“Mine’s fine,” Margaret said through the speakers.
A red light showed on my heads-up. “Targeting won’t link with my Maxwell, so I’ll have to use iron sights. Otherwise I’m OK.”
A moment later we heard the coughing of an engine and saw steam billow from the tractor where we left the others, and I realized I’d forgotten the instructions we gave them. They had heard our gunshots and assumed we’d come under fire. Yoon-sung’s unit moved forward slowly, and in infrared we saw the heat of their bodies, coming in a group as they huddled behind their makeshift vehicle.
“Take the left side of the road,” I told Margaret, “I’ll take the right. In the ditch so we can give covering fire.”
Both of us dove into our positions, facing the center of
town, while the tractor’s rattling grew louder behind us. We waited for Yoon-sung to draw to our side but before she did, a group of Koreans gathered in front of us, walking forward in armor.
“I can hear them,” said Margaret. “They’re Kim’s people and one is asking what all the noise is; the tractor has them confused. I think…”
I opened fire. Tracer flechettes walked into them, and one by one the figures fell to the ground until none remained standing. When the tractor drew even I told Yoon-sung to wait.
The wind picked up, sending ice and snow across the road, and Margaret and I jumped to our feet, sprinting toward the Koreans we had just killed; we slid into the pile of dead, not pausing to fully stop before our hands worked to pop their armor. I recognized some. Two old women stared back at me, dead, and I remembered that they had worked with the Second Logging Unit, a memory that froze me in place.
“What are you doing?” Margaret shouted.
“This is Mi-ae. The girl we smoked with whenever it snowed. I can’t remember the other one’s name.”
“It doesn’t matter, Catherine, we need the armor.”
“I can’t remember her name!”
A squad of Korean soldiers rounded the corner, from the other side of the People’s auditorium, and I dove behind one of the bodies, resting my carbine on its back. My sights centered on a moving target, a woman, and even though Margaret’s flechettes flew and snapped, their green streaks seeming to float down the road and into the people at which she had aimed, my finger wouldn’t move. It had stopped working. Then someone targeted me, riddling
the body in front with fire. I ducked my head before Margaret called out.
“Clear. We have to get these weapons and armor back to Yoon-sung, Catherine.”
But it didn’t matter. Yoon-sung’s unit showed up around us, silently slipping into undersuits and armor, grabbing any weapons they found. These were Chinese- or Russian-manufactured Maxwells, and felt several pounds heavier than the ones I had grown used to, but it could have been due to the fact that I hadn’t held one in so long that the weight was now foreign. It felt better when Margaret ripped it from my hands.
She pushed me down when I tried to stand. “Stay down, Catherine. You’ll get someone killed.”
“I can’t see the way anymore, Margaret.” I tried to stand again and she slammed her carbine into my chest, forcing me to trip over one of the bodies.
“I don’t give a shit. What’s wrong with you? I followed you because you were the Little Murderer, the one who took life without a thought. I don’t want you to die. But I also don’t want you with us right now, not when you’re insane.”
Yoon-sung’s people were ready and she stood next to Margaret, saying, “Listen to her. Just stay here.”
And before I could respond they were gone. It was late-morning now, and clouds gathered overhead, the temperature dropping back to the point where it felt like winter again, and when the snow came I started to cry. The tears must have been what brought the dead. All of them, everyone I had killed including Heather, knelt around me and formed a massive crowd of people and genetics so that the throng stretched farther than I could see, and each one’s eye-sockets had been crammed with
bundles of fiber optics. The dangling strands glowed. At first the sound of laughter came from these people, until I realized it came from
me
because I saw it clearly finally, that my mind had caught up, had fully spoiled. Explosions ripped through the street, but not even they brought me back. It was hard to tell the difference between what was real and what was a lie, but the blasts of grenades threw ice and rock against my suit, and then thermal gel that hissed in its familiar way, suggesting that they were real, and my visitors the only illusion.
“I am at home here,” I said to them.
Heather smiled, her mouth leaking blue fluid. “You are past your shelf life, Murderer. Come with us now, because it’s true: we all wind up in the same place.”
“You are in hell.”
“No,” she said, “but not heaven, either; it’s just a place where things make more sense. You don’t know who you are anymore, but we know, we know everything. The spoiling isn’t insanity, it’s normality, maybe the only indication you have that you aren’t who you think you are.”
“I am the Little Murderer.”
“Are you?” she asked. “What’s stopping you from killing now?”
I grabbed two handfuls of snow and dirt, throwing them at her only to see them pass through, her body that of a ghost. “Because I am with them now. Humans. This is the first time I’ve encountered any who treated us as equals, who took us in and gave us a chance when everyone else wanted us dead. Because I
owe
them.”
“Owe
them
? Have you forgotten all your history? These people are almost genetically predisposed to dictatorial rule, and their genocides exceed those of Stalin,
Pot, and even Hitler. They don’t treat anyone as an equal, least of all their own kind. Are you really
with
them, or only
like
them?”
I shook my head. “It’s you who doesn’t get it, Heather, because those questions don’t matter. History is about perspective. Maybe for someone like me, a strong leader makes sense, a leader for whom the threat of death is just as useful a tool as diplomacy. A leader like Stalin.
Maybe I feel at home because I’m like them and with them—both
.”
“Really?” Heather smiled. “Then stay here. Forever. Don’t leave this place and die so that your body can decay in the earth of Chegdomyn. But you won’t stay. You keep running because you’re afraid to face death, and now you’re too afraid to even take a life.”
“I am not afraid!”
“You hated me in life. I understand. But I don’t hate you now, in death, so listen to me for once: I’m not Heather. I’m you. And I’m telling you that man calls it the spoiling because it is a mental deterioration that reduces their creations, nibbles away at us until we are shadows of humans. Weak. It makes us question war and death, telling us that killing is wrong and that for it we are damned. These are lies, Catherine; God intended for man to create us as killers, holy and fearless, but the spoiling is His, and given time you will see why He inflicted us with madness. Man did an imperfect job and made mistakes. Yet what man made incomplete, He can make whole. Help Him. Take the next life you see and it will deliver you from the spoiling forever, so that you can take a message to the nonbred, for Him.”
“What message?” I asked.
“You’ll figure it out, Catherine, but I can’t tell you; you need to have faith. At the end of your journey, when you are perfect, then you’ll know.”
The crowd of phantoms began fading into the snowfall, allowing a man to run through Heather as she spoke. “Kill
him
now. Don’t show me anger or fear; show me that you are still with God. This is another test, Catherine, and like the last day at the atelier, he is a kitten.”
His armor had been burned in places, its helmet not completely locked down so it bobbed and clicked as he ran, and his feet moved uncertainly, as if not used to the weight of armor, or he may have allowed himself to get too soft, too weak. A patch of ice sent him onto his face. The man slid toward me, and as he got closer I heard wheezing breath, then a sob as he spoke in Korean. He tried to get his footing, but each time a grenade landed nearby the man overreacted, sending himself flying. I grabbed him as he passed and ripped his helmet off.
General Kim screamed, and put up both hands as if trying to stave off what would happen next. You didn’t need to understand Korean to know that he was begging.
“I don’t hate you, General,” I said in Russian.
He lowered his hands. Dirt streaked the man’s face except for where tears had run, and his skin looked red from the exertion of sprinting.
“Please,” he said, “don’t kill me, I didn’t mean what I said at dinner.”
“Why did you attempt a coup?”
“She is too old. You wouldn’t understand, because you’re new to our culture, new to humanity even. Respect toward the elderly is our way. So I would never undertake something like this lightly, especially not with someone
so revered as Na-yung, not with someone I am sworn to serve, someone old enough to remember the war. But this is a different war. Soon we’ll be caught in the middle of it, and I don’t think she can navigate us through.
You don’t know what she has planned for you and your friend
.”
“I want to thank you.”
He opened his eyes all the way, maybe surprised. “For what?”
“For everything your people have done. For me and Margaret. Even though you don’t want us here, I appreciate the collective decision to keep us; I’m sure it couldn’t have been easy for you to accept it.”
“You will let me go?” he asked.
It would have been cruel to answer him or to allow the conversation to continue. And by then the fires had begun around the camp, touched off by the grenade and rocket fire, so that when a group of soldiers marched in our direction the flames backlit them, their silhouettes getting larger as they approached. But it wasn’t an easy decision either—not like the ones regarding those who had died before. I had to grit my teeth and close my eyes, then find his head by touch before I twisted as hard and as quickly as I could, snapping his neck. A feeling descended on me then, a kind of weightlessness and lack of care; God had been there.
By the time Margaret and the others reached me, along with Na-yung’s forces who had fought underground, I wasn’t hearing anymore and couldn’t see or talk. Later Margaret told me that I lay on General Kim’s body for the rest of the day and into the night, begging him for forgiveness. Crying. Na-yung had thought she understood. She
knelt beside us for a while, and shed her own tears, brushing the hair back from Kim’s forehead and then cleaning his face with a handkerchief while she told me in Russian that it was never easy to kill a great man. But that wasn’t it; how could
she
understand? What had come to me that night, through Kim’s death, was the gift of acceptance, of finally knowing who and what I was: a killer. But not like the one who had fought her way to Kazakhstan through Iran and Uzbekistan. I would be a killer like nobody had seen before, one who saw God’s will.
“Na-yung counts us among the trusted now,” said Yoon-sung.
I didn’t respond to her. They had given us Chinese armor and Maxwells, and after so long in clothes, the ceramic felt heavy and confining, so that at times like now it seemed to suffocate, but not in the way it had when I once feared the helmet. Whatever had happened on the night of Kim’s death, it had restored me—removed every bit of fear so that the armor’s weight and confinement was nothing like it used to be, only a distraction. Spring had arrived in full, and Chegdomyn lay just far enough south that the snows melted fully, turning the areas surrounding the city into a swamp. We stayed helmeted, not because there was any danger, but because of mosquitoes. The insects had become so thick that, unhelmeted, if you opened your mouth for even a few seconds a hundred would fly in, catching between your teeth or inhaled into your lungs. Margaret said something in response to Yoon-sung about earning the Dear Leader’s trust by defeating the coup, but I knew that wasn’t it because I remembered
more of what she had said during our time with General Kim’s corpse—when she revealed that she could speak Russian fluently.
I secretly agreed with the General, Catherine, that you are an abomination. But the abomination isn’t that your kind was created in the first place; the abomination is that here you are, barely twenty, and yet you think and speak as though older than me by twenty years. I have pity for you
.
“How much longer?” I asked.
“Those are the most words you’ve spoken all month,” said Margaret, “I’d begun wondering if someone had removed your tongue.”
Yoon-sung surveyed the rail yard. “At this rate, about two more days.”
We stood on a gantry over the main rail line that ran through the middle of town, and looked down on the men and women who ran from one job to another while massive steam cranes swung back and forth, lowering logs and cut lumber into waiting cars. The cars were ones I had never seen. Yoon-sung told us that a Unified Korean business had developed them, and had designed the cars to open like clam shells so the lumber would be protected. Each side of the cars rested on the ground, and once full, the sides would swing upward and seal hermetically, locking out radioactive dust and biologicals that still lurked among the route we’d take through a desolate North Korea. I didn’t know what to feel. The breakdown I’d suffered during the coup had caused a shift in me, and maybe was just the thing I needed, so that now I felt comfortable with the thought of moving south. There was a kind of peace. The new warmth felt wet against my skin when I took off my helmet, and the smell of new grasses
and flowers amid the swamps and forests wafted through the air, as if the season quietly promised that something good was about to happen. Even the mosquitoes didn’t bother me that day.