Unity by Elly Bangs (free e reader txt) 📕

“Why?” I said. I had never dropped the ‘sir’ before. I noticed this and didn’t correct it. I could tell he’d noticed it too, but there was no surprise or disapproval in his face. He just gave a shadow of a nod. He placed his hand on my shoulder, the way he had on that first day, and I met his eyes with as much confusion as I had then.

“Give me your weapon,” he said.

With great hesitation, I did. He slung it over his shoulder. He handed me his own, powered down. That was it.

From the top of a building, I watched them all march out and dissolve into the maze of scorched walls and billowing toxic gasses. No history remembers them.

It was only in the Major’s final look back that I understood his unspoken intention in giving me his waver: he expected me to lock it away somewhere safe, never to be fired again. I was the last person left to carry his memory, and the initials he’d carved into that cedar pistol grip were the only physical artifact of his existence. I burned my uniform just as he’d asked, but when the weapon was all that remained, it stuck in my hands.

I found I never blended in.

The memory of the following years devolves into a howling din, an indistinct morass of time and violence. The lives I cut down and the bare subsistence it brought me. The aimless travel in the dark corners of cargo containers. The arbitrarily strategic landscapes and the double-chinned warlords bent on obtaining them at any human cost, and the maps of the former United States that I watched go on splintering into ever smaller pieces—until I understood that the Republic I’d fought for, the whole sixty years of its existence, had only been a tiny eddy in the roaring flow of history. It was that river, the continued collapse of land-based nations and the rise of the new aquatic superpowers, that brought me inevitably into the service of Medusa Clan.

I

In some corner of myself, I’m still aware of the present. My surroundings. I can’t move. I can’t open my eyes. I can only smell the burning wreckage, taste the blood iron, feel the bright pain racking my flesh and bone. I can hear them, our attackers. They’re walking around us, scraping their feet through the sand.

“Get his gun,” a woman shouts. “Get the fucking gun! Check them.”

“Nice gun,” a man mutters.

There are fingers on my neck—both my necks. “Alive,” another man says. “All alive. Real fucked up though. Out cold. Must be concussed. Losing blood. Get me the, uh—”

There are hands in my armpits, lifting me.

The woman shouts, “Stop! Put her down! Don’t move them before Doc checks her spine!”

“I’m just trying to get them away from all this burning wreckage, Jenna—”

“I said put her down!”

The hands roughly drop me. One of my heads hits the sandy earth.

Jenna lets out a guttural growl. I hear the dull crack of the butt of a rifle against a skull. A whimper of pain. More scraping in the sand.

“Wanted alive!” Jenna shouts. “Which of those two words don’t you assholes understand? Do you remember what these people are worth? Do you have any idea what the Medusas will do to us if they find out we killed their bounty? I told you to target the road in front of the wheels and you made it a direct fucking hit!”

“Give me a fucking break, Jenna. Who the hell knows how far they were planning to go? How many more days do you expect us to track them? We were already down three drones. I saw a decent shot. I took it.”

“Spines are okay,” somebody says. “Brains, though? Hell. I don’t know.”

“When will you know?”

“When they wake up. Or don’t. But they’re dead for sure if we don’t squirt some blood into them.”

“Then do it. Get the cuffs. Cuffs! Now! Put them on the truck. Let’s get out of here before somebody sees the fire.”

I’m being lifted again. They’re carrying me. All of me. Then a metal floor is rattling under my bones, and we’re moving. Hands are peeling off my clothes. Scissors cut my sleeves open and needles pierce my veins. There’s a surge of pain and something cold percolating through my flesh, and then my consciousness ebbs again, and I sink back into the flood of my memory.

DANAE

I will never have any one beginning. I’ve been born 223 times, and each of those first breaths was my first breath. Each of those lives, in their own time and place, became my life. I am the confluence of everything those 223 people ever were, said and did, thought and felt, knew and wondered—both apart from each other, and as me.

Once I was born in Jersey City in the year 1998, a citizen of what was not yet widely referred to as the American Empire. I was an actress, a mother, a grandmother, and I witnessed the worst decades of the collapse myself. I heard the gunfire, the rockets and jet engines with my own ears—and when the Bomb took my hearing, I went on seeing the burning cities, the ever-changing world maps in which whole countries disappeared into unmarked gray zones and were not replaced—and when age took my sight, I went on feeling the collapse, in the rattle of my bones at distant concussions, in the words my children and grandchildren signed into my arthritic fingers.

One day when I was nearly a hundred years old, just when I thought I had finally reached the end of my life, I met someone who told me—patiently repeating everything I didn’t understand or could not at first believe—that she was not what she appeared to be: not a single face with a single life story, but a unified consciousness created by the fusion of hundreds