The Branded Rose Prophecy

by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  As they reached the top of the motionless escalators down to the subway level that Fudge had already climbed down, Charlee picked up her feet and drew level with Lucas. They climbed down the escalators into a thick, orange-lit atmosphere. Down at the bottom level of the subway, there was no light but what they could create, and that was usually a fire of some sort. The venting of the tunnels was passive, the smoke and heat generated by the humans in the tunnels passing through ducts to the surface that had been in place since the nineteenth century. There were no fans anymore, not since the power had failed. The tunnels grew warmer in summer, although they never became uncomfortably warm, and they were freezing in winter, but were warmer where humans congregated the thickest.

  They walked out onto the platform, Fudge moving up next to them, weaving between the shakedowns and sheet tents, sliding along the narrow path that had been left for pedestrians. At the edge, Asher climbed down from the platform onto the rails below via a set of informal stairs that had been built there, using objects of diminishing height including a high chair with no tray, a coffee table and a 1950s vintage television, the curved screen still intact. The wood cabinet was scratched and pitted, but it was still sturdy.

  The track closest to the platform was clear except for people picking their way along the ties, their heads down. There were quite a few walking the tracks, for the subway lines had become the major arteries of human movement in the city. They were below ground and out of the gaze of the Alfar above.

  As a small bonus, it had been discovered that the Lajos and Myrakar were uncomfortable with spaces that were belowground. Only the Blakar seemed at ease underground, and it was rumored that on Svartalfheim, their home-world, they lived in caves and holes in the ground. As the Blakar were dark of skin and the tallest of them was only five feet high, humans had decided that they were the origins of the fictional dwarves that populated so many human stories. Blakar differed from the story dwarves, as they were not able to grow beards and like their Myrakar and Lajos cousins, they preferred knives in battle. Charlee had never seen an axe wielded by a single one of them.

  However, as stout and hardy as the Blakar seemed, even they were reluctant to come into the subway tunnels. A long, slender and fully enclosed area with only one entry point was considerably easier to defend against unwelcome intrusions than any spaces aboveground. Like the Alfar’s roundups and patrols, the battles to penetrate the subways had petered to a rare attempt at breaking through the front lines. With each successful defense of the subways, humans grew even more fiercely determined to hold the territory, no matter what.

  So the subways had become their roadways. They had also become a busy thoroughfare that provided more than just safe passage.

  From custom and hard experience, one track in each tunnel was kept clear for foot traffic. Sometimes the through-track switched over, snaking around stationary trains, which had become the new apartment buildings for the lucky few who managed to claim a car or a section of a car. No matter which track was the through-track, the other track provided commerce.

  Stretching along either direction for as far as the eye could see, between the rails of the other track, were people displaying their wares for sale or barter. Barter was the usual coinage now.

  Anything and everything was available for haggle and swap, although food items were the most common. Charlee set up shop every few months, selling off the herbs and medicinals she had prepared. Basic medicines and preparations were highly sought, and Charlee was often paid in real coins and notes. A single dollar had a far greater purchasing power than pre-occupation money, but Charlee stashed the money she earned and used the same food, medicinals and cosmetic preparations to buy what she needed. Her moisturizers and lip balms and pretty makeup items were never refused.

  It was the middle of summer, so food was in abundance. Charlee didn’t know where they grew it all, for the roofs and streets were only green with wild plants and weeds. Perhaps like her, the gardeners had found undiscovered patches of ground where they could safely grow crops.

  There were also the crops and trees that had been growing in Manhattan before the occupation. Ylva’s house had not been the only one to sport a rooftop garden, and potted vegetables and herbs were everywhere. There had even been miniature fruit trees. In the first year of occupation, Charlee and Asher had raided the ruins of Ylva’s house four different times. On the fourth and last occasion, vandals and the hungry had picked through the ruins, too. However, Charlee knew exactly where the most valuable items had been kept. They had systematically stripped the house of anything useful, and most of the goods they had taken with them were still serving them well, two years later.

  One of the items Charlee had spent the better part of day looking for among the rubble was seeds. She had found the remains of the antique apothecary cabinet with most of the little drawers still intact and had carefully sorted, repackaged and indexed the seeds and taken them with her.

  Seeds had become almost as good as grown food when it came to barter. The collection of seeds and the raising of them was a major preoccupation, and Central Park had become an overgrown jungle of edible plants, bushes and trees where scraps were scattered, letting nature take its course. There were small apple trees growing wild there and sometimes Charlee ventured out into the park to pick strawberries and mushrooms, along with the chickweed, dandelions and thistles that were threatening to take over. She stayed at the edges of the treeline, and kept her head and shoulders covered. The tower overhead was an oppressive reminder to be cautious.

  The three of them walked carefully along the track, with Fudge moving in slow circles around them. In the tunnels, Fudge stayed close, but there were friends here who sometimes held out morsels to eat.

  Custom dictated that everyone still walking stay on the right to minimize collisions. By unspoken arrangement, Asher trailed along last and Charlee led the way. She was known to many people along this stretch of the subway and would draw attention away from the shadowy figure behind her. She also made her progress look casual, stopping occasionally to inspect goods or to ask after the stall owner. When she did, they would all step onto the middle concrete divider between the tracks, to make way for travelers behind them.

  It took forty minutes to reach the end of the tunnel and the next station. They passed the tunnel guards, and Charlee greeted them and waved as they stepped up onto the platform itself. This time, the stairs were made out of hand-sawn logs settled into the earth on their ends.

  The same tent-and-blanket city populated both levels of the platform. Those who had been living on the platform the longest had graduated down to this level, while newcomers took space on the upper level.

  They made their way up to the surface, their heads lowered. The streets here were just as deserted as those underneath the belly of the tower. They were only a quarter of a mile away from the northwestern foot of the tower here. The foot was monstrous in scale. The base of it rose sixty feet into the air, before it curled in a graceful arc up into the soaring leg, one of three that supported the tower itself, which rose nearly a mile into the air. The tip of the tower couldn’t be seen from here, for the wall of the foot dominated the view.

  Lucas glanced at it as they hurried across the street. “I still can’t get over how fucking big the thing is.”

  “It’s bigger than the London one, we think,” Charlee murmured.

  “Save it,” Asher said harshly and Charlee grimaced, for he was right.

  They pushed on, moving back into the strung-out, single-file line, with Fudge back on point. Charlee removed the bow she had strung over her shoulder and walked with an arrow loosely tucked into the string, held between her two fingers, the bow itself hanging from the notch in the arrow. A quick flip would bring the bow up, and the movement would finish with her pulling on the string. It was a quick draw position that didn’t tax her arms and fingers by keeping a constant pull on the bow.

  They were heading northeast, drawing closer to the wal
l of the southwest foot, which loomed larger and larger as they progressed. Even the foot itself was home to a small city of Alfar, for windows and white space dotted the surface. They had conjectured that the Blakar lived in the lower levels, along with humans who had been imprisoned and put to work to run the Alfar’s tower for them. The higher up the tower, the higher the class of Alfar—the Myrakar would live at the base of the tower itself, while the imperial Lajos would keep the loftier levels for themselves.

  As they walked, Charlee could see that Lucas was staring ahead, taking in the impact of the tower on mid-town Manhattan. There were two other triangular feet, just like this one, and Asher had used trigonometry and a scale map of the greater New York area to plot where the three feet were placed. They were heading for the northwest corner of this foot, which neatly cut off 9th Avenue. The northern side of the triangular foot underlined Central Park and the northeast tip ran across Park Avenue, almost to where the Kine hall had been. The hall was there no longer. It had been completely obliterated by the arrowheads on the first day of the occupation. Asher had never made it back to the hall. It had been on fire and crumbling when he arrived. There were too many arrowheads and Alfar on foot for him to risk staying in the area, but he had returned a week later and a month after that and found no one.

  “It doesn’t mean a damned thing,” he’d pointed out to Lucas and Charlee. “If they’ve got any sense at all, they’ll have gone to earth, just like we have. We’ll find them eventually. In the meantime, we stay out of Alfar hands while causing them the most inconvenience possible.” But it was around then the flyers with Charlee’s and Asher’s faces on them had begun to circulate, sometimes raining from the tower itself like a paper snow storm, and their priorities had abruptly shifted.

  When the wall of the foot was all they could see ahead without lifting their heads, Lucas stepped closer to Asher and Charlee closed the gap so she could hear what he said.

  “How much farther? We’re going to hit the wall itself in a minute.”

  “Afraid?” Asher asked.

  “You’re not, you freak?”

  Asher pointed ahead. “That crack there.”

  “Which crack?” Lucas demanded. “There’s only, like, a bazillion of ‘em. The Alfar didn’t exactly clear out the space when they took over.”

  All three of them had watched the frightening, quite awful construction of the tower, which had taken nearly a full year. The bases, however, had been built within a week, for they arrived prefabricated. They were airlifted by dozens of the bigger workhorse arrowheads the Alfar had developed, brought in from some far-flung, Alfar-held location, sending shadows across the landscape that had darkened the day.

  The three of them had sat at the windows of the top floor of Asher’s bank building on Wall Street, which was relatively untouched and completely deserted, for there was no food to be found there. From there they had watched the southwest base make its way from the north of the state, coming in over Hackensack, unable to properly absorb the size of the thing. It had taken hours of hovering for the arrowheads to position it in exactly the right place.

  “They’re very close,” Lucas had said, his voice tight with concern.

  “And very high. They’re going to have to start lowering it soon, aren’t they?” Charlee had asked Asher.

  But he had watched the tight maneuvering silently, his face a mask. She could feel the tension in him and left him alone. Later, when they were alone, she would ask him what had troubled him.

  Then Charlee had noticed something. “The platforms. They pulling away!” It would take several weeks for the nickname of arrowheads for the irregular diamond-shaped platforms to come into common use.

  Lucas pressed his hand against the glass, like he could reach out and stop everything. “They can’t!” he breathed. “The people, all the survivors, beneath…” He glanced at Asher. “They wouldn’t, would they?”

  Charlee understood, then, what was troubling Asher. “They are,” she said softly and bit her lip. They could do nothing to stop it. Asher had already considered it and knew they were helpless.

  The big base began to drop as the arrowheads all pulled away from underneath it. It seemed to sink slowly, which told her how truly large the thing was. Charlee drew in a shaky breath and tucked herself under Asher’s arm, clinging to him. His grip on her was tight.

  They stood silently, watching the base descend. When it landed, the tremor ran through the building, making it sway, and dust began to billow in clouds that didn’t properly disperse for another two days. But even by nightfall, they could see clearly enough how the base had landed.

  “Everything…is just…flattened,” Lucas whispered, his face drawn. “Buildings, trees, houses, everything. It’s just gone, like an elephant stepping on an ants’ nest.”

  They stayed at the windows for another day, paying silent tribute to anyone who had been caught beneath the base, too horrified to leave the view.

  Now they were standing only a few dozen steps away from the very bottom of the base wall, and here the damage from the base’s landing was emphasized. Buildings were cleaved sharply in two, as if a giant chef had chopped through them with one blow. The remains of buildings that had been sliced had most often collapsed and rested against the base like forgotten toys flung against the wall. Some of the buildings had slid down the wall, sagging like candles left too long in the sun.

  The strangest and most disquieting, though, were the remains of buildings that had stayed standing. Perhaps their construction had been stronger, the engineering better, or perhaps the section that had been removed by the tower base had not removed vital support with it. Whatever the reason, there were some buildings that hugged the base wall itself, looking like they were completely intact, making Charlee feel like if she blinked and cleared her vision, the rest of the building would appear. It was eerie to look at the remains of buildings still perfectly whole, that had been home to humans not so long ago, pressing up against the Alfar symbol of conquest.

  Of course, there were cracks everywhere, where buildings had collapsed, where others had sagged and still others had fallen in upon themselves. It was toward one of these that Asher strode, where timber framing was propped up against the base wall.

  The wall was a charcoal grey—almost black, except when the sun shone directly on it; then Charlee thought the color shimmered like a rainbow. Or perhaps it was the building itself that shimmered. Magic was everywhere these days.

  The remains of human buildings were all a dusty dun color, regardless of what they had once been. In comparison to the wall, the rubble looked utterly lifeless. Windows with broken panes gaped like mouths with missing teeth.

  Missing from this area were the Norse runes, the Valknut and the pentacle. No one ventured this close to the tower voluntarily.

  When Asher was ten yards from the crack, he whistled softly and pointed. Fudge raced ahead, diving through the crack.

  They waited.

  Twenty seconds later, Fudge stuck his head out. He was panting and grinning again.

  They stepped forward and slipped through the gap between the framing and the base wall. It looked like the section of building would slide down the base wall if so much as an errant breeze caught at it, which discouraged anyone crazy enough to get this close to the base wall to even consider venturing under the wreckage. But Asher had spent days shoring up the remains from underneath, where the support would not be noticed. It was as sturdy as a well-constructed roof.

  The crack was deceptive. It was possible to walk through standing upright. Ten feet inside, where the light failed, Asher reached behind a beam and flicked a switch. Dull LED lights began to glow, giving enough light to see the way ahead in the gloom. The path twisted around the beam and disappeared.

  Charlee nudged Lucas forward, encouraging him to follow Asher, who had stepped under the beam and moved on. Lucas ducked under himself and stepped forward. Charlee dipped her head under and followed. The path was wider on the
other side of the camouflaging beam, and here, the light from the LEDs seemed brighter without the sunshine to compete with. The path was clear of rubble and four feet wide, leading right up to a panel door that rested on beams and sections of collapsed walls. One of the sections still had a clock hanging from a nail, but the glass was broken and the hour hand was missing. There were also several hundred pounds of drywall fragments and dust, which stirred in the breeze created by their movements. The dust and the ruined vestiges of human occupation, like the clock, gave the space an abandoned feeling.

  Asher waved Lucas forward and pointed at the door. The handle had been wrenched from it and had left behind a circular hole.

  “Put your fingers into the hole. Carefully,” Asher told Lucas.

  Lucas gave Asher a look that was his equivalent of raising a brow—dropping his chin and looking directly at him. He gave it two seconds, then reached over to slide his fingers gently into the hole left by the doorknob. Then his fingers grew still. “Trip wire,” he said.

  “There’s enough slack to open the door a few inches,” Asher explained. “Then you unhook it from the latch on the inside of the frame.”

  Lucas grinned. “You devious bastard.”

  “Forget to unlatch the wire and you’ll blow half a block out. There’s twenty pounds of C4 hooked up to it.”

  Lucas pulled the door up and open the required few inches, then reached inside and around the frame that had been hidden beneath the door. He grunted his satisfaction and opened the door all the way, until the hinges wouldn’t swing anymore. The opening was door shaped, but it was at an angle. Stairs led down from it. They were quite normal and horizontal.

  “Basement?” Lucas asked.

  “Several of them,” Asher agreed. “I’ll go first. I know where the light switch is. Fudge.”

  Fudge hopped through the doorframe and trotted happily down the stairs into the dark. Asher stepped through and climbed down the stairs, ducking carefully under the top of the door.