Scavenger of Souls

by Joshua David Bellin

  “Birds,” she said. “Those are birds.”

  We entered the city to the sound of the birds’ morning carols. Everything was there: the towers, the avenues, the giant dome. Seeing it at last, I knew why it had felt so familiar in my dream.

  I’d been here before.

  I’d been born here.

  Aleka had fled Udain’s compound when she was pregnant with me. There was no way, it struck me now, she could have escaped without someone’s help, no way she could have made it across the stone desert with a two-year-old at her side and an unborn child months from delivery. She must have relied on someone else: a sympathetic guard, someone angry at Athan for what he’d done, someone she continued to trust until the day both of them died—Siva. It was Siva, I was sure of it, who’d helped her cut the tracker from her arm so she could get away, Siva who’d offered to go with her—but when she refused, it was Siva who helped her steal one of the compound’s vehicles so she could drive into the canyon on her own. The city she found must have been built before the wars, protected by the canyon walls from the worst of the damage, hidden from the ravages of the Skaldi. And then Aleka arrived, giving birth to a child everyone assumed was human, a child who would fulfill that belief until age three, when they ventured beyond the safety of the canyon and the Skaldi tracked him down.

  I understood now what a risk my mother had taken in leading us to the canyon. Though she’d had no way of knowing that Asunder had claimed its southern entrance in the years after the attack on me, she must have believed the city was still prohibited to her, the sentence of exile still in force. Living out in the desert with Survival Colony 27 and then Survival Colony 9, she couldn’t have known that the city was no longer alive—that the attack had signaled the Skaldi, who’d overwhelmed her lost home and the people who had driven her from it.

  We strolled the empty lanes beneath the rounded towers. In places I saw where the bodies of Skaldi had crumbled, pale shapes like shadows in rooms protected from wind and rain. We reached the stage I’d seen in my dream, found a plaque on the rear wall that told the city’s history: that it had been built as an experimental community, an artists’ colony and an exercise in sustainable living in the years before the wars. Cisterns—now cracked—had collected rainwater, a wetlands had flushed the sewage clean, sagging wind towers had provided energy. The area behind the dome was crisscrossed with garden plots, all gone to weeds. So much had fallen into disrepair in the years since the city had been deserted, it was hard to imagine the thriving community it had once been, even harder to imagine it becoming such a place again.

  “Well,” Mercy said, squeezing my hand, “you called it. Not that I doubted you, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “Kind of a fixer-upper, though.” She shucked her jacket, muscles playing beneath her glossy skin. “What say we get to work?”

  We did. We found storerooms full of tools to supplement our own meager supply, construction materials to fortify the turbines and seal the cisterns and canals. Mercy had been tinkering with her father’s protograph during our trek north, and she’d finally unlocked its most precious secrets: information on building and growing things, breeding plants to resist toxins, culturing bacteria to replenish the soil. With that knowledge and an eager team of workers in the members of our combined colonies, Adem supervised the work necessary to revive the wetlands. I discovered that, even when he talked—and he talked nonstop with Nessa at his side—I couldn’t understand a word he was saying. I’d barely known him before, hadn’t been able to tell if he was smart or stupid, scared or just plain shy. Now I realized that the entire time the rest of us had been busy running and hiding from the Skaldi, he’d been devoting all his brainpower to the problem of what to do if the Skaldi ever disappeared. He’d already rebuilt human civilization in his mind. All he’d been starving for were the know-how and materials to work with.

  Mercy relinquished the protograph to him, and he dug deeper. New canals, roads, and other improvements sprouted under his hand. For a while we relied on the groves and berry bushes in the mid-canyon to keep us fed, while we waited for the seeds Chelle’s colony had given us to bloom in the gardens we cultivated. One of the plants was topped with oblong brown tufts that felt at once fibrous and elastic, almost like skin. These, the women had told us, weren’t for eating but for braiding or weaving into an infinite variety of forms, just as Asunder’s colony had done to create their clothing, their torches, their ropes. As the days passed and the work progressed, other survivors trickled into our community, loners and parentless children who’d been on their own in the desert or holed up in the ruins of cities until something they couldn’t name—a feeling, a hint—told them to come out, guided their feet all the long miles to us. Five years into the rebuilding, we had a community of almost two hundred, far smaller than the city could hold but far larger than any survival colony had been. The new people brought skills and stories and strong backs we needed to keep us going, and our leader was happy to welcome them into the fold.

  That leader wasn’t me, though. For the first few weeks everyone looked to me for the go-ahead, but it soon became obvious that our real leaders were Nessa and Adem—him to supervise the individual projects, her to oversee the grand design. There was no vote, no coup, but by the end of our first year they’d assumed the roles they were meant to have. Mercy, meanwhile, turned her attention to security, which covered everything from registering weapons to repairing outer defenses to mediating disputes. Ramos served as her deputy—which, so far as I could tell, meant her uncomplaining gofer and whipping boy. She carried Aleka’s battered and inoperable pistol as the sole insignia of her office, and she told me time after time that much as she’d gotten a charge out of being a soldier in war, it was much, much better to be a soldier in peace.

  Me, I was more comfortable with the kids, the way I’d always been—and since Nessa believed, once we got settled, that there was a need to teach our young ones and the others who appeared from time to time, that became my job. We converted one of the buildings behind the dome to a schoolroom, and there I spent my days. Sometimes I’d lead my students into the canyon, walking as always with my crutch, remembering the chains I used to form with the youngest members of Survival Colony 9. There’d been so few then. Now the chain felt endless, with me at the head and all the others joining hands behind me. How a chain so fragile could hold was a mystery I couldn’t begin to answer.

  Once a year, on the anniversary of the day we discovered our new home, we held a ceremony. Very simple, with stories and songs and thanks. Zataias volunteered to lead, and though he was no older than twelve when it started, he was the perfect one for the job. He’d memorized all of Chelle’s stories, as well as adding some of his own, and he recited them in a deep, rich voice, something you’d never have guessed when he was a wide-eyed kid watching the world with silent wonder. At the end of the day, using paper from the fibers of another plant Adem had cultivated, I worked with Zataias on jotting down all the stories we could remember, trying to preserve a permanent record of the times we’d been through. It grew to hundreds of pages before I decided it was done.

  Other, private ceremonies we performed on our own. Wedding vows we shared only with each other.

  Mercy wakes me, as always. She retains her soldier’s training, her preference for early rising. I keep my penchant for sleeping late. Being lazy, she says. Thinking, I say. Dreaming. Hoping.

  But today’s different. When she calls, I open my eyes at once, the mist of sleep scattering before the sunlight.

  She stands at the window of our tower apartment, framed by the day. When she turns to make sure I’m up, I see her rounded belly, straining against the uniform top she still likes to wear. At our last visit, Tyris said it could be any day now. Eighteen-year-old Bea, training to take over as healer when the time comes, smiled, saying how nice it would be for a new baby to join Nessa and Adem’s. Their son, born two months ago, they named Wali. His hair has started to come in
in curls, so he may live up to the original.

  Mercy’s already decided on names. If it’s a boy, Ardan. A girl, Korah. I ask her if she wants to burden our child with the weight of the past. She tells me the past is a burden only if we let it be.

  She may be right. But for me, it’s not that easy. Often, I’ll wake from dreams I remember all too well and lie in bed, feeling Mercy breathe beside me, staring into darkness until it goes away. But the daytime isn’t safe either. Too many things I do, teaching a kid to read, eating a meal with Mercy, climbing a hill with her to watch the sun set—all can bring the past gliding back like a phantom, and then I’m stranded there again, in the compound, the tunnels, at the nest, the river, the circle of children, the altar, feeling as if I never left, as if no time at all stands between then and now. It’s not always bad: there are times when memory feels like a cool stream carrying me back for glimpses of what I left on its shores. The poolside, the place where Korah and I stole an almost kiss. My mother, gray-eyed and wise. Laman Genn, the only father I ever knew. But other times it’s like a hard rain pounding down on me, and all I can do is let it fall.

  Memory, I’ve learned, is responsibility, and responsibility never lets you forget.

  But today, I’ve promised Mercy not to dredge up the past. Today is for her, the last day in a while, it may be, for us to get out and hike the canyon trail. To my last-minute question about her fitness for the climb, she only rolls her eyes. I throw my legs from bed, testing my right foot as always before trusting my body to it. Then I rise and dress quickly, hoping we can reach the top before the sun gets too high.

  I offer Mercy my arm. She takes it, though not without an ironic smile. Bracing myself with the crutch I’ve carried these past ten years, I exit the apartment with her.

  We walk through the city. Few are up this early. Keely, fifteen years old and already taller than me, hammers away at a bent windmill blade, his bronzed back and shoulders shining with sweat, his blows ringing above the quiet chorus of bird song. Later, he’ll join Adem and his crew on one of the many urban improvement projects our chief engineer always seems to have dreamed up the night before. We nod at a few other early-morning walkers, and they smile at Mercy’s enormous belly. I’m glad to be anonymous beside her. I’m glad we’re the only ones heading out of the city this early. My history’s not exactly a secret among the newcomers, but sometimes I still feel uncomfortable in their presence.

  We reach the foot of the trail and begin our climb. If I thought Mercy’s burden might slow her down, I was dead wrong. It seems to propel her even faster than usual, and the arm I’ve lent her becomes less a means of support and more a way for her to drag me along. For easily the thousandth time, I marvel at her energy, her life. I give thanks that this is the woman who chose me to father her child.

  But I have to admit, I do worry who that child will be. What that child will be. I carry both human and Skaldi genes. What combination of traits will our child possess? The first time I watched a lumpy appendage roll across my wife’s stomach, it really did look like an alien creature. Tyris assures us the pregnancy is progressing normally, but she has no way of seeing inside. No way of seeing ahead. And neither do I.

  What will my child be? What choices will he or she make? Will our city stand or fall? Will we leave in search of elsewhere, or stay right here? Will we live to see the world renewed, or spend our lives in the shadow of its final days?

  We dwell in the past, it may be, because it holds so many fewer secrets than the future.

  The sun breaks upon us as we exit the trail and stand on the canyon’s upper rim. To the south and east, the impact zone—too far to see—rolls in black and undisturbed silence. The altar, if we could glimpse it, would glitter in the late-morning sun like a crown of darkness. But we face away from those icons, away from the sorrows they hold. This is not a memorial. Not a vigil. I could ask Mercy why we’re here, but what answer would she give me?

  We’re here, she would say, as she’s said to me so many times before. We have this moment. It’s the only thing we do have, the only thing we’re given. We’ll never be more alive than we are right now. Hold on to it, Querry. As long as you can, until you have to let it go.

  I stand behind Mercy, my arms wrapped around the life within her, while she lifts her head to the sunlight and laughs, fearless and free.

  JOSHUA DAVID BELLIN, author of Survival Colony 9 and its sequel, Scavenger of Souls, has been writing books since the age of eight (though his first few were admittedly very, very short). When he’s not writing, he spends his time drawing, catching amphibians, and watching monster movies with his kids. A Pittsburgh native, Josh has taught college English, published three nonfiction books (one about monsters!), and taken part in the movement to protect the environment. You can find him online at joshuadavidbellin.com.

  Margaret K. McElderry Books

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  ALSO BY JOSHUA DAVID BELLIN

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2016 by Joshua David Bellin

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  ISBN 978-1-4814-6244-0 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-4814-6246-4 (eBook)