At which point the world turned upside down and exploded.
He must have caught her completely by surprise, he realized later, or she wouldn’t have hurt him so badly. When the pain receded, he was sitting on the bed with no idea how he’d returned there, panting, and feeling like his stomach and kidneys were about to burst. And Osnat was holding a wet towel to his jaw.
“I’m really, really sorry, Arkady. Of course. Ants. Shit. I didn’t even stop to think. Are you all right?”
She looked sick. He felt as if he were seeing, for the first time, the woman inside the soldier. No, he corrected himself. Not the woman inside the soldier, but the woman who was the soldier. Because there was no inside or outside with Osnat, no layers under layers. That was what had drawn him to her from the beginning, though he could only now put words to it.
“I’ll get you new ants, Arkady. Okay? I’ll go outside and trap the little fuckers. I’ll buy you a damned ant farm. Whatever you want. Just don’t look like that, for God’s sake.”
He smiled, making an effort. “The ants will be back. It’s their gift.”
He thought she would leave after that, but she didn’t. Instead, they both stared at the river of ants, significantly thinned by the carnage Osnat’s boot had wreaked, but still moving according to the unfaltering guiding logic of the superorganism.
“By the way,” he said, “you still haven’t answered my question.”
“What questio—? Oh. No, there’s nothing between Moshe and me anymore. Nothing like that, anyway.”
“Why not?”
One coppery eyebrow lifted in amusement. Obviously she was recovering her composure. “I didn’t explain it to him. What makes you so special?”
“Nothing.” Arkady closed his eyes and put a hand up to feel the rising lump above his cheekbone. “Nothing at all.”
Osnat put the towel back up to his cheek. “I’m sorry I hit you. I really am.” She laughed her laugh-not-to-cry laugh. “You’re having a pretty rough time of it, aren’t you, boychik?”
“Is it going to get better from here on in, do you think?”
“It’s going to get worse.”
“I don’t know if I can take it.”
“Most people can take a lot more than they think they can.”
He looked up at her. What could he tell her that would help Arkasha, if, please God, Arkasha still needed help? How could he hope to sway her, move her?
“Help my friend, Osnat. Please. He’s a good person. He deserves your help.”
She stood up, frowning, and pressed the towel into his hand. “Keep it on the bruise and keep running cold water on it every few minutes. It’ll make a big difference.”
“Osnat—”
“And don’t fool yourself into thinking you have some kind of relationship with me, Arkady. I’m notyour friend. I’m notlooking out for you. And pretending different is just going to make things harder on both of us.”
She was leaving, he realized. The conversation, which had never really gone anywhere in the first place, was over.
“No, Osnat! Wait!”
She turned in the open doorway to face him. “I feel bad for you. And I feel like a monster for hitting you just now. But I can’t afford to let things get personal. I’m here because they pay me to be. I take Moshe’s orders because I’m paid to take them. It’s not personal. None of it’s personal. I made that choice a long time ago.”
“And what if Moshe orders you to kill me?” He hadn’t meant it to be a question, but there it was, naked enough to make him cringe.
“Do you want me to lie to you?” Osnat asked. “You don’t seem like the kind of person who wants to be lied to.”
They crossed into Palestine twenty minutes before the border closed in a dusty, stinking, gasoline-powered minivan that Arkady suspected was older than KnowlesSyndicate.
The man who handled their travel papers sat at a large empty desk in a large empty office, under a large bronze relief of a lion disemboweling an antelope. He worked in the dark, with only the fading daylight that filtered through the dust-caked windows. There was no power, he explained in tones of austere self-righteousness, because the Zionists had turned off the water that fed the hydroelectric turbines. He apologized with distant courtliness for the fact that the lack of electricity had inconvenienced them by making it so hard for him to read their travel papers. He suggested that they try to make future border crossings between 10:00 and 12:00 A.M. Weekday mornings were, as a general rule, the best time for electricity.
He seemed to be under the mistaken impression that they were off-planet journalists—an error that Osnat made no attempt to rectify.
“You understand,” he told them, “that it isn’t always possible to guarantee your safety once you enter Palestine. It isn’t us threatening you, naturally, but the Zionists…” He let his words trail off into suggestive silence.
“Are you going to stamp our goddamn visas,” Osnat asked, “or do we have to stand here all day talking to you?”
The man eyed her narrowly for a moment. Then he stamped their passes, tossed the customs declaration forms on top of them, and scraped the whole little pile of paper off his desk and handed it to Arkady.
“I’ll be taking those, thank you verymuch.” Osnat snatched the papers out of Arkady’s hands and secreted them in the same pocket they’d originally emerged from.
Three sentries guarded the crossing. They were all female, all young, and all pretty underneath their jilabsas far as Arkady could tell. Two of them stood before the crossing arm. The third stood on the little hillock above the road, her eyes glued to the high-resolution sight of a tripod-mounted machine gun.
One of the girls at the crossing arm had a first lieutenant’s bar sewn crookedly to her sleeve. She asked for the papers in Arabic, then in UN-standard Spanish, pored over their small print with exquisite deliberation, stuck her head into the car’s open window to stare at them, and then retreated into the makeshift guardhouse.
Two minutes passed, then five, then ten. Once Arkady made the mistake of looking up to meet the second girl’s unwavering stare. After that he kept his own eyes resolutely glued to the dashboard in front of him.
They heard the Enderbots long before they saw them. And when they finally saw them there was something monotonously anticlimactic about the massed block of soldiers. Until you saw the eyes. The eyes were terrifying.
“Those…things are fighting civilians?” Arkady said.
“Not fighting. Occupying. That’s why they did it in the first place. Armies aren’t good at police work. And training only helps so much. Frankly, anytime you hand a bunch of teenagers assault rifles and put them in charge of unarmed civilians you’re gonna find out that some of those teenagers aren’t very nice people. Also, even the nice ones are terrified. And fear can make you one heap big trigger-happy. EMET stopped all that. It’s not afraid. It’s not mean. It doesn’t play the bully. It doesn’t panic. It just does its job. The year EMET came on-line, IDF casualties on the Line dropped twenty percent, and reported civilian casualties in the Line were cut almost in half. EMET is a better, cleaner, more human way to fight an occupation. That’s the official line, anyway.”
“But not what you think.”
She shrugged. “I see the good points of it. But I also see that there’re plenty of officers—in the IDF at least, and I assume it’s the same this side of the Line—who like the idea of soldiers who don’t think for themselves and can’t argue with stupid orders or tell reporters when the generals fuck up.”
“So is EMET good or bad?”
Osnat twisted around in the cramped passenger compartment and fished on the floor behind her seat until she came up with a beach towel decorated with fluorescent pink cartoon fish schooling across blue-and-purple seas between strands of electric-green seaweed. She shook the towel out and leaned out the window to wipe the yellow khamsindust off the driver’s side mirror.