Page 56 of Repossess My Heart

A Few Stitches

Heartbeat by Isabel LaRosa

Reverie

CeCe’s lights flicker again, my hand trembles as I hold on to hers, deathly still as always. There’s nothing concerning about that. Nothing that makes it particularly alarming. She’s a bot, they don’t do all the small human things we do, not unless you’ve taken the time to program it into them. It’s the context that has my heart thundering. The bone deep fear of getting everything I’ve ever wanted.

Out.

Freedom.

No more needles or long naps.

CeCe keeps sputtering out the same code. I have no idea what it means, only that bots do all manner of bizarre things when their systems fail. Three days ago, she dismantled nearly every piece of medical tech mom had hoarded in here. Storing it in piles as she tinkered with this and that.

“8F20BH61DY36H7P.”

I rattle off the code with her in my head and when she urges me to lie flat on my stomach; I don’t fight her. Not that I could do much, anyway. That’s another thing she seems to be particularly obsessed with, health scans. Hourly sometimes. Monitoring my vitals more than usual and mapping out my brain waves for whatever reason. These ones don’t hurt, so I let it be. It’s only a matter of time now before she’s gone.

And I’m alone…

I still can’t decide exactly how I feel about that. Feelings come and go quickly now, even the big ones.

“8F20BH61DY36H7P.”

I hiss when the prick of a needle finds me, knowing soon sleep will too.

“CeCe, will you still be here when I wake up?” I ask, unnerved by how calm my voice is.

“If that is what Reverie needs.”

My eyelids grow heavy as my mind fuzzes. CeCe turns into a white blur. “I-I’m not sure I know how to be alone.”

“Perhaps a story then?”

“Yeah… one last story…”

“Once upon a time there was a garden, and in that garden were the most beautiful pink peonies…”

****

My eyes snap open, my hands already fisted and shaking as I wait for the agony to steal my breath from me. I wait for the smell of piss, sweat and sick, but it doesn’t come. It never does at the end of the dream, but still I expect it every time. I can still feel the fabric of the couch as I rolled myself off it and onto the cool floor, the way it stuck to my skin and how painful it was to pull myself away. I remember the sound of my own screams and the exact moment they stopped. Not because the agony had stopped, but my mind had gone somewhere else. A place it never really came back from. A safer place for me was just a series of other painful memories. The bad always seems to outweigh the good. I knew this time when my mind took the pain away; it wasn’t coming back. I knew this time was different. That was the first time I’d wished for death in any substantial way, but it had nothing to do with the blinding pain in my head. It was the lack of anything else that shook me. I was perpetually empty. Seems ironic that her last-ditch effort to save me was what finally killed whatever was left inside.

My eyes find Nine quickly, watching as his drone works on him, doing my best to ignore his lack of clothes. Only black skintight boxers cover the large bulge of his cock. His own eyes have been glazed since he pulled us into this safe house, if you can call it that. There’s no ceiling and rusted pipes. Hardly a sanitary environment to perform surgery, but it’s all he could come up with I guess, and he was in worse shape than I had realized. Not that his dick seemed to know the difference. It stood tented even when his drone began prodding at the numerous bite and stab wounds he sustained. My core clenched, arousal sweeping into my underwear until my eyes got too heavy to hold open.

I had hoped I wouldn’t dream.

Mine are rarely good ones.

“What is he looking at?” I ask. Nine twitches ever so slightly his head barely turning in my direction where I’m sat pushed up against the giant stack of wooden crates containing who knows what. The strong off-putting almond smell is getting less offensive by the minute.

“Master Nine is reviewing all his footage from the past years, gathering a schematic layout of the Officials’ headquarters.”

Oh yeah, his whole blow up the world gamble.

“How does he plan to do that again?”

It's Nine that answers this time in a faraway kind of voice, like he’s only half involved in the conversation, “I’m going to blow the upper reactors.”

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