Free An End by Paul Hughes

gaze so that he would not inadvertently stare at the angel and the child.
    “Are you sure?” Nan stroked Lily’s hair, the child’s face buried in her chest, her body sending second-hand sobs into the projection’s periphery filter.
    “Of course I’m sure. I spoke with Mo—I spoke with Maire myself. It’s time for the girl to begin.” He absent-mindedly picked one of Lily’s dolls from the floor, a buxom lass with impossible features, made even more ridiculous by the fact that almost every female that had even remotely resembled her had died a horrible death at the hands of the silver affliction. The doll was one of a dead breed.
    Lily turned from the safety of Nan’s embrace and walked calmly over to Mr. Pierce, defiantly tore the doll from his grasp, walked back to Nan. “Mine.”
    Mr. Pierce was taken aback for a moment. It had been decades since he had actually interacted with a child. “I see you’ve taught her how to share.”
    Nan scoffed. “Leave her be. She’ll be sharing enough once you get your hands on her.”
    He couldn’t believe the gall of the projection, talking to him in that condescending manner. “This isn’t something I want to do, Nan. This is something I have to do.”
    Nan pulled Lily closer, kissed the top of her head. The child had finally stopped sniffling, and she was engrossed in her doll. “She’s just a baby.”
    “And you knew all along that we’d have to send her away. You’ve become attached, Nan. Never should have become attached.”
    She watched the girl, and Pierce saw that look in her eye, that empty, longing look of the projected machine. How she yearned to be constructed of beautiful, awful, mortal flesh. She looked at the girl as if she herself had given birth to her.
    “She’s not yours, Nan. Never was.” Pierce leaned back in his chair, smug and proper.
    Nan grinned. She stood up, picked up Lily and doll and walked to the door to the child’s bedroom. “She’s not yours either.”
    Pierce frowned his objection at the projection. “I need to take her—”
    “Mother can have her tomorrow. For now, she needs to sleep.”
    Nan took Lily into her bedroom, shut the door behind her. Lily watched Pierce the whole way from over Nan’s shoulder, the chesty doll still held in her tiny hands. Pierce feared that gaze, feared everything about this little girl, and the job that she would begin in the morning.
    As for Nan, once the girl was gone, she would be switched off. There was no need for a Nanny in a world without children.
     
     
    She had fallen asleep at the kitchen table again, no doubt, although it was now too dark in the flat to be able to tell for sure. Hunter knew that if he turned on the light in the living room, it would rouse his mother from the fragile and necessary escape that sleep gave her. He didn’t want to wake her up, because he knew that she wouldn’t be able to fall asleep again for a long time if she did. No real reason to turn the lights on anyways. He found all the entertainment he needed for the evening inside of his head, and outside of the thick wide window behind the thick wide drapes.
    A gnawing hunger spoke in his belly, and although he was certain that there was food in the kitchen, his sleeping mother gave him all the reason to avoid it for a few more hours. He did not have the luxuries that other children had: two parents with a steady income, three meals a day, education, toys. He was content with Honeybear Brown and the window. He knew that there was a reason for all of this; there was a reason that his father had been taken from the planet and shot into another corner of the sky, and there was a reason that other kids’ fathers were still here. His Papa had been fortunate (unfortunate?) enough to prove his worthiness of such a divine mission at the outset of the Troubles. Other kids’ fathers would die here on Planet One.
    “We all gotta die someday, Windy.”
    Hunter hated when Honeybear Brown called him that. But of