In the blink of an eye, Mr. Rider, Zi, and I were all in Mr. Rider's office. The first breath I sucked in left me choking on stale air.

"Take me back!"

I screamed it again and again, becoming more shrill with each repetition, but they paid no mind. Mr. Rider removed all our NEVAs and threw them into a drawer in his desk, then moved to unbuckle my baldric and pull everything off my belt, to strip me of the only things I had that could possibly give me a chance against him. As I struggled against Mr. Rider fruitlessly, Zi worked to patch up the stab wound on his leg. When all my weaponry was discarded and Zi was done, Mr. Rider grabbed one of my arms, Zi grabbed the other, and they dragged me out of his office kicking and screaming. In the room outside of his office, Mr. Rider's Synthuman secretary sat typing away at her desk. Synthia's gray eyes followed over, and for a second as we locked eyes, I saw the nothingness in them that Mr. Rider saw. She quickly looked back to her screen, face blank, ignoring my pleas for her to help me.

I was pulled into the hallway and then into an elevator, where Mr. Rider pressed the lowest button. Once he pressed his finger to a scanner, we went plummeting down, down, and even farther down. The doors slid back open, and they pulled me into another hallway that was darker and colder than the one above.

The entire basement was made of metal, making my screams reverberate down the halls over every loud step Mr. Rider and Zi took. We went past door after door, each one with seemingly random numbers inscribed in the plaques above them, before coming to a stop at a door labeled 82662. I was re-positioned for Zi to get a better grasp of me while Mr. Rider let go. He held his thumb to the scanner next to the door, making it flash a bright green as the door opened.

Zi brought me into the room, and when Mr. Rider was in and the door was shut behind us, Zi finally let go of me. As soon as he did, I ran back to the door and slammed my finger against the scanner. It flashed red.

"You don't have permission to open the door," Mr. Rider said. "You're not getting out of here."

I tried a few more times anyway, and then tried using brute force to push the door up, but it wouldn't budge. I turned around to look for some other way out. My work at the factory had kept me mostly on the testing floor in the past, and though I never had the privilege to enter the basement, the room felt eerily familiar, and I found I wasn't surprised that there was no other escape route. There were no windows because we were underground, no doors leading into any other rooms, no vents I could fit into—my only possible escape was the door behind me, the door that wouldn't open for me. If I could just get one of them to touch the scanner...

I grabbed Zi's arm and tried to yank it toward the scanner, but before his fingers even came close to touching it, he pulled me back into his arms and held me tight.

"Let. Me. Go!"

Mr. Rider walked in front of me and crossed his arms. "Look, I'm willing to be nice, but only if you work with me."

That wasn't true and I knew it. No amount of good behavior would stop him from killing me. I continued trying to claw Zi's arms off me, barely able to see with the tears that clouded my eyes.

"Take me back!" I yelled again. "I don't understand! If you don't want me around so bad, then why can't you leave me there?!"

"Do you have any idea how much time was poured into making you? How much money? I'm not going to let you rust away in some other world. I'm recycling you so you won't be as much of a waste of resources." He bent down with his hands on his knees so we would be closer to being face-to-face, but his head was still high enough above my own to look down on me. I felt like a child being reprimanded, and the way he spoke to me made me certain that was his intention. "Now. Are we doing this the easy way, or not?"

I tilted my head back and spit in his face.

He blinked slowly, then straightened up and lifted his arm to wipe his face with his sleeve. "You've made your choice," he said, voice betraying the tranquil front he put on, trembling with his stifled anger. "Zi, take her over to the table. I want to run some diagnostics while you're still here."

The table.

'Death is on the table.'

Link was wrong. It wasn't that my death was up for discussion—it was literal.

Zi picked me up and sat down on the table, wincing slightly when he rested my weight on his leg and holding me firmly in place while Mr. Rider walked past us. I heard things rolling over behind us, and then Mr. Rider came to stand by my side with a slim cord in his hand. He pushed my head against Zi's chest to keep it still, and he slid the cord into my right ear until I heard a small click deep inside of it.

Mr. Rider walked out of my view again, and when I turned my head to peek at him, he was sitting on a chair in front of a desk with various metal tools and the computer I was hooked up to. I could hardly breathe through the overwhelming sense of dread I felt. The keys to ending my life were right on the desk next to me, and I could do nothing but sit there in Zi's arms and cry.

"Wow," Mr. Rider said under his breath. "Well, less of a waste of resources than I'd thought. Look at this, Zi. I told you I had to send her to try out NEVA first instead of you or Daina."

"Her Gy peaked at over thirty...? Isn't Gy units of radiation absorbed?" Zi asked.

"Yes. I knew she'd absorb a good amount being the first one to use it, but... Even with immediate, state-of-the-art medical intervention, that would still kill a real person in days. No wonder it was so easy to stay in contact with her via her phone and follow her all the way to that dump. She was basically a walking antenna."

It was nice to know that I had spared someone from death, but it hurt to realize I had been right from the start. He had never cared about giving me freedom from Daina, or about me being the first person to ever time travel. He was only using me so that a 'real person' wouldn't have to die. It was all for his own benefit, and none of mine.

"Though, maybe she really didn't handle it so well..." he went on, quieter. "She was fine for years, and only started acting up after being exposed."

"I-I only started 'acting up' after you—!"

"Oh, quiet, you," Mr. Rider interrupted me. "I can see how overheated that head of yours is right now on my screen. You're incapable of thinking straight."

I couldn't deny that I wasn't thinking straight, but what I was going to say was still true. It wasn't radiation that made me 'act up'—it was him.

"Is it safe to be so close to her?" Zi asked.

"It should be entirely contained inside her. Even if it wasn't, she's about three-fourths of the way through her automatic self-decontamination process at this point. It's nowhere near as bad as it was."

"But you're going to be touching her organs and recycling or donating what you can... Is that safe?"

"I'll be taking safety measures to not come into contact with any radioactive material myself, and I'll be sure to have everything fully decontaminated before recycling or donating it. Everything will be fine. I know what you're attempting to do, and it's not going to work, Zi. Stop trying to come up with any excuse you can to get her out of this, already. My decisions are final."

They both went quiet, and there was more tapping from his desk. Every now and again, Mr. Rider would mumble some technobabble that I didn't understand. The only information I picked up was him saying that my main battery had died, and I was running on my backup, which would have run out of charge soon, too.

"Look," he said, finally speaking up in a clear voice. "There. Code modified 9/14. She... She really did it."

"She ... actually overwrote her programming?"

"Like everyone said. What more proof do you want that we need to put an end to this now?"

Zi didn't say anything back.

I heard Mr. Rider stand up, and he pulled the cord out of my ear. "You can leave now. Synthia will help me handle everything from here."

"Can I have some alone time with her? Please? Just a few minutes," Zi begged. "And then I want to talk to you alone, before..."

Mr. Rider huffed. "Fine. I'll be in my office. I'll send Synthia down when your time is up—you'll help her get Vanna ready."

Zi scrunched his face up. "I don't want to—"

"And I don't want to deal with her kicking and scratching me," Mr. Rider said. "It's the least you could do to help me when all of this could have been over with months ago if you hadn't let her get away the first time."

He walked away before Zi could argue. Once the door zipped shut, Zi hugged me tighter. I didn't want to hug him back at first, too angry at him for betraying me, until I realized this was the last hug I would ever get in my life. I wrapped my arms around his back, hugging him equally as tight and crying into his chest.

"I'm so sorry," he said. "I tried everything I could to convince him to leave you alone... Even my mom told him to let you go, but he still wouldn't."

"This is your fault," I squeaked out. "If you—if you hadn't helped him find me..." I couldn't finish what remained of my sentence—'I wouldn't be about to die.'

"I told you before: if I didn't find you, then someone else would have. This was going to happen no matter what I did. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I can't say it enough."

I pulled away from him slightly, looking pleadingly into his eyes. "Run away with me." He started to frown and open his mouth. "Please! You have your TPort! Go get mine and we can go live somewhere else! You don't have to stay here and take over Ridertech!"

"You know we can't use TPorts inside unless the teleport blocking transmitter is turned off, and my dad is the only one who has access to the lock panels. Unless he already turned it back on in there, the only room that's not locked right now is his office—which he's in."

"Whatever, just take me outside first, then! You can open the doors and use the elevator!"

He groaned and tilted his head back. "Why don't you understand that he's going to find you no matter what? You have a tracking chip implanted in your neck like every other Synthuman. He'll chase us down to the ends of the earth."

"Then take out my chip! Do it! Please! You know all about Synthumans, you can take it out!"

"Vanna," he said. Zi reached up to push a strand of hair behind my ear, and he rested his hand on my cheek. His eyes were starting to look glossy. "I'm sorry. But it's time to give up."

I could only stare at him silently for a moment. "...You're letting your dad murder me," I whispered.

"I'm not letting him do anything to you."

"You're not stopping him!"

"I've tried! There's nothing more I can do!"

There was a high-pitched whine from behind him. I tilted my head to look past his arm, seeing only cabinets and a box with a sheet covering it. "...What was that?"

Zi sighed. He stood up and walked around the table with me, put me down, and then pulled the sheet off the box. It wasn't just any normal box—it was a kennel, with a little gray Chihuahua in it.

"Rade!" I cried.

I nearly fell in front of his kennel. He started yapping excitedly and wagging his tail.

"I thought you might want to see him one last time, before... You know..." Zi trailed off.

I opened the kennel, and Rade jumped onto me. I picked him up and held him, burying my head into his fur while petting him. "I missed you so much, boy," I said quietly.

The longer I held him, the more reality sunk in. This was the last time we were going to see each other.

I wasn't sure how much time passed—only that it was not enough—before Zi crouched down next to me and spoke. "Synthia's gonna be here any minute... Please, please don't fight this. I don't want to have to be rough with you."

Zi took Rade out of my arms and put the whining dog back in his kennel, then grabbed my arm, and I stood with him. He wrapped his arms around me.

"I'm sorry. I'll try talking him out of this one more time once I go up. I doubt anything will come of it, but... I'll try, okay?"

I merely nodded and returned his hug. Nothing was going to come of it. My death was on the table, but I didn't know the answer. I was going to die.

I felt like I'd already been broken down, taken over by the devastating awareness of how helpless I was. Somewhere deep down, a tiny piece of me was still working desperately to come up with the answer, but all my ideas were unsound. Breaking Mr. Rider's computer would only delay the inevitable. Zi was unlikely to give in and run away with me even if I kept on begging. How could the fortuneteller have told me that the answer was with me when I had nothing?

When he backed away, I looked up at him, and he rested a hand on my cheek again. More tears welled up in my eyes at the sight of the tears falling from his; I had never seen him cry before. He shut his eyes and shook his head.

"Everyone would think I'm crazy if they saw me right now, crying over a robot..." Zi opened his teary eyes. "But you're so much more than a robot. You're my best friend, even if I've been the world's worst best friend to you lately, and you're alive, I know you are. You're alive and sentient and conscious and everything my dad tries to convince me you're not, and I love you." His voice broke, and more tears spilled out.

My hands curled into fists at my sides, but I wasn't angry at him—I was angry at myself for the way I felt. I wanted to lie to him and myself, to pretend that I felt differently, but I couldn't. "For some reason, I still love you, too."

He breathed out a short laugh and smiled wistfully. "You shouldn't," he whispered.

"I know," I whispered back. "I don't know why I do. ...And I'm sorry for stabbing you."

Zi drew me in to his chest again. Our embrace, this time, lasted no more than a minute. At the sound of the door opening and heels clicking into the room, Zi let his arms fall. I couldn't make myself let him go.

"Synthia," Zi greeted without looking back at her.

She skipped the greeting, getting right to what she was here for. "Do you want to hold her steady while I—?"

"No," Zi snapped. He reached behind him to grab my hands and pull them away, and then he took a step back. "I want you to have the choice to do this yourself."

"Do what?" I asked, despite knowing already that I wanted nothing to do with whatever it was they were talking about.

He pursed his lips, eyes trailing away as if he were too uncomfortable to look at me while he spoke. "Well... God, this is really going to make you regret saying you love me," he muttered, rolling his eyes to stare at the ceiling. "Take your clothes off and get on the table."

"What?"

"Please," he sighed, clenching his eyes shut. "Please don't make me do it. Do it yourself."

I stuttered trying to find the words to say. "You—you can't—I won't—why?! No!"

"You can't be taken apart clothed and standing up. You need to undress and lie down."

Just when I'd thought there were no more lines that could be crossed.

As if everything else hadn't been heinous enough. He stalked me. Kidnapped me. Brought me to be murdered. My foolish love for him had led me to find these things forgivable, led me to excuse him for all he'd done.

And now, he had the nerve to tell me to dig my own grave?

"No!" I yelled. "I won't do it! I'm not going to help lay the groundwork for my own fucking murder! I'm not taking my clothes off and I'm not laying down! No!"

"Vanna," he said, meeting my eyes again. "I don't want you to have to go through Synthia ripping your clothes off while I hold you, and I know you don't want that, either. So, it's that, or you take them off yourself."

"I'm not—!"

"I'll turn around and give you a blanket if it'd make you more comfortable."

"No! I'm not doing it! And I won't let either of you—get off!"

Zi had grabbed me and spun me so my back was against his chest. I thrashed in his arms trying to get away as Synthia came around and started pulling at my clothes, and I screeched and screamed so loud my throat burned. He repeatedly said sorry. I was barely aware of what was happening, whose hands were whose as I fought against them. It was too much information for me to process. The next thing I knew, I was being pinned to the cold metal table while Synthia shackled me to it at my wrists and ankles. Zi stopped pinning me when she was done, leaving me sobbing and wriggling uselessly on the table.

"I take it back! I hate you! I hate you, I hate you, I fucking hate you!" I shrieked.

Zi threw the sheet from Rade's kennel over my body. "I know. You have every right to. I'm sorry."

"If you were really sorry—"

"I am," he cut in.

"—you wouldn't—you wouldn't have...!" I couldn't scream anymore. There were no more words, only three that I had already said. "I hate you," I whimpered.

Zi looked like he could cry again. "I'm still going to talk to my dad about this one more time. If he decides to go through with this, then... Then goodbye, Vanna."

"I hate you," I said between sobs.

He visibly gulped and nodded. "I'll take that as a goodbye," he whispered.

Zi stared at me in silence for a minute, then grabbed my clothes from the floor and turned. His walk to the door was slow, and every step of the way, I hoped he would turn back around and tell me that he'd changed his mind, and then he would help me run away...

But that fantasy stayed as it was—nothing but a fantasy. The metal door shut behind Zi with a quiet thud, and I was alone with Synthia.

If he failed to convince his dad not to go through with it, then there was barely any time left before Mr. Rider would come back into the room prepared to kill me. All I could try to do was talk him out of it myself, to see if my death really was figuratively on the table. It was just as unlikely to work as everything else, but with my body restrained and having only my voice to defend myself with, a discussion was the only answer I had.

Laying there, an image of Link appeared in my mind. As if I didn't already feel awful enough. His face as I had been snatched away was harrowing. I knew how much he was hurt by the responsibility he took for Colin and Queen Rutela's deaths—and now it would happen again. He was probably beating himself up as if my inability to save myself was anything but my own fault. I needed to get back to him, if not for my own selfish sake, then for him.

"You know, I was surprised to find out that you're one of us," Synthia said conversationally after a few minutes of me struggling to think of what to say through the anguish. "I'd previously assumed you were human."

Her words, innocent on her part, sparked a new escape plan in my head almost as soon as they were out. My heart started to pound harder in anticipation of it coming to fruition. I knew she was smart and that Mr. Rider had created her to obey his demands, but I had to hope she wasn't smart or obedient enough to see through my ruse.

"I am human!" I said. "Mr. Rider's gone insane. He thinks I'm a robot and he's convinced Zi that I am, but I'm not! You have to get me out of here!"

"Mr. Rider told me that you are out of control because of a malfunction. He's the sane one. You are defected."

"No, I'm not! I promise I'm not! He—he mistook me for one of his robots! He has the wrong person!"

"I'm confident you're who he was looking for. You perfectly match her appearance and voice. It's very unlikely that he captured a human with exactly the same attributes as the robot he set out to find."

"But he did, you have to trust me! I'm..." I stalled, trying to come up with some other explanation that she would have trouble denying. "Did he tell you about the other universe he went to with NEVA? Hyrule? It's like an alternate version of this world, and there are alternate versions of people here. I'm Hyrule's version of Vanna, and I'm human, I swear! The robot Vanna is still in Hyrule!"

"...I'd like to discuss the potential validity of what you're saying with Mr. Rider. He's on his way in now."

"What?! No!"

The door opened, and what little sliver of hope I had died.

"Mr. Rider," Synthia said, "this girl here insists that she is not who you are looking for. She claims to be a human from Hyrule who is their version of Vanna."

He laughed and walked over to stand next to me, where he picked up the cord and pushed it back into my ear. I couldn't make myself look at his face, but I knew without seeing him that he looked smug. "She's lying. The proof is on the screen right there. She is absolutely not a human."

"I believed she had to be lying, but I was hesitant to rule out the possibility of her telling the truth. She's the most realistic robot I've ever met."

"Unfortunately for her, they don't have robots there."

"They do!" I said.

"Whether they do or not doesn't matter. Even if they did have their own robots, that doesn't make you one of them. You can't fool your own creator," he said.

For a second, I considered doubling down on my lie that I was from Hyrule and insisting that I was one of their robots, but it felt so utterly pointless that I couldn't even begin to bring myself to.

"Synthia, get our gloves. Bottom cabinet on that wall, second to the right."

"Yes, sir."

I watched Synthia walk away, and as she did, her obedience gave me a terrifying idea.

"Wipe my memories again and reprogram me! Just give me one more chance!"

As painful as it was thinking that I would forget all the people I met and adventures I had, it was a price I felt willing to pay to keep my life. It wasn't like I would remember how much it hurt to lose everything when I wouldn't remember that I had lost anything in the first place.

"Why would I do that? You'd only overwrite your programming again eventually. I'm done with you wasting my time," Mr. Rider said. He tore the sheet off me, and I yelped and flinched. "It's nothing I haven't seen before," he uttered under his breath.

He grabbed something from the desk and moved it over to me before I could get a look at what it was. I felt something small press against the top of my sternum. I gasped, expecting pain to come, but then I felt the sensation of it sliding down my torso painlessly. It wasn't until the same process repeated on different areas of my body that I realized he had to be marking where he would be making incisions. I felt like I was going to throw up.

"Why won't you turn me off first instead of keeping me on while you fucking murder me?!" I yelled with my eyes squeezed shut.

"If I put you in your sleep mode, your contact sensors will determine that the disassembly is painful and make you wake up, but turning your power off will shut down everything all at once before I'm ready. I need to get your donatable organs transferred to a new power source quick, so I'll cut power to each one directly when I'm ready to remove them."

"Then cut power to my brain first!"

"You don't have a brain—and turning off what you've got in place of one would be the same thing as turning your power off," he said harshly. His voice softened when he continued speaking. "It's not that I want to do this. I know you may have trouble believing me, but I'm not the heartless monster you think I am. I still have a soft spot in my heart for you, and I don't like seeing you scared and upset... But I can't keep ignoring all the warnings I've heard time and time again about robots like you, and I have to do what I have to do, even if I don't like it. I really did see you as my own daughter for a long time, and what kind of father wants to kill his daughter?"

"Only pieces of shit like you," I said through my teeth.

"Reminds me... It's about time to do this," Mr. Rider said. I heard several taps on the computer beside me. "Think you can change that during what time you've got left?"

I tried to ask what he did, but when I opened my mouth, no sound came out. My eyes opened wide. I continued to try speaking, even shouting, but I couldn't.

It was over. If the answer was with me, I had no way to say it.

Mr. Rider slipped his gloves on, then picked up a scalpel and examined it high enough up that I could very clearly see it. "Now, this is going to take quite a while, but it's okay. You won't actually mind. As much as your 'brain' will tell you that you're in pain and scared, you won't really be. Remember that: nothing you feel is real."

So this was it. This was how my life was going to end—strapped to a table while being cut open and taken apart bit by bit. Soon, everything would go dark, and I would cease to exist, becoming lost in the endless void of nothing for all of eternity...

For the first time in my life, I prayed. I prayed to the Golden Goddesses, to Hylia, to the Light Spirits, to every god from my world I could think of, to whatever god out there would listen to me. I prayed that something, anything would happen to stop this. I prayed that if it couldn't be stopped, that the Hero's Shade was wrong, that there was life beyond this for me. And I prayed that if there would be an afterlife for me, that that afterlife intersected with Hyrule's, and I could be reunited with Link and Midna and everyone else I'd come to love.

My heart broke at the thought of never getting to see them again.

I turned my head so I wouldn't have to watch him as he killed me. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the glint of the scalpel as it lowered over my chest. Cold metal pressed against my flesh before searing pain set in.