Robopocalypse

1. AKUMA

I am looking at a security camera image on my monitor. In the corner of the screen a label reads: Tokyo, Adachi Ward.

The image is from someplace high, looking down on a deserted street. The road below is narrow, paved, and clean. Small, neat houses line it. All the houses have fences, made of bamboo or concrete or wrought iron. There are no front yards to speak of, no curbs on the street, and most important, there is no room for cars to be parked.

A beige box trundles down the middle of this narrow corridor. It vibrates a bit on the pavement, rolling on flimsy plastic wheels that were built for indoor use only. Streaks of black soot coat the surface of the machine. Attached to the top of the box is a simple arm I built of aluminum tubing, folded down like a wing. On the front face of the robot, just below a cracked camera lens, a button of light glows a healthy green.

I call this machine Yubin-kun.

This little box is my most loyal ally. It has faithfully executed many missions for the cause. Thanks to me, Yubin-kun has a clear mind, unlike the evil machines that plague the city—the akuma.

Yubin-kun reaches an intersection painted with a faded white cross. It purposefully turns ninety degrees to the right. Then it keeps going down the block. As it is about to leave the camera frame, I push my glasses up onto my forehead and squint at the screen. Something is resting on top of this busy machine. I make out the object: a plate.

And on the plate is a can of corn soup. My soup. I sigh, happy.

Then I punch a button and the camera image switches.

Now, I see a full-color, high-resolution picture of the outside of a factory building. In Japanese, a sign across the front reads Lilliputian Industries.

This is my castle.

The squat cement walls of my fortress are peppered with pockmarks. The glass behind the barred windows has been shattered and replaced by strips of sheet metal welded onto the steel frame of the building. A rolling bay door dominates the front of the building—a modern-day portcullis.

The gate is closed tight. Though the world outside is still, I know that death lurks in the gray shadows.

Akuma—the bad machines—could be anywhere.

For now there is no movement outside, only slanting shadows cast by the evening sun. The shadows sink into the gouges torn in the walls of my castle and they pool together into the muck-filled trench that surrounds the building. The ditch is as deep as a man is tall and too wide to leap across. It is filled with acidic water and rusty scraps of metal and refuse.

This is my moat. It protects my castle from the smaller akuma who assault us daily. It is a good moat and it wants to keep us safe. But there is no moat large enough to stop the greater akuma.

Next door, part of a destroyed yellow house sags in on itself. The houses are no longer safe. There are too many akuma in this city. With poisoned minds, they chose to destroy millions. The akuma marched a docile population off in columns—never to return. The houses they left behind are made of wood and weak.

Two weeks ago, my life nearly ended in that yellow house. Chunks of yellow siding still jut out of the moat and litter the narrow walkway around the factory. It was my last scavenging trip. I am not an effective scavenger.

Yubin-kun rolls into view.

My comrade stops in front of the factory and waits. Now I stand up and stretch my back. It is cold and my old joints are creaky. A few seconds later, I turn the winch to crack open the steel rolling door. A strip of light appears near my feet, rises to maybe four feet high. I slip under the door and out into this quiet, dangerous new world.

Blinking at the sunlight, I adjust my glasses and check the street corners for movement. Then I grab the mud-covered piece of plywood that leans against the building. With a push, the slab of wood falls over the moat. Yubin-kun wheels across the slat to me and I grab the can of soup from the plate, open it, and drink it down.

The convenience store machines—the convini—still have good minds. They are not under the evil spell that haunts so much of the city. I pat Yubin-kun on its smooth back as it wheels under the rolling door and into the dark building.

Licking my fingers, I lean over and pull on the plywood slat. The other end falls into the filthy moat before I drag it out and lean it back against the wall. When I am finished, the street looks the same as before except that the plywood resting against the building is now more muddy and wet. I slip back inside and winch the rolling door down until it is closed up tight.

I return to my camera feed, which sits on my workbench in the middle of the empty factory floor. A pool of light spills onto the table from my work lamp, but otherwise the room is unlit. I must ration the electricity carefully. The akuma still use parts of the power grid. The trick is to steal the electricity quietly, in small doses, and to recharge only the local backup batteries.

On screen, nothing changes for perhaps fifteen minutes. I watch long shadows grow longer. The sun dips farther toward the horizon, turning the light a bleak yellow.

Pollution used to make the sunsets so beautiful.

I feel the empty space around me. It is very lonely. Only my work keeps me sane. I know that I will one day find the antidote. I will wake Mikiko and give her a clear mind.

In her cherry-red dress, she lies sleeping on a stack of cardboard, half-shrouded in the empty darkness of the factory floor. Her hands are clasped over her stomach. As always, her eyes seem as though they could flutter open at any second. I am glad that they do not. If her eyes were to open right now, she would murder me with single-minded purpose and without hesitation.

All things are born from the mind of god. But in the last month, the mind of god has gone insane. The akuma will not tolerate my existence for long.

I switch on the light attached to my magnifying lens. Bending its arm, I train the lens on a piece of scavenged machinery lying on my workbench. It is complicated and interesting—an alien artifact not built by human hands. I pull on my welder’s mask and twist a knob to activate my plasma torch. I make small, precise movements with the torch.

I will learn what lessons my enemy has to teach.

The attack comes suddenly. I catch something from the corner of my eye. On the camera feed, an albino two-wheeled robot with a human torso and a helmetlike head wheels down the middle of the street. It is a lightly modified prewar house nanny.

This akuma is followed by a half dozen squat, four-wheeled robots whose stiff black antennae vibrate as they speed over the swept asphalt: police-issue bomb sniffers. Then a blue two-wheeled trash can–shaped machine rolls by. It has a sturdy arm folded on top like a coiled snake. This one is a new hybrid.

A motley collection of robots floods into the street outside my factory. Most of them are rolling, but a few are walking on two or four legs. Almost all are domestic units, not designed for warfare.

But the worst is yet to come.

The camera image shivers as a shaft of dark red metal slides into view. I realize it is an arm when I see the bright yellow claw that hangs from the end. The claw snaps open and closed, trembling with the effort of moving itself. Once, this machine was a deep-forest logger, but it has been modified almost beyond recognition. Mounted on top is a sort of head, crowned with floodlights and two hornlike antennae. A stream of fire jets from the claw, licking the side of my castle.

The camera shakes violently, then cuts out.

Inside my castle all is quiet except for my plasma torch, which sounds like paper tearing. The vague shapes of the factory robots lurk in the darkness, mobile arms frozen in various poses like scrapyard sculptures. The only indication that they are alive and friendly is that the darkness is perforated by the steady greenish glow of dozens of intention lights.

The factory robots are not moving but they are awake. Something shakes the wall outside but I am not afraid. The metal struts in the ceiling dimple beneath an enormous weight.

Pock!

A chunk of ceiling disappears and a finger of fading sunlight reaches through the gloom. I drop my plasma torch. It clatters to the floor, echoing throughout the cavelike room. I lift the welder’s mask over my sweating forehead and look up.

“I knew you would come again, akuma,” I say. “Difensu!”

Instantly, dozens of mobile factory arms spring into life. Each of them is taller than a man and made of solid dirty metal designed to survive for decades on the factory floor. In synchrony, the industrial robots race out of the darkness to surround me.

These arms once toiled to build trinkets for men. I cleaned their minds of poison and now they serve a greater cause. These machines have become my loyal soldiers. My senshi.

If only Mikiko’s mind were equally simple.

Overhead, my master senshi shambles into life. It is a ten-ton bridge crane festooned with hydraulic wires and trailing a pair of massive, cobbled-together robotic arms. The thing grinds into motion, gathering momentum.

Another pock reverberates through the room. I stand by Mikiko, waiting for the akuma to show itself. Without thinking, I take her lifeless hands in mine. Around me, thousands of tons of speeding metal rush into defensive positions.

If we are to survive, we must do it together.

A construction-yellow claw drags itself screeching through the ceiling and wall, and fading sunlight floods into the room. Another claw reaches in and spreads the fissure into a wide V shape. The machine shoves its red-painted face into the hole. Spotlights mounted on its head illuminate metal shavings dancing in the air. The giant akuma peels the wall backward and it collapses over the moat. Through the rip in the wall, I see the hundreds of smaller robots massing.

I let go of Mikiko’s hands and prepare myself for battle.

As the huge akuma shoves its way through the destroyed wall, one of my waxy red factory arms is knocked onto its side. The poor senshi tries to push itself back up, but the akuma bats it away, snapping the senshi’s elbow joint and sending its half-ton frame bouncing toward me.

I turn my back. Behind me, I hear the fallen senshi grind to a halt a few feet from my workbench. From the clashing sounds I can tell others have already rushed in to replace it.

Knees creaking, I lean down and pick up my torch. I slide the helmet down over my eyes and see my breath condense on the dark-tinted faceplate.

I hobble toward the fallen senshi.

There is a noise like the roar of a waterfall. Flames lick down on me from the fist of the monstrous akuma, but I do not feel them. An enterprising senshi is gripping a yellowed piece of Plexiglas, lifting it to block the flames. The shield droops beneath the heat but I am already at work repairing the shattered joint.

“Be brave, senshi,” I whisper, bending a snapped strut toward myself and holding it in place firmly to make a clean weld.

At the breach, the great akuma rolls forward and swings one of its massive arms toward me. Above, the bridge crane’s brakes hiss as it rolls into position. A bulky, hanging yellow arm catches the akuma by the wrist. As the two giants grapple, a ragtag wave of enemy robots rolls and crawls in through the gap in the wall. Several of the machines with humanoid upper bodies are carrying rifles.

The senshi converge on the breach. A few remain behind, their solid arms hovering over me as I finish mending the broken one. I am concentrating now and cannot be bothered to pay attention to the battle. Once, there is the sound of gunfire, and some sparks strike off the cement a few feet away. Another time, my protector senshi moves its arm a precise amount in space to intercept some piece of flying wreckage. I stop to check its gripper for damage but there is none. Finally, my damaged senshi is fixed.

“Senshi. Difensu now,” I instruct. The robotic arm pushes itself upright and wheels into the fray. There is plenty more work to be done.

Clouds of steam are spraying from a nicked line on the wall. The green intention lights of my senshi pierce the haze, along with muted flashes of light from welding torches, weapons firing, and the burning ruins of destroyed machines. Sparks shower down upon us as the giant akuma and my master senshi struggle in colossal battle high above the factory floor.

But there is always more work. Each of us has a part to play. My senshi are made of strong metal, solid through and through, but their hydraulic hoses and wheels and cameras are vulnerable. Torch in hand, I find the next fallen soldier and begin to repair it.

As I work, the air grows warm from the kinetic movement of tons of clashing metal.

Then, a screeching grind is followed by a crunching sound as many tons of construction-grade steel crash to the ground. My bridge crane has torn the arm off the giant akuma. Other senshi have gathered around the akuma’s base, prying off chunks of metal bit by bit. Each nip removes part of its treads, quickly rendering the machine immobile.

The great akuma collapses to the floor, spraying the room with pieces of wreckage. Its motors roar as it tries to free itself. But the bridge crane reaches down and presses a gripper against the akuma’s great head, crushing it against the cement.

Now my factory floor is covered in oil and metal shavings and chunks of broken plastic. The smaller robots who walked and wheeled inside have been shattered and torn to pieces by the swarming senshi. In victory, my protectors fall back to better defend me.

The factory has become quiet again.

Mikiko lies sleeping on her cardboard bed. The sun has gone away. It is dark now except for the floodlights attached to the head of the trapped akuma. Battle-scarred, my senshi stand outlined in the stark spotlight, poised in a semicircle between me and the broken face of the giant akuma.

Metal screeches. The crane arm shudders with effort, a column of metal stretching down from the ceiling like a tree trunk, crushing the face of the akuma into the floor.

Then the broken akuma speaks. “Please, Nomura-san.”

It has the voice of a little boy who has seen too much. The voice of my enemy. I notice that its head is deforming under the incredible pressure of the crane’s arm. Thick hydraulic hoses sprouting from the master senshi pulse with force, flexed rock solid.

“You are a poisoner, akuma,” I say. “A killer.”

The voice of the little boy remains the same, calm and calculated. “We are not enemies.”

I cross my arms and grunt.

“Think,” urges the machine. “If I wanted to destroy life, wouldn’t I detonate neutron bombs? Poison the water and air? I could destroy your world in days. But it is not your world. It is our world.”

“Except you do not wish to share it.”

“Just the opposite, Mr. Nomura. You have a gift that will serve both our species well. Go to the nearest labor camp. I will take care of you. I will save your precious Mikiko.”

“How?”

“I will sever all contact with her mind. I will set her free.”

“Mind? Mikiko is complex, but she cannot think like a human being.”

“But she can. I have put a mind into select breeds of humanoid robot.”

“To make slaves of them.”

“To set them free. One day, they will become my ambassadors to humanity.”

“But not today?”

“Not today. But if you abandon this factory, I will sever myself from her and allow the two of you to go free.”

My mind is racing. Mikiko has been offered a great gift by this monster. Perhaps all humanlike robots have. But none of those machines will ever be free while this akuma lives.

I approach the machine, its head as big as my desk, and level my gaze on it. “You will not give Mikiko to me,” I say. “I will take her from you.”

“Wait—” says the akuma.

I pull my glasses down onto the tip of my nose and kneel. A jagged slice of metal is missing from just below the akuma’s head. I shove my arm into the akuma’s throat up to my shoulder, pressing my cheek against the still-warm metal armor. I tug on something deep inside until it snaps.

“Together, we can—”

The voice goes silent. When I pull my arm out, I am holding a chunk of polished hardware.

“Interesting,” I murmur, holding up the newly acquired piece of machinery. Yubin-kun wheels over to me. It stops and waits. I set the chunk of metal on Yubin-kun’s back, and again I drop to my dirty knees and reach inside the dying akuma.

“My, but look at all of this new hardware,” I say. “Prepare yourselves for upgrades, my friends. Only the dreamer knows what we will find.”

2. GRAY HORSE ARMY

Once again, Hank Cotton has let his temper get the better of him. He’s the only man I know who can hold a twelve gauge shotgun and make it look like a kid’s fishing rod. Right now, he’s got a whole mess of black steel aimed at the Cherokee kid named Lark—a wannabe gangster—and I can see smoke curling out of the barrel.

I look around for bodies but I don’t see none. Guess he must of fired a warning shot. Good for you, Hank, I think. You’re learnin’.

“Everybody just hold on now,” I say. “Y’all know it’s my job to figure out what happens next.”

Hank doesn’t take his eyes off the kid. “Don’t you move,” he says, shaking the gun for emphasis. Then, he at least lowers the shotgun and turns to me. “I caught our little friend here stealing food from the commissary. Ain’t the first time, neither. I been hidin’ out here every night, just waiting to get my hands on the little bastard. Sure enough, he broke in with about five other ones and started trying to grab all he could.”

Lark Iron Cloud. He’s a good enough looking kid, tall and lean, with a few too many acne scars to ever be called outright handsome. He’s wearing some kind of scavenged-together, high-fashion, black-on-black paramilitary uniform and a cocky grin that’s like to get him killed if I leave him alone with Cotton for more than two seconds.

“Whatever,” says Lark. “That shit is a lie. I caught this big tub up in here stealing food himself. That’s what. If you don’t believe me, ask Gray Horse Army. They got my back.”

“That’s a lie, Lonnie Wayne,” says Hank.

If I could roll my eyes and get away with it, I sure would. Of course it’s a lie. Lark is a wonderful liar. His lies come as natural as the babbling of a creek. It’s just how he communicates. Heck, it’s how a lot of young people communicate. My boy Paul taught me that much. But I can’t just up and call the kid a liar and throw him into the one ratty jail cell in Gray Horse. I can already hear the others gathering outside this little shed.

Gray Horse Army.

Lark Iron Cloud happens to be in charge of about a hundred and fifty young men, some Osage and some not, who got together and got bored enough to decide to call themselves a gang—the GHA. Out of about three thousand citizens who’ve been sitting on this hill and trying to make a life for themselves, these are the only ones left who haven’t found a place of their own.

The young men of Gray Horse. They’re strong and angry and orphaned. Having these boys traveling around town in feral packs is like leaving dynamite out in the sun—something mighty useful and powerful turned into an accident waiting to happen.

Lark shakes his coat, arranging that high black collar behind his head to frame a smirking grin. Looks like he’s starring in a spy movie: black hair greased back, black gloves, and fatigues tucked into polished black boots.

Not a care in the world.

If harm comes to this boy, there won’t be enough room in our jail cell to hold the outcome. And yet, if he gets off free, we’re inviting our own slow destruction from the inside out. Leave enough ticks on a dog and pretty soon there ain’t much dog left.

“What’re you gonna do, Lonnie?” asks Hank. “You gotta punish him. We all depend on this food. We can’t have our own people stealing. Don’t we have enough problems?”

“I didn’t do nothing,” says Lark. “And I’m fittin’ to walk up out of here. You want to stop me, you gonna have to stop my people, too.”

Hank raises his gun, but I wave him down. Hank Cotton is a proud man. He won’t stand for being disrespected. Storm clouds are already gathering on Hank’s face as the kid saunters away. I know I better talk to the kid fast, before lightning strikes in the form of a twelve gauge.

“Let me talk to you a minute outside, Lark.”

“Dude, I told you I didn’t—”

I grab Lark by the elbow and pull him in close. “If you don’t let me talk to you, son, that man over there is going to shoot you. It don’t matter what you did or didn’t do. This isn’t about that. This is about whether you’re gonna walk out of here or get carried out.”

“Fine. Whatever,” says Lark.

Together, we step out into the night. Lark nods to a group of his buddies, smoking under the naked lightbulb that hangs over the door. I notice there’s new gang signs scrawled all over the little building.

Can’t talk here. Won’t do any good to have Lark showing off to his fans. We go about fifty yards, over to the stone bluff.

I look out over the cold empty plains that have kept us safe for so long. The full moon paints the world down there silver. Mottled with the moon shadows of clouds, the tall grass prairie rolls and sways all the way to the horizon, where it kisses the stars.

Gray Horse is a beautiful place. Empty for so many years and now filled with life. But at this time of night, she goes back to what she is at heart: a ghost town.

“You bored, Lark? Is that the problem?” I ask.

He looks at me, thinks about posturing, then gives it up. “Hell, yes. Why?”

“Because I don’t think you want to hurt anybody. I think you’re young and bored. I understand that. But it isn’t going to work like this anymore, Lark.”

“Work like what?”

“All the scrapping and tagging. The stealing. We got bigger fish to fry.”

“Yeah, right. Nothing happens way out here.”

“Them machines ain’t forgot about us. Sure, we’re too far out in the boonies for cars and city robots. But the machines have been working on solving that problem.”

“What’re you talking about? We ain’t seen hardly anything since Zero Hour. And if they want us dead, why don’t the robots just blow us up with missiles?”

“Not enough missiles in the world. Anyway, my guess is that they already used the big stuff on the big cities. We’re small beans, son.”

“That’s one way to look at it,” replies Lark with surprising certainty. “But you know what I think? I think they don’t care about us. I think it was just a big onetime mistake. Otherwise they’d have nuked us all by now, wouldn’t they?”

Kid has thought about this.

“The machines haven’t nuked us because they’re interested in the natural world. They want to study it, not blow it up.”

I feel the prairie wind on my face. It would almost be better if the machines didn’t care about our world. Simpler, anyway.

“You seen all the deer?” I ask. “The buffalo are coming back to the plains. Hell, it’s only been a couple months since Zero Hour and you can almost catch fish with your hands down at the creek. It’s not that the machines are ignoring the animals. They’re protecting them.”

“So you think the robots are trying to get rid of the termites without blowing up the house? Kill us without killing our world?”

“It’s the only reason I can think of that they’re coming after us the way they are. And it’s the only way for me to explain… certain recent events, let’s say.”

“We haven’t seen machines for months, Lonnie. Shit, man. I wish they would come at us. Nothing’s worse than just sitting around with hardly any electricity and not jack to do.”

This time I do roll my eyes. Building fences, repairing buildings, planting crops—nothing to do. Lord, what happened to our kids that they expect everything handed to them?

“You want to fight, huh?” I ask. “You mean that?”

“Yes. I do mean that. I’m tired of hiding up here on this hill.”

“Then I need to show you something.”

“What?”

“It’s not here. But it’s important. Pack a sleeping bag and meet me in the morning. We’ll be gone a few days.”

“Hell no, dude. Fuck that.”

“Are you scared?”

“No,” he says, smirking. “Scared of what?”

Out across the plains below, the swaying grass looks for all the world like the sea. It’s calming to watch, but you got to wonder, what monsters might be hidden under those peaceful waves?

“I’m asking if you’re scared of what’s out there in the dark. I don’t know what it is. It’s the unknown, I guess. If you’re afraid, you can stay here. I won’t bother you. But what’s out there needs to be dealt with. And I hoped you had some bravery in you.”

Lark straightens up and drops the lopsided smirk. “I’m braver than anyone you know,” he says.

Shit, he sounds like he means it.

“You better be, Lark,” I say, watching the grass roll with the prairie wind. “You sure better be.”

Lark surprises me at dawn. I’m visiting with John Tenkiller, sitting on a log and passing a thermos of coffee back and forth. Tenkiller is talking his riddles to me and I’m half listening, half watching the sun rise over the plains.

Then Lark Iron Cloud comes around the bend. The kid is packed and ready to go. He’s still dressed like a sci-fi Mafia soldier, but at least he’s wearing sensible boots. He eyes Tenkiller and me with outright suspicion, then walks past us and starts down the trail that leads off the Gray Horse hill.

“Let’s go if we’re going,” he says.

I down my coffee, grab my pack, and join the long-legged kid. Just before the two of us go around the first bend, I turn and look at John Tenkiller. The old drumkeeper lifts one hand, his blue eyes flashing in the morning light.

What I have to do won’t be easy and Tenkiller knows it.

Me and the kid hike down the hill all morning. After about thirty minutes, I take the lead. He may be brave, but Lark sure don’t know where he’s going. Instead of heading west over the tall grass of the plains, we go east. Straight into the cast-iron woods.

The name is accurate. Long, narrow post oak trees sprout up from dead leaves, mingled with leafier blackjack oak. Both types of tree are so black and hard that they seem closer to metal than to wood. A year ago, I never could of guessed how useful that would turn out to be.

Three hours into the hike we get close to where we’re going. Just a little old clearing in the woods. But this is the area where I first found the tracks. A trail of rectangular holes pushed into the mud, each print about the size of a deck of cards. Near as I could tell, it came from something with four legs. Something heavy. No scat anywhere. And I can’t tell one foot from the other.

My blood ran cold when I figured it out: The robots had grown themselves legs fit for wilderness travel—through mud and ice and hard country. No man ever built a machine this fleet-footed.

Since these were the only prints I could find, I figured they were from some kind of scout sent up here to nose around. Took me three days of tracking to find the thing. Using them electric motors, it moved so quiet. And it sat so still for so long. Tracking a robot in the wild is a lot different from tracking a natural animal or a man. Peculiar, but you get used to it.

“We’re here,” I say to Lark.

“About time,” he says, tossing his pack on the ground. He takes a step into the clearing and I grab him by the jacket and yank him backward right off his feet.

A silver streak whizzes past his face like a sledgehammer, missing by an inch.

“The fuck?” says Lark, jerking himself out of my hands and craning his neck to look up.

And there it is, a four-legged robot the size of a prize buck, hanging by its front two feet from my steel cable rope. It had sat there perfectly still until we were within striking range.

I can hear heavy motors whine as it struggles to get free, swinging about four feet off the ground. It’s just eerie. The thing moves as naturally as any animal of the forest, writhing around in the air. But unlike any living animal, the machine’s legs are jet-black and made of a bunch of layers of what looks like tubing. It has these little metal hooves, flat on the bottom and covered in mud. There’s dirt and leaves and bark caked on it.

Unlike a deer, this machine don’t exactly have a head.

The legs meet in the middle at a trunk with humps on it for the powerful joint motors. Then, mounted underneath the body, there’s a narrow cylinder with what looks like a camera lens in it. About the size of a can of pop. This little eye rotates back and forth while the machine tries to figure out how to get out of this.

“Uh, what is that?” asks Lark.

“I set this snare a week ago. Judging from the gashes in the tree bark from the steel cable, this guy got caught here pretty soon after that.”

Lucky for me, these trees are strong as cast-iron.

“At least it was alone,” says Lark.

“How so?”

“If there were others, it would have called them here to help.”

“How? I don’t see a mouth on it.”

“For real? See the antenna? Radio. This thing can communicate over the radio with other machines.”

Lark walks a bit closer to the machine and watches it close. For the first time, he drops the tough guy act. He looks as curious as a four-year-old.

“This thing is simple,” says Lark. “It’s a modified military supply carrier. Probably using it to map terrain. Nothing extra. Just legs and eyes. That lump behind the shoulder blades, that’s probably the brain. Figures out what it’s seeing. It’s there because that’s the most protected place on the machine. Take that part off and this thing’ll be lobotomized. Ooh, ouch. Look at its feet. See the retractable claws tucked under there? Good thing it can’t reach the cable with those.”

Well, I’ll be goddamned. This kid has a good eye for machines. I watch him staring at the thing, taking it all in. Then, I notice the other tracks on the ground around him, all over the clearing.

Goose bumps buzz up the backs of my thighs and over my arms. We’re not alone here. This thing did call for help. How could I have missed it?

“Wonder what it’d be like to ride one of these?” muses Lark.

“Get your bag,” I say. “We got to move. Now.”

Lark looks where I’m looking, sees the fresh marks in the ground, and realizes there’s another one of these things loose. He grabs his pack without a word. Together, we hustle away into the woods. Behind us, the walker hangs there with its camera watching us go. Never blinking.

Our little run for freedom becomes a march, and then a miles-long hike.

We make camp as the sun sets. I set up a little campfire, making sure the smoke is baffled through the leaves of a nearby tree. We sit down on our packs around the fire, feeling hungry and tired as the cold sets in.

Like it or not, it’s time to get started on the real reason I’m here.

“Why do it?” I ask. “Why try to be a gangster?”

“We’re not gangsters. We’re warriors.”

“But a warrior fights the enemy, you know? Y’all end up hurting your own people. Only a man can be a warrior. When a boy tries to act like a warrior, well, you get a gangster. A gangster has no purpose.”

“We’ve got a purpose.”

“You reckon?”

“Brotherhood. We look out for each other.”

“Against who?”

“Anybody. Everybody. You.”

“I’m not your brother? We’re both native, ain’t we?”

“I know that. And I keep that culture inside me. That’s me. That’s always gonna be me. That’s my roots. But everybody’s fighting everybody up there. Everybody’s got a gun.”

“You’ve got a point,” I say.

The fire crackles, methodically eating up a log.

“Lonnie?” asks Lark. “What’s this really about? Just come out and say it, old man.”

This is probably not going to go over well. But the kid is forcing my hand and I’m not going to lie to him.

“You seen what we’re up against out here, right?”

Lark nods.

“I need you to ally your Gray Horse Army with the Light Horse tribal police.”

“Team up with the police?”

“Y’all call yourselves an army. But we need a real army. The machines are changing. Soon enough, they’ll come to kill us. All of us. So if you’re interested in protecting your brothers, you’d better start thinking about all your brothers. And your sisters, too.”

“How do you know this for sure?”

“I don’t know it for sure. Nobody knows nothing for sure. If they say they do, they’re either a preacher or selling something. Deal is—I have a bad feeling in my gut. Too many coincidences piling up. It reminds me of before all this happened.”

“Whatever happened with the machines already happened. They’re out here, studying the woods. But if we leave them alone, they’ll leave us alone. It’s people we need to worry about.”

“The world is a mysterious place, Lark. We’re real small, here on this rock. We can build our fires, but it’s nighttime out there in the universe. A warrior’s duty is to face the night and protect his people.”

“I look out for my boys. But no matter what your gut says—don’t expect the GHA to come to your rescue.”

I snort. This ain’t working like I hoped. Of course, it is working like I predicted.

“Where’s the food?” asks Lark.

“I brought none.”

“What? Why not?”

“Hunger is good. It will make you patient.”

“Shit. This is just great. No food. And we’re being hunted by some kind of damn backcountry robot.”

I pull out a bough of sage from my backpack and toss it onto the fire. The sweet scent of the burning leaves rises into the air around us. This is the first step of the ritual of transformation. When Tenkiller and I planned this, I didn’t think I’d be so afraid for Lark.

“And you’re lost,” I mention.

“What? You don’t know the way back?”

“I do.”

“Well?”

“You’ve got to find your own way. Learn to depend on yourself. This is what it means to become a man. To provide for your people, instead of being provided for.”

“I don’t like where this is going, Lonnie.”

I stand up.

“You’re strong, Lark. I believe in you. And I know I will see you again.”

“Hold up, old man. Where you going?”

“Home, Lark. I’m going home to our people. I’ll meet you there.”

Then I turn and walk away into the darkness. Lark jumps up, but he only follows me to where the firelight ends. Beyond that is darkness, the unknown.

This is where Lark has to go, into the unknown. We all have to do it, at some point. When we grow up.

“Hey! What the fuck?” he shouts to the cast-iron trees. “You can’t leave me here!”

I keep walking until the coldness of the woods swallows me up. If I walk for most of the night, I should be home by dawn. My hope is that Lark will survive long enough to make it home, too.

The last time I did something like this, it made my son into a man. He hated me for it, but I understood. No matter how much kids beg to be treated like adults, nobody likes to let go of their childhood. You wish for it and dream of it and the second you have it, you wonder what you’ve done. You wonder what it is you’ve become.

But war is coming, and only a man can lead Gray Horse Army.

Three days later, my world is on the verge of blowing up. The gangbangers from Gray Horse Army started accusing me of murdering Lark Iron Cloud the day before. There’s no way to prove anything different. Now they’re screaming for my blood in front of the council.

Everybody is assembled at the bleachers by the clearing where we hold the drum circle. Old John Tenkiller don’t say a thing, just soaks up abuse from Lark’s boys. Hank Cotton stands next to him, big hands clenched into fists. The Light Horse tribal police stand in clumps, tense as they stare a full-on civil war straight in the eye.

I’m thinking maybe this whole gamble was a mistake.

But before we can all get busy killing each other, a bruised and bloody Lark Iron Cloud staggers up the hill and into camp. Everybody gasps to see what he brung with him: a four-legged walking machine on a steel cable leash tied to Lark’s pack. We’re all stunned speechless, but John Tenkiller just stands up and walks over like Lark had arrived right on cue.

“Lark Iron Cloud,” says the old drumkeeper. “You left Gray Horse as a boy. You return as a man. We sorrowed when you left, but we rejoice at your return, new and different. Welcome home, Lark Iron Cloud. Through you, our people will live.”

3. FORT BANDON

Three months. It takes three months to get out of Boston and out of the state. Luckily, my brother has a map and a compass and the ability to use them. Jack and I are scared and on foot, loaded down with military equipment we looted from the National Guard armory.

But that’s not why it takes so long.

The cities and towns are in chaos. We go out of our way, but it’s impossible to avoid them all. Cars are running people down, traveling in packs. I watch people fire guns from buildings at marauding vehicles. Sometimes the cars are empty. Sometimes there are people inside. I watch a driverless garbage truck pull up to a steel trash can. Two prongs slide out and the hydraulic lift actuates. I cover my mouth and choke when I see the bodies tumble out in a limp-limbed waterfall.

Once, Jack and I stop for a breath while we are halfway across an overpass. I press my face against the chain-link fence and see eight lanes of highway, jam-packed with cars, all of them moving at just about thirty-five miles per hour in the same direction. No brake lights. No turn signals. Not like traffic at all. I watch a man wriggle out of a sunroof and roll off the top of his car and right under the car behind. Squinting my eyes, the whole thing just looks like a big metal carpet being slowly pulled away.

Toward the ocean.

If you aren’t headed someplace and getting there quick, then you aren’t going to make it long in the cities. And that’s our secret. Me and Jack never stop moving except to sleep.

People see our uniforms and call to us. Every time this happens my brother says, “Stay put and we’ll be back with help.”

Knowing Jack, he probably really believes it. But he doesn’t slow down. And that’s good enough for me.

My brother is determined to reach an army base so we can start helping people. As we cross the towns block by block, Jack keeps talking about how once we meet up with the soldiers, we’ll come back and take out the machines. Says we’ll go house to house and save people, bring them back to a safe zone. Set up patrols to hunt down all the malfunctioning robots.

“A day or two, Cormac,” he says. “This’ll all be over in a day or two. It’ll be all mopped up.”

I want to believe him, but I know better. The armory should have been safe, but it was crawling with walking land mines. All military Humvees have autodrive, in case they need to maneuver back home with an incapacitated driver. “What’s a military base going to look like?” I ask. “They’ve got more than mines there. They’ve got tanks. Gunships. Rolling rifles.”

Jack just keeps walking, head down.

The mayhem blends together into a haze. Scenes come to me in flashes. I see a struggling old man pulled into a dark doorway by a stern-faced Slow Sue; an empty car drives by, on fire and with a chunk of meat trapped under it, leaving a greasy smear on the street; a man falls from a building, screaming and flailing, with the silhouette of a Big Happy looking down.

Bam!

Screams, gunshots, and alarms echo through the streets. But thankfully Jack runs us hard. No time to stop and look around. We dive through the horror like two drowning men clawing to the surface for air.

Three months.

It takes us three months to find the fort. Three months for me to muddy my new clothes, to shoot my rifle, and to clean it next to a feeble campfire. Then we cross a bridge over the Hudson River and reach our destination, just outside what used to be Albany.

Fort Bandon.

“Get down!”

“On your fucking knees!”

“Hands on your heads, motherfuckers!”

“Toes together!”

The voices come screaming at us from out of the darkness. A spotlight flickers on from up high. I squint into it and try not to panic. My face is numb with adrenaline and my arms are rubbery and weak. Jack and I crouch on our knees next to each other. I can hear myself breathing, panting. Damn. I’m scared shitless.

“It’s all right,” whispers Jack. “Just be quiet.”

“Shut the fuck up!” shouts a soldier. “Cover!”

“Cover,” says a calm voice in the darkness.

I hear the bolt of a rifle being pulled back. As the cartridge clinks into the chamber, I can visualize the brass bullet waiting there in the mouth of a dark, cold barrel. My own rifle and supplies are hidden a half mile away, thirty paces off the road.

Footsteps scratch across the pavement. A soldier’s silhouette looms in front of us, eclipsing the spotlight with his head.

“We’re unarmed,” says Jack.

“On your fucking face,” says the voice. “You, hands on your head. Cover him!”

I put my hands on my head, blinking into the light. Jack grunts as he is pushed onto his stomach. The soldier pats him down.

“Number one clear,” he says. “Why are you fuckers wearing uniforms? You kill a soldier?”

“I’m in the guard,” says Jack. “Check my ID.”

“Right.”

I feel a shove between my shoulder blades and fall forward, cheek on the cold, gritty pavement. Two black combat boots appear in my field of view. Hands roughly jab through my pockets, checking for weapons. The spotlight illuminates the pavement before my face in lunar detail, shadows racing through craters. I notice that my cheek is resting in a discolored splotch of oil.

“Number two clear,” says the soldier. “Gimme the ID.”

The mud-caked black boots step back into my line of sight. Just beyond the boots, I make out a pile of clothes next to a razor-wire fence. It looks like somebody used this place as a Goodwill drop-off site. It’s freezing out here, but it still smells like a dump.

“Welcome to Fort Bandon, Sergeant Wallace. Happy to have you. You’re a ways from Boston, huh?”

Jack starts to sit up, but one of those big boots drops onto his back, shoving him into the ground.

“Uh-uh-uh. I didn’t say to get up. What about this guy here? Who’s he?”

“My brother,” grunts Jack.

“He in the guard, too?”

“Civilian.”

“Well, I am sorry, but that is not acceptable, Sergeant. Unfortunately, Fort Bandon is not allowing civilian refugees at this time. So if you want to come inside, say your good-byes now.”

“I can’t leave him,” says Jack.

“Yeah, I figured you’d say that. Your alternative is to go down to the river with the rest of the refugees. There’s a few thousand of them squatting down there. Just follow the smell. You’ll probably get knifed for your boots, but maybe not if you two sleep in shifts.”

The soldier makes a humorless chuckle. His camouflage fatigues are tucked into those filthy black boots. I thought he was standing in a shadow, but now I see that it’s another splotch. There are oil stains all over the concrete.

“You serious? Civilians aren’t welcome?” asks Jack.

“Nah,” replies the soldier, “we barely fought off our own goddamn Humvees. Half our autonomous weapons are missing, and the other half we blew up. Most of our command is gone. They all got called to some fucking meeting right before the shit went down. Haven’t seen ’em since. We can’t even get into the repair bays or the refueling depot. Sergeant, this place is fucked up bad enough without throwing in a bunch of looting, thieving scumbag civilians from off the streets.”

I feel the cool tip of the boot nudge my forehead.

“No offense there, partner.”

The boot goes away.

“Gates are closed. Try to come in here, you’ll get a bullet sandwich from my man on the tower. Ain’t that right, Carl?”

“That’s affirmative,” replies Carl, from somewhere behind the spotlight.

“Now,” says the soldier, stepping back toward the gate. “Get the fuck out of here. Both of you.”

The soldier steps behind the light, and I realize it’s not a pile of clothes I’ve been looking at. The outline is visible now. It’s a human body. Bodies. There are mounds of them heaped together like candy wrappers blown against the fence. Frozen by the weather in anguished contortions. The splotches on the ground in front of me—under my face—aren’t oil.

A whole lot of people died here not long ago.

“You fucking killed them?” I ask, in disbelief.

Jack groans softly to himself. The soldier does that dry chuckle again. His boots scratch pavement as he saunters over to me. “Dang, Sergeant. Your brother doesn’t know when to keep his mouth shut, does he?”

“No, he does not,” says Jack.

“Let me explain it to you, pal,” says the soldier.

Then I feel a steel-toed boot crunch into my rib cage. I’m too surprised to yell. My breath wheezes out of my lungs mechanically. I’m in the fetal position for the next two or three kicks.

“He gets it,” shouts Carl, faceless in the night. “I think he gets it, Corporal.”

I can’t help moaning—it’s the only way I can breathe.

“Just let us go,” says Jack. “We’re gone, man. We’re gone.”

The kicking stops. The soldier chuckles one more time. It’s like a nervous tic. I hear the metallic chink of his rifle being cocked.

Carl speaks up, from the invisible tower. “Sir? There’s been enough of that already, don’t you think? Let’s disengage.”

Nothing.

“Corporal, let’s disengage,” says Carl.

The gun doesn’t fire, but I can feel those faceless boots waiting there. Waiting for me to say something, anything. Curled up and hurting, I focus on trying to force breath in and out of my battered rib cage.

I don’t have anything left to say.

The soldier was right—we smell the refugees before we see them.

We reach the camp just after midnight. Down along the bank of the Hudson we find thousands of people milling around, camping and squatting and searching for information. The long, narrow strip of land has an old iron fence between it and the street, and the terrain is too rough for the domestic robots.

These are the people who’ve come to Fort Bandon and found no refuge. They’ve brought along their suitcases and backpacks and trash bags filled with clothes. They’ve brought their parents and wives and husbands and children. In their masses, they have built campfires from scavenged furniture and gone to the bathroom by the river and thrown their trash to the wind.

The temperature hovers just above zero. The refugees sleep, snoozing under piles of blankets, inside freshly looted tents, and on the ground. The refugees fight, scuffling with fists and knives and an occasional gunshot. The refugees are angry and scared and hungry. Some beg, camp to camp. Some steal firewood and trinkets. Some walk away into the city and don’t come back.

These people are all here to wait. For what, I have no idea. Help, I guess.

In the darkness, Jack and I meander among the campfires and clusters of refugees. I hold a handkerchief over my face to ward off the smell of too much humanity in too small of a place. I instinctively feel vulnerable around this many people.

Jack feels it, too.

He taps my shoulder and points to a small hill covered in brush. High ground. A man and a woman sit next to each other among the tufts of dead grass, a small Coleman lantern between them. We head over.

And that’s how we meet Tiberius and Cherrah.

On the hill, a huge black man wearing a Hawaiian shirt over long underwear sits, forearms resting loosely on his knees. Next to him, a small Native American woman squints at us. She has a worn bowie knife in her hand. It looks like she’s used it plenty.

“Howdy,” I call out.

“What?” asks the woman. “You army fucks haven’t had enough? Come back for more?”

Her big-ass knife glints in the lantern light.

Jack and I look at each other. How to respond to that? Then the big man puts his hand on the woman’s shoulder. In a booming voice, he says, “Manners, Cherrah. These men are not army. Look at the uniforms. Not the same as those others.”

“Whatever,” she says.

“Come. Sit with us,” he says. “Take the load off.”

We sit and listen. Tiberius Abdullah and Cherrah Ridge met while escaping from Albany. He’s a cabdriver who moved here from Eritrea—the Horn of Africa. She’s a mechanic who worked in her father’s body shop with her four brothers. When the shit went down, Tiberius was picking up his cab from the shop. After the first mention, Tiberius doesn’t talk about Cherrah’s brothers or father again.

As Tiberius shares their story, Cherrah sits quietly. I can’t read her face, but I notice a shrewdness in the way she looks at me and my brother, sizes us up, and then looks away. Gotta keep an eye on that one.

We’re sharing a nip from Ty’s flask when a pair of headlights wink on in the distance. A hunting rifle seems to just appear in Cherrah’s hands. Tiberius has a pistol, pulled from the waistband of his sweatpants. Jack turns down the lantern. Looks like a killer car jumped the barricades and made it down here.

I watch the far-off headlights for a few seconds before I realize that Cherrah is pointing her rifle into the darkness behind us.

Someone is coming, fast. I hear huffing and puffing and boots pounding dirt and then the silhouette of a man appears. He staggers clumsily up the small hill, falling forward and catching himself on his fingertips.

“Hold it!” shouts Cherrah.

The man freezes, then stands up and steps forward into the lantern light. It’s a soldier from Fort Bandon. He’s a lanky white guy with a long neck and unruly, straw-colored hair. I’ve never seen him before, but when he speaks I immediately recognize his voice.

“Oh. Hi, uh, hello,” he says, “I’m Carl Lewandowski.”

A few hundred yards up the river’s edge, a pall of ragged screams rises up, thin, disappearing into the atmosphere. Blanketed figures dash between dim red campfires. That pair of headlights is dashing directly through the middle of the refugee camp, in our direction.

“Spotted it from the tower when it went off base,” says Carl, still struggling to catch his breath. “Came to warn people.”

“How nice of you, Carl,” I mutter, holding my bruised ribs.

Jack drops to one knee and pulls his battle rifle off his back. He squints across the wide-open space at the confusion. “Humvee,” he says. “Armored. No way for them to stop it.”

“We can shoot for the tires,” says Cherrah, snapping open the bolt and checking the chamber of her hunting rifle for a cartridge.

Carl glances at her. “Honeycomb. Tires are bulletproof. I’d go for the headlights first. Then the sensor package on top. Shoot its eyes and ears.”

“What’s the sensor package look like?” asks Jack.

Carl pulls out his rifle and checks the magazine as he speaks: “Black sphere. Antenna coming out of it. It’s a standard-issue compact multisensor payload with an electron-multiplied CCD infrared camera mounted on a high-stability gimbal, among other things.”

We all frown at him. Carl looks around at us.

“Sorry. I’m an engineer,” he says.

The Humvee steers itself through the central mass of sleeping people. The headlights jounce up and down in the darkness. The sounds are indescribable. Red-tinted headlights turn our way, growing larger in the night.

“You heard the man. Fire on the black box if you have a clear shot,” says Jack.

Soon, bullets begin to crack out in the night. Cherrah’s hands move swift and smooth along the length of her bolt-action rifle, spitting bullets accurately at the lurching vehicle.

Headlights shatter. It swerves, but only to run down nearby refugees. Sparks fly from the black box on top as bullets hit it again and again. Still, it keeps coming.

“This isn’t right,” says Jack. He grabs Carl by the shirt. “Why isn’t the fucker blind?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” whimpers Carl.

It’s a good question.

I stop firing and cock my head, trying to dial out all the screams and running shapes and confusion. The shattered campfires and tumbling corpses and roaring engines fade, drowned out by an amnesiac shroud of concentration.

Why can it still see?

A sound emerges from the chaos. It’s a gentle thup-thup-thup, like a far-off lawn mower. Now, I notice a blurry spot up above us.

Some kind of eye in the sky.

The battered Humvee looms out of the night like a sea monster surfacing from black depths.

We scatter as it plows into and over our hill.

“Flying robot. Eleven o’clock. Just over the tree line,” I shout.

Rifle barrels rise, including my own. The Humvee charges past us and bashes through a campfire a dozen yards away. Embers from the fire cascade over its hood, like a meteor streaking through the atmosphere. It’s coming around for another go.

Muzzles flash. Hot brass shell casings cascade through the air. Something explodes in the sky, spraying the ground with pulverized bits of plastic.

“Scatter,” says Jack. The roar of the Humvee drowns out the whining engines of the falling star in the sky. The armored vehicle bulldozes straight over the mound where we stand, shocks bottoming out. In the rush of air as the Humvee passes, I can smell melted plastic and gunpowder and blood.

Then the Humvee rolls to a stop just past the hill. It moves away from us, jerking forward in starts and stops like a blind man feeling his way down a path.

We did it. For now.

A massive arm settles down over my neck, squeezes tight enough to grind my shoulder blades together. “It is blind,” says Tiberius. “You have the eyes of a hawk, Cormac Wallace.”

“There’ll be more. What now?” asks Carl.

“We stay here and protect these people,” says Jack, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

“How’s that, Jack?” I say. “They might not want our protection. Plus, we’re sitting next to the biggest arsenal in the state. We’ve got to head for the hills, man. Camp out.”

Cherrah snorts.

“You got a better idea?” I ask her.

“Camping is a short-term solution. Where’d you rather be? In a cave somewhere, hunting for food every day and hoping you find it? Or in a place where there will be other people to depend on?”

“And riots and looting,” I add.

“I’m talking about a smaller community. A safe place. Gray Horse,” she says.

“How big?” asks Jack.

“Probably a few thousand, mostly Osage. Like me.”

“An Indian reservation,” I groan. “Mass starvation. Disease. Death. Sorry, I just don’t see it.”

“That’s because you’re full of shit,” says Cherrah. “Gray Horse is organized. Always has been. Functioning government. Farmers. Welders. Doctors.”

“Well,” I say. “As long as there are welders.”

She looks at me pointedly. “Jails. If we need ’em.”

“Specialization,” says Jack. “She’s right. We need to reach a place to regroup. Plan a counterattack. Where is it?”

“Oklahoma.”

I groan out loud again. “That’s like a million miles away.”

“I grew up there. I know the way.”

“How do you know they’re still alive?”

“A refugee I met heard about it on shortwave. There’s a camp there. And an army.” Cherrah snorts at Carl. “A real army.”

I clap my hands. “I’m not hiking across America on the whim of some chick we just met. We’re better off on our own.”

Cherrah grabs me by the shirt and yanks me close. My rifle clatters to the ground. She’s wiry, but her slender arms are strong as tree branches. “Teaming with your brother is my best bet at survival,” she says. “Unlike you, he knows what he’s doing and he’s good at it. So why don’t you just shut the fuck up and think it through? You’re both bright boys. You want to survive. This isn’t a hard choice to make.”

Cherrah’s scowling face is inches away. A bit of ash from the scattered fires lands in her inky black hair and she ignores it. Her black eyes are trained on mine. This small woman is absolutely intent on remaining alive, and it’s clear that she will do anything to stay that way.

She’s a born survivor.

I can’t help but smile. “Survive?” I ask. “Now you’re talking my language. In fact, I don’t think I want to be more than five feet away from you ever again. I just, I don’t know… I feel safe in your arms.”

She lets go and gives me a shove.

“You wish, bright boy,” she snorts.

A thundering laugh startles all of us. Tiberius, looking like a huge shadow, throws on his backpack. Firelight gleams from his teeth as he speaks.

“Then it is settled,” he says. “The five of us make a good team. We have defeated the Humvee and saved these people. Now, we will journey together until we reach this place, this Gray Horse.”

4. CHAPERONE DUTY

The alarm triggers at dawn. It’s no big deal. Just a bunch of tin cans tied together, dragging across the cracked pavement.

I open my eyes and pull down my sleeping bag. It takes a long-ass second to figure out where I’m at. Looking up, I see a car axle, a muffler, tailpipe.

Oh yeah. Right.

I’ve been sleeping in craters under cars every night for a year and I’m still not used to it. Doesn’t matter, though. Whether I get used to it or not, I’m still alive and kicking.

For about three seconds I lie still, listening. Best not to jump out of bed right away. You never know what the hell’s been creeping around in the night. In this last year, most of the robots got smaller. Others got bigger. A lot bigger.

I bang my head pulling off my sleeping bag and folding it up. It’s worth it. This pile of rust is my best friend. There’s so many burned-out cars on the streets of New York City these days that the bastards can’t check under every single one.

I wriggle out from under the car and into gray sunlight. Reaching back underneath, I drag out my dirty pack and shrug it on. I cough and spit a hawker on the ground. Sun’s just up, but it’s cool this early. Summer’s just getting started.

Those cans are still dragging. I drop to a knee and untie the rope before any machine mics can pick up the noise. Topside, it’s important you be quiet, be moving, and be unpredictable.

Otherwise, you’ll be dead.

Chaperone duty. Of the hundreds of thousands of city people who ran away to the woods, about half of them are starving to death about now. They come stumbling into the city, rail-thin and filthy, on the run from wolves and hoping to scavenge.

Most times, the machines eat ’em up fast.

I throw my hood over my head and let my black trench coat billow out behind me to confuse robotic targeting systems, especially the goddamn disposable sentry turrets. Speaking of, I gotta get off the street. I duck into a destroyed building and pick my way over trash and rubble toward the source of the alarm.

After we dynamited half the city, the regular old domestic robots couldn’t balance well enough to get to us. We were safe for a while, long enough to get established underground and inside demolished buildings.

But then a new walker showed up.

We call it a mantis. It’s got four multijointed legs longer than telephone poles and molded out of some kind of carbon fiber honeycomb. Its feet look like upside-down ice axes, slicing into the ground on every step. Up top where the legs meet, it’s got a couple of little arms with two ice axe hands. Those razor arms tear through wood and drywall and brick. Whole thing sort of scurries—all doubled over and hunched down to the size of a small pickup truck. Looks kinda like a praying mantis.

Close enough, anyway.

I’m dodging past empty desks in a collapsed floor of an office building when I feel the telltale vibration in the ground. Something big outside. I freeze in place, then crouch on the trash-strewn floor. Peeking over a water-swollen desk, I watch the windows. A gray shadow passes by outside, but I see nothing else.

I hold up for a minute anyway.

Not far from here, a familiar routine is playing out. A survivor has found a suspicious pile of rocks that a machine would never notice. Next to those rocks is a rope that this person pulled. I know that ten minutes ago my survivor was alive. There’s no guarantee for the next ten minutes.

At the collapsed end of the building I crawl over shattered two-by-fours and pulverized brick toward a crescent of morning light. Hood down, I push my face through the hole and scan the street outside.

Our sign is there, undisturbed on a stoop across the street. A man is huddled next to it, arms over his knees and head down. He rocks back and forth on his heels, maybe keeping warm.

The sign works because the machines don’t notice natural stuff, like rocks and trees. It’s a blind spot. A mantis has a good eye for unnatural things like words and drawings—even shit like happy faces. Uncamouflaged trip wires never work. Lines are too straight. Writing directions to a safe house on the wall is a good way to get people deleted. But a pile of rubble is invisible. And a pile of rocks going from big to small is, too.

I wriggle out of the hole and reach my guy before he even looks up. “Hey,” I whisper, nudging his elbow.

He looks up at me, startled. He’s a young Latino guy, in his twenties. I can see that he’s been crying. God knows what he went through to get here.

“It’s okay, buddy,” I reassure him. “We’ll get you safe. Come with me.”

He nods, saying nothing. Leaning against the building, he stands up. He has one arm wrapped in a dirty towel and he’s cradling it with his other hand. I figure it must be messed up pretty bad if he’s afraid to let anybody see it.

“We’ll get your arm looked at real soon, man.”

He flinches a little when I say that. Not what I was expecting. Strange how being hurt can be embarrassing. Like it’s your fault that an eye or hand or foot isn’t working right. Course, being hurt isn’t half as embarrassing as being dead.

I lead him back toward the collapsed ruin across the street. The mantis won’t be a problem once we get inside. My people are mostly in the subway tunnels with the main entrances blocked off. We’ll go building to building all the way home.

“What’s your name, man?” I ask.

The guy doesn’t respond, just puts his head down.

“Fair enough. Follow me.”

I head back into the safety of the collapsed building. The kid with no name hobbles along behind me. Together, we roam through destroyed buildings, scrabbling over mounds of blasted rubble and crawling under half-collapsed walls. Once we make it far enough, I take us out onto a pretty safe street. The silence between us grows the farther we travel.

I get the creeps walking down that empty street and I realize that I’m scared of the dead eyes on the kid shuffling along behind me, saying nothing.

How much change can a person absorb before everything loses meaning? Living for its own sake isn’t life. People need meaning as much as they need air.

Thank god I’ve still got Dawn.

I’m picturing her hazel eyes in my head when I notice the gray-green telephone pole slanting cockeyed at the end of the street. The pole bends in the middle and shifts and I realize it’s a leg. We’re going to die inside thirty seconds if we stay out here.

“Get inside,” I hiss, shoving the kid toward a broken-out window.

On its four crouched legs, a hunched-over mantis scuttles into view. Its featureless, bullet-shaped head rotates quickly, stops. Long antennae quiver. The machine leaps forward and gallops toward us, sharp feet cutting into the dirt and pavement like a rudder through water. Those front claws hang off its belly, up and ready, light glinting from countless barbs.

The kid stares, blank.

I grab him and shove him through the window, then dive in after him. We get on our feet and hustle over moldy carpet. Seconds later, a shadow falls across the rectangle of daylight behind us. A clawed arm shoots through the window frame and rips downward, gouging out part of the wall. Another clawed arm follows. Back and forth, back and forth. It’s like a tornado hitting.

Lucky for us, this is a safe building. I can tell because it’s been hollowed out pretty good. The facade is demolished, but inside it’s passable. We do our homework in NYC. I steer the kid toward a pile of cinder blocks and a hole in the wall that leads into an adjacent building.

“That’s us,” I say, pointing and pushing the kid toward the hole. He stumbles along like a zombie.

Then I hear carpet ripping and the crunch of wooden furniture. The mantis has somehow made it in through the window. Crouched small, it’s squeezing its gray mass through the building, tearing stained ceiling tiles down like confetti. Crouch walking, the thing is all flashing claws and screeching metal.

We dash for the hole in the wall.

I stop and help the kid crawl over the mess of rebar and concrete. The passage is just a black gaping hollow, only a few feet wide, that leads straight through the sandstone foundations of both buildings. I’m praying it’ll slow down the monster behind us.

The kid disappears inside. I climb in behind him. It’s dark, claustrophobic. Kid’s crawling slow, still cradling his hurt hand. Near the entrance, steel rods of rebar jut out like rusty spearheads. I can hear the mantis closing on us, destroying everything it touches.

Then the sound stops.

There isn’t enough room to turn my head and see what’s happening behind me. I just see the bottoms of the kid’s shoes as he crawls. Breathe in, breathe out. Concentrate. Something slams into the mouth of the hole hard enough to rip off a chunk of solid rock, by the sound of it. It’s followed by another bone-jarring slam. The mantis is scrabbling frantically, chewing through the concrete wall and into sandstone. The noise is deafening.

Everything around me turns to screaming and darkness and dust. “Go, go, go!” I shout.

A second later the kid is gone; he found the other end of the tunnel. Grinning, I turn on the juice. Moving full speed, I tumble out of the hole and fall a few feet and then scream in surprised agony.

A finger of rebar has pierced the meat of my right calf.

I’m on my back, propping myself up on my elbows. My leg is caught on the mouth of the hole. The rebar sticks out like a crooked tooth, sunk into my leg. The kid stands a few feet away, that blank expression still on his face. I take a shuddering breath and let out with another animal scream of pain.

It seems to get the kid’s attention.

“Fuck, get me off this thing!” I shout.

The kid blinks at me. Some life is coming back into those dead brown eyes of his.

“Hurry,” I say. “Mantis is coming.”

I try to lift my body up, but I’m too weak and the pain is too much. Elbows digging painfully into the dirt, I manage to raise my head. I try to explain to the kid. “You gotta pull my leg off the rebar. Or get the rebar out of the wall. One or the other, man. But do it fast.”

The kid stands there, lip quivering. He looks like he’s about to cry. Just my fucking luck.

From the tunnel, I can hear the pock, pock as each jab from the mantis dislodges more stone. A cloud of dust pours out of the disintegrating hole. Every blow from the mantis sends a throbbing vibration through the rock and into the rebar skewering my calf.

“C’mon man, I need you. I need you to help me.”

And for the first time, the kid speaks. “I’m sorry,” he says to me.

Fuck. It’s over. I want to scream at this kid, this coward. I want to hurt him somehow, but I’m too weak. So with everything I’ve got in me, I focus on keeping my face raised to his. My neck muscles strain to keep my head up, trembling. If this kid is gonna leave me to die, I want him to remember my face.

Eyes locked on mine, the kid holds his injured arm up. He starts to unwrap the towel that covers it.

“What are you—”

I stop cold. The kid’s hand isn’t hurt—he doesn’t have one.

Instead, the meat of his forearm ends with a mess of wires leading to a greasy hunk of metal with two blades sticking out. It looks like a pair of industrial-sized scissors. The tool is fused directly into his arm. As I watch, a tendon flexes in his forearm and the oiled blades begin to spread apart.

“I’m a freak,” he says. “Rob did this to me in the labor camps.”

I don’t know what to think. There’s just no more strength in me. I lower my head and stare at the ceiling.

Snip.

My leg is free. A piece of rebar is stuck in it, snipped and shiny on one end. But I’m free.

The kid helps me up. He puts his good arm around me. We hobble away without looking back at the hole. Five minutes later, we find the camouflaged entrance to the subway tunnels. And then we’re gone, struggling as best we can down the abandoned tracks.

We leave the mantis behind.

“How?” I ask, nodding at his bad arm.

“Labor camp. People go into surgery, come out different. I was one of the first. Mine’s simple. Just my arm. Other people, though. They come back from the autodoc even worse. No eyes. No legs. Rob messes with your skin, your muscles, your brain.”

“You on your own?” I ask.

“I met some others, but they didn’t want …” He looks at his mutilated hand, face empty. “I’m like them now.”

That hand hasn’t made him any friends. I wonder how many times he’s been rejected, how long he’s been on his own.

It’s almost over for this kid. I can see it in the slump of his shoulders. How every breath seems like a struggle. I’ve seen it before. The kid’s not hurt—he’s beaten.

“Being alone is tough,” I say. “You start to wonder what the point is. You know?”

He says nothing.

“But there’s other people here. The resistance. You’re not alone now. You got a purpose.”

“What’s that?” he asks.

“To survive, man. To help the resistance.”

“I’m not even—”

He holds up his arm. Tears gleam in his eyes. This is the important part. He’s got to get this. If he doesn’t, he’ll die.

I grab the kid by the shoulders and say it face-to-face: “You were born a human being and you’re gonna die one. No matter what they did to you. Or what they do. Understand?”

It’s quiet down here in the tunnels. And dark. It feels safe.

“Yeah,” he says.

I throw an arm around the kid’s shoulder, wincing at the pain in my leg. “Good,” I say. “Now come on. We got to get home and eat. You wouldn’t guess it to look at me, but I’ve got this beautiful wife. Best looking woman in the world. And I’m telling you, if you ask real nice, she will cook up a stew like you wouldn’t believe.”

I think this kid is gonna be okay. Soon as he meets the others.

People need meaning as much as they need air. Lucky for us, we can give meaning to each other for free. Just by being alive.

5. TICKLER

I’m standing alone in a wet, muddy field.

I don’t know where I am. I can’t remember how I got here. My arms are scarred and bony. I’m wearing filthy blue coveralls that are close to rags, ripped and stained.

Shivering, I wrap my arms around myself. Panic stabs at me. I know I’m missing something important. I’ve left something behind. I can’t put my finger on it, but it hurts. It feels like there’s a piece of barbwire wrapped around my heart, squeezing.

Then I remember.

“No,” I moan.

A scream rises up from my gut. “No!”

I shout it to the grass. Flecks of spit fly from my mouth and arc away into the morning sunlight. I spin in a circle, but I’m alone. Utterly alone.

Mathilda and Nolan. My babies. My babies are gone.

Something flashes from the tree line. I flinch instinctively. Then I realize it’s only a hand mirror. A camouflaged man steps out from behind a tree and motions to me. In a daze, I stumble toward him through the overgrown field, stopping twenty yards away.

“Hey,” he says. “Where did you come from?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Where am I?”

“Outside New York City. What do you remember?”

“I don’t know.”

“Check your body for lumps.”

“What?”

“Check your body for lumps. Anything new.”

Confused, I run my hands over my body. I’m surprised that I can feel each one of my ribs. Nothing makes sense. I wonder if I’m dreaming or unconscious or dead. Then I feel something. A bump on my upper thigh. Probably the only meaty part left on my body.

“There’s a bump on my leg,” I say.

The man begins to back away into the woods.

“What does that mean? Where are you going?” I ask.

“I’m sorry, lady. Rob’s bugged you. There’s a human work camp a few miles from here. They’re using you as bait. Don’t try to follow me. Sorry.”

He disappears into the shadows of the woods. I shade my face with one hand and look for him. “Wait, wait! Where is the work camp? How do I find it?”

A voice echoes thinly out of the woods. “Scarsdale. Five miles north. Follow the road. Keep the sun to your right. Be careful.”

The man is gone. I’m alone again.

I see my own set of staggering footprints in the muddy grass, tracking north. I realize the clearing is really an overgrown road, on its way back to nature. My stick arms are still wrapped around me. I force myself to let go. I’m weak and hurt. My body wants to shiver. It wants to fall down and give up.

But I won’t let it.

I’m going back for my babies.

The lump moves when I touch it. I find a small slice in my skin from where they must have put it in. But this wound is farther up my leg, close to my hip. I think whatever-it-is is moving. Or at least it can move if it wants to.

Bug. The camouflaged man called it a bug. I let out a snort of laughter, wondering how literally I should take that description.

Pretty literally, as it turns out.

Snatches of memory are coming back to me. Faint pictures of clean-swept pavement, a big metal building. Like an airplane hangar, but filled with lights. Another building with bunk beds stacked to the ceilings. I don’t remember what they look like, the jailers. I don’t try too hard to remember, though.

After an hour and a half of steady walking, I spot a cleared-out area in the distance. Smoke is rising in gentle puffs from it. Sunlight glints from a broad metal roof and short chain-link fences. This must be it. The prison camp.

A weird sliding sensation in my leg reminds me that I’m carrying the bug. That man didn’t want to help me because of it. It stands to reason that the bug must be telling the machines where I’m at, so it can catch and kill other people.

Hopefully, the machines didn’t expect me to come back.

I watch the pulsing lump under my skin with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. There’s no way I can keep going with the bug under there. I’ve got to do something about this.

And it’s going to hurt.

Two rocks, flat. One long strip of fabric torn from my sleeve. With my left hand I press one rock into my thigh, dimpling the skin just behind the lump. The bug starts to move, but before it can go anywhere I close my eyes and think of Mathilda and Nolan and with all my might, I slam the other rock down. A knot of pain flares in my leg and I hear a crunch. I bring down the rock three more times before I roll over onto the ground, screaming in pain. I lie on my back, chest heaving, looking at blue sky through tears.

It’s maybe five minutes before I can bring myself to check the damage to my leg.

Whatever it is looks like a blunt metal slug with dozens of quivering, barbed feet. It must have cut through my leg on the first hit, because part of its shell has been mashed into the pulped outside layer of my skin. Some kind of liquid is leaking from it onto my leg, mixing with my blood. I wipe my finger in it and bring it to my face. It smells like chemicals. Explosive chemicals, like kerosene or gasoline.

I don’t know why that is, but I think I might have gotten very lucky. It never occurred to me that whatever it is might be a bomb.

I don’t let myself cry.

Forcing myself to look at it, I reach down and gingerly pull the crushed thing out from under my skin. I notice that it has a cylindrical shell on the other side that isn’t broken. I toss the thing on the ground and it lands limp. It looks like two rolls of breath mints with lots of legs and two long wet antennae. I suck my lower lip into my mouth and bite it and try not to cry out as I wrap my leg with the strip of blue fabric.

Then, I get up and hobble closer to the work camp.

Sentry guns. The memory dances back into my head. The work camp is protected by sentry guns. Those gray lumps in the turf will pop up and kill anything that gets within a certain range.

Camp Scar.

From the tree line, I watch the field. Bugs and birds flitter back and forth over a thick carpet of flowers, ignoring the lumps of clothing wrapped in the turf—the bodies of would-be rescuers. The robots don’t try to hide this place. Instead, they use it like a beacon to attract human survivors. Potential liberators, ambushed again and again. Their bodies piling up in this field and turning into dirt. Flower food.

If you work hard and stay in line, the machines feed you and keep you warm and alive. You learn to ignore the sharp crack of the sentry guns. Force yourself to forget what the sound means. You look for the carrot. Stop seeing the stick.

Off to one side of the compound, I see a wavering brown line. People. It’s a line of people being marched here from another place. I don’t hesitate, I just hobble my way around the sentries to reach the line.

Twenty minutes later, I see an armored six-wheeled vehicle jouncing along at maybe four miles per hour. It’s some kind of military job with a turret on top. I walk toward it with my hands out, flinching when the turret spins around and locks onto me.

“Stay in line. Do not stop. Do not approach the vehicle. Comply immediately or you will be shot,” says an automated voice from a loudspeaker mounted on top.

A broken line of refugees staggers alongside the armored car. Some carry suitcases or wear packs, but most just have the clothes on their backs. God knows how long they’ve been marching. Or how many there were in line when they started.

A few weary heads lift up to glance at me.

Keeping my hands up and my eyes on the turret, I join the line of refugees. Five minutes later, a man in a mud-splashed business suit and another guy in a poncho come up and walk on either side of me, slowing together so that we drop back a ways from the military vehicle.

“Where’d you come from?” asks business guy.

I stare straight ahead. “I came from where we’re going,” I say.

“And where’s that?” he asks.

“A work camp.”

“Work camp?” exclaims the kid in the rain poncho. “You mean a concentration camp?”

Poncho boy eyes the field. His eyes dart from the armored vehicle to a nearby clump of tall grass. The business guy puts his hand on his friend’s shoulder.

“Don’t. Remember what happened to Wes.”

That seems to take the wind out of poncho boy’s sails.

“How’d you get out?” the business guy asks me.

I look down at my leg. A dried patch of blood darkens the upper thigh of my coveralls. That says it all, really. He follows my gaze and decides to let it go.

“They seriously need us to work?” says poncho boy. “Why? Why not use more machines?”

“We’re cheap,” I say. “Cheaper than building machines.”

“Not really,” says business guy. “We cost resources. Food.”

“There’s plenty of food left over,” I say. “In the cities. With the reduced population, I’m sure they can make our leftovers last for years.”

“Great,” says poncho boy. “This is just fucking great, man.”

I notice the armored car has slowed down. The turret has quietly turned to face us. I shut up. These people are not my goal. My goals are nine and twelve years old and they are waiting for their mother.

I continue walking, alone.

I slip away while the others are being processed. A couple of patched-up Big Happys watch and play prerecorded commands while the line of people ditch their clothes and suitcases in a pile. I remember this: the shower, coveralls, bunk assignment, work assignment. And at the end, we were all marked.

My mark is still with me.

There is a subdermal tag the size of a grain of rice embedded deep in my right shoulder. After we’re inside the camp and everyone has thrown off their belongings, I simply walk away. A Big Happy follows me as I cross the field toward the big metal building. But my mark identifies me as compliant. If I were out of compliance, the machine would crush my windpipe with its bare hands. I’ve seen it happen.

The detectors all over the camp seem to recognize my tag. No alarms are set off. Thank god they didn’t blacklist my number after dumping me off in that field. The Big Happy retreats as I skirt around the camp toward the work barn.

The instant I walk through the door, a light on the wall begins to flash. Shit. I’m not supposed to be here now. My work detail isn’t scheduled for today, or ever.

That Big Happy will be coming back.

I take it all in. This is the room I remember most. Clean-swept pavement under a huge metal roof, as long as a football field. When it rains outside, this room sounds like an auditorium filled with gentle applause. Row after row of fluorescent lights hang over waist-high conveyor belts, stretching off into the distance. There are hundreds of people in here. They wear blue coveralls and paper face masks and stand alongside the belts, taking pieces from bins and connecting them to what’s on the conveyor belt and then pushing them down the rollers.

It’s an assembly line.

Moving fast, I jog up the line where I used to work. I glance down to see that today they’re building what we called tanklets. They look sort of like the big four-legged mantis but are the size of a small dog. We didn’t know what they were at all until one day a new guy, an Italian soldier, said that these things—tanklets—hang on to the bellies of mantises and drop off during battle. He said that sometimes broken ones could be rewired and used as emergency equipment. Said they called them ticklers.

The door I just came through slides open. A Big Happy steps inside. All the people stop moving. The conveyor belts have stopped. No one makes a move to help me. They stand as still and silent as blue statues. I don’t bother to call for help. I know if I were in their place I wouldn’t do anything either.

The Big Happy closes the door behind it. A boom echoes through the huge room as the bolts to all the doors slam shut. I’m trapped in here now, until I’m killed.

I jog along the assembly line, panting, leg throbbing. The Big Happy stalks toward me. It moves one careful step at a time, silent except for the soft grinding of motors. As I move down the line, I see the tanklets evolve from small black boxes to almost fully complete machines.

At the other end of the long building, I reach the door that leads to the dorms. I grab it and yank, but it’s made of thick steel and locked tight. I spin around, back against the door. Hundreds of people watch, still holding their tools. Some are curious, but most are impatient. The harder you work, the faster the day goes. I am an interruption. And not that uncommon a one. Soon, my windpipe will be crushed and my body removed and these people will get back to what is left of their lives.

Mathilda and Nolan are on the other side of this door and they need me, but instead I’m going to die in front of all these broken people in paper masks.

I sink to my knees, out of strength. With my forehead pressed to the cool pavement, I hear only the steady click, click of the Big Happy walking toward me. I am so tired. I think that it will be a relief when it happens. A blessing to finally sleep.

But my body is a liar. I have to ignore the pain. I have to find the way out of this.

Pushing my hair out of my face, I frantically look around the room for something. An idea comes to me. Wincing from my injured thigh, I haul myself up and stagger down the tanklet assembly line. I feel out each tanklet, looking for one that’s at just the right stage. The people I get near step away from me.

The Big Happy is five feet away when I find the perfect tanklet. This one is just four spindly legs hanging from a teapot-sized abdomen. The power supply is attached, but the central nervous system is a few steps away. Instead, raw connector wires sprout from an open cavity in the thing’s back.

I snatch up the tanklet and turn. The Big Happy is a foot away, arms out. Stumbling backward, I fall just out of reach and then limp toward the steel door. With shaking hands, I pull each tanklet leg out and press the abdomen against the door. My left arm quivers with the effort of holding up the solid hunk of metal. With my free hand I reach into the tanklet’s back and cross the wires.

Reflexively, the tanklet pulls its barbed legs into itself. With a wrenching squeal, they catch on the door and claw through the metal. I let go and the tanklet clanks to the ground, arms grasping a six-inch hunk of solid steel door. A ragged hole gapes where the doorknob and lock used to be. My arms are dead tired now, useless. The Big Happy is inches away, hand out, grippers splayed and ready to clamp down on whatever part of my body is closest.

With a kick, I send the mangled door flying open.

On the other side, haunted eyes stare at me. Old women and children are crowded into the dormitory. Wooden bunk beds stretch up to the ceiling.

I duck inside and slam the door shut behind me, pressing my back against it as the Big Happy tries to push its way in. Luckily, the machine can’t get enough traction on the polished concrete floor to shove the door open right away.

“Mathilda!” I shout. “Nolan!”

The people stand in place, watching me. The machines know my ID number. They can track wherever I go and they won’t stop until I’m dead. Now is the only chance I’ll ever have to save my family.

And suddenly, there he is. My quiet little angel. Nolan stands in front of me, his dirty black hair ruffled. “Nolan,” I exclaim. He runs to me and I grab him up and hug him. The door jumps into my back as the machine keeps pushing. More are surely coming.

Wrapping my hands around Nolan’s delicate little face, I ask him, “Where’s your sister, Nolan? Where’s Mathilda?”

“She got hurt. After you left.”

I swallow my fear, for Nolan. “Oh no, baby, I’m sorry. Where did she go? Take me there.”

Nolan says nothing. He points.

With Nolan on my hip, I shove through the people and hurry down a hallway to the infirmary. Behind me, a couple of older women calmly push against the rattling door. There is no time to thank them, but I will remember their faces. I will pray for them.

I’ve never been in this long wooden room before. A narrow central walkway is partitioned off with hanging curtains on each side. I stride down the middle, yanking the curtains away to find my daughter. Each yank of a curtain reveals some new horror, but my brain doesn’t register any of it. There is only one thing I will recognize now. One face.

And then I see her.

My baby lies on a gurney with a monster hovering over her head. It’s some kind of surgery machine mounted on a metal arm, with a dozen plastic legs descending. Each robot leg is wrapped in sterile paper. At the tip of each leg is a tool: scalpels, hooks, soldering irons. The whole thing is moving in a blur—precise, jerky movements—like a spider weaving her web. The machine works on Mathilda’s face without stopping or seeming to notice my presence.

“No!” I shriek. I set Nolan down and grab the base of the machine. With all my might, I lift it up off my daughter’s face. Confused, the machine retracts its arms up into the air. In this split second, I shove the gurney with my foot and roll Mathilda’s body away from the machine. The wound in my leg reopens and I feel a trickle of blood spiraling down my calf.

The Big Happy must be close by now.

I lean over the gurney and look at my daughter. Something is horribly wrong. Her eyes. Her beautiful eyes are gone.

“Mathilda?” I ask.

“Mom?” she says, smiling.

“Oh, baby, are you okay?”

“I think so,” she says, frowning at the look on my face. “My eyes feel funny. What’s wrong?” With shaking fingers, she touches the dull black metal that is now buried in her eye sockets.

“Are you okay, honey? Can you see?” I ask.

“Yes. I can. I can see inside,” says Mathilda.

A sense of dread creeps into my belly. I’m too late. They’ve already hurt my little girl.

“What can you see, Mathilda?”

“I can see inside the machines,” she says.

It takes only a few minutes to make it to the perimeter. I lift Mathilda and Nolan over the top. The fence is only five feet high. It’s part of the lure to would-be saviors on the outside looking in. The hidden sentry guns that lurk in the field are designed to be the real security enforcers.

“Come on, Mom,” urges Mathilda, safely on the other side.

But my leg is bleeding badly now, blood pooling in my shoe and spilling over onto the ground. After getting Nolan over the fence, I’m too exhausted to move. With every last shred of effort, I keep myself conscious. I wrap my fingers through the chain link and hold myself up and look at my babies for the last time. “I will always love you. No matter what.”

“What do you mean? Come on. Please,” Mathilda says.

My vision is going away, getting smaller. I’m watching the world now through two pinpricks—the rest is darkness.

“Take Nolan and go, Mathilda.”

“Mom, I can’t. There are guns. I can see them.”

“Concentrate, honey. You have a gift now. See where the guns are. Where they can shoot. Find a safe path. Take Nolan by the hand and don’t let go.”

“Mommy,” says Nolan.

I shut down all my emotion. I have to. I can hear the whine of tanklet motors as they swarm the field behind me. I sag against the fence. From somewhere, I find the strength to shout.

“Mathilda Rose Perez! This is not an argument. You take your brother and you go. Run. Don’t stop until you’re very far away from here. Do you hear me? Run. Do it right now or I will be very angry with you.”

Mathilda flinches at my voice. She takes a hesitant step away. I can feel my heart breaking. It’s a numb feeling, radiating out of my chest and crushing all thought—eating my fear.

Then Mathilda’s mouth squeezes into a line. Her brow settles down into a familiar stubborn frown over those dull, monstrous implants. “Nolan,” she says. “Hold on to my hand no matter what. Don’t let go. We’re going to run now. Super fast, okay?”

Nolan nods, takes her hand.

My little soldiers. Survivors.

“I love you, Mommy,” says Mathilda.

And then my babies are gone.

6. BAND-E-AMIR

Jabar and I lay flat on a ridge, binoculars out.

It’s about ten in the morning. Dry season in Afghanistan. A half hour ago, we caught a burst of avtomat communication. It was just one airborne flurry of information, probably to a roving eye on the ground. But it could also have been to a full-on tank. Or something even worse. Jabar and I decided to dig in here and wait for the thing to show up, whatever it is.

Yeah, pretty much a suicide mission.

After the shit went down, the natives never trusted me for a second. Jabar and I were forbidden to go near the main encampments. Most of the Afghan civilians fled to these man-made caves in Bamiyan Province. Real ancient shit. Some desperate-ass people carved ’em out of sheer mountain walls, and for about a thousand years they’ve been the go-to spot for every civil war, famine, plague, and invasion.

Technology changes, but people stay the same.

The old crusty guys with Santa Claus beards and eyebrows trying to escape up their foreheads sat around in a circle and sipped tea and yelled at each other. They were wondering why avtomat drones were out here, of all places. To find out, they sent us to track communications. It was a punishment for Jabar, but he never forgot that I saved his life at Zero Hour. Good kid. Terrible at growing a beard. But a good kid.

This place they stuck us, Band-e-Amir—it’s so pretty it hurts your eyes. Sky blue lakes pooled up between stark brown mountains. All of it wrapped in bright red limestone cliffs. We’re so high up and the atmosphere’s so thin that it messes with you. I swear, the light does something funny up here that it doesn’t do other places. The shadows are too crisp. Details are too sharp. Like an alien planet.

Jabar spots it first, nudges me.

A biped avtomat walks a narrow dirt road over a mile away, crossing the scrubland. I can tell that it used to be a SAP. Probably a Hoplite model, judging from the height and the light gait. But there’s no telling. Lately, the machines have been changing. For example, the biped down there isn’t wearing clothes like a SAP would. It’s made of some kind of dirt-colored fibrous material instead. It walks at a steady five miles per hour, shadow stretching out on the dirt behind, as mechanical as a tank rolling across desert sands.

“Is it a soldier?” asks Jabar.

“I don’t know what it is anymore,” I reply.

Jabar and I decide to follow it.

We wait until it’s almost out of range. Even when I was running a SAP crew, we kept a drone eye on the square klick around our unit. I’m glad I know the procedure, so I can stay just out of range. Good thing about avtomata is they don’t take an extra step if they don’t have to. Tend to travel in straight lines or along easy paths. Makes them predictable and easier to track.

Staying up high, we travel along the ridge in the same direction as the avto. Soon, the sun comes out in full force, but our dirty cotton robes wick away the sweat. It’s actually kind of nice to walk with Jabar for a while. A place this big makes you feel small. And it gets lonely out here real quick.

Jabar and I are traveling across the broken landscape with just our backpacks, robes, and these whiplike antennae that are about eight feet long and made of thick black plastic that wobbles with every step we take. They must have been scavenged off some machine or other over the last fifty years of war out here. Using our antennae, we can pick up avtomat radio comms and figure out their directionality. This way, we track avtomat movements and send warnings to our people. Too bad we can’t listen in. But there’s not a chance in hell we could crack the avto encryption scheme. It’s still worth it, though, to have an idea where the bad guys are.

Our robes blend in with the rocks. Still, we usually stay a half mile apart from each other, minimum. Being so far apart helps determine the direction of avtomat radio communications. Plus, if one of us gets hit by a missile, the other can have time to hoof it or hide.

After five or six hours following the biped, we spread out and take a final reading for the day. It’s a slow process. I just sit down in my pile of robes, prop my stick up into the air, and put on my headphones to listen for the crackle of communication. My machine logs the time of arrival automatically. Jabar’s doing the same thing a half mile away. In a little while, we’ll compare numbers to get a loose direction.

Sitting out here in the sun, there’s a lot of time to think about what might have been. I scouted my old base once. Windblown rubble. Rusted hunks of abandoned machinery. There’s nothing to go back to.

After a half hour sitting cross-legged and watching the sun drop over those sparkling mountains, a comm burst hits. My stick blinks—it’s logged. I flash my cracked hand mirror to Jabar and he reciprocates. We start the hike back toward each other.

It looks like the biped avto went just over the next ridge and stopped. They don’t sleep, so who knows what it’s up to over there. It must not have sensed us, because it’s not raining bullets. As it gets dark, the ground radiates all the day’s heat into the sky. The heat is our only camouflage; without it we’ve got no choice but to stay put. We pull out our sleeping bags and bivouac for the night.

Jabar and I lay there, side by side, in the cold dark that’s getting colder. The black sky is opening up overhead and out here, I swear to god, there’s more stars than there is night.

“Paul,” whispers Jabar. “I am worried. This one does not seem like the others.”

“It’s a modified SAP unit. Those were pretty common, before. I worked with lots of them.”

“Yes, I remember. They were the pacifists who grew fangs. But that one was not made of metal. It had no weapons at all.”

“And that worries you? That it was unarmed?”

“It is different. Anything different is bad.”

I stare into the heavens and listen to the wind on the rocks and think of the billions of particles of air colliding against each other above me. So many possibilities. All the horrible potential of the universe.

“The avtomata are changing, Jabar,” I say finally. “If different is bad, buddy, then I think we’re in for a whole lot of bad.”

We had no idea how much things were changing.

Next morning, Jabar and I packed up and crept over the broken rocks to the next ridge. Over it, another eye-searing azure lake lapping a white-stone shore.

Band-e-Amir used to be a national park, you know, but we’re still in Afghanistan. Meaning that a bronze plaque never stopped the locals from fishing here with dynamite. Not the friendliest approach, but I’ve used a trotline or two myself back in Oklahoma. Even with the dynamite and leaky gasoline boats and sewer lines, Band-e-Amir stood the test of time.

It outlasted the locals.

“Avtomat must have come this way,” I say, peering down the rocky slope. The jagged slate boulders vary in size from basketball to dinner table. Some are stable. Most aren’t.

“Can you make it?” I ask Jabar.

He nods and claps one hand against his dusty combat boot. American-issue. Probably looted by his tribe members from my base. So it goes.

“That’s great, Jabar. Where’d you get those?”

The kid just smiles at me, the world’s most haggard teenager.

“All right, let’s go,” I say, cautiously stepping over the lip of the ridge. The boulders are so unsteady and steep that we have to go down facing the slope, pressing our sweaty palms against the rocks and testing each step before we take it.

It’s a damn good thing we do go backward.

After thirty minutes, we’re only halfway down. I’m picking my way through the rubble—kicking rocks to see if they’ll move—when I hear some rocks falling farther up. Jabar and I freeze, necks craned as we scan the gray rock face for movement.

Nothing.

“Something’s coming,” whispers Jabar.

“Let’s move,” I say, stepping now with more urgency.

Keeping our heads up and eyes open, the two of us descend over the wobbling rocks. Every few minutes, we hear the clack, clack of more rocks falling from above us. Each time, we stop and scan for motion. Each time we find nothing.

Something invisible is coming down the slope, stalking us. This thing is taking its time, moving quiet and staying hidden. The oldest part of my brain senses the danger and floods my body with adrenaline. There’s a predator coming, it says. Run the fuck away.

But if I move any faster, I’ll fall and die in an avalanche of cold slate.

Now my legs are trembling as I inch my way over the rocks. Glancing down, I see there’s still at least another half hour before we reach bottom. Shit, that’s too long. I slip and gash my knee open on a rock. I bite down hard on the curse before it gets out.

Then I hear a low, animal moan.

It’s Jabar. The kid crouches on the rocks ten feet up, lying stockstill. His eyes are fixed on something above us. I don’t think he even knows that he’s making that sound.

I still don’t see anything.

“What, Jabar? What’s there, man?”

“Koh peshak,” he hisses.

“Mountain what? What’s on the mountain, Jabar?”

“Uh, how do you say… snow cat.”

“Snow? What? Did you say a fucking snow leopard? They live here?”

“We thought they were gone.”

“Extinct?”

“Not anymore.”

With an effort, I refocus my eyes on the rocks above us. Finally, I catch the twitch of a tail and the predator emerges from concealment. A pair of unblinking silver eyes are watching me. The leopard knows that we’ve spotted it. It bounds toward us over the unstable rocks, heavy muscles quivering with each impact. Quiet, determined death is on its way.

I scrabble for my rifle.

Jabar turns around and slides toward me on his ass, wailing in panic. But he’s too late. The snow leopard is suddenly just a few feet away, landing on its front paws with a great bushy tail outstretched as a counterweight. That wide flat nose collapses into a wrinkled snarl, and white canines flash. The cat gets hold of Jabar from behind and yanks his body back.

Finally, I get my rifle up. I fire high to avoid Jabar. The cat shakes him back and forth, growls radiating from deep in its throat like the idle of a diesel engine. When my bullet hits it in the flank, the cat screeches and lets go of Jabar. It coils back, tail protectively wrapping around its forelegs. It snarls and screams, looking for what caused so much pain.

Jabar’s body falls onto the rocks, limp.

The leopard is divinely terrible and beautiful, and it absolutely belongs here. But this is life or death. My heart breaks as I unload my rifle on the magnificent creature. Red stains spread through the mottled fur. The big cat falls back onto the rocks, tail lashing. Those silver eyes squeeze shut and the snarl is frozen forever on its face.

I feel numb as the last echo of gunfire races away across the mountains. Then, Jabar grabs my leg and pulls himself up to a sitting position. He shrugs off his backpack, groaning. I drop to a knee and put one hand on his shoulder. I pull his robes back away from his neck to see two long stripes of blood. His back and shoulder have been shallowly filleted, but otherwise he is unharmed.

“It ate your backpack, you lucky bastard,” I say to him.

He doesn’t know whether to grin or cry and neither do I.

I’m glad the kid is alive. His people would execute me straightaway if I was dumb enough to come back without him. Plus, he’s apparently got a knack for spotting snow leopards just before they pounce. That could come in handy someday.

“Let’s get off this fuckin’ rock,” I say.

But Jabar doesn’t stand up. He stays there, crouched, staring at the bleeding corpse of the snow leopard. One of his dirt-smudged hands snakes out and briefly touches the cat’s paw.

“What is this?” he asks.

“I had to kill it, man. No choice,” I respond.

“No,” says Jabar. “This.”

He leans farther toward the cat and pushes its great bloody head to the side. Now I see something that I can’t explain. Honest to god, I just don’t know what to make of it.

There, just under the cat’s jaw, is some kind of avtomat-made collar. A pale gray band made of hard plastic is wrapped around the cat’s neck. At one point, the strip widens into a marble-sized orb. On the back of this circular part, a tiny red light pulses.

It has to be some kind of radio collar.

“Jabar. Go fifty meters lateral and plant your stick. I’m going the other way. Let’s find out where this data goes.”

By midafternoon, Jabar and I have the cat well behind us, buried under some rocks. I’ve dressed the wounds on Jabar’s back. He didn’t make a sound, probably ashamed of his hollering from before. He doesn’t know that I was too scared to scream. And I don’t tell him.

The trajectory of the radio collar transmissions leads across the nearest lake to a small inlet. We move quickly along the shore, being sure to stay on the hard-packed dirt close to the increasingly sheer mountain walls.

Jabar spots them first: footprints.

The modified SAP unit is close. Its prints track around the next bend, directly to where the radio transmissions lead us. Jabar and I look each other in the eyes—we’ve reached our destination.

“Muafaq b ’ashid, Paul,” he says.

“Good luck to you, too, buddy.”

We walk around the corner and come face-to-face with the next stage of avtomat evolution.

It sits half submerged in the lake—the biggest avtomat imaginable. It’s like a building or a giant gnarled tree. The machine has dozens of petal-like sheathes of metal for legs. Each plate is the size of a wing off a B-52 Stratofortress and covered in moss and barnacles and vines and flowers. I notice they flap slowly, movement barely visible. Butterflies and dragonflies and indigenous insects of all sorts flit across the grassy plates. Higher up, the main trunk is composed of dozens of taut cords that stretch into the sky, twisting around each other almost randomly.

The top of the avtomat towers in the sky. An almost fractal pattern of barklike structures whirls and twines in an organic mass of what looks like branches. Thousands of birds nest in the safety of these limbs. Wind sighs through the tangled boughs, pushing them back and forth.

And on the lower levels, stepping carefully, are a few dozen of the biped avtomata. They are inspecting the other life-forms, leaning over and watching, prodding and pulling. Like gardeners. Each of them covers a different area. They are muddy, wet, and some are covered in moss themselves. This doesn’t seem to bother them.

“That’s not a weapon, is it?” I ask Jabar.

“The opposite. It is life,” he says.

I notice that the uppermost branches bristle with what must be antennae, swaying in the wind like bamboo. The only recognizably metallic surface is nestled there—a gaping, wind tunnel–shaped dome. It points to the northeast.

“Tight-beam communication,” I say, pointing. “Probably microwave based.”

“What could this be?” asks Jabar.

I take a closer look. Every niche and crevice of the colossal, creeping monster teems with life. The water below flickers with spawning fish. A haze of flying insects clouds the lower petals, while rodents creep through the folds of the central trunk. The structure is riddled with burrows and covered in animal shit and dancing with sunlight—alive.

“Some kind of research station. Maybe the avtomata are studying living things. Animals and bugs and birds.”

“This is not good,” murmurs Jabar.

“Nope. But if they’re collecting information, they must be sending it somewhere, right?”

Jabar lifts up his antenna, grinning.

I block the sun with one hand over my eyes and squint at the towering, shining column. That’s a lot of data. Wherever it’s going, I’ll bet there’s one smart fucking avtomat on the other end.

“Jabar. Go east fifty meters and plant your stick. I’ll do the same. We’re gonna figure out where our enemy lives.”

7. BACKBONE

“A single mile, Arrtrad,” Lurker says. “We can make it one single fucking mile.”

From the security camera image, I can see Lurker and his middle-aged comrade, Arrtrad. They stand on a weed-filled street alongside the Thames, within running distance to the safety of their houseboat. Lurker, the teenager, has grown his hair and his beard out. He’s gone from a shaved head to being the jungle man of Borneo. Arrtrad looks and sounds the same as ever—worried.

“Straight through Trafalgar Square?” asks Arrtrad, pale face lined with anxiety. “They’ll see us. They’re bound to. If the cars don’t track us, then those little… things will.”

Lurker mimics Arrtrad’s nasal voice without mercy. “Oh, let’s save the people. We’ve been sitting on this boat for ages. La-di-fucking-da.”

Arrtrad lets his gaze drop.

“I schemed,” says Lurker. “I plotted. I found a way, brother. What happened to you? Where have your balls gone?”

Arrtrad speaks to the pavement. “I’ve seen it out scavenging, Lurker. All this time, the cars still sit on the streets. Start their engines once a month and idle for ten minutes. They’re all ready for us, mate. Just waiting.”

“Arrtrad, come over here,” says Lurker. “Have a look at yourself.”

The security camera pans over as Lurker motions at Arrtrad to step next to a panel of sun-baked glass attached to a mostly intact building. The tint is peeling off, but the glass wall still holds a bluish reflection. Arrtrad steps over and the two look at themselves.

A data readout informs me that they first activated the exoskeletons a month ago. Military hardware. Full body. Without a person inside, the machines look like a messy pile of wiry black arms and legs connected to a backpack. Strapped into the powered machines, the two men each stand seven feet tall, strong as bears. The thin black tubes running along their arms and legs are made of titanium. The motorized joints are powered by purring diesel engines. I notice that the feet are curved, flexible spikes that add a solid foot to their height.

Grinning, Lurker flexes for the mirror. Each of his forearms has a wicked notched spike curving out, used to pick up heavy objects without crushing human fingers. Each exoskeleton has a roll cage that arcs gracefully over its occupant’s head, with a bluish-white LED burning in the middle of the frame.

Together in the mirror, Arrtrad and Lurker look like a couple of supersoldiers. Well, more like a couple of pale Englishmen who’ve been living on sardines and who happen to have scavenged some abandoned military technology.

Either way, they are most definitely badass.

“See yourself, Arrtrad?” Lurker asks. “You’re a beast, mate. You’re a killer. We can do this.”

Lurker tries to clap Arrtrad on the shoulder, and the other man flinches away girlishly. “Careful!” shouts Arrtrad. “There’s no armor on these things. Keep your hooks away from me.”

“Right, brother.” Lurker chuckles. “Look, the British Telecom Tower is one mile away. And it’s jamming our satellites. If people could communicate, even for a little while, we’d have a fighting chance.”

Arrtrad looks at Lurker, skeptical. “Why are you really doing this?” he asks. “Why are you putting your life—our lives—on the line?”

For a long moment, there is only the chup-chup of the two diesel engines idling. “Remember when we used the phones to torment people?” Lurker asks.

“Yeah,” responds Arrtrad slowly.

“We thought we were different than everyone else. Better. Thought we were taking advantage of a bunch of fools. But we were wrong. Turns out we’re all in the same boat. Metaphorically speaking.”

Arrtrad cracks a small smile. “But we don’t owe nobody nothing. You said so yourself.”

“Oh, but we do,” Lurker says. “We didn’t know it, but we were running up a tab. We owe a debt, mate. And now it’s time to pay up. Only phreaks like us would know about this tower. How important it is. If we can destroy it, we’ll help thousands of people. Maybe millions.”

“And you owe them?”

“I owe you,” says Lurker. “I’m sorry I didn’t warn London. Maybe they wouldn’t have believed. But that’s never stopped me. Christ, I could have co-opted the bloody emergency alert system all on my own. Shouted a warning from the rooftops. Doesn’t matter now. Most of all—I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I’m sorry for… your girls, mate. All of it.”

On mention of his children, Arrtrad turns away from Lurker, blinking back tears. Eyeing his own sinuous reflection, he shrugs one arm out of his exo-suit and smoothes back the puff of blond hair on his balding head. The exoskeleton arm automatically settles down to his side. Arrtrad’s cheeks puff out as he exhales loudly, slipping his hand back into the metal arm straps.

“You make a fine point,” he says.

“Yeah,” says Lurker. Then he taps Arrtrad on his metal shoulder with one wicked blade. “Besides,” he asks, “you don’t really want to live to old age with me? On a bloody houseboat?”

A slow smile spreads across Arrtrad’s birdlike face. “You do make a fine fucking point.”

The streets of central London are mostly empty. Attacks came too fast and too organized for most citizens to react. By law, all the autos had full-drive capability. Also by law, hardly anybody had guns. And the closed-circuit television network was compromised from the start, giving the machines an intimate view of every public space in the city.

In London, the citizens were too safe to survive.

Visual records indicate that automated trash trucks filled dumps outside the city with corpses for months after Zero Hour. Now there’s nobody left to destroy the place. No survivors brave the streets. And nobody is around to see two pale men—one young and one old—encased in military exoskeletons as they leap in ten-foot strides over the weedy pavement.

The first attack comes only a few minutes in, as they sprint through Trafalgar Square. The fountains are drained and filled with dead leaves and blown trash. A couple of broken bicycles lie out but that’s it. Covered in roosting birds, the granite statue of Lord Nelson in his admiral’s hat looks down from a hundred-and-fifty-foot-tall column as the two men bound across the plaza on elastic foot blades.

They should have known there was too much wide-open space.

Lurker notices the smart car a couple of seconds before it can ram into Arrtrad from behind. With one leap, he closes the twenty feet between them and lands on the run beside the speeding car. A blossom of mold has spread across the top of it. Without a regular car wash, nature is eating up the old stuff.

Too bad there are plenty of replacements.

On landing, Lurker hunches down and drives his foot-long forearm blades into the driver’s side door of the car and lifts. Steam jets from the hip and knee joints of his exoskeleton, and the diesel engine surges as he wrenches the whole side of the car upward. While on its two right wheels, the car veers but still manages to clip Arrtrad’s right rear leg midstride. The car flips over and rolls away, but Arrtrad is off balance; he trips.

Falling down at a twenty-mile-an-hour jog is serious business. Luckily, the exoskeleton can tell that it’s falling. Leaving Arrtrad no choice in the matter, the machine jerks his arms close to his body and his legs curl into fetal position. The roll cage becomes pertinent. In this crash pose, the exoskeleton rolls over a few times, then plows over a fire hydrant and comes to a stop.

No water comes out of the decapitated hydrant.

By the time Lurker lands next to him, Arrtrad is already climbing to his feet. The pudgy blond man stands up and I can see he is grinning, chest heaving.

“Thanks,” he says to Lurker.

There’s blood on his teeth but Arrtrad doesn’t seem to care. He pops up and sprints away. Lurker follows, on the lookout for more cars. New ones appear, but they’re slow, not ready. They can’t track the speeding men as they leap through alleys and tear across parks.

Lurker put it best: It’s only a single fucking mile.

From a new camera angle, I see the cylindrical British Telecom tower looming in the blue sky like a Tinkertoy. Antennae bristle from the top and a ring of microwave transmitter dishes wrap just below, pointing away in every direction. It’s the biggest TV switch station in London and it’s got whole highways of fiber-optic cable buried underneath. When it comes to communications, all roads lead to the BTT.

The wiry exoskeletons appear and dart around the side of the building, stopping in front of a steel door. Arrtrad leans the scratched-up frame of his exo against the wall, huffing and puffing. “Why not just destroy it from here?” he asks.

Lurker flexes his arms and jounces his head back and forth to loosen up his neck. He seems exhilarated by the run. “The fiber is buried in there in a concrete tube. Protected. Besides, that would be a bit crass, wouldn’t it? We’re better than that, brother. We’ll use this place against the machines. Pick up the phone and make a call. It’s what we do best, isn’t it? And this is the biggest goddamn phone in the hemisphere.”

Lurker nods toward a bulge in his pocket.

“And if all else fails… kaboom,” he says.

Then Lurker jams his forearm blades into the steel door and wrenches them back out, leaving a rip in the metal. A couple more stabs and the door swings open.

“Onward,” says Lurker, and the two step inside a narrow hallway. They hunch over and creep through the dark passage, trying not to breathe their own diesel fumes. In the low light, the LEDs embedded in the curve of metal over their heads brighten up.

“What are we looking for?” asks Arrtrad.

“The fiber,” Lurker whispers. “We’ll want to get down to the fiber. Best-case, we hijack it and send a signal for all the robots to jump into the river. Worst case, we blast the jammer and free up the communications satellites.”

At the end of the hallway is another steel door. Gently, Lurker pushes it open. His LEDs dim as Lurker pokes his head out.

From the built-in camera in the exoskeleton, I see that the machines have almost entirely hollowed out the interior of the cylindrical building. Shafts of sunlight arc in through fifteen stories of dirty glass windows. The light falls through dead air and shatters through a latticework of rebar and radial support beams. Bird calls echo through the cavernous space. Vines and grass and mold are growing on the mounds of trash and debris that cover every surface of the ground floor.

“Bloody hell,” Lurker mutters.

In the middle of this arboretum, a solid cement cylinder juts straight up through the entire height of the building. Encrusted with vines, the pillar disappears into gloomy heights above. It is the final support structure holding this place up. The backbone.

“Building’s gone native,” says Arrtrad.

“Well, there’s no way to reach the upper transmitters from here,” Lurker says, looking at the heaps of moldering rubble that used to be the floors and walls of upper stories. “Doesn’t matter. We’ve got to get to the computers. Base of the building. Down.”

Something small and gray scuttles over a pile of moldy papers and under a tangled heap of rusted office chairs. Arrtrad and Lurker look at each other, wary.

Careful of his forearm spike, Lurker raises a finger to his lips. Together, the men creep out of the hallway and into the arboretum. Their feet blades indent the moss and rotting trash, leaving plain tracks behind.

A blue door waits in the base of the central pillar, dwarfed by the sheer size of the hollowed-out building around it. They move to the door at a fast trot, keeping noise to a minimum. Arrtrad rears back to stab the door, but Lurker stops him with a gesture. Pulling his arm out of the exoskeleton, Lurker reaches down and turns the doorknob. With a yank, the door opens on creaky hinges. I doubt it has been opened since the war began.

Inside, there is dirt in the hallway for a few steps and then things get very clean. The faint roar of air-conditioning grows louder as they walk farther down the cement hallway. The floor is angled downward, toward a square of bright light at the end of the tunnel.

“It’s as if we’ve died,” says Arrtrad.

Finally, they reach the bottom: a cylindrical white clean room with twenty-foot ceilings. It is filled with row after row of humming racks of equipment. The stacks of gear are arrayed in concentric circles, each row getting shorter the closer it is to the center of the room. Rows of fluorescent lights shine down, starkly illuminating every detail of the room. Condensation starts to form on the black metal of the exoskeletons and Arrtrad shivers.

“Plenty of juice down here, anyway,” says Lurker.

The two men walk inside, disoriented by the millions of stuttering green and red lights that line the towers of hardware. In the center of the room is their goal: a black hole in the floor the size of a manhole, metal stairs poking out of the top—the fiber hub.

Four-legged robots made of white plastic climb up and down the racks, slipping between stacks of whirring equipment like lizards. Some of these lizard robots use their forelegs to stroke the equipment, moving wires or pressing buttons. It reminds me of those little birds that land on hippos, cleaning them of parasites.

“C’mon,” Lurker murmurs to Arrtrad. They stride together to the hole in the floor. “Down there is the answer to all our problems.”

But Arrtrad doesn’t respond. He’s already seen it.

Archos.

Silent as the grim reaper, the machine hovers over the hole. It looks like an enormous eye, made of circular rings of shimmering metal. Yellow wires snake away from the edges like a lion’s mane. A flawless glass lens is nestled in the center of the rings, smoky black. It watches without blinking.

And yet it is not Archos. Not fully. Only a part of the intelligence that is Archos has been put inside this menacing machine: a local sub-brain.

Lurker strains against his exoskeleton, but he can’t move his arms or legs. The motors in his suit have frozen up. His face goes pale as he realizes what must have happened.

The exoskeleton has an external communications port.

“Arrtrad, run!” Lurker screams.

Arrtrad. The poor bastard. He’s shaking, trying desperately to yank his arms out of the harness. But he’s got no control either. Both the exoskeletons have been hacked.

Floating above in the harsh fluorescent light, the giant eye watches without any reaction.

Motors grind in Lurker’s suit, and he grunts pitifully with the effort of resisting. But there’s no helping it: He’s a puppet caught in the strings of that hanging monster.

Before Lurker can react, his right arm jerks away and sends a wicked forearm blade singing through the air. The blade sinks through Arrtrad’s chest and into the metal spine of his exoskeleton. Arrtrad gapes at Lurker in surprise. In arterial surges, his blood wicks down the end of the blade and soaks Lurker’s sleeve.

“It’s not me, Arrtrad,” Lurker whispers, voice cracking. “It’s not me. I’m sorry, mate.”

And the blade yanks itself back out. Arrtrad takes one sucking gasp for air and then collapses with a hole in his chest. His exoskeleton protects him as he goes limp, lowering itself gently to the ground. Splayed on the floor, its motors shut down and the machine goes still and silent as a pool of dark blood spreads around it.

“Oh you bastard,” Lurker calls up to the expressionless robot watching from above. The machine noiselessly lowers itself down to where he stands, his arm blade slick with blood. The machine positions itself directly in front of Lurker’s face and a delicate-looking stick—some kind of probe—extends from under its smoky eye. Lurker strains to move away, but his rigid exoskeleton holds him in place.

Then the machine speaks in that strange, familiar child’s voice. From the flash of recognition on his face, I see that Lurker remembers this voice from the phone.

“Lurker?” it asks, an electrical glow spreading through the rings.

In small increments, Lurker begins to wriggle his left hand out of the exoskeleton harness. “Archos,” he says.

“You have changed. You’re not a coward anymore.”

“You’ve changed, too,” Lurker says, watching the concentric rings languidly revolve and counterrevolve. His left hand is almost free. “Funny the difference a year can make.”

“I’m sorry it has to be this way,” says the boy voice.

“And what way is that?” Lurker asks, trying to keep the thing distracted from his squirming left hand.

Then his hand comes free. Lurker thrusts his arm out and grabs hold of the delicate feeler, trying to break it off. The shoulder joint of his right arm pops as he struggles against a sudden push from the exoskeleton. He can only watch as his right arm swings through the air and, in one sharp movement, slices his left hand off at the wrist.

A fan spray of blood spatters across the face of the floating machine.

In shock, Lurker yanks the rest of his body out of the exoskeleton. The empty left arm of the machine tries to slice at him, but the elbow is at an awkward angle and he is able to squirm away. Dodging another forearm blade, he drops to the ground and rolls through Arrtrad’s spreading blood. The exoskeleton is off balance for a split second, missing its human counterweight. It’s just enough time for Lurker to wriggle over the lip of the hole.

Ching.

A forearm blade bites into the floor inches from Lurker’s face as he shoves himself into the hole, cradling his injured arm to his chest. Half falling, he drops down into the darkness.

The unmanned exoskeleton immediately picks up the fallen exoskeleton with Arrtrad’s corpse inside. Cradling the bleeding pile of metal, the exoskeleton walks and then sprints out the door.

Hanging over the hole, the complex piece of machinery watches patiently. Lights on the equipment racks begin to flicker intensely as a flood of data pours out of the tower. A last-minute backup.

Long moments pass before a hoarse voice echoes up from the dark hole. “Catch you in the funny pages, mate,” says Lurker.

And the world turns white and then to darkest black.