Neon Sands Trilogy Boxset: The Neon Series Season One

by Adam J. Smith

  The sun, when visible and bearing down from over the canyon walls, became a domineering eye, simultaneously watching his every move, and prickling his skin like pig crackling. Head down, it tried to flash blindly across his goggles, where a bead of sweat rolled slowly across his vision.

  When the shadows returned he was grateful.

  Silent Leora. If there was anyone who had spoken less than him last night it was her. Brainless Joe and Hallwell were carrying on as though the race was already over, singing by guitar and firelight and throwing sparkers into the fire that Dimwit Joe had brought along with him, pockets no-doubt stuffed with the childish toys. They sent a rainbow of sparks up into the air that swirled within the smoke and floating embers of the fire. Others spoke in almost-whispers, conspiratorial; faces he knew but names that had mostly never stuck. Some brothers, like him. But there was a clear divide between them: some of them felt like they were actually brothers and treated each other that way, forming bonds like a real family, sharing excitements and despair and happiness and sadness – things he, Rohen – I am different – could not feel.

  But was he all that different? There were the other brothers, like him, who cut themselves off as much as they could, as though that was how they could develop their independence. Their uniqueness.

  Leora had sat next to Elissa. Both of them silent, sitting opposite him; their faces brimming with orange fanfare. Not a word from Leora, just the flames in her watery eyes as she stared into the fire. Elissa would laugh occasionally, her attention taken away by one of Rassler’s jokes, or Mercy’s boring stories. Sooner or later though, her gaze would turn once more to peer his way, holding his stare.

  No woman had ever stared at him the way she had last night, but he’d long dismissed the daydream of romance – it wasn’t in him, he knew. He’d end up making a mistake. When he needed it, he paid for sex – a fast flurry of sweaty action against the crumbling dusty walls of the alley behind The Crank perhaps, or the grime-soaked mattress of some lower train-girl shunned by the Matriarch. And once, but never again since, for he had been young and eager to please, and did not yet know himself; he had been called to one of the palatial rooms decked with silk and other soft furnishings, and paraded around the room with two other of his brothers. She who owned the world and could do whatever she wanted had commanded them to strip, from the comfort of her bed overflowing with purple and blue sheets. It had been as though she was floating on the sea that had vanished from the plains eons ago. Though he had debased himself then with his fellow brothers, it was the memory of her that remained; it was her cock-eyed smile and the glint in her eye that stayed with him night after night as he withdrew further into himself, before running away from the orphanage.

  The same kind of smile that Elissa flashed over the flames, only, the longer she did so, the more it unnerved him, until he eventually turned his back, lay down, and waited for sleep.

  This was all going wrong, he thought. Elissa was too close behind him, and now Leora was ahead of him!

  ***

  Elissa spotted Leora up on the ledge, fanning the latent particles of dirt out behind her and causing a minor dust storm to drift down upon them. There was no annoyance, just a warm appreciation: Leora was gutsy, she’d give her that.

  She hadn’t been one for talking, last night, lost in her own world, and she couldn’t be blamed. Leora had a lot on her plate, more responsibility and pressure than she did, that’s for sure; juggling her own expectations with Deo’s and her children. Trying to find the balance between pushing for victory – because no-one ever won without pushing it – and ensuring she made it back to her family alive.

  Well, she was certainly pushing that balance now. As the approaching tight left turn neared, Elissa watched Leora blaze on, the ledge rising up and over the column of wall that faced those below, vanishing from view.

  Rohen moved to the right and Elissa followed. How he would be seething right now, she thought, and smiled. And behind them both they all lined up, an orderly procession. Here, in the depth of the canyons and seriously untouched by the ion blast, except for the dust that blew down from the top, grit and dirt were abundant, and it swirled up around them reducing visibility and pattering like fabled rain upon their goggles.

  She risked a glance behind her; they were all like shadows in a storm, hints of hoverbikes, cloud so thick she couldn’t even see to the back where she expected Joe would be riding along. Maybe getting a bit panicky now. Maybe pushing it harder and harder to catch up, so that he wasn’t the last one. Especially as he would have seen Leora up ahead. Fear, it affects everyone differently. Hopefully it wouldn’t seize him.

  Keep pushing, Joe.

  These canyons. They were the first stumbling block in this race, but so often this was where the whole race could be decided. Whoever came out first nearly always went on to win. It was the advantage of a clear run. And the mines, of course. If you’re the one dropping them, you can’t be the one to trigger them.

  ***

  Gentle Joe was alone. The sky glazed the canyon ceiling with a river of crimson; with the sun arcing across the plains, the reflection of the neon sands beyond the sand mountain filled the vacancy, darkening the edges of the sky and adding to the shadows of the canyon. Gentle Joe was the most afraid he had ever been. Matron Haera, even in her most snarly of moods; even when she had rapped her stick across his knuckles and forced him inside the Locker, had never made him feel as scared as this.

  He blinked, releasing the tears that had welled. Sobbing quietly, he wished and wished that he was back in the Locker now, with its crack of light peeking around the door frame the only source from which to see. It was supposed to be a punishment. When he was young – really young – and when he used to let the heat inside bother him, it had been a punishment. But as he grew older, and the others teased him more and more with words and then pushes and then punches, it had become a refuge. He’d not eat. He’d be ‘insolent’. He’d push over one of the other brothers in full sight of Haera or one of the other Matrons, just so he could escape. So he could curl up and fall asleep in the safety of the darkness. Hoping they’d forget he was there – which they did on more than one occasion. “You stupid boy,” they’d call him, dragging him out by his ear. “Why didn’t you knock and pound on the door like a normal boy? You could’ve died in there!”

  Then they’d thrust a glass of water at him and throw him back in.

  The Locker was a sanctuary that had, for a while, until he and his brothers grew up, probably kept him alive.

  Soon, he would be locked up again, this time for good.

  The problem with the Locker was it didn’t make anything better. He’d come out and look around and head for his bunkhouse, hoping not to run into anyone. But there was always someone, eventually, ready to stamp their heel on him once again. Puck or Dommik, who in defiance had tattooed over each other’s brow-names so it was just a large black arc over their eyebrow (a punishable offence for whoever had provided the tools) were two particularly bad offenders. “You’re not one of us,” they’d say. “You don’t even look like one of us. You’re not right in the head. They should have thrown you into the fires.” They were why he was often so tired, finding solace in the Locker. At night, they kept him awake with threats of violence; his eyes would close and he’d find himself drifting off, but then the slightest bed-spring pop and he was at full alert again. They only actually followed through with their threat once, taking ropes and wrapping them around his bed and tying him down so he couldn’t move. He’d been so tired, he remembered; days and days of taunts. He hadn’t woken up until he felt that first burn on his forehead, heard the whirring of the electric needle.

  IDIOT, they tattooed. To make IDIOT JOE. Throughout, Puck had his head clamped between his knees, while the rest stood and watched with gawping smiles. For the longest time it was their smiles that haunted Joe. Silent smiles, for they didn’t want to wake up the Attendants. His own mouth gagged.

  But some
thing began to change that night. As he lay there, scared yes, and most probably swimming in his own pee-pee, he had a flash of a thought: this was as bad as it could get. He was living the worst of it now. Beyond death, how much worse could it get? It was habit that kept him scared and needing the Locker for a while longer after that, with the Attendant sniggers every time they looked at the word IDIOT on his forehead, even beginning to adopt the name themselves. But it was a habit that dissipated. That night, looking up at all those faces looking down on him, faces contorted in wavy mirrors, a face he would never have, but that was okay; looking up, he did see himself. He saw not his fear, but theirs. They could have been him. He realised the true meaning of the word ‘brother’. Until then he had looked at his bullies as bigger than him, stronger than him. But that wasn’t true. He was just like them. Just as strong as them. Just as big as them.

  The older brothers didn’t care about him, or anyone in the lower bunkhouses. He only had to worry about his own bunkhouse. And the next time they struck out at him, he grabbed the fist, or the leg, and held it, pushing back. If pushing didn’t work, he struck out himself. Sometimes outnumbered, sometimes not, but he managed more and more to leave his own mark. “I’m not scared of you,” he began saying. “You’re just me, and I’m just you. We’re the same.” He said it enough, they began to believe it and leave him alone. Either that, or they grew up.

  He had fought his way out of that locker, he could fight his way out of the canyon too.

  ***

  She’d used all her boost so deployed her sails – in all honesty, the drag it gave her made the speed more tolerable. Made her feel safer. Boosting along that last ledge had damn near given her a heart attack, but the thrill of overtaking everyone offset that fear with a burst of adrenaline, her personal boost. She’d wanted to wave, but didn’t dare take her hand off the handle. Instead she bolted forward with the fall just a couple of inches to her left, and was grateful once the ledge began to rise again.

  For an instant, there was no Deo and the girls, just her life hanging on Feather’s trust and the faith that this ledge wouldn’t crumble to the ground. As she rose back to the plateau she let out a deep sigh and replaced it in her lungs with the cool air blowing across the top, but she knew that there was still more danger to come. Now it was poor Gentle Joe on her mind; he’d been so excited the previous night around the fire, but she’d fooled him, going right instead of left. She wondered how long it had taken him to realise he was last, and if he’d crumpled like the edges of the ledge, or fought for his position. After all that Deo had done for him, turning the tattooed IDIOT into GENTLE through some clever calligraphy, so he no longer had to walk around with that scar on his forehead – he had enough to worry about – it would be sad if he got trapped here. Yet, if he didn’t keep up with the last of the riders, those great metal doors would rise into place from the ground, snaring him.

  Rather him than me, though, she thought.

  The path, as rough as it was; nothing more than a hint of something where perhaps a shallow stream of water had once ran, and as dark as old rust, angled towards a dip in the ground. She followed it, and suddenly found herself descending again. She thought about releasing the throttle slightly, but even though she knew she was ahead, she knew it was foolhardy to relax. She may pick up mines out on the plains, but did she really want to use them? The others, if they chose, could grab booster packs, so she wanted to give herself as much room as possible to not have to make that decision.

  Though she had to get over this first. Her path was ending; carving down through the sandstone into a mini-canyon of its own, walls rising to her sides; flattening out and stopping abruptly, with an edge that lead down to the riders below. Twenty-feet further on and the path continued. As if that wasn’t bad enough, it was also a twenty-foot drop.

  This is madness, my dear, said her father. Don’t do this.

  I can’t stop now, even if I wanted to. It’s downhill, my only choice is to speed up or I’ll just flop off the edge and fall like bird shit onto the others.

  So she hunkered. She strained on the throttle for every last breath, sending bolts of pain up her wrists in the process. She tucked in her elbows and felt the wind smack against the top of her head. Her fringe was plastered down across her goggles, but that was okay. Perhaps it was better not to see. There was nothing she could do anyway. It was just onwards, onwards and then down; no ramp to push her up, no lifting to be done.

  Then the side-walls vanished and Feather was flung out into the open space of the canyon.

  ***

  Rohen watched as Leora’s hoverbike burst from the side of the canyon, from a barely perceptible gap that couldn’t have been more than six feet wide, and flew from right-to-left through the air. A shower of debris cascaded down behind her, bouncing off the wall and rolling to a stop on the ground in front of him. Like exhaust, he thought; the deathly cough of a mountainside.

  Following the jump, Leora vanished from view as she fell to the other side, and there was a crashing, metallic sound that raised his hopes.

  “Damn, what a daredevil,” said a deep and crackling, tinny voice.

  Rohen nodded, taking longer than it should have before realising it hadn’t been his own thoughts projected out through his mouth, or simply a thought so vivid he thought he had been speaking. He gawped behind his mask and let out a grunt of surprise. It was lost in the roaring shout of the wind.

  Elissa, on Phoenix, a red-and-orange-and-yellow spectacle of a hoverbike (somewhere in the blur of colours was the wing-spread prow of a bird, beak proudly raised) suddenly appeared to his left. He glanced across and watched her dip her head down into the dash; she was as flat as could be. Phoenix’s tail flogged at the slipstream it created, almost as though it could tail-whip Elissa onwards, faster.

  But that was an illusion. The Phoenix-tail was no better or worse than any of their sails; he knew, because he had timed it on the plains. If anything, it was slower. No, he must’ve got distracted and slowed down, or made a wrong move. He twisted at the throttle and it moved barely a centimetre, but evidently that was enough. He cursed Elissa and lay flat to his hoverbike as they approached a heap of scrap metal; failed attempts at the jump Leora had just attempted. Somewhere among the dented and bent body of numerous hoverbikes, and the twisted handlebars, were numerous decaying and decayed bones. The pile was quite impressive at around nine feet high, banked up the left side. Some had fallen through lack of speed. Others, he had watched live over the years, underestimated the space given to them by the narrow canyon-entrance, and had scraped their handles along the wall, leaving an indentation of destruction as the rear flicked out, brushed the other wall, and sent the hoverbike into a spin before the jump had even been reached.

  The cobbled ground sped by below, no longer completely smooth, the hoverbike bouncing almost imperceptibly as it adjusted its height. He swerved right, aiming to cut the apex as he had the ground on Elissa and could force her back if he didn’t give her enough room. She sidled up beside him, legs almost touching.

  “What are you doing?” he shouted at her, though it was useless.

  She ignored him. In fact, she pretended he wasn’t even there and inched closer until they were touching, racing along knee to knee with a drone directly above watching their every move. Rohen could imagine Speke’s incredulous exclamations now, commentating on the move from the comfort of his communications tower, saying something in high alto like “Did you seeeeeee thaaaaat. She makes an audaaaaaaacious moooooove. Rohen looks stunned!”

  Stunned, my ass, he thinks, veering left, as though the two hoverbikes could merge into one single arrowing dart.

  “Guess that’s your port-side sail fucked,” said the deep, metallic voice. He could hear this dislocated voice quite clearly, despite the wind.

  “What is this?” he said through his reverberating, chattering teeth. There was stabbing sensation in his side; glancing across, he saw Elissa had raised her knee, poised for another k
ick. He veered again to the left, hoping to catch her off guard, and smiled as she nearly overbalanced and had to quickly bring herself right again.

  Through all this, the corner fast approached.

  Elissa relented from her single-mindedness, finally, and looked across. Maybe their eyes met, maybe they didn’t; darkened goggles and filth restricted eye-view, but Rohen was reminded of the previous night and her relentless gaze by firelight. Her hair flew about her head like flames, and beneath those goggles flashed her lopsided grin.

  She slowed as the pile of debris neared, with Rohen still hitting the apex. She had no choice or she’d end up the latest addition to the rusting remains. Rohen let out a sigh of relief as she left his peripheral vision, safely behind him again. He turned to look, quickly, and was dismayed to see that the collision had torn his port-side sails and bent the arms that held them. Only Elissa had her sails out like a tail, so it was rare that riders would sidle up against each other for fear of damaging their own sails, but that wasn’t a problem she had to worry about. And now it was his.

  “You bitch,” he muttered as he took the turn, swerving into a section of canyon that was the narrowest yet, pock-marked with monuments in varying poses; pleading, or praying, or waving a warning hand. Bit late now.

  ***

  Elissa put a finger to her ear and flicked a small switch to ‘on’ but not until after Rohen called her a bitch, so she didn’t catch that. The faint humming of Rohen’s hoverbike and the ocean-sound of waves both echoed loudly over the noise of Phoenix eating up the track. It was pebblier here from the years of attempted jumps overhead knocking debris down.

  “That was lucky,” she said. The microphone hidden in her mask converted her voice into a robotic staccato. The receiver hidden on Rohen’s goggles picked this up, and Elissa smiled as he cursed and told the voice to go away. She reminded herself to thank Avery for the gift.