Chapter 27: Masters of War

The agony vanished and his vision cleared.

Sunlight glowed through faded curtains. She cradled his head in her lap, stroking his hair, humming a soft, tuneless song. Her smile was a bullet to the heart.

A low droning came from everywhere and nowhere; a cold, machine sound. He pushed it down. It was replaced by the squawk of gulls.

He sat up, passing a hand over his face. “You died.”

She nodded, sadly.

“Am I dead too,” he asked, hoping beyond hope.

She wrapped her arms around him from behind and rested her chin on his shoulder. “You’re getting there.”

The cold metal of the chair bit his skin and a stinging pain filled his head, and he couldn’t feel her anymore. Frantic, he focused on the slight weight of her against his back, fixated on it until it became real again.

Water dripped from his face and streamed down his chest and arms in icy rivulets. He stared at it, numb.

“They’re trying to wake you,” she explained. “Your heart rate is dropping. They’ll administer adrenaline next.”

“I don’t want to wake up.” Her name, what was her name. “I want to be with you.”

“Stay, then,” she whispered, against the nape of his neck. “It’ll be all right. It won’t hurt.”

The droning grew louder. The bed and the gulls and the vice-grip of her arms became a little less real, and he was slipping.

“Wait,” he said, but she was gone.

The light was gone.

Her name was

“Wake up.”

Grey. Shapes, moving. Sounds. Chemical smell. His head throbbed to a savage beat.

Pain. Something dragged at the back of his neck. Water dripped slow and irregular from his fingertips and down his face. His wet shirt clung to his skin.

“What is your name.”

The voice came from everywhere as the grey haze paled to a white sharper than a scalpel. Sharper than a needle. His mouth opened and closed as he squinted into the blinding light.

“What is your name.”

He shook his head, once. No energy for more. He should stand up, remove the needle, find the source of the voice and cut it down. He had a reason to do those things, but he couldn’t remember what it was.

Needle.

What needle.

His head dropped. He saw his arms, bound to the chair with thick straps. There was no needle. Pain slivered behind his eyes.

What was his name. What needle.

White walls. White everything, except the blood dripping from his chin; he tried to reorder his mind, but it hurt. It all hurt, and he didn’t know his name.

He forgot what he was looking at and why.

There was blood on his shirt.

“What is your name.”

“I don’t know.” The voice sounded like loose gravel, like cut glass. His voice.

The light was extinguished, leaving him in merciful darkness. “You are Operative 74.”

He clung to that scrap of truth as the pain diminished.

He was Operative 74.

74 stood in his darkened room, fighting the throbbing in his temples.

The room was small. Four paces from the door to the bed. Three from the bed to the sink. Two from the sink to the shower. The darkness and closeness pressed on him. Sometimes it was a comfort, but not today.

He fumbled open the top button of his shirt. Silver insignia gleamed on the high, square collar.

A wave of pain hit him like a left hook and he bent double, arms braced against the sink, until it ebbed. When he looked up his mirror image stared back at him with a stranger’s eyes.

It had started upon his transfer to Alpha Base from…somewhere else. A different base, maybe an outpost; he couldn’t remember. He remembered being issued a uniform and a knife, which he should have already had. He remembered being given a physical exam. A haircut. That wasn’t…

Fog again. Covering everything. He had been transferred to Alpha Base four months ago. He had felt like this ever since.

He couldn’t actually remember a time when he hadn’t felt this way. Sometimes, though, when he focused, he thought things had been different once. That he had been in a different kind of place—

A sharp knock thrust him back into reality. Back into the fog.

63 waited in the hall, outfitted for the surface. His scarred face was blank, his uniform perfect.

When 74 closed the door the knob rattled in his hand; he made a fist until the tremor passed. Everything was white and the lights were too bright.

“Top button,” 63 said.

74 fastened it on the third try.

As 63 fell into step beside him, boots clicking on the polished floor, 74 wondered if he got headaches too, if he also couldn’t sleep through the night. He hoped so. He hoped 63 was in agony.

Then he wondered why he’d thought that.

It didn’t matter. He had bigger worries. He was not operating at an optimal level. He wasn’t sure how long he could ignore the headaches, or the dreams. Or it. Her.

He subtly checked for her, careful not to turn his head. But the hallway was empty.

The lift hissed open. They stepped inside in unison, and turned to face the doors in unison.

74 clasped his hands behind his back as they hurtled up. He hated surface patrol, the choking air and skulking, shifty-eyed crowds. Better to be underground, where no one looked at him.

“Do you have scars.” 63 spoke unexpectedly, still staring straight ahead.

63’s scar was on his jaw. 74 had them as well, all down his right arm and side, the skin twisted like melted and re-hardened wax; hidden by his uniform. “Yes.”

“Do you remember how you got them?”

74 didn’t know how to answer. They’d always been there, he’d always had them. That’s what they’d told him in Medical.

“Well. I don’t remember.” The doors opened and 63 strode out without waiting for a reply.

It didn’t matter.

He shrugged out of his shirt before the mirror, turning his arm to better see the red, raised scar tissue. He could not lift that arm to a ninety-degree angle. No one could ever find out or he’d be Retired.

“It’s all right to be afraid.” The soft voice came from somewhere behind him.

She wasn’t in the mirror. She never was.

He shouldn’t look.

74 glanced over his shoulder. A young woman sat on his bed with her knees drawn up under her chin, black curls tied back from her face. She had a scar too, a violent pink indent in her soft brown cheek.

He’d given her that scar. 74 was sure of it. He was sure she had been real, once, and that he’d killed her.

“You’re not here.”

She smiled. It looked sad. “Obviously.”

74 hesitated, then showed her his arm. “Do you know how this happened?”

“I only know the things you know.” She walked over to stand beside him. He felt her there. Not as a warmth, but as a distortion in space. “I’m a projection of your subconscious.”

If he reached out to touch her she would disappear, but he waited.

His head didn’t hurt when she was there. Even when his traitorous mind showed him her empty face and staring eyes, wet hair plastered to her cheeks and forehead. Even when she held out her bloody palms and asked him why. Even now. When he saw her he felt something close to peace.

“The fire was red. You were afraid.” She stared into the mirror; now 74 could see her beside him, sad and terrible and false. “Do you miss me?”

“You know everything I know.” 74 extended his hand, and she vanished.

The headache returned with a vengeance, and he pressed his forehead against the cool surface of the mirror.

74 holstered his sidearm and stepped away from the body, letting the Regulars move in. They had names, not numbers. They whispered behind their hands and flinched when he looked at them.

Last night he’d dreamed that he was a human being. In the dream he hadn’t worn black, hadn’t been armed, and the air had been clean. He’d dreamed of being talked to, of being touched, and now he wondered idly what that would be like.

74 climbed up out of the root cellar, squinting in the bitter spring daylight.

Maybe that was why he’d been reassigned. Maybe he’d committed some transgression wherever he’d been stationed before…a border outpost, he was certain now. There were trees. Somehow, there had been trees.

Why couldn’t he remember?

63 waited for him in the street, holding the leash. The black dog sat down promptly when it saw him. Like 74, it had been trained to kill and obey. To hunt. But there was a brightness in its eyes. It was alive, still. It could feel.

“The contraband was inside.” He accepted the lead from 63 and wrapped it around his fist. “Rifles from the Houston gunworks.”

The dog also wanted to be touched; it pushed its cold nose into his palm, laying back its ears as he scratched beneath its muzzle.

63 gave him a narrow look, and 74 realized his mistake. The familiarity. He swatted the sleek head away, ignoring the soft whine.

“Another cache,” 63 said, after a long pause. “Troubling.”

The Regulars filed out with the body bag and crates of weapons. One of them reminded him of her — slender, pretty, with clever dark eyes. She wasn’t afraid of him. Or maybe he just wished she wasn’t.

When he looked at her he knew exactly how her hand would feel in his. He had held her hand, once. Or someone’s hand.

“She’s not me, because I’m dead.” The apparition stood at his elbow, wearing a red dress. There was no reason for that to hurt. “You killed me.”

She showed him her palm. The blood on it was fresh and bright. He had held that hand. He had held her. As she died? No, no…before.

“You weren’t always a monster,” she explained, as dark, fatal blood soaked the front of her dress. “This is a choice you made.”

“No,” 74 said, before he realized what he was doing.

63’s eyes narrowed to blue slits, and 74 jerked on the dog’s lead, repeating the statement. It whined again, and he wondered what the prickling in his stomach meant.

63 stared a long time. “We must stop these smugglers. High Command will want your full report.” He turned on his heel and marched back down the narrow street, and 74 let out the breath he’d been holding.

“You wanted to go to New Columbia once,” the hallucination said. “With Angie.”

The dog looked up at him and whimpered, and this time 74 stroked its head until its tail slapped the pavement.

He didn’t remember wanting to go to New Columbia. He didn’t know who Angie was. He didn’t recall ever wanting anything at all.

There were whispers of war in the south, fires along the border. 74 wasn’t sure if the fire was real or code for insurgency, but either way the smoke had reached the capital.

The city had a name. It was Delphi, a shortened variant of its pre-Collapse designation.

He had been giving too much thought to names. Cities had them, but vehicles and rifles and Operatives and dogs were numbered. This was strange. It followed him.

A second city existed beneath Delphi in a network of ancient tunnels, where thousands of undesirables lived and died in the claustrophobic dark. It also had a name. He did not.

Papers in possession of the smuggler he’d shot pointed to larger caches of weapons in the Undermarket. Instead of putting boots on the ground, High Command opted for a more efficient solution.

74 watched through the lens of his gas mask as hoses pumped poison into the tunnels. They’d sealed all the entrances and exits except one. He stood with three detachments of Regulars in the cold spring rain and waited for the rats to run out.

The four-legged sort came first. Then the rest.

A man stumbled out, clawing at his throat, blood streaming from his mouth and eyes. He fell down dead, and then came a flood tide of screaming, choking people, escaping the poison underground only to run into a hail of bullets above.

74 fired. He didn’t miss once. As the pile of bodies grew higher he saw her, standing off to the side with hollow grief in her eyes. He wished he could look away.

“Do you dream.”

74 blinked. He was in the lift with 63. The mask carrier dangled from his unfeeling fingers. Screams echoed in his ears.

“Do you dream,” 63 repeated.

“No,” he lied.

63 turned away as the doors open. “I do. I dream of a white room.”

Before 74 could tell him that he’d also had this dream, 63 was gone.

The doctor pulled 74’s file up and read, brow furrowed. She wasn’t an Operative. She was permitted to show concern, or confusion, or whatever it was that drew her mouth downwards.

74 waited. They’d taken his blood, shined a light into his eyes, taped electrodes to his temple and examined carefully the jagged lines that had appeared afterward on the screen as they asked him a series of bizarre questions. How he felt. If he was in pain. Did he get tired. Had he ever felt hunger. The doctor wore gloves when she touched him.

“When did this start?” The doctor’s voice was as calm and unreadable as any Operative’s. What was her name, he wondered.

The ghost appeared instantly at the doctor’s elbow. He imagined the white glow of the screen on her face, little squares of light reflected in her dark eyes. Today she wore traveling clothes.

“Lie,” she whispered.

74 obeyed. “Three days ago.”

A pause. An entry into the computer. “Just migraines and insomnia. Correct?”

“Lie,” she whispered again.

74 was possessed with a bone-deep desire to make her happy, to earn her forgiveness. She had left him. Ever since the Undermarket he’d only seen her in his nightmares, dying. She hadn’t spoken to him. No one had spoken to him in seventeen days.

“Yes,” he said.

“When you sleep, do you dream?”

74 glanced to the side. She shook her head, slowly, and held a finger to her lips.

“No,” he said. “Never.”

“Wait here,” the doctor told him, and strode from the room.

When 74 looked back to the hallucination, he saw that a little white flower had appeared in her hair, tucked behind her ear. That was new. It suited her.

“Maybe she left your records up,” she said. “Go look.”

He hoped she would stay and talk to him. Even if she reminded him that he was worse than an animal, even if she described again how he’d killed her…he just wanted to hear her voice.

“I missed you too,” she said. “Quick. Before she comes back.”

74 jerked the screen around and confronted his file.

Operative A1074. A picture of himself he didn’t recall having taken; his hair was long, his face unshaved. His eyes were dull and empty.

He scrolled quickly through his unremembered history. There was no birth date, but there was a Date Entered Into Service.

The file said ‘Reconditioning’, and provided two dates. It said ‘Monitor closely’ and ‘2x dose’. It asked for biometrics when he tried to see where he’d been stationed before, but he did not put his hand on the scanner.

“What’s the number in front of your name?”

He couldn’t see her now, but her voice was still clear.

74 returned the monitor to its original position. “Operatives do not have names.”

“You had a name when you were with me.” Her voice was sad. “Ask the doctor about that number ten.”

The doctor returned with a small pill bottle. It rattled. “We’ve increased the dosage of your yellows. This will take care of your symptoms.”

He stared at the orange plastic bottle, the only color in the room.

“What else,” the doctor said. “I can tell you have a question.”

74 pocketed it. “What is the function of the first two digits of Operative designations.”

“They’re arbitrarily assigned.” The doctor typed something into the computer. She didn’t look at him. “Like the last two digits. Come back in a week for a checkup.”

Out in the hall, 74 took a deep lungful of cold, recycled air.

“She’s lying.” The words were spoken in a sing-song tone. “She suspects. If you don’t come back next week she’ll know for sure, and if they look inside your head—”

74 rubbed his eyes. There was nothing there. No one. He saw nothing.

“Go to the sublevels,” she said. The hallway was empty. “You’ve done it before.”

He hadn’t. But he would.

It took him weeks to work up the courage. In all that time he was alone; no sight or sound of her. That, in the end, was what pushed him to it.

Maintenance tunnels honeycombed the base. Their low ceilings and dim orange lights made 74 feel like he was being crushed. He should’ve just taken the lift down to the sublevels and walked the corridors. No one would stop an Operative, but they might stop him.

“You are an Operative.” She was still in her traveling clothes, and walked comfortably beside him. Why, why did it hurt. “Don’t forget that.”

“Was I always?”

She gave him a derisive look. Almost a sneer. “No matter how many times you try to run, it’s all you’ll ever be.”

“I would never run,” 74 said, examining a faded map pasted onto the wall at a three-way junction. “I’m loyal to the Coalition.”

She laughed, and he looked around in consternation before remembering that no one else could hear her. “Then how come you’re sneaking around your own base?”

Because every night he dreamed of a gunshot, her body lying still and bloody in the dirt. And because she was right: he had been here before.

“Angie figured it out,” she said. “She showed you.”

“Who’s Angie.”

“If you don’t know, how should I?” It was biting. “I’m you. I’m dead. You have to try harder to remember.”

“Remember what,” he said, to nothing. She had gone again.

74 paused in the middle of the hallway. Water dripped. The air was thin. None of this was familiar to him, save the sensation of having disappointed her.

This was foolish. It was insane. He had no business here.

74 wound back through the maze of maintenance tunnels, emerging in a storage bay and taking the lift back to his quarters.

Inside, he stared at the row of pill bottles line up above his sink. Red, yellow, blue. He shook them out into his hand - two of each. They sat there, heavy and full of promises.

He washed it down the sink, then collapsed onto his unmade bed and didn’t move again until morning.

War broke out in earnest, a wildfire consuming the southwest. The Border War, rekindled.

New Columbia attacked with vehicle-borne explosives and IEDs, with poisoned wells, with night raids. Radio bulletins called it a skirmish and neglected to mention why so many troops were being mobilized to the front.

74 and 63 remained in Delphi, on loyalty patrols and peacekeeping duties. Plenty of things were born in the spring, including uprisings conceived from winter malcontent. Official orders were to come down hard on every whisper of disloyalty.

Sometimes when an alert went out or they were directed to perform a loyalty check on a certain sector, 74 quietly turned the volume down on the radio and kept their vehicle on its predetermined path.

The small rebellion troubled him, but not for the reasons he’d expected: he didn’t wonder why he was doing it. He wondered why he’d never done it before.

Even more troubling was the fact that 63 saw it all and said nothing.