Prophets

She kept cutting, freeing his torso, pulling long strips off his chest and abdomen, finally his neck. He floated free of the wall, arms bound behind him. She grabbed his shoulder and maneuvered so she was behind him. When she did, he said, “My arm’s a construct.”

Oh, shit. She had completely forgotten about Nickolai’s arm. She placed her hand against the tape wrapping his right arm. The tape was a rigid shell in the shape of his arm. It had also changed color. The normal tape was a matte gray color, but it shifted toward green as it bonded to something. Even in the ruddy emergency lighting, she could tell the tape on Nickolai’s right arm had shifted all the way to the fluorescent green of a fully bonded seal.

The damn stuff was tougher than most steel alloys. Even if she freed that arm, there was no way he could move it.

She stared at it and said, “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

Nickolai shook his head and spat some more blood. “It doesn’t matter. Just don’t use that tool against it.”

“Yes.” The cutting knife would leave flesh intact, but could probably slice Nickolai’s cybernetic arm in half. At least it could do a lot more damage than the sealant tape already had. She carefully cut along his left arm, avoiding coming near his right and the hardened tape.

It took a few minutes, but she freed his left arm. He swung both arms in front of him, the right arm immobile in its impromptu cast. She pushed a little away, giving him some room. She had some fear that he might turn on her. He was the reason they were in this situation, by his own admission a traitor.

Though she wondered if that was the right word. Traitor? They both were mercenaries. In the end, their loyalty was to whoever hired them. Nickolai may have broken a BMU contract, but did that carry the weight of that word?

And why the hell am I thinking like this?

Nickolai pushed against the wall with his left hand and rotated to face her. He extended that hand toward her and asked, “May I have that tool?”

Kugara wondered a moment about the knife’s usefulness as a weapon, then berated herself. Nickolai was deadlier unarmed than she would be with most hand-to-hand weapons. If he wanted to attack her, he would have done so already.

She handed him the knife.

Nickolai wrapped his hand around the handle and held up the blade, staring at it. In his grip, the blade seemed tiny, almost a surgical instrument. She watched as his jaw clenched, and his blood-smeared lips pulled back in a silent snarl revealing his huge canines.

He lifted his right arm up, and inserting the blade at a shallow angle, he started to cut. The blade sank deeper under the sealant tape than it should have, and Nickolai winced.

He didn’t stop cutting.

He worked the blade down the length of the bindings, from the shoulder, along the bulge of his bicep, across the elbow, down the forearm. Liquid beaded along the cut, spheres of clear fluid more viscous than water floating free of the wound.

Even though it was artificial, the way Nickolai worked was too much like someone skinning themselves alive. She whispered, “Stop,” but he either didn’t hear her or he ignored her.

Under the pseudoflesh of Nickolai’s right arm were muscles and bones and nerves; the bones metallic, the muscles some synthetic polymer, and the nerves filaments of gold or some other nonreactive metal. They weren’t alive, but they mimicked life too well. The polymer muscles glistened wetly under the emergency light, sliding and swelling as he moved his arm.

When he was done, his right arm was flayed like a holographic medical display. Kugara couldn’t stop staring at it.

“Why?” she asked him.

“It was necessary,” Nickolai said.

“Does it hurt?”

Nickolai flexed the fingers on his right hand, and she could see the tendons sliding along his wrist. “The neural feedback shut down about halfway in.”