Exo

by Fonda Lee

  Donovan tried to shake his head. “That sape …” He squeezed his eyes shut for a second. “She’s my mom.”

  There was an uncomprehending silence before Jet dropped his hands. “What?”

  “Prime Liaison arriving on site!” Thaddeus shouted. “Officers at attention!”

  A second stealthcopter churned the air with a deep vibrating thrum as it touched down next to the first one. A figure stepped out. Dominick Reyes’s unmistakable voice carried across the torn street: “Where is he?”

  Every officer on the scene straightened, the Hardened ones dropping armor respectfully. For a second, Donovan felt frozen in renewed shock. Then he scrambled to his feet. The floodlights from the stealthcopter were gone; only blurry orange streetlights illuminated the shape of his father in his dark suit, bearing down on him with long strides. Donovan didn’t see his father’s face until a second before the man stopped directly in front of him. The hum of the T15’s engine faded out. In the background, Reed was still moaning, and distant crashing noises floated up from inside the building behind them, but silence stretched between the two of them like a balloon. Donovan swallowed. He was wearing Kevin’s clothes and had conducted himself nothing like a soldier-in-erze. “Father,” he said.

  His father brought his hands up and gripped Donovan’s shoulders. His fingers were remarkably strong considering he had no exocel; Donovan could feel them digging against bone. His usually inscrutable face contorted with emotion. It was a baffling and awkward sight, as if the muscles were unused to such demands and ill-practiced for it. His voice was quiet, and rough like broken rock. “Are you hurt?”

  “N-no. No, sir,” Donovan stammered.

  A small nod, nearly imperceptible. The sight of it punched something inside Donovan. He felt an abrupt urge to laugh. He was pretty sure if he began laughing, he wouldn’t be able to stop, and then he would start crying or shouting. He’d already put on an incomprehensible display of madness in front of his fellow officers; now he was going to melt down and start sobbing in front of the Prime Liaison. Donovan clenched the ground with his feet, made his spine straight. Keep it together. Keep it together. You’re a stripe. He kept it together.

  His father held on to his shoulders for so long it seemed as if the world had stopped spinning. Slowly, his father’s hands unclenched. They fell to his sides. He passed his gaze once more over Donovan’s face, as if double-checking that it was really him. The skin around his eyes loosened a tiny bit. Then he turned to Thaddeus. He was himself again, stern and in control. “Report.”

  “We’ve secured the building, sir. There was a Sapience lab in the basement, like we suspected. The scientist and at least two other terrorists escaped through a hidden tunnel in the back of a closet. We’re in pursuit; I’ve sent out an area-wide alert and given the order to have the landlord and all the other tenants brought in for questioning, pending charges of sympathizer activity. We’ll catch them, Mr. Prime Liaison.” Thad possessed the same laid-back poise regardless of whether he was enjoying a beer by a pool or reporting to the Prime Liaison after a firefight. He exuded I got this from every pore, and it endeared him to superiors and subordinates alike. Now, though, when he glanced at Donovan, his face sagged visibly in relief before he turned back to Donovan’s father. “Thank erze he’s safe, sir.”

  “Casualties?”

  “One suspect dead, one in critical condition. One exo officer with non-life-threatening injuries.” Thaddeus paused, somber. “We lost a non-Hardened officer. Marcelo Dawes. He shouldn’t have been out here in the first place, but we’re badly stretched tonight and using any stripe with combat training—Hardened or not.”

  Two other officers approached, pulling a stumbling, handcuffed figure between them. They forced her to her knees on the ground in front of the Prime Liaison.

  Donovan felt faint. Relief and anguish swept over him.

  “This is the other Sapience operative we captured, sir,” Thad said. “She resisted at first but then surrendered.”

  Max raised her face. It was streaked with dirt and blood, but cold and calm and eerily hateful. “Hello, Dominick.”

  A backward shift of weight was the only sign of surprise the Prime Liaison made. He stared down at the bound Sapience rebel without betraying any triumph or malice. “Hannah,” he said. “Or should I call you Max?”

  Donovan’s mother rose to her feet with slow dignity. “You’ve had SecPac after me for quite a while now, haven’t you? If you’d known I would cause you this much trouble, you would never have let me leave the Round.”

  “No, I would not have. I did it to spare Donovan.”

  “To spare him.” A dark curtain unfurled across her face. She looked as if she might lunge across the short space and attack the Prime Liaison with her bare hands. The officers on either side took a firm grip of her arms. She ignored them; she ignored everyone, even Donovan. Her eyes were fixed on Dominick Reyes. “To spare him?” she repeated, her voice knotting into something ugly. “You stole him. You turned him into a monster. You used him to get to me, and at the bidding of your alien masters, you are using him still, in your own selfish agenda against humanity.”

  Everyone was staring. Donovan felt cemented to the ground. His heart hammered against his ribs. The enmity foaming the air between his parents was like a solid mass, an expanding, impermeable shell. Perhaps he jerked forward anyway, without knowing it, because suddenly Jet had a firm grip on his elbow.

  “It’s over, Hannah.” Dominick Reyes’s voice was stony, but Donovan could see the anger squeezing down the corners of his father’s eyes. The Prime Liaison raised his voice so that everyone nearby could hear. “Ten minutes ago, I was notified that tonight’s Risk Area operation was a success. As we speak, SecPac forces are tearing apart Sapience’s underground bunker in the Black Hills.” He paused to let the news sink in, his eyes not moving from the woman who’d once been his wife. “The terrorists there have been killed or captured. The ones who fled into the wilderness are being hunted down and brought to justice. The war you think you’re fighting is over; we will not let you extremists drag the country into another.”

  Cheers and applause erupted from the officers nearby. Thad shouted to get their attention back. “Two teams—171 and 190—you’re staying here. Find those missing sapes! The rest of you, we’re heading back to the RA—they’re going to need our help over there.” People scrambled back into motion.

  Donovan was still staring at his mother. She looked as pale as chalk. He could see her mind trying to process the devastating news, wondering: Had any of her friends survived or escaped? Was Saul dead?

  “You are traitors,” she whispered. Her eyes were bottomless pits. “All of you.”

  “Take her away,” the Prime Liaison said.

  “Father, wait—” Donovan found his voice again, but the plea choked in his throat.

  “Donovan.” His father’s voice was quiet in the midst of the renewed noise, but it landed hard as an anvil.

  His mother was being ushered roughly across the street to one of the waiting stealthcopters. “Wait,” Donovan blurted again. “Don’t—” He tried to move to follow, but Jet’s grip on his elbow tightened. His mother looked over her shoulder. For a second, her gaze touched him. Then she disappeared into the aircraft. The T15 lifted off with a low bass hum, taking his mother, Dixon’s body, and the sedated and mangled Reed. It hovered for a moment, then passed overhead, silent as an owl.

  That’s it, he thought. It’s over.

  His knees weakened. He looked for a place to sit down, that wasn’t the middle of the asphalt, but the sight of Thad escorting Brett before the Prime Liaison shocked Donovan upright.

  Dominick Reyes said, “Were it not for you, for the enormous risks you took, and the sacrifices you made, we would not have discovered the location or the layout of the Sapience camp. This country owes you its thanks, even if your courage is never publicly recognized.” Donovan’s father paused meaningfully and extended his hand. “After all yo
u’ve done, you deserve to finally come home. And for helping to recover my son, you have my deepest personal gratitude.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Brett was sickly pale, nearly as destroyed by the night’s events as Donovan. He still looked like Brett—a twentysomething, bland-faced, working-class squishy insurgent. The sight of him shaking hands with the Prime Liaison nearly bowled Donovan over. Kevin’s obsequious lackey—the man who’d stood by, recording his torture—was being praised as a hero? As Thaddeus led Brett away, Donovan exploded. “That can’t be right! That man is a sape!”

  “That officer,” his father corrected, “has been embedded undercover in Sapience for nearly two years, at enormous and constant risk to his own life.”

  “You’re telling me he was communicating with SecPac the whole time?” An odd, numb anger was descending over Donovan. He shook his head. It was all, unbelievably, starting to make sense. “You knew where I was all along. You didn’t come for me because you wanted to get Brett inside the Warren. The Warren was the real prize.” It was a good strategy. Tactically brilliant. His hands clenched into fists. “Then you stalled. You kept him in there, learning as much about the place as he could before the SecPac strike. You let them think—you let me think—that I was a lost cause.”

  “We’re stripes,” Jet cut in, sounding angry himself. “How could you think that?”

  “You knew the whole time!” Donovan wished he could make his father react, that he could get that implacable face to move again, to twist like it had, just for a few seconds, earlier. “You knew about Mom being in Sapience!”

  His father regarded him. Concern touched the outer edges of his stern expression. “You have been through an ordeal, son. I will ignore your disrespectful tone.” He turned to Jet. “Vercingetorix, please see to it your erze mate is examined by a Nurse and debriefed by Commander Tate. Make sure he gets home safely afterward.”

  “Of course, sir,” said Jet.

  Donovan watched his father striding away, brow drawn in concentration in the midst of the continued swarm of activity, speaking to an aide that had magically materialized by his side. Wary crowds of curious onlookers had gathered across the street beyond the bright green SecPac warning tape cordoning off the building. Another stealthcopter was landing. Thad was yelling for everyone to get a move on now now now what are you waiting for.

  The world wobbled alarmingly—Donovan squeezed his eyes shut hard, opened them, and it righted itself.

  “Come on, Lesser D,” Jet said. “Let’s get you back where you belong.”

  The T15 climbed in a stomach-dropping straight ascent, then sped southwest. The lights of Rapid City shrank to pinpricks, then fell behind. In the cabin, there was only the background hum of the nearly silent engines. Donovan felt encased in some sort of mute bubble. His erze mates—Jet, Vic, and Thad—stared at him in undisguised concern.

  “We’ll drop you off at the Towers,” Thad said. “Get you checked out.”

  Donovan shook his head. “I’m fine. We should join up with everyone else and help.”

  His friends exchanged skeptical glances; they’d seen his near meltdown back there, how he’d jumped his best friend and had to be wrestled to the ground. They were wondering if the time spent in enemy captivity hadn’t knocked his screws completely loose. Was he still fit for duty? Still one of them, still in erze? “I’m not squishy-brained,” Donovan insisted. An exo who lost control, of his mind, or his armor, was squishy-brained. “I’ve seen the Warren, I can help. I’m not leaving.”

  His immovability seemed to mollify them. His soldierly instincts were still intact. He seemed lucid enough. An exo belonged with his erze; he was compelled by its needs more than his own. The best thing his friends could do for him was to get him back among his fellow stripes.

  Thaddeus looked down at the floor of the stealthcopter. When he raised his eyes, he said quietly, “It’s good to have you back, Donovan.”

  Jet’s face lost its composure. He turned to climb into the cockpit. Donovan heard him giving directions to the pilot.

  Vic looked in Jet’s direction, then back at Donovan. “He took it really hard,” she said, her voice lowered. “When Thad and I got there that night … he was … well, I’ve never seen anyone wrecked like that. We went searching for you, kicking in doors. He could barely move after taking all those bullets, but he wouldn’t give up. He broke every single one of that squishy’s fingers trying to find out where they’d taken you. Soldier Werth himself finally had to get on the line to order us back in.”

  Donovan hadn’t spared a lot of thought to how Jet would have suffered. If their positions had been reversed, if Jet had been the one captured by sapes … Donovan’s chest contracted violently. Soldiers-in-erze could be stoic about being injured or killed, but being taken alive, or worse, having one’s best friend taken alive … that was a different matter.

  “How’s your head?” he asked Vic, wanting to change the subject.

  She touched her temple. Vic had heavy-lashed hazel eyes, a full mouth a guy couldn’t help staring at, and short hair so colorless that the line of her exocel nodes showed through. Her armor bulged in a goose egg lump on one side of her forehead. “The bullet grazed me,” she said. “A few inches over, and …” She made a face. Exos survived shots to the head half of the time, but the results were not pretty.

  The slow drive from the hidden bunker in the Black Hills to Rapid City had taken hours in Kevin’s van; it took less than thirty minutes for a T15 to reverse the journey. In the dark, the thickly forested hillsides rolled beneath them. Donovan gripped one of the metal handholds as the stealthcopter banked and circled. He peered down, barely able to make out anything more than the craggy landscape, until the T15’s landing lights came on, illuminating a hole in the hillside: the entrance to the Warren. It must have been the same one Donovan had come out of earlier in the evening, but it was unrecognizable. The steel doors were blown off; smoke issued in occasional thin clouds from the tunnels within. Boulders and broken trees lay scattered nearby. Around the gaping black breach, the perimeter of a large space was guarded by SecPac assault scramblers. The stealthcopter maneuvered in for a tight landing in a demolished clearing next to two other T15s.

  Thad and Vic jumped out; Jet and Donovan followed. As soon as they did, someone yelled, “REYES!”

  “WHICH ONE?” someone else yelled.

  “Which do you think?!”

  People came running. The floodlights from several of the scramblers turned on, bathing the torn hillside in greenish light. Donovan stopped, stunned speechless by the sudden appearance of so many familiar faces. This was the most SecPac officers he’d seen in one place since graduation. At the sight of him, they broke into cheering and applause. Soldiers were an expressive lot; they swarmed Donovan with hugs, clapped him on the back, shook both his hands. Jet was mobbed too; he raised his arms triumphantly over his head. “I told you we’d get him back! Stripes never give up on their own!”

  More cheering. “REYES!” The chant was picked up. “REY-ES! REY-ES!” Donovan grinned weakly. The joyful welcome of his erze mates blotted out the lingering sense of being tainted by everything crazy that had happened to him. It felt desperately good to be back with his own people, among those who cared about him. There was an essential rightness to being in erze. Still, the sound of his name being chanted over and over made him feel a little strange. It didn’t seem like it should be for him; he hadn’t done anything. It sounded like a spontaneous cooperationist rally for his father.

  The noisy crowd parted for Commander Tate. “Cut the damn lights!” she shouted. “There are sapes crawling these woods like lice.” Tate stopped in front of Donovan. She was the tallest woman Donovan knew, dark-skinned and ridiculously energetic, with the hypertoned build of a fanatical mountain climber and a voice strong enough to carry over a crowd of men. “Officer Reyes.” She extended her hand. “It is awfully good to see you.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Donovan said, shaking it.


  A sudden blast of machine gun fire erupted from somewhere to the east. People scrambled for cover, grabbing weapons and returning fire. Tate stood unmoved. “Highest Erze almighty, I said cut those lights!” The lights went out, plunging the forest back into darkness. Tate said to Donovan, over the tumult, “Check in with Nurse Therrid in the medical tent. Then report inside. We could use your help. Lowell, Mathews—you as well.” Tate stalked back toward the hole in the hillside. “And, Reyes—find a uniform! Those sape clothes look terrible on you.”

  Unsure of where the medical tent was, Donovan started walking, but at the boom of a nearby exploding grenade, he and Jet ducked behind the lowered body of one of the scramblers, next to Thad and Vic and a small group of other stripes.

  “Leon,” Donovan exclaimed.

  “What’s going on here, Hsu?” Thad asked.

  Leon dropped back down from his perch on one of the scrambler’s six legs, lowering his nighttime field glasses. “A bunch of sapes up on that ridge just won’t give up. They have at least a couple machine gun nests and some stolen pulse cannons that will tear your armor up.” To prove his point, he showed off his left bicep, bulging with damaged armor. The distinctive smell of burned panotin made Donovan wince.

  “Squishy sons of bitches.” Thaddeus studied the ridge like a wolf scanning a herd of sheep. “Let’s get some bees in the air.”

  “On it.” Vic climbed into the scrambler’s control pod and swiveled it around.

  Leon reached for his ever-present sketchbook. “I have something for you.” He lovingly extracted a page he had removed from the book and placed inside a protective plastic sleeve. He handed it to Donovan, then thoughtfully turned on a penlight and shone it over Donovan’s shoulder so he could see. It was a drawing of a nude she-demon cupping her breasts. “Leon,” Donovan said, feeling oddly touched, “this is your best drawing yet. I don’t know what to say.”