Jace was not slower than her sisters and brothers, Max realized later when she thought back. Of course not. None of Lydecker's kids were stragglers or runts. They were soldiers.
But there are different kinds of soldiers. The X5s themselves realized this, and so did Lydecker, Max was sure, although he treated them with scrupulous equality and pretended not to see their individual strengths and weaknesses when it suited him. There were Zack and Eva, officers among officers. And then there was Jace, who peeled apples stolen from the mess on her bunk in one long strip, who watched the shift changes of the big armed ordinaries who guarded them more carefully than the others and always knew when to lower her voice, but who hummed unconsciously while she oiled the parts of her gun. Jace, who never talked back, who sometimes looked up when her designation was called with a flash of something shy and furtive in her eyes that was almost surprise.
And Max. Max was like Jace, always called little sister, even though they were each exactly the same age.
Max left Manticore because every time it happened, she seized worse and for longer, and she knew what that meant. She left Manticore because Zack stared right at her when he gave the signal that meant come, and she could see that he knew.
Max left Jace, too, Jace, whose small hands were always steady whether disassembling a grenade launcher or picking a lock or putting a cool palm to your forehead after lights out.
Zack didn't look for her face in the dormitory window -- none of them thought to. She was so quiet, it didn't hurt them until later.
---
In the woods outside Manticore, Lydecker lays two fingers to her and can feel no pulse under the skin.
"Max Max Max Max!" Cale says, her body cradled in his arms. Lydecker can see the stricken look on his face as the servomotors whine and strain. Lydecker isn't sure what it is that Cale has rigged for himself since the last time they met, but it's not as good as a pair of working legs. 452's additional weight is too much, and the kid seems to know it like a punch in the gut.
"She's gone," says Lydecker, looking at her familiar face. 332960073452. He wants to whisper it to her like a secret she doesn't know. Sometimes he feels like her barcode is tattooed under his skin, too.
He understands too well what it means to abandon her here. To his ex-collegues inside, 452 is only several million dollars of R and D, laid out on the ground. Who knows what they will do for the sake of that money. More than he and Cale can, for all their love, separate and opposed.
They have no choice but to leave her. Lydecker will knock him out if he has to. For Max.
---
Max wished she could have taken his body. She wasn't as sorry about killing him. It was what Ben himself said that he wanted, and more importantly, it made tactical sense. There was no way she could carry 185 pounds of X5 far enough and fast enough to keep them both alive. She would remember the snap and the feel of the rounded back of his heavy skull suddenly loose in her palm afterward, like a bowling ball in a sack, but there was a look of relief in Ben's eyes as she lowered his head to the ground, and that was part of her memory too. What bothered her -- for reasons sentimental and otherwise -- was having to leave him after.
She wanted to bury him, there in the woods. In a perfect world, she would have laid him out for the Blue Lady, left him resting, arms crossed over his chest, on a ledge in a cool, dry cave, like the Indians had done, and his body would have dried, his dead lips curling back to reveal his white, perfect teeth.
Barring that, it would have been enough for her to have had time to dig a hole and cover him up with dirt. She had saved her brother from psy ops, or the basement nomalies, but in the end, she couldn't save him from the lab. 185 pounds was just as heavy dead, see. Leaving him like that, type-AB blood warm in his veins, organs ripe for harvest, made her feel sicker than snapping his neck had. Max wished she had the small comfort of knowing that the insects and animals took him, but they never had a chance to ruin the body she left behind. Manticore was the scavenger beast who would assimilate his parts.
She ran. It was tactics. It was self-preservation.
She wasn't a soldier any more, but Max wasn't sure what she had become.
---
She is so beautiful, Logan thinks, that she cannot possibly be dead. Her eyelids are translucent, lovely, mother-of-pearl. He cannot bear to think of the way she drew her brows together in the last moments as her lips parted and she failed to speak. There was something that she always wanted to tell him. Logan doesn't dare to guess, but the thought burns all along his spine. He never wanted to see her cry.
Logan has been shot, and he remembers what it feels like. Sam Carr and Bling may talk all they want about traumatic amnesia and the physical inability of his nervous system to carry messages to his brain from the site of his injury -- he knows how it feels. He cannot bear to hold her in his arms like this without being able to take her away from the place that she most hates, but they are in the middle of the goddamn woods outside Gillette, Wyoming, far from anywhere Eyes Only has pull.
Logan knows where the nearest medical facility is. Fifty impossible steps away to the the perimeter. He needs to bring her inside, where -- no matter what, don't think about it -- they will know how to care for her.
He can't even lift her. He can't take her anywhere. As he feels the blow from behind, he thinks fuzzily, resignedly, I will have to leave her.
---
Once, Brin couldn't think of any solution but to wait for the black helicopters to swoop down for her. Max and Zack stood in the shadows, in the swirl of dead leaves and trash, and watched her shape on the park bench, understanding. None of them wanted her to die. Max vowed that she would come back for Brin. She had never thought that Brin would be a different person.
The Brin in the Manicore corridor, purposeful stance, funereal in a black special ops sweater and black fatigues, was a different person. She looked like the man who raised them, Max thought. No. She looked like someone Max didn't even know.
Brin was a fighter, always had been. She was willing to do whatever was necessary, just like Max. It was how they were trained. Max took her down.
At times, Max worried that her life outside the wire had made her soft, that she had become too willing to compromise. Sure, everything she learned at Manticore was twisted and wrong, but what did it say about Max's character that she threw it all away so quickly? She left Manticore -- everyone and everything she knew there -- and in the years that followed, she left every foster family, every city, job and acquaintance, without a second thought or a second look. As soon as it was compromised.
That word again. Compromise.
Until she met Seattle, home of Jam Pony, her Space Needle, her Boo. Home of her conscience. Home.
This terrible institution -- those walls -- she wanted to burn them down. Part of her screamed heresy, but there could be no compromise. Nothing could get in her way, not Ben's DNA or Eva's. Not Brin.
What kind of person leaves her sister handcuffed to a pipe in a building that she is about to blow up? Max didn't know.
She could think about it later, after it was all over.
---
"-- should've said something a long time ago," says Max. She feels one arm under her bent knees, another supports her head. She can't see anymore. Her lips won't form the words. "Logan," she says. She can still calculate reliable probabilities. She is not going to make it.
She knows what will happen. They will bundle her body into the van, Logan and Lydecker and Krit and Syl, and race off into the Wyoming night while behind them, Manticore burns unchecked. They will cry for her, when they can, and they will remember the important things she has done over the last year, the person she had made herself, in the end. She is not running barefoot through the snow, it only feels like that, light and cold.
Inside, they could use her for parts or maybe even save her, but she does not want to be saved. She does not want to stay and be remade like Jace and Brin, her lost sisters. She wants to go.
Logan's dear arms are shaking, and she can hear Lydecker's deep, familiar voice saying something she can't make out. Max is sorry for the X7 who killed her, who will be left here alone.
She needs them to take her with them. Logan knows that, because he is smart and brave and he loves her. He would never.
fin.