Her second burst struck his chest. The bullets punched into him, pushed his upper body back, flipped him head first over the railing. His head and chest flew out into space and then he was cartwheeling backwards, his legs rising as he spun end over end. Then he was gone, out into the night, plunging down the cliff face to the rocks below.

“Sam!” Feng yelled.

Sam wept inside as she turned and pulled the trigger once again.

Chapter 83: Daddy Dearest

83

DADDY DEAREST

Saturday November 3rd

Ling stepped silently into her father’s room. The house closed the door quietly behind her. The curtains were closed tight here. There was practically no illumination in the room, but her posthuman eyes needed next to none to make out his form. The bed was ahead of her and to the right. Her father was sprawled on it, face down, his limbs akimbo, his body on the side closest to her, his head turned towards the center of the bed.

Ling moved forward slowly, quietly. Her feet made no sound on the thickly padded carpet, but the urge to cry, to sob, was strong. This was so hard. So scary. Her father frightened her now. He was only a human, but he’d hit her, burned her.

Ling’s face scrunched up as she took another step, she felt tears falling from her eyes, felt a sniffle rising, felt cries rising up inside her, threatening to burst out.

She moved forward faster, her sight blurring from the tears. She was past the foot of the bed now. Her father’s hand lolled off the left side of the bed. She stepped around it, past it, until she was just before the night stand, her body against the bed, inside her father’s reach, his head just within reach in front of her.

Ling’s face was hot. Her heart pounded as the tears fell from her face. She could barely see, could barely think. This was her father! But if she didn’t do this her mother would die, die forever.

Ling raised the injector with two trembling hands, pushed it forward until the tip almost touched the back of her father’s neck.

He heard something then, or felt something. Her father stirred, made a noise, started to turn his head.

Ling jammed the injector forward, squeezed the trigger for all she was worth with both her index fingers.

Within the injector, a circuit closed, a battery delivered current to a superconducting coil, magnetizing it, activating a Lorenz-force motor that drove a piston forward. A fraction of a millisecond after Ling pulled the trigger, the injector shot a supersonic stream of nanodevice-laden fluid into the skin, muscle, and blood vessels of her father’s neck.