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Aim. And… fire.
No one was watching, he reminded himself. The firing range was empty. Bean tried to relax into the shot the way he’d been taught. But of course, that was his whole problem — he didn’t know how to relax.
He squinted at the target, the final judge. Enough bulls-eyes would make everything worth it: the mornings of waking up alone in his sterile bunk, staring at the utilitarian gray ceiling, unable to remember the last time he’d seen the outside; the formless shame every time he looked into the mirror.
No wonder he didn’t recognize himself: every part of his body had once belonged to someone else. Bean had the lungs of a swimmer, the legs of a sprinter, the ears of a hunter. His eyes were doglike, wherever they’d come from, quick to detect motion and slightly color-blind, but you didn’t need to see color to be a killer.
Was he a killer? Bean ran his fingers along his wrist seams and thought. In the right light you could see the lines where he had been stitched together; with careful enough fingers you could even feel them. He was too large to be covered by the skin of just one person. In the beginning he’d worried he’d come apart at the seams, and then later he’d hoped for it, and eventually he’d tried to forget all about it because by some miracle his makeshift body fit together like a single organism and he could do just about everything a natural human could. On paper, at least. Surely no natural human felt this twitchy and out-of-place, on the verge of falling apart.
His hands and wrists had belonged to a sharpshooter. He liked to think that they’d thrown in the muscles and the nerves too, trailing up the arm and leading back to the brain, forcing him into a state of calm. Because he was calm, he repeated to himself. He wouldn’t freeze if and when the time came to kill.
* * *
He felt more whole while he was holding his gun — his patchwork body relaxed, remembering the purpose it had been made for.
During his first week, he spent hours on the range, trying to master his body and make it his own, determined not to let himself repeat his body’s old mistakes. He spent so much time practicing that he found he was restless without the gun. His fingers clenched around empty air.
It didn’t help his nerves that they tested him constantly. How fast could he do mental math? (Fast.) How far could he run? (Far.) How could he fight? (Lethally. To no one’s surprise.)
From the material they tested him on, he intuited that he was being groomed for something specific. Surely they didn’t mean to keep him here forever, shuttling him between the same six rooms of the facility. But what?
He was too high-effort for a super soldier. All that biomaterial, training, attention, just to be blown to bits on the battlefield. Plus, if that was it, they would probably have found a way to breed a political affiliation into him. And he wasn’t a spy — he was too tall for that, too awkward, he couldn’t have been subtle if he’d tried.
A murderer, then. He wondered how it would feel to kill. It would be his first time, but not his hands’ first time, nor his heart’s or his brain’s. He hoped some part of him would still remember.
His creators had been choosy with the memories they’d given him from his past lives. He knew just about everything a normal person would know and understand what a normal person would understand, but they hadn’t given him enough for him to form an identity. The process wasn’t perfect, though, and they’d left him a few blurry images: climbing a cliff, holding a gun, bleeding out once or twice. Try as he might, he couldn’t remember any faces — not even his own. They’d scrubbed out everyone else and left him alone.
He was pretty sure at least one of his deaths had been by his own inaction. He’d been too slow on the draw, he remembered vaguely, and suddenly he was lying in a pool of his own blood. Whatever happened next had been erased, and he wondered how he had gone out. Screaming, cursing, perhaps, calling out for his mother, or just curled up and weeping.
He tried to be cool about these memories. Death happened to everyone, after all, and he’d never died in this body before. But he couldn’t ignore how now he was fidgety and struggled to look people in the eyes, always half-convinced that he’d be coming face to face with the barrel of a gun.
It wasn’t like he’d have made many friends anyway. He got the feeling that he disturbed the natural humans. (The nurses never spent longer with him than necessary; the instructors avoided him at the firing range and the cafeteria unless they were making a correction; the supervisors eyed him from the corners of their eyes but steered clear.) And if there were others like him, roaming around elsewhere in the building, he’d never met them.
He wasn’t the first creature to have been created piecewise. The first, oddly enough, had been a bid. Maybe humans were fascinated by flight, which had always eluded them; either that or it was some impulse to encarnate biblical angels.
They hadn’t needed God to put a stop to their hubris. A flying thing made of bird’s wings and human fingers that had evaded sensors and carried a fast-acting toxin half-flew, half-crawled into a White House conference room and seized the neck of the vice president of the United States. Running frothy at the mouth, turning purple, unable to scream, he was dead on the floor within minutes.
Had it been intentional or not? The creator and their motives were a mystery to this day, though everyone had a finger to point and another nine to waggle. After that there was the outrage and the bans, and then, Bean supposed, facilities like his, springing up in the shadows.
He thought about the finger-bird sometimes. He sympathized more with the nasty little thing than with his human creators. He wondered what had happened to it.
The later years of the war in particular had stoked fears of forbidden biology, reanimated corpses stalking the battlefields. Some saw it as an opportunity to revive the push for research. If only, they said, something could be done with all these dead bodies. They were shot down immediately. Grotesque, the pundits said. Monstrous.
And so his facility operated under cover. The nurses explained that there had been other attempts before him at creating patchwork humans — twenty-seven, to be exact. One for each letter of the alphabet, starting with Atlas and Bellerophon. Once they’d reached Z for Zeus, they’d turned around and started with A again, the second time around with less ambitious names. They clearly hadn’t expected viability to take this long.
So that meant he was model Bean. Unless, of course, they were lying to him and all this was just cover for a demeaning nickname. Let’s all make fun of the big guy, let’s give him the name of an ingredient to soup. Make him a little less intimidating.
On the other hand, he wasn’t sure any of the creators had a sense of humor. Their emotions in general were hard to detect, because all of them wore silver masks molded to their faces. He didn’t realize that humans commonly had skin on their faces until he watched videos of the outside world. (At first he’d even gotten it backwards and prodded his own face, trying to find the silver underneath.) The masks blanked out the employees’ features, smoothing out the noses, blurring their eyes. It wasn’t for his benefit. Seeing their faces, knowing their identities, would’ve made no difference to him. It wasn’t like he could retaliate, and he wasn’t sure he could feel care for them. Maybe the masks were just stuck on there forever.
Point being, friendship was out of the question. He would’ve been lousy company anyway. He knew people liked to “hang out” together, but he had no idea what that entailed. Plus he didn’t talk much. He didn’t like the sound of his own voice.
So when he wasn’t being tested, or trained, or force-fed film clips to teach him manners, or kicking his instructors’ asses in the firing range, or eating — turned out he had to do a lot of that — or sleeping and trying to dream back some of his memories, there wasn’t actually all that much to do. And so he started getting bored.
Strange, maybe, that boredom was the main emotion, rather than anxiety or fear. But his body was restless and his mind was hyperactive. He took to wandering around the facility, poking around the closets, flipping through whatever binders he could find. He checked the doors of the labs in the hopes that someone had left them unlocked. He ran his hands along corridor walls for hidden passageways — the silver-faces had to be getting in and out somehow.
On his third week, he finally got somewhere. A technician passed through a restricted-access door, and Bean followed a couple steps behind. (The technician was zoned-out enough that he apparently didn’t notice or care.) He didn’t set off any obvious alarms, but within minutes one of the silver-faced guards had accosted him, grabbed ahold of his elbow, and steered him back through the door.
The worst part was, he hadn’t managed to see anything interesting. Offices, a couple of cordoned-off wet labs. Just like the same six rooms he’d already explored ad nauseum. The whole experience almost felt like a test of its own more than anything — does the subject have the initiative to break the rules?
Later that day they brought him into his supervisor’s office. Bean wondered if they meant to punish him for the misdemeanor. They’d take him apart and write him off as yet another failed experiment.
He’d been waiting for this moment. Even before they’d told him about the twenty-seven others that had preceded him, he’d always secretly expected he was a mistake.
Instead, his handler sat him down and told him to kill Ender Wiggin.
* * *
“Who?”
“Leader of a cult that’s made plausible threats to the government,” said his handler. “You don’t need the specifics.”
“I think I do,” Bean said, “if I’m to do my job.”
“We’ll tell you everything you need to know and nothing more. Get him alone. Get in close range. Fire.” The handler mimed pointing a gun at the wall. “Hell, you probably won’t even need to say a word to him.”
Bean clutched his own gun. It wasn’t loaded. They’d started letting him keep it with him, once they’d determined to their satisfaction that he wouldn’t go psycho on them; for practice, they said; for his own peace of mind.
Did he have a choice? If he refused, they would take him apart at the seams. Probably reuse his parts for something else, hopefully dumber and more obedient this time. Which might not be so bad, he was realizing now, he had died once and now he would die again.
He deliberated quietly while his handler pulled up the propaganda videos from Ender Wiggin’s glory days, immediately after the war. A whole lot of shaking hands and smiling. He had a nice smile. There wasn’t any footage of the actual battles; that would’ve been too ugly. Given everything he’d heard about, Bean wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d committed a war crime or two. Maybe that was the real reason the government wanted him dead.
He made up his mind fast after that. Even after seeing Ender Wiggin’s face, he found that the idea of the mission didn’t bother him. What did bother him was the idea that he was being forced into it. So he tried to convince himself that it was the best option, rationalizing the choice to himself.
This was his purpose, he told himself, and he’d been looking for a purpose. This was the first chance he’d had to get out of the compound. The killing itself wouldn’t be hard. Everyone died — he had, several times over, and so would this stranger. He just hoped he would be steady when the moment of judgement came. He prayed his body would remember how to kill.
* * *
They gave him a cover story, baptized him as Julian Delphiki . They invented a history for Julian so that it wouldn’t seem so strange, and fitted him for an outfit that covered up the worst of his seams — a material that baffled sensors, as long as he didn’t remove his coat.
Julian was a veteran, like many of the people who apparently gravitated to Ender. After the war, he’d thrown himself into fitness, molding his body into a personal suit of armor. Now he wanted to help others do the same. And so he’d landed himself here, by volunteering to be Ender’s personal trainer.
Bean prodded at his cover story. Why a veteran? What was this cult that Ender had started, anyway, and what was its lure? He was sure that that the logic of Julian’s past held some hidden information.
His handlers resisted. You won’t need anything else, his silver-faced supervisor him again and again. You probably won’t even need as much as we’ve told you.
Before they’d left that morning, he’d spent a while staring at himself in the mirror, trying to see himself as Ender would see him. Big and broad, bulked up a little by his coat, since his long limbs and narrow torso made him an odd shape.
His muscles twitched as if they had a mind of their own. Even when he tried to stand still, his shoulder would shrug, his hand would clench around nothing. They’d taken his conscious memories, but his body still retained some of its old instincts. As he looked in the mirror, his foot began to tap an urgent, uneven rhythm.
The worst part, he thought, was his face. His eyes and nose and mouth had all been taken from separate bodies, the skin stitched carefully so the seams weren’t visible unless you were looking for him. But the skin of his face was the wrong shape for his skull, stretched a little too thin over bone. No matter how much he looked at it he couldn’t make it cohere. His eyes had a sad look to them, which was disappointing: the eyes would be the last thing Ender saw before he died. He didn’t want Ender to think he felt any regret.
* * *
The plan, stripped down to its necessities, went something like this: Get Ender alone. Fire. Escape through one of the windows over the river. The handlers will take care of the rest.
Do you think you’re the only part of the plan? they’d asked him, when he’d probed for details about floor plans and potential defenses. Do you think you’re the most important part, even? Trust that you’ll have someone watching.
So he decided his private mission would be to answer his lingering questions. For example: What exactly had Ender done? Who felt threatened enough by Ender to put out a hit on him? What kind of cult did Ender lead, and how had he turned from war hero to government threat? It was lucky that Bean had practice in keeping his mouth shut. He didn’t intend to accidentally reveal that he had no clue what was going on.
An assistant and two guards met him as he got out of the car. None of them offered to help retrieve his bag from the trunk. The duffel was filled harmlessly with resistance bands and hand weights, just in case anyone was checking. The gun stayed at his side instead, resting against his thigh. He’d clutched it for comfort on the drive over, but not here, when he was being watched much more closely. The gesture would’ve been suspicious.
People on the outside were strange after being surrounded by silver faces for so long. The assistant’s face was so emotive he couldn’t focus on what she was saying. Even the guards were bewildering, narrowing their eyes at each other as the assistant spoke. These new people confused him — they widened and squinted their eyes, crinkled their eyebrows, wiggled their fingers, speaking a language Bean had long since forgotten. It took him a little too long process other people’s words; for the first time in his short life, he felt dumb.
So he ignored the assistant. Instead, standing at the base of the path, he surveyed the house. It was wide and flat, with the back parallel to the river, balancing on top of the hill that crested and then crumbled away down to the banks far below. The plan would take him into Ender Wiggin’s private room, out through one of the back windows, and down to the river, Bean thought, already visualising his escape.
Meanwhile, another part of him was disappointed. He’d expected more, somehow — but what? Something grander and more traditional, a monument to Ender's military successes. Trumpets announcing the guest’s arrival. The eyes of dozens of turrets following him. Surely this house did have defenses, but invisible ones. And all the more dangerous for it.
He and his welcome party walked up the gentle slope toward the house, passing in single file under a series of arches laced with ivy. The ivy turned colors when Bean passed. It was unlike anything he’d seen in his memories, and he added it to his mental list of things in this world he didn’t understand.
“His team worries about him,” the assistant explained, leading him through the double glass doors into the lobby. “He pushes himself too hard. And his health has — well, he’ll tell you.”
Bean feigned sympathy and offered his help, as planned, reciting the qualifications he’d memorized. The assistant wasn’t really listening. She’d probably been briefed before his arrival.
The lobby was simple — a wide, airy room; a pair of couches facing each other in the center. Again, Bean wondered what he’d imagined. A hall lined with medals and framed photos of the war, monument to Ender Wiggin’s successes? A church lined with busts of deified Ender Wiggin? No, the lobby held no answers. He’d been foolish to expect the truth neatly laid out for him.
“What brings you here?” the assistant asked, leading him down a wood-paneled hallway.
“To do my job.” Bean shook his duffel bag. He’d decided that playing Julian as the strong silent type would be easiest.
“But why him?”
“He’s a hero,” said Bean, because that had been his cover story. Julian was a soldier who had fought in the war, though he’d placed himself hundreds of miles away from Ender. He’d only come of age at the tail end, so he hadn’t had time to become disillusioned. He was more familiar with the glory of the war’s aftermath than the years of bad news, the mounting death toll, the bodies, the blood. In other words, he was of the perfect age to idolize Ender Wiggin.
The assistant eyed him.
“What?”
“He doesn’t like to talk about the war. If you’re here to venerate him, you might as well leave.”
Her warning delivered, the assistant opened the door.
And there he was. He was sitting at a desk on the other side of the room, one hand on the table, facing the window. The wall on the far side was floor-to-ceiling windows, looking out over the river and the cloudy sky. The light through the windows was such that Ender's profile was silhouetted. He was gazing pensively at the clouds — as if he’d planned it, Bean thought, suspicious. The tableau was a little too perfect.
They’d warned him about Ender Wiggin. He was manipulative and could bend just about anyone to his will. He was smarter than his followers, smarter than Bean's handlers, capable of self-defense. He had killed so many people during the war that murder meant nothing to him.
In person Ender Wiggin didn’t look dangerous, though Bean didn’t let that fool him. Ender was tall for a human — still a couple inches shorter than Bean — and lean in a way that suggested self-discipline. Or self-punishment. His clothes were more suited for a sermon than a workout or a fight: a gray button-down shirt and black pants. He looked older than he had in the videos Bean had seen, more than the few years could account for. Shadows under his eyes. A few strands of gray hair threaded through the black.
He was paused mid-writing, fidgeting with a pen. Bean squinted — the paper under his hand looked like a list of names. His handwriting was neat and cramped.
Ender stayed still for a second, letting Bean take in the scene, and then turned toward Bean and got to his feet.
“Mr. Delphiki? They told me you were coming.” His voice was gentle without being soft, pondering without being slow.
“Julian, please.”
If this was a body double, as his handlers had warned him was a possibility, then it was a damn good one. He moved with the grace and confidence of someone who had been trained to weaponize himself. Someone who thought he’d win in a fight.
For his part, Bean doubted it. If it even came to fighting. Ender was smarter and quicker than Bean's handlers, but Bean wondered if Ender was smarter than him.
“What’s troubling you today?” asked Ender.
Bean shook his head. “I don’t need anything from you. I’m here to help.” Too trusting, he thought. Odds were Bean would be able to outmaneuver him.
The assistant had closed the door behind them, leaving them alone. Bean moved to cross the room as if to greet him, but really to get a better angle. His hand moved for the gun. Then he stopped short.
“They’re paranoid,” Ender said, gesturing at the invisible barrier. “One too many attempts on my life.” He smiled thinly. “The guards out front are armed, and the glass is tough — bulletproof, I’m told, in case there’s a sniper on the banks.”
“I’m not here to kill you.” Bean smiled, trying to play along, as if the idea was absurd. Running into the barrier had jolted him, and he resented Ender a little more for letting him do so. He’d eventually have to figure out how to open the windows. There was no obvious latch or hinge. Maybe it was controlled by the same secret button that put up the barrier, an issue he’d have to deal with first.
The most pressing problem was that he had only a faint idea of what a personal trainer did. “Is there anything that hurts?” he asked, unzipping his duffel bag.
“My neck. I tend to hunch over the desk. And you know I can’t move too fast these days —” and Ender touched his chest.
His lungs, then, or his heart. Bean almost laughed. They’d ordered him to kill Ender, when little did any of them know that something inside him would do their job for him.
“What kind of exercise do you do?” he asked, remembering his role a few moments late.
“Walking. Swimming when I can.”
“And your diet?”
“Between work and travel, I tend to miss meals.”
Ender looked guilty, but Bean let it slide. “We’ll start with stretching. Follow what I do. Let me know if it hurts.”
He launched into the series of stretches they’d given him to test his range of motion. They’d been difficult for the first couple days or so after he’d been reborn, and slowly they had become easier, his body learning how to operate itself. He hoped they were suitable for a natural-born human. Or maybe his trainers had just been fucking with him.
Bean reached down and touched his toes. He watched Ender, as if there might be a hint in the way he moved. Ender, or his body double, was graceful but very stiff. His hands barely grazed his knees, and he grimaced with the strain.
Bean wondered if his own body was the problem. Were his arms too long? Were his legs too short? He felt the same dizzying feeling as when he’d looked in the mirror: his patchwork body didn’t quite fit together.
He shifted into a lunge and waited for Ender to follow. In the silence, he fished for something a person might say.
“Your house is lovely.”
“My prison.” Ender smiled — a joke. “My exile, my Saint Helena.” Seeing Bean confused, he switched tactics. “I’m glad you like it. it’s meant to put people at ease, but for some people it does the opposite. I’ve been traveling as much as I can.”
He was talking to fill the empty space, but it felt natural rather than forced. Bean got the impression that he was used to setting people at ease. Communicating with the socially maladroit. Or in other words, they were perfectly matched.
“The garden is beautiful,” Bean said, though he’d only seen it in passing. “I liked the ivy.”
“It’s actually a detector for the artificial lifeforms. Like I said — paranoid.” Ender shrugged. Not my fault.
“Those things could get someone killed,” Bean said neutrally. It was, from what he remembered, an uncontroversial opinion. He thought of the poor maligned ball of fingers.
“Could and have. But I doubt those are so dangerous as people believe. My wife is a biologist. She says it might be possible to create humans the same way, one day, if it weren’t so fraught with ethical concerns.”
“Your wife,” said Bean. Ender seemed so lonely, he hadn’t imagined him partnered.
Ender looked at him curiously. “Is that the part that bothers you?”
“I’ve just never heard about her,” Bean said blandly.
“She spends most of her time in her lab. She likes publicity even less than me.”
Bean got the sense that he’d wandered down the wrong avenue of investigation, so he was silent for a moment, reorienting himself. He leaned forward, stretching like a cat with his arms forward and his stomach and shoulders pressed to the ground. The stretch actually felt good — he felt like he was about to tear at the seams, but it was a familiar sensation.
He looked over. Ender was attempting the same pose, but his chest remained inches off the ground. “This is as far as I can go,” he said apologetically.
Bean tapped on the barrier. “May I?”
A moment later, Ender had lowered the barrier. Bean knelt beside him and pressed gently on his back, pushing him deeper into the stretch, and Ender winced.
“You’re tight here. Maybe if you —” He gestured for Ender to unbutton his shirt,
Ender shook his head.
They were both armored, Bean thought. Ender with his formal clothing and himself with his coat.
“Let me —” Bean put a hand on Ender's top button, but Ender gently moved his hand away.
So instead Bean ran his hand around Ender's collar to the back, as much skin as he could reach without undoing the buttons. At the feeling of bare skin, his left ear started ringing, a muscle in his neck jumping in sympathy.
He moved down to the shirt, safer territory, feeling the beadlike bones of Ender's thoracic spine through the fabric. Probing the muscle under the skin, he found a knot where the shoulder blades met at the top. He didn’t know what he was doing, but what the hell — as long as Ender was letting him, he might as well satisfy his own curiosity.
He’d never felt the heat of another person before. In this life, he’d never been this close to someone he wasn’t fighting or who wasn’t a part of him. For some reason it never occurred to him that people were warm. How strange to have a body, and one that was all yours.
“The artificial humans you talked about. If they were ever made, they would be used as weapons,” he said.
“Why do you say that?”
“People like making weapons. And they wouldn’t be able to stand making someone who doesn’t do their bidding. Your assistants are right to be scared.” Bean coughed. This was the longest speech he’d made in some time.
Ender frowned. “No matter your view of human nature, wouldn’t whatever person was created still be capable of compassion? The same hand that can fire a gun can caress a lover.”
Bean's hand clenched involuntarily, driving his nails into Ender's shoulder blade much more sharply than he’d intended. Ender winced, then laughed. “And you give the perfect example. Your hand brings pain and relief, sometimes both at the same time.”
Bean took the hint and eased off. He rubbed in soft circles, long past the point where Ender's muscles had relaxed and the knot had disappeared. He was starting to enjoy the heat of Ender's body. Now that it was no longer strange to him, it made his toes curl pleasingly.
Ender's shoulders dropped and he blinked slowly, like a cat. So it was true after all: Bean's hands remembered gentleness as well as violence. He wondered what else he could make Ender feel.
“Is there really such a thing as a being that only wants to hurt?” Ender wondered aloud. “If it is able to desire, can’t they desire other things as well?”
“You sound like a philosopher,” Bean said. Or a cult leader. He took his arms away, letting Ender turn to face him again.
Ender shrugged. “I’m not much of a philosopher, but I do try. My work gives me practice these days. I listen to other people and try to understand them. Then I take my turn to speak and others listen. I aim for the truth, but you might be surprised how divisive the truth is.” He was smiling now. It was a soft smile, gentler and more honest than the one Bean had seen in the propaganda videos.
Everyone thought they uniquely had the truth, and Bean wasn’t naive enough to believe Ender was right. Nor was he weak enough to be swayed by Ender's smile. “They listen because you’re their leader.”
Ender shook his head. “There’s no compulsion. I don’t force them like we would in the military. I never wanted to be a leader, after all. It was my brother that had a will to power. I was a figurehead more than anything.”
Clouds swallowed the last of the sun, leaving the dim room even darker. Outside, it had started raining, a steady tap on the windows.
“Funny path I took,” Ender mused. “At first they set me down in front of a group of soldiers and I did as I was trained to do. Now I listen. I’m not a priest, I can’t grant any absolution, but even just speaking the truth does people good.”
Truth again. “What is the truth?” asked Bean.
“Depends on who’s talking. The veterans I’ve spoken to tell me they felt used — at best, molded into tools; at worst, treated as disposable. So different from the truth of the generals. Or the president.
“And you, Bean, I’m sure you have your own truth.”
Bean was beginning to understand what his handlers had warned him about. Nothing Ender said was particularly ground-breaking, but his presence was intoxicating. He could picture Ender at the head of an army, leading soldiers to their death; at the head of a church, leading veterans to their ruin.
And yet there was still some rebellious part of him that wanted to be ruined. He wanted Ender's attention, wanted Ender to untangle him with that gentle and steady voice. Part of him longed to be laid bare beneath Ender and allow himself to be understood. His chest was seizing up, from some impulse he didn’t quite understand; it was difficult to draw a full breath.
This was a game, he reminded himself, letting himself be manipulated, letting himself feel what Ender wanted him to feel. This was a big joke he was playing on Ender, a hilarious prank that would end in Ender's death. This was all part of the plan.
Ender had paused, letting Bean contemplate or perhaps waiting for him to reveal his own truth. Whatever that was. When Bean said nothing, Ender continued, more somberly than before.
“Part of my truth is the lives I ended. The girl who stepped on a mine and ended up in pieces. It could’ve happened to anyone, but it was me who told her where to go, even though I was just following my own orders.” His hands clenched. “She loved to climb. She was strong and had the steadiest hands I’ve ever seen. She went to school for biology, might’ve someday ended up working with my wife if everything had turned out differently. And now she’s dead.
“Do you know someone like that, Julian?”
Bean's wrist twitched. Some part of his body was responding to the story outside his control. He wanted to hear more, and he wanted Ender to stop talking. “Yes,” he said.
“I killed her,” said Ender. “I killed her through inaction, and I killed so many others by choice. How am I any better than a weapon, if I chose to kill?”
Bean wanted to reassure him, but it wouldn’t do much good; he was a weapon himself. Then again, Ender seemed to trust him enough to speak to him human to human. Bean put his hand on Ender's, hoping it would be enough.
“What’s the truth about you, Julian?” Ender asked, with what sounded like genuine curiosity. “Have you been used? Controlled?”
In answer, Bean leaned over and undid the top button of Ender's shirt.
So this was what Ender had been hiding: the scar over his chest. It was pink and a little bigger than a quarter, and bumpier than the seams of Bean's own body.
Ender flinched away. “Don’t —” he choked. But he didn’t stop him.
Bean traced the top edge, as much as he could reach. You’re just like me.
It pleased Bean to see Ender vulnerable, undone under his hands. He wanted to see what else they could do. What more relief and pain his hands could bring. He took a breath and undid the second button.
Ender put his hands on Bean's thighs, leaning closer. (This was a game, Bean reminded himself again. He was still in control.)
He imagined what it must be like to be Ender. To be something different to everyone — a hero, a leader, a monster — yet not human. Never human. Pieced together from expectations and not quite whole; filled with love for others yet unable to understand himself.
Was Ender thinking of him right now? Trying to understand him?
Button by button, he let the fabric slip apart, running his fingers along the exposed skin. He felt the same places that were smooth where Bean had rough seams, the scars that were rough where Bean was smooth.
The hair on Ender's chest was short and sparse. (Bean's own was thicker, curlier, but patchier; the hair had had trouble growing on the transplanted skin). The skin under Ender's shirt was slightly paler than the skin of his face, and unexpectedly soft. And it was all so wonderfully warm. Bean let his hands speak where language failed him. I know you. I see you. We are the same.
He longed to touch and be touched. His skin burned for it, electric along the seams. He needed Ender to keep holding his gaze with the same tenderness. He needed to take some of Ender inside of him, to feel some of Ender's care and understanding and then turn it back on himself so that he would feel whole.
Button by button. Ender leaned into his touch, tensing whenever Bean's fingers neared his scar, shivering as Bean traced the hollows between his ribs and — another button opened, fingers crawling down — the soft hair beneath his belly.
Ender shivered. Gently he put his hands on Bean's back, drawing them closer together. Even through his coat, Bean could feel Ender's fingers clutch. His seams burned, from the one on his chest, the same place he was touching Ender, all the way down to his groin.
Bean couldn’t resist bringing a hand up to Ender's neck, feeling the pulses jump in his carotids. He brought his hand to Ender's jaw, tilted Ender's head up to meet his own gaze. So sensitive to touch, and so lonely — when was the last time someone had been close to Ender? Had his wife ever touched him like this? Was it longing he saw now, in those wide, curious eyes? Or was that just wishful thinking?
Their faces were close; now they breathed the same air. Ender's lashes were thick for a man’s. Bean leaned even closer, a breath away from Ender's lips. He had the sudden urge to bite Ender, just to see how it would feel.
He wondered what it was that Ender wanted. A kiss? Something further? Or did he just want to explore, the same as Bean? Bean could see and smell and touch, his mind was as quick as anything, and yet he was out of practice with reading other people.
He didn’t know. He was trembling, he realized, they were both trembling — the same way Bean had shaken at the shooting range before he’d learned to calm himself. They were both breathing heavy, gasping the same air. Bean’s shoulders were tensed like Ender's had been. He leaned into Ender's hand on his back, to steady himself. Just a game, he thought once more; and he, Bean, controlled how it would end.
The hand that wasn’t on Ender's jaw undid the last button, leaving his shirt hanging entirely open. Bean thought dimly — even now, some part of him remembered the mission — that a bare chest would conveniently be the fastest way to his heart. And yet his hand hovered at Ender's belt, the more tempting target.
He wondered how it would feel to kiss Ender. It wouldn’t be difficult. One hand already on his bare waist, the other cupping his cheek. His face tilted at just the right angle. His lips no more than an inch away. It would only have to last a moment.
He wanted it so badly. He hadn’t wanted anything like this before.
“Who is using you?” Ender whispered. He felt Ender's breath dampen his lips.
Bean's eyes automatically went to the window.
“No one’s watching,” murmured Ender, his breath on Bean's cheek.
No one was watching indeed. No savior on the banks down below, he was slowly realizing. No one to help inside or outside the building. He had come into this mission already suspicious, but the whole time, he had been aiming at the wrong enemy.
Bean had counted on the escape route of the window, but the glass was thick, and there was no obvious way to open it. And through the front door, with the gate and the armed guards? No chance. Ender's team had planned for this, had considered every eventuality. The invisible wall wouldn’t have been the only defense
There might still be a way to rescue him. But a rescue would be expensive, and he himself, Bean was realizing, was very cheap indeed.
Bean felt his muscles starting to tense. This was the beginning of what he had feared, the freeze. Outside, the rain was weeping, so thick he could no longer see the river.
Ender moved his hand off Bean's back and reached for Bean's wrist. Bean jerked his hand away, harder than he’d meant to. There was a seam right there, he was remembering suddenly, halfway down his forearm, for the moment hidden safely under his jacket. This one was thicker and uglier than the ones on his face. Without a point of reference, Ender probably wouldn’t recognize what it meant, but he shouldn’t push it.
His sense was returning. Bean pulled his legs under him, into a squat. “We can’t —”
“I understand.” Ender turned away, buttoning his shirt.
It had only been a moment, but Bean found he already missed his closeness. He wanted to touch the soft skin of his chest just once more. He should’ve let Ender touch him in return.
Bean tried to shut himself off as he had learned in training. And yet he couldn’t forget the longing. His body remembered the feeling of Ender's skin; his lips were still moist from Ender's lips. (He wished he’d kissed Ender after all; then his tongue would have remembered Ender's taste.) If it wasn’t for that, he might’ve been able to convince itself it had never happened.
“I feel better already,” Ender said, rolling his shoulders. It was a lame joke, but Bean smiled dutifully. Every part of him was jumpy. His body wanted to tear itself apart and run in a thousand directions and once, and so he was frozen.
“My time is up today,” Bean said. The professionalism felt odd in his mouth. He thought about offering to come back, but he didn’t know how the lie would feel. Would Ender want to see him again? He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
Ender nodded wordlessly. He was dressed again, standing restless a few paces away from Bean. He was staring out the window that was now blank with rain. Almost the same position as when Bean had arrived. One of his fingers mindlessly traced around his collar, the same path Bean's fingers had taken a minute earlier.
Bean cleared his throat. “One more thing.”
“What?” Ender turned around.
Bean shot him.
His hand moved by itself. His earlier self would’ve been proud — he didn’t freeze. The sharpshooter who had given him his hands had done well.
Ender collapsed backward. The bullet had entered his forehead. A perfect shot. It made a cleaner wound than Bean had expected.
The detachment was fine. The dull curiosity was fine. Better to feel this than anything else.
Bean crouched over the body. Ender's hair had fallen over one eye. The other stared straight ahead. The bullet wound itself was a third red eye, a terrible red thing that never closed.
Bean had imagined a dead man’s eyes would be glassy; at worst, accusatory. He was afraid to look directly at the open eye in case it would damn him. But there was nowhere else in the room to look, or so it felt, and Bean was so very alone.
He peeked. The eye had the same warm expression from moments ago when he was alive. Or maybe that was just wishful thinking.
The job was done. The game was over, and he wasn’t sure who had won. His detachment was getting harder and harder to maintain. He felt his breath come in short gasps. He felt his lips tremble. He watched a tear drip onto Ender's cheek.
A hail of footsteps sounded in the hallway outside. Something had given him away. It hadn’t been the gunshot, the gun had been silent — he wouldn’t have overlooked something that simple. It hadn’t been the ivy — his coat had taken care of that. But of course there had been other sensors in place, signalling belatedly for other defenses to come to the rescue.
Bean thought again about the plan, and the river. He wondered how he’d ever believed in the escape plan. Outside the window, there were a couple inches of rain-slicked ledge, and then nothing. It was a long way to fall.
Ender's body was already cooling. Bean sat down next to him. He took Ender's head in his lap and stroked his hair, just in case there was some part of Ender left in there.
What would they find when they opened the door? A killer and the man he had loved. A broken weapon and the man who had loved him.
Bean turned toward the door and waited for his final judgement.