by K A Riley
The girl shouts at the boys to stop eating until after they’ve acknowledged the assistance they’ve been given. “No one ever died sayin’, ‘Cheers,’ before acceptin’ the ‘ospitality of another.” Her voice gets proper and dignified, and it sounds like maybe she’s quoting someone.
Sufficiently reprimanded, each boy offers up a mumbled, “Cheers,” “Ta,” and “Thanks” before scurrying off, rodent-like, to devour their protein cubes in the dark corners of the building’s lobby.
“The Hawkers—,” Brohn starts to say, but the little girl looks at him through dark eyes and a malevolent smile.
“They don’t quit,” she murmurs, a protein cube forming a right-angled bulge in her cheek. “They don’t bargain. And they don’t fail. They just ‘unt and catch, don’t they?”
“Why would they want to hunt us?”
The girl shrugs like Brohn just asked the dumbest, most obvious question in the world. “‘Cause you are who you are.”
“Listen. We’re trying to get to—,” I start to say, but I wind up talking to empty air. The girl and the three boys seem to have melted completely back into the darkness.
With the rain stopping as abruptly as it started, Brohn and Rain lead me, Cardyn, and Terk out of the building and back onto the road toward what we hope will lead us to the Tower of London. Granden told us there are answers there, and I could really use the security of a few answers right about now.
After a few minutes, Cardyn taps Brohn on the shoulder. “I know that was the humanitarian thing to do back there…”
“But?”
“It might not have been the smartest thing to do.”
“Doing the humanitarian thing is always the smart thing to do.”
“Shouldn’t everyone be a humanitarian?” I ask.
Brohn grins. “Sure. I suppose.”
“I mean, seriously. What are you if you’re not a humanitarian?”
Cardyn raises his hand. “A selfish fracker?”
“Sounds about right,” I laugh.
“That girl…She was wrong, you know,” Brohn says.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“Not every little thing helps. Some little things actually hurt. A lot.”
Cardyn teases Brohn for trying to sound “deep,” but I think Brohn’s right. Sometimes in life we’re handed some pretty bad things disguised as “gifts.”
With Cardyn and Terk unhelpfully pointing out every shadow where someone might leap out and kills us, we continue on our way, following Rain in what we hope is the right direction.
We’re only a few minutes into this stretch of our journey when I get the feeling we’re being followed.
Not by the girl or her young companions but by what looks, out of the hazy corners of my eyes, like a tall figure, possibly female, in a black and green spackled dress. I catch a glimpse of the person a few times as we walk along, but when I stop for a second to look closer, it’s just a shadow of a rusted light-post cast against the last standing wall of a crumbled, two-story building.
I’m wondering if it’s real, a trick-of-the-light hallucination, or the result of that little girl’s vague but creepy warning.
Before I have a chance to say anything, Brohn and Rain agree that we should keep moving, and I jog along to keep up with my Conspiracy.
My body may be in the right place, but my mind is on those poor kids and on the shadowy figure I really hope was just a figment of my overactive imagination.
12
Encounter
With the rain stopped and the skies clearing, the Auditor apologizes for not having better access to coordinates and local geographic information, but we all forgive her.
Squinting, Rain concentrates, doing her best to tap into her Emergent abilities to help guide us. Terk hasn’t been with us for most of our adventures, so he has a lot of very understandable questions about what and who we are, exactly. He’s especially curious about Rain.
“It’s like a…gathering,” Rain explains to him. “A collection of information. A kind of…culling.”
“Culling?”
“Culling. It means selecting. Like choosing one option or rejecting another.”
“She perceives choices,” Brohn elaborates. “The rest of us have choices. Rain sees them and eliminate the bad ones.”
“It’s most likely a genetic or manufactured enhancement of her brain’s prefrontal and orbitofrontal cortexes working in conjunction with the basolateral amygdala,” the Auditor chimes in. “It’s all in the part of the brain largely responsible for decision-making, fear response, and pleasure acquisition.”
Terk nods his head, but his face and wrinkled forehead are a cluster of confusion.
“Don’t worry, Big Guy,” Cardyn laughs. “I don’t know what she’s talking about, either.”
“There are more than just the five basic senses,” I remind them both. “Render navigates the earth’s geomagnetic field with a kind of internal compass. Dolphins and bats use echolocation. Dogs and snakes have heat-sensing, infrared capabilities built into their olfactory systems.”
“Ol…Olfact…?” Terk stammers.
“It means how they smell,” Cardyn clarifies.
“Oh.”
“Rain sees auras,” Brohn offers. “Things kind of light up for her to tell her which option to choose.”
“Or which path to take,” Rain adds, pointing to the right and leading us down a junk-filled corridor between two banks of collapsed storefronts and stripped-to-the-bones row-houses.
Brohn steps over a small slag of melted metal. “We all make a million decisions every day. What to wear. What to do. Where to go. Rain just does it better.”
Cardyn clambers over a mountain of twisted and tangled steel. He picks up what looks like half of a hubcap and whips it off to the side. “It’s hot,” he says, blowing onto his fingertips. Standing in a superhero pose, his fists on his hips, he surveys the unending wreckage around us. “I bet this was a neat city once. Shame it got turned into this Martian hellscape.”
Terk tilts his hood back and drags a sleeve of his robe across his forehead before swinging around to grin down at me. “I’m sweating.”
“Try wearing an ankle-length black leather dress.”
“Wow,” Cardyn says, squinting over the devastated city and into the morning sun. “They really messed this place up, didn’t they?”
Brohn reaches a hand down to help Rain up the pile of rubble. “We had Krug. What’s their excuse?”
Rain shakes her head as Brohn hauls her to the top of the pile next to Cardyn. “There are more Krugs in heaven and earth…”
One at a time, Brohn helps me and Terk up and over the shifting mound of sizzling-hot steel, loose bricks, scrapped building materials, and, to our horror, half-buried piles of what are, unmistakably, human bones.
We slide down on the far side of the dune, only to have to repeat the same procedure several more times over the next hour until we arrive at a relatively flat road. Instead of piles of rubbish and rubble, this particular avenue is filled with deep craters we have to navigate our way around.
“Quite the engineering feat,” Cardyn says, staring down into one of the deep holes in the street. “They managed to turn the Earth into the Moon.”
“This way!” Rain calls out, beckoning for us to follow her.
A few minutes later, we arrive at what appears to be some kind of walled-off section of the city.
“Are you sure about this?” Terk asks, squinting up at the towering wall of steel and piles of random wreckage. “This doesn’t look normal.”
Cardyn inches up to stand next to him and turns to catch Rain’s eye. “I’m with Terk on this one. Maybe your Culling-thing could lead us to an oasis or a nice beach somewhere?” Rain snaps him a nasty look, and Cardyn holds his hands up in surrender. “Hey. I’d settle for a meadow or even a nice, unkempt English garden.”
Brohn surveys the wall and runs the palm of his hand along part of its patched-together surface of
brick, stone, and steel. “A place this heavily fortified must be important. You don’t think it’s the Tower of London, do you?”
“It’s not,” I assure him. I’ve seen pictures of our destination, not just on the viz-caps Granden showed us in D.C. but also, in my mind’s eye. Frankly, it’s becoming harder to tell the difference between what’s in my head because I’ve seen it and what’s there because I dreamed it. It’s worrisome, but I’m not quite ready to talk to my Conspiracy about it. Not even Brohn. Not yet.
Terk takes a step back and tucks himself halfway behind Brohn. “What do you think’s on the other side?”
“Well, either someone’s back there trying to keep themselves in…”
“Or else they’re trying to keep us out,” I finish.
“How do we know anyone’s even on the other side?” Cardyn asks. “We’ve been in this city for a week and have seen a grand total of five people.”
“It’s been over an hour,” I remind him. “And we’ve seen dozens. Remember the rooftops? The girl and the little boys?”
Cardyn gives me a sheepish, half-apologetic grin as I point into the distance on the far side of the wall where thin plumes of smoke are drifting upward in lazy, gray tendrils. “That’s not mist. That’s fire. And it’s from people.”
“Either way,” Cardyn says, backing slowly away from the imposing barrier. “Everything here is screaming, ‘Keep out!’ and I think we should…you know…listen to the screaming.”
I hate to admit it, but he’s right. Coils of barbed wire and energy ports for laser-wires surround what appears to be an expansive compound. Stretching off into the invisible distance, the walls are a graffiti-filled mess of corrugated metal, thick sheets of plywood, sections of brick, and, in some places, just random junk—plastic bins, kitchen appliances, rusted car doors—piled as much as twenty or thirty feet high. Any gaps have been sealed off and slathered in lumpy, craggy patches of concrete, warped panels of wood, or gooey black tar.
With Cardyn still dragging his heels and mumbling his objections, we start walking around the perimeter. Rain presses two fingers to her temple as she tells us she’s pretty sure this is the right way, but Cardyn is still being his usual whiny self and keeps griping about how “pretty sure” is “a very sure way for us to wind up hacked to pieces by the radioactive mutants I know are lurking around here.”
Brohn tells him to quit being so dramatic, but I can’t say I disagree with Cardyn’s pessimism. Apparently, Terk can’t either.
“Do you really think this place is radioactive?” he asks. Although he has a history of being as nervous as Cardyn in certain situations, I don’t think I’ll ever get used to such a feeble and wavering voice coming out of such a giant of a person. Especially one who basically has the enhanced strength of an Emergent, an industrial machine riveted to half of his upper body, and a high-end techno-human consciousness strapped to his back.
If it was me, I bet I’d feel pretty powerful all the time.
“No way it’s radioactive,” Rain assures Terk. “We’d have felt the effects by now.”
“Effects?”
From her secure place in the circuitry-filled disk under Terk’s robe, the Auditor provides a slew of gruesome details. “Human reactions to radiation poisoning include blistering skin, petechiae hemorrhaging, nausea and vomiting, diarrhea, nerve damage, organ failure, hair loss, fatigue, and radically elevated heartrate.”
Cardyn raises his hand. “Um…I have some of that.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I insist, reaching out to tousle his ruddy hair with my fingers. “You’re not going bald.”
Brohn motions for us to stop, which we do.
Up the way and in the exterior shadow of the wall, a pile of dirty rags is pushing a bulky, wonky shopping cart on squeaky wheels and making its way toward us.
“It’s a person,” Terk says unnecessarily.
Cardyn turns to Brohn. “Is this the part where you do the ‘humanitarian thing’ and give away the rest of our food?”
Brohn answers with a deep sigh of frustration but otherwise, he doesn’t react to Cardyn. He doesn’t react at all, except to shift his arbalest on his shoulder and hover his hand over the quiver of crossbow bolts at his hip.
Render banks and kraas! from somewhere overhead. I feel his consciousness slip halfway into mine. I don’t get words from him this time. Just a feeling that screams, Warning!
I put my arms out to stop the others from continuing toward the person, but it’s too late.
The person—I realize now it’s a girl—sloughs off her thick layers of patchy canvas rags and whips a rust-speckled broad sword, as long as a hockey stick and wide as a strip of aluminum siding, out of the shopping cart.
I take an instinctive step back and right into a pair of meaty, hairy arms that loop around my neck in an excruciating and foul-smelling chokehold.
To either side of me, I see Rain, Terk, and Brohn have also been locked up from behind, each of them with an assailant in back of them and the business edge of a sword or dagger pressed horizontally across their necks.
It’s not like us to get caught off guard, and I rip off a string of internal expletives at myself for being so careless.
With a yellow veil draped loosely over her head and with her pleated orange dress billowing around her, the shopping-cart girl advances on me in a flash and tilts the sharp end of her sword in the direction of my neck.
Three boys, dressed in baggy yellow blouses, orange tights, and knee-high leather boots, appear around her. One slips out from a small trapdoor hidden at the base of the wall beside us. Another boy clambers down a makeshift ladder from the barbed-wired turret above our heads, and the third heaves himself out of one of the huge craters next to us in the road.
From across the street, six girls—not any older than us—materialize with longbows drawn, their razor-tipped arrows glinting in the reddish morning fog.
The six archers are outfitted in clean, matching white dresses with a red cross like an upside-down sword on the front. The dresses are cinched at the waist with a thin black belt over top of what appears to be a silvery, skintight, full-body jumpsuit.
Just as mud-crusted as the girl with the shopping cart, all of our other assailants carry a variety of old but deadly-looking swords, spears, and daggers in leather holsters strapped to their waists.
Brohn’s skin can probably handle any of the edged weapons and even a full-on volley from the archers. After all, I’ve seen him shrug off bullets before. For the rest of us, though, just being an Emergent won’t prevent us from being quickly and gruesomely killed.
It all happens so fast, I don’t even have time to consider my options.
From above us, Render folds his wings back and prepares to divebomb our attackers, but I send him a mental order to hold off.
Don’t startle them.
~ They’ll kill you.
They’re kids.
~ Kids kill, too.
Please?
Sending me the mental equivalent of an annoyed snort, Render breaks off his attack and banks away, landing on the curved arm of a nearby, steeply-angled light post where he can keep an eye on us.
Unlike Render, who has the option to fight or fly, the rest of us stand frozen, facing the unkempt girl and her team of assassins, unsure if any move we decide to make will be our last.
13
Stable
Leaving her shopping cart, the girl in the orange dress pushes her shabby yellow veil back and leans in toward me, her sword pressed forward in her outstretched hand. With my hands half-raised, I can feel the tip of her weapon make a small break in the skin just above my collarbone as the girl stares at me through deeply suspicious eyes. “Whacha doin’ ‘ere?”
“We’re…trying to get to the Tower of London,” I gulp.
“Well,” she beams, “you’ve come ta the wrong place, ‘aven’t ya?”
“We got ta take ‘em ta Ledge,” the stocky, red-cheeked boy next to her says, his eyes f
ixed on mine. He hikes up his baggy buttery-yellow pants with one hand and plops the other onto the girl’s shoulder. “Them’s the rules, eh?”
The girl looks from the boy’s hand and then back to us, stopping at Brohn and sizing him up like he’s a choice piece of meat on a butcher’s block. She seems to be debating something, her eyes scrunched up, before nodding what looks to be agreement with herself.
“I’m Trolly,” she says without lowering her weapon. “‘Dis fat, scrummy bloke ‘ere’s my little brother, Chunder.”
“What are ya doing?” Chunder hisses at his sister. “They don’t need ta know our names now, do they?”
Brushing her horribly tangled and mud-crusted hair aside, Trolly gives Chunder’s shoulder a light, back-of-the-hand whack. “‘ey. Just ‘cause we’re in ‘ell don’t mean we all got ta be devils now, do it?”
When Chunder doesn’t answer, Trolly tells him, “Never ‘urts ta be polite. Even wit’ the enemy. So shut it now, right?”
I move my jaw to speak, careful not to move anything else just in case the tip of this girl’s sword winds up slipping any deeper into my neck. “We’re not the enemy.”
“At least we don’t think we are,” Cardyn adds from behind me, his voice strained against the boy’s arm he’s got clamped around his neck. I give him a dirty, side-eyed look.
Thanks, Card. Not helpful.
Rain takes a chance and tries to nudge her captor’s weapon away from her own neck, but the tall girl behind her growls and nudges it firmly back against Rain’s skin. “We’re just on a mission,” Rain insists, hands up. “We don’t want any trouble.”
Trolly takes her eyes off of me for a second to address Rain. “You crossed inta Kensington, Love. Every mission ‘ere is trouble. ‘Til Ledge says otherwise.”
