Gray goes for the kill. Zef's mind is a spiral, fear making his thoughts like soap bubbles that pop whenever he tries to catch one. He doesn't know what to do, how to help. Doesn't even know whether to root for Gray or fear for him.

He doesn't want to watch Gray kill Rylan, except—

She evades him. There, then not there. Their movements are hard to follow. The sounds of their feet sliding, pivoting, slamming against the floor are easier to follow than the visual blur of fists and flapping clothes. All Gray's attacks have the gravity of killing intent behind them. If that kick landed, Rylan would never walk again. If his hands found purchase on any part of her, he'd rend her limb from limb.

Instead, every punch he throws glides through empty air. Rylan's stance is more relaxed, laconic. While Gray moves like a wolf, she's more like a panther—slipping aside at the last moment, feinting attacks with no real bite behind them to put him on the backfoot.

She says, "There's no need for this; I only came to talk with you—"

He gets a hold of her suit jacket. "You came to put a collar on me!"

For a second, her eyes widen. He wrenches her closer, his free hand poised like a claw to take out something vital. At the last moment, she twists. The sound of ripping fabric echoes in the empty warehouse. She sheds the torn jacket like a snakeskin, freeing herself from Gray's hold.

Underneath the jacket, one of her blouse's sleeves hangs off her shoulder where it tore at the seams. Ink curls beneath the rip, the sharp black and orange of tiger stripes.

Gray doesn't give her time to recover. Their implants crackle with electric light, but the net blockers reduce functionality to augmenting their strength alone. Neither can use their gild to paralyse the other the way Gray did with Dee earlier.

Each punch Gray punctuates with a snarl. A guttural, hunting noise. He circles and darts in, his movements patterned. Zef clues into his strategy.

For every evasion Rylan makes, the distance between she and the cage closes. Gray herds her towards it.

The smooth composure on her face doesn't crack. Not even by a hair. Gray gets her within a foot of the cage door, aiming a kick to shove her inside it. A flicker of a smile, and she slips aside.

Gray's fury turns desperate. He attacks with renewed ferocity, but Rylan remains calm, steady as the hum of the generator and the Faraday cage, alive and waiting. Zef watches each vicious move and repartee, and the mounting dread he'd felt at the thought of Gray killing his mother with the same remorseless fury as a stranger on the subway transmutes into a different dread altogether.

Because as Rylan dances further and further away from the cage, as Gray grows more desperate, as the fight gets more frenetic, Rylan retains a preternatural calm.

She's toying with him.

"I don't want to have to force you to listen, Gray," Rylan says. "Please compose yourself."

"You can't force me to do anything anymore."

A noise like a pool cue striking the eight-ball cracks and echoes through the warehouse. Gray's fist makes contact. A splitting impact to Rylan's cheek. She reels back. In the same breath lost to the injury, she shouts, "STOP!"

Gray stops. Frozen to the spot.

The data fort burned. Zef can still feel the heat of the flames like sunburn on his cheeks. He knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that every bit of data within is nothing more than smoke. In all likelihood, the whole mansion is a ruin by now. Gray made sure of it.

Yet, Gray stops.

Frozen in place, pale betrayal washes starkly across his features. He can't move, but he can speak. "No."

The hope draining out of that simple syllable fills Zef with a terror previously unknown.

He hadn't wanted to see Gray slaughter Rylan in cold blood.

He doesn't want to see Gray turned into a passenger in his own body, either.

Rylan straightens up. With fastidious care, she adjusts her blouse where it's come askew. She regards the torn sleeve with dispassionate annoyance and rips it the rest of the way off. Serrated teeth of poisonous ferns and a tiger's acid yellow eyes are blazed in ink across her arms. It doesn't look right. Tattoos on a cap. Like hanging a Picasso in a public toilet.

She sighs. "I really hoped it would not come to this. You keep leaving me very little choice."

"I torched it," Gray says. "The data fort, the control chip."

"You know me better than that. After your conversation at that strip club— Really, I raised you better than to hang around places like that— I assumed you might take advantage of my trip away to trick Zef into helping you find it. I made a backup."

Zef pales. She'd heard that conversation. Probably through the tracker Gray only disposed of afterward. Zef says, "The Net blockers shouldn't let you control him anyway."

"They are effective at blocking any long-range communication, so I relied upon short-range."

Short-range. Meaning, Rylan had to bring another control server with her. A chip to replace the one she lost. Gray stares at her, incredulous. His eyes search her frame, the metallic glint of implants on her head and in her hands, looking for anything new.

She clicks her tongue, a disappointed noise. "I wouldn't implant it on my person. I don't need to give you any more reason to maim me."

The words strike a gong of horror in Zef's chest. Like hearing the door click open at night and the room being too black to see. He knows with acute intuition that he's in danger, but not the specifics.

"Then how—"

"Gray," Rylan says, her voice authoritative as she steps towards him. Gray's face drains of blood as she raises her hand and, with a violent gentleness, touches his cheek. "Please approach our friend, Mr Kovac."

Woodenly, moving like one of the mechs at Rylan's mansion, Gray marches towards him. In his face is a plea. "I told you to run."

Zef hadn't wanted to leave Gray alone, but now he doesn't have much choice.

As he turns, Rylan walks alongside Gray with a hand on his shoulder. She says, "Restrain him."

It would always have been a fruitless attempt. Zef doesn't get two steps to the door before Gray has both his wrists in an iron grip. With his arms twisted behind his back, Zef can't move, nor can he see Gray's face. Gray's lean forearm presses against his throat. This close, Zef can feel Gray's heart hitting him in the back like the thump of a rabbit's foot warning its warren.

Rylan watches, satisfied, but also sad. It's frightening because both the satisfaction and sadness seem real.

Even so, appealing to her empathy seems pointless. Does her tech-addled brain remember how feelings work? Outmatched in strength and certain he's in mortal danger, it's the only weapon Zef has left in his arsenal.

"Look, Ms. Archer, I know I failed you."

"You didn't fail me," she interrupts. "You served your purpose above and beyond my expectations. I needed to know what weaknesses existed in this technology, and you found them. You brought my child back to me."

Well, fuck. He hadn't looked at it that way. "Okay, well, that's good. Look, I can see you really care about Gray—"

Gray says, "She doesn't."

"I do," Rylan agrees.

"And it makes you sad to see how much he hates you."

Her brow pinches. "We could never hate one another. He is misguided."

"No, he's— Look, he's not a child anymore. And I think you're still, like, thinking of him as if he is. And you have to be in control to keep him safe, but loving people isn't like that."

"Are you trying to teach me how to love him properly?" Rylan says. "Do you think you know better than his mother simply because you're transgender, too, and you want to fuck him?"

The vulgarity throws Zef off. "I don't just—"

"Do you think you love him?"

Zef feels like a fragile insect, paper wings pinned down, unable to manoeuvre out from the trap in her words.

He never said, 'I love you,' to Gray, and he doesn't know if he does, and he never imagined telling him under circumstances like these if he did. Gray's chest feels hard and unyielding against his back, as though Gray stopped breathing.

At Zef's silence, Rylan continues. "Here is, I think, the reality of what you call love, Zeffir. You think yourself a hero, and love that image far more than the person you're trying to save. Their worth is commensurate with your own ability to fix them. You cling to this because you failed to fix your best friend, and you're afraid if you don't fix the world you'll have to face that loss again and again. Did you ever stop to wonder whether Gray never needed fixing, or at least not in the way you thought? He is the start of a legacy. You are trailer trash with a lucky horseshoe hanging over you, fortunate to have come within five leagues of him."

Zef spits out, "You can't tell me I'm incapable of loving him because of classism."

"You can't love him because you hardly know him," Rylan snaps. "He's lied to you. He has played you as often as you thought you were playing him. Your entire relationship is founded on deceit, and you think you can lecture me about loving him? I made him."

Disgust fills Zef to the brim. Disgust and discomfort, because she's wrong about most of it, but there is one bit that scrapes too close to the truth.

The arm pressing into his throat gentles, transforming from restraint into an embrace. Next to his ear, Gray says, "You got what you came for. Let Zef go."

Rylan says, "I'm afraid he's still partially useful." She tilts her head like a raptor. "But he's also a liability, so..."

"No," Gray says.

"Listen carefully," Rylan says, stepping up to them. Zef stands trapped between the two, Gray frozen at his back and Rylan advancing with her hand outstretched as if to touch Zef. She reaches past him.

Zef feels Gray's hair brush his cheek as his head gives the minutest shake. Everywhere their bodies touch, Zef can feel him trembling. Fighting for control. He says, "No!"

Gray's grip on him loosens just enough Zef can slip it, but there will be no outrunning him or Rylan. He writhes free, ducking beneath their arms, shoving a startled Rylan away, putting distance between them. He racks his brains for the place Rylan could have hidden the control chip. Somewhere close-range enough she could use it, hidden enough they wouldn't come across it. If he can just destroy it, Gray will be free. She must have had Zef tailed here. He needs to get better at noticing if he's been followed. He stumbles towards the Faraday cage, surrounded by shelves that could have a control chip glued to the bottom.

In his panic, he doesn't see Rylan grab Gray by the arm.

"I want you to reach inside Zef's chest and take out the control chip without breaking it."

"Zef, run!" Gray shouts raggedly.

There isn't time to run, and Zef can't search out the control chip because he realises too late where Rylan hid it.

Gray is upon Zef in seconds, pinning him to the ground. He struggles, kicks, but Gray doesn't flinch. His arm pulls back. His fingers form a fist. Zef's terror gives him tunnel vision, focused on Gray's face. He looks wrecked. Jaw clenched so tight the tendons of his neck stand out like the cables of a suspension bridge about to break. Expression contorted, pupils like pinpricks.

Rylan says, "Do it now."

The agony of Gray's fist sinking into Zef's diaphragm is both abstract and acutely real. Somehow it looks worse than it feels, Gray's hand buried to the wrist inside his cracked breast-bone. It sounds worse. The wet slop of gutting a jack-o-lantern for Halloween. The filigree gold of Zef's new and now damaged chest reflect bloody red. Gray's fingers worm closer to something inside him and pull it free.

Slick with Zef's blood, the control chip looks small and insignificant. Not unlike the bits of trash scavenged for repairing his refrigerator in the bayou.

His throat starts to hurt like he's come down with a flu. He realises belatedly it's because he's screaming.

Rylan says, "Thank you, Zef, for bringing him back to me. A shame this was the best way to achieve that end."

Zef doesn't look at her. Can't take his eyes off Gray. The world dims. Is the sun setting already? In his waning vision, Gray looks raw with grief, the dimpling of his chin and shine of his eyes as weakly yielding and wet as overripe fruit beneath a thumb. Behind him, the chain link of the Faraday cage blurs.

Zef can't die. It means leaving Gray caged.

Zef was never strong, or even all that smart. He had only ever been resourceful.

With the last of his waning strength, he grasps for the control chip in Gray's hands. It's slippery. Hard and unbroken in his grip. Pain stakes him through the chest and makes the room sway, but he only needs to crawl the two feet to the cage.

"Gray, stop him!" Rylan shouts. Too late. She isn't touching him. The command goes unheeded.

Zef rolls the rest of the way inside the cage and kicks the door shut with his boot. The electric circuit completes, and the cage comes alive with a drone. Gray's stiff posture sags, released from Rylan's control. He nearly collapses onto the floor. Catches himself with his fingers in the chain-link.

When he looks up, he meets Zef's eyes.

Zef can see he understands. While you're in there with that chip, she can't control me.

It's hard to see Rylan's face as Zef's vision spots, but for once, finally, her cool composure falters.

She makes a bid to reach the cage, but Gray blocks her path.

Zef collapses to the floor. His cheek finds it wet and sticky. The control chip still stings his palm.

As the world fades, so does the pain. Instead he only feels sad. He thinks about his dad and Leo waiting for him at a train station until they realise he isn't coming.

Dying feels a bit like going to sleep. The last thing Zef sees is Rylan running, and Gray doggedly following her.