SHILOH

  Cold. So cold. She lies on her back on the beach, her body cradled by the moist sand, which seems to be slowly rising up around her, enveloping her. Or maybe she’s just sinking. Disappearing. Her presence—her existence—isn’t strong enough to support itself. She is becoming nothing, because she was never enough of a thing to begin with.

  The only warmth is the well of blood forming on her chest, running down the sides and front of her torso.

  She’s been shot. Defeated. So simply and so easily. She never had a chance.

  It’s like it’s always been. She strives for life, and is met with only death. Why? Because death is stronger. Her priorities have been ill-conceived, her perspective naive.

  The forces of darkness and death cannot be met with good intention alone, but with forces of her own.

  Why has it taken so long for her to see this for herself? After everything with Gavin? After everything with Daimon, and the Biodroids?

  It’s not enough to simply do the right thing. It never was. No matter what they teach you as a child. Society is pacifist by nature, even if it tends to sacrifice parts of itself for the sake of the whole, in its own contradictory way.

  As a child, Shiloh had tried to leave the Cloister, believing that all she needed was faith. And that’s just it. She was a child then. She is grown now. She must put away childish things.

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  It is a bitter pill to swallow. The reality that Gavin was right. Shiloh’s father was always doomed to fail. Vision and purpose, no matter how pure, were never enough.

  But it’s not over. Not yet. There’s still time. To be strong. To be everything her father couldn’t.

  To win.

  She scrabbles in the shifting sand, pulling herself upright.

  The Corsair has his back to her, walking away. But he stops, turning to look at her.

  He raises his pistol, pointing it at her. A rivulet of moonlight travels in a circle around the bore as he holds it up. “Looks like it’s time for the double-tap treatment.”

  His fingers flex, the bony joint of his trigger finger undulating underneath the layer of synthetic skin.

  Shiloh holds out her hand. A black tentacle leaps up out of the sand, slick and oily and covered in uneven spikes that look like shards of glass. It wraps around the Corsair’s outstretched hand like a whip, pulling it to the side just as the gun goes off.

  The Corsair screams. He attempts to extricate his hand, but the tentacle pulls tighter.

  The spikes sever and tear, casting bright ribbons of blood into the air, shiny under the light of the moon.

  As Shiloh gets to her feet, she holds out her other hand, summoning more black tendrils from under the beach. They move quickly, wrapping tightly around the Corsair's legs and arms, neck and face. They pull him backward as he struggles, and the air fills with fresh spurts of blood from his jagged wounds. He crumbles against the beach, and Shiloh towers over him.

  "You should have been more careful," she says. "Or perhaps your willpower just wasn’t strong enough. You should have destroyed me—one clean shot to the head would have done it. Why didn’t you? I thought you were supposed to be robotic, emotionless, without compassion."

  He tries to speak, then coughs up blood. "I was ordered not to… it was supposed to be…peaceful…"

  Peaceful. What a joke.

  The tendrils tighten, crushing and slicing until the Corsair is left as a crumpled form on the beach, a mound of flesh and limbs, subtly shifting with the rhythm of his breathing—until the breathing stops.