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‘Distance and windage?’ he demands.

I assess the distance to the first target. The grass bends sharply to the right. ‘Eight hundred and fifty metres, stiff west wind. No cross winds.’

Runner fires and I see a spray coming off the wooden target’s left shoulder. ‘Favour right,’ he tells me and I aim and shoot. Spray flares up at the target’s centre.

‘Favour right,’ I say and he fires, hitting the target’s left shoulder.

‘Wind is settling. Hold left,’ I hear in my earpiece. I aim and shoot, the bullet hits the left side, a little too low, but if that had been a man, he’d now have both shoulders taken off, a huge hole in his chest and his guts flying every which way.

We work our way through the other three targets, each one hundred to one hundred and fifty metres farther away than the previous one, pushing my rifle’s range to its limit. I’m good at this, out of breath or rested. But what makes me itch all over is when people are shooting at me when I’m trying to aim. Runner had me crawling across our range every day for a whole week. I had to hit the targets’ centre mass while he fired right over my head. On the first day, half of my bullets didn’t even make it to their targets. Although I knew he wouldn’t shoot me, I was shaking with terror when the bullets zipped past my ears. When we were done a few hours later, it felt as if I’d let Runner down. He tried to hide his disappointment, but it was painted all over his face and posture.

‘Grab lunch and meet me for camouflage at thirteen hundred,’ he speaks through my earbud.

‘Where?’

‘Find me here, if you can.’

Yeah, shit. I’ll most likely be in his crosshairs for half an hour before I even see a trace of him. Humping my pack and my rifle, I make for my tent.

———

I take a large sip of whatever Ben has brewed. It burns nicely down my throat. As I roll my tongue around in my mouth the pearl clicks against my teeth. It irritates Runner when I do this, but I don’t give a damn. He wanted me to have it, so he can deal with my clicking.

I’m the one who has to learn to deal with it. The pearl evokes images of violence, even in my sleep. Blinking, I focus on the aromas of fruits and flowers and the sea — the air is thick with them.
 

Itbayat is a tiny splotch in the middle of the Indian Ocean. We are the only humans here. Everybody else, some three thousand people, were overrun by fleeing Chinese, who then found themselves facing a bunch of desperate Japanese. The battle was short, if one can believe the reports of the few survivors who left the blood-soaked island to itself. The torn remains of villages and small cities with their houses built of neat round stones still bear witness to the violence that swept the island clean of the human species.

Sometimes I wonder what the people planted in their gardens, what livestock they kept in their meadows and in which trees they carved their short messages to loved ones. They must have kept many goats, because their progeny are populating the island in great numbers. Their meat is deliciously mild, yet dark like game. I’ve yet to find birches and lime trees, but maybe there aren’t any in this region. There are short cycas, tall tree ferns, wild pear trees with sweet round fruit that are less gritty than our mountain pears at home, and the countless old trees with trunks so thick one needs three people or more holding on to each other’s hands to span their girth. This island is saturated with noises and life, the clicking of cicadas or crickets, buzzing of beetles, soft hooting and screeching and singing of birds of the strangest colours and shapes — all of them changing with the appearance and disappearance of the sun, with the gusts of wind and rain.

I peer up at the canopy of red cypresses, follow their wind-battered trunks with my gaze, and close my eyes.
 

‘Want another one?’ Ben asks me. His voice pulls me back to our small unit sitting among a group of trees. I open my eyes and look down at the sea. The sun is cut in half by the ocean, bleeding dark orange across the rippling dark blue.

Ben steps in my view. ‘Earth to Micka.’ He waves a hand in front of my nose.
 

‘You are not earth, not yet, Ben.’

He snorts. He’s as pale as the sand down at the beach. His short curly hair is the colour of straw, his eyes are light blue. He’s a nice guy and I like him, but he’s flirting with too much desperation for my taste. Everything about him screams,
I need sex.

‘If I have another one, I might do things I’ll regret tomorrow morning,’ I answer.

‘Such as?’

‘Puke.’

Kat clears her throat (she never laughs) and rocks her chair far back, so far, I’m afraid she’ll tip and bonk her head. But she doesn’t drink, so she’s probably in complete control of chair and gravity and all.

‘I thought you might mean something…different,’ Ben says. Okay, here he goes again. I sit up straight deciding to amuse him a little.

‘You should be careful with alcohol,’ Kat tells me. ‘Last time you passed out after your second drink. I don’t think your system tolerates it.’

‘It will have to adapt,’ I retort just as Yi-Ting arrives. I never hear her approach. She treads so softly her bare feet don’t make a noise. She places a large bowl with rice and strips of vegetables on the table, takes the offered glass from Ben’s hand, and sits down on a fallen tree next to Runner.

Shit. I should have put my behind there instead, and she’d be sitting next to me and not him.

I notice my own irritation and let some of it leak out. ‘Such as?’ I dare Ben.

He puffs up his cheeks, wiggles his eyebrows, and smiles some kind of
can’t you guess
smile at me.

‘What?’ I huff, faking naiveté. ‘What do you mean?’

The corners of Runner’s mouth pull up a little. The sunset reflects in his black eyes. He doesn’t buy it; he knows me well enough.

Ben clears his throat. He’s about to say something, but I’m faster. ‘Okay, Ben. Give me another one of…whatever that stuff is.’

‘It’s a cocktail,’ Kat informs me coolly.

This woman is a machine. There’s not one smile inside her soul. She says weird things and the corners of her mouth don’t even twitch a fraction.

‘Doesn’t look like a cock’s tail at all. Looks like juice to me.’ And down goes the first half of the stuff. I feel much better already. I decide it’s time to flirt with Yi-Ting, but a hand sneaks into mine. It’s attached to Ben’s arm. He’s sitting next to me.

‘Um…Ben?’

‘Yes?’ he says and moves his chair closer. His arm is touching mine. I can feel the soft fuzz of blonde hair tickling my wrist.

‘I’m…’

‘Overwhelmed?’ he whispers into my ear. His breath runs down my neck when his lips touch my earlobe.

I burst out laughing. I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous. ‘Oh, oh…No, I’m…Shit, I can’t even remember the word for it. There’s a word for it, dammit. Gimme a second.’ And I’m still laughing and holding my stomach and I know it’s cruel, but
how
can he believe he’s overwhelming in any way?

 
I can’t remember the word that’s used for women like me, so I splutter, ‘Ben, I fuck girls.’ The hand disappears and a squeaky ‘Oh,’ comes out of his mouth.

‘Sorry, should have warned you earlier.’ I don’t dare look at Yi-Ting now that she knows I’m into girls. Would she feel repelled? Shocked? Or relieved? Enticed, even?

The word “overwhelmed” plays back in my head, over and over again.

‘So…girls, huh? Exclusively?’ That’s Ben. He’s pathologically over-convinced of himself and nothing really shocks him much.

‘Never thought about it,’ I say truthfully and without thinking. The only person I had sex with was Sandra, and it was lovely until she spilled her guts about Runner. ‘I could have sex with a lot of men and women as long as they don’t talk much.’

Did I just say this? I clap my hand to my mouth. I feel very sick all of a sudden. ‘I need to…’ I manage to stand and stumble to a nearby shrub. Ben’s cock’s tail or whatever it’s called is expelled from my stomach and hits the ground.

‘Get your ass into the comm tent.’
 

‘Morning, Kat,’ I grumble, pick up my breakfast, and follow her. Runner is already there, nursing a cup of tea, his straight black hair resting on broad shoulders. ‘How’s the head?’ he asks without taking his eyes off the screen.

‘Attached,’ I reply. And ringing, but he doesn’t need to know that. I settle in a chair and gingerly shovel rice and fruit into my mouth; I don’t want to upset my stomach any further.

Kat nods to a screen. It shows a live-stream of the small camera attached to the belly of Ben’s airplane. ‘They just flew over the observatory; it appears untouched.’

Puzzled, I look at Runner. ‘Didn’t the BSA attack it, kill everyone, and cut off our contact to the island?’

‘Odd, isn’t it,’ he says.

Ben and Yi-Ting have been taking high-resolution images of Taiwan since we arrived at Itbayat. They’ve now scanned more than sixty percent of the southern half of the island. The northern half is so contaminated with radioactivity that little but moss, ferns, microorganisms, and insects thrive there now. Taiwan used to have four nuclear power plants, three at the island’s northern tip and one at the southern tip. The southern plant was modern enough to be equipped with a fail-safe mechanism that forced it to shut down slowly without human assistance. The other three wreaked havoc.
 

Nuclear power plants were the main reason for the first Sequencers to organise themselves into a task force. They weren’t called Sequencers back then. They were a bunch of engineers and scientists who knew enough about Earth’s technical infrastructure to organise the emergency maintenance. When the world wars began and human maintenance was erratic at best and nonexistent at worst, the older power plants went into overdrive without adequate cooling. The results were identical all over the planet: melt-downs with intense and long lasting fires fuelled by radiation. The radioactive smoke and dust clouds contaminated land and water for hundreds of generations. There were only a few Sequencers and they managed to shut down only a handful of reactors. But the main problem the Great Pandemic and the ensuing wars brought was the sudden loss of knowledge. Whom do you ask how to lead people into battle if there’s no one left to ask? Whom do you ask how to safely do a caesarian section if all doctors were killed while tending to injured soldiers and all midwives have been raped and tortured to death?
 

As humanity went down the drain, most of our knowledge was flushed as well. Entire cultures, fields of science, and engineering were lost to disease, aggression, and utter stupidity. I learned a bit about our history when Runner and Kat called a council meeting a few days before we left for Itbayat. The one thing I found almost as unsettling as our violent past, was that all we know about combat and warfare today only comes from two high-ranking Russian military guys, a stack of books, and from experiencing war first-hand. I wonder how much the BSA has learned in the past decades.

Runner waves me closer and bends to the mic. ‘Ben?’

‘What’s up?’ crackles through the speakers.

‘On your way back, go farther south and show me the power plant once more.’

‘Okay. We’ll fly to the west shore to cover today’s area then we’ll go down to the plant.’

‘Thanks.’ Then he turns to me. ‘Not one more drop of alcohol for you. Your system can’t take it and I can’t work with someone who’s not in her best possible shape. If you need to calm your nerves after a stressful day, go for a run, do pushups, whatever. If I see you drinking again, you’ll find yourself a new mentor.’ He waits for a reply, his expression fierce.

‘Calm down, man. Nothing happened. I puked and went to bed.’

Abruptly, he stands. His hand flies towards my face faster than I can comprehend. A finger flicks my nose.
 

‘Ow,’ I say, more pride-hurt than nose-hurt.

‘Your reaction time is one of the best I’ve ever seen, except when you’ve had a drink. Two drinks and you are useless for twenty-four hours. You didn’t even think to move your head.’

I had no idea. Last night was only the third time we had drinks together. Most nights I’m either too tied up in training or too tired to move. ‘I’m…sorry,’ I croak, hot with embarrassment.

‘Good.’ He sits back down in his chair and taps at the screen. ‘Ben and Yi-Ting have finally found a Taiwanese settlement and I want you to take a close look at the footage. Tell me what you think.’

Treetops fly by, then the jungle opens to reveal a group of huts before it closes again. ‘Whoa! Too fast! Can we go back, please?’

‘They flew two circles. Wait a moment.’

The horizon tips as the solar plane flies a loop and soon, the huts come into view again. I squint and strain my eyes but all there is to see are huts and trees. ‘No bodies, but the BSA might have killed them two months ago and animals had time to scavenge. But then…there should be parts, bones, skulls at the very least. Did someone clean up? No signs of explosions, no damage whatsoever. The huts are intact. No signs of a battle. How can that be?’

‘They could have used poison,’ he says. ‘In the water or in gaseous form, but then again — where are the bodies? The BSA could have lured the people out of their village and butchered them in the woods. But why the effort? There might have been survivors who buried or burned the victims if they were killed in their homes, but so far we haven’t seen signs of survivors or the BSA.’