After the residences are cleared, I head to the labs to destroy the Gray stockpile and deal with the four people I was originally sent here to dispose of. The cramped hallways force me to make eye contact with them as well. They’re the only ones who look at me as if they know who I am or what I’m doing there.
This leaves only one building in the settlement unaddressed, a lesser geodesic dome still dotted with a blob of body heat on Kat’s map. There’s no cover as I approach. The polar sun sits directly behind me as I move, stretching my shadow out like a long knife pointed at the front door. Someone cracks it open and looks out. Having lost the element of surprise, I sprint the rest of the way to the entrance and kick it open on its hinges. Inside, there are pastel colors. It’s a school or a daycare. No, a church. There’s religious iconography in a crude mural on a concrete wall. There are folding plastic chairs arrayed in a circle. There is a couch with six children, aged perhaps four to fourteen, where the oldest one hurries to join the others. They all stare at me. I stare back. No one else is here. No one else is left.
The oldest one surprises me by looking up and asking, in what seems like a perversely casual tone, “Our parents are all dead, aren’t they?”
I nod.
“They’re in heaven,” he tells the others, simply. “We’re going too. Close your eyes. We’ll go together.”
Everyone but the eldest child closes their eyes and nod their heads down slightly. The eldest stays there in the middle, looking at me. His face is stoic—more resigned than a child’s face should know how to be. I can’t break our eye contact. I have trouble focusing. When I clear my mind and concentrate on my breath, I inexplicably find myself saying:
“You wouldn’t have wanted, anyway . . . to grow up into a world like this.”
Before I fire, there’s a strange tension in my eyebrows, twitching, something I want to reach up and rub away. Instead I keep my hands on my waver, and the six shrieks sound in precise metronomic succession.
I let the wave rifle slide down to my side, and I remove my goggles. The wind howls faintly around the plastic dome as I take a breath and begin to relax. The crude mural gives me a last hard look before I turn to leave, but I hesitate just short of the open door.
There’s something out there. I know I’m being watched.
I want to take cover, but my body won’t follow the order. I check Kat’s aerial map again, but there are no heat signature besides mine anywhere in the settlement. No body warmth. No electromagnetics. No movement. Nothing.
What had I seen as I turned? It was something indistinct in the edge of my vision, in the sky just outside the dome. The tension in my face keeps coming back, and I don’t know why I’m suddenly sweating so profusely, or why my heart is beating so hard that I can hear the sound coming up through my chest. What is this feeling? Am I afraid? No, I realize as I step forward—not merely afraid. It’s that every other fear I’ve ever felt before this moment was false, and this is true fear I’m feeling now for the first time. This is all of it at once.
I don’t know why I keep moving toward the door, but I do. I can’t stop myself or look away. The sun sits just above the horizon, shining hard into my eyes, and the frozen wind bites into my flesh the moment I clear the door, the moment I see it there, hanging in the sky directly over me:
A massive, lidless eyeball.
It’s staring directly at me. Into me. Through me. It levitates five meters above the ground, two meters wide. It seems to have no physical substance, but it’s there, a piece of space that slightly bends the image of the cirrus clouds behind it. More than that, it’s a viscerally overwhelming presence, a force I can feel in every cell in my body.
The heat of its attention slices through me, pinning me in place, and somehow I know that it knows everything. It watched everything I just did. It sees everything I’ve ever done. Every life I’ve taken, every drop of someone else’s blood I’ve ever boiled with this weapon in my hands, every killing shot of every battle of every war.
My rifle hits the frozen ground, followed by my knees, and I can’t stop screaming. My jaw wants to snap free from its tendons. My hands push on the sides of my head until I think my skull might crack.
My first fear is that this giant eye is going to kill me. I think it’s going to rip my soul out of my body. I can almost feel it happening.
Instead it does something infinitely worse:
It vanishes, leaving me there alive.
I
The bounty hunters flash their lights in my eyes a few more times. The tracers lacerate my vision even when my eyelids fall back down.
“Weird, right?” Doc says. “What I wouldn’t give for a scanner that can see inside these heads. One of those fancy new ones I hear the Clan hands out like candy.”
“I don’t care,” Jenna says. “I don’t give a shit. Just tell me if they’re going to wake up or not.”
Fingers prod my head again, rubbing scalp over skull. “There’s no head trauma. They should already be awake. I honestly have no idea why they’re not. It’s a mystery.”
“Look,” Jenna says impatiently. “If they’re okay, I need to call Duke to collect the bounty. If they’re too
