She Wolf and Cub

by lillith saintcrow

  I heard my own sigh, and couldn’t tell what was going to fall out of my mouth until it happened. “Because you need me.”

  He carried the watermaker, stepping gingerly on sandgrit rock. Settled beside me, close enough for his warmth to meet mine. After a few seconds, he leaned into me as well, his small shoulder against my upper arm.

  “I’m glad you found me,” he said, quietly.

  “Me too.” I surprised myself again.

  Because I actually meant it, and I slid my arm around him. It felt natural to tighten it just a little, to give him a gentle hug.

  It did not, however, stop the way my brain inside its knockproof container kept running lightly over all the players in the game, because I couldn’t figure out which side — or sides — Sam was kicking the ball for.

  I’d left his head and his body in a room together. It was only a matter of time. Why?

  Because even though I could have brought his head with me, I suspected he was eventually more helpful to Geoff alive, no matter which side he was on. I was hoping I was right.

  * * *

  Dusk fell in great purple and orange veils, finding us already moving with Geoff well-wrapped against the sinking sun. The water table was rising, which meant the worms came closer to the surface as a matter of course, and the big gray blunt-snouted monstrosities seemed to be hungry.

  It made little sense, really — what did they live on? The tiny burrowing things in the sand? If they did, or if they lived on the sand itself, why did they rise and snap at anything crossing the surface?

  Maybe they were just cranky.

  The fourpads plodded along. As the water table rose, so did more of the succulent greenery. Which meant more mammalian life. Catching them for Geoff to drain was getting easier. At least we hadn’t had to sacrifice a fourpad yet.

  Small mercies.

  While I rode, I tinkered with a stat-coil and two or three Pankorip circuits. Plascannon knocked the nanos right out of even a buffered agent, there wasn’t a way to reroute that sort of flux. Something about the resonances temporarily made your own flesh repel the tiny things that made near-immortality possible. The less implemented you were, the more you stood a chance of surviving plas — for a few seconds, at least, before slipping into shock from the roasting, your bodily systems shutting down one by one.

  Quick death or horrified numb descent into blackness. Which was worse?

  No way to buffer it. Hard to dodge plascannon balls, they tend to seek out their targets. Moving just made a disturbance that pulled them along, freezing let them home in on you as well. Discharging a cannon inside a City was a good way to make every corporation that held a share of the place get a vested interest in Dismissing you, because the Agency played hardball with anyone taking their ventures out that way.

  None of the corporations wanted to piss the Agency off. At least, not that openly.

  It was a puzzle. The best tech minds couldn’t solve it, and me cobbling spare bits together wasn’t going to uncover anything new. Still, it was something to keep my hands occupied. Maybe I was deconstructing under the stress of aimless running.

  I hoped not.

  A crackle at the edge of scanrange jerked my head up. It wasn’t a worm.

  Huh.

  “Mom?” Geoff, his fourpad crowding mine, was unwrapping his hands. Neither of the beasts were uneasy yet, and the sun was just below the horizon.

  “You hear that?” I swallowed the other thing I wanted to say — don’t take those off yet, it’s not really night. It was close enough, and coddling him that way would be counterproductive.

  He cocked his dark head. His eyes reflected the dusk differently than a warmbody’s, and those stiff spikes of hair bounced a little since he’d taken his hood off too. “Not really. I just… feel something. It itches.”

  “Itches?”

  “Yeah. Like it did before you showed up. I knew something was going to happen.”

  “Where precisely does it itch?” Now there was a question I never thought I’d ask anyone, ever.

  “All over.” He shifted in his saddle, a little all-over motion expressing mild discomfort.

  Well, at least it’s not localized itching. I don’t know if antibiotics will work on you. “Huh.” The crackling in my scans resolved into fuzzy static, rising and falling.

  Commchatter. None of it with encryption-spikes. The bands were sloppy, too, not tightly disciplined. A blurring buzz throbbed at the lowest end of my audible intakes.

  What the hell is that?

  A few moments later, I had the answer.

  “Skimmers.” I checked the sky — the last fading dregs of sunlight swirling down the western drain. The rocks were too far behind us for hiding. The sound jagged in and out of the edges of my range, not quite randomly. “A hunting party.”

  “Are they after us?” Anxiously crowding his fourpad even closer, as if that would solve the problem if they were.

  “Don’t think so. Probably cannibals, though.”

  He winced and I might have laughed, only it wasn’t very nice laughter. It wasn’t helpful, either. He needed me calm and steady.

  Geoff glanced fearfully around, though the skimmers were nowhere near. “Are we… are they…”

  I decided to answer the most obvious questions instead of whatever he didn’t know how to ask. “No. This time, if they come for us, I’ll fight.”

  He pushed the goggles up on his forehead, blinking furiously. “What do I do?”

  “Stay out of the way.” That’s all you can do right now, kid.

  “Why didn’t you fight before?”

  “It wasn’t efficient.”

  “Oh.” He relaxed a little bit. “I thought… you weren’t afraid of them?”

  Not very. I searched for a way to explain it. Agent training had only covered it briefly, because of complete autonomic control. Runners have several different theories about the whole thing, none of them quite satisfactory. In the end, I just decided to give him my personal view. “Fear’s a natural response, Geoff. It’ll keep you alive, make you sharper. Until it doesn’t.”

  “And then?”

  “Then, you put it away.”

  “How do you do that?” Brightly interested, his head up and his nostrils flaring as he sniffed the wind the way he’d seen me do it. “Ions. And something else?”

  I nodded. My fourpad swayed, working up a slight rise, its large feet spreading against the sand. “Fuelcore dumpoff, the wind’s right to start smelling it now. If there was one way to put the fear away, kiddo, someone would make a mint off selling it.”

  “I smell something else.”

  I took a deep lungful, in snuffles to pass maximum air over every sensing cell, organic or otherwise. Most of taste is smell, and even warmbodies get more information than they can possibly process in every breath.

  They just don’t pay attention.

  “And?” I prompted.

  “Green.” He nodded, then snuffled just like I had. A pleased smile showed the white tips of his teeth, and I realized with a jolt that he was taller, by a good inch, than he had been in-City. “I think it’s going to rain.”

  “Huh.” I tried the air again.

  No hint of petrichor. Just the same dry wind, nutmeg tang of baked sand, scorched rock, fuelcore dumpoff, ions…

  The thrumming resolved into five engine noises. Definitely skimmers, and their comchatter was full of slanging Spanics, crackles, and obscenities that would burn your ears off if you let them.

  “Mom?”

  “Hm?” I closed my eyes as the fourpad picked its way along, pointed down the opposite side of the dune it had just climbed. It might be nice to have a skimmer, but Geoff couldn’t drink from one of those machines in a pinch. Locking their commchannels gave me a better handle on location, especially since skimmers are loud in every sense of the word.

  “How do you shut off being afraid?”

  “That’s the secret,” I told him. “You don’t. You just make up your mind
to do, no matter how scared you are.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s harder than it sounds, and you have to do it a different way each time. Looks like they’re not going to come near us, they’re chasing something else.”

  A slight sound — his hair shifting. He’d tilted his head even further, probably aiming his dominant ear to try and catch something, anything out of his warmbody range. He stiffened in the saddle. “I know what they’re chasing.”

  “Do you.” I didn’t even try to sound convinced.

  “A worm. Only they don’t know something.”

  “What don’t they know?”

  “They don’t know that it can see them.”

  Active imagination, or something else? “Those worms don’t have eyes.”

  “He doesn’t need them.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’ve told him where they are and what they’re doing.”

  My eyelids flew open. Geoff’s were closed, and he swayed on the back of his fourpad with loose, uncanny grace. Dark falls swiftly out in the desert; one by one, the stars were glimmering into life. It was a good thing moonlight didn’t give Geoff any problems; whatever it was in unfiltered sunlight didn’t bounce off the big white rock in the sky.

  Or if it does, it doesn’t make it through the atmosphere. Huh. I flagged that line of thought and set it away for a little bit. Maybe there was a solution there. “How have you told him?”

  “They sing. Inside. You just sing back.” As if it was obvious, like breathing or walking.

  “Okay.” I didn’t bother arguing. I just kept building my map of their hunting pattern. Five jackasses on skimmers weren’t a huge danger in and of themselves, but the chance that one of them would paste my fragile warmbody kid with a stray lucky shot was unacceptably high.

  The skimmers veered again, just at the edge of my range. The commchatter was alive with excitement, rough words and male bonding. When they get together in packs, they urge each other on. If you want someone who hunts alone, make sure they have ovaries.

  Boys always like to show off for each other too much.

  We plodded on for a while. Geoff half-asleep in the saddle. He hummed, a low wandering melody I didn’t recognize, but I was busy keeping tabs on the skimmers. They looped a little closer, slid away.

  I had almost relaxed when the comms dissolved into a welter of feedback squeals. It almost jarred me out of my own saddle. I yanked on the reins, bringing my fourpad to a halt. Its shaggy head lifted, ears flicking as they rotated to catch whatever its silly two-legged rider wanted next.

  The noise lasted ten minutes, all told. One comm crackled with desperate sobbing breaths before a final squeal of tortured metal ending on a crunching snap.

  Then, silence.

  Geoff’s humming dwindled. His fourpad stood obediently next to mine. After a full sixty seconds, his eyes opened sleepily. He blinked. “Are we stopping?”

  My throat seemed dry, though it wasn’t. Purely psychological. “Not yet.” I coughed, slightly. Another tell. It would have given Sam a pause, probably unsure if I was displaying to provoke or mislead — or honestly reacting to an uncomfortable thought. “Can I ask you something, Geoff?”

  “Sure.” Heartbeat, respiration, all going along normally. Warmbodies didn’t have that kind of control over the autonomics. You needed implementation for that.

  Or did you?

  “What else do you hear singing?”

  “Some things.” A yawn half-swallowed the last word. You wouldn’t think he’d spent all day sleeping. “Big dogs. They sort of croon. The worms are all squeal-y. There’s small things, they get sleepy when it’s too hot or too cold, but sometimes you can hear them going sssss.” A hiss between his teeth. “You don’t have a song, but sometimes people do.”

  “I don’t have a song?”

  “Not one I can hear.” Did he sound suspicious? Frightened? Or just tired?

  He was only a kid. My kid.

  “Hm.” I gathered my reins. “The water’s rising even more. We should see actual green in a while.”

  “That’d be nice. It’s going to rain, Abbymom.”

  “Sure.” You know, Geoff, I think I’m starting to believe you.

  * * *

  Stripped to the waist in the glare of sunlight, my skin burnished ebony to suck in all the solar it could, I had plenty of time for thinking. No fourpads for this, they were in a small outcropping of rocks several klicks south. With Geoff sleeping so deeply he almost didn’t seem to be breathing, it was safe enough. Still, better to do this quickly.

  So I ran.

  I’ve spent most of my life running, one way or another. Mostly along rooftops, gauging routes and ducking when I had to, out-thinking, always a few steps ahead. It was often so laughably easy. The world is a ki-fait board, but everyone’s playing chong-qi, that ridiculous little child’s game that always ends the same way. When it wasn’t easy it was stupid, and when it wasn’t either it was boring to fight it. Much better to just retreat and let them boil in their own vat of genetrash.

  Running shook everything loose. Loping along, not fast and not slow, a comfortable pace at about three-quarters. You never showed your speed if you could help it. Or your strength.

  Or anything else.

  Of course, implementation means not-fast-not-slow is still a blur to warmbodies. The sun showered me with free energy, powering tireless muscles and reinforced bone, flushing my nanos with strength. On the sand, leaping at random, rolling sometimes — going down, shoulder to back and the world turning over, up in a shower of dry particles worn into powder by the wind and the same sun that filled me with crackling force.

  You were always my favorite, Jess.

  I never asked why he gave me that name. He never asked why I called him Sam. Meets in restaurants, alleys, occasionally in seamless, perfumed corporate highrises. Always the same. Never a blip, just passing the message along, telling me what the Agency wanted from me since the first brief meeting at headquarters — the very same black cube I’d presented myself at for testing.

  Six years ago, when I was still new to an agent’s speed and strength. Fresh off the implementation line and upgraded to the max, sold into slavery by my own hand. They didn’t call it slavery nowadays, but I knew what it was.

  It’s impossible not to.

  Hullo, Sam had said, his bleached-gray irises piercing but not overly striking. He looked just like every other corpclone, his costume carefully chosen and his every move correct. Not polished enough to be slick, not rough enough to be green. Right in the middle. Looks like we’ll be working together. Here’s a list of drops. Commit it too memory and then get creative with destroying it.

  My own instant almost-dislike, squelched ruthlessly. Creativity is not my problem, sir.

  A long, considering look. Call me something else, will you?

  Yes, sir.

  Not even a grimace. If I’d irritated him, it didn’t show. He turned, a military little movement, then he was gone. I scanned the paper. Easy drops, none of them difficult. Maybe he was watching to see what I’d do, or maybe the Agency was.

  So I popped the paper into my mouth, chewed, and swallowed, and that was that.

  My stride lengthened. There was a trembling underground I didn’t like. Tuning my ears to echolocation meant I’d have to filter out all sorts of other input.

  What I really wanted to do was think.

  So, I ran.

  They sing, you know.

  You even kiss me goodnight.

  Bright light. It was cold.

  What had they made? Or… Made, or found? What if…

  He’s my kid. I’m the last person to steal him, dammit. Mine.

  A corporation getting hold of him again might even be good for him, until he didn’t earn out. Wasn’t that what he said, looking at a cyborg pointing a rifle directly at him — a cyborg who had just killed his two caretakers? Or his protectors, his jailers — whatever they were.

  I’m an
investment. I guess I’m not earning out.

  I slowed, slightly. I really didn’t like those rumbles under the sand. Acid in a digestive system would be uncomfortable, but I was fairly confident of my ability to burst free of even the massive worms east of here. I could be the last meal one of them would ever eat.

  That will slow you down. Be efficient, agent.

  The only thing is, there’s something you can never escape. It matches you pace for pace, it breathes with you, it moves with you. There’s no outrunning it.

  Yourself.

  I crested a long, shallow rise, kicking up great gouts of sand. The rumbling under my feet sent tiny flakes of it up and down, small rocks from below popping free of the surface like water spattered across a hot impulsion coil.

  Wreckage scattered across a depression in the sand. The hole was shallow, shaped by displacement. Four or five skimmers, flung in twisted bits, scarred with acid or something caustic. The sand was glazed — I rolled and came up again, the back of my hand numb where it touched the creeping opalescent trail. Some form of analgesic, maybe — psychoactive compounds in it, the nanos perking up to analyze and neutralize.

  Isn’t that a useful little chemical mixup. Nice molecular chain. Wouldja look at those peptides.

  The long, shimmering trail looped for miles. The worm had burst up through the sand, wrecking the group of skimmers. Not only that, but it had chased its pursuers, now on foot. Maybe the skimmers had irritated it, so it struck at the metal contraptions first?

  Or maybe it had someone singing a little song about what to do with the insects buzzing overhead. What do you think, agent?

  I leapt atop one of the piles of wreckage. Settled instantly into an agent’s immobility, the eerie stillness you learn not to use when you’re around warmbodies. Out here, it just made you a rock.

  Would it be so bad, to turn into one? No struggle, no striving, no protecting fragile, breakable things—

  It broke over the rise, the great gray snout rising from rivulets of sand greased with that opalescent sheen. A blunt, eyeless head, its mouth with circular rows of serrated, backward-pointing, milky teeth.