She touched her temple. The metal was warm now. Pliant.
The cold came first. Not the cold of winter, but the cold of the operating table. The cold of the morgue drawer. Alexia lay on the linoleum of the garage, her scarred skull humming against the concrete. The titanium plate the surgeons had screwed into her cranium years ago was no longer a foreign body. It had grown hungry. titanium pelicula
And she is pregnant. With a key.
She stood. The mechanics around her—the greasy boys with their wrenches and their cheap cologne—did not see her. They saw a girl. A survivor of the crash. They did not see the way her spine yearned to become a drive shaft. She touched her temple
She turned. Her left eye had gone chrome. "It's going to kiss you back." The cold came first
The first boy laughed. "You gonna kiss it?"
She didn't attack him. That would be too quick, too human. Instead, she unzipped her own forearm. Bene the flesh, there was no blood. Only hydraulic fluid, black and sweet. The boy stared. His friends stared. And from the wound, a seatbelt slithered out—not nylon, but something organic. Ribbon of ligament. It wrapped around his ankle.