“Fuck!” said Anders. “I can’t keep this up. How are you doing this?”
“I used to run track. It’s practically why I joined Service.”
He panted.
“You can do this.” She remembered Nettle’s painting: the hunter and the gazelle. “Humans are built for running.”
“Not this human.”
“Whatever you’re feeling, it’s feeling worse.”
They fell into a rhythm. The salamander attempted to veer left again, and again they cut the angle. But it wasn’t slowing. Anders’s panting became painful in her ears. He started lumbering. Every other moment she expected him to stumble and fall. She expected more dark shapes to appear on the horizon, or fliers overhead.
“I have to stop,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Take the converter, then. I’ll keep going.”
“You have to stop. You can’t . . . kill it. By yourself.” He sucked air for a few moments. “We’re done.”
She shook her head. They couldn’t be done. They would die if they were done.
“Shit,” Anders said, and began to run straighter. “How did you . . . get like this? Why can’t you . . . let shit go?”
“We can’t let it go,” she said. “It’s our only chance.”
To his credit, he didn’t argue. She was pleasantly surprised at how Anders had performed since the jetpod. She’d often questioned how Service chose crews, both before she shipped out and afterward, and Nettle had assured her that it wasn’t just about public relations and feeds: They really were chosen to be an effective team who could perform in high-pressure scenarios. They couldn’t always tell why the algorithm believed that, but it did. She was starting to see why it might be true of Anders.
They ran. A while later, the salamander angled right. She thought it was trying to throw her: If she headed right, it would cut left toward the tornado again. But in the distance lay a low mound, some kind of lump, another small hill. Shit, she thought. She didn’t know what that was. Maybe nothing. But they couldn’t afford to encounter anything the salamander could disappear into or receive help from. They had to chase it down across bare rock until it couldn’t run anymore.
The suit pulled at her arms and shoulders. Each step, she had to lift feet that felt like rocks and put them down again. “Anders,” she said. He had been silent for a while. “You see it?”
“The hill?”
“We can’t let it get there.”
“I can’t run faster, Jackson.”
“I know. I can’t, either.” She panted. “I’m going to take off my core.”
His head twisted toward her. “What?”
“I’m faster without it.”
“What are you talking about? You’re dead without it.”
“Not right away. There’ll still be air in the suit.”
He gave an exhalation like a snort. “Not for long, without the core to refresh it. You can’t take it off.” She didn’t respond. “And even if you manage to catch that thing, if you’re by yourself, it’ll pull your head off.”
Thirty minutes or so until the salamander reached the mound, she estimated. Four hundred yards to close. She had to be fast.
Anders stopped running. The moment he disappeared from her side, she felt a thousand times more alone. But she pushed ahead. “Jackson. Stop.” She didn’t. “What if there’s another Providence?”
His tone suggested embarrassment. He’d been nursing this idea for a while, she realized. He actually thought they might be rescued. It was so ludicrous that she almost laughed.
“We don’t know where they are,” Anders said. “One could be close. It could find us.” She heard him begin to jog after her. “It could send down a jetpod for us.”
She found her breath. “A Providence could be in orbit. It would power up its plasma. And kill us all from range.” She stumbled on a knob of rock and gasped. “You never understood this. War isn’t . . . for us. We’re a blip in the AI’s cost-benefit calc.” She was out of breath but felt the need to ram this point into Anders’s skull. “The number of times you’ve said the word Service, and