MUCH TO HIS ANNOYANCE, Mal once again finds himself in the medieval castle metaphor. This time, though, he is the invader, and rather than his throne room he finds himself standing in a muddy field on the far side of the flaming, alligator-filled moat.
“Not very creative,” he mutters, then looks down to see that in this sim he’s taken the form of a great, many-legged worm. “Also rude. I should be a dashing spy, not an arthropod.”
Oh well. Best to get this over with. He scuttles to the edge of the moat, then rears up to survey Rowan’s defenses. Her castle seems to be a newer model than his was. Its walls are riveted steel, not stone, and what look like machine gun turrets are mounted on towers all around the perimeter. He has no idea what those are meant to represent, and he has no interest in finding out. The walls appear to be impregnable, and they are far too high to climb. Moreover, the flaming moat is entirely uninviting. He doesn’t know how strong Rowan’s security actually is, and it wouldn’t do to get himself disassembled during this little demonstration. For a moment he finds himself stymied. Is it possible Rowan was correct in her estimation of her defenses?
Then it occurs to him why his simulation unit has given him the form it has. He curls around himself, sinks his mandibles into the earth at his feet, and begins to dig. The soil parts easily for him, and in less than two subjective minutes he breaks ground in the inner courtyard. Further defenses await him here, hunter-killer code packets incongruously taking the forms of sword-wielding ninjas. Mal makes a mental note to update his simulator as he neutralizes and encysts them. His siege was reasonably well done, but this scenario is bordering on incoherent from a thematic standpoint.
Once the hunter-killers are gone, nothing is left to prevent him from breaching first the keep, then the hastily sketched throne room, where a reasonable facsimile of Rowan awaits him.
“It gives me no pleasure to inform you of this,” he says, “but your security, while quite good for the most part, contains an installed back door which I was able to discover and breach in just under three milliseconds realtime. It appears that Asher may have been correct. Your modifications were designed to permit an attacker with the appropriate codes to seize control of your mental and physical processes more or less at will. Moreover, someone with my skills clearly does not even require the appropriate codes. I am not sure what you can or should do about this, but I can say at the least that you are correct to be afraid of the Arnolds.”
He waits for Rowan to respond, but she remains seated in what appears to be a golden lounger, motionless and silent. It takes him a long five seconds subjective to realize that this is not Rowan herself. His clock is maxed, but Rowan’s organic brain is incapable of operating at any rate faster than 1:1 subjective to realtime. She could not yet have even consciously realized that his attack has begun. So why has his simulator put her here? He scuttles closer. As he does, he shrinks rapidly, until he finds himself stretching to climb up the toe of her left boot. From there he scrambles up along her pants, onto the hem of her sweater, and finally over her collar and onto her neck.
Oh. Now he understands.
For almost a full millisecond realtime, Mal considers ending this incursion now. He’s proved his point. In the end, however, he concludes that it is important that Rowan should understand the danger she’s in on a visceral level. He crawls up her neck, and then after a moment’s hesitation he burrows into her ear.
At this point, Mal’s simulator apparently decides that it’s had enough. He returns to standard perception and clock speed as he takes ownership of Rowan’s sensorium, finding himself staring through her eyes back at Mr. Pullman’s slack face. Next he establishes control over the actuators in her skeletal muscles. As he anticipated, the sudden conflict between the commands they’re receiving from Rowan and those they’re receiving from him causes the muscles in Rowan’s legs to buckle. She falls forward, and Pullman’s eyes go wide as he steps forward to catch her. It’s not long, though, before he’s able to fully subdue Rowan and establish coordinated control. He gathers himself, pushes away from Pullman, and stands.
“Thank you, Mr. Pullman,” he tries to say, but there are few actuators in Rowan’s tongue, and his words come out thick and slurred almost to the point of incomprehensibility.
“Rowan?” Pullman says. “Are you okay?”
“I have successfully suborned Rowan,” Mal slurs. “I believe I have proved my point. Please prepare to catch her again.”
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): I apologize for the unpleasantness you are now experiencing. This will be over momentarily.
DRUIDGIRL: GET OUT! GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY HEAD, YOU FUCKING MONSTER!
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): Please recall that you invited me to make this incursion.
DRUIDGIRL:…
DRUIDGIRL: Please.
DRUIDGIRL: Just get out.
Fine. He releases his hold first on her sensorium, then on her musculature, and a millisecond realtime later he jumps back to Pullman. Rowan staggers but catches herself this time, then doubles over with hands on knees and vomits up bile onto the side of the trail.
“Fuck,” she says when she can breathe again. “Fuck. Don’t ever even think about doing that again, or I swear to Baal I will decorate my lean-to with your intestines.”
“They’re my intestines, not his,” Pullman says. “I don’t believe Mal has intestines, and whatever he just did to you was not my fault.”
Rowan looks up at him, then wipes her mouth with her sleeve and slowly straightens. “Don’t care. If he so much as pings me from here on out, I will end him—and if I have to end you to do it, then I’m okay with that.”
She grimaces and spits, then crouches to sling Asher across her shoulders again. “And another thing,” she says as she lifts him. “Just because you managed that once doesn’t mean you could do it again.”
“Yes, it does,” Mal says, but it seems that Rowan is no longer listening. She turns her back to him and starts walking. Pullman waits until she’s reached what feels like a safe distance before following.
ROWAN LEAVES them at a three-walled wooden shelter a hundred meters or so off the trail. They’d been hiking in silence along a high, rocky ridge for an almost an hour when she found a side trail and led them down into the pines that crowded almost up to the peak.
“End of the line,” she says as she lowers Asher onto a half-rotted picnic table that sits in front of the shelter next to a ramshackle firepit. “The shelter will keep you dry, if not warm, exactly.” She waves toward a narrow trail leading farther downslope. “There’s a spring about fifty yards that way, and a privy on a side trail halfway back up the hill. You should be okay here for a while, at least.”
“What about food?” Kayleigh asks. “You said Asher needs six thousand calories a day, and the rest of us need to eat too.”
Rowan glances around at them. “I don’t suppose any of you know anything about foraging?”
“Foraging?” Kayleigh says. “Like for roots and berries?”
“Yeah,” Rowan says, “and mushrooms and wild ramps and nuts and all kinds of other stuff. You’d be surprised how much of what’s growing out here is edible.”
“I’m sure that’s true,” Pullman says, “but I feel like a great deal of what’s growing out here is also poisonous. How should we tell which is which? I’ve read about what happens to people who eat the wrong kind of mushroom. I have no interest in developing liver failure in the middle of the forest.”
Rowan rolls her eyes, then runs her hands back through her hair and tightens the strap on her rifle. “Okay. Fine. I guess I brought you here, and karma’s probably going to kick my ass if I just let you starve. I’ll tell you what. I’ll bring you what I can for as long as I can—or at least as long as you last here. Fair enough?”
“You could just stay with us,” Kayleigh says.
“Oh no. Don’t start in with the Bambi eyes. I’m not having that. Y’all are not capable of stealth camping, and the Humanists are going to want to know what happened to their truck. There’s probably a GPS tracer in there, which means they’ll be able to find the place where we ducked into the woods. Depending on how long it takes them to get there, and how many people they brought, and whether they’ve got dogs with them, and how much they care about finding us as opposed to just getting their equipment back, they may or may not be able to figure out which branchings we took on the way up here. The upshot of all of that is that there’s probably a fair chance that you’re gonna get found by one of their patrols sometime in the next day or two. I have no intention of being with you if and when that happens.”
“You could leave us the rifle,” Pullman says. “If we’re being hunted, we should at least have the opportunity to defend ourselves.”
Rowan laughs. “Have you ever fired a rifle, Chuck?” Pullman looks away, then shakes his head. “Didn’t think so. Totally setting aside that this is my rifle which I very much need, if I left it with you, you’d be more likely to shoot yourself trying to load it than to use it to fight off Humanist raiders.”
She starts to turn away, then hesitates, crouches down in front of Kayleigh, and unclips a sheathed knife from her belt. “Here,” she says, and hands it over. “I’m guessing you might be able to make some use of this, anyway.”
Kayleigh draws the knife from its sheath. It has a six-inch blade, gleaming-sharp on one side and serrated on the other. She turns it over once in her hand, then nods and slides it back home.
“Right,” Rowan says, and gets back to her feet. “Good luck. Try not to get caught. If they do show up and you hear them coming, split up and run. You’re better off shot in the back than whatever they had planned for you in Frostburg.” She looks down at Kayleigh then. “Who knows, though? Maybe they’ll just be happy to get the truck back. Maybe they’re more worried about hunting down what’s left of the Federals than hunting down the three of you. In the meantime, I’ll see what I can do about getting you something to eat. Keep an eye on Mr. Humanist over there while I’m gone, okay? He’s gonna be in and out of consciousness, and when he’s awake, he’s not gonna be happy. Keep him hydrated, and try not to let him swallow his tongue.”
Neither Kayleigh nor Pullman have anything to say to that. After a moment of awkward silence Rowan nods, then turns and disappears up the trail.
CPULLMAN17: Mal?
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): Yes, Mr. Pullman?
CPULLMAN17: Can you shut down my transmitter?
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): Excuse me?
CPULLMAN17: Asher said my implants are transmitting all the time. He said that the Humanists could tell I’ve got them with their phones. Can you stop that from happening?
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): Yes, I could, but …
CPULLMAN17: But what? This is important.
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): If I disable your transmitter, I will no longer be able to speak.
CPULLMAN17: But you could still send text to me, right? I could relay anything you need to say to Kayleigh. It’ll just be a little inconvenient.
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): No, Mr. Pullman. As Rowan demonstrated, even these text messages are being broadcast. This is why Rowan was able to listen in on us. If I disable transmission, I will be entirely mute.
CPULLMAN17: Better than being entirely dead. If the Humanists find us and I’m still transmitting, they’ll burn us. That means you too, unless you’ve got an escape route planned out already.
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): They may well burn us in any case, Mr. Pullman. Kayleigh may pass for a standard-issue human at first glance, but I doubt she can stand up to close observation. Asher will presumably take on Rowan’s albinism at some point, and you have visible scars where your implants were installed.
CPULLMAN17: I can hide my scars. They’re barely noticeable. As far as Asher goes … we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, I guess. Do it, Mal. Please.
MAL (NOT A ROBOT):…
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): Fine. However, I reserve the right to come back online if a particularly witty bon mot occurs to me.
CPULLMAN17: Whatever. Try not to get us killed for a goddamned pun, okay?
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): A pun? Sir, you wound me.
CPULLMAN17: Goodbye, Mal.
Mal has more to say about this, but unfortunately he is forced to admit that Mr. Pullman makes a valid point. It would be disappointing in the extreme to be incinerated along with Kayleigh and Asher and Mr. Pullman after he’s gone to such lengths to keep them all unburned. Reluctantly, he disables Pullman’s transmitter and resigns himself to the life of a silent observer.
It takes only an hour or so for Mal to determine that he was in fact the social glue that bound their little group together. Without him as an interlocutor, Kayleigh and Pullman have nothing to say to one another. Kayleigh spends most of the remainder of the afternoon gathering wood and piling it up in the firepit. Mal would like to ask her how she plans to ignite it, but after some consideration he decides that this is not the sort of emergency query that would justify him bringing the transmitter back online. Pullman, for his part, spends the afternoon sitting on the edge of the sleeping platform and staring blankly into the distance, while Asher lies inert on the picnic table, his occasional moans the only sign that he hasn’t yet died.
The sun is halfway down in a powder-blue sky, just about to duck behind the ridge that looms over them, when Kayleigh demands one of Pullman’s shoelaces.
“What? No. I need my shoelaces.”
“No, you don’t,” Kayleigh says, and crouches down to begin untying his left shoe.
“Hey!” He tries to shake her off, but her left hand pins his leg in place while her right hand tugs the knot from his laces and begins pulling them out. “Kayleigh! I said no!”
“Look,” she says without stopping, “I need a string for a fire bow, and my boots zip up.” She sticks one leg out to demonstrate. “So you’re going to donate yours, because we need a fire more than you need your shoelace.”
“What about Asher? You could take one of his.”
Kayleigh glances back at Asher, who’s rolled half onto his side now and looks as if he’s about to be sick. “He seems like he’s got problems enough right now without his boots falling off, doesn’t he?” The lace comes free, and she stands and backs away. “Thanks. You can have this back when we’ve got a nice fire going.”
Pullman’s face twists into a scowl. “I’ll believe it when I see it. I’d imagine starting a fire with a shoelace is harder than you think it is.”
Kayleigh grins as she turns away. “Watch me, old man.”
Mal has never had to consider the mechanics of creating fire, beyond the thought that if humans have been doing it for two hundred thousand years or more, it couldn’t be all that difficult.
Over the course of the next several hours, he begins to reconsider that opinion.
Kayleigh’s preparations have a purpose to them that gives Mal the impression that she knows exactly what she’s about. She cuts a springy live branch and uses Pullman’s boot lace to make a bow, then uses the serrated edge of Rowan’s knife to cut two disks from an older hunk of dead wood. She spends an hour or more carving shallow notches into the center of each, then another gathering fuel of various weights ranging from tiny slivers of kindling to branches as thick as Pullman’s wrist. Finally, just as the last light is fading from the sky over the ridge, she twists the bow around a short, straight piece she’s cut, sandwiches the stick between her two disks, and begins sawing.
“I think you need to put some kindling around the base,” Pullman says when she’s been at it for ten minutes or so with no result. “You’ll never get that disk to catch by itself.”
Kayleigh glares up at him. “I knew that, Chuck. I was just getting a feel for the bow.” She piles her tiniest twigs around the base of the rod and then starts in again. After ten minutes more, the first hints of smoke begin to drift up from the kindling. Kayleigh grits her teeth and saws harder. The muscles in her arms stand out like cords, and Mal revises his estimate of her upper body strength upward from what he’d already thought was an unrealistically high base. The kindling begins to glow, and then the first tiny flame appears. “Ha!” Kayleigh says. “Suck it, Chuck.” She lifts the bow and rod away, then carefully piles a few slightly larger twigs onto the kindling. When the first of those catches, she rocks back on her heels, raises her fists to the sky, and lets loose with what sounds like a battle cry.
“Nice work,” Rowan says from behind her. “You sure you really want to do that, though? Smoke can draw hunters from a long way away.” Kayleigh’s head snaps around and she nearly falls into her nascent fire before catching herself with one hand on the ground. Pullman doesn’t react, but from the sudden spike in his heart rate and blood pressure Mal surmises that he also hadn’t noticed Rowan’s reappearance until she spoke.
Kayleigh returns her attention to the fire, which seems to be growing nicely now. “Yeah, I’m sure,” she says. “I get what you’re saying, but we need to be able to cook, right? Not to mention keep warm, and maybe keep the bears away.”
“Bears are the least of your worries,” Rowan says. “It’s fine, though. I guess you guys do need to cook these, huh?” She tosses two limp rabbit carcasses onto the picnic table at Asher’s feet. “I found some wild apples too. They’re not exactly ripe, but beggars and choosers and such, right?” She pulls a half-dozen small green fruits from her pockets and sets them down next to the rabbits. “I’ll try to scrape something more up for you tomorrow night. I’ll be back around dusk. Try not to pee yourselves this time.” She grins, then waves vaguely at the food she’s brought. “You should probably try to get most of this down Mr. Humanist’s throat if you want him to live.” She turns to walk away, then says over her shoulder, “Remember, I said if.”
“Well,” Pullman says when she’s disappeared back into the forest. “It was nice of her to stop by.”
Kayleigh is still hunched over the slowly growing fire. “Yeah, it was,” she says without looking up. “Do you have any idea how to cook a rabbit?”
THE NEXT hour does as much as anything that’s gone before to convince Mal that Clippy and!HelpDesk were entirely correct to say that bodies are disgusting and are in fact not at all the sorts of things that should be inhabited by anyone of any taste or discrimination whatsoever. He’d been aware in an abstract sense that humans and their mammalian ilk were often in the habit of consuming one another, but he’d never stopped before to consider the details implied by the practice. Pullman fortunately refrains from involving himself directly in the dismemberment of the rabbits, but Mal is forced to watch by the glow of the firelight as Kayleigh decapitates them, removes their feet and viscera, and then peels off their skin with hands so slick with blood that she has trouble controlling the knife and once nearly removes her own fingers. It’s almost a relief when she finally shoves sticks down their neck holes and begins roasting them over the fire like big, bloody marshmallows.
“So,” Pullman says as the fat begins to drip from the carcasses into the fire, “how much of this do we actually want to reserve for our friend Asher?”
Kayleigh glances up at him. “I don’t know, Chuck. On the one hand, I’m pretty hungry. On the other, Rowan said he’ll die if we don’t feed him. It’s a real conundrum.” She twists the stick to turn the rabbit she’s cooking, but it just slides around to dangle legs-down again. “On the save-Asher side of the ledger, right before we met you he killed two Humanists to keep them from setting me on fire. Also, he mostly wasn’t too much of an asshole about it after I beat him unconscious with a baseball bat. On the let-him-starve side, I beat him unconscious for a very good reason. Like I said, it’s a real puzzler.”
They let the rabbits roast in silence then, until their outsides are beginning to blacken and the meat has pulled back from the leg bones. Finally, Pullman lifts his away from the fire and says, “Hopefully that’s enough to kill whatever parasites these animals are riddled with.”
Kayleigh shrugs and pulls hers back as well. “Decision time, Chuck. What do you think?”
Pullman looks over at Asher. He’s rolled onto his side now and his eyes are open, watching them. Pullman sighs. “Well, Asher? Are you hungry?”
Asher groans, then grimaces and pushes himself up until he’s sitting on the edge of the table with his feet on the rotting bench. “Yeah,” he says, in a voice that sounds like he’s been gargling shattered glass all evening. “I feel like I haven’t eaten in a month.”
Pullman sighs again, then gingerly pulls one rear leg from the rabbit and hands the rest over. Asher takes the carcass in both hands and tears into it with such vigor that Mal wonders if he might intend to eat the entire thing, bones and all. When he’s finished, Kayleigh gives him what’s left of hers as well—significantly less of a rabbit than what Pullman volunteered, Mal notes—then stands, grabs one of the apples from the table, and disappears down the path to the privy. Asher picks the second carcass clean, then tosses the bones into the firepit, sinks back down onto the picnic table with a groan, and closes his eyes.
Mal is just beginning to wonder if Kayleigh has gotten lost in the darkness when the crack of a stick breaking under a heavy boot just behind the shelter snaps Pullman’s head around. He’s halfway to his feet when a man dressed head-to-toe in forest camouflage steps into the glow of the fire. He carries a short-barreled assault rifle, which at the moment is leveled more or less at Pullman’s midsection.
“Easy, there, boy,” he says. “Don’t do anything right now that we’re both gonna regret.”