Exo

by Fonda Lee

  Donovan said, “Not you, sir. You’re a stripe, Hardened or not.”

  The warden let out a snort, but Donovan saw the pleased set of his mouth as his thick shoulders straightened.

  The cells were occupied. Thirty-nine insurgents taken alive from the Warren; no doubt many of them were here. Donovan heard the shuffle of movement as the prisoners drew close to the bars, following the passing sight of his uniform with hateful glares. Donovan walked past Kathy and heard her hiss, “I should have let Javid shoot you.”

  “You’re supposed to be dead,” another man’s voice growled, so close that Donovan nearly jumped. The prisoner’s arms were draped through the bars of his cell, his bearded jaw jutting forward and his neck bulging with a surprise that Donovan felt climbing over his own face. It was Sean Corrigan. Corrigan’s hands were swollen, every finger splinted and wrapped in white gauze, so he looked like a cartoon character with comically oversized fists. He held them up to Donovan. “Look what he did to me. You’re supposed to be dead for this.”

  The warden rapped his stick against the bars, threatening to smack Corrigan’s broken fingers. “Busted fingers are better than what you terrorist trash deserve. Now, get back; you’re not to look at this officer, much less talk to him.”

  Donovan dragged his gaze straightforward and walked a little faster, his heart rate rising to match his footfalls. They passed a stretch of empty wall before the warden stopped in front of the final cell. Donovan stepped in front of the bars. His mother sat cross-legged on the bolted-down bed. She was wearing the drab gray clothes of an inmate. She’d been cleaned up and no longer had blood and dirt on her face and hands. Her hair was down; it waved untidily just past her shoulders. Her eyes were closed, her head leaned back against the wall. She wore on her face an expression of weary calm.

  “Could I …” Donovan cleared his throat and turned to the warden. “Could I have a few minutes?”

  “You need anything, just holler, or push that button on the wall. Guards will be here lickety-split.” He looked at the middle-aged woman in the cell, then at the young exo, and chuckled at his own words. “Not that you’d need any help. If that woman is Max, then she’s responsible for a lot of dead people, but you wouldn’t know it looking at her now, would you? Heck, she looks like she could be someone’s mom.” The warden shook his head, then wandered back down the row of cells.

  Max opened her eyes. “Donovan.” She got up off the bed and came to the bars, reaching her hands through.

  Donovan approached, one slow step at a time. In that moment, it seemed to him that she was utterly familiar, and still a complete stranger. He reached out and put his hands in hers. “Are you being treated okay?” he asked.

  “Well enough.” Her lips twisted into a shape that combined a wry smile and a grimace of grief. “I have nothing to complain about.” Not when most of her friends in the Warren were dead. She leaned back a little, taking in the clean-shaven sight of him in his dress uniform. The small muscles around her mouth sagged. Her hands grew heavy in his, like two mounds of sand. “It didn’t take long, did it? For him to take you back.” Her voice was a bitter whisper. “Did he send you?”

  “He doesn’t know I’m here.” He didn’t want to talk about his father. “I just wanted to see if you were okay.”

  “That means a lot to me.”

  “I went to the Warren. It’s been destroyed, but … Saul wasn’t among the bodies or those captured.” He shouldn’t be telling her this; you didn’t just give away potentially useful information to prisoners. Donovan squeezed her hands. Scorch it. “I thought you’d want to know he might have gotten away.”

  His mother closed her eyes. Her lashes were wet. “Thank you.”

  “Mom.” Donovan drew a steadying breath. “I know something else that could help you. When SecPac took out the Warren, it didn’t get all the files inside—a lot of them were destroyed by the insurgents. Commander Tate knows that Sapience has plans for a major Peace Day operation, but she doesn’t have details.” He leaned closer to the bars. “But you do, don’t you? You’re higher up the chain than the other prisoners; you’re the closest one to Saul. You know what the plans are.”

  Max opened her eyes and gazed at him steadily. She didn’t say yes, but he saw he was right.

  Donovan’s voice sped up. “You have something valuable to offer: information that Father and Commander Tate want. You can use it to bargain. You can have the death penalty commuted.”

  She rubbed the pad of her thumbs over his knuckles. “Do you remember the story I told you about the girl whose mother left her with strangers at the gates to the Round?”

  “Yeah. What about it?”

  “Over the years, whenever I thought of you, I thought of that little girl. I wondered if God was testing me, punishing me, because I’d been so judgmental and unforgiving of that mother. So He put me in her place, for some terrible purpose. If I could be made as desperate as that woman, if I could do what she had done, abandon my own child, then from that day on, I could do anything.”

  What was she talking about? Was she thinking about the terrible crimes she’d committed? The ones his father had mentioned, and others he didn’t know about and didn’t even want to know about? “Mom,” he said, trying to bring her focus back, “did you hear me? There’s a way out of this.”

  “There’s no way out, Donovan,” she said gently. “SecPac questioned me all day yesterday. Commander Tate came in the evening and offered me something even better than a way out of the atomizer. She told me I could see you again. If I revealed everything I knew about Sapience’s plans, I would get imprisonment instead of death, and you could visit me. Wouldn’t I want that?” His mother’s smile was unpleasant. “I told her I did. But that I don’t bargain with traitors.”

  Donovan dropped her hands. Commander Tate had dangled him like a carrot for his mom? Slow anger crept up his neck; so he was being used again. Then, a second wave of anger: His mother had refused.

  “If you cared about me,” he hissed, “if you actually regretted leaving, like you keep saying you do, then you’d bargain. You’d try hard to stay alive. You’d negotiate.” His fingers curled into fists at his side. “I’m asking you to.”

  She wrapped her hands around the bars. They were so small. “Then let me ask you to do something in return.”

  He gave a slow nod. “Anything I can. So long as it’s legal.”

  “Leave your erze. Take off that accursed uniform. Run away from the Round and never come back.”

  He stared at her. “I can’t do that.”

  “You can’t? Or you won’t?” Her eyes were uncommonly bright. “I think you can. You can break the hold that they—that he—has over you.”

  Donovan slammed a hand to the bars next to her head. “It’s still about you and Dad, isn’t it? I’m asking you to save yourself, and you’re still trying to win the grudge match!” Through gritted teeth, “Whether I can or not, I won’t break my oaths and walk out on all my friends. Even an unmarked squishy like you can understand that betraying people who trust you is wrong.”

  Max waited a few beats for his words to sink in. “Listen to what you’re saying,” she said. “We’re in complete agreement.”

  “Urrrghhh …” Donovan closed his eyes, leaning his head against the bars. It was hopeless. He could see now it was hopeless.

  Her fingers touched his brow. He felt them trembling against his skin. “I’m not a good person, Donovan. I have a lot of bitterness and hatred in my heart. If you knew all the things I’ve done, you wouldn’t be standing here talking to me. Maybe I do deserve the atomizer. But I’m not a traitor. If Saul is alive, he’ll fight on, and I won’t give up anything that might compromise him.”

  “Haven’t enough people died in the last two days?” His words felt wooden in his mouth. “Most of them were your people. And you want it to go on, for there to be more fighting, more killing.”

  “We all die, Donovan. It’s how we die that matters.”

&n
bsp; His voice was a whisper; he didn’t trust it enough to speak louder. “You said, in Rapid City … you said you wanted me back.”

  “More than anything,” she said. “But I can’t have you back, I know that now. And the cause is more important, far more important, than what I want. The cause is right; even when I’m wrong, the cause is always right.”

  “I’m only trying to help you.”

  “You have helped me. You came here today. You gave me the chance to see you again.” Her voice cracked. “That’s enough for me.”

  Donovan let his head rest on the bars for another second. Then he took a step backward. Then another. Nothing had changed. He was five years old all over again, aching incurably from an abandonment he didn’t understand.

  His mother reached for him with her eyes. A long tear rolled down the crease between her nose and cheek. It hung on the top of her lip. “Good-bye, Donovan, my sweet boy, good-bye. You’re the only good thing I ever made. I love you.”

  Donovan refused to reply. This can’t be how it ends. He might be just one human, as weak as the High Speaker had made him feel, with no control over big galactic problems. But he couldn’t be helpless in this too, this one thing. I’m going to save you, he promised silently. I don’t know how, and I’m not sure I don’t HATE you, but I’m going to save you.

  He took one last look at her face. Then he turned away, practically running back down the row of cells, toward the exit. The Pen had become a claustrophobic, medieval thing all of a sudden. He made himself slow down as he reached the double-barred gates. He waved at the warden in his office, and when the man shambled over to let him out and ask if everything was all right, if he got what he came for, Donovan forced his face into a casual smile. “Yes, sir. Thank you for your help.” He burst out of the Pen and into the sunlight.

  He slumped against the outside wall for a few seconds, not wanting to move to go anywhere. He wished he could have the last two weeks expunged from his memory. If only he could return to a time when all the pieces of his life—hanging out with erze mates, bantering with Jet, the day-to-day vagaries of patrol duty, even enduring the proud and infuriating role as his father’s son—had fit neatly around him as they should. Everything was jumbled now. There were new and mismatched fragments scattered around him in an incoherent mess; he wasn’t sure which belonged and which didn’t.

  Donovan took a few deep breaths and paced back to the electricycle. A patrol skimmercar was parked next to it. Jet was slouched against the hull. He did not seem surprised to see Donovan.

  Donovan could not say likewise. “What are you doing here?”

  “I could ask you the same thing.” Jet opened the door of the skimmercar. “Talk in the car.”

  Donovan got in the car. His partner got in after him and closed the door.

  Jet pulled a can of energy drink, dark as tar, from the cup holder. He opened it and took a swallow. “I had to come in for an official reprimand. For breaking that squishy’s fingers, you know. Excessive use of force.” He rolled his eyes at Donovan’s sudden look of worry. “Relax. Five days’ suspension without pay. Delayed until whenever I want.”

  Donovan nodded. “That’s not so bad.”

  “Tate said some stuff she’s supposed to say, but she’s not even putting it in my permanent record. Soldier Werth said my overreaction was ‘in erze, given the highly unusual circumstances.’” One side of Jet’s mouth lifted, but then his expression sobered. “So anyway, since the whole official reprimand took about ten seconds, I detoured to check that you made it home okay.” He raised his eyebrows. “Obviously, you didn’t.”

  “What are you, like my nanny?”

  “I was hoping I’d find you passed out in front of your dad’s booze fridge, but when I didn’t, I guessed you’d come here.” He set his jaw, serious. Serious wasn’t a look that suited Jet particularly well. “This isn’t a good idea, D. It’s a really bad one.”

  “What is?” He was having a hard time meeting Jet’s eyes.

  “Thinking of the woman in there as your mom. The one you wish you’d had. She’s not. She totally walked out when you were a little kid, and she’s spent the last twelve years blowing things up and killing people. You know what’s going to happen to her. So don’t do this to yourself, okay?”

  Donovan said, “My dad forced her out because she was going to take me away so I couldn’t be Hardened.”

  “None of that is your fault.”

  “What if she’s right, Jet? What if we exos are bad for humanity? You heard Soldier Werth, he wants to Harden a whole lot more. But you saw what happened today with the High Speaker.” Fresh anger warmed his face.

  Jet said nothing at first. “The High Speaker is a douche. A homeworlder. The zhree zun don’t like him any more than we do; you heard the way Soldier Werth talked about him afterward. What he did to you was a dick move, and it hit you at the worst time.”

  “This isn’t just my issue, Jet. It’s all of ours.” Donovan leaned back, staring up at the ceiling of the skimmercar. “Don’t you think that’s one hell of an oh, by the way the zhree have been conveniently not mentioning to us? ‘Oh, by the way, there’s a trip switch in your brain that knocks out your armor if you ever get it into your head to turn it against us.’”

  Jet didn’t look at him. He chugged the rest of his drink, then pressed the can between his hands until it was a crumpled metal disc. His voice took on an uncharacteristically bitter edge. “It pisses me off too, all right? But what do you expect? We’re small potatoes to the shrooms. That’s right, shrooms—we all think of them that way sometimes. A hundred years ago, I’m betting the homeworlders thought even less of humans than the High Dickhead does now. The colonists would never have gotten away with giving us exocels unless there was some kind of restriction.”

  Donovan gripped the armrests of his seat. Panotin thickened his fingers and dug into the fabric. “It’s not right. The zhree call us their partners, but they don’t trust us enough to give us something important without hobbling it first.”

  Jet said, “Let’s say you had attacked the High Speaker. Put a fist in his eye, like we both wanted to. His Soldiers would’ve freaked and gunned you down on the spot. Kreet would cut Earth out of the Commonwealth like an infected cyst. There’d never be any more exos, period, end of story. Then where would we be, huh? On a backwater ghetto planet filled with squishies fighting each other all over again … at least until someone worse like the Rii came and took over.”

  “Which might happen anyway.” Donovan slumped back. “If after everything, the zhree hang us out to dry, then what’s the point? We might as well all be sapes for all it matters.”

  Jet swung around with a sharp look of disbelief. “That’s not going to happen. There are smart people like your dad, and Soldier Werth, who know a lot more than we do, whose job it is to solve the political stuff. All we can do is our job—you know, setting an example, proving that we humans can police ourselves, that we have our act together and we’re not all extremists. Us exos—we’re the ones who can get in on the bigger game, who could be equal to the zhree. That’s why the sapes hate us so much.”

  Jet leaned forward, as if he’d just remembered something important. “My dad told me something interesting from history. You know who first attempted to make exos? It wasn’t the zhree. It was the United States military, back in the War Era. They were losing hundreds of humans for every one Soldier and trying to find a way to level the playing field. It was a total failure, of course, but zhree Scientists stumbled across the data after the Accord and did it right. You know what that means?”

  “That it’s a good thing we weren’t born in the War Era.”

  “That we wanted what they had, almost from the beginning. We knew the rules of the universe had changed.”

  Donovan’s voice came out bitter. “You sound like my dad.”

  Jet stared at him for a long minute. Finally, he ran his tongue over his lips. He spoke slowly. “There’s a syndrome, you know, when a
hostage starts identifying with his captors. It’s like a way for your brain to cope with the trauma.”

  “So you do think I’m squishy-brained.”

  “I don’t know what to think. All I know is, something is not right with you. Is it the girl? The one you let escape?”

  Donovan felt his mouth twitch against his will.

  “She was in one of the photos Thad showed you, wasn’t she? You saw her, but you didn’t say so.”

  Donovan said nothing. He cursed his best friend silently. Fooling Commander Tate and even Thad was one thing, but Jet always knew when he was lying. He tried to read his erze mate’s expression, but Jet’s face had closed like a door. Finally, the silence became unbearable. “What are you going to do, Officer Mathews? Are you going to report me?”

  Jet stared straight ahead out the front of the skimmercar. “I’ve been telling myself that you’ve been through an epically bad time, but now that you’re back, you’ll be okay. But coming here to the Pen without telling anyone, and the way you’re talking now …” He ran a hand through his hair. “The world has big problems, sure. But we’re stripes. We’re the good guys. We swore oaths—important, honorable ones. That woman in there”—he pointed toward the Pen—“and that girl, they’re sapes, and no matter what happened to you, they’re not the answer. You know that, right?” Jet finally turned to him. His voice dropped to an imploring whisper. “Just tell me, D … I don’t have to worry about you, do I?”

  If it ever came down to it, Donovan knew, Jet would do his duty. If he suspected his best friend to be out of erze, he’d turn him in himself, even if it tore him to pieces to do it.

  Out of erze. Donovan recoiled from the thought. He couldn’t let Jet believe such a thing of him. “The girl,” he said at last. “I let her off the hook because she stopped Kevin. She got up and stood in front of him when he was torturing me. I couldn’t arrest her when I owed her like that.” He nodded toward the Pen. “And my mom … I wanted to give her one more chance. I thought she might know about Sapience’s plans, information she could give to Commander Tate to save herself from the atomizer. She didn’t go for it. I guess I’m not surprised, but … I wanted to feel like I did everything I could for her anyway.”