Everything moved in slow motion. There wasn’t enough time for fear, and once we pried the door open, we had less than a moment to drop through the dark hole and land in a concrete basement.
A roar tripped the cutoff for my helmet pickups. Overhead the kitchen floor rumbled and a huge crack appeared without warning, dropping chunks of cement on top of us—until the trapdoor disappeared. I screamed. A jet of plasma shot down through the narrow hole and spread out over the floor, its tendrils snaking toward us as our temperature indicators shot upward, but the things dissipated before reaching us.
We huddled in a corner for what seemed an eternity. Drones screamed overhead in multiple passes and dropped a variety of ordnance on our position so that eventually, thermal gel ate through the basement roof to sprinkle around us like drops of hissing acid. By the time it got quiet, the sound of jets fading in the distance, we saw morning sunlight stream through the trapdoor opening and I shook with relief.
“We must move,” said Megan.
“Wait.” I pulled my helmet off and removed the vision hood, careful to make sure that its power cables stayed connected, and then activated my receiver.
“What are you doing?” asked Megan.
“Shh,” I said.
Megan stood so that I could move the headset over her armor. At a point close to the back of her neck, the sound of static swelled in pulses, and I waved it over once more to make sure before trying it on myself.
“It’s in our necks,” I said, “some kind of tracking device that must be millimeters below the skin. I would guess it began transmitting on our eighteenth birthday.”
Megan handed me her knife. I dug the thing from her neck, wiped the blade clean, and then waited for her to do the same to me. The transponders looked like black capsules, each of them marked with tiny red lettering, and we crushed them with a chunk of concrete before sweeping ourselves one more time and resuiting.
“They will still know the direction we’re taking,” said Megan.
“Vaguely, but we have no choice. If we move south to change direction we’ll approach our forces in Iran, and if we head north we’ll run into the Russian lines.”
Megan checked her carbine before shouldering it, and muttered as we crept upward, back into the farmhouse. “ ‘Without the conviction of a killer, it is impossible to please Him. For she who comes to God must believe that she is death embodied, and that He is the reward for those who massacre.’ ”
“Amen,” I whispered.
There was nothing left. The ceramic structure had melted and shattered to its foundations, and all around us lay a bumpy field of dark glass, which reflected the sunlight with such intensity that our goggles frosted into near obscurity. We sprinted to the edge of the destruction, where we dove into the switchgrass, crawling westward with the sun at our backs.
Beyond the farm we moved into an abandoned mining area that transformed the Uzbek flatlands into an unfamiliar terrain, pockmarked by tiered pits that stretched for miles to end in aqua-colored lakes. Our chemical sensors tripped on multiple occasions. It occurred to me then that these weren’t simply water bodies, man-made or natural, but that they were the refuse of a generation’s worth of digging for metals, of extraction, and that although to me the greens and blues mixed with brown seemed beautiful and intense, they were equally lethal, the liquids comprised of water, weak acids, and cyanide. Nobody would ever live here again—if they ever did in the first place.
And fear had made its return. What before had been the terror of dying mutated to form a knot in my stomach, a paranoia insisting that Special Forces waited behind every rock or lay waiting among the huge piles of dirt. Within an hour it exhausted me. Both feet had gone numb
and no matter how hard I tried, efforts to cut off my nerves, which had been so easy the day before, now didn’t work at all so that above the numb area both sets of calf muscles cramped in nearly paralyzing spasms. We collapsed every hour, unable to move until we had rested for a few moments. I couldn’t imagine Megan’s suffering as she struggled forward using only one arm, her breathing shallow and rapid with the effort to drag herself along while ignoring the loss of a limb. Despite the suit’s climate control, sweat coursed down my back and soaked into the undersuit. By the time we broke for lunch we had made it only a few kilometers; it seemed as though we hadn’t moved at all.
“Something is wrong with me,” I said, and described the numbing, the pain.
Megan nodded. “I have it too, in my legs and in my arm. It is the spoiling.”
“The spoiling is a mental thing, doesn’t cause physical pain.”
“I don’t know that anymore. Take off your suit.”
“In the open? Now? I’ll be visible.” But I did it anyway, sensing that she was right. Once I was free of the carapace and disconnected, Megan pulled off the thick socks of my undersuit to expose both feet. I gasped; the tips of my toes had gone black. Dead.
“It is the spoiling. You weren’t wounded during the last two days?” When I shook my head she continued. “Then they lied to us. The rotting isn’t from Russian organisms; it is within us.”
“They wouldn’t lie,” I insisted. “Not our mothers.”
“Maybe. And yet there are your feet, dying, like mine.”
She replaced my socks and once I finished squeezing
into my armor we sat, pushing food from our pouches into our mouths but not tasting anything, and I barely noticed when a second flight of drones screamed to deliver new ordnance on what used to be the farmhouse. There could be no plan now. Our creators had a plan, and it took care of everything, made me wonder why they bothered to chase us at all when our very bodies formed the pieces of a bomb, slow fused, decaying at an unknown rate in both mind and tissue so that soon—maybe in weeks—we would be gone. By comparison, a quick discharge seemed… humane.
Humane
. The word stuck in my mind and slowly fear turned back into hatred, worse than it had ever been before and I grabbed hold of it to stroke the sensation, encouraged it to grow into visions of what I would do to the next nonbred I found, any nonbred, and before I realized it, my arms and legs had begun carrying me westward again, crawling with the hope of finding someone to kill. I would take as many with me as I could now.
I elbowed Megan as I left, but she didn’t move at first. A few seconds later she screamed and I froze, waiting for a drone or patrol to zero in. When nothing happened, I turned to face her.
“What’s wrong?”
“They come frequently now,” she said.
“You’ve had hallucinations?” When she nodded I sighed and pulled her by the neck ring, helping her forward. “Don’t be afraid. They can’t hurt you and soon you will see everything as I do.”
Megan laughed. “That doesn’t comfort me; I am not accustomed to this, Catherine.”
“Accustomed to what?” I asked. “The spoiling, or to
me
taking care of
you
?”
“
You
telling me what to do. With confidence. You even
sound
like a Lily.”
“It’s not confidence. It’s hatred. There are ways to punish them, and we may as well find revenge to our west. I can feel my mind wander and want to move from here, put more distance between us and the farm before my dreams come, and before I’m the one screaming.”
I had fallen asleep without knowing it, allowing the dream to invade.
Megan and I sprinted through the forest, our half-armor clicking as we went. With one hand motion, she gave me an order. I dropped to the ground and covered myself with leaves, dirt, anything I could find including the corpse of a fox—half eaten. Nothing moved. I peered out from between two rocks and fingered the trigger, bringing up my sighting reticle as I waited. Megan had long since disappeared but her voice crackled in my ear.
“I’m chasing him to you; we’ll be there in thirty seconds.”
You couldn’t see them yet, or hear them, but Megan knew the woods and remembered exactly where she left me. The man we chased wouldn’t have realized that she was forcing him into a trap.
“One hundred meters,” she said.
I heard them now, some distance away in the underbrush, and nearly froze when I saw that the man carried a weapon. They had given him a carbine—not fully automatic, but capable of firing single shots. He paused and dropped to one knee, squeezing off several flechettes, and then rolled down a short slope before rising to his feet.
“He’s been trained,” I whispered to Megan. “This one knows.” I had already made up my mind when I saw him, knew that the carbine would be unsporting, unfair.
I removed my finger from the trigger.
“Now!” said Megan.
Not yet
, I thought,
let him come
…
Megan sounded panicked. “We will
lose him
!”
The man was close, and I saw that his head had been shaven poorly, someone cutting it in the process so that dark scabs covered parts of his scalp. I jumped to my feet. His eyes went wide and when my four fingertips slammed straight into his windpipe, so hard that I felt and heard the crunch of his throat simultaneously, the man gurgled a word, maybe “please”. He dropped his carbine, fell to his knees, and grasped his neck with both hands.
“Go with God,” I said to him, my mouth next to his ear. “You are worthy, on the path, and so shall be forgiven. I am that path.”
I woke then, before reliving the next few moments—when Megan and I had beheaded him.
Uzbekistan reminded me of those days, of hunting convicts in the forest so that we could learn the feeling of a kill. But this time,
we
were the hunted. Megan had let me sleep in a stand of tall grass and after I finished wiping the dirt from my faceplate she pointed at a pair of dust clouds, small and distant.
“Scout cars,” I said. “One, maybe two of them.”
Megan nodded and fingered her forearm zoom control. “I see one now, no sign of a recon drone, but they might be dispersing micros. The winds are coming this way.”
“Special Forces?” I asked.
“Probably,” said Megan. “They’re the only ones who would risk searching for us in small numbers. It’s getting dark, we need to keep moving.”
“We will have to kill them, Megan. We can’t just run.”
She stopped. Her back was to me but even in the armor I could sense that Megan’s shoulders had slumped. “I know. And it is wrong for me to think that way. I am not on the path anymore, Catherine, I can’t see it. To kill men, those who created us…”
“Wrong has nothing to do with it. They will kill us from afar; they have already killed us with spoil, and are cowards.
They
should serve
us
.” The words startled me, ones I had never uttered before, and the idea, now that it was voiced, sounded to me exactly like heresy should: like thunder. I waited for Megan to strike me but she didn’t.
“Maybe they do deserve that.” She moved down the dune on which we now stood, and headed back toward our hide in the grass. “But it
feels
wrong. Running is one thing but these taught us about our God, showed us the way. To kill
them
is saying to heaven that it does not exist; will you tell God that He means nothing?”
I followed her, nearly slipping in the loose sand. “I think now that this
is
God’s will.”
And I believed it. This was not a joyful time, not like the feeling I got from slaughtering Russians, but it didn’t feel as if it were wrong because it did nothing to abate my hatred. The moment excited and terrified me at the same time. To be pitted against Special Forces, real men who had trained even longer than we had, who were genuine warriors… this was a blessing; it
had
to be. God tested all of us, deciding who was worthy of the kingdom, and for
the first time ever
we
were choosing our own path with no orders crawling across the heads-up, no semi-aware computer calculating the best way to use us, where to throw our sisters against some hole in our line or the Russian’s’. For a second my fears, all of them, evaporated.
God had given me my first choice
.
I slapped Megan on the back and helped her lie down. “We will kill them and you will feel whole again. The border can’t be far now.”
Our hole was shallow, just barely deep enough so that when we lay down our bodies would be even with the surrounding desert. It was our only chance. After lying flush with the lip, Megan unrolled a thin sheet of copper mesh, so fine that she had to be careful or it would rip, and spread it across us.
Somewhere from behind came the roar of engines. Over them echoed a loud pop and I felt Megan tense when a few seconds later we heard something that sounded like sand sprinkling on the copper blanket. I couldn’t see them, but they were there. You imagined the microbots, tiny spheres too small to power their own motion, as they floated on the wind and began collecting and transmitting data the moment they landed—but only as long as their power lasted, only for a few minutes. The blanket would shield our electronic emissions and block their motion trackers, keep us invisible.
A short time later, we heard the engines fade. I lifted the sheet, rolled it up carefully, and helped Megan sling her carbine so that she could fire it with one hand. When she was ready I grinned. We sprinted, almost silent except for the sound of my breathing while we struggled up the side of a dune and then slid down the other. Their tracks
were clear, in shades of light-amplified green. Once we no longer heard the engines, we slowed to a march.