Subterrene War 02: Exogene (11 page)

“It means that we are impure. Flawed. One step removed from God, and abominations that He probably despises—despite what our mothers said.”

Her words made me tremble. The cold that a few minutes ago had transformed me into something new now felt hostile, and I snapped my helmet back on, afraid, as if somehow anything created directly from God may have been intended to destroy me, that the cold could carry with it some form of disease or weapon, there to specifically target not just Germline units, but me. Why hadn’t it occurred to me before? The sense that I was on the path, and its assurance that everything I did was according to some greater plan, evaporated, replaced by a new kind of terror: that I would only feel safe underground, surrounded by thousands of sentry bots and encased in my
carapace, forever, because not only men hunted us now; God might be helping them, helping them to eradicate alien things in a for-human world.

“That would change everything,” I said.

“It changes nothing. It just shows the same things in a different light.”

“How, Megan?”

She snapped her helmet in place, so that now her voice came through the speakers, changing her into what I felt like: a machine.

“How what?”

“How did you come to this knowledge? How did you figure it out?”

“I have a computer.”

“So do I,” I pointed out. “But this…”

“Not in my suit, Little Murderer. In my head. On the ship when the men first delivered us to Iran, they gathered all the Lilies while you trained, and cut into our skulls, replacing the backs of them with a computer, wired into our very brains. We were warned never to mention them or it would be death for us and whomever we told. It talks to me even now, tells me we will die soon, suggests that we would do better to give up. And I can’t shut it off.”

There were no words, nothing in my vocabulary to make such a horror seem positive, and so I said nothing. Instead I held her hand.

“I didn’t figure it out, Catherine. The computer told me this just now, knew I was enjoying the snow and let me know how much we don’t belong here. Or anywhere. You might get away, find someplace quiet, but not me. How do you escape your own brain?”

“Could it be sending signals? To track us?”

Megan shook her head, her helmet barely swiveling. “I don’t think so or they wouldn’t have needed the one you found in my neck. Maybe there wasn’t enough space to add a tracking function, or maybe they didn’t think it was necessary.”

“If they could install such a device,” I said, “someone could take it out. You never know what we’ll find in the world, Megan.”

But before she responded, we heard shouts. Men. Somewhere to our east a group of them laughed and the whine of a scout car rose and fell as it crawled among snow-covered dunes, so that we couldn’t tell if they moved closer to us or not. We froze at the sound of a loud pop, and waited for the patter of microbots as they fell on us with the snow. But none came. I imagined the tiny spheres with their microcarbon propellers floating among the flakes and wondered if they could be aware, if they knew that they didn’t belong or if maybe they thought they
were
snow, one flake among millions and oblivious to the fact that their makeup fundamentally differed from those all around them. Megan pulled me from my thoughts and pointed. Less than a foot away, a dark shadow formed the shape of man; he walked past silently, not noticing the two girls half buried at his feet, and it wasn’t until ten minutes after he passed that we dared move again.

“The snow protected us from them, Megan.”

“So?”

I pulled my knees to my chest and glanced at the time, wondering if night would ever come. “So it matters. I can’t believe that God is against us simply because a thing in your head told you so. That thing, the computer, is of man. The snow
is
beautiful.”

“It’s just snow. And soon we’ll find out whose side he’s on. It can’t snow forever.”

As the night wore on, someone observing us would have seen the signs. Megan and I stumbled, and the careful crouch-walking had long since been replaced by tired, upright shambling through a mixture of snow and sand, and I slapped the Maxwell over my left shoulder, holding the barrel and letting the stock swing freely to help with balance. We stopped once to eat and fell asleep, ration packs dangling from our feeding tubes, but Megan prevented catastrophe when she awoke from a nightmare. An observer would have identified us immediately:
the walking dead
.

At about one a.m., I heard something and stopped. Megan looked at me.

“I hear it too,” she said.

We ran up the side of a dune, the sand shifting underfoot to taunt us, two steps forward, one step back. Eventually we made it to the top and peered down.

“Druzhba,” I said. Megan wrapped her good arm around me, unable or unwilling to talk.

In front of us, the Amu Darya rolled over hidden rocks, its water thick with runoff from the spring thaw, despite the fact that it had turned cold again. The water sounded angry. Great waves surged over submerged obstacles and the whole thing roared as if shouting obscenities at the world, for having forced it to navigate such a horrible place, as the border between two slices of hell. On the far banks lay the large town of Druzhba; its lights gleamed like white stars on the green backdrop of our night vision,
and I wondered how we would cross, trying not to get excited about the prospect of reaching the other side. Just past Druzhba was the Turkmeni border.

“I will help you across,” I said, gesturing to Megan’s severed arm, but she started down the dune face before I could stop her.

“Let’s
go
.”

The sand slid underneath as I jogged to catch up, unable to stop smiling. Megan paused at the river’s edge and popped her helmet, throwing it to the side so that it landed in a puddle with a splash.

“I will never wear armor again,” she said.

Hair
. She had hair too. It was short, only a few centimeters, but I hadn’t noticed it before, and for some reason the sight shocked me.

“What?” she asked.

I pulled my helmet off and grabbed a tuft of my own. “Your hair must be more beautiful than mine.”

“This is beautiful,” said Megan, running her hand across my head. “More than the snow. Yours is longer than it was in Tamdybulak; does mine look like yours?”

“How should I know?” I asked. “I have no mirror.”

“You’re so…” Megan started.

“What?”

She kissed me deeply, pawing at the latches on my carapace. “Different.”

“They are out here somewhere and there’s no time.”

“I don’t
care
, Catherine.”

We were out of our armor in minutes, too tired and excited at the same time to think about the danger while we rolled in the wet sand near the river, the cold slamming into us with a strong wind, and light snow still falling all
around.
She
kept me warm. When we had finished, Megan lay her head on my chest and looked up.

“We have no plan.”

“Stop it,” I said.

“What?”

“You. Stop it. You’re not the Lily anymore, Megan. We don’t need a plan all the time. Once we swim over to the far bank and cross into Turkmenistan, they won’t be able to hunt us and we’ll get a chance to think things through. We can plan as we go.”

“I know, it’s just that—”

Red tracer flechettes streaked by, snapping past us to hit the dunes with tiny puffs of sand and cutting her off midsentence. Megan rolled to the side. I went in the other direction and grabbed my carbine, searching for a target before I realized I couldn’t see anything without my vision hood and that the carbine was still attached to my suit by its flexi. Someone fired another round of tracers and I aimed at the source, squeezing off a few bursts before I heard her.

“Catherine,
please
.”

I knew from her voice, and my chest felt like it was about to explode as I tried to find her in the darkness. I sensed everything before seeing a line of flechette wounds running almost the entire length of her leg, the blood pumping out from an artery wound—or several of them.

“It’s not important after all.” Another burst snapped over our heads, one of them nicking my shoulder, and Megan continued. “Forget what I said about the snow.”

“Fine,” I said.

She was heavy, and I was tired. With my legs buckling at first, it took a moment to stand, and I must have looked
like a monster, naked, carrying an impossible load toward the river. What would I do once we were in it? We had almost reached the nearest bank when a red line of tracers stitched its way toward me through the sand, slamming through my legs at the same moment we splashed into the water. At first I swam, tugging Megan by her arm. She screamed. It wasn’t long before the current took its toll and my legs stopped working the way they should have, sending me down into the muddy waves, which pulled her from me at the same time my strength vanished.

The men had a spotlight. After submerging I opened my eyes and saw the water above illuminated in an orange glow:
It looked just like the atelier tank, warm and inviting
. But there was nothing warm after Megan went under and the feeling of her hand had been branded into my palm. Before I blacked out, the cold water sucked the air from my lungs, forcing me to inhale it in a twisted reflex that first prevented me from going after her, then prevented me from breathing.

It was the last time I ever saw Megan.

T
he first things I noticed were whistles. One was low, a single tone that I had heard before but which didn’t register as a train-whistle until I noticed the clanking of wheels beneath me, the shaking of a railcar. But there were other whistles. High-pitched ones. And although cold drafts pushed up through the carriage floorboards, what I eventually determined was music brushed the chill aside with a tune that disturbed and comforted simultaneously; the song was sad. Someone whispered into my ear afterward and his plucking a fiddle as he spoke made me smile.

“
Cherniy Voron, dyedushka
, a little music for death, the only warm place in winter. We’ve
all
seen the raven, but maybe none so closely as you, and it’s supposed to be spring and yet everyone freezes in this crappy railcar. A hundred years ago and Russia would have been thawed, but now? Now winter lasts six months, sometimes eight, and the nonbred all wish for those days when
warming
was a threat. Let me tell you something else…” But before he finished, pain rushed upward from my legs, forcing me back into unconsciousness.

Who knew how much time passed before I finally woke? When I did the sight of them didn’t shock me; to the contrary, it made me feel secure. These were Russian genetics. The wounded and maimed and the dying, maybe at the end of their service term. All of them were boys about the same age as me, and when my eyes opened to see how we had been arranged, in bunks stacked to the ceiling with about half a meter of space that left barely enough room to breathe, and with hot vents doing their best to keep the chill off, it felt safe in an inevitable sort of way. If they killed me, so what? The Amu Darya had already taken Megan so that whatever existence remained was more than I should have been allowed—more than I wanted since it would be spent alone—and my desire to run had vanished. Death would be a way to join her.

The music had gone, but when they saw me awake they all shouted something—those that were conscious—and then laughed, one of them leaning down from the bunk above to offer a cigarette, an act of kindness that I never would have expected.

“I don’t smoke,” I said. But he insisted, and so I took it and inhaled, coughing to the point where the pain in my legs revived, reminding me of what had happened. I started crying. Of course they were happy; these ones still had their families.

Someone said something but then another cut him off.

“She speaks English. Only English, so be fucking polite for once.”

“Play her another song.”

“
Brodyaga
?”

A number of the boys groaned, and the one above me spoke up. “Not that one again. Play us something really strange. That Jew song, that one you played a long time ago.”

The boys hushed then, and I heard several of them get off their bunks to sit on the floor next to me, and a few seconds later another song filled the railcar. I had to look. They grinned as they played, five boys, as identical to each other as Megan and I had been, and so I asked because they had gone to the trouble to play.

“What song is that?”

“The Jew song,” the one above me said.

I shook my head. “No, I mean what is its name?”

“That’s what I said, the Jew song. We don’t know its name, so we call it that, and none of us even know what a Jew is. It’s as good a name as any other, who cares about a name? Do you have a name?”