The lot was in chaos as workers in hazmat suits and plain coveralls fled for safety. Work lights had been set up to illuminate the courtyard. Stacks of crates lay in piles, ready to be transferred to or from the parked carriers. Connor looked to the doors as security guards filed out the building, beetle black in their tactical armour. They were normal men and bore standard assault rifles. Connor leapt from the cover of the parked carrier’s roof, landed among the guards and laid about with his armoured fists. He moved through the startled and unprepared men, taking several glancing shots in return. He rode the momentum, dodging in and out, striking without grace or form. The long-barrelled weapons the guards carried were difficult to aim in the confined space. The men crumpled with each hit, broken and blooded. He reached the doors and pushed through. Staff scattered deeper into the building, their panicked screams echoing in the cavernous office. Connor followed behind them, eyes shifting, scanning for danger.

Assault rifles opened up on his left, their strafing lines of fire tearing up the office partitions and glass walls around him. Bullets bounced off him, shaking him, kicking him sideways. Connor stumbled, righted himself, kept running. He swung out a compact via a tendril and returned fire blindly, hoping to drive the shooters into cover.

A giant waded through the crowd of men and women. Connor leapt aside as the Pro took aim down his sights and let off a jet of explosives. Connor rolled onto a desk, off its side and landed on his belly. Wood, glass and concrete exploded above him as the Pro emptied a full clip, showering him in debris. Connor crawled through the maze of offices, away from the blasts.

It went quiet but for pieces of shattered glass and falling masonry tinkling to the floor. Connor slithered forward, hand over hand, brushing aside papers and shredded bits of desk.

“Close in.”

He braced himself and waited, listening. Boots crunched over debris nearby. Connor sprang to his feet and pounced, tackling the Pro to the ground. Before he could shift his arms, his head snapped back and for a split second he saw flashing bursts of light. The Pro punched again, cracking his helmet along the jaw line. Connor shook it off and head butted the Pro. The optics on the Pro’s tactical cracked. Connor drove another head-butt. Another. The Pro howled in pain and released his iron grip. Blood swelled from cracked lenses. Connor extended the stinger in his left wrist and punched. The sharpened bone tip punctured the poly-carb armour under the Pro’s ribs, delivering a dose of powerful paralytics. The soldier gave a terrible gasp, as if ice pumped through his veins. Connor rolled off to the side and got to his knees. Over the ringing in his ears he could hear more footfalls.

Connor risked a glance. The guards approached hesitantly, probably more afraid of the Pro than him. He slipped back down and waited, coiling the tendrils and tensing his legs. As the party came within his range, Connor sprang, leaping into their forward member and bowling him over with a blow to the head. The others opened fire as they retreated. The armour defected the small calibre bullets, sending a cascade of fragments into the furniture and partitions. Connor lashed the guard’s compact submachineguns with tendrils and ripped them from their hands, before whirling the weapons around and clubbing them to the floor. Connor tossed the guns and delivered a paralysing punch to the supine men.

He stood back, catching his breath and taking stock on his body. The outer layer of armour had been chipped from the impact of bullets. Hairline fractures webbed from the worst offenders. His jaw and temple smarted from the Pro’s punches and he could feel the bruises his healing ability had started to reverse. Connor sighed and strode toward the stairs which led to the next level down.

The lights went out as he reached the landing. Could they see him? He rolled the infrared lens into its port and cast about. Heat signatures glowed kaleidoscopic in the darkness, from the smoking craters in the walls to the sizzling cartridges and warm bodies on the floor. He edged down the stairs, waiting for the next firefight to begin.

A voice echoed out in the darkness. “Stop where you are!”

Connor paused and squatted on his haunches. He peered around the edge of the banister. The stairs opened up on to an open area. His memories of escaping the building were sketchy.

“We have your approach covered. Surrender immediately!”

A laugh escaped him, its origins nebulous. Was it fear? He shook his head. “No. No I will not.”

The speaker paused, perhaps weighing his options. “What do you want?”

“I want me and mine freed. I want justice for the pain you have caused.”

“Who are you?”

“I think you know.”

Another pause. “You’re him. The one that got away.”

Connor didn’t feel like replying. He took a cautious crouched step forward. His hand went for the sword strapped to his back.

“I’ll make this easy for you. Surrender and we’ll make your death quick. We won’t even hook you back up. It will be short and sweet…”

“Tempting,” teased Connor. “But if that’s your best offer, I think I’ll pass.”

“Okay. If that’s how you want it…”

Connor shrugged his shoulders. “Tell me something first. Is my mother here?”

“Mother?”

“Yes.”

“…I’m not telling some test-tube monkey anything else.”

Connor grunted to himself. “Hey?”

“What?”

“Did you ever feel the slightest shred of sympathy for me, strapped to those tables, cut up a million different ways for days on end?”

“…No. I never thought about it, actually.”

Connor nodded sadly. “Thought so.”

He vaulted over the banister, landing on the floor below. A dozen rifles immediately opened fire from across the room. Mini-ex exploded across his chest and legs, blowing shards of bone from his armour. He spun from the force of the impact, bounced off the wall and fell behind a long rectangular planter box housing some indoor ferns. Connor rolled onto his back, sucking in air through a snarling rictus. The mini-ex had broken through the sections on his stomach. Blood spurted from the wound. Connor clutched at his chest and forced his ability to close the holes.

The guards moved in for the kill. Connor rocked to his side as a thin skin sealed over his wounded belly. He pinched the torn muscles and forced the fibres to stitch back together. He reached for the fallen sword.

“A little closer,” he whispered.

A gun barrel peeked over the rim of the planter. Connor whipped the blade around, severing an arm. Through the blood curdling screams he leapt, knocking a gun aside with the flat of his sword then delivering a jab with his poisoned stinger. He moved from guard to guard, using their bodies as cover as he incapacitated their numbers with darts, blows to the head or his stinger. The guns attached to his shoulder mounted tendrils fired intermittently, keeping the furthest guards hiding behind cover. His veins coursed with adapted adrenaline, boosting his speed and reflexes, allowing him to dodge the scattered gunfire and close distances quickly.

Two Programmed approached him at once, long combat knives clenched in their fists, crossing the room in a thunderous pace. Conor spun to face them as he pulled his stinger from the chest of a screaming guard. He slashed at the leading soldier with his sword.

They sidestepped, dodging the sweeping attack and followed up with a swinging haymaker which knocked Connor sideways. The following blade sunk into an exposed seam of armour in his arm. The limb went dead immediately, unable to move through the mountain of pain that radiated along the wrought nerves, Connor dropped the sword as his fingers spasmed.

The other Pro swept his legs out with a spinning kick and drove her blade deep into his exposed stomach before he touched the ground. The breath went out of him as he crunched down. A Pro stomped a boot down, pinning him.

Connor coughed and struggled to breath as his mouth filled with blood. Hands reached for the guns attached to his shoulder tendrils. The Pros ripped the growths from their ports. Connor stretched out feebly with his working arm, desperate for something to help him. A Pro got to her knees and twisted it back over his head. Bone plates snapped under the strain. She ripped the knife from his belly and poised to strike again.

“Wait!”

She paused and swung around snarling. “What?!”

“I want to watch you do it. I want to see you end his miserable life.”

Connor blinked. The lights came back on. He disconnected the infrared lens to see. As his vision swam back into focus, a short, wizened man came into view. He wore a lab coat over his plain clothes. A name tag swung from the chest pocket, too fast for Connor to read. The man smiled triumphantly as his fists shook with restrained anger. He looked Connor up and down then squatted on his haunches and flicked Connor’s chest with a nicotine stained finger.

“Look what you’ve become… you fucking little prick. Are you happy with the damage you’ve done? The lives you’ve taken? The millions you’ve cost us?”

Connor coughed and looked away. There had to be something he could do… some way to defeat the stronger, faster soldiers pinning him.

There. On the webbing of the Pro pinning his chest. A grenade.

“Answer me, damn it!” roared the man. “You’ve cost me everything! Twenty thousand people had to be evacuated because of you and the virus you cooked up. You’ve made widows and orphans everywhere you’ve been. Do you realise what you’ve done?”

Connor inched a tendril from his wrist, winding it along the inside of his arm to hide it. It snaked up the back of the Pro’s leg toward the cluster of fragmentation grenades strapped to his waist.

“Look at me!”

Connor rolled his head against the cold tiles to look the man in the eye. He tried to speak but coughed up blood and saliva.

“Are you going to say anything? Are you at all sorry?” said the old man, head shaking in disbelief.

“From the sound of it, he’s choking on blood,” drawled the Pro pinning him with a boot.

The man nodded. He leaned closer, filling Connor’s vision. “We have no plans on stopping. You and your clone buddies will be cut open for decades to come.”

Connor shook his head.

“No?” laughed the scientist. “You’ve got help coming? Some other asshole in a bone suit is going to drop out of the ventilation ducts?”

Connor started laughing, gurgling on the blood in his throat. His body thrummed against the floor.

“What’s so funny?”

Connor dropped the grenade pin and released the trigger. The metal pin danced on the hard floor, drawing three sets of eyes.

“Shi…”

He didn’t have time to finish the word. The female Pro dove for the scientist, pushing him away. The grenade exploded, ripping the male in two and peppering the Pro along her back with shrapnel.

The explosion rolled Connor back several feet, shredding his armour along the front from the force of the shockwave and accompanying shrapnel. He groaned and shook the fog from his brain. A quick stock take told him his blood supply was dangerously low and he needed raw material to replace the torn tissue in his stomach and chest. Through the ringing in his ears he heard screams. Shapes flittered past, heading for the stairs. The lenses in his helmet were cracked and smeared with blood and dust. Connor ignored the people and rolled onto his stomach. He hinged open the visor to see. Staff and guards abandoned their posts, giving him a wide berth in their flight from the warzone.

“Where is he?” he said, drooling blood as he searched for the scientist. He was obviously the leader. Connor wanted to ask him some questions.

The Programmed soldier seemed to have taken the worst of the shrapnel. Her body lay next to the scientist with him sitting against the far wall, bleeding from several exit wounds to his stomach. His eyes were filled with fear as he looked at the blood seeping from his stomach and spilling from his shaking hands.

Connor crawled closer, trailing blood as he pulled himself across the smooth floor. He gripped the scientist’s leg. “I can save you. Just give me some information and I’ll do it.”

Yelich’s fearful sobs turned into a cold laugh. “…you can’t hurt me… I’m not scared of you…”

Conor gripped his leg harder and shook. “I can save your life. Just tell me what happened to my family. Where are they?”

The man smiled, showing foamy pink spittle between his yellow teeth. “… he has a backup of me… none of this will matter in a couple of weeks…”

“Where!?” shouted Connor, shaking furiously. “Where is my mother?”

The old man wheezed weak laughter back at Connor’s face. “…fuck…you…”

Connor released his grip on Yelich as the scientist’s body went slack. He slumped over; face still transfixed with a smile. Connor pounded the floor, cracking the tile beneath his fist.

“Stubborn prick!”

He bent his head, searching for options. The old man had been his best bet, but now he was dead. Who else was high enough within the organisation to have such sensitive information? The boy who was in his head all of those years might…

Connor shivered. He’d put a bullet through that bastard’s skull first, rather than risk going back under his control.

“I’m going to have to find out for myself,” sighed Connor.

He swung his head about. The room seemed to be abandoned but for the unconscious guards, the dead Pro’s and one man, whimpering near the stairs.

“Shit. I cut his fucking hand off,” said Connor.

He had to heal himself first. Connor burrowed into the body of the Pro beside him, sliding a tendril in between an exit point created by shrapnel in the polycarbonate armour. The raw material was potent but alien, its source human enough to understand but just barely. The feeling of power it gave him was off the scale, like cocaine mixed with methamphetamines. Connor slid another tendril inside the dead body. He had to have more.

The wounds to his stomach and chest sealed over. His muscles quivered with unrealised potential. Connor shot to his feet, energised beyond belief. He scanned the area for his missing sword. He collected it and sprinted over to the man with the severed arm, teeth grinding inside his mouth and eyes wide as the Pro-blood coursed through his veins.

“Hold still, motherfucker. I’ll reattach that arm for you,” said Connor, the words leaving his mouth like a freight-train. He picked up missing limb still clutching a compact submachinegun.

The guard opened his eyes. His moan of pain became one of fear as he scrabbled backwards in a desperate attempt to get away. Connor attached himself to the guard with a tendril, connecting with his nervous system and knocking him unconscious. He fitted the hand back in place and set about commandeering the other man’s healing system. It obeyed sluggishly compared to his own, knitting the bones, nerves, tendons and muscles together as a film of pale skin covered the bloody wound. Connor stopped when he had done enough to save the man. He disconnected from the guard’s nervous system and pulled himself back wholly into his own.

Connor looked around the room. He recalled there being elevators down the passage in front of him. The majority of the scientists and lab workers had run in an opposite direction to his left. If he was to find his way through the building, he’d need somebodies help. He stalked in their direction, sword resting on his shoulder and the safety of his family on his mind.