by Max Carver
Carthage ruled outer space through their machines. Earthlings, once the proud masters of the galaxy, progenitors of the human race that had gone out to settle hundreds of worlds, had been reduced to rodents living in the trash pits of their lost greatness. Once Earth had been the light of the cosmos, the common touchstone of all humanity, or so Mother Braden said. Now they never even received news from other planets. They were cut off, isolated in every way from the rest of humanity. Just as he and Hope were forever cut off from their parents, because of the machines.
“I hate Carthage,” he said. “That whole planet should be wiped out.”
“You don't want to be as bad as they are,” Mohini whispered.
“No,” he said. “We have to be worse. So we can destroy them.”
She said nothing in response to that.
They walked by a couple of impassable alleyways filled with rubble. Many of the roads down here were blocked off like that, which provided some security, making it easier to watch the remaining approaches.
“Step where I step,” he whispered. “There are loose spots. Some of them are intentional. Some have mines planted.”
The road dead-ended in more caved-in rubble. On one side was a commercial complex, long vandalized and raided like everything else in the area.
Across the road stood one of the old apartment hives, badly cracked from the war. Chunks of the outer wall were missing, exposing some of its rooms and stairs to the street, giving glimpses of the former inner life of the building—a wrecked kitchen, a living room with the burned remnants of chairs, a room with thoroughly looted vending machines. Three stories of the building were visible from this underground road, but it extended farther in both directions, above and below.
Cheshire Cat Apartments, read the vinyl lettering over the narrow, barred entrance, along with an image of a sharp-toothed smile hovering in the air.
“Who is she?” asked a shadow beyond the door. “We don't know her.”
“Relax, Tonio,” Colt said. “She's fine. She's already saved my life. Twice. We need her.”
The shadow stepped closer. Tonio was seventeen, wiry, his eyes dark and suspicious. He carried a decades-old plasma rifle, the only one they possessed, entrusted to whomever had front-door duty.
“How do you know she's not a skinwalker?” Tonio asked, looking Mohini up and down. “She looks different.”
“Everyone looks different from everyone else,” Colt said. “Open up.”
“Password,” Tonio said.
“Orange elephant,” Colt muttered.
“That password's expired.”
“Because I've been trapped somewhere for days. Hurry up.” Colt kicked the barred door impatiently.
Tonio smirked and opened the door, letting them inside.
“Your sister's going to want to see you,” Tonio said. “She keeps searching for you. She even made Diego... ” He glanced at Mohini and fell silent.
“Is she here now?” Colt asked.
“Think so.” Tonio locked the door again and watched as Colt led Mohini deeper inside.
The interior was a labyrinth of hallways, stairwells, and apartments. A system of conveyor belts connected the larger hallways, tucked between the walls but accessible through hatches. In the old days, these hidden conveyors had delivered goods to the subterranean apartment dwellers and carried away their garbage. There were also utility crawlspaces lined with pipes and wiring thick with spiderwebs.
They walked down a hallway blocked off by junk at one end. Colt opened one of the apartment doors and led Mohini through a trashed, vandalized space. The kitchen walls had been ripped open and stripped of their pipes. The furniture had been smashed and burned in a small campfire on the linoleum floor long ago.
In the old bedroom at the very back of the apartment, Colt approached a two-person bed with a foul, stained bare mattress.
“Is this... your room?” Mohini looked around at the vandalized walls, the rotten carpet, the water-damaged ceiling.
“No. This is where you'll be sleeping,” Colt said.
“What?”
He grinned and shoved the bed aside, revealing a meter-high hole bashed in the wall, down near the floor.
“What is this? The doorway to Hobbiton?” she asked.
“Sure,” Colt said. He had no idea what she was talking about.
“What do you think you're doing?” Hope's denim-clad beanpole legs approached. She squatted down on the other side of the wall hole, machine pistol in both hands, and frowned at Mohini. “She can't be here.”
“She's the one who hacked that reaper at the clinic,” Colt told his sister. “And she rescued me from a skinwalker. The head skinwalker.” He wanted to describe the huge lab where he'd been imprisoned and the horrific things he'd seen there, but he couldn't find words for them.
“She did all that, huh?” Hope waved her gun at Mohini. “She's not with the rebels. We checked. So either she's the most brilliant lone genius we've ever met, or she's a skinwalker sent to infiltrate.”
“I am not a machine.” Mohini scowled at her.
“Oh, sure, because a spy would just admit to it.” Hope reached out and pinched Mohini's forearm.
“Ow!” Mohini drew back.
“Convincing pain response,” Hope said. “But we ought to do the blood test—”
“Hope, no,” Colt said.
“It's okay,” Mohini said. “I am not offended. I will submit to a test.”
“Just let us in,” Colt said. “Look, I brought you a coat.”
Hope's eyes widened as she accepted the garment and unzipped it. Her fingers explored the thick coat made of thousands of little cloth violets, a delicate remnant of a lost world.
Her eyes went damp for a moment, but then her gaze fell on Mohini and hardened again. “Fine. But if she slaughters us all, I'm going to kick your ass all over Hell forever, Colt.”
Hope backed off and rose up on her long string-bean legs again, carrying the coat away.
Colt and Mohini crawled through, into a space lit by hanging battery-powered lanterns.
The apartment was unlike the rest of the building or the neighborhood outside. The furniture was in somewhat better condition because it had been selected from all the apartments around it. Every item was organized—chairs aligned with each other, the small book collection held neatly on shelves, no loose junk anywhere. The apartment was also clean, wiped down regularly with water gathered from rainfall and snow melt. Mother Braden required order and cleanliness.
“Colt!” Diego entered the room and clapped him on the shoulder. “You're alive!”
“My sister was just as happy to see me,” Colt said, and Hope rolled her eyes.
“I knew you weren't dead,” Hope said, trying on her new long dark violet coat. “Just chasing after a girl. Or a girl-bot.”
“Hope—” Colt began, feeling annoyed.
“Let's see the magical hacker girl's hand,” Hope said. Her mouth turned up in one corner, in an expression Colt recognized as a nervous half smile, a cocky look she put on when she was starting to get scared. She opened a pocket knife.
“All yours,” Mohini told her, reaching out one hand.
“The other one,” Hope said.
“Here you are.” Mohini complied, switching out her hands. Her dark eyes looked up at Hope's thin face, studying the taller, paler girl.
“This is going to hurt,” Hope whispered, then jabbed Mohini in the forearm. Mohini bared her teeth at the pain but made no sound.
Colt, Hope, and Diego all stared at the small puncture mark in the girl's slender brown arm.
No blood rose.
“Skinwalker.” Hope raised her machine pistol, and Diego did the same with his rifle.
Colt tensed. Had he been tricked? The machines were getting smarter all the time, but he could have sworn Mohini was a real girl—
“Wait!” Mohini grabbed her forearm with her other arm and squeezed. Blood rose, bright and red. “See? You see, right?” There
was a tremble of fear in her voice, as if some people she'd just met were threatening to kill her.
“It looks like blood—” Hope began.
“Oh, come on.” Colt brushed his fingertip on Mohini's arm, gathering blood, then put it in his mouth. It tasted like salt and iron. “It's blood.”
“Maybe we should stab her somewhere else, just to be sure,” Hope said.
“No,” Colt said.
“We can't keep stabbing her,” Diego said.
“Go get us some water instead, Hope,” Colt said.
“I am not your servant,” Hope said.
“I know. A servant is a person who's actually useful.” Colt walked past her to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. It was missing some parts and didn't function, but they used the shelves for storage, mainly containers of water. He unscrewed a plastic jug, which had MUSCLE-GROW! on the side in thick red letters with throbbing blue veins, and took a big swig of old rainwater with a bitter tang. He carried it out to Mohini.
“Where did you go all this time?” Diego asked Colt. “We thought you were dead.”
“Not me,” Hope said. “I knew you were too hardheaded to die.”
“Don't let her fool you,” Diego said. “She hasn't talked about anything else since we lost you. We've been searching. We even went to see my brother—”
“Feel free to sit down,” Hope said to Mohini while dropping onto the moth-nibbled arm of the old couch. “Sorry for poking you. But you understand. I'm Hope, by the way. Which is a terrible name for anyone born after the war, but I guess my mom was trying to be optimistic. She shouldn't have bothered. Can I have some?” Hope held out her hand, and Mohini passed her the water. Hope took a long swig, then burped. “So you really know how to hack those machines? I mean, Diego's our best hacker, but he usually just takes over vacuum cleaners or whatever, little dumb stuff.”
“I hacked an automated hot dog cart once,” Diego said. “We used it for a battering ram and ended up with a hundred cans of Pasta Chunks from an old corner store. Not exactly dumb.”
“You know what I mean. Not stuff with advanced AI. Not one of the killers.” She smiled at Mohini, who still stood stiffly, lingering close to Colt.
“The hot dog cart had a lot of personality before I lobotomized it,” Diego said. “Called itself 'Wally Wiener.' He even had a song he'd sing for kids—”
“Did you say you talked to your brother?” Colt asked Diego. Hope gave him a sharp look and a frown.
“We thought she was with them,” Diego said, nodding at Mohini. “I mean, that was the only thing that made sense after we had time to think. Who else would have tech like that? Who else would have the balls to get close enough to a reaper?”
Mohini raised her eyebrows.
“So, yeah, we reached out,” Diego continued. “It wasn't easy, but most of the fighting's been around Wrigley Field lately, so we thought we'd find them in that area.”
“You both went?” Colt asked.
“Obviously,” Hope said. “I'm not going to let Diego wander the streets at night by himself.”
“What happened?”
“Maybe we should talk about this later,” Hope said. “Mother Braden will want to see you. I'll hang out with your new friend. What's her name again?”
“Mohini,” she said.
“That's nice. I like how it rolls off my tongue. 'Mohini.' 'Mo-hi-ni.' Does it mean anything? Like, secretly?”
“It's Hindi,” she said. “Probably means 'sacred animal' or 'cumin powder' or something. What does 'Colt' mean? A baby horse, right?”
“Does it?” Colt asked. “I think it means a fast racehorse. Or maybe a warhorse.”
“Baby horse, I'm pretty sure.”
Diego brought bandages and disinfectant for Mohini's small cut. “This is all from that clinic,” he told her. “You have to show me how you controlled that reaper. How did you even capture one?”
“It's not something I'd recommend trying to repeat,” Mohini said. “My friend died protecting me from that reaper.”
Colt wanted to tell them that the reaper wasn't even the most impressive achievement he'd seen from her. Breaking out of the lab had been a bigger deal, he thought, hacking into a secure installation and taking control of the med-bot inside it.
Instead, he passed through the apartment's kitchen into the short hall beyond. Multiple beds and mattresses were crammed into each of the three rooms he passed, leaving little room for anything else. They had been salvaged from other apartments, and they might have been in poor condition, but they'd been cleaned up and were each neatly made with blankets—more of Mother Braden's insistence on cleanliness and order, even as the world rotted and died outside.
Drawings adorned the hallway walls, etched in whatever bits of crayon, pencil, or charcoal they'd rummaged over their months of hiding out here.
The drawings were the faces of the lost, labeled by name, everyone from the group that had been lost over the years. Colt himself had drawn the face of Aaron, an older boy who'd been a bit like a brother to him for a while; he'd been gutted by reapers. Colt had found the remains. Whenever they changed camp, Colt drew his name and face on the wall first.
Most of them had simply vanished over the years, presumably taken by machines. The ritual of drawing their names and faces provided a way of remembering them and keeping them near. The presence of the lost made an old ruin or dry sewer pipe into more of a home. They were like spirits of the dead, watching over the remainder who lived. Many of them had only been children when they'd vanished.
More than two dozen faces were on the wall. Diego's brother Fernando had not been seen in some time, but Diego had not drawn his face. Fernando had left deliberately, to join the rebels.
After seeing the inside of Simon Nix's lab, Colt understood there were fates even worse than death. He wondered whether any of the lost had ended up there, test subjects for the android's bizarre, twisted experiments.
Colt shoved those thoughts out of his head as much as he could manage.
The small closet in the hall was crammed full of supplies. He took a newer pair of shoes from the heap on the floor. They read Reebok on the side, apparently a major shoemaker of the old world.
He entered the apartment's fourth bedroom, which had a private bathroom, though no water flowed through the pipes anymore. The bedroom was dim, lit by a single flickering candle on a dresser that held Mother Braden's possessions.
An old picture in a broken frame showed Mother Braden as a young woman next to a tall, smiling man, both in army green. Jane and Vince, Costa Rica read the handwritten scrawl at the bottom. The young woman was Mother Braden, decades ago, her hair pulled back in a cap, standing at the beach with her long-lost husband, who'd died in the war against Carthage. So had their children. She almost never spoke of her lost family, only of survival and strategy, of today and tomorrow.
A faded, worn old cloth flag was spread out on the wall above the dresser, with thirteen red and white stripes and seventy-one white stars against a deep blue background, the symbol of a lost civilization.
Mother Braden lay on a thin mattress on the floor; she'd always claimed she preferred sleeping on the floor.
The two youngest were sitting there now, including Tonio's ten-year-old little brother Paolo, plus Birdie, a girl of around seven or eight who did not speak but sometimes communicated in low whistles and clicks. They sat beside her and hung on every word.
“... and so Brother Rabbit slipped through the pride of sleeping lions, and because he was quiet and careful and watched his step, he made it safe to the other side,” Mother Braden told the children in her throaty, scratchy voice. “The hunter tiptoed after the rabbit. But when the hunter reached the middle of the sleeping lion pride, Brother Rabbit rang a bell and yelled as loud as he could, and the lions woke up and ate the hunter.”
“That was smart,” said Paolo, and Birdie clicked her tongue thoughtfully.
“Now, go on, both of you,” the older woman said. “I nee
d to talk to Colt alone for a minute.”
“I want another story,” Paolo said.
“Go clean the kitchen and maybe you'll get another story later,” Mother Braden said. The two kids hurried out to begin their assignment.
“Colt,” Mother Braden whispered. “You made it back.”
“I'm here.” He knelt beside her and took her hand. She felt weak. She could barely see anymore. She'd had too many years of low, infrequent medication, often unable to find any for weeks at a time. She had grown particularly weak the past few months, though, which was why they'd stayed in this location longer than usual. Maybe too long. The metalheads were always looking for scavengers to kill, and staying on the move meant staying alive. “I'm sorry if you worried,” Colt said.
“Worry never ends,” she told him. “Unless you love no one. And then you become like the machines. We've stayed at this camp too long, Colt. They'll find us soon. You need to make preparations to leave.”
“Of course,” he said.
“You're the oldest now,” she said. She didn't have to mention what had happened to the other kids. They'd been killed by the machines, or had gone missing and been presumed dead, or they'd gone to join the rebellion and likely died. It sounded like Diego's older brother Fernando was still alive, though. Maybe the older girl who'd left with him, Terra, hadn't been killed yet, either. “You have to lead the way, Colt. I can't make it this time.”
“We won't leave you here,” Colt said. “We can carry you.”
“If you have to carry me, then my purpose is done. I remember when I could carry you. I've done all I can for you children. And I've seen too many of you die. I'm not sure my heart can take more.” She smiled thinly through her pain. It was hard to believe that the weak, gray-haired woman in front of him was the same tough warrior who'd led him on long silent marches through the ruins, who'd taught him how to shoot, how to find food, how to survive. She wasn't even so old, just fifty-six, but the disease had eaten her up from the inside. Medicine was too scarce, and life was too hard on the sick.
“You can't really expect us to leave you,” Colt said.
“There is no choice,” she said.
Colt changed the subject. “We have to contact the rebels. Mohini knows how to hack the machines. She can make a difference.”
