Scavenger of Souls

by Joshua David Bellin

  And I guess he was.

  They loaded us into the cart, and Geller operated the controls to get it going. He must have understood the system better than Mercy, because whatever he did had us sailing down the tunnel at top speed, whipping around curves under a canopy of unborn Skaldi. Against the screech of the wheels and the howl of the wind, I shouted a few words into Mercy’s ear.

  “Geller’s parents,” I said. “What happened to them?”

  “His mom died in the accident,” she yelled back. “His dad was taken by Asunder. He lost a sister, too. Why?”

  “Just wondering,” I said, though I’d expected an answer pretty much like that.

  An hour or more passed with the rumble of the cart and the roar of the wind the only sounds in my ears. The air grew increasingly hot and sticky as we traveled west, and the mass of Skaldi above our heads thickened to the point that we could practically have reached up to touch them if our hands hadn’t been tied. Any thought we might have had of jumping from the cart was flung away by its speed, plus when I looked back I saw another cart racing after us, probably occupied by Geller. All I could do was hold on to Mercy as we careened toward the end of the rail line.

  Finally the cart slowed, then came to a rolling stop against thick rubber bumpers. We’d arrived at a huge circular cement pad that lay at the bottom of a cement cylinder, as wide as the pad and shooting up into darkness far above our heads. A few stray Skaldi clung to the sides of the cylinder, but the heavy mass from the tunnel had finally thinned out and then vanished. Looking straight up, I could easily imagine that the altar of the Scavenger of Souls reared into the sky above us. Warriors dressed in their caveman outfits appeared from the shadows. They dragged us from the cart while its partner came to rest against ours and Geller stepped out, rifle and staff in hand.

  “Come, children of the light,” he said to them. As before, his voice sounded unnaturally fast, like someone nervously trying to get through a speech. “Nidach asa minach. The Scavenger awaits.”

  They scaled the walls with us slung over their shoulders, their bronzed hands gripping rungs affixed to the inside of the cylinder. Mercy and I were too tightly bound to do anything except stare as the cement pad dwindled to a dot the higher we climbed. It got to the point where I had to close my eyes to prevent dizziness from making me fall despite the warriors’ grasp on me. I didn’t see where we exited, but when I felt the outside air on my face, I opened my eyes to find that they held us at the base of the altar, dawn light breaking from the east. So many warriors ringed the stone mountain, along with the cave-children who now belonged to Geller, it was obvious he’d emptied the canyon to witness the consummation of their dead leader’s prophecy.

  Geller waved the staff, and Asunder’s people bowed low to the ground. He took the time to touch every one of them, the staff descending to their shoulders the way Asunder had done in Grava Bracha. I couldn’t help noticing, though, that his hands shook, and once or twice he had to repeat the performance when he missed his target. When he’d finished, he signaled with a nod, and the warriors who’d brought us topside grabbed our arms.

  Mercy struggled ineffectually as they pulled us toward the stairs. “You little prick!” she shouted at Geller. “I should have wasted you when I had the chance!”

  Geller ducked his eyes for a moment, a flush darkening his scabbed face. But then his smile returned, the feral smile he’d learned or copied from his dead master.

  Mercy turned to me. “Kill them!” she screamed. “Hit them with everything you’ve got!”

  “I can’t,” I said. “I’ll kill you too.”

  “Then kill me,” she said. “I’d rather die that way than his way.”

  I reached inside, tried to summon the power, but got no response. I looked at Mercy, and her eyes told me she knew. Her furious cries cut my ears as the warriors’ feet pounded toward the summit.

  At the peak of the altar, the scene was laid the way it had been for Wali’s sacrifice: warriors holding spears and torches, packed so densely I could just make out a small figure between the horns. The rising sun bathed the summit in blood-red light, and Geller, coming to stand where Asunder had stood, flourished the staff awkwardly, like someone doing a bad imitation of the prophet’s elaborate gestures. It would have been funny if not for what he planned to do. But when the warriors stepped aside and I saw what was bound between the horns, my heart caught in my throat.

  It was the drone.

  Small as a child, bleeding pale yellow light against the red of the dawn, it hung there with its oversize head lowered to its chest and its emaciated arms dangling like threads from the altar’s horns. My hair rose at the touch of its crackling energy. The new ruler of the Shattered Lands stepped toward it, his lips moving silently as if reciting something he’d memorized, and the drone’s head jerked upward, blind eyes staring into the sunlight. I knew that the moment Geller contacted the creature with the staff it would explode, drawing the Skaldi that swarmed below into the upper world.

  And this time, there would be no one left to stop them.

  Geller reached out with the staff. His eyes shone, and his hand shook. Watching him, seeing his fumbling attempts at fulfilling the ritual, it struck me that he was just a kid, only a few years older than me. Maybe Mercy’s age, even younger. Too young to inherit Asunder’s mantle. Too young to have lost his family in the tragedy that had claimed his master, too young to play the part of his surrogate father. His pimpled face was as scarred as Asunder’s, but his scars were the scars of a boy, not a man.

  We were both Athan Genn’s creatures. The only difference between us was that I’d known my mother, too.

  And I remembered her final lesson.

  “Wait,” I said, and Geller paused, his eyes shifting to mine. The girl named after that lesson looked at me sharply, but I ignored her. I had no idea if this was going to work, but I figured we were going to die anyway, so it was worth a shot.

  “The drones and I are brothers,” I said. “Made by the hand of your master. To serve the same purpose.”

  Geller’s eyes narrowed. I talked fast.

  “I should join my brother,” I said. “If this is to be the end, I should share it with him. With what’s left of my family.”

  “All will share the same end,” he said, but I thought I heard a note of uncertainty in his voice.

  “The more power you command, the more surely the Scavenger of Souls will come,” I said. “With me at my brother’s side, the end will be certain.”

  “The end is certain,” he said.

  “Not always,” I said. “It can leave things undone. Let me join him, Geller. Let us finish this together, so all suffering can come to an end, and you can be with—with the ones you lost.” I caught his eyes, held them. “I promise.”

  Geller lowered the staff, his look at once hesitant and keen. He licked his lips as if deciding.

  Then he gestured for his warriors to bring me forward. They gripped my arms and dragged me toward the horns.

  “Are you insane?” Mercy whispered.

  “Must be,” I said, giving her a quick smile before they tore me away from her.

  With the drone already bound to the altar, the warriors had to circle behind the horns to place me there. I balanced shakily on a single foot, hovering over the stunted creature like Archangel over a normal-size human being. I could feel the power radiating from its body, could hear the rasp of its tortured breathing and the crackle of its energy agitating the air. Where its feet touched the surface of the altar, black rock melted to liquid glass. I braced myself as Geller took the final step toward us, the staff raised, an eager light in his eyes.

  “The Scavenger of Souls is merciful,” he said. “May he come for us all at last.”

  When he touched the staff to the drone’s forehead, it erupted with power.

  The pulse of energy flashed in my eyes, giving me a quick glimpse of Geller’s smile—a softer smile, like the winning, gap-toothed grin of the young Athan on the
protograph screen. Then the pulse consumed him, tearing the smile from his damaged face, sweeping the fragments of his body into the void. All that was left of him was the staff, which clattered to the ground at the drone’s feet. The warriors who’d tied me to the altar were next to shatter into dust, their wide-eyed expressions reminding me for an instant of the children of Survival Colony 27. But before the crackling energy field could extend any farther, I tore myself free of my singed bonds and wrapped myself around the creature, hugging it to my chest. It screamed in senseless agony as power poured from it, but unlike the other times I’d been assaulted by the Skaldi, I didn’t try to strike back. Instead, I opened myself to the energy streaming from it, welcomed that energy into my own body. Athan Genn had designed me to drain energy from other living beings, to store it in my cells forever. He’d made me stronger than the Skaldi, resistant to the beam that crippled them. If Aleka was right, the accident that had destroyed him had made me even stronger than he anticipated. What my limits were I didn’t know.

  But I was about to find out.

  The drone glowed with power, a furnace of light. Warmth at first, then unbearable heat spread through me as its life-energy flooded my system. It was like holding on to the sun. I knew the only way to gain relief was to let go, to allow some of the energy to bleed back out. But I also knew that without me to contain it, the drone’s full power would be released, and the Skaldi colony beneath us would be freed. So I bore down, clutching the creature to my chest, pulling its power into my blood and bones. Bright lights exploded in front of my eyes, shaping themselves into images in my mind. I remembered carrying Keely the night we found the Skaldi nest. I remembered clasping my mother’s body just before she died. And I remembered holding Mercy, and knew I never would again.

  Because as I gripped the burning drone to me, I felt my own body begin to burn.

  A look of dim awareness dawned on the creature’s inhuman face. It struggled in my arms, mindless panic emanating from it, limbs flailing as helplessly as an infant’s. I gripped its hands gently and held on, melting with it, letting its energy fuse us into one. My senses were failing me, but still I didn’t stop. I had passed into a realm beyond pain, beyond feeling, and all I knew was that I was going to die. A memory darted through my thoughts, something Laman used to say to us in Survival Colony 9. Never leave anything behind. But he knew, didn’t he, that in the end you have to leave everything, and there’s no going back to retrieve it?

  A rumble shook the stone beneath us, and with a deafening screech, the summit of the altar split between the horns. A minute passed before a clawed hand emerged from the yawning depths, then the entire creature clambered onto the platform. Its scar shivered, opening at the scent of fresh prey—Mercy—on the altar’s peak. But before it had a chance to attack, its body collapsed, shaking as if with palsy. It made a final attempt to rise, but its arms trembled with the effort, and finally it disintegrated, cracking along the seam of its scar and sliding to the black stone. Within seconds, all that remained of it was a pile of dust, picked over by the wind.

  Another creature ventured above, and another. Like the first, these new arrivals emerged into the sunlight only to collapse helplessly onto the rock, unable to get their quivering arms under them to push their bodies upward. When they tried, their arms folded, then shattered into dust as if a gale had struck them. It wasn’t long before I was surrounded by their dusty remains, wasn’t much longer before the wind blew all that was left of them over the glassy stone and out into the distance. No more emerged, and the only movement was that of the drone twitching beneath me.

  Even that stopped soon. It lay there with its mouth and eyes fixed open, its body limp in my embrace. It sparked a final time, then its light blinked out like a fistful of candles and its spent form joined the dust at the altar’s peak. The crackling noise died from the air, and all that was left was a slight scent of ozone. The split summit settled back into place, sealing the scar as if it had never been. I lay beneath the horns, unable to feel the sun on my face, the jagged stone at my back. On the final verge of thought I reached out to the Skaldi slumbering deep beneath me, to see if any more had responded to the drone’s call. But everything was quiet. The Scavenger of Souls had come and gone. It was over.

  A dark shape moved at the corner of my vision, and I saw Mercy hanging over me, her hands reaching to cup my face.

  “Mercy,” I said.

  She put a finger to my lips. “The feeling is mutual. Let’s not spoil it with a bunch of words.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “For what?”

  “For . . .” Leaving you, I thought.

  “Hey.” She smiled. “It’s been a hell of a ride. No complaints from this girl.”

  She leaned forward, and through the blur of my own tears I saw the silvery trails on her cheeks. Then she moved so close her face was all I could see.

  I couldn’t feel her lips on mine, but I knew she was beside me as I closed my eyes and sailed into darkness.

  20

  I stood in a city.

  It wasn’t any city I knew. Certainly not one of the cities Laman used to talk about, with their massive white towers flickering with lights and long, sleek trains speeding past on elevated tracks. Nothing like the twin compounds I’d passed through either, the shelled community where Laman had settled and then lost Survival Colony 9, the military base where my creator and his father had done their deadly work. This was a different kind of city, with tall rounded towers the color of red sand and curved lanes that glittered in the sun as if they were spattered with crushed diamonds. A city that rose out of the desert like a living thing, stretching languorously in the midday sun.

  Mercy was with me. She had her arm wrapped around my back, and when we walked, I leaned on her, moving with a stiff and clumsy gait. When I glanced down I saw why: my right foot was nothing but a curled stump, the shape you’d get when one of the little kids molded a human figure from river clay. I felt no pain, though. There wasn’t enough of the foot left to feel anything.

  We walked toward the center of the city. Shaded archways beckoned to us, while leafy plants trailed from circular windows and lined the paths with ribbons of green. When we looked up, we saw long garlands strung between the towers, twisting and curling in a way that made me think they were fluttering in the breeze. It wasn’t cool, exactly—the desert sun was always there, a reminder we couldn’t escape—but it was tolerable, heat you could grow used to if you let yourself forget about the waste beyond.

  And there was something else about this place, something I couldn’t put a finger on. Something familiar. As if I’d seen it before, or heard someone talk about it a long time ago. Someone who’d spoken of a place just like this, a place whose curved lanes and secret alcoves promised discoveries but not terrors, a chance to find something new instead of only more chances to lose.

  Mercy looked around as we walked. “Nice,” she said. “Don’t you think?”

  “Really nice.”

  “Not the kind of thing a survival colony would have built,” she continued. “Something left over from the time before?”

  “Could be.”

  “No sign of Skaldi, either,” she said. “Come to think of it, no sign of anyone. Where in the world do you think they are?”

  “I don’t know.” But even as I said it, I felt that I did know, that we were on our way to meet the ones who lived here, and that I was the only one who knew the way to find them.

  We kept walking. I realized others had joined us, people from our combined colonies. Tyris, Nekane, Adem. Zataias and the rest of the little ones, including the children of Asunder. Ramos at the head of a force of Udain’s soldiers and Asunder’s warriors. Nessa too, her hair still short and her eyes still green, though her face seemed harder and sadder than it had before. Others, though—my mother, and Wali, and Soon, and Udain, and all the people we’d lost from the survival colonies I’d known—were gone for good. I knew I wouldn’t find them here.<
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  We rounded the last of the towers and came upon a huge concrete structure rearing out of the heart of the city, a curved shape as if a giant ball had been half buried then sliced open to reveal its hollow inside. A circular platform jutted from the base of the raised semicircle, easily a hundred feet across and fifty deep, while cement canals snaked from the stage into the surrounding city. No water flowed through them, though. Cautiously, we advanced onto the stage, our steps echoing against the soaring roof, amplified so much it reminded me of the tramp our colony had made when it was whole. Looking out over the city from this spot, I realized it lay within the canyon, but not a part of it I’d traveled, the walls vague and misty with distance.

  Mercy stood beside me, her eyes sweeping the city. “No electricity. No running water. Nobody home. This place is dead.”

  “I’m not so sure.” The same inkling tugged at me as before, the sense that there was something here yet to be discovered. “It feels . . . dormant. Waiting.”

  “For what?”

  I shrugged. “For the right time, I think.”

  Mercy laughed. The sound pealed high and clear against the vaulted ceiling, carried across the city. I felt like I hadn’t heard that laugh in years. “Well, I think it’s time it stopped waiting,” she said playfully. “Time for it to wake up.”

  I turned to her. “What did you say?”

  “I said it’s time,” she repeated. “To wake up.”

  I tried to grasp her words, but for some reason they eluded me. She took my hands, peered at me with her intense black eyes.