Chapter 1

Denver, Colorado May 19, 2031

After fifteen minutes with nothing to do but stare at his watch, Calum forced himself to close his eyes, clear his mind, and try to think through the disaster that was evolving around him. It was hard to block out the noise of his classmates muttering to each other or the smell of diesel exhaust the stilled bus was pumping out and leaking back into itself. Even having Colleen pressed lightly against his arm, distracted him in an entirely different, but much more pleasant way. Most of the time, he could take that distraction in stride. She was his friend and, whatever else he might want from her, that was all she would be. But, with everything else running through his head, it was difficult to keep track of all the things he was supposed to ignore.

Once he closed his eyes, he realized that Colleen was fidgeting. To do so, she must be wound at least as tightly as he was. Only his own nervous energy had kept him from noticing before. He opened his eyes again, "You okay?"

Colleen slid her visor to rest on top of her head. Calum glanced away long enough to let her eyes focus on the real world. No matter how many times he saw it, the million mile stare that he would see in her too-green eyes if he watched as she shifted her attention from the grid to the world around her was unnerving.

She shook her head and smiled. Like her eyes, the teeth were a little too perfect, vat-engineered to stay white and straight, "Sympathy jitters. I was following the feed from a Qiin observation drone and the audio from police bands, trying to keep track of the protest outside. I know you must be ready to..."

Someone shoved Calum's shoulder from behind. The shove was too hard to be playful, but not hard enough to be an immediate attack. Even so, he was on a hair-trigger and had to draw his hand back into his lap to keep from responding violently.

He turned far enough to see who had shoved him. Sitting on the edge of the seat behind him and Colleen was Craig Patterson, who'd started the bus ride three seats back. Calum registered his malicious grin and glanced back at the seat Craig had vacated. Anne sat where he'd remembered her being, staring out the window like she wasn't watching.

"What do you want, Patterson?" Calum asked evenly.

"When your peacenik parents were meeting with their peacenik friends this morning, did they mention how long they were going to be blocking Colfax Avenue?"

Calum considered throwing a punch and ending the conversation right there. Once you heard the "p" word, violence was pretty much guaranteed. And, he was presumably untouchable by human authorities. Even conscripts had gotten away with much worse than breaking a civilian's nose once they were drafted and, if they'd suffered any sort of regimental punishment after enlisting, the Qiin hadn't bothered to tell anyone on Earth about it.

He glanced at Anne again. She was resolutely not watching. Even so, he could read the tension in her shoulders and the way she crossed her arms across her chest. He might not like her choice for a new boyfriend, but maiming Craig wouldn't make her remember him more fondly and would immediately derail his entire reason for leaving her in the first place.

"We don't get to pick our parents, Craig." he said, quietly imbuing his words with a sneer. "Even those of us who only have two."

The next shove came immediately. Calum was waiting for it. He caught Craig's wrist, twisted at the waist, and bent forward. Craig, already precariously balanced, fell on his face. Calum rolled on top of him, coming to rest with a knee in the center of the other boy's back. He held onto the wrist and wrenched it far enough that it rested against his own knee.

"Back in your seats," shouted the bus driver, struggling to rise from his own seat. Calum didn't waste a glance on him. The man was old, fat, and slow. He would never get there in time to stop what Calum had to do.

Calum leaned down and snarled in Craig's ear, "I know you're too stupid to realize that waving your dick at me is not going to impress my ex, so I'm going to tell you something even your monkey brain can understand. I'm in a state of grace." He wrenched the arm higher, "You know what that means?"

Craig cried out even though Calum doubted he'd hurt him much. Fortunately, he didn't seem to need to be hurt more, "You ... failed the exclusion exam?"

"Close enough," said Calum. "More importantly to you, it means that, if you don't want to be wearing a full body cast when you pick Anne up for the prom, you'll go back to your seat and shut the fuck up." He rose and slid back into his seat just in time for the bus driver to reach them. Even in the cool air of Denver in May, the man was sweating from the effort of walking a couple dozen feet. He helped Craig up and glowered at Calum. Craig glowered too, but Calum could live with quiet animosity.

"You were saying?" he asked Colleen.

Colleen rolled her eyes, but took only a second to resume their conversation, "Anyway, here's what I got. There are about three hundred cops keeping an eye on the protest, maybe twelve thousand protesters. For now, everything's relatively peaceful. Or, at least, if the police are planning to move in, they're doing verbal relay only."

"Twelve thousand?" Calum didn't hide his surprise.

"It's a big one," said Colleen. "But, only a little bit bigger than the last two Exclusion Day rallies. There's a big H4H contingent this year."

Calum frowned, "That probably means trouble. Peace Now doesn't have a lot of love for Humans for Humanity."

Colleen gave him an uncertain smile, "If the police move in and your parents get arrested, you'd probably get home ahead of them."

"And I could be gone before they got back," said Calum, looking thoughtful. "There's some appeal to that, but I should at least try to say goodbye."

Colleen frowned, "This is one of those family-related things I'd understand if I were natural-born. Isn't it?"

"Or if your mother didn't have an adding machine in place of her heart," Calum nodded, "I don't doubt they're going to be awful. But, it's up to them. I won't be the one who snuck off in the middle of the night. It will matter when I come back."

Colleen pursed her lips. Calum knew she was probably fighting the urge to tell him yet again how little chance he had of surviving long enough to come back to Earth. Instead of bringing up the subject they'd argued about most in the last few months, she said, "If the police do move in with those kind of odds, they'll probably use tear gas first. That's standard."

"And my parents will take off at the first whiff of it," said Calum evenly. "They do have a way of stirring up trouble, then letting everybody else deal with it. Can you keep an eye on the situation, please?"

Colleen nodded and slid the glasses down. With her eyes hidden, she looked almost normal—a little too symmetrical and flawless, a little too physically fit, a little too beautiful, although not everyone saw her that way. Commentators who covered the return of the veterans loved to talk about the disquieting sense ordinary humans got when looking at Veterans. The theory was that people identified each other by their flaws—irregularities, scars, breaks in symmetry. Veterans lacked many of these flaws. Colleen wasn't a veteran, but she'd been grown using a similar process to the enhancement veterans went through.

The favorite term for that bit of cognitive dissonance was borrowed from the early days of computer graphics, when attempts to render human forms had fallen short for the same reasons unenhanced humans thought some veterans looked odd. The term was "looking at veterans across the Uncanny Valley." It was overused now, but the earliest veterans to return had liked it enough to name their first isolated settlement out on Maui after it.

The first time he'd met Colleen, she'd been less than a week out of the vat she'd been grown in. The result had been unnerving. It had felt like making friends with a hologram of someone who wasn't really there. Since then, life had left just enough of its mark on her to distinguish her from her sisters, who'd come out of the process at the same time.

He remembered how happy Colleen had been when Oakley started making stylish glasses that worked with the indexer's visor system and she no longer had to choose between "looking like a life-sized doll and looking like an old, blind diabetic."

Of course, once she was on the grid, Calum had no one to talk to again. He glanced around. Craig was still scowling at him. Anne was scowling at Craig and saying something about how stupid he was being. That made Calum perversely happy. He looked around the rest of the bus, taking in faces he knew he would probably never see again after today. People he'd been friends with, guys he'd been teammates with, everyone was a little too engaged, talking a little bit too loudly. It was absurd. As high schools went these days, PHS 15 was pretty good. None of them were likely to fail the exclusion test, but the tension of not knowing was palpable. By midnight, almost eighty thousand eighteen year-old Americans would find out they'd been drafted to serve in the Qiin military and fight a war against an enemy no one on Earth had ever seen, on planets none of them had ever heard of. Nobody from Calum's school had been drafted, but it was still a cause for celebration not to be chosen.

Calum already knew he wouldn't be a draftee. He'd volunteered.

"They're firing tear gas," said Colleen, keeping her glasses on. She rose and slid past Calum, "Let me tell the driver."

A minute later, they were being instructed to exit the bus in an orderly fashion. In between drills and actual evacuations, Calum and his class had probably done so three dozen times. This time, people jostled nervously on their way out. A girl fell back into Calum. He helped her upright and got a genuine smile in return.

Somehow, even with the nervous energy and the bus driver screaming at them, everyone got out without injury. Calum glanced to where he thought Colleen was standing and realized she'd gone over to talk to her sister. Heather was nearly identical to Colleen, but kept her long, red hair crimped and wore the standard-issue blocky, black visor given to prospective indexers. She was much more involved in the clone pride movement than Colleen.

As the bus driver was trying to organize people into columns, Colleen walked past Calum and broke into a trot. With one last glance back, Calum turned and followed her. By the time the driver realized they'd bolted, his voice was almost too far away to hear.