Free In Heaven and Earth by Amy Rae Durreson

war…”
    He stopped himself,
sickened. It was still too easy to defend her, to remember the
general he would have followed into hell, the president he had
idolised. “I trusted her,” he said instead. “She helped me. Because
of her patronage, I was at the top of my field, with opportunities
no one else my age had. All she asked was that I support her
publicly, tell people that they could survive without
implants.”
    “ I saw the news
clips,” Chanthavy said. “You were eloquent.”
    “ I believed
it,” he said. “I never had her religious convictions, but I had
seen what could go wrong. I do still think we are over-reliant on
mechanical enhancement. I would hate to see another Hyperion
Proxy.”
    “ Is that why
you performed those operations?” Meili demanded. “Because you
believed they would be better off without their eyes or their limbs
or—”
    “ I was given
consent forms,” he snapped. “For every operation I performed, I was
shown written consent.” He took a deep breath. “I should have
insisted that I speak to every patient first, but there were so
many of them, and the president said they wanted discretion, and
the whole system was clamouring for a return to… I was wrong. I was
stupid. I should have asked.”
    “ How did you
find out?” Eskil asked.
    “ Ahrima took me
on a visit to a convalescent hospital. It was a media event, all
scripted, but my cousin was ill, so I slipped away from my minders
to contact her. While I was there, I stumbled into a side ward, saw
a man I recognised from my table, and went to ask after his
recovery.”
    “ And he told
you the truth?” Meili breathed.
    “ He had no idea
who I was. He was blind. I had taken his eyes. I didn’t know who he
was, what it meant until he started to curse the bastard who had
crippled him.”
    “ Who was
he?”
    “ His name was
Jonah Imasuen. He was one of the leaders of the opposition party.
The media had been told he had left Rigel.”
    They knew the rest, the
horrible truth that had come out over the next few months, Ahrima’s
prisons and asylums, the way her opponents had been treated, the
forced operations and silenced critics. “I investigated. Found out
what was happening. Went to Alpha Centauri and begged them to
listen. Testified. And here I am. Can we change the fucking subject
now?” He didn’t want to talk about betrayal any more, not Ahrima’s
of him or his of her.
    “ Sure,” Meili
said. “Shitty time, shitty situation, shitty leader. Damned if I
know what I would have done in your place.”
    “ Of course you
do,” Reuben said bitterly. “Everyone knows better than I
did.”
    “ Easy to say if
you’re not living it,” Eskil said, and Meili nodded
shortly.
    “ So, what now?”
she asked, staring at him. “You’re the tough one. Are we just going
to sit and wait to die? Can’t we fight?”
    “ Fight what?”
Eskil said. “We have no weapons, not to use against them. We’re not
soldiers, Meili, not even Cooper here.”
    “ I’d rather
fight,” Reuben said and rubbed his forehead. “Is there any way we
can isolate the nanites within the city?”
    “ It should be
possible to put up barriers between districts,” Meili said. “That’s
what you’d do in a contagion, to minimise the spread.”
    “ If this was a
viral outbreak, how would you approach it?” She was the expert on
contagious disease.
    “ Stop any
movement out of infected areas,” she said grimly, “which is what
they’re doing with us, and then get inoculated medical teams in
there to treat the sick. Develop a vaccine.”
    “ Don’t think
there is one for this.”
    “ We’re the
medical team on the ground,” Chanthavy said. “We have no patients,
though.”
    “ Safe disposal
of bodies is a priority in a bad epidemic,” Meili said. “We could
look at that. Perhaps it would work better to think of it as a
forest fire. We need to create fire breaks, deprive it of
fuel.”
    “ We need to
break the city apart,”