Chongjin breathed us in at sunset. The car coasted a last few meters into the city’s northern suburbs, and we whined between crumbling houses and buildings that had turned half orange and half shadow in the little light remaining. To our left the remnants of a partially eaten factory rose over the walls. Somehow the spire of a smokestack had survived the years, a middle finger that refused to give into anything, and which grabbed my
attention, the reddish sunlight making it seem covered with its own blood. I almost didn’t notice when Margaret tripped a mine. It blew half heartedly, a fizzle, which sent fire and smoke all around us as if we’d driven through flare, but the time and elements had degraded its components—or maybe it was never built correctly in the first place—and the thing did little more than set a jerry can on fire and melt some rubber from our tires.
I laughed at the sight. “
Boom, and the Americans die!
Only a tiny
Zzzt
for us though, the footstep of good fortune always tiptoeing ahead of us a bit, making everything all right, neutering things in our path.”
“It scared me to death,” said Margaret. “I thought we’d died.”
“We did. The ‘us’ that existed a second ago is no more. It’s dead. Now it’s the us that exists this second, until it passes and kills us to give birth to the new Margaret and Catherine. A new Little Murderer with every tick. Dying isn’t what you think it is, Margaret. You think it’s the end of life, but it’s not. Death is the end of birth, the fact that time can no longer spit out a new Margaret.”
“Should I get out and check?” she asked. “To see if anything else was damaged?”
“No. We need to get as far as possible tonight, so we can make Tanch’on tomorrow. Maybe between now and then a different Margaret will be born, not a rebirth, but a miracle one, a Margaret born from a virgin.”
“Like you?”
I started crying then, and knew why. There was nothing to emulate in me, and the fact that someone could think I was worth following made me sick, as though in a moment the bile would run from my pores, filling my
armor until it suffocated, but even then it wouldn’t stop, would continue until it killed Margaret and everyone nearby. Margaret didn’t know what she had said. I forgave her for that. If she had known that there was nothing special, that whatever the Americans saw to make them follow, whatever my sisters saw to make them believe in me, had been placed in my genes by men—those who created me and therefore who were responsible—she should have pitied me. But then so much had happened since my creation that deep down I knew something else had taken over and it was all from inside, all me. At a point, late in the war when Megan and I had run, the decisions had become mine, the growth mine, the changes mine. All mine. And I didn’t want the responsibility, just like I had never wanted to be a Lily. I
wanted
to be a fluke, someone else’s mistake. Everyone would laugh, I was sure, when they realized that it had all been a big mistake, and I was just like my sisters.
But I wasn’t and there was no denying it.
We waited on another road remnant, positive that we now rested among ghosts. Evidence was all around. Piles and piles of skeletons lay scattered everywhere, none of them whole since they had been ripped to pieces and we had to drive over them, the crunching sound coming clearly through the microphone and reverberating through my thoughts. The skeletons traced a path all the way along the road and led straight to a refinery’s gate, the machinery beyond it still gleaming as if Na-yung had replaced it yesterday and oiled it with the fat stripped from corpses. It was new machinery, maybe from Korea,
a compact unit that took up less than a few hundred square meters and around which had been erected a wall and tall guard towers with green leaded-glass windows. Guards were worth shielding. Armed men and women would have been among the trusted, worth protecting from radiation. But for now the fortress was vacant, and autocannons hung loosely from their tower ports, barrels covered in canvas and pointing at the sky as if angered by their own impotence. Only the skeletons were here; they had won, simply by waiting until Na-yung had left, but they didn’t know that as soon as she needed more metal she’d return, driving over them with as little concern as we had. But it was morning now, and the mineshaft couldn’t wait for us any longer; I silently praised the dead for their temporary victory. They had found a home in Tanch’on.
“How much of a dose have I gotten?”
Margaret checked the computer. “About eighty thousand millirem. A hundred thousand more, Catherine, and you’re in trouble. But the readings here aren’t so bad; it would take about an hour to get that dose.”
“We can count on the mine giving me some cover, too,” I said.
“What are you planning?”
“To find some ore carts. I have to assume that these people died in the middle of their job, probably from the exposure of making hundreds of trips outside on the surface. I’m guessing they left unprocessed ore. It looks from here like the plant itself is automated.”
“You want me to go start it up?”
I thought for a second, before climbing out the hatch and flicking on my internal helmet blower to defog its faceplate. “No. Man the guns. I’m bringing relays with me
to drop if we start losing communications, so when I talk make sure to respond.”
Wind howled through pine trees that climbed every slope, their trunks bent and twisted from the constant battle with elements, but even misshapen they amazed me. The needles were dark green. Each one held a different shade, and then between them I saw tiny birds flitting in and out silently. But when I got to the mouth of the main shaft everything stopped. The air became heavy, even inside my suit, and when I glanced back it seemed that nothing moved, as if local wildlife had put two and two together, that the presence of people at the mine meant something bad would happen, meant it was time to hide. A long line of ore carts rested on two sets of narrow rails, the ones to my left filled with chunks of rock and gravel, the ones on the right empty. Car after car stretched into darkness.
“This should be easy,” I said. “I don’t know how much gold the ore contains, but there’s already a line of full cars going as far as I can see.”
Margaret clicked in. “So all you should have to do is turn the thing on and we’ll just wait.”
“Is everything clear?” I asked.
“No sign of movement.”
I turned away from the shaft and headed toward the refinery. The main gate, a solid steel panel almost eight feet tall that linked to a concrete wall topped with an electrified set of wires, was locked. The wires hummed overhead. Working electricity surprised me, suggesting that refinery contained a micro-reactor. What other surprises were here? Blowing open the door would be easy but knowing Na-yung and Yoon-sung, it seemed
too
easy;
and intrusion was something they would have thought of; I peered through a crack between the door and wall to find three wires, stretched tight on the other side.
“Booby traps,” I said into the radio.
“What have you got?”
“Wires. Taut, on the other side of door to the refinery yard. I’m cutting them.”
“Why take the chance?” Margaret asked. “If you release tension they could go off.”
“What else is there to do? The door opens inward, and these must be designed to function on an increase in tension, not its release.”
I pulled out a pair of wire cutters, and slipped them through the crack, clipping the wires one at a time before waiting for something to happen. Nothing. So I jogged back and took cover inside the mineshaft.
“Give it a couple of grenades,” I said, “Just blow the lock.”
A minute later I was in. There were a few more traps, each one designed to touch off a series of charges that ran throughout the refinery and into the mine itself. It took a few minutes to disarm them all and then activate the refinery, the machinery coming to life with a squeal.
“We’ll have gold eventually,” I said.
“But how long will it take?”
I thought for a moment. Huge chains cranked the carts to the top of a hopper, where they automatically turned over, dumping their ore into crushers and grinders that roared and screamed as they chewed rock into smaller and smaller bits, shaking them through screens for sizing. From there, pulverized ore fell into vats. An acid solution broke down the rocks, dissolving metals and carrying
them to a new liquid home, which was then piped to the end of the line, a warehouse-like building. I checked the warehouse door for booby traps and then opened it, seeing row upon row of mechanical sorters, where gold precipitated out of solution with other metals, and was then separated based on mass, magnetism, or any number of characteristics. Furnaces waited at the end of the production line; they lay dormant for now, but a line of molds stood ready, waiting to shape molten gold into bars.
“Days.” I finally decided. “Maybe weeks. I didn’t anticipate this.”
Before she could answer there was a sound. It was from the direction of the mineshaft and the noise of ore crushers should have drowned it out completely but it came anyway, faintly, a kind of howl that didn’t fit. I left the warehouse and headed toward the mine.
“Did you hear that?”
Margaret clicked in immediately. “I heard something. It came from the mineshaft.”
“Movement?”
“None.”
The sounds disappeared once I had moved a few meters into the tunnel’s darkness, my infrared and light amplification kicking in to change everything green, the reticle for my Maxwell a bright red. There was no movement. The only sounds were those of water dripping and the squeaking of the ore carts as they inched forward on their rails, but then farther in the tunnel there was something else—a low groan, as if someone was in pain. I dropped a relay and then pushed forward, my Maxwell raised. The shaft moved downward gently, and eventually opened into a large chamber that cleared my head by at
least ten meters; the floor was littered with human skeletons in rotted, padded Na-yung uniforms now moldy and soaked from water that ran down the walls in rivulets.
“See anything?” asked Margaret. Her voice startled me, loud in my ear, and I dropped to a knee expecting something to come charging at the noise.
“No,” I whispered. “Hold on communications, I’ll get back to you soon.”
Something was moving now, but nothing showed on my heads-up, no sign of anything, and only three dark circles suggested that other tunnels existed, two running along what must have been a track parallel to the ridgeline far above, and the last heading deeper into the mountain. I was about to move toward one when my motion sensors tripped.
A huge shape crashed from the tunnel, almost tipping over a string of carts as it barreled toward me, and before I could fire, the thing collided, sending me through the air to slam into a wall, my eyes filling with stars before everything went black. Unconsciousness may have saved me. By the time I came to, the room was quiet again, and the carts still moved along their rails, heading slowly toward the exit.
“Catherine!”
Margaret screamed in my ear.
“What?” I answered. “I’m OK.”
“Did you see that?”
“It knocked me out.” I stumbled toward the outside, still groggy from the impact my head had taken, and blinked upon stepping into the sunlight. It was almost noon. “What was that thing?”
“A bear! It was the most magnificent thing I’ve ever seen, a huge black bear that came rushing out and then ran into the mountains.”
I climbed onto the scout car and opened the hatch, sliding in headfirst so I could lie down. Margaret slammed it shut behind me.
“Are you OK?”
“I’m fine. I’m surprised it didn’t rip me apart.”
Margaret laughed and rotated the turret, scanning. “I think you must have scared it more than it did us. I don’t care if we make it or not, these last two days have been the most amazing of my life. To think: first a fox, now
a bear!
”
We spent three weeks watching the bear, and once I took a chance on following him, staring in awe as it ambled up the river that coursed nearby with the refinery’s refuse, mixing it with skeletons that had collected on its banks. The bear ate dead salmon. I watched as it rolled in the grass nearby and when it stood on both legs, roaring in my direction because I had gotten too close. Both Margaret and I wanted to stay; this was an amazing place if you ignored Na-yung’s contribution, a place where the animals soon accepted us or at least ignored two strangers and allowed us to watch, to see what the world was supposed to be. But eventually our food ran low and the time to leave came. Margaret and I had gotten comfortable enough with the area that we both walked into the warehouse to take final stock of our efforts, a full three bars of gold that cooled in their molds, gleaming. Each one weighed half a kilogram. We slipped them into a ceramic compartment in our armor, breaking one roughly in half so that we each took a piece of it.
“Is this enough?” she asked.
“I have no idea. How much does gold cost?”
“How should I know?”
She laughed and we both returned to the car, touching up its alcohol tanks before starting again, but I stopped her, and jumped from the car for one last task. When I returned she was smiling. We blew up the refinery, setting off the booby traps and taking some satisfaction in knowing that one last blow had been dealt to Na-yung, even if the ones who would suffer with its reconstruction would be the ones who deserved it least. We sped down the road we had used to enter, and then slowed to rejoin the main one south, where Margaret settled back into her pattern of moving slowly, scanning for anything that might cut our trip short.