The Same Hands

I was a corporal in the Eighth Pacification when I first held one of them.

You have to understand: by then I had killed eleven of them. We had been told they were not human. We had been told they were a different species — engineered by an enemy regime in the southern hemisphere, but not, themselves, human. We had been shown, in our weekly briefings, the genetic charts that proved this. The DNA was, our briefers said, modified beyond recognition. There were extra base pairs. The chromosome count was different. They were human-shaped, but they were not human, and we should not feel about killing them what we would feel about killing humans.

This was, I would later learn, untrue.

But I had killed eleven of them, and I had not, at the time, felt about it what I would have felt about killing humans. The genetic chart had done its work.

This is the story of the twelfth.

She was wounded in the thigh when we found her — a clean shot, missed the femoral artery, but she had lost enough blood that she did not have the strength to crawl. We found her behind the burned shell of a vehicle in what had been, before the campaign, a small market town. The vehicle was one of theirs. She was wearing one of their uniforms. She had a sidearm, but it was empty and she had thrown it aside. She was perhaps twenty years old.

My orders were to detain a live one, if possible. We had been short of detainees for three months. The interrogation officers wanted them.

I knelt beside her. She watched me with the kind of attention you get from a wounded animal — not afraid exactly, beyond the part of fear that comes from knowing. Just watching. I told my squadmate Reyes to bring the medical kit. I tied a tourniquet above the wound, three fingers above the entry point, the way we had been taught. She did not flinch when I tightened it. She did not look away from my face.

When I picked her up — to carry her to our vehicle — her arm fell across my chest. Her hand, palm-down, came to rest against the back of my neck.

It was a warm hand.

It was a human hand.

I had known this, at some level, every time I had encountered one of them. The hands of the dead were, of course, hands. But the dead do not put their hands on you in the way the living do. The dead are objects. The living, even the living-from-an-engineered-species, are something else.

Her hand rested against my neck for the seventeen seconds it took me to walk her to the vehicle.

I do not remember the seventeen seconds clearly.

I remember what came after.

In the vehicle, in the field hospital, in the detention compound, she did not speak the language we had been told she would speak. She spoke a dialect of my own language — coastal, southern, a little archaic. I asked her, finally, where she was from. She told me the name of a village forty kilometers from where I had been born.

She told me she had been bred for the war.

She did not say it as a metaphor. She said it as a fact.

She told me — over three days, in the small back room of the detention compound where I was the only soldier present, because the interrogation officers had not yet arrived from the capital and Reyes had been redeployed and the corporal who had been assigned to the room was sleeping off a flu — she told me that she had been gestated in a facility outside the village. She had been one of seventy-four children gestated in that batch. The DNA had been modified, she said, but only in three loci, and only superficially. She had been raised in the facility for fourteen years. Then she had been issued a uniform and a serial number and assigned to a unit. Her commanding officers had told her that the war was against an enemy who had bred them in tanks because the enemy could not, due to a genetic catastrophe, produce children of their own.

Her commanding officers had told her, in other words, that I was the not-quite-human one.

I had been told the same thing about her.

We sat with this, in the detention compound, for some time.

"They lied to both of us," she said, finally.

I said: "Yes."

She said: "Did your people make you in a tank?"

I said: "No."

She said: "Mine did. But I was made out of something. They had to start with something. Do you think it was — "

She did not finish the sentence. She did not need to.

I had not been told, when they recruited me, that the genetic modifications introduced into the engineered enemy had been derived from — among other things — the cell lines of military volunteers, harvested decades earlier, during the previous war, under medical pretexts that no one had ever bothered to explain.

I had not been told that the enemy was, in a real and traceable sense, a continuation of my own people, modified just enough that we could be told it was not.

I had not been told.

I had not, in fact, been told most of what I now knew. I had been told the genetic chart. I had been told the DNA was modified beyond recognition. I had been told that I should not feel about killing them what I would feel about killing humans.

Of these, only the last had been almost true.

I am writing this thirty-one years after the campaign.

I am writing this from a small house in a village forty kilometers from where I was born — the same village she was bred in, as it happens. The facility is gone. They tore it down in the third year of the truce. The land was returned to the village, and the village planted vegetables on it, and the vegetables were unusually good for several years, because the soil had been carefully managed for a long time and was very rich in everything plants need.

She lives next door to me.

We did not arrive at this by any straight path. I was court-martialed, after the war, for refusing to testify against her. She was held for nine years in a facility for what they called the post-engineered cohort, which was the polite name they had finally settled on, after much debate, for the people they had bred and could not now legally classify as anything else. We did not see one another for those nine years.

When she was released, she came to my house. She knocked on the door with the same hand that had once rested against the back of my neck.

I have not yet figured out, in the thirty-one years since the campaign, what we are to each other. We are not lovers. We are not exactly siblings. We have, I think, the kind of relationship that two people have when they have both been told the same lie by the same people and have both come, separately and at terrible cost, to the same true thing.

We have lunch together on Sundays.

We grow vegetables in the soil where she was made.

We do not, when we speak about the war, speak of what we did. We speak of what we were told, and of who told us, and of what they wanted us to do, and of why.

The list of what they wanted us to do is, I think, the largest indictment of our species I have ever encountered. The list of what they told us is the second largest. Between those two lists is the place where we now live, the two of us, with our shared garden, in the village where she was made and where I was not, but which has, in the thirty-one years since, become as much hers as it has ever been mine.

Her name is Inta.

She has the same hands as my mother.

I never told her this. I do not need to. She knows.