Romy's Last Stand: Book III of the 2250 Saga

by Stone, Nirina

  I can’t shake the feeling that she’d have us all die “just for shits and giggles.”

  I find Blair there, with Sanaa and Franklin, and blurt out everything about my meeting with her.

  “Great,” Franklin says, at the same time Blair says, “Well it’s inevitable. She would have found out sooner or later. She knows just about everything that happens here. She’s got eyes everywhere.”

  Of course she does. There isn’t anyone to trust here, really.

  “It just means we need to find our girl sooner. Not that we weren’t trying to find her as fast as possible anyway. It just means we need to be extra careful, as if we weren’t being careful enough.”

  Why is he talking like that? Blair’s not one to be so—fatalist.

  Still, I nod. I made the right decision to not ask for her help. We just need to move faster and get the hell out of here.

  Then he says, “Look, I’m convinced your father’s holo has been helping all along even if you aren’t aware of it. Can you try to hone in on that? Meditate? Or something? Invite him in, somehow?”

  The others don’t react though I expected Franklin to scoff at the idea.

  “I can try, Blair,” I say. “But it’s not some sort of—I don’t know—magic.”

  “I know,” he says. “But what do we have to lose?”

  Then he ushers me into the tent to be alone as they guard the entry-way. And I meditate.

  The Vorkian

  An hour later and I’m calmer, more focused, and my brain and heart feel stronger. But have I succeeded in channelling Father’s holo? Not even a little.

  I sigh and step out of the tent to see Blair and Sanaa. Frank’s not around—maybe resting somewhere. Neither of them have to say anything—they can see my dejection clearly on my face.

  “Okay,” Blair says, “we’ll have to find this Metrill the old fashioned way.”

  “What way is that?” Sanaa says, her voice impatient. “Do we stop every single short adult in EPrison and ask, ‘Hey you. Are you a Metrill?’”

  I can’t stop the guffaw.

  “It’s better than sitting around here,” Blair suggests. “Waiting for what? A voice that’ll probably never come?” Then he stares up at the sky. “I wonder why he’s blocked from you in here.” It’s not a real sky of course, as we’re still a few floors down from there. But it’s a ceiling with a digital painting of the sky, and it hits me.

  “That could be a Faraday cage of sorts. That would explain why I don’t feel any compulsion either way, in here.”

  “You might be right,” he says.

  Sanaa just frowns at me, not understanding what I’m talking about. I explain that a Faraday cage is set up to block radio waves though I’m not entirely sure why one is set up here. She stares up at the fake sky as well. “That’s interesting. That’s—clever.”

  “And downright inconvenient,” Blair says. “So yes, I guess we’ll go around asking any short people we see if they happen to be Metrill.”

  “First things first,” Franklin says as she rounds the corner with a dark blue basket full of food in her arms—but I stop to stare at her, uninterested in what’s in the basket despite my stomach insisting otherwise.

  Her hair’s shorn short—where once she’d sported a mid-length head of thick auburn hair, usually up in a loose bun, Franklin’s now as close to bald as I’ve ever seen anyone.

  “Don’t stare at me,” she says. “Discomfort makes me lash out.”

  I’m tempted to say, “So does breathing,” but keep my mouth shut.

  “What did you do?” I ask.

  “I bartered of course,” she says. “How else do you think we’ll be able to eat in here?”

  “Credit’s no good in here,” Blair explains, “not that you’d have the Alto to use it anyway. But credits are just an idea in the EPrison. We use whatever we have on us.”

  “So, what else can you barter with?” I ask Franklin. “Now that you don’t have any more hair.”

  “With what I’ve got!” she snaps, then glares at the food, unmoving, until Blair touches her shoulder.

  The touch makes her jump then she says, “Dig in,” and turns around to walk away. “I lost my appetite.”

  What happened to her in here? I don’t ask the others—it’s none of my business, and it’s not right to talk about her—about whatever happened—without her around.

  “You,” Sanaa says to me, “you don’t have much hair, and it’s not an interesting colour anyway.”

  The insult doesn’t sting. I have black hair, about as common in Apex as my dark eyes and olive skin-tone.

  “You’d have to think of something else, when you barter.”

  I can’t, of course. The only interesting things I had on me were my gear fashioned from Maya’s tail and my travelling suit. When it comes down to it, I might have to use them, but I’ll consider that when I have to. For now, I’m about as hungry as the others, and we tuck into our food quietly.

  “Doesn’t seem right eh?” Sanaa says as she gnaws on the rest of her corn on the cob. “That we worked our butts off to harvest all this, and then have to work our butts off to ingest any of it.”

  Sounds about right, I say. “Sounds like the life of a Citizen, really.”

  She laughs as she swallows the rest of her food.

  When Franklin finally returns, it’s about two hours later, and we’re full. We’ve put aside a large amount of the food for her to have but she barely picks at it.

  “You need to eat, gal,” Sanaa says. “You need energy. We can’t have you weak in here.”

  “You’re right,” Franklin says, her voice resigned. “No weaklings allowed in here. What could we possibly do with a mere weakling? Still, she grabs food, and shoves it into her mouth, not stopping to chew most of it. Now that’s what it looks like when food’s used solely for energy. I look away.

  Whatever this place did to her, I’d rather not have her in here longer than we need.

  So I suggest to Blair that we start canvassing.

  “Should we split up?” I say, though I’m not keen to wander around EPrison by myself, without a weapon to boot. He declines, says we’ll probably work better together anyway.

  We walk around, watching people pass by, but even the shorter adults around us are obviously not Metrills.

  “It’s not quite what you’d pictured, is it?” Blair asks as we turn and walk down a narrow path I hadn’t been down before.

  “It’s nothing at all like what I pictured,” I say. “I thought it would just be a hotter, dirtier, version of Azure.” Azure was the old prison I lived in for three years before being auctioned off to work in Prospo City with the Diamonds.

  Blair laughs. “In a lot of ways, though,” he says, “Azure was a worse prison, wasn’t it?”

  Yeah. My thoughts go to Father before I can stop them. We’re walking through a small crowd of people now, most of them sitting and smoking joe, some reading old paper books, some just resting.

  Then a tingle soars up my spine, of someone staring at me. When I look to my right, I realize the source of the tingle is a Vorkian. Or at least he was a Vorkian in his old life—he had to have been. His skin is still that sickly grey colour I associate with them, and though he’s not smiling, I sense that he has a large mouthful of teeth under his frowning face.

  He’s dressed in the generic potato sack outfit, and to his left sits a little girl, her hair in small braids, her little hand in his.

  What in Odin is a little girl like that doing with a Vorkian? I nudge at Blair and he looks towards the two at the same time I do. That’s when the Vorkian speaks.

  “I know you,” he croaks, “from another lifetime—”

  The words, though shaky, come out strong in the way only the best salesmen speak. He peers at me, waiting for me to answer, but when I don’t say a thing, he yells, “Why did you do it!?”

  He jumps to his feet, pulling the little girl with him. “Why did you try to kill us?”

  I
lurch back as he charges at me, though Blair steps between us his hands out as if to stop the Vorkian in his tracks.

  “What are you on about, mate?” Blair says. “You don’t know her.”

  “I know her! I know her!” the Vorkian yells. “She tried to kill all of us! On Liberty day. In Apex. SHE was the one on the screens.”

  It hits me that he’s talking about my first introduction to the Sorens and all of Apex. My face was being played over and over on the screens when P-City and its lifestyle was brought down.

  As his yells get louder, other people start to stand as well and I realize this is so not where I want to be right now.

  “It was you!” he insists. “We were in one of the buildings you brought down. You destroyed it all. For what? What purpose? Why would you do that? Why?”

  I’ve never been asked Why so many times in one sitting since Isaac, my old mentor.

  Then recognition hits me—he’s the Vorkian that came for Isaac. I wasn’t around when it happened, but I know Isaac had summoned him that day, the last day I’d ever see him.

  I narrow my eyes at him and move forward, pushing into Blair’s back.

  “You—” I say, moving forward still. Blair’s surprise registers only for a second. “You’re the one who killed Isaac!” Then I’m on him at the same moment he’s on me, we’re punching each other, but there’s no rhyme or reason to the way either one of us attacks.

  We’re just punching, pushing, biting, though I’m careful because I realize the little girl is still there.

  All I know is—he killed Isaac. All he knows is—I helped destroy his whole world. I was the face behind the destruction.

  Finally, we’re both exhausted so we drop to our knees, still facing each other. Blair’s to my side, holding on to the little girl as she whimpers. I’m grateful to him for that, but I look back to the Vorkian.

  My fight gone, I remember that it was Isaac’s choice. It was this one’s job to kill him, but he didn’t do it against Isaac’s wishes.

  He watches me, his face passive. “Why?” he whispers.

  “I swear I thought the buildings were empty,” I say, remembering those days. Remembering my naivete in the way of the Sorens.

  I probably knew even then that things were not as they had promised me, but wasn’t there always a part of me that wanted to be blinded to all that? Wasn’t there a part that closed my eyes to the knowledge what we were doing was not what we should have done?

  Still, I breathe in and out, trying to bring my pulse down. Where once I was terrified of Vorkians, and knew to keep them within my eyesight, now, I’m not sure what to think—other than that they were only victims of the Prospo way of life, and the Sorens’ determination to bring them down, as much as the rest of us.

  He doesn’t look like he’ll come after me again, as the girl goes back into the crook of his arms. His eyes flash as he looks down at her.

  “We were all being used, weren’t we?” he says.

  I nod as I slowly bring down my breaths. “We were and still are,” I say. “But we—” I say, looking up at Blair, “are trying to change that. Will you help us?”

  I don’t know how he could, but I know the more allies we have in here, the better.

  He kisses the girl on top of her head and nods, then he offers me his hand to shake.

  “I’m Mazz,” he says, “and yes, I’ll help you.”

  The Siren

  Mazz and the girl, Sophia, sit in our tent as they eat, drink, and relay their adventure from when they met to now. We all listen carefully, only interjecting at moments that don’t make too much sense.

  Like—Sophia. “Why did you contact a Vorkian?” I say. She can’t be any older than twelve. So she would have been nine or ten when we brought Prospo City down, right on the day when she sat in front of Mazz, about to have him end her life.

  She looks up at Mazz and says, “It wasn’t my idea. It was Momma’s.”

  She doesn’t really need to say much more. I’ve seen how Prospo parents are—the ones I’ve met didn’t seem to care for their progeny the way Citizen parents do. Then I correct my thoughts.

  Because my Citizen parents were perfect, sure, until I realized my mother’s a super double spy—whatever that is—and my father had his own share of lies to feed me as a little girl.

  Still, I remember my childhood well. I know they loved me—well at least Father did. Who knows if Mother ever did or if she was just that good at lying to everyone, maybe to herself.

  Still, I push the thoughts away. This isn’t about me. The past is the past. This is about this little girl’s future. What we’re doing here has everything to do with her, and all the other kids here.

  As she chews on probably her third apple since we sat down, Franklin asks to speak with me outside the tents. I step out reluctantly. There’s no way this will be anything good. Frankie still hates me, I remind myself.

  Still, I follow her out, keeping my eyes on her shorn head. She still walks with the same long strides, slightly stiff in the shoulders. Just great. She looks even tougher with a bald head. It suits her well.

  Then she turns and faces me head on. I nearly expect her to hit me. “What do you think you’re doing?” she spits.

  “I’m—what do you mean?”

  “I mean the refugees, Romy. I’d like to know what your intentions are, with those two. We can’t take care of them.”

  My eyebrows raise at the same time hers furrow. “Franklin,” I say, “be reasonable. She’s just twelve years old. Do you mean to leave her here?”

  “Well—” She runs her head over her shorn head. “Yes, I do.” She looks back at me, challenge in her eyes. “We don’t have time to go around babysitting ex-Vorkians and little girls, Mason. In case you haven’t noticed, the whole world’s about to come to an end.”

  “Yes, exactly,” I say. “And I mean to stop that, don’t you?”

  She scoffs before I finish my sentence. “Do you really believe that’s what’s going to happen? You, me, Sanaa and Blair will stop the Metrills? The people who’ve been planning something like this longer than all our lifetimes combined?”

  She’s exaggerating of course, but I stop myself from telling her so. The last thing I need to do is peeve Frankie off even more than she is.

  “If you don’t believe it, Franklin,” I say, “why in the world are you here?”

  “Only one reason—” she says as my mind goes to Blair. “To prevent you from killing the only two people in the world that matter to me. To get them out of here before this all goes to hell. For whatever reason, they believe in you. They want to follow you all the way to Hades for this—nonsense. I’m not letting that happen.”

  Fair enough. She’s here to protect Sanaa and Blair through all this, I get it. It’s not like she’s been subtle about it. But still, I wonder—

  “There’s a small part of you,” I say softly, “that hopes we can do this, right? Otherwise, you’d have had them gone long ago.”

  She doesn’t reply but she takes a step back. I know she hates me, but I’m hoping her love for Sanaa and Blair far outweighs her hate for me.

  “Look,” I say, “if there’s a way for us to save all the kids in EPrison while we go about trying to save the Earth, that’ll make everything we go through worth it. You know better than I do what happens to the kids in here.”

  Her eyes pool with tears as she stares at me. “You really care that much about them?”

  The question takes me aback but I don’t react. She still thinks I’m fake, after all. She still thinks I’m much more like Mother than I am—she’s still convinced I’m Prospo.

  “I’ll do whatever it takes,” I say. “To get these kids—to get these people released.”

  They’re all labelled ‘Too Dangerous’ but not because they’re actually criminals, I realize. They’re political prisoners more than anything. We have to break them out.

  I don’t know when the thought had occurred to me, and I realize adding this
on to everything we need to do already is a big ask. But seeing the way EPrison affected Blair and Franklin, two of the toughest Sorens I’ve ever met, I know it must be done.

  How? I haven’t a clue. But we’ve got to.

  After hours of chattering away with Mazz and Sophia, we’re all exhausted from the day and decide to take a small sleep. The alarms for work will blare in about three hours, so we go our separate ways and sleep—as much as we can.

  When the blaring starts, I’m groggy but ready to make my limbs work again. It does help me think better, of plans that are impossible in the light of day.

  But when I head to the vedas along with the swarm of people, I’m stopped by a guard with his large walking stick. Of course it’s not a walking stick at all. It’s sharp at both ends, as if made to skewer.

  He says, “The warden would like a word with you, Lady Mason.”

  I’d rather do anything else but go see her again, but I eye the guard and his weapon carefully.

  I can take him on if I need. Around me, kids walk along with their parents into the vedas, heading up or down, depending on their tasks for the day.

  I follow the guard to another side of the compound and am back in her quarters, wishing so bad I was in the fields working my hands raw. Anything but to see her again.

  “Lady Mason,” she says as I’m ushered in. She’s slightly changed the decor—there are more shiny poof chairs around, and a new man in the birdcage. This one’s all muscle and his chin ends in a small pointed gold beard.

  “I grew—tired of the other one,” she claims as she indicates I should sit.

  “I prefer to stand, thank you,” I say. “And please, just call me Romy.”

  “R-owwww-m-eeee,” she says. “My goodness. You’re not quite what I’d expected for a Lady.”

  “Well I’m—not,” I say, “a Lady, that is. It’s just a title the Sorens—some of the Sorens—have adopted to lead in Apex. I don’t prescribe to that.”

  “Right,” she says with a wide grin. “Now the question is, then. What do you prescribe to?”