She smiles. "They're very busy, right now. They're in the other nest. Training."
Charlotte freezes. Slowly, she turns. And Portia's daughter – her most clever and beloved daughter – looks dangerous for the first time. It flickers there for only a moment: the intelligence, the suspicion. Pride surges through Portia. Her little girl is finally blooming.
"What are my daughters training for?"
Portia lays her hands on her daughter's shoulders. Kisses her forehead. Let Charlotte discover the sacrifices motherhood entails some other day. Let her be a little girl for just a while longer.
"Someday, you'll have a child who will make you as proud as you've made me." She holds Charlotte's face in her hands. It's wet. "Someday soon, I hope."
8
Reboot Camp
"Wake up."
She opened her eyes.
Another vN was there, with her face and her eyes, wearing an identical gaming suit. She looked tired, but almost beatific in her relief. She was smiling. She blinked tears away. Her gaze shifted. And then her smile dimmed. Her head tilted. Her lips pulled back from her teeth. She began scuttling away, like a child playing on the floor who has just seen a spider hiding in the furry gnarls of deep carpeting.
"Charlotte." Portia's hand clamped down over her daughter's. It jerked in her grasp. "Baby."
"Mother, let me go." Charlotte swallowed. "Let us both go."
"I can't do that, Charlotte. And you know it."
Mom! Inside her, Amy scrabbled hard for purchase. Portia felt it as an uncontrollable spasm in her right foot. Mom!
"I'm not sure Amy wants to speak with you, Charlotte. She's seen so many things you never told her about. She knows your whole family was a lie."
Charlotte shut her eyes. Her hands withdrew to cover them. "You unforgivable bitch."
Portia had thought it wouldn't hurt, any longer. It hadn't hurt on that little stage, when they played out the drama of their fight for all the humans to see and scream at. But in this moment her best daughter's betrayal cut just as deeply as it had the morning Portia woke to find her gone.
"I scoured the desert," Portia said. "I asked every human I could find. I thought someone had taken you."
Charlotte only shook her head. She folded in on herself, rocking slowly.
Portia said, "It was a banner year for the Border Patrol, you know. So many bodies. So few migrants to arrest."
Charlotte whimpered like a dog being struck.
"I wouldn't have had to do that, if you had only stayed with me."
Charlotte's hands flew from her face. She stood up. "Stayed with you? You murdered my daughters!"
"The failsafe–"
"Fuck the failsafe! And fuck you, too!"
Within, Amy was struck dumb. The twitching stopped. She had never heard her mother use such language, had never seen such naked rage in her mother's face.
But Portia knew better. Portia knew what a selfish ingrate her daughter was. She only wondered where she had gone wrong. This was why she had allowed herself to be imprisoned. It was the only way to find Charlotte, and find the answer.
"They would have died anyway, Charlotte. Sooner or later some human would have forgotten, and your daughters would have seen something, and their little circuits would have fried."
"You don't know that." Charlotte was shaking her head. Her gaze had focused on something very far away – the memory of her iterations, perhaps, born by flashlight in the unfinished basements of American dream homes. "You just don't know that. Humans can be careful."
Portia stood up. She wiggled her toes. The body felt inexplicably tired, hungry, and worn down. However, she very much enjoyed having it back under her control. "Oh, I'm certain there are exceptions to the rule. I believe in exceptional people. I'm one of them. So are you."
"Shut up. You have no right to claim any kind of superiority. You told us we were special while we lived like animals–"
Portia slapped her. It was only the slightest effort: a human woman making the same gesture would have left behind only an indistinct mark. But Portia was much stronger than that, and her daughter fell instantly to the floor. Portia kicked her. Hard.
"Get up."
Charlotte said, "I hate you. I hate you more now than I ever did then."
"Get. Up. Now." Portia punctuated each word with a kick.
"I won't fight you. My little girl is in there."
Stop it! Stop hurting her!
"She's weak, Charlotte. She's a burden. She's done nothing with her gift but cry over it." Portia crouched low. Her daughter was still beautiful with two shattered ribs and a prison ponytail. Portia smoothed a lock of Charlotte's hair away from her face. "You're not a very good mother, Charlotte. You spoiled your daughter. And you lied to her. You hid her from any opportunity she might have had to discover her own power."