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“The best way to retake the factory is not to lose it,” said Bao, evidently continuing the thread of their earlier conversation. “These are the devil soldiers we’re talking about; if we let them get entrenched, we will never take it back from them.”

“Perhaps your army cannot,” said Wu.

“No army can do it!” cried Bao. He was more confrontational than normal, which Heron chalked up to the added stress. “Not even our armies together. But if we strike now, if we make the most devastating counterattack we can possibly make, we can kill them while they have no cover. No defense. It is our only hope of victory.”

Wu mused on this. “A decisive blow now, while their entire army is committed, could destroy them utterly.”

“Yes!” said Bao. “But we must act quickly.”

“We will mobilize your army to the counterattack,” said Wu, nodding at his own decision. “Mine shall hold the flanks.”

“Hold the flanks against what?” asked Bao. “There is no other army—the Partials have committed every soldier in this sector to this fight. Ten thousand BioSynth super-soldiers. Our scouts report that their forward base is empty, and the devils stream through the streets like foul water.”

“Then we must flee in the Rotors,” said Wu, and Heron saw a hint of fear in his face. “We cannot allow . . . the satbox to fall into enemy hands!”

He wants to save himself, thought Heron, and searches for excuses.

“We must be seen to lead,” said Bao, shaking his head adamantly. “How can you ask your soldiers to fight while you flee to the rear? It will break their morale.”

They were both acting exactly according to type—exactly the way Heron knew they would act, following almost point by point the psychological profiles she had sent to her handler. Wu was a coward, and would sacrifice anything to save his own skin. Bao was an idealist, a man who saw himself as the savior of China. Wu would always seek to protect himself, and Bao would stand his ground even to his own destruction.

Both men, she realized, in this situation, facing this exact set of circumstances, would do the same thing.

“Every single devil in the army,” said Wu softly. He wrung his hands in fear. “And us trapped here like crabs in a cage. We will need as many men as we can get.”

“Yes,” said Bao eagerly. “We will need both armies. We can stop them here—we can hold this factory and defeat the devils, but only together. Your army on one flank and mine on the other. We can take anything they send at us, and throw it right back in their faces.”

“Our antiair weapons have been destroyed,” said Wu, but Bao cut him off.

“Our men are our weapons,” he said. “They are the only weapons we need.”

Their men are their weapons, thought Heron, and in a flash she saw the whole plan: everything the NADI strategists had done to produce this exact situation, to force this exact response, to pave the way for the unthinkable attack that must come next. The factory complex was the most valuable objective in the city, and now the Chinese generals were in it, and in a matter of minutes their entire army would be in it as well—an army so well entrenched in the urban terrain that they had proven almost impossible to root out. But if they left their defenses and rushed the factory, fighting to hold it, all three of the defenders’ assets would be in one place, at one time. A Partial victory here could destroy the Chinese military strength in the entire region, and that was a victory worth sacrificing for—even something as valuable as the munitions factory itself. Now that Heron had destroyed the antiair cannons, the Partials could—and would—destroy the entire complex with an air strike. It was a brilliant, devastating plan.

But it would work only if the Partial army was in the factory complex. Without that threat of overwhelming force, the Chinese would have no need to bring in so many of their own soldiers—pull the Partials back, and the Chinese would pull back as well. The air strike would hurt but not destroy them. The Partial army was bait.

The Partial army was a sacrifice.

PARAGEN BIOSYNTH GROWTH AND TRAINING FACILITY, UNDISCLOSED LOCATION

April 12, 2059

Heron lived with the Chinese prisoners for nearly a month: eating with them, sleeping in their barracks, talking and listening and learning everything she could. Though they didn’t know it, they were teaching her invaluable information she couldn’t possibly have learned in a classroom: regional slang, body language, communal experiences that she studied, processed, and adopted into her own persona. The city of Zuoquan held a lantern festival every year, and had done so for centuries. Her history teacher had told her about the meaning of the festival, its origins, its size and timing and location. The prisoners had told her about Chen’s Noodle House, and the sidewalk cart he used every year with the squeaky wheel on one side. They’d told her about Grandmother Mei and her old yellow dog, sitting on her roof and howling at the fireworks. They’d told her about the year the dragon had faltered in the rain, ruining the paper and halting the parade and forever branding Li Gong’s oldest son as the Lord of Mud. Each story Heron heard she internalized, and as she moved from group to group she became one of them, so strongly identified as a Zuoquan native that many of the prisoners claimed to have known her as a girl.

They were a proud people, cheerful in the face of hardship, strong in the depths of captivity, and ruthless in their pursuit of freedom. She admired them, and was proud, in a way, to pretend to be one of them. She helped them plan half their escape attempts, and eavesdropped on the other half, and reported all of it back to her superiors. She was a secret hero to both the prisoners and the guards.

“It’s time to send a message,” said Vincent. He was her new trainer, and one of the de facto masters of the prison camp; she had thrown a rebellious fit, as she did every few days, and they used her alleged confinement as a time to talk. “Who are the leaders?”

“Li Gong is the oldest,” said Heron, “and he has a lot of cultural presence because of it. People do what he says, but he doesn’t say much. More active, but less important, is this young man.” She tapped a photo in the prison log book. “Hsu Yan. He wants to lead an escape, and he doesn’t like the way Huan Do is doing it. Do is the other leader, he and his wife, Lan. The two of them are probably the biggest leaders in the camp, Do and Lan.”

“Define ‘biggest,’” said Vincent.

“The most followers,” said Heron. “The most influence, over both the prisoners and the guards. The most likely to form an escape plan capable of succeeding, and to unite a group capable of carrying it out.”

“The most important, then,” said Vincent. “The gear that makes the whole clock run.”

Heron nodded. “In a way, yes.” She looked up. “What message do you want me to send him?”

“He’s not the recipient,” said Vincent; “he’s the message. We’re using him to send a message to the entire camp.”

“You’re going to kill him,” said Heron.

“No,” said Vincent, “you’re going to kill him.”

The plan he laid out was simple. A message like this would usually require a lot of flash and visibility—a public execution to keep the rest of the camp in line—but what Vincent wanted was silence and mystery. If Huan Do died in public, the prisoners would learn to fear the guards, but they already feared them. They hid in the shadows and trusted only one another. But if Huan Do died in the shadows, safe among friends, the prisoners would have nowhere else to hide. Their resistance would crumble. Heron concealed a knife in her prison jumpsuit, and when her “punishment” ended, she returned to the camp.