by S. D. Stuart
He snuck out from the relay station on an almost weekly basis just to get away from the structured schedule of a government employee. He wasn’t the only one who snuck away, and they always covered for each other. Life could get pretty boring when you were young and vibrant, and stuck in a dead-end job. Sneaking out to enjoy the nightlife of the nearest city was almost a requirement. If you didn’t do it, you were most likely a snitch for upper management.
But this was the first time he had broken an emergency curfew to sneak out in the light of day. It was far riskier than sneaking out at night, and he hoped his coworkers would be able to cover for him long enough to collect his reward and get back before he was missed. Even after he paid them all off, he would end up with more money in one night than he had been able to save from his meager salary over the previous ten years of dedicated service.
Tonight’s influx of cash might even put him over the top and enable him to pay off the family debt. A shiver ran up his spine as he thought of the possibility that the entire family could actually leave their government jobs behind and finally be able to look for work in the much more lucrative private sector. Maybe even take his first vacation since he began working fifty-hour weeks as a six-year-old boy.
The iron hinges groaned softly as the front door opened partway, followed immediately by a loud crash and a sharp cry from his uncle.
Darius heard several heavy boots rush into the front room followed by a commanding voice. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know who…” was all he heard his uncle could say before there was a gunshot.
Darius glanced around him quickly. This couldn’t be the stranger they were waiting for. His uncle had met the stranger a few times before and said that he was always polite and sincere. And always alone.
It could only mean one thing. He had been discovered missing from the government barracks and the Southern Marshal sent out her soldiers to track him down and kill him.
But how had they found him so quickly? He was certain he had not been followed on foot and he would have seen or heard any airships in the sky. Why didn’t the lookouts on the outskirts of town warn anyone that soldiers were coming?
Somehow, the soldiers had made it all the way to the center of town without triggering the active underground movement that seemed to know everything that took place in the city right before it happened.
Unfortunately, he didn’t have time to worry about how the soldiers had found him. The truth of the matter was, they had found him. The only thing he had time to worry about was how to get away.
The sound of boots rushing down the hallway from the front room sent him into action. Doors were kicked open followed by shouts of the word “clear” all along the hallway as the soldiers got closer to the kitchen.
He reached for the lock on the back door and froze as his heart jumped into his throat. The door handle was already being turned by somebody on the other side. All the commotion at the front of the house had masked the noise of soldiers approaching the back door. Now that he was focused on it, he could hear someone curse when the handle bumped against the lock and prevented whoever was on the other side from opening the door.
It didn’t matter who was on the other side. Darius could not escape through the back door, and the soldiers were about to enter the kitchen from the front hallway.
The small window over the sink darkened as someone peered in through the thick brown grime that covered the glass.
There were only three ways out of the kitchen. The hallway, the back door, and the window over the sink. And there were soldiers at every one of them. He was trapped with nowhere to go.
He was about to be caught and put to death as a spy. With the added fine levied against every relative of an executed spy, his family would never be able to work off the debt. Not even if they each lived to be five hundred years old. Because of his attempt to make some quick cash to clear the family debt, his entire family’s future, even those who had not been born yet, had suddenly gone up in smoke.
The basic instinct of survival kicked in and his eyes focused on the hearth in the corner of the kitchen. Up in smoke, he thought again. Or more likely, up with smoke.
Living a life in governmental servitude meant not getting very much to eat. One of the benefits was that you stayed very skinny. Maybe even skinny enough to fit up a chimney flue at sixteen years old.
The soldiers rushed in from the hallway just as the other group of soldiers broke through the back door. They all spilled into the kitchen at exactly the same time that Darius pulled his feet up into the chimney, and out of sight.
“The rest of the house is empty,” someone shouted.
“Nobody left out the back door. It was even locked from the inside when we got to it,” another voice said.
“I saw someone in here when I looked through the window,” a third voice said.
Darius climbed quietly up the chimney as he silently prayed that there were no loose stones for him to dislodge and send crashing back down into the kitchen.
The chimney became smaller as he climbed and he had to exhale deeply and take smaller breaths to keep from becoming wedged in the ever shrinking flue.
As he neared the top, it had become so thin he had to keep his arms above his head. His knees had less room to bend as he climbed. He felt the sudden rush of wind on his fingers as his hands passed the threshold of the top of the chimney.
He was almost out.
He took a small breath and felt the chimney constrict him on all sides like a snake.
His hands gripped the top of the chimney flue, but he had no leverage to pull himself up because he couldn’t bend his arms. He tried to push himself up with his feet, but the flue prevented his legs from bending and the toes of his shoes lost their grip on the charcoal dusted stones. The only thing that kept him from falling all the way back down into the kitchen, and into the gun sights of the waiting soldiers, was the involuntary breath that expanded his chest and held him in place.
He held his breath and struggled to find purchase again with this toes. While his feet frantically searched for a small crevice to wedge the toes of his shoes into, his lungs burned with the desire to exhale so they could take another tiny breath of soot choked air. He felt like he was drowning in one of the driest places in the world. But if he exhaled before his feet found something to hold on to he would slide down the chimney, making all kinds of noise as he scrambled to stop himself.
Right before his body overrode his conscious desire to keep holding his breath, his toes found a crevice and wedged themselves in just as he blew out the bad air from his lungs.
He exhaled so sharply, he dislodged some of the soot clinging to the sides of the chimney and sucked in the tiny black cloud when he gasped his next breath.
His body involuntarily coughed before he could hold his breath to stop it.
From below he heard someone exclaim, “Did you hear that?”
Panic gripped him tighter than the chimney.
With his body in the way, he couldn’t see down the chimney at the face that was probably looking up at him by now. But there was no mistaking the next thing he heard.
“The kid went up the chimney.”
Hands grabbed his wrists above him and, not wanting to spend any more time stuck in the chimney than he needed to, he exhaled sharply as someone yanked him out the top.
Chapter 4
Before the staccato of gunfire had erupted in the sleepy little trading village, Caleb had been standing under the same intersection road sign for the third time and staring at the yellow scrap of paper that held the address of where to meet his contact. Most of the cities in OZ grew organically and the streets were twisty and seemingly random. He longed for the ordered and logical layout of Little Roma, Nero’s meticulously planned city in the Eastern Territories, were he grew up.
When a single shot echoed through the streets, his feline senses zeroed in on the direction of the gunshot, despite the numerous echoes it created around th
e haphazardly constructed city.
He had broken out in a fast run in the direction of trouble.
It had been pure luck he saw soot-covered hands poking out of the chimney that matched the address on his piece of paper.
He had leapt up onto the roof in a single bound and yanked a boy out of the chimney. Before he had a chance to ask the boy if the man he was supposed to meet was still alive, soldiers rushed into the street and pointed rifles up at him.
He tackled the boy just as bullets ricocheted off the chimney, and together, they tumbled off the roof.
It’s not true, what they say. Cats don’t always land on their feet.
He gripped the boy tightly to cushion the fall with his own body as they fell backward into a massive pile of rotting vegetables and garbage. The pile wasn’t as thick as he hoped and the impact knocked the wind out of him. His body begged to lay there for a moment to recover as he forced himself back to his feet and scanned the alley for anything he could use as a weapon.
There was nothing but wilted lettuce, stale bread, and apple cores all around him. Not even a plank of wood he could wield like a club.
Angry shouts echoed from both ends of the alleyway. There was no way out except the way they had come in.
Caleb pulled the boy out of the garbage and gripped his shoulders. “Have you ever run along the rooftops and jumped from one building to another?”
The boy nodded his head.
Caleb grabbed the scruff on the back of the boy’s shirt with one hand and gripped his pants at the waist with the other. “As soon as you are on the roof, start running and don’t stop.”
The boy cried out in surprise as Caleb tossed him back up onto the roof. Caleb crouched and faced the closer entrance to the alley just as a soldier rushed around the corner. His leg muscles exploded with raw power as he pounced and leaped nine feet through the air. The soldier froze with a look of terror on his face. Caleb knocked him to the ground hard enough to render the soldier unconscious and liberated his rifle from him.
He spun around just as soldiers rushed in from the other end of the alley. Caleb lifted the rifle and squeezed the trigger several times, with the first pull firing the rifle before jamming. One soldier went down while the rest scrambled back out of the alley. He fiddled with the trigger, but really didn’t have time to deal with a jammed rifle, so he dropped it and hopped up onto the roof. He wasn’t going to wait around for the soldiers to regroup and storm the alley. A mere second of hesitation was equal to a lifetime of poor decisions when it came to battle strategy. They always resulted in an untimely death for the person who made them.
A natural hunter, Caleb immediately spotted the boy cresting the roof of a house several streets away. He took off after him and had leaped across to a third roof when he saw a large shadow pass over the roof of the house to the left of the boy, heading in the same direction he was.
Caleb slid to a stop on the tile roof and scanned the skies for the airship that was tracking the boy.
He saw nothing.
He heard nothing.
The sky was bright blue and clear, except for a few clouds in the distance. The boy crested the roof of another building and kept running until he dipped back out of sight again. Caleb watched the massive shadow darken the roof as it moved into position right behind him.
Caleb searched the sky again, looking for whatever was casting that shadow. But there was nothing. And then a strange thing happened. Some of the blue sky crossed in front of one of the distant clouds. He squinted at the misplaced section of sky as it crossed in front of the cloud and then blended back in with the rest of the sky on the other side.
If he had not seen it with his own eyes, he would never have believed it. He didn’t know if the unendurable stress of life behind the fence had finally gotten to him, or if he’d actually seen an airship painted the color the sky.
The kid crested another rooftop with the shadow nipping at his heels. Whatever it was, it was gaining on the kid.
Gliding silently above the city in her new airship, courtesy of the man who called himself Levi and who was now a guest in her dungeon, the Southern Marshal held the spyglass steady as she watched her prey run helplessly along the rooftops.
“Don’t let him get away. He will be an example for the others.”
Taylor, the captain of her private guard, cleared his throat behind her. Without taking her eyes off her prey she said, “What is it, Captain?”
“The forward team has reported in. One suspect is dead and they are pursuing a second suspect on foot. We have already suffered a casualty at the hands of the second suspect.”
Without taking her eye off the spyglass she replied, “Tell them to focus their efforts on apprehending the second suspect. Even if he is just some good Samaritan who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, he will answer for killing one of my men.”
“Yes ma’am. And the boy?”
“I wouldn’t worry too much about him. He’s about to run out of roofs to jump across.”
Darius skidded to a stop on the edge of the roof and gazed out at the open field that spread out before him on either side. He had reached the edge of town and there was nowhere else to go. The low grasslands that stretched to the horizon offered no place to hide. His only hope was to drop down into the city, work his way through the narrow streets, and avoid anyone who might be looking for him.
A massive shadow crawled up the roof and settled all around him, the temperature dropping several degrees in the shadow of…what? He looked up into the clear blue sky; and could not find the sun.
A patch of the sky a shade darker than the rest, with a glow emanating from its edges, was getting bigger. Whatever had swallowed up the sun was expanding to swallow up the entire sky.
No, he suddenly realized with a chill that trickled up his spine. Whatever it was that ate the sun wasn’t getting bigger, it was getting closer.
A portion of the sky peeled away, like someone drawing back the curtain on a window, to reveal the hatch of an airship. He could see that he wasn’t looking at the sky at all, but canvas sails painted the same color as the sky. Now that he knew what he was looking at, he could make out the numerous strips of canvas, that covered the entire underside of the airship, rippling in the wind.
He stood on the roof, transfixed by the skill and mastery involved with camouflaging an entire airship. But how had they managed to mask the sound of the propellers? While his mind struggled to comprehend the mechanical marvel that hovered above him, he failed to notice the hatch slide open and rope lines drop down. The knotted ends hit the tile of the roof with a loud smack and jarred him out of his shocked stupor.
His head snapped in the direction of the sudden sound and his eyes focused on the rope. He tilted his head up and saw men, armed men, rappelling down the rope toward him. His mouth went dry and his skin broke out in a cold sweat.
Several roofs away, the cat man ran toward him, shouting something. From this far away, he couldn’t hear what the cat man was saying clearly, but he understood perfectly what he meant.
Get off the roof and keep running.
Darius clambered to the edge of the roof and peaked over. His muscles relaxed slightly with relief when he saw the large haystack along the side of the house. He didn’t waste any time looking back and jumped.
His shirt tugged tightly against his throat and yanked him backward to slam him against the side of the house,. His shirt collar was choking him as he flailed around, suspended fifteen feet off the ground.
He clawed in a panic at his shirt. He must’ve somehow caught it on the edge of the roof, and now it was cutting off his air supply. He reached up to unhook his shirt from whatever it had caught on, and felt the meaty hand of the soldier.
The soldier hauled him back up onto the roof and tossed him down with a curse. He shoved his boot deep into Darius’ back, keeping him flat on his stomach. “The little bugger nearly wrenched my arm out of its socket.”
The
other soldier pointed his rifle at Darius while addressing his comrade in arms. “That was an excellent catch. I thought you were going to go over with him.”
Darius lifted his head and scanned the nearby roofs, but the cat man was gone. When he first pulled him out of the chimney, he thought the cat man had rescued him from certain death. Now he knew he only delayed the inevitable.
And now, when he needed him most, the cat man had abandoned him to his fate.
Caleb had seen the soldiers rappelling down the rope and capturing the boy. He dropped off the next roof and would have to travel the rest of the way on the ground if he had any hope of sneaking up on the soldiers before they took what might be his only connection to finding Dorothy.
There were way too many dead-end streets in this town, and it took longer than he wanted to arrive at the house with the airship hovering above the roof. It gave his unknown enemy more time to mount a proper defense, or just plain leave, before he got there.
He peeked around the building that was right next to his target. He used the large shadow, that engulfed the streets surrounding the building, to let him know where the airship was. The same way you would use the tracks of a white rabbit left behind in a snowy field to know where the rabbit was.
He effortlessly leaped fifteen feet straight up and grabbed the edge of the roof above him. Using his momentum he vaulted himself up onto the roof and landed with a soft thud. Above him, at the top of the slanted roof, a soldier stood with his back to him. Caleb crouched low and slowly ascended the roof toward the soldier.
A loose terra-cotta tile dislodged under his foot, clattering down the roof and over the edge.
The soldier spun around, saw Caleb, and raised his gun to fire off a shot. Time slowed to a snail’s crawl and Caleb could see the disturbed air ripple outward as the bullet tore through the atmosphere. The bullet’s shock wave tickled the tuft of fur at the tip of Caleb’s ear as it whizzed past, missing him by a mere centimeter.
