Exo

by Fonda Lee

  Jet, Vic, Leon, Cass, Thad—they were his fellow soldiers, his erze mates, and erze was closer than kin. If any of them needed his help, Donovan would stop at nothing to give it. They would come for him; he still believed that.

  Whether they found him alive or dead was a different question.

  He waited anxiously for what he could only estimate was at least another full day before Anya returned. Again, she brought him a cup of water and an identical pouch of preserved food. “I can’t live on only this, you know,” he said after he’d devoured the small meal. He was even more ravenous than yesterday. Screw it. He tore the pouch and licked every last drop of gooey stew from the crevices. “Do they know that? Exos need certain things …” He shook his head. He felt slow and stupid now, worn down by cold and malnutrition. Of course they knew. They were giving him enough to stay alive, for a squishy to stay alive. If his panotin-assembling cells starved, leaving his exocel crippled, no one here would care.

  “What’s going on?” he asked her. “Have they tried to make demands?” He needed to learn something, anything.

  Anya’s face was a shadowy oval. She was wearing different clothes and they did not fit her very well. There probably weren’t many Sapience operatives in the Warren from whom she could borrow clothes in her size. The bottoms of her pants were rolled up and the shapeless sweater she had on under her own jacket hid the sharp slope of her chest and made her breasts all but invisible. “I don’t know.” She shifted her gaze from his. “Even if I did know, I couldn’t tell you.”

  She reached to collect the cup. Donovan shot a hand out and grabbed her wrist through the bars. She gave a small gasp. “Anya,” he pleaded in a whisper, hoping the guards had not seen or heard. “I need your help. I really do, or I’ll die in here.” He knew the desperation was plain on his face. “Please. You’re a good person, I know you are.”

  She looked down at his hand. The stripes across the back of it stood out even darker than usual against his paling skin. Slowly, she raised her face. “What do you need?”

  The next day, Anya didn’t come. Instead, one of the guards gruffly ordered him to put his hands through the bars. Donovan was surprised to hear the man talk. He’d started to think of him and the other sentries as gargoyles, impassive and immovable. “We’ve been real nice to you, zebrahands.” The man had a droopy lower lip and the words LIVE FREE tattooed across his knuckles. “Saul told us not to touch you, not to talk to you, not to so much as breathe on you, and what Saul says around here goes. But if you try to slice or gut me with your armor, I will shoot you dead and see to it the good parts of you are sewn into my new panotin vest. We clear?”

  Donovan nodded. He put his hands together through the bars and the man handcuffed him. The cuffs ratcheted tight against his wrists and were the thickest manacles he’d ever seen; even an exo couldn’t hope to break or work free of them. The guards opened the cell and escorted him down the tunnel.

  The room the guards took him to was warm and brightly lit. Donovan couldn’t adjust to the difference and kept blinking because of how sharp and yellow everything looked. The rectangular space was plain and institutional; it did not look like it was part of the inside of a cave. There was a steel table in the middle of the room and two steel chairs, one on either side of the table. Donovan sat in one of the chairs, his hands—handcuffed in front of his body this time, thank erze—resting in his lap. The wonderful warm air blowing in from the ceiling vent made him irresistibly sleepy. He knew he needed to be alert and focused, but his skull felt like lead and his eyes hurt.

  The door across from him opened. Saul strode in. He was carrying a brown paper bag, which he dropped on the table before sitting down across from Donovan. The overhead light cast a sheen on the smooth center of his shaved head but didn’t seem to penetrate the deep crevices of his face. The man pulled a packet of smokes from his back pocket. He clamped a cigarette in his mouth and lit it, then tossed the packet on the table and leaned back in his chair. For a minute, they studied each other. Saul turned his head and blew twin streams of smoke through his nostrils in a long, thoughtful exhalation. Donovan glanced around the room. The two of them were alone. There were no obvious cameras, no big burly men ready to hit him or throw him against the wall, no suspiciously painful-looking equipment.

  “I brought you something,” Saul said at last. He opened the brown paper bag and upended the contents onto the table: a half-full bottle of water, a dinner roll, and a small disposable plastic cup with a lid—the sort of container in which takeout restaurants packaged sauces or salad dressing.

  Donovan reached across the table with his bound hands and picked up the cup. He popped off the lid. There was a thick, clear liquid inside. All-purpose machine oil, he guessed. Neutral-tasting, at any rate. He sniffed it. His fingers were shaky as he tore off a piece of the dinner roll, dipped it into the cup, and brought it to his mouth.

  He’d told Anya, “Mineral oil, or machine oil, or gun oil, it doesn’t matter. As long as it’s clean.”

  “You eat oil?”

  He didn’t like the incredulous, revolted tone of her voice. “No, usually I just take the supplement that all exos get. But without it, I need some hydrocarbons in my diet. My body breaks it down to make panotin. If I’ve been, oh, say, shot a bunch of times, I need more of it to heal.”

  “So if you don’t get it, you can’t armor?”

  He dropped his forehead to the bars. How could he make these squishies understand? “You can’t affect my armor without affecting me. If I can’t armor, it means I’m pretty close to being dead.”

  Donovan wiped the last bit of bread around the inside of the cup. He struggled to unscrew the water bottle, then drank eagerly, clasping the bottle in both his cuffed hands like a squirrel holding a nut. Saul watched him, expressionless. “Better?” he rumbled, when Donovan was done.

  Donovan leaned back in his chair. Now that he was finally warm and no longer painfully hungry, he wanted nothing more than to close his eyes and lie his head down on the table. He blinked hard and focused on the outline of the closed door behind Saul’s chair. “Where is she?”

  Saul crossed his thick forearms. “Your mother? Or the girl?”

  Donovan hesitated. “Max. She’s the same Max who writes those pamphlets, isn’t she?”

  “She’s a wreck. In shock. Crying and asking to see you.”

  He tried to process how he felt about this. Was it even true? “You haven’t let her come.”

  “No. You’re too dangerous.”

  He was dangerous? He was trained to keep the peace, to be judicious but effective when it came to using violence. They were the ones who’d been flinging rocks, baying for his blood. Donovan bristled. “You think I’d hurt my own mom?”

  “So you still think of her as your mother.”

  “I …” He didn’t know how to answer that. “I suppose that’s what she is. Even if she is a terrorist.”

  Saul’s straight chin tilted down. “And I suppose she still thinks of you as her son. Even if you are an exo. A biotechnological abomination designed to support an alien race in the oppression of your own species.”

  Donovan opened his mouth to spit an angry retort, then clamped it shut. He wasn’t going to let himself be baited into a ridiculous ideological argument with a fanatic. “I want to see her.”

  The man leaned forward, elbows on the table. “Do you think that’s a good idea? She’ll be ashamed. Disgusted. It might be better for both of you to pretend the other person—the one you remember—is long dead. That’s what I’ve been telling her.”

  The same thoughts had occurred to Donovan during his long hours of isolation, but hearing them voiced aloud in such a matter-of-fact manner by this Sapience commander seemed to transform them from worry into truth. Donovan’s hands closed into fists. “You’re probably right. But I still want to see her.”

  “What you want doesn’t matter here. You’re a prisoner. A bargaining chip.” Saul lifted his eyebrows. “Whether you g
o home or not depends on what your government decides to do.”

  Donovan’s eyes narrowed. “Give me a break. We both know you’re not going to send me home.”

  “You sound pretty sure of that.”

  “I’m not stupid.”

  “No, you’re not.” Saul leaned back, impassive. “The Prime Liaison’s office has issued a statement: ‘Under no circumstances will we negotiate with terrorists.’ There’ve been no attempts to make contact or to bargain for your release.”

  Donovan had expected as much, but that didn’t mean his throat didn’t burn with the sour taste of abandonment. He swallowed it down. Nothing cracks you, does it, Father? “I told Kevin before, I wouldn’t get any special treatment. I’ll bet he’s disappointed I’m not as useful as he thought I’d be.”

  “Oh, he still thinks you could be very useful. You’re a trove of information about SecPac and the government.”

  Donovan sat still. “He’s already tried to get it out of me.”

  “He didn’t have much time the first go around. He figures you’ll be more cooperative now.”

  Donovan’s pulse began beating against the handcuffs. “If you hand me over to him, it’ll be for his sick entertainment and nothing else. You won’t get anything.”

  The man rubbed his jaw. “I suspect you’re right. You exos are as bound to your erze as shrooms. Something they do to your brains when they Harden you. It would take a truly heinous amount of torture to break your compulsion to observe an erze oath, wouldn’t it?”

  Donovan remained silent. Saul made the loyalty and discipline of exos sound unnatural, something to be disparaged, as if humans hadn’t always valued those traits as well.

  “So what are the choices now?” Saul asked. “We execute you as a political statement or keep you locked in that cold cell. Killing you risks heavy reprisals and might stir up a backlash from moderates within Sapience. But holding an armored prisoner is too risky, we’re not equipped for it. Sooner or later, we’ll slip up and you’ll make us pay for it. Simpler to get it over with. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  Dealing with Saul was different from enduring Kevin. The man said everything straight up, no malice involved. Just discussing the situation as it now stood. Donovan found himself starting to nod, even though it was his execution they were talking about. Saul balanced risk against gain; he was deliberate and calculating. Between people like him and unpredictable mad dogs like Kevin, it was no wonder Sapience was so hard to beat.

  “Here’s the problem, though.” The map of deep lines on Saul’s face shifted and his voice softened into something quite unlike what it had been before. “I’d hate to lose Max. She’s a special lady, your mother—been with the cause a long time, like me. To think, after everything we’ve been through together, all the things we’ve survived, I’m going to lose her over this …” He let out a sigh of deep resignation. “She’ll never forgive me if I order your death. I’ll do it—God knows I will—but I’d lose her forever.” He took a slow drag on the last part of his cigarette. The tip of it glowed red. “This life, zebrahands. It turns you to stone inside, it has to. But we’re not all what you think: unfeeling killers. Even killers are not all unfeeling.”

  Donovan almost smiled. He couldn’t help it. This whole situation was some kind of dark comedy. “Sounds like you’ve got a real dilemma.”

  The crevices in Saul’s brow deepened and his contemplative air vanished, replaced once more with straightforward authority. “I’ll let you see her,” he said. “I’ll move you out of that cell. You can have food and a warm shower. I’ll even let you out of those handcuffs.”

  Donovan stifled the urge to lean forward and give away how good that sounded. “What’s the catch?”

  “You swear an oath to me, like what you have with the shrooms.”

  A noise of disbelief escaped him. “You’re not of my erze! You’re not even marked. I’m not going to swear anything to you. Even if I’m trapped here, do you really think I’d turn around and start helping Sapience?”

  Saul stubbed out his cigarette on the surface of the metal table. “No. You wouldn’t be able to. You lack the free will that pure humans have.”

  Slow rage boiled behind Donovan’s eyes. There it was again, the insinuation that because he was an exo, he was a tool, unable to think for himself. Extremist lies that Sapience spread to make uneducated squishies fear and hate exos. It shouldn’t have the power to affect him, but it did. He was worn down, hurt, and confused, and it was one more smack across the face. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

  “Prove it, then. Can you honor an oath to me, a human being, the way you do with your alien masters?”

  “Your reverse psychology crap isn’t going to work on me.”

  Saul nodded. He pushed his chair back and stood; his head nearly touched the overhead lamp hanging from the low ceiling. “I’ll let her know your decision.” He crossed the room and turned the doorknob.

  “Wait.” The thought of going back to that dark cell, to debilitating hunger and cold, isolation and despair … Donovan’s heart began knocking against his ribs. If—no, not if, when, he told himself firmly—when his fellow soldiers-in-erze arrived, they would need him to be ready and waiting, not locked away in the deepest part of the cave, helpless, crippled, half dead. He had to get out of that cell. He had to see the only person who might help him. “What … what kind of oath?”

  Saul paused, his hand on the doorknob. Slowly, he turned around. “An oath of neutrality.” He stalked back to Donovan. “You won’t harm anyone or anything in the Warren. You won’t try to escape or to contact anyone outside.” Saul leaned his hands on the table. The broad set of his shoulders blocked the lamp light filtering through the smoke-fogged air. “You’ll act like a guest here, not an officer of SecPac. Swear to this, and I’ll let you see your mother.”

  Donovan turned the words over in his head. What choice did he really have? Saul seemed to be sincere, and what he was proposing was infinitely preferable to all the other alternatives: torture, execution, long imprisonment. He wasn’t going to help the terrorists, just not give them any reason to kill him, cripple his armor, or keep him frozen and starved.

  “Okay,” he said finally.

  “Say it, then,” Saul said.

  “I won’t act against you or any of your people while I’m here. I won’t try to escape or contact others. While I’m in your custody, I won’t behave as a SecPac officer.” Saying it out loud was harder than he’d expected. He found himself speeding up, trying to get it over with. He touched his lips to the backs of his bound hands. “I pledge this on the Accord of Peace and Governance, which I protect, on the markings of my armor, and on the erze that defines me, from now until the coming of the Highest State.”

  There, it was done. Donovan felt relief, and a squirmy sense of guilt and discomfort. He’d only recited formal vows twice in his life: at twelve, when he’d been marked as a soldier-in-erze, and earlier this year, when he’d graduated from training to become a full-fledged SecPac officer. What he’d just done was surely blasphemy of some serious variety. He’d sworn an oath to a terrorist leader. He’d invoked the Accord, and his erze, and even the religion he didn’t really follow, in front of a man devoted to destroying all of those things. And in some bizarre twist of logic, Saul was accepting it. Donovan averted his eyes. “Satisfied?”

  The man straightened up, looking down at Donovan with unreadable, heavy-lidded eyes. “Yes. And here’s my promise in return. If I think for even one second you’re not keeping your word, I’ll do what Kevin should have done to begin with: I’ll break Max’s heart and end your sorry life.”

  Saul left without another word. When the door opened again several minutes later, Anya came in. At the sight of her, something loosened inside of Donovan’s chest. He smiled at her, and for a second, she smiled back, her small mouth rising before she caught it and made her face serious again. It had been there, though, for a moment—a real smile.


  Anya held a key. She unlocked his heavy handcuffs and he rubbed his wrists, gingerly layering his armor from his elbows out to his fingertips, trying to return feeling to his hands. The girl took a step back at the sight of his sluggish exocel crawling across his skin. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t do anything. I promised.”

  “I know.”

  She led him out of the room. The two guards outside the door followed several paces behind, tense and suspicious, cradling their rifles. Donovan caught them exchanging disbelieving glances. Can you believe this? Saul is letting an armored stripe walk around. He kept his hands visible, and his movements steady and deliberate. If he spooked them, he wouldn’t be surprised if they sent a volley of bullets ricocheting through the tunnel, hitting Anya and each other in the process.

  They took several sharp turns through corridors marked with symbols—upside-down triangles, hash marks, random letters—their meanings known only to Sapience operatives. This place must be huge and well designed to be defended. Donovan ran a hand along the concrete-reinforced wall nearest to him. His fingers came away damp. The ceiling was bare cave rock with curious mineral formations that looked like popcorn and others that looked like frost. “This place has been here a long time.”

  “Since the late War Era, is what they told me,” Anya said. “The army back then dug out and fortified miles of caverns.”