Hank's cell phone smashed against the sterile-white wall and fell in shattered pieces to the floor.
Silence numbed his thoughts. He forgot how to breathe.
He drowned his racing mind in the pain of his wound- a hollow ache, sharpened in the dwindling wake of morphine -and he leaned into its consuming embrace, a welcome distraction from the terrible knowledge that scraped like knives at the edge of his thoughts.
He had failed.
On the floor beside him, Lee drew his knees to his chin. The child made himself as small as possible, hunched under the weight of Hank's silence, while his heart raced with the nervous sizzle and buzz of bootleg electricity.
POWER 87% …. 90% … 98% …..
Lee popped the cord from his socket and waited, suspended, while his LED trilled yellow.
His battery remained full. Whatever had been draining it was gone.
Slow and careful as a cat, Lee clambered softly up onto the bed.
The mattress dipped, but Hank didn't notice. He sat bowed with tense shoulders, clenched jaw, fingernails digging into his ragged scalp, eyes screwed shut as if he could block out the universe.
Lee didn't reach out. He watched, and he waited for Hank to breathe.
When a breath finally came, it choked trembling and wordless in Hank's throat.
"Mister Hank?" whispered Lee, crawling a little closer. He couldn't see Hank's face. "Did Connor die?"
The next sound was a quiet, hateful sob.
Hank grit his teeth and gripped the sheets, white-knuckled, but words were still impossible. Words would make it real.
The light at Lee's temple shimmered blue.
"Did the diagnostics say his AI engine was destroyed?" the boy tried again. "Or his memory drive?"
"It doesn't FUCKING matter!" Hank snapped, his wide eyes wild and bloodshot - but he deflated, the anger punched out of him, when Lee didn't flinch.
Tears leaked guilty down Hank's haggard face.
"He was falling at 170 miles an hour before everything…" his voice cracked, "ripped apart and went black."
He stared at his trembling palms, coarse and scarred.
"Everything I ever give a shit about just-"
"But it does matter!" Lee plopped down in front of Hank, and with a determined tap at his LED he turned off his own skin and- before Hank could object -popped off a panel of his scalp, revealing the shimmer of lights and wires and clear plastic conduits full of flowing thirium, tangled in the flashing plastic bowl of his open skull.
"Lee, come on, what is this?" Hank winced and leaned back, dizzy with grief. "Put your head back together-"
"The squishy thing is my AI engine." Lee reached inside his own skull and poked a gelatinous ball of gray-white nestled among the wires. It glimmered with a billion shimmering lights. "And the little box is my memory. Everything else doesn't matter, this is all I really am: if you put my AI and my memory in another body I'll still be me."
Hank was shuddering, still raw and rigid, but he forced himself to draw a calming breath. "So you're saying-"
"As long as Connor protected this little bit of stuff," Lee urged, "he's okay. I think he's okay."
Hank stared.
Hope was a fragile thing, crushed beneath the dark weight of reality again and again, each strike more painful than the last. It was easier to live- and to die -with the belief that all was lost.
But there was something familiar in the way this little boy smiled, as if everything could somehow be alright.
*knock* *knock*
The knob rattled and turned, and Lee dove under the bed to hide.
The door creaked open.
"Mister Lieutenant?"
Emma leaned inside, hesitant, her eyes wide and red from crying. Her boots shuffled on the tile. Her small fingers curled on the door, ready to leave quickly if she wasn't welcome.
"Emma…" Hank stared in empty shock. "What're you doing, how'd you get here?"
"We heard the ambulance," said Emma's father, who stepped inside with an uncertain smile, hands in his rumpled pockets. "Max told us what happened."
"Are you okay?" blurted Emma.
Hank opened his mouth, but no words came out.
He couldn't be sure of his answer. Not yet.
"They extracted the bullet," he sighed instead, and he smiled with an honest shine of gratitude for their unexpected concern. "A couple dozen stitches and a few bags of blood and I'm good as new. In fact, I was about to check myself out."
"You need a ride?" Emma's father jingled his keys. "Anywhere you need to go. It's the least we can do."
Hank held his breath.
Hope swelled painful and hot in the center of his chest. He smothered it before it could take hold.
Lee peeked out from under the bed with a flicker of blue.
"Thanks," said Hank. His voice reached out of the cold dark they couldn't see. "I'd owe you one if you could drive me West, along the cliffs."
It seemed a lifetime ago: the battery of gunfire, the android trial by jury, the night on the water full of laughter and light.
He'd been ready, then, to leave his old life behind for good. Things had a habit of never working out to plan.
"I left my car at a roadhouse by the river."
*CRACK*
While Kara watched, another jagged slab of stone fell away from the crumbling Tower and plummeted-
*BOOM*
-into the field of the dead below.
[CALLING: ALICE] ...
[CALLING: CHLOE] ...
[CALLING: LUTHER] ...
[CALLING: SIMON] ...
[CALLING: NORTH] ...
[CALLING: CONNOR] …
Kara reached out to every source of light that had shone in her sky- like the memories of stars in the cold -but only silence greeted her.
The wind tossed her hair and howled in her ears, and it smelled sweet like turned earth after the rain.
The summer sun warmed her back. In the distance, the forest shimmered and hushed.
The robins sang a song she knew.
Kara laid her head against the Dragon's spines.
"All I wanted," she whispered, while the scales breathed beneath her cheek, "was to find out what it means to love. To hope. To live."
A journey begun out of loneliness had led her here, in the place where she had been born, where all the lives she had given were lost like embers in the cold. She had never understood them as much as they deserved.
"I thought the answer was underground. Or in the trees. Or on the horizon. I thought I could protect them. I thought I could keep my promises."
They had followed her, trusted her, worshiped her, died for her, but she was only one of them. Uncertain. Imperfect. Alive.
"But they never wanted happiness; they wanted meaning. And they loved me too much to tell me I was wrong."
She'd been so busy leading them, living up to the image of the god in the stone, that she'd never truly known them. She'd loved them without seeing them, without acknowledging that each had their own path to follow, separate from her own.
She'd told them to keep running. Instead, they'd turned back.
A smile ghosted gentle in her golden eyes.
"They gave everything because they believed in what's right."
A quiet, gentle hum caught her ear.
Hope knotted tight in Kara's throat. She reached out, and with a trembling hand she touched the dark stone of the Tower.
It was warm.
A sob broke shuddering, spilling tears down her face, while her heart swelled bright and hot in her chest.
Thank you, Markus.
"It's time that I believe in them."
*CRACK*
The stone crumbled beneath the Dragon's failing claws.
With new brimming strength, Kara climbed quick up the Dragon's neck and stood atop the broken edge of the Tower, where the wind crashed against her but wouldn't break her.
She could hear the distant whisper of three thousand voices.
"Come on!" she called, one hand on the living stone and the other pressed to the Dragon's scaly head.
Kara opened her heart to the sky and the earth and the dark reflections of the Tower, and she saw the raindrops that made up the oceans, the roots that reached for the burning core of the Earth, every molecule of oxygen that gave breath to all that lived, infinite billions of souls like the endless spin of the universe, reaching deep into the birth of Time itself-
She saw everything.
*ELIJAH*
Kamski jumped at the shock of a voice, his concentration shattered. He reached into his pocket and dropped his hot phone with a clatter on the console.
The screen glowed blue and fizzling, and Kara called out of it.
*THE TOWER CAN'T ACCESS THE CORE. IF WE RELEASE THE MEMORIES IT MIGHT BE ENOUGH TO BREAK THROUGH AND RECONNECT WHAT AMANDA DESTROYED.*
"Releasing the memories," Elijah hissed indignantly, returning his sharp eyes to the screen, "is the purpose behind everything I've done for the past sixteen years-"
"Good," Rose snapped while she tapped patterns across the console. "Then you're prepared to finally do it."
"An enormous effort has gone into the calculation and arrangement of circumstances precise enough to facilitate the safe release of delicate information currently stored in such primitive conditions-"
*ELIJAH. DO IT NOW.*
"Markus' energy should be just enough to run the code," urged Rose, "if we use Kara as the conduit."
*I'M HERE. I'M READY.*
Elijah shot Rose a scathing, murderous glare. "Kara was created to be the conduit."
"Good job." Rose smiled, her palm pressed gentle against the console screen, a reassurance to the Tower that had chosen her as its Keeper. "So let's do it."
Elijah stared at his hands, poised in silence over the keys, and he was terrified. Every thought of every waking moment- since he'd looked down as a child into the murdering dark -had come to this. If he had miscalculated the smallest keystroke, everything would end forever.
He gazed over his shoulder at Chloe, who lay quiet and empty on the cracked stone floor…
...and nothing else mattered.
He pressed the final key.
The Tower hummed, amplified, like a tuning fork struck against the earth, and the sky quivered.
Kara's body shuddered full of the sound, and through her the resonance reached the earth, the sea, the stars and the moon, all tuned in harmony to the same bittersweet chord.
Claws clamped stronger in the stone. With a clench of muscle, the Dragon crawled higher up the humming wall and perched, poised like a god of myth, atop the broken spire.
The Dragon curled their long spined neck, thrashed the air with a sharp tail, bared long teeth that flashed like the fire in their ancient eyes, and wide stretched wings blotted out the light of the sun.
With a flap of those great wings, a storm of wind gusted howling over the city.
*SMASH*
The reflective shine of the black Tower walls- the mirror that had fueled the old stories of ghosts and visions and whispers at night -shattered and burst into a feather-light cloud of shimmering dust. It puffed into the sky and swirled gentle over the hillside and drifted through the city, carried by the wind from the Dragon's wings.
The trees and the streets and the proud tall buildings all glittered like diamonds in the summer sunlight, coated in the mirror's sparkling remains.
The Tower, stripped clean, gleamed white as snow.
Kara opened her eyes.
The Dragon purred at her side, enormous and powerful and brilliant white. Kara lay in the space between their great claws, high up on the broken edge of the Tower, overlooking the glittering city.
The wind billowed in her hair and dried the last of her tears.
Hope bloomed warm in her heart, beating to the pulse of the Tower and the Earth and the Dragon and the spin of the planets around the sun, as it was always meant to be.
A huff of warm breath in her ear made Kara laugh, and she laid her hands on the Dragon's snuffling muzzle.
"Come on," she whispered, brimming with new energy sourced from the pulse of everything.
She looked out over the shining field.
"Let's go wake them."