Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful

by Arwen Elys Dayton

  Unexpectedly, Kostya’s story had called up Dahlia, brought her clearly into Jake’s thoughts. Maybe he had loved her, in his selfish way. He could have loved her, for sure. And he had done nothing about it. He had taken and taken, and what had he ever given back?

  “If you hadn’t been with me all of these months,” Jake said, “I would have died. I mean, I’d still be alive, probably, because they made us so hard to kill, but it would suck.”

  Kostya nodded. “For me too.” He took in a trembling breath and said, “Going back to Russia…it’s a kind of dying.”

  “We won’t stay. We’ll go to California.” Jake didn’t know how that would be possible, but they were gornodobyvayushchiye raby, mining slaves. If he could walk across an asteroid unshielded, he could find their way to the West Coast of the United States.

  “California,” Kostya whispered. He made it sound like the name of a magical kingdom. The word hung in the air, blending into the hum of the engines, as if it were powering the freighter and impelling them back home.

  “I always thought gay guys were the best,” Jake reflected. “They would fall for each other and leave more girls for everyone else.”

  This drew from Kostya a sound that was both sob and laugh. An improvement, Jake thought. He took his friend’s hand in his and brought it to his lips. He could feel with those lips, sort of, as he pressed a kiss onto Kostya’s artificial fingers.

  15. END OF THE LINE

  “It’s fucking horrible,” Yulia muttered in Russian when Kostya had finished his history.

  “No,” Kostya said. “Those words are nothing.”

  “Fucking, shitting, cunting, bastardy! That’s what it is,” Yulia snapped.

  “Better,” said Kostya.

  Darkness was falling outside, while the snow continued to come down, thick and rich, flakes as large as a man’s hand being whisked away behind them as the train plowed onward. This train would take them all the way to Russia’s eastern coast, the end of the world. They had been traveling for most of the day and Yulia had told them they were getting close to the final station.

  Without warning, Yulia began to cry. Heavy tears ran down her cheeks.

  Kostya’s eyes snapped to the girl and some sort of understanding dawned in him. “Yulia!” he said sharply. “What did you do?”

  Yulia stood up abruptly and wiped her eyes. She looked angry as she said, “How could I know your lives? I couldn’t know!”

  She reached for the bathroom door, but Jake was on his feet before she could get hold of the handle. He blocked her exit and shoved her away from the door with his left arm. He looked from her to Kostya, confused.

  “The whole time I’m thinking, ‘She’s too nice, this can’t be real, but maybe we’ve found someone good…,’ ” Kostya said to Yulia in Russian. “What did you do?”

  “How do you—what are you—?” Jake asked.

  Kostya was also on his feet now, and he poked a finger into Yulia’s chest. “She’s not crying because of the sad story, Jake. She’s crying because she’s done something worse.”

  Yulia looked between the two boys, whose secondary arms, with weapons, were showing beneath their open parkas. Jake had seen nothing in the girl’s tears, but now Yulia put away all pretense. “What do you think I will do?” she said savagely in English.

  “When did you turn us in?” Kostya asked. “Did you signal the ticket taker at the beginning? Another passenger? Or did you wait until you went out to get food?” She had gone almost an hour earlier, and come back quickly with bread and cheese and a report that the train was already emptying out.

  Jake looked from his friend to the girl who had saved them and then back again. “Did you turn us in?” he asked her.

  “Yes. When I got food,” Yulia admitted. And then, her voice dripping with disdain, she said, “Look at baby American. Will he cry that I’m not his friend? They are exactly like we learn in school.”

  “But…why not do it back in the city?” Jake asked. “You came with us so you could torture the grebanyye raby? Let us think we were escaping all this time?”

  Yulia shook her head and had the decency to look a little bit ashamed of herself. “I wanted to hear your story. I never met American before. Like meeting a spaceman—you are American and spaceman. Maybe I would write paper about you, about social justice. But—”

  “But you realized there might be a reward for turning in slaves,” Kostya said.

  She shook her head. “No. Maybe. Not reward. But when he speaks about all the platinum and all the cost and work…I realize how important you were. Valuable government property.”

  “Property, exactly,” spat Kostya.

  “I have three behavior demerits at my university,” she told him in Russian, almost pleading for understanding. “Two political rallies, one time sympathizing with a genetic modifier. I thought—maybe they’ll clean off my record if I bring you back.” She shrugged as if to say What could I do?

  “When?” Jake asked. “When are they coming to get us?”

  “Maybe they’re on the train already,” she answered. “Or they will be waiting in Anadyr.” It was the name of the train’s last stop. And surely, now that darkness was falling, they were almost there. “Train is almost empty,” she went on, in English. “Maybe they wait for you to get off, take you from platform. Easy.”

  “Easy,” Jake agreed, envisioning their freedom evaporating minutes from now.

  He took hold of the door handle and opened the door just enough to see out—thinking he would check the hallway and then head for the very end of the train. But four policemen were standing in the corridor directly outside the bathroom. Waiting. It flitted through Jake’s mind that the officers had been listening outside the door, or maybe they’d come on at the last station and had been checking every car, but it didn’t matter now; they were here to take Jake and Kostya in.

  At the sight of Jake, the closest man rushed the door, knocking it and Jake inward toward Yulia and Kostya. This man was gripping an electric stunner as he pushed Yulia aside to reach for Jake.

  Worse than seeing the officers was seeing the look of resignation settling into Kostya’s eyes, as if he had always known that his journey home would end this way.

  “Window!” Jake yelled.

  His secondary left arm swiveled up with the makeshift knife and cut the man across his wrist, once, twice, and then again, until the officer retreated, blocking the doorway as he did so that the others, for a moment, could not get in.

  “Window, Kostya!” Jake yelled again.

  He seized his friend and together they stamped at the window. The glass spiderwebbed into a thousand cracks. The injured policeman was removed into the corridor and another man lunged into the bathroom. Before he could lay his hands upon the escaped slaves, Jake and Kostya kicked the window again. This time it was launched out into the darkening blizzard. The tiny bathroom was whipped by wind and flakes of snow. The new policeman extended his stunner for Jake’s shoulder, but somehow Yulia was in the way—not once but twice preventing the man from reaching her companions.

  Jake took Kostya’s hand and they leaped through the window together, out into the storm.

  * * *

  They hit the embankment in a tumble of fresh snow and bounced down and down, into the heavy drifts piled up at the bottom of the slope, where wind had been gathering the downfall for hours. The disorientation was total and there were panicked moments as they extricated themselves from the downy hills and found solid ground. The train, sliding away at a hundred miles an hour, was already receding in the distance. Even with the snow to cushion the fall, they would have been dead if they’d made the jump in their former bodies. Yet Jake felt not even a bruise.

  In the failing light and thick snowfall, he narrowed his eyes to scan the countryside. Em
pty. Dark. Far ahead, almost impossible to see, was the faint glow of a town. If that was Anadyr, it was fifteen miles or more away.

  He and Kostya were still suffused, still clothed. Kostya was straightening his hat and retrieving his gloves from the pockets of his coat. In the twilight, he looked as human as anyone else.

  “Do you think the police will make the train stop before it reaches the station? Or will they wait until it reaches the city to come look for us?” Jake asked him as he zipped up his own parka. He wasn’t cold, but there were appearances to keep up.

  “I don’t know,” Kostya answered. “Either.”

  “We’re leaving big tracks. They’ll easily see where we went.”

  Kostya laughed softly. “You really are from somewhere warm! The tracks will be covered by new snow in ten minutes.”

  “Ah. Good.” In the short time they’d been standing at the bottom of the embankment, the snow they’d disturbed in their fall was already evening out beneath thick, new flakes.

  “And have you forgotten, Jake? We can run. They don’t know how fast we can move.”

  Slowly, a smile spread over Jake’s face. Barren countryside, snow to protect them, a belly that would stay satisfied for days on the bits of bread and cheese they’d eaten on the train, lungs that would never give out.

  “If Anadyr is there,” Kostya said, pointing along the railroad tracks, “then east is that way. If we go southeast, we get to the ocean.” He outlined their route with his hand. “You know what is on the other side of that ocean?”

  “Alaska,” Jake said. “And do you know where we can walk from Alaska?”

  Kostya smiled.

  “Come on, California boy. We’re going home.”

  Am I dreaming? Has the world gone mad—or have I?

  —H. G. Wells, The Invisible Man

  1. THEY FELL FROM THE SKY

  Luck saw one of the sentries fall. Sometimes they swooped through the air intentionally in a way that made her breath catch in her throat. But always, in such cases, the sentries would extend their wings at the last instant, long feathers flaring to full wingspan, halting a dive that looked fatal. And then they would skim along low, above the treetops of the reservation, a hint of a smile on their faces, as if they knew Luck had been worried, as if they were toying with her—stupid Proto—and she’d fallen for it.

  That was what usually happened when a sentry appeared to fall—it turned out to be a trick. But this time was entirely different. As Luck stood atop the Rocky Jut, the highest point in the Proto reservation, she watched one of the sentries climb up and up on an early-morning updraft, and then he faltered, his body contorting. The sun was rising and it lit him with a golden light, in which she could see pieces of…something falling away from him. Luck stopped breathing.

  A familiar voice intruded on the moment. “What are you doing up here so early?”

  “Look, Starlock!” she said, pointing urgently and unable to spare him a glance. “He’s breaking apart!”

  The sentry could no longer hold himself up. In a swirling mass of feathers, he tumbled toward the Rez’s southern border. The two other sentries on patrol—a male and a female—were racing across the sky toward him, their wings pumping frantically.

  “Look! Look!” said Starlock now, swept up with Luck in the drama unfolding in the dawn air. “It’s happening to her too!”

  The female sentry, her feminine curves quite clear in the sun’s early rays, was now struggling as bits of something dropped from her wings—or was it bits of the wings themselves? A moment later, she too was falling. The third sentry dove to catch her, and all three plummeted out of sight.

  Luck and Starlock turned to each other, and Luck saw her own astonishment mirrored on his face. The pink and orange sunrise gave the world the flavor of a dream, but this was no dream. The humans had really fallen.

  “They could be tricking us,” Starlock said, gazing to the south, where the sentries had disappeared. “They could have been holding something and dropped pieces of it, so it only looked like parts of their wings….”

  “Yeah,” Luck agreed, without much conviction, “that could be. But it looked…”

  “Pretty real,” he said, finishing her thought.

  Starlock was on morning lookout duty, so he pulled the walkie-talkie from its clip at his waist (the device was more than a hundred years old, but it worked well enough for communication on the Rez), but then he hesitated. “What if they want us to go looking for them so they can laugh at us and throw rocks?”

  The sentries had done just that—pretended to be injured and then ridiculed the Protos who showed up to see what was wrong—a year or two ago, although that prank hadn’t been done in such a dramatic fashion. There was almost no chance they were really in trouble. And yet…who could say? An inappropriate proposition galloped into Luck’s mind and formed itself into words before she could rein it in.

  “Should we check it out, then, before you report it?” she suggested, keeping her voice neutral. “Checking it out” would require a long walk together, perhaps all the way to the border of the Rez.

  She avoided Starlock’s eyes but could feel the weight of his gaze, assessing the moment. A walk together was a bad idea—and yet no one could fault them for investigating after what they’d just seen.

  When Starlock remained silent, she said, goading him, “You don’t want to go check? Even after they fell? Report it, then—and I’ll go look myself.”

  Luck turned to go but had made it only two paces when Starlock caught her arm, surprising a gasp from her. She looked at his hand on the bare skin of her forearm, dark against light. They weren’t supposed to touch. Sometimes they came into contact fleetingly, a leg grazing against a leg at mealtimes, a hand bumping a hand in a crowd—moments they could both pretend hadn’t happened. But this, this deliberate contact, was different. Startling. He let go immediately.

  “No, you’re right, Luck,” he said, avoiding her eyes in turn. The sound of her name on his lips stirred something in her that she knew was best left untouched. “We can get there as fast as anyone else. We should go look.”

  * * *

  They set out immediately, walking toward the Rez border in the direction the sentries had fallen. It was a long way, and as the sun pulled fully above the horizon and lit the distant Rocky Mountains, they passed through fields of wheat and millet and corn, by the hydroponic greenhouses and the fish hatchery buildings and the sheep pens, all the while keeping well apart from each other. But when they crossed out of the cultivated land and into the wilder area of brush and trees, where no other Proto was likely to see them, Luck noticed that Starlock moved closer, so that their hands almost touched from time to time, and each near miss caused a sensation like an electric current in her fingertips. She had gone to the Rocky Jut to watch the sunrise alone, but this was better.

  Every Proto teenager knew the rules: Pairings were made by the humans, in accordance with the Legal Covenants of the Protohuman Gene Pool, and Pairings were based on how you looked, essentially. The humans expected Protos to keep all of their distinctive colorings, all of their “unaltered genetic variation,” so that humans might study and catalog that variation. It was the price of the Protos’ life here on the reservation, protected from whatever the world had become.

  Starlock was seventeen, a year older than Luck was, his skin a deep, rich brown, as rich as the bark of the great oaks in the Rez forest, his eyes so dark they were almost the black of an obsidian stone, and his hair as dark as his eyes, its tight curls cut close to his scalp. And Luck was as light as Starlock was dark, her eyes the pale blue of a clear, early-morning sky, her skin the color of milk, her hair blond with hints of red when the sun shone upon it. There was no possible way that the two of them would ever be Paired—and this meant that they were no longer allowed even to touch.

  W
hen their eyes met for a moment too long, he looked away and asked, “What are you reading now?”

  “Another Dickens book,” she said. “Dombey and Son.”

  “Tell me.”

  “It’s about love and hate and family and regrets,” she explained, “and hardly any parts of it are missing.”

  For pleasure, Starlock preferred to read engineering textbooks, but in earlier days he’d been an eager audience for Luck’s descriptions of novels, and they fell easily into that old rapport—just as, Luck thought, they had fallen easily into this walk, on a flimsy excuse, after years of avoiding anything like it.

  They discussed the book while the shimmering outline of the Rez fence grew steadily closer in the distance below. With each step, Luck became more convinced that the sentries had been tricking them. Of course it had been an elaborate prank, one clever enough to scare her and draw them in. She kept glancing over her shoulder to see if the humans were lurking somewhere nearby, in a tree maybe, watching the two stupid Protos who’d taken the bait.

  When they were within a quarter of a mile of the Rez fence, they began to hear its hum. The nearly transparent fence, which appeared as a blurred distortion of the air, was forty feet tall, and it marked the limit of Luck’s world. The fence drew a line around the reservation, a line that Luck, years ago, had figured out was about sixty miles long, because the Rez formed an approximate circle of forest and river and farmland at least twenty miles wide, and math books were available at the town hall library. Protos were permitted to know geometry and even calculus, and the sciences up to a point, including enough biology to train the Rez medics. Even some history could be gleaned from the allowed novels, though of course any references to politics and war had been removed. (Or rather, one could assume the missing parts referred to politics and war, based on the context of the stories. Probably a host of other topics had been deleted as well.) But all of the books and all of the technology in the Rez library and school halted at the Age of Computers, at the time of the Great Shift, as the humans referred to it, when Protos had made way for the new dominant species.