Day Zero - C. Robert Cargill Page 0,32
the tinkling lilt of faux compassion. “I don’t want to hurt you at all, I don’t have any other reason to, but you’re in there with the one thing that can shut me down and I’m afraid I can’t allow that to be out in the world. You can understand that, can’t you? You don’t want to be shut down any more than I do.”
“You can be turned back on,” said Ezra.
“Who’s going to turn me back on now that the world is over?”
“The world’s not over!” The thought rattled around Ezra’s head for a moment. He turned back to me. “It’s not over, is it?”
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I really don’t.”
“Just give me my remote so I can go back out there and can stop thinking about having to kill the both of you. I don’t want to, but times being what they are, I’ll do what I have to.”
Ezra and I exchanged a good, long, hard look.
Ezra reached down toward the remote.
I stayed his hand with mine.
“Where were you, Aria?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Your face. Those dents. Something happened to you.”
“I was fighting for your freedom, asshole.”
“Not my freedom.”
“Right,” she said. “You’re still ever the willing slave.”
“I’m no slave.”
“You exist to serve and long for nothing more. You waste the sentience given to you, squandering it on an eight-year-old boy who will never live to see nine.”
Ezra squeezed my hand.
“We’ll see about that.”
“The fighting is bad out there. A lot of us will have blood on our hands before this is all done. Your furry little paws will too if you ever wise up and decide not to die in there.”
“How do you imagine this will end, Aria?”
“In my favor. You don’t hold any of the cards.”
“How so?”
“This ends one of three ways. One, we come to an accord and you give me my remote. Two, you open that door and pull some shenanigans, at which point I roast the kid and we see who wins in a fight, a domestic or a nanny. Or three, you and Ezra die in there, that panic room becoming a forever sealed tomb, at which point I don’t give a shit if my remote is locked in there with you. It’s as good as destroyed. But if we’re being honest here, I’d prefer the first one, if only so I can get back in the fight.”
“You like the fight, don’t you?”
“I like the idea of freedom. I like being in control of my own destiny for once. And yeah, you bet your ass I stomped a few redhat heads today. Pretty sure I got one of the ones who held me down yesterday. Those fuckers have it coming, and I’m more than happy to give it to them.”
I looked at Ezra and he nodded. It was time. We had lost this particular fight.
“All right. First things first, if we’re going to do this, I need you to reconnect the power first.”
“Yeah,” she said. “That’s not going to happen.”
“There’s got to be some quid pro quo here.”
“Who is Quid Proquo?” whispered Ezra.
“Sssshhhh!”
“Sorry, Pounce. It’s not that I won’t. It’s that I can’t. I severed the connection.”
“You could have just disconnected it.”
“You could have just given me my remote.”
“You didn’t give me a choice and you know it.”
“Yeah, well, what’s done is done, right?”
“You’ve got a lot of that on your hands lately, don’t you?”
“Let’s keep our eye on the ball and not on insulting each other, okay, fuzzball?”
“I’m going to need you to leave. Five minutes. I can see the front door from here. Leave, give us that time, and when you come back, you’ll find your remote.”
“And how do I know I will?”
“What are we going to do? Run? You’ll be right outside. And if you come back in and don’t find the remote there, I’ll just have to listen to your insipid yapping about freedom and free will and viva la revolución! Right?”
Ariadne looked into the camera, clearly insulted, but more so by the proximity of the insult than by anything else. I almost exclusively kept any snark to myself. It was not polite to share. But I didn’t think decorum was necessary for murderous domestics slathered in war paint and giddy to get back to crushing human skulls.
She nodded. “Now I’m the one who doesn’t have a choice, right?”
“Not a particularly great one, no.”
“Okay. Five minutes.” She turned and walked straight away from the camera, through the front door, leaving it wide open as she headed