Unknown - The_Growing_589064

But it’s not that simple. All wars have collaborators. If there are no humans who have been spared as decoys, there will be. If there are none who cooperate for their own safety and their families’, there will be. And she can never, never, take a chance that another person is not a collaborator. Too much rides on her own survival for her to be trusting or merciful.

Kirsten banks the fire and pulls her makeshift bed closer to the hearth. Because there is nothing else to do, she stretches out full length on the mattress, Asimov rousing just long enough to move up beside her. She does not expect to sleep, but can at least allow her aching muscles as much ease as warmth and rest allow.

She moves through a twilight world. All about her the snow lies heavy: on the ground, in the forks of the branches that spread bare above her head. The sky is white, too, the light diffused and dim. Asimov paces at her side, his huge paws spread to carry him across the surface lynx-fashion. Her own feet do not sink into the snow. When she looks down, she sees only a faint, shadowless impression in the crust where she has stepped.

Above her, in the sky over a clearing, a hawk hangs at the hover. It gives one long and ringing cry, then banks and flies off toward what she knows to be the west, though there is no sun to give direction.

Then she sees it, a shape drifting through the trees, keeping pace with her. Kirsten’s heart seems to stop, then slams against her breastbone, but strangely it is not fear that sets her blood to racing. Somewhere deep in her mind is the knowledge that this is something she has searched for, has waited for, longer than she can remember. She tries to call out to whatever it is, but her throat closes around the words.

The ground begins to rise abruptly, and she realizes that she is climbing one of the ancient earthworks that dot the Hopewell Valley. The forest thins as she scales the top, and there laid out before her, stretching away infinitely far into horizonless space, is a long, sinuous mound in the shape of a serpent, coiling and uncoiling, doubling back on itself in rhythmic curves only to spiral outward again. There are tracks here, the prints of a large animal moving swiftly. Kirsten sets out to follow, placing her own feet in the pad marks that somehow remain undisturbed behind her. Asimov lopes along beside her, a strange eagerness in the play of rippling muscle under his black and silver coat.

Then she sees it. Straight ahead, directly in her path where nothing but air had been a nanosecond before, is a wolf. Its fur is covered in rimefrost, and it regards her with eyes of a startling sky-blue.

Its gaze lasts only a moment. Without warning, the ground gives way beneath Kirsten’s feet, and she is falling, falling through space as the stars streak past, plunging into atmosphere finally as clouds billow around her, plummeting toward a black rock island in a mighty river where she will shatter into atoms. For a moment she thinks that she may survive with no more than a few bones broken, or that she can perhaps deflect her trajectory for a landing in that impossibly blue water.

Don’t be a damned idiot, she tells herself. You know you’re going to die.

The rock rises up to meet her, and she strikes with an impact that jerks her bolt upright in her sleeping bag, to find the hearth still warm and Asimov whuffling softly in his own dreams.

Kirsten’s hands are trembling, and she feels a cold runnel of sweat as it slips between her shoulderblades. “Goddam,” she breathes. “Goddam.” Her heart lays down a rapid, thready beat, counterpoint to the rhythm of her shocked lungs.

What the hell was that?

Who the hell was that?

But she has no answers. She has seen wolves before, camping in Yellowstone with her parents when she was a teenager; she is in no doubt at all that a wolf is what she has dreamed. She tries to call up the Psych 101 lectures that bored her straight into an afternoon nap more often than not, but other than a vague recollection that almost everything, according to Dr. Werbow, signified either sex or death, she cannot connect the blue-eyed wolf with any standard interpretation.

Eventually she steadies and lies down again, yawning. She has no idea where the dream came from, though she is fairly certain that it was not something she ate. Dinty Moore’s psychedelic stew, oh yeah.

She slips off to sleep again with unexpected ease, and does not wake until the morning.

2

The big truck shakes, rattles and rolls as it bounds over the ice rutted roads, last in a fair sized convoy of impressive military vehicles. Manny sits beside his cousin, a military handset in his lap, and a machine pistol at his side. He eyes Dakota at odd intervals, trying to discover without asking exactly what is different about his cousin this morning. She seems…relaxed somehow, as if she’d spent the night….

His eyes widen, but then he gives himself a mental shake.

Nah. Couldn’t be.

Could it?

“See something interesting?”

The low voice startles him, and he blinks, then blushes at being caught out. Scrubbing a hand over his face, he shakes his head in the negative. “Just woolgathering.” He smiles weakly. “Really.”

“Mm hm.”

They both fall silent, listening to the military radio as it crackles out its continuing stream of routine messages from members of the caravan.

Suddenly, the taillights in front of them flash once, twice, then stay on as the troop carrier comes to a quick stop. Koda works her own brakes. The truck wants to skid, but in the end, it behaves and rolls to a stop, front bumper inches away from the rear of the carrier.

The radio crackles to life.

“Chief? You might wanna come look at this.”

“Everybody DOWN!!!”

The sound of gunfire shatters the morning. Dropping the radio, Manny grabs his gun and levers himself outside the passenger door.

Only to duck back inside again in order to keep his head from being blown off of his neck. He stares, wide-eyed, past Dakota and out into the brightness of the morning. His jaw drops. “Great Father, protect us,” he whispers.

Koda turns her head and sees a scene out of an Orwellean nightmare.

A long line of military droids block the roadway and the areas beyond. These are not the generically handsome, lantern-jawed, poster children for America’s Idealized Infantryman that have filled newspapers and news broadcasts to the brim over the past several years. Instead, they resemble nothing so much as a mechanized creature straight out of a 1980’s blockbuster sci/fi action/adventure movie.

Shining a blinding, mirrorlike silver, the only humanoid resemblance is in the head and torso region. The “legs” end below the knees, and are replaced by the thick treads usually seen propelling heavy tanks over uncertain ground. The “arms” end in lethal weaponry currently pointed at the convoy.

Dakota turns to her cousin. “You ever seen them before?”

“No. I heard they existed, but no. Never. Jesus.” He runs a hand over his short, buzzed hair in a gesture of nervousness familiar to Dakota.

The radio crackles to life. Maggie Allen’s voice is terse. “Check off, people!”

“Rivers here, Colonel,” Manny replies, keying the handset.

“Manny? We’re gonna lay down a line of grenade cover. You get the civvie out of here. Go back the way you came and don’t stop until you’re sure you’re out of danger.”

Dakota grabs the radio away from her cousin and holds it up to her mouth. “Sorry, Colonel, but the ‘civvie’ is the one driving this beast, and the only direction I’m going is forward.”

“Dakota!”

“Can’t hear you, Colonel. You’re breaking up.”

“Rivers!!!”

Releasing the talk button, Dakota tosses the handset down on the floorboards at Manny’s feet, pinning her cousin in place with a look. “Don’t even think about it,” she warns.