Oenone had been four years old when the Green Storm seized power, and she had no clear memories of the time before the war. Her father, who had been killed in a skirmish with pirates at Rogues’ Roost, was just a face in a photograph on the family shrine.
Oenone grew up shy and clever on an air base in remote Aleutia, where her mother worked as a mechanic. At school she sang propaganda songs like “The East Is Green” and “We Thank the Stalker Fang for Our Happy Childhoods.” At home her bedtime stories were the tales her aviator brother, Eno, told, of victories on distant battlefields. Her playthings were broken Stalkers shipped back from the fighting in Khamchatka and piled up behind the base. She felt so sorry for them that she started trying to make them better, not understanding then that they were dead already and would best be left in peace. She learned the secrets that lay beneath their armor, the braille of their brains. She grew so good with them that the base commander started calling for the Zero girl instead of his own surgeon-mechanics when one of his Stalkers went wrong. She earned extra rations for her mother and herself that way until she was sixteen, when the Green Storm heard of her talents and sent her to a training facility, then to a front-line Resurrection unit in the Altai Shan.
In that underground world of trenches and dugouts she toiled through the long, murderous winter of ’22. Dead soldiers were dragged out of the frozen mud by salvage teams and dumped on the Resurrection slabs, where Oenone and her comrades turned them into Stalkers and sent them marching back into the line.
She was surprised at how quickly she stopped feeling horror, and pity. She learned not to look at the faces of the people she worked on. That way they weren’t people at all, just broken things that had to be stripped down and repaired as fast as possible. There was a sense of comradeship in the Resurrection room that Oenone liked. The other surgeon-mechanics joked and teased one another as they worked, but because Oenone was so young, they called her “little sister” and took care of her. They were impressed by how quickly and carefully she worked, and the easy way she solved problems that they could not. Sometimes she heard them talking about her, using words like “genius.”
Oenone felt proud that she had pleased them, and proud that she was playing a part in the struggle for the Good Earth. Again and again that winter, the cities of the enemy tried to advance across the shell-torn stretch of hell that separated their Hunting Ground from the territories of the Green Storm, and they were so many that it sometimes seemed to Oenone that nothing would be able to stop them. But Green Storm guns and catapults hurled shells against their tracks, and Green Storm carriers flung Tumblers down upon their upperworks, and Green Storm warships routed their fighter screens, and brave Green Storm rocket units crept between their huge wheels and blasted holes in their undersides through which squads of Green Storm Stalkers could swarm. And always in the end, when enough of their people had been killed, the cities gave up and slunk away. Sometimes, when one was badly damaged, the others would turn on it and tear it apart.
At first Oenone was terrified by the howl and crump of the incoming snout-gun rounds and the whistle of snipers’ bullets slicing the cold air above the communications trenches. But weeks went by, and then months, and she slowly grew used to the terror. It was like working on the bodies in the Resurrection room: You learned to stop feeling things. She didn’t even feel anything when word came from Aleutia that her mother’s air base had been eaten by amphibious suburbs.
And then, during the spring offensive of ’23, she recognized one of the bodies that the salvage teams dumped in front of her. There was a pattern of moles on his chest that she knew as well as the constellations he had taught her when she was little. Even before she peeled aside the bloody rag that someone had draped over his face, she knew that he was her brother, Eno. Because their letters to each other had been censored, she hadn’t even known that he was in her sector.
She stared at him while she mechanically pulled on her rubber gauntlets. She did not want to Resurrect him, but she knew what would happen to her if she refused. Sometimes soldiers on the line tried to stop the Corps taking the bodies of their comrades for Resurrection; the Green Storm denounced them as Crypto-Tractionists, and they were shot and Resurrected with their friends. Oenone did not want to be shot. At the sight of Eno, all her feelings had returned, and her fear of death came back so suddenly and so powerfully that she could barely breathe. She did not ever want to be like Eno, cold and helpless on a slab.
“Surgeon-Mechanic?” asked one of her assistants. “Are you unwell?”
Oenone wanted to be sick. She waved him away and tried to control herself. It was wrong to even think of not Resurrecting Eno. She told herself that she should be happy for her brother, because thanks to her, his body would be able to go on fighting the barbarians even after death. But she was not happy.
Her assistants were staring at her, so she said, “Scalpel. Bone saw. Rib spreaders,” and set to work. She opened Eno’s body and took out his internal organs, replacing them with engines, battery housings, and preservative pumps. She cut off his hands and replaced them with the steel hands of a Stalker. She cut off his private parts. She took out his eyes. She took off his skin and wired a mysterious net of electrodes into the fibers of his muscles. She opened his skull and fitted a machine the size of a peach stone into his brain, then watched him writhe and shudder as it unspooled wire-thin cilia down his spinal cord, connecting to his nervous system and to the other machines she had installed.
“This isn’t really you,” she told him, whispering to him constantly as she worked. “You are in the Sunless Country, and this is just a thing you’ve left behind that we can use, like recycling a bottle or a crate. Doesn’t the Green Storm tell us to recycle everything for the sake of the Good Earth?”
When she had finished, she handed him over to a junior surgeon-mechanic who would fit the exoskeleton and finger-glaives. Then she went outside and smoked a cigarette, and watched airships on fire above no-man’s-land.
It was after that that the dead started talking to her. It seemed strange that they should be so chatty when her own brother had said nothing at all, but when she looked into their faces, which she always made a point of doing after Eno, she could hear them whispering in her mind.
They all asked her same thing: Who will end this? Who will put an end to this endless war?
“I’ll do it,” Oenone Zero promised, her small voice drowning in the thunder of the guns. “At least I’ll try.”
“Treacle!” cried Popjoy cheerfully, when she finally arrived at his offices, high in the pagoda. He was packing. In the big trunk that sat open on his desk, Oenone could see books, files, papers, a framed portrait of the Stalker Fang, and an enamel mug with the logo of the Resurrection Corps and the slogan YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE A MAD SCIENTIST TO WORK HERE—BUT IT HELPS! Popjoy was standing on a chair to unhook a picture of the Rogues’ Roost air base, which he dusted with his cuff before stowing in the trunk. Then he blew Dr. Zero a kiss.
“Congratulations! I’ve just been to see Fang, and it’s official! She’s so impressed with your work on old Grikey that she’s decided to let me retire at last! I’m off to my weekend place at Batmunkh Gompa for a well-earned rest. A spot of fishing; tinkering with a few pet projects; I might even write my memoirs. And you, Treacle—you’re to be my replacement.”
How strange, thought Oenone. This was what she had been working for ever since her epiphany in the trenches: to be the Stalker Fang’s personal surgeon-mechanic. For this she had overcome her natural shyness and fought for a transfer to the central Stalker Works. For this she had put up with Dr. Popjoy’s unpleasant sense of humor and wandering hands. For this she had spent years tracking down the grave of the notorious Stalker Grike, and months repairing him, proving to everyone that she was at least Popjoy’s equal. Yet now that the moment had arrived, she could not even find a smile. Her knees felt weak. She gripped the doorframe to stop herself from falling.