Subterrene War 03: Chimera (33 page)

“You know what this means, right?” he asked.

“What?”

Jihoon brushed by me on his way past, moving forward to take point—a good sign since he had shown no initiative since we’d arrived on the line. I wondered if he was pulling it together.

“Once the brass gets word of this, they’ll hand us flamethrowers and armor that makes all of us look like you. Your call sign won’t be worth shit anymore.”

Three times that night we stopped when Kristen chimed with her warnings of elevated nickel levels, and all of them were good hits. Jihoon and I stopped to listen on each occasion. The Chinese scouts would push past in the bush, and you wouldn’t have noticed if it weren’t also for the fact that the bugs went quiet and the things hadn’t realized yet that their weight broke branches on the jungle floor easily, the cracks booming inside my helmet.

Just before sunrise we paused. I was on point and had watched as our dot and that of Margaret’s merged, prompting Kristen to announce that we were less than a hundred meters from her location. Ji wanted to rest. But there was a feeling in the air, as if pure oxygen had been pumped into the jungle, so that it diffused through ceramic
and into my suit, heightening my senses and making my fingertips tingle the same way they would just before grabbing hold of an electrical cable. She was there. No bugs would give away her position, and this was an event I’d been expecting for so long that no rest was needed to try and figure out what I’d do when we met. We pushed on, and the jungle parted in front of us as if it gave its approval; the early morning sun had hit the highest leaves, and now that it was awake, the bush wanted to see what would happen too because even it couldn’t see that far into the future.

The jungle spat us into an area that had less foliage—not a clearing as much as it was an older section of rain forest with an immensely high canopy and few bushes on the ground so boulders and red clay lay exposed. A Buddhist temple rose in front of us. It was a round, pointed structure with a wide section near the bottom that narrowed and steepened into a spire at the top and an ornate stone arch that opened into blackness at the base. Streamers of morning light pierced the canopy above. They hit the temple’s side, most of which was covered with a creeping ivy, but in spots it gleamed with gold that flaked off in sections to make me wonder how long the thing had been abandoned. Many of the Burmese had forgotten faith. Why shouldn’t they? For more than a decade nothing had stopped the fighting that swung back and forth over their borders, not even prayer or sacrifice, so by now I figured their monks had traded robes for battle suits. No paths led to the entrance, and from the look of it we were the first people to have walked in the area for decades
unless you counted the monkeys, several of which clung to the ivy and stared at us.

“Lieutenant,” Kristen said, “I’m picking up a standard signature. Satos in decay, well above background and likely within ten meters.”

“I see them,” I said.

Jihoon clicked in almost at the same time. “
Look
at that shit.”

These weren’t satos, per se. Not American ones anyway. In front of the entrance someone had raised three poles, to which had been lashed the bodies of Chinese genetics with their fiber optics and hoses severed so that the massive heads hung down loosely. They bloated in the heat. Beneath the poles, their armor had been piled, the pieces of which showed the blackened scorch marks of a flame unit. I made sure my carbine’s safety was off and signaled to Jihoon that I was going to move in.

“I’m right behind you,” he said. “Why do you think Margaret did this with the bodies? A warning to other Chinese genetics?”

I thought for a second, just for the amount of time it took for the pieces to lock together. “Not a warning, a challenge. An invitation to the Chinese because Margaret
wants
to die.”

“What does
that
mean?” he asked.

“It means keep your Maxwell ready because I have no idea what she has planned. Or how many satos are with her.”

We crept across the clearing and moved through the archway. The passageway was dark enough to force my vision to infrared, and it squeezed us within its rocks, which formed a low-ceilinged corridor barely wide enough
to fit through, winding in a circle around the outside of the temple. A strong breeze blew through. Something ahead of us created the wind, and my temperature indicators jumped, suggesting that whatever it was also generated a significant quantity of heat, enough to dry the walls so that sheets of paint hung from the ceiling in a caricature of the jungle—the hanging flakes like leaves that we had to push through. The tunnel went on forever. Finally, ahead of me was light, and as we neared it my vision kit switched back to visible as we passed through another arch and into the temple’s center.

The main chamber was circular with a ceiling that arched high overhead and into which tiny portholes had been cut so that sunlight beamed and reflected off the polished marble floor. Wooden carvings hung to section the ceiling into six equal parts; I recognized the teak, a dark wood and infinitely hard, that someone had taken the time to shape and chisel into leaf-shaped patterns from which dangled pink lanterns. Candles flickered inside each one. The light focused on a thirty-foot-high statue of a white Buddha, his right hand raised and body clothed in gold, and I was about to step closer to it when they came; six satos dropped from where they had hidden in the carvings above us and slammed us to the ground. In less than a minute they had stripped us down to our undersuits and bound our hands behind our backs with wire. When they’d finished, they tied ropes around our necks. The fibers cut into my skin, and the girls yanked us onto our feet, tightening the noose so that I gasped for breath while stumbling toward the statue.

Margaret stepped from behind the Buddha’s legs and I stared; she was exactly like her picture—beautiful. The
tattoos held me in some kind of trance, their swirling patterns hypnotic and perfect under short blonde hair that framed them. From the neck down she wore combat armor like Jihoon’s, its polymer coating dull now and the ceramic plates chipped and broken. The other girls pushed me to my knees in front of her, and then left, dragging Jihoon toward another archway where he vanished into the shadows with a gurgle, leaving Margaret and me alone.

“Where are you taking my partner?” I asked.

“I don’t know. We waited here for you. Two or three days, I think. My chronometer broke, and it’s easy to lose track of time when it moves so quickly.”

“I find it interesting that you chose a holy place to meet us. A temple.”

Margaret sneered at me. “This place holds nothing holy. The Buddha is false, as all my
Gra Jaai
know.”

I nodded and glanced back at the entrance. “We saw your work outside. The Chinese genetics.”

“Did you like it?” Margaret asked. “We want so much to meet more of them and yet few come. When you first arrived, we had hoped it was more of them, but you are equally interesting.”

“I don’t know if I liked it or not,” I said. She was close to me now, squatting so her face was level with mine, her eyes a few feet away. There still wasn’t anything in my gut—no sense of what I would do if I ever got loose. But there wasn’t any fear either. Despite the fact that we had been captured, it was with an internal comfort, the serenity born from knowing that this was the way it was and that Margaret wouldn’t kill us. Not yet, anyway. “Some would call you a murderer, except those things out there…”

“What?” she asked.

“They aren’t
human.
”

Margaret laughed and leaned forward to kiss me, her tongue warm against mine. When she’d finished, she spat on the ground. “But they
are
human. As human as I am. As human as
you.
You aren’t the first man I’ve kissed, and if you knew how many men I’ve experienced, you’d know to trust my judgment on this. The Chinese genetics are the sons of man; how can they
not
be human?”

“Trust your judgment? Judgment about what?”

“On everything. On the fact that I know what’s inside you because I tasted it on your tongue, and it’s the same taste that we all have, a taste of infection but one that’s symbiotic, one that helps us to function in the jungle and feed its roots with corpses.”

My mind swam with the strangeness of it all. Whatever the file had said about Margaret, it hadn’t described much at all, hadn’t touched on the fact that what faced me now wasn’t even close to the satos I’d experienced in the field; this was a girl whose words sounded decades older than her age, like an old woman in a girl’s wrapper. A combination of awe and disgust battled for control over my gut, and it wasn’t clear which would win.

“What infected me?” I asked.

“The jungle itself. It’s everywhere. Do you believe in God?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“But you believe in the jungle. Its trees and vines, that they speak to you and show the way. That the jungle guides us all.”

It wasn’t a question, but I answered anyway. “I believe it sometimes. Yes.”

Margaret stared past me without speaking, and we stayed like that for a few minutes so that my knees began to scream with the pain of kneeling on hard marble, its cold stone making the pain worse. She’d started crying. Margaret didn’t sob; instead, tears rolled down her cheeks and splashed on the floor while from outside came the faint sound of monkeys screaming.

“I’m tired,” she whispered. “The jungle sent you to me, and I don’t know what to do with you. Not yet. I assume the Americans sent you, like the others, to kill me—the sato that taught everyone how Catherine the Eternal viewed life. Do you know what’s to happen?”

“No. And they didn’t send me to kill you.”

She shook her head. “That’s what Lucy said, but she doesn’t know the truth, doesn’t understand that what your superiors want is irrelevant. They probably
don’t
want me dead—want me to keep fighting the Chinese?” I nodded, and she continued, “This we’ll do. But somebody sent you to kill me.”

“I don’t understand.” My knees gave, and I fell to the floor on my side. Margaret grabbed the rope and pulled, choking me at the same time she stood and kicked me in the stomach so that I gasped for air and struggled to get up again. She raised a fist and slammed it into my face, over and over, until my vision blanked for a moment, stars floating in front of my eyes. “Don’t be weak. I will kill you if you’re weak.”

“I just wanted to ask you about Sunshine and Chen,” I gasped. It took a moment to catch my breath so I could continue. “Where is Chen and what is Sunshine? And how did the Thais reverse your spoiling?”

“Sunshine and spoiling are separate issues, unrelated.”
Margaret stood, leaning over me and looking down as she raised her fist again. “And before I answer your questions, there are things you’ll need to experience so you can hear my words. Chen is a complicated subject.”

This time when she struck me, I passed out.

Pain forced my eyes open, and it took a few seconds to realize that I was screaming. A single candle lit a small stone room. From somewhere else came another scream, this one muffled so that it may have come from a room nearby, and I assumed it was Jihoon, but who knew how many prisoners the satos had? Margaret leaned against a stone wall opposite me where she watched; the satos had lifted me from the ground and tied ropes around my biceps to insert a short pole between my arms and back so that my dangling weight threatened to force both arms backward and up, rotating them out of their sockets. I screamed again, trying to keep my arms down.

“Where are you from?” she asked.

I stifled another scream and tried to keep breathing, barely having the strength to answer. “Virginia.”

“What’s it like?”

“I don’t know, you tell me. I haven’t been there in years.”

The rope creaked overhead as I rotated, and my arms trembled with an effort that wouldn’t last forever. Margaret smiled. She lifted the candle to drip hot wax onto her open palm as she spoke.

“I’ve never been to the US—except for my time in the ateliers, but then we shipped out to Kazakhstan without seeing anything else. I guess you could call me an American,
but I’m not sure everyone there would agree given the way I look. I love our country. Not in a patriotic way; I’m talking about what I’ve seen in 2-and 3-D imaging of the countryside and its people. So many different humans, all kinds of colors and shapes. Rolling hills. I know Virginia from what I’ve seen in these images, and there is an especially beautiful spot that I hope to visit one day. Lexington. Have you been there?”

I shook my head. Spit ran down my chin and hung in the air as I gasped for breath. It wouldn’t be long now before my arms gave. But then, before I knew that it had happened, the rope snapped and I collapsed to the ground, where I curled into a ball as best as I could; both arms were still bound behind me and were in so much pain that I started crying. When I opened my eyes, I saw Margaret sit and slide a knife into its sheath; she had cut the rope.

“Your shoulder is wounded but healing. I asked about Lexington.”

“I went to summer camp near Lexington,” I said. “When I was a kid. It was a sports camp where we rode horses and played lacrosse.”

“I’ve seen horses only in training. In the tanks we rode them along with Napoleon’s cavalry, but I’ve never seen one for real.” She stopped dripping wax and stared at me with empty eyes. “I beat you and brought you here because you lied to me.”