John Strathmore laid down his pen and rubbed his eyes. A pile of paperwork still lurked on his desk, awaiting his review and signature. But it was past ten at night and he was tired. His secretary had gone home hours ago. The building was quiet and mostly empty, except for a security guard here and there.
Strathmore looked at the paper he had been reviewing. Updates on Project Apogee and the performance of the test subject. She had actually broken the legs, which his engineers had assured him was impossible to do.
Years ago, such progress would have pleased him. But Strathmore was a year from retirement and his enthusiasm for destroying Shadow had cooled. The monster kept to himself and hadn't harmed anyone in years. It was harder and harder to convince people in charge that the cyborg was a threat. He had started Project Apogee ten years ago, but he'd lost the drive to continue it. He'd pass the project to the younger guys who had begged for years to pitch the project to medical investors.
Footsteps in the hall outside - running footsteps. Strathmore straightened and rested one hand on the pistol in his belt.
The door burst open. A young female hedgehog burst in, her pearly quills in disarray, her white robotic limbs flashing in the light. The test subject, Dina Marsden. She skidded to a halt in front of his desk. "Get down!" she gasped. "Quick!"
Someone else was coming down the hall. Strathmore slid out of his chair and crouched behind the desk, pistol in hand.
Shadow the Hedgehog stepped inside, moving cautiously, like a hunting panther. He halted when he saw the girl.
"Dina!" he exclaimed. "What are you doing here?"
"Stopping you," she said.
Strathmore tensed. His creation was protecting him, even though they'd never met. Why? He peered around the desk.
Shadow stood there in a fighting stance, his metal hand raised before him. Dina faced him, arms outstretched.
"He deserves what's coming to him," Shadow snarled. "Stand aside."
"No!" Dina cried. "You can't do this!"
Shadow's mismatched eyes met Strathmore's. "You killed Maria, you swine. You tried to kill me. And now you've created her to kill me for you."
Strathmore stood up, aiming his pistol at his enemy's forehead, over Dina's shoulder. "That's right, Shadow. Because you're an aberration who should have been put down years ago. But you know what?" He slowly laid his pistol on the desk. "I don't care anymore."
Shadow's stance softened in shock. Then he crouched a little. "This is a trick."
"It's no trick," Strathmore said. "Look at me. I'm turning seventy next year. You've kept your record disappointingly clean. I can't muster the energy to bother with you."
"But you made her!" Shadow exclaimed, pointing at Dina. "She's going to hunt me no matter where I go!"
Strathmore shrugged. "Maybe. Project Apogee was about creating her. The military can use her how they like. It's not up to me."
Dina stepped sideways and looked from the old man to the cyborg. "Wait. So you don't want Shadow dead?"
"I don't care about him either way," Strathmore replied. "You're a fine test subject, Dina. Thank you for intervening when you did."
Shadow growled and pointed at Strathmore. "You ruined my revenge, scum. I'll let you live out the rest of your pointless life. And you." He looked at Dina, dropping his attack stance entirely. He threw his arms wide. "Why must you side with GUN, after all they've done?"
"I couldn't let you murder him," Dina said, her voice choked. "I'd never be able to look you in the face again."
Shadow gazed at her in silence a moment. Then he gave a tiny shrug. "You've made your point." He spun on his heel and left the office.
Dina pulled out an empty chair and sat down, hands over her face.
Strathmore watched her cautiously. "Why did you do that?"
She looked up, tears glistening in her eyes. "Because I love him."
Strathmore wanted to laugh, and a sad, ironic laugh it would have been. "It's pointless to love a Shadow."
"It saved your life tonight," she said.
He sighed and sat in his desk chair. "That it did."
Dina returned to the hospital shortly before midnight, tired, her legs and back aching. She found doctors and agents everywhere, running from place to place and barking orders.
Agent L spotted her as she entered. "Here she is!" he shouted up the hall.
Everyone converged on her. "Where have you been?" the head agent exclaimed. "We've had a report that Shadow attacked General Strathmore himself! There's still time for you to catch Shadow if you run!"
That was how Dina found herself back on the road, streetlights flickering past, as she ran in pursuit of the hedgehog she most didn't want to see.
She found him walking down the street in his jacket, one more anonymous pedestrian. If she hadn't seen him every day for months, she would have passed him by. Instead, she ran straight to him. "Shadow!"
He looked up, his expression cold. "What do you want?"
"Run!" she screamed in a whisper. "They've sent me to track you, and they're right behind me in armored vehicles!"
Shadow stiffened, looking down the street toward the oncoming headlights. Then he ran like a frightened deer.
Shadow didn't want to deal with this right now. Shame roiled inside him: shame that Dina had been right. Killing Strathmore would have accomplished nothing. The man had ceased being Shadow's enemy, after all this time.
Beneath the shame, he was grateful to Dina for stopping him. Shadow had never actually killed anyone, saving that honor to bestow upon his worst enemy. Now, perhaps, he would never kill anyone, despite the high tech weapons built into his body.
For now, he had to escape. His trump card, an orange chaos emerald, nestled in a hip pocket. He could always teleport away if the pursuit got too hot. He only wanted to speak to Dina first. He had to get away for a while, let the hue and cry due down. Then he would return and quietly take her away, remove the explosive from her back, begin a new life far away with a beautiful companion at his side.
He swung around a light pole and dashed down a side street. Dina was right on his heels, as he had trained her. Time to take the chase where vehicles couldn't follow.
He swerved into an alley, leaped up a fire escape ladder, and climbed furiously.
"No fair!" Dina yelped behind him. "I don't even know if my legs will bend like that!"
"You could let me escape," he said over his shoulder. "Say it was too hard to climb a ladder."
She growled, jumped for the bottom rung of the ladder, and began climbing.
Shadow reached the fire escape and paused to watch her. Dina climbed well, but her newly-repaired leg didn't bend as easily as the other. He could leave her far behind, if he wanted.
Instead, he climbed to the roof and waited for her to catch up. After a few minutes, she did, breathing heavily. When she saw him standing there, she opened both hands. "Why are you still here? Run away!"
"I'm going to leave," he told her gently. "They have to believe that I've gone. Once things have calmed down, in a few months, I'll come back for you. You'll vanish, and far away, we'll begin a new life together."
Dina drew a deep breath. Her lower lip trembled. "That's probably the best plan," she whispered. "I can't escape on my own."
He pulled out the orange gem and held it out. It glowed like an ember in the darkness. Dina pressed both hands to her mouth. "You have a chaos emerald?"
"It allows me to teleport," he told her. "It's how I'll rescue you. But for now-"
Footsteps rang against the fire escape's metal. Voices shouted.
"Go!" Dina cried, waving her arms. "Hurry!"
Shame still burned inside him. He had to apologize before he left. "Dina, I..."
The first soldier reached the roof. He spotted the two cyborgs and raised his weapon.
Shadow looked at Dina in desperation. He opened his mouth to tell her to drop. She gave him the same look.
Then she raised both arms and shot him with every tranquilizer dart she carried.
Splinters of pain filled Shadow's chest. One dart stuck in his cheek. He frantically tugged them out, but a numbness spread from each point of contact. The math ran through his head. Three milligrams of tranquilizer could not overcome his healing nanites, but that had been eight darts. Twenty-four milligrams might stop his heart. At the very least, he was going down fast.
Dina jumped between him and the soldier. "I already got him! Hold your fire."
The world wavered and went dim. Shadow didn't collapse so much as float downward, light as a leaf, until his head hit the rooftop. It was comfortable there. So nice to lie down and rest. The chaos emerald rolled from his limp hand. Dina scooped it up and stuck it in her vest pocket.
His eyes slowly closed, and he fell asleep for a long, long time.
Dina's heart was sick. She accompanied the soldiers as they bound Shadow's arms and legs and conveyed him to the hospital. There they lashed him to a bed like a mental patient, and put him on a anesthetic drip to keep him unconscious.
The GUN agents praised Dina to the skies. They promised her money, accolades, further freedoms, anything they could think of.
Dina endured it, standing in a corner because sitting was uncomfortable. Mostly, she gazed at her sculpted plastic feet with the metal framing.
It would have been better if they'd let me die.
Her powerful, augmented body had enabled her to chase and capture Shadow. But had that been truly what had caused him to stop and wait for her? He'd had plenty of time to escape across the roof tops. Instead, he'd lingered there to tell her goodbye. He would have escaped if not for that.
I snared him by the heart.
Dina's guilt was like bottomless quicksand. She sank deeper and deeper into it as hours passed, then days. She had let herself love this dangerous, renegade cyborg, and he had returned her feelings. And look where it had gotten them. He was unconscious in a secure ward with GUN engineers crowing over him. She was petted and praised like an obedient dog.
How many more people like him would she have to hunt down?
Often she lurked in the hall outside his room, listening to the doctors and engineers talk. Shadow had been an incredible specimen before he had been augmented. He was composed of layers of technology, some robotic, some nanotech, some genetic. Specialists were being flown in to study him.
Finally, after Shadow had been contained for a week, Dina went to the head GUN agent. "Could I please see Shadow? I'm so curious about him."
The agent frowned at her for a long moment. "I suppose if you want to see him, it'd better be today. Let me check with the doctors."
They let her into the room that afternoon, when there was a lull between scientists' visits. Shadow was still strapped to the same bed, an IV dripping drugs into his living wrist. His black fur and metal stood out against the white sheets. They had stripped off his clothing, revealing his augmented body in all its dubious glory. Dina gazed at the white, scar-like line down his torso and stomach where metal met flesh. It zigzagged here and there, following the contours of bone and muscle. She gathered from the doctors' chatter that this line was composed of nanites that had stitched him together.
She took his limp metal hand. It was cold. "I'm so sorry," she whispered to his expressionless face. "You probably can't even hear me. But I did this to you, and I'm sorry."
His robot eye flickered on, the red pupil fixing on her face. Shadow's lips moved in the faintest of whispers. "I'm sorry, too."
Dina glanced at the IV. "How are you awake?" she whispered. "They've got you on enough morphine to kill a horse."
"Shadow is asleep," he whispered. "I am the AI in his robot half."
Dina found herself facing the weirdness of the Mecha-fusion project. No wonder the engineers were so excited. The robotics could function even when the living body was unconscious? An army of soldiers like this would be the most deadly spies on the planet.
"I want to help," she whispered. "But I don't know what to do."
"They plan to begin dissection tonight," not-Shadow whispered. "There's not much time left."
Dissection! Dina pressed a hand to her mouth to stifle a cry. This sculpted body, flesh and metal, would be cut open like a fish at the market. "I've got to do something!"
"The chaos emerald," not-Shadow whispered. "Where is it?"
"In my pocket," Dina replied.
The metal hand shifted, turning palm-upward under the restraining band. "I have a little strength left. Hand it to me, then extract the IV."
With a worried glance at the door, Dina slipped the fiery orange gem from her vest pocket and placed it in his hand. The metal fingers curled around the gem, gripping it tightly.
Shadow inhaled deeply, his head rolling from side to side. "The IV, quick."
Dina circled the bed and looked at the plastic tube feeding into his wrist, secured by layers of adhesive tape. She ripped the tape off and carefully pulled the needle out of the vein. It bled, of course. She snatched up a wad of gauze from a nearby table and taped it over the wound.
"Dina," Shadow murmured. His living eye had opened a crack. He beckoned with the fingers on his living hand.
She grasped his hand and stooped over him. "Yes?"
He whispered in her ear, "Chaos control."