-(She Wanted to Fly)

Lucy's shoulder nearly dislocated as the monowire caught on the roof's edge, redirecting her fall onto a nearby balcony. The weapons weren't designed for this. They'd be useless in a fight until she could get them fixed now.

If she could get them fixed. If there was time. If she could get away. Everything was happening so fast and it was all falling apart.

She should have told David what was going on when she had the chance. Now it was too late. She should have made the damn call instead of trying to handle it all on her own. She had trusted the wrong people.

No more.

"Pick up, pick up, please pick up!"

How much time was left before Regent's power play? An hour? Two? Would the woman even answer now?

Would she even care?

Lucy should be calling David. She shouldn't be staking his life on a Hail Mary. Yet, if what she suspected was correct, David would die anyway if she didn't get a hold of Regent right now. Die from the suit, or die from the chaos. Was that what it was coming down to? Choosing how the man she loved died?

The wind picked up and a slug landed in her shoulder, wrenching a shriek of pain from her. Lucy threw herself over the edge of the balcony before her pursuers in the helicopter above were able to jump down onto her latest perch. The monowire flew out again, and once more she was arcing through the air towards a new brief repose.

One step ahead. Not enough. Never enough. She was running out of balconies and she'd never survive a drop from this height.

"Lucy?" Regent's melodious voice finally came through over the phone line. "You're cutting it awfully close if you've changed your mind about joining us on our voyage."

"I was going to call earlier, but Faraday kidnapped me!" she yelled. The helicopter closed again and she only barely managed to jump to a new perch between two buildings. It would have to circle around to get to her. She was too high and too hurt. They were going to corner her long before she reached the ground. It was inevitable. But she was going to make sure the bastards had to work for it.

And she would ensure that she had enough time to save David.

"… Where are you? I can't promise anything, but I may have people nearby that can extract you. There should be enough time."

"I don't care about myself! They were using me to trick David into the exosuit for Arasaka. He's on a rampage and he's heading straight for the tower. That's where Faraday was taking me and so that's -"

"Where your boyfriend is going," Regent sighed. "Godammit, Lucy."

"Please, you're already going to be there. Please, save him."

Regent was silent long enough that Lucy heard Faraday's helicopter starting to approach again. "Regent, I -"

"If there is anything still left of his mind - and if it doesn't endanger my people - I'll make sure we knock him out and take him with us. Amy should be able to fix whatever that suit did to him. I can't make any promises about his mind. I can only do so much tidying up with data streams. Stop running from Three Eyes. If he's taking you to Arasaka's Tower, let him. We'll grab you also. Assuming you want to come."

"I do," Lucy whispered.

"For the record, Lucy, you're going to fucking owe me for this shit. 50 years of planning. You are insanely lucky that they are literally dragging you into my path. I get that you're traumatized, but if you dare try to pull this bullshit again, I'm leaving you in god damn orbit."

"That's fair."

The line cut off just as Faraday's men dropped back into view. She turned, then pretended to stumble. Just as she'd expected the tasers lanced into back, sending her sprawling on the rooftop, her limbs twitching. At least it wasn't more slugs.

She closed her eyes and let herself sag as the power cut off and Faraday dropped onto the roof next to her. Lucy's fate, and David's, they were both in Regent's hands now.

She'd done all she could. She'd have to trust another puppet master to pull at their strings.

At least Regent didn't have the reputation for breaking her dolls, unlike Arasaka.

And maybe, just maybe, if they were really lucky … Regent was telling the truth about going to Venus too …

It wasn't the Moon, but maybe Lucy would be able to show David the stars after all.

Data. Everything was data. This whole planet was subsumed under information overload.

It never used to be this bad. There was a time that Taylor had been able to walk down the street without nearly giving herself a migraine just from people-watching. Had that really been thirty years ago? More? God she was getting old.

"Look at me now, Mom. I always wanted to be a pilot if not Alexandria, and now I'm leading a planet-wide exodus and sometimes I think it's just so I don't have to see code everywhere I turn."

"Did you say something, Regent?" Hana asked. Her rifle was steady in her hands though Taylor knew it would be a scant moment's thought to have it changed into whatever was most appropriate for the coming battle. It was a shame she couldn't make smart guns. Though, really, that would probably have made her a little too scary so…

Taylor shook my head. "Just thinking back on where we started. Everyone's clear on the new sub-objective, right?"

Victoria scoffed. She angled a datapad towards Taylor, rolling her eyes. "We'd have to be blind to miss Mr. Destruction and his rampage. I almost want to give Arasaka props for their tech here. Are we sure that thing isn't para related?"

"Not an ounce." Sarah's soft tones drifted from our earbuds. "It's supposed to be a proof of concept thing, best I can figure. Good news, it works like a charm! Bad news, there's no convenient off-switch. Tay, sweetheart, I really think you just aim the poor guy at a hard target and then leave him be as a distraction. We can't afford to take the time to get through to him and if you all fight him he's probably going to kill one of you. We don't need this. Not when we're 15 minutes away from success."

She was right. Taylor knew she was right. It was a risk - a stupid risk.

"Regent," Dragon said, her voice low and soft, "Lucy is my friend. You would never have met me without her breaking through the Blackwall. David is already here, can't we at least try?"

Taylor really hated having friends sometimes. Rogue had the right of it, allies of convenience never guilted you into things that you knew were bad ideas.

And yet, Rogue still bent over backwards for some of those folk too, so really, who was fooling who?

"I've already said we would. Everyone else stays on mission. I'll handle David. Dragon be ready to extract him."

"I am prepared."

Taylor was met by a chorus of head bobs. She leaned back and closed her eyes, the steady thump of the rotors the only sound as they neared their destination.

"Tay," Sarah whispered in her ear. "David can't be extracted from that suit, not without Amy. There's only one ship in the plaza. It's not big enough for the whole team, plus Lucy, plus that suit."

"I know," Taylor murmured.

"Tay… You're not sending me off alone to lead these fucking children by myself. I'm not going to be your babysitter."

"Sarah don't -"

"No. Stop. I'm not in this for your revolution. The planet's dying, whoop-de-fucking-doo. I'll be dead before it becomes an issue and I doubt I'll have any bio kids. I'm here because of you, Taylor. I'm helping because of you. I could have been running the entire planet by now, but I threw my lot in with you. Because I love you, you bitch! You do not get to stay behind and give someone else their happy ending at the expense of your own! You do not get to give up your spot on that ship! Do you hear me Taylor?!"

Taylor chuckled. Sometimes, she forgot what she was fighting for. Sometimes she forgot why there were people worth saving. At times like that, she just had to look to the people she cared for to remember why she still pushed ahead. "I was going to say, 'I have a plan choom'. So it's all good."

"Don't you start using that slang now too. I feel so damn old when I get bent out of shape over it, but Jesus fuck I hate it…" she trailed off. "You're not just saying that to placate me?"

"Just make sure that Amy is nearby. I doubt I'm going to be in stellar condition, but I'll be there."

"For the record, I'm not letting this ship leave until you are."

The line cut off leaving Taylor to her thoughts. Not that she had to wait long; they had arrived.

The doors to the helicopter slid open and the sounds of a warzone blasted into the interior. Taylor scowled. Arasaka's military was being decimated as David and his suit tore through them like butter. He leaped, launching off of a hovering MaxTac vehicle and using it and gravity boosters to throw himself into a hanger near the top of the tower.

Victoria grunted. "Entry point 2 then? Looks like Point 1's been taken."

"Yes, going with Entry 2. Move!" Victoria and Hana jumped out of the helicopter, vanishing into the nearest lobby of Arasaka Tower. As soon as they had left, Dragon lifted the craft up higher, angling towards the hole that David had disappeared into.

Taylor's ship barely made it halfway there before the man flew out again, this time with a spark of green and blue clutched in his arms.

"Oh, he found Lucy. Well that makes this easy."

"Adam Smasher is in pursuit." Dragon's voice was clipped and as close to angry as Taylor had ever heard her get.

"I see him. Just remember, when I break the door open, you need to burn, but without setting off an inferno. Freeze without leaving a block of ice."

"I am aware of the delicacy required. This plan is foolish. I can do it, it's still foolish."

Taylor's lips pulled back into a grin - a grin that anyone seeing it would liken more to a snarl. "I never did tell you how my parents died, did I? I said that Lucy owes me for this. Honestly, I think I may end up owing her. I finally get to take some revenge on this fucker. And make him watch as I burn his world to the ground around him. And then I'll ride his corpse into the beautiful sunset. It's almost poetic."

"And people say that AIs are dangerous."

The falling duo lurched off of another part of the superstructure of the tower, nearing the ground. "Buzz Smasher before he lands. I'll jump out the other side and you can use this thing to distract him long enough for me to knock David out."

"Understood."

Taylor brushed aside the notifications of Victoria and Hana's progress and the moment that David dropped past them, she leaped out of the side. She grabbed the nearby data streams. Two attack drones surged to her, one angling underneath as a platform for her to ride on, while she grabbed hold of the other as it alighted above her. Together they slowed her fall enough that she was almost stepping onto the ground as it came up to meet her. She heard a roar or frustration above her and saw Dragon's helicopter angling away from Adam Smasher, still effectively keeping his attention as it fired on him and scrambled his targeting systems.

"Who the hell is Mary Poppins? Who the fuck is this gonk?!"

Taylor stared at the small girl with the very large gun three feet away. Her data was… remarkably clean and tidying for someone without much mass to work with. The girl either didn't have many implants or knew how to leverage the ones she did so they all played well together. Probably the latter since she was in Lucy's crew.

"Hi. Please stay where you are. It'll be easier to collect you all at once." Taylor strode forward, ignoring the indignant squawks and inventive cursing coming from behind her.

She had limited time.

Lucy was kneeling on David's chest, her knees resting on the giant metal slabs that had nearly taken the kid over. David himself was panting, his pupils contracting and dilating. But he wasn't destroying everything in sight.

And his data was… not horrible. It certainly wasn't good. But…

"What have you done to yourself?" Taylor murmured. She reached out, laying a hand on the boy's leg. What passed for his leg now anyway. More information fed into her head. The history of the suit, the history of the man, the nature of the link between the two - and the fraying coherence of his mind as it tried to process too many disparate portions of the code.

Cyberpsychosis. Too often mentally ill people were carted off to be torn to pieces, their tech salvaged by lazy bastards that didn't care that the 'psychopath' would likely have been fine if someone had thought to give them a bit of therapy.

And yet, there were some who went too far, too fast, too often. Some whose own bodies rejected their mind, because the mind wasn't strong enough to keep up with the machinery installed.

The best that she'd been able to tell, it was a deliberate flaw in the system. The Warrior had left that wonderful little stressor behind for us all. Her passenger didn't let her cure cyberpsychosis, but it let her fix the programming errors in their code.

Taylor grabbed the streams, tearing and ripping and shoving the problematic data away. In seconds the inherent chaos she had seen when she looked at David was calmed. In place of a tempest there was a simple storm. The man gasped, he shifted, Lucy yelled something.

Taylor didn't care. She didn't have any time to waste. She slammed her hand against the remaining data. And with a strangled gurgle, David fell, dropping like a puppet with his strings cut, with only his unquiet snoring as evidence to show that he was still alive.

Lucy twisted, her eyes wide as saucers and she stared down at Taylor. "Regent!"

"Time to go. You're on my ship. Keep him from breaking things if he wakes up before I get back. Dragon will extract you in 30 seconds."

Lucy blinked. To her credit, she didn't try to argue or ask for explanations. "Is there room for Rebecca?"

Her head jerked towards the suddenly quiet woman behind Taylor. Taylor glanced back, eyes narrowed as she did some quick calculations. "Yes. You vouch for her?"

"She's a good person. Violent, but a good person."

"I can work with that. You owe me thrice now, Lucy. We are not even."

A brief plume of smoke and a small explosion saw Taylor sighing and turning around. "Stay put for another 10 seconds. Dragon will be here."

Taylor launched herself forward. She didn't even need the data streams to tell her that Adam Smasher was nearly on her. The cyborg's body was not subtle, nor did the monster care about collateral damage.

Except he couldn't see through walls or spoof sensor ghosts like she could. She leaped over a burning car, rolling out of the way of a spray of bullets as Smasher screamed, round after round of bullets soaking into the illusions that only he could see, the illusions that she was feeding directly into his optical implants.

"Fight me fair, you coward," Smasher ground out as his weapons fell silent.

Taylor started stalking forward, throwing her voice to either side as she activated the implants in his ears and fed them false data. "I'm just evening the playing field. Though really, was it fair when you - already part cyborg - came to 'deal with' the people of a small town one night nearly five decades ago? None of them had weapons or implants."

Smasher scoffed. "That doesn't do a thing to narrow it down. You can hold a lifetime grudge against me all you want, I'm still going to be tearing your spine out of your back within the next minute."

"I'm Regent. There's an old movie from when I was young, before any of this started. It has a good quote: My name is Taylor Hebert. You killed my parents. Prepare to burn in fucking hell, asshole."

Taylor slapped her hand over his face, leaving him just enough freedom to see her face before she halted all of the data movement in the code surrounding and underlying his form. She didn't have much time, but she had enough. She threw the metaphorical door in his skull wide-open, letting Dragon in.

Where Taylor was a scalpel, Dragon was a hacksaw.

It was a good thing that no one much cared if Smasher survived. They just needed his hardware, the meatware was optional.

Taylor destroyed yet another wall - the last one, finally - in her way and walked her fancy new Smasher Bot into the breach. On the other side, Victoria and Hana were finishing the final linkages to Mikoshi. The wires between the hidden digital node and the tech that their Paras had built was a tangled mess. It would probably fry if it had to maintain any sort of input/output load for long.

So it was good that she only needed it active for a few seconds then, really.

"We are ready, Regent." Hana stood back. She glanced over Taylor's shoulder and tensed, her hand lifted in under a heartbeat, a sniper rifle already present. "You have chosen the wrong time to be brave Mr. Arasaka."

"Stand down, Hana," I said, waving my hand in her direction as I turned. Bowing slightly, I continued, "Yorinobu-san. I thought you had elected not to join us."

"I am remaining behind as we agreed. I will watch and ensure that everything my father built will fall. I simply wished to see the first blocks crumbling for myself."

"Wow, you really do have people everywhere," Victoria muttered. "Regent, you're sure that you want Hana and I to fall back? We can stay."

"There's not going to be enough time once it's activated. Get to the ship. I'll follow as soon as I start the reaction."

Hana nodded and immediately set off, Victoria pausing as she passed me. "Don't be late."

"Don't wait for me," Taylor replied with a smirk. As Victoria left, she waved Yorinobu to her side. "Your father never did realize exactly what he was doing when he cracked this door."

"I believe he did." Taylor stopped and turned, staring wide-eyed at the man. "My father, he would tell us stories about the ancient, slumbering goddess. About how she waited for her champion to wake her, and her champion would gain power and riches beyond compare. Her champion would rule the world - if only he could wake her. I believe my father was well aware of what he was reaching for with Mikoshi."

"Well… How many decades old and I'm still surprised. I hate people."

Yorinobu chuckled. "Well, at least we can both say that we hate my father equally. You will kill this goddess?"

"I'm not sure if I can kill her, but I can wake her up just enough to cripple her even worse than she already is, yeah. That I can do."

Yorinobu nodded. He handed Taylor a keycard. "The roof; because of course the rocket is on the roof. Some cliches must be observed."

She took it, and bowed again, deeper this time. "Fight with honor, Yorinobu-san."

"And you as well, Taylor-san."

Taylor moved away from her, striding towards the connection to Mikoshi. The data that she saw in the pillar of computers and code was so complex, it was nearly a living thing. It burned to look at. It felt like it should have destroyed her from the sheer complexity involved.

It was too bad that she was never the type to let petty little things like that get in the way of her goals.

She touched the machine, the tech behind her flaring to life, and the code unraveled in her mind's eye.

Between one blink and the next, she was staring at a digital construct, a green overlay of a pyramid, rooms upon rooms upon rooms. Each with a small light in the window.

Then she was past the surface of the data streams, she was deeper, she'd slipped through the crack that the project had torn between realities. Her mind brushed against… something massive. She felt her passenger stir, more clearly than she had ever felt it before. It reared back even as the Thinker creature seemed to ponderously blink, one iota of its awareness turning towards the mote of dust that was stabbing at its eye.

Data and knowledge unfurled before her. Millennia upon millennia. Eon after eon.

False promises one and all. This parasite's memories were vast, but they were pointless. If she explored, it would wake. If it woke, everything would all be for naught. But… she was here. And her tech was still linked to her, following the path she had blazed.

It had all worked!

Taylor reached one hand back, loosening her focus just enough to ensure that she was touching the machine in reality, then she recentered herself and stretched her other hand forward.

And she grasped the data pathways that made up Thinker's mind.

The machine switched on.

Fire, lightning, and ice surged through the Thinker, following Taylor's carefully coordinated directions. She and her passenger worked in concert, blazing a trail through the dormant data links, marching ever onward, storming through the safe routes and marking them clear to follow. Dragon's processor took over everywhere that Taylor's mind passed, subsuming and corrupting leaving nothing but salt and burned out tissue behind. Thinker thrashed and flailed but it was unable to process the stimuli fast enough to react. It had been too damaged and this was not how it was supposed to wake. Every moment it lost, its ability to respond was curbed further, its own neural connections being co-opted more and more fully.

It took an eternity, bare seconds in meatspace, before it was done.

Dragon activated her machine. Thinker screamed, splintering into pieces, trying to save what it could. It crumbled down to a small core that had been left untouched as the rest of its parts flew off into cracks appearing around the central mass. The roar of pain came again, this time slamming closed every wall.

Taylor's mind slammed back into her body, a spike of agony lancing through her head, blood dripping down her face from her eyes and nose. It didn't matter, her task was complete.

She stumbled back from the Mikoshi pillar, idly noting that it was now on fire.

Yorinobu cheered his victory to the heavens, even as Taylor twisted, ordering her Smasher puppet to grab her and run.

The tech box was glowing, a bright green light edging towards white.

There wasn't time.

She wrenched at the data streams, and Smasher leaped straight up, breaking floors by the dozen as he sought to get them higher and higher. All the while Taylor kept her eyes below her, on the box.

Ten seconds.

They reached the roof. Several adventurous employees ran for cover as the cyborg burst from the floor carrying a girl barely half his size.

Seven seconds.

She didn't run, she just had Smasher throw her at the rocket.

Four seconds.

It took a swipe of Yorinobu's card and a jerk on a recalcitrant stream, before she was in the rocket.

One second.

Taylor had just enough time to throw herself into the nearest chair and grab for the seatbelts.

The device peaked. Power surged out. It linked to every system, every grid, every connection across the entirety of Earth.

And for one glorious moment, it sorted through every piece of information provided, looking for the IFF signals it had been assigned. As it received them, it thrust power at those connected machines.

And across the world, as if as one, thousands of spaceships lifted off from the surface, seeking a new home.

"Look, Mom, I got to fly after all."