ALIVE [Connor]

[05] I've Got You

Hostage.

August 15th. 2038.

PM 08:34:17

Miraculously, Isla caught onto Emma's shirt and heaved the child tightly into her chest. Connor had dashed close behind in the turn of events, just as Isla turned on the spot and lost her footing on the ledge. Her shoe scuffed on the roof until she slipped and threw out her other hand to claw, in complete trepidation, for the edge.

"Shit!" Isla was dangling.

Bloodstains in the form of handprints smudged across the ledge. She seethed against the pain of clutching the little girl, putting nauseating pressure on her wounded shoulder as she remained swinging dangerously.

Connor had slumped down onto his front, leaning right over the edge of the roof to capture her. "Don't panic-"

"Don't panic!?" Isla dared to look down, the child crying under her arm as she groaned at the sight of police cars blazing red and blue from the street below, surrounding a very splattered Daniel on the road.

"I've got you, I've got you..." Connor had reached out his hand in the flurry of movement, wrapping it around Isla's wrist just in time and squeezing the charms of her bracelet uncomfortably into her skin. She barely scraped the ledge with the tips of her fingers.

"Isla?"

"First name basis! We're... we're getting somewhere Connor!"

For but a moment, the LED was, yet again, aglow with a yellowish light.

"And there he goes again, dragging up my records to figure out my favourite colour-"

"Isla, look at me."

He gazed down upon her with a definitive tone in his voice. Isla had never so commonly experienced this many androids giving their own orders. It was foreign, but not entirely forbidden.

But given everything that had unfolded - she most definitely looked up, nervous sarcasm depleting and vision narrowed by the fear of plummeting through the atmosphere to her unpleasant death. "I'm gonna pull you up, but you've gotta keep a hold of Emma, alright?"

His brown eyes oozed with concentration in the lights of the city's skyline, casting a honey-toned glaze over his irises. A splash of her own crimson blood had marked one of his cheekbones in a scarlet spray, looking foreign against synthetic skin. His dark hair was rippling through the rapid wind and his tie loosened somewhat.

He was gazing back at her with a knowing look in his eye. A look that, for a brief second, appeared far too human for the likes of an android. Or at least, she thought so.

Connor registered the fear in her eyes. The dread. The overwhelming sense of facing off death, itself. And the fact that he was the only one preventing her from that fate. He held the power over life and death, he could have dropped her. She wasn't necessary to the mission whatsoever.

But something deeper than his hard wiring wouldn't allow him to do so.

Software instability ^

And then Isla could no longer see Connor's face at all, for the searchlight of the helicopter had shone directly over the trio and obscured most of her vision. "The deviant has been dealt with. Negotiator is still on sight. Do not approach. I repeat, do not approach!"

Isla swallowed sharply, nodding thoroughly as she winced against holding the child. Connor's other hand settled over the first as he began to hoist her up over the ledge, "I've got you..." He added again, teeth gritted as he struggled to yank the weight of both the woman and the little girl.