“Stop this, Misha.”
He dropped his knife. “You are too good for the factories, Murderer. Too good for the labs. We never should have taken you from the field, should have forced you back into war where you belong. So kill me. Show me I
am right and send me home, save me from one more honorless experiment. Show me that you can still kill.”
It took no thought. By now the furnaces had cooled so that they ceased their popping, the only sounds coming from the rattle of air-handling systems shutting on and off, and the drip of water from leaking pipes far overhead, their drops splatting on the floor. At first I thought water had poured onto my hand. But with only a shift of my thoughts came the realization that my wrist had flicked, sinking the tip into his artery and then side to side, opening it to the air so that I now imagined Misha’s pain shooting out along with his blood. He was in the air now. Around me. The body slumped to the ground, almost empty, and he grinned a last grin, winking one eye.
“It is true then. Your heart is as black as it needs to be.” And then Misha was gone.
So much blood had spilled and mixed with water that I slid along the floor, stopping only at Heather’s body so I could fashion a bandage from her coveralls. A long strip of fabric tore free. I unzipped my clothing and tied the cloth around my side, wincing at the sight of a four-inch gash, white bone visible beneath, and then headed for the elevators. They took forever to arrive. The downward trip to my barracks lasted an eternity, in which Misha’s face refused to leave my mind, took its place alongside Megan’s, and even though I suspected the act of killing had made them both happy, I screamed and screamed with horror. With each scream it became clear that something was wrong: I couldn’t hear. Everything had gone silent. These were the shouts of futility, ones useless to everyone, even me, so that although my vocal chords ached and shook in my throat, no noise came out, not even when I slumped to
the floor, drained. There had been so much blood. Blood had never bothered me before and plenty of it had been that of my sisters, and so when the elevator lowered into the shaft opening, and Margaret jumped in to pound at the button to move upward, I smiled and stood to lean against her. She spoke, but it took several seconds before her words came through.
“What is wrong with you, Catherine, what happened up there?”
“Misha is dead. So is Heather.”
Margaret ran a hand through her hair and pushed me back against the elevator wall. “Then we’re through. We may as well report to the labs right now. Turn ourselves in.”
“You go to the labs. I’m going to the forest.”
“Catherine, you killed him. A boy. A factory head. There isn’t any running now, no going on.”
I grabbed her throat and slammed Margaret against the wall, the elevator clanking and sparking with the motion, which sent it to scrape against rock. The knife was still in my hand.
“Do you want to go with them? I do. I can send you there, will have no problem doing it because I’ve killed for my entire existence and it’s the only thing I’m good at. There doesn’t even have to be a thought; my body will act on impulse alone, the question ‘Should I kill?’ an afterthought. But you know what the funny thing is, Margaret? The funny thing is that I am too much of a coward to die. So I run.”
When I let go of her, Margaret nodded. “We’ll run.” She pulled a canvas bag from inside her coveralls and opened it, pushing something into my mouth. A tranq tab.
“Thank you,” I said.
“I suspect you’ll need it, Murderer. It will be a long night, and we aren’t dressed for the forest, aren’t dressed for the Siberian winter.”
“It’s winter?” I asked. “How can you tell it’s winter?”
Margaret laughed, reaching for my hand to loosen my grip on the knife, slipping it into one of my pockets. “It’s always winter in Zeya. Didn’t anyone teach you that?”
She was right. We moved through the maze of tunnels, which by now were familiar, and once we cleared the service entrance, a night wind whipped up a deep valley, slamming into us with a chill that ripped my breath away. I folded both arms and ran. We jogged down the road, winding through the mountains, and each step jolted my side to make me light-headed from the combined pain and blood loss until I felt another hallucination coming. I grabbed at Margaret to slow her down.
“Misha ordered supplies for us,” I said, dragging her to a stop. “It’s important you understand in case I fade out. Take us down the road and leave it when you see the forest, then head due east into the trees for four kilometers before turning north. We’re to meet someone named Lev.”
“Please, Catherine, it’s after ten p.m.; we have to
move
.”
Our units moved out at ten p.m. Megan and I watched as the girls spread over the wreckage of Shymkent’s northern suburbs and then crouched in holes, behind concrete, or under scraps of metal, our sisters waiting for their order to move up. The barrel of my Maxwell carbine lay on a block of rubble and vibrated softly in my trembling hands.
Quiet and eerie
. Marine units, far below us underground, were boring toward enemy lines and had to be getting
close by now. We’d get the order soon, I thought, and a few moments later smiled, knowing I had been right.
To the south, the dull crumping of our plasma batteries began and it wasn’t long before bright flashes illuminated the skyline to our north.
“Mary,” a man’s voice announced over the radio. “Mary.”
Megan gave us a hand signal and we began a crouching jog northward. In the open. It was the first time any of our forces had tried an aboveground assault, a response to the multiple Russian efforts to infiltrate our lines from above, to repay their courtesy. Lessons ticked past like a mantra: never move aboveground against well-defended fortifications; topside assaults were useless and would result in unnecessary casualties from which a unit might never recover. But none of them made me afraid; they made the move
more
exciting. We picked our way through the rubble, my boots occasionally slipping on countless Russian dead in combat armor so with each step the plasma bursts came closer. The temperature readout on my helmet display shifted colors, climbing, and I almost missed Megan’s next hand signal, but then melted into my surroundings, lowering to the ground to begin a slow crawl with chameleon skins on, so hard to see that my very existence became a thing to doubt. Within half a kilometer of the barrage, we stopped.
“Betty, Betty,” the man announced. The command meant that the Marine units were in place near the Russian lines, waiting underground for us to advance. Almost at the same moment as the signal, the barrage lifted and Megan waved us on.
Our suits scraped against jagged rubble as we moved up, the sound seeming like a scream over the winter
silence. My arms and legs cramped. To move at a snail’s pace that would not be detected by Russian motion sensors required a control that none of us had experienced, and two hours later we still lay more than a hundred meters from the enemy positions. When a green light appeared ahead of us, I froze. My vision kit zoomed onto the outline of an airlock blockhouse, its dim green interior light blinking out after its door sealed shut, and then the goggles tracked two Russians who jogged in a crouch, before both vanished into a nearby hole.
“Enemy spotted,” Megan whispered over the net. “Russian airlock located, point-two klicks to our front.”
We resumed our inching progress northward until Megan gave the signal to halt, and then passed another series of hand signals, ending it with one meant only for me. I thanked Him for the chance to kill, not doubting that I would succeed, and continued forward while everyone watched. It was better this way. An audience always made it more satisfying.
The Russians spoke loudly and you heard them laugh, comforting one with the realization that they wouldn’t be able to hear the scraping of a suit on concrete. They sounded
happy
. I reached a shallow defilade in front of their post, drew my knife, and tested its weight.
A quick kill
, I prayed,
and faith
, and then rolled into their position.
The knifepoint buried itself in the first Russian, who gasped and fell against the hole’s far side, almost ripping the blade from my grasp. The second one dropped a liquor bottle, too drunk to grab his carbine or call for help, so I snapped the knife into the man’s neck joint and slammed it in with the butt of my other hand.
“Clear,” I said, and collapsed on the ground, shaking.
There was blood. Even in darkness I saw the black pool spread across the snow, inching toward me, telling me to run. The thought snowballed. It became a voice, shouting to throw my weapons away and leap from the hole, sprint toward Shymkent and keep going south until I hit the water in Bandar, where I should dive in and swim. But Instead I sat there, paralyzed. By the time Megan peered over the lip of the hole, I had collected myself, not sure why the sight of blood had suddenly become a thing to fear, and rejoined the group, embarrassed that she had almost seen me frozen, could have mistaken it for what it was: an early onset of spoiling. Megan motioned for the rest of us to cross the last ten meters to the blockhouse, where we waited for our sapper to place a series of charges on the airlock door.
“Diane,” the man announced over the net; the Marines were about to attack.
Megan pressed her helmet against mine and whispered loudly.
“That hole was a mess. Death and faith, but you lose your touch, make it cleaner next time, efficient.” We felt the thuds of multiple explosions then, far beneath us, and Megan pointed at the sapper.
The airlock door blew inward and slammed against the far wall of the blockhouse, after which the girl slowly rose to inch her way in. A minute later she called over the net, “Inner door was unlocked. We’re clear.”
One of us, a replacement, stood quickly to rush forward.
“Stay down!”
Megan yelled. In midstride the girl realized her mistake and stopped, but it was too late. Three sentry bots popped up and spat streams of flechettes, her
helmet flying thirty meters when they chewed through the girl’s neck. Within moments the bots had retreated to their holes.
“Move in,” Megan ordered, her voice trembling with anger.
We crept toward the green light, and I crawled through a mass of tissue and blood from the girl who had just been killed, seeing the jagged shards of a spine.
I hate you
, I thought.
For being so stupid, a stupid fucking cow who can’t make any more mistakes, and for being lucky that you don’t have to do this anymore
…
“Come on, don’t be a stupid cow,” said Margaret, “
Move
. We only have six hours before day comes.”
Somehow I had gotten off the mountain. The narrow service road glistened in moonlight, its surface like a sheet of ice that had been frosted with fresh snow. We shuffled along, one of my arms draped over Margaret’s shoulder, and once I returned to the present, the haze shaken off, I let go of her, moving under my own power again.
“How long was I out?” I asked.
“An hour. I thought tranq tabs would help with that.”
I grunted, not sure if I believed what I was about to say, or that I even had the strength to answer, but tried anyway. “I took it too late. And sometimes they just don’t work.”
“You know the way? Before you stopped talking you said ‘east on the service road’ But I’ve forgotten now.”
“Misha said to leave the road only when we see trees.” I gave her the details about Lev then, and the supplies. “We still have a chance.”
Margaret stared at me as we walked and jogged, saying nothing for a while before she touched my shoulder. “You
were
a Lily, weren’t you?”
I stopped. “Why would you say that?”
“Our hair grows because we let it. Want it. But not you, even with your scars, you shave your head, keep it clean and military. You take lives so easily.”
“I am not a Lily.”
An anger came out of nowhere, all the hatred I had felt for so long awakening again and I slammed against her, throwing Margaret into the snowbank. “I am not a Lily.”
“I’m sorry, Murderer. But thank you.”
“For what?”
“For taking me with you.”
And we ran through the night. The cold bit through my leather shoes, reminding me of the pain I had once felt and making me wonder if I’d lose my toes again. But soon everything went numb. The cold bit so deeply that my teeth chattered no matter how hard I tried to clench them, and twice we had to hide while a truck passed, burying ourselves in a grave of ice and snow. Before long I lost consciousness in a way, the cold and exhaustion making everything disappear so that we almost missed it, the shapes rising in the moonlight, out of the darkness to our front.
“Trees?” Margaret asked.
“Trees.”
“We will be there soon?”
I glanced up at the sky, seeing the first signs of morning, a pink light forming over the mountains to the east, and nodded. “By midday. If we don’t freeze to death and if they haven’t already discovered Misha and the dead girls.”
Margaret leapt into the snow, her feet and legs sinking almost to her waist as she blazed the path, and I followed, hoping we’d make the treeline before another truck came. Once we passed the first birch we both laughed with relief.
“You said we’ll get there about midday,” said Margaret. “I’ll kill you if you’re wrong because I’m so fucking cold that I can’t shut my nerves down.”