My ribs felt like a bag of gravel.

  Deathlok’s grip pinned me to the rooftop, the rebar biting into my spine. Every breath was a negotiation with pain. Blood pooled somewhere beneath me—my blood, too much of it, spreading warm and sticky across the concrete. My vision kept blurring, edges going fuzzy like a bad signal. I blinked hard, trying to clear it, but the darkness crept in from the sides anyway.

  Jackie lay crumpled a dozen feet away, still out cold. Her hand was curled near her face, fingers twitching slightly. Good. She didn’t need to see this. Didn’t need to watch me lose.

  Deathlok’s red optic eye burned inches from my face. Heat radiated from the optical sensors, enough to prickle my skin.

  “You should have surrendered.” Its voice was a flat grind, stripped of anything resembling humanity. The words came from a speaker somewhere in its throat, mechanical and precise. “Pandora would have made you perfection. Instead, you chose weakness.”

  My left arm hung useless, the nerves shrieking every time I tried to move it. The world tilted sideways, gravity losing its grip on me, and I fought to stay conscious. To stay here. To stay alive.

  “Screw you,” I managed. The words came out wet, with a taste of copper. Not my best comeback.

  It tilted its head—an almost curious gesture, like a dog hearing a new sound. The movement was too smooth, too calculated. The exposed hydraulics in its neck hissed, releasing a puff of vapor that smelled like burning plastic. “Defiance. How predictable.”

  Its fingers dug deeper into my shoulder. Fire stripped the nerves in my arm, racing along every pathway like acid, and I couldn’t stop the scream. My bones creaked under the pressure, the sound distinct even over my own gasping. Something was about to give—muscle or bone, one would tear before the other.

  Through the red haze of pain, my brain threw up a memory: the schematic that Handy sent me.

  A flicker of blue light on a screen. Lines and numbers I barely understood, engineering specs way above my pay grade. But I’d stared at it long enough to memorize one detail—a tiny circle highlighted near the base of the spine, pulsing like a heartbeat. Handy’s cursor had circled it three times.

  Weak spot.

  My vision cleared for half a second. Deathlok loomed above me, its single red eye burning, its massive frame blocking out the dim light filtering through the skylights. Dust motes danced in the beams behind it, peaceful and wrong. I could see the ceramite armor plating up close now—scratched and dented from other fights, other victims. The reinforced joints gleamed with fresh oil. The trenchcoat hung open at its sides, revealing the full scope of what Pandora had built.

  And there—just barely visible when it shifted its weight—the faint glow of blue beneath the armored plate low on its back. Pulsing. Breathing, almost.

  The power core.

  Impossible to reach. Might as well be on the moon. My working arm could barely lift six inches off the ground, and my legs were pinned under its weight, going numb from lack of circulation.

  Except.

  Except I was still breathing, ragged and painful but breathing. Jackie was still alive—I could hear her heartbeat, slow and steady. And Pandora Corp had already taken too much from me. They wasn’t getting this. They wasn’t getting her.

  I forced my working hand to move. Fingers twitched, responding sluggishly to commands my brain had to scream at them. Closed into a fist. My knuckles cracked.

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  “Handy,” I rasped. The wristband was somewhere on my right arm, crushed between rebar and monster, the metal digging into my wrist. “You there?”

  A crackle of static. “Unfortunately, yes. Your vitals are terrible, by the way. Like, hospital-immediately terrible.”

  “Noted.” I sucked in a breath. Ribs screamed their protest. “The core. How much damage to—”

  “Any breach disables it. We’re talking catastrophic systems failure. Chain reaction, complete shutdown.” A pause, longer than usual. More worried than Handy usually let himself sound. “You’d need to be point-blank. As in, touching it.”

  Closer than I already was. Wonderful.

  I could feel my pulse slowing, the beats spreading further apart. Shock, probably. Blood loss, definitely. The world was getting colder, starting with my fingers and toes and creeping inward. Jackie stirred slightly, a tiny moan escaping her lips. Her eyelids fluttered. She’d wake soon. She couldn’t wake to this. Couldn’t see me die.

  Deathlok adjusted its grip, preparing for the killing blow. The fingers repositioned against my shoulder, finding purchase. “Pandora sends its regards.”

  I didn’t push away.

  I pulled.

  Every shredded muscle in my good arm screamed as I grabbed onto the hand crushing my shoulder and yanked it toward me, using its own strength as leverage. Deathlok’s optical sensor flared bright red. The machine hesitated. It didn’t have a file for “hugs.”

  I lunged for its head—or pretended to. My fingers clawed upward, wild and uncoordinated, like a drowning person grasping for air. The feint was ugly. Sloppy. Desperate. Perfect.

  Deathlok’s response was instantaneous. It shifted to block, torso rotating, one arm coming up to intercept my strike. Defensive posture, textbook perfect.

  The armored plate slid out of position. The core pulsed.

  Blue light spilled out beneath a gap in the plating, no bigger than my fist, throwing shadows across the ceramite. I could see wiring, circuitry, the delicate machinery that kept this monster running.

  Now or never.

  My claws came out. Not the human nails I’d woken up with this morning, but the real ones—curved, wicked things designed by genetics I didn’t ask for to tear through anything soft. They erupted from my fingertips with a wet crack, bone and keratin extending in a rush of transformation I barely controlled, splitting skin and nerve endings. Blood welled up around the base of each claw.

  I drove them into the gap.

  Deathlok made a sound—something between a mechanical shriek and the static of a dying radio. Its grip on my shoulder released, servos unlocking all at once. I twisted, ignoring the fresh wave of agony from my ribs, shoving my claws deeper. I felt the heat sear my skin, smelling the burning fur on my knuckles.

  The power core.

  I ripped.

  The core detonated.

  Blue-white blinding light flooded the roof, casting shadows that danced and writhed across broken equipment and cracked concrete. Electricity arced across Deathlok’s frame, crackling through the exposed hydraulics, racing along the ceramite plating in branching patterns like veins of fire. It staggered backward, convulsing, each movement jerky and wrong.

  My hand came free, dripping with oil and coolant and something that might have been blood. Not mine this time. The liquid hissed where it hit the floor, eating into concrete.

  Deathlok collapsed to one knee. The impact cracked the floor beneath it. The red optical sensor flickered—on, off, on again, dimmer each time—and its head jerked in erratic, twitching movements. Sparks fountained from the wound in its back, bright orange against the blue glow.

  But it wasn’t dead.

  It raised its arm—slow, fighting against failing systems. The plasma cannon mounted along its forearm began to glow, building charge with a rising whine that hurt my ears. Emergency reserves kicking in. One last shot.

  I couldn’t move. Couldn’t even crawl. My body had given everything and then some, every reserve burned away. My claws retracted slowly, leaving my fingers bloody and raw.

  Jackie stirred again. Her eyes fluttered open, focusing slowly on me. On the monster above me. On the glowing cannon.

  “Nikki?”

  The plasma cannon locked onto me with a soft beep. Targeting acquired. The whine peaked, the sound drilling into my skull.

  Deathlok’s voice crackled one last time, breaking up with static. “…you… break… easy…”

  Then the sound came—a roar that shattered the air, louder than thunder, louder than screaming. Heat washed over me, instant and unbearable.

  The world went white.