Bonaparte’s cell was larger than his old room. Still, the doctor tending to him—a bear named Rigel—could barely fit inside. She had to stoop to get through the gate and could not stand up straight while she checked Bonaparte’s vital signs. It was another inexplicable case—no physical symptoms, not even a fever—but the pig had definitely lost his mind.
Wawa waited outside the cell, in the long hallway of the detention block, wearing a hazmat suit. A respirator covered her snout. Two dog soldiers waited alongside her.
When Rigel was finished, the soldiers locked the cell, and all four of them walked into a decontamination area, where special hoses sprayed bleach-tinged water on their suits. Rigel laughed when she saw the crude apparatus. She asked Wawa if this was actually meant to keep the infection in or out.
“Just tell me what you found,” Wawa said, removing her respirator.
There was no change in Bonaparte’s condition. He was under light sedation—still awake, but his plans to defect to the human resistance would be on hold for a while.
“So when does it start?” Rigel asked.
“When does what start?” Wawa replied, knowing full well that Rigel was referring to the quarantine.
A loud bang in Bonaparte’s cell prevented Rigel from responding. Wawa put her mask on again and went into the hallway, with Rigel and the soldiers trailing behind her. When they arrived at the cell, they found that Bonaparte had toppled to the floor, having flipped over his cot. He tried to stand up, still woozy from the sedatives.
“Get up, soldier,” Wawa said.
“This isn’t boot camp,” Rigel said. “You have to—”
“Quiet. We’ve got enough problems around here without you running your mouth.”
Rigel threw her hands up and headed for the door. “See you at the processing station, Lieutenant,” she said.
Bonaparte propped himself up and sat on the bed, facing Wawa through the bars. His hooves rested on his chubby knees. “The humans are watching us,” he said.
“What humans?” she asked.
“You wouldn’t know,” Bonaparte said. “You fight for the Colony. You have eyes, but you are as blind as the Queen.”
He rose. His hooves clicked. “I want to help you, Lieutenant,” Bonaparte said. “I really do. But we are both running out of time.”
“What does that mean?”
“Soon one of us will be dead. Only people like me will be on a new journey.”
“We’re on a journey, all right,” Wawa said. “Like those deer at the bottom of the quarry.”
“That’s closer to the truth than you might realize,” Bonaparte said.
Wawa left the room. After passing through decontamination, she dumped the biohazard suit and the mask in a pile on the floor for the soldiers to pick up.
It was a long walk to her office on the other side of the base. Bonaparte’s detention had become an open secret among the soldiers. The only person who still seemed relaxed was Culdesac. When Wawa reported the news to him the day before, the colonel simply nodded and sipped his coffee. After doing most of the talking, she finally came out and asked him: what was going to happen if there was a quarantine? He repeated the same tired lines about how the uninfected would be evacuated and resettled.
She asked him what a processing station was.
“It’s a station where they process things,” he said. “Hence the name. What do you want from me, Lieutenant? We have our orders. We’re going to get through this.”
He had never snapped at her like that before. Even when the other cats in the unit wondered out loud about Wawa’s abilities to lead, Culdesac reminded them that he had made the right choice. The colonel even beat one of the insubordinates in front of everyone and made him apologize to the entire squad. He told the others that Wawa would now be given discretion to beat anyone who even twitched a whisker at her, and that if she killed someone in the process, he would find a replacement and move on. She went on to prove herself, and still Culdesac, her commanding officer, was the one who treated her with the most respect. Culdesac knew about her past. He told her once that he related to it. He had been wild, whereas she had been wild but caged. A warrior who had been bottled up. One time, he told her—he whispered to her—that she was like the Queen in that regard. And despite all of that, here he was feeding her a bureaucratic talking point, as though they hadn’t fought and suffered together. The blandness of it stung her, leaving a heavy sensation in the pit of her stomach, like a fist pressing down on her insides.
Wawa arrived at her office, rubbed away the tension in her eyes, and opened the door. Upon entering, she found Mort(e) sitting stiffly at her desk. With his left thumb and index finger, he rubbed a silver medallion that hung on a chain around his neck.
“What are you doing here?” she said. “You can’t—”
Mort(e) lifted a gun from his lap and placed it on the desk, right on top of her logbook. He made sure to drop it with a thud to drive the point home. “Close the door, Lieutenant.”
Wawa did as she was told. “What’s going on, Mort(e)?” she asked.
“Many things,” he whispered, his hand hovering over the gun. She fixated on the amputated digits, the smoothly worn nubs where his fingertips should have been.
“Mort(e),” she said, “I’m not your enemy. Tell me what’s wrong.”
“Maybe nothing’s wrong,” he said. “Maybe this was how it was supposed to go.”
The nice approach wasn’t working. “I spent the day talking in circles with the pig,” she said. “Now don’t you start with this—”
“I know what EMSAH is,” he said.
He sighed. His hand came to a rest on the gun. If he was going to shoot her, he either would have done it by now, or he had something to say first. Since he was a cat, and by nature enjoyed hearing himself talk, Wawa guessed it was the latter.
“My investigation is complete,” he said. “EMSAH is not what you think it is.”
“You mean it’s not a virus?”
“No. But it acts like one.”
Wawa was too far from the door to make a run for it. This was the great Mort(e), after all. Infected with EMSAH or not, he had fought at Culdesac’s side for years, while she was drinking from puddles and nibbling scraps from roadside carcasses. If she left this room alive, it would be because he allowed it.
“Good news is,” he said, “I don’t have the disease. In fact, I think I’m immune.”
“Mort(e), I know there are lots of rumors going around—”
“Rumors?” Mort(e) asked, tilting his head. “I’m Red Sphinx. Aim true, stay on the hunt. I don’t trust rumors. I go straight to the source.”
With that, he dropped another object on the desk, a device with an antenna that hung over the side, pointing at her accusingly. The missing translator. Maybe this carried the disease on it somehow. Through the mouthpiece? Through the earbuds, perhaps? She imagined an army of parasites, small greenish blobs swarming the inner ear, bursting through the eardrum, stampeding toward the cauliflower of the brain.
“Death-life,” Mort(e) said. “Overload.” He propped his elbows on the table and rubbed his face with both hands. It was not an opportunity to run away. His fingers were splayed wide enough for him to keep her in sight. “This is what we fought for,” he whispered. “It’s what Tiberius died for.”
“Tell me what you know, Mort(e),” she said.
He placed his hands flat on the desk. “It’s not a pathogen,” he said. “It’s a belief. A thought-crime. It may be the most seductive idea that the humans ever came up with. It certainly fooled them for long enough. Still does, I imagine.
“Death-life,” he continued. “Life after death. Afterlife. The Queen didn’t even have a word for it.”
“EMSAH makes you believe in the afterlife?”
“The belief is not a symptom of EMSAH,” he said. “That’s what the Queen wanted us to think. The belief is EMSAH. That’s why it can’t be cured. The Queen recruited us in her holy war. EMSAH is what will make us like the humans, if we don’t eradicate it.”
“So EMSAH is … an ideology?”
The word stuck in her ears, especially that second syllable, the rough “lij” sound, like a mosquito buzzing.
“But people aren’t simply believing things,” she said. “They’re killing themselves. And each other.”
“That’s because we’re dealing with the most virulent strain of the virus. A death cult. Sacrificing your life for the resistance is a one-way ticket to paradise.”
“No, you’re wrong,” Wawa said. “It’s not just a belief. There are ways of diagnosing it. Blood tests. Cognitive analysis. Brainwave—”
“All lies,” Mort(e) said. “There is no diagnosis. And no cure.”
“You witnessed one of the first quarantines! You were there! Don’t tell me those people died in their own blood and filth because of what they believed!”
“Oh, that,” Mort(e) said. “There’s a bioweapon, all right. It has a nearly perfect fatality rate. But the Queen created it. Not the humans.”
“What?”
“That’s how it works. A group of animals adopts a religion. Or makes one up. So the Colony poisons them with a killer flu to mask the real infection. It’s a prelude to sending in the Alphas to exterminate every trace of EMSAH. It’s probably happening right now. Here.”
He told her about the people he found in the meeting hall, all lined up and waiting to die. They had gathered in order to pray to a god who wasn’t there, for deliverance that would never come. They kept the young ones from leaving by tying them down with leashes. As far as anyone would know, the physical disease they had contracted was EMSAH. It was all a red herring to keep the animals loyal and vigilant.
“My friend Tiberius,” Mort(e) said, “he spent years trying to figure out how the bioweapon worked, how it spread. It was all a waste. Even if he had solved the riddle, come up with a cure, the Queen would have concocted another virus. And then Miriam would have said that EMSAH had mutated. And we’d be back to square one.”
“So Miriam’s been lying to us this whole time?”
“There is no Miriam. That was just an actor.”
“You’re telling me the Queen went through all that trouble just to keep people from worshipping a god?” Wawa said. “That doesn’t make any sense to me.”
“That’s because you weren’t there,” Mort(e) said. “Did you know what the humans did in their first battle with the Colony?”
“They … burned their own crops,” she said. “Some kind of shortsighted Pyrrhic victory.” She remembered reading about it in a history of the Colony, written by some rodent. She could not remember what kind.
“It was more than that,” Mort(e) said. “The humans interpreted the battle as a sign from the heavens. So they sacrificed their women and children. They cut them open and burned them alive. Drank their blood. I was there, thanks to this device.
“I don’t know,” he continued, “if EMSAH is the source of the humans’ evil, or a symptom of it. But it makes them dangerous, even to themselves. And especially to us.”
That was the point of this trial run, he told her. The Queen was testing the animals to see if they were worthy, if they could resist what destroyed the humans. But her patience had its limits.
Mort(e) was a lot of things, Wawa thought. Bitter and arrogant. Selfish. But he was not a liar. A liar would not have told Culdesac to his face that the animals were doomed to fail as the humans did. A liar would not have punched Culdesac in full view of the entire Red Sphinx.
“Worse?”
“The humans think I’m their savior,” he said. “I have to find out why. They have a fortune-teller who predicted that I would destroy the Colony. But it’s all part of the Queen’s plan. This is all an experiment. All of it. If I choose to become the savior, then the experiment will be deemed a failure. The ants will quarantine every settlement. Everyone will die. But if I don’t become the savior, I’ll never find Sheba.”
“Mort(e), why are you telling me this?”
“Someone in the Red Sphinx needed to know,” he said. “Before it was too late. If I ever see my friend again, I want to tell her that I did the right thing.”
“Why not tell Culdesac?”
“He’s on the Queen’s side.”
Mort(e) stood up, holstering the gun. He walked around the edge of the desk until he was only a few feet from Wawa.
“Besides,” he said, “You remind me of my friend. I know now that I can trust you. You lost a friend, too. Right?”
Cyrus. A million voices in her head said his name.
“That’s right,” she whispered.
There was a clock on the wall beside her desk. It was 3:02.
“He should have called by now,” Mort(e) said.
“Who should have called?”
“The colonel.”
The phone rang. It was a secure line, only for communication among the officers. Mort(e) gestured to the phone.
Wawa picked up the receiver on the third ring. “Lieutenant Wawa,” she said.
“Lieutenant,” Culdesac said. “Authorization code four-one-six.”
“Acknowledged,” Wawa said. “Authorization code nine-four-nine. Go ahead, Colonel.”
“Quebec,” Culdesac said. “Green light.”
The quarantine had begun.
“Should I order Red Sphinx to rendezvous at the base?” she asked. Mort(e) made a cutting motion at the base of his throat.
“Change of plans,” Culdesac said. “I have ordered everyone to meet at the quarry. Archer and his team are on their way. I’m already there with the rest of the RS.”
“The quarry?” Wawa grew angry at Culdesac for not picking up the tension in her voice. For not being here.
“We’re getting airlifted out,” he said. “Winged ants.”
“Understood.”
“Lieutenant,” Culdesac said, “your top priority is getting to the quarry as quickly as possible. Leave everything. Do not let anyone get in your way.”
“Understood, Colonel.”
“Good luck, Lieutenant.”
Wawa winced, realizing that she should have tried to buy more time by pretending that Culdesac was still speaking. But the click on the other end was too loud.
“Change of plans,” Mort(e) repeated in a sarcastic singsong.
A series of concussive thuds began somewhere south of the base. The low rumblings grew louder, shaking the walls.
“We’d better hurry,” Mort(e) said.
A siren wailed outside. Heavy footsteps and shouting in every direction. The regular soldiers had their own evacuation plan, but Culdesac had told the RS a long time ago to ignore it. The Red Sphinx would be the first ones out, he had promised.
“They’re dead,” Mort(e) said.
“Who’s dead?”
“The Red Sphinx. There is no rendezvous. The Colony is going to burn this sector to the ground. No one will live here for a thousand years.”
“His loyalty is with the Colony,” Mort(e) said. “And its cause. Why do you think they kept him in charge?”
“I’ve killed people who have spoken ill of the colonel,” Wawa said. “Almost killed you the day we met.”
“I remember.”
“If we’re going to die here anyway, maybe you should put that gun away, and I’ll show you what I had in mind.”
“Haven’t you been used enough?” Mort(e) asked. “Are you going to let someone betray you again just because you want to join his pack?”
He had plucked another moment from her past. The explosions were getting closer. She heard screaming, but perhaps that was in her head, a memory of the dog-fighting pit and its circle of shouting, savage human faces. Maybe he planted that memory in her head somehow.
Wawa would be dead had it not been for Culdesac. And yet the quarantine was beginning. And the colonel was not there—he was merely a voice on a phone. Mort(e) was there, and his eyes begged her to believe him.
She had to make a decision. She chose Mort(e).
“Where do we go?” she asked.
OUTSIDE, OFFICERS OF different species were lining up their soldiers, preparing them to escape in an orderly fashion. Wawa knew their plan but could already see how it would end in failure. She pictured the army moving down a highway and into a horde of marauding Alpha soldiers who would cut them to pieces. They would all die in the jaws of the ants.
To the south, in the heart of the town, thick plumes of smoke arose from the tallest buildings, a cloud hanging overhead. Squinting, Wawa saw the cloud for what it really was: a swarm of winged Alphas, patrolling the air, dropping projectiles onto the town like human bomber planes.
“Don’t look at it,” Mort(e) said.
The first thing to do, he told her, was to get Bonaparte out of his cell. He deserved a chance to escape, even if he had defected to the humans. When they reached the detention center, the two dogs who had been standing guard ran by them at full speed. One of them—some kind of poodle half-breed, judging from his fur—was halfway through tearing off his biohazard suit. He finally loosened it from his leg, leaving it on the ground behind him like a shed reptile skin.
“Hey!” Wawa said.
Ignoring her, they tried to climb the fence, prompting other soldiers to tell them to stop, to fall in with the others. Before Wawa could see what happened next, Mort(e) braced her by the shoulders and forced her into the doorway of the building. Several shots echoed off the barracks as they ran inside.
Wawa led him to the lower level. Once they were through the useless decontamination area, they found Bonaparte sitting on his cot, hooves still on his knees.
“You made it,” he said to Mort(e). “It’s all coming true.”
“Do you know where the key is?”
“The guards flushed it down the toilet,” he said, pointing at the open cell across from his.
“Try to find something that can force the door open,” Mort(e) said to Wawa.
It was a waste of time. Nothing short of a tank could open the cell. Nearby, a fire axe hung beside an extinguisher. Panting, she pulled the axe from its hook and brought it over to Bonaparte’s cell. The pig seemed unimpressed. His eyes seemed to say, Give it a shot, Lieutenant. Wawa took her first swing at the bars. The deafening clang echoed down the hallway. The handle rattled in her hands. She adjusted her grip and swung again. Only the cream-colored paint chipped away. The metal did not budge.
Mort(e) wrapped his arms around the base of the toilet and rocked it violently until the screws broke free from the linoleum. Water spilled out from the base. With one last shove, he snapped the bowl off its moorings, leaving only a gushing pipe. Thankfully, it did not stink. It had probably never been used.
“The key’s gone, Captain.”
“Shut up, Bonaparte,” Mort(e) said as he reached his arm into the pipe, fishing for anything. “It’s my fault you’re in here.”
“I know,” Bonaparte said. “But it’s okay. I know my role in the prophecy.”
Wawa, already panting, stopped in mid-swing. “Prophecy?”
“Oh, that’s right,” Bonaparte said. “The human said that you weren’t ready for that word. Let’s say plan, then.”
Mort(e)’s arm was in the pipe all the way to his shoulder. “You mean Briggs?” he asked.
“Elder Briggs, yes. He opened my eyes.”
“You’ve been talking to humans, too?” Wawa asked Mort(e).
“They’ve been talking to me,” he replied. “Briggs is your Patient Zero, Lieutenant.”
“When are you going to stop treating it like a disease?” Bonaparte asked. “Elder Briggs has spread the truth.”
“Briggs doesn’t know shit,” Mort(e) said.
“He knew just what to tell you, didn’t he?”
Mort(e) did not answer.
“Did you see Sheba?” Bonaparte asked. “When you used the device?”
Mort(e) stopped what he was doing and pondered this for a moment. “I don’t need the translator to do that,” he said.
As Wawa reared up for another swing, Bonaparte held up his hoof to signal her to stop. The water began to stream past her feet and into Bonaparte’s cell.
“You two need to go,” Bonaparte said. “Now.”
Mort(e) slammed his palm on the floor. The key wasn’t there. He stood up.
“Don’t worry about me,” Bonaparte said. “It’s going to be okay.”
“We’re not leaving without you,” Wawa said.
“You wanted me to stop being afraid,” Bonaparte said. “To choose my own path. I’ve done that. I know you don’t understand it right now. I’m not asking you to. But if you’re going with Mort(e), you’ll see. You’ll see that all this happened for a reason.”
A loud explosion rocked the outside of the building. The lights flickered.
“You need to leave,” Bonaparte said.
Wawa kept her eyes on Bonaparte but could feel Mort(e) glaring at her. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Protect Mort(e),” Bonaparte said. “Help him find his friend. Everything depends on it.”
“Time to go, Wawa,” Mort(e) said. He said goodbye to Bonaparte with a mere nod.
She was moving now, passing through the hallway, leaving the gurgling pipe behind. The axe was still in her hand, its blade dented and chipped. At the front door, the shouting and gunfire grew louder.
They exited the building. Mort(e) stuck his arm out to halt her. A large shadow passed over them. They flattened themselves against the wall. The swarm of winged Alphas had now reached the base. Panicked, the soldiers aimed into the air, shooting wildly. There was a smell of gunpowder and burning plastic. A few yards away, a flying Alpha scooped up a cat like a hawk plucking a rodent from the ground. The Alpha clamped the cat’s neck in her jaws, killing him before he had a chance to squeal.
More shouting, this time to Wawa’s left. A dog ran toward her, his coat charred and smoking. He flopped onto the ground in agony, howling, trying to roll in the cool mud. Another Alpha hovered a few feet over him. Mort(e) grabbed Wawa’s arm and forced her to move. She glanced over her shoulder in time to see the Alpha shoot a jet of fluid from the base of her abdomen. The dog screeched, then began choking. An acidic vapor rose from the dog’s melting flesh, engulfing him.
Wawa kept running. Mort(e)’s nubby fingers were still digging into her shoulder. “Let go of me!” she said, ripping away from him.
“Fine! Just keep running!”
She stopped and was about to head back for the dog. Mort(e) tried to restrain her. “There’s nothing you can do for him,” Mort(e) said.
“Not him,” she said. “I want to kill one.”
“No! We need to—”
She brought the axe up with both hands, shoving him away. “Just one, I said!”
Wawa searched the area for a target and found one within seconds: an Alpha landing on a nearby jeep, spraying acid on the canvas roof, causing it to disintegrate into a cloud of foul-smelling vapor. The soldier inside—a cat—fired through the hole in the cloth. A bullet tore through the ant’s wing, but the creature could still fly. She latched onto the hood.
Wawa took off. She was at the rear of the jeep before the ant’s antennae detected the movement. Launching herself from the bumper, Wawa drove the point of the axe into the ant’s neck. The weapon sank into the exoskeleton but missed the vulnerable brain stem. The Alpha’s jaws opened and snapped shut. Wawa wrenched the handle clockwise, breaking the neck in a grinding crunch.
Wawa had been taught that these monsters were her sisters, and that they were all joined together in a war with the humans. She gazed into in the compound eye of the insect. Her scarred face—miniaturized, multiplied—stared back.
The weight of the dying Alpha shifted as her abdomen, operating on its own, aimed its acid port at Wawa. It shot out a burst of fluid, barely missing her leg. She could not kick it away—her feet were planted in order to keep the ant from latching onto her. There was no telling when these things were dead. Wawa had once seen a decapitated ant head shear off a human’s leg at the shin when he tried to kick it away.
“Help me,” she said to the frightened cat, who sat trembling in the front seat of the jeep. The soldier bolted. He was barely a kitten, probably a runaway who joined the military to get some food. Before he made it twenty feet, an Alpha dropped on top of him, breaking his spine before carrying him away.
The abdomen sprayed again. This time, the jet of acid hit the door of the jeep. The metal sizzled.
Wawa felt the vehicle rock as Mort(e) hopped onto it. He grasped the axe handle with her and planted his foot on the Alpha’s abdomen. With the added leverage, Wawa and Mort(e) were able to pry the handle toward them until the creature’s head broke off. The body squirmed before toppling over.
Wawa tore away the shredded rooftop and climbed into the driver’s seat, throwing the axe into the rear. Mort(e) jumped in next to her. She stepped on the gas pedal. The jeep lurched to the side as it rolled over the Alpha’s thorax.
She sped to the gate, where an Alpha attacked the single soldier left defending a watchtower. It was a dog. Out of ammunition, all she could do was swing her rifle at the monster. When the ant prepared to fire acid at the tower, the soldier hurdled the railing and jumped the twenty feet to the ground below. Anticipating the move, the ant pounced on top of her, pinning her to the ground. The dog stopped moving.
Mort(e) picked up the axe and leaned out of the passenger side. “Drive,” he said.
The vehicle accelerated. Mort(e) swung the axe, the digging the blade into the Alpha’s neck. The head flipped upward, landing on the hood of the car. It lay upside down against the windshield, its jaws opening and closing. Frantic, Wawa turned on the windshield wipers and then switched them off. Mort(e) leaned over the glass and, with the top of the axe, knocked the head off.
They were through the gate, heading away from the base. Wawa adjusted the rearview mirror. Mort(e) placed his hand over it. “Don’t,” he said. “Keep driving.”