To See the Sky

by L. M. Brown

  He’d had the infochip I was seeking the entire time.

  It had been inches from my fingers when I drove into him last night. But he had waited until my soldiers and me were trapped in a standoff with DCR forces—sonicrifle to sonicrifle—to let me in on that vital piece of intel.

  I wouldn’t let him so easily get under my skin again.

  I might not have eliminated him, but I’d obtained the infochip I’d been sent to extract. And I’d taken Armise’s finger in the process. I choked on the laughter that bubbled up in my throat. Too bad the missing digit wasn’t on his firing hand.

  If nothing else, I would survive to kill him.

  Whatever this was between Armise and me ended here. Now.

  But even in my haze I was aware of how irresolute that promise sounded.

  I kept moving.

  Until I wasn’t anymore.

  Blackness overtook me in an uncontrollable instant.

  * * * *

  There were snippets of fading consciousness. Voices, all male except one—floating, flying—how was that possible?—hands, caresses—water, fresh not treated—fingers poking, exploring, and I was unable to protest or question their invasion. My throat was on fire, my tongue thick, desert dry and swollen. Then the distinctive beep of a hand held medical sensor. More voices, never speaking directly to me. Then pain. Singeing, harrowing, mind-imploding torment. I tried to scream, but couldn’t make a sound. My chest burned from the effort. My body arched off the table—bed?—and then someone was there, at my side, plunging a needle into the curve of my arm. The medicine—surge or something else?—was cool water dousing the fevered burn. Inch by soothing inch, the elixir travelled through me.

  My vision swam as the medicine slammed into my consciousness and tried to drag me under. I fought to keep my eyes open, to see where I was and with whom. I no longer wore my goggles or my respirator. The air I dragged in between my parched lips was clean, free of the sickly sweet tinge of Chemsense or the choking thickness of urban pollution. I didn’t know if I was a prisoner or among allies, but I had to assume I was still in the DCR.

  The room was dark. The wooden walls appeared to bend and twist and then I realised it was my eyes that were moving, not the room. I didn’t know how much of what I was seeing was reality. Figures moved around where I lay, calming hands, hunched shoulders, unintelligible whispers and a cool brush of cloth across my forehead.

  Thank you, I had the urge to say. But no sound came out.

  A hand on my head, the graze of a coarser fabric on my cooling skin, and my eyes started to close.

  Then the wet rag was gone and I saw a bandaged left hand pull away, the fifth finger missing, and I knew for certain that I was hallucinating.

  I let myself slip into the darkness again.

  * * * *

  When I woke up I was alone in a white tiled room, the distinctive high of surge blasting through my veins. I was more than awake. I was alive—whole, I could feel the strength in the tension of my muscles—and immediately antsy. The need to move was palpable. I scanned the room. I was in a bed, wires and tubes snaking from my arms, which were pinned to the bed with beige cloth straps. Under the white blanket that covered me I moved my feet. They were tethered as well.

  I wasn’t in the DCR anymore, of that I could be sure. Only the States had medical facilities this advanced.

  Which meant that somehow I’d made it back home.

  I struggled against the bindings holding me to the bed and a man appeared at my side. I remembered his face but not his name. A doctor for the States. I’d seen him before for routine physicals. He was the one who had stitched Jegs’ slashed face back together after her rescue in Singapore.

  I stopped fighting the restraints when the doctor stepped back from the bed and eyed me. I swallowed and cleared my throat.

  “How long?” I croaked out. My voice was thick, it took effort to push the words from my lungs, up my throat and out of my mouth, as if I hadn’t spoken in a long time.

  The doctor worked at the bindings on one side then the other until my arms were free. “We’ve had you under for almost two months. We repaired your shoulder and ribs as thoroughly as possible. We tried to give you titanalloy ribs, but your body rejected the material quite severely. Regardless, they’re also healed by now.” He moved to my feet, throwing off the blanket and undoing the restraints there. “I wanted to remove your entire right arm and give you a synth, but Neveed refused to let me take it off.”

  I glared at the doctor and tried to sit up. Synthetic limbs, synths for short, were commonplace but having one would have eliminated me from active duty. At least someone had been thinking about the long term when I’d ended up here.

  Two months. I’d been out for two months.

  I ran my fingers through my brown hair. It was longer now. Not the shave job I’d had done for my mission in the blistering heat of the DCR. I moved my hands over my eyebrow, my lip and the shell of my left ear, counting the hoops and studs. All of my piercings remained. That, too, was probably the work of Coach.

  “How many made it out?” I asked as the harsh reality of my situation settled in.

  The doctor shook his head. “Only you.”

  I cringed. Fuck. Over one hundred Peacemakers had gone into that village. But I was used to losing soldiers. It happened every mission. This particular mission had one goal though, and it was the battalion’s job to make sure I achieved it.

  “Who has the infochip?” I asked.

  The doctor’s face went blank. Unreadable. “I don’t know,” he replied, and I could tell his answer was a lie.

  I ground my teeth together. If all those soldiers had died and I hadn’t made it out with that chip I was going to have hell to pay. “It did come with me, right?”

  The doctor started removing the wires from my arm. “It’s here. But you didn’t hear that from me. Now sit still. I know you want to move. That’s normal. But you’re not getting out of this bed unless you comply.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him and held out my left arm, pleased to see it didn’t shake with the effort to hold it still. “What else do you know?”

  The doctor pulled the IV needle free from the crook of my arm and put a bandage over the drop of blood that appeared. He crossed his arms and stepped back from the table. “You’re going to have to talk to Neveed.”

  I snorted. Yeah, right. Coach was the last person I wanted to talk to after sending me to that hellhole that I’d barely survived.

  “How did I get here?”

  “Can’t answer that one either. A whole lot about you is classified.”

  I lifted my right arm, testing my strength. I’d definitely lost muscle mass but that would be easy to replace. Months at the most to regain my full strength. It would have taken years for me to adjust to a synth.

  “Go ahead,” the doctor instructed. “Rotate it around. Your shoulder is not going to be as strong as you remember. It was too badly damaged and you were away from care for too long. But I think you will see an almost full recovery. Not that it matters quite as much as anymore. They have called a truce.”

  My eyes met his. “To the war?”

  The doctor frowned. “What else is there?”

  I shook my head and dismissed him with a wave.

  That the Borders War had been waged for three hundred years and was finally over was of little consequence to me. I knew there would be celebration—a citizenry grateful to its leaders for ending the strife that had wiped four hundred million people from the planet. But their joy was premature. Unfounded.

  I steeled myself. It didn’t matter whether the Borders War was over or not. My mission, the one I’d been preparing for my entire life, hadn’t ended with my acquisition of the infochip. It wouldn’t end with a truce. And whether anyone wanted to believe it or not, I knew the real war was only beginning.

  * * * *

  It was another two years before active combat finally stopped.

  The world was in the midst of a
tenuous peace. After three centuries of brutal fighting, and the territorial lines of our world under constant shifts, the treaty—signed by the five leaders in the crumbling parliamentary building of the United Union—was hesitant at best. Fury still simmered just below the surface.

  With peace came more strife. This time in the rebuilding. In the awakening that was the aftermath. As if the world was collectively blinking the dust from their eyes, seeing their existence for the hell it was and finally realising how inequitable our society had become. An undying will to break free was barely restrained by the governments of the five countries that had been the victors in the end—if anyone could actually be called victorious in a war that had wiped out half of the world’s population.

  I was just one lightning strike in the gathering storm.

  In the time since the States had gained possession of the infochip I’d nearly lost my life over, the encryption hadn’t been broken.

  The information it was fabled to contain couldn’t be verified, let alone studied. And it was these details that were coveted by every government.

  So my superiors sent me after the only man who could be definitively tied to it.

  Armise didn’t seem surprised to see me.

  Maybe it was because he was in Bogotá. Of all the places in the world, he had to be in the city where I’d first met him.

  The city was different than the last time I’d been here. No longer as war-torn, no longer as destroyed. There were signs of rebuilding. The American Federation had emerged from the war stronger than anyone had anticipated.

  I remembered a Bogotá of crumbling ancient architecture. But Armise sat in a cafe that could only be called modern and genteel. Wire tables and chairs outside of a low angular metal building. A glass vase of spring flowers sat in the centre of the table. Armise was sipping from a white cup that looked ridiculous in his massive hands. But even that couldn’t belie his aura of power.

  Passersby gave Armise a wide berth for good reason. The man’s inscrutable face was scarred with marks that ran across his temple, and down his cheek. There were slashes on his jaw and neck I had given him. Then other marks I only knew the stories about from classified files. His frame was mammoth in comparison to the diminutive thinness of the citizens surrounding him. In the distance, the mountains surrounding the city towered high above the cranes that projected from the skyline.

  His left hand lay on the table, that missing fifth digit a reminder that should have brought disturbing and angry memories to the forefront, but instead made my lip twitch in a smirk.

  He wasn’t yet thirty years old but silver streaked from his temples. He wore a plain grey sweater against the lingering chill of winter. It clung to him. To his broad shoulders. He was bigger than I remembered, as if time had attempted to diminish him in my memory.

  Bogotá was a cloud-covered city that rarely saw sunshine, but the sun blazed in the sky, dissipating the pollution haze that hovered above every major city touched by war. I was sure the only reason for the blinding brightness was to mock me. Because I shouldn’t have felt as drawn to Armise as I was walking to that table.

  The feet of the chair screeched on the concrete as I pulled it out and settled across from him. My expression was flat, disinterested, when every nerve in my body was on edge. Armise was just as outwardly calm. Which was normal. And it shouldn’t have mattered that I knew that, but it did.

  “Missed me?” Armise said, breaking the silence between us, a sly grin spreading across his face.

  I sneered.

  Armise hummed in response and sat back in his chair. “Yeah, me too.”

  “I’d prefer to get right to the point. Since our last meeting was so eventful,” I dryly answered.

  Armise tapped the fingers of his left hand on the silver wire table. I didn’t acknowledge his recognition of what had occurred the last time we encountered each other. “And the point is?”

  “The encryption key for the infochip.” I wasn’t going to play head games with Armise. Being this close to him, able to smell the exotic mix of Singaporean balms he used to ease his muscles, was already affecting me.

  Armise crossed his arms. If my presence was having any effect on him he didn’t show it. “Obtaining the key became your problem when you and your supposed Peacemakers decided to barge in on my deal.”

  I leant forward and put my elbows on the table. “See, that’s where you’re wrong. For some reason my superiors seem to think you still have the key that will crack the chip. The key that should have been embedded in the chip.”

  Armise shrugged. “I don’t have the key. Never did.”

  I grunted. “Is that right?”

  “Would I lie to you, Merq?”

  My lips curved up into a smirk. I didn’t answer him. Instead I asked, “So who does have it?”

  Armise held out his right hand palm up. “Give me your hand.”

  I looked at him sceptically, my brows furrowing as I tried to read his expression, and didn’t move.

  “Give me your right hand,” he said with more emphasis this time. “The hand with the transport chip embedded in your wrist.”

  I took note of his slip-up, which could have been intentional or not. Either way, he shouldn’t have known that my transport chip was now permanently affixed in my body.

  Armise continued, “I’m going to give you the coordinates of where to find Ying. Chen Ying. He’s got the key.”

  I raised my eyebrows and let my disbelief show. “Just like that. No negotiation?”

  “The negotiations between us have nothing to do with that key,” Armise said with the certainty of a man for which the outcome was already settled. He knew something I didn’t. That much was obvious to me. I’d walked into an op where I was the weaker party. The exact situation I’d been trained too long to still be falling into.

  I considered him, picked his words and body language apart. But those two words said more than anything else.

  …between us.

  A wildness stirred within me that had been dead—bound, suffocated and laid to rest—since I’d returned from the DCR. I had to restrain the shiver that passed through me. Like the muscle memory drilled into me so I didn’t have to think when firing my rifle, my body remembered Armise. I felt too hot, despite the chill in the air.

  “You sure about that?” I asked.

  Armise nodded and flexed his fingers. I gripped his forearms, and he took mine, our wrists pressed together. The transfer of information didn’t feel like anything. But Armise’s skin against mine, his calloused hands, the brush of his fingertips, was too familiar. Too intimate.

  I sucked in a deep breath and pulled my hand away.

  His ease of giving up the information rattled me.

  I activated my internal comm and called my contact in the States to access the information in my chip. When the transfer was verified and I was told the analysts would take over the search for Ying, I sat back in my chair and studied Armise.

  He grinned. I glowered.

  Our business had been concluded within minutes. Much too quickly to justify the hours-long flight and weeks of preparation. I was ready for a fight and had been handed surrender. The man I knew didn’t give up. So there was another reason for his compliance. But from here it was the analysts’ job to determine if Armise’s information would pan out. My job was done.

  I scooted my chair back, getting ready to leave when Armise spoke up. “You want to talk about the rumours?”

  “When did you become a gossip?” I deflected.

  “Just talking, Merq.” He reached out and gripped that dainty cup, taking a quiet sip. “Catching up.”

  I huffed. Right. He was looking for information. Details about the backroom dealings I’d had with the Opposition. That I was supposedly a soldier for hire, regardless of which country the employer was loyal to, whether Opposition or Revolution, was a secret that wouldn’t remain undercover for long. Of course Armise would be well enough connected to hear the rumblings.
/>   I dismissed his question. “Men running scared. Grasping at any theory they think threatens their power. You know better than to buy into it.”

  “I know you better than I know any of them,” Armise protested in a quiet voice that caught me off guard.

  I scoffed. “Right. ’Cause a couple of alley fucks make us friends.” I emphasised the last word, an accusation, so he would have no doubt about the disdain I felt for the idea.

  “So it’s true.”

  “Fuck you,” I spat out.

  Armise sat back, stared me down, as if he was victorious. “That’s what I thought.”

  We stared at each other across the table—a challenge that didn’t need to be spoken because it was always there. A living breathing third entity at the table with us. Between us always.

  Armise frowned. “So that’s how it’s going to be between us?”

  I clenched my jaw. What the hell was he talking about? “What other way is there? Or has there ever been for that matter? We both have our orders.”

  Armise pointed at me. “You constrain yourself by blindly following what you’re told.”

  “I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Killing you seems like an excellent order for me to blindly obey.”

  “So do it,” he ground out, showing the most emotion I’d seen from him in our brief encounter.

  “Not until we get that key.”

  Armise seemed to be considering my words, and I wondered if he’d really given me the real answer by providing intel on this Chen Ying. I knew there was information he was keeping from me. We all had our secrets.

  In fact, I seriously doubted there was a place for truth in this world. Maybe there never had been and never would be. Those that hoped, that prayed to a non-existent god, were fooling themselves. Living a lie.

  There were too many shades and shadows—differing perceptions—for the search for truth to be a valid journey. I lived in a world of shifting loyalties and selfish motivations—we all did—and to pretend otherwise was foolish.

  Armise sipped from his cup again, then changed the subject. “Did you hear your president’s press conference today? He intends to hold the games again.”