Isolation

  “Yes,” said Bao eagerly. “We will need both armies. We can stop them here—we can hold this factory and defeat the devils, but only together. Your army on one flank and mine on the other. We can take anything they send at us, and throw it right back in their faces.”

  “Our antiair weapons have been destroyed,” said Wu, but Bao cut him off.

  “Our men are our weapons,” he said. “They are the only weapons we need.”

  Their men are their weapons, thought Heron, and in a flash she saw the whole plan: everything the NADI strategists had done to produce this exact situation, to force this exact response, to pave the way for the unthinkable attack that must come next. The factory complex was the most valuable objective in the city, and now the Chinese generals were in it, and in a matter of minutes their entire army would be in it as well—an army so well entrenched in the urban terrain that they had proven almost impossible to root out. But if they left their defenses and rushed the factory, fighting to hold it, all three of the defenders’ assets would be in one place, at one time. A Partial victory here could destroy the Chinese military strength in the entire region, and that was a victory worth sacrificing for—even something as valuable as the munitions factory itself. Now that Heron had destroyed the antiair cannons, the Partials could—and would—destroy the entire complex with an air strike. It was a brilliant, devastating plan.

  But it would work only if the Partial army was in the factory complex. Without that threat of overwhelming force, the Chinese would have no need to bring in so many of their own soldiers—pull the Partials back, and the Chinese would pull back as well. The air strike would hurt but not destroy them. The Partial army was bait.

  The Partial army was a sacrifice.

  PARAGEN BIOSYNTH GROWTH AND TRAINING FACILITY, UNDISCLOSED LOCATION

  April 12, 2059

  Heron lived with the Chinese prisoners for nearly a month: eating with them, sleeping in their barracks, talking and listening and learning everything she could. Though they didn’t know it, they were teaching her invaluable information she couldn’t possibly have learned in a classroom: regional slang, body language, communal experiences that she studied, processed, and adopted into her own persona. The city of Zuoquan held a lantern festival every year, and had done so for centuries. Her history teacher had told her about the meaning of the festival, its origins, its size and timing and location. The prisoners had told her about Chen’s Noodle House, and the sidewalk cart he used every year with the squeaky wheel on one side. They’d told her about Grandmother Mei and her old yellow dog, sitting on her roof and howling at the fireworks. They’d told her about the year the dragon had faltered in the rain, ruining the paper and halting the parade and forever branding Li Gong’s oldest son as the Lord of Mud. Each story Heron heard she internalized, and as she moved from group to group she became one of them, so strongly identified as a Zuoquan native that many of the prisoners claimed to have known her as a girl.

  They were a proud people, cheerful in the face of hardship, strong in the depths of captivity, and ruthless in their pursuit of freedom. She admired them, and was proud, in a way, to pretend to be one of them. She helped them plan half their escape attempts, and eavesdropped on the other half, and reported all of it back to her superiors. She was a secret hero to both the prisoners and the guards.

  “It’s time to send a message,” said Vincent. He was her new trainer, and one of the de facto masters of the prison camp; she had thrown a rebellious fit, as she did every few days, and they used her alleged confinement as a time to talk. “Who are the leaders?”

  “Li Gong is the oldest,” said Heron, “and he has a lot of cultural presence because of it. People do what he says, but he doesn’t say much. More active, but less important, is this young man.” She tapped a photo in the prison log book. “Hsu Yan. He wants to lead an escape, and he doesn’t like the way Huan Do is doing it. Do is the other leader, he and his wife, Lan. The two of them are probably the biggest leaders in the camp, Do and Lan.”

  “Define ‘biggest,’” said Vincent.

  “The most followers,” said Heron. “The most influence, over both the prisoners and the guards. The most likely to form an escape plan capable of succeeding, and to unite a group capable of carrying it out.”

  “The most important, then,” said Vincent. “The gear that makes the whole clock run.”

  Heron nodded. “In a way, yes.” She looked up. “What message do you want me to send him?”

  “He’s not the recipient,” said Vincent; “he’s the message. We’re using him to send a message to the entire camp.”

  “You’re going to kill him,” said Heron.

  “No,” said Vincent, “you’re going to kill him.”

  The plan he laid out was simple. A message like this would usually require a lot of flash and visibility—a public execution to keep the rest of the camp in line—but what Vincent wanted was silence and mystery. If Huan Do died in public, the prisoners would learn to fear the guards, but they already feared them. They hid in the shadows and trusted only one another. But if Huan Do died in the shadows, safe among friends, the prisoners would have nowhere else to hide. Their resistance would crumble. Heron concealed a knife in her prison jumpsuit, and when her “punishment” ended, she returned to the camp.

  She had been doing drills like this for months. Identify the target, infiltrate, and strike. In and out. She studied the camp with new eyes, noting each guard tower and bunkhouse, and decided she could do this job even without the guards’ help. She returned to her room, commiserated with her bunkmates about the injustice of the prison system, and bowed to all the right people in the mess hall for dinner, showing deference and gaining, in return, renewed trust. Hsu Yan caught her up on the latest passwords, and Li Gong himself thanked her for her shining example of resistance. It occurred to Heron that in her list of leaders she should have included herself: She was well known as a rebel, an agitator, and a planner. The camp looked up to her. If word got around that Mei Hao, of all people, had killed Huan Do, the camp would be crushed.

  The guards called lights-out at nine p.m., cutting all power to the bunkhouses, but the prisoners stuffed sheets and blankets in the cracks of their windows, and burned small lamps and flashlights they’d either scrounged or built themselves. The women in Heron’s bunkhouse talked about new plans for escape, and Heron made detailed mental notes just in case the death of Huan Do failed to break their spirits. When they finally went to sleep at one a.m., Heron lay in the dark and waited until every other prisoner was asleep before picking the lock and slipping outside. The camp was quiet and dark. Heron moved like a ghost through the streets and alleyways, dodging guards and searchlights and watchdogs as if they weren’t even there. Huan Do’s bunkhouse was near the center of camp and locked down even tighter than her own; he was a dangerous troublemaker, and the guards had been watching him for weeks. Heron picked the lock in five silent seconds, and her footsteps as she slipped inside were no louder than a snake gliding ghostlike across the floor.

  The bunkhouses were separated by gender, so Huan Do was alone in his bed; the prisoners sometimes sneaked their wives in, but not tonight. There were eight rooms to a house, and eight men to a room. All the men in this house were fast asleep. Heron stood over Huan Do’s sleeping form, the knife in her hand.

  This is the first time I’ve killed one for real, she thought. All my other missions were drills; all my other targets were mannequins, or sensors, or drones. With the exception of Sergeant Latimer, who did most of the work himself, I have never killed a real human before. She stared at the sleeping man, listened to him breathe. Her knife was polycarbonate fiber, sharp as steel but a matte black that disappeared into the darkened room like a shard of shadow. Huan Do was helpless and oblivious, like a child.

  This is my graduation, she realized. The message we’re ostensibly sending to the prisoners will be effective, but unnecessary; their escapes never work, and they’d have nowhere to go if they
did. It will make them easier to control, at least for a while, but that’s not the full reason for this action. She looked down at her jumpsuit. I’m flying out to the real war in just one week, and this is my graduation. One final mission. “Prove you can kill when the target’s a real person.” She had learned in her seduction training—from Ms. McGuire, not a drunk sergeant in the shower—about the concept of empathy. Of seeing the world through someone else’s eyes, and feeling the way they feel. “Make them love you,” McGuire had said, “and they won’t be able to kill you. Make them see you as a person, as a life, as a thing to be protected rather than harmed. All humans have empathy, and you can use it against them.”

  “Partials have it too,” Heron had said. “We can feel each other’s emotions through the link.”

  “That’s different,” said McGuire. “The link lets you know what those emotions are, but it doesn’t make you care about them. This is how you must use emotion—as a tool to be understood, manipulated, and exploited.”

  Heron considered this. “Does that mean Partials have no conscience?”

  “Most of them do,” said McGuire. “By international law, all BioSynthetic sentients must have empathy, and a conscience, to keep them from hurting their creators. It is the primary safeguard that makes you more useful, and therefore more valuable, than robotics.”

  Heron cocked her head to the side. “You said ‘most.’”

  McGuire smiled. “Thetas are designed with no conscience at all. A soldier is different from an assassin—when you kill, you must feel nothing for your target.”

  “Then our existence is a crime,” said Heron. “My life is against the law.”

  “Some laws are made to be broken.”

  The words echoed in Heron’s mind as she stared at Huan Do. I must feel nothing for my target. She stepped forward, as silent as a shadow, and got to work.

  ZUOQUAN CITY, SHANXI PROVINCE, CHINA

  June 9, 2060

  Heron’s mind raced through the possibilities: Would NADI really destroy their own Partials? Of course they would—they considered the Partials animals at best, and tools at worst. Ten thousand soldiers were a lot to lose, but they could always make more. It fit with the loss of the factory, too, because no army meant no need for bullets. That’s why my handler seemed so odd about my orders: He didn’t care if I captured the generals, because it genuinely doesn’t matter. Destroy the antiair guns at all costs, enable the air strike, and everything after was a fireball. Confirm?

  A nanosecond passed, and she turned next to her options, thinking first of how she could survive. She could hijack a Rotor and fly clear—it was 2240; there was still plenty of time to escape before the air strike landed. She could even take the satbox with her, as a sign of good faith to her handler for going beyond her orders. She had no great urge to show them good faith, since they had shown none to her, but where else was she to go? She could blend in anywhere she went, especially in China, but . . . did she truly wish to spend her life as a nameless citizen in a conquered country? She was a Partial. She was not built for that.

  But was she built to die?

  She thought then about the rest of the Partials. Every devil in the army, as Wu put it; nearly ten thousand men and women, and in twenty minutes they would all be dead. Heron knew that this should bother her, and it did—on a personal level. She had been betrayed; she had been discarded. But it was more than that. Even as she analyzed the situation, she turned that analysis on herself and saw that she was losing her . . . what? Not her innocence, for she was an engineered assassin; she’d had no innocence to lose since the moment her genome was swirled together in a vat. But she was losing something else: her own illusions about herself, and about the way her mind worked. Ten thousand of her brothers and sisters were being sent blindly to their deaths, and here she sat without an ounce of sadness for them. She had been built to feel nothing, and trained to feel even less. They had made her incomplete, and her reaction to this massive betrayal proved just how deeply that incompleteness ran. She was a broken doll, dancing on the end of their strings.

  She had to save the Partials, not because she loved them, but because she hated their creators.

  Another nanosecond passed, and she began to form her plan. How could she save the other Partials? If she warned the Partial army, then the bait would be lost and the air strike would be canceled. The situation would stay the same, except that she would be known as a traitor and forced out of the loop, completely unable to prevent the same sacrifice when they tried it again in the future. If she called off the Chinese forces, the results would be similar, but with the added threat that the air strike might still happen, so close to the wire that they couldn’t call it off in time. The Partials would be destroyed for nothing. If she was going to change this attack, she had to make sure that the outcome still favored the NADI forces. She would hand them a victory, but not the one they’d wanted; she would shove it in their faces. She had very few resources at hand—not even a gun—but what she did have were the tools of her trade. Information. Intelligence. Deception. She could do this.

  She saw the plan like a diagram in her mind, timed to the second. It was 2241; she had nineteen minutes. She activated the GPS mapper in her phone, dropped it into the satbox, and snapped the box shut. The generals looked at her in surprise, and Wu started to protest, but Heron stood and silenced them with the full weight of her genetically perfect charisma.

  “I’m afraid I have bad news,” she said. “I’m a spy for the Partial army, and my people are going to destroy this entire complex in nineteen minutes.”

  General Wu recoiled like he’d seen a snake; Bao froze, too shocked to react. The soldiers froze as well, stunned by the confession, until Wu managed to stammer out “Stop her!” and they surged forward, rifles raised, in perfect formation for a three-man capture like this—two soldiers with guns and one with a pair of handcuffs. Heron saw it all as if in slow motion: the looks on their faces, the slow, predictable movements as the handcuffs were raised. She could avoid them easily, but she put up only a token resistance, fighting just enough to look determined without becoming enough of a threat to warrant them shooting her. The man with the handcuffs pulled her arms roughly behind her back, slapping the first cuff on her wrist, but as he came in for the second one she twisted her arms and grabbed his finger, snapping it like a twig; he screamed, and the second cuff came down imperfectly on her tangle of arms and wrists. She ended up with both cuffs on the same wrist, her other arm twisted through the chain to create the illusion that she was fully restrained. The soldier behind her staggered away, too distracted by the pain in his finger to notice. Heron kept her gaze level and fixed the generals with her iciest expression.

  “Why?” demanded General Bao, and Heron could hear the undercurrent of personal betrayal in his voice. “Why did you deceive us?” Why are you not the girl I wanted you to be?

  “She deceived us because she is a devil,” said Wu, braver now that she was contained. “The question is, why did you reveal yourself?”

  “Because I do not wish to die,” she said simply.

  Wu was furious. “You think we will help you to escape?”

  “I think you’ll help me call it off,” she said. This part of the story was a lie, carefully crafted to evoke the required response. “I have the access codes, but not the access. They’ve cut off my communications, but with your computer network I could uplink to the jets themselves and abort the mission.”

  “She lies,” said Bao, his voice thick and bitter. “She thinks to trick us into calling off the counterattack, but we will not fall for her wiles.”

  “We must still be cautious, though,” said Wu. “She might have guessed that we would guess that she . . . bah! Schemes within schemes. We must cut through to the heart of the matter and deal with it the simplest way possible.” He picked up the satbox and clutched it protectively under one arm. “I will carry this to safety—with invasions and air strikes and spies it is too dangerous to
leave it here, troop morale be damned.”

  “We will never abandon our position!” cried Bao, but turned away and spoke more softly, anger turning to sour acceptance. “But you are right. If we cannot know the truth, we must hedge our bets. You will flee, and I will lead the defense of the complex.”

  “To arms, then,” said Wu, and shook Bao’s hand solemnly. “If you die, I will tell them you died a hero.”

  “And if I live,” said Bao, “I will have you and your army to thank for it.”

  Wu turned without another word, gesturing for one of the soldiers to follow him, and stormed out of the room with the satbox. A moment later Heron heard the low hum of a Rotor preparing for launch.

  “I cannot trust you to use our computers,” said Bao. “You realize this.”

  Heron answered calmly. “You think I would expose myself so fully if my life were not in just as much danger as yours?”

  “I will use the computer,” he said, holding up his phone. He tapped in a password, accessing the satellite network, and looked up at Heron. “What is the password to uplink to the jets?”

  “I can’t give you access to our system,” said Heron.

  “And I can’t give you access to mine,” said Bao. “I remind you that you are about to die: Either give me the code or lose your life.”

  Heron smiled. “Or you could just give me the phone, like I asked.” He started to respond, but Heron was already moving: She had a soldier on each side, and with her hands unexpectedly free she caught them completely unaware, elbowing the first in the solar plexus and wrenching the rifle from the second one’s hands. He fought, pulling on it, but she used his own force against him and pushed back suddenly in the same direction he was pulling in, slamming him in the face with a sickening crunch. He lost his grip and staggered back, and she turned the rifle on the first soldier just as he was recovering from his hit. She shot him squarely in the chest, then turned on the second man and shot him, too. Bao was too shocked to move. She plucked his phone from his hands and typed with her thumb, keeping the rifle aimed squarely at his heart. After a series of beeps, Heron entered a ten-digit security code and lifted the phone to speak.