Exo

by Fonda Lee

  “You cannot judge a species by its appearance,” said Scholar Elni, addressing his pupils. “Humans are not so savage and unpredictable as some of those War Era elders would have you believe. No matter your erze, it is important that you understand how to interact with the natives. They were the apex species on this planet long before we arrived.”

  “Do they play?” asked a small Builder.

  “What kind of question is that?” the Scholar said. “Of course they play. All sentient creatures play.”

  Both groups eyed the balls and toys scattered strategically around the yard. Jet dashed out, grabbed an inflated red ball, and raced back to the human side. Emboldened, a few of the other kids made similar runs. The zhree milled toward and around them cautiously. “Don’t squeeze them,” one of the Soldier hatchlings warned his fellows. “They break.”

  “These ones are Hardened,” Scholar Elni said. “When they are a little older, they will be erze marked. So you see, they are not all that different from us. Treat them respectfully and humans will reward an erze with hard work and loyalty.”

  Donovan managed to claim a bucket and shovel. He had barely half filled his container with rocks when he looked up to see Jet standing in front of him, red ball still held with both hands. Donovan thought Jet looked like the kind of kid who might be here to steal his bucket. Very deliberately, he picked up another rock and put it in.

  “Is your dad really the Prime Liaison?” Jet asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you get to fly on his plane?”

  Donovan stuck out his lower lip. “No.”

  “You don’t look that special,” Jet challenged. “I’ll bet you can’t even catch me before I get to that tree.” He ran away.

  Donovan dropped the bucket and chased him but did not catch him. Jet was really fast.

  “Do you know how to sneak up on a zhree?” Donovan asked, trying to think of something to impress the other boy.

  “You can’t. They have six eyes. They can see all around.”

  Donovan pointed to a zhree standing awkwardly off to the side by himself. “Run in front of that one and do something really silly. I dare you.”

  Jet hurled his ball away without a word and ran in front of the young Nurse, whose name, they would later learn, was Therrid. Suddenly, Jet tripped and fell, hard, on his face. He lay still, unmoving.

  The Nurse’s fins shot up in surprise, then froze. After a long hesitation, he approached Jet slowly. Donovan imagined the zhree was wondering if he would be blamed for whatever inexplicable harm had befallen the human child. He nudged Jet with one of his limbs. He strummed some nervous words. He bent over, four of his eyes sliding shut, focusing his multi-directional gaze on the prone boy.

  Donovan padded up behind him, trembling with his own daring, and yanked hard on the zhree fins.

  The Nurse let out a startled, high-pitched trill. Jet leapt to his feet with a shout of laughter. He and Donovan ran away as fast as they could, hearts pounding in their ears. Therrid would get them back later, though, by stealing their shoes and hanging them out of reach from a tree.

  At regular intervals each year, an Administrator would come to observe and evaluate the children in the class. Donovan always did well in the evaluations. He knew it wasn’t because he was particularly gifted, but because he had an educational advantage. Dominick Reyes had business in the Towers at least once a week; now he brought Donovan along. The rules were simple: If Donovan followed along behind his father, silent and observant, he stayed. If not, he would be confined at home under the eye of one of his father’s humorless staffers, chosen especially for the task based on lack of empathy toward children. It was a no-brainer. When Donovan was not at school, he was trailing after his father, absorbing the zhree language and picking up the mundane details of his father’s work.

  Nothing about this seemed special or unusual to Donovan. Boring, yes, pointless even, when he would prefer to be running around enjoying himself, the way his mother used to let him. It wasn’t until he was a teenager, marked, in training to be a soldier-in-erze, that he seriously contemplated the idea that there were millions of humans out there, growing up so very differently from him and his friends. People in the Ring Belt and beyond, with no erze to belong to and no exocel to protect them. Squishies.

  A hand touched Donovan’s shoulder. For an embarrassed instant, he thought he’d fallen asleep in the skimmercar on the way home from patrol. He began to mumble an apology; then everything came crashing back so fast he jerked fully awake, armoring, wrists tugging against handcuffs.

  Anya pulled her hand away quickly. She gathered the collar of her jacket to her throat, warding off the wind blowing through the open SUV door, and stared at him over the top of pale knuckles. She held out a yellow blueberry muffin sealed in plastic and a stick of beef jerky. “You want something to eat?”

  Donovan looked at her blearily, then down at the food in her hand. His stomach was a tight knot of ache. If Kevin or Brett had been offering, he would have refused. They would only have pulled it away from him, maybe eaten it themselves in front of him. Anya wasn’t like that, though. He struggled up to a sitting position, then armored down and nodded.

  She popped the plastic on the muffin and climbed in beside him. Her thin fingers tore off a piece of the crumbly pastry and held it to his mouth. He leaned forward and ate it. It was as tasteless as baking powder, and he wondered pessimistically how old it was, but when she held out another piece, he took it eagerly. He chewed and swallowed, eyes averted. It was strange to be eating from her hand like this, his lips unavoidably touching the cold tips of her fingers. She smelled faintly sweaty—not locker-room sweat but girl sweat.

  When he’d finished the muffin, she took out her water bottle, opened it, and let him drink. She offered him the beef jerky and he tugged on it with his teeth to take off a piece. She watched him the entire time, her gaze as inscrutable as it had been when she’d placed the muzzle of the gun against his eye, her finger on the trigger. He felt helpless and humiliated. Also grateful and uncomfortably intimate.

  He turned his face away and looked around as he worked over the tough, dried meat. It was midday. The sun was shining down, clear and white, through the tall black stilts of scaly tree trunks. They had left behind the flat, open prairie and climbed into craggy hills, densely forested. The breeze coming in through the still-open door stung Donovan’s nostrils with the crisp scent of ponderosa pine. He knew where he was: the Black Hills. SecPac referred to it as RA3-1. The Risk Area of nearest proximity to Round Three, rated as having high levels of terrorist installations and activity.

  Donovan bit off another piece of the beef jerky and looked up at the empty blue sky. Scanner planes flew over the hills frequently, but there were a lot of places here for terrorists to hide. How much longer before SecPac found him? Would Soldier Werth send in zhree Soldiers for one missing human? It was unlikely but possible.

  They were parked on a narrow gravel road, in front of a steel sentry gate. Brett was pacing about fifty meters from the vehicle. Every few minutes, he would lift the rifle he carried to his shoulder and sight into the woods at nothing in particular. Kevin was nowhere to be seen.

  Donovan turned back to Anya. She fed him the last bit of jerky, and this time he met her unwavering gaze. Neither of them looked away, neither spoke. Donovan still felt weak, but the few hours of sleep, and the food, had taken the edge off the pain. He could think clearly again as he studied Anya’s face. Why would this girl want to be a terrorist? Kevin was a zealot, and Brett was a follower, but Anya didn’t seem like either. She was young and pretty, she had a conscience. She’d stood up to Kevin, twice. Would she go further? Would she help him if he could find the right thing to say, now, while the man wasn’t here?

  Before he could think of what that might be, she spoke. “You understand their language.”

  Donovan swallowed the remaining stringy mouthful of jerky. He nodded slowly. “Most of it.”

  “It sound
s like music.” Her head tilted slightly. “What do they call you? Do you have a name?”

  “Yes,” he said. He looked at the water bottle in her hand. “Can I have some more water?”

  She poured a little into his mouth.

  “So what is it?” she asked him.

  “What’s what?”

  “Your name.”

  Donovan cleared his throat. He whistled the three notes that made up his name in Mur, the predominant zhree language of the Commonwealth. The first long vibrating note, the same as his father’s, but the second and third notes tripping down the scale, while his father’s rose briskly.

  “That’s nice.” She didn’t smile as she said it.

  “It sounds different when they say it.” A human voice couldn’t make the strumming, vibrating sounds of a zhree speech organ. “And there’s a visual pattern that goes with it, otherwise the same three notes might mean something else.” He shifted slightly forward. “Long names translate better, but Anya might be—” He whistled two short notes. “Or maybe—” A slightly different variation.

  Her expression turned cold and sharp. “Why would I want a shroom name?”

  The crunch of boot steps, and Kevin’s voice approached. Anya hastily capped her water bottle and stuffed the empty plastic wrap in her pocket. “Wait,” Donovan said quickly as she scooted away from him and climbed into the other seat. “Where are you taking me?”

  Anya grabbed Kevin’s gun off the seat and slouched back with her legs drawn up. She rested her forearms on her knees, gun aimed casually in his direction, as if she’d been sitting that way all along. “To the Warren,” she said.

  Donovan craned his neck to see out the windshield. Kevin had paused at the sentry gate. He was talking to a tall man in camouflage fatigues and an M4 slung over his shoulder. The two of them shook hands, then embraced warmly. The tall man gave a signal to some unseen eyes in the forest, and slowly, the sentry gate swung open.

  Kevin gestured Brett back to the SUV, then returned to it himself. When he saw Donovan sitting up, his eyes traveled suspiciously from him to Anya. “He say or do anything?”

  “No,” she said. “He just woke up.”

  Kevin fished a granola bar from his pocket and unwrapped it. He held it out to Anya, but when she shook her head, he took a big bite of it and took his time eating it looking at Donovan the way a hunter might study an animal in a trap. Donovan felt a fresh wave of hatred for the man and another small ripple of gratitude toward the girl.

  Brett came up, and Kevin jerked his chin toward Donovan. “Doesn’t make sense, does it? For the Prime Liaison to risk his own kid as a SecPac officer.”

  Brett said, “What’re you saying, Kevin?”

  “I’m saying”—Kevin squinted at Donovan—“how can we be sure he really is Donovan Reyes? SecPac might be feeding us a false identity to keep him alive. They could be playing us. Pretty convenient how he got us through that little hiccup back there, wasn’t it?”

  Donovan stared at the man in disdainful wonder. “Does life as a terrorist get tiring?” he asked. “Being paranoid all the time, knowing we’re going to get you eventually?”

  Kevin’s face darkened. He leaned forward, his voice a hard whisper. “Let me tell you something, you worthless shroom pet. If you get me, there’ll be more patriots who come after. There will always be more, and you better believe we’ll keep fighting.”

  “Well, Kevin,” said Brett, “you’re the boss; if you think it’s safer to kill him, we should do it. But I don’t know …” Brett shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “I think it’s him. I mean, look at him. He friggin’ looks like Reyes, man. What are the odds of that?”

  Kevin scowled. Finally, he grunted. “Once in a blue moon, Brett, you do have a good point.” He walked around the front of the car and got into the driver’s seat. Brett climbed in beside Anya and pulled the door shut. The SUV grumbled to life and rolled through the sentry gate. For ten minutes, it navigated packed gravel roads that wound through forest and hugged steep rock walls, before Kevin eased it off the path, onto a flat spot well concealed by trees, and cut the engine. “Let’s go.”

  The three of them gathered gear and weapons from the vehicle, then nudged Donovan out at rifle-point and made him walk ahead down the path. The crunch of gravel gave way to the thud of dirt. The dust from the end of a long, dry summer rose up around the toes of Donovan’s boots. Birds warbled, flitting from tree to tree. The trail all but disappeared; overgrown shrubs dragged across their legs as the SUV fell out of sight.

  Just as Donovan began to wonder if they weren’t leading him deep into the forest to kill him after all, part of a building emerged: a short concrete structure thrusting out of the hillside, shaded by rock overhangs and tree cover. It would be almost impossible to notice unless a person was approaching on foot and searching for it.

  Kevin said to Brett and Anya, “They’ll question you both, separately, to check you out, make sure you are who you say you are. But it’s nothing to worry about. They’ll know you’re with me.” From the corner of his eye, Donovan saw Kevin put his arm around Anya’s waist and pull her close for a minute as they walked. “You’re not nervous, are you?”

  “No,” she said. “I’m not nervous.”

  Donovan could not say the same for himself. The little food in his stomach balled into a hard knot as he watched the steel doors begin to slide open like the maw of the hill itself. People weren’t taken to secret Sapience camps and returned alive. Once he went through those doors, the odds of SecPac finding this hideout that had eluded them thus far and storming in to save him were despairingly slim. He was walking into his own tomb.

  For a brief instant, he considered sprinting away into the forest.

  It would be a hopeless ploy. He might survive being shot, but he’d be injured and handcuffed with no way out of the wilderness. And now it was too late; his steps carried him through the entrance. Kevin walked close behind, his rifle never wavering. Two armed men, wearing helmets and panotin vests, shut the doors behind them with a metallic clang.

  They were in a cave. A crowd of about thirty people had gathered for their arrival, but at the sight of Donovan, they fell back as if jolted by an electrical barrier. A murmur of shock rose up and echoed against the rock walls and low ceiling. Donovan felt the muzzle of Kevin’s rifle jab into the small of his back. He walked forward, his heart pounding in his throat. Everywhere, he saw hostile stares, rough clothes and faces, unmarked hands—all of it stark under the intermittent glare of LED lights running down the tunnel walls, leading him deeper into the hillside. “Home, sweet home!” Kevin shouted. “Someone find Saul, will you? I’ve been out hunting and bagged a big one!”

  Donovan bit down. You had nothing to do with it. It was Anya who’d caught him in an unguarded moment of stupidity. He wasn’t sure why it mattered at all, but the thought of Kevin taking credit for his capture infuriated him. A rock flew out from the crowd and struck Donovan in the chest. “SecPac filth!”

  Donovan flinched. His armor responded, layering instantly in response to attack. The sight set the crowd off.

  “Shroom pet!”

  “Traitor! Collaborator!”

  “Exo scum!”

  Another stone came hurtling at him, then another. One hit him in the collarbone, the other glanced off the side of his head. They stung, but they were only small rocks. They couldn’t hurt him, not badly. These people, though—Donovan staggered from the force of their hatred. Their faces were twisted, their voices raised. Donovan’s hands felt hot and swollen in their cuffs. He fought against the instinct to battle-armor; it would only stir the crowd’s bloodlust. When these people realized rocks wouldn’t work, they would lynch him in some other way. His step faltered.

  “He’s a prisoner!” Anya’s shout was drowned out. “You’re not supposed to hurt prisoners!”

  Donovan half turned, worried for some insensible reason that by calling attention to herself, the girl might get hit by one of th
e flying stones. Before he could spot her behind him, the steeply descending tunnel ended. He took one more step and found himself stumbling into an enormous chamber—and into the center of a rebel camp. Behind the growing mob, Donovan glimpsed racks of weapons, ammunition cans, and pallets of supplies. The sound of machines being repaired clattered in the background; the cool, damp air was thick with the smell of engine grease and cooking food. Donovan raised his eyes. The cave arched like the nave of a cathedral, a few thin beams of sunlight stabbing through metal grates high overhead. More people stood on the catwalks that ran along rock walls encrusted with white crystal formations that looked as if they bubbled, webbed, and dripped throughout the cave. Men and women, even a few children, pressed close to the railings, staring down at the scene below.

  “What in the name of creation is going on here?”

  The rumbling voice preceded a man with a wide face and shaved head, striding toward them with a glower. The crowd pushed forward, bold and excited now. Someone shoved Donovan hard, and he fell to his knees on the stone. The approaching man bellowed, “That’s enough! We’re soldiers here, not a mob!”

  The spectators grumbled and swayed resentfully, but hushed and waited.

  The man looked down at Donovan, stunned. He turned to Kevin. “Warde, have you lost your mind?”

  Kevin stepped forward. “Nice to see you too, Saul. There are three tubs of supplies sitting in the back of the SUV. Blankets, antibiotics, ammunition, whatever I could get my hands on this time around. Toilet paper too, y’all!” At this the crowd laughed and a few people clapped. Kevin smiled as wide as a pleased hyena and motioned Brett and Anya forward with deliberate casualness. “I brought a couple of good recruits. This is Brett. He’s been operating with me in the Ring Belt for nearly two years. Knows his way around anything you can blow up or light on fire. Anya here—don’t be fooled by her pretty face. She’s going to be a crackerjack operative. I vouch for both of them.”