by J. C. Staudt
Merrick had his hopes here too, but for different reasons. He wanted this power station to save his life. He wanted to show them he mattered; that he was more than a screw-up, some kid without a purpose. But first, he had to survive what he was about to face. The thought made him sit up, wide awake.
“You really have to travel with an armed escort everywhere you go?” Merrick asked over his shoulder.
“When things go bad, who’s the first person people blame?” said the Commissar. “The dway whose name everyone knows. The city north might be safe for you, Corporal Bouchard, but everyone knows my name.”
Toler Glaive had said the same thing about safety. When people knew who Merrick was, would he have to watch his own back everywhere he went? He wanted to believe it wasn’t true. There had been dozens of people in the infirmary, and they had all seen his wounds closing up as he walked across that room. They’d seen his hands glow, and they’d seen him touch the Commissar and bring him back from the verge of death. Some had felt Merrick’s touch for themselves. It was too late to second-guess himself. When everyone knows who I am, he predicted, they won’t blame me when things go bad. They’ll love me when I make things right.
The aboveground portion of the facility was a small square bunker with two tiers of razorwire fencing and a parking lot filled with ancient rusted-out vehicles. The soldiers who opened the gates and let them inside had the gray embroidered gear patches of the Engineering Division sewn onto the sleeves of their uniforms.
Next to the front door was a burnt-out access card slider with a shattered screen and a numerical keypad. Lieutenant Larabee gave the door four sharp raps, and the metal gave four heavy clangs in return. The door opened a few seconds later.
“Come in, gentlemen,” said the man on the other side. He was clean-cut and built of average stock, with a little extra around the edges and a head of thick, full gray hair. He wore handmade glasses with polished lenses, and a white longcoat. “Commissar Wax. It’s good to see you again.” He took a moment to regard Merrick, eyeing the lesions on his body with cold apprehension. “And who might this be?”
“Corporal Merrick Bouchard.” Merrick heard his speech come out slurred despite his best attempt at poise.
“To what do I owe… the pleasure of this visit?”
The Commissar spoke on Merrick’s behalf. “I’m not sure, Hank. Strange things are happening. The city’s on high alert. The folks who came into town the other day have become even more violent and dangerous. Our Corporal here is one of them, though he swears he’s on our side, and not theirs. He wants to see the power station. I’ve got forty men here ready to restrain him if he tries doing any damage to our precious experiment.”
“As you say, Commissar.” Hank stepped aside to let them in.
The top floor of the bunker was nothing more than a single metal room with a marble floor and an elevator on each side. A long staircase descended past several landings on its way into the belly of the station.
“He is aware that the elevators don’t work, of course,” Hank said, gesturing toward Merrick’s wheelchair.
Merrick was lacking the patience to be condescended to, or spoken about as if he wasn’t there. After tonight, people will know better than to try. “I’m aware. You’d better get started if you’re going to carry me.”
Hank scoffed and began marching down the steps ahead of them.
“We can roll you, and you can feel every bump on the way down,” said Lieutenant Larabee. “Or you can try to walk.”
“You’re in command of an entire platoon. Have me carried.”
Larabee frowned. “Are you in the habit of giving orders to your superiors, comrade?”
“I’m still getting used to it,” Merrick shot back.
“I’d watch it, if I were you.”
“If I were you, I’d be kinder to the dway who’s about to save the city north. Unless you’d like me to remember your name the next time you’re hit by a ganger’s spike or a nomad’s sword. If so, I can arrange for my own transportation.”
Larabee gave him a dark look, then summoned two soldiers to carry him.
Pilot Wax watched with amusement as the soldiers propped Merrick’s arms over their shoulders and lifted him out of the wheelchair. “You’re either going to do something amazing to impress me, or you’re going to die down there,” said the Commissar. “I’ll make sure of it.”
“I’ve been a Scarred Comrade my whole adult life,” said Merrick. “And this is the first time I can say with absolute certainty that something amazing is about to happen.”
They carried him down flight after flight of stairs, hitting each landing in quick stride with the force of the entire platoon around them. Kugh and Coker stayed close, poised to help him if his bearers lost their grip or their footing. As they descended, Merrick noticed that there wasn’t a torch lit among them; not a single lamp, candle, or sconce on the walls. The light was coming from the ceilings, a faint glow so cold it was almost blue. One of the panels was loose, and he saw a long translucent tube in the recessed cavity above. The electricity is already on.
The sound of falling water grew from a dull rumble to a deafening roar as they neared the end of the marble staircase. A floor of natural stone opened into a high cavern with steel arches built into the ceiling to support the glassed-in structure at the top. Men in white longcoats watched the flow of the clear water that spilled over the side of a high steel gate and tumbled into the deep pool in front of them. A set of stairs wound around the back of the rock face, where stray drops from the waterfall had made the steps wet and slick. A thin mist dappled Merrick’s skin. It was refreshing, and the chill made him shiver awake and blink in the dim light.
“It’s the first electricity we’ve had in years,” Pilot Wax shouted over the din. “We got the first turbines working upstream about a week ago, after years of design and development. It took a long time just to locate the right components. We had to build just about everything by hand.”
“Why not use the old HydroPyre station as a starting place for trying to generate power?” Lieutenant Larabee asked.
“The HydroPyre station isn’t underground, so it’s vulnerable to the starwinds. All our work could’ve been wiped out in a second. If we can get this system to generate enough power to feed even a small section of the city north, life here will soon be better for everyone. We’ll be able to start producing goods in ways we never could before. So far, that seems a long way off. We’ve barely managed to generate enough power to turn the lights on in this station. We can harvest some electricity from the water coming through here, but not enough, and we have no way to pump it back up to the top and create a stronger flow. If we could, the yield might be much higher.”
Hank the technician stood watching the Commissar, impatient. “What did you come down here for?” he asked.
“Where are the turbines?” Merrick asked.
Wax looked at him, and he felt forty other pairs of eyes join the Commissar’s.
“Upstream,” said Hank.
“I need to see them.”
The technician climbed the staircase and disappeared behind the rock face. Wax followed, and they carried Merrick up after him. Merrick’s shoulders ached and his head was foggy. Every step his bearers took reminded him of a different one of his wounds. They passed through the control room, where the white-coats paid them little mind, and exited through a different door into a higher chamber. Six gigantic cylinders were rotating in gentle synchrony as the water spun them like slow paddle wheels. The room was warmer than the cavern below, and a hot metallic smell was in the air.
“These are the turbines,” said Hank. “The water coming in from the springs further up gets routed through these channels we’ve created for it, where it flows along and spins these wheels as it goes by. The boxes at the top here take the friction generated and—”
“Take me to where the electricity is.”
“Where it… is?” Hank asked, confused.
“Where you store it, once it’s been generated.”
“There’s no storing it. Either it gets used, or it doesn’t.”
Merrick was losing his will to stay awake, along with his temper. “I need to touch voltage,” he said. He felt everyone’s eyes on him again.
“That’s crazy. You’ll die,” said Coker Reed.
“Bouchard, don’t be a whacko,” said Kugh. “You gotta go back to the infirmary and get patched up. You’re so delirious, you don’t know what you’re saying.”
The lightning will restore you. Raithur’s words were clearer than any others, and Merrick intended to put those words to the test. He shrugged free of his bearers and stood under his own weight. He almost went down after his first step, but when they tried to grab him again he held them away.
“Corporal Bouchard, your friend is right, you know,” Wax said. “You will die if you touch voltage. Electricity is not something to be toyed with.”
Merrick tossed the Commissar a glance before addressing Hank. “Voltage,” he said. “Show me.”
“The power lines are inside these tubes,” said Hank, indicating the metal pipes snaking away from each of the turbines. “They link up to the transformer boxes and are carried out through those wires up there.”
Merrick stumbled forward, pushing himself into a slow trudge toward the closest transformer box. The lightning will restore you. The words rang in his head, over and over, a cadence that drove him onward.
“You’re a dead man if you’re planning to go through with this, Corporal,” he heard Pilot Wax say. “If this is some kind of trick, or an act of sabotage like I warned you about, you ought to think again. You so much as blink the wrong way, and I’ll see to it that you don’t walk out of this room alive.”
I’ve already walked away from worse, Merrick would’ve said, if he hadn’t been so busy urging his legs to move and forcing his eyes to stay open. The lightning will restore you.
“Lieutenant, you now have command of your men,” said Wax.
“Platoon,” Larabee shouted. “Make ready to fire.”
Merrick heard the whoosh of guns being raised, the huck-chuck of bolts sliding home, the click of safeties being thumbed off.
The transformer was a tall box of flat gray metal with coils jutting from the top like bug antennae. Merrick had to stand on his tiptoes and press himself against the side of the box to reach the nodes. The audible hum of electricity melded with the churning of the turbines, and he could feel the nodes buzzing in his chest as he lifted the outer insulation to expose the live wiring beneath.
He stretched both hands out over the coils, inches away from death or deliverance, and felt the rush of raw adrenaline coursing through him. He was so close now that the hair on his arms was standing up like a thousand soldiers at attention. He forgot his pain, forgot his plight, forgot about the men who lay dying in infirmary beds horizons away. He forgot about the forty guns trained on his back and the white coats staring down through the high window. The only two things in the room were himself and the power, and there was nothing between them but the space of a small movement.
In the absence of all else, Merrick saw his mother’s face. He heard her voice. He didn’t remember what she looked like or how it sounded when she spoke, but he knew it was her. She was there, and she whispered to him. She spoke to him of her sadness, and a regret all her own. It was as if she’d laid those regrets out like an outfit on a bed, to show him what they meant, so he would never find the same things for himself. His life was a casualty of her selfishness, and now there was nothing left but the lives she’d left behind. Not just his life, his mother said. There were others, too. Others he didn’t know, and that he might never know. He was meant for more; meant to make the right decisions where she failed. Now that he could change everything, he couldn’t turn away from the gift she’d given him. Not if he wanted to. Not if it took everything he had.
Lightning, Raithur had said. That was how it felt, the instant Merrick’s hands grasped the coils. Like lightning bolts shooting through him, sprinting up his arms and engulfing his chest and quaking in his eyeballs like the shudder of a fast train. His body went stiff as a wood plank, every muscle tightened to the last fiber. The soft glowing lights in the chamber flickered and surged at the interruption. This was power, and it hurt more than any heartache he’d ever felt. He began to discern the Commissar’s voice over the rattling in his brain.
“Lieutenant, hand me your rifle. Second Platoon, stand down.”
There was a rush, and a flurry of movement.
“Coffing shit… he’s turning black as burnt sausage,” someone said.
“He’s still not dead,” said someone else.
“I’m putting him out of his misery,” came Pilot Wax’s voice again.
There was a moment of interminable silence, followed by a pair of gunshots. Merrick was shoved to the side, and one of his hands came free of the coils. He held on tight with the other, unable to feel anything else. When he turned his head, everything in the room was blurred and shaking like an earthquake. Two more gunshots sounded. Two more hard blows knocked him away from the transformer. His knees folded, and he slumped to the floor.
His whole body was humming. White tendrils curled up from his skin; whether smoke or steam, he couldn’t say. He tried to move, expecting the same stabs of pain he’d been feeling since he woke up in the pile of corpses at the jailhouse. But there was no pain. There was only the memory of it, a vague recollection of the places that had burned and itched and stung. When he found he could move without trouble, he took a breath to test his insides. Either he was too numb from the shock to feel anything, or there was no pain.
As he looked down at himself, his skin began to fade from asphalt-black to a deep red, then a bright glowing pink, and finally, to a warm tan color. Even his hands regained their normal coloring, all the way out to the fingertips. The only sign that he’d been through anything at all was that his fingernails were still missing.
He clambered to his feet. Before, there had been holes in him; gashes where he could see the meat and fat and bones inside. Now there was fresh skin, though it was hairless and tougher than the rest, like the scar tissue that formed over old wounds. Even the places where the Commissar’s bullets had struck him were glazed over with tough, smooth fibrosis. He felt the sites of his rejuvenated wounds to make sure they were real. It was all there. He was all there.
When Merrick looked up, every soul in the room and the glass control cage above was staring at him in stunned silence. The heat inside him was undeniable now; he could feel it lying in wait, alive and yearning. There was no stopping him now.
“You lived,” said the Commissar, half a whisper.
Merrick shot Pilot Wax a cool glance. “Soon, you’ll wish I hadn’t.”
“I was trying to help… to put you out of your misery. End your pain.”
“What about last month, when you kicked my career in the crotch? Did you care about my misery then? I was trembling when you handed down the sentence. I almost pissed myself, I was so happy to be alive. But you knew. You knew you were keeping me in suspense, making me fear for my life, and you loved every second of it. You knew pawning me off on the Sentries would turn me into this shell of a man.”
“I thought I was quite lenient with you,” Pilot Wax said, regaining some of his composure.
“Lenient? There was no leniency in your punishment. I made a mistake. I followed orders, and something terrible happened as a result. You didn’t put me out of my misery, you sentenced me to more of it. You took away the thing I loved most, and you let me wallow in my failure, as if I needed another reason to hate myself. There’s no end to the memory of what I’ve done. I haven’t once stopped thinking about that child since the day Captain Curran sent me on that mission.”
“We’ve all done things we regret,” said Pilot Wax. “We learn to live with them.”
“Have you learned, Commissar? Because you said I’d die down here. You sai
d you’d make sure of it. You’re regretting that, aren’t you?”
“That was if you didn’t prove you were on my side, see? But you have. You’ve proved that now, and you’ve shown me that you have something of great worth to the Scarred Comrades.”
Merrick shook his head. He strode over to where Wax was standing and looked him in the eye. “You should’ve told me that a month ago, Commissar. I did have something to prove to you back then. I did have something of worth. My allegiance. Now my allegiance lies in a better place. With the people of the city north.”
Merrick raised a hand to Wax’s chest and let the warmth flow. His fingers glowed white-hot, but the Commissar stood his ground. Merrick wanted to destroy him, to put an end to the man who had shamed him. Then he himself would take the reins of leadership.
“You won’t accomplish anything without me, Corporal,” Pilot Wax said, regarding him with a haughty smirk. “I built the city north. You can’t take it from me. Without me, there is no city north. Without me, there are no Scarred Comrades. Everyone knows my name, remember?”
Merrick lowered his hand. “Then it’s about time they forgot it.”
Shouldering past Wax, he started up the long staircase toward the surface.
CHAPTER 44
Living Away
The Poisoner’s hut was a more opulent abode than Lizneth would’ve imagined. Two stories, with a row of wooden beams jutting from the middle to compose the floor of the upstairs and the ceiling of the down, the building was one of the more sprawling hovels in the village. The outer door frame was trimmed in a mosaic of bright bits of seashell and shards of sea glass whose edges had been smoothed by the ravages of the waves for time untold.
“Mama Jak,” Artolo called, standing in the doorway.
“Come in,” said a feeble voice from within.
Artolo and Lizneth stepped past the open door of roughshod planks and into a living room so clean and bare it looked like it had never been used. Sparse furniture was arranged along the walls, all of it with a handmade appearance, as if it had been built to conform to the shape of the hut.
