by DJ Molles
“Why?”
“I need him.”
“Don’t be daft, boy. Why do you need him?”
Perry’s hands clenched tight on the longstaff. It began to vibrate, hungrily. Like it wanted him to blow a hole in this stuffy asshole. “Hauten is a reloader. I used to work on his outfit. And I need him to reload ammunition for Mordicus.”
Gaius sneered. “So Mordicus’s lack of foresight has somehow become my problem? He should have been more judicious with his ammunition, but I suppose such forward-thinking is beyond someone like him.”
Perry shook his head, astounded. “He took down two Guardians.”
“So he claims.”
“Gods, you’re determined not to believe anything.”
Gaius’s eyes flashed—an unholy terror that Perry thought might be the reason why his troops were scared of him. “Impudent peon,” he snarled, his pale and sunken cheeks flushing an unhealthy red. “A good commander does not believe. He operates on facts. Verifiable information. All you’ve given me is hearsay and nebulous claims. Don’t act so shocked that I’m not easy to con.”
“I’m not trying to con you!” Perry found his voice rising, and really didn’t care to bring it back down. Fuck this guy. If he got so mad that he tried some shit, he’d see just how verifiable Perry’s abilities were. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Junction City is just about as fucked up as Karapalida is. There are mechanical creatures out there bent on exterminating our entire species—that’s something you can verify for yourself. The only way we’re going to beat them is if we work together!”
“It doesn’t sound like we’re working together,” Gaius said. “It sounds like you want to take a valuable resource from me and give it to a man that can barely lead his own troops, let alone have any hope of defeating these ‘Guardians,’ as you call them.”
Perry clenched his teeth, trying hard to remember the big picture goal: Get people to work together. Easier to do when you don’t piss them off first.
“I get that you don’t like Mordicus. In fact, I’m not even going to try to make you like him. You can hate him all you want. But don’t flush humanity down the drain because you don’t like one guy. We need to work together.”
“Working together,” Gaius scoffed. “The perennial plea of the weak to the strong.”
“Alright,” Perry snapped, exasperated. “Just point me in the right direction. I’ll find my friend Hauten and you’ll never hear from me again.”
“I’m afraid that’s not possible.”
“Oh, I’m pretty good at finding people.”
“It’s not possible,” Gaius repeated. “Even if you did find this Hauten character, he is not permitted to leave.”
“Not permitted to leave? What is this? A prison?”
“I have already decreed that no one is allowed in or out of Junction City. For the safety of all.” Gaius cast a withering look over Perry’s shoulder at the centurion who had led him here, and still stood by at a respectful distance. “I see that we have made an exception for you, but that exception will extend no further.” Gaius sniffed with finality. “You have said what you came to say, and I have heard it. You may go now.”
“But you haven’t heard me,” Perry shot back. “You clearly haven’t heard me!” The next thing Perry planned to say was something about how it was hard for Gaius to hear when his head was so far up his ass, but he bit that off for the sake of his broader goals. He was already on the edge of making Gaius an enemy—best not to push it.
But Gaius was not inclined to hear any more. He turned away from Perry, flicking his hand as though shooing a fly. “Centurion, escort this trouble maker back to the gates. And, in the future, my orders will be followed.” He stopped and dipped his head, looking at the centurion. “Those that disobey will be executed for insubordination. Is that clear?”
“Very clear, legatus,” the centurion said, in the sort of dead tone reserved for authority figures who often made such threats.
“No one in or out,” Gaius reiterated, then walked away.
Perry stood there, agog, watching the legatus stride away, his blue cape billowing behind him, as full of useless wind as the man that wore it.
Footsteps at his side.
Perry turned and looked at the centurion, a bit of a challenge in his face—You really gonna force me to do something I don’t want to do?
The centurion seemed to know where he stood with Perry. He was also obviously a keen individual. He lowered his chin and spoke with a special sort of import to his words. “It would be wise of you to follow me.”
Perry held his gaze for a long moment, trying to see through his own anger to suss out the words that had gone unsaid. Finally, he pasted on a brittle smile and nodded.
“Yes. I’ll go with you.”
They exited the municipal building, out into the city square where legionnaires in strict formations marched in precise columns amid the wreckage of the city. The way they did it, so pompous, it was almost like they thought they were the conquerors. Like all the destruction had been caused by them, and not some greater force that could wipe them out on a whim.
The centurion didn’t speak as they walked through the square. A squad of legionnaires saluted him as he passed, and what he returned to them was some careless version of what they’d given.
It wasn’t until they were winding their way through the detritus of narrow streets cluttered with rubble that the centurion spoke again.
“You dropped out of the sky,” he said.
Perry looked at him, curious.
The centurion kept his eyes forward. “Some form of flight?”
“Something like that.”
A nod. “We don’t expect much out of the skies. Unless of course it’s three meters wide and comes in like a burning meteor. But I suppose you could probably fly about pretty discretely, couldn’t you?”
“I can manage.”
“And if it were dark out, I highly doubt anyone would spot you.” The centurion grunted thoughtfully as he navigated a stagnant pool of water that smelled like death. “Not that you would defy the legatus’s orders, because if you were found to have defied his orders, he’d definitely kill you.”
“I’m sure he’d try.”
A shrug. “Shame you couldn’t find your friend. But, really, it’d be difficult for you to locate him anyways. Seeing as how he’s probably with the rest of the refugees, over in the Red Quarter.”
Perry felt a smile come to his lips and suppressed it. “Yeah. Shame.”
“I mean, even if you had a mind to defy the legatus’s orders, it wouldn’t be smart. There’s checkpoints all over the place that would catch you. Specifically, there’s a checkpoint at all four main roads into the Red Quarter.”
“You’re right. That would be impossible to get past.”
“Exactly. Especially since they rotate the guards so often to keep them fresh. In fact, they rotate them every four hours, at noon, four, eight…well, you get the picture. Impenetrable defenses.”
“Right. Good thing you warned me off.”
“Just doing my duty.”
They walked for a while in what Perry felt like was a surprisingly companionable silence.
As they reached the gates and the centurion escorted Perry safely out of the boundaries of Junction City, Perry stopped and turned to him.
“You seem like an okay guy, centurion. I hope you don’t die.”
The centurion shook his head. “Don’t put that on me. Death’s the only thing I got left to look forward to.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE RED QUARTER
Perry jolted awake, certain that he was being watched.
He swirled to his feet, longstaff already in his hands and humming against his skin, his mind poised in his clasp, ready to activate his shield at the slightest provocation. In his half-conscious brain, he couldn’t remember where he was or how he’d got there. All around him was pitch black.
He turned a slow cir
cle in the darkness, gradually more aware of his surroundings. His feet scuffed in rocky dirt. He saw the fine line between the rippled, black horizon, and the slightly lighter glow of a sky filled with stars.
The sensation sat heavy on him. Something was out there, he was certain.
Still uncertain of his place in time and space, he focused on the very real conviction of being watched. He let his mind ease into his longstaff, steadily down the length of it—control. The muzzle bloomed with green light, offering a dim illumination of his surroundings.
He held it in front of him like a torch and continued his slow circle. He turned around completely at least twice before finally coming to a stop.
The sensation of being watched was now fading, and his brain was settling back into his current reality, remembering…
Legatus Gaius.
The centurion.
Leaving the gates of Junction City.
Walking out into the distance where he sat down in the dust and watched Junction City as the sun arced through the sky. His eyes had grown heavy—the near constant wakefulness of every moment between the release of The Nine and then, finally creeping up on him.
He’d leaned back. He recalled the warmth of the sun-baked ground. How it had lulled his eyes closed. The exhaustion like a warm blanket around him, suppressing any thoughts of fear, any anxieties for the future until he’d finally slipped off.
He couldn’t recall any dreams. But as his thundering heart gradually slowed, and his fighting stance relaxed, Perry started thinking that perhaps the feeling of someone else being there with him had just been a bit of a dream that he could no longer remember.
It was already receding from him. The conviction of the moment upon waking fading like mist when the sun hits it. In these moments, it’s very easy to discredit your senses.
He shook his head. Tilted it back. Looked at the wide dome of stars over his head.
What time was it? He tried to figure it out by the constellations that he knew. Teran had always been able to tell the time by the stars, but whatever facts she saw in the firmament escaped him at the moment.
It was night. That was about as close to a time as he could figure.
He did know how to orient himself to a compass direction using the stars, and he did that now, facing himself to the southwest, where he saw the slight glimmer of Junction City, nestled near the horizon. It wasn’t as bright as it once was, but it still gave off light.
“Right,” Perry murmured to himself, his voice strange and alien in the gloomy silence.
Darkness was his friend. Or at least, that’s what the centurion had heavily hinted at. Perry had withdrawn from Junction City to wait for darkness, and here it was. He could “fly” into the city without being noticed. Hopefully.
He tried to recall if he’d noticed the temple as he’d walked through the remains of Junction City. Had it still been standing, or had the Guardians destroyed it? He thought he could picture the time wheel atop the temple, but then maybe that was wishful thinking.
It didn’t matter. He had to get into Junction City to find Boss Hauten. If the time wheel was there, then great—he’d be able to determine the shift change at the checkpoints. If not, then he’d just have to sneak in and wait until he witnessed the shift change happening live.
His stomach growled, and he smacked his lips, finding his mouth dry. He hadn’t brought food or water, on the errant belief that he might be able to find some in Junction City. A bit of an oversight, but it wasn’t like he was close to dying. Just uncomfortable. But he was no stranger to hunger and thirst.
He gathered his faculties and centered himself with a few deep breaths, stuffing down the vestiges of sleepiness and getting the blood flowing in his body again. Aches and pains made themselves known. His whole right side where he’d careened through the dirt on his unsuccessful landing attempt now throbbed dully.
By the light of the energy ball glowing at the tip of his longstaff, he inspected his right arm and found that the blood and plasma and dust had mixed and hardened into an ugly scale. When he flexed his arm, he felt it cracking painfully, oozing.
Man. He hadn’t even considered what a wreck he must’ve looked like when meeting Legatus Gaius. And he didn’t put it past that bastard to hold it against him. He wasn’t exactly what you might call open-minded.
Oh well. Perry would get what he wanted out of Junction City, with or without Gaius’s approval.
With a decisive grunt, Perry launched himself into the air, activated his shield, and pulsed hard. He rocketed skyward, leaving a little halo of disturbed dust on the ground.
The shield around him suppressed some of the airflow, but not all of it. The wind still whistled in his ears as he accelerated upwards and then began to drop, pulsing again and again to dizzying, disconcerting heights.
The air grew cold around him, chilling a thin layer of sweat he hadn’t even realized had been on his skin until now.
He kept himself aloft, not letting himself fall too close to the ground. The higher up he kept himself, the less likely he was to be spotted. The trick would be in making the landing without causing too much of a ruckus. Which meant that he couldn’t angle himself too aggressively forward—he needed to take his time and keep his jumps more or less straight up and down.
Slowly—but still faster than walking—he closed the distance with Junction City. From this height, he could see the entire sprawl of it, from end to end. More lights in the eastern section, where Gaius had set up his camp. Then a lot of darkness throughout the middle of the city, followed by another cluster of lights on the west end.
The Red Quarter.
Perry kept up his steady pulses until he felt that his feet were more or less directly over the top of Junction City, and at that point he let himself fall.
Descending was still terrifying. The random thought that maybe, at this worst moment in time, he would lose control of himself and be unable to pulse back upwards, and he’d wind up as a pile of unidentifiable mush on some lonely street in Junction City for a patrol of legionnaires to find and poke their toes at, wondering what the hell all that meat used to be.
As he dropped closer and closer to the city, he spotted the tops of buildings that were not completely destroyed. He selected a nice, high one—maybe three stories—that looked structurally intact, and gently pulsed himself again, navigating himself until he was directly over top of it.
Another drop. Another moment of stomach-in-throat.
The roof of the building roared upward at him.
One more tiny pulse to break his fall.
His feet touched down, feather soft.
He smiled, undeniably pleased with himself. He took a quick look around him to get his bearings. This roof was one of the tallest in Junction City—stupidly tall buildings were, apparently, something that humans used to build, as evidenced by what he’d seen in the East Ruins, but not so much anymore. He saw several other buildings that were about as tall as this one though, and he pictured them like stepping stones, leading him towards the Red Quarter.
He scanned carefully across the center of the city, but did not see the spire of the temple’s time wheel. It should have been visible from this vantage, if it was still standing. Likely, it had suffered the same fate as so many other buildings in the city—crashed through, bombarded, and shot to shit.
So. He had no clue what time it was. But that didn’t really matter. If he kept himself aloft and stuck to the tall roofs, he shouldn’t be all that noticeable, even if he didn’t sneak past the checkpoints at guard change.
He chose a building several blocks from him, hoped that it was more than just a shell, and launched himself at it.
Hopping from building to building turned out to require a bit more finesse than simply crossing distance, but he got the gist of it quickly. He was a fast learner, and by the fifth building, he was able to position himself delicately on the edge of it, avoiding the gaping hole in the center.
Perched on the ver
y edge, he took a glance down and saw one of the checkpoints the centurion had warned him about. Five legionnaires standing in the middle of the street. They’d positioned and interlocked their shields so that they stood on their own like a makeshift barricade, while the legionnaires lounged behind them, their eyes fixed upon the streets, and not the building tops above them.
Even so, Perry didn’t hang out too long where they could see him. He negotiated himself carefully around the hole in the middle of the roof. A piece of concrete, loosened by whatever blast had taken the roof out, teetered threateningly at the edge. Cringing slightly, Perry sidestepped it, fearing the clatter it would make if it fell down through the building.
Another few jumps, and he found himself well within the Red Quarter.
It was immediately obvious why Legatus Gaius had chosen to sequester the people here. The buildings of the Red Quarter had fared slightly better than the rest of the town. There was still plenty of rubble and bombed out husks, but they seemed to be clustered more towards the northern end of the quarter, as far as Perry could see.
Still, his opinion of Legatus Gaius didn’t exactly improve. Sure, the buildings were more intact here, but there was still more people crammed into this area than the buildings could hold. Makeshift shelters had been hastily erected with whatever scraps people could find, and it was immediately apparent that the infrastructure of Junction City was still completely destroyed.
Running water was the most obvious item lacking. The place stank like an open sewer. Though the municipal area that Legatus Gaius had inhabited appeared to have some form of electricity, that did not extend to the Red Quarter, which was dark, save for a few communal fires that let off a smoky glow. Some of the fires were in trash cans and barrels. Others were simply parked in the middle of the street, burning piles of scrap wood that had likely been scavenged from the remains of older buildings.
Nearly the entire area was filled with people. Some of them moving about, some of them laying in various states of hopelessness, staring into their dim fires with vacant eyes. Voices lilted up to Perry from his position of overwatch, and there was a disconsolate tone to them. Quiet. Bitter. Subdued. Cut through occasionally by a rough shout, or a scream, which no one appeared to respond to.
