“I’ll do it,” I said, and we both suited up.
Margaret ran the numbers through the tactical computer. “If you can do it in ten minutes, you’ll absorb about twenty thousand millirems—a four-year dose. That’s including the shielding limit of your armor.”
“What if I take my helmet off?”
“What?” Margaret stared at me, her helmet half on.
I smiled. “I just want to feel the ocean. Look, you can see where the waves have washed over the beach and onto the road, spreading the sand in patterns. The ocean will take this road in a few years. And the rails. I just want to feel it for a few seconds.”
Margaret shook her head. “Don’t do this, Catherine. Just put your helmet on.” She finished locking hers, and then helped with mine, making sure that she clicked it shut. “I can’t handle this entire trip by myself.”
As soon as I threw the hatch, the warning lights and buzzing alarms started, an automated voice calling out in Korean, listing the number of invisible dangers that flooded into the compartment. I climbed out. As soon as I secured the hatch and stood, a strong wind buffeted my side and I stared out over the ocean, watching the sunlight blink against distant swells. I stayed there for a minute, ignoring Margaret’s pleas to start working. This meant
something. God had never spoken to me directly, but if you imagined his voice, this is what it would have been like, a visual language combined with the pounding surf and the wind whistling through gaps in my armor. I sighed and got to work. The fuel ports fought me and it took a few minutes to loosen the first one, finally angling the jerry-can upward and letting its entire contents slosh into the near-empty tank. It took eight cans to finish the first tank. By the time I finished the second, there was a vague sense that Margaret was screaming at me, yelling something over my ear-pieces, but none of it mattered, the job would be done when it was done. I used half our reserve to refuel. Only sixteen cans remained, strapped to the car’s side, and if we lost it or the diversion at Tanch’on took too much time, we might find ourselves walking before we reached the DMZ. I dropped back inside, locking the hatch behind me.
“Why didn’t you answer?” asked Margaret. “I was shouting at you.”
“For what?”
“You took twenty minutes and absorbed more than forty-thousand millirems.”
I sighed, the sound echoing inside my helmet, and the urge to take it off and slam its curved ceramic into the bulkhead over and over until the thing cracked almost won out. “I used to be afraid to put my helmet on,” I said.
“What does that have to do with anything?” asked Margaret.
“Everything. It used to terrify me, so that by the time of my discharge I’d go into battle with only thermal block on my head—if Megan would permit it. I was sure the helmet would kill me. Now? Now I see a helmet for what it is: a
coffin. It’s a thing often associated with death, but not its cause, a tool whose purpose is to block reality and erect a barrier between myself and God, another layer of control for the men who created us. Knowing this makes everything better, erases the terror. I still hate the helmet. But now it’s no longer something to fear.” I turned away from Margaret then and arranged myself in the turret seat, strapping in tightly before continuing. “Forty-thousand or forty-million, neither number matters. I will decide how much exposure I get, Margaret. Not some chart written by and for the nonbred. Now, let’s go. Coast when you can, do anything to conserve fuel and reduce consumption; there is barely enough alcohol to get us to Wonsan, and that’s without the detour at Tanch’on. And deactivate those fucking alarms, we know about the radiation and biological threats. We should be more concerned with the vehicle we saw.”
“Who are they?” asked Margaret.
“Someone who has been interested in me for some time. Americans.”
I spotted the vehicle three more times while we crept southward. It always stayed in the mountains, following dirt roads that barely even existed in spots, so that often it would climb over the ridges and out of sight before giving me a good look, but on one occasion I saw what looked like an American communications antennae, characteristic in the way it curved upward from the car’s rear and then doubled over. I didn’t tell Margaret because it hadn’t tripped our motion sensors, and because I already knew that they were after me, that whatever the Americans thought special had been enough to make them risk
coming to North Korea to retrieve me, enough to pay for information. Exactly
what
they thought was so special wasn’t clear at all.
“Margaret, did they ever modify you in any way, like with organic linkages to processors, like the Russians did with Exogene?”
She kept her attention on the view-screen. “The Russians told us they removed tracking devices, but I never saw or heard of anything else. Why?”
“Megan,” I explained, “my Lily. They installed a computer at the back of her skull. I was just thinking that they could have done anything to us in the tanks.” Fear, the thing which had left me alone for so long, began its return, nibbling at my certainty that everything would go as planned.
It will go according to His plan
, something in my mind whispered, and the fear subsided, a fire extinguished by a flooding calm.
“Why?” asked Margaret.
“I was just thinking about what Lev said,” I lied, not wanting to tell her yet about what had me worried, that it was me who they followed and Margaret would die as soon as they caught us, if they caught us. “About how strange he was, how he wanted a sample of our tissue and it still makes no sense.”
“The nonbred often don’t make sense, Murderer. Forget it. We’re almost at Chongjin, a major city that escaped destruction; we’ll need to be careful because if there’s anyone here, Chongjin would be a logical place for them to reside.”
“And the horned beast will rise,” I said.
Margaret shifted into neutral when she arrived at the top of a hill, preparing to coast down. “Don’t quote
the manual, Catherine. Ever. You should have seen how the Russians used it—”
She stopped in midsentence. It was late afternoon and for the last hour we had turned west, heading away from the ocean and into rugged country where what remained of the concrete road appeared more like massive blocks that a child had lined up and then kicked so that the ends no longer met, and each block had heaved upward in odd angles from decades of freeze-thaw. Steep mountains rose on either side, making it impossible to turn around. Margaret had stopped talking because we rounded a sharp corner and stumbled on the car—the one that had been following us. It
wa
s American. A secondary road joined ours, and the car had come from it, probably hoping to move ahead of us into Chongjin, when they rolled over a mine, blowing off all three tires on their right side.
But nobody else was there. My mind filled the void with an image: about fifty men and women, dressed in the same padded clothes we had worn in Chegdomyn, swarming over the car and working hard to dismantle it, to strip it of everything they could, anything that one or two of them could cart off down the road to trade or sell.
Act
, I thought.
Be determined, and resolute
. But before I could fire they all vanished, leaving me with the sensation that I had seen ghosts, an army of them, which had only existed in my mind and that reality consisted of a smoking American scout car, one of its wheels rotating slowly as it burned to send a pillar of greasy smoke skyward. The black contaminated my dream of perfection. I blinked, expecting the looters to return, maybe from a phantom universe, but they didn’t, and my microphone sent only the sound of popping metal, crackling rubber.
“Can you climb the slope on the high side?” I asked. “To get around?”
Margaret had already started forward. “Yes.” She put the car into low gear, and gunned it gently so the turbines whined as the car pushed upward and then teetered on the center two wheels. We crashed down the far side. She crept forward then while both of us scoured the road visually for any sign of disturbance, signs that another mine had been planted, before rounding a sharp curve. Maybe they would be there, I thought, again fingering the triggers. Maybe motion sensors would illuminate a line of about thirty Korean scavengers, running away from us until within a minute they’d lie dying, filled with explosive flechettes that made me grin every time they hit, each time they found a home. But the road was empty. I told her to go back, and Margaret reversed our car then, returning slowly to the scene of wreckage.
“Why go back?” she asked. “Do you want to help the Americans? See if they’re still alive?”
“No. But we’ll need their alcohol.”
“Who did this? Where are they? Why haven’t we hit any mines and why are there Americans here in the first place?”
Her voice verged on hysterical, but there was no sense in explaining it. Not yet. The hatch popped, and I climbed out as fast as I could, shouting for Margaret to dog it behind me and man the turret. The American car was still running. Its engine forced my goggles into infrared for a second, outlining the grill in white, and on its side, ten jerry cans remained. They came off with trouble. Several of their latches had been bent shut from the rocks and it took me some time to free them, tossing the cans behind
me toward our car where an additional two lay, blasted free. Men shouted from inside the car. They pounded on the hatches and begged me to open them but a boulder rested on top and even though I might have been able to dislodge it, there was no point in making the effort—calculus would have prevented me from acting. The calculus of time. Each moment I spent in the outside world, the beautiful death of radiation did its job, piercing the miniature openings between atoms of my thin lead shield, less than a millimeter’s worth, radiation knocking off an electron here, damaging a nucleic acid there. Moving the boulder would have given death more time to work on me. Besides, even if I had taken the time to free them it wouldn’t have been for their benefit, it would have been to take one out and torture him, get the man to tell me everything he knew, and I had little doubt that he would prefer to die from starvation than from my hand. Did they think they could explain anything? Be our friends? They must have eventually figured it out for themselves because the pounding gave way to curses, to the shouted “bitches” and “sluts,” the limits of their descriptive powers when it came to me and my sisters. By the time I made it back to Margaret with all the alcohol, fifteen minutes had passed; there hadn’t been time to secure it outside the car, and we did our best to store it in the interior compartment, under bags of food and ammunition.
“Next time let me do it,” she said.
“How much longer until Chongjin?” I asked. The sun was already approaching the tops of mountains to the west, and it wouldn’t be smart to sleep here, or in Chongjin; we needed to move as far as possible, as quickly as possible, but without hitting any mines of our own.
“Ten minutes at our normal speed.”
“Go slowly. Especially around corners. And don’t worry about bandits, there aren’t any. That’s just what Na-yung wants everyone to think.”
“How do you know?”
I gritted my teeth and banged my head against the turret ring, over and over again, trying to knock the truth out—about how I knew, about how God spoke to me and said things without my hearing them, so they would lodge in my mind unnoticed until I stumbled on them. Like landmines.
“I know. That was probably a mine laid by Na-yung’s people. Do you think they want South Koreans to come here and scout? What do you think they do all year, Margaret, cut down trees? What would you do and what happened to your training?” My voice rose to a shout, then a scream.
“You are supposed to be like me, able to breathe war and piss it, but instead you act like I’m your nursemaid and you’re a fucking baby!”
I let a few minutes roll by, until my anger faded, before I tried again. “The North Koreans probably booby trapped as much of the north as they could, little by little, each year, leaving skeletons behind them, the skeletons of slaves. There are no bandits, except in the legends dreamed up by Na-yung and propagated through an endless chain of lies. I know what we’ll find in the mines at Tanch’on, Margaret. I know it because I’ve already seen it, God showed me.”
“What are you talking about?” she asked.
“More mines. Traps. And hundreds of skeletons of Russians and other prisoners that they transported here to work them while being irradiated, to extract metal and gold. Just like the Americans do in Kazakhstan. We’ll
find gold in Tanch’on. And we’ll find hundreds and hundreds of skeletons, the voices of the dead which are only able to say one thing: that they’re dead. Na-yung wants people to believe that North Korea is worth nothing so that nobody will come here, so that someday she can reclaim it.”
Margaret put her foot on the brake, slowing our descent as we rolled downward toward the city. “Who were they? The Americans, why were they here?”
I strapped in, making sure the flechette hopper was still full, wondering if maybe I had fired at something and forgotten all about it. “They’re here for me,” I said, and told her everything—about the strange general and about what Misha had said, everything about the efforts that had been made to kill me, and that for some reason, the Americans thought me special.
“I know why they think you’re special,” said Margaret.
“Why?”
She slowed, driving around an almost imperceptible lump in the road. “Because you’re better than everyone. Especially them. More than a Lily, something new and incredible.”