Emergents Academy: A Dystopian Novel (Academy of the Apocalypse Book 1)

by K A Riley

  “Then what is?”

  “Them.” I point to the approaching, rolling cloud of dust and sand on the horizon. “These kids here are just trying to slow us down until the rest of their army arrives.”

  “Then we better win,” Mattea snaps. “Fast.”

  We’ve been training for a few months now. These Unsettled have been fighting for their entire lives. But we have our weapons. We also have ample fear and plenty of desperation.

  I slip my Serpent Blades from their holsters and hold them at the ready.

  Next to me, Libra draws her sledgehammer, Sara slips four throwing darts from her bandolier, Arlo grips his scythe in both hands, and Ignacio pulls out his shillelaghs and begins to twirl them in a slow, even spin.

  As I’m scanning our opponents, Mattea thrusts her hands deep into her pockets and walks toward a group of three of them with her head down but her eyes up.

  Arlo reaches out to grab her arm, but she’s already ahead of him.

  I’m sure she’s about to get hacked to pieces.

  Dragging her feet in the dirt and sand, she absently and casually kicks away pebbles and small stones as she approaches what seem to be the three Unsettled in charge.

  Flanked by two muscular boys with bladed weapons, a tall girl with a bare midriff and clumped, blond-streaked dreadlocks steps forward.

  Unarmed, she raises her hand, her palm facing us. Her words come out as if she’s puking up a bowl of alphabet soup.

  “Her dead her go don’t leave!”

  Mattea puts her own hand out, palm up, and flicks her index finger, summoning the girl to come closer. The girl obliges, and Mattea leans toward her across the ten feet or so of space still separating them. Mattea’s voice goes soft and slightly guttural “Her have no stopping, no stopping her dead.”

  Like me and the rest of my Cohort, the girl and the two boys stare. Behind the girl, the boys lower their weapons a few inches.

  Mattea points her pinky finger to each of them one at a time. “Even on her dead, her not stopping. Her’s families roams and goes and gets them’s revenge.”

  The dreadlocked girl starts to step even farther forward, her head on a curious tilt, almost like she recognizes Mattea.

  “See,” Libra says to me out of the corner of her mouth. “Mattea can get us out of all kinds of trouble.”

  I’m just about to let go of the breath I’ve been holding when the tall girl stops mid-step and shakes her head hard enough for a puff of dirt to launch from her thick mass of dreadlocks into the hot, open air. She reaches back and snatches the long-handled weapon from one of the boys and swings it in a huge, looping arc right at Mattea.

  Mattea ducks but the thin iron nail tied to the end of the stick catches her off guard and lodges in her shoulder. She shrieks in pain as I leap forward.

  In a frenzy and under a small storm of sand, Mattea yanks the weapon out and rolls away as fast as she can, clutching her bleeding shoulder and calling out to us for help.

  His twin shillelaghs clenched tight in his fists, Ignacio’s eyes close in a furious squint.

  Crisscrossing arcs of blue and white light flash in the air. Behind the Unsettled, the engines of two of their Skid Steers burst into a bright blue flame.

  Clutching their heads in their hands, three of them shriek and bolt out into the open desert where they quickly drop to the ground.

  Panicked now, some of the others from the chase-down squad dash over to what’s left of the Skid Steers while still others choose to stay and fight.

  Ignacio leans heavily against my side and starts sliding to his knees. Like a drowning man, he looks up at me for help before offering up a pointless apology. “That’s all I’ve got,” he pants.

  I haul him to his feet. “Ugh. You weigh a ton.”

  “It’s all muscle,” he groans through a strained grin.

  With the city-sized Army of the Unsettled lumbering toward us from under a fiery red setting sun, my Cohort and I draw together in a tight, six-person cluster.

  Without a ton of time working together, we don’t have the automatic sense of strategy I’ve seen first-hand from Kress and her Conspiracy.

  We do our best.

  It’s not good enough.

  The remaining members of the chase-down squad regroup, and I remember what undisciplined, savage fighters they are.

  They swarm us with rabid abandon, screaming and swinging their array of clubs and bladed weapons in a stunning onslaught.

  I take down two girls and disarm another one before I get dragged down by my wrist.

  Three of the unarmed boys rush at me, separating me from my Serpent Blades in the process. I’m fast and pretty strong, but I’ve got a few hundred pounds of swinging elbows and flying fists on top of me.

  Ignacio shouts for me to hang on as he cracks one of the boys in the head with his shillelagh and tries to pry the rest of the pile of bodies off of me.

  A few feet away, Libra is backing up as three boys advance on her, driving her right into the arms of a tall girl who loops her arm around Libra’s neck in a constricting chokehold.

  Ignacio manages to lift me to my feet, and we join Sara who’s standing, bloody-knuckled, over a boy whose face she just bashed in.

  Arlo picks up his scythe and swings it wildly, but the two attackers—one of them even bigger than Ignacio—just laugh and skip around him, spitting at him and taunting him with half-lunges.

  The remaining Unsettled don’t seem satisfied to wait for reinforcements anymore, and they level their weapons at us and attack as one.

  The blade of a knife wrapped with twine to the end of a long wooden handle whistles through the air.

  I duck as the weapon zips over my head, but I don’t have time to celebrate my evasive move as the razor-sharp edge catches Arlo in the face, slicing a huge gash from the corner of his eye all the way down to his neck.

  Shaking it off like it’s nothing, he raises his scythe, but he doesn’t attack anyone with it. Instead, he plants it in the rocky sand, both hands gripped tight to the handle with him leaning on it like it’s all that’s stopping him from falling to the ground.

  He clamps his eyes shut, and a powerful wave rips through the air around us. The blades and clubs of the Unsettled slow to a mid-swing crawl and then lodge to a dead stop in the air like twigs in wet cement.

  For a second, we’re all frozen as well, trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

  It’s Libra who snaps me and our Cohort to life, shouting at us to run as what’s left of the Unsettled slump to the ground.

  She clamps onto the sleeve of my jacket and drags me toward the tree-line just a hundred yards away, with Mattea, Arlo, and Ignacio close on our heels.

  We plunge from the edge of the desert into a thick forest of very dead trees.

  On the other side, Ignacio claps a hard hand onto Arlo’s shoulder. “That was quite the trick you pulled back there, Mr. Reaper.”

  Arlo gives Ignacio a dark, squinty glare. For a second, I think he might take a swing at him with that long-handled scythe of his. But he just steps away and grips the top part of the handle with both hands, steadying himself as the rest of us try to catch our breath.

  “Uh oh.”

  “What is it?”

  “Where the hell is Sara?”

  The tangled branches of a cluster of dead trees crack and bend, and the rest of us jump back, startled.

  We all relax our shoulders and breathe a sigh of relief as Sara steps through the bramble and into the small clearing.

  She’s not alone, though. She’s dragging the tall, dreadlocked girl from the Unsettled behind her by the ankle.

  Blood gushing from a cavernously deep gash under her eye, the girl stares up at us, teary-eyed and stunned.

  Sara grabs her by the shoulders and hauls her to her feet, but the girl’s legs give out and she crumples back down to the ground.

  Sara flicks her thumb back the way we came. “In case you’re wondering, we’re not being followed. The o
nes who aren’t dead decided to hightail it toward their big, moving city.” Sara kicks the dreadlocked girl in the ribs. “I thought maybe we could get some answers out of this one.”

  The girl groans as we all turn to stand over her.

  “We’re looking for a man. Thin. Tall.” Ignacio runs his finger and thumb along his cheek. “A man with a beard. And a bird.”

  The girl’s eyes go wide, and it doesn’t take a mind-reader to know she knows exactly what Ignacio’s talking about.

  “Her knowing only,” the girl stammers. “Her go, her tell.”

  “She’ll tell us if we agree to let her go,” Mattea translates.

  Ignacio nods to the girl, who looks relieved but also a little suspicious. Like she’s trying to figure out who we are and why we haven’t killed her already.

  Good question. I wouldn’t have thought to look to anyone from the Unsettled for information. I hate to say it, but Sara may have just saved the day.

  The girl goes on to spew out a bunch of what sounds like total nonsense. But Mattea nods and talks back to her like every word is clear as day.

  At last, Mattea stops her interrogation and turns back to our Cohort.

  “She says the man we’re looking for is in a town not too far from here. A town called Sanctum.” Mattea points to a spot off in the distance where five sharp peaks rise up to form their own crown-shaped mini-mountain range. “She says it’s in a valley just before those peaks.”

  “Sanctum,” I repeat.

  “You know it?”

  “I’ve seen it. From the outside. I’ve never been in the actual town.” I glare down at the dreadlocked girl. “If what she says is true, I guess that’s about to change.”

  34

  Caught

  “Should we let her go?”

  “What’s the alternative?”

  “Well,” Sara grins, drawing out one of her small darts and pressing it far too hard under the girl’s already-wrecked eye, “we could kill her.”

  I actually contemplate this for a second. I’ve killed before. But always to escape, in self-defense, or in defense of others.

  “We wouldn’t be killing her,” I say.

  Sara grins at me over her shoulder. “Then what would you call it?”

  “Murder.”

  “Branwynne’s right,” Libra says, stepping forward, her voice rich with an air of seriousness, authority, and finality I don’t think I’ve ever heard from her before. “There’s got to be a line we don’t cross.”

  “What the difference between killing and murder?” Sara asks with a shrug. This time, she presses her small dart deep enough into the girl’s cheek to draw a small, meandering stream of blood.

  “Good guys kill,” I tell her. “Bad guys murder.”

  Pretending to be disappointed, Ignacio smacks his thigh. “Frack. I kind of always wanted to be a bad guy.” I ignore him because I know he’s joking. He’s a wanker, but he’s hardly a killer and definitely not a murderer.

  “Listen,” Mattea urges, her eyes glued to our bleeding and helpless prisoner. “We got what we needed. We need to get out of here before the rest of her army tracks us down.”

  “Absolutely,” Ignacio agrees. “She was nice enough to point us in the right direction. I say we accept her generosity in the spirit it was given and hightail it out of here.”

  In the middle of our group-nod, I catch Mattea giving Ignacio what I think is a pretty affectionate look of appreciation for backing her up, and I wonder if there’s anything going on between them.

  With our destination settled, we’re just turning to make our way in the direction the girl pointed when Sara stops and zips a trio of throwing darts at the wide-eyed girl on the ground.

  Two of the darts find their mark in the stunned girl’s shoulder while the other lodges itself deep under her collar bone.

  Shrieking, the girl crabwalks back, her eyes even wider than before and riveted on the silver barbs jutting out of her body.

  As the girls scrambles to her feet and plunges through the thicket, I grab Sara’s arm and whip her around.

  “What the frack did you do that for?”

  “Just a going away present.” Sara yanks her arm from my hand and pushes me hard enough to knock me into Libra. “Just hope I’m not in such a giving mood with you.”

  Libra and Ignacio wedge between us with Ignacio shouting at me and Sara to knock it off and stop bickering. “We’ve got to get moving!”

  He’s right—both about the need to get moving and the need to stop fighting with each other. After all, we have more than our fair share of enemies out there we know we’ll have to face.

  Together—physically anyway—we race across some overgrown and uneven terrain. We hike for a long time, leaping over chasms in the earth, scrambling up hills, following overgrown hunter’s trails, and shouldering our way through thick fields of spiky thorns.

  The entire time, we do our best to keep our eye on the five tall peaks the girl from the Unsettled pointed out to us.

  “I wish we had Trax with us,” I tell the others in a breathy huff.

  “I bet you do,” Libra teases as she jogs along next to me.

  I give her a good whack to the arm. “He’s a tracker, you brassy scrubber!”

  Libra laughs as Arlo, who’s taken the lead, comes to a stop and barks out for us to do the same.

  The six of us duck down at the top of a small hill and behind a thick barrier of leafless bushes and dead, fallen trees.

  Arlo tilts his scythe toward the valley laid out in front of us and to the cluster of buildings making up the small town nestled in the long shadows of the five rocky towers.

  We’re close enough to the town to see most of the details: the wooden-plank sidewalks, the weather-beaten buildings, the dirt roads, the rows of two-story structures with white laundry hung over brass railings running the length of the shallow balconies.

  “Yes,” I tell the others. “Sanctum. This is the place I remember.”

  Arlo asks, “From where?”

  “Five years ago. After we left you guys back in D.C., this was one of our last stops before the Academy. We drove near here in the Terminus.” I point to a ridge far off in the distance. “There’s a little compound way off in that direction. Over there…on the other side of the five peaks. That’s where we stayed with the Cult of the Devoted.”

  “The ones Kress and the others warned us about?”

  “It’s not that bad.”

  “Then why—”

  “We were told not to stay any longer. We were told something bad was going to happen to us.”

  “Told? By who?”

  “A boy. His name was Matholook. He helped us sneak out in the middle of the night.”

  “So, for all you know, there was no real threat, and he just wanted to get rid of you.”

  “No. I know he was telling the truth.”

  “How?”

  “We talked. Separately. A lot.” The others stare at me, so I feel forced to explain. “Look. We were there for a week. I got bored. He showed me around. We got to know each other.”

  “I bet,” Ignacio sneers.

  “It wasn’t like that, you grubby git. I was twelve. We just talked. He told me things about the Devoted.”

  “Things?”

  “How they refused to join the True Blues. How they got kicked out of Sanctum.”

  “Kicked out. For what?”

  “That I don’t know. But he snuck me down there a couple of times. We would spy on the people from a ridge over the town.” I point to a high rock formation across from us on the other side of the valley. “Just over there. We weren’t supposed to. But he wanted to show me.”

  “Show you what?”

  “That there was more going on in Sanctum than just a bunch of hicks trying to wait out the apocalypse.” They stare at me some more. “There are labs down there. Tunnels. Secrets. I think…”

  Libra’s eyes go wide. “What?”

  “I think maybe they’r
e trying to do what Krug couldn’t.”

  “What’s that? Recruit Emergents?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “What then?”

  “I think…well, Matholook thought they might be trying to make their own Emergents.”

  “What—like in a lab?”

  “I guess. We never actually went into the town.”

  “So you don’t know.”

  “No. But it adds up, doesn’t it? A closed-off, secluded town. They set themselves up down here in a valley not too far from the very same mountain where Granden and his team built the Academy. They kick out anyone they don’t like or who refuses to help them, including the people who became the Cult of the Devoted. And now, a mystery person breaks into the Academy and steals Haida Gwaii—one of two ravens that can communicate with an Emergent—at the exact same time when Kress and her Conspiracy just happen to be gone?”

  “It’s a little thin,” Mattea says after a moment’s contemplation.

  Libra says she disagrees. “It’s got enough meat on its bones for me.” She turns to me. “So, Branwynne…what do we do now?”

  I wish I had an answer, but I don’t, so I suggest the most obvious course of action. “We need to sneak into the town, find the infiltrator, rescue Haida, and then get back to the Academy without being spotted and wait for Kress and the others to get back from their mission.”

  “Oh, is that all?”

  “What choice do we have? If we go back to the Academy now, we’ll have no answers, no Haida, and a whole lot of really pissed off teachers when Kress gets back.”

  “And we still won’t know what they did to Wisp and Granden,” Arlo reminds us.

  I nod and give him a mental “Thanks” for understanding.

  Libra raises her hand like we’re in class. “One problem.”

  “What is it?”

  She points to the fleet of small, scissor-shaped Patrol Drones circling the town in big, lazy loops. “How are we supposed to sneak in?”

  Mattea’s eyes glitter. “Maybe Ignacio can disable them?”

  “And let everyone know we’re here?”

  Ignacio drops his eyes and stares at his boots. “I don’t think I could do it, anyway.”