PRELUDE
The weeds were high, almost as high as his chest, and they scratched the boy’s arms. Burrs stuck to his clothing and caught on his legs. He was tired, so tired that he could not think about how much or he would stop right where he was. He would drop to his knees and he would let the weeds fold over him and hide the sky. But the soldiers might still be following him, so he could not risk stopping.
And so he did not think. He just listened to the breath rasping in his throat and felt the sweat tickling down his temple.
It had been his birthday last week, but no one had celebrated it. He was eleven now. His boots were a little too small, but he hadn’t told anyone yet. He had debated taking one of the rifles with him, but he didn’t want to shoot anyone and he wasn’t entirely sure the guards wouldn’t shoot him if he threatened them. There were no empty threats in his experience, so why would they think any different?
His pockets were empty except for a granola bar and the wad of bills he had swiped from Eli’s dresser.
And he was tired.
He was not sure what time it was. The sky was growing purple on the horizon behind him and his shadow stretched out long in front. He was so focused on the ground and his next step that he did not see the woman at first. She stood so very still. As if she had grown where planted.
The boy came up short, swallowing a scream. He held his hands up in front of him in one of the defensive postures they had taught him. His only hope, if she was here to hurt him, would be to surprise her, knock her off balance. Otherwise, she had the advantage of height and weight.
She was facing him and she did not move, but she watched him closely. The boy was not sure she blinked as he studied her. She wore combat gear, camo pants tucked into high boots and a black t-shirt. She wore no armor, but her arms gleamed white and silver in the setting sunlight. She held an M4 carbine tucked close under her arm. There was something preternaturally still and unmoving about her face. A shiver ran up the boy’s spine.
“Whitaker’s?”
It took him a moment to recognize Eli’s last name. He always insisted the kids call him by his first.
“Not anymore.”
And he could feel his chest crumpling, his lungs heaving. He gasped for breath and began to cry.
“It’s all right. You’re safe.” The words sounded practiced, but her voice was comforting nonetheless. She slung her carbine onto her back and set a hand on his shoulder. “I will take you someplace safe.”
“How do I know—” And he couldn’t get the rest of the sentence out, couldn’t voice the sheer terror that Eli had planted in his head about androids. The other kids parroted him, talked about their parents being
replaced with metal scarecrows. A girl his own age, Lia, said her dad was dead because of them. But sometimes she didn’t sound so sure.
“I am AS 542.” She dropped her hand. “Sephone,” she added. “US government.”
The panic was there, in the back of the boy’s head, the names that Eli used for the AS. But he couldn’t run anymore. And what had he been running toward, anyways?
“Help me,” he said. His legs collapsed under him, and he fell. He did not hear her move, but she bent down and lifted him. The movement was easy and smooth as if it were no effort to her at all. Her arms were hard and unyielding around him, strangely transparent against his darker skin.
“I will take you back now,” she said.
He managed to nod and then he relaxed in her arms, unable to stay alert, unable to resist any longer. He was tired. And he told himself it was alright to cry. It was alright now.
The gun clacked gently at her back. Now that he was so close, he could hear the slight whir, the whisper of her joints moving. As his eyelids grew heavy, blinking, he tried to recall if his mother had ever held him like this.
He could not remember, and fell asleep.
ADRIAN
The air conditioning was not working in the train car. It had been a long day and would be a longer night. Adrian collapsed onto one of the many free seats with a sigh, crossed her legs, and pulled her bag close to her stomach. There was nothing much of importance in the bag tonight, no classified documents, not even her tablet. Now it was just a waiting game, and all she hoped for was that the corner bodega would still be open so she could grab food before falling into bed, perhaps to sleep, perhaps to wait anxiously for the call.
She glanced at her watch, set to military time. It blinked at her, reminding her of unread mail. 22:14. It was even later than she’d thought. She shifted in her seat. Her right leg, a biomechatronic prosthesis below the knee, generated a small amount of heat, usually unnoticeable, but uncomfortable now in the stuffy car. She scanned the other passengers, who were doing their best to ignore their neighbors, studying their tablets and phones. The train rattled and screeched around a corner in the tunnel.
She read half of a newspaper article through one man’s transparent tablet, trying to hold off sleep as she deciphered the story in reverse. The woman beside her, who still looked neat and put together in a tailored suit, noticed her effort, laughed a little, then turned back to her own device.
The train jolted to a stop. Adrian rocked slightly in her seat. The doors hissed open and closed at one of the Metro stops. A pregnant woman got on and sidestepped down the aisle, picking over the feet of those sitting down. She held her hands protectively over her stomach, a large bag swinging at her shoulder. Adrian leaned back to avoid getting hit in the face.
“Here.” A thin young man stood up and made room for her near the door. “Take my seat.” Adrian couldn’t tell if he was impatient or charitable.
He grabbed onto an overhead handrail to steady himself as the woman took his place. She nodded her thanks but didn’t say anything. Her lips and face tightened, and Adrian recognized the look. It was not a good look. It was one she’d seen before battle. One she saw now before a particularly bad briefing. The man diagonal from her, a few seats down from the pregnant woman, grunted and muttered something under his breath. She glanced at him and then followed his gaze to the man who had given up his seat. As he had reached for the handrail, the man’s shirt had come untucked, leaving a small strip of his back exposed to the other passengers in the car. There, the skin was almost bright pink, like that of a white plastic baby doll. It did not match the tan of his face or hands. She recognized the color, the hallmark of Haven Corp’s androids, whose skin naturalized with exposure. Androids for the private market, undoubtedly with the language skills and neural network to match.
She ducked her head and tried to ignore the scene playing out in front
of her, pulling out her phone. It was barely the size of her hand, certainly thinner, and she could see her fingers through the screen until it shifted in opacity, registering the pattern of her iris. It had taken her a while to readjust to commercial cell phones after comms in the field. She skimmed the headlines, scrolling past celebrity gossip, lingering briefly on reports from the White House. The man’s muttering had grown louder.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the android shift his footing. He was tense, his stance and posture ready to strike. If she had to guess, there were no active protocols limiting an act of self-defense. Her heart began to beat a little bit faster. She was no longer sleepy and, without conscious intent, her muscles tightened. A tiny gear buzzed, almost below hearing, at her ankle. There was a wireless taser in her bag and her hand hovered over the outline of it. It had a charge that could kill a man if applied to the right point.
“Why don’t you just keep on moving?” The man finally raised his voice so the whole car could hear. The pregnant woman winced and looked down at her nails. The businesswoman looked at him, side-eyed, and moved to a seat on the other side of Adrian, further away.
The android did not move. He stood so still that Adrian could hardly discern his mimetic breathing.
“Did you hear me, rubber?”
It was an insult that had never made full sense to Adrian, given how much more familiar she was with the hard plastics and metal of military-grade androids, of automated soldiers. But she supposed there was some crude connection to be drawn, some allusion to cast-off condoms. Her niece had used the slur once, casually, over dinner, tearing bread as she did so. Adrian had looked at her sister and her husband, but they had said nothing and so she hadn’t either.
A muscle—or something approximating it—jumped in the android’s cheek. He turned his head to meet the man’s eyes. “I’m not trying to cause trouble.”
“You are trouble,” the man growled.
Adrian uncrossed her legs. The man’s face was pale in an unhealthy way, the skin of a heavy drinker, though he did not smell of alcohol right now. But his fingers twitched once—twice—on his knee. She
was glad she was still dressed for the field from earlier, with combat boots and pants that wouldn’t restrict her movement.
The android did not flinch. “I just gave the woman my seat. I don’t think that’s a crime.” He tightened his grip on the rail. Adrian thought she probably imagined the unnatural creasing of the skin at his knuckles, because he seemed human, standing there, down to the pain and anger in the tightness of his mouth.
“Leave him alone,” she said, begrudgingly, tired.
The man looked at her, a sort of disbelief blooming in his eyes. She steadied herself for the rage that would follow, dipping her hand into her bag. He followed the movement of her arm, studied her clothes.
“What—you have a gun in there? You going to take me out for defending what I believe?”
The words echoed humanist propaganda, but were nothing so extreme as the rhetoric of the Civil Union Militia she had been studying for the last three or four years.
“I don’t care what you believe.” She shifted so she could face him directly, feet planted on the ground, bending forward slightly at the waist. “But I want to get home and I want to sleep and I don’t want to be forced to fight my way out of whatever brawl you start.”
The businesswoman snorted under her breath. The lights in the car flickered and the train rushed through a short tunnel and came jerkily to a halt at the next station. Adrian glanced up and saw that it was hers, but she didn’t move.
“Bitch.” The man finally broke eye contact with her. He staggered to his feet and shoved past the android, who barely budged as he passed by. The businesswoman followed, as did many of the other passengers. Adrian let out a short breath as the doors closed and the train picked up speed again.
“You missed your stop,” the android said. He moved to sit across from her now that the car was nearly empty. He rested his messenger bag in his lap and set his hands atop that. She could discern more of the telltale signs now—the slight hint of circuitry under the nails, the lack of folds or bags around the eyes, the rigidity of the hair.
“Excuse me?” And she kept her hand on the taser in the bag.
“You ride this train
a lot. I notice things.” She realized he was probably speaking more literally than most humans. And that his tone should not be automatically read as threatening.
“Don’t worry about me.” She tried to smile.
“I’m not.” His voice was oddly soft and even. “I don’t care what you do.” His words were an echo of her own. She shifted, uncomfortable. She wondered if she had expected him to be grateful for her interference.
Though she had seen what androids could do—even with all of the proper training, even with safeguards in place. This one was no AS, but he had probably never needed her help.
“Sorry,” she said, an instinctive apology.
He just nodded and gazed out the window past her head as if he had already forgotten her and the man with his threats, even the pregnant woman who still breathed heavily at the front of the car. Adrian tried to do the same. She studied the lights and bold-colored posters that flashed by and were gone before she could read them. And she sighed a little as she realized she would have to ride the train to the end of the line and back to her stop at this time of night.
She was not scared. Fear, at least fear of death or physical harm, had long ago been burned out of her. But she could feel the tension building in her shoulders and neck. She practiced some of the stress-relief exercises her physical therapist had taught her when she was trying to regain full range of motion in her leg. She rolled her shoulders and then dropped her chin to her chest and slowly raised it. The android watched her, his eyes flicking between her and the window. She looked at her own reflection behind him and wondered what he saw.
She cleared her throat and pulled out her phone again. Emails were piling up in her inbox but she ignored that. Anything she needed to know tonight would not come via email. Instead, she pulled up the menu for the Thai place near her walk-up. She was hungry now and interested in more than a pre-made sandwich from the bodega. In the time it took her to place an order, the train passed another station and finally pulled into the last stop of the line. There were no passengers waiting to get on and the platform was empty. The lights
blinked. The android stood up and swung the bag over his shoulder. She smiled in case he glanced at her. He did not.
“Have a good one,” she said, not quite sure why. Perhaps angry that he ignored her.
The door slid shut on his back. She watched him walk down the platform, his pace deliberate and his stance perfectly straight. She was surprised she had overlooked him when she first got on the train.
She was alone now. The pregnant woman had also gotten off at the last stop. The car lurched, then sat still. She sighed, more loudly now, and sank down further into her seat. The train lurched again and began to speed up, back toward her stop.
Her phone rang. She looked down at it in surprise. The noise was loud in the silence of the car. Her thumb hovered over the screen. The number was blocked.
“Hello?” There was no immediate answer. She glanced at her screen to see if the call was active. “Hello?”
And the hairs on her neck stood up just before he answered. As if she could feel him breathing by her ear. As if she knew it would be him before he spoke. Maybe it was something in the confidence of that pause. He knew she would not hang up without hearing what he had to say. She hoped her voice wouldn’t betray her.
“How are you doing, Adrian?” Eli’s voice was rougher than she expected, as if he was getting over a cold. Or perhaps it was just the years since they had last talked. “You seem good. Judging by the press conference this afternoon. Still at large, I think your words were.”
She couldn’t tell what he knew, not from that alone, so she didn’t answer right away. She waited, collected herself. If she was lucky, and if they needed it, her surveillance team would be able to pinpoint where he was calling from later. But it certainly wouldn’t dispel the rumors around her childhood, about her connection with the militia leader.
“What do you want, Eli?” she asked finally.
As of 0845 today, Eli Whitaker is still at large.”
Adrian glanced out over the small crowd of reporters and the semi-intelligent
drones sent from the bigger media outlets. They had promised her, when she agreed to serve as acting director, that the position would be temporary. Yet she had stood up here and made this admission, as if going to confession, every week for at least four months. The reporters did not even make a note of the fact anymore. The drones blinked red, recording.
“But I am working closely with our field office in the Appalachian Region, with the Louisville Field Division, to do regular sweeps and to act on any intel we receive. Raids over the last two months have disrupted cells of the insurgent Civil Union Militia in Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia. We are making progress.”
She paused and glanced down at her notes. Security guards shifted at the exits and her assistant Peter, at the back of the room, was mouthing the next words in the notes they had prepared together. She breathed out.
“As we have stated before, we estimate that the Civil Union has between fifty thousand and seventy-five thousand official members.” She would not call them soldiers. “There are certainly pockets of community support that we do not include in these numbers. And the children that have been pressed into the militia.”
The reporters, almost simultaneously, straightened. The room was warm. The AC shut off for a half hour every two as part of its conservation cycle, and the humidity was building up in the room.
“Two months ago, I had the sad duty to report to you the death of one of these children during a raid on a compound in Kentucky.”
The drones clicked and buzzed. She tried to ignore them and the memories of the Russo-Iran front they conjured up. She shifted her weight onto her left leg and reminded herself that it was not real, the whistling sound of the missile on the horizon that would decimate her bivouac.
“In that raid, we took into custody eighteen children, ages ranging between seven and sixteen. Most of these children did not have homes to which we could return them. No guardians. They are severely traumatized and need to be deprogrammed. It has not been easy to determine how best to reintegrate them into general society.”
The video of the raid replayed in her head, overlapping with her own combat history, a tympanic symphony of gunshots. She gripped the podium and tried to keep her face neutral, professional. She skimmed the notes to find her place, hoping the hesitation was not noticeable.
“I am announcing today a new task force within the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, one developed in coordination with the Department of Health and Human Services. This task force, the Active Operation Foster Corps, will include field agents who have seen the compounds and know the conditions from which these children come. These agents have been handpicked for their extensive training not only in all aspects of search and seizure, investigation, containment, and combat but also for their education and backgrounds in psychology, sociology, and social work. They will be critical in aiding Social Services at the state level to place these children with foster parents who are trained and equipped to deal with their very unique needs.” She paused. “It is important that we start developing some nonviolent solutions to our problems.”
She looked up. “I’ll take some questions.”
There was a second or two of silence as the reporters finished jotting down her announcement or reread their notes or consulted with their bosses. Styluses clicked against tablets, and there was a whisper here and there. She could imagine Eli watching her now, his beard and mustache gray and stained with tobacco, his skin sallow, as she tried to stand very still, tried to show no impatience. She tried to remind herself that they hadn’t lost yet. They would find him. They would. She set her jaw as if they were facing each other in person, not in her imagination.
“NCBS here,” a reporter announced himself and broke the quiet.
She nodded to him. “Yes. Wyatt.” She had made it a point to learn the journalists’ names after her first press conference.
He smiled, glancing up and then back at his notes, as if apologizing for his question. “I appreciate your concern for the children here, your reasoning in establishing the task force. But can you tell us what action has been taken in regards to the automated soldier, the android with call sign Ora, who shot and killed the child in that raid two months ago?”
She looked quickly
at Peter. They had prepared for this question, they’d answered it more than once, but it had felt easier rehearsing the answer in the stillness of her office.
“As I’ve said before, the AS has been withdrawn from the field for observation and tests. Nothing has changed there.” She avoided using the android’s call sign. Polling showed that the names generated a poor response from much of the public when AS were the topic of conversation.
Wyatt followed up on his question. “Do you anticipate it returning to the field?”
She cleared her throat. “We will not return any technology, AS or otherwise, if we find that they are a continuing threat.”
Wyatt raised a finger as if to press her further. She continued. “I think it is important, though, that we do not lose sight of the threat of the Civil Union. They are the ones militarizing these children and placing them in harm’s way. Our priority, in any raid, is always to extricate these innocents first and foremost.”
“Director.” Sherri from CWE, a venue transitioning from tabloid to legitimate outlet. “We have a source that draws a connection, a personal one, between yourself and Eli Whitaker. Can you speak to that?”
Adrian’s fingers twitched on the podium. This, she was not prepared for. How had they dug that up? Peter, at the back of the room, immediately began searching on his tablet. He would send anything he could find to her own.
She tried to smile. “Could you clarify what kind of connection you’re talking about?” It was probably a mistake to ask that, to allow her to say more. It left her at a tactical disadvantage. The journalist’s face showed that she knew that.
“Sure. My source says that you dated Mr. Whitaker’s son, a Trey Caudill.”
“His foster son. In high school.”
“But you did date him?”
“Yes.”
“And Trey Caudill is now the special agent in charge of the Louisville field office, is that correct?”
She was tired of answering these questions. She had gone through a battery of them when they vetted her for acting director, a position she had never wanted or asked for. And hard as it was for even herself to believe, Trey’s promotion to the Louisville office after her departure
had happened without her knowledge. She would have been happy, then, to have never talked to him again.
“Where Trey and I grew up, there weren’t a lot of options after high school.” She felt her stance relax, the slightest twang of her Appalachian accent creep into her speech. The reporters looked a little bemused, surprised at the direction of her answer. “I went into the military. He got his college degree and then became an agent for the ATF. It was only much later that I decided I wanted to move closer to home and opted for a career change. I joined the ATF to try and make things better here.”
A forensic accountant had sifted through her financial records. She had agreed to an interview with lie-detecting technology.
“So your answer is yes?” Sherri was obstinate and blunt.
“It is. An equal and opposite reaction. I don’t think it’s too surprising that two kids who knew Eli Whitaker should run in the opposite direction.”
“But, Director, don’t you think—”
“And I will let you know”—she spoke loudly—“you can’t ask any harder questions than the ATF already has. I know firsthand the damage that Eli Whitaker can do. I can assure you, in my role as acting director, that there is no one who will approach this task with more diligence and dedication than myself.”
Peter had worked his way around the room and he reached out now to take her tablet and notes, signaling that the press conference was at a close. ...
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