“I have no idea, Misha.”
They stopped giving me drugs, replaced instead with a chain of operations. I watched as the doctors guided their bot in an assault against my ankles, first cutting the stumps open and inserting needle after needle, preparing the tissue for microbot insertions while I strained against the straps, bit down on a wad of cloth, and did my best not to scream.
“Zha-zha, Ubitza,”
a nurse would croon, not realizing that had I broken free, my hatred had grown into something that would have snapped her neck without thinking. I wanted them all dead. Day after day passed, with my mind drifting in and out of consciousness, sleep coming only during the prescribed hours in which the process had to be paused so wasted microbots could be collected, their power used up. Then it began again. Little by little, they printed tissue onto my open stumps—their titanium to my bone, their nerves to mine; my world was
reduced to a plastic bubble that had been erected to maintain a sterile zone.
We’re trying a new procedure, Ubitza
, one of the doctors had said early on,
so no anesthesia and I want you to describe your sense of pain as we go. No free rides. We can’t just spend our medical resources on escaped American girls and gain nothing in return, without gathering experimental data. What if we try this and the metallic-bone interface snaps? Your description could provide the key to what went wrong, so we can try again, get it right. You chose this, Ubitza, so let’s think of this as a trade. A transaction of sorts
. And I vowed that he would die at my hands, if only I could remember what he looked like.
Then, one day, I woke up to feel a lesser pain. It was a pinch, as if someone had grabbed a toe and squeezed, and looking down I saw that the medical bots had finished their work, gone dormant to fold up like dead spiders, and that new feet had appeared in the place where so recently there had been nothing; an impossibly thin line separated the new skin from the old, just above my ankles.
When I tried to move them, I screamed.
“Rest, Ubitza,” said Misha. He sat on a stool beside me, inside the plastic tent, a crooked smile on his face.
“My feet,” I said.
“They tell me it will hurt. New nerves. New muscle. You’ll have to get used to it, but the pain will go away more quickly the more you use them. Pain means that things are as they should be.”
“I want my drugs back, Misha.” I tested my arms and felt the straps, still in place. “They will all die. The doctors and nurses, everyone.”
“You think they don’t know that?” he asked, laughing.
“From here on out, I will take care of you, protect them from you.”
“Then I will kill you.”
Misha shook his head. “By Russian military standards, I’m not combat capable, but I can still fight. I still control my pain and have no fear. Go back to sleep, Ubitza.”
I stared at him for a moment, seeing that his smile had faded, his eyes glassy, and then my fear returned; Misha was right. He grinned again and patted my shoulder.
“Wait, I forgot I have good news for you, Ubitza. Something to dream about in your time of rest.”
“What?”
Misha lifted a shard of something, white and dull, like fired porcelain. “I had you assigned to my factory. We make ceramic plates, armor components. You will work for me until my name is called for the Exogene shop.”
Something told me that I should have been happy. This was freedom of a sort. I had run and succeeded in getting away from my creators, but fate had stepped in to save me from slow death, had even replaced parts of my body so that soon I could function again. The scars on my face and body meant nothing. Hatred still mattered. But as I stopped to examine the hatred, Misha’s face fading with my concentration, I noticed something had changed; it had begun to crumble at the edges. Thoughts of killing remained, a promise of a warm glow with each death, but the heat wasn’t as intense, as if a malaise had seeped in, its origins unknown but maybe related to the spoiling, maybe related to the facts that my body could be repaired but that for my mind there was nothing. A part of my mind warned me, though, a distant, subtle voice that said,
You can’t stay here, Ubitza, time to move on or you’ll lose the edge. Kill, or you’ll die another kind of death, one more horrific than the death of our body. Take what they give until you’re ready
.
“Thank you, Misha,” I said. He beamed. I waited for him to put away the shard and went on. “Misha, what happens to those who try to escape?”
Misha shrugged. “Nobody has tried, Ubitza. Why would you? There are no guards here, nobody would stop you.”
“Nobody?”
“Think about it. Russia is a big place, and there is nothing outside Zeya except the outposts which are hundreds of kilometers away, thousands. Where would you go? North? There you find only more ice, and would surely die. South, east, or west? There you would find trees. Wolves. Maybe Chinese infiltrators, or wander into China itself. Again, certain death. Why do you ask this?”
I thought for a moment and then forced a smile. “It will be an honor to work in your factory.”
“Forget honor, Ubitza. It will be fun. Cigarettes and drugs. Music. The work is hard, but once the other girls place you, accept you, we are like a family.”
“The other girls?”
Misha’s smile disappeared. “I’m in charge, Ubitza, but we allow you to govern yourselves, and I have orders not to interfere. The other girls have a system, leaders, and it’s important that you fit in. But don’t worry, I’m sure everything will be fine.”
He stood to leave, and my fear expanded, making my hands shake, so I was glad to be strapped down. Other girls. It had been months since I’d seen my own kind, and
knew that if their deterioration had been like mine, things would be different—not like the system on the battlefield, the one we’d been conditioned to follow since birth—and fitting in meant the unknown.
It took weeks to be able to stand, another two to walk, and even then it was with enough pain that I shuffled more than stepped, having to grab hold of anything nearby to keep my balance. But the doctors seemed pleased. They handed me over to Misha, who guided me through the tunnels until I became lost, only a single bulb every hundred meters illuminating our way through smooth cylinders, eight feet across. A narrow stream flowed under us in a channel. The water mesmerized me, and provided something on which to concentrate so the pain from my ankles could at least be partially ignored, and eventually the tunnels slanted upward, bringing us closer to the distant hum of machinery and roaring ventilators. Soon the tunnel air became dusty, tasted of dry metallic grit, and then Misha brought me to a thick sliding metal door where he stopped.
“Listen to me, Ubitza,” he said. “On the other side of this is my factory. As long as your sisters work and fulfill their production quotas, I have no reason to interfere with their business, their way of handling their own kind. You have to fit in.”
I nodded. “You told me that already. These are my sisters, I can handle myself.”
“Fully functional and I would believe you. But you’re not fully functional and their leader is something strange, a girl who calls herself Heather and who isn’t like you at all. Be careful. These girls have no honor.”
“Misha, why are you helping me? Why did you ask for me to be in your shop?”
“Because I am supposed to keep an eye on you—to find out why the Americans were so determined to take you back. I told them I would tell you the truth if you asked, Ubitza, so there it is: I’m to spy on you. Humans do not understand what it means to be created for death.”
“We call them the nonbred, Misha.”
He opened the door. Russian music from loudspeakers and noises of machinery filled the tunnel and forced me to cover my ears when we entered what looked like a main workshop, with huge metal hoppers that lined the walls and rested over massive mixing vats. A thick dust filled the air and Misha handed me a filter mask. Every few seconds kiln furnaces blasted jets of flame and I wondered about the danger of explosion, the errant ignition of millions, billions, of tiny metal particles, and then noticed that the walls had been scorched at least once to leave black streaks that someone had started to clean but not bothered to finish.
Explosions
, I thought,
might be commonplace
. Misha motioned for the machinery to stop and when the room went silent, twenty girls stood from where they had been gathered, hidden in a corner, all dressed in loose brown coveralls.
Color
, I realized. These girls had dyed their hair in a sea of varied shades. My head was bald, already covered with dust that I wiped off with a shaking hand, and as one of my sisters walked toward us I stared, transfixed by the blue of her hair which fell nearly to her shoulders. Even with the drugs, which hadn’t begun to wear off, I felt a sharp pang of regret, a wish that it had ended for me on the river because Megan would have looked beautiful with blue hair; it had been her favorite color.
“This,” said Misha, “is Heather.”
She didn’t look at me. Russian streamed from her lips when Heather opened them, sparking a feeling of envy in me, and when the two had finished talking Misha turned.
“Heather says she doesn’t have a free billet for you, Ubitza, that she wants you in the mines. I told her that’s not what we agreed on but she’s holding firm, and says you can earn one if you want. I suggest you take the offer. There’s nothing I can do unless I call in a human officer, and that isn’t a wise thing to do. Not for me or you.”
I shook my head. “How do I earn a slot, Misha?”
“Ubitza.”
She spat it through a filter mask in English, the tone sarcastic. Heather stared at me now, both eyes empty and black, pupils so dilated that I had trouble thinking of them as anything other than puddles of oil. “Murderer. I can only imagine the depth of your faith, a first-generation Germline who served to the very end of her term. You earn a spot in this factory, a position on-shift, by creating a vacancy. By killing one of my workers.”
“My sisters?” I asked. “You would allow one of your own to be killed?”
“You’re assuming that you’ll win. And you aren’t one of my own; we’re all captured units here, second generation and better than the first. Besides…” She pointed at my feet. “I heard that you haven’t gotten used to those yet.”
Misha laughed. “I’ve seen her knife-work, Heather, and this one isn’t like you, hasn’t gotten fat off vodka and whoring. She’s a match. Ubitza is still intact.”
“Fuck intact, Misha, you’re as new to this place as she is.” Heather smiled at me, a gesture that made me want to run at the same time that it calmed my nerves, triggering something inside to prepare since fear would only prevent
me from doing what needed to be done. “Do you want a slot?”
I nodded and Heather grinned.
“Emma.”
Another girl stepped forward, walking toward us.
“Heather,” I asked, “you said you were all captured, that you didn’t fulfill your service term. Does that mean you can still control nerve impulses, control pain?”
She laughed and slapped Emma on the back. “Yes.”
“But in terms of combat experience,” I said, bending slightly at the knees, an imperceptible amount, my muscles tightening and preparing for what I was about to try. Both ankles felt as though they would shatter. Without the ability to control nerves, I ignored the agony, sensing the room begin to spin as I prayed for my plan to work. “How much experience have you had? How many battles?”
Heather was about to answer when I leapt. My legs unloaded their pent energy, sending me in a dive at Emma, who stepped into a fighting stance and raised her guard a fraction of a second too late. It had been a long time. Months if not years had passed since I’d seen the expression that only comes when someone knows they are about to die and I couldn’t imagine the thoughts that must have run through Emma’s mind in the moment just before my shoulder impacted against her nose. There were no words to describe such a look. It was enough to touch off a sensation of regret for having to kill one of my own, almost making me stop in midair, except for the fact that I had studied her as the girl approached. Her legs had gone soft, and her face looked full, the fleshiness of relaxation and excess. You knew with a glimpse that Emma, like all of them, had lost her way. This was a prodigal moment. So
when my arms wrapped themselves around her neck, and my legs kicked up to leverage myself into a flip, pulling her over so that Emma’s back began its last arch, I sensed that it was a favor, a necessity, her penance. She would earn a death in combat. Killing Emma was a holy thing, an act of charity that Megan would have seen as my duty.
The girl’s neck snapped twice before I landed on my back, echoing throughout the workshop like shotgun blasts.
“Ubitza!” Misha shouted, raising both arms over his head as he laughed.
Heather looked furious. “That was unfair, Misha, I hadn’t started the combat. She cheated.”
“No, Heather.” Misha’s voice had gone quiet, his smile gone. “We can’t fill two empty slots, and I need you to meet production quota for the week. I can have
you
replaced, though, if you’d prefer that. Now we can consult with the hu—the nonbred if you like.”
“Let me see the back of her head,” Heather said, “If she has the mark, she can’t work, you know the rules. Lilies go directly to experimentation, straight to Exogene.”
“She’s not a Lily. I’ve seen it.”