The silver spider crawls across Joan’s palm and up her forearm. Even in the diffused light of the cave she senses that it is not entirely natural, although it looks biological enough. Its movements seem a little too well ordered; the thin needles of its legs are as weightless and delicate as a spider’s, and yet somehow mechanical. Is she overthinking things? Haven’t her own movements over the years become calculated and inhuman?
“It’s an AV recorder,” Peter says. “The spider. Mostly biological, but wet-wired. We’ve developed tens of thousands of them, in differing guises. Homebred troglodytes. Spiders, worms, salamanders. Underground creatures. The spiders seem to travel the best between worlds without deterioration of data.”
Joan’s head shoots up and Leone’s jerks toward Peter. “Between worlds?” Joan asks.
Peter inhales and holds his breath. Joan wonders how many breaths he has left. She is already thinking of where to bury him—across the wide lake in the crystal green waters reflecting the entire ceiling and opening of the cave like a moss-colored mirror, perhaps, or in a grotto where geological patterns make malachite and azure seem to shimmer alive along the walls. If she feels anything about the word brother, it is here, in this space that smells of water and dirt and living things. Her memory remains loyal to all the times they played in the woods together as children. His death, then, should bring life back into the walls and ground and water.
A faint ticking sound scatters across the walls of the cave. Water seepage, or bats, or just geology stretching.
“These troglodytes we’ve created, they can travel up and down Skylines. They can ride telluric current without a trace. We’ve been gathering tactical information about CIEL inhabitants and technologies for more than three years now. When they started sending explosives down the Skylines, it revealed that the lines could be used to transfer matter, not just energy. The more death they sent down the elevators, the more troglodytes we sent up, like invasive species. We’ve developed maps of their entire territory: their weapons systems, their food and energy supply chains, their social organization, their power center.
“And we know something else. We know they have a problem. A big one.”
“Fuck,” Leone whispers, and in her voice Joan hears the trace of the question she knows they all three share. “What about humans? Can humans travel the Skylines?”
Peter looks down at his own arms and hands. “We don’t know about humans. So far, no. At least, no humans like me.” He pauses and shifts his gaze away, then continues.
Leone makes shapes in the dirt with her foot.
“But we do know how to draw CIEL attention to a specific target. We know how to draw their energy to a source—we’ve successfully blown former ammunitions dumps or wired old technology heaps to create something interesting for them to track down here—which gets their attention, and when we do, they send a bomb exactly where we want them to. Or clusters of them. And then, when the explosives start raining down, our troglodytes are able to use fissures in the ensuing electrical storm to travel up.”
Joan and Leone exchange looks. They’d just witnessed such an attack—the sky opening up and nearly blasting them to fuck.
Peter looks back up at them. “We can’t win any wars with weapons. But we can using data. At this point there’s almost nothing we don’t know about their technologies. And something of their day-to-day life, though the images taken are blurry and static.”
His chest seems to growl . . . perhaps a cough that got stuck. But in the cough Joan hears what she already knows, that his body is rapidly decomposing, going back to dirt. He has less than half a day or night, if that. And yet he looks beautiful. His cheeks like the petals of roses, his eyes like blue-green stones. The waxen white of his hairless skin gleams like its own light source there in the cave world of her life. But the veins in his arms, climbing up from his wrists, are already turning a faint blue. When he crosses his arms and speaks again, her throat tightens.
“They can track and target certain intensities of electricity,” he says. “That’s why we thought you might still be alive. They are trying to track your energy. Though they are trying desperately to uphold the story of your execution. We were able to infiltrate enough to understand the new reality they’ve constructed up there. And what they still have planned for you. And for all of us.”
Leone stands up and adjusts Little Bee at her calf, then the Beretta holstered at her thigh, and rubs her hand over her head. “They want what they’ve always fucking wanted. Slave labor and slaughter for the rest”—Leone spits—“with a dead planet orbiting beneath them like a giant turd.”
“Yes, in general terms,” Peter answers.
“General?” Leone lashes. “There’s something specific about genocide?” Leone’s face flushes, then she turns abruptly away. Joan knows her ire is not for Peter. In fact, she knows, Leone loves Peter. At least she did the last time they’d all been together in battle, years ago. The three of them were once united in violence and blood. There was no stronger bond.
Peter’s breathing grows labored. Listening to him makes Joan’s chest hurt.
“Joan,” he says, sitting down near her now Indian-style and placing his hands palm-side up on his knees. “They don’t want to kill you anymore. They need you, Joan.”
His veins river up his arms like small blue serpentines.
The walls of the cave tick.