“I know you’ve traveled pretty far just to get here,” she began.
“That would be an understatement.”
She couldn’t help smiling at that, at the way Billy tugged at her heart. “Yeah well, I think the best thing for you to do, Mr Spaceman, is stay the night, have some grub, and stock up on provisions. And head right back out in the morning. I’m assuming there’s a craft in orbit waiting for you. No way you could head out to this quadrant all alone.”
Billy laughed again, more gently this time. His thick, black hair stood on end, all messed up from his helmet. He pushed the buttons at his wrist points, and the exoskeleton of his suit softened. He pulled the suit down and stepped out of it, looking like a man now and not a robotic killer.
He looked vulnerable.
But Anika wasn’t fooled. She knew what Billy really was, what Roberto had been before he’d gotten snuffed.
K-Ops. Genetically modified soldiers in the United States Army, technology owned by FortuneCorp, the soldiers serving their country. Sent by the US military to do what regular soldiers didn’t have the physical or mental stamina to do.
Roberto never spoke of what he’d done as a soldier out in the Glass Desert. He had wanted to leave the war behind when he had come home to her, and she hadn’t needed to know the details of his job. She’d wanted to love those memories away until he had to go back and make more of them.
But the last time he’d come home, Anika could tell something had changed. Roberto had changed. As if he knew the next time he went back to the Glass Desert, he wouldn’t be coming back.
“I didn’t come all this way just to say hello.” Billy broke into her thoughts, his voice a little too calm.
A jolt of fear shot down the length of Anika’s back. She didn’t want to hear any more, but she owed it to Billy to hear him out. He had come to the edge of the known world to find her.
“Do you know how Roberto died?” Billy asked.
Anika’s mouth was dry as sand. She licked her lips and shrugged her shoulders. “It’s war,” she managed to say. “Soldiers die in war. You don’t need to tell me more than that.”
He squinted at her, as if he were trying to figure out how much she already knew. “But you need to know. If you don’t already.”
Anika tried to relax but couldn’t. Billy took a seat on Anika’s desk chair, set in front of an ancient roll-
top desk that looked ridiculously out of place on an uninhabitable planet at the back end of nowhere.
Billy’s hands rested on the arms of her chair. She watched his strong fingers caressing the old-
fashioned realwood, and wondered where he hid his own weapons.
She knew he was armed. She scanned his spare, hard body for the weapons – traveling from those strong, knowing hands up to his muscular arms encased in dark-blue flight silk, across the defined shoulders, the curve of his neck . . .
She realized, belatedly, that Billy had stopped talking. Anike tore her gaze from Billy’s insanely beautiful body and forced herself to stare right into his eyes.
Eyes the color of midnight, of desolation. He seemed to pin her to the cot like a butterfly. Those eyes spoke of suffering she would understand, like Roberto’s. And yet his voice, vibrating inside her chest, remained gentle, kind.
“Roberto didn’t die in the field, you know.”
“I know,” Anika whispered. Miserable now, remembering. Billy was the one who had told her, after the memorial, in a low, quick undertone, far away from everybody else. The details were dangerous, she knew.
“Somebody got inside the barracks, somebody who knew they wanted Roberto specifically. They got past all of us – genmod soldiers – and killed him and escaped before we could do anything. And, Annie. I didn’t tell you this. There was no investigation. Nothing. We were told to act like it had never happened.”
Annie swallowed hard. “I figured he didn’t die the official way, the way the government told me.”
“What did you think?”
She shook her head as if she could negate the truth away. “Both of us worked for FortuneCorp, not like you soldiers. He never told you, did he?”
“Nope. As far as anybody on the team knew, he was just another soldier.”
“Well, he wasn’t. We worked together on genetic research, human and ecological modifications. He was a geneticist, I’m a biologist. Together we worked on eco-transformative research. How to mutate human beings, and climates.”
Billy nodded, not looking too surprised. “Roberto was way smarter than me,” he said. “A million times smarter. But didn’t have as much horse-sense. And you don’t just need a killer instinct to survive the Glass Desert, Annie girl. You need prey instinct, too. Roberto just wore his smarts out in the open, and it cost him.”
The lump in Anika’s throat all but choked her. She shrugged and tried to laugh. “I always warned him to watch his back. Doing our kind of research is so dangerous. Rival corporations will kill scientists, kidnap them and extract their knowledge. And Roberto put himself outside of FortuneCorp’s protection, going to war. But he wanted to understand what it was like to undergo genetic modification himself, and the only way to find out was to become a soldier. Like you.”
“Roberto didn’t fool nobody. I figured out after a while that he was a scientist, not a grunt.”
“Ah, yes. He told you his motto? ‘Geneticist, modify yourself.’”
Billy grinned sadly at the memory, and at Anika’s imitation of Roberto’s Spanish-inflected voice. For a moment, it was like Roberto was there with them, sharing the joke.
Anika smiled, and Billy looked into her soul again. But this time, his gaze felt more like a caress.
“I suppose a rival corporation got Roberto. Espionage. That’s what I figured when I heard he was gone.”
Billy stared at her for a long moment, and then he withdrew his gaze, looked into the middle distance, his open face suddenly unreadable. “After the memorial, I went back for six more months.
“Hard months, Annie. Hard, hard months. The whole team died out there, one by one. The genmod can help – infrared vision, limb regeneration – and it will keep you alive in the field, but the morale went bad.”
Billy shifted in his chair, and looked into the distance, like he saw the pictures drawn by his words.
She willed herself into complete silence. And Billy kept telling her the secrets of his war.
“Soldiers are superstitious, modified or not. And after Roberto was murdered on the base, our luck seemed to go with him. We knew some kind of bullshit was going on, okay? But we had no way to prove it. I figured with his scientist background, he made some bad enemies. Maybe he was even a spy, yeah?
We didn’t know for sure.
“I got the Murphy luck, ya know. Bad luck that gets you to the other side every time. But the other guys – their luck was just bad.”
He leaned back in the chair and sighed. And Anika trembled, only then realizing that she had been holding her breath as he spoke.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered, watching the pain play over Billy’s face like a shadow. “It must have been awful.”
“Worse for you,” he replied, his eyes still closed. “I’m the luckiest man alive, to get out of the desert.
But you think he died because of you.”
Anika took a huge gulp of air then, the guilt twisting like a knife in her chest. It was true. Roberto died because of the work they had done together.
Before she could say anything, Billy opened his eyes and looked at her. “Everybody in a war feels guilty for surviving, Annie. That’s just part of the gig.”
He looked ordinary again, the smart-ass kid from Southie that he’d once been, before he joined the Army to get the genmod. But that street kid was gone forever too, and both of them knew it.