Treva expected, Lily ran straight at the seeker and, at the last moment, dove into a somersault, tucking herself into a compact ball that smacked Treva in the leg and knocked her off balance. As Treva struggled to keep her footing, she shrieked with rage. Several people from the audience taunted and threw food at her, but her instinctual hyper-reflexes denied the jeerers any hits.
D_Light was on the ground. The kick had been like a sledgehammer, and unbearable pain streamed up his leg. It was not broken, but there was something out of place that prevented him from standing up. D_Light looked desperately over at Lily and her attacker as they danced around the stage. Lily was not running, but she was not fighting either, merely evading. Perhaps she knew that if she retreated into the throng around her, the product would be on top of her. At least here on the stage there was room to maneuver. D_Light might have thought this to be true except that he suddenly realized that Lily was laughing. Laughing! And not the half-crazed kind of laughter belonging to someone whose stress response had overloaded. It was genuine, unabated amusement. She was amazing! Someone pelted D_Light in the back of the head with something soft and watery, but he did not care. He needed to save that wonderful girl!
Treva’s prey was proving to be more of a challenge than expected. The hungry seeker had come on the stage to rip this human limb from limb with her bare hands and fangs, but the little girl was staying out of reach. Treva pulled out her stun baton, and the corrugated shaft extended with a rapid series of clicks. Appearing to be a simple rod, there was nothing remarkable about the weapon, but with one hit Treva could bring down a man far larger and stronger than this little fawn of a girl. All seekers had permits for modern weapons, specifically a “low- efficacy modern weapon permit.” That meant that Treva could legally use any weapon that fit the requirements of not being deadly, having limited range, and having a limited area of effect. Her baton fit the bill, but Treva soon wished she had a more potent weapon as the taunting little meat puppet continued to duck and weave, avoiding the seeker’s wild swings.
With Lily in danger, Brian intensified his push to the front of the stage. It was his time. His time to do what he had trained all his life to do, and he was not about to miss this opportunity. He used the butt of Tiffany, his mace, to prod people aside and, upon reaching the stage, leaped up like a man clearing a high jump. The guard landed on his side and rolled up onto his feet in one graceful move. He heard cheering behind him. They think this is a theatrical performance, he sneered. A blink came in from Lyra, but he ignored it so that he could keep his focus on the task at hand. Although the woman swinging the baton at Lily had no product tats on her cheeks, Brian immediately recognized her as a combat-ready product, having fought so many in his training sessions. He knew how they moved, inhuman in the physics of their actions, although this one lacked the precision of most of her kind. Then a thought hit him: My Soul, Lily is a product too!
Seeing Lily in action left no doubt. No human could move that fast. Nothing else could have evaded such an intense onslaught for even a second, much less for the duration that Lily had already survived. But there was no time to lose. Lily was now driven into a corner, and the one who meant her harm was slowing her approach, making sure not to overextend herself and allow Lily to escape. This lovely creature only had a second or two left to live.
Brian charged and leaped at the product like a lion ambushing an unsuspecting gazelle. However, when he landed he set his feet and bent his knees to absorb the impact so that he could stop dead in his tracks. His ploy had worked. The product had heard him, as he knew she would. As he landed, she turned and swung her long baton back at him, the tip of the weapon whistling just millimeters away from his chest. She had expected him to be a little closer, but he had anticipated the swing. It was a trick that hypersensitive products liked to play on humans-act as though they don’t know you are coming, lull you into thinking you have the element of surprise, and then bam! hit you like they have eyes in the back of their head. It was a move that Brian was all too familiar with.
Having swung her baton with the confidence that she would deliver a decisive blow but then missing, Treva was now open. Brian knew his opportunity would last only for the briefest of moments, which is why he was already swinging good ol’ Tiffany. Only a moment ago he had been swinging at empty space, but now-right on cue-the baton was there in the path of his swing. Brian’s preference would have been the product’s arm or, better yet, its torso, but the savvy guard settled with slamming the heavy, bulbous tip of his mace into the stun baton with a mighty crack.
Treva, not expecting the blow, lost her grip on the rod, which smacked against the hard stage and clattered off into the roaring crowd. She was enraged. She had been watching this new meat puppet in her periphery, the one with the club. Relative to a being like herself, the human guard seemed to attack slowly and recklessly. She had expected to neutralize him with a single strike with her baton, but the seeker had underestimated this one. Now she had lost her weapon. Normally, she would have enjoyed the challenge of a worthy opponent, but now all she desperately wanted was her prey. And this guard was interfering!
Treva turned toward the man as he aimed another blow at her head, but this time she was watching and dodged it easily, and as the club sailed past her, she launched herself on him.
Love_Monkey, the watcher of the lounge, gazed down at the stage from her throne high above. This will not do, she thought. Due to the nature of their work, seekers were never a welcome sight, but Love_Monkey had never witnessed one unleashing itself in public. Sanctioned by the Divine Authority or not, Love_Monkey would not abide such violence on her watch. Without hesitation she leaped off of her balcony into empty space, eighty meters above the groksta floor. She fell rapidly at first, but the nanothreads gradually slowed her descent. It was at times like these that Love_Monkey was grateful for the groksta’s safety matrix, the web of threads so thin that they were invisible to the human eye.
Groksters were not allowed to use the safety matrix for fun (although they were often tempted); rather, it was there to avoid the stiff point penalties imposed for wrongful death. However, Love_Monkey was not just a grokster, she was the watcher, and as such she would do what she pleased. This was a true emergency. Falling toward the groksta floor, billions of nanothreads crisscrossed across her small body, stretched, and then, unable to withstand her weight, snapped. Although the threads broke, each one absorbed a tiny amount of her kinetic energy, the collective influence causing her to decelerate as she neared the floor. The damage to the safety matrix was of no concern to the hostess, who knew the threads would self-assemble again.
During her fall, Love_Monkey had withdrawn an emitter from a QuickPocket™ in her dress. Her familiar had called up the blood profile of the seeker, but Love_Monkey was too far from her target for the emitter to work properly. As the floor zoomed in, she readied the kill switch.
The human male was adept with his weapon, and so Treva endured some solid blows, one of which nearly broke her arm. But seekers were built to take a beating and Treva had no time to play, so she took her licks and then proceeded to rip into Brian. She tore at his flesh indiscriminately with her sharp fangs and steely nails, and his body quickly became slick with blood. Astoundingly, the girl-the one Treva had hunted all this way-jumped on the seeker’s back, grappling with Treva and screaming. Treva felt the dull sting of a blade as Lily stabbed into her shoulder and neck. Lucky for the seeker, her prey was less adept at attack than it was at evasion, and Treva estimated her wounds to be nonthreatening.
Treva bit down into the throat of the troublesome man and then snapped her head backward, effectively severing Brian’s carotid artery. He crumpled to the floor in a dead heap, blood spurting from his neck. With the nuisance now disposed of, Treva turned her attention to the little girl on her back, the one Treva had been imprinted with. The scent of her prey pressed up against her was overpowering. Soon she would feed. And when she had satisfied the worst of her hunger, she would then feed on the other one, the man limping toward her with his pathetic little knife.
The bloodthirsty seeker snatched a handful of Lily’s hair, and just as her brain was sending the signal to her muscles to pull the prey off her back, Treva felt the most wonderful feeling of her life. She threw back her head, moaning in ecstasy. She then fell to the ground. Her back bowed and she started to pant. Lily was still on Treva’s back, cutting into her wildly, but the hunter did not feel the knife; rather, the seeker writhed on the ground sensuously. The quiet from the audience was deafening. Then, all at once, Treva’s body convulsed in an explosion of haphazard movements and then went limp. The whites of her eyes turned pink as the blood vessels ruptured under pressure. Lily was still on top of the seeker, hacking away like there was no tomorrow. Blood spatter now covered Lily’s body, but no one could see it behind the illusion of her skinsuit. Treva’s limbs started twitching
