Guardian

by Alex London

  “Wait, I—” But wherever Syd went, Liam went. To the ends of the world if he had to. So what if Syd didn’t feel the same way about him. He didn’t have to. Loyalty wasn’t a transaction.

  As they entered the barracks, the smell almost knocked them all back outside again.

  Marie pulled off her mask and used the balled cloth to cover her mouth and nose, but even so, she couldn’t totally stop the smell of rot and sweat and human waste from rising to her nostrils. As all their eyes adjusted, they began to see the source—or rather, sources—of the smell.

  The barracks was one long room with a door at the front and the back, leading out to the latrines. It was wide enough for four rows of sleeping mats with an aisle between each row. Slatted walls and high open windows webbed with wire let in some light and allowed the air to circulate. The meager openings, however, were no match for the powerful smells of over three hundred sick people lying on their mats beneath thin blankets, groaning, coughing, and crying out. Even in the low light, they could see the toll the affliction was taking.

  People were covered in the black webbing of their own veins. Some lay tearing furiously at their clothes and hair and skin, opening sores with their scratching. Others lay motionless, unable or unwilling to move. Some had begun to bleed black blood.

  While their symptoms looked just like those of the nopes, they did not suffer in silence like the nopes did. They made their agony known in unintelligible groans.

  Except for the ones who had passed beyond agony.

  There were more than a few of those. They looked as if all the black veins in their body had burst. They lay covered in dried blood, all over their faces, necks, hands and feet. They were ageless, genderless, faceless. In death, they had attained complete equality. They were indistinguishable.

  Marie shivered. She both longed and dreaded to find her parents and hoped the boy outside had been wrong, that they weren’t here, that they had taken the flight of the Purifiers as their own cue to leave.

  And then she feared they were out in the wilderness, sick, or picked up by another patrol of Purifiers who had not abandoned their duty and had executed her parents on the spot.

  Her mind searched for a scenario that did not end in her parents suffering an agonizing death. She wandered down the middle aisle, scanning the gaunt faces of the dying and wishing that she could offer more than her gaping stare and her rising panic that she was now no one’s daughter.

  Liam kept himself at Syd’s side. “Keep your head down,” he said. “Maybe no one will recognize you.”

  No one did.

  The savior of the people did not visit places like this, and there was no reason any of these formerly privileged pillars of society would have recognized some dark-skinned slum kid. It’s not like they could have looked up a picture of Yovel on their datastreams. As long as no one saw the mark behind his ear, he’d be anonymous.

  Strangely, this was the first time in months Syd had been able to truly let down his guard. He felt, for a moment, like himself.

  As they moved down the row, those who could reached out to Marie.

  “Purifier,” they called out.

  “Water.”

  “Excuse me.”

  “Help me.”

  Fingers clutched at Marie’s pant legs, tugged at her without enough strength to slow her down. Dark eyes pleaded. And the voices, male and female, too weak to distinguish:

  “Water.”

  “Water.”

  “Flaaa . . .”

  Some had lost the power of language altogether. There were too many hands. Too many people. Too much pain.

  “Gaaa.”

  “Water.”

  “Oooo.”

  “Marie.”

  A flood of terrified relief crashed over her at the sound of her name. Marie saw her father and her mother beside him on the same small mat, leaning on each other. The veins beneath their skin were visible, but not bulging out, not black. They were not well, but they were both alive and they were better off than many, worse off than some.

  She knelt down in front of them and resisted the urge to throw her arms around their necks. She didn’t want to hurt them. She didn’t want to infect herself. It occurred to her, far too late to do anything about it, that maybe she already had. Why did she rush in here without thinking about contagion? Why didn’t the Advisory Council warn people that a plague was spreading? Why had she let Syd come?

  Worrying about her parents had clouded her judgment. Five minutes ago, she would have berated herself for betraying her ideological purity and unwavering commitment to the Reconciliation. Now all she wanted was to make her parents better.

  “Mom,” Marie said, instead of screaming out any of the questions that raced through her mind.

  Her mother cracked a smile, her dry lips cracking doubly.

  “You need water,” Marie said, pushing herself up, but her mother’s hand shot out surprisingly fast.

  “Don’t go,” her mother said. “Your . . . uh . . .” She looked at the man beside her.

  “Father,” said Marie.

  “Yes.” Her mother sighed. “The words. My memory for them is . . . but your father . . . he’s not well. Stay.”

  Her father stared at her without speaking. His eyes were rimmed with red and his blue veins ran wild all over his face and bare head. There were angry red patches where he’d scratched himself furiously.

  “You need water,” Marie repeated. She told Syd and Liam to stay with her parents, as she rushed down the long aisle, past the groaning invalids and the blank-eyed dead. She didn’t stop until she’d gone out the back door and found the pump off the water tank. She filled a jug, noticing that the giant tank itself was nearly empty. She knew the regulations. It should have been refilled every week. It should never get this low. Something had gone wrong. Someone had not sent a hovercraft to resupply the co-op. Someone had decided all these people were not worth saving.

  She rushed back inside with the water, ignoring everything and everyone until her parents were able to take a drink. Syd and Liam just stood there, dumbly. It hadn’t occurred to either of them to say a kind word or take the hand of a suffering person. Marie shook her head.

  Her mother helped her father wet his lips before she drank her own water. He coughed and choked, but swallowed a few sips. Marie could hardly bear to look at him.

  “How long has he been like this?” Syd asked.

  “It came quickly,” her mother said. “A few days ago, we were fine. Maybe a little tired, but we assumed that was because of the work and the hunger. Others fell first. Their thoughts jumbled. We began to see their veins through their skin. We didn’t think it would affect us. But it had already.”

  She scratched an itch on her face, then the back of her hand. Then her face again. She started to scratch with both her hands, faster and faster, raised red lines on her cheeks, and Marie reached out, stopped her as she had seen her mother do before. “It itches at first,” her mother smiled meekly. “Then the blood begins to . . .”

  “Burn,” her father gasped out the word.

  Marie’s mother drifted her eyes to Syd. “I know who you are,” she told him. Liam tensed and looked around. Marie put her finger to her lips, urged her mother to stay quiet.

  “Keep my daughter out of trouble,” she told Syd.

  “She’s better at staying out of trouble than I am.” Syd smiled. He felt stupid smiling in a place like this, but he didn’t know what else to do. Liam didn’t know what to do either. He looked like he wanted to hit something, but then, he always looked like that. “Can you tell me what happened here?”

  “It spread so fast,” Marie’s mother repeated. “As people showed signs, the Purifiers shouted and beat them, but it didn’t matter, tried to make them work harder, faster. They slowed. Their bodies—our bodies—could no longer do the job.” She r
ead the worry on Marie’s face. “No one beat your father or me. I think your friend provided us some protection there.” She smiled back at Syd.

  Did she realize that not long ago all her fine clothes, her jewelry, her fancy home had come from the company that profited off Syd’s torture? Did she realize that he was the reason she’d lost it all?

  “The guidance counselor for our cadre of Purifiers fell ill too,” her mother explained. “He tried to hide the signs, but his assistants saw the beginning, they saw the lines beneath his skin, like the Guardians’, like ours . . . they threw him in here. They began throwing all the sick in here. They told us if anyone tried to leave, he or she would be killed on the spot.”

  “They’re gone now,” Marie said. “They all left.”

  “We know,” her mother said. “They left that one boy of theirs, the youngest, behind. Told him they’d report him if he abandoned his post, even as they abandoned theirs. Told him they’d kill him if they saw him before relief arrived. We all heard him whining.” She smiled at the thought. Marie found it comforting to see her mother could still hold a grudge, even as she struggled to hold her head up. “But there he stayed. I think it’s obvious to all of us but him that no relief is coming. Your colleagues . . .” She shook her head, looking at Marie’s uniform. “We would have fled, a whole group of us, but by the time we realized that boy was the only one standing guard, we were too weak to run. Besides, where would we go?”

  “Do you know where this disease came from? How it started?” Syd asked.

  “The nopes? Did it spread from them?” Marie wanted to know.

  “They showed the first . . .” Her mother’s eyes moved around in her head. She looked lost, searching.

  “Symptoms?” Marie suggested.

  Her mother nodded.

  Marie’s father let out a pained groan. He pushed himself up onto his elbows and tried to speak. “Not . . . your . . . fault . . . ,” he said.

  “Shh.” Marie’s mother stroked his head. “Rest, my love. She knows. She knows it’s not her fault.”

  “My fault?” Marie leaned toward her father. “Why would I think this was my fault?” Her father tried to answer. His lips moved, but no sound came out. She grabbed his hand. “Why would it be my fault?”

  “It isn’t, Marie.” Her mother rested her hand on top of theirs. “He’s not thinking clearly. He didn’t mean anything by that.”

  “He meant something, Mother. Tell me.”

  “He’s been like this for days,” her mother said. “I have no more idea than you do.”

  “The Machine,” her father said.

  Syd leaned down. “What was that?”

  “Nothing,” Marie’s mother replied quickly.

  “He said ‘the Machine,’” Marie repeated. “Why would he say that?”

  “I told you, he’s been like this for days.”

  “Brindle,” her father said. “Talk to Brindle.”

  “Brindle?” Liam wondered.

  “That was Knox’s last name,” said Syd. “He means Knox’s father?”

  The man nodded.

  “He knows more about the Guardians than anyone,” said Syd. “If this started with them, he’ll know what it is. He’ll know how to stop it.”

  “He’s in prison awaiting execution,” said Liam. “We can’t just walk in there.”

  “We have to,” said Syd. “Look at this. We have to find out what’s going on.”

  Liam shook his head. “You don’t think the Council will have their own doctors working on it?”

  Marie stood up from her parents. She spoke in a whisper. “We have to take this to the Council. We can’t handle this ourselves. They’ll know what to do.”

  “They won’t do anything,” Syd told her. “They want these people—your parents—to disappear. Until it starts affecting people they care about, they won’t do anything to stop it.”

  “Counselor Baram is not like that and you know it,” she said. “He’ll listen.”

  “You do what you want,” said Syd. “Liam and I are going to the prison.”

  “We’re not,” said Liam.

  “Nothing’s changed,” Syd told him. “I can still have you reassigned to—”

  “Fine,” Liam snapped. He didn’t want this argument. He just wanted Syd out of here, somewhere safer. A Reconciliation prison would be far safer than this co-op. At least there, Yovel would be respected. At least there, no one would carry this infection. “We’ll go. But that’s it. After that, we’re done taking unauthorized trips. And”—he met Syd’s eyes. Might as well take a risk—“you’ll ask me nicely.”

  “What?” Syd scoffed.

  “You heard me.” Liam crossed his arms. “I’ll help you, but you can’t just order me around. Ask me.”

  “Ask you?” Syd raised an eyebrow, studied Liam. The bodyguard stood firm, met Syd’s eyes, and waited. He might have puppy dog eyes, but he wasn’t going to let Syd treat him like a dog. “Fair enough,” said Syd. “Will you take me to the prison to visit Knox’s father?”

  Liam didn’t move.

  “Please?” Syd added.

  Liam’s face cracked a smile. “I will,” he said, then he gestured for Syd to walk beside him from the stench of the sickhouse, into the sunlight.

  Syd looked back at Marie’s parents, but couldn’t think of a thing to say, so he let Liam lead him out.

  “I’ll be back soon,” Marie told her mother. “Take care of each other. Help will come. I will make sure of it.”

  She stood to go, making sure to give each of her parents a hug first.

  Before she made her way back to the Council and Liam and Syd went to the prison, they needed to have a word with the young Purifier outside.

  “We have to get back to the city quickly,” she told Tom. “So we’re taking your tractor.”

  “But how am I supposed to get out of here? Walk?”

  Syd shook his head. “You aren’t going anywhere, Tom.”

  They explained the situation as clearly as they could: He was going to look after the sick people until help arrived, doing all he could serve and comfort them, or he would wake up from his next nap to Liam’s hand on his throat.

  Liam clenched the metal fist in front of young Tom’s face.

  Syd admired his bodyguard’s sense of theatricality. He hoped that was all it was, but he realized, despite all the months with Liam watching his every move, he knew almost nothing about his bodyguard. He didn’t, however, seem like the type to make empty threats.

  “Don’t let us down, Tom,” Syd added as a word of encouragement. “We’re counting on you. Everyone is counting on you.”

  Tom liked the sound of that, but as they drove away on their commandeered tractor, they heard him calling after them.

  “Wait! But . . . I don’t know anything about being a nurse! Guys? How am I supposed to help? I don’t know how to help.”

  That makes two of us, thought Syd.

  [16]

  “SO THE GREAT AND powerful Yovel comes to pay a condemned man a visit?” Knox’s father grinned a gap-toothed grin.

  Eeron Brindle, the once-towering executive in charge of SecuriTech, looked like a ghost of himself. His cheeks were sunken, his eyes yellowed, and his hands trembled against his thighs. The black web of veins showed through his skin, but he did not scratch at them.

  He knelt on the floor of his cell in front of Syd. A chain bolted to the wall attached to a metal collar around his neck. The cell was primitive, a cinder-block room in a building that hadn’t been built as a prison, but the door to the cell was new, a pressure-piston-locking mechanism in a reinforced frame. There was a window, looking out over the jungle, crisscrossed with graphene wiring embedded in the plexi. Those little threads made the window even more impenetrable than the door. That was the idea. The condemned should have a view of the wo
rld outside, with no hope of ever being a part of it again.

  In spite of the unbreakable window, the powerful door, the chain around his neck, and the prisoner’s fragility, Liam stood beside Syd with his bolt gun in his hand. He would take no chances.

  “Do you know why the Guardians are sick?” Syd asked.

  Knox’s father snorted.

  “Do you?” Syd repeated.

  “I know why everyone is sick,” he said. “But I do not know why you’ve come out here to see me.”

  “Do you know how to stop it?” Syd continued.

  “I get so few visitors,” Knox’s father talked over Syd. “I never realized how much I enjoyed conversation until I was denied it. I was never a people person, not like my son. I guess you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. Isn’t that what they say? Or do they say you don’t know what’s gone until you’ve got it? That hardly makes any sense, no? My memory’s not what it was . . .”

  He stared back at them, like he’d lost the thread of what he was saying. Liam shifted his feet. The old man had lost it. Syd knew it too, but he didn’t dare look at Liam for confirmation. He couldn’t bear the thought that this trip out to the prison was pointless, that he wouldn’t learn anything, that he couldn’t save anyone. That he’d have to crawl to the Council and beg them to help. Yovel the great.

  He was not ready to give up yet. He could still fix things.

  “Just answer me,” Syd said.

  “Conversation is an exchange, Syd,” Knox’s father said. “It’s a deal people make with each other. Call and response, verse and chorus, question and answer, action and reaction. It makes the world go round and round and round.”

  “Do you know how to stop this sickness?” Syd said again.

  “What I am trying to explain,” Eeron Brindle told him, “is that a conversation is a transaction and each side must have something of value to trade.”

  “There’s no credit anymore,” said Syd. “It wouldn’t do you any good anyway.”

  “Not money!” he shouted, rattling his chain and swaying from side to side. “Words! Trade words with me, you glitch-brained Chapter Eleven swampcat!”