by Sara King
“Nobody’s going to follow me,” Magali said, once more staring at the wall. “I get people killed.”
Jersey stood there for several minutes in silence before he cleared his throat. “I gotta go. I can hear the others unloading. They hit that place without me and Nalle’s gonna rip them apart. The Ferrises are gonna be hard enough for them to handle.”
Magali said nothing. She still hadn’t forgiven him for what he’d done in the street earlier that day, after she’d slaughtered twenty of his comrades. After rescuing him, twice, and after him sweeping her from danger off the shores of the Snake like some sort of glittering angel, she thought they’d come to some sort of rapport, but he had kept her on that street, hydraulic-powered fingers wrapped around her wrist in a glassy prison, surrounded by mindless smiles, listening to the numbing, frothing chants of people that didn’t see a killer, but a hero.
She must have said something to that effect, because Jersey gave her an anguished look. “Mag, I had to keep you there. Fortune needs this. If you ran off on them just when things were getting going, you think we would have had a thousand volunteers scrambling to assault Yolk factories with us right now?”
“You sound like my sister,” Magali said. Anna would have said the same thing, right after she’d used Magali to do whatever she wanted. Normal people were just puppets to people like Anna and Jersey. Pawns. Anna was always calling anyone who wasn’t a Yolk Baby ‘sheeple’ or ‘cattle’ or ‘pawns.’ “You’re pulling my strings so you can make the whole world dance to your tune.”
“We’re rescuing eggers, Mag.” He sounded agonized.
“I don’t care about eggers,” Magali said. She was finding it hard to care about anything.
Jersey gave the exit of the ship an anxious look. Then, “Look, they’re leaving without me. I’ve really gotta go. I’ll see you in a few hours, okay?”
“Don’t come back covered in blood,” Magali said. Why she said it, she couldn’t really pinpoint, but the thought of seeing Jersey’s glassy skin glistening with crimson was enough to tighten her fingers on the sniper rifle.
Jersey glanced down at the weapon in her lap, then back at her face. “Get some rest, Mag,” he finally said softly. “I’ll be back soon.” Then he left her there. Magali heard the cargo bay door open, but didn’t turn to watch him go. She saw the light from outside reflecting on the interior of the ship, smelled the crisp, fresh morning air mingle with the smell of grease and old cleaning fluid.
Jersey was gone for more than ten minutes before Magali realized the Nephyr had left the door open, the pungent smells of a warming jungle filtering inside. She took the blanket and pulled it around her shoulders.
More minutes passed. Magali found herself standing beside the door lock, hand on the button to shut the door. She frowned, then glanced behind her, not remembering getting off the bed.
That’s weird, she thought, swallowing. So much of what had happened to her since Steele had goaded her into shoving Benny off the cliff either wasn’t making sense or was vanishing altogether. Things felt disjointed, like she was floating, observing everything from above. Then, through the open door, she caught sight of a flash of white on the hillside below the cluster of ships. When she squinted, she saw it was a bandanna, bobbing in the brush as its owner jogged from the rebel ships toward the Yolk factory in the valley below, surrounded by more of his armed brethren.
What kind of idiot wears white on a raid? Magali thought. Instead of pushing the button to shut the door, she stepped out onto the gangplank to watch.
The splotch of white dipped and moved down the hillside, randomly disappearing into the jungle only to pop out again later, still following a mass of people like one white ant in a flood of black, green, and brown.
That moron is gonna get people killed, Magali thought. She sat down on the gangplank and got her scope up to her face, to get a better view with her rifle. It was a kid, she discovered. Probably fifteen, at most.
The splotch of white disappeared behind a hillock and did not re-emerge, his path no longer visible from where Jersey had hidden the ship from view of the Yolk factory.
Need a better vantage point, Magali thought. She glanced outside the ship to the northwest, locating the rocky outcropping that Jersey had said would be a good sniping perch. She considered if it would be worth her effort to climb up to it so she could watch the fight, or whether she should try to take a nap, instead. A nap really did sound good. Though she didn’t feel physically tired, she knew she needed one. She had a weird sense of bone-deep exhaustion that had been plaguing her ever since climbing down the cliff, where her mind seemed to go into neutral for minutes at a time. Jersey had brushed nanos on her toes and fingers, but even though the flesh had healed almost immediately, they still curled into tight hooks when she wasn’t paying attention, unconsciously still straining for rigidity on that cliff-face.
Magali glanced behind her at the cot she could see through the open door. She thought about how many days it had been since she’d actually rested. She thought about how badly she needed to sleep, and how good it would feel to finally lie down.
She thought about how a Nephyr had slept there last.
Magali idly got off the gangplank and climbed over to the sandstone outcroppings at the top of the ridge. Settling into position, she dialed in her scope and waited. Several minutes later, she watched the white bandanna once more pop from the trees and bounce across a swamp.
Even a blind chimp could have seen the dumbass coming, and they were still several miles away. Annoyed, now, Magali turned the rifle to focus on the razor-wire enclosure of the Yolk camp.
The place that had imprisoned her only four days before now looked mostly deserted. There was no one walking the dirt tracks between buildings, no one spending their free time sitting on crates outside their barracks, no one playing cards in the sun. The aluminum huts looked lonely and ragged in the cold of morning. Magali noticed three women in the stocks, bent over, naked, covered in bloody welts. The guards that had been sent down for Harvest as punishment, she realized. The ones who had brought the gun that Magali had taken from them and used to kill Nephyrs. Obviously, the Director had taken umbrage to the fact they had given Magali a means to help almost two thousand of her eggers escape.
After a moment of studying them, Magali realized their skin was too gray, their expressions too still, the blood too old. Dead, she thought. She considered that distantly, realizing she probably should have felt some sort of guilt for her part in their demise, but couldn’t dredge up more than a pang of irritation that Nalle had left the bodies out to rot. Tadflies spread diseases if bodies were left out to rot.
Near the stocks, the entrance to the mines was sealed. Two armed men were standing beside the door, smoking. One of them said something and they both started to laugh. Over by the fence, one coaler woman called out to them and they grinned and shouted something back. The woman turned around and slapped her uniformed ass at them, making the men hoot.
Magali shot her.
Magali didn’t realize she’d squeezed the trigger until the woman’s body collapsed in a quivering, bloody, brainless pile. She blinked at the corpse for several heartbeats, trying to remember how it had happened.
Beside the door, the smiles faded from the two men’s faces and they took a couple startled steps forward, the hands holding their cigarettes drooping to their sides in shock.
Magali watched them rush over to their friend to squat beside her and check her pulse. Because they were lined up, Magali shot them, too.
Fast and efficient, her father had told her whenever he was forcing her to play his games. Don’t give them time to run. Spurred to speed, Magali turned the scope on the closest guard tower. Detached, she realized they looked like frightened starlopes. She pulled the trigger four times, moved to the next tower, fired four times, then the next—only three that time, somebody was on piss break—then the next group got four. Then she swept down to watch startled guards slipping from the
barracks and began exploding their heads like her father’s water balloons. One after another. Then, when one of them got spattered with gore from one of his friends and ducked back into the barracks to escape her, Magali trailed her weapon along his course behind the aluminum sheeting and killed him, too. She knew she got him because he dented the aluminum when he fell, and she saw parts of his uniform and hair slump to the ground in the tiny crevice under the wall.
A minute later, Nalle and several gray-uniformed men came rushing from the office into the graveyard of bodies, spreading out in a defensive wave. Magali shot Nalle in the eye first, as the Nephyr was scanning the devastation with horror clear on her glittering face. Then, as the Director collapsed, Magali unhooked her clip and smoothly replaced it with explosive rounds. In the moments that followed, as the robots stopped to look at their fallen leader, Magali put six bullets through the brainboxes in their chests, making dozens of mechanical parts shower the twitching, glittering corpse in the middle of the courtyard. Then she switched back to regular ammunition and executed the guard that had rushed out of the bathroom, still pulling up her pants. Then she shot the cook stepping out of the tent carrying a big metal spoon. Then she killed the secretary scrambling to tighten a gun holster to his belt. Then she killed two men running around a corner, clutching their guns with looks of excitement on their faces.
Then, when no more targets would come out of the barracks or the office, Magali returned to explosive rounds and began to take out the propane tanks, the support beams, the hydro generators. When people crawled out of the tinny wreckage, their clothes smoking, arms in the air, Magali switched ammunition and shot them, too.
She kept mental tabs in her head, marking off each face she knew from camp, until every single one was accounted for. Leaving enemies unaccounted for, Milar and Anna had taught her, was how to get people killed.
When it was over, Magali stared at the devastation, watching the smoke drift up from the ruined buildings, eying the bodies with complete detachment.
Killer, Wideman Joe giggled in her head.
Magali shifted the rifle to peer at the body of Yura Nalle, even then beginning to attract tadflies. She was missing one eye. The other one was hazel, almost the color of Patrick’s, but darker, and starting to fill with blood. Magali turned and found other bodies, sprawled in the mud or draped over equipment or rubble. Nobody was moving. Everyone had been shot square in the forehead.
Just like in target practice, Magali thought. She felt like an observer in an old-style projection show, watching, not really part of the set. She returned the explosive rounds to her gun and started blowing up the ships arrayed beside the tarmac, then the Yolk bagging station, then the outhouses.
A few minutes later, a flash of gold caught her eye and she moved her scope back to the perimeter fence. A Nephyr had reached the edge of the Yolk camp and ripped a hole in the razor-wire like it was made of strands of shiny silver paper. Then, inhumanly fast, he raced across the camp towards the office, only to stumble to a halt in the array of bodies, his back to her.
Magali calmly replaced her armor-piercing rounds and waited for the cyborg to turn around, gun trained on the back of his head. Skin’s too tough to penetrate with armor-piercers, she thought, watching the back of his domed skull through her scope. Gotta get them in the eyes or mouth.
The Nephyr backed out of the courtyard, then slid sideways behind an aluminum hut, still not giving her a good shot. Magali waited, trained on that building in total concentration, waiting for him to emerge…
Jersey stood with his back to the aluminum sheeting, heart hammering a staccato against his ribs. He had arrived after a twenty-three minute run, a good ten minutes before the rest, intending to locate and take out Nalle and as many of the Ferrises as he could before his reinforcements arrived. Yet, all around him, the camp smoldered in total silence. He heard the morning breeze catching the aluminum siding, dragging it back and forth against screws, slapping it against supports where it wasn’t fully nailed down.
Everywhere he looked, there were bodies, some burning, most still twitching. Corpses lay scattered on doorsteps, hung up on fences, slouched over barricades, splayed out in roadways. He’d only heard weapons-fire for a few minutes, maybe four at most, the mountainside rattled by a several explosions that he had assumed were Nalle’s defensive fire. He had been expecting maybe five to ten dead, and he wasn’t entirely sure whose side the bodies would be on.
Instead, he was looking at a ghost town.
Dead, he thought, as the silence drew icy fingers up his spine, they’re all dead. Even the cook, wearing his big, goofy hat, and the shy little Ne’vanthi clerk that liked to flirt over doughnuts. Dead, and most still bleeding. In less than four minutes. Jersey swallowed, hard, and kept his back pressed against the building.
A couple dozen meters away, he heard the muffled shouts of eggers from behind the barricaded door to the mines. They were calling for help, having heard the gunshots. Jersey couldn’t bring himself to leave the safety of the building’s shadow.
She just killed seventy-three people, a Nephyr, and six robots in four minutes. That was a kill-shot every three seconds, and he knew she had taken time to shoot up the buildings and ships in there somewhere.
Sweet Aanaho, Jersey thought, looking out at the carnage. His instincts were running wild, and not in a good way. Whatever he was looking at, it was not something a human mind could have conjured. Maybe several of the volunteers from Silver City had stopped on a rise and helped? He was too nervous to move out of the shadow of the building and check.
What was worse, the carnage had been utterly indiscriminate. Everyone was dead, not just the big threats. Support personnel who hadn’t lifted a gun in ten years were just as dead as those who had bullied the eggers with them daily. Some distant memory from his time at the Academy, where instructors spent years intentionally breaking their students to reshape them into hard, merciless killing machines, told him that he was witnessing a mind disintegrating, a downward tumble into oblivion.
Sacrifice a queen…
…for a checkmate.
Aanaho, I’m so sorry, Mag, Jersey thought, agonized. He had pushed her over the edge…
Then a series of armor-piercing rounds hit the flimsy aluminum sheeting on his left side, several shots peppering his left shoulder, shoving him forward and around like a heavy volley with a ball-peen hammer, turning his face towards the holes in the metal…
Grunting in panic, Jersey closed his eyes and spun back around as a new volley hit the side of his head. She almost got me. Just now, she almost got me. A few more inches and she could’ve made a couple eye-shots. Through a building. Realizing that, his heart began to pound out of control.
What…is she?
Half of him wanted to bolt right there, to run as fast and as far as he could and never look back. The other half—the half that wanted to see the Coalition burn for what it did to his family—knew he had to keep Magali on the playing board if he wanted to see justice for Fortune. With that in mind, Jersey said a mental prayer to whoever was listening, knowing that the next twenty-three minutes were going to be the hardest of his life.
Magali continued to wait out the Nephyr with the patience her father’s training had taught her. They die like the rest, she thought, repeating her father’s mantra. They just have smaller targets.
More of the Nephyr’s contingent of reinforcements flooded through the hole in the fence behind him, but Magali never allowed her scope to move from the Nephyr’s sanctuary, knowing that the Nephyr was the biggest threat—the other members of her team could take out the rest.
Killer, Wideman giggled again.
Shut up, old man, Magali thought. The Nephyr was starting to irritate her, hiding in his hole like a rabbit. She put a few rounds through the wall where she calculated he was standing, all clustered to his left shoulder to spin him around so she could get a shot at his face.
Just before she got his eyes lined up through the bullet ho
les in the metal, he swiveled back around and she missed her second volley. A smart one, then.
That made her think of the last time she’d seen Anna, being escorted from their egger’s hut by a Coalition collections agent. She wondered if Anna was on her way back to the Core to become a Nephyr yet. Probably not. Anna would have hacked the robot that took her to Rath and was probably even then wreaking havoc on either Rath or the Orbital. Magali guessed the Orbital, because Anna loved to look down on everyone.
The Nephyr was still huddling behind the building. Why wasn’t the son of a bitch moving? More Coalition reinforcements were running into camp, opening the doors to the mines, pulling out the eggers, but Magali knew the Nephyr was the biggest threat. She had to kill the Nephyr before he could kill her friends.
Then, just as she was getting ready to shoot at him again, his feet moved under the edge of the hut wall. A flash of gold caught her eye, the Nephyr creating its own exit through the flimsy aluminum sheeting in the back of the building. Like all of his kind, this one ran inhumanly fast, dodging and weaving like it knew Magali followed it with the scope, but it was moving too fast and erratically and her bullets took too long to reach their targets for her to have any hope of hitting him.
Damn, Magali thought, watching it dodge her, refusing to let her get a bead. As she followed it with her scope, she saw it weave through the buildings with unnatural speed, keeping its head turned away from her, bisecting the camp to burst through the razor wire on the other side.
It’s running, she thought, confused. Nephyrs don’t run.
Then it started to circle around, using the shrubbery as cover, and she realized it was coming for her. Fast.
Magali watched it through the scope, realizing it had somehow zeroed in on her position. She reloaded with explosive rounds and began firing at the rocks and shrubbery as he passed, hoping to drive some of it into his eyes and get him to stop.
