CHAPTER FORTY
Shon seethed, staring at the map until his vision turned red, and he slammed his fist into the table. It cracked under the force of the blow, and he collapsed to the floor of the middle-school gym he had made his base camp. Human rebels still swarmed through the forest, hiding and sniping and slipping away, killing his soldiers and attacking their supplies and leading them ever farther to the east: always north and east. Away from the mainland and away from East Meadow, and now White Plains was gone and East Meadow was emptying like a sieve. In hindsight it was obvious—the humans’ actions were a powerful deception precisely because they weren’t successful. Victory after victory, prisoner after prisoner, they had swept across the island and mopped up the guerrillas and played straight into their hands like fools. The ruse had worked, and the human civilians were getting away.
The sheer coldheartedness of it enraged him. War was war, but he had tried to conduct it honorably. He had stopped Morgan’s executions as soon as Morgan’s orders stopped coming. He had gathered the humans but he hadn’t hurt them; he’d tried to quell their uprisings peacefully when he could, and he’d worked to bring East Meadow food and water. They had repaid him with a vicious bioweapon, a campaign of terrorism, and now a nuclear explosion that had undoubtedly wiped most of the Partial species off the planet. His friends, his leaders . . . he had felt abandoned before, with no new orders for weeks, but now he was completely cut off. He would never receive new orders; he would never receive another message on the radio; he would never rejoin the rest of his army because it did not exist. He had twenty thousand Partials under his command, and there would never be reinforcements because they were the last living Partials in the world.
In ten more days the next batch would expire, and they would be down to seventeen thousand. A month later they’d lose six thousand more.
He was done being honorable.
A messenger walked toward him but kept his distance, probably because of the shattered table and the angry link data still boiling through the air around his head. He took a breath to calm himself before speaking.
“Report.”
“One of the prisoners is talking,” said the messenger. “Apparently the rebels have been spreading word of the nuke, telling people to flee south before it went off.”
“And we never discovered this?”
“You had given explicit orders not to torture anyone,” said the messenger. “Now that we are, they’re . . . We’re learning a lot.”
“Who was behind it?”
“A resistance group called the White Rhinos,” said the messenger. “They’ve been in operation since just after the occupation of East Meadow began.”
“I know who they are,” said Shon. “They’ve been notoriously hard to catch—do we have any in custody?”
“Just one, sir.”
“Lead the way.” He left his aides to pick up the broken table, pausing only to grab his sidearm from the rack by the door. The prisoners were kept in a pair of basement restrooms, chained to the pipes of molding sinks and dank, broken toilets. Shon nodded to the guards standing alert in the hall outside and marveled at the fierce, almost desperate anger that seemed to permeate the entire camp. As soon as they had a target for their vengeance, they would fall like a thunderbolt.
They opened the door, and Shon reeled back slightly at the smell. The messenger led him to a short, skinny girl in the back corner, who showed signs of having been interrogated.
“This is the White Rhino?”
The messenger nodded. Shon crouched down in front of the battered girl, showing her the gun. “What’s your name?”
“Yoon-Ji Bak.”
“And you worked with the rebel Marisol Delarosa?”
The girl’s face was hard, steely and determined even through the blood and grime. “Proudly.”
“Where are the rest of the humans you have been attempting to evacuate?”
The girl said nothing.
“Tell me where they’re gathering, and I’ll make your death quick.”
The girl said nothing.
Shon raised his voice, trying to emulate as much of the sound of human anger as he could. “Where are they?”
“Shoot me,” said Yoon.
Shon looked at her a moment, then handed the gun to the messenger behind him. He clamped Yoon’s left wrist tightly in one hand and grabbed her little finger with his other. “You are a terrorist, a murderer, and a war criminal,” he said. “That broken nose is the nicest treatment you’ll get here, unless you start telling me what I want to know. I’m going to find all of you bastards, and I’m going to do what I should have done months ago—years ago. What is the rendezvous point for the human evacuation?”
“I don’t know.”
Shon snapped her finger backward, breaking it with an audible crack. The girl screamed, and he grabbed the next finger in line. “Let’s try again. Where are the humans going?”
She screamed again, gritting her teeth against the pain. “We’re getting everyone off the island.”
“Be more specific, please. Where and how?”
“You’ll have to kill me,” she gasped.
He snapped another finger, and moved his hand to the third. “Eight more chances before I start to get creative. Where exactly can I find them?”
She was grunting now, tears streaming down her face, clenching her other fist into a tight white ball against the pain. “I don’t know!”
Snap.
“Seven,” said Shon. “Where?”