I have to wait for several minutes in the grip of the attack. When my panic finally subsides and my breath isn’t coming out in hacking pants, I try to get up, and all the creatures look at me at once. It makes me want to vomit. I press myself against the wall and rise. Carefully, I walk between the Zeros until I’m across from the ghoulish Hawthorne.
I kneel in front of him. He stares, but it’s as if he isn’t really seeing me. “Hawthorne.” I try a normal tone, but it comes out in a breathless whisper. “Remember when we first met? It was in Swords, when the airships fell from of the sky. Remember?” My voice quivers. Tears spill down my cheeks. “You tried to help me, and I hit you in the nose?”
He doesn’t even blink.
I sit down and cross my legs. “You rescued me when I was Crow’s prisoner in Census. You were so brave. Nobody else lifted a finger. It was you. Just you.” I touch his hand, wanting so badly for him to hold me.
Suddenly his eyes focus. His hand pounces, wraps around my throat, and squeezes. My face flushes. My windpipe feels crushed. I hold up my hands to him, palms out, in surrender. He lets go.
I cough and sputter, gulping breaths. “Okay, so no touching,” I gasp when I finally get my voice back. I wipe my tears from my cheeks with my sleeve. I touch my ravaged neck. “I know you’re in there somewhere, Hawthorne. We’re a half-written poem, you and me. Wherever you are—whatever basement in your mind they’ve got you trapped in—I’ll find you. I won’t leave you down there alone.”
I talk as if we’re alone, reminding Hawthorne of everything we’ve shared together. Every stolen moment when we were secondborns. Every kiss. Every touch. My throat aches, but still I talk.
Hawthorne stares straight ahead. No reaction. No indication that he hears me or understands me. Hours pass with no sign of recognition from him. The pain of it is too much. It’s too real. It threatens to bury me. I hold my head in my hands and give in, sobbing quietly.
The cargo ship begins to descend. The touchdown is smooth. I try to pull myself together, wiping my face with the back of my sleeve. The tail opens. Humid air rushes in. The sky is still dark, but tall lights loom above us, like those that line the secondborn military Bases in Swords, throwing stark white light on everything.
Hawthorne stands in unison with the other mind-controlled monsters. He grabs my arm and roughly hauls me out of the hold. Agent Crow waits on the hoverpad. The black beacon on the side of his forehead blinks blue. Around us, palm trees sway in a salty breeze. Balmy air blows loose strands of my hair.
“Pleasant trip?” Agent Crow asks. He smiles, baring his wretched steel teeth.
Normally I try to have something scathingly ironic to say back to him, just so that he remembers he hasn’t beaten me. This time I don’t. This time he has destroyed me, reached inside me and torn my heart out, and I know this is only the beginning.
“Where are we?” My voice is gravelly.
“A little place we call The Apiary,” Agent Crow replies. “It’s a small island near the Fate of Seas, one of the first military Bases to have Trees. It’s been decommissioned, as far as most people are concerned. Not a lot of people outside of Census know of its existence.”
I can just make out the ocean in the distance. All around lie the relicts of a decrepit military Base. Ancient airships that I’ve only seen in holographic history files rust out in the open. Everything is at least a few hundred years old. The only lights shine from the Base’s Trees and infrastructure. Nothing but water lies beyond the Base from what I can tell. Behind us, rough tree-lined, rocky crags dapple the horizon. No other signs of civilization.
Viable airships hang from the Tree’s branches, but they’re not current models. I wouldn’t know if I could fly one unless I got inside the cockpit. Behind me, the cyborgs form two lines. Each of them is spaced the same distance apart. Efficient. Mindless. Controlled and manipulated by a psychopathic Census agent.
Agent Crow strides ahead of me into the Tree’s trunk. I’m prodded to follow. A familiar dimness greets me inside the Tree, but the smell isn’t the same as the military Trees I inhabited as a soldier. This structure has been resurrected to fit the needs of madmen. We enter a warehouse for hundreds of thousands of adult-size vials—cylindrical tanks filled with fluid. Blue neon light glows from the tops and bottoms of the transparent cylinders. Inside each is a person, curled in a fetal position, floating. Some resemble modern Homo sapiens. Others don’t. Some are amalgamations of different species. Others are unifications of human and machine. Above us are levels of vials as far as I can see, arranged in concentric rings like the cross section of a real tree.
Energy thrums and snaps in the air. There’s an overcharged, singeing scent. If I licked my fingers, I could probably taste it on my skin. As it is, I feel it in my chest. My hair rises, from the smell and from fear.
Agent Crow teeters on the edge of mania. His insolent smile cuts through my haze of disbelief. “Would you like a history lesson of the Fates Republic, Roselle?” he asks. “Not the one you’ve been taught in Swords about the nine Fates forming for the common good to create perfect symmetry between the classes. That’s mostly propaganda. I’m talking about a real history lesson.”
“Enlighten me,” I reply.
He clasps his hands behind his back, and we stroll together through a ring of the glowing tanks. “As you know, our species has made such medical strides in the past centuries that we live significantly longer now than our ancestors did—sometimes a hundred years longer or more. Advances in medicine and technology keep driving those ages higher. Once, our population exploded. We were on the brink of exhausting all our natural resources, bringing catastrophic destruction to the planet. We were wasting away. Something had to be done. At the same time, a powerful ruler by the name of Greyon Wenn the Virtuous came into power. Have you heard of him?”
“Of course,” I reply. We continue between the glowing containers like lurking rats. “Greyon was a ruthless warlord and a brilliant strategist. Brutal in his tactics, he slaughtered his rivals when they surrendered, and he set about systematically toppling every other government until he became the first supreme ruler to dominate the world. He formed a single unifying government and presided over it with ruthless aggression.”
A sudden spasm of motion explodes in the cylinder next to me. I lurch away. Hands press against the transparent surface. An open mouth with sharp fangs gropes the glass. The eyes of the creature are completely black. Gills cover its neck. Webbed fingers paw at us through the fluid. I’m not sure if it was once a person or not. I shudder. Hawthorne shoves me away from the tank, propelling me in Agent Crow’s direction.
Agent Crow chuckles and keeps walking. “You surprise me, Roselle. You know our true origins. Your mentor, Dune, taught you well,” Agent Crow says. “You’re not as ignorant as most people I encounter.”
“Dune always said, ‘Know your past so you can avoid it in the future.’”
Agent Crow chuckles. “What else did he teach you about Greyon Wenn the Virtuous?”
“I know Grisholm Wenn-Bowie was said to be a direct descendant of Greyon,” I reply numbly.
“Yes, you could trace his family line all the way back to the supreme ruler . . . but the same could be said about you, Roselle. The St. Sismode line directly descends from Greyon. Some say that the Wenns and the Bowies have the name, but it’s your family that has the blood.”
“They’re all dead now,” I say tonelessly. “You and your minions decimated them.”
“All except for you and your mother. But the Wenn and Bowie lineages lost their nobility and intelligence years ago. We simply rectified the genealogical error. We relegated them to where they belong—a footnote in history. But getting back to Greyon . . . The world was staggeringly overpopulated, and growing more so in peacetime. Greyon Wenn decreed restrictions be enacted on procreation. His government began issuing birth cards, a rudimentary way to give permission to a couple to have a child. Firstborns weren’t the only ones allowed to hav
e birth cards. It was based purely on genetics. Once undesirable traits were expunged, it became an issue of privilege. Cards were dispensed at higher and higher prices. Families died off. Inherited wealth became a way to ensure the survival of the family name. Finances were pooled and given to firstborn heirs to keep family lines alive. Only the elite could afford to have children.
The government began issuing cards for secondborn children, but with the explicit provision that the child be given to the government when the secondborn reached adulthood. And voilà! The Fates Republic was formed. Of course, there will always be rule breakers, and enforcement of laws is essential—so Census was born.”
I consider trying to choke him to death, like I did when we first met. I could probably do it if I could get my cuffs over his head. Hawthorne lingers so near to me, though. It wouldn’t take much for him to break my arms. I contemplate other killing scenarios as we pass more tanks. The beings inside these appear more human, but these people have machine parts grafted to them. The fine-boned lines of one woman’s face are covered in a shiny coating of metal. Her left eye has been replaced by a protruding lens. She doesn’t move as we pass.
Agent Crow drones on. “Over time, the population scales tipped, and we slid back the other way. Our low birth rate threatened us with extinction. Depressing the birth rate was never meant to be a permanent solution to overpopulation, and even though we were living longer, the population was declining. So again, something had to be done.
He has led us to a Census bunker. He scans his moniker under a blue light near the security doors, and they roll open. We walk a short corridor to the lifts and enter an elevator car. The last time I was in a Census elevator, it filled with lake water, and I almost died. I feel like I’m drowning now, too. The elevator doors close, and we descend.
And still, Agent Crow continues his history lesson. “Scientists were put to the task of finding a solution to our complex problem. Cloistered away from society, they lived like kings and queens on this island oasis, creating generations of offspring we affectionately refer to as zeroborns. A harvesting plant was built right here on this military Base.”
I scoff. “Why not just repeal the laws and let everyone repopulate the world naturally?”
Agent Crow scrunches his face like I’ve said something distasteful. “Bah! I never took you for a simpleton!” He looks down his nose at me and sneers. “You’d let every dirt farmer have as many brats as he wanted, wouldn’t you? You’d let the lawbreakers go unpunished?”
“My way would make Census obsolete.”
“Your way will never happen.”
The elevator doors open. Before me sprawls a state-of-the-art laboratory. It’s eerily dim, lit by a low blue haze that seems to come from the floor. Incubation capsules resembling giant wombs hang from tubing in neatly lined rows and columns. I stand frozen, mouth agape. Agent Crow exits the car, turns, and gazes at me, his hands still clasped behind his back.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” he asks. Technicians in gloves and black lab coats tend to the wombs. “The next generation of zeroborns. We use zygotes taken from captured thirdborns before we execute them. We used to genetically engineer our batches through cloning, but we’re getting much better results now—from diversity, of all things. Diversity has been the key to hiding our progeny. Clones don’t blend in well, but clones are useful in running our secret facilities.”
Hawthorne shoves me in the back, and I stumble from the elevator. Agent Crow turns and continues walking, passing rows of swollen, veiny, synthetic-flesh bladders filled with fluid and floating fetuses.
“Once the first generation of zeroborns was created,” Agent Crow says, “the operation became self-perpetuating. Zeroborns manufacturing zeroborns to work in the embryo centers, as caretakers, as population insertion specialists—chemically mapping the brains of our progeny with false memories so they can be inserted, undetected, into the population in any Fate we choose.” The technicians resemble one another, some right down to their freckles. They have zero-shaped monikers.
“How did you keep the zeroborns a secret for so long?” I ask.
“The zeroborns who are inserted into the population receive new monikers representing whatever Fate they’re assigned to. Take, for example, zeroborns earmarked to become Sword soldiers. We create them here, in our underground facilities. Other zeroborns care for them. They leave this facility when they’re infants. The zeroborn soldiers are raised at other secret military facilities, where they’re trained and given false memories of a life and family in Swords that never existed.”
I can’t believe what I’m hearing. “How do you give someone false memories?”
“Reality and perception are easy to manipulate. Your eyes, as it happens, aren’t the best way to perceive the world. They’re horrendously inadequate filters. We don’t perceive most of what there is to see. Perception is a guessing game for the brain. Once you understand that, then you know that everything you perceive with your senses can be altered and manipulated, especially your visual perception. Take our cornea implants—the silver shine results from an alteration to the visual acuity. The Black-Os aren’t seeing what you and I see. They’re being fed a virtual reality on top of the world at large. Their cornea implants, coupled with alterations to the chemicals and electrical impulses in the cerebral cortex, override their higher cognitive reasoning, replacing it with artificial intelligence that we control. We can implant any memory we see fit.”
I glance at the black disc on his temple. “How do you control them?”
He pauses next to a fleshy womb. In the translucent sack, a fetus floats, blissfully unaware of its very unnatural environment. “The Virtual Perception Manipulation Device, or VPMD, began as a toy,” Agent Crow explains. “It was a form of amusement—tricking our brains with enhanced optics. Recreational visual deception. Eventually, Census created our own virtual worlds by implanting devices into the brains of zeroborns. The implants, once embedded, create their own unique neural pathways. Biochemically, we manipulate visual and aural perception, and with implants in the cornea, show them images they perceive as ‘real.’ We have complex programs and protocols. When we send Black-Os out to perform a mission, there are ‘laws’ that they have to follow, but the program also incorporates artificial intelligence. How the collective reaches the goal is almost entirely up to them. They just have to adhere to certain rules.”
“Rules like ‘Don’t kill Roselle. Bring her to the Sword balcony while you slaughter everyone else’?”
Agent Crow’s eyes dance with amusement. “We gave them your scent. Did you know that? They smelled you, like maginots would.”
“So they have olfactory enhancements as well?”
“And so much more.”
“You use that device on your temple to communicate with the Black-Os,” I say. It’s not a question.
“That information isn’t part of the tour, Roselle,” he admonishes. “We’ve already created our own population—our own elite forces. The time for a great change in power has begun. No longer will we be subject to the idiocy of the Clarities of the Fates Republic. Census will make the laws now. Your mother, of course, is the exception.”
“It always comes down to power, doesn’t it?”
“Everything is about power, Roselle. The war between the Fates Republic and the Gates of Dawn has accelerated the transfer of power. Census has been hiding our declining population with zeroborn replacements masquerading as Swords, but we’ve been having trouble keeping up with your mother’s production demands. If things continue at the current rate, secondborn Swords will go extinct in a generation. The Gates of Dawn keeps throwing their martyrs at us, and we can’t grow new organic soldiers from infancy fast enough. We had to find a way to convert existing assets.”
“Assets?” I spit. “You’re talking about people!”
“Oh, you don’t know the half of it, Roselle.”
“If the ban on procreation were lifted,” I snap, “Census would l
ose its power. So instead, you kidnap people like Hawthorne and insert VPMDs to make them obey you?”
“It’s called conversion, Roselle. We implant devices that allow us to control the host. Let the Gates of Dawn throw as many bodies at us as they want. We’ll just keep killing them and producing enhanced reinforcements until there’s no one else left.”
“My mother knows?” I can barely contain my rage.
“We needed each other, Census and The Sword.”
“How long will that last?” I ask him. He smirks but doesn’t answer. “How long has Hawthorne been your convert?”
“Not long. A few weeks. We grabbed him at his home after that little stunt you two pulled at the Sword social club. I must admit that I was impressed with how you handled our non-converted zeroborns. It showed just how weak they are compared with our enhanced AI versions.”
“Non-converted?” I ask.
“None of the assassins you fought at the Sword social club had cerebral enhancements. It was too risky. If the implants and other enhancements had been found before we were ready to unveil them, it could have ruined everything.”
“Other enhancements?” I think of the steel claws that sprang from the Black-Os fingertips.
“Lethal enhancements, Roselle. We’re on the cutting edge of tapping into other perceptions, what some would call a sixth sense. The new neural pathways that the VPMD creates have presented us with some tantalizing opportunities. We’ve commissioned Star-Fated engineers to help us with our research—only the brightest.” I haven’t seen these Star-Fated technicians around.
“You’ve commissioned them or you’ve kidnapped them?” I ask.
“‘Kidnapped’ is such an ugly word, Roselle. Most of them are secondborns. We appropriated them.”
We leave the room and enter a stark white corridor. The light hurts my eyes. Windows afford a view of a nursery. Swaddled in temperature-controlled cocoons, infants rock gently in nestled bins. Above them, holographic images of faces hover, talking and smiling, giving the impression that a real person is attending to the infant. These are interspersed with other images, flashes of light that I can’t make out.