The bullet struck Iris in the eye as her weapon carved through Amy Sherman’s chest. It hammered her head back, rocked her skull, shocked her brain. All of her senses flickered off except for pain. Distant, primordial, and inescapable. That built in warning of danger and harm, the impetus to act, to flee, to protect herself.

But, she couldn’t feel her body. She couldn’t move her arms or legs or open her eyes or breathe. She couldn’t breathe. She was suffocating and drowning all at once and couldn’t hear her own screams. She couldn’t scream. She had no mouth and had to–

Calm down.

Memory helped. It wasn’t her first time like this. After the accident, after getting bombed in a mud pit, half infected with blight and dragged out by medics. She had been stripped of her body, chemically thrust into a purgatory of thought.

How long had she been in the dark? With no input, she had no frame of reference. Amy Sherman had shot her. High velocity impact, short range. She reasoned it must have caught her eye socket, the contour trapping the bullet and imparting the whole blast into her head rather than deflecting off. She was concussed and not interfacing properly. Either she was as good as dead, or her body would reboot and she would be back in the fight.

But she didn’t wake up and she didn’t die. She was the hypothetical of philosophers, a brain in a jar without any sensory input, nothing but a mind with itself. Except she wasn’t by herself. Something else existed with her, inside her, in the darkness of her incomplete, simulated vision, and it was bigger than she was. What that meant, she didn’t even know, but with every moment, every beat of her heart that she couldn’t even feel, she developed a more distinct impression of the quietly violent thing beside her thoughts.

It was like the split minds, the epileptic severance to two bodies of the Shermans. They each spoke and acted independently. They didn’t complete one another’s sentences, but they never contradicted one another. And she had seen the proof of it with her own eyes.

But her brain hadn’t been split in two. The infection and carnage had not penetrated her skull, else they wouldn’t have been able to put her in a HAB unit. Which left her with no idea of what the thing was, or how she was even aware of it as a thing distinct from herself. A boundary where her own thoughts stopped and other thoughts held domain. She probed at it, and in doing so, felt her hand. Firm, strong, utterly real; input from the world and she knew she was holding something.

It felt like the grip of her hand pulled her out of the darkness, dragged her back through the surface of an isolation tank and into the light. Sight, sound, body, everything connected again as power cycle alerts went through her visual feed. She had to blink and shake her head, disoriented by the lack of an eye.

She was holding something. She had Adam Sherman’s fist in her hand, caught. “What the fuck?” Her micro-blade was nowhere to be seen, and her internal energy was running on empty. Her augment suit had run out during the fight, but it seemed like his was dry too. Neither of them were moving at superhuman speeds any longer.

Time was missing. She confirmed that just by seeing the amount fo blood, real blood, that had spilled out of Amy Sherman’s body. The cut had broken into her cardiovascular system. She had killed her.

Iris felt cold inside. When Adam broke free and assaulted once more, an enraged brawl, she went through the motions of block and defend like she was merely puppeting her body. Like she was playing a video game of someone else.

Mendel shouted through the casino speaker system. “Finish him! Before it’s too late!”

Iris caught Adam’s wrist and snapped it. A trivial move of experience, martial arts brought to the twenty-third century. That made an opportunity as she closed in. Their bodies embraced, she twisted and slammed him to the ground and then she was atop him. No micro-blade, no gun, no time to get either. She slammed her fist into his face, and then the other, and then repeated. Every strike sounded like the firing of a combustion engine until steel and graphene cracked and shattered. The augment suit bracing cracked off as she caved in Adam Sherman’s skull.

Then she understood what the other thing had been. Not a demon, not her subconscious mind, but the computer in her HAB unit, the programmed interface that gave the world to her senses. Where humans had autonomous nerve feedback for reflexes, she had the machine, and her computer had kept her moving and fighting. It had stopped Adam’s attack on her, and guided her through the means of killing him.

“Mendel, I’ve done it. Head of the snake is cut off. What’s next?”

She rose to her feet and looked at the two of them, the one person in two bodies, with infrared. Through it, she could see the beat of their hearts. One must have been cloned, perhaps both. Neither still pumped. She turned her gaze up, and could still hear the panicked crowds of collaborators. The economic foot soldiers of BISON and every associate trampled over one another to get away and scatter like leaves in the wind.

“I’ve just confirmed Silvy’s safety. She says he got lucky and noticed a livestream connection that shouldn’t have been there. Hairs on the back of her neck kind of thing, you know?”

She couldn’t remember that feeling. “I’m glad. We need to raid their biolabs now, or maybe fly me to intercept Fauxnir? Who do I need to fight now?”

“Just get out of there. I’ve got other people scouring their servers for data, but everything is getting erased as we speak. Someone with some weight to throw around is pushing back on us. You don’t need to bother yourself with the delicate part.”

Iris started walking for the staircase. She passed debris on every floor as she stripped her augment suit off. With the supercapacitors drained, it was nothing but weight on her. “You’ve got US commandos going after the biolabs, don’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Can they handle it?”

“Well, I can’t imagine the Shermans have another fighter up their sleeves like Roselyn, and even if they do… well, we can always fly her out.”

“Can you afford to do that?”

Mendel laughed. “I’m spending out of the US treasury right now. Black budgets are the best kind of budgets, if you ask me.”

Iris didn’t respond after that, she just walked up flight after flight of stairs and let the remnants of the crowd flee in front of her. She touched at her face and found only synth-blood, a sticky electrolytic slime that didn’t even look red. When the sun shone down on her, she barely even noticed. The warmth came through as little more than a mental number going up, not a true sensation. The door to the bunker had been flung open, and the air was filled with the noise of helicopters and personal jets scrambling to take off. She watched them for a moment, like a panicked flight of birds taking to the skies and not yet coordinated enough to make a flock.

Then she noticed the body on the ground near her. A man in a cheetah print suit had been shot in the back. Blood made a deep scarlet spot in the middle of the gaudy coat, and he laid staring at nothing but the dirt. “You shouldn’t have helped me, Park,” Iris said, and collapsed down. She ended up sitting on the ground beside him, waiting for Mendel to land the cargo plane and pick her up. “I should have come in fighting from the start, or maybe not at all. Maybe I should have gone to the biolabs and let these people drink themselves to death in celebration.”

She hugged her knees to her chest and waited.

Eventually, the skies cleared. The noise receded. She was left with nothing but Rocky Mountain wind blowing over the airstrips. Her internal energy was low, but not empty. Fatigue still had her almost overwhelmed. She knew it was from the concussion and tried to stave it off, to keep her focus on the world around her lest she lapse into sleep, and then unconsciousness. The last thing she wanted was to find herself with that presence again.

When Mendel landed the cargo plane on Airstrip One, she stood back up, and thought she would fall. She remembered what it could be like to end up with low blood pressure and to get up and down and nearly black out; but, that hadn’t happened to her in years. There was nowhere else for the blood to go. All of her limbs were made of steel and silicon, andher balance came from the computer within her guts.

Mendel got out of the cockpit as she walked through the bay door of the plane. He put on a smile.

She said, “I need medical leave,” and collapsed.