Shesh bolted deeper into the compound. His thin limbs numb from shock and cold. He couldn’t feel anything, though. All of his friends were dead. He didn’t process the signage he passed as he ran, or the strange acrid smell.

Bold red letters stated: WARNING: CHIRALITECH R&D RESTRICTED AREA. PROPER IDENTIFICATION REQUIRED.

Shesh could hear the servos and thrumming sounds of his pursuers. The chaff-bang had only thrown them off the scent for a little while. Why the hell did they base their tactics on the story of some slum girl and her gang’s alleged exploits? Why had they believed themselves invincible because of a single, stupid little grenade?

The Rust Dog’s thrum grew louder; there were at least two behind him. They seemed to slow. Must be enjoying the hunt, he thought bitterly.

Shesh charged through the metal frame of a partially collapsed building. He stomped over a metal sign that said R&D in purple letters. The slender boy darted through a reception room and a security gate, back out into open air.

There was a mound of fallen concrete walls and what appeared to be several crushed server stacks. He ran for the pile of concrete. It had lots of openings, making it harder for them to dig him out. They’d have difficulty registering his heat signature. He altered course, heart slamming against skinny ribs.

Suddenly, there was a scraping crash within the walls of the ruin. Shesh caught a glimpse of the third Rust Dog that had been stalking him.

There were so many eyes.

Red glowing ellipses flashed in the darkness. The four-legged machine was so close. So big.

It had lost it’s footing on scattered glass that confused its sensor block. Before Shesh could convince his legs to change direction, the Dog bounced back to its carbon fiber feet. The creature appeared to be all torso and legs. There was no discernible head, only a cluster of eyes buried between what seemed to act as shoulders. A grey and yellow plastic faring covered the elaborate mechanics and sensor equipment, close to its body. It had a clumsy looking roll cage that surrounded the main chassis. Sharp looking fin antennas jutted from it at mad angles.

A panel near the robot’s eyes slid open and the Rust Dog fired a cloud of flechette darts directly into Shesh.

The marker barbs were meant for tracking, but at this range, they acted more like a violent shotgun blast. The pain seemed to shut down his senses. Shesh wheeled. He was thrown into a spin from the sheer force of impact. At some point, before he hit the ground, he recognized part of his ragged right arm falling away from him in a different trajectory from his body.

He rolled for a moment, on the muddied carpet. He could feel his own blood soaking into the remnants of his dingy white tee-shirt and brown shorts. He could see frayed flesh all over his chest. There were deep craters that had exposed raw bone, in places. Everywhere, savage quills stuck out from his body. Each one flashed a dull red. Jerkily, with his remaining hand, he felt his face. He screamed when he discovered a clutch of darts in the mass of meat where his eye had once been.

Shesh heard the whirring of the Rust dog coming behind him. He remembered Pratik’s walleyes looking toward him. Could hear Basir’s lonely scream. Sana, with a smoking shard of metal in her back. Azizul running toward his certain death. His mind bucked. It refused to accept capture.

Rolling painfully onto his belly, Shesh slid his remaining arm, caked in blood and dirt, in front of him. He pulled himself slowly. Ahead, he saw what looked like a black rectangle in the wall. It was a hole. It seemed a thousand kilometers away in his narrowing vision. Shesh pulled. He managed to curl his whitened fingertips around the sodden edge of the hole.

He dragged with every ounce of strength left and slid his skinny body into the open doors of an elevator car. There were a pair of heavy clicks. To his right and left, he saw the synthetic legs of the robot standing over him. Its weight caused the carbon fiber rods to belly in smooth arcs.

Shesh turned back to look at the Dog looming over him in the elevator. It consumed nearly all the space in the large box. It held his disembodied right arm in crab-like mandibles and was rotating it slowly. Up close, the Rust Dog looked even more like a monster.

The scree sound of straining metal stopped the deadly drone in its tracks. The Dog’s sensor block and eyes rotated and scanned the ground. The creature standing over Shesh made a chittering sound as thousands of calculations were being addressed. Then, the weather-weakened floor of the elevator in the Chiralitech R&D laboratory disintegrated in a thunderous crash. Both boy and machine disappeared from the light of the moon as though they had never existed at all.

Shesh slammed into deep, cold water. It was enough to break his fall, but not enough to prevent breaking bones. He broke the surface of the murky pool shrieking in blind agony.

After that, he could only remember flashes.

He was stumbling in a void.

He had pushed through a thick metal door painted red and black.

There was a green glow. He smelled bright, metallic copper. Like blood.

A light came from deep in the darkened tunnel.

He was limping toward the greenish light.

He saw large intricate machines. Some looked like arms with geometric hands.

He was numb.

He remembered seeing…glass things. Tubes with strange objects inside. There were vibrating sounds, like he was in the belly of one of the limbless beggar’s purring street cats.

He had vomited. There were papers all over the floor. They looked like they were written in English, but he couldn’t read. His eyes seemed blurry. He saw blood dripping on the pages. His blood.

He’d passed a number of flat screen monitors. Some of them flickered, like an error page on the Line feed.

The floor was freezing under his bare feet. Over time, he’d noticed it change from concrete to grating and back to concrete.

At some point, as he stumbled along, the old bunker’s green had faded... to black.