Stormblood, стр. 40

from my feet and hands. Light-headed with exhaustion, I staggered to the sink and gulped down ice-cold water from the tap, letting it burn down my swollen throat. I drank until I was on the verge of being sick before sprawling out on the floor. My underskin was drenched in so much sweat it was like I’d been swimming. I peeled it off, kicked it away and let the coldness of the floor seep into my back, lowering my temperature, aching limbs spread out as I breathed in fresh air.

‘Goodness me. Is everything quite all right?’ I peeled one eye open to watch the Rubix’s rabbit avatar hop towards me and sit by my side, its ears pricked and whiskers twitching, a note of genuine concern in its voice. I bit back a groan. A Rubix was possibly the last thing I wanted to speak to right now.

‘Never better.’

I didn’t want to ever move again, but I had injuries to deal with. The armour-piercing bullets had punched into my skin, but they’d not reached bone or nerve. I got the printer to print me up a medskin as I headed for the shower. I examined my wounds as I scrubbed away the layers of grime coating my body. There were neat incisions around my ankles and wrists where the Rubix had cut off my circulation. I was covered in plum-purple contusions, a showcase of lacerations, bullet wounds and sprained muscles. So many crisscrossing aches and pains it was easier to call my body one big bruise. Physical exhaustion crashed down on me like a scattershot blast, the world fading and blurring between blinks. I blinked hard and wiped my face with both hands.

Stormtech is like a muscle. Don’t use it and it atrophies. Mine had grown slow and sluggish – weak tendrils of blue wriggling up my left side in slow motion. After its bout of excitement, its reserves were depleted. Nothing left in the tank to heal me.

Finally clean, I was ravenous as I stumbled into the kitchen, found nothing but a box of ultra-sugary cereal. I hadn’t eaten in twenty-four hours so I wolfed it down anyway. When I wasn’t being kidnapped by Harmony, chased by knife-wielding Shifters, or tortured by psychopaths, I was really going to have to go shopping.

The printer pinged! behind me. My medskin was done. I slipped into its warm, skin-hugging embrace. The thick material tightened to my flesh as it vacuum-sealed around me from the neck down. Developed by Sector Prone, Harmony’s science and research department, to treat serious injuries, it was a pupil-black, rubbery suit with a hexagonal pattern system, capable of pinpointing and treating all kinds of pains and injuries. The interior was covered with a carpet of gel-coated tendrils, stirring to life like sea anemones on contact with flesh.

Never much liked this part. I shivered as the tendrils tickled my skin, searching me for wounds as it prepped the necessary antibodies, chemicals and healing ointments. Its jellyfish tentacles curled warm and wet around my limbs.

I sprawled out on the bed and did my best to ignore the pinch and prickle of the medskin getting to work. Having been strapped into a single, immobilised position for so long, I felt the searing pleasure of joints popping as I stretched my aching limbs.

My lead-heavy eyes fluttered closed. ‘Hey, pesky rabbit?’

‘Yes?’ the AI asked immediately.

‘If anyone I don’t like comes through that door, please murder them.’

‘Oh, certainly. It would be my pleasure,’ the rabbit said, as if I’d asked it for coffee. It hopped away and disappeared. The autocannon slithered out of the ceiling, targeting software switching on. I slowly sank towards unconsciousness. It’s amazing how well you sleep when you’ve got a military-grade, high-velocity autocannon watching your flank.

It felt like a nanosecond later when someone prodded me in the chest. I forced my sticky eyes open to see Grim standing over me.

I’d snatched a forty-minute nap. I needed more like forty hours. There was a nasty dryness in my chest and my head was pounding with white-hot stars. I blinked away gauzy webs of sleep as Grim glanced at the oscillating patterns of red and purple flickering across the hexagonal fabric of my medskin.

‘Man, they really messed you up.’

‘No, really? What gives you that idea?’ I coughed and my body gave an involuntary shiver as the tendrils massaged the muscles under my back to smooth out the knots. ‘It’s a big operation, Grim. This isn’t a couple of guys stealing stormtech to shoot up at their academy house parties. Their product isn’t killing Reapers by accident. It’s an industry. And Artyom’s part of it.’

I attempted to sit up, but the medskin had immobilised me. It was like I had a kilo of lead in my limbs. I felt my hands balling into fists. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

Grim perched on my bedframe. ‘Can I talk you out of pursuing this now?’

‘Can’t see it working.’ I winced as the tendrils sniffed along my shoulder blades with a slimy wriggling sensation, easing writhing silica inside my entry wounds. I jolted as the medskin applied antibodies, sterilisers, collagen, fibrinogen and military-grade morphine to numb the pain, the names popping off on my shib. There was a distinct crunch as it started gouging the bullets out. My back arched, creaking at the abrupt agony. I had a sudden memory of when I’d first been turned into a Reaper, having all sorts of uncomfortable apparatus plugged, rammed and inserted into all sorts of places. ‘I’m not letting them get away with this,’ I managed through gritted teeth.

‘You bet they won’t.’ I don’t know when Kowalski had entered my apartment. I only knew that when my body went numb, it wasn’t the medskin. Apparently the Rubix had decided I liked her.

She was wearing the same leather jacket over her Harmony underskin, open at the neck. Her look of quiet fury flickered between me and Grim, as if weighing up who was getting dragged through the verbal slaughterhouse