by S. D. Stuart
The soldier abruptly yanked the lever of his repeating rifle, ejecting the spent cartridge and loading a new one into the chamber of the barrel. In less than half a second, he would be ready to fire on Caleb again. If the soldier had barely missed him on such a hasty targeting opportunity, he would never miss if given the chance to sight down his barrel properly at Caleb.
Caleb wasn’t about to give him that chance. He charged forward and let out a mighty roar. The soldier took an instinctive step backward and slipped on a loose tile himself. He did the splits before falling backward off the ridge of the roof and disappearing from view.
Caleb scrambled to the top of the roof and looked over the ridge just in time to see the soldier slide down on his back and drop over the edge head first. His scream was cut off moments later by a sickening splat that sounded like a watermelon splitting open when dropped on a stone floor.
Caleb heard numerous shouts all around him. The noise drew everyone’s attention right to Caleb.
Around him, soldiers pointed their rifles at him from nearby rooftops.
Darkness engulfed the entire roof where he stood. The part of the sky above him blocked out the sun. Soldiers had already jumped over from the nearby rooftops and were approaching him from every direction. There was nowhere he could run. There was no way he could fight. He was outnumbered and outgunned.
The only thing to do was surrender.
Caleb held his arms high and complied with every order barked at him until he lay face down on the rooftop with his hands bound behind his back.
Within moments, he felt the tug on the bindings around his hands that pulled him slowly up to a standing position and then kept going, lifting him off the roof. His shoulders strained to support his entire weight as he was pulled up into the waiting airship.
Chapter 5
Caleb didn’t struggle when hands grabbed him and pulled him into the airship. He let the soldiers manhandle him as they untied the rope used to haul him up and then left him face down on the polished hardwood floor of the airship’s gondola.
A deep baritone voice spoke. “What have we got here, Lieutenant?”
“It appears a hybrid has broken out of the compound, Captain.”
Caleb recognized the deeper voice, the one the lieutenant called Captain, as the same man who led the team that had captured him and Dorothy as soon as they came over the southern wall.
He craned his neck to see the Captain’s face and made direct eye contact with him.
He was right. This was the same man who had taken her. He had vowed to himself that, the next time he saw this man, he would make him suffer greatly for separating them. But he had not expected to be tied up and lying face down when that time came. Instead of doing everything he’d always dreamed of doing to this man, all he could do was stare at him.
“Where is Dorothy?” he growled.
The Captain looked down at his captive and frowned. “We didn’t just catch any hybrid. We caught the king of the beasts.”
Caleb struggled against his bindings. It only resulted in a boot being placed on his back by another soldier to hold him down.
“Where is Dorothy?” Caleb growled again.
The Captain knelt down. “You’re like a phonograph cylinder with only one recording. Where’s Dorothy? Where’s Dorothy?”
He tugged on Caleb’s whiskers, causing tears to well up in the corners of his eyes from the excruciating pain. “A couple of hours with me and I can teach you to say a few more human words.”
A female voice behind the Captain interrupted him. “That’ll be enough, Captain Taylor.”
Taylor immediately snapped to attention. “Yes ma’am.”
The pain in his whiskers subsided and Caleb’s eyes focused on the Southern Marshal. She shook her head at him like a mother shaking her head at a child caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “Lift him up.”
Strong hands grabbed his bound arms from behind and brought him quickly to his feet.
The Southern Marshal let out a sigh. “When my young wireless operator broke curfew, I followed him expecting to uncover a vast spy network operating within the confines of my territory. I did not expect to find you.”
“I didn’t…” A soldier punched him in the stomach, cutting him off. He doubled over and coughed and sputtered, the wind knocked out of him. The other soldier yanked on his mane and brought his head back up. Caleb could smell the tang of onions on the soldier’s breath as he spoke. “The Marshal did not ask you a question. You will not speak until directed to do so.”
The Southern Marshal’s eyes became slits while she most likely pondered what to do with him. She had apparently made up her mind when she opened her mouth to speak. “Tell me something, Caleb. What did you offer my employees that made them willing to spy on me in my own kingdom?”
“Only if you tell me something first,” Caleb replied.
The soldier who had punched him a moment ago reared back, ready to slam his balled fist into Caleb’s solar plexus again. She held up her hand and stopped him.
They both stared quietly at each other for a long drawn-out moment before she finally responded. “She is alive and well.”
Caleb’s heart fluttered with excitement. “I want to see her.”
“I’ve answered your question. Now answer mine.”
Caleb tugged against the soldiers who held him in place. “Let me see her!”
“Answer my question!”
“I offered them a reward for any information they could find on Dorothy.”
“You offered them money?”
“Yes.”
“And they willingly spied for you? For money?”
He shook his head. “No. They did not spy for me. I only wanted information about Dorothy. I told them I was not interested in anything that didn’t directly relate to finding her.”
“And what exactly did you offer as a reward?”
“One thousand sovereigns.”
She let out a surprised laugh. “And just how did you expect to follow through on your promise? I don’t recall allowing any money into the hybrid compound.”
She glanced over at Captain Taylor. “Did he have any money on him when you captured him at the wall?”
Taylor shook his head.
She regarded Caleb with a quizzical look. “How did you expect to follow through with your promise of a reward?”
He lowered his head. “We saw the soldiers coming while we were still halfway down the wall. As soon as we hit ground, I buried the money I brought with me before we set up the small camp, well away from my hiding spot, where your soldiers captured us.”
“How much did you bring with you?”
Caleb stared at his shoes. The soldier grabbed a fistful of mane again and pulled his head up.
“How much did you bring?” she repeated.
“Five thousand sovereigns.”
Her eyebrows lifted in surprise. “You don’t pack light, do you? That was nearly forty kilograms of gold.”
Caleb was shocked at how quickly she had calculated the total weight.
“You determined the weight of all those coins in your head?”
“I’m not the Southern Marshal because I’m pretty.”
Caleb smirked. “But it doesn’t hurt that you’re pretty.”
That remark got him another punch to the gut, but it was worth it.
Unfazed, the Southern Marshal tilted her head at him. “I’m just impressed you made it over the wall at all.”
Caleb rolled his shoulders with the memory of the heavy pack, but it was time to get this conversation back on track.
“I answered your questions. Now when can I see her?”
“You may see her as soon as we get back to my castle, but only on one condition.”
“And what is that?”
“You fulfill your destiny and become a leader to your people.”
Caleb dropped his shoulders and let out a big sigh. “They’re not my people.”
“Of c
ourse they are. Just because you were raised apart from them does not make you no longer one of them. They want to look up to you, Caleb. They want you to be their leader. I want you to be their leader.”
Caleb reflected on her final statement. That was the one thing that did not make sense. Why was she taking such an interest in the hybrids? Why had she given them refuge from the persecution throughout OZ, only to place them behind an electrified fence and make them captives inside a prison within a prison?
He just couldn’t believe she did all this out of the goodness of her heart. She had to have some angle, some reason. And somehow her focus had fallen on him.
“Why do you want me to be their leader?”
“When I sent out the call that I was offering a haven for hybrids, they came from all over OZ. Not just some of them. All of them came. I gathered a scattered and broken people from the four corners of the Outcast Zone and brought them together, save for one.”
“Me.”
“You were the only one I could not reach with my message. And you were the son of the king and queen that ruled the hybrid kingdom before it was targeted and destroyed by humans. The humans were afraid. Afraid that, given the chance, hybrids could come to rule all of OZ. So they obliterated your kingdom and scattered the hybrids to the winds, enacting laws that kept the status of hybrids just barely that above the livestock in the fields.”
He had heard the same tale from Zee many times before.
“You haven’t answered my question.”
“I have given the hybrids everything that humans took away from them. I gave them a place where they could live without persecution. I’ve made education available to every one of them. But there was one thing that I could not restore.”
“Their kingdom.”
“At least not without their king.”
He was beginning to understand why she believed him to be integral to what she had planned for the hybrids. But what did she have planned?
He gazed into the deep black abyss of her eyes. They glistened back, but refused to reveal any of her secrets.
“You want me to be a leader to my people?”
Her face softened as she smiled. “I want you, to want to be a leader for your people.”
“What’s the difference?”
“If you do what I want, you do it with your head. When you do what you want, you do it with your heart.”
“Why is this so important to you?”
She reflected on his question for a moment before finally answering. “It’s not just important to me. It’s important to you, to every hybrid, and to every human in OZ. Your decision to finally become a leader just might matter to the entire world.”
A voice he vaguely recognized from his past spoke from behind him. “She’s right, Caleb.”
The speaker of the new voice stepped into his view, and his heart leapt into his throat. Despite the lack of hair, and intense scarring over the entire face of the man standing before him, he recognized him in an instant.
“Nero?”
The horribly scarred face grimaced in an attempt to smile. “How are you doing, son?”
Caleb lurched forward, but was held back by the two guards who gripped his arms tightly. “You are not my father!”
Nero leaned heavily on the cane he clutched in one hand. “So much for time heals all wounds.”
“I should’ve known you would be behind this. The puppet master pulling on all the strings.”
Nero let out a guttural chuckle. The damage to his body, when the emerald laser had exploded and ejected him out the window of the casino, was far more than skin deep and consigned a deeper, raspier, quality to his voice.
He motioned toward the Southern Marshal with a swish of his cane. “I’m afraid this time, she’s the one in charge. I’m only here to help.”
“Help!? Since when have you been the one they call when someone needs help?”
“Actually, I came to her. To ask for her help.”
Caleb practically choked on his own laugh.
“Okay, similar question. Since when have you needed help from anyone?”
“For the first time, something is coming that even I, with my vast resources and connections, cannot take on alone.”
“And just what is it that has the two of you, the most powerful people in all of OZ, running and hiding with your tail between your legs?”
Nero coughed to clear his throat. “They are the people who sent me here to find something for them.”
“Who are ‘they’?”
Near shook his head. “The infamous ‘they’ go by the name of the Directors. A small group of world leaders that operate in the shadows. I think there are only five members at any given time who make all the decisions.”
The Southern Marshal interrupted him. “You think? Don’t you know? Aren’t they the ones who sent you here?”
Nero nodded. “They only speak through proxies. I was given my instructions without ever meeting them in person.”
The Southern Marshal apparently wasn’t going to let this drop. “You’ve been working all this time for somebody you’ve never met? How can you even be sure they exist?”
He cleared his throat again and did not look directly into the eyes of the Southern Marshal. Instead, he found something very interesting on the floor at his feet while he spoke. “The Directors do exist, Madame Marshal, believe me. And the threat they pose is very real.”
Caleb had never seen Nero behave like this. Even when he wasn’t at the forefront, and hung back in the shadows, Nero always made sure that everyone around him knew who was really in charge. Now, for the first time, Caleb saw him for what he really was. Or at least what he had become. A broken man who was powerless to take what he wanted by force and had no choice but to supplicate himself to another.
She folded her arms across her chest and gave Nero a stern look. “You’ve got me all worked up over nothing.”
For the briefest of moments, Caleb saw a flash of the old Nero as he matched the Southern Marshal’s stare with one of his own. “It is hardly nothing. The dragons are coming to destroy everything we hold dear. We have to work together if we are to stop them.”
Chapter 6
Caleb was taken down below the main deck, chained to the wall in a small room, and left alone. He was actually glad to be given this time to think. After the guard closed the door and left him some privacy, Caleb tugged on the chains. They were securely bolted to the support beam along the wall. Even if he did manage to break free, where could he go? He was on an airship, hundreds of meters in the sky.
And even if he managed to escape an airship in mid-flight, and make it safely to the ground, where could he go then?
A hybrid wandering around the Southern Territories, outside of electrified fence, would cause quite a stir in any town or city he entered. He certainly didn’t want to live out the rest of his days as a wild animal, living deep in some forest hunting for his food and hiding from everything else.
He couldn’t escape back into the rest of OZ either. The ceramic wall that surrounded the Southern Territories was as smooth as glass and dwarfed the tallest trees. The tools he had used to get in had been confiscated when they were captured. And besides, he still had to rescue Dorothy. He wasn’t about to go anywhere without her.
Of course, he had already created a small stir since he was captured outside the fence. Despite how careful he had been in the past, the Southern Marshal now knew he had found a way out. She would take extra steps to seal them in tighter than they were before.
Some leader he had turned out to be. He had just made it harder on all the hybrids in the compound. Any hope of escape in the near future had just been quelled. He was the last person they should be looking to for guidance.
But the Southern Marshal was right. From the moment he first arrived in the colony six months ago, everyone had looked to him as their leader. Rather than being treated as the new kid and shunned as a stranger, he was asked to sit in on the monthly co
uncil meetings. But as much as he tried to just sit there and remain silent, he was still called upon to settle disputes among the council members. And every decision he made immediately became law.
He was constantly being pulled by the hybrids within the colony to take a leadership position. Now he was being pushed from the outside, by the Southern Marshal herself, to do the same.
But a leader of what?
And where would he be leading the hybrids to?
He still had not figured out why the Southern Marshal had invited the hybrids to the Southern Territories. Why had she accumulated every hybrid into one place? What did she plan to do with them? Everyone he spoke to waved off his concerns and told him not to question their good fortune. Despite the electric fence, everyone told him, they were better off. Asking such questions would only invite trouble they didn’t want to have.
His mind swirled over the same questions, for what seemed like hours, without coming to any new answers. Even without a window in the small room, he knew their journey was coming to an end. His ears popped as the airship descended. A final bump signaled that the airship had come to rest on the landing platform.
It was no surprise that, within five minutes of the airship landing, he heard the lock on the door to his small room engage and the door swung open. But it was a complete surprise when the first person who came through the door was Zee.
She placed balled fists on her hips and shook her head at him. “I told you. If you kept sneaking out, one day you would get caught.”
“What are you doing here?”
She held up the cast iron key that would unlock the shackles on his hands. “I’m here to help you make the right decision.”
“You told her I left as soon as I went through the fence, didn’t you?”
She ignored his question and twisted the key in the lock. The shackles dropped free and he massaged his wrists, trying to bring blood flow back to his numb hands.
He couldn’t believe Zee, who had become his closest friend in the colony, was working against him.
“How long have you been working for the Southern Marshal?”
