The Android and the Thief

by Wendy Rathbone

  Trev moved toward him, brushing against him hip to hip, arm to arm. “You don’t want to bring attention. Focus. Ground yourself.”

  A sentry stepped up. “No talking!” it said.

  Trev pushed his arm against Khim’s; Khim took in the heat as a source of calm. With Trev next to him, grounding him, he closed his eyes, the other man pinpointed in his concentration. He heard Trev’s breathing, the shift of his body on the tile. Khim smelled the faint soapy scent of him, the way his fear burned at the edges of that usual sweetness. He opened his eyes again, saw white tile, errant dark bangs, brown eyes holding his own as they lay facing each other; the alarms clanged, the chaos of sentries and more guards gathered in all directions.

  Trev mouthed soundlessly, “Stay down.”

  Khim must’ve shown some fear in his own eyes, or aggression. Or maybe outright madness. He blinked away tears before they fell, a new sensation he had not noticed before now.

  Trev nodded at him. Saying nothing. Mouth firm. Eyes holding his.

  Khim felt the metal object still pressing his left hand—the hand of his identchip. If they checked it, they’d find the object. He turned away and slowly slid the metal into the waistband of his trousers.

  Sentries kept moving, processing. The alarm kept sounding.

  Right now the whole prison was like some strange, alien hive where insects scrambled over their collection of humans.

  A sentry passed by them again, assessing. Its head swiveled. “Trevor Damico,” it said in its tinny voice. “Stand.”

  Trev obeyed. Khim saw him straighten, pulling his shirt into place.

  The sentry leaned toward Khim. Khim felt his throat quiver where his pulse raced. He clamped down on his muscles tight, tighter, to mask the shaking.

  “Khim 18367. Stand,” the robot said.

  Khim moved to his hands and knees, slowly getting his feet underneath him until he could stand.

  “Wrists up,” the robot ordered.

  Both Khim and Trev raised their wrists for the identchip scan.

  “How did you tear your shirt?” the robot asked.

  Khim said, “Uh—uh—”

  Trev interrupted. “Don’t you remember? Earlier in the day at the weights, it caught in a tiny snag on the metal. We laughed about it because the weights came down and we heard the tear.” Trev laughed lightly.

  Khim said, “Yes. We went to the laundry. They did not have extra shirts.”

  “He means,” Trev said quickly, “that they had shirts. Just not in that size. He’s not just a large, he’s a triple large. But there’s a lot of big guys in here so they were out of stock.”

  The robot said, “Quiet. Trevor Damico, the question was not directed at you.”

  Trev nodded, teeth worrying his lower lip.

  The sentry’s head moved back and forth, one to the other, watching them, processing.

  The robot faced Khim again. “What are you doing in this area?”

  Khim said around the tightness in his throat, “We were about to line up for dinner.”

  “The dinner is delayed tonight,” the robot said. “Go back to your cell.”

  Other men around them were getting up on the orders of sentries, shuffling across the white floor.

  The sentry who questioned them escorted them up to the second level. When they entered their cell, the force field hummed to life.

  Trev stood in the center of the cell.

  Khim stood to the side, his back to the wall by the toilet.

  Trev’s hair was mussed, darkly tangled against his temples, long strands falling in curves against his eyes. He had the most frantic but determined look about him, like a sprite just captured in a glass jar.

  Khim thought for that one moment—and maybe it wasn’t even the first time—that Trev looked quite beautiful. He forgot for a second that he had just killed three men.

  An unusual burning, not quite pain, rippled up from his abdomen and into his chest.

  Khim watched Trev’s lips part, his chest expand with a deep breath. Then he heard Trev say, “We have to get out of here.”

  A chill immediately replaced the strange fluttering he felt in Trev’s presence, flowing its way up Khim’s spine and spreading over his entire body. “The cell?”

  “No, the prison.”

  Khim knew that was what he meant, but he could barely acknowledge such a thought. It was so forbidden. So wrong. But not as wrong as killing three unarmed men. He shook his head as if to clear it.

  “It’s only a matter of time now,” Trev said. “They’ll figure it out.”

  Khim’s hands were shaking again.

  Trev said, “You need to sit down.”

  Khim ignored him, moved his hand to his waistband, pulled out the metal device. “This is how they freeze the sentries. I think it loops the cameras back onto themselves too.”

  Trev looked at the thing in Khim’s hand. “A remote device. I know all about how they work.” He took it from Khim. “Now, you need to sit before you fall.”

  “I don’t—” Khim started to protest, but Trev’s hand was on him, pulling him toward the bunks.

  “Are you hurt?” Trev asked.

  “No.” Khim sat. “Maybe some bruising.”

  “They kicked you?”

  “Yes.”

  Trev stood before him. “It was a really, really stupid thing you did!” Khim glared at him. “How can our deal protect you if you run off like that? They were out to get you, catch you off guard, and you just walked right into it? I had a hell of a time finding you.”

  “I sought them.” Now Khim bowed his head, unable to meet Trev’s eyes anymore. “The three who raped Jay, they are dead.”

  Khim heard Trev swallow twice. The sound was followed by a single body-shudder, then silence.

  “I told you I should have been put down,” Khim said, staring at his knees.

  Now Trev knelt before him. “But why didn’t they? That’s the question. And the answer is obvious. Someone must have seen that you didn’t deserve it. What did you do that you think you should be put down for? What did you do to land yourself here?”

  “I killed a man.” He paused. “Now I have killed again.”

  “Murder. I’ve never heard of it with an—an android. Not and have them remain, uh, living. You’re not telling me everything.”

  “I was… assaulted. Severely injured. I had a good attorney. A lenient judge.”

  “Was it self-defense?” Trev asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Is that when your programming malfunctioned? I mean, your conditioning?”

  “Yes.”

  “Isn’t it supposed to be fail-safe?”

  “I think so. But I’m a soldier. We’re different, trained to kill. So the conditioning is different. If you change the conditions, the conditioning changes—perhaps?” He ended his words in a question, for he truly did not know.

  “I don’t know,” Trev said gently. “I know more about sentries than I do about the conditioning of vat-grown clones. Or brainwashing human beings.”

  Khim nodded. “We’re human. Just like anyone else. I suppose if you break us sufficiently, all bets are off.”

  “They knew this and they put you in with the general population here?”

  “I don’t know if the lawyer and judge knew my conditioning was broken. But my advocate, Mr. Weatherford, knows.”

  “That’s crazy. I mean for your own sake too, Khim.”

  Khim almost wanted to smile at those words. Trev was an enigma. “Maybe my wealthy owners are behind it. I don’t know. Money buys a lot of cooperation.”

  “Don’t I know it,” Trev said. “Remember, I’m a Damico.”

  Khim tried not to wince. He wasn’t about to reveal all of himself. He did not yet completely trust Trev. Trev was, after all, still part of the family who owned him, no matter his temporary incarceration.

  Trev looked like his mind was moving at light speed. He finally said, “You really killed those three men just now?”<
br />
  Khim nodded, remembering it all in a kind of blur, but still feeling the men’s heads in his hands, still hearing the strange, muffled crack as their necks broke. “I think I’m going to be sick now.”

  Trev backed up, let him stand and move to the toilet. Khim leaned down. He’d rarely been sick a day in his life. It was so odd when the contents of his stomach splashed into the water before him. As he gagged, the bitterness in his throat increased.

  When it seemed he was done, he dragged himself back to the bed.

  Trev was there again. He touched his hand.

  Khim pulled it away.

  Trev said, “Hey, I was just checking. Your skin is clammy. You’re in shock. You need to stay still, okay? Are you cold?”

  No one had ever fussed over Khim before, not since Aric at the birthing vats, who’d pulled him from his tank.

  “I’ve killed before.”

  “On orders. In wartime. Even so, I hear it drives men mad. But you were conditioned for that. Not for this.”

  Khim swallowed, the sourness of it all washing over him. Finally he lay back, pulling his legs up to the mattress.

  He heard Trev moving about the cell, doing something at the sink. He closed his eyes. Saw men flying. Saw men writhing in pain on the gym floor.

  I am a very dangerous man. I can’t be allowed to continue.

  With that thought in the forefront of his mind, he fell into a dissociative doze.

  Chapter Seventeen

  TREV WATCHED over Khim as he finally slept.

  Lockdown was still in progress. They’d probably miss dinner altogether tonight.

  Three men were dead. The prison was in an uproar.

  Trev tried to ignore the curdling, eerie feeling that crept over his body and bristled his veins in his legs, arms, back. It left his skin goose-bumped, prickly. As he watched Khim, it was difficult to imagine that face, now softened in repose, was that of a murderer. An uncontrolled maniac. No, not quite. Provoked. A man provoked beyond all rational thought. That was not sheer mania. In fact, it was not truly crazy. Not if there were reasons.

  Khim’s sleep was fitful. His arms flew up. His body writhed.

  The beautiful being who fought in his sleep, who tossed from dark dreamings as Trev watched him nap, who had one of the deepest gazes of any man Trev had ever met, was being destroyed from within.

  He was like a bad fairy tale come to life. An animal with a thorn wedged deeply in its brain. An artifact the best museum technicians had failed to preserve.

  The man had murdered three men.

  And probably thousands more in his stint as a soldier.

  But none of that seemed to matter next to Trev’s intense urge to save him.

  This was a man who had at first refused to share a cell with Trev. Who had attacked Trev the very moment they were alone together. A man who’d said he didn’t need Trev’s help.

  When had it started for Trev, then—this feeling, this almost automatic urge to protect?

  With the apple, maybe. Or later, the sharing of books. Or maybe simply the hours they’d spent during lockdown playing cards knee-to-knee on Trev’s top bunk.

  Trev had lived his entire life under the control of another. Maybe that was why he could empathize. He’d never had any other choice in life but to work for Dante. He was a criminal by his father’s command. He was good at what he did. The best. It was the only way he could make himself proud of who he was, what he was. If he could make his father proud and happy, then the pressure of being a Damico lessened. But happiness in that household was moment to moment. You had to make it where you could find it. Escape was impossible. Trev had thought he’d found a way out, but he’d been an idiot.

  He, his brothers, and his sisters did crazy things sometimes to alleviate stress, to rebel. Everything from fighting among themselves to getting drunk and crashing fliers. Every little thing they got caught doing from childhood on culminated in severe punishment. Privileges taken, money docked, luxuries swept away for weeks at a time. And an afternoon chained to a pole in a cold room, waiting for the whipping.

  The last time Trev had been whipped by Dante, he had been late too many times for the family meeting. A misdemeanor, surely.

  But not to Dante.

  Trev, clad only in trousers, had shivered and cursed while chained to the whipping pole, waiting. Two hours had passed that last time before Dante showed up with his suit jacket off and his white sleeves folded up his tanned forearms. Always he would say, “This hurts me as much as it hurts you.”

  The whippings were more humiliating than anything else. The helplessness, the lack of control—it all led to a kind of horrible inner shame of not being good enough, right enough, strong enough.

  The whip made a strange crying sound as it folded the air around it. The crack of it against Trev’s skin always made him jump. The sting resonated through his bones, heart, lungs, like the painful sting of a giant horror-show wasp.

  Depending on Dante’s mood and the nature of the disobedience, it might be five lashes. Or ten. Never more than fifteen. But past five was always enough to elicit tears. And the final sorrow was when Dante would unchain him, look him in the eye as he held his bare shoulders in his grip, and say, “You understand why I do this.”

  He would always have a warm, damp cloth to wipe away the tears. He would do it gently, close and personal. Then he would say, “It is because I love you.”

  The scene always ended in a hug and Dante unlocking the door, offering a robe or other clothing, and stating the time for their next meal, saying, “I expect you to be there.”

  Not all meals were mandatory. But the ones after whippings were.

  The comfort Dante gave should have chilled Trev. But he always craved it, believed it. Until that last time. A whipping for being late? He was twenty-three years old. Well past childhood. He resented his lack of freedom. He resented his father. That was when he’d begun to plan how to get away.

  How stupid he had been.

  Trev looked over at Khim again for the hundredth time. He knew what life as an indentured being was like, knew the extremes the mind went to in order to find a way out.

  Today Khim had sought out his aggressors on a suicide mission. He’d thought he would be caught.

  And now Trev found himself thinking, I have to make sure he gets away with it. I have to make sure he survives.

  He could hear men’s voices from the other cells, some low murmurings, others starting to yell.

  Many of the men demanded loudly, “You can’t keep us from dinner! We’ve done nothing wrong!”

  Another sound came underneath the chatter. Metal footsteps followed by booted ones.

  Trev turned to look beyond the force field to the metal deck, saw a half-dozen sentries approaching from the right followed by four armed guards. They gathered at Trev and Khim’s cell. The force field zinged off.

  Trev’s skin went cold.

  “Trevor Damico. Khim 18367. You are to come with us.”

  Out the corner of his eye, Trev saw Khim awaken abruptly. The big man rolled out of the bunk and neatly into a standing position. He showed no emotion.

  There was nothing else to do but follow the guards and sentries.

  They went through Gate 6, its round aperture spinning open to let them through to a corridor with a big window showing a star field to the right.

  Trev was taken to one room, Khim to another.

  Trev’s room was bare except for a table and some chairs. Two sentries stood in different corners.

  A robot hand on his shoulder forced Trev to sit. The chair was plain, plastic, hard.

  A man in a guard’s uniform that was red instead of blue sat across the table in another plain chair. He had digital screens in front of him. He looked up after a minute. “Trevor Dante Damico.”

  “Yes.” Trev had already had his identchip scanned three times on the way there.

  “I just have a few questions.”

  “Yes, sir.” Trev’s heart hitch
ed in a weird rhythm. He waited.

  “Do you have knowledge of events today in Weight Room Two just before lockdown?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Do you know of anyone who might have knowledge of events today in Weight Room Two just before lockdown?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Can you explain what you were doing in the area just before lockdown?”

  “I had come to the plaza to line up for dinner.”

  “The lineup procedure had not yet started.”

  “I was hungry. I wanted to get there early to be toward the front of the line.”

  The guard tapped one of the screens on the table.

  “Was your cellmate, Khim 18367, in the vicinity at that time?”

  “Yes. He was with me.”

  “You did not see him going into the weight room at any time?”

  “No, sir. We were in Weight Room One earlier in the day, though.”

  “Interesting, since we have cameras in the plaza showing he did in fact enter. And we have cameras in the plaza showing that you walked across the plaza toward Weight Room Two 1.45 minutes later. You are not seen entering, but the cameras had stopped working at that time.”

  Trev said nothing. There had been no question.

  “Another 0.51 minutes later, you and Khim are seen in the plaza area together. But for a span of 0.51 minutes, you are missing from the plaza area. None of the cameras see you go in, but they cannot detect you in the plaza either.”

  “I did not go in,” Trev said, keeping his voice steady. “And neither did Khim.”

  “Khim went in before you. Then you and he are seen standing in the plaza when the alarm goes off. How do you account for that?”

  “Camera malfunction?” Trev asked, eyes narrowed.

  “You do know we will get to the bottom of this. Your cellmate is being questioned even now.”

  “I’m sure he will say the same thing I have,” Trev said. “Because it is the truth.” But the truth was that his pulse was raging. He could barely keep from shaking.

  “Maybe some time in solitary will shock your memory back in place.”

  Trev’s vision suddenly blurred. He blinked.

  The questioner said, “Take him!”

  Cold hands jerked him up by the arms and out the open door.