The End Has Come

Karron bit her lip and glanced to the fore where Ishim stood keeping the ship steering smoothly through the dark water. She hadn’t told him her suspicions about the children. Her thoughts were impossible, and she knew as well as he that even if she was right about what they were, there was nothing she nor Ishim could or would do about it.

She’d always been too curious. Her instructors at the Academy had always said so in varying tones of annoyance or amusement.

Curiosity killed the cat, she thought, turning over the phrase in her mind, a phrase from the old times, before the Ring, before the sky broke and war came to the world.

“Satisfaction brought it back,” she whispered. She had to know.

Creeping over the deck — the shush of wind in the mainsail and the lap of water against the hull covering any sound she might have made — Karron approached the sleeping passengers. She brought her finger to her lips and saw both children nod. The adults to either side of them didn’t move, apparently asleep.

She knelt in front of Oni and reached for his head. He didn’t flinch, didn’t even seem to breathe as she slid her hand around the back of his neck and felt the base of his skull.

The hard knot was there, distinct and familiar beneath her trembling fingers. Oni reached up and touched her arm. Karron bent her head and let him feel her own knot for himself. Bee’s tiny hand replaced Oni’s.

“Not your aunt and uncle,” Karron whispered, her mouth moving but hardly any sound coming from her throat. The kids would hear her, if they were like she was.

“No,” Oni whispered back. “Help us?”

“How?”

“Kill them. They are going to sell us.”

She shook her head. “Not my problem,” she whispered.

“You are like us,” the boy said. Beside him, Jill stirred, and all three of them froze until she settled again.

“Not anymore,” Karron lied.

For a long moment they sat in silence, watching one another. Then Karron crept away, her heart in her throat, and went back to her own blanket. Her head buzzed and her adrenaline spiked and the nanos at the base of her skull woke up, reacting to her heightened emotions. She took careful, slow breaths and forced herself to calm.

War Children, they’d been called. The program was dead, dismantled and torched fifteen years ago. She thought she’d been in the last generation, the last raised in the crèche in Deecee. Genetically altered, infested with nano-tech that even the Covenant didn’t understand, trained from the day they could walk to hunt, kill, be soldiers at the front of the Covenant peace-keeping forces.

She’d seen the Academy burn, seen her fellow Children burn with it. Only a few escaped that she knew of and many of them had been hunted down or gone insane. If Ishim hadn’t pulled her from the river, she would have died as well.

It was luck and staying calm and quiet that had kept the nanos from driving her insane, kept her from being caught. She’d told Ishim what she was, but he didn’t seem to care. Karron had warned him if she went crazy, he’d have to put her down.

“If you go crazy, will I even be able to kill you before you get me?” Ishim had asked.

Karron had looked away. They both knew the answer was no. No one man alone could take out a War Child.

Now there were three of them on this boat, though what training the two kids had, Karron didn’t know. At Oni’s age, she’d already run her first mission. Was there a program again? Why were these kids traveling with the suspiciously normal-seeming man and woman who Oni said were going to sell them? Sell them to whom?

Too many questions get smugglers killed, Ishim would say. Karron stared up at the Ring and pushed the questions away as stones fell out of the sky, flamed bright, and died away.

* * *

The Missip branched into a hundred waterways as the Zouri joined up with it. Ishim and Karron knew many of those ways. Which ones were patrolled by Covenant boats or led to Covenant settlements, which ones were dead ends, which were safe for a boat with a shallow draft to pole down or steam up. Reeds and willow branches shivered in the cool spring air as they tacked west and north along one of these myriad of ways. By afternoon they would join up with a bigger branch of the Zouri and in another week they’d be able to steam toward Ria, the worst of the checkpoints and danger zones.

Ria itself was controlled by a Baron, one of the gang leaders set up by the Covenant to keep a semblance of order on this side of the Missip. Long as the trains ran on time and the tithes got paid, Covenant didn’t seem to care what else happened or how the Barons went about their lives.