Angelis

“Many believe she survived the robot rebellion by hiding my laboratory, and you know what that means.”

The whispers followed her and said she was a construct, a chimera, a being of two places and none. They said I’d taken an innocent girl and put my hand in her brain and remade her in my image. They called me the Godmaker when they thought I wasn’t listening, but I’d long since stopped caring about that. 

She’d survived the war in her own way, of course, but people saw her with me, and she’d come to me once while injured, and rumours flew before she’d ever stood a chance in our little community. The truth never mattered much here anyway. 

“Angelis,” she called from the doorway, her odd little way of announcing herself before she stepped inside. As though I wouldn’t know she was there and react poorly. Her hair was blue today; someone must have given her some dye in a trade. Her green eye followed my path around the room, glass brown one completely stationary in her skull. “Angelis I need to speak to you.”

“You are speaking to me,” I said mildly, putting down the pipette on the counter and turning to face her properly. Angelis was one of the strangest names I responded to for all that she wasn’t the only one to call me it. 

No sign of irritation crossed her face at my words, and she picked her way across the room carefully, spear strapped to her back. She paused barely a foot away from me, so I could see the lines around her eyes and the red dust ingrained into her clothes. The knife at her belt was new, but this was the first I’d seen of her in months. Her boots were the same as they had been for years, laced tightly above her ankles and cracking over the toes. 

I waited patiently for her to say something, but nothing was forthcoming. “You need to speak to me?” I said eventually, gesturing around the quiet laboratory. 

“Yes,” she said, nodding, and she stepped forward again, breaching my tight bubble of personal space that she’d always been so careful to respect before. “Please stop me if you need to.”

If I had expected her to kiss me I would have expected it to be perfunctory, almost performative, a learned action, not quite understood, because I’m an asshole. Instead her lips were warm from the sun and soft, and her head tilted against mine comfortably, pressing close. She kissed without innocence or expectation, and that part of me that remembered I hadn’t taken a lover in years and yearned, responded in kind. 

When she stepped back, a faint blush high in her cheeks, my hands were fisted tightly, jagged fingernails cutting deep into my palms, and my breath was high in my throat. “Well,” I said with an evenness of tone that I certainly didn’t feel. “I definitely can’t keep calling you Nameless Girl after that.”

She smiled, and it was like the dawn breaking over the desert outside, beautiful and blistering. “So name me,” she said quietly.