She does this at night, when she can’t sleep. She closes her eyes and ritually runs her fingertips over the geography of her face. Years of childhood and family recede and depress, replaced by the valleys and mountains of scar tissue and aging. Under her right eye and where her cheekbone begins, the war years. Her gone adolescence. At her nose bridge the burned skin turns, almost spiral, and in her mind’s eye she can feel how near rage and love are in us all. We try to pretend they are opposites or at far poles from one another, but really they meet and bridge at the center of a face. They make a nexus. She feels the fiction of faith at the bridge of her nose. If she presses down on the waxen scar she can feel her skeleton underneath. How easily she could bore her finger like a drill into her own gray matter.
Near her jaw, against the edge of her mouth, she feels the people she once loved. Her mother. Her father. Her brother. And then those she learned to love through labor and resistance. Brothers and sisters in arms. Love is a word with ever-exploding definitions forged at the corners of her mouth, her mouth now set like a jagged slit against any expression or feeling.
Her face is a new world. Her skin carries the trace of her primary wound. She lives in the killer’s body; she lives in the body of one who might make life. She thought the killing was justified. In the wasteland that is left of her desires and righteous aims, she can see now that there is no just violence. Violence merely is. It murders us the moment we bring it to consciousness. Under her fingertips her burned chin sits like a guilty, poreless butte, a stubborn reminder that she was put to flame. Burned after she blotted out the sun.
If she travels the territory back up to the left side of her face carefully with her fingertips, where the burns left their most brutal mark, that place where her eye is misshapen—the lid pulling down too far, farther than a sleeper’s—that place is Leone.
My eye is you, Leone.
My eye was always you.
A clicking sound. Leone signaling. Joan opens her eyes, scans the scene before them, and nods back to Leone.
Joan elbows her way less than an inch at a time along the ground, through low-lying thistles and the skeletal remains of shrub brush. The dirt smells of dried and dead things and grinds into her clothing. She pauses and clutches a handful of dirt that has a small bit of nearly petrified twig in it. She smiles. Reaches for her rifle. The rifle’s infrared light traces a path along the ground in front of her. When she reaches a boulder twice human in size, she pushes herself up into a crouched position. It’s roughly three hours till what passes for daylight. She props her rifle up onto her thigh, turns, and sits down with her back against the rock.
She takes a deep but soundless breath. Holds it. Closes her eyes. When she opens them, the vertical line of her rifle in front of her splits her vision.
What moves her is the gas-piston operating system of her weapon, the quick-change barrel, the firing pin block, and ambidextrous charging handle. She knows the Magpul Masada better than any human. Whatever conversations, whatever potential human relationships passed earlier in her life are moot. Her weapon is now her brutal kindred spirit.
On the other side of the boulder, one hundred yards across rock and dead brush and dirt in an area that was once populated by a small stand of fir trees, is a camouflaged technological arsenal, guarded by what looks like two CIEL human sentries. Their skin too white. Grafted and puckered. Leone discovered the site nearly by accident in a routine radar sweep, literally suspended over their heads at a crap station in Tunnel 27. Joan can make out the rise of a Russian-made machine gun turret alongside a row of explosive warheads—probably American, or perhaps French—from the blue sheen of their shells. It’s difficult to tell if the small mound is meant strictly for munitions or if it holds some deeper useful secret. Kill the guards, raid the arsenal, blow it to shit. There is always a chance of finding something useful. Joan pulls down her night goggles and inhales. Her bicep twitches. She swallows. Dirt and the memory of sage. Night sniping always calms her nerves.
Low to the ground again, she peers through her scope; the sentries’ alabaster skin glints in the dulled moonlight. One guard stands up like an idiot—stretching? He scratches the place where his balls used to be. His head gleams in the muted moonlight. The other guard sits at some kind of makeshift outdoor terminal. The flaps of the camouflage are up. Probably they’ve had no action for some time. She aims the infrared laser at the ear of the standing guard.
That’s when she sees it. It’s not just an ammo station. It’s a holding station. Slightly to the left, barely camouflaged under some kind of pile of refuse, two pairs of deadened eyes.
Two animals in a cage.
No. Inside the crude wooden cage are two children, if you can call them that. Feral. Matted hair and filthy skin, bones nearly visible, eyes as wild as a jaguar’s. Where on Earth had they come from?
She closes her eyes. Her first thought: she reminded herself again of the fact of things, the traces of human left. We are not, after all, alone. She and Leone had already come across a child or two. Her second: What is the point of saving half-dead children? It’s the kind of question she asks now. A hopeless question. A question without heart. Whatever life is left on Earth and whatever lives are squirming out their worthless worm existence above, she has no part in the drama.
Joan opens her eyes with her rifle sight poised at the standing guard’s ear. She lifts her head nearly imperceptibly, and signals to Leone where to shoot. For years they have done this odd dance, Joan setting up kills, Leone executing the shots.
Leone pulls the trigger. Always Leone.
One guard’s head squirts open like a grape. The headless body wavers and then drops to the earth, thudding and kicking up dirt.
Joan opens her eyes and draws up on one knee, taking aim at the second guard, who is busy flailing around trying to get at his own rifle as he scrambles for cover beneath the table. Leone follows her gaze. Fixes the target. Fires. His chest spills onto the table, spraying it with blood and fragments of rib.
Then the night goes quiet again. If there were trees, wind would be whistling through their branches. Joan stands, slings her brutal intimate over her shoulder, and walks the distance to the dead men. With each step she struggles to decide what to do with whatever they find inside that cage.
In the dark, the blood is black and blue.
Chapter Thirteen