Chapter Text
Rosencrantz: That's it, then, is it? The sun's going down. Or the earth's coming up, as the fashionable theory has it. Not that it makes any difference. What was it all about? When did it begin? Couldn't we just stay put? I mean no one is going to come on and drag us off... They'll just have to wait. We're still young...fit...we've got years... (a cry) We've done nothing wrong! We didn't harm anyone. Did we?
Guildenstern: I can't remember.
Rosencrantz: (pulls himself together) All right, then. I don't care. I've had enough. To tell you the truth, I'm relived. (And he disappears from view. Guildenstern does not notice.)
Guildenstern: Our names shouted in a certain dawn...a message...a summons... There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said—no. But somehow we missed it.
-Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
What makes up a life; events or the recollection of events?
How much of recollection is invention?
Whose invention?
-Jeanette Winterson, Art & Lies
2015
It takes Steve a long time to find the secret entrance.
(Secret entrance—god, the absurdity of it: it's not like he isn't faced with absurdities every day on the job, but something about the cleverly concealed door and the honest-to-god escape chute, the ludicrous economy of it, makes him want to laugh and maybe not stop. Of course there'd be a secret entrance; you couldn't walk the Winter Soldier through an active banking firm. He wonders whether HYDRA execs ever had to be brought in the back way, a bunch of old men in their crisp suits trying to climb down a metal ladder with any dignity at all.)
Steve's here because the silent alarm tripped. Not the one in the bank proper, but the backdoor, the one that sent an alert to a HYDRA dropbox, one of many Natasha's sent Steve the codes for over the last eight months. He's expecting the general structure he finds in the basement of the bank, because minor variations aside, HYDRA's pretty predictable about their architecture, but—
Steve's been cracking a lot of bases; he's got this. And usually they're an anticlimax: empty, stripped, empty, one confused secretary, empty. It's troubling or weird about a third of the time, but the emptiness makes those instances almost more sad than distressing. A rack of test tubes, one spilling its contents onto a nearby pipette as if its user had dropped both in a panic. The twisted bodies of things that might've been dogs, some with too much skin for their bones, some with too many bones for their skin. A room perforated with a frankly ridiculous number of bullet holes, but no sign of human damage. Rows and rows of cages holding twenty-two dead mice, nine dead monkeys, and one live badger. A wall covered in photographs of children, front and side like mugshots, every single one of them blue-eyed. Steve had been starting to think he'd be ready for anything to greet him inside the next bunker.
He's not ready for this.
The room isn't a surprise; many of the larger bases have a workshop, power tools on the walls, usually a good welding kit. The blood startles him, but only because it's so fresh. He can smell how coppery-sharp it is from the hall, so whatever triggered the alarm probably also triggered the blood, in one way or another. The circular saw in the middle of the room looks as though someone's upended a bucket of red paint onto it, and it's spread halfway to the stairs, helped along by what looks like a dozen separate sets of footprints. One set is bare, each toe clearly defined.
Mostly, though, it's the five HYDRA goons in white hazmat suits, clustered around a chunk of something that might have been human this morning, taking pictures with their smartphones. One of them has a pink sparkly case with a kitten charm dangling from it. Steve makes an incredulous noise, and they all look up. One of them says, “Oh shit.”
The ensuing fight is more like bowling. After stashing the unconscious goons in the janitor's closet, Steve investigates the scene.
It takes him a minute to put the pieces together, but when he does, he has to go sit in the doorway for a while with his head in his hands.
And then, when he thinks he can manage words, he calls Sam.
19??
“Come on, Joe DiMaggio, put your money where your mouth is!”
1990
Murray's dozing above his overflowing desk, jerking awake every so often to bitch about bureaucracy and the perfidiousness of paperwork, while the Soldier looks over his file for the hundredth time. It's not like he has anything better to do, or any more interesting reading material, unless he wants to re-read Murray's gardening magazines or dig out the stultifying user manual for the new flamethrower that's functionally indistinguishable from the last model, and honestly he'd rather shoot himself in the foot. They're waiting for HQ's approval of a mission they sent down the tubes weeks ago, the one for which somebody conveniently forgot to include authorization protocols in the briefing package. Down the hall, he can hear the STRIKE boys getting rowdy. Something's bound to get broken if HQ keeps their collective thumbs up their asses much longer.
His file, unlike manuals and paperwork, is always quality entertainment, because it's half a trip down memory lane and half an ever-changing series of blanks. On one reading, he might not recognize a particular mission at all; on the next, he might be treated to a full-color surround-sound slideshow. It's impossible to predict what level of remembrance he'll run into, opening it up. He's tried to make a lethargic study out of it, making tally marks in the margins with a pencil if he remembers more than 50% of any given debrief. Typically, the more recent the mission, the greater the number of tally marks beside it, but a bunch of Zola's unhinged, partially decoded case notes have their own forest of lines. The Soldier tries not to dwell on those any longer than he has to, and that's not cowardice—just good old-fashioned self preservation. Put your own oxygen mask on first, except with his own brain. He's notorious for being non-functional when he's upset.
Zola aside, the file's comforting. It tells him: this is real, this is you, this is everything that ever happened to you, whether you remember it or not. Anything that's not in the file can be dismissed as a glitch in the software. Free association. An insufficiently busy mind creating something out of nothing.
And then there's the ravine.
The ravine bugs the shit out of him, because it's not in his file, and there's enough wrong with it that he can't ever entirely convince himself of its particulars, or whether it was even real. Enough elements of it are taken from life to be based on something that really happened to him, at least—but there's the brain, again, spinning fantasies to fill in the holes. He has to assume it's mostly true, or else it'll drive him nuts, trying to track down details only his past self could have confirmed.
The Soldier remembers this: he wakes up in the snow.
He doesn't know what year it was or where he was sent—he suspects Russia, it's Russians who come and find him later, face-down next to a frozen river—but this is his very earliest memory. It's easy to slot this one at the beginning of the patchwork because it's the only one where he has a left arm, a real one, not the marvel of engineering they gave him later. Right now, in the memory, it's the left arm that's the problem. It's trapped under a boulder the size of a small car.
The brain isn't built to accurately replicate the feeling of pain in hindsight, but the Soldier doesn't remember experiencing any, not in that moment. It's the cold, maybe, or shock, but he looks at his arm crushed between rock and permafrost and doesn't feel a thing. He's worried, but not about himself, which has always confused him. Now, he wonders: were there other operatives on the mission? Did the mission fail because he was trapped down in that gorge, clothes frozen to the ground, caught like a fox in a trap?
The Soldier spends the first day trying to melt the permafrost under his arm, hopeful that he can warm up the ground enough to dig a small hole, just enough to pull it out. It might be broken; hell, the bones might be ground to dust, but at least he'll be free. His progress is negligible. At sunset he stops to eat the three squares of chocolate in his lowermost pocket. In the same pocket he finds a piece of paper, unexpected, folded in quarters. He puts a piece of chocolate in his mouth and opens it up awkwardly, the rough skin of his thumb catching the edge. Inside is a drawing of a smiling young man from the shoulders up; his dark hair messy, wet-looking, falling in his eyes. He's beautiful, in a rough-hewn way. The Soldier has no idea who the young man is to him, or how his picture could have ended up in the Soldier's pocket, but his cheerful face is good to look at. In the grim white pit the Soldier is trapped in, the drawing is a spark of life, a flower in the wasteland.
The terrific drop in temperature overnight undoes all of his work. More than once before dawn he thinks he's about to die, shock and the subzero temperature making his blood sluggish, not to mention the broken things slowly grinding themselves back together under his skin. He must have fallen a long way. Caused a rockslide on his way down from wherever. Maybe he dropped out of the sky. Bailed from a plane. It sounds like the stupid kind of thing he'd do before he got his head on straight in the mid-seventies.
He remembers being afraid.
He spends the second day alternatively calling out and trying to shift the rock, which further proves his young-and-stupid theory. There's no one out here, you dumb kid, he wants to tell his past self. That dumb kid yells until he can't yell anymore, until his throat closes raw around cold air. Even looking at the drawing of the man isn't enough to lift his despair.
The second night is...bad.
He spends the third day waiting to die. He slips in and out of consciousness. When snow drifts up around him, he doesn't try to kick it off or drink any of it. He stopped shivering long ago. When night falls, he barely notices. Hour after hour, his body refuses to quit.
At dawn, he knows what he needs to do.
He takes out both of the knives he keeps in his boots. They're freshly sharpened, which is good, but they're not remotely sanitary, which might be a problem. It would be a horrible sort of irony if he was to survive three days in the snow only to succumb to something mundane like blood poisoning. He uses the first knife to cut through his jacket and the two shirts he's wearing underneath, as close to the rock as he can, rolling the fabric up his arm and out of the way. Near the crush point, his skin is ugly black and red, mottled and swollen. Instead of the rot he expects, it smells vaguely sweet. Not the bright sweet of sugar or the dark sweet of honey, but a cloying floral thing like crushed roses. When he remembers this, he thinks about the incorruptibility of saints, how they're supposed to give off the aroma of flowers through their pores. He's not a saint, so maybe every body does it, given the opportunity.
He estimates the angle he'll need and starts cutting with the second knife. The pain is bad but not unbearable, sharp nauseating sparks softened by cold and exhaustion. In the strange floating place he's found himself, it's almost beautiful—red on the snow and his dark blue jacket, the splay of muscle fibers against the blade, bone slowly coming up white in the gap. Cutting the nerves almost kills him; just touching them with the knife makes him whine through gritted teeth. He snaps them one by one, breathing hard into his shoulder while he waits for each successive wave of fire to die down. By comparison, twisting and flinging himself at the rock until his humerus breaks is the easiest thing in the world.
The shattered bone slides out of the dead part of his arm, and he's free. Bleeding, but not bleeding out. Starving, but standing. It could be worse. He doesn't bother trying to make a bandage for the stump, just leans it into a drift until the bleeding slows to a gummy trickle, and then he starts to walk.
Unfortunately, it quickly becomes clear that freeing his arm was the least of his problems. The Soldier is trapped at the bottom of a sheer-sided crevasse. It's maybe a mile to the scrub-lined edges, far above him, and there's no way he can scale the walls in the state he's in, let alone with one arm. By the time the sun has disappeared from view, maybe mid-afternoon, he's shivering violently, his body remembering how to function. He falls often, once on the stump, which makes him roar into the snow like a child. He walks all night, stumbling blind, jolts of pain shooting up his legs hurting worse than the arm.
Sunrise brings the Soldier into a widening, and then a clearing. He lets out a whoop he'll be embarrassed by later, and runs drunkenly into the open on half-frozen legs. He startles a red deer and her two fawns. They bound away from him and disappear. Where they were standing, he finds the river, frozen into stiff mounds marked by odd scratches: the doe trying to scrape through the ice with her hooves to find water. He tries the same trick with the heel of his boot, and falls on his ass. He tries again, sitting. It's no use. The ice is too thick. He laughs for no reason.
The rest of the memory is scattershot, like a damaged film strip, periods of juddering blackness cut with misty pictures. He lays down: for a moment, just for a moment. He's so tired. A man in a fur hat looks down at him. His own limp feet catching on rocks, his stump leaving a trail of red, someone dragging him through the snow. Warmth. A roof over his head. Someone swearing as they break off the exposed shard of bone sticking out of his arm like an arrowhead. The cooked meat of an animal, and then the smell of his own meat burning. He screams when they cauterize the stump. And then: nothing.
The memory tells him a few things, smoked as they are from time and too much consideration. The man in the fur hat was wearing a Soviet uniform, one that isn't used these days, so the Soldier is old, older than he looks. Memory is tricky; something tells him he wasn't an operative then, but in light of what happened afterward—it doesn't make sense. He was already enhanced. It's that dogged not-dying that tips him off, more than anything else: bones coming together under the skin. They once sent him to—where? Ukraine, Russia, Poland?—and his mission was a spectacular failure. There were unimportant letters in his pocket (letters, because the Russians take them out while he watches; unimportant, because he doesn't remember feeling afraid when they read them, only ashamed).
He doesn't mind not knowing who he was then. He can't remember anyone significant—no parents, no lovers, no children—and that's for the best, really. It saves him from sentimentality, from looking at a target and hesitating because she has his mother's eyes. For something with his function, memories of a life before could be inconvenient at best and disastrous at worst. But one thing bothers him sometimes, in the liminal spaces between sleeping and waking, in the darkness of the cryo chamber before the ice crawls into his bones, like an itch he can't scratch at the back of his brain.
How did it all go to shit so fast?
19??
The Soldier also remembers this: before he was the Soldier, he was nothing.
☙
He is captured by the enemy. Who is the enemy? He doesn't know. But his own people wouldn't interrogate him in languages he doesn't understand, wouldn't shine lights in his eyes and pull out his remaining nails, so they must be on the wrong side. He tells them again and again: he knows nothing. He does not know anything. He does not know who he is. He is injured; that is all he knows. He is injured.
They leave the room. They come back.
They say: this is a debriefing. You must cooperate. Why do you betray your allies?
Maybe everyone is the enemy.
☙
They take his clothes. The Russians have put his things back in his pockets. The men take the letters out and read them aloud. Laughter. The drawing is unfolded. Held up beside his face. Ah, they say. Hübscher Junge. Ist dein Freundin ein Künstler?
They burn his letters one by one. They burn the drawing in front of his face, close enough to scorch his brow. He snaps at their fingers, grieving. The truth will not occur to him until nightfall, when they leave him. Damp straw, damp stone. He feels his face. The orbits of his eyes, the bow of his mouth. He pulls a curl of hair into the moonlight. He weeps, there, in the straw. Someone has loved him. Someone drew him. Someone thought he was a spark.
☙
They shave his head. They clean him with a hose. When he tries to kill the men with the hose, they chain him to the wall. Awkwardly: new bolts must be drilled, a chain wrapped twice around his shoulder, digging into his armpit. Thick black sutures at the end of his stump. It's become septic twice; the fevers take him, and the convulsions, and then he gets better. He thinks it will become septic again. Their water isn't very clean.
When he tells them, they direct the hose onto his stump until he loses consciousness.
☙
He can read German. He can understand a little Russian. He can't speak German or Russian. The guards think this is very funny. They ask him questions and hit him when he doesn't respond, belts and horsewhips, whatever they can find in nearby rooms. They grow bored when he refuses to scream. One of them disappears and returns with a length of chain. The chain, inexpertly wielded, wraps around his neck and smacks the breath out of him for a full minute. He coughs and gags on the floor. He's not boring anymore.
They say: sprich mir nach. He does, badly, gravel in his throat, and they laugh. They beat him around the shoulders with a thin cane. He says: Hör. Pazhalsta. Bitte.
Bitte, the tallest one says, very distinctly.
Bitte, he says.
Ja, the tallest one says. Ja, gut, gut.
The cane lifts. A piece of candy dissolving on his bitten tongue.
☙
He attempts to escape. His bare feet on damp stone, slipping. He cuts his heel on the sill before he jumps. There are no bars on the windows here. When the wind steals his breath, when he has time to shout, when his bones splinter on the rocks below, he learns why: there's no point in barring a window no man could climb up to. He looks away from the stone walls, the buttresses, out over the cloud-quilted valleys. He waits to die. He doesn't know where he is. That seems a greater tragedy than not knowing his name.
He doesn't die. He screams when they collect him.
Anger, not pain.
☙
They beat him. They tell him: do not try to escape. This is what will happen.
When he clumsily slits his own throat with a shard of ice from the eave of his cell, they stitch him up and wait until he can stand. They bring him a filthy child, shaved bald, sores around the mouth, eyes like clear water. They strap a gun to his hand. Wire is wrapped around his finger, around the trigger. They use his hand to shoot the child between the eyes. They tell him: do not try to escape. This is what will happen.
He tries to escape. They beat him until pink froth comes out of his mouth, his nose. They beat him until the commandant stops them.
“Zola needs him in one piece,” the commandant says.
He laughs until he vomits blood onto their shoes.
☙
He tries to escape.
☙
They put him in a room with several men. The men all look alike: dirty clothing and shaved heads and eyes like empty pools. He can't tell them apart. They say: perhaps this will teach you to be more cooperative. When he disobeys, the guards come in and beat him and another man. The other man is beaten much worse. It's uncertain for some time whether the man will live, but the man does live.
He understands: this is how you break a person.
He tries to kill the guard who beat the man the hardest. They hold him down and beat him and beat another man. The second man dies the next night.
He understands: this is like the child.
The men don't approach him or speak to him. The men watch him without looking at him. He gets away from them, as far as he can without digging into the wall. He curls up and doesn't move until the guards come back. He doesn't fight them when they pick him up and move his limbs. They dress him like a doll. His left cuff hangs gaping.
His shirt says, in little black stitches: Subjekt Eins. The other men don't have numbers.
This isn't a privilege.
It is, apparently, a responsibility.
☙
The subject is told: compliance will be rewarded. He doesn't fight. He doesn't try to kill the guards. He doesn't try to kill himself. He wants to know what it might be, the reward: whether it might help him understand, whether he can trade it for favors, whether it can make him stronger. Right now, he's too weak.
They put him to sleep. He wakes with a limb of shining metal bolted to his stump. His elbow becomes steel. His wrist, mercury. Holes they've bored into his bones to hold it there, aching. He bares his teeth like a dog, like a rabid thing, like a bat he saw convulsing in the corner of the room he shares with the men, snapping at the air, dying. The numberless men aren't here, in this room. They can't be used against him. He bares his teeth.
Eight people die before the anesthetic brings him down.
☙
They install a new arm. His body rejects it. Infection is a matter of course; the fevers, spiking higher and higher. His abandoned arm has a vengeful spirit. Any tampering with what he has left, and his blood tries to boil in his skull. They beat him as though it's his fault. He laughs and clenches his silver fist.
They say: why won't you cooperate? Compliance will be rewarded.
Who am I? he says. Fuck you.
They look at each other.
Perhaps it's time, one of them says.
Maybe, one of them says.
He's been asking, one of them says.
Amerika, one of them says.
Zola, one of them says.
He doesn't know the name, but something seizes in his chest: like a heart attack.
☙
A silver coffin. Like a bullet, or a tube of—like a—
Like something he's forgotten.
They put him inside of it and lock the door. He thinks they're going to bury him alive, until the ice comes. His limbs turn to stone. His pulse slows to hard sickly thumps in his throat. His brain is the last thing to shut down, which they know. They must know. They must have planned it this way. They've given him a window to look through while it happens.
He freezes to death. He wakes up somewhere else.
19??
The room is small. They're crowded together: the subject and the men who have been brought with him. They smell like sweat and fear and illness, too hot in the airless space. None of them try to remove their uniforms. Little black stitches on the left breast. Some of the numberless men are numberless no more. We lucky few, one of them says. Proximity's made them bold. Nobody tries to avoid touching the subject. Or: it would be a waste of energy.
They haven't been given water since the door closed. Like sand moving over sand, Subjekt Drei whispers, “D'où êtes-vous?”
“Idaho,” says Subjekt Vier.
“Bristol,” says Subjekt Acht.
“Stuttgart,” says Subjekt Zwei.
“No fuckin' clue,” the subject says.
“Ah, yes, who knows really where one is from.” Subject Neun has the thickest accent. Some of the men nod. “The war, the borders—it is all shit. Lines on maps.” He spits on his own bare foot.
The subject thinks: what war?
“Hear hear,” says Subjekt Acht.
“You ever hear the joke about the old lady from Warsaw?” Subject Vier asks. “Her son comes rushing in and says, Ma, Ma, the Poles have taken back the city! Oh thank god, the old lady says, I couldn't stand another Russian winter.”
Some of the men laugh. Some of them smile. Some of them start out laughing and end up coughing.
The subject doesn't laugh. He doesn't get it.
☙
A small round face. Two small round lenses, reflecting light.
Unreasoning terror.
He fights until they beat the fight out of him, and then he fights them again. They strap him down and force needles into the ditch of his elbow. Something dark burning up his arm, sitting like tar in his chest, drawing dark curtains over his eyes. He's—
A gap.
When the blackness clears, the lights are smeary, too bright. He's lost something. He's lost time. Though unable to recall the shape of the room he was in before, he'd swear things have been moved. Some instinct, some lingering uncanniness. A doctor leans over him, lenses flashing. The doctor smiles.
The subject feels as though he should be afraid. He can't, for several days, remember why.
☙
Amerika, the doctor says. He cocks his head like a sparrow, and then he shakes it. No, I suppose you would not know of it.
The subject bleeds on the table and doesn't care. When the pain becomes worse, he begs. It changes nothing. They return him to the room, and he goes into the darkest corner. When he finds a knife-sharp pebble by laying down on it, he thinks about cutting his skin. It might make the doctor angry. He looks at the incisions the doctor made; they're almost gone. Faint pink lines. He uses the stone to write on the wall instead: I heal very fast.
☙
All of them are injected with a large needle, and everyone but the subject heals within a day. When his body rejects it, pushing out jagged metal through inflamed skin, they all see what was put into them. They don't know what it is.
“Looks like vacuum tubes for dolls,” says Subjekt Vier.
Subjekt Zwei says, “I knew a, how do you say? Physiker. Who is working on integrated electronic circuits. Like this, but—large.”
“It's too fuckin' small,” says Subjekt Vier.
“Might they be trying to control us?” Subjekt Acht suggests. “Turn us into—oh, I don't bloody know. Don't laugh. Robots?”
Nobody looks at the subject. Nobody mentions his arm.
“They were aiming for that, they shoulda stuck needles in our brains,” says Subjekt Vier.
“Don't give them ideas,” says Subjekt Fünf.
The subject rejects another three circuits. They strap him to the table and drill cores in his bones. Machinery shrieking. The smell of burning carbon. The men tell him later that he writhes with infection for two days, his joints swelling and turning red, his sweat like nothing they've ever smelled, sour and sweet by turns like rotting meat. He can't walk until the swelling goes down.
Subjekt Fünf is taken away and comes back beaten. Bruises on his face and hands and belly, a crust of blood around his nostrils. He's bitten through his cheek and slurs when he talks.
“I got loose and made a break for it,” Subjekt Fünf whispers. “Hid in a bin in a supply cupboard. Only a couple minutes before they found me—the tall one had a thing like a radio. It beeped the closer he got to me.” He spits blood and holds a hand to his ribs. “They're trackers, pals. I think we're giving off radar signals.”
“Fuck a duck,” says Subjekt Acht.
The subject scratches onto his skin, and then onto the wall: They can find us if we run. On his skin it disappears. On the wall it remains.
☙
The men are given paper and pencils. The guards tell them in several languages to write letters to their families. The subject doesn't know what to write—where his family is, if he even has one. Doesn't know who to address it to. He makes a messy sketch of one of the guards instead, the one who has interesting features, with his high sharp cheekbones and a jaw that seems too large for his face.
“That's really quite good,” says Subject Acht, leaning over his shoulder. “Were you an artist?”
“Dunno,” the subject says. No, he wasn't, or maybe, but: someone else was. Someone loved him. Someone thought he was—
“Don't know much, do you, champ?” says Subjekt Fünf.
The subject shrugs.
“Aw, let him alone,” says Subjekt Vier. “Hell, he might have a little girl at home, same as you. Only way you're gettin' outta here to see her again is if we all stick together, you keen?”
“Think I had a sister,” the subject says, before Subjekt Fünf can get angry. He doesn't think it until he says it, feels like he's making it up, but it doesn't lay heavy in his mouth like a lie. Maybe he did have a sister. Surely many people do.
“See?” says Subjekt Vier. He claps the subject on his right shoulder. “We'll get you home to Sis. You'll see. Hey, d'you think you could draw my ugly mug next?”
☙
Subjekt Vier is taken. He's returned the next day with thick bandages wrapped around his face, swaggering blind into the room like he has no fear. When the door slams shut he drops to his knees. The men cluster around him and pat him on the shoulders. They murmur comfortingly. Subjekt Sieben and his steady hands, unwinding the bandages, removing the lumps of gauze. Subjekt Vier squints and blinks and shakes his head. His once-brown eyes are webbed with blood and yellow as a cat's. The pupils aren't right. He doesn't match the drawing anymore.
“I don't think this is any regular kinda POW camp, fellas,” he says. His voice is very weak.
The subject crawls back into the corner and works on pulling out his thumbnail with his teeth. He could have told them that, if anyone had asked.
☙
Subjekt Acht is returned with stitches in his neck and ugly shapes under his skin. He can't speak. He borrows the subject's sharp stone to write on the wall: They put metal in my throat.
Subjekt Drei is returned wrapped in six thick blankets. His skin is raw-red and he can't stop shaking for several hours. He tells them he was put into a vat of ice, and then under a hot lamp, and then back into the ice, over and over. Three of his teeth are cracked from chattering.
Subjekt Neun is returned with someone else's hand at the end of his right wrist. The skin of the hand doesn't match the skin of his arm. He can't control it, but it twitches on its own. It hangs limply unless he holds it against his stomach. He gags, sometimes, when it moves.
The subject only sees the hand later. He's in a small dark room when Subjekt Neun is returned, picking up marbles with his metal fingers and tossing them into cups. If he misses a cup, he receives a small electric shock. If he drops a marble, he receives a small electric shock. If he attempts to attack the observer, he receives a large electric shock. When they return him, sedated, the skin where the electrodes clung is blackened and burned. He counts the minutes it takes them to heal and disappear. See: he can do science too.
☙
Sometimes he thinks there's too many men. Sometimes he thinks there's too few. Sometimes he's alone. Sometimes he's surprised to wake up and find the men nearby. Sometimes he's frightened and other times he's violent. The men have learned to talk him down. He knows this because they're too patient. They're not afraid of him. They make up kind stories about his sister. He doesn't have a sister. Does he?
Subjekt Acht becomes ill. The only noise he makes is the rattle of the thing in his throat. He vomits blood that night and dies. The subject holds the back of his hand in front of the man's nose before they take the body away: there's no air. The next day, Subjekt Acht is brought back into the room alive. Mute and smiling. The guards have given him small candies, one for every subject in the room. He offers them around, cupped in hairless too-clean hands.
The subject takes one with his dirt-black fingers. He worries what'll happen if he refuses a dead man's tokens.
He records it on his skin. He records it on the wall.
Subjekt Sieben is taken away for a blood sample. At dawn he strangles Subjekt Fünf. He screams while he does it. They try to tear them apart but Subjekt Sieben's fingers are locked bone-hard. White knuckles and broken blood vessels. His steady hands. He goes quiet when it's over but doesn't move from where he crouches over Subject Fünf's body. He's quiet when the guards take him away. He's quiet when they bring him back. He seizes three days later, pink froth over all his face like a caul, torquing his spine until it breaks.
Subjekt Zehn's brain swells in his skull. It's slow. The guards shoot him because he makes a terrible keening noise.
Subjekt Drei bleeds under his skin until he turns black and gangrenous. His skin splits and oozes terrible fluids.
Subjekt Zwei is suddenly ravenous. They give him half their food but it's not enough. He withers to bones. He starves to death.
Subjekt Acht's skin peels off in strips. His teeth fall out. His mouth is full of sores. He tells them: don't come near me.
Subjekt Vier can't shake his pneumonia.
Subjekt Neun's fever doesn't break.
Subjekt Sechs beats himself to death on the wall.
The subject scratches all of them down in the corner. In the shadows, his sharp dark stone.
☙
The subject tries to kill himself.
He wakes up.
☙
The subject tries to kill himself.
He wakes up.
☙
The subject tries to kill himself.
He wakes up.
☙
Laying on the table. His body is on the table but he is not.
Laying on the table. Laying on the roof. Sky so clear and blue it's almost translucent, Christ, would you look at that, pal, blue just like—just like—
Sky somewhere else. Sky in his head. Hissing as he drops a cigarette onto his naked chest, rolling over, swatting at ashes, cursing a streak as blue as—scraping his hands on tar paper, scuffling. Someone laughing. A man laughing. Not him. And then: him laughing too. Eyes. Someone else's lizard-skin bruised-up elbow, sun on his back, grit under his fingers. Warm. No sound but the sound of them laughing.
Somewhere, far away, pain.
When they take him back to the room, someone has painted over all of the walls.
19??
“I disliked anatomy in medical school,” the doctor is saying. The subject doesn't turn his head, even when metal clatters ominously against metal next to his right ear. The subject attempted to convey interest, earlier, and the doctor was less gentle. The subject is meant to hear but not to listen. An instrument smacks cold against the subject's earlobe before it digs in behind his jaw. He clamps his teeth together and swallows compulsively so he won't make a noise.
“Even at Medizinische Universität Wien, it was undignified,” the doctor continues. His thick accent slurs his T's into Z's. If the subject closes his eyes, pretends the doctor isn't attached, it's a soothing voice, musical, low. “So much limp gray flesh, so many opportunities for rude jokes by young men who thought themselves very funny. Blood and fluids and stuffy little rooms. You can imagine it was not pleasant. I felt always—what is the word? Nauseous. No, nauseated. English is an eccentric language; so particular. I felt always nauseated. But in those days we needed doctors very badly in Europe. A decade after Erster Weltkrieg and still there were so many people dying. Men with rotting lungs and rotting legs...hysteria...venereal disease. Some the influenza took and never left. Death would have been better for many of them. So futile, the fighting for land and not for idealism—so futile. There was no Zeitgeist. Little children grabbing more sweets than they can eat. So much waste.”
A wet noise and a sudden sharper pain; the subject bites his tongue to pulp. Warm liquid, rolling down his neck and settling against his spine, against the table, cooling and itching. Salt water to rinse the canvas. The doctor sniffs and returns to his work. “With the broken men I discovered a certain talent for, ah, detachment. I was an engineering student first, when I still was very selfish. I excelled at machines, but I did not function well in that environment. I found it insufficiently academic and a waste of my talent. Little did I know. I believe it was in those broken men that first I realized how like a machine the human being is. One may open it up and see all of its parts moving. One may break it and put it back together stronger than before. One may even help it cheat death. It was,” the doctor whispers, “A revelation.”
“Ain't you swell,” the subject slurs. Blood or saliva or both trickles from the corner of his mouth. He sneers to make it worse.
The doctor glares, his lips pressed thin and bullfrog-wide. “Perhaps I was not sufficiently clear at the outset. You will cease talking.”
“Make me,” the subject says.
☙
The subject is screaming.
He produces no noise. The doctor's done something to his spine, up where it slots into his skull, and he can't move. But he can see, and he can think, and he can feel. The doctor has opened him up, spread his torso wide like butterfly wings, flayed it off his ribs. He's a corpse on an autopsy table. He can feel the peeled-back skin resting slack and warm on his right arm, knows it must be the same on the other side, but he can't feel it. He's being punished. The only thing this can be is a punishment. He doesn't know why he's being punished. He doesn't know why he's not dead.
The doctor uses a scalpel to gesture inside the subject's body. On the subject's right side are two men, one moderately young and one middle-aged. On his left stands the doctor and a very young woman, no more than a girl, shoulders willow-sharp under her lab coat. Her dark hair is slicked viciously back from her face. The younger man looks disturbed; the older one fascinated; the girl, bored.
“And look here,” the doctor says in English. A dull scrape on the subject's sternum. He cuts something, from the sound. “Observe. You see?”
“Remarkable,” says the older man. The younger man looks ill. The girl leans closer.
“This could have had enormous implications for the treatment of certain cancers,” the doctor says.
“Why hasn't it?” the older man asks.
“Alas, I have been unable to successfully replicate the effects of my serum on another host,” says the doctor. “But we must not mourn for what might have been. There may yet be answers. Art in the blood, etcetera.”
“Is liable to take the strangest forms.” The younger man, sounding relieved. “You don't peg me as a mystery fan, Doctor.”
“Oh, well,” the doctor says, and when the subject opens his eyes, the girl is looking at him.
“He is awake,” she says. Her voice is flat as paper.
“Yes, he is only paralyzed,” says the doctor. “I find complete anesthesia arrests many bodily functions best observed in vivo. Look—see? He is distressed. Watch the superior mesenteric aorta.”
“May I speak to him?” the girl asks. Without waiting for the doctor's approval, she says, “Are you able to hear me?”
The subject blinks his eyes twice.
“Are you able to move any part of your body below your neck?”
He stares until his eyes water.
“Are you in any pain?”
He blinks rapidly, as fast as he can, hoping without energy that she'll understand, that she'll be appalled, that she'll tell him why he's being wrenched open, that she'll put him out of his fucking misery—
“Interesting,” says the girl, and puts her small hand inside his belly.
☙
The subject is strapped to a table. White walls; bright light. Nothing else. Across the room, men in white coats stand murmuring. Doctors. Is he ill? A young man is inserting a needle into the subject's right arm. The procedure hurts a lot more than he thinks it should, given the size of the needle. He's gone through far worse—has he? He hasn't. He's dreaming. White walls. Bright light.
One of the doctors brings the other doctors over. When the subject sees his white coat, his small round glasses, something deep within him goes cold and fluttery. Shock of sensation flooding out from the chest. He's afraid. Why? The man is small and soft. He has kind-looking hands.
The other men, the subject sees, aren't doctors. They wear military uniforms under their white coats. He feels confused, and then angry, and then confused at his anger.
“You may release the straps,” the doctor says. As the young man moves around the table, the doctor says to the men, “Due to the enhanced physiology in question, it was a particular challenge to synthesize an effective paralysis-inducing drug that would not be effected by electroconvulsive shock. Much trial and error was required. But, as you can see, we have produced intravenous restraint without sedation. At a lower dosage it proves sufficient for your general usage, and it is much more cost-effective.”
“Your government pals won't like that,” one of the men says.
“Ach,” says the doctor, like he's going to spit. He cuts one hand through the air. “Politicians. They ask me for worse things than this.”
The subject turns his head to the side to see the men better. One of them jumps. “Uh, are you certain—”
“Yes, yes,” the doctor says. “We have learned, if paralysis continues too far above the neck, we see, ah...deleterious effects on the central nervous system. Which, of course, you gentlemen are wanting to avoid.”
The subject thinks the doctor's lying. He can feel the sheet over his lower body, can curl his toes carefully beneath it, can flex invisibly the muscles of his calves. The doctor's trying to swindle the men. His arm hurts. Should he say something? Should he beg for help?
The subject waits.
“If you will allow me to demonstrate,” the doctor says, and walks around to the subject's other side. There's the sound of metal, of something rolling across the floor. The subject turns his head and looks at the ceiling so that more of the room falls into his peripheral vision. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees a row of surgical tools on a white cloth. The doctor leans over and touches them with his soft hands.
“Ugly bastard, isn't he?” says one of the men. Someone laughs.
“We are having administrative difficulties,” the doctor says sadly. “He is aggressive and dangerous when confused. His guards are too liberal with their fists. They should instead be more careful when cleaning his cell. Does not the bear attack when the hunter enters its cave?”
“Hell, squirrels attack if you get 'em cornered.” More laughter.
“Hey, Doc, there's a lump on his arm. Your boy might've missed the vein over here.”
“You ever want to see a grown man scream, just wait 'till you see—”
The subject lunges for the nearest throat.
His left arm is silver and beautiful. And strong, he discovers, when the man's face crumples under the force of it, caving in hollow, gunshot cracks. The needle yanks itself out of his skin, burning where it spills, but he's already in motion. His metal hand can cave in bellies, too, and his metal elbow can break ribs, and his metal fingers can tear off ears. He becomes aware of his own snarling when he stops. There is screaming, and then there isn't. The heady wail of multiple desynchronous alarms.
He knows there are places to hide. Someone told him once that there were places large enough for a body, upstairs. Someone also told him: they can find you if you hide. Or maybe he was the one who said it. He can hear stone scratching on stone and shrieks to drown it out. It's not real. The sound he makes is the sound of the alarms. He runs.
The corridors are empty of people. He's prepared to tear through anyone who appears, but no one does. The wailing grows louder; softer. He passes one siren after another in the halls. Boots stamping behind him and he runs faster, he can run faster than them, he's made of metal and they can't catch him, he'll rip out his own throat before he'll let them lay their hands on his iron bones. He runs until there's only a door between him and the light. There's no door and the light is blinding; he holds his arms in front of his face and runs anyway, wet on his feet, wet on his face, the world made of light.
Below his arms he sees the edge and stops just barely in time. His feet slipping wet on the grass. His arms in circles. He looks up. He sees—light. And then water. Water. Water.
It rolls down his spine to ring in the bell of his hips, upsetting an already precarious balance. He strikes out with his left foot to stop himself from falling down into the blue. Blue above. Blue below. Blue to every horizon. It steals the breath from his chest like a punch. He doesn't remember and then he does. The word for what it is.
The ocean as far as his eyes can see.
He hears them come up behind him. There is a clatter and the doctor shouts: “Nien! Stop!” He knows without looking that there are eight guns pointed at his head. He expects to be shot but no one shoots him. The subject looks out at the blue and tries to breathe. He thinks: if he jumps they'll catch him. If he swims they'll track him. If he hides they'll retrieve him. If he drowns they'll bring him back to life.
He's naked, he realizes. Sweat-slicked and filthy, bloodied head-to-toe, worse things on the soles of his feet. The cleanness of the wind coming off the water makes him feel dirty and ashamed. Shame is a new feeling. He lets it grow within him. Three long breaths of salt-sharp air.
“Will you come back inside?” the doctor asks gently.
“Yes,” the subject says.
He walks back inside the facility. Four guards on his left side and on his right. The doctor behind him. Just before he reaches the door, he turns for one last look at the ocean and the sky. It reminds him of something.
☙
The door opens. Closes. The subject is curled up small on the concrete floor, the metal arm between him and the cold, and doesn't lift his head to look. He's picking holes in his wrist to watch them heal.
“That?” someone says. “That took out six officers and a technician?”
“I know he does not look impressive on the surface,” the doctor says, “But my serum runs through him. He possesses a sort of, ah, idiot strength, as a side effect—he does not seem to understand his body. He is capable of surviving wounds that would destroy you or I.”
“Huh,” the man says. “Useful. Cooperative?”
“Ah,” says the doctor, and the man grunts.
“Figures.” Clicking of fingers. “Hey, you. What did you say his designation was? Eins. Subject. Hey, shake a leg, Slim. There's a reward in it for you if you get this right.”
The subject uncurls.
They use small words to explain it to him, like he's damaged, but he understands it like this: the officer is able to give power. He can order the doctor to take away the subject's arm and reattach it. He can tell someone to paralyze the subject and return to him his limbs. He can ask for the subject's sight to be removed and restored again. If the subject cooperates, he's allowed to keep his body. If he cooperates, the guards aren't allowed to touch him, or move him, or beat him. The subject prefers to cooperate. It doesn't seem difficult.
They bring a blindfolded man into the room and put a gun in the subject's hand. The subject wants to cooperate, but he doesn't want to shoot the man. In his mind he sees a child, a wire, a bullet between clear gray eyes. He's a statue in the middle of the room. He doesn't want to lower his arm and be punished. He doesn't want to shoot the man.
They shock him with cattle prods when he turns the gun on his own head. The officer shoots the man as the subject crumples to the floor. A great clap of sound in the little room. His ears ring.
“Always you must be so difficult,” says the doctor.
The silver tube.
☙
He opens his eyes. His head hurts viciously, a sick too-fast drumbeat between his ears, under his jaw. When he swallows he swallows blood, and chokes. Above him there's an open helmet, studded on the inside with blue lights. The lights fade as he watches them. In his peripheral vision he can see people moving around the room purposefully, working with their hands. No one speaks and the walls are white. He wonders if he's in a hospital.
“Where am I?” he asks.
A man comes up to the table. He's wearing a starched uniform and looks very stern. Gentler, when he smiles.
“You're safe,” the man says. “What do you remember?”
The subject blinks at the man. Closes his eyes. Opens them.
“Nothing,” he says.
☙
Boys dressed in the rags of unwashed uniforms, some privileged few their boots, a shred of dignity. Skeletons in their dark rags. They starve them and wonder why they die in droves. The cage next to his contains one living man and seven dead. They haven't come collecting in days. The smell is a charnel smell, seeping into the dirt. The sound of flies is deafening and the floor is a writhing mat of white. The guards will kill the living man to save on time. The living man realizes, soon enough. Lays on the writhing floor and curls up to their teeth and their bones. Black limbs, white—
He smells smoke.
He comes off the table screaming, convulsing, clawing at the air, clawing at nothing as white-jacketed men stumble back. He rolls to the floor and crawls to the darkest corner of the room, upsetting machinery and carts on his way. The wall to his back and a syringe in his hand. He swipes it unsteadily at the small man who approaches, hands in the air. A man in uniform crosses his arms and frowns.
“Zola,” the subject says, and gags.
The doctor sighs.
“Lower the thresholds and increase the voltage,” he says.
☙
He opens his eyes. His head aches, a nauseating pound in his temples. There's a man standing beside him. Another man is leaning over him, making adjustments to something above his head. White light glints off his glasses. White coat, white room.
“You've been very sick,” the man beside him says. “Do you remember?”
“No,” the subject says. He remembers smoke, and—something he doesn't want to think about. Something bad. Something bad must've happened to him.
“Am I gonna be okay?” he asks.
The man in the glasses reaches out to touch him and his body flinches. He stops breathing.
“You're on your way there,” the man says.
He closes his eyes.
☙
He opens his eyes. His head hurts.
“What do you remember?”
Smoke.
☙
There is a cage.
He screams in fear and then after in pain.
☙
There is a cage. He flinches.
A man, sighing.
☙
There is a cage.
A girl is holding the subject's right arm and inserting a needle into the muscle. Her dark hair has been slicked back from her face and tucked into a bun. He looks for stray hairs and doesn't find any. Somewhere far away there's a cacophony of noise. His arm burns, and then feels cold, and then all of him feels cold. As he watches the girl disassemble the syringe's parts and dispose of her gloves with efficient, practiced movements, he realizes, in slow fragments, that a mist is clearing from the world. The shapes around him become sharper—he can finish whole thoughts. They were drugging him, he thinks, astonished. He's been awake for a long time, drifting unaware. He sits up straighter.
On the other side of the room is a large metal structure, the kind of thing that might be used for penning livestock. Now it pens humans. About four dozen men surround the cage, shouting and cheering and rattling the bars with their hands, and inside the cage are two more men, slick-skinned under bright lights, dodging and striking at one another. A fight. The objective appears to involve knocking your opponent to the ground and pinning him there. The man who wins puts his hands into the air, opening wide his mouth and bellowing at the ceiling, although the subject can't hear him over the roar of the crowd. The winner shakes his opponent's hand, and another man enters the cage, and the process begins again. The subject watches, fascinated. A foreignness is buzzing under his skin like electricity. He wants to move.
“Is he ready?”
The voices are too loud, too close. The subject suppresses a flinch by luck alone; his skin feels stretched-taut and oversensitive. The men coming up on his left side are as different as night and day. The one in uniform tall, dark, all sharp corners; the one with the glasses short, colorless, soft-edged.
The girl grabs the subject's wrist, waits several seconds, and says, “Yes.”
“Okay, Moe, let's get this shit-show on the road.” The officer grabs his metal elbow and steers him towards the cage. The subject doesn't resist. Shouting turns to jeering as they approach, but the men part for them, and the officer walks the subject to the cage's gate. Inside, one man has the other in a bear hug around the waist, ignoring punches to his head and shoulders. He spins them both around and trips his opponent with a hook of the knee. The opponent recovers and crab-scuttles away.
“You getting this?” the officer asks.
“Pin your opponent,” the subject says.
“Good lad. Don't kill anyone. Don't break bones if you can help it.”
“Yes, sir,” the subject says, and the officer claps him on the shoulder. A ring on the officer's hand clanking off his metal scapula. When the larger fighter finally manages to pin his squirmy opponent, the subject is pushed into the cage. Already beginning to walk in on his own, he stumbles, and laughter roars from the other side of the bars. His opponent spits blood at the subject's feet; the nimble man managed to split his lip. There's no signal before the man comes rushing at him fists first, avoiding the metal arm, focusing on the subject's right side. Smart, the subject has time to observe, before he's on the ground. He expects to be taken from the ring, but his opponent switches out for another man. The second one pins him too: the subject's arms feel weak, his legs unbalanced, like he's been ill for a long time and is only just relearning his limbs.
By the fourth man, he understands.
He's faster than his opponents. More flexible. He observes their mistakes and corrects his own before they occur. Their strikes fall on him unhurting and his stagger them back, they sweat while he moves to chase the cold from his bones, they pant and they suffer when he drives the air from their lungs. They come at him in pairs once it becomes clear he won't be defeated by a single man; he dazes one with an elbow while he pins the other in the sweat and the dirt. He's more than a body on a table. He's strong. He snarls at the bars when no more men will come in to fight him. He roars and jumps towards the shouting crowd. They stumble back from the cage. Something about it hurts deep in his chest, bone-aching and twisted, but the sound that comes out of him is laughter: a half-hysterical ratchety thing, unhinged and terrible in his own ears. He wants to weep. He wants to tear them apart. He wants to clutch his head and find the darkest corner to hide in. He can't stop laughing.
“Well,” says the officer to the man in the glasses, “I think that answers that.”
19??
Run. Hit the wall. Climb, hand over hand. Twist in the fall. Come down knife first.
“Again,” the officer says.
Run. Hit the wall. Climb, hand over hand. Twist in the fall. Come down knife first.
“Again.”
“This is a waste of time,” says the doctor. “He will not remember doing any of it.”
“You've been getting behind on your reading, doc,” says the officer. “Some big-shot in Florida's been doing studies on short-term amnesiacs. Even if they can't remember doing it, they get better at repetitive tasks over time. Muscle memory—or some part of the brain, shit, I'm no medico, you'd have to explain it with some kinda catchy jingle. That's the salient part, anyway. Hey, Charles Atlas! Again! What, do I have to tell you everything?”
Run. Hit the wall. Climb, hand over hand. Twist in the fall. Come down knife first.
☙
“Kill him,” the officer says.
The subject says: “Why?”
☙
“Kill him,” the officer says.
The subject makes a mess.
☙
“Kill him cleanly,” the officer says. “Good! Good lad.”
☙
A helicopter takes him to the mainland. The subject didn't know the facility was on an island. He remembers: blue. He stops remembering. The guards keep their guns trained on his head.
On the mainland he's sent alone to wait for a target. He doesn't remember being alone. He doesn't remember being with people, either, but he's nervous alone, so he must've been. He touches all his knives and the gun they've given him. His throat, his jaw. He rubs his skin raw next to his nose. It heals. He does it again. Before the helicopter, the officer said: clean. The blood looks sloppy in the grooves of his metal fingers and the subject almost misses his target while he's trying to scrub them out.
The officer said: clean. The subject doesn't use the gun.
☙
A lobotomy renders the subject calm and malleable, even cheerful, for approximately 70 hours. The doctor is delighted. It is much less fuss, the doctor says to a technician, and cheaper. A girl in a lab coat pulls her dark hair away from her face and performs the procedure once every three days, the rod tap-tap-tapping into the subject's skull. The subject develops a tentative, childlike understanding of time: hours pass in order, and numbers are meaningful, and there are days that are different from other days. He stops squirming away from the doctor's fingers. He watches, curious, as the doctor systematically breaks and sets all the little bones in his right hand. He copies the doctor when the doctor is gone.
But, they discover, he can't load a gun. Knives fumble from his right hand; the left one spasms oddly, or hangs lifeless. He has trouble remembering instructions given to him only minutes earlier. He can't complete a task unless someone is at his side, prompting him towards the next objective. He can't take initiative. He can't be left alone on a mission. He can't kill a mouse.
The rod disappears, and the helmet returns.
☙
The subject kills a family of five. They have willow trees in their yard and wooden ducks on their walls. When he leaves, the dog is ears-deep in the father's abdomen, chewing.
☙
They put a wide metal ring above him that hisses and sparks. A great achievement, they say amongst themselves, congratulatory. A vast improvement on the helmet, they say. We will make history here today. The subject doesn't remember a helmet, but the dish makes him bleed out of his ears, his nose—his mouth, where he bites off the tip of his tongue. They push needles under his skin and try again.
The subject kills a woman who begs in a musical language. He doesn't understand it, but he can speak it. He asks the woman to be quiet. Blood still flaking on his cheekbones. Copper on his tongue. His ears ring for twelve hours.
They get it right the next time.
☙
The subject is burned in a terrible explosion. The result, when he sees himself in a plate glass window, more closely resembles pork crackling than a human body. The arm is a melted club of slag, hanging from him like a stalactite. They make him walk to the medical wing because he can. He leaves gummy plasma footprints down three separate halls. The doctor makes extensive notes over the ten days it takes him to heal, and the subject has never seen a man so happy, especially when the subject's pink new skin grows enthusiastically into the metal cap of his shoulder, requiring extensive surgery.
The subject's happy too, in his own way. The doctor uses anesthesia for the whole procedure. His new arm is silver, and beautiful, and strong.
☙
A man begs. He offers the subject money, women, cars, power, prestige, on his knees with his face wet and his hands scraped raw. The subject is upset about the blood. He didn't mean to make the man fall down. Sloppy. The man's fingers clutch the subject's trousers, smearing red, popping the seams. “I'll give you anything,” the man sobs. “What do you want?”
“I don't understand the question,” the subject says.
☙
They put him in a tank with four soldiers. No one tells him where he is or where he's going. The soldiers joke in a language he almost recognizes. In the tank, everyone sweats except the subject, the stink of petrol seeping into their clothes, their hair, the beds of their nails. One of the soldiers has a small lizard he's trained to sleep in his pocket. Every so often, it pokes its blunt head out of the flap and peers around.
When the subject climbs out of the tank, everything is on fire. Ash in the air, ash on the tongue. The sky reminds him of a color he's certain he's never seen: gangrene black and mottled red. He thinks, for no reason, of an arm crushed beneath a stone. The subject and the soldiers take their guns and move through the town. They shoot anyone they see. They leave the bodies for the ravens.
After, the subject crawls through a half-burned clearing, on his hands and knees like a stalking cat. He comes back to the soldiers with his hands full of crickets. The soldier with the lizard laughs and drops one into his pocket. They all listen for the tiny crunches. The lizard pokes its head out and licks its eyeballs, satisfied, looking for more. The soldiers laugh. The subject doesn't remember how to laugh, but he does remember how to smile.
☙
They wake him up and he wonders why his hair smells like gasoline.
He thinks: there was a lizard.
☙
“Lift it above your head,” the officer says, and the doctor shouts: “Stop!”
The subject freezes, caught between orders. He doesn't know what to do. His heart rabbit-fast. The metal arm curls towards his belly.
“He can do it, can't he?” says the officer.
“That is beside the point,” the doctor says. “It will damage him internally. Microfractures, intra-muscular fissures, internal bleeding—”
“I thought that's what your wonder drug was for.”
“I am beginning to doubt its limits,” says the doctor. “He is a test model. I did not build him for feats of strength. He was not meant to be this—weapon! You must not use him too liberally.”
“Just following orders, Doc,” says the officer.
The subject lifts the concrete block. It hurts. He puts it down. The officer claps him on the back before he leaves.
“Just following orders,” the doctor echoes, when they're alone. He draws blood from the subject's elbow. “For this we tore the world apart. Some boys will do anything if someone with medals tells them it's right. And still it is not enough—still the hydra is hungry. It can be done without violence, if only they think! But do they think, Americans? Never. It is too easy to—pfft. Shoot it if it's trouble.” The doctor takes off his glasses and polishes them with his cuffs. “I should have taken my chances with Schmidt.”
☙
They shoot him full of drugs that make him confused and aggressive. They say: this is a test. They push him out of a plane without a parachute. Somewhere in Russia, he thinks; the pilot of the plane is Russian. He lands in a forest on the side of a mountain and walks for an hour on a broken leg. When he finds a tent half-covered in snow, dark, abandoned, he crawls inside.
It's not abandoned.
They find him the next morning. He's sunburnt and delirious. He's crawled a long way from the bodies. When they pry his frozen hands apart, they find a human tongue.
☙
“I believe this is what you call irony,” says the doctor.
The officer won't stop screaming. The subject puts his fingers in his ears.
☙
“I understand it killed my predecessor,” the officer says.
The doctor shrugs. “I am afraid he ignored the warnings.” And then: “Hör damit auf!”
The subject jerks his head up. His mouth bloody. Half his fingernail between his teeth.
“It doesn't look very dangerous,” the officer says. He doesn't look right. There's something wrong about him. He's a different man, the subject realizes. There was another one.
“Looks can be deceiving,” says the doctor.
☙
There was supposed to be an officer.
19??
The subject glances right and thinks, Zola's lost weight.
He freezes. In a place more feeling than words, a nameless fear rises up in him, a certainty: he shouldn't remember this. He shouldn't remember. The technician working on his arm freezes too, both hands hovering over the metal, still as a deer in a field, liable to bolt. The subject thinks the wrath of god will come down on his head, but no one else in the room notices. The doctor—Zola?—continues to look up at the x-rays on the wall, and the woman next to him taps a rib with two fingers. Her lab coat hangs spare on her tiny bones. Her dark hair pulled tight over her skull.
“Hey,” the technician says quietly, nervously. “Everything's fine. You're safe.”
“Yes,” the subject says, and makes his muscles go slack.
196?
The subject tests a theory.
Zola has the subject's right forearm paralyzed and positioned on a movable table, his small soft hand holding it steady while he makes incisions. The incisions range from tiny nicks to three-inch slices. Zola removes his hand from the subject's arm to pick up a stopwatch. He glances from the arm to the stopwatch and takes notes on the clipboard balanced on his knee.
“You've done that before,” the subject says, and Zola drops the stopwatch. The subject relishes the half-second of fear in Zola's eyes. He says again: “You've done that before.”
“I am testing the efficacy of my serum over time,” Zola says. His composure appears to be regained. He adjusts his glasses and picks the stopwatch up off the floor. The subject realizes, slowly, as though he's crawling through mud to get to it, that Zola's always said it that way. Not the serum. My serum. As though there's more than one.
“You want to know if it's as strong as before.” It comes out mushy; he's not accustomed to speaking. “If I'm as strong as before.”
“That is correct,” Zola says. He gestures at someone the subject can't see. “I have reason to be concerned.”
“I know a test you could run,” the subject says.
“Yes?”
“You could try to kill me,” the subject says.
They drag him straight to the chair.
After, he sees uncertainty in the lines around Zola's eyes and knows, dazed and gleeful, that he was the one to put it there.
196?
“This is absurd!” Zola shouts. His accent, the subject notes, has faded over the years, but it still gets stronger when he raises his voice. Zees ees obsurd! The subject scratches his cheek until it bleeds. He watches Zola pace.
“Take it upstairs,” the new officer says. “HQ isn't happy about the amount of time he spends recovering from your procedures. They want him active, and they want him mission-ready within twelve hours at all times.”
“Impossible!” Two techs appear at the door, think better of it, and scurry. “My experiments are crucial, absolutely crucial. You do not understand. He is not built for this.”
“I understand well enough,” the officer says. He opens a folder. The subject isn't able to see the contents from the chair. Slickness under his nails. “You've driven off or bullied into submission anyone who tries to undermine your authority. Everyone HQ has sent over the last—seven years? Agent Arendt, Captain Viesturs...and let's not bring up General Duncan.”
“They were incompetent and a disruption to my work.”
“Your work, Dr. Zola, is for the Government of the United States of America.”
“My work is for HYDRA.”
“Yes, of course. But does HYDRA sign your checks? Or is it the good taxpayers of America keeping you in scalpels and schnapps?” The officer allows Zola to mutter angrily until he runs out of steam. “I thought so. Like it or not, Doctor, I'm here to make sure you remember that.”
Zola grumbles under his breath for a little longer, and then says, tight: “I am certain the relationship will be a productive one.”
“I live in hope,” says the officer wearily. “Now, I assume this is him?”
“Yes,” says Zola, and warms. He limps over to the subject—arthritis stiffening his left hip, worse in winter—and pulls the subject's fingers away from his face. Zola places a paternal hand on the metal shoulder. “My hauptwerk. I have never successfully replicated the manufacturing process. He is one of a kind.”
“What's your name?” the officer asks, and the subject blinks.
“He does not have one,” Zola says.
“That seems inefficient.” The officer goes to one knee beside the chair, so the subject is looking just slightly down instead of craning his neck. “Well, soldier? Are you ready to assassinate a president?”
“Yes, sir,” he says.
1963
Except he isn't, because even as he raises the rifle sight to his face, the target brings his fists up and tilts sideways. The woman in pink reaches for the target. The soldier almost lowers the rifle in surprise. Just as he is thinking, that was a shot, that was a gunshot, the target's head snaps forward in a mist of blood. It is immediately, obviously fatal: the right side of the target's skull is gone. The woman in pink lunges for something on the trunk of the car.
The soldier lowers his rifle. He laughs and laughs. Will this be considered mission failure or mission success?
1965
The soldier lashes out in fear or pain or both, sensations blurring together into one terrible shriek of nerves. A technician ends up sprawled on the floor, clutching his wrist, whimpering.
“No!” the officer shouts. The soldier goes still and quiet in the chair. He waits to be punished. The officer comes and sits down on the technician's chair as the injured man is taken away.
“You don't damage your team,” the officer says. His voice is hard, but quiet. Patient. “No one in this cell is easily replaceable. They all have value. You take your frustration out on the enemy. Understood?”
All the soldier understands is that he's not being put under the halo. He's not being hurt. He'll do anything for this man.
“Yes,” the soldier says.
1966
Captain Townsend—the soldier has remembered the officer's name over three separate wipe cycles now, for which he's immensely proud—is the soldier's favorite person. Townsend doesn't entirely prevent Zola from performing his experiments. He often presents the soldier with missions that are beneath his skills. He's brusque, snappish, and has no tolerance for slow learners. But Townsend doesn't like Zola. The soldier will forgive a lot of faults, for that.
When no one else is around, Townsend talks at the soldier. A response is never expected, so the soldier says nothing, even when Townsend asks leading questions. Townsend always answers them himself, given time. As irritating as the soldier finds it to be talked at like somebody's pet dog, it's better than being strapped to a table, and it allows him to gather information he can't access in any other way. How people live, what they care about. Current events that haven't been influenced by his bullets. Political changeovers he barely understands. Sports scores. The successful furtherance of HYDRA's infiltration into SHIELD. How much Townsend hates Zola.
Sometimes, after a particularly smooth mission, Townsend will praise the soldier. This is when the soldier's expected to respond: yes, sir—thank you, sir. Townsend makes the soldier understand his role within the system. He tells the soldier how his work has changed the world for the better, and where it hasn't yet, how it will someday. He shows the soldier his value. He shows the soldier that he has value. Zola also tells the soldier how important he is, but only indirectly; to other people, never to his face. The soldier's importance to Townsend is different from his importance to Zola. Zola appreciates what he's made. Townsend appreciates what the soldier can do.
The soldier blows up an archive, frames a religious leader, shoots four people, and prevents one assassination. Townsend, frustrated by the soldier's social limitations, teaches him how to be different people. Standing like this is aggressive, but standing like this makes people trust you. Tilt your head and smile. Good. Now smirk. Excellent. Flick your hair out of your eyes. Soften your gaze; you look like a sniper. Stop looking like a sniper. Now I want you to look crazy. No, quiet-crazy. You're a vet, homeless, you're scared of loud noises, you're nervous. You just want to be left alone. Now you're a businessman. Shoulders back. No, not that far back. Perfect.
He pretends he doesn't remember the lessons between wipes.
They suspect nothing, and he's never been more effective.
1968
They wake him up. They put him back to sleep.
“If only they were all this easy,” Townsend says, and then the ice takes him down, down, down.
1969
“Someone did your job for you last time,” Townsend says, while the soldier's still clearing the cobwebs from his head. The room is empty except for two techs in the corner, wearing headphones and listening to tapes, making notes. “Just a few hours before we were going to dispatch you. It's a funny old world, sometimes.”
“Like Dallas,” the soldier slurs, and feels more than sees Townsend go very still beside him. It's not a panicked stillness, but a thoughtful one, and that scares the soldier more. They're not going to kill him for this, he thinks; they won't be that merciful. They're going to punish him until he wishes he were dead, and they're going to wipe him clean. Like lye on meat, right down to the bones. He's going to forget Townsend's name and who the Prime Minister of England is and how to stand like a man who owns the world.
Townsend looks at the soldier. Townsend's eyes are brown, he notices, a pleasant, rich red-brown like mahogany wood, and it's cruel that he knows that fact now, that he'll know it for ten minutes before they scrape it out of him like an infection.
At last, Townsend speaks.
“Two weeks ago, you know, we landed on the moon—men got out and walked around. You should have seen it. It looked ridiculous, grown men bouncing around in marshmallow suits. Absolutely absurd. But it's history, and you can't laugh at history. Not while you're making it.”
The soldier says nothing. He registers that his right hand is shaking.
“Do you want to make history, soldier?”
“Yes, sir,” the soldier says.
“Good,” Townsend says, and stands up. He gestures for the soldier to do the same, and he does, unsteadily. Townsend doesn't help; just waits until the soldier has his legs under him. “We're going to work on invisibility. There's more than one way to make people overlook you...”
Zola comes through shortly after with the woman in the lab coat. He limps all the time now, even in the summer. The soldier realizes Zola is old. The soldier doesn't seem to age, but Zola does—Zola has. Zola will die someday, maybe even someday soon, and maybe things will be better.
Zola looks at Townsend and the soldier, scowls, and keeps walking. The woman with the lab coat and the dark hair—the nurse, everyone says, as if they can't remember her name—doesn't even glance at them. The soldier is learning that the nurse is never interested in anything unless there's blood involved. He considers opening his wrist to see if anything lights up in her bored, flat gaze.
“Eyes on me,” Townsend murmurs, and they continue.
Half an hour later, Zola says, “If drama class is finished, might I borrow my patient?” and the respite is over, but even as the nurse hooks electrodes to the soldier's scalp, the secret he shares with Townsend, the only thing Zola can't cut into him and find in some wet corner, keeps him pliant and fearless under their hands.
1971
The Soldier's never thought of himself as having a sensitive nose, but when Zola leans over his arm to check the IV bags, he can smell Zola's death galloping up under his skin. The Soldier only just manages to keep a smile off his face. A few more months or a few more years, it doesn't matter. It's the knowledge that warms him, not the timing. The Nurse won't be a problem; he's seen her look pinched, behind Zola's back, whenever Zola shouts and flails his arms about his serum, his patient, how he was going to change the world, change everything. As focused as she is when her tiny fingers are inside his calf, digging deep for shrapnel even as he's healing around it, she doesn't linger. Doesn't scratch on his bones for fun, not like Zola, taking notes and pretending it's science.
When he's alone with Townsend, the Soldier asks, “Did the Cowboys win the Super Bowl?” Townsend shakes his head mournfully.
“Want me to kill the coach?” the Soldier says: joking, toes in the water. Townsend booms laughter.
While the Soldier is stabbing a federal witness and staging the house to make it look like a robbery gone wrong, two songs about murder come on the radio. He kicks a pile of papers into artful randomness and hums along, one of the dead man's cigarettes between his lips. The song has a bright, easy beat. He can't remember ever humming before, but his body knows how to make the sounds, and he enjoys the vibration under his jaw. The burn of smoke in his mouth.
Unbelievably, before he leaves, another band starts singing about a boy on a homicidal rampage. Sign of the times, the Soldier figures; feeling light, feeling strong.
The world knows what's coming.
1972
The king is dead. Long live the king.
“There will be some changes around here,” Major Townsend says to all assembled, from on top of a table. The Soldier perches on the edge of the wipe chair and chews on his mouthguard. “This cell is lagging behind in terms of security, academic output, and tech. Nobody's getting fired, but nobody's getting off easy, either. I want a think tank in the science department, and I expect everyone to be attending conferences in their respective fields—you'll be recomped if you report expenditures, see the accountants. I'm commissioning a STRIKE team; we're long overdue. And—folks? The whole reason we're stuck out here in God's asscrack is to take care of the asset. It's a waste of time and resources to use him as a guinea pig when there's a perfectly serviceable bioengineering lab downstairs.” Townsend looks at the clustered medical team. “Will that be a problem for anyone?”
The Nurse blinks slowly.
“Very good,” Townsend says. “You need warm bodies, I'll get you warm bodies. No outsourcing. Let's bring this cell into the twentieth century, shall we? You're dismissed. Yes, everybody. Scamper, there's work to be done. Wait, not you. Yes, you. Baby engineer. You had some promising ideas about cloaking in your last paper, I want to talk weapon upgrades.”
The Soldier watches Townsend hold court; watches the techs smiling and slapping each other on the back where they think Townsend or the Nurse can't see them. He's not the only one happy to see Zola for the last time. It occurs to him—the thought oddly distanced, as if from someone else's head, an avalanche of observations distilling down into sense—that the cell team is good, maybe better than good, and that they'll accomplish things here, someday, with a man of vision at the helm.
After the Nurse certifies the Soldier to fly, they send him down to Tennessee. It's the home of blues music and moon pies and not much else, according to Townsend—besides the target, who's surprisingly difficult to track down despite being a soft financial-sector citizen. This one isn't meant to be found, so he carefully buries the body under a rural construction site that looks like it's getting a concrete pour in the morning. He sleeps on a train to Kentucky before taking coach on a redeye, his metal hand swapped for a clunky set of hooks.
In the plane's bathroom, the Soldier pries up a plate in his forearm. Underneath a motor he knows how to twist out of place, there's a small compartment that used to hold cyanide, back in the days when they still thought they could kill him. He extracts a piece of paper from inside. It's yellow with age, folded one too many times; he'll have to replace it soon. Under the last entry, in tiny, painstaking block letters, he writes:
DEC 17 72 - KNOXVILLE TN - H. ATKINSON
Looking at the list of dates releases a little coil of anxiety under his sternum. It's patchy in places, and he knows there are missing entries. Times when they tanked him immediately after a mission. Years when he didn't remember the paper tucked in the crook of his elbow, when the wipes still held any power over him. Years that, frustratingly, haven't come back to him. Nevertheless, it's an island of certainty in his unpredictable world.
He remembers, suddenly, another piece of paper, another time. The drawing in his pocket, the one the Germans took from him and burned. For a long confused moment he tries to remember the mark, who it was that he was supposed to kill, and then it comes back to him. The drawing that was him, his face. Hübscher Junge. The smiling boy with the wet-dark hair. He squints at the mirror, but the details elude him.
If he's counting right—and he's not, he knows he's not, he's missing too much information—then, assuming he was twenty in 1950, he's in his forties now. He doesn't look it. Under the unforgiving fluorescents, he looks about twenty-three. A baby, if it weren't for the muscles standing out on his neck, but he's hollow-cheeked, too skinny; he'll have to ask Townsend to put a bug in the nutritionist's ear. He can see why someone wanted to draw his portrait, once. He looks magnificent, focused, like a hunting dog. Bright eyes. A small, old scar under his right ear. Some mother's son gone off to war and come back—stronger.
He bares his teeth in the mirror.
1974
He's undercover for three days in a police station in Nebraska before he can get into position. They could send a spy, they could bribe a dirty cop, but they send him instead, because Townsend wants to know if he can. And he's perfect, he's perfect. He watches the men and flirts with the women, learns how to bitch like a junior officer who's been transferred against his will, eh, what can you do, though? He drinks their terrible coffee like it's water. In the basement, he shreds files and replaces them with nearly identical fakes.
It's a risk to their secret. The Soldier isn't supposed to know how to do these things. He should be a clean slate. Townsend has the engineers make alterations to the helmet, makes them think they're installing subliminal learning packets. The Nurse knows, he's sure of it, but she's not interested in subterfuge: it doesn't bleed.
The wipes make him feel clean instead of empty, bright instead of disoriented, a shot of electric caffeine straight to the brain. He loses minutes, here and there, but it's a price he'll gladly pay. Just the cost of doing business. The cost of being awake. He'll pay more than that, if it means he gets to keep thinking.
1975
Monsoon season in India, stirring up trouble. It rains so hard the arm shorts out. He's been through worse, but it's a rough week.
December in New York feels like an apology, a bomb in an airport terminal; smoke, chaos, but the Soldier is halfway across the city by then, emptying a meteorological station HQ wants eliminated for reasons incomprehensible even to Townsend. The Soldier counts his bullets and picks up every casing, letting them clink in his pocket like spare change as he boards the subway to Manhattan. The city feels familiar, more familiar than ever, more than any other city. His feet know how to walk the streets. The paper in his wrist says he killed someone here in 1970, but they had him moved a lot in Zola's day. Maybe they kept him here a while.
He watches the ball drop in Times Square before he heads to the pick-up point, and it doesn't feel like disobedience at all.
1978
Bangkok, Arlington, Detroit, Seoul, New York, Lima, god it's a busy year, they're going to have to start charging rent on his cryo chamber just to make it worthwhile. He knows how much his thaw cycle costs these days, but someone must be impressed, because the cell's received two commendations in as many years, and Townsend's a Lieutenant Colonel now. Not so you'd notice, the way nothing goes to Townsend's head. The Soldier suspects Townsend would feel just as fulfilled running a preschool as he does running a HYDRA cell. Some days, when the STRIKE boys get rowdy or the chemists accidentally contaminate the water supply with hallucinogens, there isn't much of a difference.
The Soldier watches them bicker and carouse from the safety of the chair, where the restraints make everyone afraid of him, where he finds it easy to feign indifference, forgetfulness, barely restrained violence. They're his people, he realizes, and he's theirs, and he's damned proud of them. They're changing the world.
1981
The arm starts acting up in a way that even the bioengineers can't fix, so they hire an expert, his very own mechanic. She's a tall, gawky girl, some child prodigy fresh out of Washington, two PhDs in robotics under her belt and another in neuroanatomy on the way.
When Townsend introduces the kid to the arm, the Soldier grins at her like a psychopath, just to see what she'll do. She goes pale as a sheet, and then she sets her jaw, hooking a wheely stool with one foot and a screwdriver with her little finger, popping whole sections open before she's even sat down. When he shifts a couple of plates and nearly pinches her, she flicks one off at an angle, right into his jaw. He stares at her.
“Oops,” she says dryly.
He smiles at her like a person this time, warm and easy and out of sight, and pretends he doesn't notice her fingers trembling at her own audacity. Little lionhearted girl with her plum-red mane. They'll have her in Silicon Valley building exo-skeleton armor and robotic wasps by the end of the year; she'll have her own team before the decade is out.
She scowls at his grin. He'll be sorry to see this one go.
1982
“Dr. Harrison,” she says, when she takes his surprise for confusion. She shakes his limp hand, slapstick; there's an EMP disk on his bicep, shorting everything out so she can work deep in his elbow. “I've worked on your arm before, but I guess you wouldn't remember.”
“You're not old enough to be a doctor,” the Soldier says, dancing as close as he dares.
“Three PhDs,” she says lightly, and that answers that: she finished the neuroanatomy degree while he was asleep. “A lot more qualified than the simians who've been fucking around in here for the last few years, gawd, I'm amazed you had any fine motor control at all. It's a goddamned tragedy. I'm going to feed them their own testicles.”
The guards at the door shift uncomfortably. Townsend looks as proud as a dog with two tails.
Lahore, New York, St. Petersburg, smooth as clockwork, smooth as the new servos in his fingers, strangling every target against orders just to test the strength.
“Good?” she asks, when he steps out of the helicopter, and: “Good,” he says, but she won't let them tank him, not until she's tweaked for another five hours, not until he can build a tower of playing cards higher than the chair.
1983
Harrison finds the compartment.
She looks at the paper inside, edges just beginning to soften, 63 65 69 clear as day in blocky, unschooled letters, the edge of names just visible near the fold. She looks at the paper. She looks at the Soldier.
She closes the compartment.
The Soldier isn't sure he's ever felt this mixture of panic and desperate gratitude before.
Later, oil on her fingers, bent over his arm, she whispers, “Do you remember all of them?”
He whispers back: “How would I know if I didn't?”
1984
Mexico.
Houston.
New York.
Shanghai.
New York.
Chesapeake.
New York.
Why do so many targets end up in New York, shit, it's like some kind of vortex—
1986
Harrison's default position is bent over the Soldier's arm, grumbling. It's almost comforting. He's not saying he took a spill on a sugar-sand beach with half his plates open on purpose, but he's not entirely upset at the outcome. Harrison is cleaning out the internal works with an air compressor and a toothbrush, swearing under her breath in Cuban-accented Spanish. Townsend and half the techs are watching a television that someone—the Soldier suspects Townsend himself—has smuggled into the cell. As far as the Soldier can tell, the picture hasn't changed in five minutes.
“Give me a toothbrush,” the Soldier says. She hands him one with an unimpressed look. It's purple, for his sins. “If I'm going to sit on my ass, I may as well get something done.”
“Oh, now you're sorry,” Harrison says. Something happens on the television, and the assembled men holler and whoop, startling them both. Harrison grumbles something foul.
He shifts the tiny plates on his fingers, flicking grains out of the joins. “It was an accident. I don't roll around in sand for fun.”
“After Luxembourg, I know you like to roll around in blood for shits and giggles, so I'd—oh my god.”
The Soldier glances up at her tone, about to protest, but she isn't looking at him. She's looking at the television, mouth open. All the Soldier can see is a cloud of smoke, and two techs with their hands over their mouths. On screen, a man is saying, “—hearing from launch control, the vehicle has exploded—”
“Did we do that?” the Soldier asks.
“No,” says Townsend, hollow.
The Soldier can be forgiven for thinking it, surely. He's only ever known death as a form of progress.
1988
Paris.
Chicago.
New York, New York.
Isn't there a song that goes like that?
(He doubts it's about death, but he remembers the seventies.)
The Soldier has a moment of wall-eyed terror when he returns from Manhattan. He sees Townsend and the Nurse standing with Harrison, Townsend talking and smiling; the Nurse, as ever, looking bored. Harrison is a little shorter than Townsend, miles taller than the Nurse, and next to them she looks so young. Townsend's hair is more gray than ginger, now, and there's a thin streak through the Nurse's dark hair, striping her smooth bun: steel, not silver. They're getting old, like Zola got old, and one day, when the Soldier's still looking like a kid fresh out of the army, they're going to die. There's going to be someone new in both of their places. Another Townsend—or another Zola. It could even be sooner than later; cell leaders tend to leave in coffins.
He tells himself that Townsend hated Zola, that he isn't the kind of man to leave things up to chance, that he'll have successors picked out who will respect the cell, maintain its progress—maintain its asset. Whatever happens, the Soldier'll be taken care of, like any of the weapons in the armory.
It doesn't work very well.
During pre-tank, the Nurse furrows her eyebrows at his soaring heart rate. She injects him with something that fuzzes the world, makes him dumb and happy. When he smiles up at her, she taps the middle of his forehead with one finger and says, flatly, “Never go to bed worried.”
He should be angry, but he's thankful.
1989
The Soldier disappears a journalist in Greece, props up a dictator in Argentina, fakes a terrible accident for a mountaineering team of businessmen in Alaska. He spends most of the climb being pecked at by memories of the crevasse, the boulder—something about the bone-chilling cold shakes them loose. Oxygen deprivation, maybe. He tries to distract himself by wondering how long he could survive on Everest without any gear. He suspects there's a point where he would eventually freeze or suffocate, but it would probably be something more like sleep. Hibernating, until someone found him and thawed him out. He could see the future that way. Something to think about, when the new world order is realized and they let him retire.
(If they let him retire.)
The concept of retirement amuses him on the way back down, after he's left the businessmen at the bottom of an icy gorge. He thinks about a village he saw once—Spain? Italy?—with gardens surrounding every cottage, flowers he doesn't know the name of: flowers on the eaves, flowers in the yard, flowers spilling over the path, bees and hummingbirds making an extraordinary drone. Neighbors gossiping over their fences, women in white aprons and men with their collars undone. Children in the tall grass, laughing. A gentle chaos, the peacefulness of never being alone, never being afraid. He could turn the chair on every morning and sleep in a bath of ice every night.
He's never wanted something greater than the next mission. The novelty of it keeps him warm until the helicopter lands.
☙
Cold.
Coldfirepainpain?
The floor.
Cold.