by Shaun Barger
Jem looked over at Dr. Blackwell chatting amicably with Alan across the room as he bandaged her up, remembering her warning. But no. If Blue was going to trust Jem, Jem needed to be honest with her. Needed to tell her what she’d done
Jem gripped Blue’s tattooed hand, trembling.
“Blue,” she finally said, her entire being screaming for her not to say the words. “I need to tell you something.”
Blue listened in stunned silence as Jem told her what had really happened with Eva. She spoke quietly, so Alan and the doctor wouldn’t overhear—reciting the story with cold, clinical calm. It was strange talking about what had happened with Eva. It didn’t feel real. It felt like a nightmare, or the story of something terrible that had happened to a friend, but not her.
When Jem finished, Blue stared at her. Disbelieving.
She yanked her hand away from Jem’s.
“Traitor,” she said, just above a whisper, the word full of malice. Then again, louder. “You fucking traitor!”
Jem recoiled from her, feeling Blue’s words like a body blow.
Dr. Blackwell and Alan looked over with alarm—the doctor’s startled expression becoming miserable certainty as she realized that Jem had failed to heed her advice to keep Blue in the dark.
Jem and Blue were standing now, Blue backing away as Jem followed her, hands out, placating as she tried to calm the furious woman.
“Stay away from me!” Blue said, shoving Jem.
“Everyone just needs to calm down,” Alan said, moving to stand between them. “What’s going on here?”
“This traitor ruined everything,” Blue snarled, moving around Alan to jab a finger in Jem’s direction. “That’s what!”
Jem looked at her, incredulous. “Are you serious with this shit right now?”
“Commander Colladi found a way to conscript what’s left of the human population—as was her right—by using the Synth VR networks to upload military training directly into their brains. But Jem didn’t like the plan, so she took her out!”
“Conscript? She was going to torture them. Brainwash them.”
“It’s called boot camp, you stupid asshole! Every single surviving human would have been turned into a trained soldier in, what, minutes? We might’ve actually had a chance to fix this shit, Jem! But no. Only you get to fight. Not us. Everyone else gets to die as slaves.”
Jem couldn’t believe she even had to debate this. “She was going to nuke Base Machado!”
“She was going to nuke Armitage and take control of his network! That’s what you literally just told me. The Synth have killed billions of us, Jem! What’s ten thousand more? A hundred thousand? You don’t think those people would’ve been happy to die if they knew it was going to kill an Overmind and put its entire army and infrastructure under Resistance command?”
“Oh my god . . .” Jem groaned, rubbing her hands down her face in frustration as she struggled not to lose her cool. “Blue. I don’t think you quite understand what you’re talking about. The plan wouldn’t have worked. Even Eva knew it wouldn’t work. Either the Synth would have killed us, or the colonists would have killed both of us.”
“You don’t know that! Maybe we could’ve found a way. And even if we didn’t, at least we would have died fighting! With dignity!”
Jem rolled her eyes. “Oh, spare me the ‘glory of dying in battle’ bullshit. You don’t know anything about being a soldier.”
“I’m not a soldier?” Blue spat. She pointed at her swollen stomach. “You think I even want this kid? You think I wanted to crawl through shit and mud and gunfire with a baby growing inside of me? No! I wanted to fight, Jem. We all want to fight! But this miserable, disgusting pregnancy shit is how they asked me to contribute. I wish I could have spent a virtual day in hell and then woken up a ‘real’ soldier like you, instead of this. I’ve sacrificed my health, my body, my freedom! How fucking dare you, Jem. How fucking dare you make this all have been for nothing!”
“Sacrifice? What the fuck do you know about sacrifice?” Jem wanted to hit her. Wanted to hit her so badly. Her entire body trembled with it. “I loved Eva, Blue. I fucking loved her. But I did what I had to do. I sacrificed everything for you people! So don’t you dare call me a traitor. Don’t you dare!”
Jem slung her duffel bag full of supplies and weaponry over her shoulders, moving to climb the dusty planks of the stairwell.
“Wait, where are you going?” Blue said, anger turning to fear.
“Maybe I’m just getting some air,” Jem said, spiteful. “Or maybe I’m never coming back. Maybe this was all one big, stupid mistake. Why don’t you take some time to decide which you’d prefer?”
“Well fine!” Blue called after her, when it became clear that Jem was serious. “Just run away! Since it’s apparently all you’re fucking good at!”
Jem fled out onto the pebble beach, gulping down the cold air gratefully as it rolled over her from the inky black waters.
She pulled her stealth cloak tight, clinging to the shadows as she stalked through the trees. The area was fully mapped out in her mind, so she had no fear of getting lost. But she needed to get away from the others. Needed to be alone. After a while she stopped and sat in the mud, leaning back against the rotting bark of an old tree stump.
She closed her eyes, calling up the immersive memory of the first night she’d been reunited with Eva. They were in Eva’s quarters again, a half-empty whiskey bottle hanging loose in Jem’s hand as Eva rested her head on Jem’s lap.
“Well,” Jem said, taking a swig of the whiskey, tasting the burn and feeling the fuzzy warmth of the memory of intoxication. “That could have gone better.”
Jem willed the mindless virtual personality to automation, based on Jem’s collected memories of how Eva spoke and behaved.
The virtual Eva pursed her lips, sapphire eyes sparkling with amusement.
“Ah, ma chère,” she said. “You knew Doc was right, but you went ahead and ran your mouth anyway. Too good for your own good. You never did like taking other people’s advice.”
“Serves me right,” Jem said, stroking Eva’s hair. “I really fucked things up back there. And now . . .”
“Chin up, little swan. Blue’s crazy about you. It was just a lot to take in. So quit the temper tantrum, go back to her, and talk things out like an adult. Okay?”
“I miss you,” Jem said, her chest so tight it was hard to breathe.
Eva reached up to caress Jem’s cheek. “Miss me? But I’m right here.”
A wave of disgusted self-loathing washed over Jem and she dismissed the virtual Eva. Alone again. Like always.
Eva’s warmly lit quarters disappeared in a smear of neon green, replaced by the darkness of the wood. Jem stood, reorienting herself to head back to the hideout. She realized that she still had the little steel-cased cure kit slung over her shoulder underneath the duffel strap, and hoped that her leaving with it hadn’t scared Dr. Blackwell too badly.
Gunfire tore through the silence.
Jem went cold.
“No . . .”
Jem ran. Cloak trailing behind her, hands deftly reaching into the duffel to pull out her shotgun and load the chambers with incendiary ammunition as she leaped over roots and ducked under branches.
She’d gone so far, why had she gone so far?
The gunfire had ceased following the brief explosion of noise. Jem burst out onto the shore, fearing the worst as she saw that the door had been smashed inward, the rotten porch scored with long mechanical gouging.
She rushed past the broken door, down the stairs, too desperate and frantic to scream when she found Alan nearly cut in half with laser fire and Dr. Blackwell dead from what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
No sign of Blue. No time to mourn for the others. Not yet.
She searched the shore, frantic as she looked for a trail.
There. Drag marks in the dirt. Intermittent streaks of grease and oil.
Jem had
never run so hard or so fast.
It began to rain. Big, icy droplets pelting down hard enough to sting, slowly washing away the trail. If Jem didn’t catch up soon, she’d never find Blue. Never see her again. Their final words to one another angry and cruel.
So she prayed. For the first time since Jem was a child, she prayed. Begging. Pleading. “Please, God, please let me find her, God, please!”
And there they were. Figures veiled in rain and shadow as they trudged across a grassy clearing alongside a steep ravine. Jem couldn’t see, couldn’t make out how many there were, couldn’t tell if they had Blue or—
Lightning cracked through the air, illuminating everything in a flash of pale light. Just for an instant. Just long enough for Jem to have seen them all and noted their locations in her mods—the visual overlay marking where they were and their branching estimated trajectories.
There were four Synth trackers—houndlike robots with sniffers and laser spheres for heads. Marching ahead of them were two tactical field droids dragging a broken droid riddled with gunfire behind them.
Leading the group was a Synth trooper—a bipedal humanoid android war-machine covered in thick white armor that gleamed slickly in the rain. It stood over seven feet tall, its arms and chest heavy with artillery, missiles, lasers, and an electric blade powerful enough to slice through armored tanks folded up into an arm.
Slung over its sloping shoulder was Blue. Unconscious? Dead?
No.
Jem tossed two multispectrum shielding smoke grenades in quick succession, blanketing the clearing before the Synth could mark her location and track her. Two shock grenades, one amid the houndlike trackers, another exploding just beyond the trooper—close enough to temporarily disorient the Synth with circuit-scrambling shockwaves, but far enough not to hurt Blue.
She darted through the smoke, blind but for her augmented reality overlay, weaving in a chaotic patternless zigzag as she closed in on the surviving tracker hound and fired her shotgun into its back, nearly cutting the Synth in half as hot shrapnel from the incendiary ammo sizzled through the armored circuitry.
Laser fire and high caliber shells honed in on the sound of her shotgun blast, as she’d anticipated. She rushed forward, head low, barely feeling the searing pain as the lasers sliced by her. Close enough to burn—close enough to cut.
She closed in on the first tactical droid and tore its chest open with a fiery blast, but when she spun to fire on the other it grabbed onto the barrel and pushed it aside, pressing its laser sphere against her chest.
Jem twisted, just barely able to push against the powerful strength of the robotic arm enough to send the laser slicing through the flesh along her ribs instead of piercing through her heart. Biting back a scream, Jem whipped out her pistol with her free hand and pressed it up under the droid’s chin—firing the remainder of her clip into its armored skull.
She dropped the pistol and yanked the shotgun from the dying droid’s grasp as bullets and high-powered laser fire cut through the smoke in a wide swath, nearly slicing Jem in half. But she wasn’t afraid. Pain didn’t matter. Death didn’t matter. Nothing mattered—nothing but Blue and her child.
The smoke had begun to clear as Jem closed in on the hulking figure of the Synth trooper. In the quickly thinning veil, she could see Blue lying on the crest beyond, where the trooper had placed her so it could kill Jem without risk to the prisoner.
She ran straight for the final Synth, and for a moment the trooper hesitated, seemingly taken aback at how brazen this little human was—how suicidally foolhardy. As she came within striking distance, one of its arms unfolded into a long glassy blade with a bright blue laser edge.
It swung at her, impossible to dodge, Jem’s mind calculating a million possible trajectories of attack she could take to get beyond the killing arc—settling for a path that allowed the blade to sear through her chest in a bloody line deep enough to expose fat and muscle under Jem’s filthy cloak as she twisted around and pressed a bundle of plastic explosive underneath the joint where its arm met its body.
It sliced again through her back as she darted away, a wound so deep she thought it might have gone through her spine, but no, she wasn’t dead yet, wasn’t dead—
It raised its other arm to finish Jem off with a burst of high-caliber bullets, and Jem triggered the explosive.
She felt her feet leave the ground as she was flung away, tumbling like a rag doll across the dirt and leaves until she rolled to a stop.
Silence.
Jem couldn’t hear, couldn’t see. Blood coursed sluggishly down her chest, down her back, but it didn’t matter, nothing mattered unless—
A gust of wind rose shrieking from the ravine to clear away the rest of the smoke. The Synth trooper lay on its side, half of its body burned away, molten. Sparks and fire flared in the dark from its twitching body as it lay dying.
The rain ceased, clouds breaking apart overhead to reveal an immense, slender figure shining silver in the moonlight as it towered beside Blue’s prone body.
Armitage’s husk. The rarest, most advanced Synth form. The primary body and physical representation of an Overmind.
It watched her, impassive, as Jem struggled to lift herself from the blackened mud. She clutched the open flesh across her chest, falling twice before she was finally able to stand.
“Give . . . her . . . back . . .” Jem wheezed, unable to hear her own voice over the ringing in her ears. She limped, weaving unsteady as she made her way over to the shotgun on the ground, so close. She stopped. Sank to her knees. Reloaded the gun with fumbling, bloody fingers. The last of her ammo.
Jem tried to stand, but found that she couldn’t.
She raised the shotgun, barely able to hold it steady as she aimed.
Still, the mercurial figure remained motionless. Watching her.
It was hopeless. Even uninjured, and fully armed, Jem could never destroy a husk.
So be it. One final fuck you before they took her to hell.
Jem put her finger on the trigger.
The shattered remnants of the Synth trooper let out a horrible grinding shriek as it reactivated and pushed itself onto its side to raise its remaining arm. In the instant before it fired on her, Jem instinctively swung the barrel away from the husk and shot the exposed circuitry of the trooper’s skull.
The arm jerked, the missile meant to obliterate her flying wide, twisting through the air in a chaotic spiral before exploding on the ground beyond her. Jem was flung into the air once again, numbly accepting as she flew over the edge of the steep ravine. Her eyes met with the mirrored gaze of the Armitage husk one final time, and then she plummeted into the darkness below.
* * *
Jem’s eyes fluttered open. Bright morning sun piercing through her skull.
She was barely able to breathe through the searing pain of her wounds. Somehow, though—unbelievably—she wasn’t dead. Jem would have screamed when she realized that she was hanging from a cluster of thick branches halfway down the cliff if she’d had the energy for it. As it was, she merely spun silently from her flimsy support. Blinking slowly. Trying to remember how she’d gotten here.
The heavy strap of Dr. Blackwell’s cure kit dug sharply into her wounds as it supported her weight. It had caught onto the stunted, gnarled branches after she’d fallen, saving Jem from being dashed across the jagged rocks below.
Her wounds were crusted and raw, but the bleeding had slowed to a trickle. Jem was alive. Just barely. With immense effort, she lowered herself down, root by root, stone by stone, to the pebbled shore below.
Somehow she managed to crawl back to the hideout. Each wooden step down into the basement was a final trial of agony as she struggled against the velvety lure of sleep. A slumber Jem wouldn’t wake up from if she didn’t treat her wounds.
Dr. Blackwell’s corpse seemed to stare at Jem as she weakly dug through the doctor’s emergency medical supplies. Averting her gaze, Jem applied flesh foam along the long, deep
slices across her back and chest. Pint bags swelled up with synthetic blood for transfusion and hydrating nutritional fluid after she broke the tabs within the plastic and pressed them against her filthy arms. They latched on like leeches, slender needle tendrils passing through her skin to find a vein.
Darkness took her.
Jem wasn’t sure how much time had passed when she finally woke. Enough time for the stink of human rot to have become unbearable, though not long enough for the bodies to have visibly decomposed. She yanked the empty bags from her skin and tossed them aside—her throat mummy-dry. Jem dug frantically through the rations, gulping down four boxes of water before she finally lay back down, panting from exertion.
The sun was setting when Jem emerged, the air sharp with a bitter chill. She left her friends to rot as she ventured out into the forest, seeing no point in burying them. What did it matter, anyway? Dead was dead.
She still couldn’t cry. Not for Blue. Not for Blue’s baby, who she’d never get to meet now. Not for Dr. Blackwell, who saw her miracle dragged away by monsters, right before killing herself to avoid the same fate.
Jem wondered if the doctor had still believed in miracles in those final horrible moments. In God, or fate. Wondered what she would have of thought of the cure kit saving Jem’s life.
But no. Jem being saved by the strap of the cure kit was no miracle. Neither an act of God, nor the devil. It just was. Just like everything else.
Bringing the cure to the base was all Jem had left. All that kept her from going back to where she’d lost Blue to try and find her gun, so she could finally bring an end to this miserable life.
Jem didn’t believe in heaven. But as she limped off into the shadows of the woods, more truly and deeply alone then she’d ever been in her life, she began to realize that she did believe in hell.
And maybe she was already in it.
IX.
A COMPLETELY NORMAL HUMAN
Nikolai woke with a violent sneeze, smelling salts snapping him awake like a punch in the nose.