Render

by K A Riley

  As we thank her, I choke back tears. I feel like we’re betraying Kella right now, but leaving her behind is the only thing we can do. Finding home means finding Wisp and the others. It means helping them. It’s what Kella would want us to do, with or without her.

  Adric digs around under a canvas tarpaulin and pulls out some food and two bottles of cloudy water. “We don’t have many weapons or a lot of supplies to spare, but these will keep you going for the couple of days it’ll take for you to get home.”

  “Thank you,” I say, gratefully accepting the gifts and stowing them in my bag.

  When everyone’s ready, we follow Chace and Trax on what they tell us will be a two-day hike uphill toward the Valta. There are no roads and no discernible paths, yet, somehow, the twins easily weave in and out of walls of brambles, vines, and root systems from hundreds of fallen trees.

  Brohn stays right on their heels, and I stay right on his. Render soars overhead, letting out the odd cry to let us know he’s still with us.

  The twins seem to have an endless supply of energy. We’re tired, but they urge us to keep going. We stop a couple of times to rest and once to sleep. We continue on for the whole next day, and it’s only when I see the murky dark turn wispy pink that I realize we’ve walked through the entire second night. Every once in a while, I look up through gaps in the trees to see Render gliding along overhead.

  I don’t even feel tired anymore. Maybe it’s because we’ve finally found others like us. Or maybe it’s because we’re finally so close to home. Either way, I feel invigorated. Revitalized.

  The others must feel it, too. Except for Manthy, we’ve all joined Cardyn in prattling away at light speed about how great it’s going to be to see the Valta. The past and the future roll into one as we reminisce about what was and about how excited we are to experience what will be.

  “We’re going to be the first Recruits to see home again,” Rain says with a beaming grin.

  Those words are enough to deflate me slightly. “Except for Micah,” I say quietly.

  Immediately, Rain’s expression fades to a frown. “I’m so sorry,” she says. “I forgot.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Who’s Micah?” Chace asks.

  “Kress’s brother,” Cardyn explains. “He was recruited before us. He’s amazing.”

  I send him a mental “thanks” for using the present tense. The last time I saw Micah, he was being hunted down and dragged away by Recruiters. Holding onto the hope that he’s still alive is hard at the best of times.

  These days, though, most of my thoughts and memories of him are the good ones. The kind of recollections that now come back to me in vivid waves, as if he’s sitting right next to me, his voice in my ear. I remember every inch of his face. I remember his voice when he was a boy, then the depth and roundness of it as he grew into a man. He was a great big brother, and an inspiration to everyone who knew him. “Micah proved the trip home was possible,” I remind Rain with a smile. “We’re just following in his footsteps.”

  “True,” she replies quietly.

  After we’ve hiked for a while longer, she asks, “Do you think anything will have changed in the Valta while we were gone?”

  With a chuckle, Brohn says he’s sure of it. “The 2043 Sixteens are a hopeless bunch. Messiest pile of slobs I’ve ever seen, and not a hunter among them.”

  Picking up on his old “Remember when…” refrain, Cardyn launches into a long-winded recollection about how we all came together after the last of the adults disappeared or died. “I personally helped patch the roof of the school,” he beams with pride at Chace and Trax. “We re-built the walkway down to the beach, cleared the roads, perfected our pulley system for transporting building materials, fixed the water cistern, filled the storage lockers with all the food we’d gathered. Let’s face it,” he announces, giving me a hard slap on the back, “we were awesome!”

  Manthy pushes past Cardyn. “The roof kept leaking anyway,” she reminds him.

  He’s lucky she isn’t looking when he sticks his tongue out her.

  After about another hour or so, we break out of the woods and climb an embankment up to a steep, narrow road. Pushing along, we march up the road and around its snaking curves for another hour or two until we arrive at an abandoned military checkpoint that leaves me breathless.

  It’s the same checkpoint that kept us isolated in our mountain town for a decade.

  But now there are no soldiers. No trucks. Nothing. A small building, not much bigger than a tool shed, sits alone and empty. A tall fence topped with laser-wire extends from the structure to the left and right and runs out into the woods for as far as the eye can see. Thin spires topped with what look like lifeless motion-detectors jut up from intermittent spots along the fence. The two posts next to the small building must be for an energy-gate, but there’s no power here anymore.

  Still, when we step through the gate, I expect alarms to go off or troops to leap out at us, but nothing happens.

  “Well,” Rain says, looking up the last stretch of road before the Valta, “we’re nearly home.”

  As we advance, memories of our last days here come flooding back: Final Feast. Saying our goodbyes. The arrival of the Recruiters on the morning of November 1st. Thinking I was losing Render for good. Wisp being ripped from Brohn’s arms before our Cohort of Seventeens was gathered up and loaded onto a transport truck.

  Rain leads us in a jog up the pitted and overgrown road to the open plateau at the top, the same big, open space where the Recruiters came for us all those months ago. Embedded tire tracks, old ones and new-looking ones, overlap in the crusted ground in the clearing, reminding us of the trauma of being carted away from home.

  It’s when we look ahead that we discover our worst nightmare has come true.

  8

  Most of the Valta’s buildings were destroyed in the waves of drone attacks at the beginning of the so-called war.

  But now, even the few buildings that were still standing when we left our town are devastated beyond recognition. Not a single structure is left, not even the school. No area is left unscathed.

  What was once home is now as burned out and blackened as the ruined head of an old match.

  Eleven years ago when my family moved here, the Valta was an idyllic, picturesque little town. Ten years ago, the drones wiped much of it out. A few years after that, they reappeared and nearly wiped out the rest. We rebuilt what we could and did our best to make it our town again. We cleared away wreckage, made it as safe as possible, and turned it into a new home for the survivors.

  Now, it’s nothing but a devastated and smoldering expanse of rubble like the towns we passed after escaping the Processor. But the demolition of the structures and the remaining fragments of road, it turns out, are just the beginning.

  Lying along the roadside, half-buried under debris and charred beyond recognition, are the scattered and lifeless bodies of all the friends we’ve ever known.

  I want to throw up. To double over at the sudden pain in my gut.

  To scream at the top of my lungs.

  “Oh no.” Card drops to his knees in the dirt, too weak to stand.

  I hardly dare look at Brohn. But when I do, I can see that he’s shaking his head. He’s saying, “No, no, no,” over and over again. But it’s so quiet, it sounds like a gentle wind blowing across my ears.

  My chest is clamped tight. Tears fill my eyes. I feel like I’m breathing hard but can’t catch my breath at the same time, like my body is collapsing under the weight of my mind.

  High overhead somewhere, Render lets out a cry that tells me he can feel it, too. The residents of the Valta were his extended family. They loved him, and he loved them.

  And now they’re gone.

  Rain’s fists are clenched at her sides. She takes a small step forward. Then another. Then she stops, frozen at the horror of the scene before us.

  Next to me, Manthy is sobbing so hard I think she’s going to choke to
death. She’s never been an emotional person. Never worn her heart on her sleeve. It always seemed like she didn’t care about anything, not even herself. But now, watching her collapse to the ground next to Card, the dam bursts in my own heart, and I’m crying along with her, harder than I ever have in my life.

  Chace and Trax hug each other, their faces red and wet. They may never have lived here, but this could just as easily have been their home. From what we know of them, they lived like we did: in a small mountain town in uncertain isolation. Always waiting. Always afraid.

  Our pain is theirs. Their tears are ours. They know.

  I can’t help feeling glad Kella didn’t come. When we said goodbye to her, she was barely hanging onto sanity. Seeing this…our town and only home reduced to a field of flattened structures and the burned and twisted bodies of our friends, cracked and broken over piles of blistered wood, concrete, and charred synth-steel…I know it would push her over the edge to a place from which she could never return.

  This is Hell, I tell myself. There is no other word for it. This is the end, the fate worse than death. I can’t keep going. I don’t want to keep going. It’s too much. I’m done. I give up.

  Brohn and I exchange a look, and, through our overflow of tears, I can tell he’s feeling the same thing. Why go on? What is there left to fight for? Maybe he’s looking to me for strength, but I don’t have any to offer him. I have nothing.

  Together, we fall to our knees next to Cardyn and Manthy. Rain collapses beside us, and the five of us put our arms around each other. Our sobs combine into one common shudder that rips through each of us, a lightning strike, waves smashing against rock, a tremor tearing through the planet. Chace and Trax stand frozen next to me, their eyes riveted to the carnage in front of us.

  Brohn is the first to pull away. He drags a sleeve across his eyes, then smashes a powerful fist to the ground, and I swear I can feel a shudder rumble through the fractured and broken earth beneath us. Seeing his tears, hearing and feeling the deep internal sobs that rattle his body, gives me the answer to my question: there is still something left to fight for. There is still Brohn. And Cardyn. And Rain, Manthy, and Kella. And there are Karmine and Terk to fight for. And all the others who died, and all the rest of us, those who are still alive. This isn’t the end.

  There are still so many of us, here and out there, worth fighting for.

  It’s because this is all too much, that’s why I will not give up.

  My tears burn in my throat until there’s nothing left but dry, raspy breathing and the pain of loss that burns its way to the marrow of my bones. The others feel it, too. It’s like I’m inside each of their minds, one by one, feeling their loss. Their pain.

  When Brohn and I were inside the Halo, we shared a moment where I was inside his head. We spoke to each other wordlessly, just as I do with Render. I’ve always wondered if I imagined it, or if it really happened.

  But now I know. I can feel his emotions, the dark thoughts raging through his minds as clearly as I feel my own.

  In a moment of self-preservation, I pull back, shutting myself away. It’s more than I can take right now. More than I could ever process.

  When we’re finally able to gather ourselves, we stand as one and walk slowly through what’s left of our town. Heads down, hearts heavy, we follow the path up to the massive expanse of black debris that used to be the school where we all lived. Shoshone High. It’s where we all got older without thinking about how much we were growing up. It’s the building that saved our lives in the first series of drone attacks. It’s where my father taught me about micro-circuitry. It’s where I first bonded with Render.

  Chace and Trax circle around the huge mass of charred and twisted ruins. The building’s walls have collapsed in on themselves to create an array of deformed peaks. Twisted crossbeams and knotted lengths of synth-steel pipe jut out from heaps of smashed window frames and splintered sections of the building’s roof.

  The twins occasionally bend down to examine the soil and the stray piles of building materials, much of it fused by plasma bombs into smooth mounds of glass, littering the ground. Hunched over, they scurry around, investigating boot-prints and trampled patches of scorched vegetation.

  Chace explains that it looks like the remaining kids were rounded up, forced into the school, which was then blown up. “See,” she says, “you can tell from the direction of the smaller prints. The kids were running. This is where the larger prints, the ones with the military-style tread, caught up with them.”

  “It wasn’t a drone strike?” Brohn asks. If it’s possible, he looks even more horrified than before. At least a drone strike might have meant a surprise attack. The thought of Wisp and the others dying in a state of terrified confusion is too painful to contemplate.

  “No,” Chace says. “Men were here.”

  “They wanted to kill them all in person,” Rain hisses. “They wanted to see their faces.”

  “Your friends…they fought,” Trax adds, examining our surroundings. “They tried. Struggled. There was gunfire. A lot of it. Shell casings are all over the place, but all pointing in the same direction.” Like Chace, he’s holding back his emotions. His restraint makes him sound like he’s reciting the alphabet rather than announcing the end of our last loved ones on the planet. I’m about to get angry over his lack of compassion when I realize he and his sister are just doing what they need to do to give us the information we need. “The weapons weren’t very high-tech, but there were a lot of them,” he says and shakes his head. “There was no return fire.”

  “We didn’t have guns,” Rain says. Her voice is even, but her eyes are glassy. Brohn drops to his knees again, and this time he covers his face with his hands. I kneel down next to him, one arm across his shoulders, holding on as hard as I can. He’s shaking, trembling like the rest of us against waves of anger and sorrow. I know there’s nothing I can say. Nothing for any of us to say. It’s like the waves have flooded our lungs and drowned all our words.

  After a few minutes we silently rise to our feet and dig through the rubble for a while. We use our hands to excavate what we can. We kick at some of the long beams with our boots and try to team up to lift some of the heavier fragments. It’s a mess of concrete, synth-steel supports, and alu-iron rebar.

  But there are also bodies.

  Some are lying along the edge of what used to be the school parking lot. Others are half buried in the crush of the fallen building. Everyone we knew and thought we were fighting for. All the Juvens, the Neos, and the Sixteens. As carefully as possible, we extract the ones we can. I recognize some of the kids. Others are too badly burned, or else their bodies have suffered too much trauma to enable us to identify them. I know without asking that Brohn is looking for Wisp, but there are too many bodies under too much debris for us to get to them all. I don’t tell him that any one of several of the unidentifiable, disfigured or partial remains could be his little sister. I don’t need to tell him. It’s written all over his face.

  After a couple of hours, we manage to pull twenty-six of our friends from the one place they all thought was safe. Most of them are either burned or crushed nearly beyond recognition. As far as we can tell, none of them is Wisp. The thought that we have already found her but weren’t able to identify her remains churns my stomach and brings tears to my eyes all over again.

  While we continue to dig, Brohn finds a gap in the wreckage and calls us over to help.

  “If we move this slab,” he urges, “I can get deeper down in there.”

  I’m thinking it’s hopeless, but I’m not about to stand in his way. If he thinks there’s a chance Wisp, or anyone for that matter, might still be alive in there, there’s no one in the world dumb enough, strong enough, or suicidal enough to stand in his way.

  We get to work prying apart sections of wall and cross-beams as best we can until we’ve created a small opening. Brohn kneels down in front of it. He slips off his jacket and tosses it off to the side.
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br />   “I’m the smallest,” Chace says, her small hand on Brohn’s muscular shoulder. “I should be the one to go.”

  Rain says, “No. It’s too dangerous. I’m small enough. I’ll go in.”

  She’s just stepping forward and bending down to slip into the dark gap when Brohn puts his arm out to stop her. “It’s big enough. I’ll go.”

  Without waiting for any of us to object or volunteer ourselves, he drops to his stomach and pulls himself down into the small opening. He crawls forward until his boots disappear, and all we can hear is the heaviness of his breathing and the scratching and clawing of his hands as he pushes and pries his way deeper inside.

  “It’s tight,” he calls back, “but there’s space. I can’t see much, but I can almost stand up. There are more down here. Neos, I think…”

  His voice gets distant and hollow until it fades away completely. There are no more sounds of breathing. No more sounds of digging.

  I call out, “Brohn!” into the opening, but he doesn’t respond. I shout his name again, and when he doesn’t answer, my throat gets so tight I can’t even gather enough breath to try again.

  Card, Manthy, Rain, and I exchange the same horrified look. Before anyone can stop her, Rain throws off her jacket and dives down into the hole. Manthy, Card, and I rush forward and peer down into the darkness, but we can’t see or hear anything. It’s as if Brohn and Rain have just vanished into another dimension.

  Card cups his hands around his mouth and yells down to them. When he doesn’t get a response, he tries again, then starts walking along the top of the rubble. He swings his head from side to side, scanning the debris beneath his feet, still calling out to Brohn and Rain in desperation.

  “Be careful!” I shout across to him. “If this stuff shifts…”

  Cardyn gets the idea and eases his way back down to where Manthy and I are still standing helplessly with the twins.

  I’m just about to give in to panic and despair when we hear Rain’s voice call out. Her voice is muffled, but we can hear her.