by K. C. Finn
He eyes me over Cornell’s head, and I nod. When Goddie turns to resume his duties, the tip of my rifle butts Cornell’s back. He turns suddenly, lunging his head forward like he’s going to try something, but I’m swift enough to duck and take him out under his feet with a sweeping blow. Cornell lands on his back, and I grab his collar to drag him back into the corrugated building. Back into one of the interview rooms where Sheila and Bartlett used to vet their new recruits.
“What the hell are you doing? You said we could go!”
“I say a lot of things,” I reply, pointing my gun casually. “Sit there.”
Cornell takes a seat at the desk where Sheila once asked me my name and cut my hair. The razor is still sticking out of her desk drawer, and I wonder how many others she’s tidied up, or helped to disguise, over the years. She let Boy call himself Malcolm not so long back, a ludicrously bold move, and yet she’s managed to stay undercover here right up until our surprise bombardment. I trail a fingertip along her desk, looking at her computer and her scribbled notes. Cornell spends the time watching the business end of my gun, squirming in his seat, and exhaling loud, deliberate sighs.
“I hear you’re the man to talk to around here, Cornell. You know a lot of things about this place, and what goes on around it.”
He narrows his dark eyes, clutching his bound hands in his lap.
“I wouldn’t tell you anything even if-”
“Oh, I think you would,” I cut in. “That’s why you’re leaving, right? Because you’re afraid to stay here.”
Cornell sniffs. “I’m loyal to the Governor.”
I just nod at that, my expression level. “Because she promises to protect you? How’s that working out for you and your buddies here?”
The boy is thin-faced, and his cheeks turn even more hollow when he smirks.
“You wouldn’t be so smart-mouthed if I didn’t have these binds on, bitch.”
I roll my eyes. Inside, it’s hard not to wish that Cornell hadn’t been one of the two hundred or so kids who are willing to stay and co-operate with us, but sometimes you have to face facts. I walk to the two doors of the office, securing the one that leads to the outer corridor, then the one that leads to the decontamination pods. Once they’re locked, I take off my rifle and slip it into the long top drawer of Sheila’s desk, right next to the shaver. I walk to Cornell, and a little red light flashes in my head.
This is what he wants, for me to untie him so he can make his break. But there’s more than one wish circulating inside my lively mind. Whilst the practical side of me just wants a quiet life, there’s still that shuddering, heat-filled feeling under my skin. The one that made me tip those beds and scream and cry last night. When I reach for Cornell’s bonds, the young man eyes me up. I don’t know what I must look like to him, dressed in a copycat of his own Legion’s fatigues. Maybe he thinks the Bullet Girl is all for show.
The second his bonds are off, Cornell makes a move to smash me back against the desk. I swipe to the side, letting him barrel into the edge of the metal counter top himself, and then I grab the dark hair at the nape of his neck and smash his face right into the table. I have no words for how good it feels, for the surge of power and the sick tang of guilt on my tongue in the very same moment. He’s a tough lad, and he spins despite his bloody nose to swing a right hook that just glances my jaw. I bend back to evade again, using every one of the clever moves I learned to best Kip and Sun Lin in training.
Their faces haunt my mind, flashing in the red. Though Kip’s alive and well, he’s broken like me, a gaunt shadow of the cocky, confident Westie I met not so long ago. And Sun Lin is in the ground, if they even bothered to bury her, her head in a separate place to the rest of her. And whenever I think of what happened to her, I can’t help but see the hands that caused that chaos and blood. Hands of my kin. My brother, but not my brother anymore. What they’ve done to him would be hard pressed to undo.
When the Reborn die, Mukesh will have to go with them.
“You’re going to talk now,” I say, dragging Cornell back up to my ear.
He spits and swears at me, struggling free. He reaches for me, grabbing my chest by my thin fatigues, and I let him use his strength to try and pull me forward. When I let my momentum go, we both roll until I’m on his other side, springing up and landing a sharp kick at the base of his spine to keep him down. He contorts, his face a bloody, anguished mess, and I come down hard with an elbow to his kidneys, then pin him by the back of his shoulders as he cries.
“How much can you take?” I ask him. “Probably a lot in this place. I’ll bet Briggs beats the shit out of the ones he likes as much as the ones he doesn’t. Makes them tough, right?”
Cornell’s eyes are wet, but he doesn’t speak. I could do more to him, so much more than the pain he’s in already. If I could give him the pain inside me, I would in a heartbeat. It’s so much greater than a kick in the back could ever be, the weight of the shifting lava, the choke of billowing smoke from the white-hot rage sitting under the surface of my small, strong body. I got strong, somewhere along this journey. Strong enough to have a lad almost double my size buckled beneath me.
“What is it that you want, Cornell?” I ask.
His red face doesn’t speak. His eyes are closed now, his breathing slowed tremendously. Is he waiting to counter me? Lolling like a ragdoll because he thinks I’ll give him sympathy. His weight is no longer tense beneath me. I can’t feel a rise and fall of ragged breath anymore. How long have I been holding him down, my hands on the back of his neck, my weight fully on his upper back?
I leap off the body. I stand for a few moments, watching him. My mouth is open, but I’ve no power to close it. I can only stand and watch what I’ve done. The door to my side hammers, and I jump. Goddie’s voice is on the other side.
“Boss, we got another problem. Well, not really our problem but ya not gonna believe what’s happening out here.”
I still don’t move, looking at Cornell’s lifeless form on the floor. He must just be unconscious. I couldn’t have choked him, not without knowing. My weight couldn’t be enough to do that. But his chest is slim despite his muscles, and the lean young man probably already had trouble breathing out of his busted nose. I’m heavier than I used to be, back when I jumped on Bhadrak’s shoulders for a play-scuffle. I am more well fed and muscular. I have my big boots and my forceful ways. And my rage. I don’t know how long I was lost in it, sitting on Cornell’s back.
“Raja, did you hear me? De System’s siege soldiers… dey’re shooting at der own kids! We gotta take ‘em back into de Bastion. I don’t know what dey think dey’re doing, but-”
He bangs the door again. There’s hardly a pause before I can feel the smash of his shoulder rocking the thin walls. Goddie smashes through the door with only two more tries, looking at the kid on the ground and then at me. Another kid. The kid that killed him.
“What did ya…”
He rushes to Cornell, feeling the boy’s neck, then looks at me, shaking his head.
“Ya knocked him out. Like, really out. He must’ve given ya some trouble.”
I gasp, suddenly grabbing my open mouth to force it shut.
“He’s not dead?” My lips tremble as I ask.
Goddie pulls himself up, his eyes shining as his brows crease.
“Did ya want him to be?”
I run for him, grabbing him by the shoulders. “God, no! But he just went limp. I didn’t mean-”
Goddie just pulls me in, letting me ramble a moment. Cornell lies cold beside us, and as the frozen fear of having almost killed him subsides, the world comes back to me. I scrunch my eyes tight, then blink them open a few times. Goddie pushes tears from under my eyes with both thumbs.
“Raja… would you kick me in de gut if I suggested ya might have some PTSD going on?”
“Yes,” I say at once, cracking a smile.
He’s probably right. He often is, but there’s never any time to talk about it. Whatev
er’s going on in my body and mind, I’m going to have to fix it my own way. And it’s not going to change the fact that the war is raging still out there. I break out of Goddie’s arms, his hands lingering as they leave my face, and retrieve my gun from Sheila’s desk drawer. As I put it back in place, I sniff up a breath and clear my head again. These episodes will have to go, when I find a way to stop them.
“Did you say… the System is shooting at the Legion kids?”
“Dat’s what I said. We’re having to take dem back in, put dem back in the Bastion like before.”
Three hundred extra mouths to feed. But maybe it means that some of them will think twice about where their allegiance is pledged now, and where is safest for them to be. I can only nod, sucking at my teeth and tasting that tang of guilt again. I can just about see Cornell, slumped on his front, from the other side of the shiny table. His blood is smeared near my right hand, where I smashed him into it. Goddie’s eyes are trained on the smear too.
“I didn’t get any information before he passed out.” I have to hang my head as I speak. Malcolm would have frightened all sorts out of this kid by now, I’m sure. “So I think we ought to lock this one up in some kind of solitary, try him again when he wakes up.”
Goddie shakes his shoulders out, then proceeds to lift Cornell up and over them, fireman style. He holds the lad across the backside, something the awake Cornell would probably have a fit over. That makes me crack another smile, one that feels a little more real. Relief is like a wave of warm water in my limbs. It’s strange to find it here, of all places, in the middle of what’s going on.
“Ya want to know what he’s seen, right? De Reavers coming around here lately?”
I nod. Goddie looks at the sack of a body on his shoulder, then at me. His gaze is more set than before.
“I think I’ll take dis one off your duty list, if dat’s okay boss?”
I swallow hard. “I think that’s wise. Besides, I’ve got to go and see Apryl. See if we can work out what the hell the System are playing at.”
It’s not long before I find myself winding amongst the crowd of soldiers being returned to the Bastion for safekeeping. Now that the two hundred others are out and about, helping us in any way that they can, these three hundred at least have a little more breathing room in their makeshift prison. I sneak amongst them in the same black garb, until I can break out across the yard to scurry back to the computer suite. The search for information has always helped me to put bad things from my mind, and this new mission intrigues me enough to hide all manner of sins.
Apryl is where I expected, tapping away and swiping screens all around her in a haze of bluish light. She’s forgotten to open any blinds in the suite, and for a moment she could be Delilah, keeping herself busy in the dark. I move to a window and let a sliver of the bright August sun through. Apryl squints at me, then beckons with a manicured hand to the screens around her head.
“You heard then?” I ask.
“Got radioed,” she replies with a nod. “And I know exactly why Prudell doesn’t want us giving the legionnaires a choice about where they go.”
She beckons again, and I round the desk to stand hovering behind her head. Apryl pulls up a window, expanding it with her fingertips, and I see a news format that I recognise. At first, the pit of my stomach jumps, in case it’s the announcement about Malcolm that we’ve been waiting for. But within a second of reading the headline, my thoughts quell. And then they pique again in a whole new way. My brow slams down hard at what I’m reading.
Highland Rebels are holding YOUR CHILDREN hostage at Legion Training and Rehabilitation Facility.
The reporter on the screen is muted, but subtitles tell the tale of how we, the feared and vicious Highlanders, have taken over the Legion and threatened to murder every child and teenager within it. It’s been a long while since I’ve seen this particularly perky reporter, with her shiny hair and young, bright smile. She’s the one who was on the scene when my Underground family were marched like cattle to be processed and sent to Valkyrie. Her name appears this time, something I’ve wondered but never known.
IVANA VAN HOPE REPORTS FROM THE WASTELAND
She’s out there, somewhere beyond the line of tanks and jeeps and troops, telling these lies to the screen and the nation beyond it.
“Do you think they believe it? The journalists?”
Apryl shakes her head. “I’m sure they’d have been able to see the shootings at the entryway, even from where she’s stationed.”
True enough, the shape of the Legion is visible in the background of the report. The sun is setting, so it must have come in last night. Apryl tuts under her breath.
“You can bet they won’t be showing that footage. We’ve got to be the monsters of this particular play.”
“But why?” I rub my temple. “What’s the angle?”
“It’s about what you said to the cameras on Execution Day, Raja. There could be an uprising. The Unfortunate Few, the lowest of the System dwellers, the Legion, the rebels and what’s left of the Undergrounders. If we all got together, Prudell would have no hope of surviving the turning of the tide.”
“So she’s got to make enemies out of us? Turn the other groups against us until we all resume hating each other again, and not her?”
Apryl nods, her expression grim.
“And laying siege here means she can starve us to death. Us and the Legion. Clear two groups at once to lessen the threat.”
I slam my fist hard on the table. The monitors rattle, and waves of heat from the sting shoot up my arm.
“And it all looks like it was our own fault.”
So we’re stuck here, the rebels and the children. A slow death that looks self-inflicted from the outside. I can’t let that happen to my people, or even to people like Cornell. He doesn’t deserve this either, no matter how displaced I think his loyalties are. We can’t let them win so easily.
“There’s one other thing, hun,” Apryl says, turning at last in her seat to face me properly. “The reporter, earlier on she said they had confirmation that Malcolm Stryker was leading this assault. They’re saying he’s alive, and that he’s here in the Legion.”
I swear. Just once. I clench my fists so hard the nails dig in, reminding me that I’m really here and that pain is something I can deal with. If we don’t reveal Malcolm’s death, the fear that everyone else has of us right now stays heightened. They’ll make him out to be a child murderer, no longer the heroic force of resistance. But if we tell them he’s not here. If we tell them that he might be dead, then we give triumph to Prudell’s armies that their worst enemy has finally fallen.
“Between a rock and a hard place,” Apryl muses. “Am I right?”
When faced with those options, twenty years ago, my parents and their communities knew how to deal with the issue. I can’t believe how set I feel, how un-lost I am at last. There is something we can do. Something I and my people know how to do well.
Nine
When you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place, you can try to go up, or you can try to go down. When I tell my father about the report from Apryl’s computer feed, he has the same idea as me without me even having to tell it to him.
“If we go up and over to try and get out, the System will shoot us all to bits.” He is Mad Adhikara now, standing proud and waggling his finger with the great ideas of his younger days. “But if we do as we did years ago, and go down beneath the surface, we can get out. Get the kids out too. Bypass this whole siege nonsense and get on with the business of ending this fight.”
Our council is smaller than usual. Most people are off tending the wounded, so there’s only myself, Kip, Dad and Andrew present. The gruff Highland leader has already seen plenty of nonsense since this attack began. I watch him stroking his fuzzy face, then he shifts his hulking weight, twisting one foot up under his hips to sit on it.
“What about the original mission?” He asks. “Malcolm was intent on interrogating a Reborn
to unlock the connection and shut them down.”
“And we still are,” I reply. “I’m heading up to see Briggs right after this meeting.”
The thought of that sends a shake down my body, and I’m glad I’m sitting down where nobody can see it rock into my knees and make them weak. It has to be me that talks to him, with Apryl standing by and plugged into his programming, ready to read the data and find us a gateway into the System’s heart.
“It’s going to take a fair while to build a tunnel,” Kip adds, nodding. “There’s no reason we can’t have a team working on Briggs and a team digging out.”
“Of course there is,” Andrew answers, his hands up. “We don’t have the bloody numbers, man. There’s barely five score of us here, keeping an eye on inmates that outnumber us five to one. We have to have sentries on all walls in case the System soldiers move on us, a team watching the Bastion, supervisors on the loose kids working the yard and the canteen, plus a detail watching those clerks up near your girlfriend’s cyber-domain. Where do you think diggers are going to come from?”
Kip opens his mouth, but then closes it again. Dad and I look at one another, and the solution seems simple to me. Maybe I’ve grown cruel, or been made cruel by what’s been happening, but I voice the idea like it’s the easiest decision in the world.
“Well we have three hundred prisoners doing nothing in the Bastion.”
Andrew raises his bright copper brows. “That’s slave labour.”
“I’m aware of that. But if it’s a choice between digging tunnels and being shot dead by the System, I know what I’d do to survive.”
Nods echo around the small meeting. Dad suggests a few things regarding tunnel creation and safety, particularly as we’ll be digging directly under the enormous weight of the Legion building itself. It looks like we might be able to connect to some of the tunnels in the southern forest, the ones that used to connect my own Underground home with the neighbouring ones, before the soldiers started cutting off our travel routes. I remember, just once a long time ago, heading down one of those disused corridors of earth and wood. Popping my head out into a world I thought I would never be part of.
