18:49, Fifthsol 6th M6, 2226

The corrosive tang of ammonia wafts into the alley around me, making me sit alert. I camouflage myself under boxes and shredded tarp.

Curtains of smoke part. A steel-grey uniform materialises out of the gloom. My muscles bunch ready to flee when I catch a mop of frizzy hair. The apparition comes closer. I make out a neon yellow bindi that has taken a walk across a forehead creased with terror.

Jaya staggers into the alley cradling their arm tight against their chest. Blood soaks their uniform from wrist to elbow. Their pulser-hand shakes as it rises towards me.

Seemingly unrecognisable to them in the gloom, I'm about to poke my arms out from my shelter of detritus in a gesture of surrender, when stomping footsteps echo off the alley walls behind Jaya.

A bearded attacker crashes into the alley wielding what looks like a fuel pipe ripped from the bottom of a hov. Jaya spins and slams backwards against a wall, thrusting their pulser aloft in a quivering hand. Dread clouds their eyes.

The man lunges and swings his pipe, catching the slender collimator of Jaya's pulser. It flies out of Jaya's hand and hurtles towards me, brushing millimetres past my ear before ricocheting against recycrete into the darkness beyond. I fumble for the pulser in the gloom but all I find is its collimator, snapped clean off. The remains of the weapon's diode and wave-trigger lie somewhere in the black behind me, smashed into splinters against the alley wall.

But I don't need a pulser to help Jaya.

I am a weapon.

I leap out of the dark.

The man turns abruptly to find my palm closing around his bare forearm. He tries to spring away but I'm faster. My fingers manage to get purchase, encircling his wrist.

Pure energy flows from his skin into mine.

Shiro had been right. I'm not evil. I'm not a monster.

I'm destruction.

The man attempts to bludgeon me but his pipe-arm slows in flight, halting mere centimetres from my face. The pipe slips from his fingers. Feeble arms buffet my chest, but his strength is all mine now. His eyes bulge in realisation. He paws at my locked knuckles like a trapped butterfly fluttering to smash through a window. A final attempt to claw at my hand, then he crumples to the ground.

I look up to find Jaya staring at me in horror and incredulity. 

"You're bleeding."

They dash across the alleyway, stepping over their now-unconscious attacker, and tug at my soft-pink automaton uniform. "Is Daiyu OK? What the fuck did you do to that man?"

I scramble away from them. "Press your wound and hold your arm high."

"I'm fine! What did you do?"

"I'll explain later. We need to get you somewhere safe. You're losing blood."

Jaya snarls so close to my face that I can feel their breath. "Where the fuck is Daiyu?"

I push Jaya into an alcove made by two parked hovs and tear a strip off my uniform sleeve, tying it tight around their wound. It's deep; Jaya will deteriorate quickly with no antiseptic or analgesic. I root around in my soft-pink Kida uniform pockets but all I find is Shiro's shade pen and the broken collimator from Jaya's pulser. I push the shade pen into Jaya's hand and bid them suck, at least to dull the pain until we find medicine.

My heart aches like an open wound at the sight of Jaya sucking a mighty lungful of shade. Shiro had given his shade pen to me just before his attempt to leave for Earth; I was supposed to have used it to fall asleep on my final night alive. How far away the old Heems's sad little world seems, now that tonight is Shiro's final night alive.

Shiro.

I run my hands over my face, partly inspecting my cuts and bruises, partly marvelling at the new Heems that I have become. A precious Heems, loved so deeply by Shiro. Tears begin to roll.

Jaya reaches for me and I shrink away, my mind suddenly lurching sickeningly to a vision of Shiro reaching to me for a kiss. I swat my tears away but they don't stop.

"What happened in Kida Biotech?"

Unbidden, I begin to recount everything about me. My birth, my curse, my love for Shiro. Every horror that I saw in the Kida building. Daiyu shuffling along behind a trolley with dead glazed eyes and a mind full of nematodes. Isamu Kida hunched over a pipette tray. Shy trapped by her own sister. Shiro's glaze-eyed kiss, killing himself for me. Unsure if Jaya is listening or not, I whisper on, confessing it all.

My grotesque tale has barely ended when Jaya begins to throw up into the gutter, their body spasming for long moments until they collapse against the recycrete wall, their breaths heaving.

I lean in as close as I dare. "I'm so sorry, Jaya."

They suck manically on the shade pen. Their eyes are awash with tears and defeat. "I recognised you, Heems."

"Recognised me?"

"Nine sols ago I caught you in an alleyway with a homeless woman. I first thought that you were a shade dealer, but when you ran away I saw your hospital uniform. I wasn't suspicious; I guessed that you were just giving her treatment. By then I'd got used to everyone on Eris running whenever they see a warden. But you... you were feeding on her, weren't you?"

"I only took a little. She was OK..."

"It's OK. It's not your fault."

"I'm a parasite."

"No. You're not. Kida Biotech are the fucking parasites. It's all Isamu Kida's fault. He should go on trial for what he's done to us. You've survived in the only way you know how. Daiyu and I were complete strangers to you, and you tried to help us. What have the Kida ever family done for anyone on Eris except take?"

I cocoon my head under my torn shirtsleeves. "I'm so sorry about Daiyu. I wish I could have got her out."

"Is Shyla Kida absolutely sure that there's no way to get these worms out of our brains?"

"She's sure. Isamu Kida spent a lot of effort making these nematodes resistant to every known nematicide chemical. Maybe if Shy got access to a state-of-the-art bionics lab for a few years, she could engineer a way to kill them."

"Then we get Daiyu, Shyla and Shiro out of there, and we take care of them for a few years, and—"

"How exactly can we break into the Kida building now? They'll triple their security, especially with the Earth visit tomorrow. Besides, it might be too late for Shiro and Shy. Megumi Kida has probably already..." Another bout of tears overwhelms me.

"Fucking Earth! They've designed something as advanced as the fucking Pinhole, but they can't possibly waste new tech on Edgers! Parasitic worms are all we're good for! We don't even need meatware! Who cares that we can work longer hours than the other Dwarfs now? Kida didn't invent meatware to help us. He just wanted to exploit us to make himself rich. Just like everyone did to us on Earth!" Jaya flings the shade pen against the wall and staggers up, patting at their holster and pockets. "Where the fuck is my pulser?"

"Don't be stupid, Jaya." I hold up the corroded collimator. "You have no weapons and the Kida building is full of guards."

"I've got a weapon: you. Do to them what you did to the man who tried to crack my skull with a pipe."

"Kida guards take precautions against me now. They cover their faces and hands so I can't drain them."

"Then I'll get us reinforcements from the Warden Station."

"They'll detain you for vigilantism once they realise what you're planning to do. You need wardens on your side. On Daiyu's side. We need another plan."

Jaya tears at their hair. "We need to get into that fucking building!"

The effort of wracking my brain seeds a deep pain in my skull. Shiro needs me. The whole of Eris needs Shy. "The only way we'd get into Kida Biotech would be with Megumi Kida's blessing, or with the firepower of the entire Warden Station."

"Or by attending that meeting with the governor visiting from Earth tomorrow."

"How can we attend that meeting?"

"We can't." Jaya's face curls in a broad, predatory, warden-worthy smile. "We ask an attendee to break us in."

"We don't know any attendees!"

"Mining companies will be attending. And guess whose ex is the head fucking miner?"

"No." I raise my palms, my head shaking so violently that the world begins to spin around me. "Ying hates me. She'll just arrest me and then we'll never get Shiro and Daiyu back!"

"She won't if you tell her that Kida has implanted us all with nematodes! She already knows that something's wrong with your meatware. She'll believe you." Jaya kneels in front of me, their eyes brimming with tears. "I need Daiyu back. I don't care if she can't talk or care for herself anymore. I need her back. Please."

"There has to be another way." My heart hurtles into my feet at the thought of seeing Ying again. "All Ying's ever wanted is to work for IndoChina. Her ambition is to be a governor one day. To make her family proud. She'd never do anything to jeopardise that."

"She'll make her family proud by destroying Kida. If exposing this conspiracy doesn't make her Governor-General then I don't know what will. Please, Heems."

"On the ore transporter I convinced Ying that she was going mad rather than admitting that my meatware was faulty. I hurt her really badly, Jaya."

Jaya scoops Shiro's shade pen from the ground and tosses it back to me. "Then you'd better grovel fucking hard."