The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year - Volume Eight (60 page)

"Because he would come out here to sit in a stuffy tent and enjoy your company, just for play," Alvarez said.

"I could show you," Benine offered. "Tell you something about... I don't know. One of your shoes. Or that watch you wear."

Conte looked down at his wrist, where the nylon strap of his watch had stained to almost the same dirt-brown as his sleeve. Then, with a sneer, he ripped it off his wrist, the Velcro giving with the crackle of something never removed, and tossed it at Benine's face. "Here."

Benine caught it, closed his eyes just long enough to smell blood and gunpowder and feel a knife slammed into his chest, and dropped the watch as though scalded. He looked up at Conte, who reached over and snatched it back.

"So. Not entirely a fake," Conte said.

The tent flap flew open again, and all of them looked. Then Conte jumped to his feet, and Benine followed suit. Alvarez raised her eyebrows, but seemed more interested in the bin full of bones than Colonel Gabriel's arrival.

The Colonel batted the tent flap shut. "I've been on the radio," he said, looking straight at Benine. "I had more questions for you."

"Of course," Benine said.

"Your parents did not die in the war," Colonel Gabriel said.

Benine shook his head. "My father died of a heart attack two years ago, sir. My mother died when I wasn't even walking."

"Your siblings? They are not all dead?"

"No, sir," Benine said. "Three of my brothers are still alive, sir. And two sisters."

"And they also have your gift?"

Benine nodded.

"Your uncle tells me he paid for you to go to school," the Colonel said. "He said you were smart enough to go to some foreign universities. The rebels haven't killed your family, burnt your home. Why are you here looking at bones for us?"

Benine shrugged. "I love my country, sir."

Colonel Gabriel watched him closely for a few seconds, then snorted. "Is that so? Not even the President loves this country." He shook his head. "Perhaps you'll live long enough to see how naive you are. I'll pray for you." He turned to go.

Benine stopped him by saying, "If I could, sir?" Colonel Gabriel turned back and met his eyes, then gave a short nod. Benine gathered his words. "Why are you fighting here?"

"Isn't it obvious?" the Colonel asked. He raised his eyebrows. Then, when Benine hadn't guessed, said, "I love my country," and ducked outside.

Sgt. Conte followed.

"W
hat do you feel when you look into those bones?" Alvarez asked. Dusk had just rolled around on the third day, and for those three days, Alvarez had been handing him the bones without comment, as though they were items over the counter of a store. Then he would relate what sort of person he saw and was, and whether anyone said a name in the memories, and whether he had found the person in any of the other bones, and Alvarez would take notes in tiny, black figures in a flip-top book of hers. So the question came as a surprise.

"I see places they were," Benine answered. "Little bits of their lives."

"Important bits? Recent?"

Benine shook his head. "It doesn't seem to matter. Sometimes... for one of them it was the birth of her child. For another it was just walking down a dirt road, thinking nothing in particular."

Alvarez smiled. "Was that a foot bone?"

Benine had to laugh, but he shook his head. "What about you? What do you see in these bones?"

"The same that anyone else sees, I think," Alvarez said. "Tragedy."

Benine looked at the bin – one of many that had come through, that he'd gone through, that would be packed up for transport to the capital, as though the capital was a safer place for them. He was beginning to see them as bones and memories. He knew that they were dead people, that in other places people did not die and get left unburied in such numbers, and he knew that it wasn't right, but the word
tragedy
seemed foreign and ill-fitting. This was more like a chronic disease.

He picked up another bone.

"Why did you come out here?" he asked. "To all this tragedy?"

She shrugged.

"It can't have been for the warm welcome," Benine said. He'd seen the way people in the camp looked at her.

"No," she agreed.

Benine chewed for a moment on his words. He wanted to use this as a connection – he'd seen the way the soldiers looked at him, too. But him, they looked at like a freak, a joke. Her, they looked at like a thief or an enemy. "Is it hard?" he asked.

She shrugged. "No. Not with most of them; I don't care about them. I wish things were different with Colonel Gabriel."

"The Colonel?"

"He doesn't like me," Alvarez said, then seemed to reconsider. "No; he doesn't like the
necessity
of me. We get along. We drink that terrible rum of his and smoke cigarillos and play bezique. But for some foreigner to come into his country to help identify the war dead?" She clicked her tongue. "How can he bear it?"

"He does love his country," Benine realized.

Alvarez gave him a long, strange look. "You thought he didn't?"

"I thought –" Benine started, and realized he didn't know what he'd thought. "I thought he thought me naive for loving it."

Alvarez snorted. "He has yet to learn the distinction between loving one's country and believing in it," she said. "He isn't a stupid man, for all he believes himself stupid."

"Maybe he feels stupid next to you," Benine said, and looked down at the table between his hands. "You travel across the world and identify the dead."

"Doesn't make me any wiser," she said. "All I know? I've been to thirteen different countries, and they're all different. But the sun shines on all of them, and everywhere, people bleed red. And they all leave their bones when they go." She brought out a long, broken white bone from the bin and unwrapped it – by now, Benine could recognise it as a femur. "Tell me about this one."

T
he season went on with the sun pouring down on the dying grass, the sky bluer than the ocean yet offering no relief, and rumors of the rebels taking another band of cities, boys pressed into service, old men with their eyes put out, young girls with their hands bayonetted through and their mouths stuffed with dust. All the usual atrocities one became numb to, in war.

Benine came out of the tent one afternoon. Sgt. Conte was sitting on one of a trio of buckets probably filled with peanuts or rice, a radio in his hand. The man on the radio was talking about how the rebels had taken a city not far to the west of the camp, and Conte's face was uncharacteristically grim. At the end of the report, he shut the radio off and looked to Benine.

"Yes? What?"

"I wanted to take a rest," Benine said. He wondered if Conte would mind him sitting down on the bucket next to him. Conte snorted.

"Is it all getting too much for you, city boy?" he asked. "What did you see?"

"I saw Montchacal," Benine answered. "Burning."

Conte huffed on his cigarette. "So, ten years ago. Nine? Who can remember." He spat a glob of yellow spit into the dirt. "A man, a woman?"

"A man," Benine said. "A soldier."

"That must have been easy, then."

"Hm?"

"To give the man a name," Conte said.

Benine shook his head. "Why do you think so?"

Conte turned and stared at him for a long moment, then reached inside his shirt and brought out the chain he wore around his neck and the two flattened tags dangling from it. He jerked the chain forward, shaking the tags into Benine's face.

"A soldier, you stupid rat," he said. "We all wear these."

T
his was the easy part, and to Benine's unease, it got easier. More and more of the bones belonged to soldiers. And more and more of those who weren't wore dogtags, too.

Growing up in the corner of the country, where people might still sneak over the border to trade before running back as though the war would nip at their heels – growing up there, far from the capital and the front, tags hadn't been so important. But Benine remembered a childhood friend running up to his house, grinning, proud of the tags he'd bought which jangled against his chest.

Benine's father, while he was alive, hated the idea of dogtags in their village. But his uncle, when he'd taken stewardship of Benine and his siblings, had been more than willing to buy them for any of the children who asked.

Out in the camp near Junuus this was the second month, and Benine could see the difference in the bones. No one had time to clean them, now; they came in covered with dirt that might once have been blood, and there was less distinction between the bones and Benine's skin. But the dogtags in their memories were a constant. They were all different shapes and materials, stamped in leather or aluminum or in flattened-out coins, ready to buy a way into the underworld. All the bones these days came with names.

Many of the bones came with memories of blood.

Benine picked up a lower rib and crashed into a man's death by bayonet, an abdominal wound, a deep stab and a long tear. The pain in his gut was enough to make him retch, but he could feel his gut leaking already, vomiting out his side, and all that came out of his mouth was spit and a dribble of blood and bile. Each ragged breath tugged the wound, an angry red pain that Benine couldn't see through. Buried in it was the certainty that the rebels would take his tags, cut off his head, his hands, and no one would know he had died here, no one would know his bones were his.

Benine came out of the memory with a gasp. For a moment everything looked wrong, the olive-drab tent walls and the camp-lantern light, the dirt floor and the cheap table and the bins, and he dove back in, his hand scrambling for the tags.

He couldn't change anything. He wanted to reassure the man, the man's fingers running across and across his tags, but it seemed to the man like obsession, and the thought went round and round:
They will never know. They'll never know.

A noise sounded from outside, and Benine jumped, thinking it a gunshot. But it was followed by the splutter of an engine and a string of curses: the old jeep had backfired.

Benine put the bone down on the table, put his head in his hands, and took long, deep breaths until he no longer wanted to cry.

"S
ometimes I worry that when I think of Mortova, I'll remember nothing but war," Colonel Gabriel said. He was sitting at a table in the mess, and Benine had come in to drink coffee with him. The coffee was bad, very bad – reused grounds, Benine thought – but it was something. "I'll forget that we have markets and schools and theatres and nephews with birthday parties and fizzy drinks," Colonel Gabriel said. "I am going to forget that there are little girls in blue dresses, and newspapers, and satellite phones. I am going to forget that I danced at my wedding."

Benine looked at him. He had never suspected that Colonel Gabriel was a man who'd had a normal life. But he was perhaps fifty or sixty, so he would have had an adult life even before the war. "You're married?"

"I may forget that I was married," Colonel Gabriel said.

Benine had nothing to say to that.

After a while, Colonel Gabriel said, "The soldiers have a rumor that you can control a person when you look back through their bones."

Benine jumped. "I can't," he said. Then, "Not much. I can look at something, sometimes. Maybe pick up an object. Only when they aren't thinking."

"Benine," Colonel Gabriel said.

"If they think about what they're doing, I can't do anything," Benine said. "It's only those little things, like if you pick up a pen and forget what you were doing with it."

The Colonel was shaking his head. "I don't know, sometimes."

Benine looked at him, afraid of something he couldn't name. "What?"

"Whether it was God or Lucifer who gave you that gift," Colonel Gabriel said. He drank the bad, old coffee, and his eyes were distant. Benine swallowed, and drank, too.

"How does it feel," Benine asked suddenly, "to be wearing your tags all the time? To have something on your chest that you know means you're expected to die? Or that people expect that you could."

Colonel Gabriel didn't move at all. If thinking of the tags in that light bothered him, it didn't show. Maybe it was the same way he'd always thought of them.

"It felt pointless, for a time," the Colonel said. "When all the bodies have been chopped up or pushed over into mass graves. But now you've come along, so it doesn't seem as pointless any more. Maybe it should." He turned an appraising eye on Benine. "Do you know how many have died in this war?"

Benine lowered his head. "Tens of thousands," he said. "More. Yes, I know."

The Colonel regarded him with eyes that had long ago gone yellow around the edges. "Do you intend to identify all of them?"

Benine had no answer for that, either, and after a while, the Colonel took his coffee and walked away.

* * *

T
he rebels took a city. The rebels took a bridge.

The rebels took a field and fouled it with blood and burned it to ash, and Benine sat in a tent outside the petrol port of Junuus and read the histories of dead men from their bones.

One night, the tent flap opened, and a person came in. "Benine."

Benine looked up to see Sgt. Conte standing over the table. Conte had a drawn-out expression, like he'd been drinking and going nights without sleep.

"What is it?" Benine asked. "What's wrong?"

Conte looked down at his hands. "It's only," he started, and one hand went to his chest. "I find," he said.

"Conte," Benine said, unsure of what was to come.

Conte's hand fisted in his shirt, and Benine could see the chain around his neck beneath the fabric. "I find myself checking my tags these days," Conte said, and looked into Benine's eyes. "You said it runs in your family, this... thing, of yours?"

"My little sister," Benine said, and imagined her: her bright eyes, hair in neat braided rows. Like him, she had never lived in a time outside this war. "She's better at it than me," he said. "My brothers are not as good. But we all have it. So did my mother and my aunts and uncles, and my grandmother –"