Exo

by Fonda Lee

  Donovan looked around, impressed. Did those War Era generals know that more than a hundred years later their underground fortress would still be in use as a terrorist bunker? Maybe they saw the end of the war coming and built this place to last for centuries so their descendants could hole up and keep fighting long after they were gone.

  They reached a wing of the Warren dug out into small individual rooms, one after the other, like a subterranean dormitory. None of them had doors, just heavy canvas draped across the openings, like tent flaps. Donovan tilted his head to peer around the edges of some of the draping. “They’re empty,” he said.

  “I think it’s overflow space for when a lot of recruits or refugees show up,” Anya said. “But Kevin said that with winter coming, anyone who isn’t on SecPac’s target list would rather take their chances living in the Ring Belt, or up in Rapid City, where there’s reliable work, and food, and heat.” She pushed aside the flap concealing the room at the end of the row.

  It was a simple, bare bedroom. Compared to the dungeon he’d been in for the last several days, it was a luxury suite. The bed had clean, if worn, sheets and a pillow. The dresser had a heat lamp next to it, and through a narrow doorframe in the grayish plaster wall he could see a tiny bathroom with a toilet, a sink, and a showerhead over a stone floor and circular drain. “There’s a timer on the faucets; you get five minutes of water twice a day,” Anya said.

  Donovan turned to face her. “Thank you for what you did.”

  She gave a small shrug. “They told me to bring you food so that’s what I did. I told them what you said you needed.” Her hair hung loose around her shoulders. The damp underground made it frizzier than he remembered. She was wearing a better-fitting shirt today, though her pants were still too long.

  “I know, but … no one ever asked you to be decent to me, and you have been. So, thanks.”

  Anya bit her bottom lip. Her small white teeth were slightly crooked. “It’s not your fault, what you are. We don’t all have a choice in our lives, you know? So it’s not fair to judge people for stuff they don’t control.” She spoke with such righteous indignation that it reminded Donovan immediately of how fearlessly she’d stepped in front of Kevin’s gun. He shuddered at the memory, and all of sudden, he wanted to hug Anya.

  He missed his friends terribly. Exos did not do so well separated from the erze for long periods of time.

  An awkward moment of silence passed. “I … would really like to take a shower,” he said.

  The girl seemed relieved to be pulled from the brink of what might have been further conversation. “There are towels in the drawers. At least there were in my room. And soap. I’ll try to find you some clothes.” She turned and pushed through the canvas draping.

  Donovan followed a few paces and stood holding up the flap as he watched her walk away. The two guards were still in the corridor. They’d taken up position several meters from his room, where the tunnel widened. Oath or no oath, he was still a prisoner. Saul wasn’t stupid enough to leave him unguarded, or give him access to the rest of the Warren. Then he remembered the crowd of squishies who would’ve been eager to continue the stoning they’d been giving him, and it occurred to him that the protection of Saul’s guards went both ways.

  He went to the drawer and found two slightly threadbare folded towels and a bar of clear soap. He couldn’t get out of the rough jumpsuit fast enough. He was tempted to shred it in his hands but settled for kicking it into a corner. His boots stank from days of constant wear; he shoved them under the bed. In the closet-sized bathroom, he cranked the timed faucet to the very end of its range. A stream of just-barely-warm-enough water spat from the showerhead. Donovan closed his eyes in the spray and rested his forehead against the wall. The water ran off his head, down his shoulders and back. It was heavenly. He scrubbed and scrubbed, taking off a week’s worth of grime and flakes of dried and damaged panotin. The water ran out before he’d had enough of it.

  He dried himself, then wrapped a towel around his waist and went back into the bedroom. There were no clothes in the room and he didn’t want to put the prisoner’s jumpsuit on again, so he sat down on the bed and turned on the lamp. He probed the places where he’d been shot: his sternum, stomach, shoulder, thigh, and ribs. The deep-tissue bruises were tender to the touch and hurt when he moved too quickly or took a deep breath. For the first time in days, he tried to armor himself fully. His nodes felt weirdly sensitive, which could not be a good thing, and his exocel faltered over the wound sites, as if it were hitting speed bumps all along its normally flawless run. He hoped Jet, who’d taken several bullets as well that night, had been treated in the Towers and was doing a lot better than he was.

  Donovan lay down on the bed, which sagged slightly under his weight. It felt so good to be out of that cell. He felt guilty for luxuriating in it. Some soldier he was, swearing on his erze in front of a terrorist leader in exchange for a nice room and a meeting with his mother. Jet, warrior that he was, would probably have gone down fighting before ever reaching the Warren.

  What was he going to do now?

  Accomplish one thing at a time. Donovan grimaced at his father’s voice in his head. It was right, though. He was alive and no longer behind bars. Yes, he’d given his word to Saul, but immediate duty to erze superseded all other allegiance; if his fellow stripes burst into the Warren right now, there would be no contest: He would fight with them. He needed to be ready. He needed to recover and regain his strength. And he was going to talk to Max. The thought filled him with a sick, eager anxiety.

  His head hurt. He was too tired to think anymore. He closed his eyes.

  He opened them again when he smelled food. Something hearty and sweet, mixed with the sharp smell of fresh coffee. He sat up slowly, confused at first. He must have fallen asleep. For the first time in nearly a week, he’d awoken to something pleasant.

  Anya stood at the foot of the bed, holding a tray. Her eyes traveled immodestly over his body, and for a second, he felt a jolt of embarrassed excitement to be caught wearing nothing but a towel wrapped around his waist. Then he realized her gaze was following the line of exocel nodes—each one dark and slightly raised, the size of a pinky fingernail—running up his torso, branching across his collarbones, and marching, closely and equally spaced like soldiers, down his arms. He tensed, then swung his legs over the side of the bed.

  Anya turned away and placed the tray on top of the dresser. “I brought you some clothes.” She pointed to a stack of badly folded garments at the end of the mattress. Donovan picked them up without looking at her. He shook out a pair of pants and two pullover shirts. “They even look like the right size,” he said, impressed. “Where’d you get them?”

  “From Kevin’s closet.”

  Donovan nearly dropped the clothes. He felt the urge to wipe his hands on the towel.

  “They’re clean,” she said.

  Wearing something that had touched Kevin’s body was preferable to the dirty, ugly prison jumpsuit by only the narrowest of margins. Donovan grimaced. He took the clothes into the tiny bathroom, faced the wall, and put on the pants and one of the shirts. They did fit him, although the waist on the pants was too loose, made more so by the weight he’d lost. He envisioned how pissed Kevin would be to see where his clothes had gone. It was really too bad, he thought, that the promise he’d made to Saul meant he couldn’t go find Kevin and pay him back for the four 9mm rounds to the body. A beating with a cement block would probably be a fair trade, for a squishy.

  The cafeteria tray Anya had brought had a bowl of oatmeal topped with bits of dried fruit, chopped nuts, and two slices of cling peaches from a jar. Next to it was another disposable plastic cup of oil and a mug of coffee, hot and black. Donovan pulled the tray into his lap, poured the oil into the oatmeal, and tried not to eat so fast that he scalded his mouth.

  “That’s about as good as food gets around here.” Anya sat down on the edge of the bed, leaving a space between them. “Most of it is can
ned, or dried, or frozen. And MREs. Lots of MREs.”

  Donovan slowed long enough to sip a mouthful of coffee. He glanced at her. “The life of a criminal militant not living up to its glamorous reputation?”

  Anya’s face stilled. “I never expected it to be glamorous.” She stood back up and he was surprised to see her fierce anger suddenly directed down at him. “I don’t have to take mockery from your kind.” She pivoted to leave.

  He caught hold of her by the arm, tipping the tray precariously and splashing scalding coffee over his hand and into the rest of the oatmeal. He righted the tray just in time, his fingers still gripping her elbow. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

  She stared down at his hand on her arm, then back up at him coolly.

  Donovan let go. “I didn’t mean to mock you. And I shouldn’t have assumed anything about your reasons for being here. It’s just that, for a lot of people who join up, it doesn’t end well. I would know. You seem like a good person, so I guess I was hoping you’d change your mind once you got here. That’s all.”

  The fire faded from her eyes. Donovan pulled a napkin off the tray and sopped up the spilled coffee. Without saying a word, she took the second napkin and helped him. He dried his coffee-drenched hand. Without warning, Anya placed her hand over his. Her fingers brushed lightly across the armor that had sprung up to shield him from burn. He held still until she lifted her hand away, and then he wished he’d done something, or said something, before she had.

  “I was curious about what it felt like,” she admitted. “Your armor.”

  Slowly, to hide his confusion, he ate the remaining three spoonfuls of coffee-flavored oatmeal. “And … ?”

  “It’s warmer than I expected. It doesn’t feel like skin, but it’s not unlike skin either.” An odd concern touched her voice. “Does it hurt? When they Harden you?”

  Donovan set the tray back on top of the dresser. The girl mystified him. She was so proud and vulnerable at the same time. She was resolute about being a rebel, but she seemed so naive and curious about the enemy. “Yes,” Donovan said. “It hurts.”

  “A lot?”

  “A lot.”

  She nodded as if she understood. “But if you get through it, if you choose the hurt and survive, you come out strong. So strong that almost nothing can hurt you. And afterward, they make you a soldier, part of a family as strong as you are, that’ll never let you down.” She fixed him with a burning, interrogative gaze. “Isn’t that worth it?”

  Donovan looked at her, not knowing what to say. He wished he could say yes, but he could see where she was going with this, at least in her own mind, and it didn’t make sense to him. How could she compare taking up with Sapience to being Hardened, or suggest a band of terrorists was anything like an erze, or draw parallels between his experience and hers? Yet her weird logic seemed real when she said it the way she did.

  Donovan lifted the bottom of his shirt and dropped his armor to nothing, as if he were paying respect to an erze master. Underneath the panotin, his torso was a mess of giant blotchy purple and green bruises. “You still get hurt,” he said. He let the shirt fall back down. “People still let you down.” He thought of his mother. And his father. “And sometimes, you’re not even sure if what you’re doing is right, or if it’s worth it.” He thought of the hatred he’d seen in the eyes of the people in the Warren, the same rage he’d seen on Sean Corrigan’s face and on the faces of other people whose family members he’d arrested, whose doors he’d kicked in, whose houses he’d searched, not always successfully.

  Donovan reached for Anya’s hand. “Exos don’t get to choose. We’re too little at the time; our parents make the decision for us.” He squeezed Anya’s small, breakable hand. “You can decide for yourself.”

  The canvas hanging rustled. Donovan looked up. Max stood in the entrance of the room.

  Donovan dropped Anya’s hand. The girl looked between Donovan and Max, then picked up the tray with its empty dishes and walked past them out of the room.

  “Anya. That’s your name, isn’t it?” Max’s voice came out scratchy and pitched slightly above a whisper. The woman cleared her throat uncomfortably. “Thank you for what you did. If it wasn’t for you …”

  Anya looked over her shoulder, meeting Max’s gaze for just a moment. “Don’t thank me,” she said. “Thank Brett.”

  Her words gave Donovan sudden pause. It was true; if Brett hadn’t been watching the news at that moment, Anya might have done as Kevin had asked. Pulled the trigger. Put a bullet through his eye and into his brain. How had he managed to almost forget that? He had begun to think of her as the only person in this place he could almost trust.

  Max, his mother—he still found it hard to think of her as either one—turned to face him. They were alone. She was very pale, though her cheeks were slightly flushed and her eyes were rimmed with pink. She looked as if she had been crying. There was a certain forced staunchness about her; her lips were firmed and her back straight. Her throat moved as she swallowed. The way her eyes alternated between staring at him and jumping away—Donovan imagined it was the way a recovered alcoholic would act if locked in a wine cellar. Like her greatest dream and worst nightmare were coming true.

  His throat had gone as dry as sand.

  “Hello, Donovan.” A long pause. A dimple formed in the space between her eyebrows. “God. You do look like him. The way he was when he was young.”

  Donovan felt as though he really needed to sit down. He leaned heavily against the dresser. She didn’t look as old as he’d expected, not as old as his father. Still, there were hard, pitiless lines around her mouth and eyes that he didn’t remember her having. “What should I call you?” he said at last. “Max isn’t your real name.”

  “It’s my middle name. Maxine. I’ve gone by it ever since I left the Round.”

  He had not remembered his mother’s middle name. His father would have, though. “Does he know?” Donovan asked, growing realization turning his voice wooden. “My father … does he know you’re a member of Sapience?”

  “Does he know?” She let out a short, bitter laugh. “He forced me to choose: leave you behind or be arrested for treason. He threatened to come down hard on my family, my friends, anyone I knew who might be connected to Sapience, unless I fled like a dog and never came back.”

  Donovan’s fingers curled around the edge of the dresser. “He never told me.”

  “Of course he didn’t.” She took a halting step forward. “I always meant to take you with me, Donovan, to save us both. If I’d had a choice, I would never have left you. I would never have let him do what he’s done to you.”

  “What he’s done to me?”

  “Turned you into one of them. Something more shroom than human.”

  A moment of shock before anger flared in Donovan’s skull. “Exos are as human as anyone else.” He pushed off the dresser, onto his feet. “Using zhree biotechnology doesn’t turn us into zhree! We have just as much right to the benefits of an exocellular system as—” He stopped, hopelessly bewildered. This wasn’t going anything like he’d imagined or hoped. Even though he knew he was right, he sounded like his father—the man he’d just found out had been hiding things from him for years. He drew a breath through his clenched jaw. From the bleak look on Max’s face, he saw she was having as hard a time as he was.

  “I’ve messed it up,” she said quickly. “I started this all wrong—blaming him instead of talking to you.” She turned her face aside, composing herself, before looking back at him. “Can we start again? Please?”

  Donovan swallowed. He nodded mutely.

  His mother sat down slowly on the edge of the bed. “Okay, then. How … how are you doing?”

  A grimace of derision began to twist the muscles of his face before he forced it under control. “Considering I’ve been knocked out, tortured, and imprisoned without food or heat, I’d say I’m doing all right. Better than yesterday.”

  Max closed her eyes for a second.
“I’m sorry.”

  “Why didn’t you come earlier?”

  “I couldn’t. Saul wouldn’t let anyone—”

  “Bull. I’ll bet you didn’t even try.”

  She looked stunned by his accusation, as stunned as he was at himself. “Maybe … maybe I wasn’t ready, Donovan.” To his horror and satisfaction, her eyes filmed with sudden tears. “How could I explain? How could I face you? You don’t understand … leaving you was the worst thing I’ve ever done. I’ve given everything for the cause: family, friends, erze status, a career, a marriage, a comfortable life … None of it mattered, except when it came to you. That was too much. Losing my son was too much.”

  Donovan found he couldn’t look her in the face, not when tears began sliding down her cheeks. He stared instead at her hands, curled into fists at her sides, the knuckles white, the backs crinkled with circular scar tissue where the interlocking rings of the Administrator erze markings had once been before they’d been stripped away. Nasty pale shapes in the same pattern as the bold, curved lines on his father’s hands. She lifted them to wipe her eyes and he turned his gaze away.

  “It started as just a few articles,” she said. “I wanted to be a writer when I was young, did you know that? I used to write essays and poetry for my college newspaper.”

  Donovan said nothing, though it was perhaps one of the few things he actually did know about her; as a child he’d managed to steal away one of her notebooks from his father’s purge—it was still hidden, half forgotten, in the bottom of a desk drawer in his room.

  Max said, “When I moved to the Round, some of the realizations I began to have, the things I wanted to say … I couldn’t say to anyone I knew, certainly not your father. Then I met some people who felt the same way I did, and I wrote more articles, and I started going to meetings, and it just kept growing … I felt closer and closer to the cause even though I was leading this double life as someone who was marked and respectable. Until the day arrived when I knew we had to leave for good.”