You hate the war? How the hell do you think I feel?
There were days he thought he was dead. A phantom stumbling through purgatory, which was really just a faded copy of a former life.
As the colors bled back, as the war receded into the past, he understood what was true. He was alive, and maybe he didn’t deserve to be. And the ones who’d died, they didn’t deserve that either. Their stories had ended before they really got going, crushed in the gutter of a history book as the pages kept turning.
Brodie realized he was still gripping the willow branch. He rocked it back and forth. It was deep in the sand.
Someone had put this here. He looked again at the placid water.
The branch brought forth the water.
And then he had another thought:
Roger Ames liked to bury things.
He yanked the willow branch out of the ground and started digging in the dense earth, flinging aside the sand and dirt. He felt ridiculous. There couldn’t really—
His fingertips pressed against something hard. A rock? He dug around it. No. It was a rectangle, with rounded corners. It was metal. He kept digging until he revealed enough of it to grab it and pull it out.
It was a green metal canister a little bigger than a deck of cards. It looked vintage, like what soldiers once used to carry cigarettes ormedic supplies. He popped the metal clasp and flipped it open, then dug out a plastic ziplock bag.
He opened the bag and retrieved something man-made and rectangular.
He held it up. There wasn’t much ambient light anymore, but he could make out a square metallic protrusion. The rest was plastic. It was a USB thumb drive.
What the hell…?
Roger Ames was prepping for something. Making multiple covert trips to the Vault to interrogate Bucky. Burying an arsenal in his backyard. And this…
Whatever this was, Ames felt it so important that he couldn’t risk it being discovered even if his entire house was torn down to the studs. Or maybe he’d made a bunch of copies and secreted them in multiple places. One of them being here, a special place to him, a place where he came to see the world anew.
Brodie stared at the little plastic drive. Such a tiny thing, so out of place. An artifact from that other world.
He returned it to the bag, which he put in his inside jacket pocket, and dropped the empty metal container into the hole he’d dug. Then he took one of his water bottles and drank. He was parched and had barely noticed.
The stars twinkled like jewels, and the hazy white band of the galaxy arced across the southern sky. Billions of stars and clouds of gas and dust hanging in the void at distances impossible for the human mind to comprehend.
Holy shit.
He sat where he was. It was all he could do. He felt like he could sit there and watch this forever.
Orion the Hunter. He looked at the three bright stars that made up the hunter’s belt. He wondered about the planets around them. What if there was life there right now, looking out? The creatures there,drawing their own constellations, the Sun a single pinpoint in the line-drawn shapes of animals and objects that no human had ever seen, would ever see.
He ran his right hand along the rough earth. He grabbed a stone and held it. He breathed.
At some point he ended up on his side. Ahead was flat earth, broken by scattered pebbles and rocks, and a squat thorny cactus. In the distance was the horizon line of the mesa, and the starry sky.
He saw the rocks as quartz mountains, the cactus some impossible alien giant, and along the ground something moved. Something black. Some great treaded war machine.
It was a black beetle, picking its way through the sand. He saw it. He knew. But he could see the other thing too, and now there was something else, dozens of things marching in ranks among the rocks, their metal bodies dull and dim in the starlight.
The tin men. Many more than sixty. He saw dozens and dozens of platoons in formation, whole mechanized battalions. He saw riflemen and gunners atop armored vehicles and autonomous tanks and high above them thick swarms of armed drones like a plague. Dead metal upon metal, hunting the living.
His mind flashed to the buried guns, and the RPGs, the grenades. He wanted them. He wanted to blow the hell out of those things.
A plan beneath the plan.
They weren’t the real problem. No. They were weapons. Who held the weapon? Who pulled the trigger? Bucky might have been an impostor, walking around pretending to be dumber than it was. But there was another impostor, a human one. His instinct told him it was someone he’d already met, someone on base, who had looked him in the eyes and lied, who had their hand on the lever of the plan beneath the plan.
