BOY SOLDIER Chapter 4

 Boy Soldier Chapter 4

(From the novel ‘ARES’)

Evelyn found the part in the ruins of an old robotics lab on the outskirts of Cleveland. A single, intact neural relay—exactly what Bolt needed to fully restore his higher functions. It had taken months of scavenging, of trading favors with Resistance techs, but she’d finally found it.   

She walked the corpse-road into the dead zone where Cleveland's outskirts bled into the irradiated wilds. The wind carried whispers from another age - the groan of a rusted billboard swaying on its last bolt, the skittering of a rat dragging some unnameable scrap through the bones of a convenience store. Her boots crunched over a mosaic of broken safety glass and bullet casings, each step kicking up the fine white dust that settled over everything like the ashes of a burned world.  

She adjusted the strap of her scavenger's pack, feeling the weight of three years' desperation in the empty space where Bolt's neural relay should have been. The Resistance techs had laughed when she showed them the schematics. “You're wasting calories on a glorified calculator," they'd sneered. But they hadn't been there when Bolt took a plasma burst meant for Tommy's back. Hadn't seen the way his optics dimmed like dying stars as his systems failed one by one.  

The old OmniCorp robotics lab emerged from the haze like a tombstone. Its shattered windows stared blindly across the wasteland, reflecting back a broken image of the noonday sun. The security fence had been peeled open like the lid of a ration tin, its razor wire curling inward in surrender. Evelyn's fingers found the grip of her pistol as she stepped through the wound in the fence.  

Inside, the walls hummed with the crawling of critters and reeked of decaying insulation. Her gaze shifted across a graveyard of prototypes - a maintenance drone with its manipulators frozen in a pleading gesture, the skeletal remains of a humanoid robot still strapped to an examination table. The walls bore the scars of whatever final purge had happened here, blackened streaks radiating outward from what had once been a server bank.  

She moved through the ruins like a surgeon navigating a battlefield triage, her eyes cataloging the dead tech with clinical precision. The relay would be near the back, in the shielded containment units where the sensitive components were stored. Her boot kicked aside a disembodied robotic hand, its fingers twitching once with residual charge before going still forever.  

The containment room door hung drunkenly from one hinge. Evelyn braced against the frame, her muscles straining as she forced it open just wide enough to slip through. The air inside was cooler, preserved by the room's insulation. Rows of component drawers lined the walls, their labels faded but still legible.  

Her breath hitched when she saw it.  

The neural relay gleamed in its protective casing like a holy relic, the last uncorrupted thing in this place of ruin. She reached for it with trembling fingers, the glass of the case fogging under her breath. Three years of searching condensed into this single moment, this fragile victory cupped carefully in her palms.  

Outside, the wind howled through the ruins like a mourning song. Evelyn tucked the relay into the padded compartment of her pack, feeling its weight settle against her spine like a promise. Somewhere beyond these dead halls, Tommy was waiting with his soldering iron and stubborn hope, ready to wake the ghost in the machine.  

She turned her face toward home, where the lights of Cleveland flickered weakly against the gathering dark. The relay pulsed against her back with every step, a second heartbeat keeping time with her own.  

She exhaled, her breath stirring the dust motes that hung like forgotten stars in the stale air. Three years. Three years of scavenging ruins, of trading ration vouchers for favors with Resistance techs who looked at her like she was insane for caring about a "fancy toaster." But Bolt wasn’t just a machine. He was the third heartbeat in their ragged little family.  

The relay was cool against her palm, its edges biting into her skin like a promise. Almost home.

——-

Outside, the wind carried the scent of burning rubber and boiled cabbage—the perfume of a city learning to breathe again. Evelyn walked the cracked asphalt streets, her boots scuffing against the skeletal remains of yellow traffic lines. Around her, Cleveland struggled toward rebirth. Today, brand new establishments that still smelled of paint lined the busy streets. Three years before: makeshift shelters leaned against bombed-out buildings like drunkards clinging to one another. A gaunt woman wiped motor oil from a storefront window with her apron where three years ago she scrubbed bloodstains from the former shattered window with a tattered shirt. Two pre-teen grunts   tossed a football over a grassy courtyard where three years prior two children played hopscotch over the faded outline of a Chinese drone’s blast radius.  

Evelyn moved through it all like a shadow, her dark braid unraveling in the autumn wind. At nineteen, she carried the quiet beauty of a knife blade—sharp, purposeful, honed by survival. Her eyes, the color of wet asphalt, missed nothing: the tremble in a veteran’s hands as he accepted a bowl of broth, the way a young mother cradled her baby while staring at the horizon as if waiting for the sky to fall again.  

She missed Bolt’s dry commentary in moments like these. His sensors would’ve quantified the suffering—“Nutritional deficiency detected in 68% of subjects"—but his voice, that calm synthetic baritone, always carried something softer underneath. “Human resilience exceeds statistical projections."

Tommy missed him too. She’d seen it in the way he’d tinker with Bolt’s dormant chassis late into the night, his fingers tracing the Tesla insignia on the robot’s chest plate like a talisman. Some nights, when the nightmares got bad, she’d catch Tommy talking to Bolt’s silent form as if the AI could still hear him.  

——-

The apartment smelled of solder and hope when she returned.  

Tommy knelt amidst a nest of wires and tools, his hair matted over his forehead where he’d run nervous hands through it. Bolt’s chassis lay open on the workbench, his once-pristine white plating now scuffed and battle-worn. Over the past three years, Tommy had modified him in stolen moments—reinforced titanium endoskeleton, upgraded optics capable of thermal tracking, even a prototype laser defense system scavenged from a downed Chinese drone.  

But without the neural relay, Bolt had been a king without a crown.  

Evelyn pressed the component into Tommy’s grease-streaked palm. His fingers closed around it, around her fingers, just for a second too long.  

"You found it," he whispered, as if speaking too loud might break the moment.  

She nodded, her throat tight.  

The installation took seventeen minutes. Tommy’s hands never shook, not even when slotting the relay into the neural cradle with the precision of a surgeon. When the final connection clicked into place, the apartment lights flickered.  

Bolt’s optics flared to life—brighter than before, a deep cobalt blue laced with new gold filaments. His head lifted with a smooth, familiar motion, the servos in his neck whirring softly.  

“Diagnostics complete," he announced, and the sound of his voice after three years of silence hit Evelyn like a punch to the chest. “Memory core intact. Tactical databases updated. Hello, Tommy. Hello, Evelyn."

Tommy laughed, wild and bright, throwing his arms around Bolt’s shoulders. The robot hesitated—then carefully reciprocated the embrace, his arms humming as they adjusted pressure to avoid crushing human bones.  

Evelyn reached out, her fingertips brushing Bolt’s faceplate where the scars of old battles marred the smooth surface. "Welcome home," she said 

——-

She was halfway home when she heard it.  

Music.  

Real, unfiltered, living music—pouring from the city’s old PA speakers, crackling with age but unmistakable. A piano, slow and haunting, then the voice—breathy, autotuned to perfection, the kind of saccharine pop ballad that had dominated the charts before the world burned. “I’ll love you ‘til the stars burn out..."

Evelyn stopped dead in the street.  

Around her, the people of Cleveland froze mid-stride—a laborer dropping his load of scrap metal with a clatter, a mother gripping her child’s hand tighter, a pair of Resistance soldiers lowering their rifles. All of them tilting their heads upward like sun-starved plants, their faces slack with disbelief.  

It was her. Liza Moon. The most overplayed, overproduced pop idol of the 2030s, her holographic concerts once beamed into every shopping mall and subway station. Evelyn remembered the think pieces before the war—music critics bemoaning how her algorithmically-engineered hits represented "the death of authentic artistry." She remembered her older brother sneering as he changed the radio station. “This isn’t music, it’s ear cancer."

Now, the sound of that same overprocessed voice sent a tremor through Evelyn’s chest so violent she feared her ribs might crack.  

Because it didn’t matter that this was the kind of song people used to mock. It didn’t matter that the lyrics were trite or that the chord progression was recycled from a hundred other hits. What mattered was the way the melody curled around the ruins of the city like ivy reclaiming a crumbling wall. What mattered was the way her lungs seized when she realized—  

This is the first music heard publicly in five years.

The last time she’d heard any song, she’d been fourteen years old, sitting in the backseat of her parents’ car as the emergency broadcasts cut off the radio mid-chorus.  

Now Liza Moon’s voice wobbled through the corroded speakers, the audio glitching where the old infrastructure faltered. “Even when the world... (static) ...I’ll be your... (static) ...forever..."

Someone nearby began to cry—ugly, heaving sobs that sounded like they’d been trapped behind their teeth for a decade. Evelyn didn’t turn to look. Her own vision blurred as the chorus swelled, that once-derided hook now hitting like a bullet to the heart:  

“Burn bright, my love, don’t let the dark take you... (static) ...even if tomorrow never comes."

A broken sound escaped her throat. She remembered the day the bombs fell, how this very song had been playing in the food court where she’d been stealing fries with her friends. They’d laughed at the dramatic lyrics as they dipped fries in ketchup, mocking the way Liza Moon emoted like the world was ending.  

And then it did.

The static swallowed the final notes. For three heartbeats, the street hung in perfect silence. Then the speakers hissed, and a Resistance dispatcher’s voice cut in: “All personnel report to Sector 7 for ration distribution."

The spell shattered. People blinked, shook themselves, continued their trudging paths through the rubble as if they hadn’t just been gutted by a prepackaged love song.  

Evelyn stood trembling. Somewhere beneath the static and the war and the years, the ghost of that stupid, beautiful song still echoed.  

She broke into a run.  

——-

The communal garage hummed with the quiet symphony of resurrection.  

Tommy knelt beside his Tesla cycle, grease streaking his forehead like war paint, fingers dancing through a nest of rewired neural links. The bike—a Frankenstein's monster of scavenged military tech and pre-war engineering—thrummed under his touch, its modified power core pulsing like a heartbeat.  

“Left stabilizer alignment requires 0.3-degree correction," Bolt intoned from his perch on the workbench, his newly-restored optics casting a cobalt glow across the garage. The Tesla bot's chassis still bore the scars of their last battle—carbon-scored plating, a dented shoulder joint—but his voice was steady as ever. “Current configuration risks torque imbalance at high speeds."

"On it," Tommy muttered, reaching for a micro-adjuster.  

Across from them, Mitch and Reyes lounged on overturned crates, their boots kicking idle patterns in the oil-stained concrete. Reyes gestured with a half-disassembled pulse rifle. "You realize you've created a monster, right? Bike's smarter than you now."  

“Factual statement," Bolt observed. “My processing speed exceeds Tommy's by—"

"Yeah, yeah," Tommy interrupted, grinning as he tightened a final connection. The neural interface band around his forehead flickered in sync with the bike's diagnostics display. "Just keep running the safety checks, smartass."  

Mitch tossed a wrench between his hands, the metal glinting in the garage's flickering overhead lights. "Seriously though—you're gonna fry what's left of your brain with that rig. Remember Rodriguez? Dude's neural chip melted during that skirmish at the riverfront. Now he pisses through a tube and recites binary in his sleep."  

Tommy tapped his interface band. "Military-grade shielding. And I don't overclock like that dumbass."  

“Correction," Bolt interjected. “Your current neural load exceeds recommended—"

The garage door exploded inward with a metallic shriek.  

Evelyn stood in the sudden rectangle of daylight, chest heaving, her dark braid whipping like a live wire in the wind. The fading echoes of distant music clung to her like smoke.  

"You hear that?" she demanded, her voice raw with something Tommy hadn't heard in years—wonder.  

Bolt's optics brightened. “Audio analysis confirms live musical broadcast across citywide frequencies. Composition matches pre-war popular—"

Tommy didn't need the analysis. The melody reached them now—a ghostly wisp of synth and strings threading through the industrial groan of the garage. His hands stilled on the bike's frame. Somewhere beneath the static, a woman's voice soared about burning stars and forever.  

Mitch slowly stood, a wrench slipping from his fingers to clang against concrete. "Holy shit."  

Evelyn stepped forward, her boots kicking up little storms of dust. In her outstretched palm gleamed the final component—a Tesla Cycle-neural relay, its surface etched with circuitry finer than veins.  

But Tommy barely saw it. He was too busy watching the way the music made Evelyn's shoulders loosen, how her lips parted just slightly as the chorus swelled. Bolt pivoted his head, his optics capturing the moment with perfect clarity—the way the sunlight through the open door gilded the sweat on her throat, the tremor in her fingers that had nothing to do with fatigue.  

“The war is over," Bolt observed quietly.  

Tommy reached for Evelyn's hand, the relay cold between their palms. Outside, the impossible music played on.

“I know we have to make curfew but I just want to stand here listening to this all day,” he said.

Evelyn put a warm hand on his shoulder. “We need to make curfew, Tom,” she said.

“Yeah,” Reyes added. “Or else you gonna be standing here listening to music when the druggies come.”

Tommy stood slung over, specked with grease, lost in a musical daze.

“Doesn’t seem too worried,” Mitch laughed.

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Evelyn sighed.

——-

That night, the druggies came.  

They were scavengers, mostly—ones who hadn’t adjusted to Cleveland’s new order. They’d heard about the relay, about the tech Evelyn had brought back. They wanted it.  

Tommy was ready.  

He met them at the door of their apartment, his drone already hovering at his shoulder, its twin micro-guns humming to life. The lead scavenger—a gaunt man with yellowed teeth—froze.  

"You really wanna do this?" Tommy asked, voice low.  

The man hesitated. Then lunged.  

The fight was short. Brutal. Tommy moved with the precision of three years of boot camp, his drone darting like a wasp, striking pressure points, disarming, disabling. The scavengers didn’t stand a chance.  

When it was over, the last of them limped away, and the others in the building—people who had watched Tommy grow from a scared kid into this—nodded in silent approval.  

He wasn’t just a survivor anymore.  

He was a leader.  

——-

 

The tinny speaker above their bunk crackled to life at 0600 hours. "All personnel report to the YMCA for urgent announcement."

Tommy's neural implant pinged before the words finished, a jolt of adrenaline forcing him upright. Whenever it did that, Tommy felt like his body was a punch card. There was never any thoughts of going AWOL when soldiers had these American microprocessors cementing their boots to the ground, surveying their every move. The price for freedom. 

Beside him, Evelyn was already strapping on her leg armor, her fingers moving with military precision. Watching her activated something primal in Tommy, and he grabbed her thigh, pulling her close.

“They announced the war was over last month,”  she said. “I wouldn’t worry.”

“Who’s worried?” Tommy gulped. “I just wanted to look at you and appreciate you.”

“War is over, Tom. You’re going to get to see me so much you’re going to get sick of me.”

“Impossible,” Tommy whispered, drawing her in for a kiss, over some rambling by Bolt about there being a “non-zero probability.”

——-

They found a traffic jam in progress at the entrance of the YMCA. Three hundred soldiers, Resistance fighters, who literally had  drill and ceremony beaten into them, abandoned all that for quiet panic. The tension was thick in the air, the collective anxiety palpable. A quiet echo travelled down the boulevard to the YMCA-turned-Resistance fortification. Cars parked like parking lines were invisible and parking lots didn’t exist as a concept.

Tommy didn’t like it, the sight he had of the parking lot. There was barely any space for them to circle the lot and park their mini-van. He clenched his fists until his cheeks blushed. “What is going on today? What is wrong with everybody?” he murmured. Evelyn exited the van, and lowered her shades to make sure she saw what she thought she saw. She and Tommy shared a profound sense of disappointment.

“What is happening indeed,” she sighed.

Bolt's optics glowed amber in the dimness as he ran a tactical scan of the compound.  

“Unusual mobilization timing," the bot observed. “No scheduled drills or briefings for 48 hours."

“Everyone’s panicking.” Tommy spit on the floor. “Babies.”

The YMCA's basketball court stank of sweat and gun oil. Three hundred soldiers packed the space, their composite armor clicking as they shifted. 

Commander Voss then took the stage. She had the grim finality of an executioner mounting the scaffold.  All went quiet.

"The war is over," she announced. “But our work isn't done."  The hologram behind her painted the continent of North America in pulsating crimson. 

Mitch elbowed Tommy. "Told you they'd find us more targets." His breath smelled of synthetic coffee and nicotine gum.  

The red dots resolved into clusters - Chicago's ruins, the Appalachian dead zones, the burning Texas oil fields. 

“The red dots represent non-hostile Chinese remnants," Voss continued. "They are survivors like us. But they are still armed. Still dangerous."  

Tommy's stomach lurched. He'd seen "non-hostile" clearances before. The Resistance preferred the term over "unarmed surrendering forces."  When he was twelve years old he had seen it with his own eyes. “Non-hostile” Chinese soldiers. They didn’t believe in the war, but that didn’t spare their tan necks from the blood-soaked chopping block. Funny thing was: the final blow was delivered not by American warriors, but by the military tech of their own occupying nation. Operated by whom—who knows? After three years, the endless speculation had lost all meaning.

Evelyn's fingernails dug into his palm. Her lips moved soundlessly: Not again.   

———-

The armory line moved like a funeral procession. Tommy ran his fingers over the freshly-minted neural disruptor rifle - a weapon designed to fry implants without damaging flesh.  

"Clean kills," the quartermaster boasted. "No messy war crime tribunals."  

Bolt intercepted the data packet first. “Mission parameters confirm: Phoenix Sector, former Indianapolis metro. Estimated 200-300 Chinese holdouts."

Evelyn slammed her palm against the locker. "They're sending you to slaughter refugees."  

Tommy caught her wrist. The veins stood out like blue steel cables beneath her skin. "We'll take surrenders. Mitch's team—"  

"Will follow orders," Commander Keyser interrupted, his cybernetic iris whirring as it scanned Tommy's face. "Like good little patriots."  

Bolt ran final diagnostics on Tommy's neural link while Evelyn packed his field kit with trembling hands.  

“Interface stability at 98%. Recommend avoiding drone swarm synchronization beyond 7 minutes."

Tommy nodded absently. His gaze locked onto Evelyn's - the way her eyelashes caught the morning light, the faint scar along her jaw from the Battle of Cincinnati.  

"You come back," she whispered, pressing her forehead to his. "Or I'll march into hell and drag you out."  

Outside, the VTOL transports' turbines screamed like wounded animals. Mitch and Reyes were already loading up, their joke about "Chinese takeout" dying when they saw Tommy's face.  

———-

Tommy was deployed within hours.  

His squad was a mix of veterans and younger soldiers like him, all under the command of Special Forces Leader Jon Keyser—a grizzled ex-Army sergeant with a cybernetic eye and no patience for hesitation.  

"You follow orders, you live," Keyser growled as their transport rumbled toward the drop zone. "You hesitate, you die. Clear?"  

Tommy nodded.  

———-

The drop zone reeked of decaying skyscrapers. Tommy's boots sank into the moss-covered asphalt of what had been a suburban cul-de-sac. Bolt's thermal scans painted the ruins in false-color heat signatures.  

“Multiple life signs. No visible weapons. Concentrated in the Costco warehouse." 

Keyser's voice crackled through the neural net: “Eyes on, no shoot unless engaged. We take prisoners.”

The "enemy" were children.  

Not metaphorically - actual children, their ribs visible beneath threadbare uniforms, clustered around makeshift altars stocked with canned goods. The oldest couldn't have been fifteen.  

"Hold fire!" Tommy's command came too late.  

Mitch's squad opened up with neural disruptors. Tiny bodies convulsed as their implants overloaded. One girl's eyes actually melted, the ocular nanites boiling in their sockets.  

———-

 

The drones came at noon.  

First the Chinese units—sleek black shadows cutting across the sun. Then the American birds dropped from high altitude, their rotors beating the dead air into submission. The squad's neural nets lit up with friendly tags.  

"Contact front!" Mitch called out. His HUD painted forty-seven hostiles.  

The Condors opened fire.  

Mitch's head came apart. The top half of his skull spun through the air, trailing pink mist. His body stood for a moment, finger still on the trigger, before collapsing.  

Reyes turned toward the traitor drones. "FRIENDLY FIRE! FRIENDLY—"  

Tungsten spikes stitched across his torso. He looked down at the holes in his gut, at the coils of intestine sliding free. He tried to catch them. Then he fell.  

Tommy's drone engaged before his mind caught up. Lasers cut through the smoke. A Condor exploded, raining molten shrapnel. The smell of burning plastic mixed with the iron stench of opened bodies.  

“Combat efficiency at sixty-eight percent," Bolt reported. His torso-mounted lasers cycled and fired. A Fenghuang drone burst apart.  Tommy then knew the three years he had spent developing Bolt’s hardware updates had been well spent.

Overhead, an American drone moved in for the kill. “Since when do Chinese drones have Walmart logos on them?” Tommy yelled. 

Jenkins shrugged. “The enemy loves those everyday low prices!”

Keyser appeared as if from the ether and fired three rounds into the drone's optics. Glass shattered. "Since when do our own birds shoot at us?" he shouted at Tommy.

Jenkins didn't get to hear the answer. The 20mm rounds turned him into red mist against the ruins of a restaurant.  

Tommy's HUD flashed a damage alert. His drone's guidance array was hit.  

“Compensating," Bolt said. The targeting patch uploaded through the neural link.  

The explosion was bright and clean.  

Then the mech came.  

It walked through the shattered storefronts on hydraulic legs, its armor bare of markings. The mining laser mounted on its shoulder hummed to life.  

"Aw, come on," Keyser said. He ejected the spent magazine.  

The mech's speakers crackled. “Purge protocol initiated."

Tommy moved before the laser fired. He took Keyser down behind the wreck of a minivan. The beam turned concrete to steam where they had stood. The heat seared their lungs.  

“Survival probability twelve-point-seven percent," Bolt said.  

Tommy's drone dove at the mech's sensor array. The explosion blinded its optics.  

Bolt fired at the knee joints. “Target the actuators."

Keyser shoved thermite grenades into the waste port. The explosion made the mech shudder.  

The backhand sent Bolt through a wall. The impact left cracks in the concrete.  

Tommy fired the super-turret. The rounds sparked off the cockpit glass until one found a weak point. The mech jerked. It fell face-first into the street.  

Silence.  

Keyser spat blood. "What the hell was that?"  

Tommy pulled Bolt from the wall. The bot's left optic was shattered. His voice glitched. “We are... the bad guys now?"

The squad status display showed red across the board. Mitch. Reyes. Jenkins. All dead.  

The mech's cockpit hissed open. The pilot was a corpse wired into the controls, its skull fused to the interface.  

Tommy poked it with his boot. "Remember when we just fought the Chinese?"  

Keyser lit a cigarette. The flame trembled. "I remember. Bolt, hack their IFF. Find out who’s sending these orders."

Bolt focused his working optic on the console. “Remote command source identified."

The screen read:  

[COMMAND AUTHORITY: PANDORA STATION // CLEARANCE: BLACKWATER-OMEGA]  

Keyser exhaled smoke. "We just got fired."  

——-

 

 The retreat was chaos.  

The surviving soldiers stumbled back into Cleveland like ghosts, their uniforms caked in dried blood and hydraulic fluid. The streets, already choked with the stink of burning trash and desperation, now carried the metallic tang of fresh trauma. Rumors spread like wildfire—whispers in ration lines, frantic hand signals between guards, the occasional scream from someone whose neural link shorted out mid-panic attack.  

“The drones turned on us.”

“The mech was ours.” 

“Command sold us out.”

A private from Third Platoon started laughing at the mess hall and didn’t stop until medics sedated him. A sergeant lit the American flag on fire outside the barracks, watching it curl into blackened plastic. No one stopped him.  

Evelyn was riddled with anxiety anticipating Tommy’s return, but when he did his presence never settled for even a moment. He spent most of his week back in Commander Keyser’s trailer home on the base. Nights with Evelyn were quiet and tense.

———-

Then came the second deployment.  

No fanfare. No briefing. Just a list of names tacked to the board at 0400. Tommy’s was on it. So was Keyser’s.  

They dropped into the hot zone at dawn. The stench hit first—burnt hair and ozone. Then the flies.  

The first batch of dead Americans lay scattered around a drained swimming pool, their bodies arranged in a loose semicircle like they’d been mid-conversation when death arrived. No bullet wounds. No shrapnel. Just slack faces and trickles of blood from noses, ears, the corners of eyes.  

Keyser crouched beside a corporal, his knife flashing in the sun as he worked it under the man’s scalp. The neural chip came free with a sickening pop, its circuits blackened.  

"Cooked from the inside," he said, flicking the chip into the pool. It bounced once before sinking into the muck at the bottom.  

Tommy’s stomach turned. He’d seen that corporal two days ago, alive and bitching about the coffee. Now his skull was just another broken thing in a broken world.  

———-

The second site was worse.  

A field of corpses. American soldiers. Row after row, facedown in the dirt, hands clasped behind their heads like they’d been executed. But there were no bullets. No burns. Just the same eerie stillness, the same trickles of blood.  

Keyser rolled one onto his back. The dead man’s pupils were blown wide, his mouth frozen in a silent scream. The knife went in again, probing, digging. Another fried chip.  

"EMP," Keyser muttered, wiping the blade on his pants. "Someone flipped a switch and turned their brains to scrambled eggs."  

A crow landed on a nearby corpse, pecking at an unblinking eye. Tommy threw a rock at it. Missed. By the time he turned back around, Keyser had already removed his own personal neural implant with his blade. He flicked the chip to the ground, feeling woozy with a streak of blood running down his temple but managing to stay on his feet.

"Your turn, kid."  

The knife gleamed in Keyser’s hand, streaked with gore and brain matter. Tommy’s remaining eye watered as he took it. The blade was warm.  

He pressed the tip to his temple, just behind the hairline. The first cut was the worst—a sharp, intimate pain that made his teeth ache. Then came the digging, the probing, the awful *wetness* of it. The implant came free with a sound like a cork pulling from a rotten bottle, trailing glistening filaments.  

Tommy stared at the tiny metal devil in his palm. It had lived in his skull for three years. Now it was just another piece of trash.  

Keyser lit a cigarette with hands that didn’t quite shake. "Welcome to the resistance."  

The crow cawed, flapping away as the first drops of rain began to fall.  

“C’mon, kid. The squad is waiting.”

——-

 Tommy, Bolt and the Detachment Commander started to make their way back. Over the nearby hill waited the remaining members of their 12-man Special Operations Ghost Team. 

However, the trek back refused to be uneventful. They were intercepted on the road.

Not by enemies.  

By rogues.  

A convoy from Nashville, their vehicles marked with a symbol Tommy didn’t recognize—a broken chain.  

Their leader, a woman with a scarred face and tired eyes, stepped forward.  

"We’re heading north," she said. "To Canada. You coming?"  

Keyser looked at Tommy.  

The war was over.  

But the fight wasn’t.  

The Nashville convoy's trucks bore the scars of a hundred battles. Captain Rios's cybernetic jaw clicked when she spoke. "Canada's still free. For now."  

She extended her hand, a rectangular piece of cardboard— a makeshift business card—wedged between her finger tips. Keyser snatched the card like from her hand with one informal swipe and read the contents in silence. He then passed it under his arm to Tommy, who scanned it with watery eyes. A phone number with the words “HeyYouApp #” above it. At 16 years old, Tommy was born too late to experience a normal world with a rich culture of social media engagement. But he definitely knew of the encrypted chat rooms of the HeyYouApp from his military-issue smartphone.

Tommy then stared at the broken chain symbol below the phone number. Same as on the vehicles. The symbol of a Canadian underground escape route. Ahead lay either exile or another kind of war.  

The card fluttered to the bloodstained asphalt.  

“Decision matrix incomplete," Bolt warned.  

The card landed face-up on the cracked highway, its edges fluttering in the wind like a dying moth. Tommy stared at the smeared ink—*HeyYouApp #887-555-0199*—and the broken chain beneath it. A symbol that meant nothing and everything.  

Captain Rios didn’t blink. Her cybernetic jaw whirred as she clenched her teeth. "Tick-tock, kid. That EMP storm hits in six hours, and anything with a neural link turns into a walking microwave burrito."  

Keyser spat near her boots. "We don’t take orders from deserters."  

Rios’s laugh was a dry, hollow sound. "Deserters? We’re the only ones still following the damn Constitution." She jerked her thumb at the convoy—a ragtag column of welded-together armored trucks and stolen military transports. Through the slats of one, Tommy saw children’s faces pressed against the glass. "That’s the last free Americans you’ll ever see."  

Bolt’s damaged optic flickered. “Probability of Canadian sanctuary authenticity: 41%. Probability of elite retaliation within 90 days: 89%."

Tommy’s hand hovered near his sidearm. The Ghost Team’s survivors—what was left of their 12-man squad—were dug in behind the ridge. If this went hot, the math was simple:  

-Rios’s Convoy: 4 technicals with .50 cals, 30 armed civilians, 20 kids they’d die to protect.  

-Ghost Team: 3 operators (Keyser, Tommy, Bolt), 4 wounded back at the LZ, zero fucks left.  

Keyser’s cybernetic eye zoomed in on the lead truck’s modified turret. "M240B. Vietnam-era shit. You really think that’ll stop a Manticore mech?"  

Rios unslung her rifle and tossed it into the dirt. A gesture of trust, or a trap. "We’ve got something better." She nodded to a wiry man in the truck bed, who hauled open a crate. Inside, rows of EMP grenades glinted dully. "Scavenged from Pandora Station’s trash heap. Fry a mech’s brain at 50 meters."  

Tommy’s stomach twisted. Pandora Station. The name from the fried neural chips.  

Keyser lit a cigarette with his free hand, the other still on his rifle. "Let’s say we believe you. Why the fuck would Canada take us?"  

Rios smiled for the first time—a cracked, joyless thing. "Because you’ve got him.” She pointed at Bolt. "Only fully functional Tesla combat bot outside elite control. That’s your visa."  

Bolt’s vocal modulator emitted a sound like a record scratch. “I am not a commodity."

The wind carried the distant rumble of thunder. Not weather—drone engines.

Tommy picked up the card. The numbers blurred in his vision.  

Option 1: Run north. Let America burn. Live as a refugee in a country that might not exist in a month.  

Option 2: Go back. Fight. Die screaming when the invisible enemies flip the killswitch in his remaining squad’s skulls.  

Rios read his hesitation. "You’re what, sixteen? War’s over, kid. Only thing left is choosing what to bury."  

Keyser exhaled smoke through his nose. "Bullshit. War’s just gone corporate." He crushed the cigarette under his boot. "But I didn’t survive Beijing and Denver to lick Canadian boots."  

Tommy’s fingers closed around the card. The drone noise grew louder.  

Bolt’s remaining laser arm cycled up with a whine. “Incoming hostiles: 8 Condor drones, bearing 2-1-0. ETA 90 seconds."

Rios didn’t flinch. "Last chance to board the lifeboat, gentlemen."  

Tommy looked at Keyser. The old man’s grin was all teeth. "Fuck it. Let’s go full Texas Rising."  

The EMP grenades landed in their hands like communion wafers.  

The drones fell in a rain of molten metal. The convoy’s .50 cals chewed through two before the EMPs finished the rest.  

Keyser stood amidst the wreckage, bleeding from a shrapnel wound he’d deny having. "So. Canada."  

Tommy pocketed the card. The number burned against his thigh. Somewhere ahead, Evelyn was waiting with news that would change everything. Somewhere behind, the elites were building a new kind of war.  

Rios extended her hand again. This time, Keyser shook it.  

The broken chain on her shoulder patch gleamed in the dying light.  

——-

The safehouse stank of mildew and desperation. Evelyn sat cross-legged on their makeshift bed, cleaning her rifle with methodical precision when Tommy and Keyser slipped through the rusted service entrance. Bolt’s optics dimmed to a low amber glow—their agreed-upon signal for *compromised comms.*  

Evelyn didn’t look up. "They’re frying neural links in Sector 6 now. Two squads dropped dead at chow hall." Her fingers tightened around the cleaning rod. "Brains leaked out their noses like fucking candle wax."  

Keyser tossed the broken chain card onto the mattress. "Pack light. Wheels up in three hours."  

Evelyn’s hands stilled. The silence stretched like a noose.  

Tommy crouched before her, his knees popping. The words tasted like ash. "Canada’s our only play."  

Her laugh was a sharp, broken thing. "You sound like a surrender pamphlet."  

Tommy was confused. “What’s going on with you?”

The war outside raged on, but here, in this crumbling sanctuary, the future had just drawn its first breath.  

She tossed it without ceremony—the white plastic stick clattering between grenade pins and ration wrappers, its verdict undeniable. Two lines. One life. No going back. The war would end; this wouldn’t.  

“Congratulations, kid,” Keyser rasped. “Looks like she’s knocked the fuck up.”

Tommy’s world spun around him. The rest of the day was a blur.

———-

Tommy tried to focus—rations, ammo, Bolt’s spare power cells—but the city’s heartbeat thundered in his skull. The old woman rebuilding her bakery’s brick oven, her hands bleeding through the bandages.  The kids playing hopscotch over a faded drone’s blast radius.  Himself at twelve, digging through rubble for a family that would never come home.  

Keyser clocked his hesitation. "They’re dead either way, kid. Only question is whether we join ‘em."  

Bolt extruded a welding torch from his damaged arm. “I can modify the Tesla cycle’s signature. 87% chance of evading drone patrols."

Evelyn stared at the card’s smudged numbers. "And when Canada falls?"  

"Then we die free," Keyser said, lighting a cigarette off Bolt’s torch.  “And so does that little baby in your belly. It’ll never get a chance to grow up and learn it never stood a chance.”

———

Tommy’s hands shook as he stuffed medkits into his pack. The safehouse walls pulsed with memories. He thought of Evelyn pressing a kiss to his temple after the Battle of Cincinnati; of Bolt reciting pre-war poetry during blackout nights; the ‘snick’ of Keyser’s knife removing his neural implant.  

Outside, a reconstruction crew passed by singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ off-key.  

He remembered years ago, when thoughts of an escape were commonplace in his skull. Evelyn grabbed his wrist. Her nails drew blood. "Look at me." When he didn’t, she wrenched his chin up. "You’re really abandoning these people?"  

Today, the words tore free: "I am these people."  

Keyser exhaled smoke through his nose. "Christ. We’re not martyrs, we’re meat.” He tapped his skull. "And the elites own the slaughterhouse."  

———-

Bolt interfaced with the HeyYouApp server. “Encrypted route confirmed. Canadian border patrol has been... incentivized to ignore our crossing."

Evelyn’s eyes locked onto Tommy’s. "Last chance to save our family. Or stay behind and be a hero."  

The bakery woman’s face flashed behind his eyelids. The hopscotch kids. The ghost of his twelve-year-old self, screaming into the void.  

Tommy zipped the pack shut. "Heroes die stupid."  

Keyser crushed his cigarette. "Welcome to the real war."  

As they slipped into the night, the reconstruction crew’s singing faded into the hum of distant drones.  

———-

The smoking husk of Cleveland's command center told the story before they crossed the perimeter. Emergency lights strobed across the compound where Evelyn stood guard over a pile of burning neural chips, her face streaked with soot and fury.  

"You were right," she spat, kicking a smoldering helmet. "They purged everyone with Level 3+ clearance last night."  

Tommy's fingers brushed the ragged wound where his implant had been. Bolt's scanners painted a nightmare - thirty-seven bodies stacked like cordwood behind the mess hall, their skulls cracked open where chips had detonated.  

“Pattern matches Phoenix Sector casualties," Bolt confirmed. “Evidence to support theory of corporate termination protocol."

“The signs have been in front of our eyes since the beginning that this was a fraudulent war,” Evelyn insisted.

Keyser crushed a spent neural cartridge underfoot. "So what's the play, patriot?" His remaining organic eye gleamed with something darker than anger. "We gonna keep dying for ghosts?"  

“Is it better to turn your back on everything you ever knew; let millions die?” The butt of Tommy’s rifle dug deep into his chest. His voice echoed across the empty military base garage.

"You used to beg me to run to Canada!" Evelyn screamed, hurling a toolkit across the compound garage. The pregnancy test strip fluttered to the floor between them. "Now you want to march into another meat grinder?"  

“I was a kid when I wanted to run to Canada.” Tommy stared at the broken chain symbol on the card. "But now I know: if we don't stop this now, there won't be a Canada left." His boot crunched over the shattered remains of raided military tech. "When they’re done with America, they’ll come for everyone else.”

———-

The Tesla cycle screamed through the checkpoint at 0230 hours. Evelyn clung to Tommy's back, her belly pressed between them like a secret. Bolt's remaining arm clutched the super-turret as they outran the tracer fire.  

Rios's convoy intercepted them at the old highway interchange. The armored school buses bristled with welded gun ports, their sides spray-painted with the names of dead cities.  

"Welcome to the real Resistance," Keyser growled, hauling them aboard. The bus interior smelled of gunpowder and baby formula.  

Rios’ hands shook as she unspooled the data. The holo-display bloomed between them - schematics of Pandora Station, the neural control hub buried beneath Denver's ruins.  

"They're not just killing soldiers." Her voice cracked. "They're rewriting the survivors."  

The footage made Tommy vomit: rows of comatose troops wired into simulation pods, Chinese and American prisoners undergoing identical neural reprocessing, a familiar silver-haired CEO watching through one-way glass…

Mitch's last transmission played on loop: “They made us shoot kids... oh god they made us ENJOY it..."

———-

That night, as the Canada-bound company made camp under a sky choked with stars, Tommy pulled Evelyn aside.  

"We can’t go to Canada," he said, his voice raw.  

Evelyn stiffened. "Why not?"  

"Because this is where the fight is." He gestured south, toward Cleveland. Toward the Resistance. "If the elites are turning our own tech against us, someone has to stop them."  

Evelyn’s chest ached. "You’re talking about going back to a war we just left."  

"It’s not about war," Tommy snapped. "It’s about truth. The truth is, I never asked to leave my home at 12 years old. I never asked to watch my neighbors die, to have my country swiped away from under me.”

“You used to give me so much grief about wanting to escape to Canada, back in the days when I was blind. And now that I’ve woken up, I have a child growing inside me. Our child. I want to secure a future for us, for our child, for the human race. And suddenly you decide you’re Tommy the patriot and you want to be a hero?! A hero for whom? The invisible enemy, that’s who!”

He stared at her—the girl who’d dragged him through hell, who’d promised him a future. Now she was choosing freedom over the fight.

And he had to choose too.  

“You’re the one who made me believe in saving our country, Evelyn. You’re the last person I thought would turn their back on everything; when the fight was at its most crucial point.”

Evelyn crossed her arms in defiance; then suddenly collapsed on a nearby picnic table, seemingly defeated.

“I’m still fighting the same fight I always fought, Tom,” she said. “It has just progressed onto a different battlefield, that’s all.”

———-

They stopped at a derelict gas station just south of Lake Erie. While the others refueled, Tommy and Bolt scouted the perimeter.  

That’s when they found the drone.  

It was American—or had been. Its insignia was scraped off, its black chassis streaked with mud. Bolt pried open its casing, revealing a modified control module.  

“This unit was not acting on military protocols," Bolt said. “Its programming was overridden by an external signal."

Tommy’s stomach dropped. "By who?"  

Bolt’s optics flickered. “Unknown. But the signal origin is consistent with high-tier corporate encryption."

Corporate.  

Not Chinese. Not Resistance.  

Elites.

Keyser spat when Tommy told him. "Figures. War ends, and the suits decide they’d rather keep playing god."  

Evelyn’s face darkened. "The whole ‘clean-up’ mission was a lie!”

"Or a cover," Rios muttered. "They’re culling anyone who might resist their new order."  

Tommy’s mind raced. The neural chips. The drones. The mech. It wasn’t just about killing Chinese holdouts—it was about silencing anyone who knew too much.  

Including them.  

Evelyn was no longer playing around. She grabbed her boyfriend by the collar and stared into his eyes, into his soul. “The evidence is scattered all across the ground in front of you. Now you see with your own eyes. You see now there is a conspiracy by our own leaders to wipe out all the citizens of this country. You know Bolt wouldn’t lie to you, Tom.”

Bolt spun around and began to chime in his matter-of-fact tone: “well, actually, I am designed with a strategic communication protocol that—“

“Not now, Bolt.”

———-

The rogue convoy moved like ghosts through the ruins of Ohio, their electric trucks humming softly, headlights dimmed to avoid detection. Tommy sat in the back of a repurposed military transport, his fingers tapping restlessly against his knee. Across from him, Evelyn stared out at the passing wasteland, her face unreadable. Bolt stood motionless by the door, his optics scanning the horizon.  

Tommy leaned forward, his voice a low growl. "You sure about this?"  

Commander Keyser met his gaze. "No."  

That was the truth. Canada was a myth, a whispered promise—a land untouched by war, where the old world still clung to life. But after what they’d seen—drones turning on their own, soldiers fried by their own tech—myths were all they had left.  

The scarred woman leading the convoy, Captain Rios, turned in her seat. "We’ve got contacts across the border. Safe houses. No neural chips, no drones, no puppeteers."  

Evelyn’s grip tightened on her rifle. "And if that’s a lie?"  

Rios smirked. "Then we die free?”

The truck fell silent.  

———-

At dawn, the convoy reached the shore of Lake Erie. A rusted ferry waited, its engines groaning. Beyond it, Canada.  

Rios clapped Tommy on the shoulder. "Last call, kid."  

Tommy looked at Evelyn.  

She didn’t beg. Didn’t yell. Just held his gaze, her eyes full of fire and sorrow.  

"I can’t run," he said softly. 

Evelyn swallowed. "I know."  

“When I’ve completed my mission of saving the USA, I will come to Canada and find you and the baby.”

For a heartbeat, neither moved. Tommy pressed his palm to Evelyn's stomach and made his choice.  Then he turned and walked away, back toward the ruins of America.  

Keyser exhaled sharply. "You gonna let him go?"  

She watched him disappear into the morning mist.  

————

As Lake Erie's black waves swallowed the last lights of Cleveland, Evelyn finally opened Rios's dossier. The photos showed mass graves outside Nashville, a Chinese general and American senator shaking hands, as well as blueprints for something called "Project Clean Slate".

Evelyn's tears soaked into her sleeve. "We should have burned this whole country down years ago."  

————

Back on land, Tommy’s consciousness began to return to him for the first time in days. The big dark blur that had clouded his mind was easing into a big light blur.

Bolt's damaged vocal modulator crackled: “Analysis suggests 72% probability Canada has already been compromised."

“I just sent my family off to die so I can save the world, Bolt.”

The ferry engines groaned like dying animals. Somewhere ahead, either sanctuary or another war waited. At home, or what was left of it, Tommy prepared to search for like-minded heroes that wanted their country back; the years-long nightmare to end. He prepared to fight.  

ATILA