by Erik Hyrkas
“We don’t know if there is only one of them,” Brit said. “I think you are right, though. We should follow the water.”
Chapter Eight
Peter couldn't believe his luck. He had merely wanted to grab a few souls to sell on the side, but he had run right into one of Kauppias’s men and dropped his ilo; and now, after bungling a simple hostage exchange, he had stepped onto an abandoned transport portal that took him right into the center of the Silver City itself—a place he would not have willingly set foot.
He was standing under a small canopy on one of the many ancient transport platforms that used to connect the different cities of the former kingdom that had once ruled this planet. Those people were long dead, and now the palace across the thoroughfare was owned by a powerful being, Jumala. He used it when he visited this world.
Peter made a hand gesture that should have reactivated the portal to send him back to the other transport pad, but nothing happened. He wasn’t surprised—there weren’t many portals that still operated. Nobody had noticed him yet, but he was sure that he had only moments before they did. He was wearing human clothes in a city that only saw the replays of human lives in hollow images. There was a chance a few of the upper ranked captains dealt with bounty collectors, and so he might be able to buy his way out of here if it came to it. The fact that he really was a bounty collector might help. The only lie would be that he never traded souls to Jumala because he was terrified that he’d be thrown back into the mines as a slave. His freedom now hinged on none of them recognizing him.
Hovering over one of the large flat-topped buildings was a ship he recognized, a Grathian trading vessel. They would take him anywhere if he had the credits. If he could get off the planet, or to the other side of it at least, he could find a way to earn a new ilo.
“Don’t move,” a voice behind him said. “You shouldn’t have returned, Peter.”
Peter turned to find a guard brandishing an armilon at him. He sighed. The guard was an enkeli like Peter, like every intelligent being on the planet—with the exception of a few humans he had brought and maybe some visiting traders and lords.
He was unarmed, but he had a distraction that he might use. With a quick tap of his left index finger on his right wrist, there was a brief flash of light as an extra-dimensional space expelled Peter’s hostage. He had hoped to maybe sell the human for a profit later, but right now, this seemed like his only hope of keeping the guard busy.
The human vomited all over the guard, who looked even more surprised than Peter could have hoped. Extra-dimensional space was not a technology he would have seen, and a living, vomiting human would have been even more of a shock.
Peter slammed the guard in the face and grabbed his armilon. With a quick flip of his wrist, he blasted the guard off his feet, leaving the enkeli sprawled on his back.
Another guard was cautiously approaching, but his eyes were focused on the growing pool of vomit that the human was still producing. Peter dashed around the corner into a narrow alley, pausing momentarily as he considered the risk of being cornered. The way ahead was clear to the next thoroughfare.
“In the name of the Lord, stop!” the guard behind him said. Energy from an armilon slammed the wall next to Peter’s head with a popping sound, blasting rock and dust free.
His choice made for him, Peter sprinted down the alley. This was the fabled Silver City, the seat of Lord Jumala’s power, he thought. He had grown up as a slave here before escaping to Kauppias’s domain on the other side of the planet. Permanent residency seemed inevitable now, but not without a fight. Battling was a lifelong habit he wouldn’t quit yet.
Ahead, two guards walking on the main street saw him running and paused.
“Damn,” Peter whispered.
He glanced back and saw that he was pursued by the guard he had disarmed and another guard, and this one was armed. He pushed himself harder and ran straight toward the new guards, who drew their weapons.
Peter whipped his armilon wildly as he ran, knocking one of the guards aside. Then he was hit directly in the back with enough force to slam him into the ground face first. Stunned and dazed, he looked at the blurry rocks immediately in front of his face, attempting to bring them back into focus.
“Drop your weapon,” a guard said.
Peter looked up at the guards towering over him. Resisting now would only result in a beating. He gave his stolen armilon a small push and it rolled away.
“Where are you from?” the guard asked. “You are dressed in the manner of a replay.”
“I am a servant of Kauppias’s,” he said. “I am on a diplomatic mission.” The first part was mostly true, he was at least a citizen of Kauppias’s empire, but his only mission was earning credits and avoiding death and slavery.
“What is your name, diplomat?” the guard in front of him asked.
“Peter.”
“Peter, I am Lieutenant Adriel,” the enkeli said. “We shall consult my captain, Raguel, who will have knowledge of all diplomatic missions to our city. Please, follow me.”
Two guards yanked him to his feet.
“There was another one with him,” a guard said, “a foul creature of Earth. It was spewing bodily fluid everywhere.”
“Was there?” Adriel said with a smirk. “Well, find him and bring him, too.”
Peter kept his expression in check. There wasn’t much chance they would let him go, whatever story he told, but with patience, he might find an opportunity to escape. His goal was now merely to avoid torture and death, to survive until that opportunity presented itself.
He wondered if Raguel would be here, after all, he had seen him hours before on Earth posing as a law enforcement agent. Clearly, Raguel was moonlighting as a bounty collector. What would he pay to keep that information a secret? Maybe he would help Peter escape in exchange for Peter’s silence on the matter, or maybe he’d kill Peter and be done with it. He began searching for the right words that would both keep him alive and free him.
Chapter Nine
One moment Jax was in his kitchen and his brother-in-law was in the next room, and the next moment he was in some strange white city and overwhelmed by nausea. He had puked all over a guy wearing a black and gold wetsuit and was dimly aware that a second guy in a similar black and gold wetsuit was chasing after the strange man who had brought him here.
“Are you human?” the guard asked with a look of disgust on his face.
Jax was pretty sure that the look on the guard’s face had something to do with the pizza and beer vomit soaking into his clothing. He tried to give a sarcastic reply but was overcome with dry heaves.
The man clambered to his feet. He was massive and towered over Jax by more than a foot. On his forehead he wore a donut-shaped object of black glass. He pulled out a similar small black circlet and pressed it against Jax’s forehead. In an instant Jax felt better. When the man pulled his hand away, Jax realized that the glass donut was still stuck to his forehead.
He tried to remove it, but it wouldn’t budge.
“We don’t see many humans here,” the man said. “They aren’t well suited to most tasks, but you’ll have to do your best.”
Jax stopped trying to remove the device and looked around again. “Where am I?”
“It is not a slave’s place to ask questions,” the man said. “As you are new to this world, I will take pity on you and not send you to solitary as punishment.”
Dozens of men wearing nothing more than white washcloths walked in different directions down the streets. They were all tall, muscular, and handsome.
“Is this a movie set?” Jax asked. “I don’t see any cameras.”
“Follow me,” the man said.
“Where am I?” Jax demanded.
The man backhanded Jax and sent him sprawling. “I will silence you permanently if you cannot control your tongue.”
Jax was dazed. The blow had left the entire right side of his face numb and rapidly swelling. A trickle of blood dri
bbled from his mouth. Rough hands yanked him to a standing position, and he swayed and stumbled. Before he could fall he was yanked back up.
“Stand,” the man demanded.
Jax steadied himself.
“Follow me,” the man repeated and began walking down the street.
To Jax’s left was an alley, and he saw guards subduing the man who had broken into his house. There was justice in this, but it was hard to feel any relief because his own dire situation was dominating his thoughts. Some thug had strolled into his house, somehow abducted him, and now he was in this strange city full of huge, wetsuit-clad beefcakes. This was not his ideal Sunday.
As he trudged behind his captor, he thought of Brit. At least she was safe. He wondered how long it would take for her to call the police and where they might search for him. This place looked like nowhere he had ever heard of, and he had no delusions of being found anytime soon, possibly ever. His best hope at this point was that these people turned out to be civilized and deported him back to the United States.
The sky was still in late pre-sunrise gold, and so he reasoned that he had either been unconscious more than a day or he couldn’t have been far from home. As there was nowhere like this city within hours of Minneapolis, even by plane, he speculated that he had been unconscious more than a day and really might be anywhere in the world. Maybe Africa, or maybe some remote part of Australia. It struck him as odd that his captor had not only spoken English but with a perfect Midwestern accent.
They walked past broad white buildings that stretched on and on. None of the buildings were tall, maybe three stories at the highest. They were all made of the same material and, though the material was unknown to Jax and might have been beautiful if he were not otherwise stressed, the lack of diversity in building materials made the homogenous city both uninspiring and disorienting. It was difficult to get his bearings because it looked like more of the same everywhere he looked.
As they walked past entryways of the different doors, Jax observed that none of them appeared to have doors. They simply had tall, open doorways. He pondered the design of the city. Living in such a place where your businesses and homes could never be closed to the public seemed strange and even a little scary. He wondered if this open design was by choice or if it said something about the government.
The man leading him turned abruptly and led the way into one of the open buildings. The entrance hall was vast and unadorned, a single tall lectern on a podium the only thing in the room. A man stood on the podium watched them approach. Much like the man leading him, this man also had a glass donut on his forehead.
“Greetings, Marugel,” the man at the podium said. “What has happened to you?”
Marugel looked down at his vomit covered wetsuit, then gestured to Jax. “A human happened,” he said, as if this was all the explanation necessary.
“I see,” the man behind the lectern said. “I will orient and indoctrinate him. Thank you.”
Marugel nodded. “Don’t be afraid to start him in the mines for a few days.”
The man smiled. “That can be arranged.”
Marugel turned and walked away. The man at the lectern watched until Marugel was well out of earshot.
“So, you vomited on a captain,” the man said.
“Not on purpose,” Jax said. “Where am I?”
“Slaves are not permitted questions,” the man said. “Follow me.”
Jax’s face still throbbed from being struck by the previous guard, and he decided that not getting hit again outweighed his need to know where he was. After all, he was sure that it would eventually be apparent where he was if he reasoned it out.
He had been called a slave. Where in the world could he be that they spoke English and still had slaves? He thought he had heard that there was still slavery in the Congo, though he thought they spoke French. He was also pretty sure there was forced labor in some parts of Brazil, but Jax knew that they spoke Portuguese.
The man tapped the surface of the lectern and then stood there silently. Jax looked around uncomfortably. He wasn’t in any particular rush to go work in a mine, but standing there waiting wasn’t much better. He touched the donut that had been attached to his forehead and pondered how it was affixed. It didn’t hurt or feel at all uncomfortable, but he couldn’t move it. Pulling on it didn’t tug on his skin, and it almost felt like it was attached to his skull in some way, but he hadn’t felt any pain or discomfort when it was stuck to his head and so that seemed unlikely. He might easily forget about it, except that he couldn’t help but touch it.
“If you damage your halo, you will starve to death,” the man on the podium said. “I suggest that you leave it alone.”
Jax filed this new term away for consideration. He wondered why it was called a halo and what it had to do with meals. Maybe they scanned it at meal times to determine whether you were given food. It seemed to him that having a meal-card called a halo fastened to your head was probably not the ideal situation. He wondered why they didn’t hand out bracelets.
Behind the lectern was a door that was difficult to detect from Jax’s position due to the overlapping walls, but it became apparent when a man entered the room from it. This man was also wearing a halo on his forehead. This man was as massive as the others that Jax had seen, and he was wearing the same black and gold wetsuit.
“Jerrard, please orient our new slave,” the man behind the lectern said to the new man. “He is to work in the mines.”
“Why is he so small?” Jerrard asked.
“Human,” the man behind the lectern said with a touch of disgust in his voice. “Try not to get any on you.”
This wasn’t the first time these men had referred to him as “human,” and now Jax was beginning to wonder whether that implied that they were not human. They were certainly the largest and most muscular men he had ever seen, but they still looked human.
He thought of home and Brit. How was he going to explain that he was gone for a few days because he was mining in some other country? This was not going to go over well.
Chapter Ten
“My ankle hurts,” Michael said.
They had been following the trickle of water, which was now wide enough to be called a stream, for an hour. That involved climbing over treacherous, uneven ground now slick with moisture.
“We might be nearly out,” Hunter said.
“And we might not be,” Michael said. “I can’t go much further.”
“Let’s just take a short break,” Brit said. “I don’t like waiting here in the open where that creature might find us, but we don’t want to risk further injury and have to carry Michael out of here.”
Hunter looked at Michael, who easily weighed three hundred pounds. The thought of carrying him must have been enough to persuade him. “Fine,” Hunter said, and he turned off his phone.
“How much battery does your phone have left?” Brit asked.
Everybody silently found a spot on the damp ground in the dark to rest.
“I’m down to eighteen percent,” he said. “We’re not going to make it much further.”
“We still have Michael’s phone,” Brit said.
“Either way, we might be able to explore an hour,” he said.
“Are you giving up?” Brit asked.
“Fuck no,” Hunter said. “I’ll follow this stream in the dark if I have to, but without light, I don’t think our chances of finding our way out are very good.”
There was a faint glow off to Brit’s side where Michael sat.
“Crap,” Michael said.
No sentence that started with “crap” was a good one in any life-or-death situation, thought Brit.
“I think I left my map application running,” Michael said. “It must have used up most of my juice looking for a signal. My battery is down to twelve percent.”
“Fuck,” Hunter said. “You fat fucking idiot.”
“Be nice to him,” Marcy said. “You’re such a jerk.”
; Hunter sighed. “We’re going to fucking die down here because of him.”
“We need to work together,” Brit said. “Blaming each other isn’t going to accomplish anything. Right now we are each other’s only hope of survival.”
“That’s not comforting,” Hunter said.
“I know,” Brit said with an edge to her voice. “However, we still want you to stay with us.”
Hunter chuckled. “Fine. We should probably not use our phones lights for a while and save them for when we absolutely need them.”
“Crawling through a cave in the dark is dangerous,” Brit said. “We could fall into a thirty foot pit and die.”
“I’ll turn on the light every twenty seconds, which should be long enough for everybody to spot their surroundings and know that they aren’t going over a cliff.”
“What if we crawl right into that creature?” Marcy asked. “I don’t want to be eaten by a giant alligator.”
“You heard how loud it was,” Hunter said. “We should hear it from a long way off if we are listening.”
The next hour was a blur of pain and confusion as they stumbled over a rocky cavern floor, occasionally slipping on the wet surface or tripping over the irregularly shaped ground. All four of them spent most of the time crawling in the dark, not risking standing up even though the ceiling of the cavern was fairly high.
Brit’s jeans were torn and she was bleeding from a number of small scraps on her hands, shins, knees. And she had a bad bruise on her hip from one of times she slipped. The muscles in her forearms burned with exertion, and her fingers ached from both the cold and gripping any hold she could find as she scrambled along.
When Hunter’s phone would no longer turn on and they had to switch to Michael’s, the dark felt darker and the threat of seeing the creature again felt more real to Brit. The whole experience had been surreal. Yesterday they were playing poker and talking about how miserable work made them. Today, they were in cave without food or light on a different planet.
