“We’re going to make it, Shola Ricks.” Groff believed it too. The pain fell away. He was lighter than air. He would save Shola Ricks where he had failed to save Ju all those years earlier. He would repair the girl, as he had failed to repair so many in the infirmary and the secret cells inside the zoo of the medical suite. He would watch her grow and laugh and live, somewhere rain fell.
At his wrists, there was a tiny click of twisting metal. Groff felt a cold rush of dread. He was a few short steps from the open mouth of the gunner. Giving the riser wagon a last, tremendous push, he felt it leave his grip just as the twin gel cylinders at either wrist bit in. He plunged face-first into the dust and skidded forward. Gravel pocked his cheek. Blood trickled over his hands, the pain and the terror of what was happening threatening to block out his world. Groff fought through, clinging on for a few more precious seconds. I’m on my way back to that nightclub in Nilreb, he thought. I’ll hear Ju sing and I’ll catch his eye, as I did before, and together we’ll share the sunset.
Tears slipped down his cheeks as he measured out each slowing heartbeat. His eyes strained against the vivid blue until a shadow blocked his view, arm raised and revealing the shape of a beater in sharp silhouette.
I’m coming home to you, Ju, thought Groff with his last breath. At last, I’m coming home.
Twenty-Nine
Mohab and a few brave others risked the gunfire to shoulder the riser wagon. It had rammed tight between the doors as they were sliding shut and now was wedged in the entrance, doors reverberating as they repeatedly attempted to close. Alarms pulsed all around as the Vary dodged rock shot and struggled to prise the wagon free. Trapped with its mechanism still in motion, the wagon juddered and roared, egesting smoke and filmy gas.
It was Mohab who clambered up into the wagon and found the girl. Or what had been a girl once. Her ears were stitched and distended, alongside which her pointed chin, orange eyes, and reengineered limbs told Mohab that she was one of Doctor Harris’s experiments. Groff had tried to save her.
Mohab had been shouting encouragement at the nurse when the guard stepped out from his crouch position alongside a gravel pile. It was the officer who had beaten him so savagely on his very first day. The man’s face had been carved into his mind, as deeply wounding as the nicks that had bled Groff dry. Mohab had seen the truth of what had happened though; the final blow came from the officer’s beater.
The wagon pitched and growled under him. “Jump out!” he shouted to the hybrid girl. “This wagon will be crushed between these doors or pushed back out at any moment.”
The girl stared up at him with wild, glittering eyes. He saw rage in the twist of her savage mouth. Sorrow too in the knead of her paws against her belly.
He reached out to her, but she skittered backwards to the far corner of the wagon. Either side, the doors inched apart and slammed back in. The hybrid child powered down on her limbs and sprang forward and up, causing Mohab to fall backwards in case her fangs were meant for him. She landed on the rim of the wagon, glanced down at Mohab and then launched herself back out into the sunshine.
Mohab made a swipe for her and missed. He wriggled round to see her hit the ground in a crouch and start running. In six strides, she covered the ground between the gunner and Groff’s body, kicking up ash like a sandstorm. Mohab saw the officer turn, beater raised and tipped with brain matter. The man didn’t get the chance to bring the beater down on the hybrid; with her new-made fangs exposed, the girl sprang at the guard. Her claws sank into his face while her jaws ripped into his arm. The guard tried to defend himself, but his arm was partially severed. The hybrid’s claws tore the officer’s eyes out before slicing up his breastbone.
Looking down on the scene, Mohab lurched between joy and nausea. The doors buffeted either side of the wagon, pulling him back into the present. “Push this wagon free if you want to see your wives and children again!” he shouted, clambering back into the hull. So many men had already succumbed to the bullet fire. He hoped the remainder were enough to man the gunner’s weaponry. First though, they had to get the doors shut, and quickly. More National Guard vehicles were approaching from the main camp. The artillery fire from the watchtowers was relentless.
“You need to take us up, Kali!” he cried at the top of his lungs. He didn’t get a reply. Had the comms unit taken fire? “You need to take us up!” He ran at the inside door, banged on it with the flat of his hand, tried to force the handle. The door didn’t budge.
Staring wildly about, Mohab’s eyes fixed on a large crank wrench in the hand of a dead prisoner. He grabbed the wrench and fired up the crank teeth until the power bar in the handle buzzed green.
“Open up you bastard!” He rammed the wrench into the door seal.
xx
Lieutenant Kali Titian had witnessed the blind prejudice and rabid violence against the Vary. She had witnessed and taken part in it, and never once had she questioned doing so because her father was High Judge Titian and his word was law. More than that, she was Bleek and the National Guard had fought long and hard to bring the Vary vermin under control.
Only, her day at the Killing Fields had changed everything. Seeing oceans of bodies rotting in the sun had peeled her soul back from her centre. There was light above, fire and darkness below, and air between, and, everywhere, there was death. The world had shifted on its axis for her that day. Standing on the precipice. Sweat dribbling down her back like blood.
A similar sensation took hold of Kali now. Staring at the reflection walls on the bridge, she saw the women and children assembled in their yard and knew why.
“What’s blocking the doors?” she cried into the comms unit. “I have to take us up. I need the weapons manned. I need the weapons manned!” A screen showed her the interior of the hull where a large object blocked the double doors and men scrambled to free it. Without weapons, the gunner was a floating refuge for a lucky few, but otherwise useless.
Kali slammed a fist against the control console. She only had one option and that was to watch. Watch as she had done two years before in the Killing Fields. Watch and feel her lungs and heart and gut liquefy.
Out at the wide-open space of the yard, guards assembled behind the women and children. Seconds stretched. The guards held up their arms, brandishing wrist cuffs. Do something! Kali demanded of herself. Tears flowed down her cheeks and burned like molten lava. Do something!
She chose to create a new option. She chose to fly the ship. Revolving the thrusters, she forced the entire framework to contract and buck against the tide of its momentum. The gunner roared as the rings reversed, its tessellated skin crashing into and over itself. Out the corner of her eye, she saw the interior of the hull in the monitor. The riser wagon wedged in the doors pitched forward and upended. The doors ratcheted closer by a foot. Men tumbled in free motion under the whistling pressure of the open hull. Kali winced but kept the gunner at a tilt while driving forward. Spectroimages showed her all that was occurring a few hundred metres below, where the watchtowers sparkled with bursts of rapid fire. Kali ignored the assault, even as the console pulsed with warning lights. The gunner, so recently repaired, was being stoned to death. Ammo tore up and under the skin of the ship. But Kali stayed true to one aim: Stop the Guard. Halt the bloodshed.
The gunner ripped and yawed around her, eating up the space between the quarry and the yard. In the reflection walls, she saw the factory – huge and grey and wreathed in the smoke of the dead. She saw the infirmary where the bodies of the Sisterhood were spread amongst those of the guards and prisoners. She saw the sweat cans of the barracks and the dome of the Officers’ Quarters and the gravel pits and the remnant bunkers where shorn hair and shoes were stored. She saw the two rows of slice-wire with the walkway in-between; from that height, the fences looked like scars upon the land. She saw the ash covered ground and bone stacks and, at the far edge of the desert, the glass-sheet towers of Geno. If she hadn’t grown up there under the care of her grandmother, she might
have mistaken the city for a mirage. To see civilisation so close to the camp’s barbarity almost broke her on the inside. The need to save the lives of the same Vary she had once despised lifted her above the sadness. There, above the twin watchtowers at the gates, the two antennae jutted towards the sky. Between passed the invisible current which controlled the prisoners’ nicks.
On the assembly yard, stood front of centre, was Commandant Superintendent Joltu; Kali recognised his silhouette. If she’d had access to the gun system, she would have floored him. Wasn’t that meant to be her final revenge? To penetrate him, as he had her, with terrible, inevitable violence?
She saw a first wave of Vary women and children sink to the ground, writhing in a bloodbath. A second wave fell, and a third. Kali fixed her gaze on the dalma plates. She drove the gunner at Abbandon’s twin towers and prayed the enslaved had strength enough left to break down walls.
Thirty
Twice in his life, Mohab had sensed the knife’s edge between death and consciousness. The first instance had been the guard’s assault on him when he stepped off the wagon outside the gates of Abbandon. The second instance was struggling to work the crank wrench as the gunner pitched and jolted. He was thrown hard against the inner door, the great hull echoing around him, inky and booming. Men screamed. The wagon upended between the groaning outer doors. For a split second, it was the single most terrifying experience of Mohab’s life. The air itself seemed to splinter. Beneath him, the crank wrench wormed its way into the seal and the inner door opened very slightly. The sudden switch in pressure sent him tumbling away, vacuumed towards the outer doors and the upended wagon. His spine slammed hard against the riser steel at the base. The gunner rose and fell on a tidal rush; Mohab felt the wagon shunt free of the outer doors and then he was falling, away from the dark into the blinding blue. Wind buffeted around him, hot and hard like slaps from a hand. The great bowl of the gunner soared away and left him clinging, helpless and petrified, to the sides of the falling wagon.
He thought: This is my end. I am the space between words.
With gut-curling, manic desperation, Mohab located the power latch between his two stretching fingers. He punched a fist against the latch, felt the filmy blast of heat beneath the riser steel, and jarred every bone in his body as the wagon slowed and righted just short of the ground.
Damp with horror, his eyes followed the path of the gunner overhead. He would never make it back on board, never man those colossal guns and burst the camp’s banks… A creeping inertia spread through him as he set the wagon down. The gunner travelled on a steep trajectory, heading straight for the watchtowers and their rapid firepower. No halting, no retaliation, only a strong and steady course as the ship itself became a weapon.
Was it in him to regret the choice foisted on Kali? Was it in him to feel sorrow for the men to be lost or Sister Eva, tucked into a corner? The gunner hummed on its eternal pivot, careered into the first watchtower and then, by proxy, took out the second. The noise was catastrophic. Stone turned to dust. Metal bowed and ripped. Fire tore up the broken ship, which slid sideways and rammed the ground, carving up a great wave of ash.
In its wake, the remains of the watchtowers crumbled.
All of his life, Commandant Superintendent Joltu had excelled, first as a student and later in the Bleekland National Guard. He and Kali Titian had shared that much in common. Now, as the towers fell and the Vary were no longer constrained by their wrist nicks, he excelled once more. This time, in making it to a solar jeep and out the camp gates before Kali brought the gunner crashing down. Because who else could have manned the craft, no matter how unsuccessfully? He had seen the hull doors left wide open, and maybe he and Kali alone had understood the consequences. Perhaps, in the end, the Vary had sent Kali to her death after all.
At his back, the gates and fallen towers of Abbandon were aflame, the remains of the gunner sprawled half in, half out of the camp like a slain beast. With the vast expanse of the desert spreading out ahead of him, Joltu had no idea if he was saving himself by fleeing the camp or delivering himself into Demonia’s bowels. Through the thin stonewool taupe stretched over the roof bars of the jeep, he could already feel the sun’s heat razing down. Flames at his back, flames above. And now, as he drew away from Abbandon, it became a blot on a smooth grey landscape, receding to a distant drift of smoke.
His eye became distracted by something running parallel to his vehicle, fifty or so feet away. At first he took it to be a young tiger dog – stripes yet to form and plunging along on its powerful limbs. But then the creature turned its head aside while running and he was forced to confront the godless truth. A child’s face, corroded by re-stitched flesh. A fur pelt welded to her prepubescent body. And ears – tall, twitching, their tips feathered. Rotating to home in on every sound.
The fox girl steered east to Joltu’s north – heading out to the true wildness of Bleekland’s splinter zones and lava rivers. Joltu blinked against the tears which threatened.
“I’m sorry,” he said to the abhorrent silhouette bounding away.
He wished he could have voiced something similar to Kali. But she was gone and Joltu realised he was utterly alone. In that moment, his single wish was that Doctor Tristan Harris might learn how it felt to be strapped to the gurney and dissected that evening, curtesy of the liberated Vary.
Hoping the pair of canteens he had taken from the body of a water boy would last, Commandant Superintendent Joltu maintained a course for the horizon.
Thirty-One
A gorge had opened the length of the lawn. Against the verdant green, it looked like a rotting scar. Once, Grizmare might have felt dismay at the fact. Today she felt very little, except, perhaps, a quiet arrogance because the lawn no longer mattered. In fact she had gone so far as to demand the sprinklers be turned off. The gardeners didn’t listen, of course. Hers was a Titian residence; the upkeep of house and gardens was a matter of state pride. There was also the matter of her being under house arrest and not a soul listening to a word she said any more. Even her medication was prescribed for her without consultation. The tiny green pills pressed upon her morning and night kept her in a fog. At their strongest, they transported her back into a room where she was surrounded by huge lettered blocks spilling words, and where the spark of her cane against the keystone destroyed the world around her.
“I have always been a disruptive influence,” she muttered, mostly to herself as the new paid companion, another nun, spoon-fed her pills. “My son believes he is all powerful, but he is a leech. A parasitic worm!”
“Not a traitor, though,” said the nun. Lips dry as leather. A flick of spit at her chin. “Grandmother like granddaughter. A vicious betrayal. Lord Gothendore will shear your soul in two, mark my words.”
Words… They were meaningless. And also lethal… The fresh dose of meds kicked in and Grizmare felt as if she were floating away from herself, a faintly nauseating sensation. “I wish Kali was here now,” she said softly. Her hands felt like mechanical pieces in a puzzle.
She had been dozing when the nun woke her with a firm shake of her shoulder. Grizmare took a moment to come around, struggling to part her eyelids and find the saliva to lubricate her mouth.
“A visitor,” said the nun. She left the room as quickly as a fleeting shadow.
A few moments later, a new figure entered the room. Grizmare blinked in the effort to focus her eyes; the medication had eased off to a slight, dull headache now she had slept. She was surprised to see Harriot Zoorbiah. It felt like a lifetime ago that she had endured the woman’s idiotic prattle on the steaming rooftop of the Red Orchid Hotel.
Harriot still dressed like an oversized sagging infant in ribbons and bows. Her hair was royal blue today and she brought with her the smell of red cherries and apricots – at least Grizmare thought she did. Or was it a hangover from the drugs?
“Grizmare! Oh, my dear, you look as pale as Demonia’s own corpse! Have you been eating? Should I order you quail? Or
perhaps a rack of stock ribs? You may be in need of the marrow to restore your ailing constitution.”
“I am well enough, Harriot. Enough with the fussing. Take a seat or show yourself out, I don’t mind which.”
“Now then, Grizmare. I know you don’t mean that. Well, you can’t mean that, can you? It’s not as if you were overrun with visitors even before you committed treason. Now..? Well, I doubt you entertain more than once a week!”
“You are my first visitor,” said Grizmare choppily. Better to get the admission out in a rush!
“Is that so?”
Harriot gingerly sat down on the chair opposite – the one Sister Eva had once occupied. Grizmare experienced a pang of loss. What had happened to the young woman, she wondered?
Out loud, she said, “How is Morantha?”
“The countessa has been confined to her apartments ever since your arrest.” Harriot played with the lacy hem of her sleeve. “The authorities believe you and she may have been in league.”
“Fucking imbeciles! Morantha was always more inclined to sell her soul for a chance at sharing company with High Judge Titian than turning against him. It’s the only reason she and I were friends.” It was untrue. Moratha had, at times, been a genuine support to her, including when Kali was arrested. Grizmare sighed and rubbed her temples. “I’m sorry to hear of Morantha’s troubles. I would protest her innocence, but who would listen?”
Harriot appeared to be staring through the wall of smoked glass-sheet at the ruptured lawn. “The horrors bubbling underneath finally broke through, I see.” She shifted uncomfortably in her seat.
Grizmare nodded towards the blackened rift. “You are safe in here, Harriot. This property was designed to absorb tremors. The floors are reinforced against heat surges.”
Rise Page 21
