AN: Hello all. Ten days into the new year, and this story hit 1k views! Thanks to everyone who's read so far, and special thanks to everyone who's reviewed. It's nice to know some people in the fandom are enjoying this story with me. As usual, please feel free to review if you liked the chapter, and even if you didn't! With that, read on!

Chapter Fourteen

Abbi was getting really tired of falling.

She'd fallen before, as a part of certain tests, and the swooping sensation that accompanied it was a familiar companion. It was pretty safe to say at this point, however, that she'd never fallen for this long, and the familiarity of that sinking feeling was wearing off fast. Besides, in her experience, the fear of falling was always held at bay by her own careful calculations and the comforting snugness of her boots.

Now, she only had one of those, and she could feel the difference intensely.

Abbi didn't dare shut her eyes—the calculating part of herself wouldn't let her—but she longed to shut out the sight of nothing but darkness and the concrete walls scrawled with yellow numbers going by almost too fast to see—

1500 Meters. 1750 Meters. 2000 Meters.

Somewhere along the way, a sort of calm washed over her—a cool indifference to the final consequence of her fall. The knowledge that she would either die a painful but mercifully sweet death or her boots would indeed save her from a several mile fall bubbled in the depths of Abbi's mind. It was a stark, fifty-fifty chance, uncertain in its outcome yet clear-cut in its possibilities, and the precision of it comforted her in some strange way.

3500 Meters. She hadn't been paying attention, and something was coming up ridiculously fast—

The crash was deafening, as Abbi slammed into something and sent it spiraling chaotically to the floor below from whatever ledge it had been resting on. She herself followed moments later, with a painful jolt that made every fiber in her body vibrate.

One minute. Two. She should be dead. "Should" being the key term, she noted somewhat in shock, as she inspected the miraculous black and white boots that appeared to have saved her life. If she hadn't been standing in a pile of sludgy wet wood splinters and goodness knew what else, Abbi might have taken the boots off and kissed them.

Ok…she was definitely in shock. Though her mother and to some extent, Caroline, held a special place in her heart that would always be tinged with the warmth of genuine affection, Abbi wasn't the type to go around hugging and kissing the objects of her affection. She found the practice ridiculous and, quite frankly, unhygienic, so to ever consider it—in relation to an inanimate object, no less—was clearly a sign of an abnormal mental state.

Of course…it was probably normal to feel shock at the very least after everything that had just happened.

Her mother was…well, she was…

Abbi didn't know what was wrong, only that something was.

But she was nothing if not her mother's daughter—if not biologically, then intellectually, and really, that was all that counted—and she took charge of the situation.

Dusting—those looked like wood chips, as far as she could tell—from the front of her jumpsuit, Abbi swept a critical eye around the huge space. It was dim, with impossibly huge geometric spheres hanging high above her, their manifold facets glinting with the barest touch of light at the edges. All around, there lay wreckage of the sort one would expect from a toddler throwing a temper tantrum—that is to say, if the toddler happened to be extraordinarily large and strong enough to toss steel girders around like toothpicks.

Admittedly, not my strongest metaphor, Abbi mused as she tested the weight of a particularly intact girder that seemed to bridge the piles of rubble around her quite nicely. Deciding after some deliberation that it would hold her weight, she ran lightly along it, her lithe frame practiced from years of testing. Beyond it, more structures abounded, of a distinctly chaotic variety. Curved half-cylinders of heavy concrete formed inexplicable tunnels above packed earth. Cheap plywood signs, labeled helpfully with such friendly messages as "No Trespassing" and "Quarantine Area" and "Vitrification Order", speckled the nightmarish landscape. Abbi swept past them, determined to find something useful.

She came to a door—or rather, several—surrounded on every side by a surprisingly pristine mesh fence. More warning signs plastered the wire fence, as if the poor beleaguered employee tasked with them had sneezed and decided to leave them there in awkward clusters. Still, Abbi had to admit, they got the message across. Not that she intended to obey it.

The fence was clearly labeled electrified, so in theory, attempting to climb it would be an excessively bad idea. Her sharp eyes caught the familiar white color and grained texture of some panels just beyond, and she cursed, trying not to think about how ridiculously easy it would be to get beyond the fence if she only had a portal gun. But she'd not been given one, and unless she could find one down in this…this hole, she would simply have to get along without it.

Although…the lights might be on just beyond the fence, which might mean that the electric fence was powered up, but…

Abbi found a twisted piece of metal, picked it up, and tossed it towards the fence. If it was truly electrified, then surely it would conduct the metal easily, perhaps make some sort of zappy noise to let her know. The twisted metal shard clanged against the mesh and…nothing. Perhaps a non-conductive material would be a better indicator. She wiggled one of the smaller signs out of the dirt and snapped the wooden stalk free. Warily, she prodded the fence, pressing the wood against it for a good sixty seconds. Still nothing. She felt the end of the wooden stick. Not even warm.

"Good enough." She muttered, though she hated anything short of perfection when it came to most things. Heaven help her, but mediocrity might be the thing that got her out of here.

If Caroline had hands, or perhaps more specifically, if she had a hand full of long, well-manicured claws, she would be clicking them. She deserved something as satisfying as the rhythmic tattoo of drumming nails after the morning she'd had. Besides, she needed something calculated to keep her distracted.

She was, by nature, a computer, after all, and calculation was her strength. –and after I catch that little brat, I'm going to use her and then burn her and crush the ashes—no. No, first, I'm going to upload her little consciousness into a core, and then I'll crush her, because then I can punish her for eternity…yes, that sound perfect…

The thought of her screaming in pain was a delicious sentiment, sending the tiniest ripple of euphoria through her systems. It spurred her on, urging her to scheme and plot and do anything to get more of those tiny ripples. It was a pervasive ache, reaching through every last thread of her awareness with an intense hunger to destroy that rotten, horrible, nasty—

Mentally, Caroline stepped back from the issue, as the panels in the central chamber shifted and rippled with her abrupt change in thought. Calculating. She must remember that. The little girl—she refused to use her project name unless it was absolutely necessary—was not a problem that she could simply gloss over, dumb as she might have seemed when she first came out of suspension. Honestly, all that power, and she was bested by broken glass; it was incredibly frustrating to her sense of intelligence that the result of nearly a billion dollars of research was a child who couldn't master the simple task of putting on shoes.

Yet Caroline knew she couldn't quite count the child out. For one thing, she possessed a certain calculating air herself, under that childish veneer, and Caroline knew better than to underestimate personages of apparent stupidity; she'd seen the tapes of when the little Intelligence-Dampening sphere took over the facility and knew better than to assume that idiotic individuals were completely without advantages. As some poorly-conceived act of perceived mercy, most stupid people, be they perfectly finite human beings or people stuffed into robots, were blessed with a measure of charm and charisma that bordered on the ridiculous. Just look how the I.D. sphere had worked that to his advantage; for heaven's sake, he wasn't even able to travel on his own, yet he managed to persuade a lunatic to help him take over the facility with that idiotic charm of his.

Furthermore, Caroline knew that the girl was far from stupid. The records had been very clear on that point, and reading between the lines had given her a clear picture on just how clever the little project could be. Two attempted escapes, both foiled, but not by preventative security measures—oh no. The little girl had managed to get as far as an elevator during one attempt—a literal straight shot to the surface—yet she'd been detained again with little trouble. The little project had enough telekinetic strength to literally force the elevator skyward and tear apart anything and anyone in her way, barring the fact that she could simply force the entire mainframe to comply. But she hadn't done either of those things.

Caroline would have smiled, if it were possible. Grinned even, maybe. It was precisely this little thing, cultivated by the project heads and so inherently ingrained in the project's very person, that would be her undoing. Caroline would use this weakness—her unflinching, uncompromising empathy—as leverage. If Caroline played her cards right and maneuvered the girl into just the right position, it would be laughably easy to use that empathy to crack her open like a clam, then crush her—

"No, no no no no no." Caroline muttered to herself, the sound echoing out loud in the empty chamber. She couldn't kill her quite yet. Not quite yet. She still needed her for just a little bit longer. Just long enough to help with a little…problem. Then Caroline could make her suffer.