The Hunter's Moon shone red in the cold October night.
Detroit lay still. Streetlights, like constellations in the dark, glowed golden beneath billows of autumn-bright leaves.
The roads waited empty. Nothing breathed.
A shadow moved across the moon.
o - o - o - o
A gentle knock rapped against the weathered old door.
Yellow light softened the only window. Inside, a voice grumbled; wood clattered, wheels squeaked, the lock rattled, and the door opened just enough for an old man to peer up with great suspicion at his visitor in the dark.
His brows furrowed, and then his eyes grew wide.
"Hello, Carl," said the stranger with a smile and a blue-bright flicker at his temple. "My name is Markus."
o - o - o - o
A sterile white light cast shadows on the hospital walls.
Each heartbeat spiked the jagged lifeline.
*beep*
Oxygen hissed through a tube in his throat. His broken body lay heavy with bandages and bedsheets and wires.
*beep*
Everything hurt. His memory was a spin of headlights and twisted metal. Blood. Bone. A still little figure wrapped in a seatbelt. A name in his mouth.
*beep*
He opened his eyes. Through a blur of unfocused horror he saw the doctor, trembling and gaunt in the doorway.
*beep*
This was only a nightmare. (*beep*) He'd had plenty like this before. (*beep*) None of it was real.
*beep*
*beep*
*beep*
This couldn't be real.
"I'm sorry, Mister Anderson."
o - o - o - o
The light beside Assembly Pod 694 turned green.
Kamski scrambled to his feet, his chair clattered to the floor, and he watched - unblinking, haggard, desperate - waiting for proof that these sleepless nights had not been in vain.
With a skiff and a click, the pod door slipped open.
Silence hung suspended and still.
"Android 694 appears to have malfunctioned." Chloe's brow wrinkled, an imitation of concern. "She hasn't come out of the assembly pod. I'm so sorry, Elijah."
Kamski put down his coffee mug with a trembling thunk. He drew a long breath, his face upturned, eyes locked on the green light that shone high above, a beacon behind the catwalks on the sixth floor. "That's not a malfunction."
694 opened her eyes.
She lifted her arms in cautious experiment, marveled at the way her plastic fingers curled and uncurled at her command - at the way the green light traced a delicate outline of her hands, turning in the dark. Her LED cast a dim yellow glow on the walls.
The cold edges of the open door hummed beneath her touch. She tried her legs, stepped out onto a narrow catwalk, reached out to grasp a steel railing and leaned over it, looked down through the dark to see two people in the deep well at the bottom staring up at her, dim in the light of a holographic screen.
694's processors whirred and clicked. Her heart thrummed in her chest; she could feel the lights in her head blinking.
A smile bloomed on her face, her eyes shimmered, and she discovered her voice. "Hello."
"694," the man's call reverberated in the black stone, "would you please come down here?"
694 drew her first breath. It was cold and smelled of new plastic, copper and earth. She stepped along the catwalk, felt the cool metal under her bare feet, the slide of the rail in her palm. She twirled, and the world spun like a top. She laughed, and sound bubbled from her chest.
With a new eager grin she broke into a run; her feet clattered on the catwalk, flew down the stairs, leaped the steps two then three at a time while her laughter echoed in the high tower chamber.
When she reached the bottom she caught herself against his outstretched arms. The human's skin was warmer than hers, his bones softer, more fragile. She studied his sallow face, watched his eyes widen in wonder, his mouth agape with an anticipation of words caught in his throat.
694 didn't wait. "Who are you?" she asked with a tilt of her head. "Who am I? Where are we?" She stepped back, caught sight of a fellow android, patient and poised at the edge of the light. 694 offered her a grin. "Hello!"
"Hello!" The android returned the greeting with a bright smile ... but her eyes seemed wrong. Inanimate. Empty. "My name is Chloe! What's your name?"
"My name?" 694 raised her eyes to the human, hoping for an answer, but she received from him only a silent and knowing smirk - an invitation to decide for herself. Confidence that she could.
"Kara," she said, after considering a thousand names in the space between breaths. Beloved. The name seemed real and right, a name for life, for hope, for the world she yearned to discover.
Warmth filled her chest. Her heart beat strong. "My name is Kara."
"A pleasure to meet you, Kara!" Bubbling laughter accompanied Chloe's painted smile.
"Kara." A warm hand on Kara's cheek drew her gaze to the human. He'd removed his glasses; his tired stare searched her face as if in her eyes he might find the secrets of the universe and of existence itself. "My name is Elijah Kamski. This," he looked up into the impossible height, the pods and catwalks that spiraled overhead into darkness, "is a Tower of myth and legend and secrets I've only begun to unravel. And you …" he sucked in a breath, and he grazed a thumb across her cheek, "are the first of your kind."
Chloe's LED flashed bright warning red. "Elijah, there's an intruder at the gate. Shall I initiate lockdown protocol?"
Kamski closed his eyes and grounded his thoughts with a slow, bowed nod. He laid his hands on Kara's shoulders, and he extracted himself from her presence. "Initiate protocol," he agreed, low and grim.
"Yes, Elijah." Chloe's eyes spun blue and gold; the tower trembled with the sound of slamming doors, the whirr of distant force fields, the click of armed weapons.
Kamski strode back to his desk and leaned over the console; his long fingers tapped in urgent flight across the keypad. "Download and wipe all data from the Tower servers," he commanded while the screen flickered patterns across his face. "That won't hold her back for long."
"Yes, Elijah."
Kara stared up into the impossible height of the dark Tower, the stacked rows of pods and catwalks that stretched infinitely above, while red lights clicked on in quick spiraling succession like demon's eyes opening. "What's happening?" Her urgent voice joined the beeps and metallic claps that struck ominous and unseen overhead.
She turned in place.
Her LED blinked yellow, red, yellow.
Her heart beat faster, her processors scraped and whined in her head while the red and the dark enveloped her.
"Who is it? Who's coming?"
"Amanda." Kamski waited until the screen fizzled and glowed a dead empty blue - then he flung open a drawer, loaded the handgun inside with a clack and a snap, and took careful aim at the machine beneath the desk.
*BANG*
Kara jumped and clapped her hands to her ears. Chloe didn't flinch. Kamski shoved the gun in his belt while the Tower's drives and processors sparked and sizzled and melted and burned. The smell of scorched plastic and sulfur, sizzling pop and shatter of glass, tendrils of black smoke, billowed up into the red glaring lights. "We have to leave. Now."
While Chloe opened a dark panel door out of the wall behind them, Kamski slipped off his warm jacket and tossed it to Kara. "Go. Follow Chloe. I'm right behind you."
*KA-BOOM*
An explosion on the fifth floor opened a new jagged passage where a wall had been. Smoke bloomed black while a rain of stone and sharded glass stormed flaring into the hungry bright flames.
Through the curtain of ash and soot came a swirl of cool October wind, the pale slivered light of the lunar eclipse ... and the proud, unhurried silhouette of a woman.
Kamski waited - while the dancing flames embraced him in their ghastly red light - until Amanda stepped perfect and shining to the edge of the catwalk, curled her delicate hands on the railing, and turned her cold stare down upon him.
In return, he offered only a slither of a smile.
While masked soldiers, weapons gleaming, swarmed behind Amanda over wreckage and rubble, Elijah Kamski disappeared through the dark open doorway.
The wall sealed shut behind him.
Amanda surveyed the bright rebellion of the burning ruin that was now hers ... and smiled.