With Birnbaum snapping orders, the Tin Men had the hydroptere flying all night. They made the journey from Piraeus, through the isthmus into the Gulf of Corinth, and all the way north through the Adriatic Sea in just under eight hours. As the sun rose to the east, they sailed full speed toward the shore and slowed just enough so that when the foils hit the sandy bottom they didn’t tear the boat apart.
Zuzu had trained as a medic and he’d cleaned and dressed the wounds of both presidents. In the warm golden light of a new day, Matheson and Rostov slipped down from the trimaran’s central float into chest-deep water and slogged to shore, the American president keeping his arm elevated, careful not to soak his bandages.
Danny watched Alexa jump into the sea and swim a couple of yards before her feet could touch bottom. She turned and stared at the hydroptere for a moment, then out across the Adriatic as if she had left her heart behind and could not continue without it. At last her expression hardened and she turned to march up onto the beach, sodden clothes weighing her down.
Birnbaum and Torres weighed anchor while the others dropped into the water one by one, the contours of their metal bodies gleaming in the morning light. They moved through the sea effortlessly and joined Alexa and the presidents on the sand, taking up defensive positions around them. Rows of blue lounge chairs lined the beach in both directions but from his spot aboard the hydroptere Danny could have told them to stand down. In these moments after dawn, not a single human being wandered the beach within the range of his enhanced vision.
Torres and Birnbaum slipped into the water together, a quiet camaraderie between them as they moved through the surf to join the others, leaving only Danny and Kate on board the trimaran. Danny went to her, still at the rear of the starboard wing, where she had spent the entire journey. Her father’s corpse lay across her lap. In the light of the rising sun, Danny could make out the reddish discoloration in his right cheek and in the sides of his arms, where blood had settled as it drained toward the lowest parts of his body. By now Felix’s corpse would be gripped by rigor mortis. The idea that Kate had held her father as his body went from the postmortem relaxation of the muscles to the grotesque stiffness of rigor made him shudder.
“Hey, Sarge,” he said, kneeling by her.
Kate snapped her head up. “Oh, don’t call me that, Danny. Not you.”
“You’re still in command,” he reminded her.
She sat for a while as the hydroptere bobbed and dragged in the water, turning those words over in her head.
“Kate,” Danny prodded.
“All right!” she snapped, shooting him a withering glance before her expression softened. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be.” Danny gestured toward her father’s body. “Can I help you?”
Kate gazed down into the dead man’s pale features. If the body had started to putrefy, Danny couldn’t smell it yet. It had been cool out there on the sea at night, so perhaps they’d be spared that for a while longer.
“Take him,” Kate said.
Surprised, Danny hesitated a second before he reached out. Kate had made up her mind, though, and slid her father’s body into his arms. She slipped over the edge of the hydroptere’s wing and sank into the water, vanishing beneath the undulating sea. It took Danny a moment to realize he could still see her through the clear blue water and he tracked her as she walked underwater toward the front of the boat. As she moved into shallower water, her head and shoulders and upper body emerged and she turned expectantly toward him. Danny stood and walked carefully toward the prow, where he handed Felix’s corpse down into his daughter’s waiting arms.
When Kate turned and waded up onto the beach, Danny stepped off into the sea and followed, salt water sluicing from his carapace. He looked inland, past the beach, at the idyllic Italian seaside village with its rows of colorful shops and buildings and a round tower that might have belonged to a church. A small white train with three trailing cars sat idle in front of a hotel, the sort of thing that would carry sightseers on a tour around town. An aura of calm lay across the village. Nearly twenty-four hours after the Pulse, these people had not succumbed to the chaos that the platoon had encountered elsewhere. He hoped there were other places like this.
By the time Danny reached the sand, the other Tin Men, Alexa, and the two presidents had surrounded Kate.
“Mr. President,” she said, nodding toward Matheson. “Unless you have other instructions…”
“Go ahead, Sergeant,” Matheson replied.
Kate behaved as if she wasn’t carrying her father’s corpse; no one else acknowledged it.
“Fan out,” she said. “Find a car in good shape, standard transmission—”
“Nothing’s in good shape,” Zuzu said. “Not drivable, anyway.”
“We’re gonna push,” Kate replied. “POTUS and President Rostov and Alexa get in the car. Get it in gear, and Kelso and I will push. Chapel, Torres, and Birnbaum are on protection detail. Broaddus and Zuzu take point, shove any vehicles blocking the road out of the way. Barring trouble, I call it ten hours from here to Wiesbaden. Any questions?”
There weren’t.
When they’d found a suitable car, a silver Peugeot, Kate put her father’s body in the trunk. The wind and water had acted on her scorched carapace to give the burnt areas the glassy look of black volcanic rock. As she stood there, staring at the corpse in the open trunk, she appeared to have been carved from the stuff.
She slammed the trunk hard, then turned to the wounded presidents, and Alexa Day, who stood a dozen feet away, watching her with eyes slitted against the morning sun.
“All set, Mr. President,” Kate said. “We’ll be moving fast. Can you handle the wheel or do you want one of us to steer?”
Matheson walked toward the Peugeot’s driver’s door. “I’ve got it, Sergeant. Let’s go. Quick as we can.”
Rostov and Matheson climbed into the car as the Tin Men took up their positions. Danny waited at the trunk for Kate to join him in pushing. Alexa only stared at the car, making no move to get in. It took Danny a second to realize she was staring at the trunk.
“You all right?” he asked her.
Alexa shook her head. “I buried my father in Israel.”
“You’ll go back for him one day,” Danny said.
She said nothing.
Danny frowned. “You mad at Kate because she’s not doing the same?”
“I abandoned my father’s body to make it easier for myself, for all of us. I don’t think I’ll ever forgive myself for that.”
Danny wanted to argue with her, to give her all the reasons that what she had done made sense. But he knew she wouldn’t hear him—not now.
“Give it time,” he said.
“Yeah,” the girl said numbly, and then she went over and climbed into the Peugeot’s backseat. Studying her through the window, Danny thought he had never seen anyone so alone.
“Move out!” Kate called as she came around to the trunk.
Matheson put the Peugeot into gear and Danny and Kate began to push. Zuzu and Broaddus ran ahead to clear the road.
Ten more hours and they’d be back at the Hump. Not home, but close enough.
Danny only wished he knew what they would find waiting for them when they got there.
North felt the stockroom closing in around him. His sweaty hands made it hard to keep a firm grip on the gun. He had known it was a risk, locking them in, but he had gambled that they would have a couple of hours—more if he got lucky. Humphreys Deep Station One was massive. Whoever was next in command after the late Major Zander would know what he had been attempting before and the whole base would be searching for him and Aimee, but North had figured they would focus on the hundreds of workstations in the complex. He’d gambled that their focus would be away from the kitchen and that nobody would think to check for them back here.
The variable, of course, was that he’d jammed the door locks from the inside. They couldn’t be opened by anyone unless someone could override the hack Aimee had used on the locking mechanism.
Now, less than an hour later, he could hear the pounding and shouting at the door, all the way across the stockroom. The muffled crump of gunshots followed, and then nothing. He could picture them all standing there—MPs and techs and other soldiers—trying to figure out how to get past the door. If they had an acetylene torch, they might be able to burn through, but that would take a while. Their fastest option would be explosives, but the way the Hump had been built it would take a lot more than a grenade or two to blast that metal door open. First, they would try hacking the controls.
“Keep them out of here, Aimee!” North said, gun leveled at her.
Aimee sat inside the little control booth, typing away on a flat keyboard and occasionally stopping to tap the screen or to slide one image aside to make room for another. North wished there was room in that cubicle for both of them—he didn’t trust her—but he had to rely on the gun in his hand to get him what he wanted.
One way or another, his life was over. Even if he succeeded in getting the anarchists inside, the guilt would carve out his heart eventually. But at least his mother would be looked after. His sister and her kids would be protected under the new world order.
He felt a darkness at the edges of his mind. When he closed his eyes, he still saw the ruin of flesh and bone that had been a six-year-old girl. A roadside bomb had gone off that morning and an informant had pointed to a crumbling gray apartment house and told Sergeant Morello that the bomber lived there. The little girl had been hiding in a closet, just as her mother—afraid of the robots—had taught her. She’d shifted her weight, bumped the wall, and North had strafed the closet door with bullets.
The door swung open, latch blown out of it. The little girl spilled out, blood and brain and skull fragments where her face had been. Pretty, pristine, hand-sewn doll clutched in her left hand. It had been reflex. Inside the tin, North had programmed himself to shoot anything that seemed like a threat, get the message across to the populace. Sabeen hadn’t been the first civilian he’d killed, but this time…
They’d never found the bomber.
“Listen—” Aimee began.
He rounded on her. “Just keep them out!”
“That’s what I’m doing!” she shouted, hands shaking, her nerves clearly frayed. “They think I’m in this with you. Do you seriously think I want them barging in here just in time to see me hacking the system for you?”
North closed his mouth.
This isn’t what I wanted, he thought. I never asked for—
A static hiss came from the other side of the stockroom. He snapped around, sweeping his gun back and forth in search of the source. It took him a few seconds to realize that the sound came all the way down the aisle from the kitchen door and that it wasn’t a hiss at all—it was the sound of liquid fire cutting metal.
An acetylene torch.
He swore and hung his head. Of course, they didn’t have to cut their way through the door—they could just use the torch to cut away the locking mechanism.
“Damn it,” he snarled, and he stormed over to Aimee and thrust the gun against her skull. “We’re out of time! You’re going to do this or they’ll kill us both.”
She brushed a finger against the screen and he glanced up too late to see the image that had been there. He wished she would look up at him. The first time they’d been together all he could think about were her eyes and the gentle curve of her jaw, her lovely dark skin. He knew she would have hate in her eyes if she looked at him now, but it would make her no less beautiful.
“Aimee, I’m serious!”
“You think I don’t know that?” she asked, her jaw clenched.
She did not turn to look at him. Instead, she kept at the keyboard, tapped in half a dozen consecutive commands. At the end of the sequence, she hit Return.
A series of metal clanks made North turn and stare in surprise at the elevator. The noises had come from within and above, and a moment later they were followed by a low hum and a whir of moving cables.
He stared at her, a wary smile on his face. “This…it’s done?”
Aimee buried her face in her hands, shoulders shaking, grief-stricken over her complicity. North wetted his lips with this tongue, heart still racing, and stood a few feet away. He glanced back and forth between the elevator and the kitchen far down the aisle. Even at this distance he could see the bright orange blade of flame cutting through the metal door.
“Come on, come on,” he said as he stared at the green UP arrow above the elevator. Aimee had actually figured it out. It would have taken him hours more, if he could have done it at all.
The UP arrow went dark.
His heart stopped.
Seconds passed and then the red DOWN arrow lit up. He could hear the cables moving inside the elevator shaft, could hear the whir and grind as it descended from high above. Hope ignited a spark within him.
Again he glanced down the aisle at the burning blade of the torch carving out a rectangle of metal around the lock. They were almost in. A minute or two, no more.
“Come on!” he shouted at the elevator.
This time he glanced at Aimee, still tucked inside the booth. One hand still covered her face but not completely, and North saw something that didn’t belong. Something that didn’t fit the picture.
Aimee’s hand partially hid a wide grin.
He thrust the gun toward her. “What have you done?”
Her smile faded. “Only what you asked, Tom. I brought the goddamn elevator down.”
Ding!
North swung his gun toward the elevator and felt a vast chasm open inside him. He only wished he could fall in.
“What did you do?” he whispered.
The only reply was the hiss of the torch way on the other end of the stockroom.
Aimee knew what she’d see when the elevator opened. The first thing she had hacked when she had slipped into that little cubicle workstation had been the three still-functioning exterior cameras. All the while, as she had been working to cancel defense protocols—or at least unlock the one door and one elevator—she had watched events unfolding aboveground. With the sunrise, she had seen the anarchist forces camped around the airfield, awaiting a chance to infiltrate the Hump. With the Wiesbaden personnel defeated, she’d gauged that more than a hundred anarchists remained.
But morning had not arrived alone. As the sun rose, she had seen a new battle begin, all the while hiding the hope that blazed in her heart.
“It’s over for you, Tom,” she said.
North swung his gun back toward her, wearing a desperate look. “But my family—”
“It’s out of your hands now,” she said.
The elevator doors slid open. He clutched his weapon in both hands and took aim. North shook his head, eyes wild. “No no no.”
The Tin Men stepped off the elevator. Aimee spotted the bird in flight painted on Birnbaum’s chest plate and the smile-and-crossbones on Hawkins’s forehead. Behind them came others, among them a charred, blackened robot and several human faces whose presence made Aimee catch her breath.
Hawkins saw the gun in North’s grip, the desperation in his eyes.
“Hold up, soldier,” he said, raising his hands in mock surrender. “Just the prodigals returning. And we cleaned up your mess upstairs while we were—”
North pulled the trigger. Bullets pinged off Birnbaum and Hawkins and Torres. There were shouts as other bots threw themselves back into the elevator, covering the humans with their bodies.
Hawkins roared and hurled himself at North, batted the gun from his hand, and grabbed him by the throat to slam him against a massive shelving unit.
Choking, North clawed at Hawkins’s metal fingers.
“He’s a traitor,” Aimee said, surprised to find that she could barely speak above a whisper. The whole of her ached and she wanted to weep with exhaustion and sorrow. “He faked sick so he wouldn’t be with you all when the Pulse hit and he’s been trying to override defense protocols to let the anarchists in—”
“The dead anarchists,” Torres sneered.
“Oh, you son of a bitch,” Hawkins said, and Aimee flinched, sure that he was about to break North’s neck.
The burnt robot lunged from the elevator and grabbed Hawkins by the arm. Only then did Aimee notice the pitchfork still barely visible on Kate Wade’s cheek.
“Stop!” Kate snapped, pulling at Hawkins’s arm. “Let him go!”
Kate stepped between Hawkins and North, pushing at their chests, and separated them. Hawkins scowled. North looked relieved until Kate pressed him back against the shelf and turned toward the elevator.
“Mr. President,” she said. “I have a present for you.”
Aimee stared openmouthed as President Matheson stepped off the elevator, with the Russian president and a young woman behind them.
“You think he’s got answers?” President Matheson asked.
Kate stared at North. “Probably not many. But it’s like a kitten with a ball of string, sir. You bat it around enough, start tugging, and sooner or later it starts to unravel.”
The others came off the elevator then. Aimee counted eight Tin Men in all, three of whose markings she didn’t recognize. She had watched them on the monitor but hadn’t been sure if there were others. Now she thought not, and wondered what had become of the rest of Platoon A, if they were still out there in the world somewhere or if the worst had happened. She took a closer look at the three she didn’t recognize, hoping somehow their markings had been worn away and she would see traces of the familiar WWII–era blonde riding a rocket.
Hopeful heart aching, she looked at Danny. “Travaglini?”
Danny shook his head.
Fists began hammering at the door into the kitchen, on the far side of the stockroom. The hiss of the cutting torch grew louder, drawing Kate’s attention.
“Private Torres,” she said. “Go and open that door. Save them having to finish cutting through. The president’s going to want a word with Private North, and I think it’s high time the rest of us got our bodies back.”
They all froze and then turned to stare expectantly at Aimee.
“You can do that, right?” Kate asked. “Tell me you can do that.”
Aimee exhaled. “I think so.”
Later, Danny would remember them as having woken up together, but his canister hissed open a minute or two before Kate’s. The lid rose and he found himself looking up into the face of Aimee Bell. His thoughts were like cobwebs, all strung together and quivering as he tried to make his way from one to another. His eyelashes stuck together a bit until he blinked them free and his legs and neck ached until he began to stretch and groan.
“Everything in working order?” Aimee asked.
Danny twisted his head to crack his neck. “Ugh. I think so. I figured I’d feel rested, but this is like the world’s worst hangover.”
Aimee helped him remove his headgear and the leads on his chest. “How can you feel rested when your brain’s been active for more than thirty hours?” she said. “You need sleep. Real rest.”
Danny sighed. “Sounds good.”
Although he knew they wouldn’t be getting much rest for the foreseeable future. The handful of members of his platoon who’d made it back to the Hump were getting their human bodies back but the rest of the world was still falling apart. There was no way to tell how many anarchist cells were operating around the globe, never mind terrorists and would-be warlords. Other Tin Men would be working their way back to the Hump, but whether any of them would make it was still in question…and the world needed them more than ever.
Technology was dead. Every community would have to circle the wagons and try to rebuild and the people making decisions would have to step carefully into the future. So much weighed upon their every move, but fortunately that was their problem. He was just a soldier. A Tin Man. He would go where he was needed.
Danny got himself into a sitting position and immediately felt dizzy. Exhaling, he held on to the sides of the canister and waited for the dizziness to subside. Blinking, he remembered the way his imagination had begun leaking into his perception. In one particular moment he had thought he had seen his dead father. Now that his mind had been returned to his flesh, he couldn’t help but think about ghosts and visions. If there were such things as ghosts, would they be very different from the consciousness of a soldier torn from his body and trapped inside circuits and metal?
Maybe you’re still out there somewhere. Huh, Dad?
Or maybe that was just bullshit, more cobwebs in his brain.
Beside him, Kate’s canister hissed and the lid climbed upward. Aimee bent over the open canister a moment before returning to the control panel at its feet.
Grunting, Kate sat up. She huffed out a long breath and then pulled off her own headgear.
“God,” she rasped, “I need to brush my teeth maybe a dozen times.”
Danny gave a soft laugh. “This is you in the morning, huh?”
Kate glanced at him with the mischievous eyes he had so missed, and her smile held all the sadness that Danny knew must be in his own. Around them, other canisters began to hiss as their lids rose. Aimee and several other techs were monitoring vital signs, but a single glance reminded Danny just how few of Platoon A’s canisters would be opening. Trang, Reilly, and Guzzo were still back in Damascus, as far as anyone knew, along with a handful of other soldiers from the platoon. Rawlins had stayed with Trang, too, but nobody knew what would happen if Rawlins made it back to the Hump.
Danny stared across Staging Area 12 at Rawlins’s canister. It stood open, no lights on the control panel readout. Rawlins had no body to come back to. Looking at that empty canister, Danny wished Hawkins had snapped North’s neck after all, no matter what Peter Matheson wanted.
He studied the green lights on nearby canisters. Hartschorn. Prosky. Corcoran. Their hearts were still beating, their lungs drawing breath, but for all intents and purposes, they were dead. Their minds were simply gone, souls departed. Had Rawlins made it back, could Aimee and the other techs have found a way to slip Rawlins’s mind into Hartschorn’s body? He didn’t know.
“Hey,” he said.
Kate didn’t reply.
Danny glanced at her and found her staring at him.
“Don’t even suggest it,” she said, and he understood that her thoughts had strayed into the same dark and impossible waters.
“You sure?” he asked. “I don’t…I mean, it’s crazy, I know. But none of them are coming back.”
“Danny, look at me,” she said.
He studied those purple eyes again. He had wondered many times what it would be like to kiss her, but this time there was something more in that curiosity than there had been before. Something urgent and protective.
Danny climbed out of his canister and moved to hers, his hands on the smooth metal. Torres and Birnbaum were awake and sitting up, which meant good things for Birnbaum’s baby, he hoped. Hawkins hadn’t gotten up yet, but his lid stood open and his control panel was green.
Danny lowered his voice to just above a whisper, so only Kate could hear him.
“You’re not interested in living in someone else’s body,” he said, gaze fixed on her. “I get it. Crazy idea. Stupid, even. I have a lot of those.”
“I don’t want to wake to see someone else looking back from the mirror,” she said quietly.
“I just thought you might want to…I mean…”
“My legs.”
“…run.”
“I’m never going back into a bot,” Kate told him. “I need to be human. My face in the mirror has to be mine. And if something’s going to happen between us, I want my own hands and my own arms. Even my own legs. I want to be the Kate you know.”
Danny was silent.
“That is, if you want something to happen,” she added, her eyes narrowed with hurt. “I know you’ve got this wandering samurai thing in your brain where you feel like you can’t—”
Danny reached into her canister and twined his fingers in hers.
“Stop,” he said, and squeezed her hand.
For a moment, neither of them spoke a word.
“Well, you two aren’t wasting any time,” a voice said.
He flinched and turned to see Aimee leaning against another canister, watching them with a smile.
Danny looked past her, up toward the catwalk at the far end of the staging area. Alexa Day sat there on the latticed steel, watching them, her arms draped over the railing.
“Has she been there the whole time?” he asked.
Aimee and Kate both glanced over at the girl.
“Never left,” Aimee replied.
“She doesn’t have anywhere else to go,” Kate added.
As if summoned, Alexa climbed to her feet and hurried down the metal stairs, weaving through canisters as she came toward them.
“Okay,” Alexa said, pushing a lock of hair behind her left ear. “They’re all awake, safe and sound. Now how long is it going to take for you to format Kate’s bot for me.”
“Alexa—” Kate began.
“You don’t want it anymore. You said so yourself. Aimee told me the bots have these synthetic gangli-whatevers. They can insert one that hasn’t been imprinted yet and map almost anyone’s brain onto it, so the consciousness moves from one to the other and it’s no different from an impulse sending emotion or pain from one part of your brain to another. Like adding an external drive to your mind.”
Danny held up a hand. “Whoa, kid—”
“I’m not a kid, Kelso,” Alexa snapped, and the flint in her eyes showed the truth of it. “I’m a year or so younger than that asshole Mavrides. That’s it. Kate doesn’t want her bot and I do!”
“Just slow down,” Aimee warned. “I said it was possible. I can’t snap my fingers and make it happen. This is a military operation. You want to sign up, you’re going to need training, and you’re going to have to get authorization from whoever ends up in official command of the base now that Major Zander’s dead.”
Alexa glanced at the floor, frustration and grief almost steaming out of her. She took a deep breath and then looked up.
“I’ll be patient for now, but I’m going out there. The Tin Men can go wherever they want, can do the things that human beings can’t do, and protect the people who don’t have anyone else looking out for them. Right now that’s most of the world. So whatever’s gonna happen, it better be quick.”
Torres, Birnbaum, and Hawkins had come over to join them while Alexa spoke. Not one of them said a word, waiting for Kate. Whether she wanted to be or not, Danny realized, she really had become queen of the Tin Men.
But Kate wasn’t looking at Alexa anymore.
“Who’s this now?” she asked.
The man coming down the metal steps stood at least six and a half feet tall and had arms like redwoods. His hair was shaved down to stubble and he wore a beard the same length.
“I know him,” Aimee said. “Fourth Battalion.”
“Which one of you is Sergeant Wade?” the giant asked.
“That’d be me, soldier. And you are?”
“Corporal Sedensky.”
Danny frowned. “I know that voice.”
Sedensky nodded. “It’s Zuzu, Sarge.”
“Wow,” Alexa said.
“POTUS is asking for you, Sarge,” Zuzu said. “Time to put our heads together, he said. Figure out the next step.”
“Why does he want us in there? We’re a bunch of grunts,” Hawkins growled.
“We’re survivors,” Zuzu replied.
Danny looked at Kate, wondering. She didn’t want to be in a bot ever again, but did that mean she had stopped being a soldier? She glanced at him, and he knew the answer.
“Warrant Officer Bell,” she said, turning to Aimee. “Bring my chair.”
Zuzu blinked in surprise. “Wait, you’re Bell?”
Aimee hesitated. “Yes?”
“Got a message for you, too,” Zuzu said. “Chief Schuler says to tell you it’s a good thing you’re not a traitor. You were trying to get one of the old satcomm lines working, right? And you got a signal?”
They all turned to stare at her.
“I thought I did. An underground research base in Vancouver.”
Zuzu grinned. “Well, apparently you got through. One of the other techs was at your station and heard voices. They lost the signal, and Schuler wants you to get it back.”
“I have no idea if I can do that,” she said.
“Well, he thinks you can.”
Danny turned to her. “Go, Aimee. Fast as you can.”
“What’s the hurry?” Hawkins asked.
“Vancouver’s a hell of a lot closer to home than Germany,” Danny said. “Maybe they can get messages out, spread the word. And not just to the people we’re worried about. America needs to know their president is alive, just like Russia needs to know that Rostov is alive. There are going to be a lot of people who think this is the end, that society is shattered—”
“It is shattered,” Torres said.
Danny wanted to argue, but he couldn’t deny the truth. With a grim nod, Aimee turned and headed off and everyone watched her go—except for Kate, who turned to Danny. He took her hand, saw the determination in her eyes, and knew she shared his reaction to Torres’s words.
The world had fallen apart.
Time to start putting it back together.