CROSS FIRE

by Fonda Lee

  All six of Therrid’s opaque yellow eyes had gone wide. “No one,” he said in a slow, adamant voice, “has ever attempted such a thing.”

  “But theoretically, it could be done, right?” Donovan pressed. “If I showed you Dr. Ghosh’s research, could you—”

  “No!” Therrid whistled so that the sound echoed down the hospital corridor. The Nurse stepped closer and brought his voice down to a humming whisper. “You’re asking too much now, Donovan. Suggesting I help you deliberately sabotage zhree biotechnology—”

  “Zun Therrid.” Donovan grasped the sides of the Nurse’s hull with pleading urgency. “You’ve spent your life caring for exos. Saving fifty or sixty thousand is all that Soldier Gur figures he needs to do. There’ll be so many of us left on Earth and we might have a fighting chance against the Rii if we didn’t have this hobble in our brains. If you could help me figure this thing out—”

  “Your own erze master refused to entertain the idea. Why do you think that is, Donovan?” Therrid demanded, his voice hitting high notes. Therrid wrapped two sets of pincers around Donovan’s forearms. “The inhibition reflex has been a mandatory feature of human exocels for as long as human Hardening has been in place. It was designed by the early colonists a hundred years ago to ensure that humans couldn’t use the abilities granted to them to turn against the zhree. That is the reason why Kreet tolerates the existence of exos at all. You saw that for yourself last year, when the High Speaker visited. Removing what the homeworld sees as a necessary restraint on human capability could turn Kreet’s opinion against exos completely. It would put the entire evacuation plan at risk, for exos of every erze.”

  “Right. We can’t have that.” Donovan’s voice was flat and cold. He dropped his hands to his sides. “Better to save a small, subservient population of humans than do something that might help all of us.”

  “Donovan …” Nurse Therrid said weakly. “The human exocel is a complicated thing. Even if Dr. Ghosh’s research is sound, there’s no guarantee that …”

  “I understand, zun.” Donovan stood up, no longer able to bear the pitying yellow eyes. “I should never have asked you to go out of erze like that. I’m sorry.” He’d known the Nurse since he was five years old; if there was any zhree he considered a friend, it was Therrid. Soldier Werth’s blunt refusal hadn’t felt as bad as this. Donovan turned and walked away, leaving Nurse Therrid standing in the middle of the hospital corridor, staring after him.

  He thought he might suffocate or lose his mind if he stayed in the hospital another minute. Donovan walked out to get some air and found the streets unnaturally empty. The Round was in a state of siege. People were barricaded inside their homes, frightened by the sight of the disintegrating spore vessel, the presence of Soldiers in the streets, and the news that numerous cities on Earth were burning. The late afternoon sky seemed gray and hazy; smoke was rising from somewhere in the Ring Belt. Donovan walked for thirty minutes before he found an open sandwich shop, where he ordered the first meal he’d had in over a day and devoured it in seconds. He bought sandwiches for Jet and Cass and began walking back.

  With his hunger abated, his steps began to drag with fatigue. His shoulder ached badly and he thought about asking for more painkillers once he got back to the hospital, but he didn’t want to talk to Therrid again. Donovan kicked angrily at a loose rock by the side of the road, sending it sailing into some bushes. He punched a fence post with his uninjured arm, leaving gouge marks in the wood. All these months, he’d done everything that had been asked of him. He’d acted as an adviser to the zhree zun, he’d supported the failed transition talks, he’d been a good stripe. Commander Tate and Soldier Werth and Therrid were all telling him there was nothing more he could do, that the enormous events happening now were beyond even their control, much less his. So why did he feel like such a failure?

  Because his father—farsighted, pragmatic, shrewd Prime Liaison Dominick Reyes—must’ve considered the possibility of this disaster unfolding. If he were alive, he would be able to see all the political angles, he would have some idea of what to do. What had he planned to accomplish with Dr. Ghosh’s secret research? Donovan rubbed his knuckles against his forehead as if he could wring some elusive insight from his exhausted brain. All his life, he’d felt as if his father expected something more from him. The future depends on people like you. What his father had always said to him wasn’t just the annoying parental rhetoric he’d always assumed it to be. It was the literal truth. Fifty thousand exos were destined to be the only human survivors.

  What am I supposed to do about it?

  Donovan reached the hospital and once again saw all the SecPac skimmercars parked outside. Doubt and despair swept back in like a cold tide. He was wrong. His father wouldn’t have been able to change any of this. He’d been merely one human, foolishly committed to the idea of interspecies partnership. Perhaps Donovan’s mother and her Sapience comrades had been right all along: the zhree were and always had been the enemy—Mur or Rii, it didn’t matter. The voice of Hannah Maxine Russell started speaking in his mind: Exos are a terrible thing, Donovan. Designed to serve an alien race, to divide and oppress other humans. They shouldn’t exist.

  Donovan’s guts clenched like a fist. That’s not true.

  Reluctantly, he went back inside the hospital. There were fewer people in the waiting room now, but an oppressive sense of post-disaster disorder still pervaded the sterile air. He helped a couple of Nurses (here to lend Therrid a few extra sets of pincers, presumably) who were having difficulty figuring out how to use the elevator, and eventually found his way to the room where Cass was sitting and talking with Thad, who was conscious but unable to answer her, on account of being hooked up to a breathing machine and having a tube in his chest. When he saw Donovan, Thad smiled from behind the oxygen mask and wrote on a pad of paper Cass had placed under his right hand: Glad you’re alive. Seeing Cass dig gratefully into the takeout bag Donovan handed her, he added, Didn’t get anything for me?

  “Hospital mush for you, busted-lungs lieutenant,” Cass said, unwrapping her sandwich and waving it in front of Thad’s face. “Mmm, meatballs.” Thad gave Cass the middle finger and scratched out: Vic okay? Donovan exchanged a glance with Cass and said, “We don’t know yet. Jet’s with her right now.” Thad wrote: Leon? Donovan hesitated, then shook his head. Cass’s momentary sense of cheer vanished. She put her sandwich down, uneaten.

  Donovan found Jet asleep, one arm pillowed under his head on Vic’s bed, his other hand holding hers, exhaustion having finally gotten the better of him. Donovan placed the remaining sandwich in its bag under his friend’s chair and sank into the empty chair on the other side of the bed, too bone weary to take another step. Sleep began sucking him down as well when he heard Vic’s voice. “No. Please, no,” she whispered urgently. “Not him too.”

  Donovan opened his eyes. “Vic?” He scooted closer to her. Vic’s eyes were glassy and bloodshot but open. She seemed to be staring past Donovan into midair. “They’re all dead,” Vic wailed. She thrashed her head back and forth on the pillow. “All dead. All my friends are dead. Jet, poor Jet …”

  “Vic.” Donovan gently grabbed her head and held it still. “It’s not real.” Wounded soldiers sometimes hallucinated the most horrible things. Vic’s delirious utterances made Donovan want to cry. Under his fingers, her exocel nodes were feverishly hot, and her armor was patchy across her neck and face, no longer doing even the basic job of protecting her wounds. “You’re in a hospital, and you’re going to be all right.” Donovan did his best to sound reassuring, but his voice shook. “I’m here, and Jet’s here. Jet’s right here, see?”

  Jet stirred, his dark-ringed eyes blinking open in alarm. Sitting up quickly, he leaned over his girlfriend’s terrified face, kissing her cheeks and brushing a trembling thumb over her brow. “Vic, I’m right here.”

  Slowly, Vic’s gaze pulled back and found them. Her eyes focused and the skin around them slackened in relief and dawni
ng lucidity.

  Jet’s face was cracked with worry. “I’ll get Nurse Therrid.” He started to get up, but Vic clutched his hand and wouldn’t relinquish it.

  “Don’t go. Stay with me, both of you.”

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” Jet promised.

  “No,” Vic whispered. “You’re leaving. You’re going far away and not coming back.”

  Jet sat back down and stared straight into Vic’s eyes, his mouth a firm anchor trying hard to keep the rest of his face together. “I’m not going anywhere. I was wrong, and I’m sorry we argued. I’m going to stay with you. Just get better, okay? I promise I’ll stay.”

  Tears began leaking out of Vic’s eyes. “You have to go. I want you to live. I was never a good reason for you to stay, Jet. I was never the right person for you, I always knew that. I just wanted to keep pretending that I was.”

  “What are you talking about?” Jet drew back, his voice full of hurt. “Why would you say that?”

  Vic closed her eyes for a second, then opened them again. “I have to tell you something,” she said quietly. “Just listen and try not to interrupt.”

  “Maybe you should rest instead,” Donovan suggested, increasingly alarmed by the sweaty pallor of Vic’s skin. “When you’re feeling better …”

  “You’re already interrupting, D,” Vic said. “You should hear it too.” She drew in a wheezing breath, ignoring both of their expressions of concern. “After we were Hardened, after Skye died, I tried to kill myself. I was only six years old and didn’t know what I was doing. All I knew was that if my twin was dead, I ought to be dead too, because we did everything together. I jumped off a balcony. I tried to cut myself with a knife. At first my parents thought I was just testing my armor, like all new exos do. When they realized it wasn’t that, we started going to a therapy group.”

  Vic licked her lips and tried to reach for the glass of water on the side table. Donovan propped her up a little as Jet picked up the glass and helped her to sip from it. “The group was for families who’d lost children,” Vic continued. “There was another couple there who’d lost their daughter in Hardening. After a while, the woman stopped showing up, but the man still came every week. Sometimes he talked about his daughter like she was still alive. Most of the time he just seemed sad, but sometimes he was angry. He said his daughter had been murdered by human ignorance and complacency. Those were the words he used. He didn’t blame the zhree. He blamed himself, I guess. He was a scientist-in-erze and he blamed people for making the wrong choices.”

  A slow sinking feeling had begun pulling at Donovan. Jet had gone entirely still. Vic said, “That man ended up going out of erze and leaving the Round. The next I heard of Eugene Nakada was last year, when I learned he was a fugitive affiliated with Sapience. I couldn’t believe it. We’d been in that support group together for so long and he was one of the few people who ever really understood how I felt about losing Skye.” Vic swallowed with difficulty. “I hadn’t been to the group in years, but I still went onto the forum boards once in a while. When I saw Eugene’s face on the screen at that mission briefing, I sent him a message. I told him to get out of Denver.”

  Jet’s voice was a whisper of denial. “Vic, you’re delirious …”

  Vic began to sob quietly. “I tipped off the sapes that night, Jet. I caused the mission to fail. I knew Eugene was studying exocels, but I didn’t know he was dissecting murder victims. He used to say that if exocels weren’t this powerful, mysterious thing, then people wouldn’t want them so badly. And I always thought, maybe that would actually be a good thing.” She turned pleading eyes to Donovan. “I’m so sorry. You were almost killed by a basement bomb because of me. It’s been eating at me every day for months. I didn’t mean to betray any of you. I’ve tried for so long to be in erze, to be a good stripe, a good exo … but I’ve never been okay with what we are.”

  Vic’s lovely features seemed to break in a dozen tiny ways as she gazed into Jet’s stunned, disbelieving face. “I love you, but I’m looking forward to finally catching up with Skye.” She closed her eyes. “Don’t miss me too much; I don’t deserve it.”

  Vic’s heart stopped sometime after midnight. Donovan left Jet alone with her in the end. Just before he slipped out of the room, Donovan heard his partner whispering, “Vic, if you’re trying to make me angry with you so I’ll let you go, it’s not working. It’s not working at all.”

  Donovan went around a bend in the hall and curled up on a hard bench, his heart aching and his vision blurred. Therrid woke him with a touch on the arm some hours later, and Donovan, in that moment of sunken grief, couldn’t remember to still be angry with the Nurse. Therrid’s many eyes were dull and his limp fins trembled with sorrow. “I couldn’t do anything more for her, besides take away the pain at the end,” the zhree said. “She was just a hatchling. She should’ve lived for another hundred and fifty years.”

  Jet was gone. Donovan searched the corridors. He hailed his erze mate on the comm. Nothing. Donovan took the first free electricycle he could find and went back to their house.

  “Jet?” He walked up the stairs and pushed opened the door to his partner’s room. Jet was sitting on the floor in the corner, his shoulders hunched, his eyes red. He didn’t look up at Donovan’s entry.

  Slowly, as if approaching a wounded animal, Donovan stepped into the room and sat down silently on the floor opposite him. After several minutes, Jet said, “When Vic let Nakada off the hook that night, it tipped off Warde as well. She put the whole mission team at risk.” Jet’s voice was as flat as if he were reading from a script in his head. “She was a traitor.”

  Donovan said nothing. He recognized what Jet was doing—he’d done it to himself after his mother had been executed. She was a terrorist. She hated exos. She wanted to be a martyr. And he’d done it when he missed Anya: She’s a sape. A squishy who prefers sadists. Donovan was intimately familiar with the mental gymnastics of trying to convince himself that he shouldn’t be as crushed as he was. He also knew it didn’t actually work.

  “I knew Nakada had a personal connection in the Round,” Jet went on. “I even knew from interviewing his ex-wife that he’d been in a support group. I’d started digging into it, before the world went to hell. But I never connected the dots to Vic. I had no reason to. She was in erze. She was one of us.” Jet’s voice broke on the last words.

  Donovan squeezed his eyes shut for a second. “Don’t remember her unkindly, Jet. Trust me, it won’t help.”

  After several long minutes, Jet said, “It doesn’t matter anymore. Nakada, Sapience, SecPac—none of it matters now.” He looked down at his striped hands and clenched them. “We’re all scorched anyway. Nothing to do but wait for this sick joke to end.”

  Donovan found it hard to speak for a moment. He had never heard Jet talk like this. “Maybe it doesn’t have to be like that,” he said hesitantly. “There has to be a way we can fight the Hunters. If the zhree are determined to give up on Earth, then it’s going to be up to humans—exos and squishies—to defend it once they’re gone.”

  Jet raised sunken eyes. “Don’t be ridiculous. A planet full of squishies won’t stand a chance against an invading army of those monsters. And we’re only different from squishies because of this.” Jet raised his hands, armoring fully in a burst of frustration. “And this is useless against the Rii. All it’s good for now is a ticket off the planet.” Jet thudded his head back against the wall. His armor receded and his voice fell. “If we stay, our fellow humans will get us before the Hunters do. That’s what we’ll get for putting our lives on the line every day, for keeping the peace, for fighting Sapience all these years. The rest of humankind doesn’t give a damn about us.”

  Donovan stared at the carpet, jaw clenched. “It doesn’t matter if they give a damn or not. If they hate us or not. We swore oaths to protect people.”

  “We can’t even protect ourselves,” Jet whispered. “Or those we love.”

  “There’s a way t
o take out the trip wire that causes our exocels to fail. That’s what was in those memory discs. My dad was the world’s number one cooperationist but he hedged his bets. He went behind the zhree zun and asked Dr. Ghosh to research exocels. He must’ve known that someday we’d have to fight the Rii on our own.”

  Jet didn’t open his eyes. “Did you tell this to Soldier Werth?”

  Donovan exhaled in frustration. “He won’t consider removing the fail-safe. It’d be going against Kreet.”

  “I guess you’re just going to have to learn brain surgery on your own, then.” Jet put his head between his hands, a gesture at once both achingly vulnerable and entirely exasperated. “Oath and erze, what do you expect me to say? Maybe you’re right. Maybe your dad had some brilliant plan. But you’re not your dad, Lesser D. And I can’t help anyone.”

  A pressure was building in Donovan’s chest. “You’re saying we should give up. Follow Soldier Gur’s orders and leave everyone else behind to die. After seeing the Hunters and what they can do …” Donovan’s fingers curled in the carpet. I need you with me on this, Jet. I know you’re hurting, but I need you to be my partner right now. “We shouldn’t have accepted the evacuation spots. You said so yourself that we were wrong; you promised Vic we’d stay.”

  Jet’s eyes snapped open, blazing. “I said that before I knew what she’d done. We were nearly blown up in Denver. Warde escaped and publicly murdered a SecPac agent, rallying True Sapience and sinking the transition talks. All because Vic didn’t follow orders. She went out of erze for someone who didn’t deserve it, and she didn’t think about the consequences. You want to be worse than her?”