Achilles was breathing wrong from the start of the run.
Maya saw it on the bio-meter in the Humvee before any of the cameras showed it, and she had been watching the bio-meter all morning, because the bio-meter had been the thing the buyers had not seen. The buyers were on the guard tower, their advisors at the rail, the Baron at the center with a thin smile that came and went. They had been told that the Humvee was the coordination vehicle and would be running the ops. They had not been told that, on the dashboard, a small grid of green lines was reading out the heart rate, the cortisol level, the serum oxytocin, and four other readings of each of the seven animals on the run.
Achilles’s heart rate had spiked at three hundred yards out and had not come back down.
She tapped the screen.
“Sherman.”
“I see it.”
“You’re going to lose him.”
“I’m dialing.”
“Dial faster.”
Casper and Pollux led the squad out of the trees and across the rough scree at the foot of the mock fence. Spartacus and Hector took the lead into the wedge formation. They had practiced the breach on this fence five times in the previous week. They had hit it five times in clean unison. The buyers, on the tower, were nodding at each other in advance of what came next. They were, in their pockets, working out exchange rates.
Wham. The wedge hit the fence in unison and a ten-foot section of chain-link folded down. The squad poured through. Spartacus and Hector spread to the flanks. Perseus and Orestes moved center. The Spitters dropped low and began the ground-search pattern Maya had drilled them on for a month.
Achilles did not move with them.
Achilles broke right.
He went straight at the guard tower.
“Sherman.”
“He’s not responding.”
“Try the secondary channel.”
“I am on the secondary channel.”
“Dump him to sedation.”
“I dumped him.”
“Dump him again.”
The bio-meter on Achilles had two readings flashing. The cortisol was off the top of the scale. The serum oxytocin had dropped through the bottom. He was not on the chemistry of the trained team. He was on his own.
He hit the base of the guard tower at a dead run.
Wham. The tower went onto a four-degree lean. Two of the buyers caught at the railing. The Baron, at the center, swayed and laughed. He thought it was the show.
Joyce, beside him, was reaching for the radio.
“Shut him off. Shut him off.”
“He’s not responding.”
Achilles took two paces back. He came in a second time. He hit the base of the tower at a slightly different point. The wood at the base, which had been built to plywood-village specifications, cracked along the grain. The tower went onto a thirty-degree lean. The buyers stopped laughing.
The Baron stopped laughing.
“Sherman,” Maya said. “Drop him. Hard.”
“He’s on the floor of the tank.”
“Then lift him to bliss. Spike him.”
“Maya, he is —”
“Spike him.”
In the tower, the men were rolling out of the crow’s nest, the buyers half climbing and half falling down the inner ladder. Achilles backed off ten paces. He came in for a third charge. He leapt at the tower’s side, his eight-foot mass riding into the planking, and the tower went over.
It went over slowly, the way a chimney goes over when a chimney has decided. It went down across the corner of the practice village, snapping a section of fence, and the men in the crow’s nest tumbled out of the falling structure. The mercenary who had been at the rail beside Joyce came up out of the wreckage firing his rifle, bap-bap-bap-bap, into the dirt around Achilles’s feet because the man had not yet had the time to assess that he was firing at a thing that was eight feet of bio-engineered fury and not at a thing that fell down when shot at.
Achilles came down on him.
The sickle-claw came down once.
The mercenary did not have a head, after.
“Off,” Nick was shouting into his radio, in the seat behind her. “Off. Shut them off. All of them.”
“They are off,” Sherman shouted back. “They should be unconscious.”
WHAM. Achilles hit the side of the Humvee broadside with his head.
The vehicle rolled.
It rolled like a vehicle in a bad highway film. Up onto the two right wheels, hesitated, and then over. The roof of the cab took the brunt. Maya took her left shoulder against the cabinet of monitors. Nick took the back of his head against the doorframe. Sherman screamed.
“Oh please don’t eat me don’t eat me don’t eat me.”
Maya pulled herself sideways out of the seat and hung from the seatbelt. The world was upside down. The dirt of the valley floor was where the ceiling had been. There was a smell of fuel that had not been there a moment before.
She unclipped the belt and went to the floor of the inverted cab on her hands and knees. She crawled to the passenger side and pulled at the door handle. The door, above her head, opened.
A face appeared in the inverted frame.
It was not Achilles.
“Easy. He’s down.”
It was Joyce.
She came up out of the wrecked Humvee onto her feet in the gravel of the courtyard. She turned. Achilles was on his side on the dirt fifteen yards out, breathing shallowly, a glazed look in his eyes. The cortisol on the bio-meter, which she could no longer see, would, she knew, have dropped through the floor in the same instant as the body shut down. Sherman had finally found the right dose, or the body had finally accepted the dose, or some combination of the two.
She walked over. Nick walked over with her. Joyce, half a step behind. Sherman sat on the side of the flipped Humvee, behind them, shaking uncontrollably.
“A berserker,” Joyce said. “We’ve had problems with him before.”
“I think he knew exactly what he was doing,” Nick said.
“The response time on all of them keeps getting longer,” Sherman said, behind them.
“They’re not machines,” Maya said, and her voice was a voice that came up into her throat from a place she had been keeping it for some time. “You can’t just point your finger and expect them to kill whoever you —”
“Are you suggesting,” Joyce said, “that they have a conscience.”
“It would be nice,” Maya said, “if someone around here did.”
“If you’re not behind the program, Maya, you can always —”
“Quit.” She stepped to him. She let her lab coat fall back at the shoulders. “I’d be dead before I got across the moat.”
It was out in the open then, between them, in front of Nick and Sherman and the buyers on the slope. Joyce smiled the half-smile and his eyes went, for the first time she had seen them go, hard.
Zeiss came up from the tower wreckage with his rifle in his hand.
“The others are all down too. Looks like they were just taking care of business.”
He gave Achilles a hard kick in the ribs.
“It’s just this son of a —”
“He sees and hears everything you do.”
“Not for long,” Zeiss said.
He brought the barrel of the rifle to Achilles’s temple.
“Belay that,” Joyce snapped. “We need to know what went wrong here.” He turned to Sherman. “I want a full work-up on him and a report tomorrow morning. We don’t have time for this.”
Maya looked down at the body of the slain mercenary, ten yards off, one arm thrown back behind the head, the rifle in the dirt. The man had a wedding ring on his hand. The ring was a thin band, the kind a sergeant on field pay buys his wife and gives himself a matching one for. She had not, in the eight months she had worked here, learned the names of any of the mercenaries. They had been other men’s men, paid for by other men’s contracts, and she had let them stay other men.
“What about him,” she said.
Joyce shrugged. “Accidents happen.”
He stepped close to her. He kept his voice level.
“Which is why we must all be very careful.”
He held the look. She held it back. She knew about looking. She had practiced it on wolves. Joyce was not a wolf. Joyce was something wolves tried, on the whole, to stay clear of.
She held the look.
He smiled, eventually. He turned. He walked back up to the buyers, who were dusting themselves off and beginning, with the small embarrassed laughs of men who had paid too much money to be embarrassed, to clap.
Nick stayed.
He crouched beside Achilles. He put his hand on the long flank, just above the rib cage, where the breath was running shallow. The hide was hot under his palm. The dewclaw on the second toe of the foot, the great curving sickle, was relaxed against the dirt the way a sleeping dog’s claw relaxes. Maya watched him.
“Nick.”
“I know.”
“They’re testing the boundary.”
“I know.”
“They’re going to find it.”
“I know.”
He stood up. He brushed his hand on his pants, the way a man brushes his hand without thinking after touching something he loves.
“He’s running out of envelope,” Nick said. “What Sherman did today would have killed any of them a month ago.”
“Their brains are developing new pathways,” she said. “Rearranging circuitry. The way people do after a stroke.”
He looked at her. The look was a long, tired, lucid look.
“What if it’s not a stroke,” he said. “What if it’s just them.”
She said nothing.
Achilles, on the dirt, opened his eye. The eye was not the wet hot color of the morning. The eye was a quieter color, a dark pinned color, the color of an animal that had taken a measurement and was, by the small mute observation of his own breathing, recovering for whatever came next.
He held Maya’s eye.
He blinked, slow.
Her stomach dropped the way it had in the cage with the violet sweater, and this time she had no name for the drop.
She turned away.
Behind her, on the slope, the buyers were applauding.
She walked up to the slope. She walked past the Baron, who was holding court with the two South Africans on the merits of the day. She walked past Joyce, who was drying his hands on a small white handkerchief. She walked past the Colonel from the United States who had not introduced himself and whose patches Nick had read.
She walked into the Humvee marked CLEANUP and asked Sherman’s senior tech for the keys. The senior tech was a Hungarian named Kovács who had been at Grendel longer than any of them. He had a thermos of coffee on the dashboard and the dashboard had a small enamel pin on it of a beetle, the kind of pin a man’s daughter gives him for a birthday and the man cannot bring himself to throw away.
He looked at her face. He gave her the keys.
She drove the Humvee around to the back of the practice village to where the cleanup crew was working at the slain mercenary, and she got out and walked a slow careful circle around the body. She knelt at the head. She kept her hands off him. She read his patches and logged the unit, the rank, the date of last service.
Reuben Becker. Master Sergeant. Thirty-three years old. South African passport. Two children.
She wrote it in the back of her field notebook in pencil, the way her father had taught her to write things she might need to give somebody.
She stood up.
Behind her, in the cavern lab, isolation cage three was locking with a quiet pneumatic hiss as Achilles, sedated and twitching, was lowered into it. The other four were lowered at one-minute intervals into adjoining cages on the same maintenance schedule. Hector, Spartacus, Perseus, Orestes. Five cages in a row.
The five raptors had begun to call to each other in pulses below human hearing. Sherman, in his lab, leaned over the playback at half-speed and listened, and his fingers came off the keyboard and stayed off it.
“Look — the. The pattern.” He could not finish. “It’s a, a — a pattern.”
He played it again.
In her bedroom Maya lay on top of the covers and did not sleep. At three she got up and stood at the slit window. The town lights were out. The bell did not ring.
Whatever Nick was planning, it started in the morning. She put her boots back on.