Chapter 1
Chapter 1
From beside a ruined stone wall and under a pile of fallen thatch, a noise.
I crouch, hand reaching into my quiver before I’ve even processed what I’ve heard. The noise was a bleat. Bleats come from sheep. I don’t need to defend myself from a sheep.
For a long moment, all is still. The misting rain makes a hushed beating sound against the grass. Crows caw above an overgrown field. This farmstead is long ruined, chaotic old stone ceding to lichen and vines. Humans have been gone from this area for only three years, but this cottage must have been abandoned long before that. A victim of industrial agriculture rather than impending war.
Another bleat.
“Come, come, fallen one,” I say. I guess I’ve sung the words. They’re from a Dimokratía lullaby, and sprang to my mind after years of never hearing them. A long line of boys in the Celius orphanage, a nurse in starched gray walking down the row of cribs, singing to all of us, each of us happy to be sung to but longing to be held. I don’t remember any more of the lyrics, hum the music instead.
From the ruined doorway of the farmstead appear sweet and soft ears, a face and trembling black nostrils.
“Come, come, fallen one,” I repeat.
The sheep takes a step forward, evaluating me. It’s been raining all morning, the sort of Scottish rain that I don’t usually notice until my shirt is soaked through and clinging to my chest. I only realize it now because when the sheep winks one eye I see its long lashes are jeweled in water droplets.
My hand returns to my arrows. Not to shoot in self-defense anymore, but for the hunt. It has been months since I’ve eaten meat, and I ought not to let this opportunity pass. But, for the second time in so many minutes, my hand returns from the quiver without an arrow.
Last time I killed an animal, it was a mercy killing, a horse with a broken foreleg. I decided not to waste the meat, and still have a salted flank hanging beside my cabin, waiting for the harder times of winter. I’m relieved to see that this sheep has no blood matting its wool. There isn’t any pain in its bleat, just a longing for another being. I don’t need to kill it. Someday I’ll run out of canned lab protein out here. That day hasn’t come yet. I hold out my hand, empty. “Come, come, fallen one.”
With great effort, the sheep emerges from the thatch.
What she does have is wool. A lot of wool. Centuries of artificial selection by humans have produced a creature that grows as much hair as possible as quickly as possible, counting on us to shear her before it’s an impediment. But now there are no farmers in this forbidden zone, and this sheep is fully twice as big as she should be, a sphere of wool trapped on the inside of the doorway.
She startles when I approach, and tries to back deeper into the ruined farmhouse. With the extra wool, though, she doesn’t have a chance. I’m upon her in two strides, then easily push her over. She rolls onto her puffy side, legs kicking. I lean hard on her. I’ve got a lot of body weight, but with all this substantial cushioning there is no risk of me injuring her. She might not even feel me.
There will be no using this wool. It reeks of rot and balled-up socks. She’s been growing this hair since Old Scotland was abandoned after the Fédération bombardment. It wriggles. There’s a whole ecosystem in there. I’ve seen the carcasses on the hillside. Her family succumbed to infestation long ago. Death by maggot is not a pleasant way to go.
“You’re a tough one, aren’t you?” I say as I unholster the shears I lifted from the abandoned agricultural supply in town. They still have the polycarb safety tag fastening them closed. I bite it off.
She goes still, staring at me with surprisingly calm eyes. I wonder if she remembers the last time her farmer cut her wool. They must have been a gentle caretaker.
I hack into her stiff encasement. It takes all the corded strength in my forearms to make headway into the reeking mats, hard clumps of rot-black hair falling away to reveal pink irritated skin, swarming with maggots. I brush them away, revealing a scattering of blood spots, and can only imagine how good it must feel to her to finally have that biting infestation away from her skin.
Foul hardened hair surrounds us, keeping its stiff shape. It looks like this baby-pink animal has just been born from the center of a giant walnut. I’m not religious at all, but surrounded by the hush of the forest, the weedy overgrowth of this farmhouse whose ruined roof dapples the sunlight from above, the moment does have a divinity to it. I didn’t sleep well last night; maybe that’s what’s going on. Memories of training, and my quick escape from the cosmology academy, a pretty stranger at the gate delivering shattering news, kept me awake.
“A metamorphosis,” I whisper into the sheep’s ear as I finish the last shear, a stiff black collar of wool around her neck thudding to the ground. I’ve spoken to her. I guess that means I’m going to keep her, if she wants to stay with me.
I give her soft flank a stroke, sweeping away the last of her parasites, avoiding the places where her skin is bleeding from the maggot infestation. “All finished.”
She gets up on all four hooves and stares at me. Can we go home now? She definitely had a kind farmer. I’m already pledging that I’ll live up to their legacy. We did a lot of pledging back in training. Not that those pledges have worked out so well for me.
I gesture toward the leaky barn over the hill. “Go on, go live in there.”
My orders are clearly unconvincing, even to this animal trained for obedience. She looks at the barn and then returns her level gaze to me. That’s not home anymore. She starts to experiment with her new lighter weight, making little dancing hops, fallen maggots bursting under her hooves. Already their shallow bites are clotting, the shine of her blood dulling as it thickens.
I put my hands back in their repurposed gardening gloves—another thing I looted from the abandoned supply store, along with some employee’s old apron, Michaela still stitched on it in red thread—and rub them together to warm them against the morning chill. I’d planned on spending today checking and fortifying my traps. Not teaching a sheep how to be free.
I start toward home, taking my usual labyrinthine route, passing along grassy back roads that weave through ruined castles. It would be easier to take the straight paved roads that pass by shuttered strip malls instead, but then I could more easily be followed. After Fédération finished its Old Scotland bombardment with a round of EMP dusting, rendering modern life impossible, Dimokratía withdrew its citizens from the area. They were smart to—not only was life without tech hard to imagine, EMP dusting in the past had been a way to prepare for atrocities, to black out the ability to report on what happened once the militias entered. There are some roving ex-Fédération gangs here, soldiers who defied orders and chose to stay in one of the few places they could escape the grid. Since disobeying could mean a lifetime of imprisonment, or death from above, the only people likely to do so knew they’d be facing life in prison anyway. They’re not the sort of people I want to meet. They’re people like me.
Running away here means spending my life alone, but I don’t mind. Alone is how I’m meant to be. After my parents abandoned me at the Celius regional orphanage, probably on their way to defect to Fédération like everyone else in the 2450s, I had no one to rely on. My childhood friends were culled from the spacefarer training. Except Celius Li Qiang, who became my biggest ally and erotiyet, but he never spoke to me again after I beat him out for the Titan rescue mission. My life has been solitude with surprise moments of companionship, not companionship with surprise moments of solitude.
The “mission to Titan.”
I pick up my pace back to my home, cutting across hiking trails, unhitching my machete to clear the runners of grass and wild blackberry that tirelessly work to reclaim every human path. Every time I stop to cut, I look back to find the sheep twenty paces behind, waiting to find out where I’m taking her. “Shoo!” I say. It doesn’t work. I don’t want it to.
I pass through the parking lot of the old state park, tap my knuckles against the sun-faded “No Overnight Parking” sign, enjoy the minor thrill of danger as it rings out. It’s one of my ludicrous rituals. I hurry over this exposed section. If someone did want to take me out, they could set up in some sheltered sniper spot overlooking this lot, weapon at the ready while I so predictably return from the day’s errand. At least that’s how I would kill me.
I know I should alter my route, but the other way to ruined civ from my home takes far longer. For some reason I’m only dimly aware of, taking the risk of crossing through this open section makes me feel alive. Feelings are distant for me, like blurred fish swimming below thick ice.
I sheathe my machete. There are still plenty of vines I could cut, but I intentionally let this path that leads to my cabin stay overgrown, so no stranger will discover it and find my home. So far so good. Four months living here and not a soul has broken my solitude.
Except for this damn sheep.
I smile at myself, at what I hold dear about who I am. This strong solitary hermit, destroyed in minutes by a freshly shorn, sweet-eyed sheep, hopping for joy while her sores clot.
“Come, come, fallen one,” I sing softly as I pull to one side the branches that camouflage the final stretch of path. I’ve never seen any sign of someone on these trails, neither an intruder nor even the broken branches and twigs of someone who happened to pass through. There are the feral dogs and wolves and bears and boars, of course, but no amount of subterfuge I could set up will do anything to deter a bear.
I stand to one side, holding back a branch. “Come, come, fallen one.” The sheep passes near, stopping to nibble some moss while I replace the camouflage.
A roar above. I look up, visoring my hand over my eyes, and see a commercial Cusk craft. That’s not all that uncommon; even if no one’s officially living here, this part of Old Scotland is still on the low-altitude North Pole Sea Station route. I return my attention to the path, then look back to the sky when the roar lasts longer than it should. This Cusk craft has paused in the air over the old parking lot. Where Sheep and I were minutes ago.
Shazyt .
This could just be a Pause. I hate those: when someone of note dies in Fédération, their relatives sometimes pay a huge fee to stop all vehicles. Even a second’s Pause costs more than the combined lifetimes’ earnings of a hundred thousand ordinary citizens, but how else do you make a statement in a world ruled by capital? “Good riddance and good waste,” I mutter at the sky.
Of course, that’s only one explanation for what just happened. A craft can also pause to deliver someone to the ground. The abandoned lot of a forgotten national park is hardly a tourist destination, but I suppose it’s not impossible that some adrenaline junkie hired a craft to take them here, which is why I hate when these economic Pauses happen nearby. I don’t like not knowing. Old Scotland is unmonitored territory—if these are Dimokratía citizens they’re breaking the law, but if they’re from Fédération they can do as they like, even though they’re unprotected by their country. Unfortunately, I can see only bits of the craft through the trees, so I won’t have an answer. If these are Dimokratía police, I’m not about to go deliver myself to them. I’ll just have to be on high alert for a few days. Great. As if sleep weren’t coming hard enough already.
“Come, Sheep,” I say as I pick up the pace.
The final approach to home is trickier now, since I can’t just hop between my vine traps. I have to undo them individually, so Sheep doesn’t get herself snared. I’ll have to rely on my knife, axe, and bow and arrow for defense. Like in my earliest days here.
Sheep watches attentively as I kneel on the wood, wet and soft beneath my bare knees while I undo the sapling triggers. “You’d better be worth the risk,” I mutter.
She stares back, her jaw working side to side as she slowly chews a clump of dandelion she’s torn from a boulder crevice. The movement under her placid expression is enough to make me chuckle. The sound of it, this noise that lives next to laughter, is unfamiliar.
We make our way to the end of the walkway, where the wooden steps stop at a simple hut. I have no idea who originally built this site, or for what purpose, but I suspect it was for something more than mere habitation. Something artistic, perhaps. The cabin is built on a hillside, and because the ground slopes away it looks like it’s floating in midair. I can’t even see the third dimension of it from this angle—it looks like a poster of a house, hung up in the sky.
When I open the door, Sheep tries to barge her way in. “No way,” I say, blocking her. “Did your farmer let you sleep inside? I don’t think so.” I suspect they might have, though, since Sheep didn’t seem to think twice about it.
I step in.
It’s a simple single room with a narrow wooden bunk, my few looted belongings folded and stacked in one corner. I have a stack of canned food in another, which I’m reserving for emergencies, along with that salted horse flank hanging outside.
The far wall is all clear glass. Because it’s vintage material, actual melted sand, the pane doesn’t have any autocleaning functions. I open my leather bag, and pull out the main target of this morning’s pilfering: a spray bottle of cleanser. The green moss that grows on every tree in this rainy area will also happily colonize this glass if I let it. Since the unblocked view of the stars at night behind the safety of the glass is my main reason for settling in this cabin, I’m not about to let that moss take my greatest pleasure away from me. I get to work applying the blue fluid to the glass, wiping it off with one of my used shirts. I’ll rinse it in the stream tomorrow—this ammonia will hopefully clean the fabric some, too.
As I clean, I’m happy to see Sheep come into view on the hillside. She’s particular in her browsing, selecting tender stalks of yarrow from between the tougher blades of grass. She’ll have plenty to eat; its yellow is scattered up and down the slope. The beautiful weed reminds me of the training breaks I used to spend camping. The presence of yarrow was part of why I chose to retreat here.
Once I’ve scrubbed the window clean, I stare out at the stretch of woods. This area had once been completely deforested by the humans who lived here, but trees are returning. Good for you , I think. Maybe I’ll have to cut down some trees a few years from now, so that Sheep or her offspring will have a place to graze. I’ll welcome the need of it.
As always, whenever I let myself dream of a future my mind reminds me of the bitter past, the day that started with final preparations for the Titan mission and finished with all the spacefarers—including me, the one who was supposed to man the Aurora —thrust out of the academy. Gather all your belongings. Doors will lock at 13:30. You may not return. I’d already been on the hillside, listening from a thicket. As soon as I’d overheard the hushed conversations, witnessed the odd relaxing of our training regimen after my full-body medical scan, I’d begun planning my escape. I didn’t know why any of it was happening, but I knew that I was expendable.
While my fellow cadets milled in front of the fence, I was already half a kilometer away, unburying the backpack with escape supplies I’d secreted away weeks before, in case this very thing happened. I had no idea what I’d done wrong, why my government would have lied about my purpose, but I wasn’t about to let myself be rounded up and disappeared.
That was when I saw him—Devon Mujaba. I didn’t recognize him as a celebrity, though even I had heard of the Heartspeak Boys. I recognized him as the sometimes concubine of the president, who would show up at formal state ceremonies, in Dimokratía uniform despite his defection years ago. None of us liked to see someone permitted to return to the homeland they’d abandoned, but we recognized someone with power when we saw one, so we kept quiet.
There he was on the hillside, a concubine no more, his own pack on, a plasma rifle at his side. Greeting me by name. “Kodiak Celius. I’ve been hoping to meet you.”
He gave me the counterfeit documents that got me all the way to this EMP-dusted zone, where I could be free from technological monitoring. Where I could hope to avoid being arrested by the state to which I’d devoted my life. In return, he asked me to wait for him here, where we’d begin recording guerrilla communications, to take down the world’s locked politics, to build a new society, this time built from non-extractivist logics. I didn’t know if I’d ever go along with that, but I did know I could use help getting out of deep Dimokratía before someone made me disappear.
The meaning and purpose of my life had flipped in the moment I met Devon on the hillside. I’d not only been training for a canceled mission; I’d been training for a mission that was never intended to begin. I raged as I voyaged, kept away from other humans as I made my way through the most sparsely populated regions of the world, finally across the Channel and up this island. I’m calmer now, almost at peace—but I do wonder what I will do when Devon Mujaba returns. Will I make those guerrilla recordings he wants, about the false mission? Will I help break the world in the hopes that it can be remade differently?
Maybe that Cusk craft that lingered over the parking lot wasn’t from a Pause. Maybe it was him, finally joining me.
I shake my head. Enough wallowing in useless wonderings. I bring my cleanser-soaked shirt down to the stream to rinse.
Once I’ve wet the shirt, I remove the one I’m wearing and scrub it as well, enjoying the chill air that lifts the soft black hairs of my chest and underarms. I give the rest of my body a good rinse, too, and then lie out on a flat stone. Despite my desire for it to be still, my flesh shivers.
The best way to warm a body is to use it. I roll onto my side and begin my daily exercises. I’m long past peak training condition, back when martial arts and wrestling took up hours of each day. A half hour of push-ups and crunches will only do so much, but maybe that’s not terrible. Mostly I welcome the shrinking of my physical self—it is easier to maintain an existence that requires less food.
The stream bends a short way from my washing spot, and in the water that pools there I can watch the reflection of swaying green trees and cerulean sky. There’s a flash of another color, a bronze brown. Not quite the color of Sheep. Not quite the color of anything that lives here.
It’s gone as soon as I glimpse it. If this were Devon Mujaba, he’d have simply announced himself. I go motionless, cursing myself for the series of lax mistakes I’ve made today: indulging in cleanser, knocking on that “No Parking” sign, adopting a sheep, disarming my traps, lying naked and vulnerable here. A series of errors grave enough to kill me.
Maybe someone from the Dimokratía secret police hasn’t come to murder me. This could be a bear instead. Is that better? I think it is.
I snag the sleeve of my shirt from where it’s been drying on a nearby rock, drag it to me, and roll the wet fabric down my shivering body. As calmly as I can, I arrange my leather skirt over my thighs, then slowly and deliberately crouch by the water’s edge, cupping water in my hands as if to splash it on my face. But I hold still, angle it to the spot in the trees where I saw the flash of bronze.
The water’s surface trembles to my surging pulse, but the reality is still unmistakable: there’s a person in the trees. I can’t make out the face, but he has the darker skin of equatorial genetic lines, not my Mediterranean olive. He’s got a royal bearing, and skinprint mods glint on his face and neck. His clothing is not that of a wealthy person, though: it’s a mass-produced traveler’s jumpsuit with a Disponar patch, technical fabric in swirling greens and grays and browns.
He lingers between two trees, mostly hidden. He probably thinks he’s fully camouflaged. Perhaps he is not experienced.
I reluctantly give up my mirror by splashing the water on my face, strategizing all the while. It would be one mistake too many to let this stranger take the initiative. My bow is up in the hut, twenty feet in the other direction. My knife and axe are below the cabin, sticking up from my chopping stump. Both weapons too distant to be useful. Shazyt. If I survive this set of mistakes, I will do better.
He’s got a small weapon in his hand, probably a bolt caster. It shouldn’t work with all the EMP dust in the soil here, but maybe Cusk has finally invented portable tech that can resist it. I wouldn’t know—the dust means I’m locked out of current news. If EMP shielding has spread beyond warbots, it would still be very expensive, but this man looks like he could afford it.
I’m much bigger than he is, could almost certainly take him in a fistfight. But I have to assume he is effectively armed... and I am not. Therefore I’m not sure of my odds.
At least he won’t catch me by surprise. And I still have some traps engaged.
It’s unlikely that he would have wandered over to my hut so quickly. He had to have come directly here from the Cusk craft. Which means he knows my location. Have I been tracked? Has Devon Mujaba been uncovered and tortured?
I crouch and run the back of my arm over my face. For a moment longer, I’m still. But I know surprise is the best thing I have going for me, even if I don’t know what to do with it.
So I act.
I throw myself into the stream and course underwater, kicking my legs powerfully, only breaking the surface once I’m many lengths downstream. I could have held my breath longer, but down here the river shallows out too much for my thick body to pass, the skin of my belly scraping the stones of the bottom. I fling myself out on the far bank, dash into the tree line.
“Stop!” the intruder yells, speaking Dimokratía in a posh Fédération accent. “I just want to talk to you!” I leap over a bramble, scrambling on all fours up the slope toward my hut, where my weapons are waiting.
He’s running after me. I get to my feet and cut to the side, picking a direction at random to keep him off track. Sheep bleats somewhere far off in the woods, and I instinctively alter my course toward her.
The intruder’s body blurs as I race, but I can still tell he’s cupped his hands around his mouth. Making a word that I don’t recognize at first, but I then realize is my name in that posh accent. Kodiak.
He knows my name?
There’s no time for questions now. I switch directions and barrel toward him, the mass of my shoulder striking him in the kidney. He goes down, his smaller body folding at the waist as I roll with him. We come to a rest, my wet hair whipping around my face as I stand and heft his struggling body over my shoulder. I lug him up the slope; he’s struggling all the while, fists battering my back.
Then his hands are at his waist. Getting out a weapon?
I panic and drop him, then sprint toward the cabin. With shaking hand, I yank my hunting knife out of the chopping stump and whirl in time to see the intruder surge into motion, escaping into the tree line. I brandish the knife. “Come out,” I yell in Dimokratía and then Fédération.
I turn in a wide circle, looking for the enemy combatant. No sign of him.
Then there’s sudden motion in the trees. He emerges beside the stream. I can see him in the full light now, this stranger with the skinprints. He’s surprisingly beautiful. I think I recognize him. Why should I recognize him? Some of the tension relaxes from my system. He doesn’t seem like much of a fighter.
The intruder brandishes his bolt caster. The small device, no bigger than a finger, can shoot out an arc of ten-thousand-volt electricity, auto-aiming it at the nearest human-sized object in a cone-shaped zone. He wastes no time firing it at me, shouting triumphantly as he does.
He must not know about the EMP dust. Or if he did, he’s somehow forgotten.
I’m not the only one making mistakes today.
We’re both frozen, but only for a split second. I take advantage of his error to close our distance, dashing three huge strides and then lunging toward him, knife outstretched. His eyes go wide with surprise, then he just has time to get his hands up defensively before I’m upon him. At the last moment, I let the knife drop from my hand. It would be all too easy to puncture his abdomen, which would be fatal in an area with no medical care.
Knife clatters. Person grunts. Sheep bleats.
We roll, his wiry body resisting mine. An elbow clocks my chin, but then I’ve got him onto his belly, face pressed into the mud. He chokes and splutters as I wrench one arm and then the other behind him. He manages to turn his head. His hood has fallen back in the struggle, and I see his cheek is smeared with mud—and some blood, too. It might be mine. I think he busted my lip open. “I’m here to talk to you,” he says in Dimokratía.
“Enough,” I say, wrenching his arms behind him harder. “Say another word and I break these.”
I look around for something that I could use to restrain him. Nothing within reach. “I mean it. Don’t move,” I say as I reluctantly release his wrists, press my knee into his back, and peel off my tunic. He lowers his arms to his sides, but doesn’t do anything to resist. I whip the shirt in a circular motion, so the wet fabric wraps around itself, forming a sort of rope. I wrench this stranger’s hands together and make a rough cuff around the wrists, tying it sharply enough that he gasps.
I turn him over, see brown skin, freckles like poppy seeds, frightened eyes. I straddle his waist, my palms pushing his shoulder blades into the mud.
“I’m not resisting you,” he says in Dimokratía. “Do you notice that?”
That posh accent. Is he another of the Heartspeak Boys? Is that where I’ve seen him—a celebrity reel glimpsed somewhere during an academy break? “Stop speaking,” I say in Fédération.
He goes still, looking up at me. Taking in details.
There’s something... hungry in his gaze, as if he’s trying to see as much of me as he can, as if looking at me is important to him. At first I think he’s studying me as an enemy. This is how cosmology academy rivals would look at me before they attacked, trying to absorb as much information about their opponent as fast as possible. Then his expression looks like desire, like we’re the last two cadets in the changing room with nowhere to be until dinner. Then that doesn’t feel like what this is, either, and it’s something bigger and stranger. Like I’m the celebrity. He knew my name.
I sit back, moving my weight from his ribs to his hips. “You would have electrocuted me just now if you could have.”
He rapidly closes and opens one eye, a sarcastic Fédération mannerism. “I knew it was pretty futile, since my bracelet stopped working as soon as my cruiser passed over Glasgow. And my arc thrower is set to a wimpy level.”
He groans as I lean over to pick up my hunting knife, the awkward movement pushing my groin hard into his belly. “I have a knife in my hands,” I say.
“I can see that,” he says, the white of his visible eye stark as he strains to watch me.
“I’m going to get up. Do not move when I do.”
“I wouldn’t dare, Kodiak Celius.”
He wants to remind me that he knows my full name, that he’s sought me out specifically. I’d like to know how he knows who I am. But I will not allow him to decide the course of our communication.
I get up, standing over him with my knife at the ready. He remains still.
Checking every second to make sure he hasn’t moved, I return to the storage under my tarp, pull out a length of rope, and use it to better bind his wrists. Curious about this captive human, Sheep approaches and taps her nose against the rope, rain in rivulets down her pink skin.
“I have to say, this isn’t going quite like I planned,” the stranger says, laughing darkly. This demonstration of calmness—almost friendliness—could very well be being deployed to fool me. I will myself to ignore it, as appealing as it is.
All the same, I wonder: Could he be a local who stayed? Maybe he’s dressed like a traveler to throw me off the fact that this is his land, his home. His sheep or his cabin, even? I can’t imagine why he’d have gone to such lengths to trick me, but I can’t figure out any other possible motive for what he’s done.
“So,” the stranger says, “how are you today?”
Was that a joke? “Don’t speak again until I allow it.” I crouch before him, knife in hand, arranging my leather military skirt to cover my thighs.
“I like your sheep,” he tries again.
“Are you trying to die?”
“I’m gambling that you wouldn’t kill me until you found out why I’d come. It’s just... the reason is a little complicated to spit out casually. And no, let the record show that I officially do not want to die.”
“Project your ID,” I say.
He nods. “Sure. I can do that. I have my fizz. Only...” He raises his bound arms slightly and shrugs.
Fizz is a Fédération colloquialism for “physical card.” Because he can’t project his identification with the EMP dust around, of course. I’d used that phrase in an old habit. “Where is it?” I ask.
“In my breast pocket.”
I lean over him. It feels strange—I haven’t been this near a human in weeks. My thumb is against one of his chest muscles, can read the tattooed word Violence when I peek below his neckline. I pat his breast pocket, and find his plasticine ID. For him to have risked bringing his fizz means he is thinking of this as more than a short-term trip.
I hold the card up to the afternoon sun, reading through the rain-beaded polycarb. It’s emblazoned with Fédération holoseals, as difficult to counterfeit as the Dimokratía ones that authenticate my own fizz.
Ambrose Cusk
Cusk Academy Cadet
Full Fédération Citizen (Onyx)
ID: NYX0009
Ambrose Cusk.
Oh.
That’s why I recognize him. I’ve seen him in news reels. And Devon Mujaba told me all about him before he left to track him down. “You are the Fédération spacefarer who was selected to man the Endeavor. ”
“To human it, yes. On... the Titan rescue mission?” Ambrose asks, peering at me intensely. It’s odd that he’s phrased it like a question. I wonder if there’s some subtlety of the Fédération language I’m not picking up on.
“The canceled Titan mission. Yes.”
“Kodiak Celius, that’s part of why I came here. I want to tell you what I know about it. And find out what you know about it.” He takes in a long breath, lets it out slowly. “I’ll go first. For starters, I know that the mission to Titan was never meant to take off. That the Titan SOS was deployed to make everyone—me and you in particular— believe there was going to be a rescue mission.”
I stab the knife into the bright green moss beside me and rub my hands together for warmth. This accords with what Devon Mujaba said. The abrupt cancellation of the Dimokratía space program had to be for more reasons than the rising tensions with Fédération. I don’t understand the why of it at all, though.
“I know Dimokratía has a different philosophy to its mission structures than Fédération does,” Ambrose says. “They avoid letting the glory of individuals rise above that of the program as a whole, so they kept your identity under wraps. But you were the spacefarer who was meant to go on that mission, right?”
I reluctantly nod. This stranger bound in front of me has revealed far more information about himself than I have yet offered. He probably thinks it’s my turn to give something up. I do want to ask him if Devon Mujaba sent him here, like he did me, but I also don’t want to risk Devon’s life by mentioning his name.
“You were manipulated, like I was,” Ambrose prods.
“You came here to tell me this?” I scoff. “You’re too late.” I don’t really believe him, this stranger who claims he’s traveled across a world in conflict to discuss his past with an enemy. Why would anyone do that? But I am curious to see if I can trip him up, get him to reveal why he’s here.
“Yes,” Ambrose says flatly. “I have. And I have a request, too.”
“Ah,” I say. “Of course you do.”
Irritation flashes in his eyes. Good. I’m irritated, too. “I know some about how Dimokratía training works,” Ambrose says. “You were plucked from the orphanage and made it through an intense gauntlet to be selected for a mission that didn’t happen. It wasn’t just the focus of your school life, it was your whole life, and now you find that its foundations were untrue. It’s not too hard to figure out what got you from there to here, with you in full retreat. I’m in retreat, too. And you’re the only person in the world who can relate to what I’m going through.”
This is all true. But it’s also just so Fédération, to race one another to be the bigger victim. I don’t need someone to wipe away my tears while I wail about my sad, sad feelings. I need to survive, and surviving means being undiscoverable. He’s threatening to take that away.
Ambrose points somewhere behind me. I don’t look, in case this is the diversion moment before he launches some counterattack. Then he speaks. “I like your sheep.”
I let myself look. There’s Sheep, pink and shorn, scabbing from her infestation, watching us from the relative safety of the tree line. She’s shivering. A sheep shouldn’t be shorn in these temperatures. I need to knit her a coat. “You were the second being to invade my life today,” I grumble.
Ambrose laughs, with a cough at the end of it. “I hope you enjoyed your solitude while it lasted.”
I run my hands over my hair, thick and a little matted at the ends. Water flicks off, disappearing into the rivulets of rain on the nearby rocks. “Here is what will happen next,” I say. “I will keep you restrained, but I will bring us into my shelter. We can continue to talk there.”
Ambrose seems about to argue, but then he just tenses his lips. His words come out measured. “You could leave me bound outside, but you’re not. Thank you for inviting me in.”
His compliance makes me more suspicious, not less, but not so much that I feel any need to back out of my plan. I stand and Sheep toddles over to me, leaning against my leg. Probably remembering her old farmer and wondering where my barn is and when we’ll go inside it. “You’re first,” I tell her.
I walk her up the steps to the hut entrance, and open the door. I take my old thick wool blanket, raided from the ruins of Le Havre on my way here, and arrange it in the corner. Sheep happily flumps into the middle of it, nibbles experimentally on the fringe. “No. Bad sheep. We don’t eat blankets,” I say.
Then I head back outside. For a moment I wonder what I’ll do if Ambrose is gone, or—far worse—if he’s been joined by confederates. But he’s right where I left him, watching the hut doorway with an expression that is worried and also something else. Longing?
I crouch in the mud beside him. It’s hard to look into his lustrous brown eyes for long. “I’m going to bring you inside now. This will only work if you don’t make any sudden movements. If you do, I will take full advantage of your being restrained to eliminate you. Understood?”
“Wow,” Ambrose said, eyebrows arching. “Did you tell yourself to get meaner while you were in the cabin just now?”
I keep my face impassive. He’s right, of course. I did that very thing. Fought against my own weakness. “On your feet,” I say.
He nearly loses his balance with his hands bound, but I easily lift him into the air and place him standing on the ground. I nod to the steps. “You first.”
Once Ambrose is on the floor of my hut, I go back out, put most of my supplies under their tarps, collect and then stash my knife and axe, since they could just as easily be used against me as by me, and head back into the hut. I shut the door and latch it, stare out the window as I stamp my feet to push out the wet cold.
I stand at the door, look at the human and the bovid on my floor. My cabin is full, when this morning it had just me inside it. I’m not at all sure how I feel about that.
Ambrose attempts, as best as he can with bound wrists, to rub some of the rainwater off his shivering leg.
I sigh. “Hold on.”
He watches as I nurse the remaining ember in the woodstove, add kindling and a fresh seasoned log, blow until it catches. The stove will heat the room up eventually, but in the meantime I place my towel, only slightly damp from my morning’s bath in the stream, on the iron surface to heat up. Once it’s warm, I kneel beside Ambrose. “It’s okay?”
He looks at the steaming towel, and at me. “I’d rather do it myself.”
“I’m sure you would. But you’d find that very difficult with your wrists bound.”
“Fine,” he says.
He watches my face with wide eyes as I rub his hair with the hot dry towel, run it down his back and legs. Brisk, respectful movements, like I’m a schoolmaster drying off a kid coming in from recess. Ambrose strangely intimidates me, so I go quickly. I start folding the towel after I finish until, with an impish grin, he lifts his arms. Shaking my head, I dry his armpits. This is not running exactly like the captive situations I trained for.
I resume folding the towel, but then Ambrose speaks up. “Aren’t you going to dry yourself?”
I’m soaking, too, though not shivering. Ambrose watches quietly while I rub down my body, then hang the towel on the back of my single chair to dry near the woodstove.
I sit in that chair and face the bound human on my floor. Sheep has been watching us, chewing on a strip of burlap she ripped from my bedding, like she’s got her snack ready and is waiting for the show to start.
“So, Spacefarer Kodiak Celius, what can I do to convince you I’m telling the truth?” Ambrose asks.
I shrug. “If this area weren’t laced with the EMP dust your country scattered, I’d say we could look information up. But we have to do this all the old-fashioned way. Interrogation.”
“I’m not sure what else I can say to convince you. Devon Mujaba sent you here, didn’t he?” Ambrose offers. “He sent me here, too. To start the resistance. To send out anti-capitalist messages from a place where we’d be difficult to track down. To use our notoriety to change the world.”
Change the world. Sure. Typical Fédération self-importance. I keep silent, using the towel to idly rub the surface of the stove. It gives me no advantage to confirm what Ambrose just said. He could be lying about being sent by Devon, to trap me into agreeing.
Ambrose tries again. “Can I ask why you’re here? Not why you left Dimokratía, but why you chose Old Scotland? There are four EMP-dusted regions to pick from.”
That’s fair. I stare out the newly cleaned window for a while, considering my words. “It’s five regions, after Newfoundland in 2470. But to answer your question. In training, when we had breaks, I wouldn’t go with the other boys into the city. I would trek out as far as I could, to camp and to remember the stars. The universe, the place I wanted to disappear into. When the cosmology academy shuttered, I knew I had to go somewhere else, fast. Somewhere I couldn’t be found. This isolated wooded location was perfect. I like the plants that grow here.”
“Isolated—until you’re found by me. And a sheep,” Ambrose says. “Then that all goes out the window.”
“Let us start there. How did you find me?”
Ambrose shifts uncomfortably on the floor. I must have hurt his buttocks during our fight—the pressure of the wood beneath him is clearly bothering him. “Devon Mujaba gave me a name and location— your name and location. I was up on the Cusk launch satellite, made the elevator trip down, and used the credits on my sister’s onyx card to secure myself a black-market craft up here. One-way, unfortunately.” He pauses, then his eyes light with excitement. “Kodiak, I saw the Coordinated Endeavor . The spaceship our clones will share.”
That makes me curious. But I tamp the feeling down, renew my resolve to stick to my course. “And Devon Mujaba?” I ask. “Why isn’t he here with you?”
The excitement falls. “He was arrested. As I was leaving.”
“Arrested,” I say. This means I won’t see him again. Whatever plan he had is gone with him. Or far worse—is getting tortured out of him. Along with our location. Shazyt.
“Kodiak?” Ambrose says. “Judging by your face, I’m going to assume that Devon Mujaba did send you here. And that his being arrested changes something for you.”
“Idiot,” I say. “He’s an idiot. He risked everything and lost.”
Ambrose sputters. “Your clones and my clones are going to spend lifetimes together. It seems reasonable for us to meet. Devon tried to make it happen, and he succeeded. It’s a kindness.”
“Kindness? Please. He did not do this out of kindness. He did it to use our sudden fame to try to burn the world down. What do you think is happening to Devon Mujaba at this very moment?” I ask. “He’s not lazing around on house arrest, eating grapes.”
“Well, they’re not torturing him, if that’s what you’re implying,” Ambrose says. “That’s against the Fédération accords.”
“No, you have other ways,” I say. “All they have to do is scan his brain, and then start databasing the synaptic data in his neural maps so it becomes searchable.”
Ambrose nods heavily. “I know. And eventually, out of all those billions of thoughts and memories, they’ll isolate the coordinates that led me here. It’s a heavy load of data, and indexing is far trickier than simply copying one-to-one, like they did for you and me... but it can be managed. Which means we don’t have a lot of time.”
A pained silence fills the room. I look at my cabin. My home. Maybe Cusk and Fédération won’t root the coordinates out of Devon. Maybe the shift in mission plans has distracted everyone enough that they won’t care anymore about finding me. Maybe Devon Mujaba has been released to go play some concert. Maybe all these strangers will let me live in peace. Maybe.
Ambrose continues. “Do I smell tea leaves? Is that what that tin on the shelf by my head contains?” His mouth curves into an impish smile. “What if you unbound me, and I boiled us some water? Wouldn’t a cup of tea be nice? We are in Scotland, after all.”
I mutter, not quite making words. At some point in the past few minutes my subconscious decided that I’ll be freeing him. I don’t have time to be his jailer, for starters, and by now I believe he doesn’t mean me harm. Easier to have him moving around and available to help defend us, if Fédération authorities or Cusk corporate police could be on their way to us at this very moment.
I could make my own pot of tea, of course, but it would be a nice treat to have someone else do it. As I untie his wrists, Ambrose chuckles. “I know how to make coffee, too. Just want you to know that, in case that inspires you to leave me unbound.”
He rolls his wrists, then starts into motion. Ambrose doesn’t ask another question, just sets about filling my iron kettle from the water pail and setting it on the woodstove before turning to the teapot, using my wooden spoon to sift the tea tin before carefully spooning out a quantity of loose leaves. I watch him quietly. There’s something mesmerizingly competent about the process.
“Orange pekoe,” I say.
“Yes,” Ambrose responds. “Good choice. One of my favorites.”
There was an unexpected quaver in my own voice when I said pekoe . I decide to shut up for a while, in the hope that Ambrose didn’t notice. Something about being in sudden company after all this time has made me soft. Or maybe I’ve changed irrevocably in these weeks of recovering from having my spacefarer dreams ripped away, and now I’m facing the proof of it. Maybe it took being an island for a few months to realize I don’t want to be an island forever. Bah.
“Clearly I haven’t hidden myself away as cleverly as I thought I had,” I say, saying my words slowly to be sure that my voice doesn’t break. “Since you know my location and my name. But if Dimokratía hasn’t come after me yet, I guess they have better things to do. Fédération, though... or the Cusk Corporation itself... wouldn’t they want their princelet back? Why have they let you come here?”
Ambrose studies the warming kettle. The water droplets underneath it sizzle. He clearly knows something that I don’t. “What?” I ask.
“Do you not know?”
“Not know what ?”
“The war.”
“The cold war?”
Ambrose shifts his weight again. “That’s the thing. It’s not really so cold anymore.”