by K. Makansi
“This city was built on the framework of an old city called Kingston,” Chan-Yu says, narrating as we jog over to the entrance to the sewers. “In this part of Okaria, there are old sewer lines that haven’t been incorporated into the Okarian water filtration and recycling system. They’re not well-mapped. Almost nobody knows they even exist except the engineers who built the new system in the first place. But the Outsiders,” he pauses and bends down to the ground to heave open a trapdoor that looks like something out of a child’s storybook, “use them to get in and out in dire circumstances.”
He steps onto a ladder and starts to climb down into the black. I pull out the light that attaches to the scope on my Bolt and hook it on. I use it to light my way as I crawl down after Chan-Yu, and Miah brings up the rear.
“I feel like a frog,” he complains as we crawl into the damp, metallic tunnels.
At the bottom, I hear Chan-Yu’s boots splash in a puddle of water. When I connect with solid ground, I point the light on the path in front of us. It’s mostly dry, but there are puddles here and there, and the walls are mossy and thick with algae. The tunnels aren’t big, no more than six feet in diameter, and Miah has to duck as we walk to avoid hitting his head.
“Why isn’t this entire thing flooded?” Miah asks. “We should be drowning right now.”
“The same water flow system that works to keep the water moving in the Sector sewage system also help to drain the water. In cases of floods, such as during winter or immediately after a heavy rainstorm, water will fill up here. But in normal circumstances, they’re empty.”
“Better hope it doesn’t start raining, then,” Miah says, a meager attempt at a joke. I glare at him, but he can’t see me in the dark.
We run in silence after that, jogging after Chan-Yu through the silent tunnels. I think of Soren, Vale, and even Linnea, hoping against hope they’ve escaped the Sector’s notice. We’re only underground for maybe ten minutes, though, before Chan-Yu points to a dead-end and a flood door.
“If it’s open, we exit there.”
I pray it’s open.
Chan-Yu cranks on the strangest opening mechanism I’ve ever seen in my life—a circular door handle, one that twists like an enormous knob as he turns it counterclockwise. I hear some enormous mechanism within the wall click and clank, promising sounds.
“When I open this door, they’ll be able to track us again if they’ve bugged us in any way. We have to move quickly.”
I nod, and Miah steels himself for the effort. Running isn’t his forte.
Chan-Yu pushes the door open with an enormous heave. We’re in another tunnel of some sort, but judging by how much fresher it smells on the other side, this one isn’t underground, or even inside. It smells like summer, and I realize we must have emerged outside.
“Where are we?” I ask, whispering.
“At the bottom of the hill by the park,” Chan-Yu responds. I take a moment to stare at him in silent admiration. He must have the entire city map memorized at all elevations. He’s brought us to within a kilometer of the rendezvous point by the river, where there’s supposed to be an emergency hovercar waiting for us. Just in case.
We emerge in a concrete tunnel built into a hill, which, sure enough, opens right by the park. The clean smell of cut grass in the early summer night fills me with memories, of the countless times I came to this park not as a renegade on the run from soldiers and Watchmen but as a teenager, spending time with my friends and thinking of nothing but how best to enjoy ourselves.
Crouching by the riverbank, we watch the hovercraft to see if Vale and the others will show up, knowing we can’t wait for long. They’ll find us, sooner or later, the drones or the soldiers or both. A light drizzle sets in, chilling my skin, somehow refreshing me. I close my eyes and let the rainwater drip down my face, wondering if we’ll survive tonight. If we’ll make it out of the city. If everything we’ve ever done has been in vain.
When I open my eyes, a flash of movement to my right jerks me back to readiness, Bolt up and ready to shoot. But the two figures approaching are wearing hooded, heat-cloaking gear just like us and not soldier’s uniforms. Abandoning caution, I stand up and watch them approach, jogging doggedly down the hill to where the hovercar is parked, one large figure, one smaller, female. Soren? Linnea? But where’s Vale?
Sure enough, they come barreling down the hill and Soren pushes his hood off.
“In the car!” he shouts. “They’re hot on our tail!”
Without slowing, he hops over and into the open-top hovercar, and Linnea follows suit. Chan-Yu gets in as well, but Miah and I hesitate, glancing at each other. The sound of the river next to us grows to a swell inside my ears and when my voice emerges, it’s so quiet I can barely hear myself.
“Where’s Vale?”
“Get in the goddamn car, Remy!” Soren screams at me. I shake my head dully, no, I won’t do that.
“You left him, didn’t you?” I say. Miah looks at Soren for a half-second and I could swear there are sparks flying between them, the connection of an unspoken message they share.
Miah tackles me from the side. He’s huge, bigger than Vale, bigger than Eli, almost bigger than Soren, and the weight and size of his body is like being engulfed by a falling building. He grabs my arms and tries to throw me over his shoulder. For a second I don’t fight, not comprehending what’s happening or why. But then I realize:We’re leaving without Vale.
We’re abandoning him.
“NO!”
I scream.
Miah slaps his hand over my mouth and throws me in the car, but I’m wriggling so frenetically that I don’t land where he wants me to. Instead, I slide off the side, and instantly I roll to the ground on the other side of the car and am sprinting through the grass, back up the hill. Back the way I came.
For a long time, I know nothing except that I must keep running. I don’t know where he is, I realize. What am I hoping to accomplish? I don’t know. All I know is that I can’t leave him here. I’ve lost too many people I love. My sister, my mother, Eli. I can’t lose him, too.
So I run. Time slows to a crawl. I run and I run. Back toward El Centro. Back through city blocks and down dark alleys. Soldiers. Running through the streets, just like me. But they don’t care about me, they can’t track me. They’re not looking for me. They’re looking for Vale. I follow them at a jog, keeping my distance, hoping they’ll lead me to him. What are you going to do, Remy? How are you going to help him?
I round a corner, and then I see it. Him. At the top of a building, his back to me, to everything. His arms are spread, as if ready to fly off the building.
And then I see the unmistakable blue crackle of electricity hit him square in the chest, and as he falls, his foot goes out as if expecting to step onto an invisible platform. But there is none.
“VALE!”
Two of the soldiers ahead of me whirl at the sound of my voice.
Vale falls, his body limp, seemingly moving against the rules of gravity: drifting, rather than falling, towards the ground. Like a feather.
Two drones, bearing a mesh net between them, catch him at the absolute last second, right before he hits the ground. The fabric expands with his impact, but his body never touches the ground.
I watch, aghast, as the drones carry his limp, unconscious body down the streets and away from me.
One of the two soldiers opens his mouth as if to shout. I pull up my Bolt and shoot him. He collapses in a heap of crackling static. The one next to him raises his weapon to fire at me, and I would shoot him, too, but my weapon needs a second to charge, and I don’t have a second. I move. I duck behind a compost bin, then run into an alley, listening as shouts behind me indicate that there’s a team of soldiers hot on my tail.
Vale is gone.
I run.
~ End of Book Two of the Seeds Trilogy ~
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THE HARVEST
Book Three of the Seeds Trilogy
K. Makansi
Copyright © 2016 by K. Makansi
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Layla Dog Press
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Cover by K. Makansi & Kevin Wietzel
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016904048
ISBN: 978-0989867191
For our grandparents,
And for all those who resist oppression
and stand up for justice
Prologue
KANAAN ALEXANDER
Prologue: Sector Annum 52
The arcing shadows of the steel framework bend around me. I cough, the sound muffled by the mask clasped over my mouth and nose. I duck under a torqued I-beam and into a pitch black room. The air dances and swirls, disturbed for the first time in centuries. Increasing the power on my biolight lenses illuminates the room in yellow-green. Dust clouds my vision, gathering like an angry storm.
“Find anything interesting?”
I cough again, clearing my throat, before I can get out my words. “Tell you when the Oklahoma Desert settles,” I shout back. “You?”
“Papers,” I hear from the adjacent room. “Nothing but papers. These people must have cut down enough trees to stack them to the moon and back.” His voice is distorted through the haze of debris and ancient metal.
I scan the detritus of the Old World—destroyed furniture, ruined computers, electrical wires, rusted plumbing, crumbling walls—and yes, there, in the corner, bones. A skeleton. Lily-white and grinning, with a long shard of glass still embedded in the rib cage like a hunter’s spear point. Obvious cause of death. I grin back.
“That looks painful, buddy,” I mutter. “Let’s hope I don’t end up like you today.”
I glance around, checking that there’s no immediate danger, no wall about to collapse, nothing to crush or impale me like my newfound friend. But everything looks stable. For now.
As the dust settles, I get a better look at what the room contains. I had to slice the door open with my laser cutter, which made me think I might have finally hit pay dirt. To prevent looting or material destruction, most of these old research facilities had triggers to initiate shutdown sequences to secure valuable equipment and data in case of emergency. Of course, my new friend in the corner might have been saved if medics could have reached him—or was it a her? A stomach wound like that would have been easily treatable, especially with the kind of medicine they had back in those days. If those Old World corporations had cared more about their workers and less about their profits, my friend might not have ended up dying alone in a locked room in the first place. But then, judging by the destruction in the area, I’m guessing no one lived for long once the bombs started falling.
I click on a handheld biolight and pan the room, moving deeper into the dark, bumping up against the remains of an overturned table. I squint into the corner, and smile behind my mask. Jackpot. A graveyard. This is exactly why we’re here.
We’ve stumbled on the kind of storage room where old lab equipment went to die, or at least was stored until disposed of. Without even picking through the junk, I can see a few thermal cyclers in various states of disarray, a line of centrifuges on a shelf still clinging to a wall that lists at a precarious angle, two large rotating hydroponics systems—mostly intact, although one is missing a large chunk of metal at the top. Best of all, there are several ancient spectrophotometers. The old sturdy ones, not too temperamental. And that’s just what I’m seeing from a quick scan. I’m betting this equipment was already broken when the lights finally went out, but the Corporation won’t care. Scavengers have already mined all the good stuff. These days, they’ll pay for anything their engineers can fix up into something usable.
“We done here?” I hear my friend call.
“Not a chance,” I holler back. “We hit gold, Gold.”
I hear booted footsteps and heavy breathing behind me. I turn to see his grey-green eyes and black hair sticking out around the straps of his mask. He’s taken the rest of his scavsuit off—including his goggles, I note with consternation—but at least he’s got the sense to keep his boots, gloves, and mask on. His full name is Augustus Orleán, but most everyone calls him August. I just call him Gold, a reference to the shorthand for the element, Au.
I glare at him. “Keep your damn goggles on. You don’t know what kind of toxins are—”
“I’m fine, aren’t I?” he interjects as he saunters toward me, his voice deeper than usual and thick through the mask. The creases in his eyes belie the smile on his face. “I’m not blind yet.”
“You’ll be thanking the fates for that once you see what’s in here.”
Looking past me, his eyes go wide, taking in the wealth in front of us. He slaps me on the back.
“You weren’t joking, K. This is serious money. If we can get this to the Corporation without getting bushwhacked, they’ll finally load us up with enough seedcoins to set up our lab.”
“That’s a big if.”
He laughs. “Always the pessimist.”
“I prefer ‘practical’.”
“Then get your practical ass to work harvesting this tech.”
Gold pulls his goggles back down, recognizing that we have no idea what kinds of poisons could be in the equipment we’re handling, or in the debris around us. We sort through the rubble, separating obvious trash from things that could have value. Much of the equipment is broken but reparable, and if not, the pieces inside are salvageable. Even things that are broken beyond a hope of reuse can teach us about the Old World.
An hour later, the room no longer looks like a tornado touched down. Everything has been arranged in neat piles based on potential return, and Gold starts browsing through them.
“Check this out,” I hold a thin strip of metal and tap it in my hand. Gold looks up at me. “A backup drive. I found it in his palm.” I point to our skeleton friend. “Like he held on to it right to the bitter end.”
Truthfully, I found it on the ground at his feet, but I’ve never considered myself above a little creative license, especially not when it makes the story so much better.
“Intact?” Gold inquires, his eyes wide.
I shrug. “We’ll see. Want to load it, find out what they were doing here?”
Gold and I have been scavenging in and around what used to be New York City for the better part of the last three years. Most of what was Manhattan is flooded, of course, and we don’t have the resources to do a lot of underwater work. Besides, anything we found down there would be corrupted beyond repair. So we work on the outskirts. There were plenty of major companies set up in a ring around the city, too, and we’ve hit a fair
few of them in the last few years. We’re trying to get enough funds from the Okarian Agricultural Corporation to set up our own research lab, but in order to do that, we have to bring them equipment. That’s how they trade. We provide them with technology, information, or hardware, and they return the favor with seedcoins. With seeds, we can buy what we need to set up our own lab.
We came here on a rumor from one of the other scav teams that there was a big biotech organization headquartered south of the city. Of course, Gold had to put a knife to a man’s throat to get him to tell us the rumor, but that’s just the nature of scavenging these days. Based on what we’ve found so far, he wasn’t wrong, but the research facilities aren’t here. We were expecting a wealth of lab equipment, but instead we’ve found nothing but basic computers, servers, and papers. Until we hit this room, we thought we’d wasted a week of trekking on a wild goose chase and Gold had been threatening to skin the man who led us here in the first place.
“Go ahead and load it up,” Gold says. “Find out what these lunatics were working on all those years ago.”
“If it’s even readable,” I mutter. “It’s probably corrupted. And if not, it could be encrypted.” I pull my plasma from my pack and set it within range of our UMIT. I drop the backup drive on top and wait for the data transfer to begin. After a few seconds, my plasma flashes green.
“It’s readable.” Gold stops what he’s doing to look over my shoulder. We watch as lines of code flash across the screen.
“I don’t even recognize that language,” Gold says.
“No wonder. It’s gotta be at least two hundred years old.”
But whether we recognize it or not, my plasma seems to be able to read it, because in a matter of minutes the file is loaded. A prompt appears, asking if I want to open it.
