Unity by Elly Bangs (free e reader txt) 📕

cautiously up my inner thigh. I raised my leg to let him in, and he gasped in amazement at the pressure of his fingers to my lips, just as my breath left me when I wrapped my hand around his cock. Finally we were lost in each other. Our minds were separate, but our bodies shared everything. Our hearts and lungs fell into a single rhythm until there was no mine, no his—only our hands. Our breasts. Our cock, our clit. Our entering and admitting, our wet heat from inside and out, spines arching, singing together in three symmetrical waves of perfect ecstasy, our voices lost in the rattle of the road.

When our bodies couldn’t handle any more, we disentangled and lay back on the metal floor, savoring the doubled afterglow while we could. My view through Naoto’s eyes gradually dimmed as the unifier nanobots in his brain self-terminated and dissolved, leaving me numb again to his senses.

He sniffled. In the compartment’s dim light, I thought I saw tears dribbling down his face until he rolled over and away from me.

“Are you okay?” I whispered. I cautiously slid closer to him and he didn’t push me away. “Was that too much?”

“No.” He shook his head. “It’s never enough.”

I wrapped my arms around his chest and hugged him tight, and he held them back.

Remember me, I thought, until sleep took me. Carry my memory home.

BORROWER

In the pre-dawn light, I kissed Rutger’s wife goodbye as if I were merely going in to work early. Then I met my alpha copy at the depot, and together we booked passage in the cargo truck that would carry us far away from Crossroads Station and deeper into the open wasteland. If I was ever to return to that place, it would not be in Rutger’s body: the hand I’d ruined the day before was still bleeding and already showing ominous signs of infection. Staying in this vessel was now an unacceptable risk.

Fortuitously, a third man climbed into the cargo truck with us just before the motors whirred to life. He was in his late forties, short and bald, light-skinned, marred by sun damage. That is to say, he was very far from the kind of vessel I would normally assume, but at least he had two good hands. He was also considerably more muscular than he appeared at first, as the alpha and I discovered. Even with both my copies working together, we were only able to subdue him via blunt head trauma.

This was always the most torturous moment in the work by which I sustained myself: watching this new vessel, waiting for it to stir back to wakefulness; sitting here with fists clenched, praying inwardly that my baton strike wasn’t too hard, checking every knot in the rope that binds him, tying the gag, compulsively inspecting the head wound again and again even though I knew full well that I could only wait for those eyes to open.

My alpha copy grabbed the vessel’s wrist to check its pulse under the rope, and there I saw something strange. I zipped the sleeve open. On the inside of the forearm, I found a series of five short parallel lines, carved with mechanical precision into the flesh above the tendons.

“An aim-assist implant,” my alpha copy said before I could. In the looks we exchanged, I knew we were thinking the same thought: our vessel was a soldier or mercenary of some sort. No, a bounty hunter.

I felt a tremble of excitement and saw the same in my counterpart. In my seventy-two years of this work I had become nearly every kind of man, but I had never been someone like him—simply because I abhor killing. Under the circumstances, however, his body might prove very useful.

The truck bounced over something in the road and shook our freshly caught vessel. I heard him groan. His eyes fluttered slightly under the lids but didn’t open.

Alpha handed me the heavy briefcase containing the patterner. It felt good to hold it again. I’d never entrusted it to another person before; knowing I technically still had not never seemed to lessen the anxiety whenever my alpha copy held it.

“Be more careful with this flesh,” he said. “Punching that wall was erratic.”

I glared at him. “Need I remind you, you would have done exactly the same in my place.”

Alpha pursed his lips and shifted uneasily. We didn’t like each other. Neither of us wanted to contemplate the existential questions posed by maintaining concurrent copies.

But this is it, I realized. After all my careful planning and all my years of slow death, salvation was finally within my grasp. Sybil was waiting somewhere just over the scorched horizon in front of this truck.

Alpha shook me from my reverie. The captive flesh was awake and staring at us. Where I expected fear in his eyes, I found only cold, calculating brutality. The crags of his face glistened in the sweltering heat between the truck’s flimsy dark canvas walls. The alpha copy shone a light in his face and waved it side to side, observing the constriction of his blue irises. Symmetrical. No signs of brain damage. We allowed ourselves a symmetrical sigh of relief.

The man—the vessel—grunted something through his gag. He wanted to talk. For our part, we needed him to.

Ordinarily, this was when I would begin the work—no, the artistry—by which I had perpetuated myself for more than seven decades. To become someone, I had to emulate his identity perfectly. I needed his accent, his quirks and mannerisms, his likes and dislikes, his hopes and fears. Usually it took months of preparation to assume a new vessel. I shuddered to know I had no time for that in this case.

“If you scream or try to escape, we will kill you,” I lied.

Our captive nodded. My alpha copy removed his gag. He again surprised me by failing to immediately plead for