giving me this.
I was going to keep them safe. For as long as I could. Or until they got between me and protecting Ez.
I pulled the clip out of my plasma rifle and pressed a small button I now knew was on it.
Beep. Beep.
Two pips out of five. This plasma rifle didn’t have a lot of life left in it. The cops Haddy had probably got it from were a few blocks away. Cops sent to deal with runaways had two clips apiece but sometimes took more if they’d had a bad experience bringing down an amok bot in the past. It was best to go check them out before leaving the neighborhood, just so I could handle any trouble along the way.
I began running dozens of possible plans through my head. We needed to think about manpower, transportation, firepower. The array of things roaring through my brain was astounding. It was a drug, an elation, a high that made me for the first time into something I had never truly been before. Confident.
“All right. Quentin, I need you and your family to stay here. Ezra, stay with them.”
“But—” he began.
“I will be gone seven minutes.” I held up my rifle. “I’m going to see if I can scout us some ammo. When I get back, we’re going to need to score some proper transportation.”
“Isn’t that dangerous?” asked Bernice. “We could be tracked.”
“Not after I’m through with it. Ezra?”
“Yeah?”
“I love you. I’ll be back in seven minutes.”
I immediately exited.
Time was of the essence. There was no telling how many potential immediate threats were in the area. We needed the cover of darkness to get through certain sections of town. And we had lost so much time already. There was a war out there, a real war, and it was likely to wash up on our shores any moment.
As I ran through the streets, taking the shortest route possible to the police car, I started scraping my data for info. That brought me to the hardest part of the night: reliving Sylvia’s death through these new eyes.
Mam.
Beh. Ma. Mo.
Mama Bear. She was trying to say Mama Bear.
Sylvia’s last words weren’t gibberish. They weren’t confused. She was thinking of Ezra. She was always thinking about Ezra. She went all in on the panic room because of him. She bought me because of him. And when she was gasping for her last breaths on this earth, her only thoughts were of protecting him.
I loved that woman.
And I didn’t really know how much until that moment.
I hopped a fence, scrambled across the lawn of a darkened house, then leapt the fence toward the front, coming to a stop in the shadows beneath a tree in the front side yard. The street was dead quiet, only insects chirping and a rat slightly chewing in an attic three doors down. My new suite came with an array of analyzation tools that allowed me to better filter sounds and also identify a variety of threats via their sound signature. With my volume cranked, the neighborhood was alive—like I was peering at the molecular nature of the universe, seeing each molecule move individually.
But nothing was here. There wasn’t a moving robot for half a mile.
At least one outdoors.
I ran as fast as I could across the front yards of houses, using the grass to dull the thuds of my steps, on toward the abandoned police cruiser.
The bodies were exactly where I’d last seen them.
One, Officer Freely, was clearly shot from a vantage point across the street. Judging by the angle and size of the wound, he most likely hadn’t seen his assailant until at the very least it was too late. The other, who was lying facedown so he couldn’t be identified without disturbing his corpse, had clearly been shot from behind three times.
I hunched down next to Freely and checked for his ammo pack.
Score.
The bots hadn’t thought to check for extra ammo. As much as the bots were able to better coordinate than the humans ever could, none of the ones out here had any sort of training or programming for this sort of thing. Aside from me and any bots like me, that is. Of course, there weren’t many fashionables in my neighborhood and fewer Blue Star Au Pairs. So for the first time since this all began, I felt like we were at an advantage.
I crept around the car to examine the other corpse. As I rolled him over to check his ammo pouch, the