Exo

by Fonda Lee

  “First, the High Speaker was scheduled to leave Round Three this morning and continue his tour of Earth by visiting Rounds Four, Eight, Nine, and Twelve before returning to Kreet. His departure has been delayed and he remains secure in the Towers until the zhree can be sure the situation is safe for him to continue. That means we’re continuing to run extra security in the Round.

  “Second, there’s going to be a lot of confused people in the Ring Belt today. Most civilians wouldn’t be able tell the difference between a Mur Nurse and a Rii Hunter to save their lives. All they know is that there was a lot of noise and ships flying overhead, and they’re going to be scared. The Liaison Office is preparing a statement to calm everyone down, but in the meantime, we have jobs to do. Sapience isn’t taking a holiday; in fact, they’ll be trying to rile up people’s fear and hostility. Don’t make any statements, to the media or the public, that you don’t know for a fact you’re authorized to make. Stay alert, be careful out there. Questions?”

  Someone in the middle of the room raised a hand. “Commander, if there is an invasion, what are we supposed to do? Is SecPac going to support Soldiers in combat if the Rii attack?”

  It was a fair question, one everyone in the room wanted to know the answer to. They all bore Soldier’s stripes on their hands and were ultimately accountable to Werth, but SecPac’s role had always been to manage human threats, not alien ones. Tate glowered. “That is something I am discussing with Soldier Werth and he is discussing with the rest of the zhree zun. When I have an answer, you’ll hear it. Anything else?” Silence. “Back to work, stripes.”

  Leon met Donovan near the door as people dispersed. “Some morning.”

  “No kidding. Hey, what’re you working on these days?”

  Leon took out the sketchbook he kept zipped under his jacket and showed Donovan a sketch of a naked fox-woman and a wolf-man embracing. “That’s really good,” Donovan said. “I like the pencil shading.”

  Leon shrugged. “I’ll probably do it over. Can’t get the faces quite right.”

  “Have you heard from Cass? How’s she doing?”

  “Okay. Her armor won’t ever be the same, though. She might not be combat rated anymore.”

  “That’s awful.” They both fell silent for a moment.

  Donovan scanned the hall and said, “Hey, have you seen Jet?”

  Leon shook his head. “Vic’s right over there, though. Hey, Vic, where’s your sweetheart?”

  Vic’s pale skin went pink as they came up. “I haven’t seen him.”

  “He ought to be here,” Donovan said, troubled now. He hailed his partner over the comm again and still received no reply. “He’s radio silent. There’s no way he could have missed those alarms, and we have the day off today, so he’s not on assignment.”

  “I’m sure he’s fine, D. Tied up with something. He’ll be back soon,” Vic said. “How’ve you been? We’ve all been worried about you.”

  “I’m fine.” Something about Vic’s lack of concern over Jet’s absence roused Donovan’s attention. Vic Kohl was a good soldier but a terrible liar. “What aren’t you telling me, Vic? Your face is turning red. Is Jet in some kind of trouble?”

  “No, it’s nothing like that.” Vic’s scalp was flushing now.

  “Then, what? You know; don’t tell me you don’t.”

  “I don’t … I’m not supposed …” Vic stammered. “He’s on assignment, is all. That’s why he’s not here.”

  “What assignment?” He’d been with Jet less than twelve hours ago; his partner hadn’t mentioned anything about an assignment. Jet had secret assignments that he didn’t? He turned to Leon. “You know anything about this?”

  Leon shook his head. “Bunch of people left here with a prison transport truck when I was getting back from shift around oh-three-thirty, though. Maybe something to do with that?”

  Donovan turned back to Vic, insistent now. “They’re moving prisoners?”

  Vic hesitated, then said in an anxious rush, “It was a last-minute thing. Jet was only told about it yesterday morning, and he was ordered to keep you out of it. They still wanted to do it publicly, but right away, before the sapes could learn about the change.”

  “About what change? What are they doing that Jet couldn’t tell me about?” The answer dropped into his stomach like a stone.

  Vic glanced helplessly to Leon for support, then slid Donovan an apologetic look. “The execution. It’s happening at dawn. Jet’s running security detail for it; that’s where he is now.”

  Donovan tore free of the hand Vic put on his arm and ran for the electricycle. She yelled after him to please stop and think for a minute, what was he—Donovan didn’t hear the rest. He leapt onto the vehicle and slammed it into a tight U-turn, tearing down the road out of Central Command and toward the nearest gate in the Round. He was sure Leon and Vic would call in to security; someone would try to stop him. He raced the e-cycle to the side of the road, dodging between skimmercars and running heedlessly over tidy lawns, heart rate skyrocketing. Gate 5 was coming up ahead at the end of the spoke road; guards were hurrying to barricade the exit. Donovan gripped the handlebars, clenched his jaw, and swerved into the entrance lane, flying between the slow-moving vehicles entering the Round. He burst through the checkpoint going the wrong way against traffic, heard the shouts of the guards and the crackle of yelling coming from comm units, and then he was through the wall and out in the Ring Belt.

  He turned on the e-cycle’s navigation system and swerved across two lanes to hit the freeway entrance that would take him to the Steps. The sky was pale, the streetlights were going out; it would be less than twenty minutes until dawn. Donovan switched on the e-cycle’s patrol lights; cars moved out of his way as he shot past them, the wind tearing at his eyes. Fury and confusion lit his brain. The execution wasn’t supposed to happen for another ten days! Why was it happening now, all of a sudden, with no announcement or warning? How was that even legal? Why hadn’t he been told? All the information he’d given Saul—wrong, wasted!

  Again, he tried to get Jet on his comm. “Jet!” he shouted into the transmitter. “Answer me, dammit!” The words were ripped from his mouth almost as soon as he said them. He almost missed the exit ramp and shot narrowly between two trucks, blood roaring in his ears, exocel bristling at full armor in anticipation of being hurled against asphalt at a hundred miles an hour. He cleared the exit and slowed, but his pulse kept thudding hard and fast. A few more blocks. Just a few more blocks. Ahead of him, he saw a Road Closed sign blocking off the street. He barreled past it, turned the corner, and squealed the electricyle to a stop.

  The terraced Steps lay at the intersection of several roads, and from all directions, an impromptu crowd was forming, drawn by the sight in the center of the public plaza: a semitransparent cylindrical chamber on a raised platform, the base and top of it humming with power and lit with red hazard lights. Waiting spectators were murmuring with nervous anticipation. Overhead, Donovan heard the low thrum of a circling T15 stealthcopter.

  He leapt off the e-cycle and shoved his way through the outer layers of the crowd, making for the center. At that moment, a figure climbed the three short steps up to the platform, escorted by two guards, and stood facing the assembled throng of people. They fell silent, waiting expectantly for the final words of the notorious Sapience writer.

  Donovan stilled. His mom’s face glowed with confident serenity. She looked, for the first time, the way he’d once imagined she would look: full of life and uncompromising passion. In a clear, strong voice, she declared, “My life is the least of the things I’ve given up for the cause. I give it gladly, so that one day we will celebrate freedom instead of peace.” The wall of the atomizing chamber cracked open lengthwise down the side. Briskly, deliberately, she stepped inside the execution chamber, as if into an elevator she was eager to take to the top floor.

  In the silence, the sound of her shoes hitting the metal surface of the chamber shattered Donovan’s immobility.
With a strangled noise of disbelief, he fought his way forward, barely hearing the gasps and angry exclamations as his armored shoulders jostled through the press of people. As he rushed for the metal barricade fencing off the platform, he saw Jet breaking free from the line of SecPac officers, moving toward him fast. Pale with shock.

  The atomizer sealed Donovan’s mother inside. A static hum began to emanate from the machine. Donovan sprinted; he put a hand on the railing and hurdled over it. He launched himself up the short steps of the platform. He could shut the thing down, smash through the translucent hull with armored fists. The nearest officer, Lucius, lunged and grabbed him; Donovan whirled, slammed his elbow back into the man’s head without thinking. Armor smacked against armor; the other exo reeled but didn’t let go. Donovan drew his gun and aimed for the base of the atomizer. He tabbed the coil charger, his finger curled around the trigger, and then Jet was on him, seizing his hand and the weapon and forcing the barrel of the gun toward the ground. With a sharp twist, he ripped the electripulse from Donovan’s grasp. Other arms joined in, grabbing Donovan and forcing him down to his knees. “No, wait, not yet,” he choked out. He heard a sound, a soft thud, and looked up; his mother was pressing her hand against the inside of the wall that separated them. She was smiling at him.

  Then she was gone.

  It happened as these things always did. One second she was there, her eyes so intensely focused on his, the moist imprint of her hand against the surface separating them. The next second, a burst of blinding white light filled the chamber, just for an instant, like a colossal camera flash, burning Donovan’s vision in a retinal eclipse. The crowd sucked in a collective gasp. There was no sound or heat; the walls of the chamber glowed but contained the entire reaction. Lightning in a bottle. A faint burning smell filled the air. Donovan blinked, and the cylinder was empty; the last of the particles of ash were sucked downward into the base of the machine until, in moments, they too were gone.

  Everything gave way in a wave—first his legs, then his body, then his arms, neck, and head. Donovan slumped forward as if boneless. All the fight went out of him; numbly he let his fellow stripes pin his arms and handcuff him. Jet got up and turned away, his breath hard and ragged. When he turned back around, his eyes held pain, but his voice was all soldier.

  “Donovan Reyes, by authority of the Global Security and Pacification Forces, I charge you with interference in a state execution and willful obstruction of justice.”

  Donovan could hear voices outside of the room. His fellow soldiers were talking about him in the hallway. He couldn’t hear all they were saying, but he caught snatches of mumbled conversation: “squishy-brained” “… think they’ll strip him?” “… feel terrible for Jet.” An exo gone spectacularly out of erze was a revolting and fascinating thing.

  Jet and Lucius had brought him back to SecPac Central Command and placed him in the small detention room where stripes were held if they were under internal investigation or awaiting disciplinary hearings. Prior to a week ago, Donovan had never imagined he would become familiar with the inside of this room. There was a long padded bench to sit or lie down on and the reproachful seal of the Global Security and Pacification Forces looming over him on the wall, but that was pretty much it. The metal door was locked, but every hour or so, the guard posted outside, a strapping exo whose name Donovan couldn’t recall, looked through the narrow spy window to check up on him. You couldn’t leave squishy-brained people unattended.

  On the skimmercar drive back into the Round, he’d roused himself from misery long enough to ask, “Why was it moved up? Why didn’t anyone tell me it was today?”

  “Don’t talk,” Jet had said through a clenched jaw.

  “Jet, please.”

  “Look, I don’t know why it was moved. As for why no one told you, obviously it was because there was a chance you’d go insane and do something like this.” Armor crawled involuntarily over Jet’s knuckles as his hands tightened on the steering column. In a defeated mutter, “You’re in a scorching hell’s pit of trouble and I can’t get you out this time. I can’t.”

  “I know,” Donovan said miserably.

  Jet blew up at him. “What were you thinking? You sat in the car with me that day and looked me straight in the eye and promised me you had your head on straight. Nope, I didn’t have to worry, you were going to stay far away from this whole mess. Then you came back on duty, putting on a show for me, acting all normal, and the whole time you were figuring on trying to bust her out, weren’t you? If the execution hadn’t been moved, if you hadn’t been caught off guard, what would you have even …” Jet could barely speak from disbelief. Finally, in a heated whisper, “You really are a squishy-brained piece of work.”

  “My mom just died, Jet.” Anger penetrated his desire to curl up and fall through the floor of the moving vehicle. “You don’t know what it’s like to have parents like mine. She was a sape, but I didn’t want her to die. There’s nothing left of her now, not an atom, and I’m going to be stripped and my dad is never going to speak to me again, so just lay off, all right?”

  Jet had been as silent as a frozen lake for the rest of the drive. In the other seat, Lucius had said not a single word and done his awkward best to avoid looking at either of them.

  Donovan lay down on the bench in the detention room. He guessed it was midafternoon by now. Lucius had brought him a leftover chicken wrap and a bag of chips from the cafeteria sometime around noon, but Donovan had no appetite. He ate the chips and left the rest of the food untouched. He knew the long wait was on account of Tate having to convene a disciplinary tribunal on short notice. SecPac handled charges against its own quickly and behind closed doors. Since all soldiers-in-erze answered ultimately to Soldier Werth, his erze master would have to be alerted, and it would be the zhree who had the final say in Donovan’s fate.

  In his solitude, he kept replaying the image of his mother pressing her hand against the inside of the atomizer before everything flared white. The grief he felt was strange—dull, resigned, heavy as lead. Supreme uselessness and apathy. He’d failed in every way possible.

  The door of the room finally opened. Donovan looked up and wanted to die. His father stood in the entrance, staring down at him. The Prime Liaison turned and said to the guard, “Keep the door closed and the hall clear. I’d like some time alone with my son, please.”

  Donovan rose to his feet without meeting his father’s gaze.

  “Sit down, Donovan,” his father said. “Look at me.”

  Donovan sat back down and reluctantly raised his eyes. His father’s face was difficult to look upon—disbelief, shame, and anguish seeping through a cracked mask of stoniness. “You have no idea what you’ve done, at the worst possible time.” The Prime Liaison closed his dark-ringed eyes for a moment, then opened them again. “What do you plan to say to the tribunal?”

  “The truth,” Donovan admitted. He’d been foolish to think he could change the course of things being decided by people and forces so much bigger and higher than he was. All he’d done was let people down—his mother, his father, his partner, his commander, his erze, even, strange to think of it, Saul and the Sapience rebels who would’ve attempted to save Max if they’d received the information he’d tried to pass to them in time. “I can’t be a stripe anymore.”

  “You acted in a moment of foolish, impulsive emotion,” his father insisted. “You didn’t have time to come to grips with the sudden news; you acted without thinking.”

  “No.” There was no point in lying, not anymore. He might as well make it easy for his father to be rid of him. “I did a lot more than that. I came up with a plan for Sapience to rescue Mom. I wrote a letter with all the details of the scheduled execution, the route, the transport vehicles—and I gave it to some suspected Sapience members during one of my patrols, after I tricked Jet into leaving me alone for an hour.” It was both excruciating and oddly satisfying to let the words out. Like probing an infected wound. “I’m a traitor,
Father. And you know what’s worse? I’m not even sorry I did it. I’m sorry I lied to Jet, and I’m sorry that I’m a disgrace to you, but I’m not sorry I tried to save her. Even now that she’s gone. Especially now.”

  Donovan dropped his face, fighting tears. Despite everything, he didn’t want his father to see him cry and to be even more ashamed of him. For a long minute, the Prime Liaison was silent. Then he said in a stunned voice, “What you’ve done goes beyond what can be forgiven. If you admit this at your hearing, you’ll be stripped of your markings. You’ll be an exo without an erze. An outcast with nothing: no friends, no future.”

  A sick taste rose in Donovan’s throat. There was nothing he could say.

  “That’s it, then?” His father’s voice was rough. “You intend to give up?”

  Donovan’s face twisted. “What do you expect me to do? I have no choice. I can’t be trusted, and I can’t do this job, not anymore. SecPac executed my mom without even telling me!”

  His father stared at him, exhaustion and pity etching lines into his face. “Do you want to know why the execution date was suddenly changed?” The Prime Liaison took two steps forward. “The night before last, your mother made a deal with Commander Tate.”

  Donovan said slowly, “I don’t understand.”

  “She refused to escape the death penalty by volunteering anything about Sapience’s plans or operations. But she did finally offer SecPac something valuable: information on Kevin Warde. She gave Commander Tate several of Warde’s aliases and the names of half a dozen of his close associates—two of them were arrested yesterday. Warde is on the run now.”

  Donovan’s mouth opened but no sound came out. His mom had betrayed Kevin? A memory flashed into his mind of the two of them squaring off in the Warren: Kevin’s sneering contempt, Max’s gritted anger. Donovan shook his head. Had she turned on Kevin, for him? Then, another thought: What about Anya? Was she being hunted along with Kevin?