Did you think you were who they said, the sound of your name lifting up off of your body in a great crescendo, the sound turning always to fever and ritual and chant, the sound of your name driving masses of men, women, and children, their teeth gnashing, their bodies falling forward in their own brutal and quickening deaths? The mother kissing her son good night the night before the battle, the son still dreaming of talking animals, his sister’s soft breathing through her small nose in the bed near him, the father locking the doors—as if everyone were part of a story that would make history, and not a story that would engender slaughter.
Did the white of your war banner give you the right to make murder a beautiful story? Who were you at sixteen, your chest yet unformed, your shoulders and biceps balling up like a boy’s, your voice not low in your throat, but high, just under your jawline, a girl’s voice, a cheekbone beneath the blue light flickering like some alien insect at the surface of your skin? When they mindlessly followed you into the fire of battle, when they shed their despair and aimed their hope straight at your face, when they turned their eyes to yours and surrendered, smiling, when you sent them into siege and seizure and bloodletting—in the moments before their deaths, did your valiancy outweigh your heart? Did you even have a heart? When you walked them into hell, was your heart open?
Did the song in your head give you the right to kill them?
Her vision blurs. Sometimes she sees things that are not there. She is used to it and at the same time not. Her head light; she can’t feel her feet or hands. She looks up. When she looks back to her physicality she is in a floating room with slate-colored walls and floors. The windows black as space. It’s a room she’s never inhabited. A room made of pure imagination. Or of dread.
“Joan?”
Who calls out to her in such a room? But there is no room. It is Leone, and the ground under her feet, and the smell of their rifles and of bodies recently made dead. She snaps to.
“Same firepower. From the past. Yes.”
Joan watches Leone run her hand along the length of a single PG-29 rocket. Her eyes linger on the small bone at Leone’s wrist.
Ironic. A replica of the very munitions she herself used in Orléans. Years ago. A nine-day battle at the height of her command. Those old dead wars leaving artifacts everywhere.
So the CIEL bastards are using old Earth firepower. She turns the tubular metal object over in her hands. She holds the blue black metal cylinder upright. She smells it. Dirt and death and alloy. She strokes the length of it, its shaft a tandem warhead and rocket booster. She fingers the folding stabilizer fins at its tail, spits on its metal side.
Fuckers.
The only place someone needs weapons of war is down here. Not up there. Did that mean there were large numbers of humans left? How many? Where? Or just random individuals? Untethered civilian armies? Random feral children?
Wind skates the valley. In the distance, foothills climb up toward a low mountain range. A rain forest once rimmed the rocky face of these mountains; she can’t remember its name.
Joan gazes once more at the dead men, then pockets the recorder and earbuds and looks up again at the night. There’s probably a Skyline near. Wherever there is a munitions station, a Skyline isn’t far away. The dark and thickened sky may obscure it from view, but she knows what is up there: invisible technological tethers dangling down to Earth like umbilical cords. The planet’s population of Earth’s elite above, now living an ascended existence away from a dying environment.
Joan walks over to a field table under the camouflage canopy and rummages around. The table is littered with topographical maps, rendered in plastic. She spreads her palm on one flat of the table and leans over it. “What’s this?”
Leone comes close beside her and shines infrared light from the barrel of her rifle onto the map. “Looks like . . . what the fuck are those weird markings?” Leone laughs under her breath. “They look like fucking lightning bolts. Were these idiots just sitting here doodling?”
Nothing but night answers.
Joan looks out into the dark desert in front of them, then over to the foothills and mountains. The topography no longer means anything. There are deserts and mountains and water. Sometimes. Maps are useless. Life is underground.
How many salvage missions had they traveled together around the world, abandoned tanks and military vehicles they’d located and hidden like vertebrae on a spine? Collecting food and ammunitions and supplies for survival—at first with the assumption that they’d have to stockpile large quantities for their comrades, survivors, former rebels and civilians, maybe even enemies. But through all their travels and elaborate missions a bald truth emerged: the people they found came to them, now and then, in the form of a single feral child, or as enemy combatants stationed sparsely along their path, guarding resource arsenals headed Skyward.
Where had all the people gone? they had wondered. Was it possible that entire armies, populations, had truly been atomized by geocatastrophic waves? Or had they gone forever subterranean, like Joan and Leone?
When the fuel began to deteriorate and run out, it became absurd to try to replenish it. It became absurd to maintain the old travel routes.
Finally it became absurd even to believe these rumors of roving bands of survivors. It was as if humans had devolved, like the earth’s erosion, crumbling and sliding and disappearing back into soil and rock and dry riverbed. Or maybe back to their breathable blue past . . . into ocean and salt and molecules.
Joan shakes her head and focuses on the map in her hands.
Find and obliterate the Skyline.
Confiscate munitions.
Blow what’s left.
Get out.
Joan looks up. If supplies are coming and going down this Skyline, it is imperative to destroy it. If anything else—an attack—comes down, we are nowhere near prepared.
Joan starts collecting what she can of the ammunition. Leone matches her every move. As they work, the child’s song weaves through her skull. Moon, are you nothing more than a ball?