“I’m . . . yes.” He tried to keep from staring at her: suddenly she looked so different to him. He kept shuddering from the eerie déjà vu that washed through him at the sound of her voice. “You’re not . . . you’re not a woman, are you? Inside, you’re both genders. I mean—not both. All.”
She sighed deeply. “It’s very complicated. Through unity, I’ve learned a measure of conscious control over my own gender identity. Under the circumstances of my exile, and given how people perceive me, it’s been . . . expedient, to call myself a woman. To think of myself as one, for the sake of blending in. But you—” She gritted her teeth against the pain when she rolled over to face him. “You can’t kill? Since that mission to Antarka, you can barely even bring yourself to knowingly hurt anyone, can you?”
Alexei shivered. He clenched his teeth and felt the rusty floor beneath him. He said nothing.
“You saw something,” she said. “During your breakdown, after you killed all those people. You’re afraid you saw God. That giant eye in the sky you think is following you.” She stopped and listened for him to respond, but heard nothing but the ringing in her ears. “You agreed to help us . . . because you thought it would get you killed? Because you wanted to kill yourself, but your military conditioning wouldn’t let you?”
“The Major—” Alexei stammered. A twitch in his body scraped his chains across the floor. “I couldn’t betray him. Not now. Not ever.”
“The Major who made you a child soldier, you mean. He’s the one who betrayed you. My God. More than you’ll ever know. He took your life before it had even begun, and you took his name as your own? You think of him as a hero. No, worse: like some kind of father figure. But he was the farthest thing from either.”
“He was the only—” he began, but never finished.
They lay on their sides in silence for a long time, seeing nothing. The air between them began to rapidly heat as the desert sun dawned on the metal-walled compartment.
Finally he whispered, “You’ve killed too. In Asher Valley, five years ago. That’s why you ran and stayed separated from your . . . your other selves. No, that’s not the right way to say it, is it? You’re trying to go back to rejoin the rest of yourself. You’d rather die than stay separate from it any longer. But you think it won’t take you back, because you killed a man.” He squinted. “One man.”
“One murder is all it takes to be a murderer.”
Both lay silent then with some version of the same thought: that Danae’s one killing had contained more malice than all of Alexei’s hundreds combined. To her, that hate multiplied her guilt a hundredfold. To him, it sounded like a mitigating factor; there was something so much worse, he thought, about taking a life without feeling, without personal stake.
She started to tell him that without Naoto she had no reason left to go on at all, but the only sound she managed to make was his name—and when it hung in the air between them it silenced them both, and they could only lie there on the truck’s metal floor, two different people physically overwhelmed by a single grief.
ALEXEI
Daylight stung my eyes and shocked me awake when the door swung open. A figure climbed inside and stood there looming. It was . . . me. Another me. Its expression was utterly dispassionate, like the embodied ghost of all my misdeeds. For a moment I wondered if I was dreaming, hallucinating, or still lost somewhere in the cybernetic fugue I’d shared with Danae—but when my eyes adjusted, I saw Jenna, wearing my coat and armor.
“Rise and shine,” she grunted. She trained a wave pistol on us as she stepped in and knelt to press a finger to Naoto’s neck. She sniffled and grimaced and flipped open an air vent on the ceiling before stumbling back out into the light.
“Where are you taking us?” Danae croaked.
She paused just before shutting the doors again. She told us matter-of-factly, “Duke sure wants you bad. Never seen a bounty that high. Normally I’d say you really lucked out, but, well. Depends on what the Medusas want you for, doesn’t it.”
The doors shut. The bolt locked. Somewhere the motors hummed to life.
A few bands of sunlight blazed through the vent Jenna had opened, and in its ambience I could see Danae’s despair when she turned to me and said, “We have to get out of here.”
“Unless your twelve thousand years of memory includes a technique for hacking electronic locking shackles without tools . . . I have no suggestions.”
The floor beneath us rumbled with the broken desert road.
“We can’t let Duke take me alive,” she pleaded.
I remembered the last words Duke had said to me. “My death won’t be any quicker than yours.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about. If Duke manages to reverse-engineer the nanobots in my nervous system, he’ll turn them into a new generation of Gray weapons, a thousand times more deadly than anything he already has. He’ll be free to liquefy any city he likes without fear of counter-attack. We can’t let that happen.” She swallowed hard. “If I die, my nanobots will all self-terminate. It’s the only way to keep them out of his hands.”
She was asking me to kill her, I realized—but she could read me now just as clearly as I could her, and she knew without my saying it that there was nothing I could do. I reached out haltingly for her throat—but it was viscerally clear to me, even before my fingertips perceived the heat of
