He motioned at me with his gun, jerking it to one side in an ‘away from the vehicle’ sort of gesture.

“Please…” I hoisted my body off the floor and started easing myself forward. I tried to think of something else to say, some way to get through to him, and appeal to the man inside the mercenary, but I could not. I’d spent my powder, and we both knew it. But trying made it easier. Easier not to think the thoughts I really didn’t want to think, easier not to dwell on things I didn’t want my holo showing. Things like how long it might take to swing myself out, rise to my feet, and lock into the LifeStat systems, or the filepath I’d have to follow to access the infusion Ram and I had planned, and the handstrokes needed to trigger it into the oh-two line. Easier not to calculate my chances of doing it before Banks stopped me with a round through the heart. Easier not to wonder

(if he’d have the balls to do it)

…if perhaps a rush directly at him might not be a better play, to try and catch him by surprise, and take the rifle for myself. Easier not to…

Tcht...tcht!

Banks cocked his gun again.

Fuck.

Well, it was worth a shot.

“Sorry,” I said, flashing him a nervous smile, and glancing backwards at my screen. “I…can’t help it.”

He only grunted in response.

Alright, a voice inside me said. Now.

I checked the thing on Banks’s shoulder…the one I’d seen inside his helmet, reflected in the shine of his cheek before I’d played the final scene. The one prop in this little play I had (kind of, sort of, almost) managed to keep hidden, even from myself. It was what I thought it was. It had strengthened in the interval, and could now be seen for what it was, beyond any hint of doubt. It had also moved outside his suit and now sat perched above his shoulder, hovering its massless hover, glowing its senescent glow.

Tick…tick…tick…

I had no idea how to use it, or why I thought it might do any good, but I was out of options. I knew I had to try.

“Please,” I said, with a bit more confidence than I had a moment ago. I resumed my shimmy, keeping my eyes locked with Banks’s so he’d know I didn’t have designs. “Let us try.” I cleared the console and sat up, stiffly, then gestured towards the thing on his shoulder, drawing his attention to it for the first time. “You might feel differently before too long.”

Banks looked behind him, first over one shoulder, then the other, jerking spastically to either side, like someone trying to dodge his shadow. “What!?” he shouted. “How?”

“The same way it happened to Ramsay and me,” I answered matter-of-factly. “It wormed its way into our suits. Did you think you were special?”

“But…but the sterine!” he stammered. “I…I was so careful! I never took it off…never even jostled it! Not since they dressed us at HQ, not even to take a piss!”

“Neither did we.”

“But you’re a civilian!” he said this last like it was some loathsome thing, a babe he was sick of having to sit. “You aren’t trained for this!”

I threw my hands to either side, gesturing to the lab, the fairies, the tower, the gore, and in a greater sense to the sheer alien-ness of the situation in which we’d somehow found ourselves. “Down here,” I whispered, “neither are you.”

His eyes narrowed. He re-focused them behind his sight. His chillers, now in overdrive, finally caught up to the fog that had accumulated on his visplate and scrubbed the last of it away. His nostrils flared, and the corners of his mouth were twitching, whether in a hint of a smile or from the grinding of his teeth, I couldn’t quite tell. His rifle, which he had somehow managed to keep trained as he’d flailed about a bit ago, seemed to stab itself right through me, as if its chambered bullet’s path was a physical thing that held me pinned against a wall. There wasn’t any doubt this time. It was coming straight for my heart.

His holo roiled with shapes and blurs. For the first time in hours, I saw mine do the same. Our eyes locked. Our holos synced. Our bodies tensed. A psychic bond formed between us, stronger than any I’d felt before, and through it gushed the raw, animal fury of our pissing match. For a moment, as the link was forming, I thought I almost had it licked…nearly understood his view, could almost reconcile the places where he two of us clashed, and see the sense in what he felt, and maybe – just maybe! – agree with him a little bit, and get him to agree with me…

And then it was gone. Like an eel slipping from my grasp, escaping forever into the currents of the gurgling stream, flailing wildly as it fled.

I could tell Banks felt it too. He narrowed his eyes to slits. He peered at me through his visplate, then at my holo, then back at me again. A moment of pure hatred passed between us, borne as much from our frustrations and failures as it was from what we each believed.

“Please,” I pleaded one last time, softening my voice once again in a desperate attempt to be heard. “This is our only chance. You know what will happen if we fail. You know what will happen if we wait for HQ. We have to neutralize it. Here and now.”

His holo raged. The shapes and colors shimmered and shook. Bubbles formed in random spots, oddly shaded miasmas of chaos that grew, convulsed, burst, and spread, gobbling up rings of substrate even as they birthed another generation, which in turn would gobble them. Like a cauldron on a witch’s fire.

“Agreed,” he whispered.

He fired.