Static Crush {M/M} ✔

Chapter #53

The stretch of road and everyone occupying it are silent, except for the hiss of wind through the trees. Hale lowers his arm, once braced to stop Damo from surrendering himself. Theo has a comforting hand on his shoulder.

That video was a weapon. A last bludgeoning to beat Damo into submission. Nothing Kipling said was an appeal, not for reason, nor for sympathy. He didn't try to leverage Damo's burgeoning need for companionship by offering a false olive branch of last minute compassion. He hadn't even bothered to offer, like Sami had, the safety of Damo's friends in exchange for his compliance. All Kipling had intended was to reiterate how hopeless Damo's situation was. That no matter how far he'd come, all he'd ever amount to is a data point in some programmer's roster of glitches to patch.

For a second, Hale fears it worked as the silence draws thin.

"Had to have the last word," Damo says.

"He's dead," Theo reminds him.

Sami casts a critical look at Theo for that statement. "Yes, Kipling has died since this message was recorded, and it was his last order that you return."

Damo lets out a breath, the first syllable of a laugh cut short. "And if I don't comply, you'll carry me out in a coffin."

"In a car," she corrects.

Damo raises his head and looks at Sami, at the space where Kipling's face had delivered the final blow. Hale's every function, heartbeat included, freezes. He remembers Damo's consciousness curled up while a virus infested his higher processes. Damo telling him to leave, that there was no hope for them. Hale fears he's about to hear the same thing.

Damo says, "Go fuck yourselves."

Sami appears incensed. New as she is, the threat of failing at her first directive lights a fire in her.

"As I said, if you will not allow us to apprehend you," she says, pulling something out of her pocket, "we will do so without your cooperation."

An icy terror roots Hale to the spot as he registers what she's holding. A remote control. Her thumb on the button. She points it towards Damo.

In the split second it takes before Sami presses the remote, Damo sends a file to Hale. It's a log file with a series of obscure commands that should override a remote shut down. He must have put it together after the altercation with Violet, in case they ever encountered something like it a third time.

Sami's thumb descends on the button. Damo smirks.

"That's not going to wor—"

Damo doesn't finish his sentence. His jaw locks, his expression closing like a window shuttered. He collapses. His head hits the truck with a bone-chilling, metallic ring. Theo's voice seems to fail her as she falls to her knees, grabbing Damo's collar to shake him, but he doesn't reanimate. Sami disabled him with one click of a button. His overrides didn't work.

Hale knows the sensation of lost control well, but fear of facing the same doesn't stop him moving with Rayner to block the advancing line of men and women from taking their friend. He sends a frantic message to Damo. They've managed viruses and escape from armed lunatics. There has to be a way out of this too.

>>Damo??

No immediate answer. Theo screams something nearly unintelligible. "Don't do this. Please."

Sami raises the remote again. Unthinking, Hale throws out a command line request for a network connection to her. It's as much a desperate attempt to communicate as it is to see if he can't hack and control her like Damo had once done to him.