At the munitions site, Joan stares first at the dead guards, then briefly up into the godless night sky, then over at the cage. Girls. They didn’t make a fucking sound. That guts her. Though the moon merely smudges a spot in the sky, and the brilliance of stars has faded to a dull salt-and-peppering, the night sky still feels familiar to her. In the dark, a person’s shadow is nothing. Like the past losing its light.
She doesn’t need to think much about what to do with the pile of girls. There are only two. And one doesn’t have long, from the looks of it. You can see in a person’s eyes when life is leaving. Something going slack and empty. Joan’s heart folds and darkens.
Leone walks closer and drops her head so profoundly her jaw clacks.
“Motherfuckers.”
Then Leone bends down as gentle as a mother, unlatches the cage, and lifts the most lifelike into her arms. “Can you speak?” she whispers to the thing.
“Can’t feel . . . insides,” the creature rasps.
Leone clutches the girl so close, Joan fears she’ll break one of the girl’s arms.
“Leone,” Joan says gently, touching her shoulder.
Her fellow captive dies the moment they touch her, her mouth open in the shape of an O, her eyes lost to matter.
Joan looks into the alive girl’s eyes, vacant foggy pools of gray. Did they injure you? Did they starve you? Did they even remember the difference between human and animal? Was there a difference? The girl takes what seems to be a breath larger than she is, stares intensely into Leone’s eyes, and never breathes again.
They bury the girls in the ground because there is nothing else to do about anything. Joan’s mind carries what everyone’s does: memories, ideas, random bits of knowledge, desires, wounds, synaptic firings. But it carries more than that. Sometimes she wishes it didn’t. How old had those girls been? She was so young when she heard the song that drove the rest of her life. And the first time she was very much afraid. More afraid than she’d ever been about death. Had they been afraid? Of death? Or something else?
She met Leone when they were both girls. Leone with long black hair, Leone with long black hair reaching to the small of her back. Leone as strong or stronger than any boy who dared to arm-wrestle her. They swam naked in clear pools deep in the mountain ranges of the various countries where they were fighting. How they curled into each other’s bodies alone next to night fires away from their garrisons. How Joan rose in ranks with the speed of a miracle when she proved she could win battles by engulfing the enemy in elements, how Leone was never away from her side, Leone’s eyes shining blue-green like Earth from space, Leone laughing in the most dire of circumstances, the girl that Leone was slipping into—warrior—before she even had a chance to grow breasts.
If only Joan could give Leone back her childhood—any childhood—with dogs and kites and long swims in azure pools and endless forts they could build together by firelight, a fort for everywhere they had been, and dancing shadows and wolves and night creatures their fellowship . . .
But there is no such power.
War pervaded and imploded their childhoods, then became a monolithic violence and power so displaced that it lifted up off the ground to distinguish itself. Like a god would. CIEL.
And more bloodshed than all wars in human time added together.
She looks sideways at Leone, standing over the graves of the girls, long enough to see that Leone is not crying. Rather, her face looks like a stone relief: scored by grief, edged with anger.
She walks over to the second guard Leone shot and nudges him with her boot. His chest is a gristled blood-heap; his face wears the unmistakable slack skin of the dead. The first guard barely has a head. She can smell the metallic mix of blood and spent bullets.
“You think there’s a Skyline near?” Leone’s voice a compass.
Skylines. The thousands of invisible tethers reaching from the surface of Earth to CIEL’s geostationary orbits, urban platforms, and to CIEL’s web of stations.
“Look at this grunt,” Joan says without turning, gesturing toward the dead faceless guard. “He’s got earbuds on. Remember earbuds? Wonder what he was listening to way out here, in the middle of Desert Asshole.” Joan leans down and tugs the earbuds, one of them blackened with blood and dirt, from what is left of his head. She shoves them in her ears. Still warm. She bends down, grabs a black palm-size gadget from his front jacket pocket, and plugs in. She hears something faint and looks over at Leone.
“What is it? They look Russian. Is it Russian pop music? They all played it back during the sieges. Fucking Russians,” Leone hisses. “I hate old Russian pop music. It all sounds like some drunk Communist with rocks jammed in his mouth.” Leone spits on the ground.
Hard. They are both hardened.
True enough, thinks Joan as she fiddles with the device. But in terms of weaponry, military technology, much of what the Russians had during the wars did deserve respect.
The volume kicks in, and through the earbuds, so recently planted in the ears of her enemy, comes a song. Her throat pangs and her eyes sting until she bites the inside of her cheek to stop it.
A child’s song.
A French child’s song.
One she knows by heart:
It was in the dark night,
On the yellowed steeple,
On the steeple, the moon
Like a dot on an i.
Moon, whose dark spirit
Strolls at the end of a thread,
At the end of a thread, in the dark
Your face and your profile?
Are you nothing more than a ball?
A large, very fat spider?
A large spider that rolls
Without legs or arms?
Is a worm gnawing at you,
When your circle lessens,
When your disk lengthens
Into a narrow crescent?