“Don’t think of them as people. Think of them as targets.”
Sam muttered under his breath as he strode across the prairie with a small arsenal strapped to his body: half a dozen grenades hanging from his waist, an automatic rifle slung from his shoulder, and the ion shotgun cradled in his hands. He flexed and unflexed his hands on the stock of the shotgun, then pictured the Vagri village with its gray-skinned occupants ambling unarmed from hut to hut—the men, the children, and above all the women.
“They’re not people. They’re targets.”
The air was still. Sam’s words resonated small but clear on the open plain. And yet, when the words came from his mouth and reached his ears, it wasn’t his own voice he heard.
It was his father’s.
Sam’s father had been the one to raise him. They lived together in a decaying house in the forest. His father feared the city, feared the OmniCore government—and so they hadn’t left, not even after the sun grew hot in the sky and the forest withered around them. Instead, his father blacked out the windows and made radiation suits for them out of old scraps of cloth and rubber tubes and pieces of plastic from the barn. They survived on canned food Sam’s father had been stockpiling since before Sam was born. And during the long days they spent trapped together in the cramped house, Sam’s father taught him.
Taught Sam about the city: “It’s an evil place, Sam. Full of greed and depravity. It’s a monster that eats men whole.”
Taught Sam about the government: “OmniCore turns citizens into slaves. It’s a bunch of tyrants. And the tree of liberty must be watered by the blood of tyrants.”
Taught Sam about people of other races: “Birds of a feather flock together. Stay with your own kind, Sam. Remember that.”
And taught Sam about women: “Don’t be ensnared by their beauty, son. They’re evil at heart. A whorish woman brings a man to ruin.”
Sam’s father seemed to have a saying for everything—and when he delivered them, he was usually sitting at their kitchen table, pointing at Sam with his other three fingers wrapped around a whiskey bottle. On the table next to him sat a black leather book. Sam had the idea that much of what his father said came from the book, but he couldn’t be sure, because his father never opened it, never read from it.
Sam once asked his father where his mother was, and his father had an answer for that too: “Ran off to the city with another man. But good riddance. Better to live in the wilderness than with a nagging wife. You remember that, Sam. When some woman tries to bewitch you—and they will, they always will—you remember it was your daddy who raised you, your mother who abandoned you. Don’t you ever forget it.”
One day, Sam’s father also taught him how to shoot a gun. Packed Sam up in one of their homemade radiation suits and brought him to the barn, where he put a target on the far wall and a rifle in Sam’s hands.
“They’ll come for me one day, Sam. That’s why you need to learn how to shoot. Because they’re coming for me—and when they do, we’ll need to protect ourselves.”
Sam looked at the rifle in his hands and swallowed. He liked shooting at the target, but he couldn’t imagine shooting at a person.
“Don’t think of them as people,” his father said, as if reading his mind. “Think of them as targets.”
Sam’s father had been right—one day men from the government did come for him. But they came at night, bursting into the house while both Sam and his father were asleep, and Sam couldn’t get to his gun in time. They’d dragged Sam away screaming and crying; the last he saw of his father, he was being marched to a prisoner transport with his hands cuffed behind his back.
Sam was eight at the time.
“Your father did something bad, something against the law,” the social worker said. “He got mixed up with some dangerous people, some anti-OmniCore terrorists. Do you know what that means?”
Sam nodded. The social worker was a woman; the skin around her eyes was soft, wrinkled.
“He’s going to go to jail for a while. And you’re going to live with a nice family.”
Sam nodded again, but in his heart he hated the social worker. She was lying. His father wasn’t bad. She was bad.
Sam visited his father in prison over the years. Each time he saw him, the old man seemed to grow weaker, smaller. And with every visit, Sam’s anger grew—anger at the world that had broken a man he’d once thought unbreakable, the man who’d taught him everything he knew about the world.
Then, one day, his father had a request.
“The Exo Project,” he said. “You should volunteer.”
Sam was confused. “You hate the government. Why would you want me to help them now?”
“The reward.”
Sam squinted. “One million units? What are you going to do with that in this place?”
“They’ve got a special reward for people with family in prison,” his father answered. “The winners get a pardon, for anyone they choose. You could get me out of this place if you won. You don’t want me to die locked up, do you?”
And then he’d started crying. It was a horrible thing, seeing your own father cry.
Sam had agreed.
He hadn’t wanted to come. But he’d done it for his father. And now he was here.
This horrible planet, ruled over by women who saw visions, and healed with their black blood, and kept the men as their slaves.
The others were blinded. They couldn’t see what was in front of them. Dunne thought she could figure everything out with her tests, and her theories, and her pointless bustling around the laboratory. And Matthew …
Matthew had been enchanted. Sam had seen them together. Him and the witch. She was clouding his judgment. Blinding him to everything but his own desire.
It was up to Sam. Only he could save them.
They’d see. They’d all see. Soon, they’d know that he and his father had been right all along.
“They’re not people. They’re targets. They’re not people. They’re targets. Not people. Targets.”
Sam tightened his grip on the shotgun and walked a little faster.
Po waited for nightfall in queasy anticipation. He stood just outside his tent, clenching and unclenching his hand around the handle of his spear, staring intently at the door to Xendr Chathe’s hut.
Waiting. He hated waiting. He’d been waiting his whole life, it seemed—waiting to grow up, waiting to make his own life, waiting for Kiva to notice him the way he noticed her. Waiting for things that never came.
Now, when he closed his eyes, he saw them. Kiva and Matthew. Together. He couldn’t get the image out of his mind.
He was tired of waiting. Tired of thinking. He wanted to move, to lose himself in action. He wanted to destroy something, to channel the pain that he felt and give it to someone else, to make the world hurt as he hurt.
Mostly, he wanted to finish what he’d started when he shot Matthew in the chest with an arrow. He wanted to put a spear in Matthew’s gut and watch as the life bled out of his body. He wanted to look into Matthew’s eyes and see the exact moment when he died.
Finally, the sun set. A few minutes later, Xendr Chathe came out of his hut, an animal skin draped over his shoulders, a spear in one hand. He looked at Po across the camp and nodded.
Po stood and quickly found the eyes of the nine other Forsaken men he’d recruited, huddled nearby around a campfire.
“Let’s go,” he said.
Together, they fell in step behind Xendr and made their way across the plains.