The two soldiers rolled her on her side. They both hailed from that new country that had been re-colonized in the last few centuries, a place where the blood of a thousand origins ran together. They were imperial in self-regard, and they spoke a faddish language that had swept the world. It was a great civilization in wealth and prowess, and arrogant, but she hadn’t bothered to learn its name. She had stopped learning the new ones’ names.
“What is this stuff?” asked the one called Seo. He tugged the strands of her kanaf, all that remained of the mystic fibers that normally cloaked her. Another thing lost in the battle.
“Can’t tell,” said the one called Kessler. “Fiber’s stiff, like Kevlar.” He tugged and it popped out of the slit in her back. “These six lacerations on her back are different from the others. Too symmetrical, not bloody enough, and this black stuff looks like it got… worked into it somehow. Almost like she’s attached to it.”
“They don’t match the other wounds. Maybe two different guys worked her over.”
“You’d need a scalpel to do this. Probably not even that. These remind me less of cuts and more of… gills.”
The butchers cut away the last of her kanaf. How long before it would regrow?
Kessler took her wrist. Ryn feigned unconsciousness. She remembered Kessler, the one who had injected her with the drug. Normally the only thing she liked about soldiers was the sound they made when she broke them. But these ones didn’t stink quite so badly, Kessler especially, and so she hadn’t yet mutilated him. She’d lost consciousness around him and he hadn’t harmed her. That didn’t seem typical of humans.
He attached a sensor to her undamaged wrist and she felt a prick to the inside of her elbow. Fluid tried to drain into her through the needle but her body stopped it. A “beep-beep” sounded from one of their loud machines.
“This bag isn’t flowing. No stoppage. What the hell?” Seo asked.
Ryn slitted one eye open.
“Don’t know, but there had to be four pints of blood in the camp back there between the post and where they tortured her. Should be tachycardic, but her pulse is strong, slow.” Kessler was a brown-skinned man with symmetrical features, eyes like black slate, and charcoal hair.
“You sound worried.”
“It’s too strong,” Kessler said. “She’s lost half her blood, ought to be in stage-four hypovolemia. She’s not in shock, not at all. She’s… stable.”
“Strong kid.”
Kessler absently massaged his throat and nodded. “Maybe too strong. She’s what—five feet tall? Sixteen years old? She weighed a hundred pounds, give or take, when I lifted her.”
“What’re you getting at?”
“Ever seen a girl this size throw a punch like that? She’s just a kid.”
“Fear and adrenaline?”
“Could be. My friend back home sometimes works with troubled kids. Juvenile offenders from all kinds of crazy backgrounds. She said you’d be surprised what these kids can do. One of them—barely twelve—once put a three-hundred-pound caseworker on crutches.”
“Good thing she’s zip-tied down.”
“Guess so.” He pressed fingertips to her hair and smoothed it away from the gunshot wound on her scalp. “I’m not a surgeon, and she’s scabbed over, so we’ll let the ER docs on the ship take a crack at most of this. Maybe stitch up this mess, though. Pass me those scissors.”
Seo passed scissors over her and she realized they meant to cut her hair.
No.
“Shit, she’s awake,” Seo said.
“Not with all the dope I put in her.” Kessler met her eyes and she peeled her lips back, showed him her canines. He didn’t shout, or curse, or sign himself with the cross, or throw salt over one shoulder—all mortals reacted differently to her eyes, to their cold depths and the spark of divinity that burned in her irises. She guessed her weakness had dimmed the spark, because he only shivered.
Ryn jerked at her plastic bonds. She twisted her spine in every way a spine could bend and a few more. Both men jerked away from her. “Fuck!” Seo shouted.
“Everything okay back there?” called someone from the cockpit.
“It’s a scene from The Exorcist!”
Her gaze narrowed on the scissors and she sensed some give in the plastic tie binding her right wrist, where he’d tied it looser because of the metal shard embedded there. They had sawed the spike off the post rather than pulling it from her flesh. She rotated her wrist faster and faster, using her blood as lubricant, never mind the bolt of pain that fired up her arm so sharply that she felt it in her jaw.
“Hey, easy, sh sh shh, it’s okay. I’m putting them down,” Kessler said over the flying machine’s engine. He lowered the scissors.
She followed the motion of his hand. The monitor’s annoying bleeps had sped with the rate of her heart.
“Do you speak English?” He touched his chest with both hands. “I’m Sergeant Kessler. This is my friend, Corporal Seo, and we’re not going to hurt you. We’re flying you to a hospital. Can you tell me what language you speak?”
Ryn didn’t understand. Soldiers were men with weapons, hard men sent to the serene fringes of the civilized world, who bent it and subdued it and filled it with loud noise for the sake of colored pieces of cloth waved around on a pole. The idea that a soldier did not want to hurt—especially a female—only confused her. What else were they for? Yet this one spoke of hospitals. “Soldier,” she said. “Soldier means no harm? No. No.” She hadn’t tried their language before and it sounded foreign to her own ears.
“Yeah, soldier,” Kessler said, patting the metal tags dangling from his neck. “Not a bad soldier. We don’t want to hurt any innocent people, or you, we were only hunting the bad guys.”
Ryn shook her head. “Always hurt. ‘Want’ not matter. Always women, small ones, old ones—caught by bullets, swords, spears. If not on purpose, then accident. Clumsy.” She spoke the last word like a curse because too few humans understood how wrong their clumsiness really was.
“I’m not clumsy. Let me fix your wound. I just need to cut your hair.”
She snarled.
“I don’t think she wants you to cut it,” Seo said.
“Really? You think?” Kessler glanced down at her again. “Okay, okay. What if I put the stitches in and leave your hair alone?”
Normally she stitched her wounds with her kanaf, but that was gone. “I do it.”
“I can’t let you. But I can tell you don’t trust me. That’s all right. Here,” he said, and rummaged for a tray bottom. It was reflective like a mirror and he gave it to Seo. “Hold this up for her.” She could see everything his hands did to her scalp now. “You can watch, all right? That way you know I’m not being clumsy.”
She glared, but until they untied her, she could do little. That irked her. Even worse, the cottony hold of the drugs had returned and she felt it lulling her toward the brink of unconsciousness.
He cleaned the wound and put sixteen stitches into her scalp.
“Done,” he said. “See?”
“Not good.”
“Was it clumsy?”
“No. Just not good.”
He chuckled. “Thankless brat.” She didn’t know what “brat” meant but it sounded good and bad at once, the way he said it.
“Let go. Let me go,” she whispered.
“Don’t worry. You’re not in clumsy hands. You’re all right.”
“No. Not in hands. No one’s hands. No one holds me.” Her voice sounded far away and her heavy eyelids lowered. She felt only the rattle and vibration of the flying machine, and then nothing at all.
~*~
Kessler stepped into the cramped briefing room on board the USS Tsongas, one of the military’s “floating cities” that deployed around the globe. It had the medical facilities—and then detainment facilities—to deal with the girl, and he’d been shuttled alongside her while the limitless wisdom of the military bureaucracy tried to decide whether she was a deta
inee, a refugee, or something else that fit into their check sheets. He was glad it was Major Blackmun who sat behind the desk, since he’d served under him before. Beside him was a bespectacled doctor with a receding hairline and his nose buried in a thick medical chart.
“Have a seat,” Blackmun said. He had a square, boxy head, with the hardened frown of a bulldog, and he put his glasses on with the noticeable disdain of a middle-aged man who hated the small betrayals of his body.
“Yes sir.”
“At ease. What’s this I hear about your transfer?”
“Garfield thinks I’m too slow on the trigger, sir. Fraction of a second. Wants to move me for the rest of my term, put me in an investigative role. Said it suits my personality better.”
“Can’t say he’s wrong. You’ve got great instincts, but you’re the kind of soldier who has to be sure before he pulls the trigger. That kind of caution will suit you where you’re going. Now. You’re here because we still have a puzzle to solve. You went and found yourself a stray, Sergeant. And nothing about her quite adds up.”
“No, sir.”
He motioned to a monitor on the wall and judging by the time stamp it showed footage twelve hours old. The girl sat in an interrogation room at a metal table, cuffed, in an orange jumpsuit. She didn’t move. She stared straight up into the camera, and from a distance her eyes were dark with bright sparks where the irises should have been. Kessler had never looked at her eyes and not shivered, this time included.
Blackmun never looked up. He kept his gaze steady on Kessler. “You don’t think she should be a detainee, do you. Why not?”
“Because they tore her up bad, sir. Never seen it that bad before, and I didn’t grow up in the best neighborhood. Broken bones, lacerations, bullet and stab wounds, two mashed-up eyes, burns, and those weird incisions on her back. I don’t even want to know what else they did to her.”
The doctor cleared his throat and said, “The report yielded little. They tried to get her to sign the consent form and she stabbed the nurse through the hand with a pen. However, we do think she was—”
“That’s enough, Dr. Mellon,” Blackmun said. “Yes, I read the report. They tortured her and she lost more than half her blood, although what concerns me is that a good deal of the blood on her hands and body belonged to other people. Her predilection for violence is a problem. She woke from her surgery and choked a surgeon. But beyond the violence, there are other questions.”
“Yes,” Mellon said. “Like how she’s back on her feet so quickly. She’s already got a red-cell count that’s off the charts.” The more he went on, the faster he talked. “Most of her wounds have mended. Her bones have mended. Her metabolism is unreal—I don’t mean high, I mean impossible—because she hasn’t eaten or lost any weight. My colleagues want to test her DNA, because we’re not even certain she’s genetically—”
“Doctor Mellon.” Blackmun silenced him with a glance, then looked back at Kessler and hit a button on his desk. “Then there’s this.” On the screen, which Blackmun still refused to look at, the time stamp went from a slow crawl to extreme fast forward. Minutes ticked by faster than seconds, but the girl didn’t budge. There was no jerkiness to her. She sat like a statue, a fixture as motionless as the table, unflinching, for eight hours. She stared through the camera, peeled back the circuitry and wires, and looked straight into the briefing room. Interrogators blurred into the room and tried to talk to her, and even when they put water in front of her it remained untouched. Kessler’s skin crawled.
Blackmun hit stop. The only indication was the frozen time stamp.
“What are you getting at, sir?” Kessler asked.
“I believe three things,” he said. “First, that she isn’t allied with the nuclear traffickers, and we lack any other evidence to suggest she’s either an asset or an enemy of this country. Second, that she’s a foreigner to the country where we picked her up, origins unknown, and clearly a minor at that, which, let’s just say, complicates things for an old man like me.” For as long as Kessler had known Blackmun, he’d had pictures of his daughters on his desk. “And thirdly, that she’s unusual in ways that make her… dangerous.”
“You think she’s a child soldier, don’t you?”
“You tell me. She won’t talk to us. You’re the only one to successfully communicate with her so far.”
“Wrong part of the continent,” Kessler said. “Also, she’s white and speaks some English, so she’s from somewhere else. Her verbal and interpersonal skills are stunted. Then there’s the violent behavior, physical toughness, and neither of you even mentioned the eyes or the filed canines.”
“Oh, not filed,” Mellon said. “There’s no evidence of dental—”
“Mellon, you can leave us,” Blackmun said. The doctor frowned, sighed, and left through the ship’s heavy steel door. When it shut, Blackmun said, “He’s one of five doctors who want to write on her for medical journals. I’m not having any of that. This operation is still classified. The girl is a problem. I need her to go away, quietly. Help me understand her, Sergeant.”
“What about feral children?”
“Like The Jungle Book?”
“Sort of. I researched it a little, and most feral children miss a developmental period. They don’t pick up language, or learn how to eat with a fork and knife or use the toilet, and they never develop an interest in other human beings. Not my impression of this one. She’s only half-feral. She recognized gestures, spoke some broken English. Sort of like a child who ran away very young, when she was halfway socialized.”
“Ran from what?”
“Usually a rural home. An abusive one. The wilderness is sometimes more attractive.”
“You think she survived where? The Fortress of Needles? I’ve read the briefing. Experienced survivalists have died there. One slip, one tumble, and you end up vivisected. The mission work-up explicitly forbade your team from engaging in that environment for fear we’d lose most of you. Then there’s the question of who she ran away from, since there aren’t that many white English-speakers in the vicinity.”
“Missionaries, maybe?”
“Then you think she could be American?”
“It’s possible. Have you asked her?”
“No. I want you to.”
“I understand, sir. What do you plan to do with her? She’ll want to know.”
“If we can’t figure out where she belongs? We’ll treat her like a refugee. But I don’t want her stateside unless we can find an institution for her.”
Kessler recalled the other research he’d collected on feral children. “I have an old friend back home. A caseworker out of New Petersburg. She has a lot of connections, and she deals with children—some very violent. I think it’s likely we could place her. There’s private money there for it, some kind of trust fund, and a lot of professionals are interested in feral children.”
“No research,” Blackmun said. “She’s connected to a black op. No research, no publicity.”
“Like I said, I know someone. I can take care of that. What about citizenship?”
“I’ll pull some strings at State. Grant her asylum for now. But make sure she’s not Russian, or British, or God knows what else first. And find out if she has parents, if you can.”
“Yes, sir.”
~*~
The girl slipped her cuffs twice and they finally stowed her in a small cell with a thick locking door, then stationed two guards. It felt to Kessler almost like a joke to wrap so much security around a hundred-pound teenage girl, but he reminded himself of the vicious left hook she’d used to damn near knock him unconscious.
He and the guards exchanged salutes and he glanced through the eye-level viewport into the cramped bunk. Her sheet had been draped over the side of the metal cot and she was likely beneath in a makeshift tent.
“Blackmun told us not to fuck with how she sets up the room,” said the guard. “Long as she stays put, anyway. Probably wouldn’t even understand us if
we ordered her to fix it.”
“She understands us.” Kessler reached into his pocket and took out an orange. “Open the door.”
He stepped in and the guard shut the door behind him. The echo reverberated in the narrow confines. Kessler settled on the floor, back to the wall and his side facing her tent. He listened, hard, for the telltale sound of breathing or the small scrapes of motion. None came. He only heard the distant hum of ship engines through bulkhead. She made less noise than settled dust.
He set the orange down next to his knee. Then he rolled it, so that it lay between his leg and the curtain.
He waited.
It must have been an hour. His mind wandered. The guard poked his face up to the window now and then, but Kessler ignored him. He never once looked entirely away from the orange because some part of him felt certain that if he did—for even a second—it would disappear.
At last, a small hand darted from the curtain, snatched the orange, and shrank back in the bat of an eye. He could hear her peeling. She took her time even though she must have been starving. After a spell, orange peels slid from beneath the curtain.
“You’re welcome,” he said.
Nothing.
“There are citrus groves in the Fortress. I figured you’d like oranges. My name is Kessler. Do you remember me?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“Do you have a name?”
“No.”
“What should I call you, then?”
“Whatever you like.”
“You should at least pick something. Otherwise, I’ll call you Butt-Face.”
“Then call me Ryn.”
“Are you afraid of me, Ryn?”
“No.”
“Then why are you hiding?”
“The eyes. They itch.”
The One Who Eats Monsters (Wind and Shadow Book 1) Page 3
