by K A Riley
In addition to the symmetrical gaps between the vehicles that form a network of roads, people are trading and haggling under kiosk awnings on the sides of vans, which appear to serve as a series of shops. We pass a place where little kids are running around on the back of an open flatbed, playing some kind of full-contact soccer game. The sides of the open trailer are lined with high walls of black mesh to keep the ball from skittering off into traffic. Right after that, we come upon a similar trailer, only this one has steel grating around its exterior, while inside, five boys and five girls are engaged in a full-on, no-holds-barred, bare-knuckles blood-brawl.
At first glance, I think it must be some sort of punishment. But all ten of the kids—through bloody lips and missing teeth—are smiling, laughing, and seem absurdly happy.
All of it—the shoppers, the soccer players, the fighters, the machines, and us—are in creeping but constant motion.
Ducking the little stones and various bits of garbage and debris—mostly finger-sized twigs, orange peels, and more crumpled balls of tin foil—people keep throwing at us, we shuffle along. Guided by Domino-teeth and with three of the Unsettled, each armed with a holstered hunting knife and a chainsaw carried rifle-style in both hands, marching stiffly along on either side of us, we move in a right-angled pattern through the makeshift avenues of the moving city.
It’s hot out, and although the Unsettled are dressed in drab layers of what looks like heavy, itchy clothing, I don’t think I’ve seen any of them sweat.
Part of me is hoping we don’t make it out of this alive. I don’t want to have to report back to Kress about what happened. After the stunt I pulled by slipping out of school and spending the day with the Devoted before letting Matholook follow me back to the Academy, I think her faith in me is hanging on by a thread as it is.
From the back of our procession, Arlo calls out, “Is anyone else hungry?”
One of our Unsettled guards reaches out and tugs at the metal collar around Arlo’s neck. Since we’re all attached, the rest of us stumble but manage to avoid dragging each other to the ground.
“You’re just in time for dinner,” the guard laughs.
To eat it, or to be it? I wonder.
We finally arrive at the rear end of a long, slow-moving tractor-trailer.
We don’t stop, though. (Nothing here seems to ever stop.) Instead, two women—maybe fifty-years-old or so—lift the latch handles and swing open the double doors at the back of the moving rig.
Domino-teeth slides the thick steel wire out of the loops of our collars and wraps it in a neat, clunky coil. We all breathe a generous exhalation of relief.
We may not be free. But at least we’re not shackled anymore. I guess there’s more than one definition of “freedom.”
Domino-teeth hands the coiled wire-rope to a slump-shouldered boy who clips it to a carabiner on his belt. Another boy collects the collars from our necks. We all rub our necks where the collars have left a perfect red ring in our skin. Libra’s the only one who thanks the boy, and he glares at her for a second through a snooty squint like she just asked permission to spit in his breakfast cereal.
Turning his attention to Domino-teeth, the second boy gives her a little salute and sprints up toward the cab of the tractor-trailer. Jumping up onto the foot-rail, he leans into the passenger-side window and has a conversation with the driver we can’t see or hear from this far back.
“Up you go,” Domino-teeth says to us with a splotchy but rather pleasant smile.
Like she’s inviting us in for high tea.
“Into there?” Ignacio asks, peering into the gloomy dark of the trailer’s interior.
“It’s called the ‘Trial Barge,’” she explains, her face rosy with glee.
That definitely doesn’t sound like a place where they serve high tea.
At the no-nonsense insistence of the guards, we’re forced to climb into the steaming steel box, and the double doors close shut behind us with a metallic finality that echoes in our ears.
Inside of the deep, empty trailer, we bump against each other with the rocking sway of the rig as it continues along with the rest of the moving city.
“What is this place?” Libra asks. Her voice sounds smooth and soft in the trailer’s humid interior.
“Looks like a jail to me,” I tell her.
“Aren’t jails supposed to have bars?”
“You spent most of your life in a Processor,” I remind her. “Did you see any bars in there?”
Libra drops her eyes and offers up a meek, “I guess not.”
“At least it’s roomier than that last rolling prison,” Matholook says, his palms up in a make-the-most-of-it shrug.
Sara, looking more annoyed than worried or afraid, has Ignacio on one side of her and Arlo on the other. Turning back and forth between the boys, she asks, “Can’t one of you do something?”
“What do you suggest?” Arlo asks through a wrinkled frown.
“I don’t know. Ignacio, can’t you short circuit this rig?”
Ignacio shakes his head. “I think maybe there’s too many vehicles and people around. All the electrical energy is overriding my brain. I’ve never been around this many machines before. They’re all giving off an electrical energy signature. I’m used to it in small doses from my training sessions with Brohn. But this is a total, and honestly agonizing overload.”
To emphasize the point, he presses his fingertips to his temples and rubs them in a slow circle.
“Besides,” Arlo adds, his voice a molasses drawl, his head lolling down in defeat, “even if he could somehow stop this truck, what would we do after that? How would we get out? Where could we go?”
“True,” I tell him, doing my best to stay positive but failing. “But not especially helpful.”
“What about you?” Sara asks, swinging around to face me. “Or that white raven of yours?”
“I don’t know where she is. Ignacio’s right. There’s something…disruptive about this place.”
“Maybe it’s all the smoke,” Libra suggests.
“Maybe. That might stop Haida from trying to find us,” I agree, tapping my temple. “But it doesn’t explain why I can’t even connect with her.”
I almost tell them about my last couple of connections with Haida and the fuzzy images of war and the feelings of confinement and betrayal she shared. But until I get it all sorted out in my own head, it’s probably best to keep the uncertain, unexplainable rubbish to myself.
Biting her lip and pressing her hand to the corrugated steel wall, Libra asks, “What do you think they’re going to do to us?”
“Nothing good, I imagine,” I sigh.
No sense sugar-coating the obvious, right?
Arlo cups his jaw in his hand and squints at me through the darkness. “They could have hurt or killed us a million times over if they wanted to. The fact that they haven’t…well, it’s not the worst sign in the world, right?”
“Maybe they don’t want us at all,” Ignacio suggests.
“What do you mean?”
He flicks a thumb toward Matholook. “Maybe they want him. The Devoted are their enemy, not us.”
“Everyone is their enemy,” I snap back.
“The Devoted did not do that back there,” Matholook insists. “Those Outposters were wrong. Or else they were lying. We spend half our lives keeping an eye on the Unsettled. They’re out of control. Violent. Look at this place. Look at where we are, what they’ve done already. What they still might do.”
“The girl who killed Mattea…,” Libra begins.
“What about her?” I ask.
“She looked like an Unsettled. She dressed like them…”
“But?”
Libra folds her arms across her chest and leans against the truck’s hot interior steel wall. “I’m starting to think maybe there’s more going on here than we thought.”
“You said it yourself,” Matholook insists. “She looked like them. She dressed like them. She was ar
med like them. What makes you think she was anything other than an Unsettled murderer?”
After a brief pause while she appears to gather her thoughts, Libra nods and seems like she’s ready to surrender the point. But then she reminds us that the Unsettled are almost never out alone. They have a reputation for killing but not for murder. And the Outposters knew details about the Devoted, and they didn’t have any reason to lie about the invasion. “Something just isn’t adding up,” she finishes.
Next to me, Matholook tenses up, and I swear I can feel the heat of anger steaming from his body.
Before he can react to Libra, though, and before I can react to him, we all jump at a series of bangs and clunks that fill the steel-walled trailer. The wall at the far end of the trailer near the cab groans, cranks up, and starts to rise.
As bad as being captured and trapped in this steel box is, it’s way better than knowing that the worst is almost certainly still to come.
14
Charged
With an ear-splitting refrain of metallic clanks and rattling clunks, the wall of horizontal sections up front by the cab rolls up, a foot at a time, to reveal a huge wooden desk and a massive, wide-armed, high-backed chair. Trimmed in gold and with a queue of shiny, ruby-red stones around its top edges, the desk extends nearly from wall to wall of the trailer’s nine-foot-wide interior. The chair—dark wood decked out in chiseled star and crescent moon patterns and with burgundy pads on the arms and a matching burgundy pillow for a headrest—looks less like a random piece of Unsettled furniture and more like a throne for one of the Wealthies.
Like everything else around here, the furniture shifts and shimmies with the uneven roll of the tractor-trailer. The chair keeps knocking against the desk like it’s an annoyed dog scratching at the back door, desperate to get back inside of a locked house.
Two banks of flickering yellow lights on black tripods behind and to either side of the enormous mahogany desk cast rakish shadows throughout the interior of the boiling hot space. Spotlight-bright and lava-hot, the lights illuminate every scratch, scrape, dent, and patch of dried blood on the walls and covering the wood-planked floors of our moving prison.
For the past five years, I’ve been accustomed to the clear, white holo-lights of the Academy or the sizzling cherry-red sunlight of the outdoors.
In here, glowing furnace hot, the old-style incandescent bulbs burning from the two light-stands feel Hellish and pointlessly aggressive.
Matholook and my Asylum and I all squint, blink a whole whack of times, and drape our arms over our eyes.
“I think they’re trying to broil us,” Libra guesses, her cheeks flushed and her forehead shiny with sweat.
Personally, I think “broiling” is an exaggeration, but it’s sort of hard to disagree when I can feel the hairs on my forearms getting singed off.
From behind the lights, an adult man cries out in a grandiose baritone, “Level Two for the Governor’s entrance!” and, as if in answer to the prayers of my frizzled, crispy-fried skin, the intensity of the array of lights drops a couple of notches. It’s not much, but it’s enough to let me know we’re probably not going to be roasted alive. Yet.
I look over and exchange glances with Matholook and Libra who are on either side of me.
“That’s a little better,” Matholook sighs.
“Everyone okay?” I ask the rest of my Asylum.
“I’ve been ‘okay-er,’” Ignacio grumbles from just behind my shoulder.
Sara is standing next to him, unnaturally calm, like she’s about to yawn. Her eyes lock onto mine. “I’m not looking forward to dying,” she confesses, “but yeah, I’m okay.”
“Arlo?” I ask.
He drags the back of his hand across his scarred face and then rubs the heels of both hands in little circles over his eyes. “The heat feels kind of nice, actually.”
I can’t tell if he’s kidding or not. “I think you have defective pain receptors,” I tell him.
“My pain receptors are a million times better than yours,” he teases, and I can’t help but smile.
A rustle and a scrum of commotion cause all of us to snap back to attention. Squinting into the light, we spot the motion of shadowy human figures. From out of the darkness behind the lights, a boy appears.
Escorted by an adult man on one side and an adult woman on the other—both dressed in matching white, terrycloth bathrobes—the boy steps around one of the two light-stanchions and positions himself, chin up and chest out, next to the wide-backed chair behind the huge wooden desk.
The boy’s glossy black hair is neatly combed with a tidy part on one side. He has the orangish-olive skin of many of the Unsettled, but he’s cleaner and more polished than most of the ones we’ve seen so far. He’s decked out in an odd combination of a yellow dress shirt, an oversized plaid sport coat, ironed blue jeans two sizes too big, and thick-soled work boots. He’s got small, round reading glasses perched on his nose, and a pair of heavy canvas work gloves on his hands. Thin and short but not frail, he looks like a twelve-year-old who couldn’t decide if he wanted to be a business executive or a construction worker for Halloween. So he decided to raid his father’s closet and go as both.
The adult man next to him, blond and scruffy faced with a few days’ worth of silvery stubble, moves away to stand at ramrod attention off to the side while the woman, her dusty brown hair falling in a cascade of tangles over her face, hauls the clunky, high-backed chair out from under the desk and steps back as the boy hops into it. He looks small and swallowed-up in the large chair. With a clear line of sight under the front of the desk, I can see his feet don’t quite touch the floor of the trailer.
After slipping off his thick work gloves and setting them neatly to the side, he draws a silver pen out of a cylindrical, pewter holder on the desk and taps it a few times against his knuckles before scrawling something onto a piece of yellow, curled-edged paper at the top of a pad. Tearing the sheet off with magisterial flourish, he hands the paper to the silver-stubbled man behind him. The man takes it with a little bow and hands it to the woman who skitters off with it, disappearing with a hunched-over gallop into the darkness behind the bank of lights.
As we’re all still rattling around and trying to keep our balance in the constantly shaking trailer, the boy turns his attention to us. Pushing his wire-framed glasses up onto the bridge of his nose and then lacing his fingers in front of him, his elbows planted firmly on the table, he announces with arrogant gravity, “My name is Governor Angel Fire.”
“Did he say, ‘Angel Fire’?” Libra whispers.
“Governor Angel Fire,” I correct her.
“Silence!” he shouts from behind his desk, and I choke back a laugh. His voice is high-pitched and about as intimidating as the average piccolo.
My amusement fades, however, when Silver-Scruff, standing protectively behind him, reaches under the flap of his bathrobe and draws out a modern-looking ARX-160 assault rifle and levels it straight at us. With a telescopic stock, a sixteen-inch barrel, and a grenade-launcher mounted underneath, it’s a beast of a weapon.
We know from our lessons that guns like that are hard to come by. The Wealthies have commandeered or stockpiled most of the best weapons, and there’s no telling if the one aimed at us right now is even loaded.
I’m not in a hurry to find out.
I drop my internal grin, and I can feel my Asylum tense up and shuffle a few inches back in the face of the potentially deadly weapon being aimed at us in very hot, very close quarters.
Although it’s hard to conceive of the six of us dying in a hail of gunfire right here in the back of this steaming trailer-office of the Unsettled, it’s not entirely impossible to imagine, either.
If my imagination had fingers, I’d cross them right now and hope there’s some better fate in store for us.
Governor Angel Fire adjusts his fat-knotted tie, slides down from his monstrous chair, and walks over to Silver-Scruff. Placing his hand on the barrel of the m
enacing gun, he shakes his head. The armed man, his jaw clenching and unclenching, lowers his weapon and takes a half step back, as Governor Angel Fire walks around to the front of the desk. Hopping up, he sits on its front edge, looking for all the world like a ventriloquist’s dummy with his face waxy, his feet dangling, and his skinny ankles exposed above the top of his clunky work boots. His speaking voice is slightly deeper than his shrill shouting voice when he tells us, “Unlike some of you scavengers left in the world, we Unsettled obey strict rules and codes of conduct.”
I’m just about ready to ask him what he plans to do with us, but he cuts me off with a glare and a firmly raised hand.
“You thought you were following us,” he says with a smile, “but really, it was the other way around in reverse.”
“Isn’t that a double negative?” Libra whispers in my ear.
“I’m not about to argue semantics with this kid,” I mutter back through the corner of my mouth.
“What’s wrong with that?” Ignacio beams, leaning over my other shoulder. “There’s always time for some antics.”
I give him a backhanded whack, which he absorbs with a wincing, embellished cry and a big step back.
“You’ve been charged with a crime,” Angel Fire announces, pointing directly at Matholook.
Matholook presses a fingertip to his chest and looks back and forth between me and Angel Fire. “Me?”
“You are Devoted.”
“Um...yes?”
“Step forward, Devoted.”
Matholook complies, edging his way to the front of our group.
Angel Fire makes a show of glancing at his fingernails before polishing them on the lapel of his jacket. “You attacked an Unsettled caravan. You killed innocent Outposters.”
