Alexa felt as if she couldn’t breathe. The bots weren’t troubled by the heat, but in the back with her father and the anarchist and half a dozen Tin Men, the temperature just kept rising. Hot wind blew through the shattered windows but did nothing to cool her. The vehicle bumped through a pothole and swayed as they moved around another car that had died on the highway.
She shifted in her seat, careful not to jostle her father too much. The ambassador’s injuries weren’t life-threatening, but he’d been given some heavy painkillers and was sleeping off and on.
“He looks almost peaceful,” a low, accented voice said, just behind her. “In the midst of all this, that’s quite a feat.”
Alexa stiffened. Her father was sleeping but Hanif Khan was not. She glanced out the broken window and watched the brown hills for a while before she realized that she could see the anarchist’s reflection in the gleaming metal door frame. If he’d had a knife he could have cut her throat or stabbed her through the seat.
“You’re lucky they didn’t just shoot you,” she said quietly, heart pounding. With all the other dangers she had faced today and then the exodus from Damascus, she’d barely thought about Khan.
“Shoot me for what? Fighting back?” he replied softly, his voice somehow both rough and silky at the same time. “If you had lived my life, girl, you would—”
Khan’s head slammed hard against the TSV’s interior. The anarchist hissed and spun to stare hatefully at the robot beside him. Alexa turned halfway round in her seat. The soldier had a smiley face with pirate-flag crossbones beneath it on his forehead. Hawkins, she remembered.
“Don’t talk to the girl,” Hawkins said. “Don’t even look at her.”
How can he not look at me when you put him right behind me? Alexa thought.
“Words aren’t going to hurt me,” she said instead. “What can he do? He’s a prisoner.”
Khan smiled. “You think that means I’ve lost? There are no victors here.”
Hawkins smashed his head against the metal again. A hand touched Alexa’s shoulder and she turned to see that her father was awake.
“That’s enough,” the ambassador said. He glared over the seat at Hawkins. “I know you’re looking out for my daughter, but she doesn’t need anyone to bleed for her.”
“You defending this piece of crap?” Hawkins asked, his robotic features attempting a sneer. “After what this guy did—”
“Coming up to Al Quneitra,” Kate called back to the rest of them.
Bending to peer through the windshield, Alexa saw that they were moving along a street of faded two- and three-story residences. People were camped on top of the dusty, useless cars in the road, and they rose to watch the vehicle roll past, anger and suspicion and confusion on their faces.
The Humvee sped up and Alexa was glad. She didn’t want to look.
Minutes blurred past and sometime later the Humvee jerked as it slowed to a halt on the side of the road. Alexa looked up to see that they were well clear of the town and had stopped in the middle of nowhere.
“What are we doing?” she asked.
Kate popped open her door. “Robots don’t have to pee, but we figured those among us with bladders might want a quick break.”
Hanif Khan groaned with relief. Alexa hadn’t even been thinking about needing to go, but now that Kate had mentioned it she realized she had to. They all piled out of the TSV except for Trav, who remained behind the wheel, and Torres marched Khan off toward a stand of trees to relieve himself.
Alexa glanced up the grassy slope to her right, saw an outcropping of rocks surrounded by thick bushes, and made a beeline for cover.
“Hold on,” her father called. “You should have someone with you.”
“I think I can manage!”
Even with the sweat that had beaded on her skin, she was thrilled to be out of the Humvee. The sun felt good and a breeze rustled the bushes around her as she slid her pants down. When she had finished and rearranged her clothes, she leaned against the rocks for a minute, enjoying the solitude. Staring out across the land, she saw no sign of civilization save for a handful of distant farm buildings. For that brief time it was possible to imagine that nothing at all had changed, that it was the same old world it had been the day before.
On her way back to the Humvee she came upon Danny and Hawkins talking quietly. She slowed down, hesitant to interrupt what seemed like a serious conversation, and she overheard enough to realize that Hawkins was just finishing some kind of message to his mother. A goodbye, Alexa thought. In case.
She frowned, wondering where the camera might be, and then it occurred to her that Danny was functioning as the camera, somehow recording the farewell message with the eyes and ears of the robot he inhabited.
“Your turn,” Hawkins said.
“Nah, I’m good,” Danny replied.
Neither had noticed Alexa yet and she stood there, awkwardly frozen. What was she supposed to say now?
Hawkins grunted his disapproval. “Come on, Kelso. You telling me if things go tits up, there’s nobody you’re gonna want to know that you were thinking of them at the end?”
“Sorry to disappoint.”
“Bullshit,” Hawkins said. “What about Kate?”
Danny held up a hand. “I don’t know what you think—”
Hawkins shook his head. “All right, Kelso. It ain’t my business. All I know is, if I didn’t have anyone worth living for, I’d top myself right now. Be done with it.”
Alexa tried to take a step, hoping to circle around them, but in the quiet that had fallen between the two soldiers the crunch of her footfall seemed inordinately loud. Danny and Hawkins both glanced at her.
“Sorry,” she said sheepishly. “Just going back to the Humvee.”
Hawkins nodded. “Me, too, kid. Thanks for your help, Kelso.”
Alexa strode to the vehicle, Hawkins at her side. He said nothing about the conversation she had just overheard and she was glad. She’d felt awkward enough without having to acknowledge it. At one point she glanced over her shoulder and saw that Danny hadn’t moved. He stood still, staring into the sky.
They found several of the Tin Men gathered behind the vehicle in conversation with her father. Behind the wheel, Trav started the engine and it rumbled to noisy life.
Alexa sat on the roadside, propped herself up on her arms with her legs out straight, and listened to his voice.
“Many of them will see us as the enemy, passing through these towns,” the ambassador was saying. “You’ve got to find a way to let them know that you’re no different from them. It won’t be easy, but, look, you’re all someone’s child. Some of you have kids of your own. We all hoped for a future better than the past. We have that in common.”
“But they do see us as the enemy,” Birnbaum said.
Alexa watched her father shake his head like a tired schoolteacher who wasn’t getting through to his students. She’d seen that expression on his face so many times.
“There are no enemies now,” he continued, the pain in his voice almost mesmerizing in its depth. “Every country is going to have to turn its attention inward. We all just want to go home, to be with the people we love and help them rebuild.”
He paused for a breath. Alexa couldn’t hear it over the rumble of the Humvee-TSV’s engine but she saw his chest rise and fall. She frowned, thinking that it sounded as if the Humvee’s engine had an echo.
Confused, she started to glance around, and so missed the sight of the bullet punching into her father’s back and exiting his chest. She whipped her head around in time to see the spurt of blood that spattered two of the Tin Men. Her father fell forward, crashing into Prosky’s arms. Birnbaum and Lahiri turned in the direction from which the shot had come and opened fire.
Around the front of the TSV, Kate shoved Hanif Khan to the ground.
Alexa realized she was screaming. She saw them all gathering around the vehicle and taking aim, and she heard the echo of the Humvee’s engine growing louder, and now she understood it.
A second black TSV had rolled up to idle two hundred yards behind them.
The Bot Killers had followed their trail. They wanted their boss.
Kate snapped off orders but her squad didn’t need to be told what to do. Hawkins grabbed Alexa and shoved her farther back, pushing her to the ground so that she was nearly forced under the vehicle. Bullets plinked against robot bodies and off the rear of their TSV.
Alexa kept screaming and tried to rise.
“Stay down, kid!” Birnbaum called, kneeling beside her and trying to hold her as Alexa batted at the robot.
In some calm place deep in her brain, she knew what she had seen: her father falling to the ground. The rest of her could only scream and cry and buck against the weight of the robot trying to cover her.
See? that calm shard of herself thought. What do you want to see?
Alexa planted her feet and shoved Birnbaum away. Birnbaum shouted at her as she rose, but Alexa ran toward where she saw her father lying in the road, his arms and legs at odd angles, blood pooling around him.
Daddy, she thought, grief clawing at her heart.
An image crashed into her mind of her bedroom at home, her closet doors yawning wide as they always seemed to be, clothes and shoes spilling out. Before she’d left to come here she had cleaned that closet. In the back, in a box, she had found a pair of glittery purple sneakers that her dad had bought her when she was six years old. He’d bought them not because she’d begged but because, he said, he’d seen the way her eyes lit up when she saw them in the store window.
Cleaning out that closet, she had thrown away the sneakers. Then she had gotten on a plane and flown halfway around the planet to visit her father, and the world had fallen apart.
Alexa stood over her father’s bloody corpse and stared at the sad, surprised look on his face and she wailed in anguish, hating herself for having thrown away those glittery purple shoes.
Bullets kicked up chunks of road and dirt around her. Birnbaum ran over, took up a protective position between Alexa and the anarchists, and started shooting.
“Hit the deck, kid!” Birnbaum snapped.
Alexa fell to her knees in the street, picked up her dead father’s hand and held it.
“I hate you,” she whispered.
She was speaking to him. She was speaking to herself.
“Your people want you back so badly,” Kate shouted into Hanif Khan’s ear, “they’d better be careful where they shoot.”
As if to underline her words, the gunfire from up the road ceased, its dying echoes swallowed as the Tin Men continued to fire. Kate started forward, pushing Khan ahead of her as the rest of the squad fell in beside her. Windows shattered in the anarchists’ Humvee. The bastards had spread out, taking cover behind trees and in a gulley beside the road. One of them stepped out a second too long and Kate shot him through the throat. Another died, but not by her bullet.
Hanif Khan glanced back at her. “They didn’t come for me. They came to finish the job they were given.”
The words repeated in her head just as she saw the two men emerge from behind the anarchists’ Humvee with rocket launchers on their shoulders. The other Bot Killers started firing at the same instant, a spray of bullets for distraction.
“Scatter!” Kate shouted, and she bolted to the left, dragging Khan to the ground with her.
As the Bot-Killer rockets streaked along the dusty road, she saw Mavrides haul Hawkins to the ground. One of the rockets hit a stand of trees where Danny had taken cover, blowing splintered wood and leaves apart and knocking him backward. The second hit the ground right between Hartschorn and Prosky.
The explosion tore them apart, blasting smoking pieces of robot all over the road.
Alexa lay on her back on the ground. Her ears were ringing from the explosions and her cheek felt damp. One hand fluttered up to touch the wetness there. She held her fingers in front of her eyes and saw red. Her blood, from a piece of shrapnel that would have taken her eye if it had struck two inches higher.
With a groan she rolled onto her side on the hot road and found herself staring at her father’s corpse not six feet away. His eyes were open. A lone fly buzzed around his face with great interest and then began to investigate the exit wound on his chest. A fresh wave of grief rushed up through her and new tears sprang to her eyes even as the sounds around her returned.
Gunfire.
She forced herself up to her knees, checking herself for injuries. She turned and saw Birnbaum fifteen feet to the north, down on one knee, firing at the Bot Killers in the distance, not worried about the other members of her platoon who were in the crossfire, knowing her bullets could do nothing to them.
Alexa pressed her eyes closed. She heard boots striking pavement and then hands grabbed hold of her. Her eyes flew open and she struggled even before she saw the grim features of Hanif Khan. She tried to fight him but he batted her hands away, shouted something at her, and threw her over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. Alexa screamed and beat at his back as he ran with her.
Seconds later he put her down, none too gently, in front of their Humvee TSV, the only real protection they had. His hands were still cuffed, but in front of him now instead of behind.
She shoved him away. “Don’t touch me, you fucking—”
Hanif Khan shoved her against the TSV’s grill and pinned her there with his cuffed hands, his arms like iron bars.
“You’ll be killed, you idiot!” he barked.
Before Alexa could reply, they heard the scream of another rocket. Both of them turned just in time to see it strike the pavement ten feet from Birnbaum. The road erupted with the explosion, hurling the robot backward so that she hit the ground and rolled until she was parallel to Alexa’s father’s body.
When Birnbaum rose, Alexa saw that the robot’s legs had been painted red. She had slid through the pool of Arthur Day’s blood.
Whatever fear or anger had been holding Alexa up gave way and she sank to her knees. Numb, she stared from the safety of the alley at her father’s body.
Khan crouched beside her. Alexa realized for the first time that he had probably saved her life. All she could do was wonder why.
“Don’t worry for your father, girl,” he said, his voice a deep, rasping growl. “For him, the fight is over. Worry instead for yourself.”
Kate killed two of the rocket-launcher men herself. The other ran for the open door of the Bot Killers’ TSV and went down in a barrage of gunfire. Their TSV’s tires kicked up dirt as it roared off, headed back the way it had come. Several other men rushed the vehicle and leaped in through open or shattered windows.
“Trav, you and Torres check to see if Hartschorn and Prosky are still functioning!” Kate called as she moved to the center of the road and the rest of the squad started to form around her. “Hawkins,” she said, focusing on the familiar smiley-and-crossbones. “Take Mavrides and Lahiri and go kill those motherfuckers.”
On foot, the three Tin Men caught up to the Bot Killers in no time. The bastards shot uselessly at them from the retreating TSV until Hawkins—she assumed it was Hawkins—reached in while running alongside and dragged the driver from behind the wheel. Kate turned away then. Whether Hawkins, Mavrides, and Lahiri wanted it quick or took their time, she was fine with it. The Bot Killers were getting what they had coming.
Her foot kicked something hard and she looked down to see that it was the blackened head of a robot, its eyes dark and dead. She had no idea if it was Prosky or Hartschorn, but now—reduced to this—it didn’t seem to matter.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this, she thought. The whole point of drones was to prevent this.
Only then did she notice that she had lost track of Hanif Khan.
Danny clambered to his feet, head ringing from the explosion of the rocket that had nearly done him in. If not for those trees, he’d be scrap metal now. He started toward the Humvee, feeling useless and pissed off, then saw Khan crouched behind the vehicle with Alexa Day. With the last gunshots resonating in his head, he strode toward them. Birnbaum knelt over the ambassador’s corpse in the middle of the street but Danny walked right by her. The rest of the squad was back along the road a ways, dealing with their attackers, but Danny’s interest was in Khan.
The anarchist’s brown eyes tracked him as he approached, but Khan did not try to flee. He had managed to slip the chain on the cuffs beneath his feet so that he would have his hands in front, but he did nothing to protect himself as Danny stomped up and grabbed him by the shirtfront.
“There were other TSVs,” Danny said. “That means the motherfuckers my squad just killed are not the only ones out there. So I’m asking…how many men did you have with you this morning? How many more of them might be in pursuit?”
Sweat glistened on Khan’s expressionless face.
“Many,” the anarchist said. “Very many.”
Alexa Day backed away from them both. Danny shook Khan again.
“Why are they doing this?” he demanded. “You didn’t strike me as jihadists.”
“We are not.”
“Then why? People don’t sacrifice themselves like that unless it’s for faith!”
Now Khan sneered, upper lip curling back in revulsion. “Faith,” he said, “or revenge. Every one of the men working with me lost someone they loved—not combatants, you understand, but innocents—to your kind. They know you are all vulnerable now and they are not going to stop until you are dead. Or they are.”
Danny hated him, but as he studied the man’s eyes he understood that Hanif Khan’s hatred was greater than his own.
“What about you?” he asked. “Who did you lose?”
“Not an innocent,” Khan admitted. “But it doesn’t matter. If not for you, he would still be alive.”
Alexa Day made a small sound, one Danny feared was born of sympathy. He wanted to remind the girl that her father lay dead forty feet away…but when he looked at her he saw her staring at Khan with such hatred that he realized he didn’t need to say a word.
Danny grabbed Khan by the back of the neck and shoved him, stumbling, around the side of the Humvee. There were so many retorts struggling to make it to his lips, but he spoke none of them. He held on to the belief that the Tin Men had done more good in the world than harm—he had to believe that—but he couldn’t argue with Khan’s hate. Only with his actions.
He hauled open a door and shoved Khan into the back of the Humvee. “From now on, I’m your keeper.”