Free Blades of Winter by G. T. Almasi

priorities, and I am totally not ready to lose my mother.
    I
am
ready to lose this cast on my arm, though. It itches like crazy. The Med-Techs won’t give me anything for it because they’re worried about how the antihistamines would react with the residual drugs in my body. They were only half joking with me when they said I’d voided my arm’s warranty by punching that last guy so hard. Apparently my upgrades are able to withstand only “reasonable force and stress.” I told the Med-Techs that we’d see how reasonable
their
behavior was after I’d kidnapped all
their
mothers. I think they’re just pissed at me for making them miss their golf games.
    I’m quite a sight. My arm is all wrapped up, and there’s also the big stupid bandage on my left cheek from that graze I took in New York a few days ago. This is the firsttime I’ve had to be rebuilt after a job. When my father was in recovery, he’d gripe nonstop about it, and now I see why. It’s only been a couple of days, and I’m
so
fucking bored! I’d be especially grumpy if it weren’t for my mom taking care of me.
    We’re in a two-bedroom suite in the hotel upstairs from Extreme Operations’ HQ. The hotel is mostly for VIPs, but it also is used as a hospital and halfway house for homeless recovering Levels and their mothers. It’s just as well that we’re staying so close to work. The Information Department has spent the entire weekend feverishly plotting a response to the mess I walked into in Manhattan and to Cleo’s kidnapping. One guess from Info is that Cleo’s kidnappers didn’t want my mom so much as they wanted information about my dad. Another guess is that they were supposed to snatch me and got us mixed up.
    This has all swirled around me without really sinking in. My father has been dead for eight years, and now we get news that he’s turned up alive in Carbon, the Germans’ high-profile yet highly classified cloning program. I don’t know what to think. I’m so used to how things have been that this feels like it’s about someone else. I’d be able to make better sense of it if I weren’t so tired from my surgery. I’m also too hungry to think straight.
    I hold the bowl in front of my face and chug the last half of the soup. As I bring the bowl down, I see that Cleo has appeared in the kitchen doorway. She puts her hands on her hips and clucks her disapproval. I grin sheepishly, then daintily dab a napkin on my lips with a very prim and proper look on my face. Mom takes the bowl away in a huff. Her mouth makes a thin, straight line not because she’s angry but because she’s trying not to laugh. My table manners are so hilariously hopeless that she can’t stay mad at me about them.
    Cleo goes into the kitchen to put the bowl in the sink, and as she walks back into my room, she finally bursts out laughing. She sits next to me on the bed, takes mynapkin, and wipes my forehead. I guess the top rim of the bowl got some soup on me when I was drinking it. Now we both start giggling.
    “Angel, what will I do with you?” She’s still smiling as she takes my face in her hands and looks into my eyes. After a moment, her smile fades and she repeats, more seriously this time, “What
will
I do with you?”
    “I’ll be fine, Mom. I’ll be good at this job. Better even than Daddy was.”
    After a pause, she says, “I’m not sure how to feel about that, Alix. Your father’s work took a terrible toll on him. By the time you were born, he wasn’t the man I met and married.”
    “What was he like when you met?” It’s difficult to talk to my mother about my father because she and I had such different relationships with him. The two of them fought a lot, whereas Dad and I got along great on the rare occasions when I saw him.
    She gets up and slowly paces around the room. “When we met, he was more … balanced. He was strong and capable, but he also had hobbies, interests. He read books about architecture. We’d take walks