hand.”

“Oh, it's gonna work – trust me.” Bach gestures for Ava to join them. “Use her hand as the template.”

Ava paces over zombie-like. She's become a passenger in her own body; events around her turning too rapidly; her racing mind more than a little bit stunned.

Bach seizes her by the hand and thrusts it at Doctor Hostage. The scientist in turn takes her by it and drags her to the adjacent piece of machinery. There's an opening and he pulls and situates her robotic appendage within it.

“You won't be harmed,” he says, “this machine will simply scan your modification and create a schematic to work from.” He enters a command on the adjacent keyboard and a bright green light flashes inside the compartment where her hand is held. “That'll do.”

Bach smashes him in the head once more and the hostage collapses, unconscious. He mashes a button and the machine goes to work. It's an advanced fabricator, everything is automated from this point. The others—Ostby, Ava, Uri, Darby and the rest of the child cyborg Slaps—all crowd around to watch. Everyone simply ignores the blaring alarms.

Something mystical is happening here.

Bach maneuvers around the machine while its inner-workings grind and pump and wheeze. And then he suddenly thrusts his stump inside another opening, similar to that which Ava moments earlier had her own cybernetic hand inserted inside.

Then for a moment Ava thinks he's being electrocuted. He tenses and growls, rising in intensity and volume until he's screaming. And finally the machine finishes and he retracts his steaming stump.

But it's not a stump, anymore. He has a hand again, a fresh mechanical claw forged from some impossibly black super-alloy. It's not like Ava's – hers seems somehow toy-like and flimsy in comparison.

He flexes and squeezes an electrically-crackling fist, grinning his bullet grin wider than Ava can ever remember.

“Finally,” he sighs, staring at the hand like it's some sort of ancient and powerful artifact he's discovered after a long and excruciating search. “Finally!”

Wait a minute.

Did he just use her?

Here she's been thinking the world revolved around her, that everyone existed to play a role in her story – but was that all wrong?

Wait just a goddamn minute.

Is this in fact Bach's game—his story—after all?

The rolling shop-door Ava saw when they first entered the lab slides up, clattering along its tracks. The alarms continue to scream.

A pair of strangers loom in the doorway, tall and slender, wrapped in rags or scarves which seem to orbit around their bodies, swirling in perpetual motion. They might not even have bodies beneath those shreds of drab-colored cloth, for all Ava can tell. They look the way a dust-devil might if brought to life and forced to take on a humanoid form.

She's transfixed. The alarm sounds far away and muted. The first slender stranger takes a step inside the lab and Ava realizes the others all seem under their spell, too. A moment ago everyone stood in wonder while Bach completed his quest, but now his turn is over. The stage belongs to these mysterious strangers now.

And before anyone can react the first to step forward sweeps his arm through the air and Ostby is on the floor trying to scream but his voice won't work. Holding his groin and his right hip in both hands and screaming without a sound.

And Ava looks down and realizes his leg is severed there at the hip and he's trying to hold it together. But it's no use because his entire leg is laying an arm's-length away, the slice clean and straight like something in the window of a butcher's shop.

“The Lepers,” she hears Bach say, a smile in his voice, “I thought you'd never make it.”