by S. D. Stuart
Something caught his eye and he focused on an object bobbing in the center of the lake. It was the wooden box. He took a deep breath and dove back into the lake.
He dragged the box up on the rocks and felt a chill run up his spine that had nothing to do with the temperature of the lake. He had developed his instinct for survival by growing up in the most dangerous place in the world. A continent sized prison was not the place for a boy of seven to be orphaned and alone on the streets. He had to grow up fast, and grow up fast he did.
His instincts had been sharpened to an almost supernatural level.
He glanced around him before he scanned the skies and spotted the black dot in the middle of the crisp blue sky that could mean only one thing. An airship was coming.
He dragged the box into a dense thicket of bushes halfway up the hill and had just returned to collect the leather armor and blunderbuss when he heard a loud splash at the base of the waterfall. He didn’t bother looking because he knew what it meant. Somebody had followed him out of the cave.
He scrambled into the bushes and peered out as Nero clawed his way, coughing and sputtering, out of the water.
Nero flopped over onto his back and gulped in air for several minutes before he finally caught his breath and sat up.
Jasper crouched perfectly still in the bushes as he watched Nero look up and down the river and all around the waterfall and tiny lake. He held his breath every time Nero glanced in his direction for fear even the slightest movement of his chest expanding and contracting might shake the leaves and give away his hiding spot.
A shadow passed over the lake and settled on Nero, making him look up. Jasper craned his neck and saw an airship had already arrived and floated only a dozen feet above them.
Every airship he had seen before was slow and loud. It was why they were never useful in combat. Either the enemy saw them coming, heard them coming, or both, in plenty of time to prepare a proper defense. This one was different. It was long and sleek; and nimble. And it had come in silently on the wind.
He watched it spin around quickly to face windward and hold position without needing to be tethered to the ground. He could barely hear the propellers. And he was less than a hundred yards away.
He realized that the only reason he had seen it at all when he looked up into the bright blue sky was that it was painted a deep midnight blue with random white pinpoint dots all along the underside to match the night sky.
This airship was designed to sneak up on the enemy under cover of darkness. And it was not small. The long gondola that ran the entire length of the sleek airship could easily hold a hundred men.
He had never seen anything like it before and guessed that the owner would kill him immediately if he knew he was looking at it now.
The airship dropped to hover effortlessly ten feet off the ground. Nero stood defiantly facing the airship, not even attempting to run away. A ramp lowered from the front of the gondola. At the halfway point, the stairs along the ramp looked like the jagged teeth of a dingo, its gaping mouth threatening to swallow Nero whole. The ramp continued tilting downward until it settled lightly on the ground.
Jasper risked parting the branches of the bush wider to get a better look at the airship that floated rock steady in the shifting breeze without being tethered to the ground first. Even this close to the ground, the sound of the propellers could easily be dismissed as the slight rustling of leaves on some distant tree.
The adrenaline his body created while he fought for his life in the underground river was starting to dissipate and his body complained, with each lifting of the breeze, that he was still in wet clothing. To make matters worse, he had settled into a crouch in the bushes and his calf muscles were beginning to cramp. He had hoped to use the sound of the airship to mask his movement so he could sit down and relieve his leg muscles from their hunched stance, but this airship was too quiet. If he tried to reposition his legs to sit down, it might shift the loose rocks under his feet and Nero would hear him.
If Nero could hear him, so could the man walking down the ramp followed by a group of heavily armed soldiers.
For now, his muscles would just have to deal with the pain.
Nero stood there feeling like a drowned rat, and probably looking like one too, as Levi strode victoriously down the ramp like a conquering hero with his elite guard in tow. Every one of the nine-member guard was decked out in a modernized version of the armor worn by the Praetorian Guard, the personal bodyguards of Roman Emperors until they were disbanded in the fourth century, complete with crimson red heraldic crests mounted on top of their helmets.
Levi himself looked the part of an ancient Roman Emperor readying his troops for battle. The only thing missing was a laurel wreath on his head.
Nero did his best to stand up straight and appear stronger than he felt as he squinted up at Levi through the bright morning sun. “You’re early.”
Levi looked down his nose at him. “From the looks of you, it would appear I’m already too late. The Directors should have chosen me to come to this place instead of you.”
Nero thrust his chin out defiantly. “I can only guess that it was you who convinced the Directors I needed to be replaced.”
Levi frowned. “Take a look at yourself, Nero. Trust me when I tell you that it did not take much convincing.”
“What makes you think you could have done any better?” Nero asked.
“Because I would have never cared about the natives,” Levi replied as he held up a small device. “And I would have used one of these.”
Nero shook his head. “It was buried under tons of rock; underground. That detector would never have led you to it.”
Levi regarded the device in his hand. “The goddess of Rome sings, and this little toy can hear her.”
“There is no goddess inside that box,” Nero corrected him.
Levi smirked. “That’s right. We live in an enlightened age. We are men of science. We don’t care whether you call what’s inside that box the evils of the world released by Pandora herself, or the God of the Hebrew’s when they carried it around inside their ark, or even the Roman goddess Cybele, believed by the Oracle of Delphi to be encased in black meteoric stone. We don’t believe that there is some mystical or magical being living inside the box. We believe that what is inside is quantifiable by science and ultimately controllable through scientific means.”
Levi let out a sigh and looked down at Nero as if he were admonishing a small child. “I don’t care who believes what it is. When the Hebrews had it, nations fell before them. When the Romans had it, they conquered their known world. Now the Directors want it, and they don’t care how or why it does what it does. They only want it to do it for them.”
“You are never going to find it with that thing.”
“We’ll see about that.”
Levi flipped the switch on the detector and his face registered surprise. “If I am reading this correctly, it is very close.”
Nero resisted the urge to glance at the bushes where the kid was most likely hiding with his box. When he first clamored out of the water, he noted the wet and overturned stones making a straight line from the water to the bushes. He had followed them both down the hole soon enough that there was no way he could have gotten any further. By the time Levi arrived and blathered on, the water had dried up enough that there was no visible indication anyone other than him had climbed out of the lake.
If he had any chance of keeping what was inside that box out of the Directors’ hands, he had to convince Levi the box was not here.
He took a step toward Levi and paused when the two forward guards took a step toward him. “I pushed the box ahead of me down the hole right before the cave collapsed on my soldiers. If we leave now, we can catch up to it before it gets too far downriver and out of range of your detector.”
Levi squinted at the device in his hand. “No. According to the gauge, when I walk this way the signal is stronger.”
Nero to
ok a sideways step and came between Levi and the bushes. “That’s because your machine is detecting me.”
Levi frowned at him. “What makes you say that?”
“When I fired a gun into my emerald laser to destroy it, the explosion embedded a piece of emerald shard inside me. Go ahead; wave your little trinket close to my chest.”
Levi held the detector close to him and the needle on the gauge jumped.
Nero breathed a silent sigh of relief. He hadn’t known whether the emerald shard would interfere with the detector or not. “This river goes by a town less than three kilometers from here. If someone else spots that box floating in the river and fishes it out, it will be even harder to retrieve.”
Levi smiled. “I highly doubt that. I have an armada of a hundred airships, just like this one, due to hit the northern coast within a week. If we have not recovered the box within that time, my army of ten thousand soldiers will tear this place apart until we do.”
Jasper’s legs trembled under the strain of not having moved while he stayed in a half-crouched position in the middle of the bushes. Nero glanced back in his direction and gave a slight nod just before he disappeared up the ramp into the airship.
He overheard everything the man talking to Nero had said. He also remembered Nero’s earlier comment about the detector not working if the box was underground.
It wouldn’t take them long before they realized the box had not gone down the river. They would ignore anything Nero tried to tell them and return here to begin their search.
If he wasn’t gone by then, they would most likely kill him when they took the box. He had overheard the invasion plans for OZ and they would not leave any witnesses behind who could potentially warn somebody.
He had to get away from this place as quickly as possible if he hoped to live to see another sunrise. He had no idea where to go. He had never traveled into the Northern Territories before Nero led his army here to retrieve the box.
He had to hide it somewhere where it could not be detected by that device, and before anyone saw him with it.
Suddenly, the box felt heavier as he dragged it up the hill and away from the river.
Chapter 3
For the first time in his life, Caleb was around others just like him. The entire town was filled exclusively with half-human half-animal hybrids and, when he walked through the market in town, he was greeted with smiles rather than gasps of horror because he looked more lion than human.
The Southern Marshal had broken years of silence and separatism to offer sanctuary for every hybrid in OZ. Eager to escape the persecution they suffered at the hands of humans, they accepted her offer and, for the first time in a decade, outsiders crossed the thousand-foot high ceramic wall that separated the Southern Territories from the rest of OZ.
When the last airship crossed over the wall, the border was closed again and all contact with the outside world was severed. The Southern Marshall had provided a safe harbor for the hybrids. She had even gone so far as to build an entire town specifically for them. A place where they could live in peace and harmony. And then she surrounded it with a fifty-foot tall electrified fence.
Officially, the fence was to keep out those who wanted to harm the hybrids. But Caleb knew deep down in his soul, the fence was really there to keep them in. He didn’t know why and he didn’t care to know why. He didn’t like to be caged up, regardless of the reason.
He was finding it difficult to shift from being Nero’s personal bodyguard and assassin to becoming the leader, by birthright, of the hybrid compound.
Everything was better inside the compound. The hybrids were not persecuted for being different and, as their leader, his word was law. As the ruler over this tiny kingdom, he could have anything he wanted. But the thing he wanted most was to leave.
Every morning he woke up with a list of royal obligations, things he needed to do as the king of his people. Yet every morning always ended the same way. With him looking out through the fence toward a freedom he might never attain again.
This was not to say he had never gone over the fence.
No prison, not even OZ itself, had ever been able to contain him. Despite always being able to leave, he always managed to return of his own free will. Maybe it was not so much free will as it was a sense of obligation. He returned to OZ, when he was younger, out of his obligation to Nero for rescuing him from death. He returned to the compound out of his obligation to the hybrid community, who saw him as their natural-born leader.
Whatever it was that always brought him back, he knew there was one person he would be willing to leave everything for and never once look back. But he had lost her the same day they climbed over that wall into the Southern Territories. It had been six months since they were captured and separated. Six long months of not knowing whether she was alive or dead.
Not a single one of the informants he’d cultivated outside the fence had brought him any word about her. It was as if she ceased to exist the moment she was taken away from him, and he was losing his grip on the hope that she was still alive.
He closed his eyes and tried to picture her face. It was getting harder each day, the details blurring into generalities under the relentless march of time. Imbalanced by the memory of all he had lost, he leaned in too close to the electrified wire fence, causing tufts of fur to lift up from his skin and stretch out in the direction of freedom. He ignored the smell of burning fur as some of the longer strands came in contact with the wire.
“You know, there are safer ways to cut your hair to a respectable length.”
His eyes snapped open and he regained his balance as he leaned back away from the fence.
Zee held a finger to her nose to block out the smell. She was one of the few hybrids that looked almost entirely human. If it weren’t for the soft coat of white fur with black striping over her entire body, she would never have been sent to live behind the fence.
“If you keep looking out that fence, you’ll miss everything we have in here.”
“We are caged in here like wild animals.”
“The fence is for our safety.”
“Safety from what?”
“You were sheltered from what the rest of us had to deal with, out there in the real world. We were second class citizens… no, third class citizens. We were not allowed in schools. We were not allowed to have jobs. The lucky ones were given menial and dehumanizing chores that just barely kept the rest of the family in poverty.”
He reached for the fence with a hand and stopped himself short of touching it. He could feel the warmth emanating off the wire.
“There has to be a better way than this.”
“I agree with you Caleb, but for most of us here this is the best we have ever had. Out there I worked as a sideshow attraction in a traveling circus. In here, I’m being taught clockwork engineering. If I test well this season, I might be one of the five taken this year to the Southern Marshal’s private university for further training.”
The wind kicked up and jostled the fence, the wire almost touching his outstretched palm. He lowered his hand and looked at her. “Have you asked yourself why, Zee?”
“Why what?”
“Why has the Southern Marshal taken such an interest in us?”
“I’ve learned not to question good fortune. She has given all of us more than she has taken away.”
He looked back through the fence. “Not all of us.”
She placed a hand on his shoulder. “You miss her, don’t you?”
“I think I shall never see her again.”
“I wouldn’t write her off that easily.”
“It’s been six months without a word.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” she said as she held up a small slip of paper.
He stared at the yellow stained paper gripped between two fingers.
“What is that?”
“Your word.”
He reached for the paper and she withdrew it back quickly. “Don’t jeopardiz
e everything we have been given here for her.”
She offered it to him again and he snatched it out of her hand. “I just have to know that she’s safe.”
Fifteen kilometers from the hybrid compound, in the middle of one of the busiest trading cities in the Southern Territories, Darius, only sixteen years old but already showing signs that his hair pattern was following the family trait, paced back and forth in the back room of Uncle Jedediah’s small cottage.
Jedediah sat calmly at the kitchen table with his arms crossed over his enormous belly. “Stop being so nervous Nephew or your head will be as bald and shiny as mine before you’re twenty. Relax, he will be here soon.”
Darius gestured in the air with his arms as he spoke. “The Marshal has a twenty-four hour curfew on all government workers. If I’m caught outside the relay station like this, I’ll be killed on the spot as a spy.”
“Relax. You’ll be back before the lunchtime roll call.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“Money doesn’t buy happiness, but it does buy silence. Your share of the reward is more than enough to cover the costs to keep your little transgression from the ears of the Marshal.”
Darius let out a long steadying breath. “I sure hope you’re right Uncle.”
A knock at the front door stirred Jedediah from his chair. “That would be him now. You stay back here while I talk to him for a minute first.”
Darius grabbed Jedediah’s sleeve. “Get the money up front.”
Jedediah patted his cheek and smiled. “That’s what I’m going to talk about. You just wait here.”
Darius held his breath as he listened to his uncle unlatch the front door. In a few minutes he would tell the stranger what he knew, collect his reward and head back to the relay station before the Southern Marshal’s security forces even knew he was gone.
