Scavenger of Souls

by Joshua David Bellin

  He stepped closer. The room grew even smaller, the guards crowding my back while his giant frame trapped me. I expected him to catch hold of me again, but instead he tapped a code into his wrist cuff, and another cell slid open, a larger one.

  An empty one.

  “Don’t you see,” he said in a voice turned soft, “that this is the only way?”

  I stared at the empty cell, letting his words sink in.

  “It’s not,” I said. “I’m sorry, Udain. I’m leaving.”

  He backed off, glaring at me. “Even if you could leave,” he said, “even if you could save the rest, I hold the one you care for most. Aleka. Your mother.”

  I fought down panic at his words, though it no longer surprised me that he knew. He’d known all along, connected the dots far faster than I had. Whether through the eyes of his hidden lenses or through his own eyes, he knew everything that took place in his compound.

  “If you touch her,” I said, trying to meet the imposing man’s gaze, “if you touch any of them . . .”

  Unexpectedly, he laughed. It boomed in my ears, and the light blinked as if the walls of the underground prison were about to collapse.

  “Boy,” he said, his face still shaking with mirthless laughter. “I’ve led armies, fought monsters in their dens. Who are you to threaten me?”

  He reached for my arm, and I braced myself against the wall of the tiny room.

  “Actually, Udain,” I said. “So have I.”

  Without stopping to think what I was doing, I leaped for the pistol tucked in the giant commander’s belt.

  Udain shouted a warning, but it came too late. The buzz of the guards’ rifles hit me, jarred me, but didn’t hurt me. The pulse Mercy had felt when she shot me was so strong this time it knocked them against the cement walls, their rifles clattering to the floor. Before they could regroup, I sprang for the stairs. I feared that Udain might have closed the door at the top, but I shouldn’t have worried. The moment I touched it, a buzzing sensation ripped through my body and the door snapped from one of its hinges, freeing me from the building that would have been my tomb.

  I ran for the gate. Mercy’s guards hadn’t moved from the spot where we’d left them. They’d tightened their ring around her, Geller leading them in taunts and laughter, while Mercy stood silent, her face expressionless.

  They saw me at the same time she did. But she reacted faster.

  In the seconds it took me to reach her, she had Geller down and, from what I could tell, out. The rest backed away from the rifle she’d taken from their felled ringleader. They hesitated for a second, fingering their own weapons—but though they outnumbered her, it only took them a second to make up their minds and run. I was too far away to see her eyes, but I wouldn’t have wanted to face her at that moment either.

  “Head for the gate!” I shouted as I came up to her. “We’re getting out of here!”

  “But what about Grandpa—”

  I grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the gate. She was as strong as me, probably stronger, but she didn’t resist. Her fingers clenched mine so hard the nails bit into my skin. I heard heavy feet pounding across the cement courtyard, but in the quick glance I could risk, I couldn’t tell who it was.

  The gate bled yellow light into a sky as dark as tar. Only one guard stood there, Geller’s companion from the night we’d arrived. Up close, I saw how exhausted he looked, and I wondered if the guards ever changed shifts, or even slept. He raised his rifle as we pulled up to the gate. “No way, Mercy.”

  “Yes way,” she said. Her rifle rose a fraction, his mirroring the movement. In her eyes, I saw she was about to pull the trigger.

  Again I acted without thinking. I threw myself at him, saw his rifle swing toward me and the energy beam erupt from its muzzle. But then the rebounding pulse wrapped him, and he fell to the concrete, moaning. I smelled burning hair, and I hoped the burst had been brief enough that he’d survive.

  Mercy was staring at me in shock. Her eyes widened even further when I gripped the bars of the gate.

  This one hurt.

  So much energy flowed through the gate, I could barely hold on. But I leaned into the force, letting it hammer against me, knowing something would have to give. I just prayed it would be the gate and not me.

  A jolt, the hardest I’d felt by far, blasted through my body, and with a silent concussion, the gate sprang open. The compound was plunged into darkness. When I rested my hands against the bars again, I felt nothing, no force, no repulsion. The beam was dead.

  I’d shorted the system.

  Backup lights glowed weakly from the four corners of the compound, too dim to show anything but the outlines of what happened below. The two guards from the power station had appeared, their commander a looming shadow behind them. I stood between them and Mercy, daring them to shoot, hoping they wouldn’t. They froze, as still as the statues that had been carved into the impact zone fifteen years ago. I wished I could return to the infirmary, check on Zataias and Adem, make sure my mother was recovering from her surgery. I feared what Udain might do to her in my absence. But I knew if I hesitated even a moment he would catch me, and shackle me in the drone room, and then not only my life but the lives of everyone I loved would be over. Shouldering the fallen guard’s rifle, I grabbed my companion’s hand and backed out the open gate.

  Udain stepped in front of the guards, his hair crowned a ghostly white. He held a hand toward Mercy, and even in the dim light I could see the pleading expression on his face. For a moment I thought she was about to give in.

  But she didn’t. The impact zone lay ahead of us, and she squeezed my hand as we turned and fled into the night. In a minute we’d passed behind the row of stone guards, and the compound’s weak glow vanished as if it had been snuffed out by a breath.

  “Will they follow us?” I asked.

  “It’ll take a while to get the beam back online,” she answered. “But heck yeah, they’ll follow us.”

  “Then we’d better hurry.”

  We raced into the night, not looking back.

  “So this was your plan?” Mercy said. She smiled, and for the first time since I’d met her, her smile didn’t look like she was about to take a bite out of me. “No offense, but it seems almost like you made it up as you went along, you know?”

  10

  Mercy and I ran for hours, the black land a solid darkness around us.

  We must have covered ten miles before we finally slowed down, but I didn’t feel the least bit tired. Neither did she. Her strides were steady and strong, her eyes shining with the same determination that gripped me. As soon as we were out in the impact zone I brought her up to speed about my conversation with Udain, though I left out the goriest details of what I’d seen in the power station. She’d been less angry than I anticipated when I told her Udain’s true reasons for not attacking the canyon. But now I put everything out of my mind as our feet moved in tandem, each step bringing us closer to the canyon and whatever lay in wait for us there.

  Long past midnight the moon struggled free of its cloud cover, and the impact zone gleamed a liquid silver in its path. With the landscape’s peaks and ridges, fathomless craters and shining pools of stone, the plateau looked like a mirror moon, spread out for us to explore. Though I knew the shapes in the rock were the bodies of people long dead, fossilized by the catastrophe that had claimed Mercy’s family, they held a weird and peaceful beauty in the moonlight, a stillness like natural sleep settled to stone. I wondered, as I watched Mercy surveying the land, if she could find beauty here too. And I wondered why the little bits of beauty left in this world—the glass desert by night, Mercy’s smile—had to come at such a terrible cost.

  Mercy kept her inspection brief. “We should get going. Udain will be after us before we know it.”

  I nodded. “Mercy, I—about Udain—”

  “Nothing to say,” she cut me off. “He made his choice. We made ours. And it was about time, too.”

  I spo
ke the thing that was gnawing at me. “Do you think he’ll do anything to my colony? Zataias and . . . the others?”

  She shook her head. “He’s not stupid. He knows if he hurts them, he loses his hold over you.” Nodding to the west, she said, “Now let’s get cracking. There’s a canyon with our name written all over it.”

  She held out her hand. I took it, and we headed due west, running as if we’d never known tiredness before. The moon paced us, slipping through the sky like a comet. After a time it fell below the horizon, and we continued in complete darkness. Still I didn’t doubt a step. Mercy squeezed my hand, and a laugh bubbled from her, choked at first, then pealing high into the night.

  “Not bad for a pipsqueak,” she said breathlessly. “You sure there’s not something you’re not telling me?”

  We ran on, and Mercy’s laugh lit what the moon no longer showed.

  We rested once more for a drink and an energy bar, and by the time we were done with our skimpy meal, dawn had sliced the sky at our backs. The altar stood on the far western horizon, its deeper darkness bulked against the pale darkness of the impact zone, only its twin horns tipped with morning fire. Mercy, better at distances than me, estimated it to be less than five miles away. I looked out over the empty landscape, trying to penetrate the gloom. Now that I had time to think, all the doubts I’d held at bay during our midnight run came swarming back.

  Mercy must have seen it in my eyes. “Having second thoughts?”

  “No,” I lied. “Or I don’t know. I think I’m going completely crazy.”

  “Well, opposites attract, right?” She squinted at the distant altar. “Anything I can do to help you make up your alleged mind?”

  You’ve already helped more than you know, I wanted to say. “Mercy, look. You don’t have to—when I go into the canyon, you don’t have to—”

  “Stay here and look for bunny rabbits in the clouds?” she said. “Of course I don’t. I’d much rather go with you.”

  “But what if I . . .”

  She drew close, squeezed my arm. “Did anyone ever tell you you think too much? Sometimes you just have to go for it.”

  I looked at her dark eyes, her smile. For a second I was reminded of Korah’s smile, lost what seemed years ago. Facing whatever lay in wait for me up ahead seemed a little less awful thanks to Mercy’s smile, and a lot less confusing than trying to answer it.

  “All right,” I said. “But can I ask you one more question?”

  “Fire away. Metaphorically, of course.”

  “If it gets too rough in there. If they’re killing me. I just want to make sure you’ll save yourself—”

  “That’s not a question,” she said. “But for what it’s worth, the answer is no freaking way.”

  I took a deep breath. Mercy smiled in the dawn light. And the black lands led nowhere but on.

  “All right, then,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  We marched west. With every step closer to Asunder’s realm, a mixture of nerves and resolve tangled in my chest. I felt as if every muscle in my body had been drawn tight, the fiery rock and fiery sky pulling me between. I thought about my days of indecision in the canyon, the foolish hopes I’d clung to, the failure of everything I’d tried to do. Mercy was right, I decided. I didn’t know how strong the power in me was. But the grown-ups in our lives had screwed up plenty, starting with what they’d done to the world before either of us was born. It was about time we found out what we could do.

  Mercy and I had reviewed our plan after breakfast. It amounted to little more than getting close to Asunder and shooting first. We’d decided to approach the canyon via the northern route, avoiding the rock city where the terrain made an ambush more likely. She’d tested our two rifles against the black rock, discovering that Udain either hadn’t jammed them or couldn’t from this distance. She gave me a crash course on how to operate mine, including how to increase the energy output, though she warned me that would expend the charge quickly. If all else failed, she suggested, she could always shoot me instead. “You obviously amplify the beam,” she said. “So why not?” I couldn’t tell in her dark eyes if she was joking. All I knew was that when it came, and I was sure it was coming, my trial by fire would be against a human being. I could tell myself he was Skaldi-infested, but like all Skaldi, he looked an awful lot like me.

  “Down!” Mercy’s voice broke into my thoughts, and instinctively I dropped to the black stone.

  I had no time to thank her for the warning. The spear that had been launched at us missed, embedding itself in a rock formation where our heads had been. The weapon was followed by its owner, one of the anonymous warriors who’d lain in wait behind another jutting boulder. In the second it took him to leap across the space, I realized what his presence out here meant: we were expected, had been watched, our progress reported to Asunder. The next second, the man’s body crashed into Mercy, who’d sprung to her feet the moment the spear flew past, her rifle aimed at his chest. But the warrior had the advantage of size and strength, and the force of his leap knocked the weapon from her hands and carried her against the stone outcropping, where she was pinned by his weight.

  A stone knife appeared in his hand. Mercy brought a knee into his crotch, but he twisted to avoid the force of the blow. She dodged the knife’s descent, caught his hand in both of hers. But her hasty grip was too awkward to hold him for long.

  I scrambled to my feet and threw myself at the man, all thoughts of Skaldi or internal firepower erased from my mind. I only knew I had to get him off her before the knife came down again.

  I landed on the man’s back, my arms snaking around his neck. My weight threw him off-balance, giving Mercy the leverage to push him away. He staggered with me wrapped around him, stumbled backward. Something in the rock beneath his feet gave way with a sound like shattering glass. The man bucked, wobbled, nearly fell. I glanced over my shoulder and saw a crevice too deep to find bottom, felt my head spin as the warrior’s feet scrambled on the broken stone—

  —and then we were sailing toward Mercy, as if a silent explosion had thrown us through space. We landed heavily, the man on top of me, his weight entirely limp where a moment ago it had been all straining muscle. I pushed him from me, felt him roll to the ground. His eyes stared blankly at the sky, and where his teeth were bared I saw shreds of bright yellow fire. The stench of cooked flesh filled my nostrils.

  The man twitched once then lay still.

  Mercy knelt beside him, then looked at me, shaking her head curtly. Without a word, she relieved the man of the knife clutched rigidly in his fingers. A final spark leaped from the blade, crackling as she pulled it free.

  “I’d say the experiment was successful,” she announced. “This loser would appear to be toast.”

  I looked at my hands. They shook with a power all their own, crescents of yellow light dancing across my fingertips. I realized this was the first time I’d emitted the energy without any outside force to provoke it. Fear alone had done what it had taken Skaldi or energy rifles to do before.

  “Did you know him?” I said. “Was he one of yours?”

  Mercy reached out and pulled me to my feet. She winced at my touch, but no sooner did we make contact than the sparks died. Ignoring the dead warrior, she turned and yanked his spear from the black rock. Then she placed a hand on my shoulder and stared intently into my eyes.

  “I was only a kid when Asunder took this one,” she said. “We all were.”

  I looked at the man on the ground, tried to think of him as a former Keely or Zataias or Mercy, tried not to think of him that way.

  “We march straight on,” she continued. “We don’t kill anyone we don’t need to. But we don’t spare anyone we do.”

  “How will we know the difference?”

  She looked at me hard. Her black eyes gleamed, echoing the dull glare of the wasteland at our feet.

  “For years after my sister died,” she said, “I had a nightmare. I’d be out in the courtyard, playing with
her. Dolls and things. Then the sky would go solid yellow, and we’d both look up, and the light would shower down on us like rain. Beryl would laugh and open her mouth to drink it in. But then she’d look at me, and her face would turn black and crumble away, and where I held her, her hands would dissolve into black powder, and I’d scream and wake up. Every night, the same dream. You know how to get nightmares like that to stop?”

  I shook my head.

  “That’s too bad,” she said. “I was kind of hoping someone would.”

  She shouldered the spear, tucked the knife in her belt, and, avoiding the fissure in the stone, picked up our trail west. I glanced one last time at the lifeless form spread-eagled on the ground, then hurried after her. My legs quivered with the aftereffects of the energy discharge, and my heart raced.

  “I didn’t mean to kill him,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, he sure as hell meant to kill me,” she answered, not turning her head. “So take your pick.”

  “That’s the thing,” I said. “I think I just did.”

  She stopped, and this time she looked at me. Her smile, weary and sad, reminded me of her uncle Laman’s. “And I’d like to thank you for that. For choosing me over him.”

  Without another word she turned, and we continued on our way.

  Mercy and I had plenty more opportunities to thank each other after that.

  But we didn’t waste breath on thank-yous. There wasn’t time, and she wasn’t the sentimental type anyway.

  My suspicion about the first man turned out to be right. It seemed Asunder had sent him to test us, to see what he was up against. How he knew I was headed back to the canyon I couldn’t be sure, but the Skaldi always seemed to know more about me than I knew myself. Maybe it had something to do with the part of them living in his staff. Or maybe the discharge of my power had triggered something deep inside him, so he no longer held back his forces.