Marchey changed position, his hypersensitive ur-fingers tracing the convoluted skeinings of his patient’s nervous and circulatory systems upward. Toward the head. Toward the brain. A tight-lipped, disapproving frown shadowed his face.
Form V or mimetic cancer had turned the old man’s thoracic area into a metastatic jungle of blackflowering malignancies. Lungs. Liver. Spleen. Stomach. Kidneys. The list went on and on.
“I turned her into the perfect enforcer and bodyguard. She doesn’t believe she is an angel, she knows it. Her certainty is absolute and unshakable. Every glance in the mirror confirms that certainty. I was the one who tattooed her face, by the way. A most enjoyable art form, in that it is the canvas and not the artist that suffers. Her loyalty is absolute. She will disbelieve her own senses before she doubts me or my orders.”
He had to pause for breath. For the last few months he had not been able to get quite enough air.
“As for the name Scylla, that was a private joke only I was properly equipped to appreciate. When she was ready, I tested her. The first two tasks I gave her were simple. First I had her kill the doctor who made her what she was. Slowly, and with a certain bloody flair. Then I had her kill her own mother.”
Marchey shook his head, displeased. One of Form V’s mimetic variations was vascular. It insinuated itself into the structure of the patient’s veins and capillaries, replacing healthy cells and mimicking their function. To destroy or excise it would cause vascular collapse.
That was what it had done inside Brother Fist’s cranium. The old monster’s brain was as rotten and tumorous as the abominations it housed. Remove the cancer and he would begin hemorrhaging in literally hundreds of thousands of places.
As Marchey explored the damage, some mental subsystem heard the story of how an innocent girl had been warped into a monster and felt sorrow. Another felt relief that there was almost no chance he would be able to perform a self-damning healing. But for the most part he was in the position of a fireman who has arrived on the scene only to find the house he is supposed to save already completely engulfed in flame.
Brother Fist could not resist fondling the grim bones of his works. “You should have seen it. The expression of shock and horror on her mother’s face was one of the most exquisite things I have ever seen. She recognized her child. She wept. She pled. She cried Angel’s name, but it meant nothing to my creation. Scylla flayed—”
The rest of that grisly description was blotted out by a wall-shuddering reverberating boom, deafening as the thunderclap riding a lightning strike, deep and foreboding as the first trump of the Apocalypse. Books and art objects jittered from their shelves, crashing to the floor.
It came again, this time bringing a stony rain and the tormented shriek of rending steel.
Brother Fist stared past Marchey, his face turning an ashy gray when he saw Scylla standing in the ragged hole where once there had been an armored door.
She was an apparition to strike fear. Dust swirled around her like smoke. Her demonic face was twisted into a terrifying mask of hatred. Her angel eye was aimed at her Master with the deadly intent of a gun-sight while her other eye burned with an angel’s wrath and glistened with an angel’s unshed tears.
“—no—” Fist protested, his voice coming out as no more than a cracked whistle. He tried to aim the Fukura at her, but Marchey was in the way. He pawed at the larger man desperately, but Marchey remained oblivious, all his attention was focused on the impossible task at hand.
“Fist.” Scylla’s voice was cold, empty. The sound of a soul scoured by vacuum. She stepped across the bent steel and stone rubble that had once been a heavily reinforced door, pieces crunching under her metal feet. “You. Devil.”
Scylla stalked toward her maker, her steps measured and balletic, the gleaming silver metal of her exo flowing liquidly with her every motion. She seemed to glow with gathered power and purpose; a radiant, sword-sharp instrument of vengeance cast in argent and set into unstoppable motion. She was beautiful, the way a panther closing in for the kill is beautiful— form, function, and a terrible grace welded into one deadly purpose.
Brother Fist was in no position to appreciate the breathtaking perfection of his creation as she came toward him. His panic-stricken squirming finally let him get the gun pointed at her. He wasted no breath in warning, instead grimly taking aim at her face and pulling the trigger. The weapon roared and bucked in his hand, wrenching itself out of his feeble grasp.
Scylla’s amped reflexes let her swat the folded steel missile screaming toward her forehead aside like a lazy fly. One glassy eye in the wall of screens shattered explosively and went blind. She bared her sharkish teeth in something too bloodcurdling to be a smile.
“I don’t know if I am really an angel anymore,” she said as she came up behind the oblivious Marchey, her voice flat and hopeless. She shoved him aside, bowling him off his feet. Then she reached for her creator.
“—but I am going to send you to Hell anyway.” Her curved talons hissed from their sheaths and locked into place with a menacing snick. Each one ten centimeters of diamond-hard, microtome-sharp neoceramic, the ones on her left hand still crusted with her own blood.
“One piece at a time.”
She reached toward him to begin.
Brother Fist cringed back in his chair. But it wasn’t deep enough to let him escape his angel’s deadly caress.
Marchey found himself facedown on the floor with only a hazy idea how he had gotten there. He got himself onto his knees and turned around in time to see Scylla wrap her taloned silver fingers around Brother Fist’s throat.
“No! Don’t!” he shouted, lurching to his feet. He launched himself at her and wrapped his arms around her to restrain her.
They sank through her body as if they weren’t there. He stared down at his stumps in dumb surprise.
Brother Fist writhed and kicked his feet, the liverish slash of his mouth stretched wide in a soundless howl. His bony fingers clawed in futile desperation at the vise clamped around his throat. Wet, livid red spattered his black cassock as the talons sank like hooks into his wattled neck.
With her head cocked to one side, Scylla stared down at his face as if seeing him clearly for the first time and trying to figure out what he might be. The anger was gone from her face. All that remained was a lifeless, moon-cold landscape.
“Don’t do it Scyl—Angel,” Marchey crooned soothingly as he centered himself and brought to bear the invisible hands which made him what he was. He sank them into her back and moved them gently inside her, playing her nervous system like a harp as he cautiously, delicately, probed first this bundle of nerves, then that one.
“I have to.” Her voice was perfectly flat, emotionless as the metal that sheathed her tightening hands. Her shoulders sagged, but her grip did not loosen. Fist’s face was turning bluish gray, his eyes bulging in terminal disbelief. His hands scrabbled like dying crabs, fingers slashed and bloody from clawing at Scylla’s talons.
“You don’t,” Marchey said softly, insistently. “He’s beaten now. Let him go. Look at him. He’s old. Sick. He’s dying. Form V cancer, that’s what he has, and its so advanced that even I can’t do anything to save him. Let that kill him. Don’t let him make a killer out of you.”
Scylla’s one eyelid was growing heavy as Marchey gently stole her consciousness. It sagged at half-mast, like a pale flag of reluctant surrender.