I stepped slowly around the boulder, gun in both hands.

“You’re human, Dad,” I said. “You’re a human with an implant, like me. Don’t let Ishango tell you what to do.”

I heard a moan from beyond the boulder. Maybe I’d broken his leg with my kick. I followed the sound, but he got the drop on me and fired his gun.

I felt the bullet hit me in the chest, right in one of my metal ribs.

My father had shot me.

CHAPTER 53

Jordan

I STAGGERED BACK, and Dad advanced, limping.

“Father, Father, we don’t need to escalate,” I said, raising my gun, but he shot it out of my hand, sending bullet fragments into my wrist and arm. Ouch. I dropped the pistol and fell to my knees. I’m still not sure I would’ve been able to fire it at him anyway, but I also wasn’t confident that he’d take any mercy on me.

“Jordan!” Maggie screamed, and started running toward me, but I held up a bloodied hand.

“Stay back!” I roared. My chest burned, and I could feel blood spreading on my shirt. I thought of Alpha, who had survived so many of my bullets. Could I shake off a gunshot wound and get back in the fight, too?

A line from that western Cat Ballou came to mind: The old gunslinger Kid Shelleen tells a younger man, “At first you don’t think you can stand to get hit, then you realize you can take it ’cause the blood don’t matter, and you know you’re gonna live. It’s a great gift I’m giving you—to know it don’t hurt to fight.”

The blood don’t matter and you know you’re gonna live.

Or as Patrick Swayze put it in Road House: “Pain don’t hurt.”

Despite the blood, I felt like this wound wasn’t bad. The bullet hit a rib, but these metal ribs were pretty sturdy—or so I assumed.

So I ran straight at my dad, not grimacing, not gritting my teeth. I was gonna live.

He looked surprised as I slammed into him, wrapping him up like my linebacker coach had taught me. I was tackling him and stripping him of the ball, in this case the gun, which I swatted from his grip as I took him down onto a rough pile of jutting rocks. I’d already been good at tackling before the implant in my head made me better, stronger, and faster, and now I knew exactly where to hit him to inflict the maximum damage and to punch all the wind out of his lungs.

There was another booming gunshot, and all three of us froze.

It was Maggie, who’d picked up the Magnum again and fired over us.

“That was a warning shot, Mr. Conners,” she said. “The next one won’t be. I don’t have the same soft spot for you that Jordan does, because you shot my mom, you robotic piece of shit. Let Jordan up before I pop a cap in your ass and another in your eye socket for good measure.”