by K A Riley
“It’s okay,” Epic promises the pair, a cottony-soft smoothness and a hint of condescension on his pale blue lips. “We’ll take them from here.”
With the type of silent communication possible only between two people who know each other intimately, Treva and her husband exchange a look I can’t read. Exuding a closed-off, “this is nobody else’s business” aura, the energy passing between them is secret, private, and palpable.
Is this how it looks to others when I connect with Haida? Do my friends examine my blank face and my “Galaxy Eyes” and guess at what’s happening in my head like I’m doing with Justin and Treva right now?
I do a mental scan for Haida, but I don’t feel anything. There’s no connection. Not even a flicker.
Don’t panic, Branwynne. Your connection’s been glitchy for days now. I’m sure she’s fine.
I know it’s wishful thinking, but that’s the only kind of thinking I can allow myself right now. Anything else is sure to drown me in a crippling helplessness from which I may never return.
Forcing myself to focus on what I have instead of what I’ve lost, I turn my full and furious attention to Justin and Treva.
Their mental exchange complete, Treva pivots her body toward her husband, but her eyes stay fixed on Epic, and I get the sense that even here and now, allied and victorious in battle, she doesn’t want to turn her back on him. Not that I blame her. Even for someone as clearly ruthless as Treva, taking your eyes off of that guy is a good way to wind up in an underground lab with a bunch of wires suction-cupped to your head.
“I don’t know if that’s such a good idea, after all,” Treva says, half under her breath.
Justin puts a hand on her forearm. I think it’s supposed to be a gesture of comfort and reassurance, but Treva draws her arm back like she’s been electrocuted.
In their matching red, white, and blue battle gear, the two of them stand side by side, Justin, pink-cheeked, balding, and with a matte-black, polymer combat rifle leaning against his shoulder, and Treva, scowling and still looking like she’s crunching on a mouthful of rocks. All they need is an oil-painted, peaked-roof house behind them and they could be a mid-21st century version of that “American Gothic” painting.
Clearly amused, Epic huffs up a shiny-toothed laugh in the face of their somber stillness and reminds them both that “a deal’s a deal.”
“What deal?” I chime in through a dribble of blood pooling at the corner of my mouth. My face still stings from where Bendegatefran backhanded me. I lean over, my eyes on Epic, and rub my jaw against my shoulder to try to dull the pain. It sort of works, and I’m relieved.
At least the giant arse didn’t dislocate my jaw.
“It’s about as easy of a deal as you can imagine,” Epic says, his eyes still locked in some sort of long-distance battle with Treva’s. “I help the Devoted win the war. They get the Unsettled. And I…well, I get you.”
Great. The only thing worse than being a pawn is being a captured pawn.
“The deal we made was before we saw what you turned them into,” Treva says, an accusing finger raised in the direction of the eight Hypnagogics, who are lined up and sitting, kneeling, or squatting in gargoyle crouches along the hood, roof, and tailgate of an oversized, twenty-three-foot Crew Cab pickup truck.
From blonde to brunette and ivory-skinned to mahogany brown, the Hypnagogics are a range of skin tones and body types. Perched on the truck with their smoky black battle armor and its orange edging, their equally orange eyes, and their stony, unreadable faces, their outlines blend into the distant mountain ranges beyond the far edges of the Army of the Unsettled. The eight of them look, for all the world, like a murder of giant alien crows.
“They’re not your concern,” Epic warns Treva with a finger wag of his own.
“They’re everybody’s concern,” Treva insists, her lips tight and the muscles in her jaw pulsing and tense. “If you’re planning on turning the Emergents into…them…” She points once again to the Hypnagogics, whose electric orange eyes are now flashing with amusement as they take in the scene.
“That’s not my intention at all,” Epic coos. Treva’s fists unclench, and the “V” between her eyes relaxes and evens out. “I can’t turn Emergents into Hypnagogics,” Epic goes on to explain. “It doesn’t work like that. But I can turn them into something a lot better. A lot more powerful.”
“You see?” Treva cries out to Justin. “He wasn’t helping us. He was helping himself. How long before we’re just another nuisance to him and he turns those…things…against us?”
“He won’t,” Justin answers with cool certainty. “We want different things.”
“Your husband’s right,” Epic agrees. He makes a contemptuous pfft sound with his lips and offers up a wide, general sweep of his hand, taking in everything in the vicinity: the smoke billowing from under the hoods of hundreds of vehicles, Angel Fire kneeling with his head down and his wrists cuffed behind his back, the victorious Cult of the Devoted, and the defeated Army of the Unsettled. And, of course, me and my captured friends.
“If you want this country,” Epic tells them, “it’s all yours. My guess is that you’ll come to the same fate as every despot before you. You’ll revel in your victory here. You’ll extend your reach too far. You’ll fall under the weight of your own empire and the added weight of your ego and ignorance. So, yes. Take the country back. But these kids,” he adds with a wry smile as he turns that swooping hand toward me and my Asylum, “are mine.”
Treva’s lips part, but Epic anticipates her interruption and cuts her off.
“I just handed you a victory over your one and only rival for power,” he says through what somehow manages to be a charming snarl. “Handing me a few stray meddlers in return…well now, that’s not too much to ask, is it?”
We all swing our heads in unison to await Justin and Treva’s response.
I’m half-hoping they’ll stand up to Epic and renege on whatever deal they had. I know we’ll be as good as dead in the hands of the Devoted. But in Epic’s hands…we’ll certainly be subjected to something a lot worse.
42
Voice
“Time for you to come home, my little orphans,” Epic says, his pink gums and ham-slab of a tongue flashing against the backdrop of his bleached and veiny-blue skin.
He’s not an albino. His eyes aren’t pink. Could he be leucistic like Haida? And is that just a coincidence, or is something else going on here?
“Where are you taking us?” Libra asks.
Epic smiles at her, his voice breezy, as if he’s inviting us all back to his flat for high tea. “Back to Sanctum. Only this time, we won’t be letting you get away so easily.”
“We won’t be letting you get away at all,” Aubrielle adds. Like Epic, this woman is seriously fit. I can see every striation in the sculpted muscles of her exposed arms. Of course, it’d be easier to admire her if she weren’t part of an evil cabal bent on dissecting me.
“It wasn’t easy,” Ignacio growls with a lot more confidence than I have at the moment. “We had to break in and slip past a dozen of your gutless guards.”
“And we must’ve knocked out at least two or three more,” Arlo adds, piggybacking his bravado onto Ignacio’s. “Plus, we freed Branwynne and got out before any of you idiots had a chance to blink.”
Everything they’re saying is true, but I give them both a silent “Shut it!” glare before they antagonize this lunatic into going completely off his trolley right here and finishing what he started.
Flanked by Aubrielle and Micah, Epic orders a handful of his Civillain Sentinels to get us moving.
“And don’t let them out of your sight along the way. Even without weapons, they still have…weapons.”
I wonder if he knows just how glitchy-at-best our so-called “weapons” have turned out to be.
Yes, we all enjoy firearms and bladed-weapons training classes in the Academy. But the one-on-one mentoring sessions—when we get to explore
and learn to harness our abilities as Emergents—that’s where we get the biggest thrill. Classes are mostly about camaraderie. But at night, when we’re done being put through our paces, that’s when camaraderie morphs into competition.
I can’t count how many hours we’ve spent decompressing in the Lounge, bragging—sometimes with passive-aggressive subtlety, sometimes with undisguised bluster—about who’s been able to do what on any given school day.
Ignacio will brag about how he worked with Brohn and was able to short-circuit a bug’s brain from twenty feet away. Libra, usually more modest, will quietly explain how easy it was to dismantle and reassemble one of War’s magnetic propulsion pads or reconfigure one of Wisp’s prototype telecommunication beacons. Arlo proudly shows off his newest scars, bragging loudly enough for everyone in the Lounge to hear about how the injuries he shrugged off during his training session with Mayla would have killed anyone else in the room.
Returning from a mentoring session with Rain, Mattea used to ask us to challenge her. “Give me any language,” she’d boast, “and I’ll speak it for you right now.” So the younger kids in the newest Cohorts to the Academy would go skimming through their wrist-mounted research-ports and then call out, “Swahili! Liki! Ishkashimi! Pawnee! Unsettled!” And, sure enough, she’d launch into a full recitation in whatever language they wanted. (Of course, since I don’t speak any of those languages, I could only assume she was doing as she claimed. For all I know, she was faking the crunched-face facial strain and making up every syllable on the spot. Still, it sounded impressive. Plus, she’d accompany each performance with a parenthetical little history lesson. “Liki was spoken in a small part of Indonesia until 2032. Ishkashimi from Tajikistan in central Asia is a spoken-only language and doesn’t have a written version. Pawnee is an Indigenous language from Native communities around the Platte River in the American Midwest. Not too far from the Academy, actually. And Unsettled is a patchwork of English, Spanish, and a bit of Pirahã, a language of a small community of native Brazilians who used to live along a tributary called the Maici River in the Amazon.”)
Sara—now that I’m thinking about our brag-filled exchanges in the Lounge—almost never joined in. I know she can do something manipulative with her mind. But whatever it is and the degree of power and reliability she possesses…well, she keeps that a pretty closely guarded secret.
As a Typic, Matholook doesn’t possesses any special abilities, unless you count being kind, empathetic, and heart-thumpingly handsome. While those are great qualities in a potential suitor, they don’t offer a lot in combat situations.
That leaves me. A seventeen-year-old Emergent who has, in the past, built a strong telempathic bond with a white raven, survived drones strikes and the Atomic Wars that turned London into body-filled badlands, and who has passed through solid walls…three times.
And who, in the present—terrified, immobilized, and disconnected from Haida—is about as deadly as a paralyzed puppy.
I reach out to Haida again, sure we’ll connect this time.
I need you.
Nothing.
At least let me know you’re okay.
Still nothing.
I’ll take anything. A word. A feeling. A breath.
When I’m answered with more nothing, I get angry at the tears trying to surge their way out. I order them back and tell them they’ll have to wait.
Not yet, I command in my mind. There’s plenty of time for worry and sorrow. Now isn’t it.
As we’re shoved into a forced march, all around us, the Army of the Unsettled are sinking even deeper into their own defeat.
On one side of us, three teenage girls are dragged by their hair from a small camper and are thrown to the ground where the Devoted soldiers kick them in the ribs, zip-cuff them, and then stand with one boot on the girls’ backs in triumph, while four more of their mates gather around in fist-pumping celebration.
On the other side of us, six screaming boys and girls—none older than about ten or eleven—scramble out from underneath a smoking pickup truck and try to run, but one of the Devoted whips out a Desert Eagle with a ten-inch barrel and fires a spray of bullets at the fleeing kids. A few of the stray bullets whiz over the heads of the limping children, plinking against the solid steel exhaust vents of a giant combine harvester. The rest of the bullets thunk into the kids’ backs, and all six of the young Unsettled sprawl to the ground.
Next to me, Libra gasps.
But there’s no time to contemplate, complain, or mourn.
Epic’s Sentinels lead us past the outer edge of the Army of the Unsettled on a forced march. Less than five minutes later, we’re in a desert clearing with five military escort jeeps parked in a protective huddle around an enormous matte-black truck. The ten-foot high, mostly windowless rig is thick and powerful, with synth-steel reinforcements around its body, armor plating on its doors, a silver sensor spike on its hood, an angry-looking metal grill on its front end, and four heavily studded wheels holding it all up.
Boxier, uglier, and nearly as big as the Terminus, it’s pretty much a rhino on wheels.
“This is the BearCat,” Epic announces with a pride-filled smile. “Our recommissioned riot-control Armored Evac Personnel Carrier. It’ll be your home for the next few hours while we take you back to Sanctum.”
Sanctum. The name of Epic’s town, with its rustic-looking surface and its high-tech underground labs, sucks the air out of my soul.
Don’t cry, I remind myself. And don’t panic. “Worry” isn’t a strategy.
“You’re not a revolutionary,” I snarl at Epic. “You’re just another version of Krug.”
“You couldn’t be more wrong,” he laughs. “While we’re waiting for the BearCat’s cells to recharge, let me enlighten you.”
Epic paces a little in front of us, but Micah shuffles backward a few steps while Aubrielle, stays stone still, her hands clasped in front of her as Epic “enlightens” us.
“Krug had it wrong. His vision for the world was the vision of a child. He thought of you Emergents as some kind of savior, a missing puzzle piece, a tool, and a weapon. But you’re not any of those things. Do you know what you are?” He tilts his head like he’s waiting for us to answer. When no one does, he steps directly in front of me and grins. “It’s good to see you again Branwynne.” (If my mouth weren’t so dry, I’d spit in his face.) He pivots from me to face the others. “You’re a warning. Your abilities, the things you can do…it was all an experiment. But you know that. What you don’t know is that the experiment failed.”
I glare at him, hoping my stare will be enough to bring him down but also knowing that it won’t.
“We’re not a failed anything,” I growl.
“Of course you are,” he laughs. “And not just because you allied yourself with the losing side of this war. No. Your failure is your absurd idea that you can fix the world. Did it ever occur to you that the world doesn’t need to be fixed? Every species has a hierarchy, a system of order to keep itself healthy and in balance. With your infantile dreams about some utopian future, Emergents upset that order. Only by preserving what is best and sacred about the nation we were can we ever hope to become the nation we were destined to be. Today is the first day of what will one day be known as a glorious history. Today, the Devoted will begin the districting of the Divided States. Their Districts will be pure. The Unsettled will ensure their safety and serve to protect the Devoted from their enemies, including your little Republics on the coasts.” His voice peaking with pride, Epic makes grand gestures to the left and right. “Even as we speak, the walls are being built. The coasts can live out their remaining days of lawless decadence until they crumble to ash like all those that have come before.”
“And what about them?” I ask, my eyes planted on the eight hooded Hypnagogics skulking in a semi-circle around us.
“Ah…them. They’re a necessary evil.”
“Evil is never necessary.”
“I forget sometime
s how young you all are. ‘Evil’ is just an arbitrary label people apply to anyone who refuses to agree with them. What you call ‘evil’ isn’t only necessary, it’s inevitable. But don’t worry. These Hypnagogics are just the beginning. They’ll protect the Devoted while I scour the world for more of them.”
“You can’t just make the Unsettled do your bidding. They’ll fight you.”
“They just did. And they lost. Don’t get so caught up on the ideal of freedom. Like evil, it’s all in the way you choose to look at it. What’s so great about freedom, anyway? Freedom is chaotic. It’s messy. It leads to anarchy, confusion, and entropy. Freedom is the enemy of order.”
“You won’t get away with this,” I snap. “The Devoted should know better than anyone. Despots ultimately fail. Empires always fall.”
“What’s to get away with? It’s a done deal. The wheels are in motion. The walls are already going up. The Unsettled have been stopped, and the Devoted are in place and dug in.” Epic offers up a self-satisfied, gloating smile. “The Wealthies control the arcologies. But now, the Devoted will control them. And once Justin and Treva and their Devoted army have secured the country, they’ll expand their borders until the world finally looks like they think it should.”
“But that’s their dream, not yours.”
“Their dream will help mine come true.”
“You’re helping them succeed just so you can have the power to take them down someday?”
“Ha! I never looked at it like that. But yes.”
“Someone will stop you.”
“Who?”
I part my lips, but no sound comes out. I don’t have an answer. So I’m startled when someone I can’t see calls out, “Us!”
I know the voice before I even figure out where it’s coming from. It’s a voice I know better than my own, a voice that’s guided me and trained me for the past five years.
