How drunk is he? Jones wondered.
“I’m sure you won’t be in Antarctica forever,” she offered.
“I’m going to die in Antarctica. I’m going to die as an irrelevant pimple on the ass of the world.” He laughed bitterly. “Eh. So be it. At least I won’t have to give a damn about what happens to all you shortsighted bastards up here on top.”
He glanced at Jones, and suddenly all the drunkenness was gone. His sharp blue eyes held her. “But you, you will have to give a damn. It’s your problem now.” He toasted her with his glass. “And a pretty problem it is.”
“We have a better chance—now that we know what we’re actually hunting for.” She couldn’t keep the accusation from her voice.
“Well, at least now you know why I was willing to risk everything. Our standing in the Seascape. The billions in trade over the pole. Financial embargoes.” He laughed. “You thought I was willing to take on the Seascape and rile up its allies just because some monster bit my face off. Simple vengeance.” He spat over the rail. “You thought I was insane.”
Yes. I thought you were insane, old man. And so does ExCom, and that’s why you’re being sent to Antarctica, where you can’t cause any more trouble.
Caroa gave her a disgusted look. “I hit him hard, with everything I had”—he scowled—“everything I was allowed to have. Because for this very brief moment, he was vulnerable. He didn’t know we were coming.”
“Apparently he did,” Jones said dryly.
“We had a chance at surprise!” Caroa snapped. “If you hadn’t sabotaged the Raptors, I would have used those as well, and I would have made absolutely sure he was dead.” He gave her another piercing look.
Jones didn’t let the barb rile her. “That’s what got me the promotion, you know. ExCom was horrified that you were willing to drop Havoc on the Seascape. They had no idea what you were up to—”
Caroa waved a hand dismissively. “Bygones, Jones. You made the right choice, I made the wrong one.” He drew on his cigar and pointed it at her. “But every day that passes, our friend gets a little stronger. And that means the next time, it will be much harder to get rid of him. Much, much harder.”
He took one last sip of his cognac. Made a face. Abruptly, he tossed the snifter over the balcony edge, out into the open air.
It tumbled, glittering, arcing downward, disappearing into the darkness below. The general stared sourly after it.
“He’s your problem now.”
27
MAHLIA LIVED IN the mud, healing slowly.
The first night under the piers, Tool disappeared into black Seascape waters and later returned with medical supplies stolen from an unwary ship: tubing and needles, suture thread, empty IV bags—but to Mahlia’s surprise, no cell stimulants and no antibiotics.
When she asked why he hadn’t brought back medicine, Tool said it wasn’t necessary. A rudimentary ether compress over her face sent her under. When she awoke, her guts hurt worse than before, and her belly was puckered with fresh stitches. And Tool was fitting an IV tube into his own arm.
He flexed his muscle and a plastic IV bag filled with fluid, thick and black in the darkness under the pier.
His blood.
“What are you doing?” she asked fuzzily.
Tool attached another IV line into the sac, fitted it with a needle.
“Tool?”
She watched with horror as he took her arm in his massive clawed hands. She wanted to pull away, but she felt almost hypnotized by his actions. The tube running from his own vein, full of blood, filling the sac, the new line with the fresh, gleaming needle that he now held over her own arm.
“What are you doing?”
“This will be difficult for you,” Tool said. “My blood will help you heal.”
Mahlia recoiled instinctively. “Are you crazy? How do you know we’re the right type?”
“It was one of my kind’s uses, on the battlefield. We were designed to donate our blood to our humans. You will heal in ways that would take much longer if we used only human medicine.” He looked at her seriously. “But this is battlefield medicine. For soldiers, in extreme circumstances. It will not be comfortable. Parts of your body will rebel when my blood invades your veins.”
She couldn’t stop staring at the needle. “You’ll do it anyway, won’t you?”
Tool shrugged. “It is better if I have your agreement. Your immune system will be surprised. The experience will be unpleasant.”
An understatement.
Within minutes of him inserting the needle, she was vomiting so hard she thought her guts would burst open again. Tool was forced to imprison her in his arms. He gathered her close as she seized and convulsed, vomiting over herself and him. Everything that she’d eaten, and more besides. Blood, black and dark, spilled out of her mouth.
“You’re killing me,” she croaked as she wiped bloody bile from her lips with a shaking hand.
“You are healing,” Tool said, and then new convulsions seized her.
His muscular arms pinned her to him as waves of nausea ripped through. Even as she jerked and twitched, he held her close, keeping her from tearing her stitches loose with her thrashings. Whenever the seizures stilled, he would squeeze his fist, rhythmically pumping his genetically engineered blood out through the tubes and into her own arm.
Her vision blurred. She passed out. She woke sometime later, sweating and trembling with weakness.
“Is it over?”
Tool shook his head solemnly. “There is more.”
Fever. Sweat. Shivering. Her body ached. Each bone inside her body felt like kindling. She disappeared into the pain, surrendered to it.
Sometimes she saw Tool, crouching over her, caring for her. Other times she saw soldier boys. Ocho and Van and others. Sometimes it was Mouse, the boy who had once saved her life in the Drowned Cities; sometimes it was old school friends, being gunned down by the patriotic militias. Once, it was her mother, bargaining with some ship captain for the best price on an artifact, her dark skin a sharp contrast to her smiling white teeth, gleaming in the sun with pleasure as she made a deal. How beautiful she’d been…
She remembered her mother holding her, pulling her close and comforting her when her father was in one of his moods. Him, the commander, sitting in their apartment in the heart of the Drowned Cities, drinking his baijiu and cursing the people of the Drowned Cities who didn’t know how to be civilized.
Nightmares ravaged her, and when she woke, there were crabs skittering beneath her skin and more clawing inside her guts. She tore at her clothes, ripped at her bandages, trying to get them out—
Tool loomed. “It is my blood.” He seized her hands and held her immobile as sharp-clawed crustaceans ran riot under her skin, hollowing out a home in her belly.
Sometimes she would rise out of her delirium to find Tool crouched beside her, watching patiently, and she would feel safe and grateful, amazed that he was still there, amazed that anyone was still there for her at all—and then she would sink back into nightmare. At one point in her fever dream, Doctor Mahfouz came and sat beside her and wiped her brow, caring for her, regretfully informing her that war always created more war.
Always always always.
She tried to explain that she hadn’t chosen the fight.
I tried, Mahlia tried to explain. I tried to escape all of it.
But when she came out of her fever, it was not the doctor but Tool who crouched over her, the creature who solved all his difficulties with overwhelming violence, and she didn’t have to justify herself anymore.
At last she woke to sunshine glittering on the blue waves of the Seascape.
Tool squatted nearby. He was busy gutting some sort of animal, the corpse shuddering as he fed. A seal. Tool’s ears twitched at her movement. He glanced back, his muzzle bright with blood.
“How do you feel?”
Mahlia tried to speak. Found her voice rusty with disuse. She cleared her throat. “Better.”
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She moved hesitantly and was surprised to feel only a few dull twinges in her guts. “A lot better.” She pushed herself gingerly upright and drew her legs in so she could sit. “Strong.”
Tool came over to inspect. Pressed a hand to her forehead. “Soon you will be able to leave the Seascape.”
“Why are you strong? Why now?”
Tool paused in his ministrations. “You healed me.”
“No. I mean, you were weak before. When… when they came to kill us. You were just lying there… and then you were finally fast, but it was too late.” She choked back a sob, remembering Ocho, lying smashed as she left him. “You were too late.”
“It was my conditioning,” Tool said quietly. “It had been a long time since I faced the shock troops of Mercier.” He shook his huge head, a frustrated, human gesture. “I thought myself well rid of my need for obedience, but I was wrong. My former masters placed deep controls within me. My training—it is in my genes, and it is in my upbringing. Thousands of years of adapted obedience from domesticated animals. I was designed to seek a master, and Mercier owned me completely, for years. When they attacked, I found it unimaginably difficult to fight them. Even now…” He paused, and looked away. “Even now, a part of me desires to roll over on my back and beg forgiveness.” A violent headshake of disgust.
“But in the end you fought,” Mahlia said. “Just too late to do any good.” She couldn’t keep the bitterness from her voice.
“Yes,” Tool said softly. “I am flawed.”
Mosquitoes buzzed around them. Mahlia tried to swat at them when they settled on her body, but she was tired. She rested her head again on a muddy arm, and listened to the lap of the waves and the stamp of feet on the docks above as stevedores unloaded ships. From here, it was hard to guess where the Raker had floated. She wondered if there was anything left at all. If it had all been sunk or recycled.
“You said you wanted to hunt them,” she said finally.
“Mercier. Yes. They made me for war. So. I will give them their war.”
“But they have armies. Thousands and thousands of people working for them. You’re alone.”
“They are very powerful, it’s true.”
“It’s more than that! You have to obey them, whenever you see them. I saw what—”
Tool was growling. “I am no longer their obedient dog. It will not happen again.”
“But I saw it happen! You couldn’t do anything—”
“They are not my pack!”
Mahlia flinched, instinctively throwing up her hands to defend against Tool’s outburst.
Tool growled and looked away. “We were taught, from youth, to obey. Those who did not perfectly obey were made lessons of. We fed upon them. We ate those who failed, you understand? We tore them to pieces, and ate them, flesh and bones. They were not fit to be our kin. Long before I was imprinted on Mercier and Caroa, I was groomed for obedience. We were given gods to worship. Gods of killing, and of war. We made sacrifices to those gods. We sacrificed our weak and unfit to them.”
He nodded up at the sun, high above them. “We were told that our god was the sun, riding his war chariot across the sky, hunting. And he judged us for our valor and our failures. If we fought and died in fearless, glorious battle, we were guaranteed a place beside him, racing across the savanna of the sky, hunting lions and saber-toothed cats. We were promised fresh kills every day, told we would bask in cool river pools at night beneath the moon, and hunt across the sky during the day—all of us who had fought and died, unafraid, in combat. All of us together. Pack.”
He fell quiet. “It brings great shame to turn against those ideals. Our kinship. Our honor. It is almost unbearable to think that your god and brethren despise you. To think that you shattered the bones of the weak and sucked out their marrow, believing that they deserved to die… and then to see that you yourself are one of those failures. And then to see that, perhaps, we did not eat our weakest, but destroyed our strongest.”
He bared his teeth and his ears flicked back. “It is difficult to hold on to the idea of some new kind of honor, and to balance it against the honor that one believed in before.”
“Would it happen to you again? That weakness?”
“No.” He touched her shoulder. “You are my pack, Mahlia. We are pack. They are not. It is enough for me to know that. When I face them again, I will not falter.”
“But there’s no way to really fight them. They’re far away. They have drones. They have battleships and armies and dirigibles. Missiles—” Mahlia broke off.
To her surprise, Tool was chuckling, a low, contented sound. “Yes,” he said. “My gods think they are powerful because they can rain fire down upon me.” A knowing glance. “They did it once before, in Kolkata when I discovered my true power and my true nature.” He flexed one clawed fist. “And that is why I must slay them now, if I am to have peace.”
“But it’s impossible!”
“Not impossible. Only difficult,” Tool said. “My gods live in the sky, so I must hunt them there. That is all. I will climb into the sky.”
He smiled slightly, showing sharp teeth. “Do not doubt, Mahlia. Instead, have faith. I will climb into the sky, and I will hunt my gods, and when I am finished with their slaughter, there will be only me, racing my war chariot across the heavens. Perhaps I will become the sun.”
28
BUT FOR A long time, Tool did not climb into the sky as he so madly described, nor did he do anything else to slay his so-called gods.
Instead, he lived in the shadows and the mud, and Mahlia continued to heal. Tool was adamant that they not come out from beneath the pilings of the piers. They lived amongst seagulls and crabs, visited by the occasional seal that came flopping up into the mud, and that Tool promptly disemboweled.
They didn’t lack for food.
Slowly, Mahlia regained her strength, and so, too, did Tool. Day by day, he became more assured. Power seemed to emanate from him, a smoldering intensity of purpose.
Sometimes, she would catch him squatting in the darkness beneath the piers, dismembering some fish or seal or dog that he had caught—and Mahlia could admit to herself she feared him.
Before, he had carried some basic human qualities, a softness, if she could call it that—at least an empathy—and because of that she had trusted him.
But now…
Now he seemed something else entirely. Not friend or ally. Something primal and unnerving. A nightmare out of humanity’s primeval past, a monster of old, a creature re-emerged from the darkest myths of protohumans, when jungles had never been razed, and when apes still cowered from darkness and struggled to master fire. A monster with its own interests and agenda. A creature that might as easily devour her as continue to care for her and provide her with fresh food and water, stolen from the ships all around the Seascape harbor.
One time, he caught her watching him.
“I am no threat to you, Mahlia,” he said. “We are pack.”
“I wasn’t—” she started to say, but the protest died in her throat. There was no point disputing. Tool saw too much.
One day, when she had healed sufficiently, he said, “I need news. You must fetch it for me. There are cameras. They will be looking for me, but also for you. As you are, you will be recognized.” He offered her a cloak he had stolen off some ship out in the bay. “It is chill enough in the evening to wear this. You will not be remarked, I think.” He offered her a stone. “Put this in your shoe. It will throw them off.”
“How I walk?”
“They measure many things about an individual.”
“They might not even be watching.”
Tool shook his head sharply. “They are always watching. In places such as this, they will have surveillance. They will ally or infiltrate with the Seascape, and their cameras and computers will never sleep.” He waved an admonishing finger at her. “You must only go up at night. Your gait and your shape and your face are well known by now, and their
camera eyes will mark you within a thousandth of a second.”
“If it’s so dangerous, why are we still even in the Seascape?”
“Because I find it useful.”
And that was all Tool would say.
Mahlia went out from under the piers and kept her face dirty, and wore a rain slicker and a floppy hat and limped from the rock in her shoe. It became a pattern for her, sneaking out in the darkness, to fetch things for Tool.
Sometimes, he sent her for things he couldn’t steal from ships, but more often he sent her out for scream sheets. Papers that got printed cheap and given away on the docks, advertising to sailors just off their ships.
At first, Mahlia had thought she was retrieving them because Tool was building a nest—which he was—digging deep into the shore embankments just above sea level, tunneling back into the mud, deep beneath the piers. He hollowed out a space that was surprisingly large, so that Mahlia joked tentatively that maybe he was actually part badger.
Tool only shrugged. “In some parts of the world, badgers kill cobras,” he said. “It is possible. My gods built me from the best killers.”
And then he sent her out the next night to fetch more scream sheets. Again and again. Day after day. Edition after edition. Long after Tool had enough paper for a dozen nests, he sent Mahlia out for more. He used them to insulate the nest, but mostly, he read them. Every night, Mahlia would catch him reading in moon-shadow dimness. Scanning the papers, one by one, compulsively.
“What are you looking for?” Mahlia asked when she returned with the day’s papers. “Maybe I can help.”
“Patterns,” Tool said.
Mahlia gave him a dirty look. “I’m not a child. You can tell me your plans, you know.”
“It’s better if you don’t know. If you are captured, I prefer that my enemies not learn my plans.”
“I’m not getting captured.”
Tool stilled, gazing at her. “You asked to stay with me, Mahlia. If you wish to remain close, you must accept that you are my soldier, and I am your general, and you will not ask questions.” His teeth showed slightly. “I am not your dog to do your bidding. You are mine. However much you may dislike it, you will obey.”