“They will stop soon,” Megan said, “to sleep.”
I checked my computer. “And now the wind is at our backs.”
“ ‘Remember the former things of old,’ ” said Megan, “ ‘for I am God’s messenger, and we are many.’ ”
I smiled at the words, felt the warmth of doing what we had been born to do. “ ‘And there are many like me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, His counsel shall stand.’ ”
“ ‘And we will do what we please, for we know all before it happens,’ ” Megan finished. “ ‘God gave us the foresight, and from His judgment no man can hide. Death will teach some everything, but it will be too late; these lessons do no good in hell.’ ”
She adjusted her carbine and flicked off the safety.
The men had camped in front of us, in a flat area of desert where they had parked three vehicles and arranged a ring of sentry bots. A dead soldier lay beside us, my combat knife still embedded in his throat. We knew they’d be there. Megan and I never talked about how we knew these things but we did, always, as if it were a sixth sense or maybe more simple like knowing there would be air when you took a breath. While Megan had disabled the closest sentry bots, I had killed their watchman.
And I felt good again.
Megan let me lead because with only one hand she couldn’t give commands, but I would have led anyway; now
that I was half-dead, I felt alive at last, a Lily who moved under God’s hand, which guided everything as if the world had revealed itself to be an intricate clockwork—everything in place, everything with a purpose, but, ironically, a world in which now I had a will. One could walk into the camp loudly, spraying flechettes as one screamed, or crawl up silently and break each neck, one at a time, grinning more widely with each snap. I crouched and moved in slowly. Three of them rested next to the scout car closest to me and I motioned for Megan to take them, holding up two fingers so she would give me time to reach the others.
There were four near the second scout car. One of them stirred, rolling over with a cough, and it occurred to me that they had been sloppy—that they had bunched up.
Two minutes came. The first one died instantly, with only a slight twitch when I slammed the knife through his armored neck joint. The others heard it. Within a second, I had sprayed them with my carbine, the sound of flechettes snapping loudly across the dunes, a continuous zipperlike noise that ceased only when everything became still again.
“Come here,” Megan said.
I approached and saw one of them propped against the scout car, his helmet off, the man struggling to breathe. “Please,” he said.
I pushed the barrel of my carbine against his forehead. “Deactivate the remaining sentry bots, so we can leave your perimeter.”
The man’s hand shook and blood trickled from his mouth as he punched at his forearm controls.
“Who are you looking for?” Megan asked.
He stared. “For
you
. Our guys didn’t know if you were
killed in the airstrike. We lost your transponder signal and they sent us to do a sweep—to make sure.”
I felt like smashing his face, like slamming my carbine into it. “Why can’t you just let us go?”
“There have been so many lost. We don’t know where they are, and Command ordered us to hunt you all the way to the Turkmeni border.”
Megan dropped to her knees and grabbed his neck ring. “There are others of us?”
He nodded. “Yes. I don’t know how many.”
“What about Turkmenistan?” I asked. “Can you hunt us there?”
“Not in all areas,” he said, “because we don’t occupy most of western Turkmenistan. Some of us operate out there anyway, but at risk of getting shot by the Turkmen Army. Please, let me go.”
I slit his throat without thinking and wiped my knife clean while he slumped to the sand. “There are
others
.”
Megan popped her helmet and grinned. “Turkmenistan.”
We took a few minutes to gather ration packs, water, and fuel cells before moving out again. There would be no rest—not that night. In the morning, someone would come looking for them and we needed to put as much distance between the men and us as possible. At one point I checked the computer map and laughed out loud.
“What?” asked Megan.
“We will be at Druzhba in a few days. Then across into Turkmenistan. Free, in a way.”
“Yes,” she asked, “but then what?”
It was a good question, one that we both had been asking ourselves since setting out, and neither of us had an answer. Not yet.
We traveled by night. The days had gotten warm—warm enough that Megan and I grew concerned about our suits’ ability to maintain temperature without straining climate control—so we slept during the day, buried under sand.
At night, waking dreams and hallucinations always came. We tied a long piece of webbing to connect us, so that if we both fell into a dream state we at least wouldn’t get separated. The wind howled in my helmet pickups and both legs felt like lead as we moved slowly up the side of one dune, sliding down the other, over and over, until collapsing at first light. There were no landmarks, just sand. You couldn’t have known where to go and how to navigate without computers and suit guidance software, the thin blue line of the Amu Darya, the border, edging closer to us with the arrival of each day.
We were still a day or so from the river when Megan heard it, just before sunrise.
“Down,” she said.
I flattened into the sand as the noise of jet engines grew. Three aircraft, painted a flat gray almost impossible to see in the dim light, flew slowly overhead and turned in wide, lazy curves as the vehicles scanned the ground. Eventually the planes passed overhead, their roar fading to a groan as they increased their distance.
“They know we’re heading for Turkmenistan,” I said. “Those were recon drones.”
Megan nodded and rose to her knees so she could dig a shallow hole. I joined her. When we were done we lay down, and began scooping the sand, pushing it onto us so that it covered everything except one air intake port.
“Rest,” said Megan. “I’ll get up in a little while and stand watch.”
“Did they see us?” I asked. But she was already asleep, and my eyes fluttered shut.
When Megan finally woke me the sun had gone down, and I sat up to grab my carbine.
She waved me silent. All I could hear was the sound of an owl, screeching as it looked for prey under the moon—a thin sliver that had just risen above the horizon. She pointed south, toward an open salt pan and held up four fingers. I crawled slowly to the edge of a tuft of switchgrass and peered out.
My night vision cast its green pall over the scenery, making it hard to distinguish between shapes, and at first I didn’t see them. Then they moved. Four shapes rose from the ground to form the vague outlines of men in combat armor, their chameleon skin activated, all of them crouch-walking slowly toward us.
Megan motioned for me to raise my carbine. We turned our Maxwells over and dialed down the power, to ensure that the rounds would fly at less than supersonic velocities.
Silent
. When she signaled, I extended my barrel from the dry grass and touched the trigger lightly, steadying my aim. The trigger clicked shut. With a noise that resembled a spray bottle, flechettes sprang from my carbine and punched through the first one’s face-plate so that he collapsed to the ground, a puff of blood settling gently on the sand as I moved my reticle to the next one and steadied my aim.
It was over in three seconds, but we waited for a few minutes to make sure they were dead.
“Get up,” said Megan, “it’s not good to stay here anymore.”
We crouched, walking slowly southward across the salt flat.
The wind came and went, howling across the desert in a gale for one minute, falling the next to embed us in a layer of silence. Megan dropped to the ground at the sign of anything unusual and twice we had to wait for aircraft to wander across the sky and out of sight while my muscles screamed at me to stay in place, not to move.
Rest
. The numbness had moved upward now, separating the top of my foot from the shin in a sharp line of burning agony that I tried to ignore but couldn’t. In three hours, we advanced only about five kilometers, and after another flight of aircraft I was about to suggest we stop when my silent alarm activated, filling my helmet with red light.
“The drones dropped
Micros
.” I swatted at my forearm computer, popping the cover off with a single motion, and began punching the keys.
“Hurry,” said Megan, “I can’t use my computer with only one arm.”
As soon as I hit the final key, a blue web of crackling static electricity ran over the outside of my armor, frying any bots that had adhered to its shell. I grabbed Megan’s arm. But by the time I finished activating her countermeasures, we both saw the heads-up display.
“It’s too late,” I said. The computer flashed a yellow indicator. “They transmitted.”
Megan dropped her carbine and snapped off the hopper, tossing it to the ground before we switched on our skins. “
Run
.”
The sand gave, our feet slipping with each step as we tried to put as much distance between us and our previous position as possible. Once we had moved what seemed
like a hundred meters, we dove into a depression between two low dunes and stayed still. The growing rumble of jets came from the southwest.
An attack drone passed overhead, scanning the ground for heat and movement. A second came in much lower and I braced myself. The plane sprinkled the dunes around us with flechette and thermal gel cluster bombs, their detonations making the ground tremble, and at one point the aircraft came so close that I heard the wind whistle over its skin. We lay on the edge of the beaten zone. The overpressure of multiple explosions flattened the mounds of sand in front of me and droplets of thermal gel hissed all around, sending up tiny streamers of smoke while we braced for the third plane. It came in low, but further west of our position, all its ordinance wasted on an empty section of desert. Finally, the first aircraft looped back. It screamed straight over us, so that we heard explosive bolts pop when the plane dropped its munitions.
Megan shouted at first, but then laughed when she saw what had happened. Four cluster bombs detonated a hundred meters away, well behind us, and I laughed too when I realized just how badly the plane had overshot. With their wing loads expended, the craft turned and sped away.
“They’ll send another patrol,” Megan said. “We have to move,
now
.”
So eventually I stood, wincing with the agony of each step as we ran westward, while my suit discarded its waste down the side of my leg.
Time had almost stopped. As I stared at the map, showing the Amu Darya so close that my dot had merged with it,
our day disappeared behind clouds and the temperature dropped to below freezing. A thick snowfall prevented us from seeing anything except the insides of our helmets. Megan popped hers first and then I slowly removed mine. Although we had fought in snow, neither she nor I had actually experienced a storm like this, where we had the time to think about the stuff and contemplate it for what it was—instead of for tactical considerations. For the moment, we were safe. Sensors wouldn’t penetrate the low clouds, so there was no worry about being spotted from above or of having to stay still. The bitter cold seeped into my suit from the neck, snaking its way down to my waist, where it felt clean and dry against the sweat-soaked undersuit. I let flakes melt on my tongue and then found Megan by touch before noticing that she had collected some snow in her good hand, placing it inches from her eyes where she could examine individual flakes.
“It’s beautiful,” I said.
She shook her hand clean. “It’s just snow.”
“How can you say that? It’s so clean. The flakes look like feathers, white from a distance and clear up close. You saw it yourself. Perfect.”
“And why should
that
be beautiful?” I heard her anger clearly now, and wondered if her mind had spoiled in a different direction than mine; I had never seen her so enraged.
“Answer me!”
she screamed.
“I don’t know. It just is.”
“That isn’t a good enough answer. Not nearly. Look at us:
we’re
perfect. Perfectly designed to fight, to kill, to live in a combat environment and take orders. Perfect slaves. But snow has an advantage over us, something
that makes it better, closer to God. Do you know what that is?”
“No.”
Megan slammed the back of her hand into my face. The impact jarred my teeth and I felt the sting when my lip split, sending the taste of blood and the incredible sensation of pain throughout my mouth. Now it was certain; all of my ability to control nerve impulses had vanished, and tears welled in my eyes before I could stop them.
“What is wrong with you?” I asked.
“
Snow
was made by God. That’s what’s wrong with me. And you.
We
were made by men, and those men were probably cowards, soft like the ones in white coats, scientists and intellectuals, the same types we’ve despised ever since I’ve known you. Since we first stepped onto the field. What does that mean, Catherine?”
“Tell me.”