The Last Good Man

Li Guiying

It’s noon when the riad’s double doors open to admit Li Guiying. She transits the passage in cautious steps, pausing to peer into every corner of the courtyard before she emerges. The sun is witness. It pours a rectangular column of light onto the tiles, the fountain, the citrus trees. The brilliance deepens, by contrast, the shade beneath the balcony—though this late in the year, the air remains cool, not even sixty degrees Fahrenheit.

Shaw has reorganized the courtyard furnishings, moving the chairs and the padded bench close to the fountain, where they’re under open sky. True objected to this, but he insisted on it. “Don’t worry. I’m watching.”

Of course he is. He told her last night he likes to know who his enemies are. He is using Guiying to draw them out. True doesn’t like it, but she resists the urge to look up. She’s not wearing her visor, so there’s nothing she could see anyway against the blinding sunlight.

She sits in one of the chairs as Guiying enters. Shaw stands behind her, stone-faced in his visor, assault rifle held casually in the crook of his arm. Guiying lowers her head in greeting. It is only the second time True has seen her in person.

She is thirty-four years old but still with the same waiflike figure and wispy, layered haircut that True remembers. Like that first time, she is finely dressed, wearing a tailored black business suit and carrying a large shoulder bag, clutching its strap in a white-knuckled grip. There are shadows under her dark eyes, and though her face is round, her cheeks are gaunt and striated with a faint red flush.

True gestures for her to sit on the bench. She does so, setting her bag on the ground beside feet sheathed in graceful black high-heeled shoes. She tries to keep her gaze on True but it drifts up, perhaps inevitably, to Shaw.

True waits, unwilling to direct the conversation. After a few seconds Guiying coughs softly into her hand. Then, in contrast to their first meeting years ago, she looks True in the eye, and her gaze is steady.

Details of that meeting come back to True and it’s not pleasant. All war is risk, Guiying said. Advancing technology demands to be used. Words that might have meant anything, but she clarifies their meaning now, and though her voice is a little hoarse, her English has become polished and her accent refined when she says, “I am responsible for the death of your son, Diego.”

At this admission, True feels her heart explode against her ribs. Eight years late, she thinks. It angers her, knowing that Guiying sought her friendship, watched her—out of guilt or insecurity, it makes no difference. And oh! it hurts to hear it said. But True did not come here for comfort. Only for the truth. At last, the truth.

Shaw, his voice a low growl, reminds them both, “It’s not just Diego. It’s hard to see past his spectacular exit, but there were more men with me on that mission. Do you know what their names were?”

The red streaks on Guiying’s cheeks deepen in color. “Their names were Francis Hue, Jesse Powers, Hector Chapin, Mason Abanov, and Shaw Walker.” Beside her the fountain sparkles in the hazy light. “It was a miscalculation,” she adds in clipped, determined syllables. “A mistake. I… wanted to prove the effectiveness of our autonomous capabilities. I wanted to show that the task given to those men could be done by my swarm instead… so that in the future there would be no need to risk the lives of our patriotic soldiers. It was a simple mission. I thought it was a perfect test. But there was an issue with the swarm’s instruction set, and… we did not have real-time communication to correct the aggressive response.”

True leans in, angry now. Guiying calls it a mistake, a miscalculation. Oh, yes. Because what she meant to do was show off her talents. She wanted to beat Shaw’s team, hijack their mission, leave them looking slow and ineffective with nothing left to do but quietly withdraw. And when it all went wrong… she abandoned them.

“You had communication,” True says. “You must have, because you instructed the last mech in the swarm not to attack, but to follow the survivors, even after they were captured. You knew they were alive.” She hears a rising strain in her voice but she presses on. “You knew where they were being held. Were you under orders to stay silent?”

“No,” Guiying says firmly, insistently. “My superiors did not know what had happened. I made a decision not to report it. Not then. This was my decision. I eliminated the data we received and I told them I was forced to destroy the swarm when it lost integrity and the components became scattered in the forest. I did this because I had to put my country first. We could not be seen as the cause of failure. Don’t you see? The recriminations that would have followed, the mistrust. Then after the video… I was afraid of how it would escalate, of what might happen.”

She draws in a sharp breath. “They were soldiers. They knew they might be sacrificed for a greater good.” She frowns down at the low table between them, composing herself, before returning her gaze to True. “It was your son, and so you think it was the wrong decision, but without cooperation between our countries, how many more would have died?”

“It wasn’t your decision to make,” True says, forcing the words past her constricted throat. She swallows and tries again. “You’re not sorry for what you did?”

“I’m sorry I had to do it.”

True presses her fist to her lips while in her mind she hears Lincoln saying, Someone’s got to do the dirty work.

Shaw picks that moment to step out from behind her. A cobra. Guiying shrinks from him, turning a shoulder to the unforgiving glint in his pale eyes.

“I never did finish the story, True,” he says in his calm way. “I didn’t tell you about our last stand. It was after Mason got hit. We’d been running for over an hour, and he’d been hit more than once. Then a bullet took him in the knee, shattered the joint. He couldn’t walk, but he could still shoot. Diego was all shot up too, hit in the side, the shoulder, the leg. And we still had Francis with us, though he was barely breathing, wasn’t gonna last long.

“I was the only one with no wounds, like I had a fucking force field around me. Mason told me, ‘I feel sorry for you. God clearly has plans for you and you are going to pay hell for catching the Old Man’s attention.’”

Shaw finally moves to sit down in the empty chair. He looks on edge, wound tight. “I told him what I thought of God.”

True glances at Guiying, listening with rapt, respectful attention.

Shaw says, “We set up a defensive position. Nothing else to do. And we held that position until we burned through all our ammo. Any UAV in the area should have observed that firefight. Command should have known, no matter what fake intelligence her office was sending them. That fucking Lincoln, he should have known. He was supposed to be shadowing us. He should have sent backup but we got nothing—and we had nothing left.”

There was a rescue effort. True knows this because Lincoln told her. But the first helicopter had to put down because of mechanical issues and by the time the second bird was on-scene, the forest was quiet and two men were missing.

Shaw doesn’t know this, or if he does, he chooses not to believe it. He says, “Francis had passed by that time, and Mason too. He took a final hit right through the eye. Diego was the last of my men. He was in bad shape, running on adrenaline. And me? I wasn’t even bleeding. God’s a hell of a joker.”

His knuckles are white as he grips the Triple-Y.

“Diego didn’t want to surrender. He still had fight in him. He got his knife out. Said we were gonna make them kill us. I said okay, that’s how it would be—and we tried. There were just too damn many of them, and Saomong knew the propaganda value of taking us alive.”

True closes her eyes, tips her head back. Be still, she thinks as grief floods in again, a fresh tide, but she is proud, too. So proud. And horrified.

We’re gonna make them kill us.

A warrior’s resolve, when there’s no way out.

Shaw clears his throat. She opens her eyes. He’s looking away, looking into the past when he says, “So now you’ve heard it all, True. I hope it was worth the visit.”

She presses her fist over her racing heart, feeling used up, flushed and dizzy. She nods to cover the seconds it takes for her to remember how to speak. Then she tells him, “It was worth it.”

Guiying clutches the arms of her chair so tightly her hands look almost skeletal. “I am sorry,” she says. “I am sorry for the blood on my hands. I have tried to make up for it in the years since. I’ve tried to do good things. Then last night two more men died. That wasn’t necessary. It needs to stop.”

Shaw leans forward. “You triggered that when you hired them.” His words come at a fast, aggressive pace. “That was an autonomous response. It worked exactly the way it was supposed to. Not like that night in the forest. You fucked up. You fielded your swarm too early. The algorithms weren’t reliable. And another mistake—your swarm was too damn small. If you’d had sixty mechs out there, or a hundred, you could have taken care of us with no problem, no questions, no drama. No consequences. No need to be here today.”

She stares at him in shock, looking as if her courage has deserted her. Is she on the verge of panic? Will she try to run? No. She recovers herself, retreating into formal academic speech, even as tears swim in her eyes. “I believe you are correct in your evaluations. The swarm had been tested. We believed it to be combat-ready, but it was too small.”

“Why did you come here?” True asks her.

Guiying sounds plaintive when she says, “I thought it was over. I am here to ensure it is over”—her delicate fingers slide into an angled pocket on the front of her tailored jacket and the hair on the back of True’s neck stands up—“for the protection of my government, my country.”

True lunges to her feet, sure they’ve made a fatal mistake, that beneath that stiff, tailored jacket, or maybe in her shoulder bag, Li Guiying carries explosives that she means to detonate, eliminating all of them and burying this tragedy in the past.

Shaw leans in. He has taken off the centipede bracelet. It’s quiescent as he lays it on the little table.

Guiying’s fingers pull a tissue out of her pocket. She dabs at her eyes with it, even as she casts a wary gaze at the centipede. “A biomimetic. Meant for me?”

Shaw answers, “Your choice.”

“Don’t touch it,” True warns her. “It’s toxic.”

Shaw says, “Painless justice. Doesn’t take long. Less time than Diego was screaming.”

True’s stern self-control breaks in the face of this image. The video restarts in her head. Her breathing picks up and nausea burns in her belly as she sees again the flames licking Diego’s wounded body.

Guiying says softly, “I still see it too.”

True’s anger flares. Her response is a vindictive whisper: “Good.”

But a memory rushes up as if in opposition. She finds herself recalling the sense of consolation she felt as Miles walked free from his cell. That moment eased the dark gravity of the past. In contrast this… this moment… the weight of her hostility, the burden of her resentment, is crushing her heart.

Years ago, True used to fantasize revenge… but those fantasies never wore the face of this brilliant, remorseful woman—as scarred by war as any of them—who even now reaches for the centipede.

Before Guiying’s small fingers can touch it, True is there.

“No,” she says. An isolated word, swiftly repeated. “No! Get back! That is not how this is going to play.”

To ensure it, she stomps the edge of the table. The table flips. Guiying snatches her hand away, scrambles from the bench. The centipede spills to the courtyard’s tiled floor, where True crushes it under her boot.

She lifts her chin, turns to face Shaw, and finds herself staring down the barrel of his Triple-Y. He’s moved back several steps to get clear of the chairs. His back is to a pillar. A twitch of his finger is all that’s needed to end her life and Guiying’s, too. True forces herself to look up past the weapon, to meet his eyes, veiled by the screen of his visor. Oh yes, he’s pissed off. But he hasn’t pulled the trigger yet.

She draws a shaky breath and turns to Guiying. “No deal, no promises. Just get out. Go now.”

“That’s all?” Shaw demands in a voice vibrant with locked-in rage. “After what she did to Diego?”

Guiying hasn’t moved. She stares at Shaw. A mouse caught in the cobra’s gaze.

“Her death won’t balance his,” True says heavily. “And I want no part of a murder. I know Diego would have stepped up. Stopped this. So—”

She interrupts herself as a huge, winged shadow, faint and fast, sweeps the length of the courtyard. “Are they here?” she asks anxiously, looking up, squinting against the sun’s blinding light, turning in a dizzying circle to survey the sky.

“I don’t know.” Shaw sounds worried. “I’ve got no reports. I don’t know what that was. It’s got to be stealthed. Get under cover.”

Good advice.

True lowers her sun-dazzled gaze to Guiying, who still hasn’t moved. “Get out of sight,” True tells her. It’s not a request. True grabs her daypack and Guiying’s arm, hauling her under the shelter of the balcony.

The nearness of death has left Guiying shivering and pale. “What is it?” she whispers. “What’s happened? What’s going on?”

“You must have known you’d be followed here.”

“Yes. But I believed I would have time. True, please. I need to make it right.”

“You can’t,” True tells her coldly. “Don’t ever again look to me for comfort or for absolution. I’ve got nothing to offer you. Just live with it. Live with what happened. Like I do.”

She looks across the corner of the courtyard to Shaw, who stands in shadow, his daypack on his shoulder, his assault rifle in the crook of his arm, his data glove working as he studies the display on his visor, “Shaw, what have you got?”

“Nothing. Streets are quiet.”

Something cast that shadow. “We need to move out before ground troops show.”

He looks up. “You’re holding on to unfinished business.”

True’s grip on Guiying tightens as he moves through the shade of the balcony, closing the distance between them in his quick silent way. She puts Guiying behind her. The slight shake of his head reads as a judgment on the futility of this move. She argues anyway. “You said this was for me to take care of. I’ve done that. It’s over.”

The mission’s over. There are no further steps to take, no more mysteries to unravel, no more guilty parties to uncover. It’s done. But it’s left her hollow. There’s no sense of closure, no release. The old scars remain, and they have not faded.

As he looms close, she adds, unsure if she’s speaking to herself or to him, “I thought if I knew what happened, if I understood it…”

What? What had she expected? Had she hoped to make peace with what had happened? “Nothing has changed,” she says, looking up at him. Bitter words.

“Nothing ever changes,” he tells her. “It can’t. Because we all died in that forest. Even you, True.” His gaze shifts to look past her shoulder to Guiying. “Even her. Even if you never set foot in the place.”

No raving madman, him. But a killer all the same. Focused and determined. Eight years spent walling himself off from redemption. Why?

How did it come to this?

True ponders it, studying him with a tired, unselfconscious gaze, the same way she once gazed into the eyes of her newborns, striving to see into their futures, to glimpse the influence, the effect their souls might have on the world. For better? she would ask herself. For worse? With Shaw though, she strives to imagine the past. His path circumscribed by the gravity of what happened in Burma and by things that went before.

As if to assure her of his irrevocable fall, he reminds her in his soft dangerous voice, “No qualms.”

She feels it coming, the cobra’s strike. His gaze shifts. He’s a half step past her, faster than she can react. A squeak, a gasp from Guiying as his gloved hand grips her throat, right under her jaw. At the same time, his scarred hand moves to block True from reaching for her pistol.

But she has no intention of pulling a gun on him. She puts her hands up instead, palms out, backpedaling as she screams at him, “Let her go! Shaw, let her go.”

It’s not what he wants to hear. He wants her on his side. Fury contorts his face. Maybe it’s hate. He shoves Guiying hard, sending her tumbling to the tiles. “You want her?” he demands, turning to True. “She’s yours, then. None of this matters anyway.”

“Maybe it doesn’t to you.” The explosive violence in him is so close to the surface. She should just shut the fuck up. Let him go before she brings it down on herself. But her gaze drifts to Guiying choking on the floor—and she takes the chance. “Maybe it doesn’t matter to you, Shaw, but it matters to the rest of us.”

“You want to believe that. But there’s plenty like me. More all the time, ’cause good men don’t last. Diego was a good man and Saomong hated him for it, for daring to be a good man.”

“That is not why it happened! They didn’t know him. They didn’t know anything about him. They took him because he was already dying. If you were the one wounded, they would have taken you.”

“That’s not how God wrote the story, True.”

It’s his concluding statement. The end of the debate. He walks on, walks away toward the passage. She turns to stare after him, knowing she was wrong before, sure now there is still one more mystery, one more part of the story he hasn’t told her. The core of it, maybe. The black heart.

Guiying is curled on the tiles, crying softly. True crouches beside her, a hand on her shoulder. “Stay here,” she says. “Your people will come.” Then she goes after Shaw, pausing at the mouth of the passage just long enough to retrieve the wafer-shaped beetle from the wall.

Light floods into the passage as the doors swing inward. Shaw slips past them, into the street. She hurries until she’s only a step behind. Last chance.

“Shaw—”

He turns. “You don’t fucking give up, do you?”

“Nothing changes,” she reminds him.

“Shit.”

“You need to come home, Shaw.”

“You know that’s not going to happen. Can’t happen.”

She shifts her attack, a new angle. “You heard about our fighter pilot?”

“Your dead fighter pilot? Yeah, I heard Rihab claimed it.”

“Al-Furat,” she corrects.

“Al-Furat is Rihab now. The kid hates drones. And he’s a fuckin’ madman. Vicious. Worse than Hussam.”

“Come on,” True protests. “He’s nineteen.”

“Sure, but he’s lived harder than you and me. He was six when a drone strike killed his mom and two sisters. Burned half his body. Hard to forgive shit like that. You should know how that works.”

“Okay. I get it.”

“Your pilot was done when she pulled the trigger on those technicals that followed you out of Tadmur. A remote operator, throwing down hellfire to cause the only kills on the mission, no risk at all to herself. No way Rihab could let that go.”

“Did you help him?” She steps closer, wanting the truth, even now. “Lincoln thinks you did. He doesn’t believe Rihab could have set up the operation on his own. And he will come after you, if you don’t come home.”

“Fuck Lincoln,” Shaw says, backing away, backing down the hill. His truck, True remembers, is parked around the corner. “I gave him a peace treaty.”

Hope gives a rising inflection to her voice as she asks, “So you didn’t help Rihab?”

This is what she wants to believe. She wants confirmation that he had nothing to do with Renata’s death. The other things he’s done during eight lost years—they’re real. No denying it. She’s heard Miles’s graphic description of his capture and the executions. But she’s also heard Shaw pleading for mercy: Let him live. Take me instead. She is still striving to reconcile both truths.

“Think about it, True,” Shaw says in that low, lethal tone that makes her catch her breath. “I was paid to be protection for Al-Furat, and your operation kicked my ass. You tell Lincoln if he wants to come after me, join the party. Rihab’s already gunning for me, but I’ll—”

Whatever threat or promise he is about to make is interrupted by a sharp crack from overhead, like metal snapping.