PART 2
They sat like that for a few long, long minutes before Gray’s tears dried and she felt empty and stiff.
“How did they find out?” Rice asked quietly, thumb stroking her back.
She didn’t say anything for a while because it still felt so far away, now, and if she wasn’t careful then she could almost start to feel like it had never happened at all. Part of her wanted to know what the board said. She checked her watch, had to remind herself that no one was coming to relieve her of her post. This was no post. There was no relief. She shivered.
“Let’s get away from him.” Gray swallowed and looked over to the dead man.
Rice nodded and stood up.
“We’ll walk.”
They walked. In what direction, Gray wasn’t sure, but she told him how it all went down. How he had missed his tracks up on the ridge, how they knew the wound he’d inflicted. How they found his single shell casing.
Then she told him about Kessler, the corpsman from all those months before, and about Wesson beating her. Rice stopped and knelt.
“You never told me you cracked a rib,” he scowled, jerking up her shirt to get a look at the purple, heel-shaped bruise for himself .
Gray winced hard as he gingerly felt the swelling with his fingertips. “It wasn’t this bad the first time.”
“Here.” The giant reached into a pouch at his belt and produced a small pink pill, which he set down on a flat rock. With his tac knife he carefully cut it in half, and handed her both.
“Take one now, the other at sundown.”
“Where are we going?”
“Just follow me. I’ll walk slow.”
They continued. For hours, it seemed like, though at least the pill had kicked in. Rice let Gray take sips of water from the mouthpiece on his shoulder strap, and he let her take his kaffiyeh when they baked in the afternoon sun.
When back out in the open, a pair of wastelanders came up on the horizon at a beating gallop, and the two had to fling themselves behind a rock and some brush to keep from being seen. Gray suspected that the Anak had to do that a lot out here.
Eventually, as the afternoon wore on, Gray began to recognize where they were.
It was the same dry riverbed, the same road where they had planned their ambush. As they came up on the ridge, the view was unmistakable. And there, about 150 yards down the slope, was where the charges had gone off. The pave-mint was cracked and buckled, blackened from char and gunpowder. The place had been picked over, but there were still pieces of metal flung this way and that, the ground still littered with shells.
Gray looked to the giant. “Why are we here?”
His face was harder than it was before, and he scowled deeply before setting off down the embankment. “C’mon.”
She followed for the sheer morbid curiosity of it. The human had no idea what Rice had in mind to show her here of all places, but she remembered Wesson. Maybe he did see something.
They picked their way close to where the charges had been placed, and Rice lit a smokestick as he simply stood and surveyed the scene, distantly rueful. He’d done this before, hadn’t he? Here? He looked over the old wreckage as if he’d been back to visit several times before.
“Look. What do you see?”
Gray scanned the ground. What was she looking for?
“I see junk,” she murmured.
“No. Look.”
And that’s when she saw it.
Peeking out from the sand beside a rock was something round and sun-bleached. As she stepped closer, Gray realized that it was a skull.
A human skull.
Quickly she fell to her knees in the dirt and pulled it up to brush it off.
Something in her still stung from earlier and Gray turned to face him with narrow eyes, emboldened by the pill he’d given her.
“There was a fight here a month ago. Why wouldn’t there be bones?”
“You’re angry, not stupid,” he said with that kind of authority he reserved for his own kind. “Think, Gray. You corpsmen weren’t anywhere near the road. My men were here. I’m not fuckin’ lying to you.”
Grudgingly, she remembered and frowned. When she turned and opened her mouth to say something, Rice spoke from where he now sat on a boulder, looking uncharacteristically tired. She noticed a spray of old blood on the rock behind his calf.
“Those explosives killed 27 humans that night. That’s all we had in those transports. You thought it was weapons, or scrap metal, or something else that would have been of use to you, but all you did was blow up a few dozen people instead. That old man only got it half-right: we don’t literally eat humans, Gray, we farm you for genes. Food we can get anywhere; but it’s good genes that keep us alive. The masters we’re all made from were damaged a long time ago.”
Gray felt like the wind had been knocked from her, again. She could only imagine so much, think so much. But maybe it was better this way; maybe it was all exactly as simple as he made it out to be. What was a gene, anyway? She knew that they had something to do with why children looked like their parents, and could inherit things from them like a good build or bad skin. But he was talking about something else, something much more esoteric. Still, part of what he was saying didn’t quite make sense to her.
“I thought clones didn’t have to worry about any of that?”
“Genes mutate, degrade over time. I know it’s hard for you to understand, but they’re like the Corps manual. Every time one of us is made, we get our own manual, written by hand, copied from a copy of a copy. I’m the 402nd copy of a human man who was once named Elliot Anders Rice. He died in 2067 at the age of 44, in an Algo pairing facility. He was one of the eight original humans that the Algo cloned us all from. All us ‘Naks.”
Gray gently returned the broken skull to the soil, and a blustery wind picked up from the south. She watched it kick up clouds of dust, scatter dry leaves and bits of scorched cloth. A small lizard darted to the top of a rock to give a dominance display.
“Were you… gonna pair with me?” she asked.
Rice smiled bitterly as he flicked some ash into the wind. “No. And we don’t get to pick them anyway… you’re matched to a genetic line. And then sent to to a facility to be used to administer gene therapy for a few years. You’re fed, watered, clothed, just like the Corps. But it’s not a life. I wouldn’t do that to you.”
“Is it better than being in the Corps?”
The enormous man looked at her, holding her gaze as he took a last long drag of his smoke before tossing it away.
“Nothing’s better than anything else here,” he said quietly. “’Nak or human, free or bound. Only way out is to get out.”
Emotion welled up in her as she decided he was, indeed, telling the truth, and had been the whole time. Part of her wanted to cross the small distance to bury her face in his side and be received by his embrace, but it seemed naive and childish. So she hugged herself instead.
“Rice, I’m sorry about what I said… I… Earning my freedom meant so much to me, I’d do anything to get it.” Gray swallowed. “I thought it was real.”
He looked uncomfortable with those words hanging in the air. “It is real. Just not in the Southland.”
“Then I have to leave.”
For the first time since they met, she seemed to catch him truly off-guard, and he looked at her with something that wasn’t even there when she had asked him to kill her.
“Fuckin’… what? And go where?”
“Anywhere.” Gray stood up. “And you’re coming with me.”
“No.”
“You want to stay here? You want to keep fighting over nothing? Killing your own over nothing? You’re a bond too, you know.”
He stood and let the silence crackle between them.
A very harsh gust kicked up suddenly, and she shielded her eyes from the blowing dust. When she opened them again, she noticed dark clouds on the southern horizon.
The rains.
“I guess summer’s over,” Gray murmured, staring at the clouds. They looked like they were bubbling up from the earth in the far distance. That’s how they always came, every year. Ominously.
Rice was quiet though, quiet and still, and when she looked up she saw his cutting eyes were fixed not to the south, but to the east, towards the hills. It quickly became obvious what he was staring at: high in the air and slowly arcing down toward the ground on a thread of smoke, was the bright green light of a signal flare. Her heart skipped a beat.
“Fox,” Gray whispered.
Rice cursed loudly and had a warlike look about him, like he’d been roused from a daze.
“What’s going on?” she demanded. “You know, don’t you?”
“They weren’t supposed to start yet!” the giant growled at the sight. “I was supposed to have 24 hours!”
“24 hours? Rice what the f—!“
“I don’t plan attacks, Gray, I see them through. Last night I was told Camp Fox had 24 hours. Then you happened, and I saw an opportunity to make it look like brigs got to you before we did. I would have you on the road and be back in time for… the offensive. But it looks like they want Fox wiped off the map before it starts raining.”
Fighting in the mud and the rain was miserable, and it made guns jam up faster.
“I was going to tell you.”
He grabbed her by the arm with one massive hand and dragged her into something resembling a sprint. It didn’t take long for the little human to stumble on the uneven ground, and Rice only slowed just enough to hoist her up onto his back for her to cling to him and his ruck. Then he took off at a breakneck pace through the rocks.
The corpsman hadn’t said anything more, but when they were underway he must’ve sensed what she wanted to ask.
“320 brownbands,” he said, panting. “Against 1100 corpsmen.”
Rice slowed to a jog, then stopped altogether. Gray wondered if he was winded, but the way he rested his hands on his knees painted a different picture.
“I tried to stop it,” he muttered. “I fucking tried, Gray, you have to believe me. I over-reported your numbers, your battle readiness… But someone else must have reported the real intel from under me. Another Rice.”
Another Rice.
“This is my section!” he continued, yelling in the direction of the flare, which was now being carried by the winds. “And I have another five goddamn years here!”
She slipped off and Gray looked to him, then to the hills, and took off at her own jog.
“Where are you going?” he snapped.
“I need to see it,” she called. “One last time!”
