I was too cold to talk. A log hut stood in a clearing ahead of us, reminding me of the farm in which Megan and I had found the murdered farmers, so that for a moment I was sure we would find Lev dead and hanging from the rafters—assuming this was even the right place. Smoke billowed from the hut’s chimney. A bundle of wires ran down one corner of the structure, a sign that we hadn’t stepped back in time three hundred years, that the hut had at least some modern features, but the energy it required to process the thought nearly made me drop; winter’s winds had been too hard. Margaret showed no sign of any similar deterioration and even looked at me with a grin as a wave of dizziness hit, making me stumble. She grabbed me before I fell.
“Are you all right?”
But I had no breath, couldn’t seem to piece together a sentence to answer her. Margaret looped my arm over her shoulder and dragged me to the hut’s front door, pounding on it with a free hand until an old man opened it.
“What?” When he realized what we were his eyes went wide. “You! Dear God, now I understand why Misha sent armor and supplies, and to think I was about to send them back. Come in, come in.”
Margaret ushered me through and the man shut the door behind us, blocking the cold. A fire burned in a woodstove. Compared to outside the air in the small room seemed tropical, and I collapsed on the floor with exhaustion, curling into a ball to shake while he knelt by me and shone a light in first one eye, then the other, before disappearing into a side room and returning with a blanket. He threw it across my back.
“Your friend is in bad shape,” the man said to Margaret. “Is she first generation?”
She nodded.
“What are you?”
“Second.”
“My God,” the man repeated, “what a treat! I’ve never seen one up close. So you still have much of your genetic material intact, ability to control pain, blood loss, all the normal functions, and she”—he pointed at me with a thumb—”is more or less like me now.”
“She is a Li—she is still fearless. Catherine is a killer. I am Margaret.”
I did my best to control my teeth from chattering as I spoke. “A-a-are you L-L-Lev? Misha told us you were a g-g-genetic, a boy like him.”
The man clapped his hands. Instead of a uniform he wore a wool sweater and tweed jacket, a pipe hooked from the left side of his mouth, and the pure white of his beard reminded me of the snow we had just escaped. He nodded at my question but then pulled the pipe from his mouth, speaking for the first time in English.
“Yes and no. I’m Lev to the Russian genetics. They are allowed to speak to me over the com lines but not to visit, and the Army tells them I am a genetic, the fulfillment of
their promise to provide the boys with their own land one day. I’m a lie.”
“Who are you, really?” asked Margaret.
“I’m Vince. Doctor Vincent Sleschinger. One of the first Germline designers, but that was almost thirty years ago; I was much younger then. My God, do you think I could take a tissue sample from both of you? You are the true pharmacons, the precursor of exogene and everything that stems from it. They won’t let me near any Germline units—security or something. In fact after I gave them my data on our first generation, they put me out here. There’s Russian gratitude for you. I must remember to thank Misha, send him something nice from my workshop.”
“Misha is dead,” I said, “I killed him. You designed us?”
The man shook his head. His smile faded and he moved toward what looked like a small kitchen, to sit on a tall stool. “Not you. The boys, the first generation that failed. I designed them, the ones who turned on their handlers and massacred an entire company of Marines in Iran, or was it Special Forces in Thailand? Who cares? It was spectacular as far as failures go, you should have seen the aftermath of the fight, where my boys had waded in to kill the men by hand, not stopping even when nobody remained to fight so that my sons battled the human corpses, ripping them to pieces. But what does the military do? Shit-canned. Kicked me to the street along with a
do-not-hire
sign around my neck so it wasn’t long before I became desperate for money. I left America and worked my way to eastern Europe, where I ran into some very interested buyers and voilà. Zeya has been my home ever since. I was the one who suggested a simple fix for the aggression: snip off the boy’s balls.”
As soon as he stopped talking, the feeling from my extremities returned, forcing me to scream. Margaret dropped to my side. My feet felt as though they had caught fire and a sense of panic rose in my chest as I scrambled to pull off the blanket and then my shoes, convinced that all ten toes had already turned black. They were bone white. Vince came over and squatted, then poked at them with the tip of his pen, watching over a pair of glasses.
“Blood flow is returning to normal, but barely. You were close, Catherine. It’s a good thing you found me when you did.” He pulled at the makeshift bandage then, which had soaked with blood, and checked the knife wound on my side. Vince reached toward his belt. He pulled out a medical kit and told Margaret to hold the wound closed before he sprayed it with an antibiotic adhesive, adding to my pain, to the burning. Vince tried to hide something then but I saw: he pushed what looked like a swab, its tip red with my blood, into the kit and then reattached the kit to his belt.
I screamed again and grabbed Vince’s arm. “Armor and supplies. Where are they?”
“They’re in the back, but I’ll need help, I’m not young anymore, Catherine.”
I didn’t trust him. The man hadn’t stopped smiling since we arrived, and there was a look about him, a kind of hunger that spoke of men I had seen before—of Alderson. Margaret followed him through a small door at the back of the hut and then disappeared, leaving me to the sounds of the hut and the wind; I was about to shut my eyes when I noticed a kind of scratching sound. It came from the kitchen. I threw the blanket off and stood carefully so my wound wouldn’t reopen and shuffled closer to
the noise, which came in bursts and at first was difficult to locate. I looked in every drawer, every cabinet, taking the time to do it noiselessly so that almost five minutes elapsed before I stumbled upon the sound’s source under the sink: a radio headset. Even though there was no sign of a receiver, it was there, relaying to the tiny speakers, which mumbled for a moment and then scratched with static. I picked the headset and wrapped it around my ears to hear Russian.
“Keep them there, Doctor. We’re on our way, please respond.”
“Understood,” I said, trying to make my voice deep, and the other end went quiet.
“You discovered my secret,” said Vince.
I spun to find him standing in the doorway, still smiling, an aeroinjector grasped tightly in his right fist.
“You were careless,” I said, moving a hand into my pocket until it touched the knife.
“In this case, their distrust of me, a foreigner, worked to your advantage. Misha never told me why he sent supplies, and the Russian forces never told me that you had escaped so I didn’t know anything until you knocked on my door. There wasn’t much time to radio that I had visitors. You were lucky, but it’s over, Catherine. Lay down and let it all happen now. Rest.”
My next moves had already been mapped, preordained, and there was no need to plan or prepare, the only sensation a familiar hatred that invigorated me.
This
was Alderson. It didn’t matter that his name was Vincent, didn’t confuse me in the least, because they were both motivated by curiosity, saw us as something to own and use, to vivisect.
“Where is Margaret?” I asked.
“She’s resting already.” He held up the injector. “A kind of sedative, one I’ve developed to counteract the biochemistry of Germline defenses. When fully functional, you were a masterpiece. Almost nothing chemical or biological would get through except for my little cocktail, and you could never imagine the amount of work it took to formulate, how many girls died when the Russians tested different versions for me. But I have no idea what it will do to a first-generation girl. You should just give up. How can you fight on when you have none of the benefits of being a genetic, and most of the disadvantages of a human?”
He didn’t wait for my answer. Vince’s courage surprised me—or maybe it was that I still suffered from blood loss and the cold—because he ran forward with the aeroinjector extended in front of him, and almost slammed the thing into my chest. I spun to the side, slicing downward. The knife struck his outstretched arm with a loud smack, digging into his bone, and the aeroinjector clattered to the floor. He dove for it. Vince had wrapped his left hand around the thing and was about to turn for another try when I threw the knife as hard as I could, burying it in his chest. He slid to the floor, his back against the wall, and looked first at the knife and then up at me with a horrified expression.
“Why don’t you give up, Catherine?”
I shook my head. “Because I think there is one more thing to accomplish. I don’t know what it is, but if it gives me more chances to kill men like you, it must be good.”
“Take me with you,” he whispered, too delirious to understand anything. “I want to watch.”
I kicked the aeroinjector from his hand and leaned
over to grab the knife. The hallucination came at the same time. I had just pulled the blade out and slammed it into his neck when everything went blank a second later.
“Germline units don’t take prisoners, do they?” he had asked before dying.
We never took prisoners. On our way northward through Iran a Guard unit had surrendered to us en masse, and they stood there with their hands up, weapons on the ground, all of them with looks of uncertainty and fear. On the beaches we had thought them brave; the Iranians had no combat armor, and I recall being taught that once most of the oil had gone, their forces suffered from a lack of money, a lack of discipline, but had a faith in God that matched ours—a fundamental belief that dying in the face of our advance would ensure them a place in heaven. So they fought. Neither Megan nor I had yet fired a shot in anger since our first landing, having only just moved off the shore, and the Iranian’s surrender made me feel sad that the battle had ended before it began. Maybe these men were
not
so brave.
Our human advisor spoke Farsi, and approached them. After a few words, he turned to one of the Lilies from a different unit and sketched an imaginary plan into the palm of his gauntlet.
“We can hold them here until our main forces catch up to the advance. Can you spare a hundred of your girls to guard?”
Her voice sounded cold over the helmet speakers. “No.”
“What?”
“It’s not in your original orders,” she explained.
The man must not have understood, and scratched his bare head as the morning sun turned the horizon wavy. “So? Adapt and improvise. Prisoners are a good thing, they can provide intelligence on enemy plans and defenses.”
“Our orders are to advance and secure the border before halting. They die
here
.” She motioned to the rest of us. “Faith.”
We opened fire. The Iranians realized immediately what was happening, and most tried to run. Some dove for their weapons.
Our advisor crouched to avoid the fire and began speaking excitedly, forgetting to switch into command net so that we all heard him on the radio.
“Fox-Seven, Mango-One.”
“Fox-Seven,” a voice answered.
“Get command, I need orders for my girls to hold the Iranian prisoners here.
Alive
.”
“Hold.”
The radio went silent for a few minutes, and we began moving forward again, chasing the ones who had run. I felt depressed. This was like killing animals, unfulfilling and without honor, especially when it came to the ones who fell to their knees and begged, throwing their hands up in supplication.
When the voice came back, it was more quiet. “Negative, Mike, orders are to push on, secure border. Over.”
Our advisor stood then, and watched us, his Maxwell still slung over a shoulder. When we finished he waited as we loaded back into our APCs, and before snapping his helmet into place I saw the look of hatred on his face, amplified by a scar that ran over his left eye.
“I hope that was fun,” he said.
I came around to find Margaret shaking me. When my eyes snapped open, she grinned, handing me my knife, which she had cleaned so it gleamed in the firelight. “It looks like you had some fun.”
“What happened?”
“He surprised me, injected me with something that induced unconsciousness and I only just came to. It’s been half an hour, Murderer.”
“Did you find the armor? The supplies?”
Margaret nodded, laughing at the same time.
“What?” I asked, “What’s wrong?”
“The armor, Murderer. It’s for boys. Misha sent us diapers to wear because the undersuits weren’t meant for female waste needs.”
I laughed too, and pulled myself from the floor. Margaret handed me another tranq tab and I swallowed it whole, waiting for the relief. It came almost immediately.
“Let’s go then. Get dressed and we’ll move out. Vince alerted them we’re here; they’re on their way now.”
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“I don’t know exactly. But south.”