They were ten feet from the drop ship.
Five feet… The end was in sight.
Crypto's breath caught in his chest, and his legs collapsed beneath him. He crumpled forward onto the sandy ground.
No, not now, his silent scream echoed inside his head. He sucked in air with a frantic gasp. His throat burned; his chest didn't seem to want to cooperate. He coughed, and fine droplets of blood spattered the ground beneath him.
His hands fumbled desperately with the straps and zippers of his backpack. The ship was so close- if he had the strength to jump forward, he could have landed on its loading ramp. It would be so stupid to die here, now…
Those were his thoughts as black and purple spots closed in around the edges of his vision, and his hands and feet began to feel distant from his body.
His mind wasn't so far gone as to spare him from noticing the searing metal coiled around his upper arm when Revenant grabbed him and hauled him to his feet. He screamed in pain, but no sound could come out.
"Get up, you pathetic sack of flesh. You don't get the luxury of dying- you haven't earned that yet."
Crypto's foot caught on the loading ramp as they made their way into the drop ship. He went down, and Revenant fell to one knee beside him. The simulacrum snarled and dragged him the rest of the way up the ramp by the shoulders.
Revenant slammed the side of his fist into the control panel that would close the back of the ship. The hydraulics moved agonizingly slowly. He finished unpackaging the syringe that Crypto had been struggling with, and pressed it firmly into the hacker's hand.
It seemed to take Crypto an immense amount of energy to perform the simple action of pressing it against his opposite wrist.
Moments after the smart polymer entered his body - seconds that felt like hours - his breathing eased, and the fog in his head began to clear. The door of the ship locked into place. They were safe from the Ring at last, the ship's metal enclosure protecting them from the waves of energy.
Revenant collapsed to the floor with a loud clang, devoid of his usual stealth and precision. He was propped in an upright position against the wall of the ship. Every movement he made was followed by the screech and grind of metal against metal, along with a shower of sparks. Most of the paint on his mechanical body was peeling off.
"What the fuck are you looking at me for, skin-suit? Get the ship back online!"
He crumpled up the packaging from the syringe he'd just used, and tossed it at Crypto. By the time it sailed past his head, the hacker was already on his way to the front of the ship to reset its computer system. He brought his drone online and did a scan of the ship's circuitry, which allowed him to find the exact electrical pathway he needed to reactivate after… whatever Revenant had done to it.
As he worked, he could hear the simulacrum moving around near the rear gate. The damage done by the Ring had mitigated the deadly quiet with which his body normally functioned.
Good, said a voice in the back of Crypto's mind, complete with a small sense of satisfaction. He deserves it. Hope it hurts.
Something else competed with that impulse reaction, though. There had been moments throughout his agonizing journey outside the Ring in which the thought of giving up - of letting death take him - was a comfort. He'd never give in to such a feeling, of course; one did not have the privilege of giving up when their family was in trouble. He realized something now that he never had before, however: death was the ultimate security, the one thing that was certain when he was alone, afraid, didn't know what would happen next.
That security, that certainty, was something the corporation took from everyone who participated in the Games, and it had been taken from Revenant long before.
Combine that with the way they'd programmed him to think he was human, uploaded someone else's thoughts, feelings, and memories into his processor- Crypto was beginning to understand the toll that must take.
He found the simulacrum despicable. Nothing would ever excuse the hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent lives that Revenant had taken as casually as someone else might take a phone call- the constant threats, the fear that he instilled in everyone around him for his own selfish entertainment. Somehow, at the same time, Crypto had found a modicum of respect for his maligned squadmate.
That was a strange internal conflict that he would have been hard-pressed to explain if someone were to ask him about it.
The ship hummed to life. Track lights on the walls and floor flickered and illuminated.
"Navigation system loading," announced a computerized voice. "Estimated time to arrival: 10 minutes, 32 seconds."
Crypto smiled wide. "We made it!"
He holstered his drone, crawled into the back of the ship, and slumped against the wall in the corner, as far away from Revenant as he could manage in the small space. His mouth felt dry, and he looked down at his hands to see that they were shaking.
In the Games - never mind his little excursion beyond the Ring - competitors found themselves wounded, bleeding, and exhausted in an existential way, with limbs that felt like lead and terrible thoughts that gripped their minds and refused to let go. They used a syringe, the wounds mended, and the bleeding stopped. The exhaustion, the anguish, the pain that didn't come from physical damage remained, and the Games kept going as though it didn't exist.
You're not bleeding anymore. You're not dying. There's nothing wrong with you. Get out there and keep fighting.
The miracle technology that instantly healed otherwise fatal wounds, and even brought the dead back to life, was unimaginably cruel in a way that few people would ever comprehend.
There was a light, rumbling hum in the ship around Crypto as it lifted off the ground. A material that the corporation had developed, packed between the inner and outer metal plating, damped the immense G-force as the ship accelerated, so its occupants only felt a small jolt.
Revenant pried open a panel on his upper chest, near his right shoulder. Some component inside him had been damaged, and was leaking coolant, which dripped down his side and onto the floor. Crypto grimaced and looked away- the sight was too similar to his earlier excursion in the Games, when he'd watched Gibraltar, and later Mirage, die through the sight of his rifle.
He told himself that his reaction was ridiculous. He was merely looking at a damaged machine, no different than when he took apart and repaired his laptop. Even with that knowledge, he couldn't stop the flood of horrifying images that it brought to the foreground of his mind.
The hacker brought his knees up to his chest and allowed his head to tilt forward. He squeezed his eyes tightly shut and opened them again several times, trying to clear his head of unwanted thoughts. Screaming or crying occurred to him, but even if he hadn't been holed up in a metal box with an aggressive simulacrum, he didn't have the energy left in his body to do either of those things. He caught himself drifting towards sleep and clung desperately to consciousness, refused to let it happen despite his exhaustion- he was terrified of the nightmares he might experience.
He flinched at the sound of grinding metal.
"Stop that," he hissed.
"Forget who you're talking to, skinbag?"
Crypto folded his arms over his chest and looked up, directly at Revenant's optics. The assassin wasn't looking his way; he was still occupied rooting around in the internal mechanisms of his shoulder.
"Kill me, if you're going to," said Crypto with uncharacteristic ferocity. "I don't care anymore. Otherwise, shut up about it."
That got Revenant's attention. The simulacrum looked up and met Crypto's eyes. He seemed weary, too, the hacker thought- that was strange. His mind must be playing tricks on him. Robots didn't get tired.
Revenant certainly had no problem leaping the distance of the drop ship in the time that it took a human being to blink. His hand wrapped around Crypto's throat as he knelt over the hacker. He dug the tips of his fingers into the sides of the man's neck. Crypto didn't react, not even when the assassin's grip tightened, or when he began to lift the hacker upward, putting painful pressure on his lower jaw.
If anything, the blunting of his consciousness and strange, fantastical images that danced across his vision when the circulation to his brain reduced were peaceful, amid the suffering he'd experienced today.
Revenant gave up and let him fall to the ground. There was no satisfaction in killing someone who didn't mind it. In some way, watching Crypto suffer felt good. For once, he wasn't the only one.
The hacker's eyes were level with the open panel on Revenant's chest. Behind the wires and cables that were bulging out, he could see the mechanism that moved the assassin's shoulder. It was surprisingly simple, despite being so different from any modern robotics technology he'd read about.
He could see where the actuators were out of alignment, grinding against each other when the simulacrum moved wrong.
"I can fix that," he said.
He reached out and moved the wires aside to get a better look at the damage. Revenant hissed in pain and pulled away.
Crypto lowered his arm and looked up at the robot, the surprise on his face obvious. Revenant's reaction was harder to read- the assassin stood still, eerily so, in a defensive stance. Crypto was still alive, and he figured that was a good sign.
Slowly, Revenant lowered himself to the floor. He leaned back against the wall beside the hacker, lowered his arms to his sides, and waited.
Crypto got up on one knee and shifted so that he could clearly see the mechanism. This time, he moved slowly and carefully as he moved the wires to the side. Though Revenant made no move to stop him, he could feel the tension that the simulacrum was holding back.
He got his fingers around the misaligned actuators and snapped them back into place. He thought he might have heard Revenant hiss again under his… whatever passed for breath, but that could just as easily have been a noise from the ship's engines. Gingerly, he pulled his hand out of the robot's chest and backed away.
Revenant held his arm out in front of him, testing the joint. It moved smoothly and silently. He closed the panel on his chest and began going through his backpack, sorting the syringes and other supplies he had left. He said nothing- no threats or snarky, edgy comments. Crypto supposed that was the closest thing to a thank you that Revenant would ever give.
Another small jolt let them know that the ship had decelerated. It was descending now, nearly at its destination point. Crypto picked up his rifle, checked that it was loaded, and flicked the safety off. He crouched to the side of the rear gate, ready to defend himself if they found themselves facing armed guards.
Revenant took up a position on the opposite side of the gate.
"Let me go first," the simulacrum commanded. "The longer we can go undetected, the better chance we have of doing something here today."
Crypto didn't argue.
They felt another slight jostle as the ship touched down, followed by the mechanical whir of the hydraulic cylinders that lowered the exit ramp.