A couple of them had weapons we’d never seen, the kind that, if you go looking, don’t exist. Focused toxin’s my guess. Or some fry-brain electronic equivalent. I saw nothing, no muzzle flash, no recoil, no exhaust, when one of those locked on Li lifted his handgun, but I saw the result. Li went down convulsing, limbs thrashing independently as though they belonged to different bodies.
Three of the four coming for me fell almost at the same time, one down, two down, three, without sound or obvious reason. Once I’d dealt with the fourth and looked again, the two by Li were on the ground and still. The whole sequence in just under sixteen seconds.
Movement atop a battered steel shed to the right took my attention, as it was meant to do.
Never show yourself against the sky.
Unless you’re purposefully announcing yourself, of course.
She came down in three stages, over the side and catch with the left, swing to the right, drop and turn. Faultless as ever. No sign of what weapon she’d used. I recalled her late interest in antiquities, blowpipes and the like. One violinist wants shiny new and perfectly functional, another’s always looking for old and funky, an instrument that makes you work to get the music out.
Her hair was cropped short and had tight curls of gray like steel filings in it. The row of geometrical earrings, circle, square, triangle, cross, was gone from the left ear. Otherwise not much had changed. Musculature stood out in the glisten of sweat on her skin. Yellow T-shirt, green pants.
“Interesting choice of clothing for someone doing her best to be invisible.”
“Figured if it came to it and I stood dead still, they might take me for a vegetable.”
Blood had pooled in Li’s face, turning it purple, then burst in a scatter of darker splotches across it. Limbs were rigid. No respiration, no pulse. A pandemic of that: No pulse or respiration in the ones she’d put down either.
“Here we go leaving a mess behind us,” I said.
“Ah, well.”
“With a bigger mess waiting ahead.”
“Ah, well again.” She snatched the mystery weapons from those by Li. “We hit the floor with whoever shows up on our dance card.” Then looked around. “No eyes out here. No trackers.”
“Chosen for it. So they’re not government.”
“Who can say?” At the time we believed them to be a single team, didn’t understand there were three factions at work, a tangle of forces.
Fran had dropped to a squat and was breaking down one of the weapons. “Indications are, they think of themselves as freedom fighters. Then again, who doesn’t? Freedom from taxes, bureaucracy, using the wrong texts at school? Or maybe they just want to tear the house down. Maybe we should have asked them.”
She stood and brought over the gutted weapon. “Ever seen a power source like that?” A bright blue marble with no apparent harness or connection, spinning gyroscopically in a chamber not much larger than itself. “Have to wonder what else they have.”
“Six less footmen, for a start.”
“There’ll be backup. We should be missing.”
“Missing, we’re good at.”
“Have been till now.”
She retrieved the second weapon and we started away. Darkness had begun unfurling from the ground and the air smelled of rain. Insects called to one another from trees and high grass, invisibly.
“When I was a child,” Fran said, “no more than four or five, there was a cricket that sang outside my window every night. I’d go to bed, lie there in the dark and listen to it sing, night after night. Then one night it didn’t. I knew it was dead, whatever dead was, and I cried.”
Fran as a child, crying, I could scarcely picture. “Why were these six, and the others, on you?”
She pulled the power source from the first weapon, discarded its carcass. “They weren’t.”
She’d been working a private job much like that of mine back before the team in dark gray cars came for me, and stumbled onto something that wasn’t right. She finished the job and took to side roads, kicking over traces till she realized that both job and not-rightness were come-ons. Hand-tied lures, she said, designed to bring her out. So out she came. They were stalking her. She was stalking them, coming in and out of sight. Getting a fix on them. Who they might be, how many.
“They were moving around in teams, randomly, and about where you’d expect, train stations, transfer points. They’d see me, hang back, never close. Which was how I knew it went deeper. So I stepped it up.”
“And they stepped in.”
“Maybe they got impatient. Maybe like me they decided to push to see what pushed back. And I sent a message up the line to you—which is what they anticipated.”
By this time we were moving towards the central city but on back streets long forsaken, block after block of abandoned warehouses and storage facilities from a past in which people were driven to accumulate so much that it spilled over. We’d spotted a few stragglers of the kind that, once seen, quickly vanish. Tree dwellers brought to earth, I think of them, on the ground but never quite of this world.
A razor-cold January morning. Snow falling past the windows—silently, but you can’t help looking that way again and again, listening. How could something take over the world to such degree and make no sound? The room’s warmth moved in slow tides toward the windows, tugging at our skin as it passed by. Even the machines were silent as I did my best to become one with them.
Abraham watched and paced me, speaking in low tones about Ethical Suicides back during our string of interim governments.
“Not much there when you go looking…. Loosen up, I can see your shoulders knotting…. Barely enough information to chew on…. Breathe. Everything comes from the breathing….”
I’d often wondered how a man with such leanings could possibly wind up working where he did. Were his intimations a furtive challenge, a testing?
“This is difficult for us to grasp, but you have to look back, to the sense of powerlessness that got tapped into. People were convinced that government, that the country itself, was broken and couldn’t be repaired. They saw an endless cycle of paralysis and decay about which they could do nothing. ES’s were not about themselves, they were about something much larger.”
I stopped to catch breath and shake muscles loose. Took the water bottle from Abraham. Eager electrolytes swarmed within. “Absolute altruism? In addition to which, they acted knowing their actions would come to nothing?”
“That’s how it looks to us. To them, who can say? Can we ever appraise the time in which we act?” Abraham stacked virtual weights on the upper-body pulleys, thought a moment and dialed it down a notch. “You’re skeptical.”
“Of more and more every day.”
“With good reason.” He reached for the water bottle at the very moment I held it out. Another dead soldier had become a joke between us.
Shortly thereafter, as had become our custom, sheathed in featherweight warmsuits, we were walking the grounds. Snow still fell, but lightly, haltingly. “When I first came, not so many years ago,” Abraham said, “there were still dove in the trees, calling to one another. It was the loneliest sound I’d ever heard.”
The rehab facility had originated at city’s edge, adjacent to a cemetery with old religious and older racial divisions, then, as the city burgeoned, found itself ever closer to center. The cemetery was gone, doves too, but bordering stands of trees and dense growth remained.
Further in towards the heart of the complex sat the original building about which all else had accrued, three storeys of rust-colored brick facade and clear plastic windows that on late evenings caught up the sun’s light to transform it into swirling, ungraspable, ghostlike figures. Other times, passing by, I’d look up to see those within, on the second floor, peering out, and feel a pull at something deep inside myself, an uneasiness for which I had neither word nor explanation.