Travelers

by K A Riley

  Leaping to her feet, Rain cries out, “Set us free? But we passed every test!”

  The knight behind her clamps his steel gauntlet onto her shoulder. Rain turns quickly, her fists balled up and ready for another shot at a fight, but Harah intervenes.

  “At ease, Sir Steven. This dining room is for dining. Let’s keep the killing to a minimum, shall we?”

  Still seated but with his forehead creased with anger lines, Cardyn gives Harah a “time-out” signal. “Rain’s right. You can’t trade us for Brohn. We passed the tests together. We’re a Conspiracy together.”

  I cross my arms hard across my chest. “What about the time-honored royal tradition of ‘sparing the commoners’?”

  Harah squints like she’s deep in thought. “Yes. About that. It turns out that lying is an even more time-honored royal tradition.”

  This gets a round of raucous laughter from her three Attendants-in-Waiting and by all four of the knights, whose echo-y guffaws rumble out from underneath the steel facemasks of their helmets.

  “As for Brohn,” Harah says through what is no longer an especially pretty smile, “he stays with me.”

  I give her an evil-eyed stare that I really hope will melt her like the witch she is, but she just returns my glare with a pleasant grin.

  “It’s for the best,” Brohn says, struggling to get the words out and clearly suppressing a stammer. “We’ve never had a guarantee of safety since…well, ever. Now, Harah is offering one.”

  Something’s wrong here, but I don’t know what. Until we figure it out, we might have to play along.

  “Brohn stays,” Harah insists, more firmly this time. “We’ll provide the rest of you with safe passage to the Tower of London where Brohn tells me you need to go next. And we’ll make sure you’re untouched as long as you’re in London. No need to worry about the riff-raff—the Roguers, Scroungers, Hawkers, or the Banters. If you decide to go home, we’ll help arrange that as well.” Harah pauses, as if for dramatic effect before adding, “and…we’ll let you borrow the Alternator.”

  She pauses into the thick silence that’s settled over the room. “Fair?”

  When Cardyn, Rain, and I exchange silent glances across the table, Harah sighs with impatience. “You do need it to save your friend, right?”

  When we still sit there, speechless, Harah puts her delicate, manicured hands flat on the table. “Don’t think of this as an exchange. It’s a gift. A once-in-a-lifetime gift.”

  Brohn drops his eyes. “I’m sorry, guys. She’s right. It’s a gift. A rare one. And we need to take it.”

  When he looks up again, our eyes lock, and I’m waiting for the subtle thumbs up. The knowing wink. The mental message that assures me this is all just strategy.

  “Don’t worry,” I want him to mouth to me from across the room. “It’s all for show. I’m still with you.”

  Instead, his mouth turns toward Harah as she tugs him over to her and into a long, lingering, and sensual kiss.

  If this is Brohn being strategic, he’s gotten way too good at it.

  Rain’s hand locks onto my left arm, and Cardyn’s locks onto my right. I’m confused at first, and then I realize I was about to lunge down the length of the table and do…I don’t know what. But it wouldn’t have been calculated, planned, or well-thought out.

  With the knight’s death grip on my shoulders, such a brazen move would have also been painful and pointless. Not to mention suicidal.

  Taking a deep breath, I let Rain and Cardyn hold me back and stop me from making a fool out of myself or from doing something that would get us all killed on the spot. I’m honestly not sure which outcome I’m more afraid of.

  “This is a lot to process,” Harah says, gently running a finger along her lips. “You don’t know what to think. I get that. You don’t know if you’ll be dead or alive in an hour. Or if losing Brohn for the good of the rest of you is a fair trade. Or if we’ve brainwashed Brohn or something. I get all that, too. Why don’t you take what little time your friend Terk has left and think about it?”

  With her arm around Brohn’s shoulders, Harah leans in front of him and gives him another kiss, but I can’t tell from here if it’s on his cheek or his mouth. Either way, I’m disappointed when he doesn’t pull back and punch her in the face.

  Sitting up and sweeping her two cardinal-red braids behind her ears, Harah announces that we are to be “detained at her Majesty’s pleasure.”

  She waves goodbye to us with a little flurry-flick of her fingers as three of the four knights clamp even harder onto our shoulders, lift us clean out of our seats, and escort us, with the fourth knight and Squire leading the way, right out of the room.

  I don’t know what they have in store for us, but if the last image I see in this life is Brohn and Harah kissing, these giant knights might as well just kill me and get it over with.

  33

  Killing Time

  Cardyn, Rain, and I are dragged from the dining room, down a long hallway and a half flight of stairs, and out one of the palace’s side doors.

  It’s early afternoon now, and the sun is busy baking everything in sight.

  “This is St. James Park Lake,” Squire explains as she and the four knights march us along a wide dirt path that cuts through a forest of dead trees.

  Some of the trees are cracked clean down the middle and have been pushed off to the side. Some are close to toppling, their trunks burned and blistered. Others are struggling to survive, their spindly branches splayed out white like patterns of crystalized ice.

  Cardyn, Rain, and I let our eyes pass over the wide gorge of splintered rocks, heaps of garbage, dried vegetation, and the hundreds of croaking black birds picking at every scrap of organic matter they can find amid the junk and the skeletal remains of whatever animals—and possibly humans—came here, were left here, or were dumped here to die.

  “Not much of a lake,” Cardyn says. “Quite the smell, though. I don’t suppose her holiness the queen spends a lot of time sunbathing out here, does she?”

  I expect Squire or one of the four silent, lumbering knights to chastise him, but they all maintain a kind of reverential silence until we pass through a set of gates and step out onto another one of the badly damaged and rubble-lined roads.

  With the four knights taking flanking positions around us, Squire leads us closer to a massive tower I recognize from old viz-cap images.

  “Big Ben,” I say out loud. “Is that where you’re taking us?”

  “We still call it ‘Big Ben,’” Squire sighs. “Sometimes. Just for old time’s sake. But for a while it was the ‘Elizabeth Tower.’ Now, it’s ‘Harah Tower.’ ‘Big Ben’—the actual bell—is over there.”

  We follow to where she’s pointing.

  Rising up from a pool of oily, brackish river water are several thick wooden beams with a giant bell and four or five smaller ones, cracked, splintered, and covered in a coat of reddish-green grime. Lying next to the decayed wooden struts and rusted bells are a cluster of thick metal cogs and the glass and steel remnants of an old clockface. It’s all half-buried about a hundred yards away from a split-in-two and partially submerged bridge in a thick swill of sandy sediment at the river’s edge. From here, we can hear the water lapping against the fragmented collection of cogs, gears, steel casings, beams, and bells.

  Cardyn looks up to the top of the tower and then back to the destroyed remnants of the clock, lying in a heap like an orphaned island on the bank of the Thames. “Wait. That’s the parts of the clock? How’d all that get way over there?”

  With my hand over my eyes, I can see that the top of the once four-sided tower has a huge chunk taken out of it. From here, the highest part of the lofty building looks like a partially eaten cookie.

  “The Eastern Order,” Squire explains, pointing from the hole in the top of the tower and then back over to the huge expelled and abandoned machinery of the clock in the water, “blew the bloody bells and half the motors clean out of the tower, int
o the river, and halfway to ‘ell.”

  The Eastern Order. The name haunts me like a ghost I want desperately to be rid of, but there’s no exorcising this particular phantom from our past. It’s been the perfect hoax, the greatest distraction, and the ultimate scapegoat. It was the great lie we were told, and now it’s what drives us to uncover whatever is left of the truth.

  For a long time, everything about the Eastern Order made sense. They wanted our freedom, and if they couldn’t have it, no one could. They wanted power, and they’d stop at nothing to achieve it. They rejected our religion, diplomacy, democracy, and every attempt at negotiation and compromise. They were violent, belligerent, godless savages, unfit to walk among the civilized people of the planet.

  Or so Krug had us believing.

  And as so many millions, maybe even billions—if there are even that many left in the world—continue to believe.

  And yet, the Eastern Order was an illusion. They never existed. Not a single one. No one from the so-called Eastern Order invaded our country. No one from the so-called Eastern Order killed anyone, blew up a school, brought down an airplane, leveled a village, burned our oil pipelines, hacked our national network, wrecked the climate, caused a plague, encroached on our land, threatened our way of life, or terrorized a single person. It was all Krug. It was always Krug.

  No. That’s not true, either. Blaming it on Krug is just another kind of scapegoating.

  No. The Eastern Order worked because we needed it to work. All of us. Without a foundation of compassion, of empathy, of the humanitarianism Brohn was talking about before, we were left in search of an enemy.

  All Krug did was give us what we thought we needed. He was as wrong to spin his lies as we were to let fear make us believe him.

  Squire doesn’t know any of this, of course. She thinks her city got bombed by a savage foreign terrorist cell called the Eastern Order, and it’s not my place to tell her different. Not yet, anyway.

  At some point, though, these people have got to know the truth.

  I’ve just got to hope we live long enough to tell them. And right now, our chances don’t look good.

  Brohn is back in the palace with Harah while Cardyn, Rain, and I have to undergo this forced march to what I hope is simply imprisonment. For all I know, though, they could be getting ready to dump us into the river along with what’s left of their famous clock and bells.

  “Come on, then,” Squire urges as the knights resume their positions around us and clomp along the buckled pavement toward the tower.

  Looking across the distance one more time at the half-submerged system of cogs and bells, Cardyn says out loud how impressed he is, which I think is a rude thing to do, all things considered. After all, a lot of the kids here have got to be old enough to remember the life they had before this one. This city meant something to these kids at some point. Or at least to their parents. They took pride in it, the same way we took pride in the Valta before it was destroyed.

  But Squire seems to agree with Cardyn. “Those bells…they used ta chime for special occasions and such. Long before my time, though. Just ‘eard stories about it. Now, it’s just another piece of rubbish that’ll be swept away by the river before you know it.” For another few seconds as we walk, she stares out at the water at the junk the bells have become before adding under her breath, “Everything gets swept away.”

  Flanked by the four knights, their armor making bell-like peals of its own in the empty street, we follow Squire the rest of the way to the entrance of the tall tower.

  With its foundation a mess of brick and mortar and with the entire structure battered and beaten, the tower itself is about two inches away from reaching its tipping point and falling completely over.

  I’ve seen pictures of the Leaning Tower of Pisa—the famous twelfth-century bell tower on Italy’s northwest coast. This looks like that. Only scarier, since we’re about to be taken inside of it to be imprisoned before we get executed.

  I tilt my head up. From here, I can see that the exposed, blasted-out section at the very top of the tower has been filled in with iron bars to create what must be some kind of prison cell.

  “You’re not taking us up there, are you?” Cardyn’s voice gets high with the stress of serious worry.

  “Harah says that’s where we got to keep you. At least until…”

  “Until what?” Rain asks.

  “That’s not for me to say. Harah calls the shots. She decides who lives and who…well, doesn’t.”

  Squire reties the white belt around her red robe and beckons for the two red knights to lead the way up the dizzying set of spiral stairs going up the center of the tower. She follows the red knights with us right behind her and with the two silver knights stomping heavily up the stairs behind us.

  It’s a long, slow climb. The stairs creak under the weight of the knights whose armor clunks and clangs in the hollow shaft leading up into the darkness. At one point, breathing hard and clearly straining to make the climb, the knights draw their swords, which slide out of their scabbards with a scratchy hiss.

  For a second, I can feel us all tense up, but then we breathe a sigh of relief when we see that the knights are only using their swords as walking sticks to help push themselves up the stairs.

  They’re just kids under there, I remind myself. Kids who will still have to pay for what they’re doing.

  There are exactly three-hundred-and-thirty-four steps from the bottom of Harah Tower to the top. I know because I counted every one of them. And for every single one I counted, I tried to come up with a rational reason for why Brohn would do something as dumb as give himself to Harah in exchange for an Alternator for Terk and freedom for the rest of us.

  In my head, I feel like I’m having a debate with Render, only he’s not around, so the voices bouncing back and forth in there are all my own:

  Maybe he thinks he’s being heroic. After all, what’s more heroic than sacrificing one’s self for one’s friends?

  How about sticking together no matter how much the odds are stacked against us?

  Brohn cares so much for us that he’s willing to help us even those odds a little.

  If he cared, he’d stay with us.

  If he stays with us, we’ll die.

  We’ve survived worse.

  That was out in the world against enemies we had no choice but to fight. It’s a lot harder to survive an execution. That’s out of our hands.

  Maybe he’s stalling for time. Sure. That’s got to be it.

  While Harah locks me, Cardyn, Rain in a tower and prepares for our beheadings? That’s quite a gamble.

  We’ve gambled before.

  But not with each other’s lives. Not with Terk’s life. Or with the Auditor’s.

  Technically, the Auditor’s not really alive.

  You’re just trying to distract me from the real problem.

  Which is?

  Brohn. She must have gotten to him somehow, gotten inside his head.

  Come on. This is Brohn we’re talking about. He’s literally taken a bullet for us. Lots of them, in fact.

  Could this be his way of taking one more? After all, if he stays with Harah, we all live.

  Being alive isn’t the same thing as living. Our Conspiracy doesn’t work without him.

  It also doesn’t work if the Auditor and Terk don’t get power and if the rest of us wind up with our severed heads in a basket at the bottom of that, frankly, horrifying guillotine.

  My mental battle rages, but at least the voices get quieter as we approach the top of the spiraling, iron-railed staircase.

  “This is it,” Squire says. She hangs her head a little and apologizes, although I’m not sure for what, exactly.

  For not standing up to Harah? For the long climb? For bringing us up here so we can wait to die?

  One of the red knights points his sword at the open cell, and Cardyn, Rain, and I helplessly file in, our heads down in defeat. One of the silver knights pushes the massive iron
-barred gate closed behind us. The other silver knight inserts a hammer-sized key into the lock and turns it hard, sealing us into the small cell.

  Squire apologizes a second time. “Things are the way they are,” she says cryptically, “not the way we may want them to be.”

  With the four knights behind her, hyperventilating behind their visors, Squire begins the climb back down the tower.

  We can hear the bang of heavy footsteps for their entire descent.

  Inside the cell, Rain has reached a level beyond angry and beyond stressed. If I had to guess, I’d say she’s two seconds away from nuclear-meltdown mode.

  “We trusted her,” she snaps at last.

  “No we didn’t,” I remind her. “We just didn’t have a choice.”

  Rain stares into my eyes until I get nervous and look away. “We trusted Brohn.”

  “We can still trust him,” I say quietly to the floor.

  “Trust him to do what?” Rain barks. “Give himself up for us? Slide us across the table like poker chips while he makes a bargain with the devil?”

  “She’s not the devil.”

  I don’t know why I’m defending Harah. Is it because, despite her pretentious airs, her royal entourage of suck-ups, and her whole holier-than-thou attitude, I find myself kind of liking her? Or is it because I can’t handle the idea of Brohn making a deal on our behalf that will win us our freedom and cost him his soul?

  34

  Possibilities

  It’s only a few minutes later when the unmistakable bellow of Render’s kraa! echoes into the room from somewhere outside the tower.

  Landing on the small ledge outside of the window of vertical iron bars, Render tucks his black wings against his body and bobs his head.

  “See, Card,” I say far too triumphantly for someone locked in a tower, “there’s still light at the end of this tunnel.”

  Cardyn slides up next to me and reaches his hand through the bars to stroke Render’s oil-slick and gold-trimmed feathers. “More like a darkness at the end of the tunnel.”