Painstaking by Rich Larson (audio)

You are listening to a Clarksworld Magazine podcast. I'm your host and narrator, Kate Baker. Welcome to Painstaking by Rich Larson, which has been brought to you by your support. So thank you if you have subscribed, if you've chucked a few bucks our way via donation, if you've gone to patreon.com forward slash Clarksworld. We cannot bring you these stories each and every month without the support. And you let me continue to do what I love to do. Our author, Rich Larson, is no stranger here to Clark's World. We've got many stories that we've published over the years. Rich Larsen was born in Niger, has lived in Spain in the Czech Republic, and is currently based in Canada. He is the author of the novels Annex and Ymir, as well as over 250 short stories, some of the best which can be found in his collections Tomorrow Factory, The Sky Didn't Load Today, and Other Glitches, and his latest book, Change Log. His fiction has been translated into over a dozen languages among them, Polish, French, Romanian, and Japanese. And his Clark's story, Ice, was adapted into an Emmy-winning episode of Love, Death, and Robots. And if you like what you hear, please, I implore you to go back to an even greater coal to come. Mollum, mollum, mollum the Scourge, the indomitable Captain Holly. Lol, said the Scorpion, wants pawn term. So my dear listener, I hope that you can sit back, relax, and let me tell you a story. Mars can smell meat cooking over charcoal. Before he was recruited, before the procedures, the scent was foreign to him. He survived on tuo and onions as a child. Meat turned his stomach the first time he ate it. Now he shares his body with an obligate carnivore, and just the smell triggers a jet of saliva under his tongue. He follows it across the taxi depot, passing a huddle of cabs all hooked to the same solar station, sipping sunshine through electric proboscisies while their human trainers sprawl in the shade. Some of the men and women look up, evaluating his dusty boots and tightly strapped rucksack, his regular loping gait and fixed forward gaze. One of them makes a half-hearted offer. Mars shakes his head, only breaking stride at Sam Neoma Drive, to let an auto-holler thunder past. He shivers slightly at the dancing pebbles, the blast of hot air. Then he strides across the pocked and bubbled tarmac, hops over a shallow ditch full of scrub and broken glass, and reaches the sandy lot where the handful of vendors are setting up shop. An old man is selling capanna and sausages, prodding them this way and that on a makeshift grill hitched to a rusty electric bicycle. When he catches sight of Mars, his roomy eyes turn sharp with curiosity, trying to guess the tribe, maybe from his broad face and stocky build. There are many possibilities here in Winduca. Damara, San, Herero, and Ovambo are the most common, but migration has brought in a multitude more. Still, Mars doubts he will ever hear his mother tongue in the street. He's traveled a longer way than most to shed his pursuers. so when the vendor's expression becomes one of recognition, it sends a needle of ice down his sweaty back. You again, the old man says, in English though his accent here is different from the ones Mars learned during his training in northern Nigeria. The hungry one. Mars forces a smile. Me again, he says. Yes, always hungry. Inside, he feels a different sort of gnawing. Anxiety serrated with anger, he realizes his clone brother has been careless. Again. Mars makes no further conversation he pays with his block phone, scanning a printed QR code sheathed in grease-spattered plastic, then bundles the bag of steaming food into his rucksack and sets off for home. It's safer to walk even if it draws local attention. Taxis have too many internal cams, and there's no way of knowing how far the military has managed to spread its face-hunting algorithms. Mars and his twin are too valuable to vanish easily. That's why they fled as far south as they could, first by hijacked helicopter, then by bush taxi, night bus, their own unblistering feat when necessary. They slipped over the Angola-Namibia border two weeks ago and made their way down to the capital city. Winduka has tripled in size in the past few decades, growth spurred by solar storage and rare earth's extraction, but it's still nowhere near large enough for anonymity. He already recognizes faces in the street as he makes his way west. And if the Karpana vendor is any indication, Mars' face is memorable too. Their final destination lies across another border. South Africa's government does not tolerate interference from the Sub-Saharan Alliance. And in teeming Joburger, Durban, one can disappear entirely, but it takes time to forge the necessary biometric cards and until then they must be cautious. Bearing that in mind, Mars pulls up his nylon hood and tightens it. The summer storms have yet to arrive. They are later and wilder each year, he's been told but the air is beginning to cool. The uphill march along Jan Junker Road creates a comfortable warmth in his calves and hamstrings. He follows a well-worn foot trail that snakes through the dirt alongside the tarmac boots crunching on gravel and broken glass. Vehicles glide past him in steady rhythm. The vacant cabs hoot to announce themselves. Some share his destination, the quick-crete hives stacked up above the derelict road, built to house the seasonal influx of miners and solar rigors. It's a coming-and-going place which serves Mars and his twin perfectly. They had enough funds left over from the job in Luanda to secure themselves at least a modicum of privacy. Their capsule has its own entrance and no internal sensors, which is important because as far as the leasing algorithm and neighbors know, only one person is living there. The sun sinks as he trudges up the final stretch of trail. The dry heat here reminds him of home, but the sky is different, especially as dusk falls. There's less dust in the air to diffuse the light, so the colors are more vivid, aggressive, a beautiful inferno of reds and purples. Mars reaches the capsule and stops on the stoop, turning to watch the final moments of exsanguination before the sun disappears completely. He scans the hillside for quadrupedal drones, soldiers in stealth gear, the usual boogeymen. Then he realizes he's taking his time, not from an abundance of caution, but because he does not want to go inside. He goes inside. Mars did not choose his own name. When he was a child, that was all he was. Yarrow, when he was a test subject, selected for the congenital inability to feel pain, he was a mutation plus identification number. Marsili, 17. When he was a trainee, his squad mates called him Mars, and sometimes joked that he had come from there in a little spaceship, and he grew to like the sound of the French word. His twin did not think they should both be Mars, so he chose a different name, one in their mother tongue. Balarabe, born on a Wednesday. It was a Wednesday, the day Mars found him starved and confused and confined, held captive in a rusting bathtub with a drill churning endlessly into his stomach. It was a Wednesday, the day Mars freed him and told him they were brothers. This is true in the sense that they are genetically identical, but they did not share a womb. Malarabe grew from Mars' mangled flesh like a starfish sliced in half-grows to become two, testament to the ingenuity of the immortal organism. that inhabits both their cells. But more and more often, Balarabe feels unfamiliar to him. When Mars enters the capsule, his twin is vivisecting himself. The coppery smell of blood hangs like a shroud. A military-issue nanonife, tip-dipped red, sits beside the wash basin. Balarabe squats over top it, the flesh of his right forearm held open by calipers. With his left hand, he plucks at the long tendons he's managed to expose, the fingers of his right hand spasm. Sanu daiki, Mars greets, setting his rucksack on the table. Sanu, Balorabe sniffs the air, nods at the rucksack. Lokachina bincine. I, Mars unslings the rucksack and retrieves the food. The meat is good here. So say, his brother agrees and unclips the incision in his arm. Balarabe squeezes the wound together, hard, wriggling his fingers, and after a few minutes, Mars sees the creep of fresh scar tissue. Balarabe is endlessly fascinated by his own anatomy by the limits of the organism Mars was bored of it long before his twin came into existence He peels open the plastic bag and doles out the capanna which is no longer sizzling but still pleasantly hot Balarabe's eating hand is functional again. It is only habit. Neither of them are good Muslims, so he reaches for his share. He mumbles his thanks around a mouthful of charcoal-smoked meat. Nagodi, Mars. Ba come balrabe. It's good to eat together, to speak. Hausa together. But before Mars can enjoy the food, he needs to make certain his brother understands something. The taste is familiar, he says. Yes? Balrabe shrugs, grins, gray-pink strands in his teeth. Meat is meat. Yesterday was your out day, Mars says. You said you walked along the riverbed. You said you shopped for food at the checkers. You did not say you bought capanna from a vendor. His twin stops chewing. He was friendly. I was hungry. We are meant to be one person, Mars says. That's why I tell you exactly where I go and what I do on my out day. You need to do the same. Valarabe's eyes darken. He chews more fiercely, and Mars has the sense he is grinding words between his teeth instead of speaking them aloud. He is more prone to anger than Mars. It is a relief when he swallows and breathes. I forgot, he says. Tomorrow I will remember. Mars holds out his hand the way he did when Balarabe was still growing, when it was simpler to think of his clone brother as a child than an incomplete recreation of himself. Now Balorabe claps to it hard with a hand the exact size and shape as his, and Mars feels the dangerous strength in his grip. It reminds him of all the times he used his hands to kill, whether with gun or bomb or nano-knife. There was much anguish in those days, but it was a simple sort of anguish. Lately, the feeling comes tangled with others. Tomorrow you will remember, Mars agrees, trying to believe it. The symbiont that makes them invulnerable to most injury and valuable to their pursuers is a ravenous one. They go back to eating. It is easier than speaking. Mars knows the problem is memory. He'd hoped that as Balarabe finished growing, the holes in his memory would fill. But the organism, miraculous as it is, does have limits. My head is bad, is one of the first things his clone brother told him Mars has tried to seal the gaps by speaking of his childhood in Galmi His abduction to a gene lab in Lagos The years of training and deployment all throughout the Sub-Sahara It felt important also that he tell Balorabe how he came to exist Nine weeks and a lifetime ago, Mars had stepped onto the highway to die changing his mind only in the final milliseconds as a roaring auto truck bore down on him. His attempt to leap aside sundered his body in two, and when he crawled away from the highway, he left his legs and a splinter of spinal column behind. Mars had never considered how badly the organism wanted to be whole. He never imagined it might shape a second him from the remnants in the ditch, a clone brother he would later rescue from vicious captors. But those giddy early days of their escape south, those long nights murmuring plans in their mother tongue or watching old films together on a single block phone screen, had given way to a more jagged coexistence. When Balarabe sets off for his out day the next morning, under a grey sky still fainting rain, Mars is relieved to have the capsule to himself. they paid for privacy not luxury there's barely enough space for the wash basin and cook pad even with the gel bed folded up into the wall and the heat pump wheezes like a dying thing mars has seen worse so balarabe has too but his clone brother acts as though it were a cage tapping his feet against the wall pushing his face to the one-way porthole when he leaves he takes the tension with him mars splays out onto the quick greet floor and breathes deep. His years as a soldier taught him many things, many of which he wishes to forget. But he will always be grateful for the meditation techniques. He charts each contact point between body and floor, skull, shoulder blades, buttocks, calves, heels. Then lets each of them melt and sink. He observes the push and pull of his lungs and does not need to cut himself open to do so. By noon, he is relaxed and almost perfectly thoughtless. Then the ceiling above him erupts. The blast showers him with burning chunks of quickrete. He cannot feel the pain, but he knows to curl fetal, arms wrapped around his skull to protect his eyes and organs. He tries to track the damage as fragments batter his body with dim heat, plucking pressure, piercing his skin in a dozen different places. One sharp wedge drives through his shin and jars bone. He's up and limping before the rubble settles. The organism works quickly. The buzz and roar in his ears lasts only half a heartbeat before the hair cells regrow, picking up the panicked shouting of his capsule neighbors, and then, more importantly, the soft whine of rotors. He hurls a glance skyward and sees a fearsome silhouette descending through the dust. Butcher drone. He recognizes the Kenyan-manufactured drone, remembers watching one hunt a fleeing saboteur along the foggy banks of the gungola. Heavy-duty, high-quality designed for prolonged engagements instead of the usual fire-and-forget-suicide swarms. When this one swoops toward him, he sees it carry a non-standard loadout, a short-barreled shotgun and a humming, snarling saw. Mars dives sideways, scrambling through the ruins of his temporary home. He seizes a hunk of quick-crete, spins, hurls it, seizes another, and slings it blind over his shoulder. He knows the drone will dodge. His only aim is to fill the air with chaff. Force microsecond delays on its targeting algorithm while he searches for the shotgun booms, but only a few pellets find their mark. He sees a telltale glint in the rubble and goes down anyway. He scoops up the nanonife, rolls, and skims just enough momentum to swing back upright. The quick-crete hives are emptying. Nightshift workers stream out into the daylight, hollering in half-dozen languages. There's safety in crowds, but Mars does not trust the drone's collateral damage parameters and does not want to cause even one more death. He scrambles the opposite way, up the hill, and hears the pursuing whine of rotors. The logic of the drone's loadout is clear. The shotgun drops him. The saw lops off his limbs, continually if necessary, until the organism runs out of mass to work with and he's fully incapacitated. So when Mars hears the drone's rotors change pitch, stabilizing to fire, he twists his body to the left, shielding his activated nanonife. The shotgun booms again, and this time it punches him off of his feet. He falls face first, tastes sand and old copper, tries to assess the spread picture, the ragged holes constellating his back and buttocks. He hopes the muscles of his right shoulder are intact. He can't twitch to test them without risking another salvo. the drone descends Mars listens to the saw's snarl intensify he finds all the parts of himself pressed to the thistle webbed dirt cheek chest belly kneecaps forearms feet and lets them melt and sink he observes the push and pull of his lungs when the saw's spinning teeth are close enough to whisk his leg hair as he strikes the activated nano knife drives through the saw's housing, carving into the circuitry, and the saw's tungsten teeth still bite through his skin but shudder to a halt before they reach meat. He grips hard to the knife's handle as the drone surges upward, swings his body out of the way as the shotgun goes off, so near to his head he feels the blossom of sundered air. The world mutes again, but he does not need his hearing for what comes next. He scrambles with his other hand, finds a finger-hold ridge on the drone's armor, and clings with all his strength as he twists the nanonife free. The drone keeps rising, slewing side to side. He crabs around the side of its chassis, using his blade like a piton until he can straddle the closest rotor arm, reach its motor. He plunges a nanonife right through its chugging heart. They fall together. Wind shrieks through the drone's chassis, and the earth spins wildly below. He sees, when Dukas, cityscape and fragments The gleaming towers downtown The wicked pith of the colonial era Christus Kyrke The puffy sponge walls groan to absorb The summer storms They spiral toward the garden hill With a radio tower at its summit He tries to ready himself The landing still snaps his spine Mars feels a horribly familiar spasm as splintered vertebrae burrow through flesh, sharing nervous pathways. He's blind for a moment. When his vision returns, he sees billowing smoke, jagged remains of the drone all around him, sometimes poking through him. The organism is already hard at work. He sees wet pink putty transmuting into muscle fiber around his hip, feels its cilia slotting skewed bones into place. The paralysis lasts only a moment before his nerves fizzle and needle back to life. He flexes his hands. It would be wise to wait here until he is fully healed. It would be wise to inspect the drone's wreckage closely, identify the mercenary or military agents who have finally tracked him down, and know exactly who he's dealing with. But he can't do either of those things because Balarabe is somewhere in the city and drones so often hunt and packs. Mars orients himself. Secures a deactivated nanonife in his waistband. Then he starts to crawl downhill, dragging himself away from the sound of approaching sirens, ignoring the sound of bone, scraping bone. He's bipedal by the time he reaches Sam Nuwoma Drive. he managed to sponge the splattered blood off his face. There was nothing to be done for his tattered clothes and bare feet except change his way of moving and hope he can pass for a sun-dazed beggar, hunching and swaying. Luckily, the bystanders, clodding along the side of the road, are focused on the wailing emergency vehicles and crashed military drone. He pickpockets one of them, sums a message to Balarabe that goes undelivered. Maybe whoever sent the drone is jamming the net, but he sees nobody cursing and waving their phones at the sky. Maybe Balarabe's phone was destroyed by a shotgun blast, or maybe he destroyed it himself just before a drone incapacitated him. Mars discards the Solon phone, lurches onward, keeping his head down but listening hard for the soft whine of rotors. If Balarabe investigates the sirens and realizes the danger, he should be making his way to the first rendezvous point. Aveis dam on the eastern edge of the city. Mars wishes he could trust his brother to remember this. He heads for the taxi depot, ready to risk a ride for the sake of speed. Only a few trainers are with their calves. Most are gathered at the edge of the lot, peering toward the hubbub, arms folded and mouths muttering. He tries to guess who is most likely to take a ragged barefoot passenger with no questions asked. He reaches for the wad of emergency cash in his shirt lining. Then he spots a familiar head of sparse white hair and pivots. The vendor has parked his rusty electric bicycle under a tree and set up his grill. He stands, bent over his work, sawing open sausages, spraying droplets of grease that sizzle against the hot metal. Mars approaches with open palms, greets him in English. Hungry one, the old man says, tearing open a bag of flour-smeared buns. Where are your boots? Stolen. Did I have them earlier? Mars asks because there is no time for caution. Have you seen me today? The vendor keeps his gaze on the grill, but his mouth twists. I have seen your brother. Normally, Mars likes to hear this word, no matter the language. Today, it makes his whole body tense like a spring trap. For a wild instant, he imagines the old man pulling a handgun from beneath the grill or lunging forward with the serrated knife. People are not scared of twins anymore, you know, the vendor continues. You don't need to be so secretive. mars relaxes this man is not an agent of their pursuers just keen-eyed wise in his ears old enough to remember more superstitious times when did you see him mars asks where was he going please two hours ago maybe i was still setting up when he walked past the vendor points west and mars notices the delineation of light and shade has softened on the sand clouds are gathering again, diffusing Winduka's searing sunshine through gray gauze. He turned left on Robert Mugabe, the old man says. He looked sad. So long as he had his limbs, Mars thinks. So long as he was not cocooned in restraints and slung from the underbelly of a drone. Thank you, Mars says, and reaches for his emergency cash. Half the antiquated plastic weave notes are melted into the fabric of his shirt by the shotgun blast, but a few hundred rand bills are intact. I would like to buy meat, he nods at the rusty electric bicycle. And I would like to borrow that. The sky swells and bruises overhead, the summer storm lurking behind skin-thin membrane, and Mars pushes the bike's motor to its winding limit. He bounces and hurtles down pitted side streets, sloshing his full stomach, but avoiding the camp-monitored main avenues. Balrabe has different memories and is becoming a different person, but Mars thinks he knows where his clone brother would go on a day like today. Thunder cracks, the clouds open at last. The warm rain comes down and thick lashing ropes, like a sluice had been opened in the sky. The bike loses traction. Mars slews too wide on the next curve, narrowly avoids a hooting taxi, but he's glad for the rain. It will make things harder for the hunting drones, and it strengthens the likelihood that Balarabe is at Merua Mall. Mars leaves the bike at one of the loading bays, bending a discarded metal pipe to lock it into the railing. Then he heads to the theater, always dark, usually empty, where the screen is so much bigger than a block phone. Balarabe came across it during their first few days wandering Winduka, and said that if the storms ever came, it would be good to sit there in the old plush seats and half watch the movie, half listen to the rain. The roof is old, also, as Mars hurries up the stairwell, his bare feet skid on puddled tile. He sprints along a row of faded posters, vaults past the ticket machine, startles an employee placing yellow hazard cones. The lobby's skylight, a geometric swath of plastic glass, is leaking in a dozen places. He darts through the falling droplets and ducks inside the darkened auditorium. He shouts, even though it is not polite, Balarabe! Kananan! Balarabe! Scattered, heads turned, none are his brothers. Mars feels ice roiling in his gut. He guessed wrong. Balarabe might be far from here, might be captured or fighting, oblivious to the danger of fleeing and alone. Mars sways, stranded between possibilities. It was so much easier to plan and adapt when he was only one person, when he did not feel terror on anyone else's behalf. Beyond him, on the glowing theater screen, a woman holds her hand to a candle flame until her skin sloughs away. Mars can almost feel its heat. He turns, stumbles from the auditorium, and is greeted beneath the skylight by armed police. There are only four of them, and they are nervous, damp from sweat as much as rain. When Duca is a calm place, people hear still speak about the diamond heist that happened decades ago, but one of the policewomen is harnessed to a swiveling autogun, and her earphone is military issue. They are not here to make Mars buy a ticket. He looks at the face of the one with the autogun, guesses a vambo. Voila, Po, he greets. The policewoman blinks. Eh? Inotila, Mars exhorts, then switches to English, raising his hands. i am not what they tell you i am not dangerous a laugh sticks in the policewoman's throat they say you killed hundreds none here mar says zero here the storm intensifies outside smashing winds and driving rains all the pent-up ferocity of a disappearing season fresh leaks spout from the skylight flood alerts bleat from a dozen phones a mob of school children come staggering around the corner, soaked and howling with elation. They see the police and freeze in place, caught between two threats. People come creeping from the auditorium, too, drawn by the commotion. He should have fled when he had the chance. Now there are bystanders everywhere, and bullets inevitably find the innocent flesh. They say you were grown in a tank, the lead policewoman, the one with the autogun, saying, like vat beef. Mars must keep them calm. You have fat beef here? He makes himself smile The caperna is fat beef Never fat beef or caperna One of the men exclaims Never It would be wrong Mars nods Mimes thoughtful The texture is too good to be fat beef He looks to the lead policewoman I was not grown in a tank I was born north of Niger I have a twin brother Have you seen him There are no knowing looks exchanged at the mention of Balarabe which gives Mars some hope A fresh surge of rain batters the roof, a thump and clatter that makes the youngest policeman flinch. They told you to shoot me, Mars says, but it feels unnatural yet. And it would be dangerous here, bullets can ricochet. You need to clear these people away. The lead policewoman blinks, finally seeming to notice the wide-eyed faces peeking out of the auditorium, the raised block phones recording from the stairwell. She does not notice the dark blurry shape at the edge of the skylight. Mars does because he has been ambushed from above once already today. The autogun notices also and gives an electric chirrup just before the plastic glass smashes apart and balarabe drops through. Mars sees how he must look, eerily graceful, gracefully deadly, the organism fine-tuning each firing nerve and amplifying every muscle contraction as his brother plunges both boots into the policewoman's back. The sound is so much worse, knowing her bones may never knit themselves whole again. But he cannot contemplate it because the autogun is a writhing snake filling the air with bullets as it hunts for Balarabe's moving form. Mars hurls himself onto its muzzle. The successive shockwaves shake his eyes in their sockets. He feels metal chattering into him, chewing through him a tempest to match the one outside. He tries for the nano knife from his waistband, but the impacts knock his arm askew and his fingers claw air. Somehow he sees it in his hand anyway, blade activated, flashing in from the side. It's over in seconds. The glowing barrel of the autogun clatters to the tile. Two ruined sidearms join it, one with a policeman's severed hand still trapped in the trigger guard. Mars hears a faint wailing, sees one blurry silhouette cradling another. The organism is working, dredging bullets from his body and spitting them out like fruit pits. They dance and skitter across the wet floor through puddles now tinged pink. Barabe is staring at the stump of the youngest policeman's arm as if waiting for it to regrow. The nano knife hangs loose in his grip. We were meant to meet at the dam, he says, loud enough that Mars can hear him through the tinnitus hum. Your memory is bad, Mars. emotions flood over him relief that balarabe is safe fury at his brother's rash action fury at his own grief for whoever is wailing in the stairwell and grief to see balarabe coated for the first time in someone else's blood he wanted balarabe to have a cleaner life than his but that was delusion his brother is not a child and never truly was and most of the memories he inherited from Mars are bloody ones. Mars wants to apologize for that, but when he tries to open his mouth, he finds his tongue is shredded meat and his jaw is splintered bone. The organism has prioritized its vitals, as always. We were meant to meet at the dam, Balarabe repeats in a vague mutter. You are lucky. I know how you think. Mars' legs are not working yet either, but his brother picks him up, slings him over his bony shoulders, and carries him out into the rain. Balrabe follows the ancient railroad tracks until Mars can walk. Then they cut across two flooded streets that reach the riverbed. Normally, the Gamams River is little more than a damp thread winding south through the city. Now it swells with muddy water, plastic trash, and dead vegetation churned upward to form a floating thicket on its surface. Once it rises high enough, they slide down the slick bank and let the organism breathe for them while they ride the current. It's swifter than walking, and Mars impales himself only once on a jutting branch. The storm subsides as they reach Winduka's southern outskirts. They struggle free from the river and reunite on its muddy shores under a slowly clearing sky. Mars observes the shimmering sun, reorienting himself as they stagger from foot-sucking mud to dry ground. Beyond the remnants of a wire fence, he sees low, undulating hills dotted with knee-high shrubs. Eventually, it will flatten to desert. They are moving in the right direction. We can keep heading south. He tongues his regrown teeth. His enamel is still slightly spongy. My foot is best, until we reach the highway. It's a long walk, but it will give them time to formulate a plan. Mars is all but certain that the contact they paid to forge their biometric cards also alerted the military, intentionally or not, to their whereabouts. Disappearing into Durban, or Joburg, will not be as easy as he hoped. Balrabe interrupts his thoughts. The highway has auto-haulers, he says with a strange bitterness. You will have to watch your step. for a moment the warning is nonsense then mars recalls the highway where he stood with his knees locked his head tipped back staring at a sky choked with armattan dust waiting for the roaring clattering auto truck to fly around the curve and free him from the world it was pain that rooted him to the blacktop then and it is pain that now stops him in his muddy tracks you never asked to exist he says realizing it fully for the first time and in those first weeks of existence you were alone then captured then starved his throat aches and tightens I wanted your life to be different than mine no sorrow no blood but your life began in my seeking death his brother stops and turns and mars sees his own face made unfamiliar contorted with longing streaked with the tears he has stopped for so many years and only nine weeks of living balarabe has somehow learned to crack the clouds open the world hurts his brother admits and neither of them carry scars on their skin but mars hears them in Balrabe's voice. It's true I never asked to exist. Sometimes I'm angry with you. Other times with myself. He draws a raw breath. Other times I watch the sun setting, or a good movie beginning, or my own body moving, living, and I think. Miracle. Thing of wonder, Mars echoes, remembering when he was a child and bothered by electric shocks. Abhin al-Ajabi. You dove aside, Balorabe says, so my life began in shunning death, not seeking it. You wanted it to be different from yours. It already is. He shades his gaze against the sun, looking directly into Mars' eyes, and life will keep changing, and we will keep changing, and we will never be one person again, but we will both be better for it. It is the most Mars has ever heard his twins speak, and more than he has ever spoken himself, and as the last words leave his lips, Balarabe looks suddenly exhausted, uncertain, but he holds out his hand. Even though it still radiates strength, even though its sinewy fingers held a nanonife just hours ago, it no longer looks dangerous to Mars. He grips Balarabe's hand, then claps his shoulder, then throws both arms around his brother and lets his face come undone. No tears fall. Not yet. But maybe he feels the membrane thinning. Balrabe hugs him back, and a shuddering breath moves through both their bodies then. It is time to walk. They walk through sand and scrub over broken glass and thorny seed pods until they reach the highway. Trees twist up from the ditch here and there. Termites build nests in their shade. the red-brown mounds look like travelers kneeling down to rest and when mars points this out to balarabe it makes his eyes gleam they walk until the sky turns dark and starry until it pales again with dawn their legs are tireless but the organism is hungry and they are relieved when they come to a rust ringed charging station with a vending machine attached it offers only vat beef but they agree that the texture is good and it is wondrous to think that the cultured cells never suffered, not even for a moment. Thank you for joining us on the story. I do hope you'll come back and join us. And until then, my dear listener, I bid you a very fond and hopefully very temporary farewell. Thank you.