Before the first burner singed the air, I had jumped. I didn’t know why. Perhaps I wasn’t truly asleep and heard strange steps in the hallway. Or perhaps a voice whispering what was planned for us. I don’t know.

Whatever warning there was fell into my sleeping mind and made my body react. I woke up half way through my jump-and-dive, dragging with me my brother Pol, who slept in the next bed. We thudded together into a too-narrow space between his bed and the wall.

It saved our lives, because the blinding flash of the burner swung in an arc which sliced my bed in two, setting it on fire. Still half asleep, dazzled by the brilliance of the light, the acrid smoke in my nostrils, I pushed Pol further back and down, shoving him right next to the wall and pressing close to him, close, my heart beating a deafening rhythm.

“Cas, what–?” he said, his voice barely audible, because in addition to the sizzling sounds of the burners there were now screams and gurgles, moans and cries for mercy. I recognized the voices of my dormitory mates, and I didn’t want to recognize them. I’d never heard them sound like that.

My hand covered Pol’s mouth, my other hand tapped against his shoulder, in dark-water-language, “Shut up, shut up, shut up. Stay quiet. Shut up.”

He made a movement, but didn’t try to fight free or to speak again. The burners zinged and cut, and our dorm mates – judging by the noises – screamed and died. I braced my feet against the ceramite floor, and tried to become one with the wall. Thoughts ran through my head like water dripping from a burst tank. They’ll see us! They’ll set fire to the bed!

And at the same time, a mad part of me wanted to run out there and save my creche mates, the closest thing I had to a family.

It wasn’t that I was particularly close to any of them. Pol and I were twins, a freak accident in the building process, an egg that gave our fabricators a bonus: another homo-aquaticus, designed for intelligence and cunning and speed, who could be trained for the war against the Earthworms.

But Pol and I had what none other of our kind had – a true blood relative. That had both set us apart and made us rely on each other more than on anyone else. The trainers had caught on fast. We’d been sent on the same missions, trained for complementary skills. We spent more time together than with anyone else.

Still the others had always been there. I couldn’t let them be slaughtered. I couldn’t.

I must have moved, because Pol was holding my arm fast and tight and beating against my skin the words, “Stop. You can’t help. You can only die.”

I don’t know how long we stayed there. I could close my nostrils under water, and now I wished I could close my ears too. But I couldn’t. Not voluntarily.

Fortunately, my heart beat so hard that it drowned out a lot of the noise. But I smelled the fire and the blood. After a while a dark liquid trickled under the side of the bed to touch my feet with viscous warmth, and I had to bite my lips together so I didn’t vomit or scream.

“They must have found us out,” Pol said, in dark-water language, tap-tap-tapping on my arm. “The Earthworms.”

I nodded, then tapped quickly, “yes,” but some part of me couldn’t believe it. No reason. It just didn’t feel right. Of course the Earthworms would try to kill us if they could. Anyone sane would. How could it be different? We were the scourges on their shores, the stealth enemy who swam up to inaccessible harbors, past defenses that would keep ships and submarines out. We were the ones who sabotaged their plants. We were the creatures who swam next to their ships undetected and attached mines to the hull. We’d cost their navy and – more importantly – their commercial transport more than they could stand to lose.

They weren’t supposed to know we existed, of course. Some treaty or other from the last war between Seacities and Earthworms. It made our kind – any human created for war purposes – a war crime. It made us the most secret of weapons. But secret weapons had been found out before. Blood pounded in my veins, impelled by a too fast beating heart, buzzing past my throat, pounding past my ears. But secrets could be discovered. That was what espionage did. I clenched my teeth so hard my gums hurt.

But how would they get here, past the wall around the compound, past the guards, past everyone else who works here: trainers, servers, cleaners? And if they did, wouldn’t they do this job faster? A bomb. A grenade.

Pol’s hand clutched my arm so hard I knew his fingers would be forever imprinted on my skin. I felt as if it would bruise my bones.

I swallowed, ineffectively, because my mouth and throat felt dry, and my nose felt as though it were trying to close the way it did in water. And if they’d killed everyone on their path to get here… but… why would they do that? Why kill us one by one, like this? No. If they wanted one or more of us to use in court against our creators, they’d have captured one or two, and then bombed the rest.

I forced my breath past the membranes on my nose which were doing their best to shut down tight. There was only one reason to do it this way. To keep people in other floors, in other dorms, from giving the alarm. I knew all too well, from my visits there, that nothing could be heard in the floor above. The dimatough walls and floor prevented it.

And then I realized I could hardly hear any screams, anymore. Just scattered whimpers, and footsteps on the floor. A sliding sound and a man’s voice, “Damn fish guts. Almost fell.”

Pol’s hand shook as my throat closed. That was one of the guards. I didn’t know his name, but he was supposed to guard us. Not to–

“Well, don’t go in, then,” another familiar voice said. “Damn waste of time.”

“Some might have escaped,” the first one said.

“Nah, we blocked the door. And even if they did, fat good it will do them. We’re closing off the beach access and this place is going to go up in flames in fifteen minutes. Come on. No point staying here. Stuffy and smelly and besides–”

The voice went away as it spoke, the steps went away with it. Three, no four pairs of boots. Armed. Against a room of sleeping young men. Unarmed, sleeping young men.

I felt as if I would cry at the injustice of it, but I very much doubted tears would do any good. Pleas for mercy hadn’t. I swallowed again, forcefully, as Pol tugged urgently at my arm, then tapped, “Fifteen minutes, Cas, we have to go.”

I opened my eyes. I hadn’t even realized I’d closed them through this. Pol’s face next to mine was very pale, his green eyes unearthly large, his short blond hair seeming very bright in the gloom under the bed, by the scant light of early morning. “We have to go.”

“What if they haven’t gone?” I tapped back, trying to concentrate, trying to think rationally, trying to forget the horror. Forget the dead. Forget that they’d wanted to kill us too. The important thing now was to get out of here. The important thing was to survive.

“They have gone. Come.”

I allowed him to pull me, as we crept from under the bed. The sight… I won’t describe it because I never fully focused on it. I didn’t want to. It wasn’t that bad most of the time. We’d seen blood before. In the survival courses we’d been taught, we’d had to kill animals and fish. Blood and flesh were just blood and flesh. I could block it and think it was just blood and flesh. It meant nothing. But then I would glimpse dark hair I knew all too well. Darius. He used to sit in front of me in language. Could never master German. Then a step ahead, a hand ornamented with a fake gold ring. Jason. He told everyone he’d bought that ring, but one of the girls in the dorm above had given it to him. He’d never taken it off. Now his hand was off, a bleeding piece of meat belonging to no one.

Pol dragged me past it, before I realized I’d shied like a school of fish edging around danger, and to the door, where he paused and peered around the door frame, then gave me a quick, flashing hand sign, the same we used on missions. “All clear.”

I followed and turned towards the door, ready to run out. The broad, open door seemed almost too bright, flooded with light and air. It led, through the exercise yard and the garden, to the beach. Yeah, okay, so they were waiting at the beach, but we could wait in the garden–

Pol had turned the other way and was running up the stairs.

“Pol!” I said, in voice, loudly.

He turned around, finger to his lips, then gestured, sign language – visible water language – quickly, “the girls.”

I looked towards the door, then up at my twin. The girls, as far as Pol was concerned meant Sandra. Oh, we weren’t supposed to know any of the girls and they weren’t supposed to know us. And we were never, ever, ever supposed to meet. Well, not outside missions. Not unsupervised. But between the missions and the exercise yard, we met.

At first it wasn’t very interesting. Girls were just… girls. Mysterious only because they were kept separate from us. But from about the time we turned twelve, they’d started being… interesting. And we’d figured out ways to get to their dorms: by climbing outside, by using trees, by taking emergency fire escapes. Not that we could ever stay long. They had guardians even more stringent than ours who came by every ten minutes. But ten minutes was enough to kiss and hold hands.

They left notes for us in the trees in the garden, we answered the same way. Every knot in a tree was a secret mailbox.

To me all girls were equally fascinating. I’d kiss whichever one let me. I’d answer any notes left with my name on them. Pol was different. For Pol there was only one girl, and that girl was Cassandra. Sandra.

I realized I could no more keep him from going upstairs to check on her than I could keep him from breathing. Chances were she was gone, but he had to know that for himself, or else he’d fight me to the last breath, and we’d go up – whatever that meant — when the building did. I suspected incendiary devices.

So I turned and ran up the stairs, catching up with Pol, and then lopping up beside him. If my reasoning was right, then the girls would be dead too. A bomb or a grenade, tossed into one room might have been a second too soon and given the other people warning of what was happening. But an attack with burners, every room with a team that blocked the door would have worked. Had worked.

I didn’t realize how much I hoped I was wrong until faced with evidence I wasn’t. Worse, on the doorway to the girls’ dorm there were two women. Not ours. Homo sap. Normals. Middle aged and portly, they’d served as maids and – earlier – nannies to the girls, and lately as guardians against our ineffective advances. And now they were dead, bleeding. Just like everyone downstairs.

I stopped, but Pol went on, leaping over the corpses, into the dorm, calling, “Sandra.”

I didn’t need his sob to know what he’d found. I hadn’t expected otherwise. But I also knew – or guessed – that Pol would be too shocked to move now. I must think and move for both of us. And the back of my mind had come to the conclusion that the front door and the garden were a bad idea. They couldn’t be that stupid. Someone would be there, ready to cut us down. At least, though I couldn’t understand why, clearly someone – someone who had lived in this compound–

No. Many someones who had lived in the compound, if they’d killed the servants too, had decided that we must die, every one of us. Die and burn and be forgotten. The why right now was less important than staying alive .

The girls’ dorm was like ours, far away from the tall, black dimatough wall that ran past the compound. But there was a tree right up against the southern most window. It was the tree we used to climb up when we could. And the tree wasn’t that far from the wall. And the wall, here, ran straight to merge into the sheer artificial cliff that formed this side of the island.

It would be dangerous jumping down from atop the wall, even if we tried to make it far enough that we weren’t too close to the cliff. I didn’t know how far the foundations of the seacity extended on this side. We never did maneuvers here. And even if the foundations had once also been sheer and straight down, they were hundreds of years old. Coral and molluscs had grown around them and extended them. But it was our only chance.

I stepped around the corpses, ran into the room. My brother was kneeling by what remained of Sandra. I didn’t look too closely. Look, I’d never been in love with her, but Pol had loved her. I’d seen her a lot, heard about her even more. I didn’t want to remember her like this. I caught a glimpse of her blond hair, loose over her shoulders as I’d never seen it. It was enough.

“Come, Pol,” I said, grabbing his arm and pulling. He didn’t move, his body heavy against my pulling. I couldn’t let him stay. Something that one of our nannies had taught us, when we were very young, about someone turning into a pillar of salt went through my head. I had no idea what it meant and at any rate, Pol was more likely to become a bunch of ashes, and I’d be damned if I’d let him.

My hands under his arms, I lifted him, bodily, dragging him. He fought me like a mad man, mumbling incoherence, “Sandra! I can’t–”

“I can,” I said. “Come on, Pol.”

“Cas! Pol!” A girl’s voice, and from under a bed, someone unfolded. For a moment, I didn’t recognize her. She was short – about as tall as my shoulder – and dark haired, pulled back. She looked very pale, brown eyes wide. Her white nightgown was covered in blood and she held in her hand – of all things – a pillow. Tightly clutched, in such a way that I thought she meant to hit potential attackers with it. A pillow! Because that would be effective against a burner.

A gurgle of completely inappropriate laughter climbed my throat. I managed to turn it into a gasp, and in that moment I recognized the woman. “Helena,” I said.

She nodded, as though I’d asked a question. Then opened her mouth, but all that came out of it was a sob.

“They did the same downstairs,” I said. “We hid. Come on. We have to go. We overheard them. The place is going to go up in … minutes. We have to be out of here.”

She wasn’t crying, but her nose was dripping and her lips had that loose look that lips get when people had cried a lot. She tried to speak again, but all that came out was a small sob, quickly repressed. Her eyes looked at me intently. Then she nodded, looked at Pol and, without a word grabbed his other shoulder.

“The south window,” I said. She didn’t require explanation. I don’t know if she knew what was on my mind, or was in too much shock to protest. But we managed to get out of the window and maneuver Pol past it, and along the sturdy branch of the tree, then a thinner one, one at a time – Pol by this time was not resisting, just moving like a sleep walker – towards the wall.

We stood on the wall when I heard a sound like “paff” distantly. It was like the sigh of a giant, the exhalation of a dragon.

I grabbed Pol’s arm and pulled, as I jumped and yelled, “Jump” and hoped Helena would follow.

The fall was both eternal and a moment, my breath crushed out of my chest, my body stretching, my feet pointing, so I would minimize the impact.

Behind us, I heard an explosion as I fell. I caught a flash of red light off the corner of my eye as my feet hit water. And I went down. I felt more than heard or saw, as Pol fell by my side.

It wasn’t until – after going down, down, down into the blind darkness with the image of conflagration and fire burning behind my eyelids – I swam back up to the surface, that I saw Helena. Her head broke water at the same time, her black hair glued to her head but still neatly caught back. Pol surfaced a moment later, drawing breath.

I didn’t know how coherent my brother was, and talking was impossible anyway. My ears had shut on the fall, and the waves were roaring against the cliff just a few feet away. I lifted my hand, my elongated swim-membranes shining wet in the morning sun, and gestured quickly, “We have to get away. They might come around the island this way.”

Helena nodded, then Pol did too. He did look up at the top of the wall, where the light of a great conflagration was visible. I felt unreasonably relieved. I’d been afraid he’d want to die.

We swam in no particular direction for a long while. It wasn’t a strain. We’d been built to swim long distances – even if not forever. Still, I don’t know how long we swam in the featureless sea, just the three of us, side by side. I know I was hungry and that the sun had climbed way up in the sky.

So it must have been about noon when we heard a boat motor. Pol dove under the water, closing his nose, breathing with the gills behind his ears. I did too. But as I was diving down, into the cool, greenish water, I thought that we needed to get somewhere.

We might be called Homo Aquaticus, but we’re not. Not really. We’re amphibians. We couldn’t keep swimming forever in the ocean. We’d need to rest and eat and sleep. We didn’t sleep in the water. Put a frog in water, with no place to rest, and he’ll drown. And so would we.

I touched Pol with my fingertips, to get his attention, and saw that Helena was behind him, looking intently at me. I’d fallen into mission mode, and was speaking to Pol only – as he was usually my only mission partner. I had to remember to include her. “We’re in open water,” I signed, flashing my fingers in his line of vision. “Judging by the fish, we’re miles from land.” I’d excelled in marine biology. Pol, not so much. Though he was better in hand to hand combat. “We need that boat.” I pointed up.

“They’ll be armed,” Pol gestured.

“We learned hand combat,” Helena put in from behind him, her fingers flashing fast in the dim water. “If we come at the boat from all sides. Quietly. We take them by surprise and we – ”

“Only if there’s no more than two of them,” Pol gestured, rapidly.

“All right,” I motioned. “We swim up enough to see how many, then if it’s only two we take them.”

The boat was a large motorboat, with a cabin. As far as we could see there were only two men in it. I was afraid there might be a third hidden in the shadows of the cabin. But in this type of operation, you always had to be prepared for an unpleasant surprise.

We had trained for this. Or at least, we had trained for this type of thing. We dove back to just under the surface and coordinated. We’d all go over different points as close to at the same time and as silently as we could. Both men were in the cabin, as far as we could see, one was looking in the direction we’d come from, with some sort of far seer. Not binoculars, but the sort of enhanced, satellite-bounced machinery that would give him a view of our point of origin. I wondered if that was what they were looking at, and why. The markings on the boat were from the Allied Land States, the loose confederacy of Earthworms that opposed the Seacities and was trying to bring them under the tutelage of the older nation states and their conglomerates.

Mind you, I didn’t know much politics. What we had learned in our classes was that the Seacities were the good guys, the Land States the bad guys. I don’t think that our instructors ever called them by anything but Earthworms.

I was even willing to believe everything they’d ever told us was absolutely true. The Seacities had been founded, almost a century ago, to escape the oppression of the Land States. I was willing to believe that the Earthworms were as terrible and oppressive as everyone said, and their Mule rulers, grossly and inhumanely bio-engineered, tyrants that made any right-thinking person’s blood curdle.

But our own side had just tried to kill us and I didn’t know what to expect from the other side. They would be looking towards Olympus Seacity, where we’d been created and raised. Were they looking for us? Had they ordered our deaths?

I couldn’t believe they were trying to save us. Not if what we’d learned about the laws that made our kind illegal was true. So…

I gestured fast, delineating the plan. Go over the boat sides, all at the same time, so we could surprise them before they could get hold of a burner. Immobilize them and incapacitate them. Find the burners on board. And then we’d plan again. See if there was some place we could run. There had to be a place we could be safe. After all, with our hair just long enough to hide the gills behind our ears, and if we were careful not to display our long, but not abnormal between-fingers webbing, we could pass for normal saps. Just about. That was part of the point when we went in for a job of sabotage.

We slithered over the sides of the boat and went on automatic, just as we’d learned it in our training – which always assumed we might have lost our weapons before action. They didn’t even hear us drop in – even though Pol and Helena were a little ahead of me. Gripping the boat and vaulting over the side was easier said than done while the boat was moving, albeit at a slow clip. We’d not have managed it at all if we hadn’t trained and trained till we could do it in our sleep and hadn’t been endowed – or at least been told we were endowed – with better strength and coordination than homo sap.

As it was — I fell behind a little and by the time my feet hit the rope and equipment littered deck as softly as I could make it — Helena was already picking up something that looked like a short dimatough cylinder, doubtless used for some boat purpose. And Pol was cat-stepping towards the cabin, something dark in his hand. I did what I could and grabbed the ropes from the floor of the boat.

Helena’s opponent never saw her coming. She hit him, forcefully, over the head from behind. He went down without a sound. Pol’s, the one piloting the boat, fought back, causing the boat to zigzag and waver, tilting madly this way and that. It didn’t last long – Helena hit him over the head also, quickly. And then they were laying on the floor of the cabin, unconscious.

I checked the pulse on each of them. Alive. The rope was too thick to be pliable, but I tied them as tightly as I could and dragged them out of the cabin, still unconscious.

As I came back, Helena was checking the course computers, and Pol had taken over piloting. He said, “Did you throw them overboard?” in a tight voice that seemed to issue straight from his throat and between clenched teeth.

“No.”

“Why not?”

Helena looked up and at Pol, curiously. I said, “They’d drown. It’s a long way to land and they can’t swim the distances we can.”

Pol made some sounds. They weren’t words. They were sounds intercut with frantic swallowing, as if he were keeping tears at bay.

When you have known someone from the moment a single ova split, you don’t need words to know what they’re thinking, precisely. I said, “They weren’t the same people, Pol. These two aren’t wearing Olympus Seacity uniforms.”

He gave me a wild look and I wondered how far away it was to a pharmacy that had some sort of tranquilizers. We never killed saps unless it was part of the mission description, and, anyway, if we ended up tried in some sort of court, or coming to public attention – and I had no idea how to avoid it – knowing we’d killed someone would only get us swiftly eliminated.

“How far are we from land? Or a seacity?” I asked Helena.

She looked at the screen of the computer embedded in the dash, then pulled up a panel next to it and started fiddling with the innards of the computer. I didn’t ask her why. It was standard ops.

“We have two choices,” she said. “We’re not far from Syracuse Seacity. We could make it by night fall.”

I thought of the men in the uniform of our own Seacity, killing our dorm mates, and shivered. She nodded. “Or we can make it to a little island, about five hours away, if we go full throttle in the other direction. A natural island. No name. I suspect it was the type that used to be under water most of the time, and that it has been artificially improved and is used as a vacation spot now. A few dozen houses. No military presence. It theoretically belongs to a land state. France. But I don’t think there is anyone there who cares.”

A few dozen houses was bad. If we went there, we’d find ourselves way too conspicuous. Maybe. People on vacation… If it truly was a vacation spot, some people were bound to rent their houses for the season. We might be able to concoct a story, at least if they were not too hard on nudity. Pol and I were wearing skin and Helena was in a bloodstained nightgown, the spots faded but still visible after the long immersion in seawater. We would pass no one’s inspection.

I watched her work on the computer as I thought. Nameless Resort or Syracuse.

She worked deftly, her head bent, so that some of her hair hung down in front of her eyes. She opened the computer and removed the tracking and responding unit. Normally we did that so it could not automatically call for help when you removed the gen-print unit, and bypassed it, to pilot the craft. Or wire it to auto and blow up.

This craft was clearly not that sophisticated. There was no gen-print on the unit. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to remove the tracking and responding, in case someone was following the route and realized it had deviated.

Most of the time the person supervising the craft movements is paying no attention at all, but sometimes… sometimes they are awake. Helena finished extirpating the offensive parts, handed them to me. I stepped back, threw them out and over the side to the water. Our two prisoners were still asleep, and I realized as I did it that I’d made a decision. France. I could speak French like a native. I stepped back into the cabin. “Let’s make it to nameless island,” I said. “Can you get more on it, Helena?”

She nodded and tapped on the screen, accessing the infoweb and blocking our own address and location from it. A little difficult in most military craft, but either easier in this one, or she wasn’t having any problems.

I looked back at our prisoners and they remained unconscious. I started worrying in case they were dead. But in a couple of hours they woke up, and they woke up in a foul mood. They ordered us to surrender. They ordered us to go back. It was quite a while before they realized they couldn’t order us to do much of anything. Not while they were tied up.

Then they went very quiet, and we looked through the compartments in the cabin till we located sandwiches and some apples. Pol growled when I asked him if we shouldn’t feed the prisoners, and much as I felt it would be humane, I couldn’t convince myself to give up any of the food. We hadn’t eaten since the day before, and we’d swum for probably six hours. Helena did give them the water from two bottles, though.

She spelled Pol at the piloting, then I did, then it came to Pol again.

We ransacked the cabin, found nothing to enlighten us on the prisoners’mission.

“Do we really want to know?” Pol said. “What does it matter?” He was still in that mood. I figured his shock had dissolved into anger, and I’d never seen Pol so angry. We knew very little of what we were and we differed from homo sap. And what I knew of homo sap grief was from mindless vids – there was a good chance Pol would go grief-stricken on us again. I hoped it wasn’t before we landed.

“Of course we want to know,” I said. “Just in case, you know, they’re on a man hunt for us. That they know we’re out. Then someone seeing us…”

He was eating the last apple while piloting with one hand, and stopped, with the apple halfway to his mouth. “Oh, right. But you said it was our people, and I saw –” He paused and looked thoughtful for a moment before continuing. “Maybe they were in the pay of the Earthworms?”

Helena went with me to the back of the boat, now bathed in the golden light of the setting sun.

“What were you doing, out when we captured your boat?” she asked in French, the language they’d used to threaten us.

They didn’t answer. I was starting to wonder what the hell we could do to make them talk. We weren’t trained in torture. I presumed our army had people so trained. At least they told us the enemy did, and what to do about it if we were captured – which mostly consisted of committing suicide.

Helena smiled, dimpling. “Right. Cas, I’ll pilot. You and Pol throw them overboard. At least Pol will be happy.”

They talked. I suspected I would have, also. Any creature who can say that with a radiant, dimpling smile, is not one you want to thwart.

“We were surveying Olympus Seacity,” the darker one of them said – though they were both dark, one had brown hair, and the other pitch black hair and tanned skin.

His friend growled, and he said, “What, Joe? What are they going to do about it? Look, it’s because of the treaty. The treaty has been signed, and they’re all set to shake hands and make friends after the Fi– The Seacities make their apologies, see? And some reparation or other, including letting our people inspect their places to make sure everything is as declared.”

“What peace treaty?” Helena asked, and her voice sounded funny, all dry and crackly. I wasn’t talking. Mine would have sounded the same. No one had told us anything about any peace treaty.

The brown haired one elbowed Joe but Joe either wasn’t taking a hint, or was wondering what harm it could do to reveal information that was all over the air waves. “Bless your heart,” he said, staring at Helena. “Don’t you listen to the vids? It’s all over the infos too. The Seacities surrendered. The allies won. The Treaty of Bogota, they call it, where it was signed three days ago. It’s all over but the shouting.”

“So why were you surveying Olympus?” Helena asked.

He sighed. “They’d told us there were military installations there, and that they’d been creating monsters.”

“Monsters?”

“Genetic hybrids. Humans who –”

“Like the mules?” I asked. I couldn’t help it. If they could create mules – with superhuman intelligence and ability to rule them, why was making soldiers a crime?

He frowned and looked mildly offended. “The bio-rulers,” he corrected me. “Are still mostly human. And besides, they were created to rule not… to kill humans, like these creatures were said to be.”

“What kind of creatures?” I asked. My heart beat in my throat.

“What’s it to you?” Brown hair asked.

“I don’t know,” Joe said. And I wondered if it was true or if he’d decided to clam up.

“All over but the shouting.” I remembered the shouting of our friends as they died, in our dorm. Attacked by surprise.

My mind whirled. Back in the cabin, we told Pol what we’d learned. His eyes grew really large.

He ran his hand back through his hair, making it stand on end. “Do you think….”

I nodded. There was nothing to discuss. We were forbidden biological weapons. We had been eliminated. Evidence destroyed.

I thought I was taking it amazingly well, until I felt my stomach rocket towards my mouth. I barely made it to throw up over the side.

Afterwards we’d probably have remained quiet, only Helena seemed to have become even more the soul of efficiency. I decided the reason I had never paid her much attention before was that she scared me a little. She seemed to know what to do, even in these bizarre circumstances.

Strangely, it wasn’t scaring me now.

“We need to approach the island this way,” she said, pointing on the screen. “From what I understand, this part of the island is just houses, and some of them aren’t rented. We need to find an empty house, break in, and then figure out what to do. Presumably we can find clothes, in the house.”

“What’s on the other side of the island?” Pol asked.

“Some sort of administration offices and people who look after those vacationing in the island. Cleaners. Cooks. That sort of thing. They will be there all the time, and they will notice an approach.”

“Will there be some sort of gate?” I asked. Or a harbor where we must put in?”

“Hopefully not,” Helena said. “I understand the houses have private docks, so we should be able to enter one of those.”

But as Pol was maneuvering around the small island, the houses barely visible amid the dense greenery, I heard a splash from the open area of the boat. Walking back there, I realized our prisoners had freed themselves – the ropes lay on a heap on the floor – and jumped overboard. By the time I came to the back, they were a good distance away swimming. We were rounding the isle on a broad arc, looking for a safe area to land, and they’d simply swam at a straight angle, towards land. A much shorter course.

“We should veer to catch them,” I told Helena, who stood beside me.

“No point,” she said. “They’re saps. They’re dressed. They’ll get somewhere where they can sound an alarm on us before we can land. And if we get in the water to stop them… We’ll have to kill them… and then, if we’re caught…”

“And now?” Pol asked, when we told him. “What will they tell the people on the island?”

“I don’t think we can go to the island after all,” Helena said. “They’ll be on the alert. We should try for the coast of France, where– ”

“Helena,” I said. “Everyone will be on the look out for this boat.”

“We should go through the front. And surrender,” Pol said softly.

“What?” I turned toward my brother, certain he had, at long last, taken leave of his senses.

“We should go through the entrance to the isle. Find out whoever is in charge and surrender.” The hazy hate in his eyes was gone, certainty taking its place. “Ask to speak to the Allied commanders of the Land Forces.”

“Okay,” I said. “But there have to be less unpleasant ways of committing suicide.”

“No,” he said. “Think. They want to build a case for war crimes against the Seacity commanders.”

“They can do that with our corpses,” Helena said. “Our DNA– ”

Pol shook his head. “No. Sure they can. But the really dramatic case, the one that will grab headlines and make people get behind the effort to punish the Seacities, will come from our testimony. The way we were raised. The missions we’ve undertaken. What happened at the end.”

“Oh,” Helena said.

“Right,” Pol said. His jaw was set. It looked more square than it ever had. I felt my own jaw to see if it had undergone a similar transformation. It was like he’d grown up, overnight. “We go in through the front door.”

I was the strategist and the planner. I was not used to being out-decided by those with me, but Pol and Helena took it in their hands – firmly – from then on.

It took us a little while to get the people in charge of the resort to get what we were doing, what we were, and what we wanted. Then, despite the fact that they we’d surrendered, they’d sat us in a comfortable room, with a burner pointed at us by a young man in leaf-patterned bathing shorts – whose hand trembled so much that any one of us could have got to him and wrenched that weapon from his hand before he managed to aim it, much less fire it.

Something about amphibious humans scared them, as if we told them we subsisted solely on human flesh, or perhaps that we were in the habit of breathing fire. We ignored the young man with the gun and sat on a comfortable, broad sofa in the reception room into which we’d first walked, waiting for the manager of the resort to get hold of someone relevant.

When he finally did get hold of someone with the power, he just said, “Yes, sir,” a lot of times, then came back to us. “They’re going to pick you up. In a military vehicle. They had already dispatched one. We had… two gentlemen with a suspicious claim of piracy.”

“Will we be safe?” Pol asked me, tapping his ankle against mine in dark-water language.

“Probably,” I replied the same way. “If not, we’ll work with it when it comes.”

But we were safe when the military transport arrived. They didn’t even point weapons at us. Not that they needed to. There were fourteen of them, and they all looked like trained commandos. I recognized the bearing and the discipline. These people were trained as we were. Military. Only the lucky men were saps, and not evidence of war crimes.

They looked a little shocked, I don’t know if at our nudity or at our age. I know that the man in charge said that we looked awfully young, and then another one had said, “They’d be sir. They’d have to be conceived at the start of hostilities.”

And the commander had frowned and said, “At the beginning of hostilities at the start of the last war with the Seacities, at that,” and he looked stern and somehow tired.

I didn’t feel tired, but I clenched my fists, as the time line fell in place for me. The last war had happened about seventeen years ago, and there had been a peace treaty about five years later. It was known as The War of the Two Defeated. It was widely considered to have been a pause to allow both sides to rearm. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been shocked that they’d continued raising us as water-confined commandos for the hostilities that were sure to come. I wasn’t so foolish that I thought they wouldn’t have killed five year olds. But I wondered if the war hadn’t come, would they have killed us at ten? At twelve?

The polite men in the military haircuts gave us grey fatigues to wear. All of us. Even Helena. They only looked good on Helena. Pol and I looked like waifs in hand-me-down clothing. Which I supposed we were. After we dressed they escorted us to the transport – briefly, through the velvet-dark night – and to seats. They taught us to use the safety straps, so different from the ones we used at home. Then we were airborne and it was no time at all before we were landing.

I don’t know what I expected. A military compound of some sort. Rooms of people treating us like explosives.

It didn’t happen. Instead, we landed in the courtyard of what looked like a vast private estate. The landing pad was surrounded by gardens – roses, orange trees in full blossom. An assault on the nose, and a riot of color.

As we walked up the path among the trees, I realized our own gardens, back in our compound, had been institutional and sparse. And yet, even as I walked on lawn so smooth that it didn’t hurt my bare feet at all, I wished that I could wake up back in my normal bed, and know that all this had been a horrible nightmare and that we could count on Olympus Seacity being as loyal to us as we were to it.

The trees and flowers gave way to a seemingly endless, manicured lawn. It was nighttime, but a full moon revealed the landscape and painted it with a silvery dream-like quality, as we approached an immense mansion with a broad staircase and massive double doors. The doors were open and there was light and music inside. Both grew stronger as we approached.

Near the house, to the left of the staircase, there was a tree with a table and chairs under it. The table and chairs looked as if they were spun of solid silver. There was a jacket over the back of one of the chairs. It waved gently in the night breeze. All of it looked like the scene for a vid. It was a way of life we’d never been exposed to. And we’d never be exposed to. The best we could hope for after this was a quiet, institutional life.

We didn’t go up the staircase. Instead, we went between the tree and the grand expanse of marble steps, to the side. Under it, there was another door, at which the commander knocked. He spoke earnestly to a man in formal black two-piece suit inside.

It was only when the man bowed slightly, I realized his formal attire was in fact a servant’s uniform.

He led us – while our military escort followed us – into a room that resounded with footsteps and music from above. I heard a woman’s laugh. There was the sound of glass hitting glass.

I wondered if the area we were led through was the servant area. It was as opulent as anything I’d ever seen, even in vids – heavy, carved furniture, shining wood floors, deep carpets that caressed the bare soles of my feet. It smelled of wax and cleaners, but not unpleasantly. It was as though it proclaimed that armies of servants made sure it remained spotless.

“This way,” the servant said, and took us up a winding staircase of polished wood. From a niche in the wall a statue of a man with goat legs and human body made me stare. Was this another creature created by the saps? Had they made the statue before they killed the poor bastard?

Up and up, past a landing, then another. Up there, there was music too. It came from behind heavy golden-wood double doors that were the only opening from a landing carpeted in heavily patterned, but not garish, carpet. The only furniture was a heavy dresser topped by a silver ewer that looked like it had never been used, but was assiduously polished.

The music sounded like violin – I knew that much from the vids. Perhaps someone was watching a vid of violin playing? Seemed like a boring occupation. Why not be downstairs in the party?

The servant flung the door open. “Sir,” he said, then looked back at us and seemed at a loss. “They’re here.”

The room contained three people, but I knew whom he addressed. He addressed the tall, redheaded man who had been standing the furthest away from the door, by another set of doors that led to a terrace. The other two men sat at a massive, polished dark-wood table that took up much of the room between the interior doors and the external ones.

One of them, dark haired and dark skinned, sat on one side of the table, reading something and making notes on his reader with a stylus.

The man on the other side was also dark haired, but with piercing blue eyes that gave us the once over, from head to toe. He had been playing with something on the table – something that looked like a holo of the world’s surface. Not a map. It was tri-d and where his finger touched it seemed to have expanded, to show a detailed view of Olympus seacity, the tallest building about five inches tall. The part that had been our compound was gone. Only the walls remained. The rest looked scorched.

He removed his finger, and glared at us, then looked back at the redhead, who had been standing with his back turned, and now turned around, revealing that he’d been playing the violin. The case lay open at the head of the table. He carried the instrument carefully to it, then smiled at us, as he set the violin in the case, and waved his hand airily towards the military commander. “Thank you. You and your men may go. I take responsibility from now on.”

“Jarl,” the man who’d been playing with the holo said in a warning tone.

“What? They’ll infect me with amphibiousness, ’xander? It will do. They’re three children.” Which sounded odd, since he didn’t look much older than us. Perhaps it was because he had the type of nordic looks that made people look younger than their age until they became wrinkled: Very pale skin covered a square jaw and emphasized the very deep green of broadly open eyes. His hair was somewhere between gold and bronze. His expression didn’t help him look old and grave either. He looked like the whole situation amused him. Perhaps everything amused him.

The other man closed his reader and looked up. All three of them seemed of an age. They appeared to young to command this kind of respect and obedience, I thought as the red head said again, “You may go,” to the troops. And the troops went.

He looked at us. “Have you had dinner?”

Now I was absolutely sure I was dreaming. I couldn’t have answered if I wanted to, but Helena said, “No,” in the tone of voice that gave away she too thought she was walking in a dream.

He smiled at us, snapped the lid of his violin case shut, and walked past us to the double doors. He was as barefoot as we were and the clothes he wore weren’t much different from the ones we had on – loose shirt and pants. But his shimmered with the rich look of a fabric that wasn’t designed to be worn in rough conditions. He opened the door, and I heard him talk to someone outside. Then he came back into the room. “There,” he said. “They’ll bring you something from downstairs.” He waved us to seats at the table, “Sit down.”

“Jarl,” the man who’d been examining the holo said.

Jarl, the redhead, shook his head at him. “You can go, ’xander. Go see how the party is going.”

The dark haired man made the sort of face that I associated with Pol when he was much younger and they told him he’d have to study his languages. “It’s your party,” he said, and it was that sort of voice too.

“Yes. I realize that. But I need to attend to this, ’xander. You may go.”

The other man looked like he was going to argue, but then he looked up at his friend and shrugged, “Your damn funeral.”

He managed to bang the door on the way out, and there was the noise of metal and glass after that. I think he crossed paths with the servants bringing dinner – who came in a second later – and startled them, causing their trays to rattle. But from the temper he’d left in, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d thrown the beautiful silver ewer through a window. I wondered why he was so upset.

The other man stayed, sitting very quietly and looking at us, as we sat in a neat row across from him, just down from the holo. The servants came in and set plates in front of us, as well as several covered dishes. Jarl waved them away again, airily. “They’ll serve themselves, thank you,” he said.

This seemed to upset three of the servants who’d been taking places behind us, but they bowed and left.

Jarl took the lids off everything, as though curious at what was under them. “I recommend you start with the soup, proceed to the salmon and finish with the roast beef, but feel free to take it in any order you wish,” he said, as he removed the lid from yet another platter and said, “Ah,” at the sight of heaped fruit. He reached for a nectarine that sat on top and plopped down into the chair across from me, biting into it. The juice dripped down his chin. He wiped at it ineffectively with his other hand, till I handed him my napkin, at which point he grinned and said, “Thank you,” as he used it. Then he looked at us, his expression suddenly grave. “Tell me about yourselves.”

“Who… Who are you?” Helena said, sounding both awed and confused.

“Oh. Jarl Ingemar. I beg your pardon. I should have introduced myself.” And to what must have been our look of total incomprehension. “I am the commander of the Allied Forces. Surely you’ve heard of me.”

I’d heard of him, but not as Jarl Ingemar. And if he was the mule who ruled supreme over all the other mules in the land states, he looked awfully young. He couldn’t be more than twenty. No way was he thirty. And the commander had to be at least fifty. He’d been in power that long.

But he didn’t seem to be lying, and his intent expression when he listened to us seemed to indicate he was indeed in charge.

We told him our story in three voices, haltingly, between mouthfuls of food that tasted better than anything else we’d ever eaten. One of us picked up as the other finished. His expression of interest morphed into one of concern, and finally something very much like anger. He got up and paced. He waved for us to go on with our story. We did. He wasn’t a man who was used to being disobeyed.

As we tapered away into silence after we describing flying here, he reached for the violin case, still resting at the head of the table.

The other man grabbed his wrist. “Not the time, Jarl.”

Jarl looked at him for a moment, abstracted, as if wondering what he meant, or perhaps who he was, then he blinked, shook his head and gave the impression of waking up. He let out breath with a hissing sound. “What are we going to do with you?” he asked us, earnestly.

I blinked and was shocked to hear myself say, “Nothing unpleasant, I hope.”

This brought a startled laugh from him, and then, “Not if we can help it.” He turned to his friend. “Bartolomeu?”

The other man shrugged. “What do you want me to tell you? You know damn well what we should do. We take the kids before the Joint Commanders. We let them depose. We have the judge condemn their creators.”

“And then?”

“Their creators get hanged.”

“And the children?” He looked at us as he used that word again, and his gaze seemed to soften, and grow more concerned.

The other man shifted uncomfortably in his chair, which was weird, because these were the most comfortable chairs I’d ever sat in. “I’m sure they can be made comfortable in –”

“Unless of course ’xander gets hold of them,” Jarl said. “And it’s no use telling me he wouldn’t. He’s very resourceful, is our friend. I know it’s not his fault, but all the same, it’s not theirs either. And there are a hundred ’xanders in the system, some of whom would kill them from the purest of motives, to prevent corruption to the human genome. And some of which would torture them in the name of science.”

“Oh, come,” Bartolomeu said. “No one is going to torture human –”

“They’re not.”

Bartolomeu was quiet a while. “Then… what?”

Jarl sighed. “I have recorded their testimony.” He took a small circle from his pocket and tossed it on the table. “And stopped recording at the end of it. You’re my witness it’s not fabricated. Can you get your kit and take gen material from all of them, so we have substantive proof?”

Bartolomeu opened his mouth, then snapped it closed. He looked suspiciously at his friend, frowned at us, and left the room, quickly.

Jarl paced, his footfalls almost soundless on the thick carpet. I thought that he meant to have them kill us after they took the gen sample, all in the name of saving us suffering. The silver knife they’d given us for the steak was quite sharp, I gathered. Or at least looked it. But before my hand fully closed on the handle, his hand was over mine. “Wait,” he said, with a hint of laughter in his voice. “Wait. There will be a time to use that.”

I hadn’t seen him move. He’d seemed to teleport from his position to mine. There was nothing I could do against him. I moved my hand away from the knife. What did he mean by there will be a time for that? Was he going to kill us with these knives? Helena and Pol continued eating, but I set my silverware aside.

Bartolomeu came back, carrying a black bag, which he opened to remove something that looked like an injector, but was, I gathered, a blood collector. He took a sample of each of our blood and looked in a readout window on the gadget. “Very interesting,” he said. “Jarl, I believe they used the experiments you did –”

“Shh,” Jarl said. He looked up. “Go now, Bartolomeu.”

Bartolomeu’s eyebrows rose. “And leave you alone with potential hostiles, again?”

He waved his hand. “The potential hostiles will be fine. Does that readout tell you whether they have the speed built into them?”

Bartolomeu frowned. “That sort of detail is not really noticeable….”

“Ah,” Jarl said. “Go now. I believe it’s very hot and stuffy down in the party rooms. Imagine if someone were to faint. They’ll need your help. Of all of us, you’re the most versed in human biology.” He grinned and the tip of his tongue protruded momentarily between his lips making his expression impish. “Well, except me, but I am very busy.”

Bartolomeu sighed and gave the impression of a man watching a show of which he knew the ending. “Yeah, yeah. Be careful. You might be their nominal ruler, but don’t go breaking your own damn head. You know the entire council can turn on you and try you for letting potential contamination out into the sacred human gene pool.”

“Oh, indeed. And don’t worry. The sacredness of human genes will be kept quite safe and tidy.”

Bartolomeu looked dubious. Unlike his friend, earlier, though, he didn’t slam the door shut on his way out. Nonetheless, Jarl walked to it after him and locked it, then came back to the table.

He flung himself into the chair again and got another nectarine. “This is what we’re going to do. One of you is going to get that knife and hold it to my throat. Do I have a volunteer?”

None of us moved. He looked at me and his lips twitched. “Not even you, son?”

“You’re much faster than I,” I said. “You’re looking for an excuse to kill me.”

He laughed. “I don’t need an excuse to kill you. I could have you executed this minute, with a word. I could have poisoned this food.” He shook his head at our expressions. “Easy! I didn’t and I won’t. No. You heard what Bartolomeu said. He’s not stupid.” He looked at us for a moment and looked exasperated. “It’s like this – once you’d turned yourselves in, they would of course insist you testify. That was well played. No one is going to hurt you or kill you til you have testified against the commanders of the Seacities who might have known of this. But afterwards…”

He shrugged. “You’re not of them. You might look like them. You might be better than them.” For a moment the amusement vanished from his face, the residual smile from his lips, the joy from his eyes. He looked very old. Not just fifty or whatever it was, but as old as time. “They will never consider you human. That means you have no rights. And since I presume they didn’t give you the skills necessary to become a…” His mouth seemed to hesitate in forming the words. “A ruler of men, you’ll end up dead. If you’re lucky.”

My heart had started drumming again. “But–”

“We have a case against your creators already,” he said, softly. “The recording and the samples will do it.” He looked at Pol. “Your girlfriend will be avenged. There is no reason for the three of you to stay here. But if I just let you go… I’m not of them either. I might rule them, but I can’t control them. If word got out that I let you out in the world to reproduce – yes, you are fertile, in case you wonder. I suspected it from the fact they segregated you, but the sample confirmed it, from what I saw over Bartolomeu’s shoulder.” He shrugged. “If I let you out to reproduce, since you’re close enough to homo sapiens sapiens to mingle with them, I will be tried. And I will be shot. A fate I don’t relish. So, we’ll do this. You’ll take that knife, and hold it at my throat. I think we’d better leave through the terrace door, because if we go through the house, we might get through four levels of servants and guards, but we won’t get through Alexander Milton Sinistra. Or Bartolomeu, for that matter. He’ll be forced to do something, even if he doesn’t want to blow my plan.”

“Your plan?” I asked, confused.

“Of course,” he said. “You’re going to steal one of my flyers. Nothing I can do to prevent it.”

“But… but… I’m not fast enough… no one will believe it!”

“Didn’t you hear Bartolomeu?” he asked. “They can’t tell from that sample. Or if they can, he’ll make sure they don’t.” He looked suddenly impatient. “Come, young men, lady, which is it going to be? Are you going to be free or live as victims?”

***

The first guard was the worst. First, it was really hard for me to look threatening, when I had to hold my hand way up to keep the knife on my “prisoner’s” throat. And when he was far more muscular than I. Visibly so.

Second, the guard reached for his burner, pointed it at us, and my voice cracked as I said, “throw the burner down or Jarl Ingemar gets it.”

The guard glared and shifted, but Jarl said, “Do it, Roger. They are as fast as I am, or faster.”

The burner dropped. “And don’t give the alarm,” I said, now more confident, as Helena bent to get the burner. “At the first sign of pursuit, we will kill him. If you don’t give the alarm we won’t harm him.”

“Sir!” Roger said. Not to me. He was looking at Jarl.

Jarl opened his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “I’d appreciate it if you don’t get me killed. Don’t worry. Everything is under control.”

It wasn’t until we were some space away that Jarl said. “Everything works out perfectly, see. You needed that burner.” He spoke in a whisper but still made me insanely nervous. What if there were people from the party, astray in the gardens. Why was he playing with fire? If he was one of the legendary mules, was he tired of being safe?

“You know, you could hold the burner pointed at me, instead of the knife at my throat. This position is very uncomfortable.”

“No,” I said. Mostly because I had a feeling no one would try heroics with his body in front of mine, and I remembered all too vividly the burners that had cut my kind down. “You’re a flight risk. We need the knife and the burner.” I felt the chuckle that shook him all the way down my arm.

The guard at the entrance to the parking space didn’t even try to argue, just dropped his burner and stood, watching us go in.

Jarl led us to a small silver flyer. “Now, do you remember what I told you? Don’t worry about the tracking, I disabled it long ago. Young lady, do you remember how to disable the remote detonator?”

She nodded. Apparently the flyer had a remote detonator in case of theft – which seemed extreme but then, I suppose it contained secrets he didn’t want falling in anyone’s hands. “Aren’t you going to need what you have in –”

“The flyer?” He shook his head. “I’ll miss some of it. It’s been my getaway vehicle when the pomp and circumstance gets too oppressive, but no. It’s more important that you three go in safety.”

He looked at me, “Cas, remember where I told you about where to hit with the burner beam?”

I nodded. “Do you think you can do it?”

“It’s not unlike exercises we had,” I said. I let go of him, started to climb the steps to the flyer, pushing Pol and Helena ahead of me. “We’ll manage, sir. We won’t let you down.”

“Right,” he said. He inclined his head. “May I look at your hand?” he asked. “Hold it up.” I did, in confusion. His fingers touched the webbing between my fingers, gently, then reached, gingerly to touch the sensitive spot around my gills, behind my ears. He lowered his eyebrows, but looked more sad than angry.

Then without warning and to my eternal shock, reached out and ruffled my hair. “Take care, son,” then looked up. “Children. Be careful out there. Live. Mingle with homo sap. Keep your secret.” A smile made him look amused again, but it was an amusement tinged with sadness. “The three of you are the closest I’ll come to having children. I designed a prototype for you, once. Just the genes. I never…” He shrugged, then the smile grew brighter. “Not all of your characteristics will go on. Most of them won’t. Your genes will be overwhelmed by the vast population of the Earth. But they will be there, in the essence. You will go on. Grow. Multiply. Fill the face of the Earth.”

We went up into the flyer and took off, flying the directions he’d told us to program, South and, eventually, within swimming distance of the many islands off the coast of Australia.

If he gave the alarm right after we left, as he’d said he would, his scramblers must have been much better than he’d told us. And he probably lied about the direction we’d flown in too. I wouldn’t put it past him.

We caught hints of frantic chatter from our pursuers, in the transmitter on board, but they never came near us.

When we were within a few hours’ swimming of the group of islands we were aiming for, we sent the pre-arranged signal to Jarl, so he would “activate” the self-destruct on the flyer.

And then we jumped out, one after the other, into the frigid waters. One. Two. Three.

I was the last, and, as I fell, I aimed the burner at the place where the explosives were and fired.

For a moment nothing happened, then a bloom of heat and light appeared on the carapace of the flyer. Since it kept going in the trajectory it had been, by the time the explosion came it was well ahead of us, and over ocean, where the pieces would sink and be gone forever.

As for me, I fell into the water, in a perfect stance, and went down, down, down.

By the time I got to the surface, I saw Pol swimming towards me. I looked for Helena and found her, very close by, on the other side. She reached out and touched my hand with hers.

We were going to be fine.