Army of the Unsettled: A Dystopian Novel (Academy of the Apocalypse Book 3)

by K A Riley

  Surging past her, Ignacio elbows one the guards in the ribs and vaults Angel Fire’s desk. Shouldering straight through the team of archers, he sprints the length of the Trial Barge, sliding to a stop next to Arlo while Matholook and I shout and flail in the unrelenting arms of the guards.

  We both stop struggling and stare as the uproar from the crowd plummets into a muted groan.

  With Ignacio’s help, Arlo stands up. Looking around like he’s just woken up from a long sleep, he nods his thanks to Ignacio and gently pushes him a step back.

  With everyone staring in heart-stopping silence, Arlo reaches behind his neck and locks both hands onto the arrow’s shaft. Grimacing, he pulls the arrow clean through his neck and holds it in front of his face like he’s a duck hunter showing off a fresh kill as blood drips from the arrow’s flight feathers and begins to pool on the wooden deck around his boots.

  Waving his hand with a “shoo fly” flourish, Angel Fire orders the guards to release us, and we scramble over to surround Arlo, pat him on the back, and marvel at his impossible accomplishment.

  “I guess that’s going to be a new scar for you,” Ignacio giggles.

  Arlo makes me gag a little when he slides his finger back and forth into the raw, puckered hole going straight through his neck. “It’s for the best,” he grins. “I was looking for a new place to keep my pencil.”

  Sara says, “Gross,” smiles, and crosses her arms in a defiant huff.

  Microphone in hand and squeezing his way through us to throw his arm around Arlo’s waist, Angel Fire says he agrees with Sara. “Definitely gross. But quite impressive!”

  Leaning into the microphone, he announces to the now-cheering crowds that we have passed the Body Appeal.

  “Arlo’s got his abilities back,” Matholook whispers to me, his head low and his lips barely moving. “Are you able to…?”

  “Reconnect with Haida?” I squint and tell him, “It’s patchy.”

  “Enough for us to try to make a run for it?”

  “Yes. But not enough to keep us from getting killed in the process.”

  “Where does that leave us?”

  “Here,” I sigh. “Unfortunately.”

  Matholook gives my shoulder a supportive squeeze. “But one step closer to not being here.”

  I put my hand on his, grateful for a pleasant thought in the middle of so much carnage but also worried that pleasant thoughts alone might not be enough to get us through whatever happens next.

  20

  Character Appeal - Ignacio

  The archers slip around us and grunt as they pry their arrows out of the wall.

  As soon as they’re done, they head back to their grandstand while the huge wooden wall starts to crank back down, and my Asylum and I shuffle out of the way to avoid being crushed as it folds with a clunk and a steamy hiss back into the floor of the Trial Barge.

  “The third appeal,” Angel Fire announces to us and to the crowd, “is the Character Appeal.” He stalks across the flatbed to stand in front of us. “In this Appeal, your answers will let us know if you’re the kind of person who should be trusted and spared…or else cast off the Trial Barge and run over by a cement-mixer.”

  I’m waiting for the crowd to laugh. When they don’t, I realize the taunts and applause from the audiences have died down to next to nothing. And then I realize he might be dead serious.

  Angel Fire summons Ignacio forward.

  Full of macho brio, Ignacio strides out to the middle of the Trial Barge. He may be ready for whatever’s about to happen, but I’m sure as frack not.

  His microphone to his mouth, Angel Fire glides in a slow circle around Ignacio.

  “I’m going to walk you through a scenario. The more honest you are when you answer my questions, the better your chances of walking off this Trial Barge with your head and limbs still attached to your body. Do you understand?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Close your eyes.”

  Ignacio looks over at us, and the five of us shrug in unison.

  Sighing, Ignacio closes his eyes. Kind of.

  Angel Fire leans in close until he’s nearly nose to nose with Ignacio. “No peeking.”

  Ignacio groans, “Fine” and clamps his eyes shut all the way as Angel Fire’s voice wafts out again from the black speakers posted around the flatbed for everyone to hear.

  “Imagine an empty room.”

  “A room?” Ignacio asks, his eyes closed, the sleeves of his white military jacket rolled up to the elbows, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his black tactical combat pants.

  “An empty room.”

  “Okay.”

  “Describe it.”

  “I don’t know. Big.”

  “Go on.”

  “Okay,” Ignacio’s shoulders droop, and he huffs out a resigned sigh. “I can barely see the ceiling or the walls. I know they’re there. They’re just far away.” He pauses, and when he starts up again, his voice rolls out in serene, almost surprised-sounding waves. “Really far away. And there are dangerous parts of the room. Little pockets where it’s too cold or too hot. I can’t see them, either. But I know they’re there.”

  “Imagine a cube in the room. Describe it.”

  Ignacio scrunches up his face, but his eyes stay clamped shut. “A…cube?”

  “Yes. Describe everything about it. What it looks like. Its size. Where it is in the room.”

  “Okay. It’s a big cube. Not huge, though. It’s floating a little. And rotating, but it doesn’t want to. It wants to be still, but something is keeping it moving.”

  “Imagine there’s a ladder in the room. Describe it.”

  “It’s close to the cube. No. It’s part of the cube. And it’s not just one ladder. There are six of them, each running along one of the faces of the cube.”

  “Now, imagine a horse in the room.”

  “A horse?”

  “You know. The big animal.”

  Ignacio’s eyelid twitches, and he peeks out at Angel Fire. “I know what a horse is.”

  “Describe it. And close your eyes.”

  “Fine. The horse…it’s got a serious side and a playful side. It’s beautiful. And…it’s hurt.”

  “And finally, imagine a storm in your invented room.”

  Ignacio’s hands tighten into fists at his sides. “It’s horrible. Loud. Churning. But I can control it. No. I’m not controlling it. I’m partnering with it. I can’t stop it. But I can kind of move with it. It’s not so bad, anymore.”

  The crowd gasps as Ignacio drops to his knees, and my Asylum and I automatically get ready to sprint over to him, but we’re stopped by Angel Fire who holds his hand up, palm out, and shakes his head.

  With uncharacteristic tenderness, he steps over to Ignacio and rests a hand on his shoulder. Ignacio looks up at him with either strained, puzzled, angry, grateful, or else totally hypnotized eyes. I honestly can’t tell.

  Guiding him to his feet, Angel Fire helps Ignacio balance with a steadying hand on his forearm.

  “It’s called the Cube Test,” Angel Fire says into his microphone once Ignacio can stand on his own. “Its origins are unknown.” He puts his hand up next to his mouth like he’s revealing his deepest, darkest secret. “Personally, I first read it about a year ago in an old college textbook on Relational psychology.”

  Dropping his hand back down, he goes on to tell us, “Some say the origins of the Cube Test are from the Sufi religion. Others says it’s just an urban legend about a parlor trick used as a means of social seduction. Or it could be like one of the personality tests in a Japanese book called Kokology. That’s Greek for ‘the study of psychological games as a guide to human behavior.”

  With a second conspiratorial whisper from behind his hand, he tells us, “I found that one in what was left of a library in Amarillo.”

  Pausing, Angel Fire seems to notice that the audience is still there, leaning in and hanging on his every word. They all seemed rowdy but otherwise perfect
ly happy watching me lose the debate and watching Libra and Arlo succeed at their appeals challenges. I get the sense this whole business about the Cube Test is as new to them as it is to us.

  Angel Fire rounds on Ignacio, standing toe to toe with him and taking one of Ignacio’s hands in his.

  “As your spiritual guide through the many rooms in the house of you, I’ll interpret your answers.” Angel Fire suppresses a giggle, but it might also be a sneeze.

  “The room,” he begins, “is how you see the world right now. The cube is you. It’s your ego, your sense of self. You said your cube was solid. That’s your strength. You described it as floating. A little. That’s your bits of humor and whimsy breaking through an otherwise serious soul. And dark. That’s your secret. The ladder represents your friends. The distance between the ladder and the cube reflects how close you are with your friends. Your description was…unique. You and your friends are…intertwined. Mostly. Your bonds are unbreakable. Nearly. Most of you support each other. In some ways, some of you are each other. The horse is your ideal romantic or spiritual partner. The storm…that’s your obstacles. It’s all the things in your way, whether they’re put there by chance, by someone else accidentally, by someone else on purpose, or, most significantly, by you.”

  Ignacio blinks hard and stares down at his hand in Angel Fire’s before asking, “Why would anyone put up their own obstacles?”

  “The same reason anyone does anything evil, cruel, or stupid: Fear.”

  Angel Fire holds the microphone up between himself and Ignacio, so both of their voices can be heard.

  “So…,” Ignacio asks. “Did I pass?”

  “You are a young man of great physical strength, high moral character, and a fascinating blend of confidence and insecurity. Your forces are in balance. Barely. That’s what makes you dangerous to some, helpful to most, and compelling to all. And yes…you passed.”

  Angel Fire winks at Ignacio, and the crowds burst into a frenzied round of applause as Angel Fire drops Ignacio’s hand and raises his own fist in triumph.

  Although I’m not quite sure what he could possibly be celebrating.

  Ignacio just won, right?

  Still a bit shaky, Ignacio makes his way back over to our Asylum where we greet him with hearty pats on the back that I think nearly knock him over.

  The six of us square up to face Angel Fire, but he’s now busy leaning over the side of the flatbed, high-fiving the kids in the front row of the Port Grandstand.

  Ignacio is standing on one side of me. I tug his sleeve and lean in so only he can hear me. “I get the room, the cube, the ladder, and the storm. That all sounds like you. But the horse?” I ask. “The partner. What was that one all about?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  True to his word and despite just having scored another victory for us, he sulks his way between me and Matholook, nudges past Libra, Arlo, and Sara, and takes a quiet stand by himself at the back of our Asylum.

  21

  Soul Appeal - Sara

  Angel Fire finishes fraternizing with the grandstand audiences and pivots back around on his heel to face us.

  “The fourth and final appeal, the Soul Appeal is the discovery of your inner essence, the part of you deeper than action, instinct, or intellect. The Soul Appeal is your last and only chance to render your own verdict for or against yourself.”

  “I guess you’re up,” I say to Sara, hoping this won’t be the last time we all see each other alive. Just because there’s no love lost between us doesn’t mean I want to see her fail. Especially if her failure means our death, too.

  “So,” Sara sighs at Angel Fire, her whole body brimming with frack-you attitude. “What do I have to do? Dodge a bullet? Eat a bug? Assemble a jigsaw puzzle with my feet? Demonstrate my knowledge of the quadratic equation?”

  “You’ll wish it was that easy,” Angel Fire answers with a cool, easy laugh.

  Reacting to Angel Fire’s silent nod, the Unsettled guards surround the rest of us and march us to the edge of the trailer. With a chorus of warbled grunts, they herd us onto the small metal bridge spanning the distance between our trailer and the one next to us.

  The spectators on the trailer cheer and chant as they shuffle back in a crowded clump to the last rows of the steel bleachers to make room for us. Some of the hooting kids reach out to us—possibly to hit us, or maybe just so they can go home and say they touched real-live Emergents.

  Either way, the guards order them to back off and brandish some menacing looking bladed weapons to show they’re not joking around.

  Turning their focus back to us, the guards force us to stand in a line behind a metal restraining bar, leaving Sara standing alone in the middle of the Trial Barge.

  She sways and rocks along with the motion of the trailer, and her short blond hair is whipping all over the place, but she doesn’t seem to notice any of it. There’s a cloak of calm over her, a calm that shouldn’t be cloaked around anyone in her situation.

  Angel Fire hops up onto his desk. For a kid on the shortish side, he’s agile, and he makes the high leap look easy.

  Taking his microphone from where it’s tucked in his belt, he pins his eyes on Sara. “You and your friends over there are running from a horde of Survivalists,” he begins. Matholook and I share a confused look and a simultaneous shrug.

  “You’re running,” Angel Fire continues, “and you find a good place to hide. But you have a baby with you. You know it’s about to cry and that if it does, it’ll give away your hiding place. If that happens, you and your friends—and the baby—will all be killed. You have two options: Kill the baby and save everyone, or let it cry and condemn you all to death.”

  He points to one of the men by the tall score-clock behind him. The man sets the arm of the clock to “6” and the hand starts moving right away, inching its way backward toward “1.”

  Sara puts up her hands in a spiritless shrug. “Am I supposed to tell you what I’d do?”

  “Your answer will tell us all we need to know about you. And based on that, we’ll know what we need to do with you and your companions over there.”

  “What’s happening?” Libra asks into my ear.

  I shoo her away and tell her to stop breathing on me.

  Matholook is more charitable. “It’s a moral dilemma,” he whispers over to Libra. “There’s no right or wrong answer.”

  “Then how will Angel Fire know if he should—?”

  “Kill us or not?” Matholook’s voice drops to a husky whisper. “I wish I knew.”

  Alone on the middle of the flatbed, Sara seems to be lost in thought, while the crowds behind us and on the flatbed on the other side of the Trial Barge sit back in silence, waiting for her response.

  I know what she must be thinking: Is it worth killing a baby to save six people? And I can imagine the follow-up questions Angel Fire might be sadistic enough to ask: What if it weren’t a baby? What if it was a cat? Or an unusually loud bug? What if it was someone you knew and loved who just couldn’t stay quiet? Or someone you hated? What if it was a hundred people being saved instead of just five?

  The arm of the clock continues its march, taking a few torturous seconds to move from one number to the next. Just as the thin, tapered black arm is about to click over to the “1,” Sara opens her eyes wide and plants her fists on her hips.

  “You have your answer?” Angel Fire asks from his wide-legged perch on the top of his desk.

  “I do.”

  “Present your answer, and we’ll see if you live or if you die.”

  I don’t know how I’d answer, and I definitely don’t know if Sara is going to say she’d kill the baby or sacrifice all of us.

  It’s a no-win situation, and both answers seem horribly wrong.

  I guess that’s why they call it a “dilemma.”

  “First,” she says, leaning into her own microphone and ticking off numbers on her fingers as she goes, “I track down the psycho who thought c
oming up with such a sadistic, no-win hypothetical situation would be in any way helpful in determining the state of my soul. Second, I pull his oversized sport coat over his head and get my friend Ignacio over there to short-circuit the electrical synapses in his pea-brain. Third, I gather up my friends, and we get the frack out of here, leaving the drooling psycho-boy and his huge, smelly, rolling army to rot away in the desert.” She has her head tilted down as she grins and glares at Angel Fire through the tops of her eyes before adding, “Hypothetically speaking, of course.”

  She’s now standing, alone and exposed, in the middle of the Trial Barge, facing Angel Fire. She’s got the microphone clasped in both hands and that cheeky grin still plastered on her face, while Angel Fire stares at her hard enough to burn holes in her forehead.

  It’s a frozen moment in time.

  The Army of the Unsettled keeps moving along, of course. But everything else—the shouts of the crowds, our thoughts, and Angel Fire’s orders and pronouncements—come to a stunned and screeching halt.

  He stares down at her from the top of his desk. I don’t know if he’s swaying from the motion of the rig or if he’s just gone catatonic. He doesn’t say anything. No questions. No snappy patter. No comeback.

  Sara stares right back. No. Not exactly. She’s not staring. She’s waiting. She’s watching. It’s the look Rain gets when she gives us chess lessons and we take too long to move. Sort of amused. Sort of impatient. But also brimming with confidence. After all, if we’re taking that long to react, our opponent knows she must have done something right.

  Angel Fire finally blinks, and that seems to snap the rest of the world back into motion. The crowds boo and jeer. Next to me Matholook’s breath is light as gossamer in my ear. “What did she just do?”

  “Not much,” I shrug with a sigh. “Just condemned us all to death.”

  Angel Fire works his jaw around a few times and clamps his thin fingers into strained, white-knuckled fists at his sides. His eyes seem to be fighting between the urge to open wide in surprise or else scrunch down into squints of fury.