2. An Eye for an Eye

She would be back. If she really blamed me for her sorry state, she'd be back. I knew enough about revenge to know the desire didn't die so easily.

What I didn't know was how, or when, or where. She'd blown her only shot. She couldn't leave the industrial district, and I sure as hell wasn't going there again; besides, she had nothing left to bait me with. I felt sure that this wasn't over – not by a long shot – but it also seemed I was holding all the cards.

Okay, so she broke my Game Slave. That was the number one thing.

I could've just forgotten about her. Left her to waste away on the fourth floor of that old lemon factory, until her robot began to rust along with the rest of the machinery, until she was nothing but a skeleton that somebody would find when they finally revamped the place and maybe think weird, these don't look like human bones before they swept her away with the cobwebs and the dust. Let that be her penance for screwing with me.

But the thought was less than satisfying. For one thing, she already knew it was coming. For another thing, I wouldn't be inflicting it myself; I'd just be slumped on the couch, watching hobo cage fights on The Violence Channel until my eyeballs bled, wishing I had my Game Slave or at least that I'd broken a few fingers to pay for it. I mean, I always figured that was the boring part about being royalty, right? You got to sit up on your throne and shout "off with his head" right and left, but you were never the one wielding the axe.

I could've traded her misery for Dib's, and told her he had her ship. I'd get rid of her that way for sure. But there was no vengeance in it, and as much as I tended to relish Dib's pain, he hadn't done anything recently to make me need to hear him howl. Besides, that might actually qualify as being nice to her, and I wasn't in the business of being nice.

I could've gone back out there with a twelve-pack of soda and a chainsaw, and squeezed myself a nice cool glass of alien guts. It wouldn't be too hard. She would have deserved it, and I wouldn't have felt bad about it – at least, I told myself I wouldn't.

I didn't actually know. I'd never needed to destroy anyone so thoroughly as all that. Usually, when I got it into my head to get revenge, the victim in question was like a red-and-white striped target: there were a lot of larger rings circling the bullseye, nonvital points I could strike. I could hurt someone without obliterating them, and usually, that was enough.

But Tak was all bullseye now. Other than her life, there was nothing I could take from her that she hadn't already lost, and I wasn't sure I really wanted to kill her. Maybe I was a heartless jerk, but I wasn't a murderer – not in cold blood, anyway. It squicked me out to think about just straight-up crushing her like I'd crushed the robot's claw-cord, even if I knew I could.

So what was there to do? Nothing but think. Nothing but wait.

Two nights after my foray into the industrial district, I woke suddenly for no reason I could place, the clock by my bed reading four AM. Years of living with Dib – Dib scattering thermometers to check for cold spots, Dib dusting my windowsill for chupacabra footprints, Dib summoning demons to curse me with pigmouth – had taught me to know instinctively when someone else was in my room, and that night, I was instantly on guard.

It didn't take me long to see them. A pair of purple eyes, locked on me from across the room, almost glowing in the darkness. A cable cut through the air and my arm shot up to catch it; with it twined around my forearm, I dragged her out of the shadows to the edge of my bed, the heels of her boots digging into my carpet, the anger in her eyes redoubling with every inch.

"Brave girl," I said with a grin, becoming increasingly aware that not taking her seriously was the best button I could push. "Not all humans are the best night drivers, you know. It's a good thing nobody mistook you for a little iguana crawling down the street; you could be roadkill right about now."

The cable retracted with a snap. "I never did anything to you," she growled, half to herself, half to me. "I never had it out for you. Why are you always ruining everything?"

"You mean your robot's claw? It's in the trash if you want it. Hey, lucky cat's paw, right?"

She looked as if she'd have liked to sink those almost-fangs into my throat. "Just one more reason to end your pitiful life."

"Right. You're still on about revenge, huh?"

"Irken code of honor. As humans would say, an eye for an eye."

I snorted. "You lost to Zim. Aren't you a little beyond honor?"

In an explosion of silver and red, what seemed a thousand different horrific implements sprouted from the armory on her back – five hundred lasers trained on my forehead, five hundred blades aimed at my heart. In the same second, I snapped the fingers of my free hand, and a ring of red lights wreathed my room. My security plushies' eyes flickered on as their defenses deployed, accompanied by a flourish of canned cackling.

She glanced around and spat something in a language I didn't understand, eyes thinning to violet slits. I smiled. "We can do this all night, babe."

I watched her process the situation, frustration mounting inside of her until she nearly burst at her seams. Finally, she withdrew her weaponry, and backed away from my bed. "You think you're so clever, child," she hissed, then skittered out my window, the bob of her wonky antenna the last thing I saw before she disappeared.

I was almost glad she did what she did to my Game Slave. If she hadn't, I might've actually felt sorry for her.

She tried again. I got texts and e-mails from scrambled or fake sources, trying to lure me to the outskirts of town on false pretenses; I rolled my eyes and hit "delete." I'd be hanging in the courtyard during free period and catch glimpses of silver in the brush, the telltale glint of the robot's red eyes; it was gone within a few shakes of a soda can.

I would find suspicious little tokens in my room, spherical widgets that beeped and blinked from inside my desk drawers or under my mattress, engraved with the same symbol I'd seen on her ship. I scooped them up, dunked them in the sink, and programmed my dolls to fry intruders on sight.

Weeks went by. I tried to buy a new Game Slave, only to find out that the Game Slave 6 had been discontinued in anticipation of the release of the Game Slave 7 in the spring (spring being, at best, an excruciating three months away). I watched reruns of The Real World: Transylvania on The Vampire Network. I picked up a new girl, Zara – one of those poser goth types, strutting around like the star of the show in black tutus and spiked dog collars, but her Hot Topic lipstick was sweet all the same – and she proved pretty good at distracting me, especially once she got her tongue pierced.

One Friday night, we'd nuked some popcorn and popped in a movie – Intestines of War 5: Revenge of the Cyborg Dinosaurs – and were curled up on the couch, the living room lights dimmed. I had just unhooked Zara's bra when I heard the noise – first a zap, then a crash, from a direction that was unmistakably my room.

I groaned. "Be back in a second," I said as I heaved myself off of the couch, and without bothering to pause the movie, tromped up the stairs.

When I opened my door, who should I see but that frickin' robot, perched wide-eyed on my windowsill? From the smoking laser-burns speckling my bedspread, I deduced that it had dodged the blasts from my dolls, and frowned as it turned to dart out the window.

"No you don't, little alley cat," I snarled under my breath. Grabbing a stone statuette of a zombie unicorn from where it sat on my desk, I flung it at the back of the robot's head, and it connected – nearly punched a hole through to the other side, when it hit with a force that made the robot's red eyes go grey. It wobbled, sparked, and tumbled with a clang to my bed, the statuette still lodged in the back of its head.

"This has gone on long enough. Let's see how Tak likes me disposing of her plaything."

I extracted the statuette to find a dent crescenting the robot's head, making it look like a half-eaten apple. Plunking its unmoving shell on a shelf above my bed, I slammed the door shut behind me and went back downstairs to Zara and our movie, just in time to see a T-rex waste a barracks with its laser eyes.

I finished with Zara before the movie ended and sent her home, feeling no need nor desire to see her in my bed the next morning (and knowing that, in any case, her presence there would make the night's events both intolerably awkward and unfathomably complicated). Then, I got ready for bed, slid under my covers, and waited.

That night, she didn't waste time watching me. No sooner did the tapered tips of her ladybug-legs (well, spider-legs, really, but that thing on her back still reminded me of a ladybug) pry open my window than they unfurled towards the robot's shell, and I snapped my fingers beneath the blanket; at my signal, the plushies flanking the robot woke in defense mode, seizing its limp arms in their claws.

To her credit, she didn't play tug-of-war with them, though it would've been amusing to see her try. Instead, she vaulted in through the window and turned the silvery limbs on me, looming above me, seething. "You'll return my property if you know what's good for you, child."

"Uh-huh. Are we really going to do this again?"

Another snap of my fingers and a bean-filled purple gorilla lumbered over to my bed, slinging one arm around her waist (or what waist she had, anyway – the more often I saw her, the more I found it funny that she hadn't changed in six years, what with me so much taller and a considerably different shape) and shoving a fist up against her neck. From its knuckles, a row of razor sharp, Wolverine-style claws extended, glistening in the moonlight.

"Give her back," Tak spat in the gorilla's grip, the limbs returning to their ports like snakes slinking back to their burrows. "She's mine."

"What happened to the Irken code of honor? An eye for an eye. A toy for a toy."

I could see the muscles in her face working, twitching as if to restrain an outburst. "Mimi is more than a toy. Give her back!"

"Mimi is a hunk of metal and circuitry, just like my Game Slave. I'll give her back if you give me one good reason why I should."

She squeezed her eyes shut a moment, and I found myself studying her. Watching her chest flutter in quick spasms of breath, her hands ball into fierce, useless fists. Like it always seemed to these days, my gaze drifted to her twisted antenna; for half a second, I felt a disturbing urge to reach out and straighten it myself. I wondered how it would feel between my fingers – if it could be bent back into place, like a pipe cleaner, or if it had to be set like a broken bone. If it hurt.

"You ruined everything," she said when she opened her eyes, her voice nearly a whisper. "I had a second chance, and you crushed it. I die a little more every day because of you. What would you have me do?"

"I could ask you the same thing." I leveled my gaze with hers. "You were going to wipe out my entire race. What would you have done? Sat back and let it happen?"

"I would have kept my filthy human nose out of the affairs of superior beings," she snapped.

"Funny. You don't look so superior right now."

To that, she said nothing. Just glared at me, silently steaming, coursing with an energy for which there was no outlet. It was an expression I recognized, having seen it stamped across the faces of my more rebellious flings – those girls who were always pissed off at everything, at their parents, at their friends, at society, full of this huge directionless anger that melted with their eyeliner once I got to work with my vibrator.

I wondered, briefly, horrifically, if she would swallow that cure as easily as they did. If I could slip my hand under her skirt and turn that fire inside to a better purpose, put a nice big crack in her pretty voice.

To distract myself from that incredibly weird thought, I glanced up at the robot, my fingers poised to snap. "So. An eye for an eye, right?"

"NO!" she cried, so loud I actually flinched. "Please don't hurt Mimi! She's—all I've got left!"

I could have – could have, would have, should have – done it anyway. Should've had my dolls roast the robot right then. Maybe toss it to the stuffed lion with the car-crusher jaws. I could've had the gorilla cut her throat right then and there, and watched her bleed out on my bed.

But who knew how hard that'd be to wash out of my blanket?

"You're pathetic."

Rolling my eyes, I craned up to the shelf, grabbed the robot by one leg, and threw it at her. Then, I nodded to the gorilla, and it chucked them both out the open window – Tak, and the robot in her arms.