by Fonda Lee
“Drive,” came Kevin’s voice, low and dangerous, from behind. “Slow and normal-like.”
Donovan opened his window and waved thanks as they rolled past. A minute later, the SUV was speeding down the freeway, the Builder and his crew gone from sight. Brett let out a loud breath. He swiped his brow with the sleeve of his shirt. “Man, oh man. That was close.”
“Stop the car,” Kevin ordered.
Brett cast a darting glance at Donovan, then slowed the vehicle and pulled it to the side of the road. As he did so, Donovan felt the barrel of Kevin’s handgun come to rest against the base of his neck.
“What are we doing?” Anya asked.
“Waiting,” said Kevin. “To see if we’re being followed.”
Brett put the car into park but left the engine running. He rolled down the window and leaned out on his arm, fingers jiggling, watching the side mirrors. Silent minutes passed. In the distance, a pair of turkey vultures drifted over the old wreck of a wooden windmill. The rising sun reddened the long clouds streaking the sky. Donovan felt hot and woozy. He’d used what little energy he had left in the charade back at the construction site, and now he felt as if the inside of the car had become a strange, moving echo chamber throbbing in time to the pulse behind his eyes.
Kevin said to Anya, “What did he say to them? Anything that might have tipped them off?”
Anya thought about it. “I don’t think so.”
Kevin grunted. “You can’t ever be too careful. Don’t forget that. You never know how the shrooms are going to try to get you.” In a half whisper to Donovan, “That was a nifty stunt you pulled, Reyes Junior. Playing your cards real clever, just like your daddy. Now, move over to the middle seat, slow, and lie down with your hands behind your back.”
Donovan envisioned whipping around and closing armored fingers over the man’s throat. Instead, he did as he was told, because lying down had never seemed like such a good idea. He crawled between the two front seats and lowered himself across the middle row. He could feel how weak his exocel was when the handcuffs went back around his wrists. Everything was hurting again, worse than before, and when the SUV started moving, he couldn’t tell if it was traveling forward, or up and down, or spinning in place. His eyelids dragged shut and consciousness drained from him.
Donovan’s father had a lecture he used on any occasion he thought his son was not living up to expectations in some way, which by Donovan’s estimation was often. “The future depends on people like you—those who can straddle the divide between the species,” he would say, as preamble to why Donovan’s skills rating ought to be higher, or his academic evaluations better, or his comprehension of the zhree language more fluent. Sure. No pressure or anything. The last time Donovan had stewed silently under the barrage of heavy-handed Dominick Reyes rhetoric, he’d wanted to snap back, “You’re the Prime Liaison! Shaping the future between the species is your job, not mine!”
The first incarnation of the lecture had been given right before his Hardening. His mother had been gone less than a month. It had happened suddenly, without warning. She had dropped him off at school one morning, and partway during the day, his father had picked him up—something he had never done before. Donovan’s mother had gone on a trip, his father explained. One that might last a very long time. No, there was no telling when she would return. Sadly, she would not be there for his Hardening, but not to worry, his father was going to do something else he’d never done before—take a day off from his new, Very Important Job, to spend time with Donovan beforehand. They would go to the park and the ice-cream shop.
The reality of his mother’s abandonment came gradually. At first, Donovan kept expecting her to be there when he got out of school, or at least for her to show up in time to tuck him into bed at night. If she wasn’t there today, then surely the next day. It took weeks for him to realize that she would not be there the next day, or the day after that, or the day after that. Her belongings disappeared from the house; his father put out boxes of her clothes and shoes, her personal items, her little notebooks of scribbled poetry—and men came and took them away. That was distressing enough, but the thing that convinced Donovan that his mother was truly gone was the silence in the evenings. The raised voices, the arguments he had gotten used to overhearing before he fell asleep—they had been replaced by silence. Even his crying was silent.
His Hardening Day arrived.
His father had woken him early. Donovan was starving. He hadn’t been allowed to eat for eighteen hours beforehand, but he was too anxious to complain. They had driven to the center of the Round, to the Towers. Donovan had only visited the national seat of zhree government once before (so the place would not be too frightening for him on Hardening Day) and it was not yet familiar to him, the way it would be later. That morning, he was awed by the alien magnificence of the buildings, the way the curved walls and rounded entryways appeared to be knit together from unearthly metal fiber. He stared nervously at the battle-armored Soldiers guarding the entrances, their unblinking eyes watching in all directions.
They went into a special building that his father explained was used just for making exos. It was separate from the Hatchery, where the Nurses cared for zhree broods and oversaw the Hardening of their own kind. The Hardening of a human was different. The zhree had residual natural exoskeletons, an evolutionary trait left over from thousands of years past, before they’d developed the exocels that would enable them to become a space-faring, multi-planet civilization. For the zhree, living machine cells fused with organic structure in a seamless rite of passage that had been going on for innumerable generations. Not so for humans. Exos were still a tiny minority. Hardening was painful and dangerous.
Donovan stood in a semicircle with the other boys and girls. They ranged from four to six years old. That was the window of time that worked for humans; any younger and the child might not be strong enough to handle the procedure, any older and the body would reject the integration of panotin-assembling cells. Donovan’s father stood behind him, hands on his shoulders, as did the other parents behind their children.
Donovan looked around the circle of faces. There were thirty-eight kids, from all around the country. He recognized three of them from school. Jet looked anxious, his face screwed up a little, as if he might start crying. Vic and her twin brother, Skye, were standing side by side, giggling and poking each other in the ribs, while their mother admonished them to stay still and pay attention. Donovan dropped his eyes to the ground, his face heating with fear. Sometimes people died from Hardening. A lot of these kids didn’t know that because their parents didn’t want to scare them. Donovan knew.
“Jet said that it hurts,” he’d blurted to his father days ago.
“You will be unconscious,” said his father. “Afterward, there will be pain, but it will be manageable.”
“Is it true that some kids die?”
His father nodded. “One in twenty times, the process does not succeed. Either the child dies, or survives but must live with an exocel that is deformed or nonfunctional.”
Donovan’s face trembled. “Will I die?”
“You will not die,” said his father firmly.
“But what if I do?”
“You will not,” his father repeated.
“How do you know?” Donovan demanded, tears flooding his eyes.
Suddenly, his father’s voice took on an edge of anger. “Because you’re my son. I’ve sacrificed too much for you to die. Now, stop crying. The Hardening process is much safer than it used to be. You have nothing to fear.”
Donovan learned later that there were two casualties out of his batch: a four-year-old named Susannah Morrows, and Vic’s twin brother, Skye. He also learned, much later, that sixty years ago, the mortality rate had been 30 percent. Who knew how many people had died at the very beginning, almost a century ago, when the zhree had first attempted to Harden the legions of human war orphans who had fallen under their care.
A Nurse w
as making his way around the semicircle, walking on three legs in a rotating motion. With the other three limbs he was marking children off a list on a computing disc and scanning them for signs of illness or infection. He stood slightly taller than the children themselves, and when he reached Donovan he bent his supporting limbs so two of his solid yellow eyes were level with Donovan’s face. He seemed kind, and he moved his fins in a gesture of calming as he checked Donovan’s pulse and temperature. “Don’t be scared, hatchling,” he strummed, too quietly for the translation machine, but Donovan murmured, “Yes, zun,” politely, as he’d been taught.
As each child was checked off, the two nurses-in-erze, a plump, friendly young woman named Evangeline and an older grandmotherly woman named Theodosia, led the kids away from their parents and through an arched door. There were hugs and tearful partings. Some of the younger children cried and had to be carried out. Some of the grown-ups cried too; the others smiled with false bravery. Donovan looked up at his father. His father looked serious but unconcerned, as if they were standing in line in a store. Donovan relaxed a little. Everything would be okay. He just wished his mom was here.
“Do you remember what it means to be an exo?” His father held him at arm’s length.
Donovan nodded.
“When you wake up, you’ll be better and stronger than you are now. You’ll have erze status for life, and when you grow up, there’s nothing you won’t be able to do. Maybe one day you could even fly in a spaceship to other planets if you want to.”
Donovan nodded. His bedroom at home was cluttered with small toy spaceships, and he was jealous that one of his classmates, whose parents were engineers-in-erze, had visited the zhree orbital stations and the Moon.
“You will have enormous advantages and responsibility. Do you understand?”
He didn’t. He was only five years old. But he said, “Yes, Father,” and then Evangeline led him away. He looked over his shoulder. His father was standing silently, watching him go. He didn’t know it at the time, but everyone else, zhree and human, had been watching Dominick Reyes as well. They observed the new Prime Liaison’s public display of loyalty, his calm confidence as he sent his only child to be Hardened.
Evangeline led Donovan into a clean white room with a stool, strange-looking machines with long arms and tools, and a Hardening tank. He’d never seen one before. It looked like a large oval fishbowl, three-quarters of the way full with a slightly pink, viscous liquid. “Okay, can you take your clothes and shoes off for me?” she asked. He did so, folding his clothes neatly and setting them on the stool. He put his shoes on top of his clothes. “My underwear too?” Yes, his underwear. When he stood naked, shivering slightly, Evangeline said, “I’m going to give you a little shot now, okay? My, you are a brave little boy.”
To distract himself from the shot, he studied the gentle, swirling erze markings on Evangeline’s hands. “How did you become a nurse-in-erze?” he asked.
“Well, sweetheart, I had to apply. The shr—I mean, the zhree only need a certain number of human workers, so the Liaison Office has an application process to decide who’s qualified to be in erze. Unless you’re an exo, of course. Then you’ll be in erze automatically when you turn twelve and get your markings.” She smiled at him.
“My father works for the Liaison Office,” Donovan said proudly. He kept on talking, much faster now, because he was starting to feel nervous again, and he wanted his mom. “Do you know what ‘in erze’ means? It means a member of the erze, like a member of the family. The zhree don’t really have families, though. My father says it’s more like a … um, a tribe. And everyone in the tribe works together, as Nurses or Builders, or whatever. So that’s why ‘in erze’ also means, ‘correct’ or ‘good.’ ’Cause that’s what you have to be, to be in the erze, right?”
“You sure are smart,” said Evangeline. “Why don’t you get into that big bowl of pink jelly and see what it feels like? I bet it would be super fun to swim in.” She helped him up the two steps and into the tank.
“It feels wet and squishy,” he said.
“Can you put this little mask over your head? That’s it. See how it’s connected to a tube with air in it? You can even put your head underwater and still breathe. Now, just lie down and relax …”
His father had been wrong. When Donovan woke up, he didn’t feel better and stronger. He felt like he was dying. He sweated, and thrashed, and sobbed for his mother. His heart raced so fast he thought it would burn up in his chest, then throbbed so slowly he was sure each beat would be its last. A Nurse came by his bed regularly to check on him, trilling and humming instructions to a fat nurse-in-erze, not Evangeline, someone whose name he didn’t know. They gave him fluids, and medication for the pain, but not too much, so the drugs would not interfere with the Hardening.
The Hardening was like having a million fire ants crawling under his skin and inside his bones and in his brain. He wept and begged for it to stop. His frail human body was being conquered and remade. For four days he burned with fever, shook with chills, and passed in and out of consciousness and delirium. He hallucinated that his mom was there, soothing him and kissing him with cool lips. His father was not there during the day, but twice Donovan awoke at night to see him sitting by his bed, watching him with hands folded in his lap, a motionless shape in the darkness. He hated his father.
On the fifth day, the Nurse declared he would survive. The fat nurse-in-erze duct-taped fleece mittens to his hands so he couldn’t scratch and pick at the erupting exocel nodes, which burned and itched. They broke out in the usual pattern: up the length of his spine to the crown of his head, across his collarbones and down the front of his torso, along the outside of both arms and legs. His hair fell out, in patchwork clumps. By the eighth day, he could get out of bed, and by the tenth, he and the other surviving, half-bald, newborn exos had started playing games of tag in the curved hallways of the infirmary.
Jet was the first to do it. He wasn’t watching where he was going and accidentally bowled over a bad-tempered boy named Tennyson, who took a retaliatory swing at him. Jet flinched back and armored, just like that, but lost it an instant later and got punched in the ear. Still, everyone was so excited, even Tennyson, that Jet spent the rest of the day begging people to hit him so he could figure out how to do it again. Donovan was jealous. He could feel his exocel but couldn’t do anything with it, not yet. When the time came, after fourteen days, for the parents to take their children home, Donovan could only armor up by concentrating so hard for thirty seconds that beads of sweat popped from his forehead. Jet was already showing off by hitting himself with sharp rocks, which the nurses-in-erze immediately ordered him to stop doing.
It was exciting, discovering their new bodies. The only one who wasn’t giddy was Vic. She didn’t care. She sat curled in the corner, crying for her brother.
In a rare show of indulgence, Donovan’s father let him spend his first few days back at home doing whatever he wanted: staying up late, watching cartoons, eating cake in the morning. His father was busier than ever. He arranged for a fifteen-year-old exo named Jamieson to watch over Donovan and help him begin to control his exocel.
Jamieson set Donovan’s toy tool bench on the floor between them. “Look,” he said. He extended his armor out to a flat point on the tip of his index finger and used it as a screwdriver on one of the plastic screws. He made a fist, encased it in armor, and hammered down one of the nails. He formed the outside flat of his hand into a sharp blade, set it against a block of wood, and tapped it with his other hand, making a small pile of shavings.
Donovan was impressed. “I can’t do that,” he said morosely.
“You’ll learn, little guy. You’re going to love it.”
“Do you love being an exo?”
Jamieson hesitated. “There are people who don’t like us,” he said. “People outside the Round, people who aren’t in erze. But so long as you stick with your own kind, it’s great. If you get chosen and marked by
a good erze, you’ve got it made. You’ll always have a good job, a nice house”—he gestured to Donovan’s home—“and you’ll live twice as long as those poor suckers who are just made out of meat. Maybe you’ll even have your dad’s job someday.”
Donovan made a face. “I hope not.” His father’s job sounded terribly dull and complicated. Jamieson laughed.
Donovan went back to school, into an exo class. Much of their time at first was spent learning to build control and coordination. For the first few months, their exocels were erratic and flickering. Sometimes Donovan’s would start insulating him when he was already too warm, or go to full armor for stupid reasons, like someone sneezing nearby. But it got better quickly. Control came to him slowly, but when it came, it was fine and consistent.
One day, the teacher led the group of exo children, their heads fuzzy with new hair, into a grassy, fenced play yard where a Scholar stood waiting, surrounded by a cluster of older zhree hatchlings. Ms. Reynolds said, “Class, we’re going to be sharing our outside playtime once a week with our friends from Scholar Elni’s brood cell. Remember what we talked about: Always drop your armor before you ask a question, and pause so everyone who’s listening can hear the translation. We’re going to have a contest afterward to see who can remember all the erze markings.”
Donovan wasn’t paying attention to his teacher; he was fascinated by the concentric ripples of the Scholar’s markings, which he had not seen before. Earth, his father had explained, was primarily a military and trade outpost, whatever that meant; there were plenty of Administrators, Soldiers, and Builders, a fair number of Merchants, Engineers, and Nurses, and colonists of other erze, like Scientists, Scholars, and Artists in fewer number.
The two groups, humans and zhree, regarded each other silently from across a wary distance.
“I don’t like humans,” one of the adolescent zhree said at last, shifting his weight squeamishly. The translation machine was indiscreet enough to repeat him. “They look strange.”
