The first time Obadiah Thompson emerged from a pod he’d done so with a sharp violent breath. His hallucinatory lungs were still empty, and between that and reality there was a thread-thin instant of unimagined pain.

--

He’s standing in the cornfields and there’s the hush-hush of overgrown rows tangling in the light breeze that he can’t feel through the gas mask. There’s blood on his ribs and caked on his hands, and the first is his but the second isn’t.

Some of them had gone into this barreling like monsters huge and terrifying. Others had gone out easily and quickly, small and fragile. And others were light-footed, quiet: quick, unseen dangers that bred fear and paranoia. Omicron-9 fell into this latter group.

So did she.

Half his effort now is channeled into keeping the sharp thud of his breaths against the gas mask from undoing the effort of his stealthy footfalls. Every exhale feels unimaginably loud, and he tries to listen over his own breathing and the pounding of his ears, motionless, but he can’t hear anything at all but the hush-hush fields, where there is no forward or backward or left or right but only the endless meaningless susurration of the leaves and a sea of shifting shadows.

He counts the meager survivors over in his head: himself, and Alpha-6, and Nu-4, and her.

---

He’d been following her for the better part of a day and every time she paused he told himself now now but he’d liked watching her, liked watching her shift instantly from predator (quick and lethal; she’d gotten a backpack with nothing in it but a rope and she’d made good with that rope a half-dozen times) to prey (a motionless tiny tableau of alert awareness when a single errant footfall had dislodged a pebble down the scree). She’d likely had no idea of her living shadow until her last attack went sour and Pi-7, in a sudden movement, got her down.

Pi-7 should have been the easier target. If he’d been wiser he’d have let him take advantage of her poor footing, her misjudged timing, her exhaustion, and then picked off the survivor. But he was not wise. None of them, newly-made and childlike and ignorant, were wise.

---

It felt good, to kill. He did not know many things, and in his short existence had not had time to learn many. When he had killed the first one he had learned that he liked feeling powerful, and that he loved the sense of a job well done. He’d looked up from the first one shaking and pleased and sick, waiting for some voice somewhere to tell him that he’d done very well. No one had, of course. After the first handful the rules and order fell away and somehow they’d gone from fuzzy-directed competitions in a run-down school building to this feral hunter vs. hunted quiet chaos out in the open and now there was no one to say very good.

Something had felt strange then, when he’d turned the body over and looked for anything useful. Something about the unresponsive flesh and the empty stare behind the mask, and a nagging question that he couldn’t quite hear over the roaring of his pride.

Omicron-9 tells himself that when he kills her, finally, he will tell her she has done a good job. It is the greatest kindness he can think of. And then there will be, maybe, no unheard question.

--

So he’d made himself known in the twist of a knife and she’d given him Pi-7 like a gift, and when he was done he sat back on his heels in the red clearing and looked up trembling and joyful to show her look what I did for them, look what I did for you and she was gone, of course, and now he wasn’t following her, and she was gone, and it was quiet, and she was gone, and he was afraid.

--

It is dark and he is alone in the hush-hush silence and for the past hour, the past two hours, longer, he has been alone with his curiosity over whether anyone had ever told Pi-7 or the first that they’d done a good job. Whether they’d been as afraid as he was now. Whether it had hurt.

The first thing he’d learned about himself was that he enjoyed the taste of power, and the sense of a job well done. And then, weak and humbled and nerve-wracked, he’d remembered empathy, and with it had come guilt, and with guilt had come paralyzing fear.

He holds his breath so he can hear, and what he hears is silence.

He’d tracked her for the better part of a day and even as she clung like a lioness to the throat of her prey he’d never once heard her make a sound.

--

There is no forward or back or left or right, only the endless meaningless susurration of the leaves, only somewhere, somewhere, issued commands and a promise of praise.

Somewhere under his ribs under the blood and gaping muscle there’s a strange hollow sensation, a turmoil, a writhing sickness shoving its way past the noises in his head and his breath in the mask and demanding to make itself known. He’s trying to still it, panicked and motionless, when the scream breaks out.

The scream is far away and it is not hers and he isn’t sure why but he bolts like a startled deer, blindly, and he can’t even run away from it because he doesn’t know where it is but he runs because he can’t help it, and this is how he finds her. She is not expecting him but she rises to meet him and he wishes he could see whether behind that impassive nightmare fallout face she smiles or whether, like him, she is sick and angry and terrified.

This is their short cruel existence. Put here, armed, and told: survive at all costs. At all costs.

She’s too fast for him but if she hadn’t been he’d be too paralyzed with grief and remorse to act. He wishes it had been Pi-7’s knife in his back. He wishes he’d been the first to go, the one that had screamed like a rabbit, the muffled noise in the mask still perfectly-recalled even now.

Instead there’s just the rope and her barely-there weight on his back fighting him to the ground, and he realizes he can hear her hard panting breathing echoing against the glass of her mask and it’s the first time he’s heard her at all, and for a delirious moment he hopes she will tell him, as she pulls, pulls, pulls: you did very well, and that she will know as she does it that it does not answer the silent question.

He has not done well. If he had done well the only blood on his hands would be his own. He will die ashamed and he will die trying desperately to ferry air past the increasing wreck of his throat into his screaming lungs.

No one will know this. He will die ashamed and no one will know and so he’s trying to breathe, trying to get one single lungful so that he can exhale a wailing and inadequate confession to a world without an absolver, but she’s pulling so hard her arms are shaking and he can feel it down the noose like a wire against his throat, and through the foggy noise of his own slowing pulse in his head he can hear Nu-4, somewhere far away, screaming his last in the hands of Alpha-6.

Assessment, Omicron-9:
Obedient.
Took easily to execution orders. Demonstrated enthusiasm for directed violence.
Emotional responses from onset appeared juvenile, even primitive.
Obsessive focus.
Craves approval.

It feels like there’s a secret on the other side of the encroaching dark that will fit all the pieces together in one perfect beautiful redemptive explanation. He’s stretched out on the ground and weakly he extends a hand, grasping at something that is not there.

He’d forgotten it then, all but the sound of someone else’s coveted breathing in his ear and his lungs burning and his frantic ineffectual gulps of air.

He remembers it now, over and over and over again, in the perfect clarity of relived recall.

Somewhere there’s a quiet cornfield where the leaves toss, and there’s Omicron-9 with someone else’s blood on his hands, and there’s the silent pleading behind his ears please please please let this be the last time please, and the rope.

There’s a blue light behind his eyelids, and a golden tree on a white sky, and the rope.

There’s a secret if he can get it, and blood, and the tree, and the rope.