Neeka Featherstone

by R. J. Lucas

  In a few days, I mutter behind closed lips, Lord Solomon may be begging for a swift and painless end.

  One of the Royals steps forward and raises his goblet. Its gems twinkle in the sunlight and he declares, “To Lord Solomon the Merciful!”

  Clamoring over one another in agreement, the other Royals thrust their goblets into the air.

  “To Lord Solomon the Merciful! May his mercy endure forever!”

  Their chant is shattered by the blast of Atwood’s blunderbuss being fired skyward.

  4 - Battle for Survival

  Before I realize what is happening, it has begun. A howl rips from nearly a dozen throats as the transgressors leap forward, already clawing at each other in their urgency to reach the weapons and water. My breath catches and I watch as the whole pack surges forward. I see elbows flying and fists swinging this way and that. And before they’ve taken ten steps, three of them are down already, clutching bleeding noses and broken bones.

  So quick. I can’t believe it. A wave of sand hisses into the air as two of the fallen scrambles to their feet again, shoving a third man back down. They sprint forward. One goes down a second time as another man trips in front of him. Both are trampled by the stampede.

  Papa snatches at my sleeve. “Neeka! This way!”

  He pulls me and Old Man Ambrose in the opposite direction. My breath snags in my throat as I heave Ambrose’s right arm over my shoulder and help him along. My heart is thudding like a madly beaten drum. Unable to help myself, I glance over one shoulder to watch.

  One man is fast, much faster than the others. It’s hard to tell from this distance, but I think it’s the tall man with furtive eyes. He reaches the supplies and snatches a blade and tankard with hardly a hitch in his step. He keeps running, letting the momentum of panic-fever swing him in a wide circle to the left. I can’t help thinking that could have been me. The first one there, blade and water in hand.

  But it’s all moving too fast; even my thoughts are cut to shreds. They fall apart like tattered ribbons in the wind as I’m caught up in the violent fervor of what happens next. The other transgressors fall upon the remaining supplies like starving beasts. Snarling, they struggle against one another with desperate, ferocious zeal.

  One of them snatches a blade and whirls around. Before he’s even fully turned, he’s run one of the others straight through the gut. Blood spurts and I’m hit with a wave of nausea, but I can’t turn away. I’m riveted by the madness of it, the zeal of the transgressors as they fling themselves against one another, scrapping with nails and teeth for every split-second advantage. They know this may be the last fight of their life.

  But no, they can’t win it. Only one, maybe two. So why do they fight? Why not run? Wouldn’t they last longer? But humanity is madness. Fear drives us to improbable ends. So, as I stagger away, Papa across from me and Old Man Ambrose hobbling in between, the other transgressors slaughter each other behind us. Everyone thinks they will be the one to win until the blade pierces their heart.

  Breathless, I glance behind me again. The Royals are taunting the gangly man from the airship, calling him a coward, but he keeps running. Smart, if you ask me. He stands a better chance of survival fleeing on his own than caught in the mad melee he’s leaving behind.

  Under the airship, three men are already down, and it’s only been a matter of seconds. The man who was stabbed through the abdomen writhes his life away on the hot ground, leaving smears of blood in the sand. Another lies still; I didn’t see him die, but apparently it was quick.

  A short, stumpy man tries to stumble away from the fray. His right arm hangs limp at his side. Bone pierces the skin in his upper arm as blood flows down to his fingers and drips to the ground. His lower arm sways back and forth like a loose rope on a sail. I see the pain in his face, the manic desperation as he scrabbles away from the others. He must know he’s wounded beyond hope. The humanity inside him chants the prelude to his death, but there’s something feral that won’t let go. Some deep-down, primeval part of him insists on fighting to the end, some organic impulse that won’t surrender the shred of life left in him. Staring at him, I feel a flash of pity. Only a flash, because that is all I have time for before he dies from massive blood loss.

  That could have been me. It could have been Papa. The poor soul had a past full of memories and people and hope, just like the rest of us. He could have had a future if only…

  The woman with the scar on her cheek finds a blade in her hand and skids out from the thrashing mass of transgressors. A look like thunder is on her face. She swings it at another man’s neck, and I look away.

  When I look back, he is lying face-down in the sand. My pity turns hard and cold inside my chest, a node of urgency spurring me on. Move faster. With dry breath tugging at my throat, I quicken my pace. Old Man Ambrose struggles to keep up between me and Papa. We’re half-carrying him now, and my shoulder is flaring with pain from holding him up. But I know I cannot slow. Behind us is a massacre; ahead, a wasteland. The wasteland is our only hope.

  I hear a hoarse shout from behind us and flinch. My hair streaks across my face as I turn toward the sound. The one-legged man is a dozen paces away from the others, hopping across the sand in our direction, his hand outstretched as he yells for us to wait. He seems to have decided he has a better chance fleeing with us than fighting. I’m not so sure. With one leg he can’t get far, and we can’t turn back for him now.

  Even as the thought flickers through my mind, one of the others, a burly transgressor with a blade in his left hand, catches sight of the one-legged man and darts after him. The hopping man stumbles to the ground and curls in on himself.

  Something inside of me gushes to the surface and I shout. I don’t know what it’s meant to be. A warning, perhaps? Pure horror, maybe? The gruff man with the blade glances my way and pauses before raising the small sword high. A sinister grin creeps across his face as if he is proud to take the disabled man’s life.

  As he moves forward and down, his step falters and he loses his balance. That split-second of pride costs him his life.

  In a flurry of movement, the big guy, the bruiser, darts out of the melee, faster than I expect him to move. He has the wooden mallet in his hand.

  This time I don’t look away. The big man swings his mallet through the air, an arc of dull brown against the backdrop of breathless blue sky. It hits the other transgressor in the back of the head, and he jerks forward with a sudden, unnatural motion, before gravity claims his limp body and he crumples to the sand.

  So much barbarism. So much pointless, odious death.

  For the first time since the brawl started, I remember Lord Solomon and the Royals. My eyes lift to the airship railing, where they stand shouting and cheering. Their laughter is poison to my ears. I hate them. How can they derive pleasure from such brutality? They create spectacles of horror to satiate their own morbid desires. What sort of person, I wonder, would do that? What sort of perversion would it take to stand up there and laugh at the slaughter taking place below?

  In my head I fling curses at Solomon, I re-swear the oaths I’ve sworn a thousand times before. I will kill him. Someday. I will kill him and rid the earth of his existence. Let him stand up there now, bloated with all his prideful glory. Let him laugh. I will wait for my revenge.

  Below the airship, the skirmish has died down. Only three transgressors are left standing; the one-legged man is still crawling away, but they ignore him. He’s easy prey and poses no threat. The three face each other in a sloppy triangle, panting but trying valiantly not to show weakness.

  Bodies litter the sand around them. Some look as if they could be sleeping. Others have mutilated limbs twisted at nauseating angles, blood saturating their skin and staining the sand around them.

  Each of the three still standing hold a tankard of water and a weapon. Two of them rusted blades; the bruiser still has the mallet. Stepping forward, he thrusts it at the sky. “The blunderbuss is mine!” His rough voice ech
oes across the sand and swells with the arrogance I saw in his eyes earlier.

  One of the other men seems to hear it too, and I can tell it frightens him. Nobody wants to go toe to toe with the big guy. The man’s feet start to shift, and after a couple seconds he breaks out of the stare down and darts toward the one-legged man.

  “Neeka,” Papa says, but I can’t look away. I need to know how this ends. I need to know who will be chasing us down.

  The one-legged man wails and covers his eyes like a child, but the other transgressor is merciless. He stabs him through the neck and grabs his water pouch. He’s hardly made it ten steps, though, when the report of blunderbuss fire shatters the scorched desert air.

  For a heartbeat, I’m confused. The transgressor who just killed the one-legged man jerks and collapses. He lays still in the sand. Dead. I don’t understand. My eyes dart to Protector Atwood on the airship’s balcony as he lowers his weapon.

  “Never take away what Lord Solomon has given in mercy!” Atwood bellows.

  My gut sours.

  “You speak of mercy,” I hiss, and Papa mutters warnings under his breath. He’s afraid my anger at Solomon will override my wisdom. Sometimes, I am too. But right now, I have control of myself. Escaping this insanity is the first step to killing Solomon.

  By this point we’ve managed to struggle a good distance away, far enough for me to have to strain to hear Atwood’s bellow. It could have been a lot farther, if Papa and I didn’t have Old Man Ambrose to look after. But I refuse to leave a friend behind.

  It’s just the two transgressors now: the bruiser and his rival. The gangly man has made it out of sight. He’s still running, I’m sure. Putting as much distance between himself and that blunderbuss as possible. Again…smart.

  The scalding desert air tears at my throat, and I feel like it's bleeding. If there weren’t more urgent concerns at hand I would stop, but I know I can’t. I glance over my shoulder one last time as Old Man Ambrose stumbles between me and Papa.

  The smaller man breaks his staring contest with the bruiser and dashes toward the transgressor Atwood shot down. He snatches his tankard and turns to flee. In my head I curse him as a fool, Atwood’s promise spinning through my mind: the last citizen left standing below the ship gets the blunderbuss. With a single bullet in the chamber. A single bullet.

  Atwood tosses the weapon down to the bruiser, who catches it and turns toward the fleeing transgressor. I feel a spark of guilt at the relief inside me, but I know this is how it must be. He dies, and we live. If that bullet wasn’t for him, it would be for me, or Papa.

  The bruiser takes aim and fires. At the last moment, the fleeing man realizes his mistake, but it’s too late—the bullet takes him in the back, and he goes down in a spray of sand.

  No more bullets in the chamber.

  Relief clashes hard with fear inside me as the bruiser drops the weapon, strolls over, and picks up the dead man’s water tankard. At least with him now having all the water, he’ll have no need to come after us.

  5 - The Dread Wastes

  Papa and I keep Ambrose upright as we trek across the wasteland. Papa has torn part of his shirt and used some loose twine to make himself a head covering. Ambrose squints and wipes the sweat from his eyes.

  “You doin okay?” Ambrose asks me as he limps forward. “I’m not too heavy for you, am I?”

  The sun has baked his skin and the creases beneath his eyes wrinkle like tributaries of some unseen river.

  “I’m okay,” I tell him, not revealing how much heavier he would have to be before my legs would begin to fail me.

  “We’ve got to find shelter before last light, it’s going to get cold soon,” Papa says, his mind already solving the next problem. It’s amazing how drastic the temperature shift can be in the Dread Wastes. Once the sun goes down, the temperature isn’t far behind.

  “We won’t make it to last light if that brute of a man catches up to us.” Ambrose glances back to ensure we aren’t being followed.

  “He won’t. I saw him head in a different direction,” I tell him.

  “Maybe we could sleep under that tree,” Ambrose says, pointing to a crooked husk of a tree in the distance. The lifeless trees that dot the landscape could barely offer shade in the day, much less shelter at night.

  “I think we’d have better luck there,” Papa says and nods to the horizon.

  The rocks emerging out of the flat, dead land are like the shoulders of a great beast.

  “Those boulders there?” Ambrose asks Papa, squinting to see them. “How far do you think they are?”

  “Not too far,” Papa says, already heading in that direction. “Maybe a few hundred paces, but out here, visual perception can be deceiving.”

  “You think we’ll get lucky enough to find shelter and water there?” Ambrose wants to know as he shakes his pouch above his mouth, coaxing out the last drop of water.

  “Shelter? Hopefully. Water? I doubt it. That’s okay though. I have a plan.”

  Papa always has a plan. I hate he is banished to the Dread Wastes, but I’m glad he’s here with me. I’d probably be dead now if it weren’t for him. He’s the most intelligent person I know. He created my proths and designed my enhancements. I can’t imagine what my life would be like without them. He’s a genius at figuring things out and can make just about anything one could imagine. Before being banished, all the Plebs and Middlers would come to him for proth repairs.

  I don’t know how Coghaven will survive without him. I guess his apprentice, Samuel Blackwood, will do the best he can. Papa tried to make me his apprentice for a while, but I get too distracted. Once I got my legs, I couldn’t stop moving.

  We walk through the wasteland in silence for another hour. I try not to think about the fact that I’d already be in the shade if I were going the speed I’d like to. It’s like my legs are walking out from under me, wanting to be unleashed, wanting to run. I decide talking to Papa will distract me from wanting to sprint all the way to the rock outcropping.

  “Papa, what did Lord Solomon mean when he said you were an old friend? Were you really friends with that plugtail?”

  “Language, Neeka.”

  “Sorry, Papa.”

  “When Solomon and I were young, like eight or nine-years-old young, we were indeed friends.”

  “That’s so hard to imagine.”

  “You have to know this was not long after the event that destroyed the old world. We were still kids. This was even before the Blue Demons became hostile.”

  Blue Demons. Lord Solomon hates them. The rest of us are just scared of them. I’ve never even seen one up close, just heard all the horrible stories about how they can tear you apart within seconds. I did see one from a distance once when the protectors had caught one. The crowd of people watching the outdoor trial was so large, thousands of people were between the court balcony and the rest of us Plebs. I was lucky to even get a glimpse, but from what I could tell, they don’t look much different than us humans. Except their skin is blue.

  “I never knew the demons weren’t hostile.”

  “There’s a lot you don’t know, Neeka. I’ve kept a lot of secrets from you over the years for your own protection. However, that time may be coming to an end.”

  “I’m ready to know more, Papa.”

  “Yes, you are, but now is not the time.” He sighs and we let the reality of that truth settle upon us before Papa transitions the conversation to a more immediate reality. “It will be dark in a couple of hours and we need to get a fire started for the night. It’s going to get cold out here.”

  We walk in silence the rest of the way to the boulders. When we finally get there, Papa sits on a rock and Ambrose collapses into a sliver of shade that only covers half his body. The hopping has exhausted him, even though Papa and I basically carried him. I’m glad Papa and I are here to help him though, otherwise he’d be half roasted in the sun rather than sitting in the shade of boulders right now.

  “Neeka come h
ere, sweetie,” Papa says to me.

  I walk over to him and he opens a small hidden panel on my left calf and pulls out a sliver of iron pyrite and a small chert stone. It works great for starting a fire.

  Ambrose’s eyes light up when he sees the hidden treasures.

  “You are just full of surprises, aren’t you?” He smiles.

  Papa sits on a rock while Ambrose clears rubble away from a spot and tries to gather some kindling. He finds some twigs. They are small, but they might do the trick if he gets enough of them. I can tell Papa is thinking something over. He takes his makeshift hat off and rubs the bald part of his head and stares out into the setting sun like it might share some revelation with him.

  “I wish we didn’t have to leave those water pouches,” he says.

  “We were lucky to get out of there with our lives,” says Ambrose, shocked Papa had any regrets about the incident.

  “Yes, but it’s such a waste to leave them. They’re guarded only by dead bodies. It’s like they are just sitting there, free for the picking.”

  Ambrose sighs, “Not much we can do about it now.”

  Papa looks at me and grins.

  “Neeka could probably snatch them up pretty quick without a couple of oldsters weighing her down…no offense Ambrose,” he says, still smirking a mischievous grin.

  “You’re gonna send Neeka? Back there? She’s just a little girl,” he asks, incensed Papa would put me in danger. Then he adds, “No offense.”

  Ambrose is sweet to worry, but he doesn’t know what I’m capable of.

  “Neeka’s legs are not ordinary proths,” says Papa. “She can cover the distance in no time at all.”

  “How is that possible?” Ambrose asks, looking at me as if something in my face will give away the secret.

  Papa turns to him. “You know how most proths are made using mini hydraulics?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I designed Neeka’s a little differently. Instead of hydraulics, I used hundreds of gears, springs, and belts. The design makes them much faster. And although the components are more fragile than hydraulics, they are well protected with the outer shell.” Papa reaches over and knocks on the hard covering of my leg. “In addition, I placed a power cell in each leg for an extra boost.”