“You should promise,” she whispered. “Do that much for me at least. Tell me we’re going to get there.”
“You don’t want bullshit, Sergeant,” he said grimly. “Bullshit isn’t going to help you do your job. It’s not going to help us reach the President.”
Or your father, he thought.
Much of the city had been deserted, but in places where the warnings had not come soon enough, people gathered beneath awnings and fanned themselves on balconies. Smoke rose in twisting spires in the distance where fires had begun without anyone to put them out. When they passed within a block of the wreckage of a passenger jet, he slowed for a moment to gape at the plane’s mangled nose cone, which had come to rest on the steps of a school. The rest of the fuselage had broken up and destroyed much of the next two blocks and two apartment buildings were still on fire. A woman sat on the curb outside of a corner shop, her face buried in her hands. One of the plane’s engines lay inside the shop as if its walls were a nest, the engine an egg.
The world unraveled, and the Tin Men kept rolling.
“Hey, Kelso,” Lahiri called up to them. “What’s the deal with this boat you’re hoping to find?”
“It’s a sailing hydrofoil,” Birnbaum answered for him. “A trimaran big enough for all of us, but so fast it’ll do fifty knots on the open sea. Maybe a little less, given our weight.”
“Aw, the rich girl knows sailboats,” Mavrides said.
“Looks that way,” Hawkins agreed. “Thank God for that.”
Danny knew how to sail, as well. Had, in fact, been on a Hydroptere before, back in high school, but not because he was rich. His father had been a working sailor, part of the crew of a steel gaff schooner owned by the CEO of a nu-energy corporation, which was one of the old school oil companies retrofitted to look as if they gave a shit about the environment. Danny’s father had taught him how to sail from childhood and made him promise he would have his own ship one day, and never crew someone else’s.
If they were lucky, today he would break that promise.
Haifa had thrived since the Tin Men had forced relative peace on the region. During that same period, the hydroptere had become a status symbol for rich assholes and a gift to adventurers with a genuine interest in mastering the seas.
They could make the journey from Haifa to Athens in just about any sailing ship large enough to hold them—Danny and Birnbaum could see to that—but minutes might matter, and a hydroptere would save hours.
With the city behind them and miles blazing past, they came upon fewer vehicles. Danny weaved in and out and spoke a silent apology to each pilgrim they passed on the road and every voice that cried out from those dead cars and trucks. This route would cut fifty or sixty miles off of the trip, but better yet, out here in what Mavrides called the Great Big Nothing there were simply fewer people.
He tried not to think about how many of them were going to die.
“Hey,” Kate said, too softly for the others to hear over the growl of the engine.
Danny glanced at her. “What’s up?”
“You really believe you’re alone in the world?” she said, really studying him. “I mean really believe it?”
He glanced back and forth between her and the road, slid the Humvee around a pristine silver BMW, and then looked at Kate again.
“I think it’s safer that way.”
Kate glanced away, the hesitation full of such vulnerability that he could almost see her human face.
“I had the idea we were looking out for each other,” she said quietly.
Danny glanced at the road, hands still tight on the wheel. When he looked back at her, the terrain to the west had turned into rough stone hills, orange and red like some alien landscape. They were as far from whatever they called home as they would ever be. He had no idea how to even define “home” anymore. Was this it, right here with Kate?
“You going to tell me I’ve been imagining this thing?” she went on. “’Cause you seemed to like the idea until today.”
How many times had he imagined what it would be like to take her to bed? Or let her take you to bed, he thought. This is Kate we’re talking about.
Now here they were. But even if he allowed himself to stop swimming, just for a second, to see if he could handle all these things he never allowed himself to feel…what would be the point? Trapped inside the tin, what was the use of tenderness?
“I liked the idea, yeah,” he confessed. Danny glanced at her, wondering how much his robot eyes revealed. “But look at us, Kate. There’s no point in having this conversation while we’re like this.”
She glanced away.
“The irony’s fucking brutal, isn’t it?” he asked quietly.
“What is?” she asked, trying to draw him out, make him spell it out for her.
“Never mind.”
Danny glanced over his shoulder. The others were still talking, speculating, arguing. None of them were paying attention to the front seat, as if he and Kate were the parents and the rest of them the squabbling children. All but Khan, who remained silent. Danny glanced in the rearview trying to get a glimpse of the anarchist, but instead he saw the girl, Alexa Day, watching his eyes in the mirror.
“I get it,” Kate said. “The irony.”
“You said you didn’t,” Danny replied quietly.
Kate stared straight out through the windshield. “It’s not the same for me.”
“Why isn’t it?”
“Your end goal is to get back to the Hump,” Kate said. “Get back to your body, just like the rest of them. And I want to make sure that happens for you. It’s important to me that you make it back there.”
Danny steered around a dusty white delivery van, but saw no sign of whoever had been driving it this morning.
He glanced at Kate, not sure he’d understood. “You saying you don’t want to get back to the Hump? You got some plan to martyr yourself along the way?”
“Nothing like that,” Kate replied, then turned to meet his gaze, unflinching. “I just don’t give a shit if I ever get my body back. The bot might get scratched or charred, but barring some seriously bad luck I could live a thousand years. Hell, maybe forever.”
“Kate—“
“And there’s the other thing, y’know?” she said, glancing out the window again. “Like this? I can run. I have legs.”
Danny stared a moment longer, then turned his attention back to the road. Three motorcycles had been dumped on the hardscrabble shoulder of the highway, their owners nowhere to be seen.
Kate’s hand touched his, a brief moment. A metal caress. Then she withdrew her touch, not wanting to draw attention from the rear of the vehicle.
She prefers the robot, he thought.
And the Tin Men rolled on.
BOOK TWO
~15~
Alexa felt as if she couldn’t breathe. The bots weren’t troubled by the heat, but there in the back with her father and the anarchist and half a dozen Tin Men, the temperature just kept rising. Hot wind blew through the shattered windows but did nothing to cool her. The vehicle bumped through a pothole and swayed as they moved around another car that had died on the highway.
She shifted in her seat, careful not to jostle her father too much. The ambassador’s injuries weren’t life threatening, but he’d been given some heavy painkillers and was sleeping off and on.
“He looks almost peaceful,” a low, accented voice said, just behind her. “In the midst of all this, that’s quite a feat.”
Alexa stiffened. Her father was sleeping but Hanif Khan was not. She glanced out the broken window and watched the brown hills for a while before she realized that she could see the anarchist’s reflection in the gleaming metal door frame. If he’d had a knife he could have cut her throat or stabbed her through the seat.
“You’re lucky they didn’t just shoot you,” she said quietly, heart pounding. With all the other dangers she had faced today and then the exodus from Damascus, she’d barely thought
about Khan.
“Shoot me for what? Fighting back?” he replied softly, his voice somehow both rough and silky at the same time. “If you had lived my life, girl, you would—“
Khan’s head slammed hard against the TSV’s interior. The anarchist hissed and spun to stare hatefully at the robot beside him. Alexa turned halfway round in her seat. The soldier had a smiley face with pirate-flag crossbones beneath it on his forehead. Hawkins, she remembered.
“Don’t talk to the girl,” Hawkins said. “Don’t even look at her.”
How can he not look at me when you put him right behind me? Alexa thought.
“Words aren’t going to hurt me,” she said instead. “What can he do? He’s a prisoner.”
Khan smiled. “You think that means I’ve lost? Well, there are no victors here.”
Hawkins smashed his head against the metal again. A hand touched Alexa’s shoulder and she turned to see that her father was awake.
“That’s enough,” the ambassador said. He glared over the seat at Hawkins. “I know you’re looking out for my daughter, but she doesn’t need anyone to bleed for her.”
“You defending this piece of crap?” Hawkins asked, his robotic features attempting a sneer. “After what this guy did—“
“Coming up to Al Qunaitra,” Kate called back to the rest of them.
Bending to peer through the windshield, Alexa saw that they were moving along a street of faded two and three-story residences. People were camped on top of the dusty, useless cars in the road, and they rose to watch the vehicle roll past, anger and suspicion and confusion on their faces.
The Humvee sped up and Alexa was glad. She didn’t want to look.
Minutes blurred past and some time later the Humvee jerked as it slowed to a halt on the side of the road. Alexa looked up to see that they were well clear of the town and had stopped in the middle of nowhere.
“What are we doing?” she asked.
Kate popped open her door. “Robots don’t have to pee, but we figured those among us with bladders might want a quick break.”
Hanif Khan groaned with relief. Alexa hadn’t even been thinking about needing to go, but now that Kate had mentioned it she realized she had to. They all piled out of the TSV except for Trav, who remained behind the wheel, and Torres marched Khan off toward a stand of trees to relieve himself.
Alexa glanced up the grassy slope to her right, saw an outcropping of rocks surrounded by thick bushes, and made a beeline for cover.
“Hold on,” her father called. “You should have someone with you.”
“I think I can manage!”
Even with the sweat that had beaded up on her skin, she was thrilled to be out of the Humvee. The sun felt good and a breeze rustled the bushes around her as she slid her pants down. When she had finished and rearranged her clothes, she leaned against the rocks for a minute, enjoying the solitude. Staring out across the land, she saw no sign of civilization save for a handful of distant farm buildings. For that brief time it was possible to imagine that nothing at all had changed, that it was the same old world it had been the day before.
On her way back to the Humvee she came upon Danny and Hawkins talking quietly. She slowed down, hesitant to interrupt what seemed like a serious conversation, and she overheard enough to realize that Hawkins was just finishing up some kind of message to his mother. A goodbye, Alexa thought. In case.
She frowned, wondering where the camera might be, and then it occurred to her that Danny was functioning as the camera, somehow recording the farewell message with the eyes and ears of the robot he inhabited.
“Your turn,” Hawkins said.
“Nah, I’m good,” Danny replied.
Neither had noticed Alexa yet and she stood there, awkwardly frozen. What was she supposed to say now?
Hawkins grunted his disapproval. “Come on, Kelso. You telling me if things go tits up, there’s nobody you’re gonna want to know you were thinking of them at the end?”
“Sorry to disappoint.”
“Bullshit,” Hawkins said. “What about Kate?”
Danny held up a hand. “I don’t know what you think—“
Hawkins shook his head. “All right, Kelso. It ain’t my business. All I know is, if I didn’t have anyone worth living for, I’d top myself right now. Be done with it.”
Alexa tried to take a step, hoping to circle around them, but in the quiet that had fallen between the two soldiers the crunch of her footfall seemed inordinately loud. Danny and Hawkins both glanced at her.
“Sorry,” she said sheepishly. “Just going back to the Humvee.”
Hawkins nodded. “Me too, kid. Thanks for your help, Kelso.”
Alexa strode back to the vehicle, Hawkins at her side. He said nothing about the conversation she had just overheard and she was glad. She’d felt awkward enough without having to acknowledge it. At one point she glanced back and saw that Danny hadn’t moved. He stood still, staring into the sky.
They found several of the Tin Men gathered behind the vehicle in conversation with her father. Behind the wheel, Trav started the engine and it rumbled to noisy life.
Alexa sat on the roadside, propped herself up on her arms with her legs out straight, and listened to his voice.
“Many of them will see us as the enemy, passing through these towns,” the ambassador was saying. “You’ve got to find a way to let them know that you’re no different from them. It won’t be easy, but look, you’re all someone’s child. Some of you have kids of your own. We all hoped for a future better than the past. We have that in common.”
“But they do see us as the enemy,” Birnbaum said.
Alexa watched her father shake his head like a tired school teacher who wasn’t getting through to his students. She’d seen that expression on his face so many times.
“There are no enemies, now,” he continued, the pain in his voice almost mesmerizing in its depth. “Every country is going to have to turn its attention inward now. We all just want to go home, to be with the people we love and help them rebuild.”
He paused for a breath. Alexa couldn’t hear it over the rumble of the Humvee-TSV’s engine but she saw his chest rise and fall. She frowned, thinking that it sounded as if the Humvee’s engine had an echo.
Confused, she started to glance around, and so missed the sight of the bullet punching through her father’s back and exiting through his chest. She whipped her head around in time to see the spurt of blood that spattered two of the Tin Men. Her father fell forward, crashing into Prosky’s arms. Birnbaum and Lahiri turned in the direction from which the shot had come and opened fire.
Around the front of the TSV, Kate shoved Hanif Khan to the ground.
Alexa realized she was screaming. She saw them all gathering around the vehicle and taking aim, and she heard the echo of the Humvee’s engine growing louder, and now she understood it.
A second black TSV had rolled up to idle two hundred yards behind them.
The Bot Killers had followed their trail. They wanted their boss back.
Kate snapped off orders but her squad didn’t need to be told what to do. Hawkins grabbed Alexa and shoved her further back, pushing her to the ground so that she was nearly forced under the vehicle. Bullets plinked against robot bodies and off the back of their vehicle.
Alexa kept screaming and tried to rise.
“Stay down, kid!” Birnbaum called, kneeling beside her and trying to hold her as Alexa batted at the robot.
In some calm place deep in her brain, she knew what she had seen: her father falling to the ground. The rest of her could only scream and cry and buck against the weight of the robot trying to cover her.
See? that calm shard of herself thought. What do you want to see?
Alexa planted her feet and shoved Birnbaum away from her. Birnbaum shouted at her as she rose, but Alexa ran toward where she saw her father lying in the road, his arms and legs at odd angles, blood pooling around him.
Daddy, she thought, grief cla
wing at her heart.
An image crashed into her mind of her bedroom at home, her closet doors yawning wide as they always seemed to be, clothes and shoes spilling out. Before she’d left to come here she had cleaned that closet. In the back, in a box, she had found a pair of glittery purple sneakers that her dad had bought her when she was six years old. He’d bought them not because she’d begged but because, he said, he’d seen the way her eyes lit up when she saw them in the store window.
Cleaning out that closet, she had thrown away the sneakers. Then she had gotten on a plane and flown halfway around the planet to visit her father and the world had fallen apart.
Alexa stood over her father’s bloody corpse and stared at the sad, surprised look on his face and she wailed in anguish, hating herself for having thrown away those glittery purple shoes.
Bullets kicked up chunks of road and dirt around her. Birnbaum ran over, took up a protective position between Alexa and the anarchists, and started shooting.
“Hit the deck, kid!” Birnbaum snapped.
Alexa fell to her knees in the street, picked up her father’s dead hand and held it.
“I hate you,” she whispered.
She was speaking to him. She was speaking to herself.
“Your people want you back so badly,” Kate shouted into Hanif Khan’s ear, “they’d better be careful where they shoot.”
As if to underline her words, the gunfire from up the road ceased, its dying echoes swallowed as the Tin Men continued to fire. Kate started forward, pushing Khan ahead of her as the rest of the squad fell in beside her. Windows shattered in the anarchists’ Humvee. The bastards had spread out, taking cover behind trees and in a gulley beside the road. One of them stepped out a second too long and Kate shot him through the throat. Another died, but not by her bullet.
Hanif Khan glanced back at her. “They didn’t come for me, you know. They came to finish the job they were given.”
The words repeated in her head just as she saw the two men emerge from behind the anarchists’ Humvee with rocket launchers on their shoulders. The other Bot Killers started firing at the same instant, a spray of bullets for distraction.
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