Felix knew they were making progress, but in the dark the shadows all looked the same. He felt like screaming. He dared not ask how much farther to Piraeus, afraid the answer might break whatever remained of his spirit. Instead he just shuffled along in the wake of the two presidents, muscles as taut as violin strings. The tunnels were so dark that even with the splashes of light provided by the Tin Men he stumbled again and again over the tracks. Twice he fell and skinned his palms. Others had it worse. People walked in columns, one hand on the person ahead, or they walked side by side in a prison-road-gang shuffle as they tried not to fall. With one robot in front and one in back there wasn’t a lot of light to go around, but they made do.
They had passed four underground stations thus far. Each time, the passengers they’d gathered along the way flooded the subway platforms and rushed up the steps in a frantic struggle toward daylight. Each time, Felix had been tempted to go with them. But he stayed in line behind President Matheson and President Rostov, following Chapel’s guide light as if it had mesmerized him, and perhaps it had. He thought of Moses leading his people out of Egypt, but he knew the comparison was flawed. Matheson and Rostov might not wish these people harm but neither president showed much interest in their welfare. Leading them to an exit had simply proven to be the most expedient way of dealing with them.
“Platform ahead!” President Matheson called.
Chapel repeated the words, translating into Greek. A cheer went up from the latest congregation of passengers who had marched through the darkness behind them. Felix could hear several people break down in sobs. Others picked up their pace, physically urging the pack onward.
“Don’t push!” Chapel shouted. “You’ll be there in a minute or two. If you push, people are going to get hurt and I promise, you’ll be one of them.”
The crowd subsided a bit. The two presidents remained in the lead with Chapel and two Secret Service agents and the Russian president’s bodyguard, Grigori. The bodyguard’s shoulder wound had been bandaged, but he’d lost a lot of blood. Somehow he kept walking, refusing to give in to the injury.
Ahead, Chapel stopped and turned to face the train platform so that the guide light from his chest plate would illuminate as much of the route to the surface as possible. Grigori and the Secret Service agents moved the presidents out of the way as dozens of passengers hauled themselves off the tracks and began to rush toward the exit stairs.
Felix felt a hand on his arm. In the dark, with only the dimmest peripheral illumination coming from Chapel’s light, he turned and saw Maggie. Beyond her, Jun tried to stare through the darkness at his feet, picking each step carefully.
“Hey,” Maggie said, linking her arm in his and snuggling up beside him as they walked, almost as if he were taking her on some old-fashioned promenade. “We’re leaving.”
Felix glanced at Jun, who gave him a nod, eyes alight with urgency.
“You’re going to stay in Athens?” Felix asked. “Without the president, you have no way of getting home. It could be weeks or months before the situation normalizes enough for you to find safe passage back to the States.”
“You may be right,” Maggie said sadly, “but we’re focusing on staying alive, not getting home. It’s dangerous for anyone in Athens right now, maybe Americans especially, but we think we’ve got a better chance of being killed with him than on our own.”
“You should come,” Jun said.
Felix took Maggie’s hand. Her skin felt soft and warm, so comforting that it nearly persuaded him.
“Living doesn’t matter much to me right now,” he said, unsettled by the realization that he meant it. “All I want is to see my daughter again. The only hope I have of doing that is if I can make it to Wiesbaden. But you go, and try to stay safe.”
Maggie squeezed his hand, stepped up, and kissed his cheek the same way his daughter had always kissed him good night when she was a little girl. Those days were long gone, but it was nice to remember.
“Good luck, Professor,” Jun said.
“And to you, my friend.”
Most of the passengers had already made their way onto the platform and through the exit. Only a few stragglers remained as Jun and Maggie walked over to President Matheson to explain their decision. They hadn’t gotten more than a couple of sentences into it when the president reached out to take Jun’s hand, shook it once, and then offered his hand to Maggie. She hugged him instead.
Felix moved nearer to them. Chapel and Bingham still faced the platform.
“Let’s move, Mr. President,” Syd said. “The more passengers we return to the surface, the more people there are who have seen your face and know you’re alive. Any one of them could point your enemies in the right direction.”
“I agree,” President Rostov said. “These delays could be fatal to us.”
President Matheson ignored them, clasping Maggie’s hand. “Thank you,” he said. “I hope I’ll see you both again one day.”
“So do we, sir,” Maggie said.
Jun tugged her arm and she went with him. Chapel turned away even as they hurried for the platform, leaving Bingham to light their exit. Chapel’s light dispelled some of the darkness ahead, farther along the tunnel. Felix felt a twist in his gut, knowing that they still had miles to hike through the dark. He told himself—again and again—that Kate waited for him at the end.
“Wait,” a gruff voice called.
Grigori had spoken, but not to Chapel or to Syd. Felix stared at Rostov’s bodyguard, at the blood soaked into the fabric over the left shoulder of his shirt and the hollows around his eyes. Perhaps he was not invincible after all. Grigori took two steps toward the platform. Maggie had already scrambled up onto the concrete ledge but Jun paused with his hand on the painted concrete edge and turned toward Grigori.
“I’m coming with you,” the bodyguard said.
He lowered his gaze, but could not hide the shame he felt.
Rostov took two steps toward him, features contorted with anger and a kind of revulsion. “Worm,” Rostov said in Russian. “You have a duty to your country.”
Grigori hung his head a moment longer, then lifted his gaze. “If I stay with you, even if I live to see the end of this tunnel, I will be of no use to you. Another hour or two of this and you will need to carry me out of the station at Piraeus. Every step I take, I feel the bullet in my shoulder grinding against the bone. It must come out.”
Rostov stared at his bodyguard, and after a moment the anger leached from his face.
“Go, then,” Rostov said, exhaling loudly. He brushed a hand at the air, ushering his bodyguard away. “Find a doctor. Live, you bastard. I hope you have a long life full of children who break your heart.”
Aimee sat on her hard bunk in the Hump’s stockade, a sterile concrete corridor that would have reminded her of a hospital ward if not for the steel doors, each with its own mesh grill window. Her cell had a small toilet in the corner and she felt the need to use it. It was clean enough, but part of her believed that by doing so she would be accepting her position as a prisoner.
The cell had no mirror; otherwise, Aimee would have been staring into it, wondering what Zander had seen that he could have mistaken for the kind of person who would betray her country, her battalion, and the whole damn world in the bargain. Her version of events sounded so much more rational, at least to her own mind. How could Zander listen to her and North and not know that? Did the guy have some racial or gender prejudice that she hadn’t picked up on before or had North been that convincing?
Don’t be stupid. North used your access code to get into the system. Zander can’t just assume you’re not involved because you have an innocent face.
“Hey,” a voice called from the corridor. “Hey, Aimee.”
She clutched the edges of the bunk, bilious hatred burning up the back of her throat. North. She thought for a moment that he’d somehow managed to get out of his cell but realized he wouldn’t have been able to do that without her hearing it.
Aimee rose and walked to the door, placing her hands on the cold steel. She stared out through the metal mesh, shifted her head to look up and down the corridor, and saw that it was empty. Diagonally across from her, North had his forehead pressed against the mesh of his own cell door. With his face framed by the small window, his blue eyes were as bright as ever. Images fluttered in her mind like photographs scattered by an errant breeze. Those eyes, when North had first flirted with her. Those eyes, when things ended between them. Those eyes, on a surveillance camera, revealing his true nature.
“I should tell you—” he began.
“There’s nothing I want to hear from you,” she said. “If you have something to say, tell it to Major Zander when he comes to question us.”
“That’s not…” He pressed his eyes closed for a second and then reopened them, gazing at her across the space between their cells. “I didn’t know, you understand? I just wanted to say that to you before things get uglier than they already are.”
“Didn’t know what?” Aimee said.
“What you saw before…me mourning those guys…that was the real me. I had no idea that they were going to be trapped in the bots. Until you told me, I thought we were remote piloting, just like everyone else. If I’d known—”
“You wouldn’t have betrayed your country?”
North hesitated. Even through the mesh, she could see that he looked a little sick. “You haven’t seen the things I have. When we’re in the tin, we’re not human. It’s too easy to do ugly shit. You take away the risk and you’re not a soldier anymore, you’re just a killer.”
Is that what this is about? she thought. Is that what changed you?
“So who did you kill?”
“Her name was Sabeen. Six years old. I don’t know what she looked like because I never saw her face,” he said, voice a rasp of pain. “Just what was left of her.”
Aimee tried to make sense of it. “You know how many soldiers come out of the army haunted by shit they did?” she said. “They get help, if they can. Or they end up topping themselves. But what you’ve done—you want me to feel bad for you? I don’t give a shit who put you up to this or why you went along with it. After you found out that your platoon was trapped in their bots, you sabotaged their canisters. You killed some of them with your own damn hands.”
North practically snarled at her. “You think those guys are gonna make it back here? Their bodies are just going to rot. They’re vegetables now. The ones who died are the lucky ones. I was trying to do them the same favor I’d want them to do for me if I was as completely fucked as they are.”
Aimee couldn’t reply. She wanted to argue, to tell him that all the Tin Men based out of the Hump would find their way home, but she knew the odds were slim. The world outside would be one of destruction, at least for a time. Chaos would rage; there’d be indiscriminate killing.
“We’ll see,” she said at last.
“I don’t think we will,” North replied. “Even if some of my platoon make it back here, they won’t find a friendly reception. Not once the people upstairs get in here.”
“They can’t get in. Not with you in a cell.”
“Yeah,” North said quietly. “I guess you’re right.”
Aimee shivered at the hollow chill in his voice.
“I don’t get any of this,” she said. “How did the anarchists even find you? Or did you go looking for them?”
“It wasn’t like that. A lot of people knew what I did…how much it fucked me up—”
“I never knew. You never told me, all that time you were rotting inside.”
North slammed a hand against his cell door. “I never told anyone. But people knew, get it? There were other people there and someone talked about it, talked about how I’d been unraveling. Word got around that maybe I thought the Tin Men were as bad for the world as so many people said we were, that maybe I no longer believed in our cause—”
“Someone offered you a different cause,” she said quietly.
His blue eyes stared at her through the mesh. “In a bar. Over a lot of whiskey. That little girl haunted me. This guy told me they had a way to put a stop to the Tin Men, put the world back on an even keel. Make war matter to Americans again. Give them something to lose.”
The gate at the end of the hall clanked as it was unlocked and then swung open. Aimee twisted her head to see Major Zander entering the stockade, followed by a pair of MPs.
North spoke so softly she could not be sure of the words, but she thought she understood them. “I thought they’d all just wake up in their canisters. At least they’d have a chance.”
Aimee felt North’s pain, but that didn’t make him any less of a traitor.
The tread of the MPs’ heavy boots echoed off the walls. Major Zander strode ahead of them and stopped in front of Aimee’s cell. He looked in at her.
“I don’t have time to be anything but blunt,” Zander said. “Most of what you told me checks out. But North had your access codes. I roll this around in my brain and there’s a version of it where you were in on this with him and changed your mind when you saw the massacre going on outside, so you shut him down before he could unlock the doors. What happened to Platoon A—you’d have had an easier time getting that done than North.”
“Major—”
“The problem for you, Warrant Officer Bell, is this version I’ve got cooked up in my brain? The one where you and North have been in cahoots the whole time? This version paints a picture that makes a hell of a lot of sense to me. So you’re staying right where you are, for now. We’ll get to you in a while.”
Aimee stared at him, her mouth open, then closed it. How could she argue when she agreed with him? His version seemed more plausible than the truth.
Major Zander turned his back on her and nodded to the MPs.
“Cell Six!” one of the MPs called. “On the gate!”
A loud buzz sounded and North’s cell door unlocked.
Aimee watched as Zander and the MPs went in, slamming the door behind them.
North had said things were going to get uglier. It turned out he’d been right.
The wind whistled past Kate’s head and the last light of the sun glinted off the robots on board the hydroptere, and on the ship itself. The trimaran sailed above the water so smoothly it felt more like flying, with almost none of the roll and pitch of the sea. As fast as the Tin Men could run, Kate still felt as if they were hurtling out of control across the water and that any second the hydroptere might spin off into the air or tip a wing into the waves and tear itself apart.
She held her scorched and severed arm in her lap and smiled morbidly to herself. If they were going to be torn apart, at least she had a head start.
The smell of the sea pleased her and made her wish she could breathe it in, but of course lungs were part of her original body, not this one. From the first moment she had inhabited a Remote Infantry bot, Kate had known that she had reached a stunning technological horizon—that nothing would ever be the same. After the Pulse, when she finally understood the true genius of the bot’s designers, she had found herself even more impressed. In comparison, the hydroptere was elegantly simple, and yet she found herself caught up in the magic of it. She felt like Aladdin on his flying carpet.
Water sprayed her face and she wished she could taste salt on her lips. The trimaran continued to pick up speed, the sail like a knife in the sky, carving the wind into the shape of its own desire, its own needs. Birnbaum had explained it to them all as they were setting sail. The hydroptere had marine wings, foils deployed at forty-five degrees under each of the floats on the trimaran. As soon as they unfurled the sails they began to increase their speed, but the magic truly came once they had reached ten knots. At that speed, the foils generated an upward thrust that lifted the ship from the water in the same way an airplane took off from the ground, increasing speed to forty-five knots in the first twelve seconds or so after rising off the waves.
Now they were slicing through the air fifteen feet above the sea, only the foils actually touching the water itself. The hydroptere was a thing of beauty, and it pleased Kate to feel a kinship between the ship and her own body. Sitting at the stern of the center float, she watched the others at work. Each of the hydroptere’s wings was equipped with what looked to her like little more than a steering wheel and a hand crank. The crank reeled in or unspooled lengths of the white rope that made up the ship’s rigging, moving the sails. Birnbaum had the wheel on the left wing, with Danny moving the crank at her instruction. She had already trained Hawkins and Trav, who were on the right wing, ready to perform the same job when she gave them the signal. Birnbaum had been modest about her abilities as a sailor. She’d had them under way minutes after boarding and now, an hour and a half into the journey, she had taught the squad the basics.
At the prow of the central float, the two additions to Kate’s squad—Zuzu and Broaddus—kept Hanif Khan under guard. Khan’s cuffs had been removed to keep him from accidentally slipping over the side of the hydrofoil trimaran. If the murderous bastard decided he wanted to die he could throw himself into the sea and be done with it. From the moment they’d set sail, Kate had been waiting for him to do just that and Khan’s apparent decision to keep living surprised her almost as much as her own willingness to let him. She told herself she hadn’t killed him because POTUS’s people might have better luck getting useful information out of him, but she had started to think the truth might be a bit more convoluted than that. If she killed Khan now and discovered later that her father had been killed in the chaos he and his confederates had wrought, she would have no one left to punish.
According to Birnbaum, they were sailing west-northwest. Chasing the sun, she’d said, and Kate liked that idea. They were skimming along the rim of the world. Due west, she could see the sun sliding toward the sea. In moments it would begin to vanish over the horizon and then it would seem to speed up. She had watched enough sunsets in her life to know to expect that strange bleeding effect, the flashes of different colors before the sun disappeared for the night. Once, when she was ten or eleven years old, she had been sitting with her mother on a beach on the Gulf of Mexico—a place where people applauded the sunset every night as if it had been a show performed exclusively for them—and her mother had said that the sunset reminded her of life. Her own mother, Kate’s grandmother, had been dead only a few weeks by then. When Kate asked her about the comparison, her mother said the leisurely progress of the sun across the sky was an illusion, that really the Earth spun with dizzying swiftness, and it was only there at the end, when the sun seemed to dash from the sky, that people could truly appreciate just how scant were the hours in a day, how miserly the God who granted them.
Kate no longer believed in God the way her mother did, but every time she watched a sunset she remembered the meager allocation of hours in a day, or in a life. As the salt air burnished her charred frame and the hydroptere soared beneath her, she thought again of her mother and she understood that she had been given a gift of hours. Inside the robot, the blazing sun of her life had ceased sinking toward its inevitable horizon.
Ahead of her, Alexa Day sat on the hydroptere’s left wing, hair flying around her face as she dangled her feet over the edge. Kate had watched Alexa’s face while the Tin Men had lowered her father’s corpse into a hastily dug grave in a small park overlooking the sea, back in Haifa. Alexa had wept, but the girl had fire in her eyes—the kind of fire that forged steel. Though she grieved for Alexa’s loss, Kate had been heartened to see that fire; the girl would need it for the life that awaited her in the coming days and years.
Motion caught Kate’s attention and she glanced over to see Birnbaum hurrying along the span that connected the center float with the right and left sides. As she ducked beneath the sail and turned to hurry back to Kate, the sun vanished below the horizon and indigo darkness swept across the sea. Birnbaum turned on her guide light, a shining beacon in the dark. The crescent moon and the stars would provide more than enough illumination by which to sail, but Kate knew the light was not for the squad’s sake—it was to comfort Alexa.
Torres lay in the netting that connected the central float to the wings like a spider’s web. The netting sagged just a little under the robot’s weight, but Torres lay there as if someone had shut her down.
“Get your butt up here,” Birnbaum said to her. “I want to have a look at you.”
Torres grumbled something that Kate couldn’t hear over the raging wind and crawled toward the central float—toward Kate.
“How are you, Sarge?” Birnbaum asked, coming to kneel in front of her.
Kate studied her face. “How fast are we going?”
“The old hydropteres—back when they first started breaking speed records—could do about fifty, maybe fifty-five knots. That’s over sixty miles per hour. But that was decades ago. I figure we’re nearer ninety mph, which puts us about six hours out from the main port of Athens. I’m estimating based on the charts in our onboard systems. Without a satellite connection, I can’t be sure.”
Torres clambered up onto the central float just behind Birnbaum. Even in the dim moonlight, her ruined eye socket had a monstrous quality about it.
“You really think you can navigate well enough to get us there?” Torres asked.
Birnbaum turned away. “I do, actually. Now sit there and wait your turn. As soon as I’ve got Wade’s arm reattached, I’ll see if there’s anything I can do for your eye.”
“Don’t tell me you have a spare,” Torres said.
“No, but I might be able to restore certain basic visual functions without one.”
With the tap of a finger, Birnbaum lit up a small screen on her abdomen, displaying rows of symbols, some familiar to Kate but most not, though she had seen the screen before. Tapping in a code, the tech opened a hollow in her carapace just below the guide light.
“There’s something weirdly intimate about that whole process,” Kate said.
“Tell me about it,” Torres muttered.
Birnbaum had begun to withdraw small tools from within her chassis, but now she paused. For several seconds she glanced out to sea, and then she turned and searched Kate’s eyes.
“Sarge, I need to ask you something.”
Kate nodded.
Birnbaum glanced away again. This time Torres reached out and took her hand, nodding her encouragement. Whatever this was, it seemed Torres already knew.
“I know your father’s in Athens—”
Kate bristled. “He’s there, yeah. And if he’s still alive, I hope to keep him that way. But if you think—”
“No, no,” Birnbaum said. “Just listen. If the president was back home or in, like, Australia or something, I wouldn’t have sided with you. But he’s close enough that there’s a chance we can make a difference, and that means it’s our duty to do so. I believe you’d have made the same decision even if your father hadn’t been traveling with him. I just…I need your promise, Kate.”
“I don’t understand what you’re asking.”
“We get to Athens, find POTUS—and your father, if we can—and then we head straight to the Hump. No matter what,” Birnbaum said.
Kate nodded again, glancing from Birnbaum to Torres. “That’s always been the plan. As far as I know there’s no safer place for the president than back at the airfield, anyway.”
Birnbaum stared at her, wind buffeting them, whistling around them. “What if he has other orders?”
“I hadn’t considered that.”
“No matter what happens,” Birnbaum said, “once we’re done in Athens, Torres and I are heading for the Hump.”
Kate glanced down at the charred arm in her lap. Her own arm. “What’s this about, Naomi?”
Birnbaum didn’t respond.
“Look,” Kate went on, “if the commander-in-chief gives a direct order—”
“Wade,” Torres said curtly, her ruined face unreadable. “She’s pregnant.”
Kate stared at Birnbaum. “She’s—”
“She’s got to get back to base,” Torres said. “She’s carrying—her real body—”
“Her original body,” Kate said without thinking.
“No!” Birnbaum snapped. “My real body. My baby needs me.”
“The process doesn’t endanger the baby?” Kate asked. “Who knows what they really pump into us in the canisters.”
Birnbaum stared at her. “The doctors promised me.”
Kate hesitated a moment and then held out her severed arm to Birnbaum. “Let’s just get there,” she said.
“Shit, Wade, your bedside manner sucks,” Torres said.
Kate focused on Birnbaum. “When the time comes, you do whatever you have to do. Seems like that’s the way of the world now.”
Danny watched comets streak across the night sky over the Mediterranean and wondered if they were really there. He’d been working the crank on the left wing of the hydroptere until Birnbaum had asked Torres to take a turn. His mind felt exhausted and an unpleasant buzz had begun to infiltrate his head. His thoughts seemed too simple, as though their sharp edges had been sanded away.
Birnbaum had come back to take the wheel after doing whatever repairs she could on Kate and Torres. That had been two hours ago, and now Kate sat alone at the stern of the ship’s central float, where she’d been since they had set sail. Danny sat beside Alexa Day on the wing, water splashing up at them from far below.
“Beautiful, aren’t they?” Alexa asked.
“The stars?”
Alexa glanced sidelong at him. “The robots. You guys. In the moonlight, with the stars reflecting off the metal, you’re beautiful. Not sure how that works in battle—”
“We have a stealth mode,” Danny said, triggering it with a thought. His carapace went dull, darker, and non-reflective. At night, he knew, it would almost be as if he’d vanished, except Alexa sat too close for him to have disappeared completely.
“Wow, that’s—”
“Cool, right?” Danny said.
“I was going to say ‘sad.’ ”
Danny laughed. “Maybe so,” he said, and turned to gaze at Kate again.
“Go talk to her,” Alexa said.
“She looks like she wants to be alone,” Danny replied.
Alexa bumped him with her shoulder. “I was angry at my dad. Now he’s gone and we’re all out here in the middle of the sea, and he’s almost all I can think about. I don’t…I feel lost without him.”
Danny studied her shimmering eyes. He wanted to tell her it would be all right, but he didn’t like to lie.
“You’ve lost a lot of your friends today. From your platoon,” the girl said. “But all of us…I don’t think we’ve really even begun to process how much we’ve lost. Birnbaum says we’ve got another four hours or so before we reach Athens. They’re gonna be the longest four hours of my life. So, anyway, I say you go talk to her.”
Danny nodded, staring down at the water, and then glanced at her again. “You’re pretty damn wise for seventeen.”
Alexa did not smile. “Chalk it up to a youth of burning candles and writing emo poetry in my journal. Go.”
Rising to a crouch, he made his way carefully across the span to the central float and then worked his way to Kate.
“Hey,” he said.
Kate cocked her head at him as if she had only just noticed his arrival. “Pretty out here, isn’t it?”
Danny sat down facing her. “Calm before the storm.”
“I don’t mind whatever fighting we’ve got ahead of us,” Kate said. “I just don’t like not knowing. Are they still alive or not, y’know? I’m trying not to think about it.”
“How’s that going?”
Kate slid her foot out to kick him lightly on the leg. “Lousy, thanks.”
“Athens won’t be like Haifa or those little villages on the road from Damascus,” Danny said. “We get there, it’s gonna be full-on madness. Real-deal anarchy. If the G20 summit got hit the way we think, the people in Athens will know none of this is an accident. They’re not going to be sitting around waiting for the power to come back on.”
Kate nodded. “I’ve thought about that. We’ve got to keep the girl safe. Hanif Khan—I don’t mind if he catches a bullet, but Alexa…”
“So we leave her on the boat, with protection?” Danny asked.
“Maybe Zuzu and Broaddus.”
Danny glanced back at Alexa, whose gaze was fixed on the stars. “I don’t think she’ll go for that. My guess is she’ll be begging for her own gun before we even reach shore. Not to mention that we’ll need all the soldiers we can get. Zuzu and Broaddus could be really useful if we find the president and need to get him to safety. Someone has to stay with the boat, but only one someone. A sentry.”
“So the girl stays with the sentry.”
Danny shrugged. “We’ll see.”
Kate studied him without speaking. Danny shifted, glanced away, and finally met her gaze again.
“Listen,” he said, “I know now’s not the time. In the middle of all this…it’s just the worst time imaginable. But there are things…things that need to be said.”
Her eyes went cold. “Pretty sure you said all you needed to.”
“Maybe, but I said it poorly. You mean something to me, Kate. I joined the army because I needed something to believe in, and I believe in you.”
“Danny—”
“So I’ll follow you into battle. I’ll follow you to the end—”
“Listen—”
“But I can’t need you. If you hate me for it—”
Kate kicked him again, harder this time. Sea spray speckled their bodies and the rush of the wind and the roar of the trimaran’s foils knifing through the water tried to drown out their words, but they heard each other. They always had.
“Stop talking,” Kate told him. She did not look away, but he had the feeling she wanted to. “It’s just possible that I love you, Danny. There’s my confession. But every hour that goes by, I feel more empty inside. Things that used to matter to me are starting to matter less and less.”
“What are you saying?”
“I don’t want my old body back,” she said. “Not ever.”
Danny stared at her. “Are you…how can you say that?”
“We’d have been dead a dozen times today if we were just flesh and blood.”
“Still.”
Kate gazed out across the waves.
“You realize what you’re saying?” Danny asked. “You’ll never feel again. Really feel, I mean. Never feel a human touch or the sun on your face.”
Kate laughed. “This from the guy who can’t man up and admit when he likes somebody.”
Danny threw up a hand. “Hell with that, listen to what you’re saying. You’ll never taste chocolate or have sex or have a baby or…or anything.”
Kate lowered her eyes, gazing down into the water below them. “You don’t get what it means to me to be whole again. I look forward to being in the bot. To being strong. To being able to run. To being more than human.”
“Less than, Kate. We’re less than human.”
She glanced out at the sea. “If they put us back in our human bodies, there’s no guarantee I’ll ever be able to pilot a bot again, and I just can’t take that risk. You don’t understand.”
A chill slithered up Danny’s spine. “You’re right,” he said. “That’s one thing I’ll never understand.”
But it occurred to him that perhaps he understood very well.