>>5288448“I said I’m doing this.” Alicja repeats, staring up at the woman towers head and shoulders over her with a resolve that genuinely seems to have caught Mara off-guard. “People are suffering, and I…there’s a chance, however slim, that I can do something to stop it. I’m not going to sit around and do nothing.”
“You could die.” Mara intones.
“They could live.” Alicja counters.
The taller woman grunts, folding her arms before stating; “This is a lot to ask of you.”
“In the grand scheme of things? Not really.” Alicja shrugs, chuckling weakly. “But…there is something I’d like to ask of you? It’s kind of a big thing, so I understand if you-”
“Name it.” Mara cuts her off, her gruffness undercut with a warmth that robs the syllables of any cruel bite.
“If…if this doesn’t work, then could you…” Alicja stumbles, flashing Mara a meek smile. “…make it quick?”
Mara’s mouth opens, then closes. She just stands there, staring down at Alicja before going down on one knee and pulling her into a hug. From the treeline emerges Alpha, still clad in her calcite panoply and with an unconscious form slung over one shoulder—a deer-like amalgam, its features a mess of prey animals with its hide striped with dozens of different textures, both hide and feather.
“Got one to test!” She announces proudly as Mara lets Alicja go. “We ready to save the world?”
“Well...are we?” The young woman asks with a smile, bravely extending her hand to Mara.
The woman who would become Marrow Dragoon reaches out to take it when the diorama shudders, the actors subsumed into the ambient biomass before the cabin grows in size to ‘zoom in’...just in time for the building’s front door to be violently kicked open and for Alpha to come storming out.
“Fuck. FUCK!” She screeches, a swing of her armored fist shattering the railing as she stomps down the steps. “God FUCKING damn it!”
Mara emerges from the darkened doorway, chasing after Alpha as she starts pacing furious circles in the front yard. “Where do you think you’re going? We need to get back in there and fix this, Alpha.”
“FIX it?! The girl’s fucking broken, and that amalgam’s…I don’t know what she did, but it sure as hell wasn’t control! She fucking re-wired it, or something, I don’t know!”
“This is exactly why I warned you about West. She’s playing with forces she barely understa-” Mara begins before Alpha whirls on her with a snarl.
“That girl was the one that fucked it up! I should’ve reinforced her Core with some of the augmentations West mentioned before all this, but…fuck it, we’ll just re-do the damn thing. We can salvage this.”
“...What the hell are you talking about?” Mara mutters, standing very still in the face of Alpha’s meltdown.
(Continued)