Destiny: Quantic Dreams Book 3 by Elizabeth McLaughlin (dark books to read txt) 📕

there. I should have defended him against the soulless machines who took his life, or I should have died alongside him. I pounded the dirt with a fist, another silent scream erupting from me. It was like giving birth; the body goes on an autonomous process and you’re along for the ride, no matter how badly it hurts you.

I remembered all the times he had been there for me. How many nights he had stayed up with me when I was small and scared, certain that some unnamed tragedy was bound to befall us. The fights where I accused him of being the world’s worst father, cursing and spitting in my teenaged rage. He wasn’t perfect, of course, but he always waited until we had finished fighting before reaching out and hugging me until things felt better. When I was pregnant with Marcus and terrified of being a mother, he would tell me stories about my own mother and offer any wisdom he could impart to me. And I had abandoned him to live out decades with only that psychopath A.I. for a companion. If I wasn’t the world’s worst daughter, I definitely came close. On top of losing Dad, my wife had been shot. Shot because of my clumsiness and my failure to be quick enough. Shot because I had led her into a veritable suicide mission. We could have lost her, and it was all because I didn’t insist she stay home. I turned from the fire to gaze at her sleeping form. The day’s travels had not been easy on any of us, not least of all her. Her hair was plastered down with sweat and dirt, and underneath the survival blanket the tear I had made in her shirt was becoming more ragged.

Finally, I couldn’t cry anymore. I spit the mucus from my mouth and nose on the ground and covered it with some dirt in an effort to hide the signs of my anguish. It didn’t matter; my eyes would be swollen and puffy by the time I had to wake Marcus up. He would understand. Eliza would too, even if I was still embarrassed to cry in front of her after all these years.

A small voice in my mind reminded me that Dad had come on the journey with the full knowledge he might not be coming home. I don’t think death at the hands of androids was the fate he envisioned, but he knew that the journey might have been the last of his life. Somehow the reminder didn’t make it easier. I wish it did.

I spent the remainder of my watch concentrating on my senses. Rotating through what I could feel, smell, taste, and see kept the grief at bay and it reassured me that there was no one sneaking up to kill us. I chuckled to myself. That’s the standard I lived by now. No vicious animal or homicidal robot creeping through the darkness to rip me apart? Everything’s great! How quickly life changes.

Where we went from here was still up in the air. The androids had every reason to come after us; we had humiliated them with our escape and killed another of their own, even if a panther had done the deed for us. The machines would be coming for war. The moment we got home the colony had to move. I felt a pang of regret at the hundreds of man hours wasted; all the material we had so carefully collected and cultivated to make a life on the outside would go to waste. Leaving the surface colony left us with two options; try to return underground and hope that we could reassemble enough of the shelter to make it functional again, or set out and hope there really were humans with military technology. The truth was that we only had the second choice. The shelter’s entrance would be all too easy for a group of androids to blow through, especially since they had real weaponry.

In a twist of irony, we were left with the same problem that spurred us toward the machine city in the first place. I reached down and toyed with the handful of palm seeds I printed before our escape. There were no doubts that I could engineer a genetic solution—I was already most of the way there—but the colony still had little food. One could only hope that the aid the androids had sent wasn’t completely gone. We were going to need every extra calorie we could get.

I jumped a little as my tablet crackled to life. Marcus’s and Eliza’s did too, jerking them out of a sound sleep. The noise sounded like a radio with bad reception. Marcus grabbed his gun and stood over the two of us like a wolf guarding his family. The crackling got louder, feedback breaking through the noise loudly enough that I was convinced it would disturb the local wildlife. So much for laying low.

“...ello?” A voice broke through the noise. “Can you hear us?” The speaker was distinctly human. An android wouldn’t bother with the pleasantries. “Hello? If you can hear us, listen closely.” I searched the tablet’s screen for some way to interrupt the transmission and reply, but there was none. “I can’t tell you my name. You know as well as I do that they’re listening, and I don’t want to put either of us in danger. We know who you are, and where you are.”

“Fuck.” Eliza tried to push herself on to her elbows but the pain forced her back down.

“We come as friends. We know what happened to you in the machine city, and we have heard what is coming. You have allies. Go North. We will find you.” Another crackle as the transmission ended. The three of us looked at each other in silence for a moment.

“There’s no way.” Marcus stared past me, keeping his gun lowered but at the ready. “Those sick fucks are just trying to lead us to