Ex-Isle by Peter Clines (electronic reader TXT) 📕

hand inside the skeletal titan, right where the pilot’s stomach would be. “There’s nothing in the suit right now,” he said.

The battlesuit took a step back. “That’s weird, bro. Don’t reach inside without asking or saying something first.”

“My point is, you don’t have a body like this. There’s no meat for them to go after. So why are they following you? What do they see?”

“I dunno. I thought about it for a while, the first couple times I saw it. I think it’s ’cause the suit’s me when I’m in it.”

“What?”

The battlesuit held out a hand and flexed the fingers. “This is me right now. So they see the suit as alive cause it’s me. It’s, like, living metal or something.”

Gibbs scowled up at the exoskeleton. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“It kinda makes sense,” said Cesar. The steel hand flipped over, and one finger bent down to tap the palm. “Y’know, that’s how my hands got all cut up. Was in a car, the wheels got shredded on a spike strip, and then my hands and feet were all shredded when I got out.”

“You’ve got scars on your feet, too?”

“Yup.”

“Still doesn’t make any sense. Exes don’t see any more than we do. They don’t see ‘life.’ ”

“Just the way it is, bro.”

The lieutenant shook his head. They walked across a small lawn spread between the main building and the fence. The toes on Gibbs’s mechanical foot sank into the grass, and his limp grew. Cesar slowed down a bit for him.

The battlesuit registered movement on top of the building. It was one of the Unbreakables in the little watchtower-slash-sniper nest they’d built up there between the solar panels. Cesar zoomed in, and the figure leaped from thirty feet away to five. Sergeant Johnson could see almost two-thirds of the fence line from there. His elbow brushed the basketball-sized warning bell they’d hung up there as his binoculars scanned back and forth. The big lenses held on the exoskeleton for a moment, then continued on to check the people working in the gardens.

Cesar and Gibbs headed for a concrete path that cut through the lawn and down through more garden plots. It led to the parking lot, and on the far side of the parking lot was the service road that looped around the northern fence, the one along the freeway. And that would bring them back to the Hot Zone.

Cesar sighed. It came out as a buzz of radio static. The lieutenant glanced at him. “Something wrong?”

“Bro,” said the titan, “this whole patrol thing is boring as hell.”

“Welcome to the military,” Gibbs said.

“I’m not in the military, man. I’m a superhero.”

Gibbs snorted.

Something moved in one of the garden plots, and the suit systems highlighted it. Cesar used the digital zoom again. It was a woman with a good butt and nice hips, working alone in one of the plots, crouched over to pull weeds. She looked a bit older, but still in good shape. He’d been feeling kind of sophisticated lately, checking out some of the older ladies in their thirties and forties, and congratulated himself on being so mature just as the figure shifted and he saw the claw-hand and realized he was checking out Christian Smith. He shuddered, and the battlesuit reacted with a tremble that made some of the servos whine.

“What’s wrong?” asked Gibbs.

“Umm, nothing.” He unzoomed his view. The armor took a few more steps.

“Jesus, kid,” said the lieutenant, limping alongside him. “You don’t even have a face right now and you’d suck at poker.”

“Hey, you know what,” Cesar said. “I think I’m good now. You want to head back to the workshop and I’ll see you once morning patrol’s done?”

Gibbs shook his head. “I was going to walk with you at least to the other side of the parking lot.” He paused in his step to lift the mechanical foot. “I need all the exercise I can get. This thing lets me walk, but I can’t run anymore since I lost…”

His voice trailed off as his eyes found Smith. His free hand squeezed into a fist. Then he let it go and flexed his fingers.

Cesar looked down at him. “You cool, man?”

“Yeah.” The lieutenant stepped forward. “Yeah, I’m fine.” His metal toes came down on the concrete path with the sound of a steel rake.

Smith leaped up and slashed the air with something. She held the small shovel like a knife in her good hand. She glared at Gibbs, then up at the battlesuit.

A purple-red bruise covered one side of her face. Cesar had seen bruises like that on his aunt growing up. When he’d joined the Seventeens, he’d seen them on one or two girls who hung out with some of the wilder, more violent gangbangers. He’d stood up to one of the guys about it once. And gotten smacked down.

That was back before he was a superhero, though.

He took a step toward Smith. The battlesuit’s broad toes sank into the dark soil. Gibbs muttered something about cleaning.

The Asian woman took a step back. She glanced to either side, checking for paths away from the titan. A collection of syllables formed and died on her lips.

Cesar cleared his throat, and a raspy squawk came out of the speakers. Smith flinched back. “Are you okay, ma’am?” the battlesuit asked. “Or sir?”

Smith looked up at Cesar and rattled off another string of silent words.

“Ummmmm…I didn’t catch any of that. Maybe yes or no?”

The Asian woman scowled, shook her head, and gave him the finger with her mangled hand.

“Do you want to tell me who hit you?”

She turned back to her weeding. Her shoulders went up as she took in a breath. Then the trowel went back into the ground and she tried to work out all the roots of a weed the size of a small bush.

“I want to help,” said Cesar. “People shouldn’t be beating you up.”

“Just let it go,” murmured Gibbs.

The exoskeleton turned, and the lenses focused on him.

The lieutenant shrugged. “She doesn’t want to make