by Fonda Lee
“Is it?” said Kevin.
Yes, is it? Donovan’s heart had begun beating again, optimistic he might continue living. But he felt sick and confused. He’d been prepared to do his erze duty, to die without giving these criminals any scrap of information they might use. Now that they knew his father was the most powerful man in the country, what would they do? They would want to use him—or his death—in a more dramatic and calculated way.
“Kevin, what are we going to do?” Brett exclaimed, more animated than he’d been all night. “This is really big! Maybe we shouldn’t kill him right away. Maybe we can bargain for him, use him to go after SecPac, even the head dog Reyes.”
“You’re supposed to make bombs, not give opinions! Shut up and let me think.” A weird parade of emotions was shuffling across Kevin’s face: excitement, disappointment, suspicion, sober deliberation. He took off his ball cap. Underneath, his mess of dark curls was permanently imprinted by the hat’s rim. He ran a hand through his hair and jammed the cap back on, tugging the bill back and forth with nervous jerks. “We take him. And we get the hell out of the Ring Belt.”
They fled in a different car, a silver petroleum-burning SUV with tinted windows. The sort of inexpensive, common human vehicle that wouldn’t attract attention, it rolled along the ground at an erratic, rumbling pace and had to be manually controlled at all times. They put Donovan in the middle seat, his hands cuffed behind him. Steel wire was fastened around his ankles, then looped around the metal base of the car seat for good measure. Brett drove. Kevin and Anya sat in the backseat behind Donovan, weapons in hand.
Donovan was in pain. The bullets he’d taken had bruised him terribly. “It won’t work, you know,” he said. His voice sounded hoarse. “You won’t get any concessions or ransom. My father won’t negotiate with terrorists.”
“That would be a real shame,” Kevin said from behind him, “for you.”
Donovan closed his eyes briefly. “You don’t know my father.” Prime Liaison Reyes was the lead diplomat between the human government and zhree oversight in West America. He was responsible for the entire erze approval system upon which cooperation between the species rested. He couldn’t afford to put his personal feelings first, and he surely wouldn’t be cowed by Sapience, not for anything. He knew the risks inherent in Donovan being a soldier-in-erze; on SecPac’s trainee graduation day, he’d looked Donovan up and down in his crisp new uniform and said somberly, “Be careful, son.” He still said it whenever he saw Donovan leave on patrol, as he had yesterday morning. Because if worst came to worst, Dominick Reyes would not treat his son differently than any other soldier—ultimately expendable. Maybe for now, Kevin was under the impression that Donovan had some worth as a hostage, but the more Donovan thought about it, the more certain he became that torture and death had merely been delayed, not averted.
He dropped his exocel way down, to save energy. Fatigue and injury were sapping him fast. He could not tell where they were in the Ring Belt. He’d gotten only a two-second glimpse outside before he’d been shoved into the SUV, and all he saw through the windows now were streetlights casting orange light on unfamiliar roads. Even if he managed to escape, he wouldn’t make it far.
Kevin and Anya fished bagels from a brown paper bag. Kevin tossed the bag up front to Brett, who pulled out a bagel and chewed it as he drove. Donovan’s stomach hurt as he watched them. He could ignore hunger, but thirst was a different matter. He licked his dry lips. “Can I have some water?” he asked.
No one answered him. After a few minutes, he heard Anya unscrewing the top off a water bottle. She held it up to his face, and he tilted his head back so she could tip the water into his mouth. He drank greedily, trying not to let any of it spill. It tasted stale and a little funny, as if the bottle had sat in the sun for too long and absorbed the flavor of plastic, but it was the best water he’d ever had. When she took the bottle away, too soon, he said, “Thank you,” then wiped his chin on his shoulder and leaned his head back against the headrest. His head felt too heavy, as did his eyelids.
They drove on in silence.
He could tell now they were traveling north. The sky to his right had lightened. The buildings were thinning, the countryside broadening into a sea of windswept grass rolling over low hills. They were coming to the outer edge of the Ring Belt. Once they left the Belt, it would be harder for SecPac to locate him. They would not give up, though. Jet would never give up. Donovan had to stay alive long enough to be rescued.
The vehicle slowed. From the driver’s seat, Brett said, “Oh, scorching hell.”
The road was blocked. In the gray half-light of early morning, a crew of workers was directing heavy machinery—diggers, earthmovers, assemblers. Two workers were setting up signs indicating the road closure and detour. The three cars ahead of the SUV were slowly turning around, heading back the way they had come.
Brett edged the vehicle forward. “Kevin?” he asked anxiously, “What do we do?”
Anya pressed a hand to the glass, peering out the window. “The detour will take us back into the Belt.”
“We aren’t going back into the Belt,” Kevin said. “SecPac will be crawling all over it by now.”
“Drive right through the barricade?” Brett’s foot came a hair off the brake.
“Like that won’t set alarm bells off,” Anya said. “They’ll call SecPac in five seconds flat.”
Indecision clouded the inside of the car. One of the construction workers began walking toward them, pointing meaningfully at the detour sign. Kevin leaned forward over the seat back. His voice grew low and urgent, all business. “What do you see, Brett? Are those people clean, or are they marked?”
“They’re marked,” said Brett.
“How many of them?”
“Three. And one shroom.”
“Any of them exos?”
“I can’t tell for sure … I don’t think so.”
Kevin ducked down and brought his rifle up. “All right. When I say go, gun the engine. Drive right through those signs and stop next to that digger. We throw the doors open and take them out, all of them.” He braced the stock against his shoulder. “I’ll go for the shroom, you two handle its pets. You think you can manage that?”
Brett reached for the glove compartment. He took out a handgun and held it in his lap with his right hand, tightening his grip on the steering wheel with his left. His twitchy eyes skipped between the road and the rearview mirror. “Got it, Kevin.”
Anya took Kevin’s pistol in her hands. He nudged her with his shoulder. “No chickening out this time, Anya. This is for real. Trial by fire. You’ve got what it takes, or you don’t.” She set her jaw and nodded.
“Don’t do this!” Donovan swiveled his body around, twisting his injured shoulder painfully. These sapes were crazy. Kevin was crazy. Those were innocent people they were planning to massacre.
Kevin jabbed Donovan with his rifle. “On the floor. Facedown.”
“No.”
“Do it, or I’ll make you stay down.”
The worker walking toward them slowed, puzzled that the SUV hadn’t moved yet. Donovan’s hands clenched behind his back helplessly. He couldn’t just let four people die. He would have to start yelling and struggling, and hope the commotion warned them before he was silenced with enough lead.
Kevin jerked his head from Anya to Donovan. “Fry him again. That’ll keep him out of it. Brett, you ready?”
“I can get us through!” Donovan blurted.
Kevin flashed a sharp scowl. “What do you mean?”
Donovan pinned the man with a wild, imploring glare. “I’m an exo and a soldier-in-erze. I can talk to them, I can get us through. No one has to die. Take these handcuffs off and let me go out there.”
“Scorch that.”
“Listen, you asswipe.” He was talking as fast as he could now. “Even if none of the humans are Hardened, you have maybe even odds of killing the zhree. Soldiers will arrive in minutes and they’ll know
you were here. I can get us through without leaving a bloody trail.”
The man hesitated. Anya said quietly, “Let him try, Kevin.”
“He’ll run out there and warn them, then turn on us.”
“I won’t,” Donovan said. “I don’t want anyone getting killed. One of you can come with me. You’ll hear everything I say. If I make a wrong move, you go back to shooting everyone. Just decide, fast.”
“What do I do, Kevin?” Brett called. “Should I run this guy over or what?”
Two heartbeats of silence and tension so thick it felt like fog, trapped inside the vehicle. Kevin cursed. He leaned down with a pair of wire cutters and snipped the metal binding Donovan’s ankles, then reached around the seat and unlocked Donovan’s handcuffs. “This better work, zebrahands,” he hissed. “You better not be messing with me.”
Donovan opened the door and stepped out of the SUV. For a second, he wobbled and put a hand out to steady himself against the side of the car. Then, with effort, he brought his armor up to half strength, an on-duty level, and walked forward as authoritatively and confidently as he could manage, trying not to limp or wince.
The man he approached had a ruddy, sun-roughened face and broad shoulders. The blocky patterning on the backs of his thick hands marked him as a builder-in-erze. “Morning,” Donovan said, making his voice bored and a little weary. “I can see you’re setting up a work site, but I’m afraid we’re going to have to get through here.”
The man raised his brow, then furrowed it back down. Donovan watched the squinting eyes take in his exocel, his youth, his erze markings, and his damp uniform, streaked with dirt and torn with bullet holes. Gruffly, “You look like you’ve seen some trouble, Officer.”
“You could say that.” Donovan forced a grim smile and looked down at himself. “We flushed out a terrorist hideout last night. It got pretty ugly. Haven’t had much sleep.” All true. Donovan motioned toward the roadblock. “I’m heading north on urgent SecPac business. I can’t afford to lose time to this detour.”
The builder-in-erze looked past him. Donovan glanced over his shoulder. Anya had come up just behind him and was listening warily. He turned back to the man in front of him. “I’ve got three civilians with me. No one else behind us. Once we’re through, you can close it off.”
Would the man recognize him? Had he seen the early morning news already, with Donovan’s face plastered on the screen? No, he obviously hadn’t. He blew out an annoyed breath. “You’ll have to talk to the boss.”
The Builder was in discussion with the other two members of his crew, a man and a woman. As Donovan drew near, he saw that the man was an exo. He was lightly armored, and his dark skin made his exocel nodes less visible, so it wasn’t surprising that from a distance, Brett had not seen what he was.
Another exo! Donovan’s mind sprinted over the possibilities. Two exos and one zhree were more than a match for three squishy insurgents. Could he communicate his dire situation to this man somehow? Ask for his help?
The exo and the Builder were having a disagreement, the man’s patterned hands gesturing around the perimeter being marked out by landscape survey drones. The zhree was replying with equal vehemence, limbs waving, his voice hitting high excited notes. The mobile translation machine between them trilled and jabbered madly, trying to keep up with the rapid conversation. Finally, the Builder said something in the staccato rhythm of command, fins gesturing sharply to indicate the end of the discussion.
The exo’s shoulders tensed with internal struggle. He looked ready to keep arguing, but it was hard to defy a direct order from one’s erze master. The man grumbled something, scowling, but dropped his armor in acknowledgment. As he turned away, he looked up briefly in Donovan’s direction.
Donovan hesitated. What should he do? He had seconds to decide. Anya’s eyes were drilling into his back.
Kevin and Brett were crouched in the vehicle with high-powered firearms. The Builder and his exo foreman were unarmed and trained to use their exocels for construction work, not combat. What if they froze or cowered? The two non-Hardened human workers wouldn’t stand a chance.
Only the foolish aspire to die fighting. That’s what his father would say. Planning for survival—that is difficult.
Donovan stepped up to the Builder and dropped his armor respectfully. Panotin retreated across his skin. “Excuse me, zun,” he said. “I realize your crew just finished blocking this road, but my vehicle needs to pass through on urgent SecPac business.”
The translation machine began relaying his words in strumming musical notes and chirps, but the Builder didn’t wait for it to finish. Clearly, he understood English well enough not to need the machine’s help. “Soldier Werth did not inform me that any of his humans-in-erze would be interrupting this project. The construction of the auxiliary communication tower is extremely high priority.”
Everything was high priority these days, it seemed. Coincidentally, the centennial Peace Day wasn’t the only major event coming up; the Mur Erzen Commonwealth had a new leader, a new High Speaker, from the distant zhree homeworld of Kreet, who’d never been to the outer colonies. In a couple of weeks he was scheduled to visit Earth for the first time. It was a great honor that the High Speaker would begin his planetary tour at Round Three, and according to Donovan’s father, the momentous occasion had zhree of every erze—and, by extension, a great many humans—scrambling in preparation.
“I understand, zun,” Donovan said, not waiting for the translation either. “This came up unexpectedly.”
From slightly behind him, Donovan could feel Anya staring so hard her eyes were surely drying out. Was this the first time she’d been close to a zhree? It was hard for Donovan, who’d grown up in the Round, to remember there were still millions of humans who went about their daily lives only rarely, if ever, interacting with members of Earth’s governing species. He wondered fleetingly if the experience was living up to Anya’s expectations. Was she surprised? Repulsed? Disappointed?
The Builder was taller than average. Most zhree stood around four feet, but this one came up to Donovan’s chin. His domed, exocel-clad body bore the blocky pattern Donovan had seen scaled down on the hands of the workers. Each of the limbs arrayed circularly under the zhree torso could be used as an arm or leg; right now the Builder was standing on four of them and holding a computing disc with the other two. The “head” was not separate; it bulged up from the center of the torso. Six solid yellow eyes, like opaque glass lenses, were spaced equally around it. With a large heaping of imagination, Donovan could see where the derogatory term “shrooms” came from. Enormous, armored, six-legged mushrooms—that’s what War Era humans thought the zhree resembled.
“What is this urgent business?” The Builder spoke by drawing his tiny seventh limb across the hollow, ridged speech organ on the underside of his torso, like a violin bow across strings. The light and dark fins on top of the rounded body flashed in concert with the musical speech, like semaphore flags.
“I’m afraid I can’t say, zun. Erze orders.” That should end further questioning.
The Builder focused on Donovan by closing three of his eyes and regarding him intently with the others. “Why are you in that old human vehicle? Where is the rest of your squad, and who is this unmarked human you have with you?”
Crap. He was getting far too curious. Donovan fought to keep calm. If he began to armor reflexively, out of stress, it would only raise more suspicion. It didn’t help that the translation machine relayed the message a second later in a stern male voice that reminded Donovan of his father on his most humorless days. The Builder was not really male—the zhree were hermaphrodites—and the high, lilting musical tones sounded almost feminine, especially since he could see this Builder’s swollen egg sac. But Donovan thought of all zhree as male, because of their translated voices. The aliens had learned long ago that humans obeyed a low male voice more automatically.
“Every SecPac skimmercar is being used to patrol the Rin
g Belt, zun,” he said. “Only the undercover vehicles could be spared.” Donovan grasped for a plausible story as if hurriedly collecting spilled toothpicks. “I’m escorting three unmarked civilian witnesses to a detention center up north, to help identify terrorist suspects. That’s all I can disclose.”
“You are an adolescent,” the Builder observed. A curious pause. “But you do not look too healthy.”
Donovan swallowed. No kidding. Was it the flushed face? The sweat on his brow? The hitch in his movements? Facial expressions were totally foreign to most zhree, but those that worked closely with humans were more perceptive. Donovan turned his open hands palm up—a gesture the Builder would understand—and tried to give off a sense of weary good humor. “It’s been a tough week. With the High Speaker’s visit and Peace Day coming up, everyone in SecPac is being worked to the ground.”
The Builder flicked his fins in a gesture Donovan would have translated as a snort or tsk. “Soldier Werth ought to take care not to wear out his exos.” He closed two eyes and opened a different two in sequence, shifting his gaze to look in the direction of his own exo foreman. In a rhythm of grudging affection, “Sometimes it is easy to expect too much and forget that you are only human.” He lifted a third limb off the ground and waved to the man by the road whom Donovan had spoken to earlier. “Danielson! Let this soldier-in-erze through, then send out a Belt-wide detour alert and move the signs farther down the road.” To Donovan, “Go in erze.”
“Thank you, zun.” Donovan walked back to the SUV as casually as he could muster. Anya trotted close behind him, casting backward glances the whole way. Donovan went to the passenger’s side and opened the door, climbing into the front. As soon as both he and Anya were inside, he said to Brett, “Okay, you can go.”
