[ 0.1 ] - zaporizhzhia

Fire carved across her skin, and the air shimmered as in dreams and gas stoves. Breaths came to her in gasps. The heat wicked away the last of her clarity. No obvious shapes, no cohesive concepts left; just blurred lines and blurry tears. Everything ran together like melted asphalt. Everything hurt, and not for the first time, M4 wished that she could not feel.

“I have brought you your death,” Agent observed.

Rockets fell distantly. Each emitted a scream not unlike that of a human as it flew. M4 could not distinguish these from the real screams, coming still more distantly, twisted as light by the rippling air into whispers daggering into her ears. All of these mixed together, percussed by the rumbling earth into the rhythm of a lullaby, rocking the city into the infancy of rubble. Enough of it and anyone would want to sleep forever. But no: she wasn’t about to die, though neither of the two standing there in the inferno knew it yet. So they carried on as if everything was about to go according to plan.

The taller one’s shoes squelched down in the softening, runny floor; the shorter one dangled limply six inches off of it, pawing like a wounded kitten at her neck. Tears squeezed out of M4’s eyes. Maybe it was Agent who squeezed them out, up through the vice-grip valve she had on M4’s throat. Squeeze a bit more and maybe blood would start coming out. More tightly still, and who knows what else. Life would be out in a fountain.

There was no pleasure in killing, but the control made willful tugs at the corner of her lips. She shook the smaller woman’s body around, just to see how it moved — if it was more human than machine. If it would kick as much as it cried. Dance, or supplicate, or what other behavior had it learned from its masters and dying beggars? She wondered if it would burn, and her hand twitched as if to throw. “Did you think you’d get away with our secrets? This is the end, and the time’s here to take a curtain call. You should witness the whole scene.”

M4 gasped as the choke tightened, her hands ripping seams in themselves trying to pry the metal claw away from her throat.

Agent brought her down close. “Look at me. Open your eyes,” she said. “Look at me, M4-A1.”

Look death in the face, would she? M4 complied, knowing that there was nothing to see. Everything was in the feeling of it, chaos curled tight and folded around them like a finger-trap. Every struggling breath it closed in on them more, sharp white heat crisping the skin on their shins, concrete cracking like gunshots where the flames licked up the buildings, gunshots cracking like concrete from a mile away. The thunder of artillery guns rolled over the city on treads. Wind howled through the bombed-out wreck of a building, whipped the flames into a frenzy. Mayfly clouds of embers burst around them. Those were the walls of this place and it was suffocating, and it was going to crush her if Agent did not.

Agent cocked her head, considering the Doll within her fist. She had that fleeting, noncommittal curiosity of a boy who’d got ahold of butterfly by the wings. “Interesting.” Agent would not pull her apart yet. She had to take a good look. There was nothing to be learned or revelations to be had — her judgment had been made already. She was simply looking for confirmation. Agent nodded when she found it. “Yes. Even when you are about to die, you have a different look in your eyes than other Dolls. It looks like frustration. Hate. It looks like emotion.”

“That’s what they have done to you, you poor girl. They have taught you to feel. So tell me, how do you feel?” She doubled up her grip, crushing the girl’s trachea. M4’s body convulsed. “How does this feel? Hm? Does the little Doll feel hurt?” Agent slammed her into a wall and dragged her skin across the hot concrete toward the window. “Look at what you rats have accomplished. Well there’s your mousetrap. Here we are.” A pistol appeared in her hand. “First comes you. Then the rest of your squadron, and then every single half-baked circuit stuffer that you brought with you into this city. What will they do without you? What do you think? Are you going to let yourself die here? Leave your infantile troops to be chewed up?”

Before M4 could formulate a thought, Agent had already pried her jaws apart with the barrel of the gun. M4 tasted oil and steel as it thrust against the back of her throat.

“That was a joke. Machines do not have a choice. You were never built to have a choice, and you don’t have one now. In a few seconds, you will die, and there will be no choice left for your dolls, either.”

“Forget a few seconds, I’ll send you to hell right now.”

Agent twisted her body around. Too late. M16 put ten bullets into Agent’s shoulder. The joint blew apart in a shower of sparks and the arm fell to the ground, lifeless finger still curled around the trigger. M4 worked her jaw soundlessly and coughed again, painfully. The woman did not flinch or acknowledge the wound in any way except pronounced displeasure. “You!”

“This ends here.” M16 stepped into the room from the hall, rifle trained on Agent.

Agent’s remaining arm thrust M4 in front of her. “Drop the gun or I’ll crush her skull.”

“Don’t be stupid. I’ve also got a hostage. Pull anything and you’ll wish you hadn’t.”

This gave Agent pause. M16 pressed on, knowing that she had at least the one listener.

“I sure would’ve liked to kill you, but that’s not what I came here for. Mostly. To be honest I was really hoping with all my heart to have the chance to punt you over the Straits of Gibraltar.” She grinned. “Well. Next time.”

M4 groaned. M16 hurried to the point.

“Let’s be honest: you’ve been talking through your teeth. ‘Did you think you’d get away’? Rhetorical questions don’t suit your style. Yeah, we’re gone. Your data’s out of the bag. And you didn’t stand a snowball’s chance in here of getting it back, and you knew that.”

M16 paced a ring around the Ferri doll, hands dropping to her sides. Agent turned her body to keep up with her, looking more and more dispassionate with every passing word, until it had been a circle-and-a-half and the Ferri Doll’s face was an utter emotional vacuum.

”You, career big talker and dilettante sore loser, somehow got your hands on an accurate assessment of the situation untainted by your engorged ego. Not that that takes much in the cranial department, lucky for you. We have your data, you don’t. It’s one hell of a belt that mommy’s going to show you when you’ve tell her that you’ve let things slip. So you turned to bullying my little girl.” She came to a halt. “Suppose you quit that and gave her back?”

“Interesting,” Agent said. “Interesting! You’re proposing a trade. The core data for the life of a robot.”

“I see that even Blackjacks can read between the lines. Congratutlations.” She removed the memory stick from her pocket, dangled it like a cigarette. The prism was in too esoteric of a format to be accessed without a mainframe, and those were not found in the heat of battle, or in this city at all. Both of them knew that it had been neither read nor copied, because that was impossible. It had been stolen just an hour before.

The doll’s eyes rested on it just long enough for M16 to know that things were going to turn out. Yes, Agent never believed in hiding her hand. Not when she thought it was the superior.

“Terrific.” She shook her head. “This flimsy paper that you struggled so long for, gambled away an army for, all because you don’t want me to kill your beloved sister.”

“Choice, Agent.” M16 showed teeth. “It’s your choice.”

“You are all mistakes,” she said. “That’s all. Give me the file and I will give you your trash back.”

She made as if to snatch the prism from M16’s outstretched fingers, then jerked back as a hole appeared in her midriff. It gaped wide in cross-section, edges dripping molten metal and plastic to reveal the circuitry and wires running through her abdomen. M16 stepped away. Agent stumbled. The hole ripped through her side and up through her shoulder in a splatter of liquid material. Then her neck separated in a line, burned away by the same. Her head bounced a few times on the ground with hard, metallic thumps, and was cut off in its roll by the point of an invisible boot.

The air sifted away to reveal a woman standing over Agent’s body, gripping a smoking knife and grinding the skull beneath her shoe. She was wrapped in a thin cloak that shimmered with every color, dominated by tones of the dusty fire that surrounded them now. She looked sharply at M16 before bending over the body and going to work. “What was that?”

M16 beamed at the newcomer. “I kept her attention for near a century, Star, I knew you’d make it.”

“Sure. Last time I overestimate the size of your mouth. Though I didn’t know that was possible.” ST AR-15 whittled away the last limb and tossed it into the fire in the stairwell. “Let’s get out of here. M4, are you alright?”

M4 braced herself against M16’s body, struggling to stand up.

M16 reached an arm down and swept the girl up in her arms. “Yeah, yeah, up we go, princess. You owe us one. Maybe a few, giving me a heart attack like this.”

“Th-thanks.” M4 mumbled, relief coloring her whispered voice. “Where’s Soppo?”

A fourth figure poked her head into the room, eyes wide. Upon seeing the girl in M16’s arms, SOPMOD II squealed and threw herself onto her. Her gun clattered on the floor, forgotten. Round cameras like eyeballs fell through her fingers and rolled across the floor.

“M4!” Soppo nuzzled into her chest. M4 stroked the new girl’s head. Soppo’s face was grimy with oil and long scratches traced across her cheek where bullets had grazed her face. Ash streaked her hair. M4 reached up to brush these away. Soppo laughed and blinked away the creases in her forehead. “You’re okay. I’m just — I’m so —”

“Sop.” Star’s tongue was ironclad. Soppo jerked her head up, face blank. Then she remembered what awaited them outside.

“It’s, um, bad. Blackjacks are coming in like a net. We weren’t very quiet getting here.”

“Isn’t anything we didn’t just handle. Come on, round two. And I’m sure Soppo wouldn’t mind, would ya?”

Soppo giggled as M16 threw another arm about her, bringing her close. M4 tried for a smile up at her. The three of them cut the look of two stooges and a babe, or a trio of women looking for more trouble out on the town.

“Not with M4 in her condition. We dodge.”

M4 held still, slung across M16’s back at the insistence of the latter. She held on tight. M16 shuffled from foothold to foothold, only occasionally pausing to adjust the loads on her back as they climbed across the skeleton of the ruined bridge. The husks of skyscrapers curved up around them like walls, and below lay thirty or forty stories of open air. At the bottom of the concrete barrel, M4 could see pinprick squadrons bounding down the streets. Wind whipped past them, cold air blowing down the corridors, while the thermals from the street fires carried up the mechanical clatter of packs of Dinergates and Prowlers on the hunt.

A piece of rebar broke away beneath M16’s foot, clattering a long ways down.

“Oops,” M16 muttered.

Another three packs materialized from the alleyways to surround the point of impact, dozens of cameras enthralled with a rusted knot of metal. None thought to look up. Dinergates’ logic processors came just short of a five-year-old’s.

M16 swung deftly to the next tangle of metal as if nothing had happened.

Star was waiting to help them up at the precipice halfway across, where the bridge was straight enough to walk on. She pressed a finger to her lips and gestured in rapid sign at a handful of neighboring towers. Jaegers. Silhouettes of Dolls broken up by the long, toothpick outline of rifles perched on the corners of the buildings, illuminated from beneath.

Soppo stood in the cover where the bridge had twisted into something more foliage than metal, aiming down the scope of an unfamiliar rifle through the gaps. The decapitated body of a Ferri Doll at sitting against the wall of the burrow gave away the origin of the rifle. Its head lay at Soppo’s feet, one of its eyes a gouged pit sparking with cut wires. M4 did not need to see to know that Soppo’s chain of optics had grown a few larger.

Soppo had affixed a silencer to her new toy in the time it had taken them to cross. Every time she pulled, there came a muffled pop and another sniper doll dropped off its perch. After a while, she gave them an excited nod. M16 high-fived her. Star shook her head in exasperation. They moved on.

Star’s insistence on speed had been swiftly outstripped by an insistence on caution. They all felt it on their skin as familiar as cold sweat; an understanding that there were no promises fulfilled in war, that there was no such thing as logic, and that even the destruction of the Ringleader did not imply their happy ending. Success died in the homestretch because it forgot that the homestretch was not home. Shells still sang andante overhead and the Ferri Dolls came out in force.

“It seems like they scrambled every machine they had in reserve,” Star said, stopping for a moment at the edge of the bridge. She had a hand lifted to the side of her head, absentmindedly playing with her headphones. Caution meant that they took the long ways around; across the upper streets formed by the toppled husks of skyscrapers and the skybridges that still connected them. Blackjacks kept to the ground. Agent’s death had done at least a little for them. In the absence of a central directing intelligence, they preferred swarm tactics. Like ants, they carpeted the streets.

M16 came to stand beside Star. They watched the Dinergates tear through the alleyways, indexing every inch of the smoldering ruins with their cameras. Chrome-domed Vespers stalked through the streets at the centers of the packs, rifles close at hand. Suddenly, with the motion of a school of fish, the mass of Dinergates pulled away from a store on the street. One of the ever-present whistles came close. A rocket fell out of the sky in a blur, and the shop was suddenly dust and fire. Neither of the Dolls blinked, even as the blast streamed past them and the stench of hot metal blew their hair out behind them. The Dinergates waited for the structure to finish collapsing before darting in to continue their search.

M16 cracked a smile. “We can’t go anywhere without ruining the place.”

“I think it’s pretty,” Soppo protested, coming up from behind. She put her thumbs and index fingers into a rectangle and pretended to take a picture. “The colors are like sunset.”

“Fit for the Louvre,” M16 chuckled.

M4 had not joined them. She was preoccupied with the swinging fixture of a blown-out lamp, dangling from a torn wire. Or, not preoccupied at all: she had an expression like someone sleeping with their eyes open, not seeing anything. Star glanced at her. “Shut it, you two. M4, are you —”

“I’m fine,” she said immediately.

Star’s lips pressed into a line. Her tinkering with her headphones intensified.

“Have you gotten anything yet?” M16 said. She tapped her finger against her ear.

Star shook her head. “She stole a march on us. Crafty fox.”

Since they had begun their retreat from Agent’s demise, the radio had been static on the usual channels. More than that; a veil had been cast across them, or this entire city, something opaque that, by the nature of obscuration, made the situation suffocating. It felt as if they could not see, nor hear; every passing moment brought fewer shells, and gunfire had faded steadily. That in itself meant that the all-clear they had sent before Agent had ambushed M4 had gone through, and that the expedition had fallen back from the city center towards the fortified sector they occupied. No message had since found a reply, nor had any message arrived. It was convenient for the Ferri scouts that swept in to fill the void.

Star could feel Agent mocking them still. As if any obstacle could do anything more than inconvenience them. She set the calibration spinning through the channels, stepped off the bridge onto the balcony of the next tower. “Let’s keep going. Radio or not, HQ’s still going to be there.”

M4 reached up and took a handful of Star’s cloak as she passed. Star knelt. “We’re already moving too slow for my liking,” she said softly. “If you can’t walk, M16 will carry you again.”

“I heard something.”

They counted back the channels, rolling back into the distress shortwaves. Star hadn’t lingered on those for very long. There seemed to be little need. They could tell her nothing new, nothing she wanted to hear. And there had been nothing but distress in Zaporizhzhia for the last two days. She said as much.

“This is ridiculous,” Star protested. “An emergency signal the only one coming through?”

M16 told her to play it out.

A squadron had been chased up a skyscraper in the financial district. There were Dinergates and Prowlers coming up from beneath, Guards and Jaegers occupying the neighboring tower. They were running out of bullets. The walls pressed closer and closer. So, distress. The message played over twice more. Star cut it off in the third and sent the radio seeking again.

Before she could open her mouth M16 cut in with a low voice. “Try me, Star.”

Star had the tone of reprimand. “Agent has already wasted enough of our time. We should have been out of this city two hours ago, we shouldn’t screw around two more. And do you think you could handle every Blackjack in the city coming down on us?”

M16 had the same old counters ready.

“Star. We’ll assist,” M4 lifted her head up from against the wall, fixing the two of them with a tired look. She forced herself up from the wall, shaking away M16’s concerned approach. She talked in a murmur. “We already have what we came for. We’ll take it easy. And there’s no use in throwing lives away.”

Star clamped her mouth shut. She went to the side of the bridge, digging in her pack, and threw her arm out. Something the size of a small tile flew out from between her fingertips, flickering and flashing red light as it went. M16 watched it tumble down until it vanished from the distance. She frowned.

Star snapped her fingers. “Let’s go then.”

The tower was one of the few spared the shelling, for the most part. Only a lopsided, shattered sign — Bartleby’s & Co. — indicated it had been clipped by a dud on the way down. Otherwise it was pristine. Aside from the windows. There was not a window in the city intact. Where the bombs had made casualty of the Dolls, glass had suffered, and like the Dolls, glass lay in pieces thickly upon the floor. Dusted in the crevices along plaster walls. Ancient dust, separated by just one turn of the seasons. This was not the first time that this city suffered.

Having caught what little light came from below, the halls of the tower were faint starfields, glittering galaxies under the naked eye. M4 lifted her chin up towards the steel-grey clouds that pressed down upon the city like the underbellies of ships. No starlight came there, only the scattered reflection of fire, brighter by a thousand degrees.

It was as if the sky had fallen and shattered on the floor around her. She rubbed her eyes. She walked alongside a shattered window-wall, without which the hallway had become a balcony and beyond which was open air. Shards crunched like small bells with each footstep. It was a far way to fall.

She looked ahead. M16 had already climbed the stairs and made herself comfortable at the edge of the rooftop, half-obscured by Bartleby’s ill-fated sign and dangling her legs over the ledge as she waited. M4 dragged herself on.

When M4 arrived at the ledge, M16 handed her a rifle. It was the same one that Soppo had stolen and modified. M4 took it and looked at her, comprehending but not quite understanding.

M16 mimed pulling the trigger.

“Why?” M4 asked flatly.

“I don’t feel like it.” M16 folded her arms across her stomach and leaned back against the base of the rusted “R”. “And I’ve been your personal late-night limo service. I want my just deserts. I have rights.”

“Lazy,” M4 shot back.

But she hefted the rifle anyway, testing its weight.

“Disadvantaged,” M16 corrected her, sticking out her chin in a mock pout. “I don’t have the brainspace for aiming. No fancy targeting computers like Soppo and you have.”

“That’s a lie.”

“Fine. Not as fancy of a targeter. I mean, hey, I hit the side of a truck and she can shoot the wings off a fly, hardly a difference. Just a couple orders of magnitude. Maybe even just two.”

“You make up some terrible lies, and two’s an enormous amount.”

“Enormous, she says. And so our soiree here becomes an army. Persica made you an accountant, did she?”

“And you make such terrible jokes.”

Against herself, M4 found the corners of her mouth turning up. M16 pretended not to notice. Instead, she pushed a hand out against the city, five fingers stretched out to feel it all. The wind was strong in the heights. All other noise was blown away. The two of them were left alone, both leaning into the alcove provided by the sign, a glass bell of still air encasing them. Star had earlier vanished into the building along with Soppo, the latter cackling to herself quietly. Whenever M4 did not feel like it, Star made the plans. Whatever Star had planned, she had not seen any need to reveal to the other two, but she had given them Soppo’s rifle and told them to go up top. They had done this before.

So M16 and M4 waited for the signal. Waited for someone else to do something.

The bridge flared out like a river beneath them. A strongpoint formed of bulletproof shields had been erected between wrecked cars and the rusted skeleton of a bus halfway across the bridge. The bodies of the Guards responsible lay piled up against the cars. The sergeant leading the stranded squadron had pulled some tricks. Two more lines of Guards formed up reluctantly further back, almost directly beneath M4’s dangling feet, advancing slowly and halting — even retreating — whenever a burst of fire emerged from between the walls of the barricade. The Jaegers manning the tower they had snuck up through took potshots whenever they thought they saw movement among the wreck. It was a stalemate in all but matters of attrition. Without intervention things would have been worn down.

M4 looked to be contemplating such alternate universes, half-hearted smile slipping down as she overlooked all of it from ten floors away.

“A penny for your thoughts?” M16 said, suddenly.

“Huh?” M4 turned around, half jolted out of her reverie.

“That’s … it’s an adage. A human saying. I’ll give you a penny if you share whatever’s on your mind, is what it means.”

“That’s bizarre.”

M16 put her hands up in an exaggerated shrug.

“Do you have a penny?”

“It’s a metaphor. But suppose I did.”

“I think a penny wouldn’t do.”

“Suppose I gave you the world.”

“What an escalation! Suppose you did. The whole world? The whole entire world?”

“And everything in it.”

“That’s worthless.”

M16 laughed. It was not cynicism to say such things. When the former regions of Italy lay in glass, infected clawed at the far side of the Urals, and the Mediterranean glowed hot with radiation at midnight, it was not cynicism. There was good left in the world, but neither of them had not seen any of it. They were the muckrakers. For their sort of people, pessimism was a vocational hazard.

“Fortunately I don’t have the world. Know what I do have?”

“What?”

“A penny for the princess.”

She did not answer, instead choosing to occupy herself with the rifle. She peered through the scope, marking out the individual shadows of each guard with her eye. Remembering them, the way they moved, the way their heads and torsos bobbed this way and that. She watched them like someone might watch a waterwheel go. They did not inspire in her anything like familiarity. Their patterns were obvious. Their motions were choreographed. Ferri machines, like stones and rivers and chemical reactions, knew no other way to be.

That was how it once was, at least. She touched her throat, remembering the exception that marred the present age, and for a moment all of her sensors felt an imagined cold.

“Coming here was a mistake,” she said at long length, lowering the weapon to her lap. She looked like she wanted to say more, but the words caught at the back of her head, snagged by the hooks upon which hard words and instinct caught. The reasons floundered, the emotion came through. M4 noticed her hand had balled up into a fist, shaking. “It was a mistake. We shouldn’t have come.”

“That’s a silly thing to say. Some of her chickens might’ve already flown the coop, but Persica’s are orders. Not much of a choice for us there.”

She shook her head. “No. If I had told Persica I didn’t want to —”

“And would you have?” M16 flicked the girl’s cheek. “Would you really, or are we so bored out of our minds that we’re spinning processors contemplating hypotheticals?”

M4 seemed diminished. “What have we gained?”

“You want to see it? Hold it in your own hands?” M16 flicked something into the air. The stick, encased in cheap black plastic, was larger than any chip they had known. It was an old data type, incapable of storing very much; if there were museums in days like these, it should have found itself home in a display. But now all the past was good for was keeping secrets. M4 held it up in the dim, smoky light. If indeed it held secrets worth knowing.

“What is it?”

“This is it. Persica thinks so at least, but that doesn’t matter.” M16 plucked it from between M4’s fingers. “It’s done! We’ve won! Cost a quarter of the brigade and you an arm-and-leg, and I’ll kick their teeth, but we’ve won. Like you said. We’ve got what we’ve come for. Take it easy.”

“It doesn’t feel like that,” M4 said. “I don’t feel anything like that.”

“You don’t need to feel anything. We’ll do the heavy lifting for you.”

Some small movement on the bridge. Familiar now with the sway of the guards, M4 tightened her grip. M16 craned down and squinted.

In thirty seconds, fifteen minutes of waiting and preparation came to fruition.

The explosion came along wavelengths above and below visible Both of them felt, at this distance, a wave of static shimmer across their vision and a high-pitched whine that was not heard but seen. On the surface of the bridge, the lines scattered like panicked beetles exposed from beneath their rock. Some fell to the ground, clawing at their visors.

M4 brought the rifle to her shoulder and started firing. The crack sof the shots from the rooftop were carried away by the wind; the bullets were not.

A figure sprinted out from the cover of the building and slipped through the Guards like a thread through a needle. Some of them got a few wild shots before they dropped, flailing with holes in their necks. Ferri were not good with being taken by surprise. The probability of being snuck up on was too low to bother with, particularly when they had the expectation that someone was watching their back. Theirs was a strange sort of faith — faith in the probability of all things going to plan. Machines did not believe in luck, good or bad. Neither did Star.

As M16 took the more direct route down the tower, she took note of the outlines of Jaegers sprawled across the floors, wisps of smoking curling from sundered bodies.

Star was waiting outside the elevator as M16 and M4 descended onto the bridge, playing with her knife. She fell in step with a cool nod.

They ascended the stair of scrap into the fortification, Star leading them. The floor was paved with spent magazines lying one beside another. The dolls watched them pass, drew back from them wherever they stepped. They were few standing, many wounded, but none dead. Many were nursing shredded limbs, some dripped coolant from abdominal punctures. One seemed to have an arm half-melted, a close victim of a thermal grenade.

The sergeant stepped forward. They acknowledged each other. What else to do, when one has saved another’s life? Weight hung down upon them all, one of a hesitant, embarrassed relief. A half-caught breath, the doll searching for the words with what little remained.

“We’re grateful,” she said, simply. Her voice was that of someone who, having resigned themselves to die, had found some meagre disappointment with the three women who had climbed into the bus.

“The tactical cost was outsize. I won’t come to regret it, I hope.” Star stated.

The sergeant stood stock still, then bowed. That was an antiquated maneuver; nobody bowed except those unfortunate characters in ancient books written about the ancients’ ancients. If she understood, Star did not seem bothered. “How quickly can you move? Never mind,” she cut herself off. “That doesn’t matter. Get your dolls together. Sergeant, take care of M4.” M4 looked like she wanted to protest, but the doll took her by the arm immediately. M4 mumbled about grace and asking forgiveness. The sergeant told her to sit, then shot off some orders at the few gawkers that had surrounded them.

M16 followed Star out as she went to call for the missing member of their group.

“It’s just about midnight.” Star frowned at the sky.

What little of midnight came through the flame-painted clouds, M16 could not fathom. But there was much about Star that she could not. She crossed her arms. “You have a rare way with words.”

“I am a rare creature.”

M16 sighed. “Endangered, maybe. Veering on critically —”

“I should remind you whose decision it was to remain in a nest of Blackjacks. Which if you asked me — and I forget if you did — I might suggest is pretty suitable for that phrase you were about to use. But isn’t it strange” — Star cast an arm about, a sudden, furious motion — “that everywhere you look, there isn’t a hint of them? Aren’t we lucky, M16?”

“Dumping your secure signal as bait isn’t some crowning, brilliant move. It’s just a target on your back for a hot minute. And a liability.”

“Agent’s dead, they won’t know what they’ve got until we’re back at HQ. Then I’ll just get a new key. What can I do? It’s the price I pay for your whimsical adventures.”

“Price you p—” M16 stopped herself, kneading her head. “You’re a bit rotten tonight.”

“Rotten’s a strange word. But maybe I deserve it. I’ve been spoiling you two, after all.” Star’s laugh was a hard, ill-used sound.

They came to the end of the bridge, littered with parts and scrap metal from the broken-up Prowlers. Star barked out for Soppo. The girl bounded up to them, trailing smoke and grease, and fell into the column assembling behind. A minute of checking to ensure nobody was left behind, then they began to march.

Star struck out in front alone. M16 and the sergeant made small talk behind, and the rest followed in a frayed thread. They wound around the tower and cut an arc close to straight out toward the east of the city. As they tunneled through the burnt-out streets, M16 observed the refuse of the retreat. Spent casings, blast marks, toppled ammunition boxes behind abandoned barricades. Every so often they came across platoons of bodies. The bodies were clad in the characteristic Ferri black-metal. Violet circuitry bled faint light through the holes in their torsos. The dolls of the Brigade had done their diligence falling back. Their position had only just fallen back from the precipice of precarious. Until they were back in Donetsk, none of them nursed any delusions.

No trouble found them even as they descended the freeway from city center down into the Residentials, contrary to their expectations, and soon they were walking in the half-light of lamps cast on the road like shadows.

The prism came out again. M16 held it up to the light, a rare moment of peace for inspecting the prize.

“The treasure that launched a thousand ships,” the sergeant quipped.

“The apple of discord,” M16 countered, then shot a sideways look at her. “That’s an old reference.”

“Five minutes old, maybe. Troy’s burned down and we’ve got what we came for. Here’s our ride out.”

A collective breath was released as the tell-tale glint of camp lights appeared among the tenements before them, fleshed out by the rumble of vehicles and shouted orders.

A doll was waiting around outside the wire-mesh fence when they arrived. She had a haggard look — haggard, as if Dolls could know fatigue. It was the product of processors turned to maximum for a long time, which meant that she had craned at every sound and light, analyzed every signal she received. Her existence was to wait for them, and to her it felt like forever. “The colonel needs to see you. And you, sergeant.”

“Whatever the colonel would like, can wait until after we’ve washed and M4’s gone through repairs.” M16 looked around at the bustle which engulfed the blocks. “What is all this anyway? We’re supposed to be packed up by now.”

“All officers have been summoned. Please follow.”

Star’s lips pressed so tightly they nearly vanished. M16 traded looks with M4.

The war room was packed by every officer in the brigade, short the handful who were absent for the usual reason. Had any of the group counted, they would have been impressed that only two officers had died that night. In the corner, the radio station was unmanned. The screens spiked with nonsense playing on a low volume. Whatever jamming had been employed, struck far. The colonel waved for them to sit down. None of them moved. None of them had seen the motion at all, for their attention was turned absolutely to the map display hovering above the table like a burning brand.

A replica of the land surrounding Zaporizhzhia turned lazily on its axis. Spectral lines detailed the mountains enclosing the north, the twisting hills of the south, and the Dneiper River flowing down from the former into the latter which divided the map in half. A thin green ray centered upon Zaporizhzhia traced the silhouette of the terrain as it swept across the map, leaving red dots in its wake. As it passed over the valley to the east, past which the protected areas of S09 lay, it revealed a solid cluster of red globules outside the city.

“That’s three Ringleaders,” said the colonel. It had to have been old news to everyone but them, but M16 could hear hissed intakes of breath making the rounds. Three Ringleaders meant three entire divisions, spread out across the only road home. West, toward the heart of Ukraine, was a direction that had seen waste at the hands of the rogue Ferri dolls. Zaporizhzhia had been the furthest west in S09 Gryphon had dared to go. That was their escort; a single half of the 44th Brigade that had struck as fast and moved as quiet as they could, punching through the most poorly-defended section of the quarantine line relying on surprise. The game had been predicated on speed.

And here they were, three divisions materialized out of nowhere — down from the mountains? — half a day after they had entered the city. In the end Agent had gotten to taste victory after all. At least, she had gotten them to taste defeat.

“What are our choices?” Star was cool as ice.

A murmur ran through the room. “Do we have any?” offered one voice. A few others started talking feverishly.

A series of lights flickered across the radio receiver and its crackling began to intensify. One of the screens started to resolve, an image appearing from the static. M4’s breath caught in her throat. Agent glared out from the monitor, all her features intact and her head squarely on her shoulders.

“Congratulati—”

Star emptied two shots into the machine without turning her head. She holstered the pistol, then lowered herself into an empty seat. The static no longer came forth. The silence that had taken its place was a bit weightier.

“The objective of the mission remains the same. I have a few things in mind for achieving it. But I would see what the colonel thinks, first.”