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by Annelie Wendeberg

  ‘There’s water,’ I point out.

  ‘Yes. A ferry ships the train across the channel.’

  “Channel” makes the wide stretch of water sound rather cute. But when I compare that to the vast seas, it’s tiny. ‘Will I see the ocean?’

  ‘Yes. Taiwan is here.’ He walks around the globe and points to an island in the pale blue.

  ‘The other side?’ I cough.

  ‘In total, we’ll travel forty-eight hours. Most of this time will be spent with an introduction to various assault rifles and an assessment of the situation. I don’t think we should start on explosives this early.’ He scratches his chin.

  Explosives. Assault rifles. Situation. Sure. I nod, matter-of-factly. Nothing can rattle me.

  I’m not good with bullshitting myself. And I need to get my breathing back to normal.

  ‘Kat,’ Runner says to the woman with the efficient movements, the severely short brown hair, and quick eyes. ‘The first simulation, please.’

  She clicks buttons on a rectangular…whatever thing, and the globe begins to grow hot. No, pink, all over.

  ‘This is the human population before the Great Pandemic,’ Runner begins. ‘And this is how it shrank during the pandemic. You’ll notice the characteristic pattern. Coasts and large cities clear before everything else. The first cities to disappear had three factors in common: a population size of greater than ten million, an elevation at or below sea level, and an air hub…’ He looks at me, making sure I follow. ‘…an international airport with at least fifty incoming and outgoing flights each day.’

  I nod as if I could grasp anything of what he’s saying. Ten million or more in a single city? How is this even possible? How do you feed so many people? Didn’t they all starve to death in winter? Maybe they flew in food, but from where? I shake my head; it doesn’t want to wrap itself around all this strangeness.

  Kat and Runner show me how ten billion people in pink die. It takes only seconds. Cholera comes down in purple, pushing pink aside like waves washing away grains of sand. Tuberculosis is yellow and has always been there, thinning the pink gradually, while purple swallows big chunks. Black is the blossoming of the BSA and similar groups, the spreading of violence, raging like fire across the planet, leaving only small and scattered dots of pink behind. Then, for a moment, the BSA dissolves to seemingly irrelevant black pinpricks, scattered by disease and war and a lack of people to recruit. It looks peaceful, the lit-up globe. Green and blue, but mostly blue.

  ‘How does the ocean taste?’ I whisper.

  ‘Salty,’ Runner says.

  Nothing happens on the globe until slowly, gradually, more and more of the tiny pink dots blacken, only to disappear a second later. Then it stops.

  ‘This is our current situation. The data we collected allows us to make a rough assessment of the BSA’s future development. Kat, the predictive model, please.’

  She pushes another button and all pink dots are washed away by black streaks travelling across the globe until Earth is wiped clean of human dots, no matter the colour.

  ‘We tested more than five thousand variations. The predictions all fall into a window of ten to fifteen years. After that, our species is gone. But that’s not the remarkable part. The next one, Kat.’

  I’m not sure I heard correctly. Did he say it’s not shocking that all of us will be dead soon? My palms are hurting and I look down at my hands. My nails have left red half-moons on my skin. I flex my muscles and try to breathe.

  Runner’s hand points to Taiwan — healthy-looking pink splotches, not a single black one. ‘This happened in the past three months.’ He gives Kat a nod. At the edge of the island, one pink dot after the other blackens then fades into nothingness.

  ‘It began at the west coast and slowly spread inland. So far, we have observed a population loss of twenty percent, until two weeks ago, when we lost contact. Not a peep from Taiwan since.’

  He walks to a large screen. His fingers fly over small buttons that have letters printed on them. ‘Satellite images show that the BSA stopped moving two weeks ago; one day later we lost contact. The problem is…’ He looks up at the woman. His expression reminds me of the day he lay bleeding in the snow.

  ‘In the past two weeks, Kat and her team screened every single satellite image we took of this region. They can’t find anything.’

  ‘Why is that a problem? The BSA is gone. Shouldn’t we all be happy?’

  ‘No, Micka, the people are gone. Within days, every single one of them disappeared.’

  My tongue is still a little swollen. Gingerly, I push it around in my mouth and let the bead click against my teeth. I like it, this oyster pearl on a steel stud impaling my tongue. When I bite down hard on it, a liquified gas will be released from the hollow pearl. I can choose to either die alone, or take someone with me. The toxic kiss. There’s something magic and sexy about it.

  The intrauterine implant sits silently in my teenaged womb, ready to poison whatever might lodge in there. I told them I don’t plan to get pregnant anyway. All male Sequencers have an implant, so there seemed to be no need for me to get one, too. They said it didn’t matter. They said that sometimes, it’s not the woman’s choice with whom she has sex. I told them my toxic oyster pearl will take care of rapists. The white-coats shook their heads no. ‘If all raped women killed themselves, there wouldn’t be any women left,’ they said. ‘You keep the pearl intact until you are captured by the BSA. Then you take down as many of them as you can.’

  With that, the topic was closed.

  I press my forehead against the window while watching the Tibetan Plateau slip past. It’s so near, I feel as if we could touch down softly any moment now. The rising sun paints the snow orange. I wish I could walk there forever, eating snow and sunshine.

  Runner believes that whatever awaits us in Taiwan will decide our species’ survival. If the Taiwanese were able to kill the BSA’s troops in such a short time, we could learn from them. But he’s not sure why they would be hiding now. They might still be fighting, concealed by the dense jungle. Ever since he spoke about the prospect of a good fight, his eyes shine clearer and his body stands taller. Runner is itching for battle.

  But chances are that it was disease killing everyone in only a few days. Soon, birds will transmit the pathogens to the continent and an epidemic will spread like fire through the whole of Asia. He’s told me of the Black Death, and how it travelled along trading routes from Asia into Europe. It happened in the fourteenth century, killing one-third of the European population. But the remaining two-thirds did not murder each other. ‘Our ancestors must have been nicer people,’ I said.

  ‘Unlikely,’ he’d answered. ‘They had primitive weapons, and killed each other in hand-to-hand combat mostly. Their witch-hunts were disorganised. We, on the other hand, are extraordinarily effective killers. Push a button and end millions of lives.’ Then he gave me a single nod and stuck a pin the size of a fruit fly to the cockpit door while I walked to the back of the aircraft.

  With my left fist tucked under the stock of his unloaded .50 calibre highly accurised rifle, I gazed through the scope, taking aim at the tiny target only thirty metres away from me. I exhaled, emptying my lungs of air, and curled my right pinky, the next finger and the next, and — in one smooth move — the index finger, too. The trigger produced a click. The green laser dot didn’t stray from the pin.

  ‘Good. But this rifle is made for long-range shooting. Once we arrive, you’ll need to learn triangulation and the effects of gravity, spin drift, and wind force on the bullet’s path. I’ll teach you how to hit a target from a great distance. And we’ll not be using the laser pointer.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  My indifferent answer gave him a pause. He took the pin from the door and stood. ‘The muzzle velocity is one thousand metres per second. This rifle doesn’t punch holes into people; it rips them apart. Whoever shows up in your finder, Micka, you own them. You own their lives.’

 
I remember how cold my face felt when Runner finished speaking.

  It was as cold as it is now. With my cheek pressed against the icy plastic window, I try to catch a last glimpse of the Tibetan Plateau. After a short moment, it’s gone.

  Is this how it ends? I wanted to take my own life and now I’ll take the lives of others.

  Preview of Book Two: Fog

  You darkness, that I come from,

  I love you more than all the fires

  that fence the world

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  My breathing is calm; my lungs know what to do before my finger pulls the trigger. Long breath out. Long breath in. Hold, release. Fire.

  But not yet. Not quite.

  My cheek brushes the stock of my rifle; the crisscross patterns carved into it feel rough against my skin. My index finger rests against the trigger guard, ready to squeeze off a round at Runner’s chest.

  The hunt began three days ago and I’ve spent much of that time in trees. He prefers to dig himself a hole in the ground, disappear and wait for his targets to walk past. I have a hunch he’s expecting me to do the same. But maybe he’s expecting me to do the exact opposite, in which case, I’ll be screwed.

  The circular view of my finder shows the forest in crisp shades of grey and green, with crosshairs and mil-dots stamped on it. The night-eye fastened to my scope works perfectly, but my vision doesn't. Until last night, my brain compensated for the monocular vision — my one eye receiving the combined signals of image intensification and active shortwave infrared through the scope, my other eye seeing nothing but pitch black, and both combined to a neat picture in my head.

  Now, it’s all jumbled. No matter how hard I stare, the world is drifting in and out of focus, the circular view flickers this way and that. If I shut my eyes for a few seconds, I would fall asleep and out of the tree. The muck a few metres below wouldn’t soften the drop much.

  My limbs tremble. Whether from being cold or exhausted, I’m not sure. Probably both. I’m not even sure if my soaked clothes help at all. My skin temperature is about 32°C, the outside temperature is 19°C. That’s 13°C difference; enough to show up in Runner’s night-eye, even with the ghillie — a sniper’s fuzzy camouflage suit — blurring my outline. Every now and then, I climb down, shed my ghillie, roll in water or muck to lower my skin temperature by unknown degrees, and then pull the ghillie back on to blur whatever thermal signature is left. I have no way of knowing how well this works, since I can’t look through my own night-eye and check how much I glow in the infrared channel.

  I think I slept for a total of four hours, a few minutes each time I couldn’t hold myself upright any longer. Four hours in a total of seventy. It’s stupid to sleep, but it’s even stupider to aim a highly accurized rifle when the one aiming has lost her sense of what’s up and what’s down. I could just as well be drunk. Same difference.

  The food problem hasn’t been a problem, really. There is enough to forage, although mostly low-calorie stuff like fruits and small nuts. I don’t dare eat the mushrooms since I don’t know them all yet and a poisonous one might slip my notice. If I lit a fire, Runner would find me in a flash. That’d be awkward. Hey dude, hold your fire, I have this extra delicious…

  Anyway.

  No wild goat or crab meat for me, although they are all over the island. I don’t dare kill a goat. It’s too large an animal to cleanly get rid of blood and guts and the excess meat I wouldn’t be able fit into my stomach. The carcass would attract attention and that’s the opposite of what I want. Raw crab tastes like snot. I tried it and almost puked. I had raw lizard, though. It’s tolerable as long as one doesn’t think about taste and consistency. But the thing was tiny and not one of its buddies was willing to cross my path after they’d seen what I did to lizard number one.

  I’m lucky, though. Runner hasn’t gotten a glimpse of me in three days and nights, and I’m uninjured, healthy, and strong enough to go for another six to twelve hours without toppling over. My rifle feels like a third arm, third eye, and second heartbeat to me. My trap is set. Despite the rain earlier tonight, my footprints are laid out clearly — from my far left all the way to my far right, before elaborately snaking back to the tree I chose as my hideout.

  I shift my weight and flex my fingers.

  The hairs on the back of my neck begin to prickle. Cicadas are clicking. Birds are hooting. All is as it should be. And yet…

  I’m not cold anymore. I move my head a fraction and scan the perimeter. The waning moon cuts leafy shadows across the forest floor. Fog begins to rise in silvery tendrils. And there! A movement to my right, subtle and easy to miss.

  Shit, he’s good. His thermal signature is nonexistent; his movements are exceedingly slow and most of his body is hidden behind a thick tree. I can’t get a clean shot. I’ll have to wait until he steps away from the trunk. From the little I can see, he seems to be wearing a mask under the hood of his ghillie.

  He doesn’t look up. I’ll be the first to know when he does. He moves forward a fraction. The barrel is pointed to the ground. He doesn’t seem to know I’m here.

  I inhale slowly, exhale, and hold. My index finger increases the pressure on the trigger. Just a little bit more. Come, Runner. Just one step farther. Put your centre mass in my kill zone.

  He takes that step and, in a move too fast for me to comprehend, he lifts his rifle and points the muzzle in my direction.

  I hear the plop at the same moment the pain spreads through my ribcage, slamming all air from my lungs. Shocked, I jerk, slide, and lose my grip. My hands flail, trying to catch the branch that now quickly evades my reach. Pieces of moss shred off the bark and fall with me.

  The shortest moment of wind in my hair.

  Then, the forest floor hits me hard on my back. I gulp. My lungs are a frozen clump of agony. My eyes burn. The singing in my ears drones out the soft noise of approaching footfalls. But I can see him, his weapon at the ready, eyes glittering in the moonlight.

  Fuck.

  He slips off his mask. ‘What did you put on your face?’ He bends down and dips a finger at my cheek. ‘Mud. Hmm. The thermal imager picked it up. Good hiding spot, though. Why did you wait? You could have shot me.’

  ‘Hhhhh,’ is all I can answer.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  The asshole hasn’t asked me how I am since we arrived here. He has his toughen-up-Micka project going. As if I needed any of that. On my second day of training — after he chased me through the surf for twenty-four hours and the sand rubbed my skin raw, especially the private places — I decided that whatever pain he dishes out, I’ll take it and ask for more.

  As usual, I show him my middle finger.

  ‘Excellent. Debriefing at sunrise, land-navigation training at oh nine hundred. You have two hours. Get patched up.’

  Yeah, sure. As if I have the habit of asking anyone to bandage my ouchies. I touch my side where the marker hit. My fingers find the slimy paint. I bring my hand to my face, but can’t identify the colour. Last time he used a purple so intense and sticky, I couldn’t get it off me for hours.

  I blink and turn my head to watch him leave. Slowly, the world drifts into focus. Runner’s gone.

  ———

  It took me twenty minutes to reach our camp. Kat was already up and about. She saw me limping past, raised an eyebrow and told me to follow her into the comm tent. Knowing that a physical would entail getting undressed, I shook my head. Besides, I don’t trust her. There’s something off with Kat. She’s tough as nails, efficient, and rarely expresses any emotions. But that’s just the obvious. It’s like she has this space around her, a bubble of harshness that keeps people away. When you dare to step into this bubble, her pupils contract and her eyes grow cold. She’s a communications specialist — not someone you’d find in the first line of defence, but I could swear she knows from experience how to kill. And something tells me there’s no soft core underneath all her rough layers.

  So when she grabbe
d me by my arm and stopped me half-way to my tent to examine me for injuries, I automatically switched to counter-attack mode. It’s like someone flicked a switch in my brain. There’s never fear. My skin heats and the flavours of cold brass and iron spread at the back of my tongue. Time slows and I know where precisely I have to hit and kick to cause a shitload of damage.

  But when her fingers pushed and probed through my shirt, I wasn’t so sure anymore what to do first: pass out from the stabbing pain, or punch her throat. She told me that fractures of the ribs are unlikely — seeing that it doesn’t seem to be hurting much — but should I experience breathing difficulties, I’m to let her know at once and Ben will fly me to a physician on the mainland. A pneumothorax isn’t fun.

  Haha.

  As if flying with Ben is any more fun. He would probably pull one of his loopings while I’m trying to hold on to dear life, puking all over his airplane.

  I wasted another thirty minutes on peeling my body out of mud and clothes (splattered with lovely pale-green marker slime), wiping the sweat and dirt off my skin, and replacing a few items in my rucksack. There’ll be no sleeping until we are finished with debriefing and land navigation training and whatever else Runner comes up with today. But I’ll not worry about it until I topple over. He can either leave me snoring wherever I plop down, or ask Ben to carry me to my bunk. Ben would be delighted, I’m sure.

  Right now, I’m wolfing down a bowl of Yi-Ting’s delicious crab soup. I love the spices she’s using. They come in all colours, aromas, and strengths. From the yellow flower petals that add the barest hint of sweetness, to the ground hotness of small red seed capsules that had once scorched my thoughts for hours. I couldn’t even hear properly. Not to speak of all the spilled snot and tears. I’ll never try those again.

  A hand touches my shoulder. ‘Micka? Wake up,’ she says in her sing-song dialect.