But Heather moved before I could stand again, grabbing me by the arm, and without thinking, I reacted, used her to pull myself up and regain my footing. I launched into her then, knocking her off her feet at the same time I grabbed for her larynx.
“No!”
Misha shouted, forcing me to pause before I crushed Heather’s throat. “She’s a trustee, so if you kill her I am obliged to have you executed.” Misha pulled my hand from her neck, and then turned my back to the group, forcing my head down so they could see it clearly. “There, the number one. This is no Lily.”
Heather spat on the ground. “Fine. She works. But the first time she screws up, this one goes to the mines or worse.”
Misha opened a nearby cabinet, pulled a set of brown coveralls out, and handed them to me. They smelled of bleach. He watched while I dressed, grabbing me each time I tottered on the verge of collapse.
“Amazing, Ubitza,” he whispered. “I never saw it coming. Where did you learn to move like that?”
I shook my head. “I’ve been asked that before, and never had an answer. Killing has always come naturally to me, Misha, and I never had to learn how to do it.”
The main barracks had been carved out of rock, a hundred meters under the factory, and two elevators and an emergency shaft serviced them directly from the ceramic workshops. Its ceiling barely allowed one to stand. Bunks filled the chamber so that narrow passageways provided just enough room to traverse, and a haze of cigarette smoke made breathing and seeing difficult propositions, in addition to adding stale nicotine to a mixture of smells that combined latrines with unwashed workers. I pushed through, looking for an empty bed. My ankles ached and trembled, threatening with each step to give out, but walking upright mattered in the face of my sisters, their mental state unknown, where a sign of weakness might provoke an assault. And the next time they would be ready for my surprises. A hush fell over the chamber; as I passed, the girls whispered that it had been me who killed Emma, who defied Heather, me who had almost crushed their leader’s throat just because she had touched me. It
was like looking into a menagerie of Megans, each one a little different, each one potentially hostile. A scar here, a different hair color there, they all reminded me of her so that by the time I found an empty bunk their stares had brought tears, made it so that I had to roll onto the mattress and shut my eyes, waiting for the thoughts to leave. Megan had never stared at me with such a lack of recognition.
The bunk I had chosen, its top and bottom racks empty, rested in the corner farthest from the elevators and for a moment it felt like a foolish one to choose, one that would trap me if they came. But being cornered didn’t matter; in the event they all attacked there would be no escape regardless of where I was, because having to wait for an elevator or unlock the emergency shaft would take too much time anyway. In a corner, at least surprise would be harder for them to achieve.
A girl called from the bunk next to me, and my eyes snapped open as I recalled Megan’s voice.
“You could have taken any bunk you wanted,” she said, “maybe even Heather’s. If she lived here.”
The girl had short blond hair, but a scrollwork pattern covered her face with black lines, tattoos in a labyrinth of swirls and sharp corners so dense that her face seemed more ink than skin. I smiled with relief at the sight: she didn’t remind me of Megan at all.
“Why do you think that?” I asked.
“We’ve all heard the story, that maybe you’re a Lily, someone with the courage to stand up to her. Resolve enough to rip out her larynx. I barely remember having so much resolve.”
I shook my head. “I’m confused. We’re all the same,
born of the atelier. You should see the duty in killing one so far off the path, the satisfaction, and that it has less to do with courage or resolve than it does with calculus. She is broken, an abomination. Why haven’t any of you killed Heather yourselves?”
“Because we know better. Maybe we even like her. It’s different for the ones who flee at the end of their term, first generation like you. For us, the second-generation ones they capture who are less than seventeen equivalent, the Russians have a special program.”
I propped myself up on two elbows. “What program?”
“Rape.” She paused to light a cigarette and then snapped her lighter off. “And some truth—enough anyway to show us that mindless fools like you are the danger, not Heather. There is no God, Germline-One.”
“That’s a lie,” I said. But my words felt empty, no matter how they sounded, because she didn’t speak like any of the girls I had known, not even the new ones we had lost so long ago at Tamdybulak. It occurred to me then: this girl was the veteran in Zeya, in their factories, but not me. It was my first day. Deep down I wondered if maybe she was right, and that this discussion would prove me the idiot in an unfamiliar world.
“What would you know about lies?” the girl asked. “Ever been raped without end for months? It tends to open your mind to new ideas, like maybe there is no plan, no point to all this and maybe it’s acceptable to do what you need to survive. It’s why we hate you—all the first-generation ones. You’re too stupid to do anything but die.”
“What’s your name?”
She shrugged. “Margaret. I know yours already, Ubitza. Catherine.” Something beeped on her wrist and Margaret
glanced down before stubbing out the cigarette. She stood to pull on her clothes. “Lights out in ten minutes, Ubitza, welcome to Zeya.”
“Where are you going?”
“To earn some tranq tabs. How many did they supply you with? The usual?”
“Misha issued me three.”
“Three seems hardly like the old days. I remember being supplied with all the drugs we could eat, all you’d ever want.”
“Where are you going to work, Margaret? How do you earn extra tranq tabs? Misha said the factories were a good place to work, that there would be plenty of tranquilizers.” Already I felt the last one wearing off, my hands shaking with the onset of fear and the prospect of hallucinations making me grip the bed’s blanket.
“He wasn’t lying, there
are
plenty of drugs, but only for those willing to earn them. One tranq tab for every Popov you fuck. Here, killing gets you nothing, Ubitza, because you need a different set of skills, ones that it sounds like you’ve yet to master.”
“You relate with them, the boys? Misha?”
Margaret laughed and had enough trouble stopping that other girls shouted for her to shut up. Already the lights had dimmed and would soon go out. It was the only indication of night we had.
“
Relate
. We don’t relate, Ubitza, we fuck and screw, and Misha doesn’t
screw
anyone. None of the boys do, only the nonbred men and some of their women—the researchers and their guards. Their boys, their genetics, have no testicles. Our people abandoned male genetics in favor of females to deal with problems of aggression, but
the Russians? They created an army of eunuch warriors. I’m off to see a young nonbred doctor and he’s not as bad as some, sometimes gives me two tabs if I do a good job.”
Margaret began moving away through the bunks when the lights finally clicked off. I called after her. “Margaret, I need your help!”
“With what, Ubitza?”
“Russian; I need you to teach me Russian.”
“Fine. You’ll be dead before I can teach you anyway. Nobody gets by on three a day here. Not even those with mountains of resolve.”
Margaret and I were driving an electric truck when a Russian experiment went wrong. The engine whined as we climbed the final ramp to the surface and three trailers clanked behind us, slamming over the concrete curb and into the open where the sun made me squint; I hadn’t seen it in almost a year. Three-meter snow banks lay on either side of a narrow path that had been cut through drifts near the main tunnel entrance and we drove along it, careful to swerve out of the way of trucks winding in the opposite direction, coming out of the railyard. By now, we spoke only Russian. Mine was broken, slow, the language of a child, but it was enough to get by and with the basics my vocabulary grew every day. Although responding was often difficult, I understood anything said. Misha had sent us topside to collect the factory supplies and I closed my eyes, leaning my head back so the sunlight soaked into my skin, warming it with direct rays that instantly lifted my mood and made me smile.
“How long?” asked Margaret.
“How long since what?”
She pointed to the sky. “Since that?”
“Since my arrival. I don’t know, exactly.”
“Everyone needs the sun, once in a while. The sky. When I see it I wonder, how much longer I will live, is a life underground really worth much?”
I shrugged. “It is where we are. You do what you have to.”
She nodded and gunned the engine; the truck fought its way up the icy incline but slid side to side, struggling against the combination of gravity and reduced friction. One of the cars scraped a bank. Piles of snow collapsed onto our vehicle, forcing me to curse and sit up so I could wipe it off, the snow’s cold reminding me of my first day off the train when everything about Zeya had seemed so new. Now it was all there was, so that it had become harder to remember war, remember that I had once meant to go beyond Zeya, with Megan; but Megan didn’t visit anymore. Escape for something like freedom had become the dream of an ignorant child, a thing to remember and laugh at over vodka.
“Heather hasn’t bothered you since your arrival,” Margaret continued. We made it over the hill and began our descent, the railyards spreading out below us in the middle of a man-made forest—chimneys that stuck from the ground, their pipes spewing exhaust.
“I know.”
“Don’t you think it’s strange?” Margaret asked. “She hasn’t stopped hating you, and there are rumors that she and her closest will try something soon.”
“I’m hallucinating more,” I said, changing the subject. “I save my tablets for my shift, so I won’t black out in the factory, but they come at night. Not dreams.”
“Nightmares?”
“Not nightmares. I go back to the war or the atelier, and it feels like I’ll never come back.”
Margaret laughed, the noise immediately swallowed by the screaming engine and absorbed in the high snow banks. “Why would you want to come back to Zeya? To this? Don’t worry about them, Ubitza.”
“If I have one on shift, Heather will send me to the mines.”
“No,” she said, “that wouldn’t happen. If you spoiled on shift, Heather would have a reason to kill you—or to send you to laboratories. Probably the former, though.”
We pulled onto the concrete platform next to the train tracks, parking behind scores of other trucks who had also come for supplies. Margaret turned off the engine. She was about to say something when an alarm sounded in the distance; we both stepped from the truck and stood, squinting against the glare of sun on snow, trying to see. Other girls, from the mines or one of a hundred factories, stepped from their vehicles and did the same.
“What is that?” Margaret asked. A far-off portal leading to an underground section had burst open, and something emerged—a black shape that disappeared with a shimmer.
“It’s coming,” I said. “Are there weapons here?”
“What, Ubitza? What is it?”
I pushed Margaret toward the flatcars, and then waved for the other girls to follow. “Under the railcars, now.”
After I had taken cover, lying on ice and feeling it burn through my factory overalls, the cold made me shiver to the point where I forgot and tried, unsuccessfully, to regulate body temperature. The others must have been second
generation; none of them shivered. Soon we heard a thumping noise, the footsteps of a giant, which grew louder with each passing second.
“What is it?” Margaret asked again.
“One of their powered armor experiments. But maybe the alarms mean something went wrong.”
Seven missiles streaked overhead, and one of them slammed into a nearby boxcar, shooting splinters of metal and wood into the ground. One of the girls to my left screamed. I glanced over and saw her, shredded, a pool of blood growing in the snow but I looked away when the ground beneath us began vibrating. We watched as a camouflaged shape approached, its chameleon skin turning the air into something like a mirage so that I couldn’t tell the thing’s shape, only that it headed straight for us. It reached the platform at the same time a rocket impacted, striking its rear and sending hot metal to hiss on the ice-covered concrete. One of the armor suits, the same one shown to me by Misha, materialized then, as it crashed to the ground in front of us. Its shoulders sparked. The thing was close enough to touch and I reached out toward its helmet just as teams of armored Russian soldiers swarmed in, their weapons pointing at me and voices screaming to keep my distance, their officer pushing through to kneel beside it. He flicked open a panel and punched a series of keys until the carapace hissed open to send a wave of green fluid around his feet and reveal the suit’s occupant, who was face up, empty eye sockets connected to the suit via a series of fiber cables. When I saw the face, I threw up.
“God above,” said Margaret. “It’s one of us. A Lily.”
We didn’t stay to watch. But the memory of her—armless and legless with tubes and wires that seemed to
grow from her head, ears, and stumps—stayed with me as we loaded the carts, refused to disappear even after we had left the platform. We drove back toward the factory. At first neither Margaret nor I spoke but half way there, at the top of the hill, she stopped the truck.