by K. A. Trent
The vehicle roared to life and the door opened in front of us. The bleak view of the garage was replaced by an even bleaker looking outside world; this one in ruins, the silver sky a punctuation mark on a broken sentence. I could see the ruins for miles as the vehicle slowly moved forward. We sped up a bit once we cleared the door, and up ahead a chain link fence began to open automatically. Before we drove through, we were joined by two other vehicles, each one guarding our flank. I looked to Brea nervously.
“Backup,” she explained. “Can never be too careful out here.”
Tires rumbled against a mixture of hardcrete and gravel, the apocalyptic landscape rolled by slowly as she turned the wheel left and right to avoid various obstacles. The wreckage of a car, a pile of hardcrete and rebar, old metal crates, all of it seemed to form a maze of obstacles that Brea expertly weaved her way through until we emerged into an open section of road. It was still cracked and broken, but it was at least more recognizable as a road.
“Old Luna is pretty charming, isn’t it?” Brea said offhandedly. If it weren’t for the slight chuckle in her voice I wouldn’t have been able to tell if she were serious or not. In front of us were all of the destroyed buildings that Layla and I had passed on the way in but this time they were laid out across the broken-teeth horizon like a fantastical matte painting preceded by a murky river. “It’s the only thing that keeps us safe; if the Proctorum could figure out where we were in this mess... we’d have a problem.”
“Layla found you pretty easily.”
“A lot of people can. But they also know what happens if they talk.”
“What... makes you think I won’t talk?”
“Do you know where you are? You familiar with Ereen geography? Luna’s layout? No? I don’t think we have too much to worry about.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“We let Layla in, anyway. If we didn’t want her there we would have ‘redirected’ her. We only let her through because you were with her.”
“You knew who I was?”
“Everyone on Ereen knows who you are, Astra.”
There was no arguing with that. I looked out the passenger side window and rested my head against the glass. The ride was smooth save for the lev system auto-adjusting for debris in the road.
I watched the world pass me by, destroyed buildings one after another. I tried to imagine what it must have looked like once upon a time when all of these buildings were occupied, the people going to work above ground. Then that thought brought me back to the wonder of imagining what it must be like to simply go about your life, not worrying from one moment to the next whether you were going to live or die.
One of the things that I had inevitably noticed with Donna’s daughters was how they seemed to not care about life beyond their immediate surroundings. The next moment to them was irrelevant. Life, for them, wasn’t a game of chess. I marveled at how it must feel, about how light someone would have to feel living like that. Did they even know? The way they walked, the way they moved, the way their clothing flowed about them. All of it seemed to meld into their very being and created an air of confidence that I would never experience myself.
“You awake over there? We’re here.” Brea brought the vehicle to a stop and surveyed the bridge in front of us. “That’s weird, no one’s here yet.”
“Maybe they’re hiding?” I was half joking.
“Not their style.” She had taken me seriously.
I watched her peek out over the manual steering column and survey the faltering bridge for a moment before finally shaking her head. “Do they have to be late?”
She pulled the handle on the driver’s side door and stepped out onto the hardcrete. I unstrapped and followed suit. I heard her shout a warning, probably telling me to stay in my seat, but I managed to ignore it, or at least pretend I didn’t hear it. My feet smacked into the hardcrete, my dress fluttered a bit.
I walked around the vehicle and joined her on the other side; she was standing near the railing, staring out over the bridge and into the river. My hands touched the oversized tubular railing, skin against rust, eyes resting on the rushing waters below.
“They say this water used to be clear,” she remarked. “You could see all the way to the bottom. Now look at it. I wonder if humans are the same everywhere.”
“Everywhere on Ereen?”
“Nah, everywhere in the universe.” She leaned out a bit and tried to get a better look at the water. “I don’t know much about what humans are like on other worlds, we... People from Nocht don’t get the opportunity to travel that much. Ereen’s purity laws, the travel restrictions-- we’re pretty secluded. But I wonder if humans tend to destroy everything they touch on other worlds, too.”
“Maybe not.”
“After everything you’ve been through you’re still optimistic. I like that.”
“I haven’t been through that much,” I said seriously. I rested my chin on the railing and stared out over the ruins of the factory district. I could pick out the aqueduct that Layla and I had run through, and somewhere off in the distance, the textile factory.
“You haven’t-” I heard the incredulous and questioning nature of her tone.
“They gave me a chance to be me,” I shrugged.
“They beat you.”
“It’s just a little pain. I’d rather be hurt as the person I am than live in darkness as a lie. I’ve learned more about myself in the past few weeks than I ever would have back... there.”
“That’s...a weird way of looking at it. You could have just...discovered who you were without all the pain.”
“I wish.”
I stared out at the city-scape a bit more and then my eyes wandered over to Brea, who had stood from the railing, her arms stretched upward as a yawn escaped her lips. I couldn’t help but wonder what we were still doing here; where was Kerra? Surely she would be coming.
“They’re never this late,” Brea remarked.
“You do this a lot?”
“I mean, it’s not uncommon.”
I heard a rumbling in the distance, the sound of lev-tech thrusters; it wasn’t something you heard on a typical car. Definitely not Donna’s car, which ran silent most of the time. Both Brea and I turned our attention to the opposite side of the bridge; four black vehicles-- all a bit larger than hers-- were approaching.
“Brea, is that them?” I slowly turned to see an expression of horror crossing her face. Something was wrong.
“Astra,” she said evenly, but still with more than a hint of panic. “It’s the Black Swan. We have to run. Get back to the car.”
I immediately turned toward the car and quickly noticed that the drivers from our escort vehicles were stepping out. They were dressed in black, military style, wielding assault rifles, fingers on the triggers. The first driver raised the weapon, pointed it directly at me.
“Keep Ereen pure!”
Chapter 24
She was fast, insanely fast. I didn’t even see Brea draw the pistol from her jacket, moreover, I didn’t even hear it fire. I saw the brief muzzle flash of an energy weapon and then the look of agony on the woman’s face as the bolt tore through her. Flesh was seared, the woman’s center opened. I watched her drop to her knees with a thud, the rifle clattering against the ground.
“Come on, back to the car!” I felt her hand against my shoulder pulling me back toward the vehicle, but it was too late; three more piled out of the other escort vehicle, weapons pointed in our direction. A hail of gunfire immediately emerged from the other side of the bridge; I jerked in surprise as a round ricocheted off of the railing near me. Brea’s hesitation lasted for a mere second before she tightened her grip on my shoulder and began to push me toward the railing.
“Brea wait, no, what are you doing?!” I exclaimed.
“Sorry, Astra,” she said without a hint of apology in her voice. She hoisted us over the railing, the world changed in an instant; the solid ground was no longer under my feet. I’d had fa
lls in the Factorum before, dropping off of equipment, off of ledges, the ground roaring toward me. There was nothing wore than that really, at least on the ground you can control your destiny, you know what to do, you can dig in, you can run. In the seconds of freefall just after you’re torn from your comfortable cradle of solid ground, you’re helpless, in flight, flailing. It was a familiar feeling, all three directions open, but the embrace of death rushing to meet me from below. I took a gasp of air that never seemed to reach my lungs and the water rushed upward at us. The world went silent for a moment and it was just us, Brea and I, falling hand in hand toward our inevitable doom. My mind wandered a bit, back to the Factorum again, back to old man Sand.
“I’m patching you up an awful lot lately,” the Sand had said to me as he wrapped my chest with a strip of cloth. I’d winced and suppressed a whimper. “There’s a trick to falling kid, you know. Watcha do, is when you’re about to hit the ground, you swing that arm of your out and you slap the ground like it said somethin’ silly to ya. That way ya’ arm takes all the impact an’ you take none of it.”
“But won’t I break my arm?”
“You want a broken arm or a broken spine, kid?”
A broken arm would do any day.
The approaching water didn’t seem like a river, it seemed like an ocean, dark and foreboding. the waves reached out like the tongues of hungry giants ready to lap us up and consign us to the dark below. The movement was nearly unconscious, instinctual, my hand shot out, my palm flat, it impacted the water first, a jolt of pain firing through the flesh and resonating in the bone. I’m not sure if I screamed or not, all I knew was that the few seconds between the fall and colliding with the surface of the water were a blur: blacked out from my memory. My next conscious moment found me beneath the surface with my arms in front of me, clawing endlessly through the murky liquid that passed for water. I didn’t know what to do; I had never been inside a body of water this big before. I knew it was called ‘swimming’, I’d read about it, now that I was submerged, all I could do was flail for my life. My legs kicked against nothing, my head rocked back and my eyes beheld the surface far above; a glimmering liquid ceiling cascaded by the dim sunlight of Ereen’s silvery sky. That light barely penetrated the surface and I was moving farther from it. Even more, I was being swept forward along with the river’s undeniable current. The roar of the river pounded against my ears, my every gasp for breath was met with another mouthful of toxic river waste. The sensation of drowning was all too familiar to me, memories came flooding back; memories that were swiftly interrupted by a hand encircling mine. Brea. She was still here. She was dragging me upward toward the light. The burning sensation in my lungs was spreading to my entire body, my vision darkening. The pressure in my head grew even as the light above became more pronounced in my vision. Then, all at once, we broke the surface. Slowly at first, my head peaked above the waterline and was swiftly met with a wave, washing over my face and pushing me back under once more. I was quickly yanked back above the surface by Brea’s determined hands and I finally managed to gasp in a breath of air. It was unsatisfying, it was painful, it burned.
“Hold on to me!” Her screams barely overpowered the roar of the water, I could feel her hoisting me onto her back as we both shot down the river like two unwelcome bacteria in a vein.
We were moving further and further away from the bridge and the Black Swan operatives atop it had no doubt lost sight of us by now. Did that mean they would stop looking? Maybe they thought we were dead. Maybe we were dead. I kicked my feet, they pressed against the water and I longed to have solid ground beneath my feet. Nothing made sense; the waves continued to crash against my face. Every time we began to rise above the waterline, we found ourselves dragged back beneath the surface. My ears were filled with the roar of water above the surface and then below the muted but exhaustively loud silence of the deep.
I held tightly to her; my hands wrapped around her waist. Brea was swimming or at least trying to. One arm after the other, legs kicking behind. My dress clung to my legs and practically bound them together, eschewing my efforts to aid her. It went on for a long time, minutes, hours maybe. I don’t know. Then we stopped moving, suddenly and without warning. I was laid flat, coughing and sputtering. My head ached, my body was spent.
Suddenly I was laid flat, my back against soaking wet hardcrete. The waves still teased us, lapping up across the concrete platform but we were out of the water. I couldn’t move; my body refused to respond. All of the training with Kerra couldn’t have prepared me for what had just happened.
“What- how…” I managed to gasp. Brea was on her knees beside me, both hands clutching her chest as she inhaled deeply and coughed violently.
“It’s...it’s a lock,” She blurted out as soon as she was able to form words. Boats...used to travel down the river, they put a lock in to keep people out when they wanted. We’re...we’re sitting on top of it.”
There was no way to describe how my body felt as I lay there, I had no idea how Brea was even remaining upright. I felt her tugging at my shoulders, telling me to stand up.
“I...I...I can’t,” I shook my head and squinted at her. I felt her trying in vain to move me, her hands under my shoulders attempting with all her strength to drag me along the length of the hardcrete platform.
“This isn’t the time!” She choked before falling onto her haunches and dropping back to the hardcrete. “Stop being a little bitch!”
Beside me I could hear the rush of the river, the sound of waves lapping at the hardcrete, still. I was soaked, I was cold, my skin was clammy, everything within me told me to close my eyes and fade off into oblivion. My mind was winning that battle. Eyelids heavy, I laid back and allowed the darkness to overtake me. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t get up; I couldn’t go any farther.
“You two just going to sit out there or what?” a familiar voice called out to us in the distance. I opened my eyes slightly, saw Brea’s head turn toward the sound.
“Layla, I can’t believe I’m actually glad to see you,” Brea shouted over the roar of the water. “Help me get her off of this!”
I tried to help them, I really did, but my muscles were aching and I couldn’t work up the will to move. It didn’t matter, my body began to move, I watched the clouds above remain stationary as I was dragged along the wet hardcrete. I could feel my shoes scraping against the surface.
“Astra you have to help us out here,” I heard Layla insist. I summoned all the will left within me and pulled myself upward, taking my feet and forcing myself to follow along. “We have to move, we’re all in this now.”
“How did you know where to find us?” Brea asked her as we moved along toward a narrow space between two dilapidated buildings. I could hear the roar of the water behind us, I felt the change in temperature as we stepped out of the light. Brea kept a tight grip on my hand.
“Dumb luck,” Layla shook her head and joined Brea in dragging me along. “I was taking the long way back the city and heard the shooting.”
“Where were you going?”
“Work, you idiot, you made me a Desh, remember?”
“I might rethink that.”
“Well aren’t you generous,” Layla snapped.
“Okay, we've got a problem,” Brea said; we emerged from the pathway and onto an open street. A wrecked car and a mangled street light stood in our way. “We aren’t going to last out here for long. Astra’s going to freeze to death and the Black Swan knows this part of the city like the back of their hand-”
“Yeah how about we ask the real question?” Layla looked to Brea who raised an eyebrow and stared at her expectantly. “How did the Black Swan know to come here? I mean, think about it. You said you contacted the Proctorum Elicate, right? Why did the Black Swan show up? How did you get ambushed?”
“I-...I don’t know,” Brea admitted. “I didn’t really think about it.”
“There’s a leak, obviously. Someone in the government works for
them-”
“No kidding, Layla.”
“Someone high up, someone capable of intercepting your communique. Even if we do manage to get out of this, imagine how much trouble we’re going to be in. We can’t trust anyone.”
“Wait,” I gasped, stopping in my tracks. I caused both of them to jerk as they tried to move forward. “We can bring Kerra here.”
“Unless you have have a direct line to her-” Layla started.
“I do,” I nodded. “Well, I did.”
I saw Layla’s eyes suddenly light up with recognition.
“Of course.”
“What is it? What am I missing?” Brea looked at us, from one to the other.
“Her wristband,” Layla explained. “The one that they gave to her back...you know.”
“What about it?”
“They would be able to track her with it, Kerra specifically. I don’t know much about the situation, but it’s been clear from the start that Constable Erth has been on top of her. We turn that band on, the real Proctorum Elicate will be on top of us in seconds.”
“Where is it?” Brea looked around helplessly.
“Textile factory, over in-”
“Are you serious?!” Brea practically shouted. “We can’t make it that far!”
“We’re not going to make to the city either, and even if we do, what then?” Layla pointed out. “Either way, we’re all dead. We start now, we run, we get that bracelet.”
“Maybe if you hadn’t left it behind?” I pointed out sarcastically. They both paused and looked at me briefly; there was a look of surprise on Brea’s face. I think I was surprised too; I’d never spoken to a woman in that manner.
“You’re getting a little sassy,” Layla looked at me with a sideways glance.
“Layla,” Brea glared at her and spoke evenly. “That’s not a male. Does that even look like a male to you? Treat her with respect, please.”
