<shout>
“We have a problem, ma reine! They’re going to see us!”
</shout>
“Oh, they’ve probably already taken several pictures,” I muttered to myself, then shouted over the whine of the transport’s engine and the creaking of the suspension, “You think it’s a standalone?”
“Probably,” Étienne shouted back. “Niger knows the Tuareg use electronic countermeasures, so there’s a good chance the WarBird flies silent.”
“Someone’s highly trained, hopped-up bald eagle then.”
“The brain, yes. But the body is a soft composite. Plenty of hard points on the wings.”
“A surveillance bird packing heat? That’s a bit odd.”
“This is supposed to be a no man’s land. If anyone’s out here, it would be either the Nigerians themselves or the Tuareg. Why wouldn’t they come armed?”
“Well, as long as they really are on their own and don’t get any images of us back to their HQ, we’re fine.”
I told one of Étienne’s men to drive for me and gave him the wheel. Moving into the back compartment, I pulled out a lethal-looking cylindrical object stashed next to the crates of cigars and booze—something the Kel Tamasheq warrior had thrown in as a “bonus.”
“Get down from the gunner’s seat, Étienne. I’ll handle this.”
“What do you mean handle—”
When the Frenchman looked down from his perch and saw what I was holding, every muscle in his body froze, causing his hands to slip from the railing. Étienne fell past me down into the passenger compartment. Not that I blamed him. It wasn’t every day you saw a girl cradling a more-than-a-century-old RPG launcher under her arm.
“Tell your man driving to keep us going straight. Whatever he does, I don’t want him jerking the wheel one way or the other.”
“Got it,” came the muffled reply. Shamelessly violent launcher in hand, I stuck my torso out through the rooftop hatch.
“You sure you can handle that thing, Miss Kirie?” I heard Étienne’s voice from the floor of the transport below.
“Better than you can,” I replied quietly, then gave the trigger a squeeze.
For all their sophistication, WarBirds were fairly artless things when it came to flying. They never zigzagged or circled, just flew straight toward their target like this one was flying toward us right now. All I had to do was fire my gift from the Kel Tamasheq into the air directly behind us to ensure a fatally explosive midair rendezvous.
<list:item>
<i: wings covered with hard points>
<i: a body and fuselage controlling the wings>
<i: a living animal brain fused with a neural net>
<i: a little bit of armor plating>
</list>
What had been the bird scattered in the sky in a brief flare of plasma—a daub of bright paint haphazardly added to the blue and yellow landscape.
“Combat glasses!” I shouted, thrusting my hand down into the compartment without taking my eyes off the sky behind us. Étienne passed up his binoculars and I quickly scanned the area. No more WarBirds in sight.
“Nothing at a low altitude, at least. Let’s keep an eye out though,” I announced as I ducked back inside the transport.
I let the now-empty launching tube roll on the floor, and I collapsed, feeling the tension drain from my limbs. After I had caught my breath, I undid my ponytail. Free from its restraint, my hair swirled, brushing across my forehead and cheeks.
Smoking cigars was tough these days. Getting your hands on them in the first place was even harder. My mind, newly released from the vice-grip of tension, was whimpering inside my skull, wanting to see nothing, hear nothing. Why not? Étienne can get us back to the base. I’ll just sit here quietly until we’re through that security gate.
I closed my eyes and let a soft sleepiness come over me. Waves of fatigue, lapping at my temples.
≡
The swift realization came the moment I opened my eyes. I failed.
The light on the ceiling glowed with a soft, pale pink light.
I was lying on my side, surrounded by machinery. There were tubes attached to me—not just the one on the medport below my collarbone, but attached the old way too, with needles. I was in an emergency room at a hospital. Or maybe an emergency morality center. It only took me a little while to realize which it probably was.
I was alive. Which meant I had failed.
Not just once, but twice.
This hadn’t been the first time I’d attempted to kill myself with food. A while before I’d even met Miach Mihie, I’d been carried to a center just like this one after overeating. I don’t think I had consciously decided to die that first time. It was more of a vaguely defined longing toward death that had been rattling around inside my skull for years before I finally decided to take action.
<disappointment>
Overeating didn’t kill me. Neither did undereating.
</disappointment>
“Not again,” I mumbled, even though by then I had realized that my mom was sitting right there next to my bed.
This is it, this is the time I die. I had been so sure of it. How foolishly optimistic I had been. All I needed was Miach and the tools—the weapons—she gave me, I’d thought, and I’d make it for sure. If she could make a device capable of mass murder out of a household medcare unit, she could do anything.
If I couldn’t do this thing even with her help, then I’d live my entire life without being able to do it at all.
How completely dependent on her I was.
“You’re awake,” my mother said, then she began to cry. It was like what I’d said hadn’t even fazed her. Or maybe my throat had been too parched for her to make out the words. Who cared, anyway? I was the one that would have to live with my failure, not her.
“What about Miach?”
This time I was sure she heard me. I saw her frown a little, her eyebrows drawing together. I asked her again.
Somewhere over my head, a children’s bio-monitor was softly chirping away.
I wouldn’t need one of those if I were an adult. They wouldn’t need any external devices to tell what was going on inside me. Not with WatchMe installed. Not with a swarm of medicules tattling on everything going on beneath my skin at all times.
“Miach … didn’t make it,” my mother said, chewing her lip. Like it was her fault.
I wanted to vomit.
<anger>
Don’t do that, Mom.
</anger>
My mouth remained closed, but inside my thin, motionless body, I shouted: Don’t do that! Don’t feel guilty about someone else’s death! She had nothing to do with you! It was this world— the one that demanded you sympathize with everyone, even people you’d never met—that I couldn’t stand. The air reeked of kindness, with the awareness that everyone was public property. The only acceptable form of thought was a public correctness that compelled you to blame yourself for not being able to stop someone from committing suicide—even if there was no conceivable way you could have.
But I lacked the stamina and the will to shout it out loud, so I simply muttered, “So she died.”
My mother nodded, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. “Cian’s okay, though. She’s being treated at a different center.”
“Oh.”
The pharmaceutical regime and counseling that came next dragged me, kicking and screaming, back into society’s fold.
<list:item>
<i: Out of the world of hypokalemia.>