The boy is tangled up in barbed wire at the bottom of a shallow gully. Must be about eight or nine, by the size of him. Dead maybe a week. He’s wearing a torn gray coat, plastered in dried mud and brown stalks of grass. I can’t quite see his face yet, but I will here in a minute.
Long as we’re inside the Cherokee Nation, that’s my job.
Squinting into the sky, I spot the black saucer of my wadulisi recon drone. I signal it with a tired wave of my hand. Out beyond the big maize fields, we’re nearing the gray spine of the tribal border wall. The wadulisi has been loitering up high, blinking police flashers and signaling the roaming grain threshers to stay back. Them machines are thirty tons apiece and they work out here on their own, taking everything the land has to give.
I hike up my pants and sidestep a little ways into the ditch.
Back before they had barbed wire, the ranchers and cattlemen of Northeastern Oklahoma planted rows of thorny trees to keep their herds. They called it Osage orange, after the color of its roots. It was horse-high, pig-tight, and bull-strong, as they used to say. Took a while, but once the trees were grown there wasn’t hardly any way to get rid of them. Those old fencerows, native to this land, sent roots down into the dirt, and their branches swept up into the air, a break against the wind that wanted to strip away the soil.
Wire come along and took those trees away right around when this whole place got turned into a dust bowl—when the storms were a mile high of screaming black silt laced with lightning and death.
I stop at the bottom of the gully.
Favoring my bad left knee, I squat beside the twisted-up little body. I tip back the brim of my hat with one finger and just look at him for a spell. I pull a pair of brown leather gloves from my hip and slide them on. Finally, I reach to my creaking leather holster for the quantum analyzer. There’s a patch of visible skin on the boy’s neck and I push the tool against it, the flesh still spongy.
I need to know whether this boy is one of ours. Does he belong on this side of the wall or the other? It’s a simple question with a lot of complicated answers.
The analyzer spits an error code I’ve never even seen before.
Two hundred years ago, the Cherokee were force-marched a thousand miles from lands all around Georgia, over here to what they called Indian Country. Later, the U.S. government took count of the ones who lived. A tally was made, called the Dawes Rolls, and that’s how the quantum analyzer knows who’s who.
You’ve either got an ancestor on the list or you don’t. Period.
Wind washes over my neck as the wadulisi descends, already taking pictures of the body. It’ll send the data straight back to the nation. We’re out in the sticks here, even for tribal land, but we’re on the right side of the wall and that’s all that matters. This little boy died in Cherokee country.
I slap the analyzer against my thigh and try it again.
It scrapes a tiny bit of skin and runs a DNA test against ancestors on the rolls. Once again, the answer comes back funny. The name Mary Feather flashes once, then disappears.
This boy doesn’t belong here. Yet it seems he does, too.
I sigh and look up at the lip of the ditch. Even down here, I can see the top of the Sovereign Wall. It’s a metal fin, forty feet high, dotted with sensor arrays that are all watched over by a computer program that never sleeps. It protects what the nation spent the last thirty years buying up wholesale from the state. After going to so much trouble to take it away from us, in the end Oklahoma was happy to sell off its land just to save maintaining it—to try to pay its debts once the tax money dried up and the oil folks lit out.
Cherokee never did have a reservation. Not until they decided to go and build one. And these days it’s not about keeping us inside. It’s about keeping them out.
“King one-oh-three, calling wall dispatch,” I say into my collar radio.
“King one-oh-three, go ahead,” replies the dispatcher.
“I’m at the far wall by Lost City. Got a DB. Our side of the fence. Location transmitting. Any breaches in the wall near here?”
“Copy that,” he says. I hear typing in the background. “Got nothing on seismic.”
“Looks like it rained. Any gaps in the record?”
“Nope. Picked up a storm about…two days ago. Hit that area at three in the morning.”
“Well, that’s when the border jumpers like to cross. This DB is a juvenile. See if you can’t check infrared, find some aerial footage. I’d like to know how many suspects and where they went. Don’t know how they’d leave behind their little boy.”
“Shoot, they’re desperate out there,” says the dispatcher. “Nothing surprises me anymore.”
“I’ll look for you back at the car. Go ahead and issue an auto-recovery. He’s pretty well wrapped up in barbed wire, so they’ll need a newer ground unit. Over.”
“You got it, Marshal,” he says.
“Wado,” I say. “Over and out.”
I sit with the boy for another minute. The wind sweeping off the wall and across the plain smells wet and metallic. All the clumps of scrubby grass around me seem to be breathing with it.
The little boy’s eyes are closed. He looks peaceful, even tangled up like he is. I can’t help it and I put a hand on his shoulder. I say a little prayer for him, whoever he is. Wherever his people are.
With my multi-tool, I clip off a length of the wire and run it into a circle like a lasso. Holding it over my thigh, I crunch over dead grass back toward my patrol car. In the distance, those threshers are groaning and rumbling over the land like hungry, forgotten gods. They eat and eat, but they’ll never be full.
Used to be, the great plains were wide open, horizon to horizon. Real primal freedom. No boundaries, far as you could roam. Legendary herds of bison migrated here, hooves churning dirt, followed by fly swarms that could darken the skies. Countless tons of shit and breath and life kept the land here fertile. Fell into a kind of pattern that lasted too long. Progress don’t wait for nobody.
So they come and they strung wire across the whole thing.
A lick of sunlight gleams on the wood-laminate table in front of me, climbing a chipped white mug of coffee and a short coil of barbed wire.
The boy was young. Nobody left him behind on purpose.
Folks outside are trying to get into tribal land and they’re desperate, it’s true, but they’re not animals. When the federal government started going private and the corporations took over more and more, a lot of people got caught with nothing. The ones with money climbed a ladder and they pulled it right up after themselves.
Out there beyond the wall, it’s every person for theirself.
If you make some money, life is good. If you don’t, why then life might not last very long at all. You might not get to see a doctor. The police might not come when you call. Or the fire department. Money talks, out there.
It took a while for it to get this bad, but there it is.
Our side of the wall has still got some community left. The law of our tribe wasn’t stripped away by lobbyists and investors and politicians. We weren’t worth their time. Now that everything has shook out, there’s a lot of people wishing they could join us.
Somebody is out there mourning this little boy right now. What happened to him had to have been a surprise. Something tore him right out from his mama’s arms or off his daddy’s back.
Something strong and quick and without a heart.
I pop open the pearl button over my breast pocket and pull out my tribal-issued dikata. It’s a silver rectangle about the size of an old yellow legal pad. I lay it on the table, then fish out my bifocals and put them on.
I wait for a second while the waitress refreshes my coffee.
“Dikata,” I say. “Can you find any extreme weather where I was at today, in the microclimate database? Wado.”
Always pays to be polite, even with the machines.
“Affirmative. Requesting access to Tsisqua dedicated satellite,” it says.
“Granted,” I say. “Cherokee marshal authorization.”
The dikata projects data in the air above itself. The wood laminate shimmers with tiny rolling clouds and the blush of temperature fluctuations. But I see nothing out of the ordinary.
Thinking about that for a second, I take a sip of coffee.
Water doesn’t think; it only flows. Pushing and pulling, slow or fast. And if a little boy got caught up in the tide, why, the water don’t mind if he has a laugh or if he goes ahead and drowns. Water just flows.
“Expand search, please, north and south, along the wall,” I say.
The view from my little crystal ball pulls back and now I see the churning gray pixels of a storm front, farther north.
“Satellite view, please.”
The familiar gullies out beyond the fields run all the way up to the border wall. Under the lashing sheets of simulated rain, rivulets flow. Water is being channeled, a flash flood that carries on down to where I found the boy. And that’s where I see something strange, just outside the wall.
I’ve been looking in the wrong place.
Razor wire glints against a sky as creamy as bread pudding. The strands are pulled taut, up high on the Sovereign Wall, broken up by occasional camera nests or a snub-nosed turret. The wire is an ancient defense, like the scratching branches it replaced, still doing its job among all that high technology.
I’m not used to seeing it from this side.
Three miles north of where I found the boy, outside the wall, I’m wandering through the dawn on creaky knees. My wadulisi is buzzing around somewhere overhead. Every now and then it flashes those blues and reds.
Satellite spotted the semitrailer maybe a half mile away from paved road, sunk hubcaps deep in wet dirt, tilted forty-five degrees. Grass is shoving up around its tires and tickling its belly. The trailer has been out here awhile, streaked in dirt. If I hadn’t been looking for it, I’d never have seen it.
I wave to the wadulisi.
“Go on ahead,” I say, limping my way over the rutted field.
My breath plumes in the morning air. From a distance, I see that the back door of the trailer has been flung open, spilling out trash. Some of it has collected against the scrub bushes, rumpled skirts made of refuse.
While I walk, I pull out my dikata and check the drone feed.
The trailer seems abandoned. Nobody around and nothing much to see. But the trash is medical. A pair of blue scrubs are twisted in a low bush. A dirt-stained surgical mask lies out like a dead perch. This trailer is out here for a reason. But whatever happened is over.
It takes me a couple minutes, but I get there. I rest a hand on the cool metal lip of the open trailer door and squint into the darkness.
Empty. Ransacked, more like it.
“Come down, please,” I ask the drone. “Give me some light.”
As I drag myself up into the cockeyed trailer bed, I hear the whir of the wadulisi and a spotlight flicks on over my shoulder.
“Wado,” I grunt, standing up in the trailer doorway.
The floor inside is wooden, polished, and layered in blue medical-type paper that’s gotten wet and been torn. Clear sheets of plastic hang along the walls, probably related to keeping the place sterile. What’s left of a surgical table is lying on its side, and metallic tools are scattered on the ground like dropped silverware. Gouges mark the wood floor, where a piece of equipment was dragged out.
I nudge the trash around with the toe of my boot. Smell the antiseptic stink of the room and run my fingers over the damp plastic sheets. There’s a couple of reddish smears on the ground that are concerning.
Somebody has been out here doing something they shouldn’t.
This trailer is outside my jurisdiction and my evidence won’t be admissible, but that doesn’t matter much. Kneeling, I use my multi-tool to dig up a few splinters of the red-stained wood and drop them in a plastic bag. Moving slow so I don’t fall, I stand myself back up.
Nothing more to see here.
Standing in the mouth of the trailer, I reach up and grab the ceiling and let my gut lean out into the chill prairie breeze. A drop of rain plunks into the brim of my hat. I take a deep breath of the growing storm and smell the grass and wind. I let my gaze follow the twists of the gully until my eyes settle on the border wall.
We’re not a mile from it.
Every step I take, the wall seems bigger. The land out here is flat to rolling, rutted and brown. Things don’t grow so well in shadow.
I already sent the wadulisi rushing off over the wall with the blood sample. Here in a minute it’ll rendezvous with another, bigger drone that’ll run all the way to the tribal hospital.
I went ahead and put a priority on it.
Cherokee take it serious when somebody claims blood. They’ll sniff you out and make it clear whether you’re a citizen or not. We have a long memory. We know there’s only so much to give, you understand, and we’ve got to think of our own people.
Like this boy, maybe. With his ancestor-not-ancestor.
As I walk along the base of the wall, sunlight streams through the wet bones of it and flickers over the brim of my hat. The thing feels like the rib cage of a prehistoric whale, with sheet metal strung between. The other side is clean, but this side is covered in graffiti. People set up tents and try to live beside it. Tribal drones chase them off, most times, without anybody even having to come out.
I nearly fall straight through the breach—stepping on a snarl of black plastic drainage pipe that writhes off under the wall. The grate has been pried off, the black mouth propped open with a piece of rebar, big enough for one person to come through at a time.
Seismic must have been fooled by the storm and rushing water. Whoever came through this pipeline was baptized here and born again on the other side. It would have been scary as all get-out but possible. If you were desperate enough.
I catch sight of my wadulisi against the bruised clouds. It descends down to about eye level, wavering a bit in the shuddery breeze. A projector fires up and a small Native woman in a white lab coat appears in the air before me.
Time to find out about those blood samples.
“Osiyo, Peggy,” I say. “Find anything good?”
“Hey, Connie,” she says. “Both blood samples were from the same boy. But the second one had irregularities.”
“What kind?”
“In the DNA. Gene therapy, maybe.”
“Explains the medical trailer.”
“Probably part of a package deal. The coyotes give them a DNA signature that links to the Dawes Rolls, then send ’em under the wall. Once they’re on this side, they use their DNA to get tribal ID so they can start using the main gate.”
“Why’d it register funny?”
“Changes didn’t propagate in time. Poor kid didn’t live long enough. So it was only in about half his cells.”
People are people, and they do what they have to for their babies.
“What now?” I ask.
“Now?” she asks. “Now you go see his mother.”
The quantum network clocked a matching descendant to Mary Feather about an hour ago. A woman came into the Cherokee Nation Department of Motor Vehicles to register for a new license. It’s the DMV, so I imagine she’ll still be there.
A little bell jingles as I push open the door.
I stamp the rain off my boots and glance around. A half dozen people sit at retired school desks in this dim little room, waiting on their turn. A portable heater in the corner breathes out warm air without much enthusiasm.
One lady in particular looks up, sees my uniform, and looks away.
That’s her, gotta be.
I peel off my jacket and hang it on a hall tree, watching her out of the side of my eye. The woman I see has lost so much. Her loss is there in the way she holds her purse against her chest like a kid clutching at a teddy bear. It’s in the pinched lines of hate that radiate out from the corners of her mouth. The paranoid glare in her eyes, muddied with mascara that’s been poorly cleaned off.
That would be from the crying, I expect.
I finally amble toward her, looking closer while she looks away. Her skin is slightly orange. She must have put on some kind of bronzer. Trying to blend in, as if the Indians around here are all stern-faced, cigar-store carvings.
She don’t have a clue what it’s like on the inside.
Dark braids and proud cheekbones and eagle feathers are not the whole story of this nation. Hell, the chief himself is maybe one thirty-second at most.
“Ma’am,” I say.
Her chest hitches and she stands up all of a sudden, tries to push around me. Starts to stammer something nasty. She’s a citizen and how dare I harass her.
I just put up my hands, palms out.
“It’s okay. I just need a second,” I say, reaching for my breast pocket.
She stops, eyes latching on to the blank back of the photo.
The image is still curled and warm from the printer in my patrol car. It’s a reconstruction, showing no trace of the wire-torn jacket or the swollen skin. But it’s still a corpse’s photo—the boy’s eyes are closed, his hair matted, with the alignment grids pasted over it all. The rain-torn gully is visible in the background. I wince, noticing a twisted coil of barbed wire.
“You know this child?” I ask, turning the picture around.
Her knees dip and I catch her by the elbow.
“No,” she says, lips trembling. “No, no.”
The woman starts to fall and I wrap my arm around her. Her face presses against my jacket and her purse thumps to the ground. Those clawed hands of hers hook over my shoulders and she’s crying outright now, shaking, her face warm against my chest.
She lost her place in the world. She lost her little boy. She lost a lot.
And it’s my job to take the rest.
“What were you doing in that trailer?”
Whatever she had to do.
Her hair smells like cigarettes and rain. She moans against my chest—I can’t tell what—fingers digging into my shoulders.
“Who did that blood work?”
Whoever was willing.
I gently set her back down in the cheap plastic chair. She puts her face in her hands, features hidden by strands of black hair, blond at the roots, streaked with gray.
“What did it cost you?” I ask.
Everything.
Blindly, she pulls the photo out of my hands. Pushes it up to her face, clutching it, grief twisting through her body like tree roots. A kind of primal sadness. I feel I’m watching the snuffing out of all her potential, a capitulation of hope.
Outside the window, that distant wall is rusty and high.
It’s quiet for a second and so I start to think. About how people take from each other. They take and take. Our world itself is a great big taking. And life is just giving. We give away everything we have, one day at a time, until we can’t give no more.
I guess that’s the price of living.
The boy’s mother doesn’t struggle as I walk her out to the patrol car. I clump the door shut and she sits calmly behind bulletproof glass. She’s staring down at her hands, where I let her keep the photo.
It’s about all she’s got left.
DANIEL H. WILSON is a Cherokee citizen and the author of the New York Times bestselling Robopocalypse and its sequel Robogenesis, as well as seven other books, including How to Survive a Robot Uprising, A Boy and His Bot, and Amped. He earned a PhD in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University as well as master’s degrees in artificial intelligence and robotics. His latest books are a novel, The Clockwork Dynasty, and a short-story collection, Guardian Angels & Other Monsters. Wilson lives in Portland, Oregon.