Koda nods. “We need to come back here and collect as much as we can before we blow the place up.”

On the other side of the hall, Kirsten leans into a room whose door stands ajar. She says softly, “Koda. Over here.”

“Over here” is a delivery room. Koda sweeps the light around its tiled floor and walls, all spotlessly kept still. An autoclave stands on a counter to one side, its LED bright crimson in the semi-darkness. She touches it and draws her hand sharply away. Still hot, still in use. Carefully she unlocks and lifts the lid; forceps, clamps, hemostats, scalpels, all neatly ranged inside, ready for use. Kirsten, staring down into the sterilizer as if she is gazing into the pit of hell, says in a flat voice. “So what do they do with the women after they deliver? Send them back to the34 jails to breed again?”

“Are they even that organized?” Beatha asks. The controlled substances cabinet swings open to her touch, not locked or even latches. Androids, after all, cannot become addicted.

“We’d better check the incinerator out back,” Koda says grimly. “Look for adult remains, too.”

Despite the sterile atmosphere, the stink of decay is stronger here. Nothing in the room seems to be the source of it. Koda plays the light over the acoustic tiles of the ceiling; it is possible, just possible, that a possum or other uninvited resident has gotten into the roof space or the air conditioning ducts and died. But if that were the case, here on the downside of summer, there would be flies. There are none. “Something,” she says quietly, “something—”

“Is dead,” Kirsten finishes for her. “Somewhere close.”

“Next room,” Beatha says. “Let’s try there.”

The smell hits them full force as they push open the door to the adjoining examination room. Kirsten gives a small, strangled choking sound; Beatha gags, covering her mouth and nose with her free hand, sweeping the room with the muzzle of her rifle with the other. Nothing.

At first glance, the small space seems as clean as the delivery room. Table, counter, blood pressure cuff dangling from the wall, oxygen tank, all spotless. A steel trash receptacle stands by the table, its lid down. The edge of a red plastic bag shows under the edge of the top. A five-gallon can, it might hold bloody bandages, used dressings, discarded gloves.

Except that the room is otherwise spotless. Except that they have seen no humans that might need such things. Certainly no one would walk into a place like this as if it were a neighborhood med station, wanting a sprained ankle bandaged or a cut stitched.

Bloody bandages. Used dressings. Discarded gloves.

A very small human body.

Steeling herself, Koda crosses the room and, not giving herself time to think, steps on the pedal of the receptacle. The smell pours upward out the can, and she turns away for a moment, choking on the stench and on the realization that there can now be no possible mistake about what they found in the incinerator in Salt Lake City .

The light shows her a small, rounded bundle, the curve of head and shoulders and updrawn knees clear under the plastic. Leaning down, she slips a hand between legs and belly; the flesh beneath, even in the heat, is chill to the touch. Dead some time, then.

“Is it—?” Kirsten asks.

“Yeah. It is.” Koda lets the lid fall. No time now to examine the corpse.

The rest of the corridor appears clear. No sound comes from the other side of the building, the other women presumably going there from room to room as they are doing here in the east wing. At the double swinging doors that lead from the service wing into the reception area, Koda pauses, hunching down below the eye-level ports. The other women range themselves behind her against the wall, hardly breathing. Koda concentrates on the small sounds that come to her through the wood and metal; a voice, not so distant now in the far corridor; a whimper that might be a living child; the clink of metal on metal as someone shifts her gear. She can distinguish nothing that she can identify as distinctively android.

“They’re there,” Kirsten says suddenly.

“What? Who?”

“The androids. They’re in the center section.” Kirsten moves forward to crouch with Koda beside the doors. One hand is raised to her temple, her fingers white-knuckled in the light of the flash. “I can hear them.”

“What—? How the hell?”

A downward slash of Koda’s hand cuts off Beatha’s question as effectively as if she had slapped the woman. “Implants,” Kirsten answers. “I’m deaf.”

“How many?” Dakota whispers.

“Three, I think. One near the front door. The other two further back.”

“Okay, then. Everybody lie flat. Let’s do a little differential diagnosis here.” Koda stretches out on the tiles, her small party face-down behind her, and, with the muzzle of her rifle, gently nudges one of the swinging panels open an inch or so. Withering machine gun fire answers her, shattering the lexan panes and tearing through the upper portion of the door where human heads and torsos would be if they were not plastered to the corridor floor. About five feet up on the walls, the light from the torch shows long gashes in the hospital-green paneling. From across the reception area, then, comes a high yell of “Amazai! Amazai!” and a cacophony of fire breaks out, the Amazai firing into the reception area and droids answering.

Koda levers her feet under her, pulling one of the incendiaries loose from her belt. “High-low, Beatha!” she shouts. “Annie, cover us!”

With that she kicks the door wide, crouching low, and as Kirsten’s gun sprays the room, she lights the fuse and lobs the container of homemade napalm at the nearest shape, a droid with an M-16 at its shoulder, firing down toward the bottom of the ward door opposite. It takes the android on the shoulder, and flame spills down its back and flowers up through its dynel hair and over its optical sensors, where it will cling and burn through to the circuits below. Her second, arcing through the air in a fiery pinwheel with Beatha’s, lands at its feet, sending a column of flame up its uniform trousers. Others spin across the room from the opposite door, landing at the droids’ feet, taking one in the face. And still they continue to fire, wheeling blindly as the bullets spray from their M-16’s, eerily silent as the incendiaries burn away their uniforms to expose the metal plates and sensor arrays below.

From across the room a human voice, Morgan’s Koda thinks, yells, “Back! Back off!”

Koda snatches at Kirsten’s elbow, pulling her back, and with Beatha they retreat again down the corridor at a crouching run. Behind them comes the concussion of two explosions, not the main charges by the sound of it, but a pair of grenades as the roar echoes in the confined space and shakes the walls, bringing with it the crash of falling light fixtures and the shatter of breaking glass.

Silence falls. Something hisses and whirrs overhead, and the sprinkler system sends sprays of water down onto them. Koda flinches with the sudden shock of it, then runs a hand through the wetness and over her face. “Think they got ‘em?” That is Beatha, her normally pitched voice a novelty after the cacophony of a moment before.

“Sounds like,” Kirsten answers. “I don’t hear them anymore.”

Behind them the door pushes open, and Inga appears, her face and hands soot-blackened. “Ten minutes till we set the main charges. Morgan says trip off anything that looks useful and get out.”

“Gotcha,” Koda says. “Pharmacy. Let’s go.”

Fifteen minutes later, the raiding party regroups across the street. The charges are laid and timed. Koda shoulders a trash bag full of medicines, swept at random from the shelves, Beatha and Kirsten two more. Morgan, her face and hands blackened from scrabbling through the wreckage of the entranceway, holds a baby perhaps two years old, her head on the Amazai’s shoulder. Sarai, her face stained with blood from a cut on her forehead, holds a cellphone in an equally bloodied hand. “Ready?” she asks?

“Anything else?” Morgan asks, looking around the small circle of women in the moonshadowed darkness. “Because once that signal goes, we move. We don’t stop for anything till we get back to the Jeeps and we don’t stop after that till we’re back home.”

“Didn’t you want to check the incinerator, Dakota? For remains?” Inga looks up from where she is stuffing medical instruments into her backpack that has lately carried several pounds of plastique.

Koda shakes her head. “No time. No need.”

“No need?”

“Later,” Kirsten says.

Morgan’s glance runs over her sharply. But she says. “All right. Trigger the timer, Sarai. Let’s move!”

They cover the distance between the clinic and the parked vehicles on the town’s outskirts in a tenth of the time it took them going in. Half-running, keeping up a steady trot with fingers ready on the triggers of their guns, they arrive at the abandoned car dealership in just over ten minutes. They have met nothing and no one, only a pack of dogs that crosses their path a few blocks from the clinic, just another band of hunters in the wilderness that has claimed the city. At the lot, they pile into the Jeeps, Koda driving one with Kirsten beside her, Morgan and Beatha in the back.

“Wait.”

Koda’s fingers freeze on the key in the ignition, and she looks up to see Sarai holding one hand at shoulder level, her cell phone in the other. “Ten,” says Sarai. “Nine. Eight. . .. Three. Two.” Her hand comes down in a slashing gesture of triumph. “One.”

From a mile and a half away comes a rumble like a freight train, like an earthquake. Above the roofs of buildings still left standing, red stains the night sky, a black billow rising to blot out the moon. Koda, leaning over the back of her seat to get a better view, sees Morgan’s eyes narrow in triumph, a smile like a sickle blade touching her lips. She runs a hand over the baby’s back, soothing her as the noise rolls over them. “Good job,” says the Amazai Queen. “Let’s go.”

CHAPTER SIXTY

THE SUN STANDS halfway to noon when Koda emerges from the showers. Her body feels clean and polished, despite the cold water. The errant children of Israel might have yearned for the fleshpots of Egypt in their wanderings—she was a sophomore in high school before one of the nuns explained that that meant stew pots, to Koda’s great disappointment—but Dakota Rivers would be happy with a hot shower. Not that cool water is a terrible hardship on the last day of July. She turns her face up to the warmth, swinging her still-wet braid over her shoulder to settle against her back. Kirsten, up and bathed earlier, is most likely to be wherever there is a late breakfast to be found, and Asi with her.

She sets off up the road to the stone circle, which seems to be both dining hall and meeting place. The cabins she passes stand empty, neatly made-up cots visible through the screen mesh, clothes poles hung meagerly with jeans and shirts and jackets. Several bear the crudely drawn images of large black birds, apparently intended to be ravens. Ravens on some, she corrects herself as she passes one with a saucer-faced raptor with eyes almost as big, owls on others. Both are sacred to warrior-goddesses, ravens to the Morrigan of Celtic legend, owls to Athena. There are no doves, which does not surprise her.

It doesn’t disappoint her, either. She and Kirsten and Morgan had sat up until well past midnight attempting to riddle out the puzzle of the murders. Item: droids kidnap women. Item: droids breed women, presumably with the purpose of producing babies. So far, understandable to a point. Dakota has lived in ranch country almost all her life. Most livestock eventually find their way into one of those fleshpots, even the breeders when their reproductive value is exhausted. Even horses, on many operations, ultimately wind up in an ALPO can. No puzzle there. It’s what comes next that is the problem.

Item: the droids kill and discard infants and toddlers. They are not, clearly, consuming long pig. Just as clearly they are not supplying anyone else’s depraved taste for the same.

Which leaves the burning question why.

A medical expert, a cyber expert, a legal expert should have been able to put together some hypothesis, but nothing they could postulate held water. The only thing that made sense was sheer terror. More than one human conqueror had pursued a strategy of killing enemy men, raping enemy women, slaughtering enemy children. But that doesn’t work, either. They’ve made no effort to set up a government. In fact, they seem content to let the rest of us be, at least for the time being.

Most of the rest of us, she amends. They still want Kirsten.