“So here’s the lesson,” Bonesaw said, “Hurt her, take her apart. If you go easy on her, or if you leave her in a state where she can move, she’ll cut you, and then she’ll cut a body part off that man on the couch there.”
Damn.
Murder Rat placed a blade against her cheek, scraped it down toward her chin, as if giving Amy a close shave.
“You know I don’t have a beard, right?”
She reached up and touched the woman’s chest. Without Hack Job touching her, her power was coming back quickly. She felt Murder Rat’s biology snap into her consciousness, until she could see every cell, every fluid, every part of the woman. The two women. She could see Bonesaw’s work, the integration of body parts, the transfusions of bone marrow from one woman to the other, the viruses with modified DNA inside them, skewing the balances and configurations until she couldn’t tell for sure where one woman started and the other began.
Chimeras. That’s what I should be calling these things.
Also, it’s kind of interesting how they’re connected enough that even though it’s not quite seamless, Amy only needs to touch on point on the chimera to get access to both parts.
(Alternatively, I suppose it’s possible that both women have cells in the area Amy is touching.)
She could also see the metal frames inside the woman, interlacing with the largest bones of her skeletal system, the needles in her spine and brain. Bonesaw’s control system. There was something around the heart, too.
Ah, yes, total control of her nervous system.
Metal, with lots of needles pointing inward. She was rigged to die if the control frame was ever disabled. The woman, no, the women, were awake in there. One and a half brains contained in a synthetic fluid in her skull.
Got a bit of a failsafe in case of technomancers or others with the ability to cut off the control and turn the chimeras against Bonesaw. And of course, they’re both aware of the hellish existence they now have.
She targeted the ligaments at the woman’s shoulders and hips. Cutting them was easier than putting the things back together again. Dissolve the cells, break them down.
Huh. Not a bad tactic.
The woman collapsed onto a heap on top of her.
Yeeeah, I would think detaching the bones of the arms and legs would do that.
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