Crack in the Kill Code (AmpCore #2)

59 - Hate is Where My Heart Is

Piper awoke with a start. For an instant the only thing in her vision was that last image: the cyborg reaching towards her, the surge of pain and then the blackness. She blinked a few times and shook her head, dragging the room in front of her into focus.

It looked surprisingly clean. All gun-metal grey and pale work lights, but neat and tidy. Wafer thin holo-screens shimmered along the walls, showing what looked like city maps, but her foggy mind couldn't quite coalesce the images together to see where.

Then she realised, belatedly, she was strapped to a chair. No, not strapped – lashed – with thick metal cables. Her wrists were clamped to the armrests and her ankles wrapped up tight against the chair legs. A coil of solid wire had been lashed around her torso, squeezing tight enough that she could barely wriggle.

Taking a deep breath, Piper resisted the urge to tug at the bonds. Instead, she examined her captors. They seemed like the elite of whatever mad force had invaded the heart of Hadrian: lithe-limbed semi-human cyborgs and chrome-bodied codewraiths. They watched her impassively. She couldn't feel much from them, just a kind of blunt determination seeping out of their circuits, and everything else concealed behind a set of brutal, old-world firewalls that she lacked the strength or control to break through right now.

Her gaze shifted from the guards, and to the leader – the red-eyed cyborg who was sitting just a few meters from her. He perched on the side of a table, with his feet resting on the chair. She locked eyes with him. He smiled. His steel-plated hands rose with surprising deftness to sweep the hood back off of his head, and for the first time, Piper got a good look at him.

In the light, his sickly grey skin was laid bare. From his neck, all the way up to just below his eyes, he was sheathed in malleable metal graft-skin that shimmered faintly with power lines. He still had his human skin in the hollow of his cheeks, around his eyes and across the bald dome of his head. There were ugly, black-metal spines grafted to his head and climbing down the back of his skull, studded with thick access ports. His ears were still there, and still mostly flesh, but pinned back against the sides of his head, held there by what look like a series of rivets along the rim and down to the lobe.

The young man gently folded his hands together on his lap. His crimson eye implants glimmered demonically as he looked up at her, his neck letting out a faint creak of servos. Piper held his gaze with an effort.

"Hi," he said. "How's the head?"

"It's been worse." She rolled her neck awkwardly from side to side.

He gestured to his face. "What do you think?"

Piper managed a faint smile. "Do you really want to know?"

"Not exactly ageing gracefully, am I?"

"That's one way of putting it."

His smile broadened into a chilling metallic grin. "It's good to finally meet you at last, Piper. Away from your spiv friends, you know?" He made a vague gesture to their surroundings.

"You seem to know all about me already," she replied. "Who are you?"

"That's a long fucking story, let me tell you," her captor laughed, "but you can call me Osric."

Osric. Just like that. A name to go along with it all, but one that didn't answer any of her questions.

"I'd say it's nice to meet you, but..." Piper tugged at her bonds and gave him a withering look.

"Afraid you're gonna have to stay that way for a little while," Osric said. "You're a bit too dangerous for me to let you out, even without your little wand thing."