Page 45 of Kiss of Steel

He led her to the sofa. She curled her legs up on the couch and angled toward him, but he sat ramrod straight, hands on his knees. He wouldn’t sugarcoat the truth, but he hoped she could understand. Taking a deep breath, he forged ahead. “As you overheard, Fury and I are cyborgs. Solutions didn’t send us here; they targeted us.”

She nodded.

“The company created us for a specific purpose, which I’ll get to in a moment. We began as fertilized human embryos, but Solutions tinkered with our genetics and then installed various computer chips in our brains. We weren’t born; we gestated in vats and emerged as mature adults. I’ve only been alive ten years.”

She widened her eyes.

“Solutionsownedus. We were under their total control. That’s no excuse for what I’m about to tell you, but it did factor into why I did what I did.”

“You can’t own another person. Slavery is illegal.”

“You can if they’re nonpersons. Under a little-known law enacted for Solutions’ benefit, cyborgs are not considered persons. The government classifies us in the same category as robots.”

“B-but you’re not a robot. You were created from human DNA; therefore, you’re human.”

“Organs can be grown from human DNA, but hearts and kidneys aren’t human beings. Under the law, our genetic origins are irrelevant.” The discussion was getting offtrack. “I suspect you don’t know much about the company you worked for. It serves many clients, but the primary one is the deep state, the secret parallel government of nonelected officials who make the decisions and run things. When the deep state needs aproblemeliminated, they call Solutions.

“Cyborgs were created and engineered to be assassins. Killing people is our sole function, which is why the government will never grant us freedom or citizenship.”

She sucked in a breath, and her jaw dropped, but she didn’t leap up and run screaming from the cabin. Maybe she was too stunned to flee. He couldn’t stop now, or he’d never get through this. “I’ve killed a lot of people. Most of them were terrorists or human traffickers. Drug cartel leaders. A couple of serial killers. Pedophiles.”

“Bad people.” She exhaled. He could see her relief.

“Very bad people,” he agreed.

“The world is better off with them not being in it.”

“Arguably so. Except assassination circumvents the judicial process. No one cares if a child rapist or terrorist gets killed, butwhogets to determine if he’s guilty and undeserving of life? A nonelected secret cabal with an ulterior motive? How can we know the accusations against a person are true unless we go through an open, transparent vetting? If you raid a basement and catch a kidnapper torturing his victim, his guilt is obvious. But not all situations are so black and white. There were instances when my missions, as we called them, weren’t clear cut, when I had few details. I would get a name and a location and nothing else. I started to wonder whether all the people I was sent to kill were guilty of the accusations against them, or if they’d just run afoul of the deep state.

“One day, they sent me to dispatch a traitor, a spy accused of selling classified information to a foreign nation, resulting in the death of several government agents.

“The individual sat on a park bench with his four, maybe five-year-old granddaughter. He’d bought her an ice cream cone from a cart vendor. I was supposed to put one through his chest.”

Honoria covered her nose and mouth with her hands.

“I watched Grandpa smiling at his little granddaughter, enjoying some ice cream on a warm spring day—and I couldn’t do it.

“Was he guilty? Maybe. Just because he looked innocuous doesn’t mean he was. Bad people can have nice families.” He shrugged. “But, in that moment, I was sure I had no right to determine his fate. Neither did Solutions or some insulated secret government official who answered to no one. I walked away. Actually, I ran. Solutions came after me. They caught me, disabled me, and put me on a ship bound for Hell’s Gate to be destroyed. An electronic glitch revived me. Fury was on the ship. We escaped together.”

She dropped her hands. Tears streaked her face. “That’s awful. Terrible.”

“Yes, I’m a monster.”

“No.” She shook her head and wrapped her arms around him. Her tears dampened his face as she hugged his neck. “You’re not. Solutions is the monster. They enslaved you and tried to stamp out your humanity, but they failed. You knew where to draw the line, and you did. There are terrible people in the world, in the galaxy, evil people who prey on innocents, who deserve to be wiped from existence. For the benefit of society, justice must be transparent and carried out in accordance with the law, but I’m not going to weep for the death of a terrorist or a pedophile.”

“Then, why are you crying?”

“For you! For how you suffered. For your enslavement, the toll of being forced to kill, the years and everything else you lost. All of it. I worked for Solutions for a year and had no idea what they were up to. I only got an inkling at the end, but I had no idea its criminality was so extensive, that murder was the company’s entire purpose.”

He adjusted her on his lap and wrapped his arms tight around her, hanging on for dear life. Did he dare trust that everything would be all right? Or would unforeseen circumstances snatch her from his life? Given what he had done, did he deserve to be happy? He closed his eyes and breathed in her scent, still grappling with his fears.

“What can you tell me about your friend Mike Fury?” she asked.

“His story?”

She nodded.

“There was a mission neither one of us were involved in that went horribly wrong. The cyborg involved was destroyed, and all cyborgs were tricked into reporting for deactivation, but Mike went AWOL. They captured him.

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