Something else was awake in Bloom City that night. In a chamber made up to look like an ordinary storage tank, set apart from the habitat sections, there was a machine that never slept: Medusa Clan’s prized molecular assembler, a throbbing mass of solid-state machinery in a reinforced vacuum chamber. Its end product was pumped invisibly through a nanoscopic tubule and injected into a hollow sphere the size of a human heart. When the sphere was full, a robotic arm gently transferred it into the next warhead on the line, there to wait for its fateful commands. Anyone looking inside the nanoweapon core would only have seen what looked like oil, black and viscous, with a dull metallic luster; unidentifiable by sight as a mass of a billion tiny mechanisms, each the size of a blood cell. They were simple machines, identical, and with a single function: to make copies of themselves out of any matter they touched. Even the people who operated the assemblers, who walked among the rows of loaded warheads and took inventory, couldn’t fathom what they themselves had made—because it’s one thing to know in factual terms, and something else to truly understand: to hold such an object in your hands and grasp that it encloses a hunger deep enough to eat the whole world.
ALEXEI
On the edge of elusive sleep, I remembered it, vivid as a hologram: a night, sixteen years ago, when a room full of children felt the concrete around them shudder.
Like a dozen times before, like they’d been taught to, they leaped from their bunks, skittered on bare feet over the cold floor, and collected around the sturdiness of the walls and corners of the room. None spoke. All eyes were glued to the hairline cracks in the ceiling, all ears listening for the muffled blasts. Guessing at the distance. Among those fifty-odd orphans, two stayed close. They let their gazes down from the ceiling and peered at each other in the near-perfect dark. They held hands and leaned in close to whisper.
“I love you,” said the girl, twelve years old, into the boy’s ear.
“I love you too,” whispered the boy, ten.
“Matron said I’m too young to know what that means. Loving and being in love. But I do know. I care about you. More than anyone or anything else.” Her grip on his hand tightened. “Do you feel that way about me?”
He studied the freckles in her pale skin. “Yes.”
She kissed the side of his face as another shockwave sounded, closer and louder than those before. More concrete dusted the floor.
“People out there want to kill us. What would you do if someone tried to kill me?” Before he could answer, she said, “If someone tried to hurt you, I would kill him. I will do anything to protect you. No matter what.”
“I would kill him too. If someone tried to hurt you.”
“They say it’s hard to make yourself do it. Even the soldiers who are out there. It’s hard even for them.”
“I don’t care. I would do it.”
Another loud blast shuddered through the walls, followed by the low rattle of bomblets and the whistles of flechettes. The boy only stared into her unblinking eyes.
“What if I die anyway? Sometimes you can’t protect someone. You do all you can and they still die.”
The boy said nothing.
“If I died, all I would want is for you to still be alive. If there are ghosts, if I was one, I would still want you to stay alive.”
“That’s all I would want, too—for you.”
“Then if you died, I would stay alive,” she said. “No matter what. Because I’d know it would be what you wanted more than anything.”
“Yes.”
“I want to make a promise with you. Promise me that if I die first, you’ll stay alive.”
“And if I die, you have to stay alive too.”
“I promise,” she said.
“We promise each other,” he said.
Their hands held more tightly as the rumbling blasts grew fainter.
“I love you, Eryn,” said the boy.
In response, the girl handed him something she’d made out of loose wire. A crude stick-figure of a human being, its edges glinting in the darkness. “So you never forget me or our promise. I love you, Alexei.”
Nightmare leaked into the memory. I was standing in that room as an adult. I was stepping between the steel bunks, and all the children were screaming. My heels hit the ground with the resonance of distant bombs, and that twelve-year-old girl and ten-year-old boy were staring at me, backing away into the corner, wide-eyed. They were in the ironsights of my wave rifle. I tried to put it down, but I couldn’t. The sights settled on Eryn’s face, and my finger was on the trigger, pulling.
I bolted upright with the sound of the shot ringing in my ears, but the room was silent. The music had been shut off and the ducts all held their breath. No matter how long I listened, I could detect no other sound in the muggy, sour-smelling darkness.
The woman who’d been watching me was gone.
My shard rang suddenly, making me jump again. I let out a sigh and answered, my fingers so sweaty on the holographic glass that they barely registered.
“Dahlia Lem is dead,” Kat’s digitally scrambled voice said.
It took a moment for the information to process. I made sure I was awake. I stifled my urge to ask her to repeat herself.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“You think I wouldn’t be watching Bloom like a hawk with the hell you’re putting me through?” she shouted. “Medusa Clan’s whole network just lit up with e-warfare, like a Christmas
