Элинор Арнасон - The Year's Best Science Fiction - Thirtieth Annual Collection

Starvation on top of endless malnutrition had shriveled her mother’s badly depleted body. The woman had insisted that her child eat everything available, which was very little, and that final deprivation meant that even cuts that should have healed in moments refused to knit. Organs, named and otherwise, were plunging into hibernation. Old wounds were resurfacing, and each labored breath could have been the last.

“You did what you had to do, daughter.”

The strength drained from her legs. Slowly, she dropped to the ground and wrapped her arms across her bare knees, sobbing peacefully.

“I was lost—!”

“I could have buried your body,” she interrupted. “Hidden you and come back again, with food. With nutrients.”

“That wouldn’t have happened,” the phantom replied.

“In my pack,” she said, looking south toward the sea. “I have enough treasures to make you over again. Bring you to life and back with me—”

“Your child needs those gifts, darling.”

“I didn’t have to,” the young woman muttered, mouth against one knee, the salty taste of her own flesh making her guilt even worse. “Your bones … they were just a few little sticks at the end…”

“Mine became yours,” the phantom assured her.

But that sorry truth just made her sicker, and sadder, and she pulled the palms of her hands across her wet eyes and choked back a deep sob and let little gasps leak out while the phantom said, “Sticks, yes. Spent, yes. But still with little nodules of minerals that you needed worse than any dead lost soul would need them … and that was the beautiful heart of your day, daughter … regardless what you pretend to think…”

Another ollo-lol spoke in the darkness.

She looked up, looked around. What would she do now?

“Run,” the dead mother advised one last time.

Then the young woman rose to her feet again, finding the strength to retrieve her rifle from the hiding place. What she would do next wasn’t decided. She didn’t know her mind yet, and it might have taken another thousand breaths before she finally gave up the wait. But then came the sudden thunder of bombs exploding to the east and south, and she turned in time to see a flash rising from where the barricade divided the island into its two halves, both His.

She ran.

Then halfway down the rocky slope, she stopped. What good could she do in this fight? Her task—his hope—was for her to be where he expected her to be, waiting for the signal. Always, impulses seemed to rule over reason inside her. She chastised herself and managed to turn around, starting to climb again, when a voice she didn’t know screamed, “The forearm! The left forearm! And his damned gun too, I got it!”

Mercer was injured.

“Blood,” the voice said. A woman’s voice. “Look for blood trails.”

Badly hurt, she realized.

Some man asked, “Which way?”

Another man said, “Here’s a track, here…!”

Where the dry stream poured down onto the farmland, human shapes were moving. Brush was snapping; she heard overlapping orders. A single man stood in the moonlight for a long moment, presenting an easy shot. The enemy believed that the war was won. Whatever had happened before made them feel safe and powerful, and obviously they didn’t have any hint that she was standing nearby, eager to spray explosives down across their heads.

Instead of firing, she crept silently along the slope, trying to guess where Mercer was.

A kinetic pistol fired.

Half a dozen larger weapons slashed at the trees, starting fires that sputtered and died as the ripped bladders bled over them.

Then somebody yelled, “Quiet,” and then, “What do you see?”

In the chill light of the moon and endless stars, she saw the familiar shape struggling to run. He was still some distance ahead of his pursuers. The hyperfiber armor still encased the powerful body, but it was obvious that nothing had worked as planned. Mercer was staggering. Two steps, and he dropped to his knees while the stump of one arm flailed senselessly, and then he rose again and did nothing after that, too spent to manage even one weak step.

Mercer was still too far down the drainage.

Exposed, and caught in his own trap too.

She ran, pushing down the slope while working upstream, running out onto a bed of dried, dusty pebbles. She was above him. Even facing her, he didn’t seem to notice anything amiss. Walking was everything that he could manage, and he did it erect, shattered feet dragging on the rocks and the armor catching the moonlight, making him all the more obvious, and what sounded like a spongeworm squishing every time his nearly useless lungs managed to take another breath.

The army closed on their victim.

She heard the monsters talking openly, happily. An infectious mood, a kind of celebration, erased all but the last shreds of caution. She even heard two voices near the front arguing passionately about which one of them should get the final pleasure.

On her toes, she ran toward Mercer.

His helmet was missing. A burnt face managed to see her as a shape approaching, and he lifted his final pistol and tried to fire with the empty chamber, perhaps puzzled by the useless series of clicks.

She kneeled and aimed over his head, flinging half a dozen explosive rounds over his head.

The blasts flung him to the ground.

She had never heard so many humans speaking at once, and every last one of them was cursing.

“A new gun,” someone decided. “He must have stashed one.”

Nobody wanted to get battered now, at the end. So they hunkered down, waiting for Mercer to make a fresh mistake.

He was fighting to stand one last time. Lying on his chest, he looked helpless. She came close and dropped flat to put her mouth against his ear, and tasting ashes, she said, “I’m here.”

He didn’t answer. But his body seemed to relax, slightly.

She grabbed his surviving arm and tugged hard, once and then again, and he decided to obey what he felt, pulling one leg up and then his body, allowing her to slip under that arm and helping him to come upright. But every step was miserably slow. He was astonishingly, frighteningly light. Something awful had happened, and that he could heal enough to stagger this far was miraculous. But that lightness meant that a rested and strong woman, no matter how small, could push herself under his bulk and shove up hard enough to let his shattered body lay limp over her shoulders, and with her rifle in one hand and the other arm between his shrunken legs, she could run straight for nearly a hundred rapid breaths.

A dried waterfall stood like a wall before them.

Behind them, voices argued and debated and gradually pushed closer. And then as she wondered what to do, a man’s voice declared, “There’s fresh prints here. He’s got a friend.”

She bent low and swallowed an enormous amount of air, and then with a clean shove, she flung him over the brink of the dried falls.

He was unconscious now.

Shaking from fatigue, she dragged him up to where the winter currents had cut into the bank, creating a tiny shelter roofed with ruddy corundum. Into the less-burnt ear, she said, “Stay,” and then she retrieved her rifle and ran hard up the hill, terrified that she wouldn’t have time enough or that her trap had been diagnosed or that any of a thousand little mistakes could have doomed both of them.

Below her, countless rifles fired at every shadow.

She reached the fuses without drawing anyone’s fire. Time mattered, but so did precision. She used the flint lighter to light one short fuse that she had lashed around the others, and then stood back, one long breath spent wondering what to do when this didn’t work. Shoot the fuses with her rifle? Or detonate the trees one by one, maybe?