He still did not know if the feeling was pain. Or if it was even real.

There were changes taking place within Raze. He could not see them, could not truly feel them. But he knew them. He knew them as surely as he could touch the smoothslick coolness of the growths upon his skin, as surely as he could feel the radiance of the stranger's presence at his back, seeming to come from the firebloodheat of his bound hair.

Odd, that feeling.

That sunlight.

So much stranger than the shiftings in the pit of his stomach, the stirrings coiling liquid glass around the fibers of his muscles. Warm. Warmth did not have a place here in this cold City of eternal winter night. Machines....were not warm.

He wondered if it was warm on the Outside.

He wondered if there was an Outside, and if the sunlit stranger came from there. He did not smell of the City.

His smell filled Raze's nostrils, and he thought of sand, and water. Bright pictures on vidscreens, made real by the other's scent.

He felt an odd longing, and a quiet urge to possess that scent.

Dragons curled within his mind, and their scales gleamed cold and black as the artificial sky, their hisses sounding in his ears like the soft shushing of waves against a white-sand shore.

Creation, they whispered, and he did not understand. Child. Brother. They spoke with his voice, with the stranger's, with his mother's....with the City's. Thing.

Is this all that there is? he asked them again--and the voice of the stranger answered in silence, light and the color of ripe hay before his eyes, dancing between his vision and the grey-black world that passed beneath his monotonous steps.

No.

Then what?

Creation, is all that the hissing Dragons said once more, this time in another single voice, the voice of The Doctor. Creation.

Thing.

Raze paused on the edge of the rooftop, at the edge of the universe, and felt the ever-present warmth sway to a stop just at his shoulder as he stared out over the City, over the curving of the great grey wall of the Bronze District.

I do not understand. A forgotten memory teased at the corner of his mind, another floating globule of taunting blue-green that would not allow itself to be seen.

Thing.

Somewhere in the City, wind chimes danced without sound.

The silence was almost religious in its pewter thickness, and Throttle was reluctant to break it as he stepped to the roof's sheer edge and looked over the wall that towered even above the crumbling buildings: the end of the world, sculpted in cracked and fading cement.

"Bronze?" he ventured, and the single word was a death-knoll for the pristine quietude.

"We can take the transport from here." The single dispassionately stated sentence held more words in itself than Throttle believed Raze had spoken since their meeting.

"Transport?" he repeated, slightly nervous; transports were ugly things, with myriads of scanners that were sure to send the City's authorities after him. "I would still rather travel by foot...."

"That would require months. Name another option."

Throttle opened his mouth to offer the dubious possibility of finding another vehicle, but the question was cut off by a buzzing whir.

An all-too-familiar buzzing whir.

Metal flashed in eyebright flickers against shadowed streets, and the avenues below filled with the dry, whispering scuttle of insectoid limbs.

Machines. They poured from all directions, swift and chittering, multiple and segmented limbs skating over the cement, held before their wedge-shaped mockeries of heads like praying mantises. Terrible, gleaming-cold, they swept through the streets--almost a mile away, and yet their streamlined flashes and soft, mechanical chittering preceded them, and a thousand composers turned over in their graves at the crickets' metallic symphony.

Throttle knew that they were coming for him.

"Oh.......shit, " he exhaled softly. He had been traced.

Curiosity, inhuman and detached, flickered in Raze's eyes as he watched the bullet-approach of the mantis-creatures, curiosity and even a frozen flash of equally detached and yet almost reassuringly human fear. "What are they?"

Your worst nightmare, he thought, swiftly assessing any hope of escape as his sharp eyes roved the plain of hard, flat squares that stretched into faceless eternity around him and the forbidding wall that almost touched his nose. "Chrome-plated trouble, that's what they are, mate. Retrieval units sent out to round up trouble-makers like me."

"What have you done?" Chin-point touched shoulder-curve once more, and that single unshielded eye suddenly made Throttle feel as though he were burning beneath the Inquisitor's lamp.

"I can't say, " he answered, nodding grimly, surprised at his own calm in the face of what could very well be his death, rushing closer with each second, silent save for the serpentine hiss of trailing coils racing across the ground. "Better get going; it's best if I find my way on own now. No bloody use in you getting into a fix."

"I have no other place to be."

That cinched it. The boy was out of his mind.

"You're daft if you're planning on staying here; they'll kill you in an instant!"

The dash of stark white that cut across Raze's brow lofted, and once more Throttle gained an impression, even though the boy's expression never changed--this time of mild cynicism. "And they will not kill you?" So precisely stated, words like silver blades, cool and whispering through misty air....

"I warrant they'll want me for questioning so I might have a chance of surviving, " he answered quickly; the creatures were almost upon them, only a few blocks distant, and he wanted the other out of danger immediately before attempting to deal with his own plight. "I doubt you'll be given the same consideration."

"I will not die."

The words were stated with such calmness, such certainty, that Throttle found himself believing them--believing him with a conviction that he could not escape, and he could only stare at Raze, pinpricks of slight awe tingling his scalp. A lingering something tugged at him, and suddenly he could not shake the feeling that he had not merely found this boy who would not die, but had been led to him....or chosen by him.

But why?

He had no further time to think, for steel claws scrabbled at cement, and the building shook beneath them.

Then the first of the wedge-shaped, insectoid heads topped the edge of the roof, and Throttle could only watch in breathless amazement.....as Raze danced.

For dancing was truly the only word to describe Raze's movements, his wasted body drifting amongst the segmented steel shapes that swarmed around them, drifting beneath them, drifting around Throttle, always between him and the next approaching mantis-droid like some twisted version of a guardian angel--or an angel of death.

Destruction trailed in Raze's wake, and the terrible screech of rending metal split the night....the howl of a thousand souls.

The first ceased to function before it fully broached the rooftop. Raze stepped forward before Throttle even had time to react, and somehow, though he had not noticed them changing, Raze's fingers had grown....their convoluted gloving of wires and chips extending into talons, fingertips like finely honed blades that gleamed beneath the blackened sky. They reminded Throttle of a spider's legs.

Those blade-fingers sliced neatly through a steel-sheathed, jointed neck, shearing through wires and boltings and exoskeleton like scissors through paper. The first assailing machine fell, crashing to the earth and dragging two of its brethren with it in a horrid wailing of metal scraping over cement that only ended in a death-cry of a resounding crash into unyielding pavement. The smell of oil-smoke was heavy on the air, tinny on the tongue.

Raze twisted, and another gleaming beast flew apart in a rain of metal as claws screeched along its outer casing and dug in, eviscerating it and sending its coiling, looping guts of wires spilling out over the ground. It had intended to take the thin, white boy from behind.

No matter where Throttle looked, Raze was there, as though there were not one boy, but dozens, all moving in perfectly synchronized, graceful unison. Calm, efficient, beautiful, terrifying, the slender wraith whirled in a flashing of bladed appendages, dispatching machine after machine with a cool ease that would have been sickening had his near-helpless victims been human.

Had he been human.

It seemed then that he was one of them, one of the sleek, silent constructions of death, slaughtering his brethren relentlessly as his superior evolution made them obsolete, fit only for extinction. Turn, flash, twist, silent murderer, beautiful death, and machine oil fouled the ground like hot, thick blood, oozed from between spasmodically twitching joints that still refused to believe that their primary functions had ceased. Bodies littered the rooftop like a junkyard, and Throttle could only stare in disbelief.

Eternity passed, an eternity of silent music accented by a symphony of steel-shriek and electric-sizzle, an eternity orchestrated by that drifting pale flower that desiccated everything that its delicate petals touched. Eternity passed, and was swallowed by the death of a few short minutes.

The dove came to rest, alighting softly before him, back turned to a black-eyed gaze as the slightly winded killer looked out over the scene of carnage before him, the dangling, sluicing edges that had once been his fingers curling at his sides. He was a demon with his hell-born eyes, soul-swallowing and depthless as they surveyed the destruction that he had wrought, the smoking heaps of steel-shards, the round red orbs of infrared sensors that stared from each severed head like accusing eyes. He was an angel, with his beautiful body marked by the signs of his otherness, with his inscrutable nature and softly dispassionate voice that somehow teased and questioned the very foundations of existence. He was a machine like all the others, cold and unfeeling and his skin seeming to gleam like white gold with the sheen of cooling sweat slicking it. He was a boy, smooth and curious and slender, a boy poised on a rooftop at the border between the Iron and Bronze districts, at the border between sanity and reality.

He was impossible.

"What are you?" The question finally voiced itself, dry and raspy and shimmering like desert heat only to hover like carrion birds above the silent testimony of technological wreckage. Throttle stared at Raze through eyes widened by a child's believing wonder as the boy, the machine, the angel, the devil, turned to face him, movements slow and somehow carefully controlled.

He was met with silence, and a golden stare that made his throat tighten and stomach leap with its distance even as that throb-pulse of oneness momentarily stilled his heart again. He was staring at Raze across a gulf that he could never comprehend, let alone cross.....and yet somehow, something stretched between them.....

....and touched.

For the first time in his reckless life, Throttle experienced fear.