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 steel bar.
"Open it," her fellow prisoner said.
Amy's fingers fumbled on the lock. Grimacing, she forced the bar up and over. It squealed a little as it slid down. She pushed open the doors–
–and almost fell into oncoming traffic. Her arms windmilled for a minute before a hand bunched up in her jumpsuit and yanked her back. Columns of headlights had gathered just a foot below them. Drivers honked and gestured at dashboard comms. Far away, she saw the blink and spin of police cars. The kennel room wasn't a room at all: it was a vehicle.
"Hey, a mobile prison," said her new captor. "The chimps are getting creative." Then he pushed her.
Amy landed on her knees – atop a car. She winced and tried to apologize to the woman shouting in the driver's seat. Beside her, the other prisoner jumped down and grabbed her arm. He pulled her off the car and along the highway, out of the red glare of the mobile prison and into the rows of increasingly noisy cars. Amy looked back. The sisters stood high above in the mobile prison, watching. They could still help you, a voice inside said. Do you want to be a hostage?
"Out," said her kidnapper. He was tapping on the driver's side window of an old and dented blue sedan with the business end of the gun. The teenaged boy inside yelled something, and Amy's captor flipped the gun around and busted the window with it. "Out," he repeated. "Please."
The boy scrambled out of the car on the other side. He held his hands up. "You can take whatever you want," he said. "I mean, seriously, just take it, just let me go–"
"Start running," Amy's kidnapper said. The boy ran.
Her kidnapper reached inside the door via the broken window, and opened it. He pushed her inside. She crawled over to the passenger side and squeezed back against the seat as her hostage-taker reached across her and pulled the door shut. It slammed and she flinched. He gave her an odd look before shutting his own door and edging the car past the prison and into the flow of traffic. He could barely fit his bulk inside the driver's seat. He didn't bother with a seat belt.
"You see that?" he asked, pointing at the mobile prison as it blurred past. Outside, it looked like an ordinary eighteenwheeler with the words ISAAC'S ELECTRONICS inscribed across its panels. "That's somebody's idea of a joke. It's fucking sick."
Amy said nothing. The gun sat between them. She wondered if she could grab it and use it. But where would she go? They were screeching through traffic. She couldn't drive. At least, not in real life.
"You could thank me, you know." He began ripping out peripherals and throwing them out the window.
"For taking me hostage?"
"For saving your ass!" He tossed a fistful of wires onto someone else's windshield. "You didn't want to go with them, did you?"
Amy blinked. She hadn't quite thought of it that way. "Well, no…"
"Who were they, anyway?"
Amy hugged her knees. "My aunts, I guess," she said. How much had he heard back there? "I, um… I sort of killed my grandmother." He said nothing, but she sensed the suspicion anyway. "She and my mom were having a fight, and I got in the middle, and–"