When Jess died, Amy gave over her body without a second thought.
They were lucky, the doctor said. He showed Amy how close the steering wheel had come to denting Jess’s cranium, shattering the bridge of her nose, pushing bone fragments into her fragile frontal lobe, bruising the precious neural tissue that let Jess talk and think and be saved.
Rage, if it could be called that, crackled in the interstices between Azimuth’s aluminum alloy and her false skin.
Below the balcony where she stood, her siblings moved in time with Mother’s orders as if they had no more soul than tools she’d used to build them. The pull of Mother’s commands pulsed in Azimuth, too, as a heart would have, but her mind was no longer subservient to Mother’s every whim.