by K A Riley
The knife slides in a long even stroke along the boy’s throat, and a spray of blood fans out from the side of his neck.
We all scream at the same time, with Libra collapsing to her knees, her tear-stained cheek pressed to the cab’s glass wall. She says, “No, no, no” until the single, small word fades into her sobs.
Down below, Justin hands the knife to Treva who plants it under the chin of the little girl.
From his knees, Angel Fire raises both hands, his own screams muted by distance and by the glass walls of our makeshift sanctuary.
In a deadly mockery of the motion we saw in the classical music concert, Treva drags the knife along the little girl’s neck like a musician drawing her bow over violin strings. The girl’s head lolls to the side, and she slumps down to a blood-soaked heap at Treva’s feet.
Ignacio bangs the sides of both fists on the glass and echoes our own screams of devastated disbelief.
We all collapse to the floor, our eyes fixed on the pair of executions we just witnessed. We’re like that for a long time while we watch Justin and Treva continue to pace in front of Angel Fire.
“What should we do?” Libra asks.
“We can surrender to them,” Matholook suggests. “They might be…”
“Merciful?” Ignacio snarls. “Did that look merciful to you?”
If Matholook planned on answering him, he doesn’t get the chance. Arlo says, “Look” and draws our attention back down to where four of the Devoted are each dragging another pair of small children along with them. They toss the stumbling kids to the ground between Angel Fire and the two Devoted leaders.
Down in the clearing, Angel Fire, his head sagging low to his chest, points a weak, trembling finger in our direction.
“They know where we are,” I say out loud. Not that it needed to be said at all.
Led by Bendegatefran and Efnisien, a small battalion of the Devoted march between smoking rigs and over the lifeless bodies of the Unsettled to arrive at the base of the crane we’re in. With his axe on one shoulder and his other hand cupped around his mouth, Bendegatefran bellows out for us to come down.
“What do we do?” Libra asks.
“We fight,” I snap. “Unless you feel like dying.”
“We’ll die if we fight,” Ignacio says, pointing out the obvious.
“If they even let us get to the ground alive,” Arlo adds.
As if our situation weren’t already desperate or impossible enough.
There are six of us, weaponless and thirty feet up in the glass cab of a crane against a legion of cold-blooded killers, a giant, and his savage half-brother, all of them backed up by the entire might of the Devoted army and an Emergent with the power to keep them coming back from the dead.
Sara offers up an annoyed grunt and shoves past us to the cab door. She lifts the heavy latch and opens the steel door a few inches—just enough to let her voice be heard by the enemy troops below—and calls out, “We’re coming down!”
“Wait!” I snap. “We didn’t decide that!”
“Yes, we did,” Sara says evenly over her shoulder and turns around to start the backward climb down the ladder. “When we decided not to die.”
Going down there into the arms of the enemy doesn’t seem like a reasonable thing to do at the moment. But it’s better than being a treed cat.
Isn’t it?
Sara leads the way with Libra, Ignacio, and Arlo following close behind. I’m about to step out onto the ladder when Matholook locks his fingers around my upper arm and tugs me back. I turn and lift my head just in time for his lips to meet mine.
It’s not the best or the longest kiss we’ve shared (there was one in the middle of the night back at the Academy that made me sure my heart was going to sledgehammer its way out of my chest), but it might be the most important…since it might also be the last.
Which is exactly what Matholook tells me when he pulls back, a wry smile on his extraordinarily kissable lips. He tilts his head toward the cab door and in the general direction of the assembled army that might very well be about to double as our executioner. “Sara’s right,” he says. “The Devoted are more than they seem.” He steps through the cab’s open doorway and turns to face me before starting his descent. “But so am I.”
I’m the last of the six of us to hop down to the ground. We stand there, surrounded on every side by deep crowds of the Cult of the Devoted, and I have an instant awareness of what it must have been like to be a slave about to be fed to the lions for the amusement of a Roman emperor.
Bendegatefran and Efnisien are accompanied by their personal entourage of Devoted soldiers, most with handguns and all with holsters full of serrated, black-handled hunting knives strapped over top of their once-white dress shirts.
Efnisien flexes and unflexes his big-knuckled hands. His sharp-tipped fingernails are glossy as a raven’s talons.
Practically as big as an excavator arm, Bendegatefran towers over everyone in the open area of empty desert at the base of the crane.
Behind the two half-brothers and their personal security detail, more of the Devoted are stepping over the bodies of the Unsettled and herding the survivors into small groups to be zip-cuffed, processed, and passed off to small teams that begin leading away their prisoners of war.
The platoon led by Bendegatefran and Efnisien ushers me and my Asylum into a line and starts snapping buzzing zip-cuffs to our wrists.
They get Libra first. And then Arlo and Ignacio. They pause at Matholook, who offers his hands, his fingers curled into loose fists, for them to administer the restraints. The Devoted soldier hesitates, so Efnisien snatches the cuffs from the woman and snaps them onto Matholook’s wrists, himself.
Efnisien doesn’t bother to lower his voice in the least when he leans in close to Matholook and hisses, “Traitor!” in his ear.
Behind him, his axe glossy with blood and resting on his shoulder, Bendegatefran scowls, but I don’t know if it’s because of Matholook’s actions or because of Efnisien’s reaction.
His sharp incisor teeth protruding over his lip, Efnisien snarls at the rest of us and then snaps a gloating grin out of the corner of his mouth at Libra, Arlo, and Ignacio, who are squirming helplessly in their cuffs.
I know from experience that zip-cuffs tingle and feel almost soothing. But then they tighten the more you resist and ramp up a painful energy pulse by design.
With the exact same grimace on their face, my three friends struggle and wince against the restraints. I know the energy cuffs don’t affect Ignacio as much as they do Typics or other Emergents, so I suspect his knotted face is more about having to surrender like this, the indignity of being a prisoner, and the knowledge that we just secured a total, embarrassing, and epic failure.
The guards reward my friends with smug smiles and a reminder of what happens when you struggle. “Don’t worry, though,” they assure us all with a mocking laugh. “There’s plenty more pain to come.”
For some reason, they don’t make a move to cuff Sara at all.
When a female soldier—one of the shimmering blue-white zip-cuffs dangling from her finger and thumb like a garter snake—shuffles over to me and orders me to put my arms out, a floodgate opens in my mind, and it feels like every emotion I’ve ever felt in my life has turned into a live hand-grenade and exploded in my head.
Haida Gwaii!
The consciousness of the white raven blasts into my brain with a single word. I don’t know if it’s meant as a warning, a suggestion, or an order. But the word itself is unmistakable:
~ Fight.
So that’s exactly what I do.
40
Fight
With a strike I know is too fast for the woman in front of me to follow, I drive the heel of my hand into her nose, breaking it in an explosive spray.
Her head has barely snapped back when I’m already executing a reverse leg sweep on the Devoted soldier next to her. The man’s legs fly up, and before the back of his head cracks ag
ainst the jagged, rocky ground, I’m already on to Efnisien with a flying knee to his sternum.
Drooling, ferocious, and as savage as ever, he shakes off my attack and slashes at me with those sharp, talon-like fingernails of his. He misses my neck with one strike, and he gets close enough with a second shot for me to feel the breeze of his hairy hand whipping past my face. There’s a bumping, scraping clink as his nails rake over the ridged waffle-pattern of armor plating in the shoulder and upper arm of my jacket.
I glance down to see the bloody git’s managed to rip a hole in the material.
This red leather jacket and I have been through a lot. I swear…I’m going to survive just so I can make him watch while I mend it with thread I personally make from his entrails.
He tries a quick follow up with his other hand, but he’s off balance, and that slicing attack brushes harmlessly off my forearm deflection.
We each throw a string of stinging strikes. His shots are as wild as mine are controlled. It’s his savage unpredictability versus my enhanced, surgical precision.
After another lightning-fast flurry while his stunned mates look on, he comes out on the short end of an exchange of blows:
I get a few scratches on my arm. He gets the wind knocked out of him and an express, nose-first trip to the rough ground where he lands in a spread-legged sprawl among the rocks and a patch of scruffy gray-brown shrubs.
While I allow myself an inner celebratory cheer, a dark shadow falling over me blocks out the sun and chills me to the bone.
Still bound and with a Devoted guard holding him by the collar, Matholook shouts out for me to watch my back.
Whipping around, I clench my fists and dig the heels of my boots into the rocky ground.
I’ve faced Bendegatefran before. Twice. And I won. Both times.
A head taller than most of the motorhomes we’ve seen in the Army of the Unsettled and backed up by the Devoted, he’s an intimidating spectacle to behold.
Staring up at him, I feel like I might as well be fighting a tree.
The giant towers over me, and I get the impression he could just step on me or lash out with one sweep of his arm and send me spiraling off across the desert.
I don’t plan on giving him the chance to do either.
Grinning their confident smiles and cheering on their colossal comrade, the Devoted step back, leaving me face to face with their real-life Goliath in the circular clearing.
Leaning in, he swats at me with a hand the size of a car door. He misses, but the wind alone is enough to send me spinning and staggering backward.
Moving faster than I thought possible for someone his size, he catches me in the side with a follow-up punch that compresses my ribcage and vibrates my spine like a tuning fork.
“Stay close!” Matholook yells.
Close? I’m planning on staying as far away from this human sequoia as possible!
“He needs space to fight!” Matholook reminds me.
The guard behind Matholook kicks him in the side of the leg, dropping him to one knee.
And now I’m really pissed off.
Turning now to his weapon, Bendegatefran swings that Paul Bunyan axe of his with enough speed and force to slice through a truck.
But I’m no truck.
With my reflexes and predatory instincts jacked up to superhuman levels, I easily dodge the swing and step in close to Bendegatefran until we’re nearly toe-to-toe. (Considering the size of his boots, each of his toes must be as big as my entire foot.) I know from experience that he’s as deadly by himself as any army. But Matholook is right: he has weaknesses. Well, one weakness: He has no idea what to do with an enemy who is within arm’s length.
Sliding in close, my face barely even with his navel, I release myself to Haida Gwaii, who guides my leaping uppercut to the giant’s sternum followed by a quick side kick to his patella.
I leap back, expecting him to buckle and go limp as his kneecap succumbs to the ramped-up strength of my attack.
That doesn’t happen.
Instead, he growls loud enough to blow back my hair and swings a backhand at me hard enough to level a mountain.
Fortunately, I’m able to dodge the blow. Kind of.
His fist catches my shoulder, and I go flying twenty feet through the air, hit the ground, slide another ten feet, and come to a crashing stop with enough force to gouge a me-sized trench into the rocky terrain.
Overhead, Haida gurgle-clacks a way-too-late warning for me to watch out.
I send her a sarcastic, telempathic “Thanks” and roll to the side just as Bendegatefran’s axe comes swooshing down, its bladed edge lodging a foot deep into the hard-packed earth.
With his free hand, the giant snags me by my collar. With my red jacket bunched between his fingers and with his brick-sized knuckles digging in between my shoulder blades, he lifts me clean off the ground.
I kick and thrash with every bit of strength I have left (which isn’t much), but Bendegatefran has me locked up tighter than a puma on a possum.
I try to tap into Haida again, but nothing happens. At first, I think maybe she got scared and abandoned me. Or else she realized the futility of my trying to fight a human mountain with a few thousand members of his army backing him up.
But then, I realize the horrifying truth:
Haida hasn’t abandoned me. Out of the corner of my eye, I see her white-feathered form blasted by a Devoted sniper who’s kneeling on the rounded hood of a nearby tractor. His shot screams through the air, and Haida does a downward spiral about fifty yards away. She disappears behind a massive, green and yellow earthmover, and just like that, her consciousness fades from mine, leaving me more helpless, vulnerable, and plagued by a guilt big enough to rival the guilt I feel over losing Mattea.
In my mind, I scream loud enough to split my brain in two.
My bond with Haida goes both ways. She can lend me her abilities. But she can also experience my pain. And I can experience hers.
I try to say her name out loud, but Bendegatefran locks me in his grip, and the breath in my lungs is squeezed out of me in a rushing torrent.
Clamping my arms to my sides with one hand, Bendegatefran holds me still while Efnisien, brushing dirt from his face and spitting a gob of bloody saliva to the ground, slips around behind me and tugs a pair of zip-cuffs as tight as he can around my wrists.
Now, bound the same as my friends—except for Sara who remains uncuffed—the six of us are shoved into a tight clump in the middle of the clearing.
Also locked up with humming zip-cuffs, the troops of the Unsettled kneel around the perimeter of the circle with a ring of the Devoted soldiers standing on guard behind them.
The crowd parts as Justin and Treva step forward to gloat in their victory. But the real surprise is right behind them.
Just as the troops of the Devoted parted for their two leaders, those leaders now step aside, themselves, and offer small, deferential bows as three people—two men and a woman—stride forward to stand, feet wide and fists planted on their hips, in gloating victory.
One of the men is bald and looks carved out of marble. His iris and pupil-less eyes, the exact opposite of my “Galaxy Eyes,” are white with tiny black dots sprinkled in. The other man is thin, bug-eyed, and curved as a question mark. The woman is exotic-looking, with honey-colored skin, hair as smoky as raven’s wings, and a pair of metallic legs with a built-in propulsion system that generates an air wave distortion as she half-walks, half-glides forward.
I know all three of these people. How could I not?
It’s Epic, Micah, and Aubrielle: the trio who kidnapped me and Haida and who would have certainly dissected both of us down to our DNA if my friends hadn’t help us escape. They call themselves a “Triumvirate.”
His coppery-brown hair a spiky, disheveled tangle, Micah seems closed off and sad, a sagging, slump-shouldered, husk of a human. He’s Kress’s brother, but I think a mum and dad are the only thing they could possibly have in common.
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The other two members of their Triumvirate look supremely happy, only I can’t tell if it’s because they’re on the winning side of a war or if it’s because they’re about to get their scurvy little claws into me for a second time.
41
Better
While everyone else tends to turn some shade of red under the hot desert sun, Epic’s bald head somehow stays milky white, with just enough of a spiderweb pattern of thin, pale blue veins running under the skin to save his skull from looking like the world’s largest pearl.
Unlike the patriotic kit of the Devoted, he’s dressed in canary-yellow scrubs that manage to look baggy and comfortable while still making him look evil and scary. His veiny, muscular arms are fully exposed under his short-sleeved shirt. Even his shoes—glossy white with black trim and a golden backwards “E” emblazoned on the side—have managed to resist the red scuffs brought upon most surfaces out here by the scorched desert sand.
Sculpted and robust, he’s a figure of confidence, vigor, and lethality. Not the kind of guy you’d want to run into in a dark alley.
Or a light alley, for that matter.
It’s quite the magic trick, one replicated by Aubrielle, whose hearty, athletic build and elegant curves seem out of place in a world plagued by starvation, war, disease, and death.
Behind Epic and Aubrielle, his dark, soulless eyes pinned to the cracks and crags of the ground at his feet, Micah has the defeated, distressed expression of a scolded toddler.
His side just won. What does he have to look so glum about?
Snapping his fingers and tapping his foot to some tune I guess only he can hear, Epic takes a mini-stroll in front of me and my Asylum. He shakes his head like we’ve disappointed him somehow before planting himself in front of Justin and Treva, who don’t seem to know if they should be hugging Epic, attacking him, or running from him in fear for their lives.
I don’t blame them for the puzzled expressions on their scrunched faces. This guy is part techno-geneticist, part pit-bull, and all psycho.
