The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 (27 page)

“Nobody's coming for us,” Lieutenant Matthias Granger says, looking up from his carving. “We'll die here.”

He was from a small town before all this, a place where he'd thought to eventually own a pharmacy. He volunteered. His deeds at Kinotra are well documented. The photograph of his Eighth Mercy, the Reversed Mercy of Truth, was on the front page of the
Times.

We keep our promise of pain, even if they are not deserving,
those lines went.
Though a criminal be forgiven, he will still be punished.
The Eighth Reversed Mercy is the Punishment of the Innocent.

I don't turn my head when Lieutenant Granger speaks. He's beside the fire we've lit to keep mosquitoes at bay. General Steng hasn't emerged from his tent in fourteen days. We can hear him talking, to himself or to something else.

Our second-in-command, Major Mivak Priest, looks out into the trees and orders the men to sharpen their stakes. Humidity jams our rifles. Mold grows in our cartridges and fungi bloom in the barrels of our pistols. The sharpened stakes are—this is unspoken—also meant for falling upon should we reach the point of suicide, though there is no suicide protocol in our orders. We've been ordered to do the opposite of die.

“Nobody's coming!” Granger screams. “Do you hear me? Nobody!”

Then he stops making words and just utters sounds. I don't see the thing that takes Granger, but some of my men do. A tail, whipping and black. Claws.

My men begin to shout and shots are fired, but Nobody takes Granger into the dark, and there's not a man among us strong enough to follow. We stand in armed confusion for a minute. We can't go into the trees. They're outside our boundary.

“The old woman!” cries Lieutenant Lep Kvingsman, expert in the Seventh Mercy, Generosity shifted to Reverse Abundance, the expertise of famine provision. He's best friend to the deceased, and there are tears on his face. “It was the old woman! She came out of the trees and into the camp! I saw her!”

He's been in his hammock too long, scratching at his legs, humming a high spellsong that in better times would've summoned a naked girl to fall from the clouds and drape her long hair over his body. Here it only summons a bat, wings printed with slogans from the years when we thought we'd win this war.

I may be the only soldier who thinks about performing a Mercy for Lieutenant Kvingsman, but I suspect I'm not. We've not done it in seven years. It's an ecstasy. I have expertise in the Eleventh Mercy, the Reversed Mercy of Rebellion. My hands itch, and my teeth.

“It was the old woman,” Kvingsman whispers. “She'll take us, one by one.”

We refuse to listen to him.

Out in the trees, Nobody devours Lieutenant Matthias Granger, bone by bone, hair by hair, and we hear one scream, and then another. No one moves.

It's a Mercy, we decide. We'll take it as one.

The Brightest Colors, the Highest Resolution

There are worse Mercies than those we invoked at Kinotra, but ours were immortalized.

The photographs of my men performing the Thirteen Mercies are now as memorable to the viewing public as paintings by the Old Masters. They could be clicked into life-size, and then into sizes larger than life. A wound the size of a caterpillar becomes a jagged excision the size of a car. I am told, though I didn't see them, that for a time there were billboards on the roads leading to and from the capital, showing me with the prisoner in my arms, our faces the size of buildings and our expressions clearly visible, his agony, mine certainty.

We never learned who took the photographs. Whoever it was, he's among us now. We were all brought here together on the transport. Our betrayer is with us, living, eating, shitting. Our betrayer is our brother. Perhaps Granger was the photographer. We don't know.

Torture was nothing surprising to the public by the time the photos went viral, but the world's capacity for righteous horror was greater than we might have imagined. Before the photos of our company's mission at the Kinotra Prison were leaked, we would've been acquitted. We were elite soldiers, after all. We were decorated.

Images hit the Internet, and then the newspapers and televisions. There were protest marches, boycotts, assassination attempts. One of our mothers was murdered by a mob.

Does no one in the world realize what we did to save them? What we did, we did according to our orders. What we did, we did to save the world from worse Mercy.

The General and His Enemy

General Hyk Steng stands at his tent flap, tall and wiry, his head shaven with a knife made of slate. He's not a young man, thirty-five years into his career, but he spends nights lifting his own weight and his muscles are larger than they were when we arrived. There's nothing to do here but build mass in misery. We're living on lizards, coconuts, and Ready-Pac rations.

“I dreamed it would come,” General Steng says, his eyes the eyes of someone damned a long time ago. His expertise is in the Thirteenth, the Mercy that would've ended all this.

“This begins our true campaign,” he says. “The execution of our orders. We've been deployed to fight the enemy, and this is the enemy's incarnation.”

Major Priest looks to the general for further instruction, but the general says nothing more. He just stares out into the green, smiling a little.

Things were bleak in the years after the war began, bleak enough that a man like Steng seemed like what we'd all been waiting for. The country wanted a man willing to shoot to kill, and he was put in charge of the military.

The general was a prisoner of war early in his career. There's video of him emerging from a cave in the mountains of Ghenari, a young man, hobbled and pale as bone, all his nails missing and his voice broken from screaming. This was in the days before the enemy began to take tongues. He went on to lead our country through several of the wars that didn't end. That was the way we spent the last years of that century.

In the mountains of Ghenari, the story went, the general ate his captors. He walked out of that cave carrying two men's roasted heads in his hands. He was nearly elected president after that.

We haven't seen our original orders, of course. This is a punishment, not a true deployment, or so we all thought until this moment, the general now informing us of our task. Some of us still believe that eventually our time here will end and a transport will come to reclaim us. The world will have forgotten our faces, and we'll be able to go home, wherever home is.

This punishment is, by all accounts, a Mercy unto itself. There was, in the months before the trial, talk of our execution by firing squad. The word
Mercy
doesn't mean what it once meant, not to us. Not to anyone.

We've been in the rain too long. Our skin is soft as felt, thin and tearing, and insects eat us from the inside out.

General Steng looks into the jungle. Out there, we hear them singing, whoever they are.

We're under constant invisible guard, but we aren't guarded from Nobody.

Justifications for Things Not Termed Torture

“Had we not torn out their fingernails,” Commander Verald Wrenn said during the Vetroiso Offensive, “they'd have used them to tear out our eyes.”

“Had we not silenced their soldiers,” the other side's High Officer, Chemrai Lirez, said during the aftermath of that same negotiation, “they'd have screamed spells to call their gods. It was a service to the future of humanity to cut out their tongues. We could not allow the heavens to drop to Earth.”

After Vetroiso, battalions of our tongueless soldiers were returned to us, and to the other side we returned soldiers with their nails peeled to the beds, along with a separate cargo of amputated fingertips and prints rendered in blood. It was all part of the business of war. The prisoners were exchanged, and everyone agreed to forget about them.

There've always been variations on Mercy. The enemy's children, for example, have always tied our children to trees and scalped them, and our children have always held the enemy's children underwater until they drowned.

General Steng went in person to the court in full uniform on the day of the verdict, not to plead but to show himself. He made no progress, never mind his fame.

By the time the events at Kinotra Prison happened, our spells had largely stopped working. Our gods no longer responded. Their gods were stronger. We were losing. The rest of the world had overtaken our reputation.

We were everyone's enemy.

The roads began to rise, rippling asphalt, and beneath them were tunnels filled with insurgents. A whole country crossed the borders into another. What else were we to do? We were angry, and we were in the right. We'd lost loved ones. We were defending our homeland.

We were trained in the Thirteen Mercies, all of us, in a silent camp in the desert. Each of us paid in his loved ones' blood. Each of us knew loss.

The Thirteen Mercies were a final attempt to blast our enemy into the dark.

I didn't say this when I was called to testify. I couldn't. There are still secrets. I was third-in-command when the Mercies at Kinotra occurred. I was off-shift, exhausted, and asleep on my cot when the rituals of the Twelfth were done, and no one called me to witness them, or to take part, yet here I am, along with my men and my commanders. Justice came down on us all, no matter our individual crimes. The government had been shamed, and the president himself accused by an international tribunal of 587 counts of war crimes against the Convention.

“My men were performing the Thirteen Mercies, and they were responding to direct orders,” testified General Hyk Steng, but he refused to explain to the tribunal what that meant. He could not.

We'd all sworn, and the swearing was permanent. To speak the Mercies to the uninitiated would be to choke on blood. Those oaths couldn't be defied.

Those Who Love These Soldiers

Our orders say that we must stay alive at any cost, that we must take our instructions from no one but the president. We no longer know who the president is. For the first few years, planes flew over us. Once, they dropped a confetti of leaflets, but they were not in our language. One of my men claimed he could read them.

“They're love letters,” he said. He had a fiancée at home, from whom he hadn't heard since our arrival on the island.

I have a son who's grown into a man since this deployment began. I've worked for this government my entire career, taken orders from my commanders, and to be abandoned here—

This jungle sings, but it doesn't sing for us. The mosquitoes here are as big as kites, and they come at night to drink us dry. Our uniforms are rotted. None of us can dress in a manner that shows respect. We're in shreds of camouflage, and our skin is smeared with mud.

There are no airplanes now, no messages dropped. There are no sounds coming from our radios. We don't know if there's still a world, and if there is, whether it remembers our faces.

We are loved by insects, by rain, and by Nobody.

The Qualities of Mercy

The Thirteen Mercies were a prayer, to begin with, a prayer for compassion, stating the many forms of god's goodness as revealed to a man named Moses, back in another world, back in another book.

The Thirteen Reversed Mercies were created by men as an insult to god, as the back edge of the original attributes. Everything good has something bad beside it. That's a thing we know by this point in the history of the world. To speak the Thirteen Reversed Mercies is to pray for unforgiveness. There are no gods to make things right. There are only men like us.

No one remembers, really, the Reversed Mercies' original purpose—we've forgotten the purpose of most old things—but the thing they are used for now is power. To speak them is to break oneself open and crack one's own heart. That's a portion of the training.

The Reversed Mercies become part of a soldier, and as he performs them, he entwines with them. The Thirteen Reversed belong to an ancient tradition of bad magic that once balanced the good, before the world went wrong. There's no good now. There hasn't been in some time. There's only bad, overwhelming the last little scraps of everything.

When our military took the Thirteen Reversed Mercies on, we did so with full knowledge of the dangers. We knew they were tainted, and that they'd wound us. We needed them. None of us would've made it intact out of Kinotra, not if the Mercies had been completed. We were prepared to die to save our country.

Instead our country sent us here to die condemned, not as saviors but as villains, as though our enemies were not the ones who'd forced us into this. Without provocation, we'd never have brought the Mercies into the war. It was the fault of the dead.

We performed the first Twelve. Only the Thirteenth remains, but we have no hope of completion.

Things Done by Women

The old woman keeps it raining. We can hear her singing, her voice more like a bird's than a woman's, and then more an insect's than a bird's.

We don't know what women's voices sound like anymore. It's been years since we last heard them. We haven't spent our lives among women, most of us, and though I must still have a son, I never knew his mother. We met in the dark, and left one another before the sun came up.

We're soldiers, and our lives are the war and the Mercies, not women, not children. We still don't know what the women did in the war, not with any certainty. Sometimes a woman in a position of authority gave an order and killed an entire company of men.

Enemies realigned and commands shifted. We weren't always warned. We were too occupied, there in our desert camps, mapping territories over ancient lines, tunneling, slingshotting into the sky in search of crows to augur over.