Searchlight
Leona: "Fuck."
I said it quietly at first.
Then, as the helicopter's rotors grew louder beyond the hills:
Leona: "Fuck, fuck, fuck."
I didn't need a detective to work out who had called them.
Mom.
Maybe Kira had discovered the open window first. Maybe she'd gone upstairs looking for me, found the empty room, the missing laptop and the collar sitting beside the old family photograph. I could imagine the exact moment her usual sarcasm would have disappeared. Kira could be cruel, but she wasn't stupid. Six missing spider drones, Dad's staff gone, tools missing, no phone, no Leona. She would have understood immediately.
But Kira wouldn't have called the Authority.
Mom would.
I sighed heavily, adjusted the backpack against shoulders already bruised from the fight and started moving again.
I couldn't even be angry with her properly.
That would have been easier.
Elara Voss had spent ten years rebuilding her life around obedience.
People who knew Mom later, after everything she became, sometimes had trouble understanding that. They saw the woman who could eventually tell governments to go fuck themselves with a smile and grow forests through military installations if sufficiently irritated. They didn't know the version of her I grew up with.
Dad had been the one who questioned things.
Dad argued with forms. Dad read contracts before signing them. Dad wanted explanations. If an Authority officer said a regulation was necessary, Dad wanted to know who wrote it, why they wrote it and what evidence they had used. He wasn't rebellious for the pleasure of it. He simply possessed the inconvenient belief that institutions were made of people, and people could be wrong.
Then Dad died.
Mom lost the man she'd followed through most of her adult life. She woke from an accident in a body she hadn't chosen, with a ten-year-old daughter beside her who had also lost her legs, and an eleven-year-old sick child waiting at home who needed someone to explain why her father wasn't coming back.
She had a farm to run.
Two daughters to raise.
A completely new body to learn.
Medical appointments.
GHCA registration.
Insurance.
Hybrid dietary requirements.
Feed orders.
School.
Bills.
Repairs.
Grief.
There were too many decisions.
So Mom discovered the easiest survival strategy available to her.
When the doctor said something, she did it.
When the Authority sent a form, she filled it out.
When the feeding specialist told her what to order, she ordered it.
When the GHCA said Kira was Civil Class, Mom accepted it. When it said their new bodies were safe, she believed them. When officials told her Dad had died in the crash and there was nothing left to recover, she believed that too.
Obedience made the world smaller.
Rules meant someone else had already made the decision.
I understood that better later.
At twenty-one, crawling through wet Texas brush while an Authority helicopter searched for me, my understanding was considerably less philosophical.
Leona: "Thanks, Mom."
I ducked beneath a low cedar branch.
One of my rabbit ears escaped the hood and caught on it.
Leona: "Ow. Fucking... everything."
I pulled the ear free and kept moving.
The helicopter was still northeast of me, but getting closer.
I imagined what had happened at home. Mom entering my room. Seeing the collar. Seeing the empty compartment where the spiders had been. Panicking.
Not because she'd decided I was livestock trying to escape.
Because her daughter was one meter tall, F-Rank, medically fragile, freshly discharged from the hospital and wandering alone through rural Texas at night.
She would have cried.
Definitely.
Mom cried when chickens went missing.
Then she would have called the people she'd been taught were responsible for situations like this.
The Global Hybrid Classification Authority.
Elara: "My daughter is missing."
They would ask for my identification.
Elara: "Leona Voss."
The file would open.
Twenty-one years old.
Recent emergency conversion.
Leporidae, dwarf variant.
Domestic Class.
Food Production subtype.
F-Rank.
Post-traumatic rehabilitation incomplete.
No combat ability.
Then someone would notice the most important line.
ESCAPED DOMESTIC.
I hated how easily I could imagine it appearing in red.
Maybe Mom genuinely believed they'd pick me up, put a blanket around my shoulders and drive me home.
Maybe that was exactly what they had told her.
Don't worry, Mrs. Voss. We'll bring your daughter back.
They might even mean it.
That was the complicated part.
Not everyone working for a terrible system was secretly sharpening knives.
The helicopter crew might contain decent people. The pilot might have children. The search officer might genuinely be concerned that a tiny rabbit girl was bleeding to death somewhere beside a road.
This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.
They could find me, rescue me, hand me back to Mom, and still ruin my life without anybody involved believing they'd done anything wrong.
I climbed over a low limestone shelf and nearly fell when my left leg failed to clear it.
Spider Four stopped ahead and rotated its camera toward me.
Leona: "Not. One. Word."
It resumed scouting.
I kept thinking.
If the Authority had sent an actual helicopter, somebody had considered me worth recovering.
That was interesting.
Not reassuring.
Interesting.
A routine escaped Domestic report in a rural county didn't necessarily justify aviation fuel, especially at night. Helicopters weren't cheap. Thermal cameras weren't cheap. Pilots weren't cheap.
Maybe the timing mattered. Fresh medical conversion. Missing vulnerable patient. Severe trauma history. They didn't want the liability of a recently discharged rabbit being found dead twenty kilometers from the farm.
Maybe Mom's classification mattered.
Elara Voss was B-Rank.
Civil.
Registered lamia.
Farm owner.
Taxpayer.
Widow.
Kira was Civil too.
Two Civil lamias calling about their vulnerable Domestic family member probably earned more attention than a rancher reporting that one rabbit hadn't come back from a field.
That thought made me feel sick.
Maybe they weren't searching because I mattered.
Maybe they were searching because disappointing two Civil predators created more paperwork than losing one Domestic rabbit.
Then another possibility occurred to me.
My education.
My records.
My old projects.
My grades.
My technical certifications.
The things I'd done legally, at least.
The government knew I was an engineer.
Maybe somebody had actually read farther down the file.
Domestic Class did not prevent employment. It simply made employment wonderfully economical for everyone except the Domestic.
There were federal technical placement programs.
Corporate partnerships.
Research contracts.
Special aptitude programs with names designed by people who had never once worried about being assigned to one.
They could put me somewhere.
A laboratory.
A maintenance division.
A defense contractor.
I could design drones for twelve hours a day while receiving housing, meals and a salary so low an ordinary Civil intern would laugh at it.
Someone in an office could describe that as a wonderful opportunity.
Look, Leona. You're much too intelligent for agricultural work.
As though I were supposed to be grateful that my brain had earned me a more comfortable cage.
And then, ten years later, a new director could take over.
A budget could change.
A program could be consolidated.
The rabbits could be transferred.
My hands tightened around the bent staff.
Leona: "Nope."
The helicopter's searchlight appeared behind me.
Not directly.
A white glow moved against the underside of distant clouds, then vanished behind a ridge.
Too close.
I tapped the tablet.
Leona: "Spiders. Tight pattern. Passive only."
Five movement indicators acknowledged.
Spider Five remained strapped to my pack, damaged beyond scouting.
The surviving units changed formation immediately. Instead of fanning far ahead, they moved through cover twenty to thirty meters around me, hopping between shadows and vegetation.
Their thermal sensors became my eyes.
My own night vision wasn't particularly special beyond the modest low-light improvement of rabbit biology, but my hearing was becoming useful.
I hated admitting that.
The helicopter wasn't just sound anymore.
I could hear differences in it.
Rotor pitch as it banked.
The change in engine load when it climbed.
The slight shift as it turned south.
I stopped.
Listened.
It was sweeping.
Not flying directly toward me.
Good.
That meant they didn't have my location.
Yet.
I left the ranch road immediately and entered heavier vegetation.
The terrain became miserable.
Good.
Misery was cover.
The low hills west of Lampasas fractured into limestone rises covered in juniper, oak and thick scrub. Normal people avoided walking through that at night because normal people enjoyed retaining skin.
I had armor.
The outer plates scraped branches. My torn poncho caught twice. The backpack caught three times. Every few minutes I had to stop and gently free an ear from something designed by evolution specifically to annoy me.
But overhead visibility dropped drastically.
The helicopter could have the best thermal camera in Texas and it still couldn't see cleanly through rock.
Trees were less reliable, but layered canopy, uneven ground and residual moisture from the storm complicated thermal imaging.
I knew that because I had stolen a very expensive technical report about aerial thermal surveillance when I was seventeen.
Crime pays educational dividends.
Another sweep of light crossed the sky behind me.
I crouched automatically.
The rabbit instinct wanted a hole.
For once, I agreed.
A dry creek had cut deeply through the hillside ahead. I slid down the bank, landed badly and nearly collapsed when my bruised ribs protested.
The spiders followed.
The creek bed gave me cover on three sides.
I moved along it west.
Slowly.
One hour.
Then another.
The helicopter never completely disappeared.
Sometimes it faded until I convinced myself the search had moved elsewhere. Then, ten minutes later, the distant rotor returned and my ears pivoted toward it before I consciously heard anything.
I started hating helicopters.
That was new.
Storms still ranked highly.
Spiders excellent.
Helicopters could go fuck themselves.
Dawn was still hours away, but the night no longer felt endless. The moon had shifted noticeably. My tablet's battery sat at sixty-three percent. My own battery felt closer to four.
I ate while walking.
Nutrient bar in one hand.
Bent staff in the other.
The first bite tasted like compressed cardboard sweetened by somebody who had read about chocolate but never personally experienced it.
Leona: "Fantastic."
Spider Six climbed onto a rock ahead.
Its thermal camera rotated.
Nothing.
Again.
Nothing.
I had been sending increasingly broad search requests whenever the helicopter moved far enough away.
Find structures.
Metal concentrations.
Artificial heat.
Subsurface ventilation.
Power emissions.
Radio leakage.
Anything.
Nothing.
Texas contained a staggering quantity of abandoned human infrastructure when you weren't looking for anything useful.
Collapsed sheds.
Old wells.
Rusted agricultural equipment.
Concrete pads where buildings no longer existed.
Two empty hunting cabins.
A buried septic system Spider Three became extremely enthusiastic about until I checked the chemical sensor.
Leona: "No."
The drone stood beside the access cover.
Leona: "Absolutely not."
It rotated its optic.
Leona: "We are not escaping government oppression through a septic tank."
I moved on.
Ten minutes later the helicopter passed closer than ever.
The sound filled the valley.
I dropped flat beneath an overhanging limestone shelf and pulled the poncho over my hair.
The spiders froze wherever they stood.
White light swept across the ridge above me.
Slow.
Bright enough to turn night into an artificial afternoon.
I stopped breathing.
The beam moved through trees.
Across exposed rock.
Closer.
My heart hammered.
The rabbit part of me wanted to flatten into the ground until bones became optional.
I pressed my cheek against cold stone.
The light reached the far edge of the creek.
Stopped.
My eyes widened.
Rotor pitch changed.
The helicopter circled.
Leona: "No, no, no..."
Very quietly.
The searchlight returned.
It crawled along the opposite bank.
Closer.
Twenty meters.
Fifteen.
I could hear something through the helicopter's external speaker, distorted by distance.
Authority Loudspeaker: "...Leona Voss..."
My stomach dropped.
Authority Loudspeaker: "...this is the Global Hybrid Classification Authority. Your family has reported you missing. You are not in trouble."
I nearly laughed.
Of course I wasn't.
I was Domestic.
Trouble was for citizens.
Authority Loudspeaker: "Remain where you are and signal the aircraft. Medical personnel are standing by. Your mother is waiting for you."
That one hurt.
Mom.
I could picture her in the kitchen. Coiled too tightly around herself. Eyes red. My collar probably still on the desk upstairs.
Authority Loudspeaker: "Leona, if you can hear us, you are considered medically vulnerable. We are here to bring you home safely."
I closed my eyes.
For maybe five seconds, I wanted to stand.
Not because I believed them.
Because I was exhausted.
Every muscle hurt.
I'd killed three people.
Two drones were broken.
My clothes were torn.
I smelled like blood, dirt and fear.
Mom had pie. Mom would hold me. Kira would call me an idiot. I'd sleep for fourteen hours.
Then next week Mom would put me on a scale and record my weight for the Authority.
My eyes opened.
No.
The searchlight moved again.
Past me.
It climbed the bank.
The helicopter continued west.
I waited until the rotor noise faded.
Then another minute.
Then two.
Leona: "Move."
The spiders came alive.
So did I.
Painfully.
I kept west, deeper into the hills.
The night's beauty had mostly abandoned me by then. Moonlight was just enough illumination to trip over things. Trees were obstacles. Limestone was something designed to damage ankles. Every kilometer became something I had to steal from my own exhaustion.
But the farther I moved, the less likely Mom's helicopter was to find me.
Mom's helicopter.
I knew that wasn't what it was.
It felt that way anyway.
I wondered whether she was sitting at the kitchen table waiting for a call.
I wondered whether Kira was angry.
I wondered if she had found the missing feed record from the barn and realized I'd passed within meters of her while she ate.
That thought almost made me laugh.
Almost.
My tablet vibrated.
I ignored it. Another vibration. Different pattern. I stopped.
Spider Three.
Search result.
I stared at the screen.
ANOMALOUS STRUCTURE DETECTED
My exhaustion vanished for perhaps half a second.
Leona: "What?"
I opened the feed.
Spider Three was nearly forty meters ahead at the base of a wooded limestone rise. Its low-light camera showed rock, brush and the remains of an old wire fence.
Nothing else.
I zoomed.
Leona: "That's a hill."
The drone had detected metal.
A lot of it.
Not surface scrap.
Behind the limestone.
I switched overlays.
Magnetic anomaly.
Artificial geometry.
Spider Three moved along the slope.
The readings followed.
Straight line.
Then a corner.
Then another.
My pulse increased.
Concrete behind natural rock.
Reinforcement steel.
Something buried inside the hill.
I forgot the helicopter.
Forgot my ribs.
Forgot being tired.
Leona: "Everyone converge."
The spiders changed direction.
I limped toward Three as fast as my body allowed.
The old fence had almost disappeared into vegetation. I found the remains of a sign beneath vines, so corroded I could barely read it.
Most of the lettering was gone.
Only fragments remained.
PROPERTY OF ARCA...
Below it:
BIORESEARCH DIV...
I touched the metal.
My fingers trembled again.
Not fear this time.
Behind me, somewhere far to the east, the helicopter turned.
Its rotors became faintly audible once more.
I looked at the buried structure.
Then at the sky.
Leona: "Come on."
For the first time all night, one of my spiders had found something.
Now I just needed whatever was buried inside that hill to be worth running from the entire world for.