She knows I’m lying.
All of us knew he was lying.
Da stood with one hand on the back door’s latch and a crumpled page in the other. He peered over his shoulder at my mother. Keim and I hid in the hallway. Mum’s eyes sagged with exhaustion, her gaze distant. Since Freude, she’d struggled to keep her mind in the present. Da, his hands bandaged against urvogel scratches and his hair gray with dust, glared at her with a flinty expression.
“I just need time to think,” he said in a dead voice. “I’ll be back before bed.” His lies swarmed around me, stinging like wasps. I flinched with each word.
He’s leaving, something whispered to us. Our hearts told the truth even when our tongues wouldn’t.
“No! Don’t go,” I cried. Don’t leave me.
Da’s eyes searched for me. He stepped toward the hallway with his brows pinched like vanillekipferl cookies and his mouth as rigid and crooked as a crowbar.
My mother stepped between us and blocked my view of him. “Just leave if you’re going to leave.”
Her quiet voice turned my bones to ice. She was sending Da away. She did that sometimes. She’d tell us to leave, her voice cold and sharp, stabbing us to the heart. But, didn’t she see? Didn’t she see that this time he would leave, and for good?
His patience cracked. He shook the crumpled, tattered page in her face. “Woman, you had more sons than just Freude. If you’d have remembered that, Ehren wouldn’t have left, too.”
Her eyes turned blank and cold. “Leave.”
Leave. Always leave. Never stay.
The back door slammed against the wood frame and swung back open, creaking. Outside, the battered auto shrieked and then roared to life, like a siren in the fading light.
Mum slumped onto the couch. Freude’s death notice lay on the floor at her feet.
When Ehren left, she’d watched with empty eyes. Even when the door had kept bashing its frame, she just stared through it. Finally, I’d shut it for her, understanding. Sometimes that door could be so hard to close.
This time she didn’t watch. She sat with her face in her hands, but I knew she wasn’t crying. She hadn’t cried since Freude died. Instead, she bottled her sadness inside, and the tears she would not shed ate away her soul like a gullywasher.
I ran out of the house after Da, dashing into the road, but all that remained of Da was a trail of dust and the silence of bad things happening. I went back inside after the last slice of yellow sunlight crumbled into shadow. I shut the door tightly after me.
None of the lights were on in the house. Keim lay wide-eyed in his bed, staring at the ceiling. I didn’t dare disturb him.
The living room looked and felt empty. Mum had stacked Da’s abandoned belongings on the dust-bloated couch already. On impulse, I snatched Da’s pocketknife from the pile. A crack had split the wood handle, and the joint ground with dust when it opened. It wasn’t worth much, but Da had spent weeks excavating the midden heap on our property in search of valuables. The knife was all he’d found. When Mum asked why he kept it, he said it reminded him not to go searching for buried treasure when he had treasure enough at home. What did it mean now that he’d abandoned it?
Blue darkness enveloped the house. I crept silently to my room in the blue shadows. I crawled into bed with my clothes on and pulled the sheet over my head. I fell asleep clutching the pocketknife.
Keim wasn’t in his room the next morning. He wasn’t in the house. His backpack was gone; and, the back door was unlatched and blowing in the wind. Its slamming woke me.
Leaving speaks in two languages, lies and silence. I prefer silence because lies are tiring.
After the woman speaks to me, I walk into the trees. When I turn to peer back at the encampment, hundreds of refugee fires dot the hillside in front of me. Shadows lurk around and between the spots of light.
There are a few people, like the woman, who are bright lights, fires burning with compassion and wisdom, but the rest of us are only shadows of humans, shades. We shades gather around these lights for warmth and comfort, but in the end we smother them.
I won’t smother her light.
I find a dead tree and begin wrenching joints of wood off its trunk. I break branches with my bare hands, feeling splinters sting my palms with a perverse pleasure. I gather more than usual. Knowing the woman, she’ll share her wood with her neighbors in the morning.
A pained smile tweaks my lips.
She’s too kind; I can only hope someone will be kind to her in return. I worry for them. I wish I could see them through this harshest stretch of our journey. I wish I could eat more meals with them. I wish I could listen longer to her talk. I wish.… But, no.
A sliver of blue moon hangs above the horizon, and the red moon lights the night dimly, little more than a muted circle in the sky. Its wan light tinges the world slightly red. Thunder groans in the distance, a sandstorm stirring.
I approach the woman’s campsite cautiously, carrying the wood under one arm. But as I creep into her camp, I sense a wrongness that causes my belly to clench. My senses heighten, like a beastie that’s caught the scent of a predator. The sensation feels so familiar that I inwardly cringe from it.
I step into the dull glow of ember light and realize the woman and the boy are gone. The wood drops from my hands into the dust.
Boot prints score the ground, and dust and twigs lie on their disheveled bedrolls. I follow a trail of shattered branches and find the woman’s shawl shoved into a bush a few meters away. The boot prints, mixed with the small shoe prints of the boy and woman, lead through more broken trees. I follow the path a few meters farther. Something flutters on a tree, catching my eye. I pinch it between my fingers and recognize a bit of blue fabric from the woman’s torso wrap. I turn, squinting into the darkness. A few meters farther, I spot another fluttering piece of fabric tucked among shattered limbs.
All Light and Darkness by Duncan Halleck
I clench my eyes shut. She left me a trail. She wants me to come after her. She expects me to come after her. But I can’t. I can’t give myself up for her.
I rub the fabric of her shawl between my fingers. The threads snag on my rough skin. I run my fingers over my head, my hair as snarled as my thoughts. Isn’t this a good thing? They’ll sell her in Rettung and send her far away from the Wahren and me. This solves my dilemma, doesn’t it?
An errant breeze whips past me, tossing the woman’s shawl in my face. Her scent fills me. I see her hunched in the firelight stitching the holes in my ragged shirt. I see her face alight as she describes the future she dreams of.
She called me mensklik—human, in spite of all she suspects.
“Lights Above,” I mutter, both a prayer and an oath.
I wrap her shawl around my neck like a scarf. Her smell soothes me. It eases my muscles and focuses my mind. I close my eyes and trigger the mechanism installed in my brain and fused to my nervous system.
The nodes open and waves of black nanomechs surge out, sliding beneath my clothes and webbing across my skin, threads thickening into an armored membrane. With a barely audible snip, the membrane closes over my scalp, cutting through my hair. Filthy blue locks fall to the ground. It closes over my head and face, covering my ears, eyes, nose, and mouth. Satiny armor envelops me; yet, the nanomechs allow sound, light, and air to permeate the membrane.
After months without it, I am unused to the suit. My body responds slowly, like a snake on a cold morning. Months of malnutrition-induced fatigue ebbs away. I flex my arms and shoulders. The layers of nanomechs slide over one another easily. With a burst of speed, I charge several kilometers into the darkness, my body bursting through trees and lunging over dips and ravines. Urvogels and tiny, four-winged microraptors erupt from the trees, screaming as they scramble into the sky.
I revel in the sensation of having every increment of effort magnified
tenfold. I crush a boulder of granite the size of my head, dust erupting between my fingers, just because I can.
But that is the inherent danger of the suit: Just because I can. That thought leads men down dark paths. It leads them to consider doing what they should not, even if they can.
My hands ball into tight fists, the joints aching. I will not be that creature again.
I run until the last campfire disappears from view. Then I stop and listen, waiting for the last raptor cry to die out. I fidget nervously, breaking twigs in my palm smaller and smaller while I wait. I’m afraid, but I will do what I must.
The nanomechs give me strength, agility, and armor; they give me my demon body. The enhancer is my demon heart. But the port—the Titanite disk connected to my brainstem—that is my demon soul. It is what I know and who I am, my knowledge and memory. With it, I can manipulate the nanomechs, either manually or instinctively. With it, I can access information and download it directly into my mental archive. And, with it, the Wahren can find me.
With a deep breath, I tap into the Wahren’s servers.
“Hello, Leviathan,” a familiar voice, neither male nor female, says in my mind. My skin crawls with revulsion. I still despise this mechanical creature. The AI enforced all the Wahren’s policies and commands, sometimes using my endocrine performance enhancer to do it.
“Hello, Kog. Could you please retrieve a detailed map of this area for my use?”
“Leviathan, you are listed as absent without leave.”
“Not absent, Kog, only on a brief hiatus. The map?” I ask with false confidence. To my relief, a map forms in my mind’s eye. “Kog, please cross-reference this map with known slaver movements in the area.” I don’t even consider that the Kog might not have the information. The Kognitive Network thrives on patterns.
Kog complies without comment, and its compliance makes me uneasy. It means it’s focusing its processing power on discovering my location. At least it will divine little from my nanomechs. My surroundings are resoundingly nondescript, as I intended. No people. No campfires. Only desert and darkness.
The data emerges and, with a glance, I identify the slavers’ main encampment. “Thank you, Kog. That is all. Going dark,” I state hurriedly.
Kog attempts to argue, but I quickly lockdown all frequencies coming to or going out from my Kog Port. Using dark mode also removes me from the Kog’s tracking apparatus, but it will have marked my general location. Not only have I confirmed that I am alive, but I have told the Wahren where to look.
I am a fool, and yet, I feel no regret; I know the location of the woman and boy. Like a hound with the scent, my body yearns for motion.
Not yet.
I touch the shawl to my lips, just briefly. “For the woman who speaks of likt unt shaden,” I murmur. Then, I sprint into the darkness.
The slavers have arranged their equipment to look like a refugee camp, but their autos, massive rigs with powerful engines and lots of cargo space, are kept in too good of condition to belong to refugees. Besides, only men stalk about the camp, packing and growling at each other.
I observe the slavers from a copse of trees on a hill above them. My tech-fused eyes show me at least a dozen hostiles, and I think I know which truck the woman and her brother are held in. Three slavers stand guard around it. It seems they are the only captives.
My eyes readjust to six-six vision, and I tune my hearing to reach their camp, but other noises interfere. Animals scurry through the underbrush. The wind rattles branches. Thunder roars in the distance. I use my Kog Port to focus on the voices, filtering out the distractions.
“Why didn’ ya watch that one, ya shattering gyp,” a man snarls. He talks with the clipped inflection of Rettung’s slums. “I don’ care if he seemed dangerous. Ya could’a jumped him all on his lonesome as he left their camp or nabbed him in his sleep.”
He stands near the center of camp. A snakelike tail, as brown and yellow as the Dustlands, trails from the man’s tailbone and hangs over his shoulder. The tip curls and uncurls on his chest as he talks. His companions work around him, packing camp.
“At least we got the Blueblood,” a large man with thick lips offers.
The leader sneers. “At least we got t’ girlie,” he mocks, before striding over to the man and knocking him to the ground. His tail slips around the man’s neck, and he presses his face into the dirt with his boot. “If you’d think wit’ your head instead of your pecker, ya little schist, then maybe ya’d realize a young man like that’s worth more and easier for selling than a shattering Blueblood. We’d have to go all t’ way to Endonia to sell t’ little witch. As it is, we’ll have to pawn her off to a whore shed in Rettung before we sell t’ boy to t’ Wahren just to keep t’ Wahren from stringing us up.”
Mention of my former master brings bile to my mouth, but it’s their plans for the woman and boy that sicken me most. I bite my tongue to trim my anger, and I taste blood. I take deep breaths through my nose, trying to bring my emotions back under control.
“Don’ know what t’ Wahren’s doing in the south anyway,” one of the other slavers mutters.
“It don’ matter what ya know,” brays the leader. “This,”—the man points to his temple with a knobby finger—“this is why I’m t’ boss and ya clinkers work for me. What ya think don’ matter! What I think don’ matter! All tha’ really matters is understandin’ what’s really going on, and I can do that.”
I narrow my eyes. As if a worm like him could understand what really turns this world. No one understands until they have nanomechs in their nerves and a voice in their head.
“Now,” he continues, after releasing the thick-lipped man. “I’ma go fec, and this job better’ll be done by t’ time I get back.”
The leader tramps away to relieve himself, and I finally make my move.
I set the woman’s shawl aside. Then I picture the leader in my mind and set the nanomechs to moving. They slide across my skin. They layer themselves, altering my features, and change color to imitate the image. Hawkish face. Stringy blond hair. Narrow jaw. Lean, long, and tense, quivering like a whip ready to strike. And a tail hung over my shoulder. I’m not wearing their leader’s clothes, but this will throw off his henchmen long enough.
“Goddess, save me,” I murmur. Then, with a deep breath, I stride into the camp.
The slavers become frantically busy, but the subterfuge doesn’t last long. I don’t know what I missed. Maybe my silence gives me away, or I didn’t get his nose quite right? Regardless, one of the men looks closely at me, the thick-lipped one. He has a paunch, but he’s tall and heavyset. I see his hand reaching for the gun shoved haphazardly into the waistband of his pants.
He knows I’m a threat. What he doesn’t know is that he’s already dead.
I strike before he can say a word. My disguise falls away as I leap at him; I’m a black creature, a demon, again. As soon as I twist his neck, the suit’s endocrine performance enhancer triggers my brain, and my blood swells with endorphins and dopamine. I feel incredible. I feel invincible. I feel the need for more.
The slavers scatter like insects. I convert armor into greater speed and pounce on the nearest one. He screams until I crush his trachea. A group rushes me, and I sift through my archive of information, falling back on hundreds of hand-to-hand combat lessons downloaded from the Kog before I left the Wahren. The kicks fall precisely and the punches land exactly.
As I kill the last man, I smell ozone and immediately dodge to the side. A lightning ball streaks past and strikes a tree. The tree explodes, splinters ricocheting off my suit. I spot a spindly man guised in black hefting an ion cannon. I bolster my armor as I stalk toward him. I feel the drain on my speed as my energy focuses on armoring the nanomechs.
The spindly man fires again. The lightning ball explodes against me, lightning coiling around my arms and down my legs like snakes. Some of
the nanomechs spark, smoke, and die, overloaded, but the nodes replace them. The cannon is useless against my Koganzug; a crossbow could do more damage. The man fires again but with the same result. Since the fool stubbornly depends on his cannon, I reach him easily, crushing the barrel in my hand. The gun explodes, killing the slaver. I toss aside the twisted scrap metal.
“Don’ move or I kill t’ runt,” a familiar voice bawls.
I turn and face the leader outfitted in his anzug. Black nanofabric covers him from head to toe, and he holds the beast-child hostage in front of him. His tail wraps the boy’s throat. They stand twenty meters from me, but I can smell excrement on the leader’s boot. His hawkish face, still prominent beneath the black fabric, looms over the boy possessively. The boy winces, his arm twisted behind his back. His blue eyes, bright with firelight, glance back at the man with—what? Fear? Panic? No, annoyance.
I hear his sister crying for him in the truck. The sound is like blood in the water.
The remaining men slink into view. Some pull anzug masks over their sneering faces and activate their suits, hoping to intimidate me. They think they’ve won. They can’t see that I’m smiling, too.
Anzug combat suits have standard abilities—stealth, speed enhancement, auto and manual armoring, strength augmentation, combat technique assists—every suit-bearer enjoys these. But I wear no mere anzug, something to slip on and off again. No, I wear a Koganzug, a combat suit that uses nanotech to integrate with the user’s nervous system, mind, and the Kog. Because of this, Koganzug users develop unique abilities—signature abilities. They called me “Leviathan” for a reason.
A single tendril of nanomechs trails from my suit to the man, weaving up his clothes like a needle and thread. A thin glint of metal flashes in the firelight as it slides across the leader’s throat like a bow across a string. The nanofabric, normally resilient, might as well be silk.
The leader stares at me for a moment, his feline eyes terrified. Then blood pours from his throat. His tail falls from the boy’s neck. The man collapses, hands clamped over the wound. The boy glares at the dying man, absently massaging his sore shoulder. Then he scrambles into one of the autos.