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by K A Riley

  “The Patriot Army…” the taller man starts to say, but he trails off.

  Rain steps forward. “The Patriot Army?” she asks.

  The taller man lifts his head and gives us a pleading, frightened look. “The ones responsible for sealing off the city.”

  “We’ve never heard of them,” Rain tells him. “We were Recruits.”

  “Recruits? Recruits for what?”

  “For the war,” I say, surprised and more than a little confused. “The war that we were supposedly fighting against the Order. We’re Seventeens. Cohort of 2042.” I deliberately don’t mention that the Order might be a total fiction.

  “What’s a Seventeen?”

  This time, Brohn, Rain, and I all exchange a look of shock. Rain leans toward the three strangers. “You do know about the Recruitment, right? And the Seventeens? We get taken away every year. For the war effort.”

  Now it’s the three adults’ turn to exchange a look. The two men turn to the woman for guidance, but she shrugs and pivots back to me, squinting, like I’m suddenly not speaking English.

  “You do know about all this, don’t you?” I ask. “The way we were supposed to help win the war?”

  The woman shakes her head.

  “What about the Processor?” Rain asks. “The Agora and the Cubes?”

  This time, the woman doesn’t even bother to shake her head. Instead, she stares at us through the desert gloom and takes a full step back.

  Her two buddies follow suit, and all three step away from us. The shorter of the two men asks if we’re part of the Patriot Army.

  “No,” I assure him. “We don’t know that is. We were training but not for the reason we were told.”

  “Then you’re I.C.A.?”

  I shoot a glance from Brohn to Rain and back to the three quivering strangers who might as well be speaking a foreign language themselves. “We don’t know what that is either,” I assure them. Either they’re crazy or else we are, and, right now, I’m not sure which scenario is worse.

  “I-I-I don’t understand,” the taller man stammers. A shudder runs through his shoulders and neck.

  “It’s just…we don’t know what to believe,” the woman says as she takes the man’s hand in hers. “They buried us. Buried us under so many lies.”

  Now, the taller man drops his head and starts crying.

  “It’s okay,” Brohn says. “Look, we don’t have many supplies, but we’ve got shelter back in a cave close to here. We’re setting out first thing in the morning. You’re welcome to come with us.”

  “To where?” the woman asks. Her eyes dart side to side, but I can’t tell if it’s out of suspicion, if she thinks there are more of us about to leap out at her, or if she’s just looking for something heavy to hit us with.

  Brohn points to the faint outline of the mountain range just across the dark desert. His voice is even and soothing. “We’re going to head for the foothills. We think there might be a camp and other people there. Maybe people who can help.”

  The woman still looks skeptical, but she agrees to come with us. She puts her arm around the taller man who is wiping tears from his face with the sleeve of his shirt.

  In a group, we walk back toward the cave with Brohn and Rain in the lead. I follow behind to keep an eye on our three new friends who, for all we know, could be about to turn into our three worst enemies.

  4

  Cardyn is waiting for us at the mouth of the cave with Manthy just behind him, still watching over Kella. Once we’re all inside, Card starts to ply us with questions. Brohn quickly explains the situation, but Cardyn doesn’t look too convinced. He’s staring at the three strangers like they’re time-bombs with the timer about to hit zero.

  “Hey,” he whispers when he’s taken a few steps toward me, “I trust Brohn, but I don’t think we’re really in any position to be inviting a bunch of strays into our little cave.”

  “They’re not strays,” I whisper back. “They’re people in need. Like us. They’re scared. Confused. We couldn’t just leave them out there to kill each other.”

  “No. Much better to bring them back here so they can kill us.” Cardyn’s voice is barely audible, but the sarcasm in it might as well be a scream.

  Resigned, he crosses into the deepest part of the cave and pulls our last phosphor-pack from Rain’s supply bag. He clicks it on as he walks back, and the small cube struggles to glow warm and yellowish-white in the middle of the cave. We’ve used these cubes many times over the past weeks for heat and warmth, but this one’s charge is clearly on its last legs. We have to get right up to it now to warm our hands, and the feeble light is barely strong enough to cast our shadows on the cave walls.

  At least the light from the cube reveals the extent of the trio’s suffering. The two men and the woman are clearly defeated, barely hanging on to life. In the weak light, we’re now able to see in detail how their clothes are in worse shape than ours with big holes showing off patches of red skin and thick scars. The taller man is bearded and haggard. His hair is a dreadlocked mess of dirt and tangles. The shorter man is bald on top with long straggles of graying hair on the sides.

  The woman looks feral. Her face is dirty and deeply creased. Her piercing green eyes dart around in the gloom of the cave like she’s looking for something to eat or fearful that one of us is going to eat her. She jumps and shrieks when she spots Render, still napping on his little ledge. The sound startles him awake, and he barks an irritated kraa! before ruffling up his feathers and glaring at her with his jet-black eyes then clawing at the rough surface and trying to fall back to sleep.

  “Don’t worry about him,” Cardyn says with a flick of his thumb. “That’s Render. He’s one of us.”

  The three strangers look like they’ve been fighting hunger, thirst, and the elements for as long as we have. How they managed enough strength to fight with each other is beyond me.

  Rain invites them to sit down and starts digging a hand into her shoulder bag. She takes out what’s left of our bag of protein chips and empties the contents, one small pile at a time, into the outstretched, cupped hands of the three strangers. They all nod and mumble their thanks then begin scarfing down the brittle white flakes in greedy gulps.

  Rain gives me a worried look, glances into her bag and back at me. She motions to me that it was pretty much the last of our food. None of us has said it out loud but making it safely to the woods in the morning and finding some help is truly our last and only hope now.

  “Where did you say you come from?” Brohn asks the woman as the six of us sit in a semi-circle facing the three strangers around the phosphor-pack in the middle of the cave.

  I’m grateful to him for taking the lead on this. The truth is that guiding us along various highways, backroads, and over some pretty rough terrain over the past weeks has been tough, but at least I had Render to help me along. Interrogating three adults in a shadow-filled cave in the middle of the desert isn’t exactly my wheelhouse.

  “Santa Fe,” the woman says after a panting pause. She gestures south and east, deeper into the desert. “That way…I think.”

  “What’s your name?” I ask.

  “Asha,” she mutters, her head down, chin back to being buried in her chest. She pushes up the sleeves of her army-green jacket and gestures half-heartedly at the two men. “This is Wes and Theron.”

  Theron, the taller, bearded man, raises his head, pushes aside a clump of hair dangling over his eyes, and gives us a forced smile. Crumbs from the protein chips speckle his tangled moustache and beard. The smaller man named Wes doesn’t look up from the spot on the ground between his crossed legs.

  Rain turns to Cardyn and Manthy. “They say they don’t know about the Recruitment or the Seventeens.”

  “How’s that possible?” Cardyn asks. “The Recruiters came for us every year. Every November 1st.”

  “November 1st,” the woman says, suddenly alert. “2032. That’s the day the Freedom Wars started.”

 
; “So you know about the war?”

  “Of course. The Eastern Order invaded ten years ago, and we’ve been struggling to survive as a nation ever since.”

  “Yeah,” Cardyn starts to say, “about the Eastern Order—,” but I shush him with a look and an elbow to his arm. Now is not the time to push these three distressed strangers into a sensory overload of too much ugly truth.

  “What can you tell us about them?” I ask. “The Order, I mean.”

  “What’s to tell?” Theron says. “They’re the enemy. They invaded. We fought. We lost.”

  Asha disagrees. “We haven’t lost yet.”

  “The government’s turned against us,” Theron mumbles from behind his dangling hair. “Our own government. Once we lost our democracy, we lost the war.”

  “What do you mean ‘lost our democracy’?” I ask.

  A look of anger washes over his face. He squints hard at me, then at Brohn. “Where are you kids from?”

  “The Valta,” Brohn snaps. “It’s a small town up in the mountains. And we’re not kids. Not anymore. Not after what we’ve been through.”

  Wes drops his gaze. “Apologies.”

  “What don’t we know?” I ask. “All we see is empty roads and abandoned towns. Where is everyone?”

  Asha rubs her arm and then runs her hand through her mop of thick brown hair. “The government decided the small towns were too scattered,” Asha says. “Too hard to control or keep safe. So they centralized everything. Started moving everyone into a few of the big cities. All under the pretense of keeping us safe from the Order. The people who refused were…convinced. Ever since the Arcologies started going up, choices were limited anyway. If you weren’t a Wealthy, you couldn’t get a spot. That meant having to figure out how to survive on your own down below. So the shantytown settlements went up in the shadow of the Arcos, and we just got used to fighting each other and living in fear all the time.”

  A picture begins to form in my mind’s eye. A picture of mass, forced migrations. A type of herding where people have become cattle, expendable commodities to be used, abused, or discarded at the whim of the cattle-herders.

  The man named Wes drags his finger along the cave floor in front of him. The light is weak, but I’m pretty sure he’s crying. “The government’s got everyone fighting each other so there’s no one left to stop them from taking total and absolute control.”

  “Well,” Brohn says, his voice in full man-mode, “we plan on doing something about that.”

  When he talks like this, when he takes over, Brohn has a hypnotic effect on those around him. I feel its effects on me right now. I don’t think he’s right, but I believe him. And that belief is a welcome comfort in a moment of anxiety and uncertainty.

  The three strangers don’t object when Rain insists they get some rest. In fact, they seem grateful for the chance to sleep. They’re out before their heads hit the ground.

  Brohn summons the rest of us outside the cave where we debate whether it’s really best to take them along. Kella doesn’t want to come outside at first, but Cardyn convinces her that we need to stay together now more than ever.

  “I don’t trust them,” Rain says with a skeptical glance back into the cave where the three strangers are snoring in a discordant chorus.

  “They seem harmless enough,” Card says. “Not counting the snores. Or the smell.”

  I give him a punch to the shoulder. “Knock it off. This could be a matter of life or death.”

  “Yeah,” Card says. “But whose? Theirs or ours?”

  “There’s a lot we don’t know about those three,” Brohn cautions.

  “True,” Rain adds. “And there’s plenty they don’t know about us. Like how can they not know about the Recruitment? It’s been going on for ten years. It’s all over the viz-screens.”

  “Maybe we’re the only ones who saw the viz-screens,” I say slowly, pulling my eyes up into the night sky. “We need to face the possibility that the Eastern Order isn’t the only lie we’ve been fed.”

  Kella glances up at me from where she’s been leaning on Cardyn for support. “What do you mean?” she asks.

  “For all we know, the Processor could have been even more top-secret than we thought. I mean, what if there was no Recruitment?”

  Kella shakes her head. “But we know there was. They came for us every year.”

  “We’ve been assuming it was a nation-wide program. A kind of military draft. A way to combat the Order. But what if the Order isn’t the only thing that was made up?”

  Now it’s Cardyn’s turn to shake his head, like he doesn’t want to hear what he knows I’m about to say. But I have no choice but to say it anyway. “What if it was just us? What if it was just the Valta? Hiller said they were going after kids who showed a certain sign of genetic mutation at our age. What if she didn’t mean everyone? What if she just meant those of us who lived in the Valta?”

  “Can’t be,” Brohn says. “What about the thirteen kids we saw outside the Processor? They must have come from somewhere.”

  “Okay,” I concede. “You’re right. Maybe it’s not just us. But maybe it’s mostly us.”

  Cardyn frowns at this. “There’s nothing special about the Valta. It’s got to be the most boring town in the world.”

  “So we think. Maybe there was more to it than met the eye.”

  “Which means maybe there’s more to us?” Rain asks. She flicks a thumb at Brohn and me. “We already know about you two and Manthy.”

  Now a visible tremble rips through Kella’s frail frame. “And you think this whole thing…the Recruitment, the Processor, the Eastern Order…you think it was really all about us? You think we’re all alone in the world?”

  “I don’t know if I’d go quite that far,” I say, trying to keep my voice low for our guests’ sake and calm for Kella’s. “But yes, I think there are some pretty important things about ourselves and this whole situation we still need to find out.”

  “So where does that leave us and our three smelly friends?” Card asks. “Do we take them or leave them here to kill each other?”

  “No one’s killing anyone,” I reply in a voice so authoritative that it surprises me. “And we can’t have their deaths on our heads. We take them with us. It might not be the safest thing to do, but it is the right thing to do. I’m still trying to sort through the images I got from Render, but I think we need to keep going and get to whoever belongs to that fire out there.”

  Kella puts her head in her hands and whimpers. “You said it could be dangerous.”

  “Maybe. It’s hard to say. For Render, anything unknown is potentially dangerous. But remember, he’s looking out for us.”

  Kella nods, but she doesn’t look any less worried.

  Brohn looks from one of us to the other, and I’m thankful for the dimness of the desert night. If it were light out, I’m afraid he’d see the terror and uncertainty I’m trying so hard to hide.

  “Okay,” he says at last. “Let’s turn in and get a fresh start in the morning.”

  With that, the six of us tip-toe back into the cave and settle down into our now-expanded circle.

  Kella and Cardyn drift off first, and it’s not long before Brohn, Rain, Manthy, and I are out cold as well.

  Whatever sleep we manage doesn’t last long. I’m in the middle of a pleasant dream for a change—this one about watching through Render’s mind as he flies over huge, healthy fields of wheat and corn—when the kraas! I hear in the dream morph into the sound of someone screaming in the real world. I leap awake to find Asha and the two men arguing again. Brohn and the others jump to their feet with me, instantly shaking off the trance of sleep.

  When he sees what’s going on, Brohn thrusts his arms out in front of us.

  Asha has a small gun clamped in both hands, but she’s not looking at us. She doesn’t even seem to register that we’re still here. She’s shaking wildly and looks like she’s about to throw up.

  The two men are on the
ir knees in front of her, their arms extended with the palms of their hands facing out. They plead with her not to shoot as they inch their way backward toward the cave’s exit.

  I shout out, “Wait!” but I’m too late. The woman shoots the two men in the head, one after the other. Their bodies pitch forward, sagging to the ground like bags of water.

  Over on his ledge, Render shrieks awake and spreads his wings.

  Instinctively, Cardyn leaps in front of Kella. Manthy and Rain slip to either side of the cave and assume defensive positions like we were taught to do in a hostile situation in close-quarters. Brohn and I approach Asha and try to talk her down, but she doesn’t seem to hear a word we say.

  “They’re out there!” she shouts.

  “It’s okay,” I say as calmly as I can, despite the fact that every inch of me is shaking. “ “There’s no one out there. There is no enemy.”

  “There is,” she moans. “There has to be.” She waves the gun around casually like she’s forgotten it’s in her hand, and for a second, I think she’s going to accidentally shoot us all. With her eyes wide, she gurgles a kind of half-laugh, half sob. “There has to be an enemy. There always has to be an enemy.”

  Brohn steps forward, his hands out. “Take it easy. There doesn’t have to be an enemy.”

  “Ha! Of course there does. Always has. Call it what you want,” she says. Her eyes flutter and dart around like two angry bees. “Eastern Order. Patriot Army. Terrorists. The government. Rebels. Men. Women. Immigrants. Black. White. Human. Modified. It’s all the same. It’s all just names.” She taps the barrel of the gun to her temple. “In the end, they’ll get into your head just like they got into ours. They’re already in there,” she warns in a whisper, pointing her gun at us one at a time. “Don’t think just because you escaped that you really got away. You can’t get away from your own people. You can’t get away from yourself.”

  Moving out of his defensive position, Cardyn eases up next to Brohn. His voice is surprisingly calm, practically melodic. “We survived. We’re going to fight back, expose the lies. We can help you figure things out.”