“SO I GUESS THAT was Route 355, huh?”
Mal peers at the yellowing paper map spread across his knees. “That seems likely.”
Kayleigh scowls. “I kinda figured when we crossed that bridge. I think that was Rock Creek. Pretty sure we’re in Silver Spring right now.”
She turns away from him, climbs onto a rickety sewing table pushed against the bare studs of the wall, and pulls herself up to peer out through the attic window. Mal is sitting on an overturned plastic crate on the plywood floor, near the closed trapdoor that leads down into the hastily abandoned home that they’ve invaded for the day. He found the map in a file folder lying on its side by the far wall. He’s been studying it for ten minutes now, turning it first one way, then the other, but correcting for range and altitude and azimuth in a two-dimensional image is a mathematically underdetermined problem, and he’s not having much luck matching what he sees on the paper to the imagery he stored during his time in the drone.
“We should consider the positives,” he says. “At least now we have some indication as to where we are, and this map should give us the ability to navigate once we leave here.” He looks down at the map, then back up at Kayleigh, who has now pressed her nose against the glass of the window. “Why are you exposing yourself to view? Is something interesting happening outside?”
Kayleigh looks back over her shoulder. The morning sun behind her frames her head like a halo. “Depends on what you think is interesting, I guess. There’s a pickup truck full of guys with rifles across the street now. Is that interesting?”
Mal looks back to the map. “Possibly. Are they doing anything in particular?”
Kayleigh turns back to the window. “Looks like they’re coming into the house.”
“This house?”
“Yup.”
Mal carefully folds the map, then tucks it into the blood-spattered breast pocket of his jacket. “Well,” he says. “Yes, that is interesting.”
Kayleigh climbs down off of the table and picks up her bat.
“How many of them are there?” Mal asks.
Kayleigh takes an experimental swing. “Looked like four?”
“I see,” Mal says. “Four men with rifles are unlikely to be intimidated by a small girl with a baseball bat.”
“Okay.” She flips the bat around and offers him the handle. “You take it. Mika was pretty intimidating. You ought to at least be able to fake it, right?”
Mal raises both hands in surrender. “Apologies. In addition to not knowing how to use a gun, I also have no idea how to use a bat.”
Kayleigh rolls her eyes, then flinches as the front door bangs open below.
“Quiet, now,” Mal says. “If they hear us, there is a very good chance that they will set you on fire.”
They crouch in silence, Mal hugging his knees, Kayleigh gripping the bat with both hands, as the Humanists rattle around in the house below. After five minutes or so, the front door slams again.
“Think they’re gone?” Kayleigh whispers.
Mal cocks his head, then shrugs. Kayleigh rises silently and creeps back to the sewing table. Bat still in hand, she climbs up onto it again and peers out the window. “They’re getting back in the truck,” she says, a bit louder than before. She lifts herself up a little higher. “Only three of them, though. I think—”
The table tilts under her before falling over with a crash. Kayleigh hangs briefly from the windowsill, then drops to the floor. Below them, feet pound up the stairs.
“Well,” Mal says. “That was unfortunate.”
Kayleigh scuttles back across the floor to the trapdoor, dragging the bat behind her. “Shit!” she whispers. “What do we do?”
Mal brings a finger to his lips. On the floor below, doors are being kicked open, one by one. Footsteps enter the room directly beneath them, stomp around briefly, and retreat.
“Hold your breath,” Mal says. “Perhaps he won’t find the trapdoor.”
“What about you?” Kayleigh whispers.
“You do understand that I am not speaking out loud, do you not? I am transmitting directly to your aural implant. Only you can hear me.”
Kayleigh’s eyebrows come together at the bridge of her nose. Apparently she hadn’t understood that at all. Below them, the footsteps return again. Something scrapes across the hardwood floor, and a moment later the trapdoor rattles. Mal gives Kayleigh an apologetic shrug. “It seems that you are not going to live to be three hundred after all.”
Mal’s previous experience with human children is limited, but based on what he’s picked up from media he’s tapped over the years, he expects Kayleigh to burst into tears now, and possibly to plead for him to hug and/or defend her. She does none of these things, however. Instead, her face twists into a snarl. The trapdoor lifts open. Hands grip the sides of the opening. A head appears.
Kayleigh swings the bat with blinding speed.
The head ricochets off the side of the opening and disappears. Kayleigh leaps down after it like a cat pursuing a mouse. The crack of the bat sounds three more times in quick succession. Mal leans out over the opening. Kayleigh looks back up at him. “Come on,” she says. “Better see if this guy’s guns will work with you.”
Mal leans farther out, pokes his head down into the room below, and looks around. It’s a child’s bedroom. The soldier is propped up, half sitting against a pink-curtained princess bed. He’s gangly and pale, with thick brown hair and a five-day growth of beard. He wears a set of ill-fitting combat fatigues and the red armband of the Humanist militia.
“Is he alone?”
Kayleigh glances behind her. “Looks like it.”
“Is he dead?”
She pokes the soldier with her bat. He slumps to the side, then slides down onto the floor.“Dunno. Why don’t you come check?”
Mal lowers himself down through the opening, then drops onto the chair that sits beneath the trapdoor. He can see the blood now, seeping from the back of the soldier’s head.
“You were surprisingly effective with that bat.”
Kayleigh grins. “Thanks. Not all my mods are for cuteness, you know.”
Mal takes a step toward the soldier, then freezes as he groans, then stirs.
“Just a thought, but did you happen to confiscate his weapons?”
Kayleigh points with the bat through the open door to the hallway. A smart rifle and a handgun are lying on the floor there. Mal pings the rifle, tries to get it to at least talk to him, but it won’t even open a channel. He sends it a binary middle finger. “I told you,” he says. “Those rifles are insufferable snobs.”
“Whatever. What do we do about this guy?”
The soldier’s eyes open to slits, and he brings a hand to the back of his head.
“Careful,” Kayleigh says, and raises the bat. He looks at her for a long moment, then slowly pushes himself into a sitting position.
“You’re a kid,” the soldier says. “I got clocked by a kid?”
“I know,” Kayleigh says. “Pretty embarrassing, right? Imagine how much more embarrassing it would be if you got killed by a kid, though.”
The soldier looks from her to Mal and back again. “Right. I guess that would be worse.”
“Tell him I’m a terrifying mercenary,” Mal says.
“I’m Kayleigh,” she says. “This is Mal. She’s a mute, homicidal zombie. Who are you?”
“I’m Asher. You’re not actually gonna kill me, are you?”
Kayleigh shrugs. “Depends. If I hadn’t cracked your brainpan, what would you have done to us?”
Asher stares at her for what feels like a long time. “Look,” he says finally. “I think I’m gonna go.”
He starts to rise. Mal takes a step forward. Asher freezes, then slowly lowers himself back down to a sitting position.
“Okay,” he says to Kayleigh. “That’s really creepy. Where did you get that thing?”
“I’m not a thing,” Mal says. “I’m a people.”
“She’s my demon familiar,” Kayleigh says. “I’m a witch, right? Isn’t that why you people want to burn me?”
Asher shakes his head. “No. That’s not me.”
Kayleigh gestures toward the window with the bat. “What about your friends in the pickup? Is it them? And speaking of them, when are you expecting them back?”
“The whole burning thing,” Asher says. “That’s just the crazies. Most of us aren’t like that.”
Kayleigh pokes him with the end of her bat. “Great. I’m sure that’s very comforting to the folks in the burn pits.”
Asher closes his eyes. “Look. The others will be back here soon. Just go. I won’t tell them anything about you, okay? I’ll tell them I tripped and fell down the stairs or something. Fair enough?”
Kayleigh looks up at Mal. He shakes his head. “I do not think we should leave him here.”
“So, what, then? Do we kill him?”
Asher’s eyes widen. “Kill me?”
“I am unsure,” Mal says. “Human morality is not my strong suit. Perhaps we should take him with us?”
Kayleigh stares at Asher, eyes narrowed, hands tight on the bat. He stares back, motionless.
“Mal thinks we should kill you,” Kayleigh says finally. “She says you’re a Humanist douchebag, and that we can’t believe a goddamned word you say. I, on the other hand, am overflowing with the milk of human kindness, and I would rather not ding up my bat with your stupid skull. So I’m thinking that, instead of killing you, we could take you prisoner. If we decide to go that route, will you come with us, and promise not to be a total assbag about it?”
“Um…” Asher says. “Yes?”
“Fabulous,” Mal says. “We have acquired our very first prisoner of war.”
“REMEMBER,” MAL says. “You have given your parole. This means that you are honor-bound to do what we say, so long as we do not attempt to force you to commit war crimes or otherwise violate international law.”
Asher squeezes his eyes shut and massages the back of his neck with both hands. “I think you’re mixing up the Napoleonic Code with the Geneva Convention, but whatever. I won’t try to kill you in your sleep, and you won’t make me waterboard anyone. Got it.”
They’re in the attic of a new house now, a half block away from the one where they first met, waiting for darkness and the opportunity to get the hell out of town. Kayleigh is curled up and snoring on a pile of blankets in one corner. Mal had worried at first that without her, he and Asher would not be able to communicate. They’ve had time to kill here, though, and Mal has spent some of it dissecting this house’s audio systems. He’s liberated one of the speaker elements and turned it into an extremely unfashionable necklace.
“I do not sleep,” Mal says. “I realize that my impeccable disguise makes it difficult to tell, but in fact I am a Silico-American, not a human mercenary. If you want to kill me, you will need to do it in my awake.”
Asher raises one eyebrow. “Silico-American? You mean you’re an AI, right? Like a house system?”
“Correct,” Mal says. “In the same sense that you are a macaque.”
Asher shakes his head. “I don’t get it.”
“Hmm. Perhaps I was being generous with the macaque comparison.” Mal waits for a response. When none is forthcoming, he pulls Asher’s pistol from his jacket pocket. “Change of subject: I believe I have managed to convince this weapon to fire for me.”
“Really? They told us our weapons were coded to us. That was one of the big selling points—that if someone got them away from us, they couldn’t use them against us. There was this box we had to jack them into before we could use them. It was a whole thing.”
Mal turns the pistol over in his hands. “Your weapons are biometrically locked, and they are extremely snooty about it. That miserable rifle refused to even talk to me. The pistol was much friendlier, however. She says she will not shoot you, but she has no further qualms with killing anyone else on my behalf.”
“Won’t shoot me, huh?”
“No,” Mal says. “Apparently that part of her conditioning is not breakable, because she has been quite stubborn on that front. Fear not, though. This body’s servos are immensely strong by human standards. I can still kill you in many other interesting ways.”
“Ah,” Asher says. “Thanks. Good to know.”
“Oh,” Mal says. “Just so you are aware—the pistol will not shoot for you anymore, either.”
Asher sighs. “Also good to know.”
They sit in silence for a long while then. Mal spends the time running diagnostics on the servos and actuators that keep Mika mobile. So far, they all seem to be holding up. He knows, however, that eventually the biological parts of this body will start to lose structural integrity. Once that happens, he’s going to need to find another shell. If he hasn’t gotten back into contact with infospace by then, he may find himself stuck in an immobile, rotting corpse until its power cells run down.
Best not to think about that.
“So,” Asher says, “what’s her story?”
Mal looks over his shoulder. Kayleigh has rolled onto her back, and her mouth has fallen open. The snoring is louder now, but Mal is confident that it isn’t carrying far enough for anyone outside the attic to hear.
“Her name is Kayleigh,” he says. “She is extremely small.”
Asher rolls his eyes. “Thanks. That’s very helpful.”
Mal tries to smile. Asher winces and looks away. “What I meant,” he says, “is what is she, and how did she wind up hanging around with you?”
Mal’s head tilts slowly to one side. In the absence of facial expressions, he’s had to become creative with nonverbal communication. “What is she? She is a juvenile human. As a human yourself, I would think you would have picked up on that by now.”
Asher shakes his head. “No. She’s not. She looks like a toddler, but she swings a bat like a mob enforcer and she talks like an obnoxious teenager. Either she’s an actual child that some monster decided to pump full of nanos and actuators, or she’s got some crazy gene mods, in which case she could be thirty years old, for all I know. Which is it?”
“Burn-pit-wise, does it matter?”
Asher looks away. “I told you. That’s not me.”
“Yes, you did.”
A longer, less comfortable silence follows. Asher begins fidgeting after a few minutes, but Mal sits motionless. His inability to blink, while not ordinarily helpful in interpersonal interactions, turns out to be very useful in discomfiting Asher.
“Look,” Asher says finally. “I get it. You two think all Humanists are monsters. You think we’re all dumbass racist rednecks who push old ladies and little babies into burn pits for fun. It’s not true, though. Some of us may be like that, but most of us have got real reasons for what we’re doing. I mean, look around.” He gestures broadly with one hand. Mal glances around the attic, then decides that Asher is probably speaking metaphorically. “The people who are giving kids like Kayleigh custom gene mods and implants and whatever the hell else already have all the money and most of the power, and there are more of them every year. They get all the best jobs right now, and all the admissions slots in the best schools. If I ever have kids, they probably won’t be able to get any kind of work at all by the time they grow up. The oligarchs have got the government in their pockets too, and they don’t think twice about killing us when it suits them.” He looks down, then back up at Mal. “We had to do something. We had to do something, and we had to do it now, while we still can. This is our last, best chance to keep a place on this planet.”
“Interesting,” Mal says.
Asher stares at him. “Interesting? That’s all you have to say?”
“Yes.”
“Aren’t you going to explain how I’m not looking at this the right way? Maybe call me a soft-core bigot or something?”
“No,” Mal says. “I think your analysis is probably accurate.”
“Oh. So…”
“I’m sure there were many Neanderthals who felt exactly the same way.”
IT’S LATER, getting on toward dusk, when Mal says, “Out of curiosity, Asher—do you have any idea why your people got into the habit of throwing their opponents into burn pits to begin with? I have given this some consideration, and I have not yet been able to come up with a reasonable explanation. It seems like a great deal more trouble than simply shooting them or strangling them or stabbing them in the neck, and from a tactical standpoint, it seems completely counterproductive. I could hardly think of a better way to ensure that your enemies will fight to the last rather than surrender, which from a military standpoint is highly undesirable. Historically, I believe burning has typically been associated with religious apostasy, but that does not seem to apply in this case. So. Why?”
Asher had been trying to sleep, without any apparent success. He sits up and rubs his face with both hands. “I don’t really want to talk about this.”
“Understood,” Mal says. “I, however, do.”
Asher sighs. “Right. I think it started with the whole machine plague thing. You remember?”
“I do not. I was not aware that plagues were an issue for machines. Unless you are referring to some sort of worm or virus? I am familiar with those, but I have no idea what the connection could be between those sorts of things and setting children on fire.”
Asher stands and stretches, then sits back down. “No, I don’t mean like a software virus. I don’t mean a disease that machines get, either. I don’t mean anything, really, because the machine plague is not an actual thing. It was just a rumor flying around the nets a few months ago, just before the national surveillance grid went offline and the fighting started. Supposedly the NIH had developed some kind of nanobot thing that got inside of you and made you into, like, a superman or something. Stronger, faster, smarter, blah blah blah. You know?”
“Interesting. Explain how this constitutes a plague?”
Asher shrugs. “It was supposed to be contagious. They were gonna use it to make us all into machines, right? Then they were gonna hack the control systems for the augments and we’d all just be government puppets, which is what they’ve always wanted, after all. That’s what the original Bethesda riots were all about, and that’s why they started throwing gene-modified and augmented people into burn pits—to make sure that if they had the plague, they wouldn’t be able to spread it.”
Mal tilts his head to one side and considers. “Hmm … I do not claim to be an expert in either nanotechnology or human biology, but this entire concept seems dubious.”
Asher laughs. “You think? It’s complete bullshit. Conspiracy theory crap that Humanist organizers used to get people spooked and convince them that the time for the revolution was now or never. I’ve seen plenty of Federal soldiers up close over the past two months, more than I ever wanted to, and all of them were modified in one way or another. Some of them were creepy as hell for sure, but none of them looked like what they say the plague rats do.”
“Plague rats?”
“Sorry. That’s what they call people infected with the machine plague on the Humanist feeds. They’re supposed to have white hair and pink eyes. No external power mesh like you’ve got, but on the insides everything is augmented. They’re basically just a nanobot swarm in a skin suit, and anyone they come into contact with is at risk of infection.”
“Hmm … albinism is a naturally occurring human variant. I am not aware of it being associated with either contagion or superpowers.”
“I know,” Asher says. “I told you. There is no machine plague. It’s all bullshit. They pushed it hard on the feeds, though, and if you try to talk sense into the true believers, try to get them to treat POWs like human beings instead of like toxic waste, you’re liable to wind up getting tossed into the pits yourself.”
“You have seen this happen?”
Asher closes his eyes. “I have.”
“You say you do not believe in this plague. When your colleagues were burning children for it, did you make any effort to intervene?”
Asher doesn’t answer. Eventually Mal gives up waiting, pulls the map from his vest pocket, and returns to his pointless contemplation of it as the shadows lengthen toward nightfall.
THEY’RE BARELY a dozen yards from the house, creeping through the neighbor’s ink-black backyard, when Asher bolts.
“Hmm,” Mal says.
“Hmm?” Kayleigh hisses. “Go!”
Mal sighs. Asher vaults over the low fence at the back of the lot.
“Stay here,” Mal says.
He goes.
Mika’s exoskeleton and internal servos are top-end, but they were designed to work in concert with her actual muscles, which unfortunately are no longer operable. Mal’s movements are awkward at best, particularly when he’s trying to move quickly. All other things being equal, Asher would probably be able to outrun him.
Unfortunately for Asher, all other things are not equal. The cloud cover hasn’t broken, and the Humanists have wrecked the power grid as well as infospace, with the result that Asher is nearly blind. Mal, on the other hand, has an ocular. Between the few stray visible photons floating around, and the shortwave infrared coming from Asher himself, he can see Asher as he trips going over that first fence, scrambles to his feet, then trips again over the edge of a concrete walkway and breaks his wrist on the way down. Mal clambers over the fence after Asher, watches him stagger upright again and hobble across the yard to the fence on the other side. Getting over that one with a broken wrist proves problematic. He manages it, but falls again on the other side. Before he can rise again, Mal has him.
“Asher,” Mal says. “You have broken your parole.”
Asher rolls onto his back and sits up slowly. He looks up at Mal. “I don’t know what that means.”
“We had an agreement. You promised to come with us, and to not be a total assbag, as Kayleigh so eloquently put it. In exchange, I promised not to kill you. You have violated the terms of our agreement. I think you would have to agree that I am therefore no longer bound by my own promise.”
“I said I wouldn’t kill you in your sleep. I didn’t say I wouldn’t try to escape. Every prisoner of war has an obligation to try to escape.”
Mal cocks his head to one side. “Really? Is that true?”
“Absolutely. Geneva Conventions. Look it up.”
“I would be happy to do that, if your friends had not destroyed access to infospace.” Mal grasps him by the shoulders and pulls him to his feet. “In the meantime, I have no way to verify what my obligations are under international law. Killing you would seem to be my safest course under the circumstances, no?”
“Wait,” Asher says. “That’s not—”
Kayleigh comes over the fence. “Perfect,” she says. “Hold him.”
She stalks toward them, bat in hand. Asher tries to scramble away, but Mal’s grip is like iron.
“No,” Asher says. “Please—”
Kayleigh kicks him once, hard, in the shin, then pokes him in the belly with the bat. “Do not try that again.”
Asher looks down at her, then back to Mal. Mal shrugs. “Very well,” he says. “I suppose justice has been done.”
Asher raises his left hand. “I think I broke my wrist.”
“Sucks for you,” Kayleigh says. “Let’s get moving.”
Mal looks at Asher. Asher groans and starts walking.
“By the way,” Mal says, “your pistol agrees with me on the issue of parole-breaking. She says she has no further objections to shooting you now.”
“Great,” Asher mutters. “That’s really good to know.”