Spares

In the clearing Nearly and Vinaldi were still hanging from trees, alone but completely uninjured. They hadn’t been nailed, only tied. I let them both down, and accepted a handshake from Vinaldi, but the relief in their eyes brought me little pleasure. Nearly looked frightened and probably wanted a hug, but I couldn’t provide one. Instead I walked away, sat down on a rock and lit a cigarette. My hands were shaking and I could see very little except the image of Suej’s face at the instant the orange light had killed her.

I didn’t hear the footsteps behind me, and was only aware of Nearly’s presence when I felt her arms slip round my waist. I stiffened against them, but she persisted, and after a while I gave up and let myself be held.

“We saw,” she said, “jack, it wasn’t your fault.”

I shook her off and walked a few paces, keeping my eyes fixed on the ground. I didn’t trust myself enough for eye contact, and at that stage I didn’t have the wit to consider that Nearly might be hurting too. She’d liked Suej; liked her very much.

“Maybe it was meant to-be,” she continued quietly, rubbing life back into her wrists. “Maybe it was better that way. I mean, if someone wanted her that bad it can only be because they needed her for parts.”

“Do you know where the others are?” I said brusquely. “David, Jenny?”

“Jenny’s been used already,” Vinaldi said, and I looked up to see him standing a few yards away. The right side of his face was one Targe bruise, and he was standing awkwardly. I guess he and Yhandim had discussed their unfinished business. He continued talking with the air of someone who knew he had bad news that had to be gotten over with. “Yhandim told us. They managed to keep her twin alive until she was found, and she was operated on immediately, the day Mal got killed. There was nothing left. The one called David has been taken to another Farm someplace. Where, I don’t know. They incinerated Mal’s body. The other two spares are dead. Their owners wouldn’t pay the ransom, so Yhandim got to kill them. He sounded pretty psyched about that.”

I barely heard the last few sentences. I didn’t know what to say, what to think, where to go, what to do. There didn’t seem anything large enough, any action sufficiently extreme or futile to express what was going through my head. It was less than a week since we had left the Farm, the spares scared out of their wits but hopeful that they might be able to have a life, become “proper people.” I brought five and a half human beings out of the womb and into the world, and now they were all dead—except perhaps David, who had been taken God knows where to be thrown back into a tunnel and wait for the knife.

That’s what I’d given them. That’s what their association with Jack Randall, Esquire had brought into their lives, and I’d only been trying to do the right thing. They say Jesus loves me, and I guess I can believe it. I’ve had weirder relationships—or as weird, possibly. My dad was pretty mean to me sometimes. But not as mean, I don’t think, and the highs were better too. Maybe Jesus does love me, but sometimes I wonder whether it isn’t time for a trial separation.

And this other guy, God—Him I have a real problem with. Someone needs to tell Him to keep His eyes on the fucking road.

“Jack, don’t beat yourself up over this,” Vinaldi said. “I say that partly because you can’t blame yourself for everything, and partly because you going nonlinear is going to be no help to us in what is still a far from ideal situation.”

“How come you’re still alive?” I asked. “How come Yhandim didn’t just whack you?”

Vinaldi shrugged. “I don’t know, but I think things are getting fucked up for those guys. When they came through and grabbed me, first they chased you for a while—and by the way, you can move when you have to, I’m impressed—then they brought me here and tied me to a tree. The guys had a quiet couple of words with me about the fact I got out of The Gap back then and they didn’t, and they slapped Nearly around a little, like they felt it was expected of them, but that was it.”

“They spent most of the time in a huddle over there,” Nearly said. “There was a lot of shouting.”

“They didn’t do anything else to you?” I asked her.

“No. I think maybe sex isn’t Yhandim’s core interest in life, you know what I’m saying? They just sat there and looked pissed.”

“Maybe Maxen’s fucking them around,” I said.

Vinaldi nodded. “Things are going sour in Psychoville, and I think they had to bring you in as part of the deal.”

“Why?” Nearly asked, turning to me. “They’ve got all the spares. What is this guy’s problem with you?”

“Jack knows,” Vinaldi said. “Don’t you?”

I glared at him and avoided Nearly’s eyes. The gunship was cruising slowly into the clearing, which gave me something to look at. Ratchet set it down gently in the center, and extruded the two supports which kept it upright.

Vinaldi looked at the gunship for a while and then laughed, a sound not often heard in The Gap. He shook his head admiringly.

“I have to admit I was kind of expecting I’d see you again, Jack, and sooner rather than later, but shit—that’s really overachieving. How did you manage to find a gunship, get it working, and then fly the fucking thing?”

“You know my methods,” I said. “Brute, dumb luck.”

Vinaldi didn’t look convinced, but I had nothing else to offer.

“What do we do now?” Nearly asked. “I mean, it’s been a blast and all but I’d really like to get the hell out of here.”

“I’ve no idea,” I said. “We can either stay here and have a bad time, or we can have one somewhere else. It’s a matter of supreme indifference to me.”

“Jack,” said a voice. Ratchet’s. It was relayed from an external speaker on the gunship, the kind usually employed to inform villagers that they were about to be destroyed.

I didn’t blame Ratchet at all for what had happened, and strove to keep my voice calm. “Yes?” I said.

“I can get you out,” he announced, quietly.

“What? How?”

“This gunship is equipped with partial sideslipping capability. They all were—in case the brass needed to get out in a hurry.”

“Yeah,” Vinaldi muttered in the background. “That figures.”

“It’s not very powerful,” Ratchet continued, “but if you know where you got in we can probably still get out that way.”

“We don’t need the full sideslip gear?”

“No. A semblance of cat-ness is programmed into me. It’s only an approximation—that’s why we need a place where it’s happened recently. We should really go as soon as possible.”

“What are we waiting for?” said Nearly, and started climbing the ladder. Vinaldi followed her, but I remained outside.

“I’m sorry, Jack,” Ratchet said quietly.

“It wasn’t your fault,” I said. “Just part of the whole big fuck up.” I looked away for a moment, at the trees, the blue light, the strange world around us, and I wondered again if something had changed. Though I felt very sad, and depressed, and angry, for once I didn’t feel frightened. Maybe there wasn’t any room left in my head.

“It didn’t end as you would have wanted,” he said, suddenly. “But it was still the right thing to do. You did the best you could for the spares, Jack. Sometimes that has to be enough.”

“Thanks, but why are you telling me this? We’re going to have years to Monday-morning-quarterback this one.”

“No,” said Ratchet. “We aren’t. I’m going to have to pilot this ship right up to the last second. This time it’s really good bye.”

Great, I thought, as I climbed wearily up the ladder. At this rate, in a couple more days there wouldn’t be anyone left for me to lose.

A last flickering run in the forest; through endless night, past never-ending trees, buried deep under a sky I’d never seen. I let Vinaldi perch on the pilot seat for the journey, and sat next to Nearly in the back row of the passenger section. None of us spoke, but instead looked out of the window or stared straight ahead into whatever was coming next.

After a while I pulled my hand out of my pocket, found Nearly’s, and held it. She looked at me with surprise, then gripped my hand tightly in return.

I didn’t know what I meant, what was being said. Perhaps nothing, but it felt better that way.

When Ratchet told us we were nearing our entrance point I went to the control panel. I pointed out the precise spot. It wasn’t hard to find: There was still a lingering shadow cast by the truck in the other world.

Ratchet reversed the gunship, plotted his final course, and calculated the exact moment at which he should trigger the sideslip effect. I sat down in the copilot’s seat and strapped myself in.

“Good luck,” Ratchet said, and Vinaldi and Nearly wished him well. I didn’t. I wasn’t saying good bye.

Because at the exact instant when the hurtling gun-ship crossed the line I lunged forward and clasped my hand round the chip under the “IQ” panel.

I’d decided that it was time to stop letting go of things.

A face full of snow. Pain in my temple. The sound of someone groaning quietly nearby.

“We’re back,” Vinaldi said, indistinctly.

I sat up slowly and looked around. We were at the bottom of the slope leading down from the Farm, near the remains of Vinaldi’s truck. The light was fading, and I looked at my watch to see it was five in the afternoon. We’d been in The Gap nearly twenty-four hours, impossible though that seemed.

I turned the computer chip over in my hand a few times, and smiled, then slipped it safely into my pocket and went to help Nearly. She was lying spread-eagled on the snow and muttering like a starfish that had been woken up much earlier than it wanted.

“So where the hell are we now?” she demanded as she flapped snow off her clothes. “Kansas?”

“About-half a mile north of Covington Forge,” I said, and she rolled her eyes.

“Back here again. Fun, fun, fun. Maybe we could go to Detroit next. Hey,” she added, peering at Vinaldi’s vehicle. “Is that the truck you got out here in?” The hood of the truck was so completely wound round the tree that for a moment I had a flash-memory of The Gap. It looked like the tree had grown up from beneath, to become part of the car.

“Yes,” Vinaldi said, reaching into the back to pull out a new gun. I guess Yhandim had taken his old one. “But I doubt it’s the way we’re going back.”

“You’re telling me. You guys really did it the hard way. All we had to do was follow some cat.”

“Stay here a moment,” I told them, setting off up the slope.

The cat was cowering in what used to be the control room of the Farm. It ran across the room and into the darkness under a table, so I just sank to my knees and stayed put, hand held out in front of me. While I waited I noticed its bowl over by the wall. There had been food in it, once. The cat made its way over eventually, sniffed my fingers, and decided I was unlikely to give it a hard time. I don’t know how they make that decision, but they generally seem to be right.

I undid the clasp on its leash, picked the cat up and headed for the main door. On the way, I noticed something lying against one of the walls.

It was a piece of machinery, about the size of a car engine but so finely wrought that it looked like a scale model of something larger. It was running, and it answered the question of how Maxen had been able to forge a link back into The Gap. From somewhere he’d laid hands on one of the original sideslipping devices. I thought they’d all been destroyed, but I guess the military isn’t like that. They’d keep cigars in Pandora’s box.

I put the cat down, and shooed it away. Then I pulled my gun out, slammed a full clip into it, and emptied it into the sideslip machine. By the time the ricochet from the last shell had died away and Vinaldi had come running in to see what was happening, it was very clear it would never work again. I felt nothing but relief and the sound of a heavy door slamming shut.

Nearly was standing outside the entrance, stroking the cat’s head and looking cold. I walked over to her and picked the cat up off the ground.

“Somebody’s taken Ghuaji’s car,” Vinaldi said. “I guess Yhandim and the others got out first.”

“We’d better start walking,” I said.

“You are, I take it, kidding?” Nearly inquired, head held sweetly on one side. “I mean, like, ha ha?”

“No,” I said. “And you’d better keep up, or I’ll make you carry the cat.”

We set off down the driveway out of the compound, kicking our way through what had obviously been a heavy twenty-four-hour snow. It’s impossible to describe the difference between walking in The Gap and walking here. It’s like going for a stroll after finishing an exam, even if the world in general is not exactly looking upon you with favor.

We turned the corner into the abandoned road and walked down it, past the remains of the gas pumps and the derelict picnic area. Nearly muttered darkly all the way. I glanced across at the rotted remains of the picnic tables, but there seemed to be nothing there.

“Something’s happened, hasn’t it?” Vinaldi said, startling me.

“Yes,” I answered, taking a deep breath of the crisp air.

“You guys just keep talking in riddles,” Nearly said. “No, seriously, it’s great. Have a good time. I’ll just keep walking through all this fucking snow.”

It was dark by the time we reached the main road, and my mood had worsened. I couldn’t get the faces out of my head. Having escaped from The Gap in one piece almost seemed to have made things worse. It was as if I’d confronted my worst fear and come out the other side, only to discover the world I’d been saved into was fucked, and that everyone I cared about had died while I had been away. Even the landscape looked like an old photograph: irrelevant, creased, dead.

And there was something else, something rising inside me. A need I knew I was going to be unable to deny.

A need for radical and extreme vengeance.

We walked down the road a few hundred yards, Vinaldi with his thumb held out despite the fact that there weren’t any cars. Even the picture of New Richmond’s premier “businessman” trying to hitch a ride couldn’t break my mood. Nearly soon picked up on this and stopped complaining. She walked a little to one side of me, taking her turn at carrying the cat, and I sensed her glancing at me now and then. I hoped she wasn’t going to ask me anything, because there was nothing I wanted to say.

A car passed us after a while, but wisely resisted the temptation to pick up three weirdos out for a walk in the back of beyond in the middle of winter. Ten minutes later another car came by, and this one at least slowed; but then it swished off again, taking its yellow lamps with it and leaving us with nothing except the crunch of our boots in the snow.

Then finally a car did stop, driving up the road toward us and pulling to a halt when it was level. Loud trance country spewed out of the windows, and four drunks lurked inside. They were all very large, and wore microfiber-check shirts. Three sported the kind of beards which make you look like you’ve glued a raccoon to your face. The other’s face was so ugly he didn’t even need a beard. The driver peered at us, guffawed merrily, and conferred briefly with the guy in the passenger seat. Then the driver opened his door and got out of the car.

“Well, look here,” he said, swaggering up until he stood a couple of feet from Nearly, his legs planted solidly apart. “What’s a girl like you doing out walking with a couple of queers on a night like this?”

“Thanking God I’m not in that car with you,” Nearly quipped, with her unique talent for diplomacy.

“Funny you should say that,” the man said with a smile, “’cuz that’s just what we had in mind. Thought maybe we’d try to warm you up.” Behind him, a back door opened and No-Beard in the rear seat put his foot out onto the snow. Meanwhile his buddy turned his attention to Vinaldi and me. “You two gentlemen can just step back and let us get on with this, or you can get the shit whaled out of you.” He shrugged at his cohorts in the car. “Think that’s a fair choice, don’t you, fellas?”

“More than fair,” drawled No-Beard. “Can’t no one say more fairer than that.”

The chief turd nodded happily and crossed his arms. “So. What’ll it be?”

“Hmm,” Vinaldi said mildly, looking away. “That’s a difficult one. Too difficult for a queer like me to answer, what with it being so cold and all, so my brain is nearly as frozen as yours.”

There was a pause. “What?” the guy said.

Vinaldi clicked his fingers, as if suddenly blessed by inspiration. “Hey,” he said. “I’ve come up with another option I’d like to run past you.”

“What the fuck you talking about? What option?”

“The one where I punch your face through the back of your head.” Suddenly, Vinaldi was an indistinguishable blur of movement. Chief Turd tried to parry the first couple of blows, but he didn’t have a prayer. Vinaldi’s fists moved too quickly for me to even see, and before anyone knew what was going on the guy was on the ground, blood flooding out of his nose. No-Beard was already halfway out of the car, but I kicked the door back into his face, then crunched it against his leg.

“Also,” I said, producing mine and pushing the barrel hard into one of his eyes, “we have large guns. So get out of the fucking car.”

Vinaldi and I herded the four of them off the road while Nearly climbed into the backseat of the car. Then I got in to drive, and Vinaldi climbed in the back with Nearly because the front passenger seat looked like someone had dissected a moose on it I turned the car round and Nearly waved cheerily at the checked shirts as we drove back off down the road. I stared out the front window into the last of the twilight, and as the lights of Covington Forge began to appear in the distance I could tell that whatever was going on in my head was getting worse.

By the time we were onto Route 81 my head was hurting badly, and I was gripping the steering wheel to prevent my hands from shaking. There was nothing to do except watch the road, and no conversation to drown out the one I was already having with myself.

“What is it between you and Maxen?” Nearly said quietly then, breaking the silence. I didn’t answer. “I mean, I get the sense this guy hates you real bad.”

“It’s nothing,” I said, lighting a cigarette. Vinaldi should really have been driving. It took me three attempts to get it alight.

“The fuck,” Nearly said calmly. Her tone very clearly said that she’d been building up to this and was unlikely to stop for animals or small children. “What you mean is it’s none of my business.”

“Yes,” I said tightly. “That’s exactly what I mean.”

“Well it is so my business!” she shouted, suddenly furious in that force-of-nature way women have. “I’ve got a right to know. Psycho lunatics come slamming into my life, take me beyond the Twilight Zone and completely ruin my shoes, and you say it’s none of my business?”

“No one has any right to know anything about my life which I don’t want them to,” I said, forcing the words out slowly and clearly.

“Not even someone who likes you?” she said, her voice different.

“Especially not them.”

“They helped you, didn’t they?” Vinaldi asked suddenly, out of the darkness in the back.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sure you do. The kids. They helped you find the ship.”

“What kids?” Nearly asked.

“You didn’t see them, I guess, because you weren’t there the last time. Maybe just because you don’t know about them, or maybe because old Jack and I have got a fair dose of The Gap inside us as well. I think it’d be fair to say that, don’t you, Jack?”

“Just shut up, Johnny.”

Nearly: “What kids?”

“When that little girl—Suej, or whatever—went down, I saw something.” Despite myself, I found I. was listening to Vinaldi. I’d thought that last vision had been mine alone, a product of misery and fear. “There was a whole bunch of children standing round her, Gap children—except they didn’t look right. They show you where the ship was, Jack?”

I didn’t answer, and Vinaldi took that as a yes.

“You know what they were, don’t you Jack? You know why they looked so weird? Didn’t you see the scars on them? On their necks?”

“Johnny, please don’t tell this.” My whole body was shaking now, the headlights on the highway in front of me a Jackson Pollock of red and white blurs against black.

“I’m going to tell it, Jack, and you know why? Because you’re full of shit. You go round the whole time with a chip on your shoulder about how badly you’ve fucked up. You think everything’s tainted, that somehow you did something which has spoiled the whole world. You spend your whole time saying to yourself ‘Well, I’ve fucked up this life so I’m just going to sit here and wait for the next one.’ Well you didn’t This whole mess is because of Arlond Maxen, and it’s not your fault the guy hates you. He hates you because of something you did which was not a fucked-up thing to do, and that’s why all those spares died, and why Mal died, and why you’re probably going to die too.”

“What?” Nearly shouted, and then said it again more quietly. “What? Johnny, what are you talking about?”

I knew there was nothing I could do to stop him, so I just kept the car on the road and tried not to listen as Vinaldi told her.

It happened two months before the war in The Gap was abandoned. Mal and I were part of a unit which was very deep in-country. North and South don’t mean a whole lot in there, but if most people were in the South, we were so far North we were off the compass. I don’t know how Vinaldi got to hear of it. A rumor, he said. I certainly didn’t tell anyone, and neither did Mai. We hoped no one would believe us.

I think everyone pretty much knew by that stage that the war wasn’t one we were going to win. The villagers were too tough, too unyielding. They had The Gap on their side, and the farther away you got from the point where everybody sideslipped in, the more inexplicable and terrifying it got. It was like you were going deeper and deeper into yourself, into places you were never supposed to see. Some of the people in our unit had rigged up plastic bottles of Rapt solution, and had a constant drip into their bloodstream.

But our orders were to keep on going, and so we did. We crawled, we staggered, we ran—all more or less in the same direction, farther and farther away from any-thing we recognized as real. There’d been talk of meeting up with another unit which had been sent this way, but none of us really expected that to happen anymore. We couldn’t even tell what color the air was by then; with the combination of drugs and deep strangeness around us the chances of us doing anything cohesive or deliberate were absolutely minimal. We could only look after each other. By that time that was the most we could do. Everything in that world was trying to kill us, and the only sane purpose any of us could find in it was to try to keep as many humans alive as possible.

On the day in question we were hacking through the densest forest any of us had ever seen. The trees grew so close together they were touching, and you could be confronted with solid walls of trunks which you might have to journey half a mile to go round. It was so tangled that it was even difficult to think, as if the building blocks of thought were too heavy to manipulate. It was unbearably, swelteringly hot, and we were carrying two of the unit on makeshift stretchers. They’d been injured in a firefight with villagers the week before. We’d bandaged their mouths up, so they wouldn’t scream, but I don’t think there was any one of us who couldn’t hear their agony in our head. They stank of shit and blood and skinFix, and one of them had Gap maggots in the wound in his leg. He said he could feel them eating him. Maybe he could, but we left them there, because they were eating the gangrene which would otherwise kill him even sooner than his injuries. Every one of us was cut somewhere, had ragged handmade stitches spidering over some part of our bodies. We hadn’t eaten in four days, and worse than that, we’d run out of cigarettes. Even the Rapt was getting low, and our Lieutenant was beginning to panic. He knew that none of us could go on much longer, but we were hundreds of miles away from anywhere. We were less than zombies by then, the walking dead’s walking dead. We didn’t care who won the war anymore. We didn’t really care if we were going to survive. We were just going to keep on fighting until we all dropped, and then that would be the end of it.

Mal and I were struggling along in the middle of the line carrying one of the stretchers, and so we weren’t the first to see the village. Mal was limping badly from mine wounds to his thighs, and the guy we were carrying was having a very bad time of it. He’d taken a head shot and you could see his brain. I was half delirious with hunger, exhaustion, and nicotine withdrawal, and when I first heard someone hiss that there was a village up ahead I was inclined to dismiss it as another illusion.

But soon enough we realized it was really there, and stopped. The tree cover round the village, now about two hundred yards ahead, was too thick for us to see anything even with binoculars. Faintly, carried through the thick and swirling air, we thought we could hear shouting, and even singing.

Gap villagers don’t sing. They simply don’t do it. They’re not very cheerful people.

The Lieutenant decided to leave one person with the wounded, and that the rest of us should go ahead to check out the situation. He motioned to me to lead us forward. He generally did.

We crawled across the forest floor, keeping behind bushes, sliding under piles of whispering leaves. An insane level of caution had become an unthinking instinct. There was nothing we wanted to see more than some of our own kind, but nothing we needed less than another firefight. As we got closer the singing became more distinct, and finally we were able to recognize the tune. It was from a song which was getting big airplay just before we went into The Gap, though the words seemed to be different.

Either way it meant the singers were some of ours, and we hauled ourselves to our feet and walked the rest of the way, Mal and I walking point. I don’t know what Mal was thinking—about noodles, probably—but I was fantasizing about cigarettes. I could almost feel the smoke in my lungs. I thought I might try having five at once.

The village was in a large clearing, and from forty yards away we could see soldiers in the remnants of the same army fatigues we wore. They didn’t seem to be doing anything very much, seemed in fact to be wandering around with a glazed look in their eyes. There was something odd about them, and I held my hand back to the others, urging them to be quiet and keep out of direct sight.

No one wanted to be in that village more than I, but I was getting a weird feeling. Instead of going straight into the front, I led them around the side and we carefully approached the village from a different angle. The closer we got, the easier it became to distinguish another sound, beneath the guttural singing and shouting. It sounded a bit like crying, or more precisely, like a number of people crying very quietly.

You didn’t see many tears in The Gap. People were either dead or glad to still be alive. I looked at Mai. We turned to the Lieutenant and he shrugged, clearly out of his depth. Then we walked into the village.

The first thing we saw was a little girl. Both of her legs had been cut off at the knee, and she was tied to a board which was propped up against one of the houses. She was crying quietly to herself, her eyes gazing without sight past us into some inner world. As the others stared at her I ducked my head into the house. I nearly vomited when I saw what was inside, and I thought I’d seen everything by then.

When I came back out I felt as if the world had changed, and as if it would never be the same again. I signaled dreamily to Mal and we walked a little farther along the village path, mouths open against the smell. We could see other soldiers, half naked, wandering around some of the huts a little distance away, but that wasn’t what we were looking at.

Gap children’s bodies lay all over the ground, broken across paths and lolling out of the doorways of huts, some little more than babies, others in their early teens. Some were recently dead, others had bloated in the heat until their guts exploded. Many of the corpses seemed to have a distinctive wound, a deep slash across the throat. The dust was crusted brown with their blood.

We came upon a makeshift pen in which about ten children squatted in the dirt. Some were missing limbs, their stumps hastily cauterized. Others were bleeding to death there and then, while the remainder stared hopelessly up at the sky, flinching as they heard us approach. Most of them had been blinded.

The rest of the unit caught up with us then, grinding to a horrified halt, and as we stood staring we heard a shout, and turned to see a soldier pointing at us. He was standing in the clearing at the center of the village, and it looked as if there were others there. We left the pen and approached him, passing walls stained with splatters of blood. Yards away we stopped, and this is what we saw:

Ten soldiers, most naked and dripping with sweat, others with strange scraps of clothes still hung around them.

A small pile of children’s bodies, the clearing red with what had escaped from them.

Three live children, two girls and a boy, held down on their knees by makeshift wooden frames.

And in the middle of all this, nodding his head in time to the song which the soldiers were chanting, stood their Lieutenant. He alone of all the soldiers was more or less still in uniform, though his pants were around his ankles. He had his cock out, and was thrusting it in and out of a gash which had been cut across the throat of the five-year-old girl who was being held down in front of him. Her head was held up so that he could see her eyes as he worked. She was still alive.

We stood there for an eternity, without moving, as the other soldiers stared back at us. It felt as if the world had stopped.

I pulled the rifle from over my shoulder and shot the Lieutenant in the head.

That moment is there every second of my life. Just as a fact, like my muscles are a fact and the weather is a fact and the color of my hair is a fact. In retrospect, and maybe at the time, the rifle seemed to swing perfectly into position, to fit so snugly into my shoulder; and as I pulled the trigger I knew, as if my soul was carrying it home, that the bullet would hit the very atom I was aiming for.

That shot is my life, and for that instant I felt like an angel, of sorts: not redeeming, because I redeemed nothing, least of all myself. I was simply under a fate that fell from the heavens and flattened me into the ground. Sometimes when I wake in the night and wonder what has startled me, I think it is an echo of that shot, of that moment, and I wonder if it will ever cease.

Nearly cried quietly in the back of the car. I wished I could reach out to her, could tell her that it was a long time ago. I was glad that Vinaldi hadn’t described, and probably didn’t know, what we’d found in all of the huts in the village. The leftovers. We did what we could with skinFix and bandages, but it wasn’t very much. It wasn’t enough. Then we left the soldiers there, abandoning them to the forest.

Vinaldi was quiet, and then I heard a spark and the intake of breath as he lit a cigarette.

“One more little detail,” he said. “The man Jack shot, the Lieutenant? He was Arlond Maxen’s older brother. They were in the same unit, and Arlond made it back out.”

Nearly sniffed, and looked out of the window. She was a bright girl. She’d worked it out. Then in the rearview mirror I saw her eyes looking at mine, and she asked me a question. “What are you going to do now?”

I barely heard her, because I’d finally realized the Farms’ second purpose. They hadn’t been created just for spare parts. The group of men who came to them at night hadn’t been sneaking in. One of them owned the whole deal, and the payments made to the caretakers were simply to ensure their silence. I wondered why they’d never come to my Farm. I was hired under a false name. They couldn’t have known it was me.

It didn’t matter. The answer to Nearly’s question still came easily. “I’m going to kill Maxen,” I said.

“Is that going to solve anything?” she said sadly. “Is that going to bring anyone back?”

“I’m not doing it in the hope of solving something,” I replied. “I’m going to do it because I want to.”