Something tickles my back. I gasp and the water flows in, drowning my lungs, flooding out what air I had left. But the thing in the water with me has a light on its head and strange, shiny legs and it’s using them to get under my arms and drag me up until we reach the surface and I cough and retch and breathe, thank you God. The thing takes me to shore, where Tris is waiting to hug me and kiss my forehead like I’m the little sister.
“Jesus,” she says, and I wonder if God really does take kindly to demands until I turn my head and understand: my savior is a drone.
“I will feed you,” the glassman says. He looks like a spider with an oversized glassman head: eight chrome legs and two glass eyes. “The pregnant one should eat. Her daughter is growing.”
I wonder if some glassman technology is translating his words into English. If in his language, whatever it is, the pregnant one is a kind of respectful address. Or maybe they taught him to speak to us that way.
I’m too busy appreciating the bounty of air in my lungs to notice the other thing he said.
“Daughter?” Tris says.
The glassman nods. “Yes. I have been equipped with a body-safe sonic scanning device. Your baby has not been harmed by your ordeal. I am here to help and reassure you.”
Tris looks at me, carefully. I sit up. “You said something about food?”
“Yes!” It’s hard to tell, his voice is so strange, but he sounds happy. As though rescuing two women threatened by one of his reaper fellows is the best piece of luck he’s had all day. “I will be back,” he says, and scuttles away, into the forest.
Tris hands me one of her rescued apples. “What the hell?” Her voice is low, but I’m afraid the glassman can hear us anyway.
“A trap?” I whisper, barely vocalizing into her left ear.
She shakes her head. “He seems awfully…”
“Eager?”
“Young.”
The glassman comes back a minute later, walking on six legs and holding two boxes in the others. His robot must be a new model; the others I’ve seen look more human. “I have meals! A nearby convoy has provided them for you,” he says, and places the boxes carefully in front of us. “The one with a red ribbon is for the pregnant one. It has nutrients.”
Tris’s hands shake as she opens it. The food doesn’t look dangerous, though it resembles the strange pictures in Tris’s old magazines more than the stuff I make at home. A perfectly rectangular steak, peas, corn mash. Mine is the same, except I have regular corn. We eat silently, while the glassman gives every impression of smiling upon us benevolently.
“Good news,” he pipes, when I’m nearly done forcing the bland food down my raw throat. “I have been authorized to escort you both to a safe hospital facility.”
“Hospital?” Tris asks, in a way that makes me sit up and put my arm around her.
“Yes,” the glassman says. “To ensure the safe delivery of your daughter.”
The next morning, the glassman takes us to an old highway a mile from the water’s edge. A convoy waits for us, four armored tanks and two platform trucks. One of the platform beds is filled with mechanical supplies, including two dozen glass-and-chrome heads. The faces are blank, the heads unattached to any robot body, but the effect makes me nauseous. Tris digs her nails into my forearm. The other platform bed is mostly empty except for a few boxes and one man tied to the guardrails. He lies prone on the floor and doesn’t move when we climb in after our glassman. At first I’m afraid that he’s dead, but then he twitches and groans before falling silent again.
“Who is he?” Tris asks.
“Non-state actor,” our glassman says, and pulls up the grate behind us.
“What?”
The convoy engines whirr to life—quiet compared to the three old men, but the noise shocks me after our days of silence on the bay.
The glassman swivels his head, his wide unblinking eyes fully focused on my sister. I’m afraid she’s set him off and they’ll tie us to the railings like that poor man. Instead, he clicks his two front legs together for no reason that I can see except maybe it gives him something to do.
“Terrorist,” he says, quietly.
Tris looks at me and I widen my eyes: don’t you dare say another word. She nods.
“The convoy will be moving now. You should sit for your safety.”
He clacks away before we can respond. He hooks his hind legs through the side rail opposite us and settles down, looking like nothing so much as a contented cat.
The armored tanks get into formation around us and then we lurch forward, rattling over the broken road. Tris makes it for half an hour before she pukes over the side.
For two days, Tris and I barely speak. The other man in our truck wakes up about once every ten hours, just in time for one of the two-legged glassmen from the armored tanks to clomp over and give us all some food and water. The man gets less than we do, though none of it is very good. He eats in such perfect silence that I wonder if the glassmen have cut out his tongue. As soon as he finishes, one of the tank glassmen presses a glowing metal bar to the back of his neck. The mark it leaves is a perfect triangle, raw and red like a fresh burn. The prisoner doesn’t struggle when the giant articulated metal hand grips his shoulders, he only stares, and soon after he slumps against the railing. I have lots of time to wonder about those marks; hour after slow hour with a rattling truck bruising my tailbone and regrets settling into my joints like dried tears. Sometimes Tris massages knots from my neck, and sometimes they come right back while I knead hers. I can’t see any way to escape, so I try not to think about it. But there’s no helping the sick, desperate knowledge that every hour we’re closer to locking Tris in a hospital for six months so the glassmen can force her to have a baby.
During the third wake-up and feeding of the bound man, our glassman shakes out his legs and clacks over to the edge of the truck bed. The robots who drive the tanks are at least eight feet tall, with oversized arms and legs equipped with artillery rifles. They would be terrifying even if we weren’t completely at their mercy. The two glassmen stare at each other, eerily silent and still.
The bound man, I’d guess Indian from his thick straight hair and dark skin, strains as far forward as he can. He nods at us.
“They’re talking,” he says. His words are slow and painstakingly formed. We crawl closer to hear him better. “In their real bodies.”
I look back up, wondering how he knows. They’re so still, but then glassmen are always uncanny.
Tris leans forward, so her lips are at my ear. “Their eyes,” she whispers.
Glassman robot eyes never blink. But their pupils dilate and contract just like ours do. Only now both robots’ eyes are pupil-blasted black despite the glaring noon sun. Talking in their real bodies? That must mean they’ve stopped paying us any attention.
“Could we leave?” I whisper. No one has tied us up. I think our glassman is under the impression he’s doing us a favor.
Tris buries her face in the back of my short nappy hair and wraps her arms around me. I know it’s a ploy, but it comforts me all the same. “The rest of the convoy.”
Even as I nod, the two glassmen step away from each other, and our convoy is soon enough on its way. This time, though, the prisoner gets to pass his time awake and silent. No one tells us to move away from him.
“I have convinced the field soldier to allow me to watch the operative,” our glassman says proudly.