# V: Blue.

::/ Dushanbe, Tajikistan.

::/ May, 2104.

::/ Edane Estian.

Fluid gurgled out of Edane's ear, dripping to the market's cobblestones. Part of the pool growing beneath his face.

Red.

He struggled to turn over. He couldn't hear properly. Voices were going too fast or too slow for him to understand, and automatic rifles kept roaring in coordinated bursts of electronically assisted over-the-horizon fire.

None of it made sense. Edane didn't understand. He couldn't roll over.

Pushing furiously at the cobblestones with his left hand, he fought to lever himself up, his fingers slipping in his blood, until the searing pain in his right side finally eased and he thumped over onto his back.

The gurgling noise in his right ear stopped. Had a clogged, underwater feeling instead, but his left ear was clear. He blinked, once. People were running by him, over him, shadowy in the corners of his vision. Something went pop in his ear and Edane felt the hot trickle start all over again.

The sky was blue.

Blue.

He blinked again. Didn't see the people, for awhile, or feel his armored collar digging into the back of his neck. Just saw the sky. The last wisps of smoke -- from the mortars, it had to have been airburst mortars -- were blowing away, leaving the sky a pure blue.

Edane had never seen anything so blue. Never. It was too bright for words. It made his eyes water. He didn't have words for anything like this, but he'd never had anything like this to try and tell anyone about. Never seen a sky so blue.

Blue.

He reached up toward it, but couldn't reach. Something was wrong with his right arm. Edane wanted to touch the blue, to hold it, to breathe it.

Someone stood between Edane and the sky. A little boy, with pale-pink skin, but not the pale-pink of a European, and he wore a skullcap over his dark, messy hair, so the little boy had to be Tajik.

The little boy stared at him, wide-eyed, and stepped around the pool of Edane's blood, frightened of it, skipped over something else, and made his way to another man's side. The man was already dead, and the little boy got his shoes dirty. The little boy pulled at the dead man's bloody shoulder, looked into his face, and lost interest, letting him go as he started looking elsewhere, calling "Papa?", his voice somewhere distant and to Edane's left, even though Edane was looking right at him.

Edane let his head sag. Saw something lying on the cobbles a little way away, between him and the dead man.

Oh. That was what was wrong with Edane's right arm. It was over there, on its own on the ground, and he was over here.

Edane looked down at himself, but he couldn't tell what was his ballistic armor and what was flesh and what used to be flesh. There was too much blood.

He stretched out his remaining hand, trying to reach, even pulled at the cobblestones, thinking he could drag himself, push with his legs, but he wasn't strong enough. His boots just slid over the slick flagstones. Edane felt like he might start crying -- not because he was in pain, or because he was tired, or because he was going to die, but because he couldn't quite reach his right arm's wrist, couldn't even reach the limp fingers to drag it closer. He didn't want to lose it.

There was a foot next to him. Not his. Someone else's. A tall man. A local. He blocked out the sky, his silhouette made larger by the loose white clothes he wore. Everything about the man, except his dark beard and eyebrows, was clean and white. He bent over Edane, reaching for him, but hesitated, fingers twitching.

"Hey, hey! What are you doing?" Edane's brother said, the words repeated a moment later in Tajik by an automatic translator.

The man in white looked up. He stared in amazement, and pointed to Edane's chest. "He has a medical kit. People have been hurt, they need aid." The words came back, in English, from Edane's own translator. Just in his left ear. Not his right.

"There's a first aid station at the gates! Now get off him."

"They are busy with the worst cases, the gates are far, his medical kit is right here, and there is a person bleeding right in front of you!" The man in white pointed savagely at a woman behind him. "Now take his kit and give it to me, he is dying anyway, and I cannot touch him."

Edane, and his brother, both looked at the woman the man had pointed at. She wore a scarf over her head, face exposed -- not the fully concealing clothes some of the locals wore -- and blood was trickling down her face. Scalp cut. Those bled a lot.

"It's a minor injury," Edane's brother snarled.

"She is a person, he is a dog. Now give me his medical kit. I cannot touch dogs."

Edane's brother kept snarling, his teeth exposed, putting a wrinkle down the length of his snout. He touched the grip of his rifle. "Fuck off," he growled, ears back flat against his helmet, tail trembling in warning.

The man in white spat -- leaving a bubble of white foam in Edane's blood on the market stones -- and left.

Edane saw the sky again.

Blue.

Edane's brother knelt in the blood, pulling at Edane's uniform for a better look, and swore. "Edane's down!" he yelled. "I need the EM-STAB!"

"Coming up!" another of Edane's brothers answered.

"The fuck did that come from?" A fourth asked, watching the sky with nervous twists of the head.

Edane wasn't sure which of his brothers was over him. Or which one was fetching the EM-STAB kit. One of them had to be Sokolai. One of them had to be Esparza. Edane couldn't remember which of his clone brothers were scheduled to patrol Tajikistan's markets with him that day.

"It's going to be okay," Edane's brother said, hunching over him and blocking out the sky. Edane struggled, but he couldn't even move his head enough to see past his brother. Couldn't even do more than shiver, like he'd been running too hard and his muscles were spasming.

Edane's brother pulled open Edane's chest-pocket medical kit, and sprayed a mockingly small amount of coagulant foam over the wound. Hands weren't enough to stop the blood flow, nor was the second tube of foam. The skinplast patch did fuck-all, and there wasn't enough left of Edane to secure a tourniquet to.

Sokolai -- Edane saw the pocket name-patch, printed black-on-grey -- tore off the front panel of Edane's armor, throwing the ballistic fabric and plating aside, then cut away his shirt with snub-nosed trauma shears. When he saw what he didn't have left to work with, Sokolai rolled Edane onto his side and lay on him, hip jammed into the crater where Edane's shoulder used to be, trying to staunch the blood under his body-weight.

"Where the fuck is that EM-STAB kit?" Sokolai screamed.

On his side, Edane couldn't see the sky anymore. His nose was wet in the mess of his own blood, and he wasn't strong enough to lift his head. Couldn't even reach out to try and get his arm back, either.

Edane hurt.

If the sky was pain, instead of blue, Edane hurt more than the sky was blue. And the sky was bluer than anything.

Something drooled off the pointed tip of his ear, it popped, and then he couldn't hear anything on the right side of his body anymore.

Edane went to sleep.

He missed the sky.

He woke up with Sokolai on his chest, and a new, almost pathetic spike of pain as Sokolai pushed a bonepunch needlegun up against his sternum and it spiked into him with a noise like a gunshot. "You still there, Edane? You still there?"

Edane tried to answer, but nothing worked. His head rolled to the left, muzzle hitting the wet stone, and he saw one of his brothers beating a man in western clothing to death, gore clinging to the red-brown fur of his brother's fists.

"Esparza! What the fuck are you doing?"

"He's the fucking artillery spotter!" Thump. "It's the fucking journalist! He's the one calling in the mortars!" Thwuck. "He was taking pictures of us, he was taking pictures of Edane -- he stepped outside the gates a fucking minute before the strike! I saw him!" *Thuck. *

"Stop it Esparza, you're killing him!"

Esparza ignored their brother, and rammed his fist into what was left of the journalist's face. The journalist tried to fend him off. Esparza was six and a half feet tall, gengineered for strength out of a dog's DNA, and had been learning how to throw a punch since he was three years old. The journalist was maybe five ten, skinny in that underfed refugee way, and badly hurt.

Esparza kept hitting him.

The journalist stopped moving.

Esparza kept hitting him.

Edane managed to look down at himself. Blood oozed around a tightly packed crust of coagulant foam running down his right side. Two needles were in his chest, both sticking out of his sternum, one connected by a trailing tube to a packet of synthetic blood plasma and platelets one of his brothers was massaging to push the fluid into Edane's body. Sokolai was fitting a syringe to the second needle. Orange-red fluid. BorGlobin, to help keep his tissue oxygenated.

Sokolai finished pushing in the first syringe, threw it aside, and broke open the top of another and pushed it against the port tipping the bonepunch needle.

Esparza kept hitting the journalist.

Edane let his head lull to the right, and the gurgling noise came back. He wasn't deaf. That was good, but there was a problem.

"What's that?" Sokolai dipped his head.

Edane tried again.

"I can't hear you."

"Hurts," Edane croaked.

"Oh fuck. Fuck. I forgot to give him painkillers." Sokolai kept pressure on the second syringe, pushing the BorGlobin into Edane's bones -- and from there into his blood -- as fast as the needle could take it.

Another of Edane's clone brothers came and helped, slipping a much smaller needle into Edane's arm.

The pain was still there.

Edane looked up at the slice of sky he could still see, and it was still so very blue, above the red-stained stone.

Esparza stopped hitting the journalist.

It started to hurt less.

The sky was very blue, but Edane couldn't keep his eyes open.

Edane's mothers danced together on the kitchen floor. They were very tall, so he must have been very young. Maybe seven years old, eight? It was soon after they adopted him, anyway. Soon after the Emancipation closed the barracks.

Beth and Cathy were barefoot, in their nighties, and looked very strange and very different and soft. They had explained to Edane who they were, and what their job was, and Edane hadn't believed them at first. It seemed absurd that anyone's mission profile would be to raise children, especially since Edane had been able to get food at the creche and wash and dress himself ever since he could remember. And he still couldn't understand why they wanted to be called 'she' and 'her', didn't even know what those words -- she, her, mother, woman -- meant. None of it made sense.

They moved gracefully together, like they were rehearsing how to throw a punch or something, but there wasn't any violence to the motions and Edane had no idea what the point of the exercise was. They were smiling at each other, while funny noises played, like language -- music, he knew. Edane hadn't liked music then, and he liked it a bit now if it was the right kind, the kind that his mothers were dancing to, but when they'd been that tall he hadn't known what music was.

Cathy's bare heel skimmed the kitchen tiles, which were covered in Edane's blood, but she didn't get any on her. Beth laughed, grasping Cathy's waist, spinning her around and around and around until they both stopped dead, staring down at Edane.

"Daney, are you alright?"

"I'm hurt, Cathy."

"Oh, oh baby. Call me ma. It's okay. It's going to be okay. You've just hurt yourself, there's nothing scary about it." Cathy knelt down in the blood covering the tiles, and picked Edane up. Held him, while Beth came in from the back, wrapping her arms around both of them.

Edane didn't understand why either of them held him, but his mothers did a lot of strange things. His mothers' kind of strange was okay.

"Daney. Oh Daney. Were you running? Are you alright?"

"I'm hurt real bad, Beth."

"Call me mom. God, look at that, Cathy -- has he broken it?"

"Don't be ridiculous, Beth, he's just skinned his knee."

"That's a skinned knee?"

"It's just been bleeding a long time. Why didn't you say anything, Daney?"

Edane bled into Cathy's nightie, slicking it to her skin with his blood. "They hurt me. They blew me up with a mortar bomb. They hurt me, mommy." He felt tears prickle his eyes. He'd only cried twice in his life before. Only called his mothers 'mommy' once.

"It's okay, Daney. It's okay. We'll put skinplast on it. Can we skinplast him without shaving his knee?" Cathy asked, looking at Beth.

"God, I don't know. Maybe?"

"The little boy didn't want to touch me. None of the Muslims like me. They hate me and they hurt me, mommy."

His mothers clung to him, kissed his forehead and ears -- he really didn't understand why they did that, but it felt good. "It's okay, Daney. It's okay. It's time to come home now."

"Time to come home, baby. Come home." Beth took her turn holding him, and his ruined shoulder drew slick trails across her torso.

"But I'm not ready to come home." Edane's head swam. "I'm not finished yet."