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They were kids. They ducked their curfew and slipped up to a quiet rooftop overlooking the city. The noise of the street down below them, the sirens, the squealing tires, the interminable footsteps of the people, it seemed to melt away into the night air. Up here, there was just the sound of the wind, and their quiet conversation.
Earlier in the day, truck after truck bearing the logo of Luio & Co. came weaving through the maze of shipping crates to the corner of the harbor where the Audhumla lay hidden. Kamille had watched from the catwalk as crewmen wearing Karaba jackets hauled crate after crate of supplies up the ramp. Some of them were open; Kamille could see weapons and ammunition, as well as clothing, normal suits, ration packs, jugs of water, toiletries, tools, and huge drums of liquid fuel. He’d watched enough of these resupplies to know that it would all be used to keep the fighting going. The Audhumla was an organism that ate crates of provisions and excreted death.
The fighting never stopped. Nominally, it was all in service to the mission, which was to end humanity’s reckless pollution of the Earth. The most efficient way to do that, apparently, was to fly from airstrip to airstrip, getting into a new skirmish every five or so days, littering the ground and sea below them with fuel, flak, shredded mobile suits and nameless corpses.
Kamille was colony-born, a Spacenoid. The Earth wasn’t his problem. He might have lived his whole life without coming within a million miles of it, if circumstances hadn’t forced him in with the AEUG. And really, the mission could have been anything. When he was in space, the mission was to get to Earth. Now that he was on Earth, all anyone could talk about was getting him back into space. And the fighting. It never stopped. The waiting, the nervous preparation, the walks up and down the corridors of the Audhumla anticipating the blare of the siren, it was all an extension of the fighting. And that never stopped, not for a second, not even while he slept.
But it had stopped now.
They were kids. They sat side-by-side with their fingertips almost touching. The wind from the bay stirred the potted trees and whistled softly through the chain-link fence. It was so quiet.
Four knew she was being watched. She was always being watched. Her earliest memory was of a panel of doctors watching her from behind frosted glass. She was lying on a hospital bed in an unfurnished concrete room. A computer monitor was mounted in front of her face by a plastic arm. Distantly, she felt the ventilator tube in her throat, the metronomic pulse of air in and out, operating her body the way a pendulum operates a grandfather clock. There was a hum, and then a voice.
"Number Four: Make the phrase 'Sieg Zeon' appear on the screen in front of you."
She did. It was easy.
Cheers erupted from behind the glass and after a moment, the voice instructed her to go back to sleep. The lights flicked off, leaving her in darkness, accompanied only by the rhythmic hiss of the ventilator.
It hadn’t occurred to her to ask where her memories were being kept. It hadn’t occurred to her that memories could be kept. For a while, she just assumed she’d been born in that sterile white room, and that she’d die there. It wasn’t until she stopped doing what she was told, which was often to move blocks and turn on lightbulbs with her mind, that the people in charge of her began throwing that promise around. Her memories. They’d put something in her, they said, which suppressed her memories from before the institute, something which could be turned off at will. Their will.
So that became the deal. Work hard, use her gifts to pilot the larger and larger machines they made just for her – at great expense, they added, like that meant anything to her – and then when the work was done, poof. Back to normal. Whatever normal was, or had been. She was a war orphan. Whatever memories they had locked away were not pleasant, she knew that. But in the breaks between sorties and debriefings, tests and analyses, when the automated light in her room clicked off for the night, she had nothing but the institute to cast her mind back to. Even in her dreams, she merely replayed the events of the day. There was no escape, not for her body or for her mind. There were only tests, migraines, and that bitter, all-consuming loneliness.
There was no one like her, not even Murasumes One-through-Three. No one who understood her. It was like she was invisible, or dead. Even in a room full of people, they all looked past her, talked through and around her, never got too close. They gave her orders, or they gave her space. That was all. She was alone.
But not tonight.
They were kids. They’d snuck out after dark to see each other. They talked about the irrational behavior of the adults around them. The senseless lines they drew between them. Something connected them, some pull stronger than gravity. They spoke the same language, the language they’d only ever thought in. It was electric. They were alive, alive , for once in their short lives. To each of them, the other was an anchor, a lifeboat, the one other fixed point in a universe of shifting, buzzing, twirling nonsense. Without words, they confessed their sins, and forgave one another. Their hands found each other. Four’s nails were painted. Kamille’s were bitten nearly to the quick.
“Hey,” said Four. “Can I ask you something?”
“What is it?” Kamille asked. His heart was pounding.
She leaned into him, and his every nerve ending blared at once. He hated being touched, being breathed on, and yet her touch, her breath…It felt right, like a key in a lock.
He felt, at times, like he was not Kamille, that he was something smaller and more integral, piloting his body like a mobile suit. It was clunky, exhausting, frustratingly imprecise, but it kept the outside at bay. He was trapped in this body, insulated and numb.
But Four could see him, the real him. She could reach through his armor. She could touch him.
She could touch him, he decided.
“Kiss me,” she said.
He felt himself nod. “Hm.”
He’d never done it before. He closed his eyes.
She was surprised how good it felt. His lips were soft, and his breath tickled her cheek. She opened her mouth a little, and felt him relax, and at that moment there was no line between them, no seam. They were two halves of something beautiful, reunited after all these years, a new, strong, beautiful thing with no past and no future, recursive and self-similar. She loved him. He loved her. Their love was a universal constant, like gravity. It was observable in every atom of the universe. Their lips parted, but they did not, not ever.
There was an explosion, a blast of air, a flash of light and the sound of creaking metal in the distance. In the street below, people screamed. Kamille and Four looked towards the noise. The wind picked up, hot and restless now, blowing their hair back. A column of orange smoke rose from behind a row of buildings. A trio of helicopters buzzed like locusts, and a black shadow, sharp and mechanical, loomed over the city skyline. The fighting had begun without them. It had never really stopped.
Four ran down the stairwell with Kamille calling after her. He chased her into the street, into the crowd, and she turned to face him, and her eyes…
“Can’t you tell who I am?” she asked him.
I’m your enemy, she didn’t say.
She disappeared into the crowd and ran towards the smoke and fire, towards the machine they’d made just for her. She didn’t love him. She couldn’t. Love was for people with a future.
Kamille watched her go, then looked up at the mobile suit wreaking havoc on the city. They’d need him again. That’s why he had to keep fighting; he was good at it, and it was easier to fight than not to. The two kids ran towards opposite ends of the city, opposite sides of the war. The moment was gone, and they were soldiers.