“I don’t know.”
“You’re bruised. We’ll take them away.”
“Okay.”
The angel lifted the child from the seat.
“Nan?” but she knew it wasn’t. This angel was different. Lily couldn’t feel the
“No. You may call me System. Or Arch.”
“Ark? Like Noah and the animals?”
The machine frowned. “What?”
“You look like Nan.”
“Call me Arch. Like Noah and the animals.”
The child smiled. “It’s cold here.”
“It will get warmer.”
“Are we home again?”
The angel carried Lily across the walkway toward the chamber entrance. “No.”
“Where are we?”
“This is your new home. We’re between the stars now.”
“Can I play with the boys now?”
“Maybe for a little while.”
“Arch?”
“Yes?” The chamber door cycled open.
“Can I have some chocolate milk?”
He fell from his vacuum chair into a withdrawing puddle of flux, splashing the lazy fluid up with a meaty slap. He heard similar splashes all around him, but his eyes didn’t work. He couldn’t see.
The little boy pushed himself to all fours, sat back and wiped gelatin-slick hair from his face, scrunched his fingers into his eyes in an attempt to clear his vision. He couldn’t stop coughing. Vomiting. He’d had the flu once. This is how it had felt.
Blink, blink. He heard crying.
Metal crash and warm wind filled the room. The floor was drying.
Click and the room was red. His eyesight hadn’t disappeared; the lights had just been off. Now, he saw everything as it must have looked in Hell. Mommy had whispered to him about the places they’d go after this world: one was happiness and clouds and angels, and one was fire and red and screaming. From the screaming and crying and red, Hunter wondered if he had died. He wondered if he’d done something wrong and ended up where the bad people went when they died.
The lights grew brighter.
A giant snap like the firecrackers that his father had brought him, set off down in the sand by the water. Hunter jumped. The room shimmered as phase shielding dissembled.
There was a smaller boy sitting on the floor beside Hunter. He was sobbing. Hunter helped him to his feet.
“I’m Hunter.”
Through sniffles: “I’m Br-Brendan.”
“Are you okay?”
“Where’s Mommy?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where are we?”
“I don’t know.”
Brendan covered his face and cried some more. Hunter didn’t know what to do.
The chamber door slid open with the slosh of phase. Hunter and Brendan looked on with fear and confusion. Other boys stood in silence.
A procession of angels entered the room, surrounding a middle-aged man in a charcoal gray suit. He looked over the boys with a gaze like fire; Hunter felt he was human. He felt the angels weren’t exactly angels. There was none of that tugging he’d become used to from the projections. Eight, ten, twelve: the angels walked amongst the boys, helped some to their feet, gently held the weeping, surveyed the little soldiers for damage.
The man cleared his throat.
“My name is Captain Pierce. You may call me ‘Uncle.’ Welcome to your new home. His name is Archimedes.”
An angel bent to Hunter’s level, turned his face from side to side, looked him over. “Do you hurt?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“My Mommy’s dead.”
For an instant, the angel froze, head cocked, as if listening to a voice from within. “Your mother is safe now. You will be reunited with her soon.”
“You’re lying.”
Motionless non-human: the pause was longer this time. “Are you hungry?”
“No.”
The angel didn’t respond, but moved on to Brendan.
Uncle walked around the room, patted the heads of his new soldiers. “We’ve come a very long way, boys. We have a lot to do. We have a lot to learn. But first, we’ll have something to eat. Who’s hungry?”
There were a few noncommittal affirmatives.
“Good. You have to eat and become strong like your fathers!”
Hunter wondered if Uncle’s father had been killed somewhere between the stars, too. Somewhere deep and black, a place with two stars, where the squeal of shattering glass had been the last sound before—
“Let’s have some supper, boys!”
“Three days.” Hunter sighed.
Lilith cradled his face in her hands. She knew he was thinking…too much.
“We’ll find a way.” Her eyes to his eyes, her soul to his
“Arch?”
yes?
“Have you met the Rebecca before?”
outsystem offensive action, fourth extinction air support group.
“Why don’t I remember that?”
Lilith held his hands. “We’ve been through so many—”
“Arch?”
yes?
“Where’s she from?”
rebecca crew ascended upon initial Earth siege.
“Soldats perdus. City?”
canberra compound.
“Fuck.”
“You’ve heard of them?”
“Arch, set course and engage.”
specify destination.
“Deep Outer, full speed.”
specify destination.
“Just fucking fly.” Hunter stood from the vacuum chair, fingers groping through unruly hair. He paced the bridge. “Up bubble three, four, five. Full speed.”
“Hunter?”
crew secure for Light X. Sirens roared to life.
“What?”
“Who are they?”
He slammed his fist to a dead control panel. “They’re a rogue…”
Pacing. His hand moved to his right temple, rubbed. Reflex.
“Hunter?”
There was a building pain underneath his fingertips. Lilith looked from his closed, frowning eyes to his temple, fingers massaging in a circle: forth, back, forth, around.
“Hunter?”
He opened his eyes, grabbed a dead angel from one of the command chairs, threw it across the room with a growl of fury. Mechanical guts spilled across the bridge floor. His hand went back to his temple and forehead.
“Hunter?”
“WHAT?”
“Your hand.” His heart broke a little more when he saw her eyes, her gaze. The way her hands were clustered before her mouth.
He looked, horrified before he even saw, because he knew, and he knew, and he knew.
Faint lattice of silver, just below the skin. It crawled from fingertips to palm to wrist. He spun an overhead monitor into the light, saw even in the reflection of the dead display that the silver was working its way underneath the skin above his skull.
Lilith sobbed as she activated the shield mechanism on her cardiac plate. The phase gelatin engulfed her form as she stood from the vacuum chair. “Hunter, I—”
“No, it’s not—”
“I’m so—”
“It’s not your fault!” He cried out as the silver gave one last twinge in his head that brought him to his knees. “It’s not your fault.” The pain subsided as Lilith’s shielding provided a buffer between his flesh and her affliction.
She knelt at his side, dragging the slosh of phase behind and around her.
“It’ll be okay. We’ll be okay.”
Hunter nodded, although he knew that their love would kill him.
Pierce took off his jacket and slumped into a bridge chair. “When did you find it?”
“About ten minutes ago. Faint at first, then a signal spike. It’s definitely for us.”
“Stop Arch and snag it.”
“Yes, Uncle.”
He hated the machines, hated the way they spoke to him, hated the way they looked just enough like real humans to disturb, to place that sliver of doubt in his mind. He hated the machines, hated Mother (Maire) for this prison without end, hated this war and this purpose. He hated being the caretaker of several hundred boys trapped within a box of metal flying faster than light toward a galaxy that they would kill. He might have hated the girl most of all, the brat who had once stolen a doll from his grasp with a mine.