I watched as Idris’ head dropped in disappointment. My brain and heart felt like they were going to jump out of my body. Idris had told me not to tell anyone, and I had told Smith. I thought Smith was my friend! That son-of-a bitch! Just then, I heard Idris speak.
“The rest of us aren’t like Smith. The rest of Circadia will not allow this to happen. Circadia will stand and fight,” he said, his voice low. “Am I right?” I watched as he looked out at the crowd.
“Not to harsh your vibe, Idris, but I’ve been here with everyone for quite awhile and they’re all a bunch of ignorant cowards,” Smith said. As he walked closer, he approached within an inch of Idris’ face and whispered something. I couldn’t hear what he said, but whatever it was prompted Idris to cry out to everyone around him.
“Who will stand and fight?” he asked. Raising his voice to a battle cry, he asked, “Who’s with me? This is our planet! This is our world! Don’t let them take it!” he howled. I saw Idris look at me, almost daring me to start a revolution, then his eyes went blank.
Smith stood behind him while the other man held him. Smith’s knife from his MACE suit was sunk into Idris’ side. “Run!” Idris spat out with a spray of blood. Gushes of blood ran down his light blue shirt. I saw Smith whisper something else to him and dig the knife in deeper.
The entire crowd dispersed quickly as the originals ran toward the woods. I watched as most of my people got away, but some were captured. I continued watching as Smith withdrew his knife from Idris’ ribs, and the other man let him flop to the ground. Idris’ eyes were wide open and glazed over. He was gone.
Leslie’s voice could be heard ever so slightly over the chaos as he ordered, “Go get them.”
I watched as three hundred of the ‘crew members’ swarmed across the fields toward the woods where everyone had run to hide. The wave of hell moved swiftly and efficiently.
I turned to hide behind the supply hull, grasping my axe firmly in hand. What the hell am I going to do? What are we going to do? Panic overcame me, until it was clear. We had to stop this. This was far from over. I grabbed my axe and stood.
Bring it on.
GOVERN
Chapter One
THE WOODS LOOKED TO be miles away, but I ran as an army of nearly three-hundred chased me. My feet pounded hard on the dirt. Sweat streamed down my face. Breaths came rapid and shallow, as legs powered through the pain. “Stop!” they yelled, but I kept running. The axe in my hand was heavy, but I held on.
The tree line was fast approaching, which would provide me with a chance to get ahead. I knew these woods better than anyone behind me, that was for damn sure. As I glided in under the canopy of the trees, a quiet overtook me. The chaos of the outside world felt like it faded away, but I knew better. Maneuvering around the tall purple trees, and over the enormous roots on the ground, I heard the men following me stop at the edge of the field. Hearing their voices as they conspired in the trees, I continued forward.
Night began to fall, and the leaves of the trees made dusk even darker. Shadows crept from the trees, urging me to stay alert. My run had slowed to a quick sneak. If I couldn’t hear my footsteps, then neither could they. Keeping my breathing quiet and my eyes wide open, I made good time through the vast timber.
I kept my ears open for my friends, my colleagues. Knowing that some of them had escaped the takeover, I didn’t doubt that some of them would be hiding in these woods, trying to escape the predetermined fate the new world leader had planned for us. My eyes darted back and forth searching for any sign of movement, but I never saw one.
After an hour of trucking along, I crouched down beside one of the large tree trunks and sat, quiet, listening for any footsteps or whispers. I heard nothing. Absolute silence. Letting another hour go by, I waited. If someone was going to be heard, it would be now. People are prone to noise and folly especially when they think they are on the offensive, so I waited. Still nothing.
Standing up, I turned around to see a silhouette in the distance. A man. “Garrett?” I asked. Hoping that it was him, I walked forward, but he said nothing in return. I slipped my axe down and behind me so it wasn’t shown to the person standing in front of me. “Hello? It’s okay, they’re gone.” As I walked closer, the face became more pronounced, and the hair color more prominent. The red hair struck me first, then the glaring eyes. It was Smith.
“Hello, Aella,” he said.
“How did you find me?” I asked.
“Wasn’t hard,” he said. “When we reached the woods, I knew you would try to outsmart us. Told them to let me go on my own, so I followed you. I thought I lost you for a moment, but I waited. Waited a very long time, and just when I was ready to give up, you stood up and started looking around.” He smiled at the ground until his eyes shot up to meet with mine. “I’m sorry about what happened back there.”
I gritted my teeth together until I was able to speak. “You killed Idris. You killed our leader. He was the only one out of this whole process that gave a damn about us, and you betrayed him. You betrayed us.”
“When you say it like that, it sounds awful,” he said, as he clutched his chest. “I’m not the bad guy in this, Aella. You know that. We’re friends.”
“Were. We were friends. That ended about two hours ago,” I said.
“Well if we weren’t friends, I would have had all the crews come out here to collect you, but I thought I should give you a chance. You can still be a part of this world, a big part, just like you wanted. You could probably even be a level two citizen with the right recommendation...” he said, obviously in love with himself. “Maybe we could even make this work, right?”
“Make what work?” I asked.
“You and me. Now that Garrett’s out of the picture...”
My heart raced and my face turned hot. “What did you do to him?” I screamed. “Where is he?”
“Calm down, he’ll be fine. As long as you cooperate,” Smith said.
The axe in my hand dropped down a little behind my right leg in my hand, ready to swing. “I will never be what you want me to be. I will never work for Leslie. I will never want you and I will never stop trying to kill you,” I said as I swung the axe over my head at Smith. The heaviness in my hands turned to power as it arched over my head to deliver the wrath of its own weight and my force.
His hand rose up to meet with the axe handle, and instantaneously the momentum of the weapon came to a stop. “I don’t think so,” he said, ripping the axe from my grasps.
“Guys!” he announced to the empty woods. “Come get her!” Three-hundred strong descended from behind the shadows of the trees. Two large men latched onto my arms and shoved me down to my knees to wait in audience of Smith. He brushed off his shirt where dirt from the axe had fallen onto him and fixed his hair. Walking over to me, he came inches from my face and said, “Guess you don’t really have a choice, do you? Now, where are your friends?”
“You followed me out here, you know I don’t know,” I spat back.
“I have a pretty good idea that you’ve been coming out here for a while, am I right? I’m guessing you all have this fun little spot that everyone goes to, to get away from it all, right?” His piercing eyes drilled into mine.
“Smith, I swear if I knew where they were, which I don’t, I wouldn’t lead you to them.”
One of the crew members spoke up that was holding onto my arm. “You think she’s lying? They’ve gotta be out here somewhere. We watched a hundred people run into these woods and you’re telling me they’re all gone now? I don’t think so,” he said.
Smith barked back at him, “Well, do you see them anywhere?”
The man cowered away and returned to his duties.
Returning his gaze back to me, Smith worked his jaw back and forth. “Aella, I’m going to give you one last chance. Tell me where they’re at.”
“I really have no idea. I swear.”
“Fine, then. Let’s go have a chat with Leslie, see what he thinks.”
<
br /> CHAPTER TWO
The two large men grabbed me by each arm and pulled me up onto my feet. Walking towards the open fields, away from the woods, I stole one glance back towards the depths of the darkness, searching in the black for a hundred people who seemed to have vanished, only to be met with disappointment. I wondered what was waiting for me back at camp. Smith said he was taking me to see Leslie, the director of the reality TV show that had brought us to Circadia. The same man who had come to visit shortly after Earth’s demise, and had taken over our planet. He had left millions of people on Earth to die in exchange for money, and he didn’t seem to care. Yet, here I was, being dragged to be in his audience. The man I hated the most.
Leslie was the Director of ‘Grow.’ During one of Earth’s darkest moments, there was a crowdfunding effort to send a reality TV show to the new world that had entered into our orbit led by him. Quickly finding the funding to visit Earth’s new neighbor, we were led to believe science was at the heart of the mission. We quickly realized soon after though, Circadia’s colonists—us—were only sent to the new planet to make Leslie money. We were ill prepared and ill informed. That didn’t stop them from using us as a refugee camp when Earth’s nuclear powers collided, and it didn’t stop them from charging people billions of dollars for a ticket to Circadia to escape their fate on Earth. Leslie was an evil, manipulative person, and he had stolen away everything I loved.
Smith led the way through the dark fields towards the light of the camp. Lit by the power we created, I could see camp was much more empty than usual. My heart sank a little, knowing that it was my friends that were missing from the picture. Each step I took broke my heart.
When we approached the camp, Smith dashed forward to speak with Leslie alone. The men holding me stopped just out of hearing range of the conversation. I did my best to watch their lips, trying to determine each word, to no avail. They caught me watching them intently, and the conversation stopped abruptly. When Smith returned, he winked at me, then told the men to take me to the gathering area. I fought their efforts to bring me forward, but it was useless. Moving about twenty feet to the left and around a few huts, we reached the dusty area known to be the gathering area.
They shoved me down to the ground and my wrists caught most of the force. I looked down at my stinging hands to see blood meddling with the dirt and tiny specks of rock from the Earth. Tears pricked at my eyes, but I quickly shunned away any feelings I was emoting. I didn’t want them to see any weakness. Even if the only emotions I was capable of feeling at the moment was anger and weakness. Powerless, maybe. Standing on either side of me, they didn’t make a move, just stood ready. Smith took a seat on the ground near me, also waiting. The group was quiet, but I heard footsteps swooshing through the grass towards the gathering place. When I looked up, I saw boots crushing the flower weed underneath them, and following up the boots, I saw Leslie’s smile gleaming back at me.
His blonde comb-over was now a mess from the recent debacle, but his clothes looked clean and pressed. Even on Circadia where most of us made use of very little and lived simple lives, Leslie was living high on the hog. Lavish housing, unlimited food, and a lack of labor had treated him well. He actually looked comfortable in his skin, in contrast to the rest of our skeleton-like bodies.
“Aella, I’m so glad we found you,” he said. “Out of all the talent we have acquired in the short amount of time we have had control, I am most excited to have you on board. I mean, you treated me so well when I first got here, right?”
I remembered driving my fist into his face over and over. Just the thought gave me some relief, but not enough. What I wouldn’t do to punch your stupid face in right now, I thought. I wished I had never stopped hitting him before, and wouldn’t have, had I known what was going to happen.
He continued on with the voice he so much loved to hear. “I gave all of this to you. To all of you, and this is how you repay me.”
“Why couldn’t you have been happy with your fair share? You could have lived in harmony with us, why kill Idris?” I could feel my eyes bulging out of my head as I spoke. I tried to keep a steady tone, but it was impossible. My voice came out crackly and hoarse. I was letting my emotions get the best of me. Once I was waiting for a reply, I took a deep breath to calm myself.
His words sounded more like a growl as they left his lips. “My fair share is more than yours, and don’t you ever forget it. I worked tooth and nail to get you here, do you understand that? This is mine! This is all mine.” He took a moment to calm himself and took a deep breath. “As for Idris, the man was trying to cause trouble with his superiors.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means he was trying to tell me what I could and couldn’t do on my planet. He needed to be taught a lesson, and when he wouldn’t take it, I made an example of him,” he said.
“This is not your planet, Leslie, and all you did was make a martyr out of him. People loved Idris. You’ll pay for what you’ve done here, I promise you,” I said.
Not a second was wasted before I felt the sting of his hand across my face. My head snapped sideways and my jaw ached. I was already exhausted, and the pain heightened the fatigue.
“You do not speak to me like that, do you understand? You’re in my world now, you play by my rules, okay, sweetheart?” he said as he flicked the tip of my nose. “Take her away, put her with the others,” I stared down at the ground, broken. “And by the way, Aella, your friends are as good as dead out there.”
The men dragged me to one of the new apartment buildings. It was more of a large townhouse that Ronald had built but was subdivided into smaller rooms. Though it was meant to make living quarters for refugees from Earth, it was now being used as a prison. The doors were padlocked, and a woman came forward with the keys from the group trailing behind us. Fiddling with the lock before it was unlatched, I peered inside to see nearly twenty-five people from our original colonists sitting in the small, dark room.
“Go on,” the woman with the key said. I looked up to make eye contact with her, and she quickly turned away, doing her best to avoid me. I scoffed and entered the room. Once I was inside, my escorts left, closing the door behind me and locking it from the outside.
Straining to see into the black room surrounding me, searching for a familiar face, I found only a few that I had even talked to before in passing. Of course, everyone’s faces were familiar, as there had only been an original one-hundred of us sent here to Circadia—experts from a variety of fields—but the familiarity only gave me so much comfort.
“Did they capture you guys in the woods or did they get you when the whole thing went down?” I asked. I wondered if any of them had seen where my group had gone, and when the last time was that they were seen. It was strange I hadn’t found them in the woods.
“Most of us were caught up when the whole mutiny happened. Some were caught shortly after trying to run through the fields to hide,” an older woman answered.
“How far did you make it?” one man asked. “How long were you out there before you were caught?”
“About an hour or two. I ran forever, or it felt like it, and then I hid for a while in the woods. They knew where I was though. Smith caught me.” My head dropped to my chest in disappointment.
“Who’s Smith?” the older woman asked. It had never occurred to me that most of what had happened, had happened within my team. I thought about how they must have felt, in the dark about everything. Apart from people I had to deal with every day, I never really had a chance to get to know the rest of the Originals sent with us.
“Smith was on the agricultural team with me. He was my friend. He’s also the one that stabbed Idris,” I said with a heavy heart. At first, I scanned the crowd to see reactions and was met with anger, then empathy. “Did you all know Idris very well?”
Everyone nodded, and some began to cry. It was easy to see that Idris had an effect on everyone he met. Idris had not only been the fearless leade
r of the entire program but had also been a friend to every single person sent here. He was the only one who had gotten us as far as we had come, and the one that had begged for us to fight the oppression that Leslie had brought to Circadia during his last moments.
‘We have to get out of here,” I said.
“We’ve tried, but when the architectural team built these houses, they were built tough. This was one of the earlier houses, so there’s no windows and the whole exterior is green wood. There’s no way out,” one man answered. Several more echoed his last words. “There’s no way out.”
The hopelessness from the group was palpable.
I frowned. “Well, they’ve gotta let us out of here sometime, right?”
“I assume they’ll let us out tomorrow,” one man said. “But from what I understand, we’re basically gonna be treated as slaves.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’re level three citizens now, remember?”
Just before Leslie had killed Idris in front of all of us, he had rounded everyone up with his recently discovered army and made us listen to his monologue. He dictated to us the new rules that he would establish: everyone would be subject to a three-level citizenship hierarchy. Level one was the highest level of citizenship you could have and included Leslie and the people who had paid to live here. Level two citizenship included Leslie’s military, and level three included the original hundred that built the new world. Each level up would have better rations and accommodations than the next, as well as easier labor.
The entire system was backwards, but greed had a funny way of turning everything upside down. When we built Circadia, we dreamed of a world without the constraint and corruption of currency. A planet where the fruits of your own labor would determine your wealth, and work wasn’t a prison, it was a right. One that could be a sense of pride. Instead, Earth’s evil had followed us.
In the morning, we waited for them to come, but they never did. Expecting a hard day of work ahead of us, I was anxious, but the relief never came. Neither did the food. As the day progressed, I was sure that they would come, at least to feed us, but they never did. No water either.
The Circadia Chronicles: Omnibus: The Complete Colonization Sci-Fi Series Page 14
