The Wandering (The Lux Guardians, #2)

by Saruuh Kelsey

  She is so much like me, it’s scary.

  Her head bumps against my shoulder as I haul myself up yet another flight of stairs and I realise she’s fallen asleep. Good. At least in her dreams she doesn’t have to build walls around herself for safety.

  “Leah,” she murmurs in her sleep and my heart jumps into my throat. It’s been years since I’ve heard that name spoken aloud. I have a vague memory of Tom and Livy saying it over and over after Yosiah jumped from the train but my mind was too hazy to absorb it. Now I’m alert and the name cuts right through me. It drags a shudder down my spine, terror through my chest. Memories come in sharp, unwanted flashes—my mother screaming my name, throwing a plate at my head; Thomas waking from a nightmare and crying out for me; Officials in dark uniforms framing a red haired man.

  “You give us information or you die, Leah.”

  With a burst of new energy, I scurry up the stairs until I’m level with Yosiah, shifting Olive so my left hand is free to grab Yosiah’s wrist. I squeeze him so hard it must hurt but he doesn’t complain.

  “Whatever it is,” he says, low. He waits until I raise my eyes to continue. “It can’t beat you. You’re stronger than anyone, Miya. Nothing can break you unless you let it.”

  Siah’s intense stare gives me a foothold on the present. I loosen my grip on him a fraction and imagine myself repeatedly punching this crippling fear until it’s nothing, until it can’t affect me. I am Miya. I created myself. I’m who I want to be. This won’t beat me, won’t break me. I never have to be Leah again.

  “There,” Siah murmurs, “you’re you again.”

  I feel a smile building at how right he is but quickly chase it away with a glare at the flecked-grey steps beneath me. “Thanks,” I mutter. He touches my hair, quick as anything, and we resume walking.

  Our room is on the third floor—something I’m grateful for when I realise some people have to go up a hell of a lot more stairs. How many floors does this place even have? I think, as I stumble through the doorway. The door doesn’t close right because The Guardians had to shoot it open, but there’s a chair we can lean against it for some sense of privacy. All things considered, it’s better than Underground London Zone luxury to me.

  Livy doesn’t wake as I tuck her into the bed, and Thomas is asleep as soon as his back hits the mattress. Being quiet about it, Yosiah and I turn the rest of the furniture the right way up.

  I drop onto a half-comfortable purple sofa and lean my head back, relieved and ready for bed. The seat dips under Siah’s weight as he settles beside me and a sigh sinks into the air around us.

  “What do you think will happen,” he asks after a while, “when The Guardians have won and States has lost control?”

  “I think we’ll probably die,” I say on a yawn, getting a prod to my shoulder in reply. “Okay. If we survive, I reckon The Guardians will take over from the Ordering Body. They’ll tell people what to do and control everything. I don’t think they’ll be as bad as States, but we’ll never be free of authority. There’ll always be someone telling us what to do, setting rules for good reasons and for bad.” I shrug my jacket off and close my eyes. “It’ll be better, probably, if the Guardians win. We might even be able to live the way we want, with them in charge. But that’s if they win.”

  “You don’t think they will?” Siah’s turned towards me—I can tell by the way his breath falls on my neck.

  “If we make it to Bharat, we’ll stand a better chance.”

  “And if we don’t?”

  “We’ll be dead.”

  “Hmm.”

  I crack open an eye to find Yosiah’s face pressed against the back of the sofa, his eyes closed and his mouth hanging open. I watch him for minutes. He shifts in his sleep, his hands closing into fists and his breathing speeding up. I touch the inside of his elbow but my touch doesn’t calm him like it normally does.

  “No,” he gasps. Then: “Mel, run!”

  My entire body goes rigid, my spine a straight line. The fear in Siah’s voice … I’ve never heard him sound that way. Never.

  I wake him as gently as I can. He bolts off the sofa, looking around like a startled kid.

  I approach him slowly. “Siah?”

  “I’m fine.” That’s all he says for minutes as he fights to keep his hands still, watching their every tremor. He looks up at me eventually and in a stronger voice repeats, “I’m fine.”

  He doesn’t speak when I pull a bed from inside the sofa, following instructions we were given earlier, nor does he comment as I throw an old cover over it. Yosiah gets into the left side of the bed, his side, without uttering a word.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I don’t ask. I mean to but exhaustion grabs me in its big hand and drags me to sleep. I don’t think Siah sleeps at all that night.

  ***

  Honour

  06:57. 15.10.2040. The Free Lands, Northlands.

  The Guardians have spent all night gathering supplies by looting the old shops and houses of Hull. I think mostly they were given the task to keep them from dwelling on the loss of their leader. I’m expecting half of The Guardians to have fallen to pieces by the end of the day; every Guardian I met loved Alba. I don’t want to think about what her death will do to her son. I’ve lost too many people to grief. I can’t lose Dalmar too.

  I seem to have escaped Alba’s death with little pain. I didn’t know her well enough, I guess. I feel horrible for being so grateful but I can’t help it. I’m glad I didn’t know Alba, glad I’m not blinded by loss right now. All I feel is an ache, an echo of Dalmar’s pain. I hurt for him but I don’t hurt for myself, and I’ve never felt so lucky in my life. If I lost another person, I know I wouldn’t survive it.

  I won’t survive it.

  When I lose someone.

  Because I will. This hell isn’t over yet. But who will I lose? Who will be taken from me?

  I can’t think about it.

  The Guardians return after an hour and we gather under a statue of a woman in the town centre. Victoria Dei, that’s what it says on the statue. She’s tall and wide and wearing a crown, framed on either side by angels or devils—I can’t tell which they are. Maybe that says something about me, that I can’t tell apart gods and monsters.

  I think the crown means this Victoria Dei was a Queen at some point. Maybe she’s an ancestor of mine and Tia’s. I stare into her cold, sculpted face for any common features but find none. With a shrug, I turn away from the statue and pay more attention to the five people raised in front of us—the Guardian council.

  One of them is the robed man who took over giving orders yesterday. Timofei is stood with him, along with three others I vaguely recognise. One of them, a man twice my age, is called Cell. For the first time it becomes obvious that every Guardian leader is using a fake name, all but Timofei at least. Each of their names is four letters long and I seriously doubt they were born with them. Who christens a kid Cell? The robed man is Saga. The remaining two are Brig and Hush, two Guardians that couldn’t be more opposite if they tried. Brig is blankness personified—white hair, pale skin, watery grey eyes and a face so young he might be even younger than me. Hush is a black skinned woman, sharp faced, with close cropped hair and a body that never had to deal with starvation.

  Cell’s moustache flutters in the wind, a huge beige stripe above his mouth. “We’ve suffered an unparalleled loss,” he says in a nasally voice. “Alba was a great leader but she’s dead. Sage’ll act as leader in her place until we’re stable enough to elect a new one.” His eyes linger on Dalmar. It takes me a moment to realise that Cell’s suggesting Dalmar lead the Guardians. I glance sidelong at Dal but he’s fixated on the stone slabs beneath his feet. “For now, our mission’s the same. We’ll cross the land to the rebel town of Manchester, use their resources to gather anyone who’s still alive on this island, and then we’ll all fly to Bharat. There we’ll finalise our uprising until we can take control from States’s President and the Ordering Body.” He crosses his arms
over his round stomach, not bothering to ask if anyone has questions.

  Ten minutes later we begin the week-long walk to Manchester.

  For days all I do is put one foot in front of the other, never mind that the soles of my feet are screaming and my toes are bleeding from being squashed into these Guardians boots. I’m not given an option—it’s walk or be left behind.

  People take turns speaking to Dalmar, trying to comfort him, but they might as well not bother. Dalmar doesn’t want comfort or molly coddling. He’s dealing with the death of his mother by getting on with things without complaint. He doesn’t speak about his loss once and if it weren’t for the hollow expression he wears every day, I’d think he was trying to convince himself she was still alive. But I know what he’s doing. He’s throwing himself into every task, carrying boxes when it’s not required, helping the few civilians still with us, calming the littlest kids when they freak out. He’s trying to be the best Guardian, the best person, he can—for Alba.

  On the third day of walking Marie sidles up to me and gives me a crooked grin. “Still killing people?”

  I almost reply with a snarl but I don’t have the energy for it. “Don’t need to,” I say. “People are dying without my help.”

  That shuts her up for several minutes, long enough for Priya to realise her girlfriend has disappeared and catch up to us. Priya is more polite about asking how I am and I am much nicer in return.

  The two girls spend the next hour or two or three—time doesn’t exist out here—explaining everything they know about the program that made me a carrier. As I drag my feet across a dusty expanse of nothing, evidence of the flares everywhere around me, I learn that States were experimenting on kids, back in the day, to find a cure for the demons they created.

  The Ordering Body made The Sixteen Strains to cull the population but Priya tells me the Strains began to infect States’s own people. They couldn’t find anything to stop it. This was long before they invented the vaccine that could kill me at any moment. States began to panic. The President began to panic.

  The program was set up to find a way to stop the spread of the diseases. The Ordering Body put an insane amount of money into the development, hired dubious scientists and madmen, and eventually a solution was found. Somehow, some lunatic scientist discovered that The Sixteen Strains didn’t infect children the way they did adults—I try to block out every question that demands an answer to why children were tested in the first place—and that foetuses were completely resistant to the infection.

  Marie explains in great detail, using more scientific jargon than I’ve heard in my life, that the forbidden files they stumbled upon spoke about a Strains trial. Scientists infected unborn children and when the babies were born their biology was fucked around with. Engineered to carry or resist the Strains. Marie says this must be how Yosiah and Miya are immune, but she offers more questions than she does answers.

  I clench my fists through the whole explanation. I still don’t see where my sister and I fit into this. I wasn’t new-born when they ‘altered’ me and neither was Tia—if they did anything to her at all.

  “Maybe the program had advanced by that point,” Priya offers but I don’t buy that and neither does Marie. The conversation fizzles out, killed by a glaring lack of answers.

  I walk in silence, not bothering to voice my destructive thoughts, and eventually the girls leave me alone to my fury and my fear. By the seventh day my emotions are buried inside me where they can do no harm, my arms are littered with bruises from where I’ve pinched my skin, and I feel nothing at all.

  ***

  Bennet

  10:36. 21.10.2040. Bharat, Delhi.

  The Guardians home in Delhi is five times the size of the building in Mumbai. I remember when I was first shown around the Mumbai base by a man named Rafe who found me bewildered in the middle of a bazaar. He knew who I was and that I’d arrive in the exact moment I did—he was following instructions on an ancient piece of paper. Instructions written, impossibly, in my own hand. Since then I’ve come to accept things as they happen, abandoning the need to know details and facts of how everything is possible. Things happen because they need to.

  Whatever seems insignificant now may prove to be essential later.

  I was transported to Bharat, to the future, because it was important that I be here. I survived the Fall of Mumbai because I’m important. I wasn’t meant to die. And now, as I weave through the night-time streets of New Delhi, I acknowledge that I have a purpose because it is important, that it’s vital that I alone should complete this task. I need it. I can’t let anyone else do this. It has to be me.

  The first time I learned of the Guardians’ aims and intentions, I thought they were mad. They were cultivating a crazed plan to topple their government! But I’ve since seen the tentative way a good portion of Bharatians live, how they tiptoe through their lives for fear of drawing the attention of those they call Dark Soldiers. They might be healthy, well provided for, and in possession of technology way beyond my dreams, but their lives are spent balancing on a dagger’s edge. It’s no way to live. And I’m told that life outside Bharat is much, much worse, that people in the Forgotten Lands don’t have freedom, let alone enough food to keep from starving.

  I can’t imagine being permanently hungry, every second of every minute. I’m so lucky to have been brought here and not there.

  In the days I have been here, I’ve spent most of my time learning about this world I’m reborn into. There were once twenty four Forgotten Lands and two Cities, the survivors of the savage diseases and solar flares the Bharatians call the Third War—the war between nature and man. Of them, the two Cities remain—one of which is the country I’m now in—and as of yesterday eighteen Forgotten Towns are standing. But that could change at any given moment.

  My research means I now know why there are very few elderly men and women here. Years ago, in a Bharat rampant with disease, the sickness cut down the very young and very old as though with a broad sword. Only those in their adolescence and early adulthood remained. A dreadful amount of the population was lost in the Third War.

  Bharatians would have been wiped out completely, but their governing body was smart and they made the people work together to stop the illnesses spreading further. Movement between towns was halted. Great barriers of chain erected around the perimeter of the City, keeping out further Strains. Treatments were developed to stop most of the diseases—some of them, I’m told, were nothing but a common cold, the same kind I caught every year as a child. Strangers were taken into people’s homes and cared for as if by family. Medicine, food, and every other resource needed to live was shared equally between all people, rich or poor.

  Bharat gave every one of its citizens an equal choice. It’s admirable, truly, but I’m not sure I could be so selfless.

  There’s a high stone wall around Bharat now, effectively keeping out people with the diseases, and everyone who comes into the City is ‘screened’ for the Strains. Some with weaker versions of the disease are even treated at the borders. But people with the stronger Strains, the deadly ones … they’re forbidden. Anyone who lets them inside the City is executed.

  It’s harsh, but it’s effective, and it keeps Bharat from being claimed by sickness again. By severe contrast, the rest of the world is near-irreparable—but not because it has been claimed by nature or disease. Because of the Dark Soldiers of States.

  Why the western City is so intent on destroying what remains of the world is a mystery to me. Surely they’d want to unite the Lands, to repair what destruction has wrought apart? But the Dark Soldiers aren’t like the Guardians. Where the Guardians want to piece the world back together, States wants only to sever the fragments even more—until, I suspect, they are the few that remain.

  It’s senseless and devoid of logic.

  Vast says the Soldiers are scared of us, of what we may do if we choose to rise up against them. They ought to be scared. We are uprising. Other Gua
rdians and leaders are coming from Britain and France, and more too will come—from Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia. The world is fighting back. It makes my stomach flutter. I may not be of this world but it still fills me with pride to see the people rallying for themselves. Humanity as a whole will not be bent, will not be degraded, and will certainly not be cheated out of what it is owed.

  In the unwavering heat of nightfall, I slip around a crumbling building and into the open road. And in a second my pride is crushed by sadness. Branwell would love it here. He used to speak of travelling to new, unexplored places. He wanted to go with our aunt and uncle on their adventures, to see the lands where the peculiar devices that decorate their home originated. To see the world.

  This world, I think, is one Branwell would like to see.

  But then I recall what lays outside this City, the poverty and the misery. I decide I never want my brother to witness that. It is better that he is where he is, wherever that may be. Wherever he’s meant to be.

  I rap my gloved knuckles on a concealed door. It opens, spilling orange light onto the pavement, and the grizzled owner beholds me. He says something aggressive in the native language of Delhi, flapping his hands about.

  Rasmi Verma, knight in shining armour, detaches herself from my side and introduces us in Hindi, her calm voice lilting and melodious. She graces the man with a bright smile that transforms her aquiline face into something closer to aristocratic beauty. I watch the man melt with admiration.

  Nobody, man or woman, can resist Rasmi’s charm. As we cross the threshold, she shares an exasperated glance with me behind the man’s back. It speaks of something I understand all too well—frustration yet grudging acceptance of man’s singular appreciation for a beautiful face. It doesn’t matter to this man what intelligence and kindness lies beneath Rasmi’s beauty. But at least it gives her something to use to her advantage.