by Amber Jayne
Gator dragged the crates down one by one, sometimes wrenching them from underneath a good deal of pinning rubble. As Arvra and Bongo hauled them out to the transports, Arvra grabbed up any other objects strewing the ground that looked useful. True salvage. Pipes, metal fittings, papers, anything that appeared to have been an electronic device. These she simply loaded atop the crates she and Bongo were carrying. If the added weight bothered him, he never said so.
Thus, the Order of Maji would be satisfied, and she would return with a proper haul of salvage.
Hervo, Pelkra and—maybe especially—Virge kept off the Passengers who were aroused by their presence in the city. Arvra saw glimpses of the creatures’ bodies where they’d fallen in the street. The vehicles were nearly fully loaded by now. They had to have taken on at least a hundred fifty rifles at this point. Whether those weapons would prove functional, she didn’t know, although the plastic crates appeared sealed, without any signs of decay that would’ve let in damp and corrosion.
“That’s it,” Arvra said curtly as she and Bongo fitted yet another crate into the cargo hold of the second of the two haulers. You didn’t want a raid to last too long, and they’d spent enough time at this single site, in her judgment. And since this was her operation, her decisions were all that counted.
She called in to Gator. A moment later he emerged, hair white with plaster dust. She too felt grimy with dirt and sweat. She wondered distantly if he could put together another hot bath sometime in the near future, and the thought tickled a memory of that previous time, of Gator’s broad bare body, of his hands.
To shake this off, she raised her head to call Virge down from the armory’s roof. Before she could utter a sound, though, a sharp whistle came from above. Arvra shaded her eyes against the sickly Shiplight and saw the woman in the Guard outfit waving. Waving and pointing. Upward.
Arvra looked past her, to the two figures descending. Next to her, Bongo muttered darkly, “If Urna’s been hurt…”
The two men, one supporting the other, came down and down and at last alit upon the street near the vehicles.
* * * * *
It was a tableau. Shadowflash, Weapon, salvagers. Rune felt he could almost see the scene at a remove, as if he were outside himself. In some sense, that was true. Urna—Laine—had undone his reality for him. Or, more accurately, had clarified it. The past. Their past. Rune had always felt that they two shared a history. What Laine had told him on the rooftop…it had the tenor of truth, of fact.
Or else it was the most elaborate web of lies Rune had ever heard spun.
They landed on the street. Everyone froze for that moment. The scavenger gang members regarded them wide-eyed. Two were armed with primitive weaponry that nonetheless appeared to have kept the inevitable Passengers at bay. It was strange being down here at street level, on the floor of the ruins. He was used to remaining high up, directing his partner from the tops of towers. But those days were gone. Never again would the male with the silver hair be his Weapon. That was how it had to be. Rune, though the thought tore at him with grim force, believed he could accept that.
Laine had recaptured some part of the life that had been taken from him. A life of which both of them had been robbed.
The stillness broke after a few seconds when one of the salvagers, a man with blond hair, stepped forward. “Are you hurt?” he asked Laine. His green eyes flashed past him, picking out Rune, the look dire.
“I’m fine.” Laine waved dismissively. Looking around, he asked, “Are you done here?”
A female with wildly colored hair nodded. She turned, lifted her head and gave a single shrill whistle. From the roof of the nearest building, which the group seemed to have been engaged in raiding, a figure started climbing down, quite nimbly. She found many helpful footholds on the structure’s pitted front. The biggest man among the crew went around to the backs of the two vehicles and closed up the hatches. Whatever salvage they had come here for, it seemed they had obtained it.
During this, Laine had not looked at Rune. His dark-blue eyes were on the ground. Rune had no reason to linger here. He had delivered the former Weapon back to his friends. He had nothing to say to these people. They were from the opposite end of the Safe’s society. Dregs. But they must have some worth, he conceded. Else Laine wouldn’t have fallen in with their company.
He had to return to the Citadel, to bring the bloody lock of hair to Aphael Chav himself, to tell the lie that Urna the Weapon was dead. He would do so, just as he himself would remain a Shadowflash, serving the Lux. It was the life he knew. Whatever past his erstwhile partner had uncovered, it was still inaccessible to Rune. So be it. Perhaps someday he might make the discovery for himself. Perhaps not.
The wings’ abused motor had cut out on upon landing. As Rune went to restart it, Laine suddenly lifted his head. Stricken eyes were large in that beautiful face. Abruptly he bent, slipped something out of his boot and held it out toward Rune. It was a square of stiff-looking paper. An old photograph, it looked like. It depicted three people. Two were adults, one younger. Sun reflected on water in the background.
“This isn’t either one of us,” Laine said. “But it could’ve been.”
Bemused, Rune took the picture from him. He didn’t understand the significance of this, but plainly it meant something to Laine. Even so, he couldn’t resist saying, “You’re so sentimental.” He put it into the same pocket with the tress of bloodied silver hair.
Laine said, “Micah—” But Rune fired the engine. The harness was heavy and uncomfortable across his shoulders. His body ached, as the bruises he’d acquired started to rise. It would be a long journey back to the Citadel.
Whatever else Laine meant to say to him, Rune didn’t hear it. The wings lifted him. The decaying street fell away beneath. He banked, up and away, with a final glimpse of the silver-haired head, a daub of colorless color against the gray of the surrounding rot, then the man who held his heart was lost to him.
* * * * *
Urna watched the Shadowflash soar away, a smooth arc, despite how labored the wings’ motor sounded. He hoped Rune would make it back to the Safe. Not just for the great service the Shadowflash would be doing him by bringing “proof” of his demise to the Toplux. It was more than that, beyond selfish motives, beyond even what might be best for the Order of Maji. Rune, who had once been a boy named Micah, was Urna’s mate, someone who was joined to him on some impossible, profound level. He might never fully understand the bond between them, but he was in awe of its power, especially now, with the partial return of his memories.
Virge Temple was down from the roof. The operation had been a success. Arvra was ordering everyone back into the vehicles, having paid Urna no more attention than to level a gaze at him and ask, “Can you do your job?” Virge strode up next to him and wordlessly handed over the pistol, lustrous eyes brighter than ever, a satisfied look on her face.
He took the gun, the butt warm from her hand, and said to Arvra, “I can.”
They all got aboard the transports, taking their positions. As they set off back down the street, Pelkra’s bow twanging as she dispatched another Passenger, Urna could feel that the big-wheeled hauler was moving a little sluggishly. The gang must’ve taken quite a load out of the armory. He hoped Bongo had gotten what he’d expected from this raid.
Gator quickly got the vehicle going at a good clip, following once more in Arvra’s wake.
A short while later they were out of the moldering city and making fast for the border.
Chapter Twenty
After the raid on the Unsafe, Arvra Finean had been pulled in for questioning by the local Guard garrison, along with Gator and Pelkra and Hervo and just about everyone else she knew. The Guard were stirred up, rattled, angry. It was understandable. What had happened on the night when the power was cut off was unprecedented in the little border town’s history, so far as anybody knew. The people hadn’t exactly risen up against their oppressors, but the disturbance that night h
ad approached the uproar of a riot and certainly it had interfered with normal Guard operations.
The black-clad authorities wanted a return to normalcy—which was, naturally, a state of complete repression. It wasn’t, however, quite working out that way.
Arvra had realized, from a few slips made by the clumsy local Junior Interrogator, that she’d been under some kind of surveillance since before the raid into the Unsafe. It wasn’t much of a stretch to guess that the Lux had ordered her watched in case Urna came looking for her for some reason. That the fugitive Weapon actually had showed up here was pure coincidence.
During the interrogation, she claimed total ignorance. This succeeded in seriously frustrating her questioner, which was entertaining for her. For maybe the first time in her life, she felt like the Guard didn’t have the upper hand.
Still, they had seen her with Urna. They plainly suspected that she had something to do with the raid. The Guard had seen the vehicles leaving town. The Junior Interrogator also asked her repeatedly about someone named Cawd Delfel, a name which Arvra could honestly say she’d never heard before.
It probably would have ended badly for her, one way or another. She was even regretting returning to the town after disposing of the transports and leaving the valuable salvage at a secure site on the outskirts where it could be retrieved later on. She’d had to come back, though. Her life was here. Her brother was here. She wasn’t ready to go off with the Maji.
But something happened in the course of those interrogations. The announcement of Urna’s death came. Power had been restored earlier that same day and the screens were receiving broadcasts. Urna the Weapon, so the grim-faced commentator said, had died bravely on a self-appointed mission into the Unsafe. He had not, as it turned out, been working with co-conspirators after all. Rather, he had taken it upon himself to fight the Passengers alone. A suicidal act, perhaps, but a courageous deed nonetheless. That was the story, anyway. It was a very safe bet that the conditioned public wouldn’t question the specifics, like how his body would have been found. People were told what to believe and they believed it.
After that, the interrogations limped on for a little while longer. Then the Guard seemed all at once to drop it. Like they didn’t care anymore. Like, with Urna dead, none of it mattered. They didn’t even pursue the issue of the salvage foray, probably because they didn’t have any serious proof. That didn’t usually stop the Guard, but Arvra had come to realize, as she maybe never had before, just how shiftless a border town contingent of Guard could be compared with the disciplined, menacing ones at the Citadel. You likely had to be cut-rate material to get assigned to the border, anyway.
So they let her go. Urna was gone. That meant she wasn’t even going to get tapped for whore duty any longer. That made her even less interesting to the Guard.
It was fine by her.
If there were any non-sympathetics in the town, none of them fingered the salvage crew. No one was able to identify the vehicles’ occupants and the rigs themselves were never found. Apparently, no threat was great enough to make these people give up on those supplies they so desperately needed. Arvra already had plans to smuggle the goods into town and distribute them. She’d make some profit on the operation, but that wasn’t the point.
Arvra walked back to her small shack feeling exhausted, but overall no worse for the wear. The house wouldn’t be empty, of course. Frank’s usual watchers would’ve rotated through while she was detained. But when nobody answered her coded knock, fear bit at her.
Had they changed the sequence? Was it the regular time to do it? She couldn’t remember. And anyway, it didn’t matter. No one had told her what the new one was.
But she shrugged off the fear. This was, after all, her place. She banged on the door harder. “Let me in, damn it!” A few seconds later she heard footfalls. The lock disengaged. A rush of surprise overcame her, and she sucked in a breath. Then she let it out as a stunned whisper. “Bongo.”
He stepped back and she hurried inside. She’d last seen the blond-headed Maji member when he, Virge and Urna had parted from her and the other salvagers outside of the town. Their plan was to bury the crates of rifles, then come back for them when the weaponry could be disseminated through their network. Or so Bongo had implied. Arvra had avoided asking direct questions. The less she knew about the specifics of the underground movement, the better. So she had decided for herself.
“What’re you doing here?” she asked when the door was locked.
He gave her an impish grin. “I’m glad to see you too.”
She found she wasn’t much in the mood for banter, despite how handsome and chipper this man was. “Why have you come here? It’s dangerous.”
“It’s not,” he said. “Not really. The Guard in this town have gotten awfully lax. People are walking around bragging about the hullabaloo that went on during the blackout. I was chatting with one guy who said he pissed on the boot of a Guard member that night. Don’t know if it’s true, but the fact that anybody would claim it means things have changed.”
She had to concede that, and so she nodded. But she still wanted to know what he was doing here in her home. Before she could ask again, however, Bongo lifted a finger, touched it to her lips, and said softly, “Come and watch. I’m almost done with the healing.”
Bewildered now, she followed. They crossed the room to the dirty mattress and the form underneath the covers. Her brother. Poor Frank.
Bongo knelt at the bedside. Arvra saw that several strange objects were placed at what looked like deliberate intervals around her brother’s head where it rested on the pillow. Some were stone, some crystal, others metallic. She didn’t know what they were or what the hell Bongo was doing when he closed his eyes and started making weird gestures over Frank’s body. She actually jumped a little when he broke into a kind of atonal chanting.
Her fear returned to her suddenly, the tenor of it different. She felt something in the air, like a burnt odor making everything seem heavy. Only there was no smell, just a curious sensation crawling over her flesh. She rubbed her arms. She wanted to stop this, but made no move to do so.
Frank’s eyes drifted open and shut, according to no obvious pattern. If he was aware of what was going on around him, he didn’t—maybe couldn’t—indicate it.
By the time Bongo had finished, Arvra had no doubt she had just witnessed an Order of Maji ritual. They had to have rituals, didn’t they? Magic was like that. When children played at it, that was what they did. Invented all sorts of rites and rules. Drivel. Meaninglessness.
Bongo rose, wobbling, to his feet. His forehead was moist. She could see the strain in his green eyes. They were, she had to admit, quite attractive eyes.
“Arvra…”
She froze. She’d been about to say something to Bongo. Now her gaze shot past him. On the bed, with those bizarre objects still scattered around him, Frank was blinking. But it was the sort of blinking you did when your eyes were adjusting to light. It was the blinking of someone aware that he was blinking. Focusing his eyes. Taking in his surroundings. Conscious.
And he’d spoken her name—
“Arvra.”
Her heart leaped. She tore past Bongo, who only just backed out of the way in time. She dropped to her knees by the mattress. Her brother looked at her. Right at her.
“Frank.” She reached toward him. A hand shook itself from the covers and caught hers. His flesh was a bit damp. His grip wasn’t especially strong. But it was more animation than he’d demonstrated in a long, long time. “Frank, it really is you, isn’t it?”
Behind her, Bongo chuckled, a tired, satisfied sound. “Before we split up, Gator mentioned how he’d tried a few healing spells. I’ve got something of a knack for them. I thought I might be able to do something more.”
Arvra could see nothing. The tears had started and she didn’t, in that moment, imagine they would ever stop. Again, it was fine by her. She would cry with joy until time ended. Or at least until she r
an out of tears.
The absurdity of that thought struck her, and she let out what sounded to her own ears like a demented laugh. And then she laughed at that. Frank’s other hand was closing around hers now. He squeezed, and there was returning strength there. Whatever she had thought about magic and the Maji didn’t matter now. She could throw out all her old beliefs and disbeliefs.
Everything had indeed changed.
* * * * *
While Lavinia was on her stomach in front of him, Rune pulled his fingers through her thick black hair and imagined that it was silver. The texture was all wrong, but when he closed his eyes tightly, he found the illusion incredibly easy to conjure.
The person who meant the most to him in this world, either as friend or adversary, had always been Laine. Even without the return of his own memory, that fact of Rune’s personal history seemed to have asserted itself. Laine with the silver hair like no one else’s. The name Laine had replaced that of Urna in his mind somehow, without his even trying. He couldn’t remember ever actually speaking it, but he heard it clearly now anyway, in his own voice. Laine. Like a lane, or a path. A way forward, toward the light.
The invisible connection between the name and that seemingly meaningless nonsense on the Weapon’s walls had come to Rune several nights ago, and though there was nothing he could do with the knowledge—that was Laine’s journey to take—it stuck with him. A truth the Lux could never snuff out. He had contrived to visit the former room of Urna on a whim a few nights previous, and found that the walls had been stripped and painted over. He found himself oddly unmoved by this.
Whatever truths the walls had displayed, they were Laine’s to hold. To Rune, those now-obliterated scribblings meant only one thing. They were his partner’s ungraceful, stubborn, indomitable attempt to map out a history he could only sense as an absence.
