“Do you want me to, you know.” Kai touched the rifle strapped across his back.
“If you want to kill me, I can’t stop you.” The defiance, the hostility in his voice, was unmistakable.
Kai held up his hands. “Hey, I didn’t mean it as a threat. I meant, if you wanted me to do it as a favor.” Why was he talking to this stilt? Maybe it was just morbid fascination. He’d never spoken to one before. Even lying there, mortally wounded, the thing scared the shit out of him.
He took a few steps closer. “Why are we fighting? I mean, we’re supposed to be allies.”
“I’m a soldier,” the defender said, as if that were all the justification he needed.
Kai nodded. “Fair enough.”
The defender licked his thin lips.
“Do you have water?”
“No.” He sounded almost embarrassed to admit it.
Kai pulled his canteen from his belt, unscrewed the cap, took a few more steps toward the defender, and underhanded the canteen to him.
He went on his way.
As he walked, it occurred to him that this wasn’t the first time he’d provided comfort to the enemy. He laughed out loud. What was it about cold-blooded killers that brought out the maternal instinct in him? Maybe Oliver could explain it.
There must be something about him, though. How many times had he wondered why Five picked him that night? There had been thousands of people within Five’s psychic range. Tens of thousands. Yet he’d chosen Kai. What had he sensed in Kai’s mind? Was it weakness? Kindness? That Kai was an outsider?
His entire life, everything he was, hinged on Five’s decision to choose him. Kai would have died in that bathroom if Five hadn’t goaded him into making a fire. If not for Five, he never would have met his father, or Lila. There would have been no Errol. He carried the burden of being the Boy, but what was that, compared to life, a father, a wife?
Yet he still hated the son of a bitch.
It had been such a shock, to learn Five might still be alive, hiding in a bunker with the rest of his kind.
Stepping over a guardrail and cutting down a ravine, Kai headed across the parking lot, toward the shopping center they’d passed on the way in. He kept his rifle at hand, but there was no one in sight, friend or enemy. The two stores on the end of the shopping center had been shelled, probably by the defenders’ bombers.
Kai felt more alert, better rested than he had since the day the invasion began. He’d slept fourteen hours straight the night before. With his judgment sound and clear, he felt more certain than ever that he’d made the right call. His allegiance was to his family, and himself, not to the nitwits who’d thought attacking the defenders was a good idea.
As he approached the Target, he reviewed his mental shopping list. Food, if by some miracle there was any left inside. New reading material—fiction, preferably set long ago in some other place. Socks. The house he’d chosen to hole up in had plenty of abandoned clothes, but no warm socks.
He ducked through shattered doors, praying it hadn’t been completely looted, and immediately spotted bodies.
They were soldiers, recently killed. One was draped across a checkout lane with big defender bullet wounds in his neck and face. Another, a young woman, was lying facedown in the big center aisle. There were five or six others.
Kai couldn’t understand how a defender could fit through the doors to get inside and shoot them. It was a big space with a high ceiling, so once inside a defender could move around, but the entrance was too tight, unless they got down on their bellies and shimmied through the double doors.
He walked the periphery of the store. It grew darker as he moved away from the front windows, but that was fine with Kai—he’d grown to associate darkness with safety. It reminded him of the early days with Lila. Every weekend he’d take the bus to New York to visit her. For months he stayed in a depressing, smoky hotel room on those visits because Lila wouldn’t let him stay over. She lived alone, and she was happy to have sex with him—she just wouldn’t let him sleep over. It baffled him for the longest time; all he could think was, she didn’t want things to get too serious.
Kai smiled wanly, remembering the night she finally let him stay over. It turned out she slept with all the lights on, the TV blaring old romantic comedies. She’d been embarrassed for Kai to find out.
After a few sleepless weekends in Lila’s brightly lit and loud bedroom, Kai tried to convince her to sleep with the TV and lights off. He was there, he’d said. That would replace the lights and TV. She would be safe.
Lila got angry. Everyone was fucked-up in some way, she’d said. Everyone coped in their own fashion. She wasn’t going to give up the things that comforted her, so if they were going to have a future together, they’d have to find a solution that didn’t involve turning the lights out.
When she’d finished, Kai was speechless. It was the first time Lila had suggested there was a “they,” and a potential future for them, and Kai had been dumbfounded with happiness. Lila took his silence for anger and said, “Are you saying you weren’t damaged by the war, that you don’t have any scars?”
Kai couldn’t keep from laughing. “Lila, I’m the Boy Who Betrayed the World, remember? What do you think?”
He bought earplugs and a sleep mask, and moved in.
There were big doors in the back, to cart pallets out of the delivery area using a forklift. Kai checked the delivery area to make sure there were no unfriendlies skulking around. He was about to start shopping when he heard a voice.
Catching the door before it shut, he went back inside and spotted a soldier looking up at him from the floor. She was lying at one end of a thirty-foot-long bloody streak. She’d dragged herself along the floor that far.
Kai squatted beside her. She’d taken three or four shots to her thighs and lower abdomen, the oversized bullets taking pieces out of her.
“Can I have a drink of water?”
Kai had left his canteen with the defender. He sprang up. “I’ll get some.”
He pulled a canteen off one of the bodies, found a medic’s bag on one of the others, and grabbed that as well. On the way back, he called HQ to request a medic. They didn’t mention him being AWOL; in all likelihood they’d lost track of him, thought he was dead. They told him they couldn’t afford to send one, so he would have to bring the wounded soldier back to them.
What was he supposed to do, pull her in a little red wagon?
She was middle-aged, Indian or Middle Eastern. Kai helped her roll onto her back. When she’d managed a few gulps from the canteen, he set it aside.
“I told them I was a stockbroker,” she said, gasping. “They said that meant I was smart, so I should be in demolition.”
“I told them I was a gambler. They gave me a rifle.”
She didn’t laugh.
“What’s your name?” Kai asked.
“Sudha. Are they all dead?”
Kai nodded.
“I couldn’t reach it,” she said, her voice a hoarse whisper.
“Reach what?”
“It was all set.” She looked at the ceiling. “Shit. It was all set.”
Kai looked up, tried to see what she was looking at, but it was too dark. The only light in the room came from an open bay door.
“Then they got Aiken, and I couldn’t reach it.”
He looked at the blood streaked across the floor. She’d been trying to reach something. He followed the line in the direction she’d been going, and saw another soldier, dead, lying beside a forklift.
Demolition. It was all set. “You wired the store with C-4?” he guessed.
Sudha swallowed, nodded.
Kai pointed at the body. “Aiken had the detonator, but he was killed, and you couldn’t reach it in time.”