Scavenger of Souls

by Joshua David Bellin

  Nessa tossed her hair, apparently forgetting it had been cropped too short to toss. I guess she remembered a moment later, because her cheeks flamed beneath her green eyes.

  Seeing them all here, restored and alive, I felt a shiver travel through me that I must not have had time for at the scene of battle. I’d brought an army of Skaldi to the world, risked all of their lives. Yet here Mercy was, still looking at me with her flashing eyes, still teasing me with her jokes. And here I was, still feeling my heart stutter when I remembered her lips meeting mine. The kids clustered near me the way they used to: their hands twining with mine, their faces showing no awareness that I had killed others just like them. Ardan glowered at me, but not in a hostile way—just in the way I figured a big brother looks at the guy his sister is pressing up against. Did no one realize what I’d done? Did no one care?

  “Guard our rear, Mercy,” Aleka said. “If anything comes remotely close, blast it.”

  “With pleasure,” Mercy said.

  “Querry first,” Aleka said, and I was about to squeeze through the cockeyed door when Ardan yanked the whole thing off its final hinge and flung it in the general direction of the Skaldi. He cut me another challenging glare before I started down the steps.

  The others followed. Mercy’s gun let off a few short bursts, the Skaldi moaning in response. Then there was nothing but our footsteps pinging in the empty room. I wondered at how silent it was, and then I realized the glow that should have lit the room and the vibration that should have stirred the walls were missing. The box that had housed the final drone had been opened, revealing nothing but the bands that had held the prisoner in place.

  “The drone,” I said.

  “Udain has removed it,” Aleka said. “I’ve no doubt he’s secreted it somewhere, but we can’t convince him to tell us where.”

  She nodded into the gloom. I saw what I hadn’t noticed in my previous visit: a door to the side, on the only wall that didn’t hold the drone boxes. Aleka leaned over, punching a code into Udain’s wrist cuff, which circled her calf, way too loose even there. The door slid upward without making a sound. Beyond lay a cement tunnel, lit by fluorescent bulbs. I had only a moment to wonder how she’d gotten the cuff when a huge shadow moved and a voice spoke from within the tunnel.

  “The drone is safe,” Udain said in a tone so numb I knew I was hearing the only words he had left to say. “I’m responsible for it. I’m responsible.”

  14

  The former commander of the Kenos Project stepped out from the tunnel, ducking his whitened head beneath the low doorframe.

  But even Aleka’s warning couldn’t have prepared me for how much he’d changed.

  Where he’d once stood erect and indomitable, he now shuffled forward, his shoulders stooped as if they could no longer bear the weight of his giant frame. His uniform, once so pristine, was befouled with dirt and speckled with ragged holes as if it had been burned. His braids had come loose, his long white hair hanging in grimy strands over his cheeks and forehead. And the lines of his face had deepened so much they looked like cracks carved into solid rock by eons of water and wind.

  His eyes were the worst, though. Still dark, still intense, but without the spark of angry pride I’d seen only days before. They darted from face to face with no hint that he knew or cared who we were.

  “Grandpa!” Mercy called out, bounding forward to give him a hug. She barely came up to his chest, and as she clung to him, I thought I was seeing her as she’d been years ago when he’d taken her into his care.

  Now, though, he looked down at her in confusion and doubt. His hand stroked her hair, but his words were the same mechanical refrain as before. “The drone is safe,” he said softly, as if he was telling her a bedtime story. “I’m responsible for it. I’m responsible.”

  “What’s wrong with him?” I whispered to Aleka.

  “He’s been this way since his return from the impact zone,” she whispered back. “He ceded control of the compound to me, then retreated into his own private world. Tyris thinks it’s trauma or shock, but we can’t rule out the possibility that he’s suffered a stroke. In either case, we’ve been unable to discover what he’s done with the drone.”

  Mercy peered into her grandfather’s face, her eyes sparkling with tears. Ardan approached them, and I realized he was even taller than Udain, though maybe that was only because of the stoop in his grandfather’s shoulders. Ardan laid a hand on Udain’s arm, and the old man’s eyes wandered from Mercy’s face to his.

  “Grandfather,” Ardan said. “We must leave this place. Will you come with me?”

  Udain looked at him helplessly, his lips beneath his yellowed mustache mumbling the empty words.

  “It’s Ardan, Grandfather,” the young colossus continued. “Give me your arm and I’ll take you from here.”

  Mercy squeezed the old man’s side before moving to make room for her brother. Gently, but with a strength I knew couldn’t be resisted, Ardan laid his hand on the old man’s elbow and steered him back into the tunnel.

  At first Udain let himself be led, the bewildered look remaining on his face. But a few paces into the tunnel, he stiffened and began to fight against the pressure of Ardan’s grip. I caught sight of Mercy’s face as she jumped forward to help, saw the alarm in her eyes. Udain pulled free and began swinging an arm dangerously, forcing her to duck out of the way.

  “No!” he bellowed. “The drone must be protected. I’m responsible for it. I’m responsible. Let me be!”

  A moaning sound from outside made us all turn. At the top of the stairs, a jumble of shadows showed that some of the creatures had revived and were almost on our heels.

  “Take him, Ardan!” Aleka shouted. “Mercy, guard our retreat. The rest of you, inside. Now!”

  Without a moment’s hesitation, Ardan tightened his grip around his grandfather’s arms and lifted him from the ground as easily as he had lifted people half the old man’s size. Udain moaned, the sound eerily like the Skaldi’s senseless voices. But he couldn’t fight his grandson’s full strength, and his moans were his only form of protest as Ardan held him and sprinted down the tunnel.

  Mercy’s gun pulsed behind me. Skaldi screamed, the smell of their burning bodies wafting down into the room’s stale air. With Aleka waving us ahead, we crowded after Ardan.

  “Now, Mercy!” Aleka ordered.

  Mercy threw herself into the tunnel. A second later the Skaldi came pouring down the stairs. A second after that, Aleka activated the button on the cuff, and the door slammed closed. Bodies reverberated against it, but it held.

  I turned to look down the tunnel. I could hear Ardan’s echoing footsteps, but the corridor branched into three a few paces ahead of us, and I couldn’t tell which route he’d taken.

  “Where to now?” I asked Aleka.

  “Follow me,” she said.

  She took the rightmost of the three branches, and I fell in step beside her. The tunnel carried ahead for long minutes, angling steadily downward and cutting left and right, broken every hundred yards or so by a door. Aleka used the cuff to open each one, closing them on the other side. Though I wasn’t 100 percent confident Skaldi in large numbers couldn’t force their way through, I felt somewhat reassured when I realized the route wasn’t a straight line but a maze, with multiple options leading the wrong way. Our course only looked direct because Aleka walked it so confidently. I tried to match strides with her, and was surprised to discover it wasn’t as hard to do as it had once seemed.

  To keep my nerves from bubbling over, I asked her a question I thought she might answer. “How’s the power still running?” I said. “With the drone gone?”

  “The compound was designed to run on stored energy for several days,” she answered. “In case the drones were captured or destroyed.”

  “Do you think Udain destroyed it?”

  She looked at me sharply. “If he had, we’d know it. The drone is extremely dangerous, Querry. We need to locate it before the Ska
ldi do.”

  There was no accusation in her voice, but I couldn’t help thinking of what Udain had said before Mercy and I left the compound. You’re dabbling in forces you don’t understand. He’d been right. And now he himself was another victim of my ignorance.

  “I’m sorry,” I told her.

  Her eyebrows lifted. “For what?”

  “Everything.” I couldn’t begin to think where to start. “You told me to—to take charge. And I tried. But all I did was make things worse. And now . . .”

  She didn’t slow her stride, but she cast one of her long, appraising looks on me. Her eyes seemed enormous in her gutted face. I felt exposed, as if she could see everything about me, everything I couldn’t. But I didn’t expect what she said next.

  “This doesn’t begin with you, Querry,” she said. “Now why don’t you go talk to Mercy?”

  I turned and saw Mercy walking at the back of the crowd, her rifle slung over her shoulder and her head lowered so all I could see were her dark curls. I had to squeeze past everyone else to reach her, but Nessa moved out of the way, giving me a look that was almost a smile as I passed. Then she tossed her missing hair again and took my place beside Aleka, the two of them exchanging words too quiet for me to hear.

  Mercy didn’t look up when I joined her, but she slipped a hand through my arm. “You okay?” I said.

  She shrugged.

  “Tyris is really good with people. She might . . .”

  Mercy looked at me, smiling through tears. “Grandpa’s one tough hombre,” she said. “But I think he’s fought his last war.”

  I put my hand on hers, tried to communicate sympathy through my skin. For years, she’d dreamed of escaping her father and grandfather. But now that her dream had come true, it had to hurt.

  “What happened?” I asked her. “Out there?”

  Her eyes grew distant. “The Skaldi swarmed you. Bucketloads of them. But somehow you fought them off. I don’t even think you were conscious, but your body kept doing its thing, and they kept falling back. Still, it looked to me like you were going to go under. And I said to myself, it figures. I seem to have a talent for losing the people I love.”

  My heart double-stepped at her final word. “I thought you were going to die too,” I confessed.

  “I’m not sure I know what death means anymore,” she said. “When Grandpa finally showed up, we were in bad shape. The Skaldi had pretty much given up on you and started to climb the stairs. But you’d stunned or burned enough that he could clear a path to us. And then Geller . . .”

  “Geller?”

  “That’s right,” she said with a small smile. “He helped me bring Ardan and Baldilocks down. The little ones too. They didn’t want to leave at first, but we wrestled them away and came back to base. With Geller chugging along in the moon buggy, of all things.” She laughed. “Glory hound that he is.”

  Up ahead, the back of Geller’s pimpled neck reddened, so I knew he was listening in.

  “And here’s the crazy thing,” Mercy continued. “Once we got the kids patched up, it was like they were back to normal. Blondie and Aleka, too, when she finally woke up from surgery.” She gestured toward my mother’s missing arm. “You said the staff is like an electric shock. But I guess the shock wears off. That must be why he had to keep touching people with it. Otherwise they’d have come back, remembered who they are.”

  “Sometimes,” I said, “remembering who you are is the worst part.”

  She squeezed my arm, and we walked on in silence. Our steps echoed along the corridor, covering up the small hitch of sorrow I thought I heard in her breath.

  The tunnel continued for a half mile or more, zigzagging as it went. Finally we came to a door that was much larger—and, with its rivets and steel plating, better reinforced—than the others. The muzzles of what seemed to be energy rifles jutted from its corners, positioned so that anything that came down the tunnel would be unable to avoid the blast. For the first time in what felt like years, I relaxed, realizing that Aleka’s words were true: the bunker had been designed—and, thanks to the genius of Athan Genn, enhanced—to stop Skaldi from getting in. It was just a pity the people who’d engineered this fortress hadn’t put as much thought into not waking up the monsters in the first place.

  The door groaned open when Aleka placed the index finger of her left hand on a plate so well disguised I couldn’t tell it from the rest of the door. Behind that door stood another, just as impregnable, and then one more. She moved so efficiently through the bunker’s various safeguards, it was easy to forget she’d fled this place more than fifteen years ago.

  “Welcome to the war room,” she said as the final door creaked open.

  I stepped into a space that seemed as large as the cavern of Grava Bracha, lit by a flat white light from fluorescents high overhead. The light revealed a sterile expanse of cement walls and polished metal furniture, including a long, gleaming rectangle surrounded by chairs in the room’s center. One of the chairs, at the midpoint of the table, rose slightly higher than the rest, and it occurred to me that the bunker was the model for Asunder’s canyon kingdom: the labyrinthine tunnels, the cavern, the throne. Suspended above the table and running its entire length was a five-foot-high, flat white screen I recognized as a protograph, though much longer than the one in Udain’s headquarters. A few people milled around the table, including Ardan with his hand on his tottering grandfather’s arm. But only a single figure sat there: Doctor Siva in his spotless white uniform, his hands flowing across the tabletop as they operated some kind of controls embedded in its surface. As he manipulated the controls, the protograph flickered with choppy, black-and-white images, and I realized that unlike the one I’d watched aboveground, this one was double-sided, providing a view to anyone seated on either side of the table. The images flashed by too fast for me to see what he was viewing, but I noticed that Udain watched the screen intently, as if he could find in the flow of frozen memories an answer to the confusion that had settled over his mind.

  He didn’t watch long, though. Doctor Siva switched off the screen and rose from the table, and with Ardan keeping careful guard, the old man was led to the back of the war room, where Tyris and Adem and Nekane tended to teen soldiers lying on a row of cots.

  “They’ll see to Udain,” Aleka said. “There’s not much we can do for him, but a sedative should calm him down. Perhaps, in that condition, he’ll be more receptive to questioning.” Mercy was about to pull me away when Aleka continued. “Mercy, can you and Nessa check on the condition of the weapons? I want to show Querry something.”

  Mercy looked less than thrilled, but she did as Aleka asked. I couldn’t tell if she was more annoyed to have our private conference interrupted or to be paired with Nessa.

  Aleka placed her only hand behind my back and guided me to the table. We sat side by side next to the commander’s chair, staring up at the empty protograph. Aleka touched one of the buttons in the table and the screen hummed to life.

  “Did you know that people who’ve lost limbs can feel their presence years afterward?” she said. “Or at least, so I’ve heard. I’m too recent an amputee to attest to that.”

  I’d tried to avoid thinking about her missing arm, but now I asked, “Does it hurt?”

  “It’s not so much pain,” she said. “When I woke from the touch of Athan’s staff to find the arm gone, it was like waking from a dream. Though my mind told me my body was changed, my body refused to believe. It clung to a vision of itself that was no longer true. To some extent, I imagine it always will.”

  She touched the buttons deftly with her single hand, and I heard the sound of the protograph searching. Then she paused the recording, and though the screen was still blank, I could tell she’d reached the spot she was looking for.

  “I know you want the answers to what lies in your past,” she said. “But I need to ask you, Querry: Are you absolutely sure? What I’m about to show you will change you. And once you’ve seen it, you’ll
never be able to go back to the way you were.”

  I stared at the empty screen hanging over my head. What could be hidden there that would change me so much? “I need to know, Mom. I feel like I’ve been walking around without a part of me for—well, all my life. I need to get it back.”

  She smiled and raised her hand from the table to touch my cheek. “I can give you that,” she said. “Are you ready?”

  That seemed too big a question to answer, so I simply nodded.

  “I’ll leave you here, then,” she said. “I think it should be just the two of you.”

  “The two of who?”

  But she didn’t say another word. She touched the play button with a slim finger, then stood to join the others at the back of the room.

  I turned my attention to the screen.

  The blank white rectangle filled with light, and an image sprang to life from its depths. What appeared there was the face of a boy, years younger than me, with long dark curls and dark eyes ringed by thick eyelashes. He sat alone in a canvas chair, with nothing behind him but darkness. I was about to turn to get Aleka’s attention when I noticed the boy’s hands tinkering with something offscreen, and I realized what I was seeing: the protograph recording the finishing touches of its own creator.

  Athan Genn.

  The boy spoke, his voice soft but focused. “Is it working?” He looked over his shoulder and yelled, “Hey, Dad! I think it’s working!”

  A deep voice from beyond the screen rumbled in response.

  “Wow,” the boy said, returning his attention to the screen. “Um, okay, this is really awesome. I can’t believe it’s working!” His face broke into a huge grin, showing a couple gaps where teeth were missing. “This is Athan Genn, and what you’re watching is my first . . . What?” He looked back over his shoulder, then addressed the protograph again. “My dad says I should time-stamp it. So okay, this is, um, September twenty-third, the year two thousand sixty-two, and the time is . . .” His eyes left the screen, then returned. “Five o’clock in the morning. Oh. Duh. Military time. Oh-five-hundred hours. This is so cool!”