She had been doing drills like this for months. Identify the target, infiltrate, and strike. In and out. She studied the camp with new eyes, noting each guard tower and bunkhouse, and decided she could do this job even without the guards’ help. She returned to her room, commiserated with her bunkmates about the injustice of the prison system, and bowed to all the right people in the mess hall for dinner, showing deference and gaining, in return, renewed trust. Hsu Yan caught her up on the latest passwords, and Li Gong himself thanked her for her shining example of resistance. It occurred to Heron that in her list of leaders she should have included herself: She was well known as a rebel, an agitator, and a planner. The camp looked up to her. If word got around that Mei Hao, of all people, had killed Huan Do, the camp would be crushed.
The guards called lights-out at nine p.m., cutting all power to the bunkhouses, but the prisoners stuffed sheets and blankets in the cracks of their windows, and burned small lamps and flashlights they’d either scrounged or built themselves. The women in Heron’s bunkhouse talked about new plans for escape, and Heron made detailed mental notes just in case the death of Huan Do failed to break their spirits. When they finally went to sleep at one a.m., Heron lay in the dark and waited until every other prisoner was asleep before picking the lock and slipping outside. The camp was quiet and dark. Heron moved like a ghost through the streets and alleyways, dodging guards and searchlights and watchdogs as if they weren’t even there. Huan Do’s bunkhouse was near the center of camp and locked down even tighter than her own; he was a dangerous troublemaker, and the guards had been watching him for weeks. Heron picked the lock in five silent seconds, and her footsteps as she slipped inside were no louder than a snake gliding ghostlike across the floor.
The bunkhouses were separated by gender, so Huan Do was alone in his bed; the prisoners sometimes sneaked their wives in, but not tonight. There were eight rooms to a house, and eight men to a room. All the men in this house were fast asleep. Heron stood over Huan Do’s sleeping form, the knife in her hand.
This is the first time I’ve killed one for real, she thought. All my other missions were drills; all my other targets were mannequins, or sensors, or drones. With the exception of Sergeant Latimer, who did most of the work himself, I have never killed a real human before. She stared at the sleeping man, listened to him breathe. Her knife was polycarbonate fiber, sharp as steel but a matte black that disappeared into the darkened room like a shard of shadow. Huan Do was helpless and oblivious, like a child.
This is my graduation, she realized. The message we’re ostensibly sending to the prisoners will be effective, but unnecessary; their escapes never work, and they’d have nowhere to go if they did. It will make them easier to control, at least for a while, but that’s not the full reason for this action. She looked down at her jumpsuit. I’m flying out to the real war in just one week, and this is my graduation. One final mission. “Prove you can kill when the target’s a real person.” She had learned in her seduction training—from Ms. McGuire, not a drunk sergeant in the shower—about the concept of empathy. Of seeing the world through someone else’s eyes, and feeling the way they feel. “Make them love you,” McGuire had said, “and they won’t be able to kill you. Make them see you as a person, as a life, as a thing to be protected rather than harmed. All humans have empathy, and you can use it against them.”
“Partials have it too,” Heron had said. “We can feel each other’s emotions through the link.”
“That’s different,” said McGuire. “The link lets you know what those emotions are, but it doesn’t make you care about them. This is how you must use emotion—as a tool to be understood, manipulated, and exploited.”
Heron considered this. “Does that mean Partials have no conscience?”
“Most of them do,” said McGuire. “By international law, all BioSynthetic sentients must have empathy, and a conscience, to keep them from hurting their creators. It is the primary safeguard that makes you more useful, and therefore more valuable, than robotics.”
Heron cocked her head to the side. “You said ‘most.’”
McGuire smiled. “Thetas are designed with no conscience at all. A soldier is different from an assassin—when you kill, you must feel nothing for your target.”
“Then our existence is a crime,” said Heron. “My life is against the law.”
“Some laws are made to be broken.”
The words echoed in Heron’s mind as she stared at Huan Do. I must feel nothing for my target. She stepped forward, as silent as a shadow, and got to work.
ZUOQUAN CITY, SHANXI PROVINCE, CHINA
June 9, 2060
Heron’s mind raced through the possibilities: Would NADI really destroy their own Partials? Of course they would—they considered the Partials animals at best, and tools at worst. Ten thousand soldiers were a lot to lose, but they could always make more. It fit with the loss of the factory, too, because no army meant no need for bullets. That’s why my handler seemed so odd about my orders: He didn’t care if I captured the generals, because it genuinely doesn’t matter. Destroy the antiair guns at all costs, enable the air strike, and everything after was a fireball. Confirm?
A nanosecond passed, and she turned next to her options, thinking first of how she could survive. She could hijack a Rotor and fly clear—it was 2240; there was still plenty of time to escape before the air strike landed. She could even take the satbox with her, as a sign of good faith to her handler for going beyond her orders. She had no great urge to show them good faith, since they had shown none to her, but where else was she to go? She could blend in anywhere she went, especially in China, but . . . did she truly wish to spend her life as a nameless citizen in a conquered country? She was a Partial. She was not built for that.
But was she built to die?
She thought then about the rest of the Partials. Every devil in the army, as Wu put it; nearly ten thousand men and women, and in twenty minutes they would all be dead. Heron knew that this should bother her, and it did—on a personal level. She had been betrayed; she had been discarded. But it was more than that. Even as she analyzed the situation, she turned that analysis on herself and saw that she was losing her . . . what? Not her innocence, for she was an engineered assassin; she’d had no innocence to lose since the moment her genome was swirled together in a vat. But she was losing something else: her own illusions about herself, and about the way her mind worked. Ten thousand of her brothers and sisters were being sent blindly to their deaths, and here she sat without an ounce of sadness for them. She had been built to feel nothing, and trained to feel even less. They had made her incomplete, and her reaction to this massive betrayal proved just how deeply that incompleteness ran. She was a broken doll, dancing on the end of their strings.
She had to save the Partials, not because she loved them, but because she hated their creators.
Another nanosecond passed, and she began to form her plan. How could she save the other Partials? If she warned the Partial army, then the bait would be lost and the air strike would be canceled. The situation would stay the same, except that she would be known as a traitor and forced out of the loop, completely unable to prevent the same sacrifice when they tried it again in the future. If she called off the Chinese forces, the results would be similar, but with the added threat that the air strike might still happen, so close to the wire that they couldn’t call it off in time. The Partials would be destroyed for nothing. If she was going to change this attack, she had to make sure that the outcome still favored the NADI forces. She would hand them a victory, but not the one they’d wanted; she would shove it in their faces. She had very few resources at hand—not even a gun—but what she did have were the tools of her trade. Information. Intelligence. Deception. She could do this.