Counterpart

by Hayley Stone

  “Where are we going?” I ask Zelda, struggling to keep up with her.

  It’s been days since I tussled with my clone—and killed her, don’t forget about that—but I still don’t feel quite myself. Along with the occasional racing thoughts and pounding heart, I’m dragging, like every muscle in my body has doubled in weight and my poor bones are incapable of lugging them around. It’s not just the harmless bruises on my head and neck, or the shallow cuts on my arms, which the doctors tell me won’t leave scars. The weariness goes deeper. I’m irritable. I’m not sleeping. Binge eating candy probably isn’t helping. At the end of every sugar rush is a solid wall, and I don’t know how long I can keep running into it before something snaps.

  To make matters worse, Camus and I have barely spoken since our fight, and then coolly. It feels like we’re orbiting one another, on the path to another collision. I’m not sure where he’s sleeping at night, or if he’s sleeping; he only returned to our quarters for a change of clothes the morning after the killing, shuffling through his bag in condemning silence, before disappearing out the door. In his way, I think he’s trying to create space where our feelings can cool, but I also suspect he’s off tending his own wounds. I’m a little familiar with the devastation of having the person you love not believe in you.

  “Stairs,” Zelda answers.

  Grabbing her arm, I jerk us both to a stop. “No.”

  She must see something firm and dangerous in my eyes, because she doesn’t make a gibe, doesn’t accuse me of cowardice or stupidity. Zelda swings her gaze left, then right, toward opposing corridors. “You have a better plan?”

  I think quickly. “The hangar.”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, that’s where most of the soldiers are headed. Safe bet that’s where the trouble is.”

  “Not the main hangar. There’s a secondary hangar. It’s…smaller.” My breath is coming short and fast, and we’ve only been running for a minute. What the hell’s wrong with me? “If necessary, we should be able to get outside from there.” Outside sounds good. Inside hasn’t been very much fun lately.

  “Long, are you okay?”

  Great. Even Zelda’s noticed I’m lagging.

  “Fine. I’m fine.” Say something enough times, it becomes true. Right? Of course, there’s another reason I brush off her concern: to do otherwise would be opening the door, acknowledging the possibility of a reason for it. “I know a shortcut. Follow me—”

  “What is unclear about ‘Wait here’?” Ulrich demands from behind me.

  “Did you find out what’s going on?” I ask, sidestepping the issue altogether.

  More soldiers tromp past, pressing the three of us to one side of the hall. I realize these soldiers aren’t wearing the usual McKinley fatigues. They’re not ours. At a guess, I’d say they were New Soviets. It must be bad if we’ve already asked them to come down and help.

  “Machines,” Ulrich says, watching the soldiers marching away. “They have infiltrated the level.”

  “Again? How?”

  He shakes his head. He doesn’t know.

  “What kind of numbers are we talking?”

  Again, Ulrich doesn’t know specifics, but he says the man told him at least six were spotted emerging from training room B ten minutes ago, and another six were reported near the doors to the military level’s only emergency-exit tunnel. As of a minute ago, there were no casualties, or none that the man knew about. That was no guarantee that death wouldn’t come; only that, for some reason, it was presently delayed.

  Ulrich starts hustling me and Zelda in the direction I was already planning on heading in, maybe because he has the same idea I do. Get us somewhere out of the way, with access to freedom, if needed.

  “I thought you said all the machines were accounted for!” I shout at Zelda.

  “They are!” she yells back. “At least all the machines that participated in the attack.”

  “You’re saying these are ours?”

  “They have to be. There’s no way others managed to infiltrate McKinley.”

  Unless they were helped, I think, but don’t say. After all, who would be left to help them? No one. No one’s left who can hurt McKinley again. I made sure of that. “So, what are we doing about all this?” I lob the question at Ulrich’s bobbing shoulders as he forges ahead of us. “Do we have everything under control or not? Has Military been locked down? Did he say anything about our response?”

  “No.” I’m about to ask him why he didn’t ask, when he clips me with a withering look. “There was no time to ask. My ward was not listening.”

  Right. The whole not-staying-put thing. Oops.

  “Hey, don’t look at me like that. It was her idea.” I hook my thumb at Zelda.

  “Thanks, Long.”

  I hold up my hands. “Just saying.”

  We make our way down the left corridor, and eventually the traffic begins to thin. I’m still panting, and need to take a moment to lean against the wall, catch my breath. At the same time, I don’t want to stop and slow us down. The machines could be right behind us—or ahead of us, for that matter. They could be on top of us in seconds. They could burst from the next room like fire ants exploding from a hill, and we’d be trapped. Helpless.

  I lean a hand against the wall, wheezing. Something else has already snuck up on us—or at least me. Panic.

  “I’m fine,” I repeat before either Zelda or Ulrich has a chance to ask me if I’m all right. “Just…out of shape.”

  “Pull it together, Long,” Zelda says.

  Can’t she see I’m trying to? “Right. Let me just snap my fingers and be totally restored.”

  The alarm continues to wail, and I swear the walls pulse with the sound. Oh, God. It’s happening again. McKinley’s under attack and there’s nothing I can do. Nothing…

  Beneath my fingertips, the world shivers, disintegrating into something distant and surreal. Maybe I’m imagining it. I shut my eyes, trying to push back against the overwhelming desire to crouch down into a ball. I’m better than this. I’m stronger, dammit. I’m Commander Rhona freaking Long, and I wasn’t resurrected to die a simpering coward.

  I send my name up as a flare to my brain, signaling it for help—a burst of courage or something. Rhona Long Rhona Long Rhona Long. But in the end, all repeating it accomplishes is reminding me of who else shares the name. Two dead women: one whose death happened before me, and one whose death happened because of me.

  The truth circles my mind like a vulture, waiting to pick me clean.

  Don’t think about it

  don’t think

  don’t

  please

  But the terror of the moment unlocks every narrow, paranoid, self-flagellating thought I’ve been suppressing with Jolly Ranchers and NyQuil.

  It wasn’t an accident. I might have been able to stop her some other way. I stabbed her because I wanted to stab her. Because I wanted her to die. Because I couldn’t handle the thought of competition—for leading the resistance, for the love of the people, for Camus. Because I was scared.

  I’m scared now, too. Only instead of a knife, I’m holding a gun, ready to pull the trigger on whatever or whoever gets in my way. Survival. That’s what matters. Everything else is peripheral, secondary.

  “Ulrich. Do something. She’s losing it.”

  “What am I to do?”

  “I don’t know. Snap her out of it.”

  “I cannot protect her from her own mind.”

  Their voices float underneath the wail of the alarm like oxygen hanging beneath smoke. I hunch down, taking deep breaths, try to come back to the present.

  “Fine, I’ll do it,” Zelda snaps, setting her computer case down with a plastic clatter. “Long!” She reaches for me, and it takes everything not to jerk away from her. Especially when she starts shaking me. Once, twice. Large, rough hands around my shoulders that remind me of another time, when those hands came for my throat. “Get a hold of yourself. You want to fall apart? Do i
t when we’re not fleeing for our lives.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I mutter. “That’s helping.”

  Even when she crouches to be at eye level with me, I can barely stand to look at her. The floor is a safer prospect. The floor isn’t trying to make me throw up from guilt. “This isn’t you,” Zelda says, the first person to suggest a separation between my willing spirit and unwilling body. I’m also taken aback by the gentleness in her tone, like she understands. But how could she? “It’s just your mind playing tricks on you.”

  “Some trick.”

  “Yeah. It’s a bitch.” Her lips flex into a small smile, then rebound into a frown. “I knew a guy shortly after the Machinations began. Some of the machines he helped program turned on his friends and colleagues, killed them outright. He blamed himself. But instead of dealing with it, he let the mistakes take over his life. Work turned to obsession. Obsession to self-neglect. He let it feel good to feel bad, and you know who all his martyrdom helped? Not a damn person.”

  How much of this story matches Zelda’s own experience, I wonder? How wide is the view into her own life from this tiny window she’s opening for me?

  I take another breath, feeling a small amount of calm return. “What happened to this guy?”

  “I don’t know.” I think she does know, but doesn’t want to say. Something bad, then. “My point is, you can kill yourself over what happened in the past, and worry yourself into an early grave over what might happen in the future—or you can steal a page from the machines’ playbook. Take a breath. Reset. Stop overanalyzing every goddamn thing and move forward.”

  As I stand back up, still a little unsteady, I catch Ulrich’s gaze, to see if he has any words of wisdom, too. “Good advice” is all he has to add, but there’s gruff affection in his gaze when he looks over at Zelda.

  “Okay.” I inhale through my nose, exhale through my mouth, waiting for the shaking to subside. “Thanks, Zelda.” She pretends she doesn’t hear me, or maybe she genuinely doesn’t, but her back is to me as she retrieves her computer. “Just give me another second…”

  Ulrich shakes his head. “No time.”

  We continue down the corridor.

  —

  We’re halfway to the secondary hangar when I hear it. The alarm obscures most noise—Ulrich’s gun rattling against his chest, my shallow breathing, our boots beating their frantic rhythm on the hard, concrete floor—but my subconscious must pick up on it all the same. My hands slicken, growing cold and clammy around the EMP-G I’m holding, and my heart revs like a Ferrari at a stoplight seconds before my ears register the sound.

  Whir-whir-whir.

  No. No. No.

  Stuck at another intersection, I can’t judge where they’re coming from with the sound echoing off the walls. I pick a hall at random and grab Ulrich’s shoulder, gesturing for him to follow. He and Zelda pick up the rear—but naturally I choose wrong. The pair crash to a halt behind me, almost literally into my back, as I spot the machines no farther than a hundred feet ahead of us and freeze.

  The enemy’s metal skin glints black between the streaks of red light, though whether due to some new material they’re made of or a thin coat of onyx paint, I can’t tell. I think I spot an insignia on the shoulder blade of the predator model, but it could just as easily be blood. Behind the trio are bodies. Unconscious, dead, or dying? Impossible to tell from this distance, with all the surrounding distractions—not the least being the dwindling group of soldiers ahead of us, falling one by one. I don’t see flashes indicating gunfire, at least from the machines, which makes me wonder how they’re dropping my people like flies.

  Wonder later. Act now.

  Ulrich and I raise our weapons, but the remaining soldiers—one man and two women—are in the way. We both perform a small shuffle, trying to get clear of them, but neither of us has a clean shot. In that moment, instinct finally sidesteps fear. I know what I have to do. Which is exactly why, as Ulrich tries vainly to shepherd me behind him, using his gun as a crook, I move around him instead, dashing toward the nearest alcove a few feet toward the action. In the inset, just as I expected, is a door I hope will open. I slam my palm on the ID scanner, loudly muttering “Come on, come on” as it takes its sweet time to work. A small blade of light slides up and down like an old copy machine as the scanner assesses everything from the lines of my hand to the whorls on my fingers. “Come on,” I urge it.

  Finally, I hear the door slide open behind me, but I’m busy trying to keep the machines in my peripheral vision.

  “Here!” I yell at Zelda and Ulrich, and then to the soldiers, “Fall back!”

  Only one of the soldiers appears to hear me. The woman turns, at just the wrong moment, catching something—a bullet, maybe?—in the back for her troubles. She staggers forward, but only a step, then collapses. She’s unconscious before she even hits the floor, unable to catch herself and keep from face-planting. The machines advance, stepping around her body without so much as a second glance. Their red optics fix on me instead.

  I hold their artificial gaze only so long as it takes to fire my EMP-G. I miss, just barely, short-circuiting a section of hall lights instead. Should’ve aimed for the alarm.

  My obvious aggression attracts the machines, who temporarily swing their focus to me. Uh oh. I quickly duck back into the inset before they can fire, and having lost line of sight, the machines’ event programming directs them to find a different, more immediate target. They fixate on Ulrich, Zelda, and the others again.

  One of the predators lunges for the male soldier, securing him to the wall by his throat, while the others continue toward the female soldier. In such close combat, it’s no surprise the machines aren’t using bullets. It would be a waste of ammunition. Much more practical to simply crush a windpipe, snap a neck, or slit a wrist. Predators are some of the most multifunctional machines in the higher echelon’s arsenal; killing takes all kinds, I guess.

  I don’t wait to see what the predator will do to the man. I fire again, this time disabling it. The man drops to the floor on his knees, but is quickly back on his feet, and delivers several bullets to the machine’s core processor while its defenses are down.

  But then more machines appear—not behind the first trio, but behind us, appearing from around the same corner we emerged from. Two predators, and what looks like a waste bin on wheels. Its entire body rotates around a stationary axis, multiple arms extending with a variety of plugs and tools. Siege class. The name pops into my head like it was always there, along with background knowledge about the machine. Siege-class models were created for infiltrating high-security installations, opening the way for predators and other heavier models. I haven’t seen one in this lifetime. After most major buildings and facilities were cracked, invaded, and destroyed, the model sort of disappeared. At least in North America. It could be a different story elsewhere. I recently heard a rumor the Nigerians designed electronic wire traps to prevent any sieges from getting near their bases. Or was that in Dubai?

  “Come on!” I yell again, in the narrow space between alarm cries, so Ulrich, Zelda, and the soldiers are certain to hear me this time. I also gesture frantically, hoping to catch their eyes if nothing else.

  Zelda explodes toward me and the open door with as much speed and power as if she’d launched from a sprinter’s position. Having swapped his Heckler & Koch assault rifle for an EMP handgun like mine, Ulrich covers her as best he can, even going so far as to shoot over his shoulder. The couple move in such easy synchrony I’d be surprised if they hadn’t actually seen combat together beyond Juneau and Churchill, or at least practiced scenarios like this one. It would explain how they both stay in such great shape.

  As she runs, Zelda raises her carrying case high above her head to distract the machines, who view it as an object of threat, or possibly mistake it for her head, and respond accordingly.

  Instead of a lead hailstorm, however, two large tranquilizer darts bounce off the carbon material, tumbling harmlessly o
nto the floor. Zelda’s expression turns to one of confusion, but she doesn’t hesitate. In fact, it’s only my grabbing her that stops her from slamming directly into the wall, carried forward by her own momentum. Ulrich is the last one to make it. When no one else comes around the corner, I have to assume the machines succeeded in overcoming the remaining soldiers—and pray they received nothing worse than tranquilizers.

  “Tranquilizers,” I say breathlessly, while we all hastily push into the room, letting the door seal us into temporary darkness and safety. The automatic lights should come on in a moment, but I fumble for a control panel or switch all the same. My hands encounter the edges of cardboard boxes. “Why would predators be using—oh, no.”

  If I harbored any hopes that this location would serve as a sanctuary, they’re quickly dashed when the lights come on. The realization of where we are sinks into me like teeth. It’s some kind of utility closet. Walk-in-pantry size, with barely enough room to fit all three of us comfortably—practically four of us, taking into account Ulrich’s big-ass gun. I never appreciated just how large it was until now. Although in this context, by “appreciated,” I mostly mean “did not realize how little I would enjoy having it shoved in my face.”

  “Hey, watch it with that thing,” I crow at Ulrich, slapping the assault rifle away.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.” Zelda groans, then pins me with a glare. “With this kind of luck, how the hell have you stayed alive for so long?”

  “Funny story about that.”

  “Right,” she says, dropping the attitude. Well, most of the attitude. She crosses her arms sullenly. “Still. Great choice for an escape route.”

  “I didn’t see you coming up with any bright ideas.” I mean, apart from using the carrying case to draw fire from the machines. That was pretty smart. But I’m not about to compliment her when she’s standing here attacking me. “Anyway. Look at the bright side. The machines can’t get us in here,” I point out, trying to ignore my inner monologue, which is already beginning to babble about how small this room is. Somewhat larger than the tank I spent three days trapped inside, but not quite as large as our biggest elevator, not with equipment and supplies jutting out from the steel cabinets.