Fall and Rising

by Sunny Moraine

  “A few,” said Rachel. “Not that many.”

  “That’s fine. If we’re going to take a group under the fence to break into the armory, a small team is better than a crowd of untrained people.”

  Lochlan coughed. “You’re along for the charge, eh, chusile? You, the ex–desk pilot?”

  Adam gave him a look. “You really expected me not to?”

  “I suppose not.” Lochlan returned his gaze, level and hard. “So you know of course I’m coming with you. Someone has to keep your perfect ass alive.”

  Adam smiled faintly. “I wouldn’t want it any other way.”

  The cure was passed on slowly. Outwardly, there was no sign that anything was changing. The horn blared for the midday meal, and people stumbled and shuffled toward the vats of watered-down porridge the same way they always did. This time there was a little dried meat and some bread—which Adam gathered was a fabulous luxury. At first it had struck him as odd that the inmates were so poorly fed—after all, it wasn’t as though the Protectorate was suffering from food shortages, and there wasn’t any obvious reason why it would serve anyone to keep them all at a low level of starvation. But now he understood that it was a symptom of the same phenomenon that might also serve them well in the end.

  The Protectorate fundamentally didn’t care. Food shipments from off-world were probably infrequent, and nothing particularly edible appeared to grow on the planet itself. He guessed that the porridge was watered to make it stretch.

  That, and a camp full of sick, weakened people was a camp full of people who were unlikely to launch any concerted resistance.

  They would never see it coming.

  And it was coming. Standing in line among them, Adam could feel it. The staggering, the shaking—in many of them it was genuine. However, in more than a few of them it was an act, and underneath, they were alive and keen and stronger. Their bodies were already healing, some of their ingrained, bred physical hardiness clearly remaining. Another day and they would be ready.

  Adam curled his hand around Lochlan’s, squeezing. After a second or two Lochlan squeezed back, firmly.

  Despite everything that had happened, they were still together.

  “So fast,” Lochlan whispered, looking around. “Chere, I never thought it would happen this quick.”

  “That’s the thing. The healing … Doing it comes naturally. It felt like something I had always known how to do.” Adam suppressed a smile. He couldn’t possibly assume that everything would work from here on out, but the temptation to do so was strong, and persistent optimism had been nudging at him all day. “Naomi was right; it’s like a virus. It’ll be all over the camp by the end of tomorrow. Before then, I think we’ll have enough people.”

  Lochlan shook his head. His face was unreadable, but his hand tightened even more.

  “Lock. It’ll be fine.”

  “You can’t know that.”

  “No, I can’t. But I can have faith. Can’t you?” Adam did smile then, quick and soft. “I thought you were the irrational, superstitious one. Lost in whatever gibberish you get from the stars and animal guts.”

  Lochlan huffed a laugh. “Shut up, you goddamn raya.”

  Adam lifted Lochlan’s hand to his lips and kissed his knuckles, and if anyone saw, he couldn’t have cared less. Compared to the other risks they were taking, this was no risk at all.

  So night fell. And they waited.

  Inside the large central shelter, Rachel was playing with her children in a little alcove set between two roughly connecting walls and keeping half an eye on the entrance as people trickled in. The children were laughing and chattering to their mother. Adam wondered if it was simply relief at seeing their mother well again or better health in themselves, since he gathered she had healed them.

  Or maybe, once shown how, one of them had healed the other.

  The shelter was easily ten times the size of Rachel’s, and the ceiling was draped canvas, the walls the same scrap material as the rest of the camp’s shelters. The floor was a series of boards and pieces of sheet metal, all of it caked with mud. The light of a few hanging lanterns cast weird shadows around the place, making it seem both larger and smaller than it was.

  Adam supposed that uprisings had been started in less grand places.

  Lochlan stood behind him, one hand at Adam’s back. Aarons, for his part, was leaning against one of the sturdier supporting walls with his arms crossed. It was, as usual, difficult to say for sure what he felt, but he had come, and that meant a great deal.

  At one end of the shelter, the tarp over the door was lifted aside, and in stepped Naomi, posture even straighter and her color better than it had been a few hours ago. She nodded to Adam and approached him, while the others hung back, looking him up and down with no little skepticism.

  “I’ve told them what’s going on,” she said when she reached them. “They’re not sure about you. Or the Bideshi.” Lochlan let out a dry breath of a laugh, which Naomi appeared not to notice. “They are sure that they’ve been healed, and all of them want to know more. They’ll listen. But again, I have to ask you to let me do the talking.”

  After another half an hour or so, the place was filled to capacity. Adam tugged Lochlan toward the back of the crowd, taking a place near Aarons. As they settled themselves, Naomi raised her hands and at once the crowd went silent. All eyes were on her.

  “You know why you’ve been called here. We have a matter of vital importance to discuss,” Naomi announced. “All of you have been healed of the sickness that’s been ravaging us. I can’t tell you exactly how or why. You’ve felt it—you have to make sense of it for yourselves. What you do need to understand is that this gives us an opportunity. The guards don’t know yet that we’re healthy. They’ve gotten complacent. They won’t be expecting resistance. If we move fast, and we stick together, we have the chance to win our freedom.”

  No one spoke, but many people glanced at each other, brows furrowed but without any hint of incredulity or scorn. Many looked thoughtful. A good sign, overall. After a few seconds, Naomi continued.

  “We have a short period of time where we can hide what’s happened. We’ve discovered a blind spot near the fence where the guards never get too close. I believe we can take advantage of it.”

  “The fence is lethal,” someone toward the outer edges of the crowd called. “You touch it, you die. How are we supposed to get around that? Even if there is a blind spot.”

  Murmurs of agreement. Once more Naomi raised her hands for quiet.

  “We can’t go over or through it, no. But I believe that it’s possible to go under.”

  Again there was silence, and this time the exchanged glances were accompanied by raised eyebrows, widened eyes. Before anyone could speak, Naomi went on.

  “Digging a safe distance down will take some time. But if we begin tonight and keep going after dark tomorrow, I think we can be done before the following sunrise. Then a small team could go through and make their way to the armory, gear up with whatever they can find there, and release the rest of us. There are transport ships near the hangars. We can hijack a couple of them, load everyone up, and make our way off-world.”

  Still no one said a word. Adam took a breath and held it. This wasn’t good. It didn’t feel good. Maybe he had put too much faith in Naomi’s clout.

  Maybe Lochlan was right. Maybe he did have a little too much faith here in general.

  But then Lochlan took his hand once more, thumb stroking behind his knuckles. “Just wait, chusile,” he whispered, warm breath close to Adam’s ear. “Give them a chance.”

  “Where will we go?” Another man’s voice spoke up, skeptically, but Adam took note of the phrasing. Will. That couldn’t mean nothing. “Even if we make it off-world without being massacred, without failing completely, no one in the Protectorate would take us. Nowhere would be safe for us. Where could we go where we wouldn’t be caught again? Or killed outright.”

  “There’s more than the Pr
otectorate,” Rachel said, moving to stand beside Naomi. “There’s the frontier. The Protectorate doesn’t have a lot of control out there, and pretty much anyone has their price. Or we could go even farther.”

  “Regardless.” Naomi folded her arms across her chest, her face set and stern. “It’s better than just sitting around in our own shit waiting to die. Which is all there is for us here. Now. I need to know who’s with me and who is content with that last option.”

  Nothing. Adam realized that he was holding his breath, every muscle tense. But then a young woman with brown hair cut close to her scalp stepped forward.

  “I’m with you. We’ll probably all fucking die anyway, but what the hell.” She barked a laugh. “You’re right. Almost anything would be better than this.”

  It happened in a wave. Other people nodded and raised their hands, first a few and then more and more until the entire space was a sea of upraised hands. Naomi watched them, a smile spreading across her face.

  Lochlan squeezed his shoulder, murmuring, “I told you.”

  Aarons muttered something about fucking suicide, but when Adam glanced his way, a smile was playing about his distorted mouth.

  “Good.” Naomi waved for silence again. “We move now, then. Get anything you can shift dirt with. There can’t be more than ten of you working at a time or we’ll draw too much attention. And those of you with peacekeeper training, report to me. Anyone on the team going for the armory has to know how to use a weapon.” Something cold and sharp passed across her face, though her smile remained. “There’s only a hundred or so of you in here, and I know all of your names. If the guards find out about this, if we’re betrayed … Maybe they’ll kill us. But I’ll find whoever’s responsible, and I’ll make sure that they go first. And slow.”

  There were nods. A few grim smiles that mirrored Naomi’s. Even a laugh or two, though just as grim, and a little thin. They believed she would do it. They believed she could. And they were behind her if she had to.

  “All right. Let’s get going. Everyone who doesn’t have a job right now …” Naomi let out a long breath and pointed toward the door, direct and steady and commanding. “Go out and heal people. As many as you can. Don’t tell them exactly what’s going on, but tell them to be ready. Tomorrow night, before dawn, we’ll either be free … or dead.”

  Lochlan’s arms ached. His back ached. His knees ached: the result of keeping himself in a low crouch for what seemed like hours. He was exhausted to dropping point and felt as if he might simply fall into the trench they were digging and go to sleep. Still, he kept carving away at the ground, gouging it, scooping soil into makeshift buckets and passing it back to the people behind them to be hidden away, so no mound of dirt was left behind as a giant red flag to the guards.

  They weren’t digging a hole so much as boring a crawl space under the fences. It was currently tiny, and Lochlan could tell that when it was finished, it would be barely big enough for an adult to wriggle through. The ten people on the dig team weren’t working all at once but rather were operating in shifts, one by one replacing those who were too tired to go on. Every half an hour a single guard passed a few hundred yards away, and everyone dropped onto their bellies, as still as stones.

  Incredibly, it appeared to be working.

  At last Lochlan rolled to the side and lay on his back, panting. Someone shuffled past him to take over, but he didn’t move away. He gazed up at the stars, which were hazy through a thin layer of cloud, and let his muscles gripe at him for a bit.

  Adam sat down next to him, tugging a stray dreadlock away from his face. “You okay?”

  Lochlan coughed and smiled. “Brilliant. Fucking brilliant. This is a lovely honeymoon, darling; thank you so much for thinking of it.”

  “Honeymoon?”

  “Well … Yeah.” Lochlan pushed himself up on his elbows, which complained, but he ignored them. “Don’t you know how Bideshi weddings work?”

  Adam now appeared distinctly worried. “No.”

  “Two people who are deeply in love must endure pain and the threat of death together and for each other,” Lochlan said in a singsong voice that bespoke well-known tradition. “So. That’s that, then. Pretty sure we’ve done it several times over.”

  Adam stared at him. It was delightful. “I— I didn’t. You mean we—”

  “The thing is … And I really think you should know this.”

  “What?” It was almost a squeak. Lochlan nodded solemnly.

  “I’m completely fucking with you, you stupid raya.”

  Adam stared again, then sputtered and punched Lochlan’s upper arm. Lochlan let out a barely hushed peal of laughter.

  “Your face, chusile.”

  “You asshole. That’s not even sort of funny.”

  “Yeah, pretty sure you’re wrong there.” Lochlan slung an arm behind his head, settling back. It had been funny, and more than that, it had felt important, as if he had grabbed for and briefly held a fragment of his life as it had been.

  And yet. Adam’s reaction kept tugging at him.

  “Does it bother you that much?” he asked quietly. “The idea of being married?”

  Adam turned his face away, his hands moving uncomfortably over and over each other. “I mean … I don’t know. I … I never thought about it. Two … people like us. Getting married. Does that happen?”

  Lochlan pushed himself up, shaking his head in wonder. “Of course it happens. Why the hell would you think it didn’t?”

  Adam shot him a sharp look. “You know why.”

  “Yes, I suppose I do.” He sighed. He hadn’t been ready to be disappointed. If he was honest, he hadn’t thought about marriage either—not at all. It simply hadn’t been on the scanner. Yet now he realized that he was. A little. “Never mind, then.”

  Adam was silent for a few minutes, his attention fixed in the middle distance. Lochlan was starting to slip into a light doze when Adam spoke again.

  “I think I … I would want to know it when it was happening. That’s all.”

  Lochlan turned to Adam. The spotlights around the perimeter fence were on and bright, but Adam’s face was thrown into shadow, with only its barest outlines showing. Like that, he appeared both incredibly young and profoundly old, a man who had already seen and done more than enough for one lifetime and would do more still. Lochlan hoped.

  He hoped so much.

  “So does that mean you want—”

  “Patrol!” one of the diggers hissed, and Adam dropped flat beside Lochlan, his face to the ground.

  And when the patrol had passed, Adam took one of the diggers’ places, and for the rest of the night they hardly spoke to each other at all.

  The morning dawned exactly as the others had. Lochlan and Adam returned as the sky was beginning to lighten, curled up together on Rachel’s floor and fell into a precious few hours of exhausted sleep. When Lochlan opened his eyes, it was well past midmorning. They had missed breakfast, but he wasn’t hungry. Perhaps it was nerves. Perhaps he had simply moved past hunger for the moment.

  Leaving Adam sleeping, he got quietly up—groaning as his abused muscles let out fresh protests—and made his way out of the shelter. Beside the door there was a small barrel that appeared to have been set to catch whatever rain fell, and he dipped a hand into it—it was only about a quarter full—and scrubbed at his face. He wasn’t sure it did any good, but he felt slightly more human.

  “Morning.”

  Aarons was coming toward him, lifting a hand. Lochlan lifted one in return and dropped into a crouch, trying to stretch the worst of the stiffness out of his thighs.

  “How’s the dig coming?”

  Lochlan shrugged. “Naomi was right; we’ll finish tonight. Probably not even that long after dark. I’m not going, though. I’m in the lucky bunch that gets to storm the armory; I need to not be about to fall the fuck over.” He huffed a laugh, rubbing his eyes again. They felt gritty and too big for his head, as if he had drunk too much lovina the night
before. “Where’ve you been?”

  “With the team you’re on.” Aarons grunted. “Looking ’em over since I guess I’m the one with the most actual combat experience. They’re not much, but they might not all get killed.”

  Lochlan shot him a glare. “I can more than hold my own, old man.”

  “Old is right. Like I said, experience. I didn’t say anything about your capabilities, boy, so watch your damn mouth.” Aarons paused, then added, less tersely, “For what it’s worth, I believe you. I’ve seen what the Bideshi can do. I’d trust you before any of them. It’s good that you’re with us.”

  Lochlan nodded, flicking his gaze away. “Yeah. Well. We have to work with what we’ve got.”

  “Don’t we always?” Aarons dropped down beside him, letting out a breath as his knees cracked like breaking twigs. “Like I said, you’re right. I am old. Older than I wanted to be.” He lifted his head, as though to scent the air. “But something is happening. Can’t you feel it? It’s like the whole place is waking up.”

  It was. Lochlan could. Life, in a way that there had not been. It was nothing that he could see or hear, but the despair that had hung over the place like a noxious cloud had lifted, and the sky was clear.

  Would the guards feel it too? Would they have any idea what it really was?

  He glanced at Aarons. “Can I ask you something?”

  “I guess.”

  “You people … You care about perfection more than anything else, isn’t that right? Perfection of all kinds, but especially physical. No weakness. No sickness. No place in your pristine world for the likes of Adam fucking Yuga. Or any of these people. That’s so?”

  Aaron’s brow inched higher, but he nodded. “Not sure it’s mine anymore. Not after what happened to me. And honestly I never felt like it was the best fit. Never obsequious enough when it came to those ideals. But yeah. Essentially.”

  “So why did they let you stay after you got the scars? Looking like you do?”

  For a long moment, Aarons didn’t answer, and Lochlan wondered if he was offended by the question. He had half expected the man to be so, and had decided that he didn’t much care—he still wanted to know. It had been eating at him for days: a thing that didn’t make sense.