Read vN for Free Online

Never once seeing their faces or hearing their voices or feeling their arms around her would probably hurt a lot less, if she were smashed into a million pieces.
      Red lights washed the kennels in a sudden cough syrup haze. "Shit," the guard said. He thumbed off his scroll, rolled it shut, and stuffed it in one shirt pocket. Then he pressed open a panel over his shoulder and retrieved a shotgun. Frowning, he snapped it open and sniffed the rounds. Apparently pleased, he marched down to the kennel holding the other person.
      "This your doing?" he asked. "Your boys know where you are?"
      "…chingada, cabrón."
      "Yeah, same to you, pal. I know exactly what they're doing with you, later. They're gonna smoke your ass." He stared up at the ceiling. "Serial–"
      Behind him, another door slammed open, knocking him forward. He stumbled, and the gun clattered to the floor. An alarm filled Amy's ears. She covered them. Now she watched three women walk in through the door. One aimed a can of spray paint at the guard; she misted him with it and he began to collapse. The woman caught him, and laid him down tenderly, arranging his limbs as though for sleep. It must have been some kind of drug in that can; Amy heard no screams and saw no blood. What she did see frightened her more.
      Granny. Three of them.
      Now Amy did skitter backward in her little kennel. She watched the three women walk forward, single file. They each wore her mother's face, but every other detail shouted Wrong! in Amy's head: the tightness in their shoulders, the alertness of their gaze, their mismatched clothes and the hungry way they looked at her. Up close, she saw the plastic embedded in their flesh. It poked up at odd points, black and pink and green just visible at the thinnest stretches of their skin. They peeled her door away; sparks hissed harmlessly off their thick gloves.
      "You're coming with us," one said.
      Amy whimpered. There was no way she could escape from all three of them. They were here to punish her. They had to be. She had eaten their mother. "Go away!"
      One of them moved forward. "You have something we need."
      "Leave me alone!" Amy pressed herself up against the wall. Her fingers, for some reason, were still in her ears. She was crying. They were staring. "I'm sorry, OK? I'm really sorry. I didn't mean to. Just please let me go home. Please, I just want to go home."
      One smiled faintly. "You are home." And she reached out–
      –and then her hand vanished, gone in a hot puff of wind that smelled vaguely of bile. For a moment, the other von Neumann woman watched her flailing stump of a wrist. Then the wrist disappeared, blazing away into blackly glittering nothingness that smoked from her disintegrating arm. She didn't scream. She didn't howl with pain or fear as a human would have done – she just watched as a large figure in a green jumpsuit loped down the hall carrying the guard's shotgun.
      "I think you know what this is!"
      Amy's fellow prisoner primed the shotgun again. He was hugely fat, and wore badly scorched prison slippers on his hands. Amy smelled burning cloth. The other vN women backed away, abandoning their sister, who cradled her disintegrating arm close to her chest. Now he stood at the ruined door to Amy's cage. He said, "There are three more puke rounds in here. The peroxidase in just one can eat carbon tubes faster than your repair mods can handle it. You're gonna die."
      He pointed the weapon straight at Amy's head. "And now you're gonna let me leave."
      Amy tried moving, but he was bigger and faster and he grabbed her arm and wrenched her upward. He pressed the gun into her back and nudged her forward. "Move."
       Fight back, a voice inside said to Amy. You can take him .
      But then the gun was prodding her again, and she stepped forward. The sisters followed her with their eyes. She kept walking. At the end of the hall stood a set of doors secured by a single