She stared back, her throat burning from the cold.
The sirens became louder and Garan glanced down at his huddled wife, his terrified daughters. “My girls,” he said, trying to smile, and then a white hover with flashing lights turned the corner, screaming its arrival.
Cinder ducked back through the doorway as the hover slid up behind Garan and settled into the snow. Two androids rolled out of its side door with a gurney hovering between them. Their yellow sensors flashed.
“A comm was received at 17:04 this evening regarding a victim of letumosis at this address,” said one of the androids in a sterile voice.
“That’s me,” Garan choked—his words instantly drowned out by Adri’s screaming, “NO! Garan! You can’t. You can’t!”
Garan attempted a shaken smile and held out his arm. He rolled up his sleeve, and even from her spot on the doorstep Cinder could see two dark spots on his wrist. “I have it. Adri, love, you must take care of the girl.”
Adri pulled back as if he’d struck her. “The girl?”
“Pearl, Peony,” Garan continued, as if she hadn’t spoken, “be good for your mother. Never forget that I love you so, so very much.” Releasing the hard-won smile, he perched himself uncertainly on the floating gurney.
“Lie back,” said one of the androids. “We will input your identification into our records and alert your family immediately of any changes in your condition.”
“No, Garan!” Adri clambered to her feet, her thin slippers sliding on the ice and nearly sending her onto her face as she struggled to rush after her husband. “You can’t leave me. Not by myself, not with … not with this thing!”
Cinder shuddered and wrapped her arms around her waist.
“Please stand back from the letumosis victim,” said one of the androids, positioning itself between Adri and the hover as Garan was lifted into its belly.
“Garan, no! NO!”
Pearl and Peony latched back on to their mother’s sides, both screaming for their father, but perhaps they were too afraid of the androids to go any closer. The androids rolled themselves back up into the hover. The doors shut. The sirens and the lights filled up the quiet suburb before fading slowly away. Adri and her daughters stayed clumped together in the snow, sobbing and clutching one another while the neighbors watched. While Cinder watched, wondering why her eyes stayed so dry—stinging dry—when dread was encompassing her like slush freezing over.
“What is happening?”
Cinder glanced down. The android had woken up and disconnected herself from the charging station and now stood before her with her sensor faintly glowing.
She’d done it. She’d fixed the android. She’d proven her worth.
But her success was drowned out by their sobs and the memory of the sirens. She couldn’t quite grasp the unfairness of it.
“They took Garan away,” she said, licking her lips. “They called him a letumosis victim.”
A series of clicks echoed inside the android’s body. “Oh, dear … not Garan.”
Cinder barely heard her. In saying the words, she realized that her brain had been downloading information for some time, but she’d been too caught up in everything to realize it. Now dozens of useless bits of information were scrolling across her vision. LETUMOSIS, ALSO CALLED THE BLUE FEVER OR THE PLAGUE, HAS CLAIMED THOUSANDS OF LIVES SINCE THE FIRST KNOWN VICTIMS OF THE DISEASE DIED IN NORTHERN AFRICA IN MAY OF 114 T.E.…Cinder read faster, scanning until she found the words that she feared, but had somehow known she would find. TO DATE, THERE HAVE BEEN NO KNOWN SURVIVORS.
Iko was speaking again and Cinder shook her head to clear it. “—can’t stand to see them cry, especially lovely Peony. Nothing makes an android feel more useless than when a human is crying.”
Finding it suddenly hard to breathe, Cinder deserted the doorway and slumped back against the inside wall, unable to listen to the sobs any longer. “You won’t have to worry about me, then. I don’t think I can cry anymore.” She hesitated. “Maybe I never could.”
“Is that so? How peculiar. Perhaps it’s a programming glitch.”
She stared down into Iko’s single sensor. “A programming glitch.”
“Sure. You have programming, don’t you?” Iko lifted a spindly arm and gestured toward Cinder’s steel prosthetic. “I have a glitch, too. Sometimes I forget that I’m not human. I don’t think that happens to most androids.”
Cinder gaped down at Iko’s smooth body, beat-up treads, three-fingered prongs, and wondered what it would be like to be stuck in such a body and not know if you were human or robot.
She raised the pad of her finger to the corner of her right eye, searching for wetness that wasn’t there.
“Right. A glitch.” She feigned a nonchalant smile, hoping the android couldn’t detect the grimace that came with it. “Maybe that’s all it is.”
The Queen’s Army
They came at the end of the long night, when the mining sector had not seen sunlight for almost two weeks. Z had crossed his twelfth birthday some months ago, and just enough time had passed that he’d stopped imagining glimpses of gold embroidery on black coats. He’d just stopped questioning every thought that flickered through his brain. He had just begun to hope that he would not be chosen.
But he was not surprised when he was awoken by a tap at the front door. It was so early that his father hadn’t left for the plant, one sector over, where he assembled engines for podships and tractors. Z stared at the dark ceiling and listened to his parents’ whisperings through the wall, then to his father’s footsteps padding past his door.