by Fonda Lee
The words tumbled from Donovan’s mouth before he knew why he was letting them. “I already am worse, Jet.” Vic had been his friend, and the way Jet was trying to paint over who she was with stubborn, grief-stricken scorn—it was as if a hand had reached inside Donovan and yanked the top off a kettle, and suddenly he couldn’t stop the guilt he’d carried for months from boiling over. “I’m more of a traitor than Vic was. Last year, when my mom was going to be executed, I tried to stop it, I tried to get Sapience to rescue her. I gave information to—”
“Stop,” Jet said, staggering to his feet. “I don’t want to hear this.”
“—to the Guerras.” Donovan got to his feet as well, words still spilling from him in an agonizing burst of shame and relief. “That day I convinced you to take off early from shift, I tried to send word to Saul Strong Winter.”
“Stop it!” Jet howled at him, his armor visibly rippling over his knuckles.
“The Guerras killed my dad. They used the information I gave them to do it. I’m the reason my dad’s dead, Jet, and I hate myself for it, but I couldn’t tell you. I couldn’t stand the idea of you thinking of me the way you’re thinking of Vic now, trying to convince yourself that you shouldn’t have ever loved her.” Donovan was breathing hard. “We made mistakes, but who’s to say we haven’t made mistakes in other ways—arrested the wrong people, kicked in the wrong doors, hurt someone who went on to hate us and become a sape?”
Jet’s battle armor was raised. His face was twisted with hurt and disbelief and a mess of painful, indecipherable emotion. “Get out,” he whispered.
“Maybe I am a traitor, but being in erze isn’t what makes someone a good person, Jet.” Part of him wanted to die with shame, but he refused to look away from his partner’s bloodshot eyes. “Trying to do the right thing is what keeps us in erze, whether that means following orders or not.”
“I said get out.” Jet’s hoarse voice trembled. “You squishy-brained head case, I don’t even know who you are anymore, and I don’t care. Just get out and leave me alone!”
Donovan opened his mouth again, but Jet took a single, menacing step forward and whatever else Donovan had hoped to say dissolved in his mouth. Wordlessly, he backed out into the hall. Jet stalked after him, put a hand on the door, and shut it firmly in Donovan’s face.
Donovan stood for a long minute, staring at the closed door, even more forbidding to him now than the one he’d faced when hoping to find Anya in the TransHabs.
Remorse washed in. Donovan let out a shuddering breath and dropped his forehead against the wood. Jet hadn’t needed that, not now—to be burdened with further evidence that everything and everyone he’d trusted was unreliable. Donovan put a hand on the doorknob. He would beg for his erze mate’s forgiveness and understanding, the way Jonathan had once pleaded before him. He would implore Jet for his help no matter what contempt his partner held him in. Because now, standing alone in the hall, Donovan had an idea, one that Jet himself had given him—a horribly insane, out-of-erze idea.
Donovan hesitated, then took his hand off the doorknob. He remembered all the times he’d been too sunken into darkness and grief and self-pity to be of much use, and Jet had gone on alone and done his job and held up Donovan’s end for him wherever he could. Because that was what the erze was about in the end, wasn’t it? Putting others ahead of yourself. Soldier Werth scrutinized eleven-year-old boys and girls around the world and chose the ones who understood that. Because armor didn’t protect anyone from suffering. People had to do that for each other.
He went into his own room and changed out of his torn and bloodstained shirt and jeans, rummaging in his laundry basket for his least offensively stale set of civilian clothes: rumpled pants, a shirt, a light hooded jacket that concealed the nodes on his arms and neck. From his desk drawer, he removed the envelope with Ghosh’s research and tucked it into his jacket pocket.
Jet was right. Donovan wasn’t his father. He had to stop guessing at what Prime Liaison Dominick Reyes would have done, and do only what he could do. And he could do something.
He grabbed an apple and a cereal bar from the kitchen. In the bathroom, he dug around in the medicine cabinet and swallowed the maximum daily recommended dose of over-the-counter painkillers. With a final glance back at Jet’s closed door, Donovan left the house.
It was not easy to leave the Round now. It would be even harder, he knew, to get back in. Every one of the six gates was guarded by Soldiers, many of them bearing Gur’s stripes. Fortunately, there were two unofficial passages, intended for emergencies but more commonly used by SecPac to discreetly transport important individuals or high-value prisoners in and out of the Round without garnering any public attention. One of them ran underground directly to SecPac Central Command, emerging from underneath the squat administrative building adjoining the Pen, the campus’s on-site detention facility. The problem was that the SecPac campus had been commandeered as a zhree military camp and Donovan had no idea if he could still move around freely and access the tunnel without being questioned.
He decided he had to chance it. Sending up a mental apology to his friend, he took Leon’s electricycle from the garage and drove it back to Central Command, this time avoiding the main approach and circling around to one of the side entrances. The first building on his left was the officers’ common hall. Donovan parked and went in the back door.
It was like walking into a wake. The common hall was one of the few places on campus that hadn’t been appropriated for zhree use, and it appeared as if a large percentage of last night’s surviving soldiers-in-erze had congregated in the corridors, some standing and talking in subdued voices, others sitting on the floor, staring into space or staring desperately at their comm unit displays for news about distant friends and loved ones. The large bulletin board that normally held notices and announcements was completely covered over with photographs and written tributes to slain erze mates. A screen was being updated every few minutes with SecPac’s confirmed casualties. Donovan slowed, his eyes drawn to searching for familiar faces and names, but he pulled his gaze away and didn’t let himself stop—there wasn’t time for that now.
When he was alone in the locker room, he allowed himself to check the latest messages from his cadre mates. Soldier Gur’s negotiated agreement with the Rii had become erze-wide news.
Maddison/R1: Is this for real?!! We’re being told to stand down and prepare to evacuate.
Fernando/R12: Same here. 242 stripes dead and they want us to open the gates and let in the monsters that killed them.
Jong-Kyu/R11: We had a force mustered to take back Ten but new orders are not to interfere. Commander Li is bursting his nodes furious.
Antonio/R5: Speaking of Ten, still no one’s heard from Amrita?!
Sariyah/R15: Managed to pull her last recorded comm audio from the global network. All I could find.
Donovan listened to the transmission clip. Amrita’s voice, louder and more urgent that he’d ever heard it, but still oddly, eminently sensible: “Command, we’re outnumbered. Our exocels are failing. We’re dying here. Send reinforcements, please.” In the background, there was a great deal of noise—gunfire, shouting, and some garbled reply from Round Ten’s SecPac dispatch, and then Amrita’s voice again. “Yes, sir. Please hurry. Thank you.” That was all there was. Polite to the end.
Donovan stowed his comm unit and closed his eyes for a long moment. There was nothing he could do for Amrita, or for Vic, or Leon, or the others whose names were scrolling on the screen in the hallway. But maybe, just maybe, there was still something he could do for those who remained. Palming open his locker door, Donovan grabbed a spare compact electripulse from the shelf, which he tucked into a concealed waistband holster. Then he rummaged around inside the plastic box where he threw random items—pens, empty ammunition clips, sunglasses, spare comm unit earbuds. He fished out a data storage stick and pocketed it.
In the common office area, he chose the workstation that was the far
thest away from anyone else and pulled out the envelope with Dr. Ghosh’s research. It took several minutes to copy over everything on the memory discs one by one, compact the files, and send them electronically to the Prime Liaison’s Office. Not to the public mailbox, where he knew it might sit for weeks before being looked at, but to the Prime Liaison’s personal account, which he could only hope and assume had been retained and transferred from Dominick Reyes to Angela DeGarmo. Just to be on the safe side, he sent them to himself and to Jet as well. He returned all of Ghosh’s discs to the envelope and tucked them back into his jacket pocket.
Donovan glanced around the office area. He was alone, but if anyone came over and asked Donovan what he was doing, he was going to have a hard time explaining. He tilted the workstation screen away from any inadvertently prying eyes and called up SecPac’s video security feeds. SecPac had numerous cameras situated throughout the Round—the fences around the Pen, the checkpoints at Gates 1 through 6, the airport, the interplanetary shipyards and landing fields of the Towers. At the system’s prompting, Donovan provided his security clearance information, then searched specifically for footage taken as close as possible to the Towers on the night of the Rii attack.
What he found wasn’t perfect—much of it was dark, confusing, grainy—but there was enough. A few seconds here and there that captured clear images of Rii Hunters as they swarmed the Towers. Donovan snipped clips of video and transferred them to the data storage stick. If he had an uninterrupted day or two to work on this, he was sure he could piece together much better footage, but he didn’t have that kind of time. As it was, he’d probably spent a couple of hours here already. Too long. He needed to get going. He copied one final snippet of video that made him wince—a Rii Hunter appearing in the corner of the screen, firing into a line of SecPac officers, killing three or four of them before being attacked in turn by two Soldiers. Donovan pulled out the data stick, closed everything he’d been working on, and shut down the workstation.
Running back out to the electricycle, he felt laden down with the weight of all the confidential information he was carrying in his pockets. Stealing SecPac data and taking it into the Ring Belt without authorization was egregiously out of erze—and to think, it was probably the least out-of-erze part of his whole scheme. He hissed out a breath from between clenched teeth. What did it matter anymore? The erze he’d sworn to serve and obey was falling apart before his eyes.
Feeling vaguely sick, Donovan drove past the stone sculpture of the Scroll and slowed for a squad of armed Soldiers crossing the road; they glanced over but otherwise ignored him. Taking a sharp right turn after the security gate to the Pen led Donovan to an administrative building attached to what looked like a garage with a thick steel door. To his immense relief, he saw that the guard box next to it was occupied by a single human—an older, non-Hardened reservist.
Donovan placed his hand under the reader; it verified his markings and exocellular body signature, and flashed a picture of his face and his SecPac identification onto the screen in the guard box. The guard looked between it and Donovan, in his civilian clothes on an unmarked electricycle, and frowned. “The tunnel is only supposed to be used for emergencies and priority missions, Officer.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Donovan, “but Gate 5 has been shut down for at least an hour due to civilian unrest and I need to speak personally with Officer Sebastian Thurber as soon as possible—he’s dealing with the riots in the TransHabs right now.” As far as he knew, there were still SecPac teams in the Ring Belt, guarding government buildings and erze-marked neighborhoods and dealing with the worst of the turmoil. He didn’t know if Sebastian was among them, but he was betting this guard didn’t either. When she still hesitated, Donovan shaped his expression into one of concern and urgency. “It’s about his wife, ma’am.”
Sebastian is married, isn’t he? Donovan asked himself. Yes, he was sure of it. Donovan crossed his fingers that the guard didn’t know the Thurbers personally and wouldn’t start any alarming rumors. “Oh dear.” She looked worried now. “Well, under the circumstances …” The guard touched the controls to open the door. It slid open to reveal a descending concrete ramp.
Donovan nodded his thanks, then gunned the e-cycle and shot down into the tunnel underneath the Round.
A mile and half later, the tunnel emerged on the other side of the wall, onto SecPac property consisting of warehouse space, concrete yards, and garages behind a high barbed wire fence with severe red signs warning against trespassing. Donovan had been here once or twice before. This overflow space was used for staging missions and raids, conducting training simulations, and temporarily holding larger groups of detainees. It was quiet right now, but the guards on duty were skittish. Donovan raised a striped hand and one of them said, “Be careful out there, Officer. It’s a scorching mess, like something out of the first days of the War Era, I imagine. No one knows what’s happening. Panicked people are ransacking and shooting.”
Donovan turned on the e-cycle’s navigation and drove through the Ring Belt. It felt strange to be doing so by himself, out of uniform, especially since every few minutes he noticed something that would warrant a stop if he and Jet were out on regular patrol: broken windows on houses, popping noises that might be firecrackers or gunfire, an overturned car, the smell of smoke coming from not too far away. He gritted his teeth and told himself to focus. He would only be wasting time if he tried to investigate all the incidents of chaos he came across—like trying to plug tiny holes in a sieve one by one while a geyser of water shot through.
The address he was looking for was located in a dense commercial district full of sand-colored brick buildings dating back to the first post–War Era boom, when humans from around the country had migrated here by the hundreds of thousands in search of zhree-sponsored work and housing. Driving slowly now, Donovan could make out a familiar but eroded blocky patterning carved over the entrances of many buildings: Builder Dor’s markings. Though of course it had not been Builder Dor but one of his predecessors who’d been erze zun way back then. The Builder erze had been one of the first to employ humans in large numbers. These old structures had once formed the center of a burgeoning town of postwar workers who’d helped the colonists to construct everything from the refugee TransHabs to new freeways and vast algae farms.
Today’s builders-in-erze lived in better neighborhoods in the Round, or in the newer parts of the Ring Belt. Now, even on the best of days, the Buildertown district had a slightly run-down and neglected quality to it. It wasn’t anywhere near as bad as the TransHabs, but the walls and sidewalks displayed a perpetually dirty and stained appearance. The cars gave off the smell of burning petroleum, and it seemed as if 90 percent of the people on the streets were unmarked squishies. Donovan’s long sleeves and fingerless leather gloves hid his nodes and stripes, but given that he was riding Leon’s gleaming electricycle, that only made it even more glaringly obvious to people here that he was marked. Even though they couldn’t immediately tell that he was an exo and a SecPac officer, they eyed him with naked suspicion nevertheless.
Donovan pulled up across the street from his destination and parked the e-cycle. He removed the slightly bent business card from his back pocket and held it up, double-checking the address. Is two months too long to call a girl back? he asked himself wryly. Then he took a deep breath and crossed the street to the office building of the Human Action Party.
The front door was locked. Donovan rapped on it. When there was no answer, he knocked again, louder, and tried to peer into the nearest window, which had thick metal bars in front of it. There was an intercom panel on the wall next to the door. He pressed the button and waited. No answer. He tried again and, frustrated, banged loudly on the door at the same time. At last a voice came through the small speaker in the intercom panel. “We’re closed,” it snapped.
“It’s the middle of the afternoon,” Donovan exclaimed.
“We’re closed to you,” the woman on the other end
clarified. “Leave before we call the police. Or friends of ours who aren’t as nice as the police.”
“Wait,” Donovan blurted at the speaker. “I need to talk to Anya.”
There was a moment’s hesitation from the other end. “There’s no one here by that name. And we don’t collect or give out any member contact information.”
“Yeah, she told me that,” Donovan said quickly, “but she also said that unofficially, you’ll pass on messages. I need to pass a message to Anne Leah Dodson, but she goes by Anya. It’s important.” He was afraid the person on the other end had hung up on him. He pressed the intercom button again. “Hello?”
“Who are you?” The words were slow with suspicion now.
“I’m …” He had to risk it. “Donovan Reyes. I’m a friend. She might not believe it, but I still am. And I need her help. I have something important, something that could make a big difference in the war that’s coming. I need to show her—”
The person on the other end hung up on him.
Donovan swore and kicked the brick wall. He jabbed the intercom button again and held it down. “If you can still hear me, tell Anya that even if she hates me, what I have to say is really important.” He paused, tempted to tear the black panel from the wall and try to force his way into the building. “Look, I’m not your enemy. Just let me in these doors and hear me out.” He rattled the locked doors once more, then backed up on the sidewalk until he could shout up at the second-story windows. “I’m going to stand out here until someone answers me!”
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
Donovan turned to see three men spacing apart defensively as they approached him. All three were armed. The one in the center who had spoken held a compact semiautomatic rifle at low ready. Another carried a pump-action shotgun and the third had his hand resting on the grip of a holstered pistol. They eyed him the way hunters eye a moose.
