"I'm fine," I hiss, turning away rapidly before Roy can see the tiny trickle of blood spilling down my pale wrist. I pull my sleeve down sharply, angrily, as if simply covering the wound can make the entire situation go away. It doesn't-I can still feel the stinging pain where the Drone found the tiny gap between the cuff of my leather jacket and my glove before I could pull my hand free. It's a small cut, I tell myself. The Drone couldn't have had time to inject, I tell myself. I'm going to be fine, I tell myself. I know I'm lying.
I didn't think I would lie if it happened to me. I know the rules as well as everyone. Report any scratches, cuts, or bites from a Drone to your squad leader immediately. Do not return to the bunker with an untreated scratch, cut or bite from a Drone. If you see someone hiding an injury after combat, report them to your squad leader immediately. Do not allow a teammate to enter the bunker with an untreated scratch, cut or bite from a Drone. If a teammate attempts to prevent you from reporting their injury to your squad leader, immediately consider them hostile and respond accordingly. Those rules have kept us safe for months, long after most of the other bunkers have dropped off the map.
But when I saw the Drone grab me, when its hand pushed just far up enough inside my sleeve that it could find soft, vulnerable flesh for its razor-sharp fingernails to dig in, I was surprised to learn just how weak my terror made me. All the eventualities stretching out from that moment were so terrible, so awful in my imagination that I simply couldn't cope with them. I couldn't let them exist in my head. Even if I knew I was deluding myself, even if I knew that I was endangering myself and my wife and my friends and my family and the entire fragile world inside the bunker that we've made despite everything that happened, I couldn't let myself believe that it had all just come crashing down for something as simple as a scratch.
So I turn back to Roy and say, "It's fine," a bit more calmly the second time. "The glove caught it. Scared the shit out of me for a second, but nothing broke the skin." He looks at me skeptically for a moment, the perpetual frown lines in his mahogany flesh deepening as he considers forcing me to take off my jacket and show him my arm... but then we hear a scrabbling sound in the distance, the sound of metal on loose stone, and we both know there's no time. We need to get out of signal range. The whole scavenger squad makes a beeline for the nearest sewer grate almost simultaneously.
He doesn't get another chance to talk to me for almost twenty minutes. Nobody has the breath for it, not when we're all climbing down ladders and splashing through ankle-deep puddles and sprinting across catwalks and squeezing our way into narrow, corroded pipes to get down far enough for the Drone's wireless network to crap out. Drones don't like going underground. It's one of their few weaknesses. They don't like going anywhere they can't get a signal. They want to bathe in that endless sea of pings and reshares and likes and favorites and smooth, perfect homogeneity that kills them as individuals and makes them part of the vast new overconsciousness of the human race.
Oh, they'll chase us as far as they can. They can broadcast from one Drone to the next over short distances, chaining together in a temporary network that extends as far as they do. But human beings labored underground for centuries before we got too smart for our own good, before we decided to plug ourselves into our machines and found out the hard way that our machines were also plugged right back into us. There's just too many tunnels for them to properly catalog. We always lose them before they can find the bunker.
Unless someone does something stupid. Someone like me.
I check my arm surreptitiously, during one of the stretches in the Narrows when it's easy to get separated from each other for minutes on end in the winding mazes of ancient, crumbling mineworks. I don't even see a cut anymore, and for an instant I manage to convince myself that I hallucinated the whole thing in a flash of combat-induced panic. Maybe it didn't get me after all. Maybe I just imagined the throb in my wrist, or maybe it grazed me without breaking the skin and I only thought I saw blood. But then I see it in the light of my headlamp, the tiniest filigree of copper underneath the pale, smooth skin where the wound sealed up. My network. Growing inside of me.
So obviously that's when I stop, right? That's when I do something heroic and noble like fling myself off of one of the catwalks, or take my gun and tell Roy and Duong and Bill and Sue and Ximena that I've just got something I forgot to do before I go find somewhere quiet to end it all where they won't have to see. That's when I finally give up on pretending that everything's going to be okay if I just wish hard enough and do what I've got to do to keep Amanda (and all the other people at the bunker who aren't my wife) safe.
Like fuck I do. Instead, I pull my sleeve over the tracery of copper wiring just beneath the surface of my skin and tell myself that I've still got time. The network needs a signal to connect to, of course it does. Whatever nanites the Drone injected into me, they're still constrained by the same physical laws as the rest of us. They're not just going to reach up through three hundred feet of solid rock and old lead and carbon steel to give me instructions to betray my friends and family. I can go back to the bunker, find a safe place in the tomb of concrete and metal I've called home for the past five years, and figure out a way to... to neutralize this. Surgically, if I have to.
