“Not if you share,” the guard says, flicking his cigarette into the snow.
We pass it around, puffing furtively. The guards bluster and boast about nothing, trying to impress me, but I can barely hear them over the pounding of blood in my ears. When they finally giggle off to check something back inside, Xander gazes at me.
“It’s because they’re shaped like us,” he says.
“What?” I’m having one of those buzzes that are more paranoia than any kind of pleasure. I’m deeply suspicious, among other things, that Xander is trying to get me into his bunk, but he seems willing to talk first. And I want to talk, for once.
“They’re shaped like humans. They walk and move like humans, mostly. Even some of the things they do, the way they walk with their hands on each other’s shoulders. It’s unnerving. But they’re not human, Rave. I felt a bit sick when I saw the exploding head one too, but, well, they’re not human.”
I’m having second thoughts about my desire to talk, to Xander anyway. But my mouth seems to have other ideas. “Dolphins aren’t human either. Do we blow their heads off for entertainment?”
Xander looks pretty convincingly impatient for a stoned dickhead. “Dolphins aren’t predators. We shoot . . . I don’t know . . . mountain lions in the head. If they’ve killed someone.”
For some reason this is the moment where the Nahx from the trailer crashes back into my mind. I combine my dim memories of him with the decapitation video and what I have just learned about Emily into a thought so horrific I have to grab Xander’s shoulder to keep from falling over.
“Jeez, Rave, are you okay?” he says. “You look a little green. Also, you have chocolate on your face.” He reaches out to wipe it, but I pull away. Apart from Topher, I haven’t told anyone about my encounter with the Nahx, and I’m not about to start with Xander.
“We don’t shoot mountain lions for entertainment,” I say instead. “I know this is a war, and people are going to die on both sides, but those videos are sick.”
Xander considers me quietly. My balance back under control, I take my hand off his shoulder.
“There’s only people on our side, Rave. The Nahx aren’t people. They’re like machines or something.”
“We don’t know what they are,” I say. “They breathe, you know, and they bleed.”
“That oily stuff? It’s some kind of lubricant or fuel or something.”
Nothing he’s saying is making me feel any better. Being high as a cloud and churning with paranoia isn’t helping either. I need to get back to my bunk alone and try to sleep it off. But once again my mouth has a few more things it wants to say.
“They took her prisoner. Even in a war, we don’t just execute prisoners of war. She didn’t resist or fight back. She . . . she . . .”
Xander looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. Oddly, he also looks surprised. “She?” he says, shaking his head. “Rave, you either need to stop smoking this stuff or start smoking a lot more.” Then he leaves me alone in the long passage, shaking his head again as he walks. “She . . . Jesus, that’s funny.”
EIGHTH
Each time the transports touch down in the city, I march down the gangplank with the others, rifle raised, convincingly emotionless, though I’m bristling with fear. I hate the city. There are survivors here, humans who didn’t evacuate but somehow survived the ground assault and firebombs. They crawl out of holes, and our job is to dart them and leave them where they fall. But each day I slip away, down a dark alleyway, or into a stairwell, empty my rifle into a drawer or pile of garbage. Then I curl up somewhere hidden and wait for the transports to come back. I occupy my mind with capturing memories and trying to fix them in place. But the armor and the black syrup make them slippery and quick to escape, like eels in a rushing river.
The human girl floated away down the river. I remember that easily enough. And the feeling I had when I thought I might have killed her. I do more than remember that. I relive it, my heart jumping in my chest, making my notched ribs ache. I choke on the tube in my throat, but I can’t take it out and disconnect, not at this low elevation. The syrup calms the gag reflex and my heart rate after a moment, but leaves me giddy and confused. This happens at least once every day.
The directives have changed slightly. Search for humans. Dart them. Leave them where they fall. And because it is a fresh transmission, it is loud, persistent. I have to focus to resist.
I somehow manage to not forget that I refuse this mission. Though sometimes I still see the humans as vermin, each day my rebellion repeats. If I am discovered, they will kill me, painfully probably, and leave me where I fall. I creep out when I hear the transports return, and blend in with a group of Ninths or Tenths, who are so dull witted they are unlikely to notice me.
When we return, they ask us about hits. The first time I wasn’t prepared, so I answered forty, which is how many rounds my rifle carries. The Second who asked grabbed my throat, kicked my feet out from under me, and slammed the back of my head down on the hard floor until sparkles floated in front of my eyes. No lies, she signed to me. After that I reported twenty or twenty-five, and once ten, but that got me punished again for not being enough. I lose count of how many days we have been doing this. The winter settles in and coats the bodies left where they fall in drifts of thick white snow.
I don’t disconnect, so I don’t eat or sleep. I can feel my sense of self being saturated in slug slime, in the oily syrup that circulates through my armor, being replaced with mindlessness and malice. Only watching the snow fall or smelling the dormant trees keeps my mind from dissolving into nothing but obedience.
Disobedient. Defective.
Eighth. Will. NOT. Obey. The cloudy-haired girl in my memory gives me strength.
I crouch in dark passageways, hidden between abandoned vehicles or burrowed into the rubble of ruined buildings, my mind spinning. Some of the memories I grab on to as I wait don’t make any sense. I try to hold on to them anyway, but they slither away.
RAVEN
As the weeks pass, the public screening of the videos becomes a near daily event in the cafeteria after meals. Both civilian and military watch, with more civilians volunteering to train as fighters every day. Despite this, we seem no closer to launching any kind of attack even after being at the base for two months. It is because the winter is too harsh, Kim explains to the ones she calls “enlisted,” the pseudo-military ragtag renegades she has assembled—mostly kids, like us.
The winter is unyielding. It has not stopped snowing for weeks. Giant drifts seal off many of the exits, and all of us, civilians included, are assigned to working parties to keep the other exits clear. Topher and I find ourselves one morning outside the observation windows, digging away at snow that has blanketed them overnight.