by Celeste Raye
More fire rained down from the enemy ships. People screamed and ran, scuttling across the street and back as they realized that no place was safe.
Talon and the other set to work. The goal now wasn’t to prevent the invasion but to minimize the casualties.
A man with blood pouring from his nose grabbed Talon’s wrist. His eyes held rage and courage. “Give me a weapon,” he said in an urgent voice. “I can fight. I will fight. I am from below and, well, if I want to stay above, I suppose there has to be an above, now doesn’t there?”
Talon nodded. “I would say yes, but you are wounded right now. I am not sure you are well enough to fight.”
“I am,” the man insisted.
A woman ran up. Her robes were blue and her hair white. She fell to her knees beside a young woman who was moaning in pain. The older woman looked up at Talon and the others, her face awash with tears. “The Federation delegate’s mansion still stands. We need to take it and use it. There’s nowhere else big enough to use as a medi-bay. They blew up the medi-bays.”
Talon looked in the direction that the woman had pointed in. “Take it?”
“I mean if there’s anyone in there who says no you and yours will have to tell them yes.” The old woman stood, and that was when he saw that her robes were stained with blood. “I have lost far too many this day and the days before it. There is death everywhere here, and we need to set up a place where people can get help.”
The man with the bloody forehead said, “They’ll likely bomb it too.”
“I know.” The woman sent him a beseeching look. “I do, but I have to try. Please, for the love of all that is good and sane, help me with those who are hurt. I am begging you.”
Talon said, “Come on, let’s help get the wounded there.” He paused. “Have you seen a woman, dark blonde, in a uniform like mine?”
The woman frowned. “I think so. When I was driving the tracked craft a woman wearing something similar was running with two small boys. She said she had found them in a rubble pile. The boys said she could not get their mother out. They went to the alley where we have the rest of the wounded that we have found so far, but they can’t stay outside. Many of them need attention now, and we need a place we can defend if those creatures land.”
True enough. Any stronghold was better than none.
Talon wrapped his arms around the battered young woman and lifted her in his arms. “Do you have meds and bandages?”
“Some, but not enough. I can’t keep up. The medi-bays are gone, and we might just have to make do with what we have and…”
Her lips turned downward, and he knew what she meant. They might just have to let the ones injured the most gravely die in order to help those who were less injured. It was a hard choice, and he knew it. He gave her a long and level look. “I understand. Let’s go; everyone help someone, and do it now. When we get these in, we’ll go to this alley of yours and help the rest.”
The young woman in his arms sobbed, “They abandoned us. The Federation abandoned us!”
The older woman looked at the young woman and said, “They have only just now abandoned you. They abandoned those of us who lived below centuries ago.”
The young woman’s sobs tapered down. Her face wore a stunned expression. “You…you live below?”
The older woman’s eyes held anger and compassion. “If you don’t want a below grounder to touch you, if you are like so many of your kind, you go right on and say so. I have people who actually want to live and who don’t care who helps them all over this city.”
Talon started walking.
Chapter 16 - Talon
Jessica’s bloody, dusty hands scrabbled at shattered rock and plaster. The muffled cries that she’d heard coming from below the rubble became clearer with every stone she freed from that pile.
She managed to roll a large stone away, and pity and sorrow spun up inside her as she saw the faces of two small children and what must’ve been their mother staring up at her. “Come on! I don’t know how long whatever’s holding it up off you is going to stay in place! You have to come out of there now.”
The mother said, weakly, “Please, take my children. Here” Her hands thrust the infant out through the hole and Jessica grabbed it. The child was dusty and coughing but seemed otherwise unharmed. The second child, a small boy with large brown eyes that held a stamp of shock and absolute fear, clambered out quickly.
Jessica handed the infant off to his brother. “Give me your hand!”
The woman coughed again. “My legs are trapped! I can’t get out! Just save my children!”
Jessica said, “Which leg? Tell me which leg so I can move the…”
The pile let out a loud groan. Instinct kicked in. Jessica snatched both children up and ran backward just as the pile suddenly crumpled and the woman’s face disappeared in a fast slide of crushing stone.
“Mama! Mama, come back!” the young boy screamed onward and onward while the infant merely stared, his eyes wide and uncomprehending.
Jessica said, “I can’t help her now. Nobody can. Come on! We have to go!”
She wound up running through the streets, carrying both children. Everywhere she looked, there was chaos and death. Houses had fallen, killing their occupants. Once upon a time she had envied and hated those who lived above, but now, as she saw nothing but death and destruction all around her, she pitied them.
A large tracker craft pulled up beside her. The hatch opened, and a woman shouted, “Get in! Come on!”
Jessica shouted back, “Take the children! Their mother was just killed in a rubble slide, and I don’t know their names. I have to go help!”
The woman inside the tracker craft yanked to the children in and then slammed the hatch shut. Jessica stopped running for a moment, bending over to place her hands on her knees once more in an effort to get her breath and to recover from the unrelenting nightmare unfolding all around her.
Yori!
His father’s residence still stood, and it was dead ahead. Jessica’s feet kicked up a choking dust from the broken street’s surface as she aimed toward that still-magnificent abode.
The doors, a heavily carved set made of ancient wood and iron, opened easily. That alone was enough to give her pause. Had everyone within deserted the place?
She stepped into the great hall, her eyes going to the grand staircase that arched upward before splitting into and running in a perfectly symmetrical curve to the upper floor. An eerie silence hung over everything.
Jessica swallowed hard as she listened, trying to hear a single sound. There was nothing, not so much as a stirring inside the house.
A shiver worked its way up her spine. There were at least two dozen servants working at any given hour. There were always visitors; Federation business was of paramount importance and always needed to be tended to.
There should have been doors opening and closing. There should have been voices raised in greeting or goodbye; there should have been servants dashing about, trying to be as unobtrusive as possible.
There should have been something.
Yet there was nothing. Her hand trembled as she shut the door firmly behind her and surveyed that empty staircase and the silent hallway. Had they all fled as soon as they had news of the attack?
Her feet carried her forward. As a friend of Yori’s, and as a Capo, she had made many visits to that house, and she knew its layout very well. To her right lay the passageway that led to the kitchens and the dining hall. Beyond that door was a small parlor where Yori’s mother entertained the spouses of visiting Federation members and dignitaries.
Jessica paused, as she took in the slightly ajar door of that parlor and the rug, slightly askew, on the floor before it. That rug said to her that something was amiss. A servant should’ve already straightened it, and her nerves tingled as she jutted one finger out and pressed the door open just a little bit more so that she could see into the parlor.
Yori’s mother sat in her favorite cha
ir. Her hands folded in her lap and her face turned toward the windows. Jessica’s heart leaped high in her chest as she abandoned caution and dashed into the parlor.
“Why are you all alone in here? Where are the servants? Come on; we have to get you to…” Jessica’s words died in her throat.
Yori’s mother was dead. A single blast wound covered the side of her face that had been turned toward the windows and not visible to Jessica from the door. Jessica scrambled backward, one hand to her mouth.
Her eyes went around the parlor. A bottle of expensive and pure water sat unopened on a tray next to a small plate of fruit, now buzzing with insects. Jessica’s eyes went back to that head wound. It was obvious the woman had been killed at least ten to twelve hours earlier.
But by who?
Jessica grabbed the bottle of water. Morals didn’t matter at the moment, and she was incredibly thirsty and in need of hydration in order to keep going. She spun the cap off and drank the richly oxygenated water down in several gulps.
The rush of liquid and air into her system buoyed up her ability to handle what she was looking at. She stepped out of the parlor, listened hard, and then retraced her steps back to the door that led to the kitchens.
In the kitchens, she found several servants, all of them dead. The kitchens had been looted, the water purifiers drained, and all of the massive pantries emptied as well.
Sick to her stomach now and saddened by the realization that those below must have indeed been engaged in fighting those who lived above, and with disastrous results, Jessica stepped back out of the kitchen and into the hallway.
Her feet took her up the staircase to the study of Yori’s father. He too was dead, and his death had not been easy or swift like his wife’s and the deaths of the servants.
Disgusted and horrified by the loss of human life, she turned away. It was past time to get out of there and get back out on the streets. She had to help people, and there was nobody here for her to help.
She turned toward the door, and her mouth dropped open in surprise and relief as Yori suddenly appeared within the frame. His eyes met hers.
Her lips trembled. “My God. I am so sorry. We can’t stay here. We have to move.”
He didn’t answer her for long moments. His fingers plucked at the weapons in his belt. His eyes moved past her face to the body of his father, but no emotion showed upon his features.
He was in shock. She moved forward, making sure to keep her hands at her side so as not to startle him. “Yori, we have to go. Come on, come on.”
His eyes shifted from his father’s body to her face. There was not a flicker of anything in there. He could have been a cyborg for all the emotion written upon his face. “They just wouldn’t understand.”
Jessica didn’t know exactly who he was referring to. She wasn’t sure she cared either. All she cared about was getting him to leave there. She wanted out of there, out of that house of death. “Come with me. Come on.”
He ignored that entreaty. “Do you know how many times I told them that they had to change? Do you know how many times I told them that if we did not end our insistence on slavery and mistreatment of those who live below that they would rise up against us? I had to show them. I need you to understand that.”
An uneasy feeling set in. “I have always understood that. We need to leave here now.”
“Have you understood it?”
He paced closer, and that uneasy feeling grew deeper, clawing its way along her nervous system and telling her that there was danger here. He was obviously unhinged, and why wouldn’t he be? He had just witnessed the death of his parents. He had railed against their way of life, but he had never wanted them dead.
He’d clearly snapped. Yori was always above it all: the violence and the dirty work of the resistance. He had not even been willing to break into the warehouses to steal the nutro-loaves and the foodstuffs that had kept those belowground in the most need from being starved to death. He was…he was an observer, not a participant in things.
She had seen too much bloodshed, but the senseless death in that house had rattled her as well, and she was not even family.
She kept her voice low and soothing, talking to him as if he were an invalid. “Yes, I have. We have to leave here. The people are in the streets, and they are dying. There’s so much death out there. We have to help. They’re firing at us from above, and it’s not safe here.”
It wasn’t safe anywhere, but now was not the time to say so.
He came closer still. “Do you remember the first time we met?”
Her lips formed an unwilling smile. “How could I ever forget that moment? It changed both our lives forever. If it had not been for you standing up for me that day, making it known what had happened down there in the tunnels, I would’ve been put to death for the crime of coming above.”
His eyes, still expressionless and unreadable, locked onto hers. “I lied that day.”
Another niggle of disquiet nudged into her consciousness. What was wrong with him? Obviously Yori, who had no taste for bloodshed and never had, had been pushed completely over the edge by the bloodshed within his home. “It doesn’t matter.”
His voice lifted into a shout. “It does matter! It matters a great deal! Don’t you dare stand there and tell me that it does not matter when everything hinged on that one lie!”
Her entire body felt as if it had been encased in a cryo-chamber. Her mouth went dry as Talon’s words came back to her. Could Yori have betrayed them? “I don’t know what the lie was. I never knew you had lied.”
The expression on his face now was one of pure rage, and it held her transfixed. He had always been so remote that was one of the reasons why their brief love affair had not lasted. He had always cultivated within himself a great distance from others. He kept everyone at arms -length and his emotions buried beneath a calm demeanor. “I said that it was all Heren’s idea.”
Jessica gawked at him. What did it matter now? So what if it hadn’t been Heren’s idea? Heren was dead, and had been for a great many years. He had died several weeks after that tunnel incident. He had fallen from a roof turret while working as a house guard as part of his punishment from his parents for going down into the tunnels.
She chose her words carefully because she was terribly afraid they might be her last. The suspicion that Talon had planted in her head made her very aware of just how close to his weapons Yori’s fingers really were.
Those weapons, they were like him. He preferred to be the mastermind behind the bloodshed. He had created that chamber above the tunnels but below ground in order to have a command center from which to run the resistance. He did not even know how to use a weapon as far she knew. But he wore the ones strapped around his waist with real authority.
He said, “Nobody could ever see it. I was always just the catalyst for the rest of you. You were the devices by which every part of the plan was played out. None of you could see how necessary my role was.”
She back-pedaled a step, and he came forward. Her heart hammered in her chest as she realized that she had walked right into something both deadly and dangerous. “We all knew how necessary you were. You are our leader. We would’ve been nothing without you. We would have failed early on. You brought me into the resistance, remember? I had no idea it even existed until you took me into the tunnels and into the command center.”
His eyes flashed. A smile, so evil and vicious that it took her breath away, lifted his mouth. He looked like a complete stranger now, and she took yet another step back, knowing that he would pursue her if she tried to run. His hands were so much closer to his weapons than hers were to the ones she wore. She might have a chance to get off a shot, but not before he got off one of his own.
He said, “You were the easiest one to convince. I already had your loyalty. All it took to buy you was to elevate you from the tunnels to the training grounds for the Capo. It cost me nothing but a few words to own you.”
She had to buy some
time. He was going to kill her. She knew it. She heard faint noises from downstairs and hope lifted her spirits, but not for long. That might be his reinforcements, come to aid and assist him in murdering her, and whoever else might be left in the house.
She had time to reassess the situation however when he paused for a second, a slight frown marring his face as he too heard those voices and footsteps below. That he was obviously not expecting someone made her feel better about whoever was down there not being an ally of his, but then again, they may not be allies of hers either. They could be Federation officers ready to kill anyone who moved.
Her gaze flicked back to his face to see that he had come forward yet again. She had missed her window of opportunity to draw fire upon him. His attention was focused back on her again.
Jessica knew, deep down in her heart, that part of what kept her weapons sheathed was a vast sense of loyalty to this man. He had indeed taken her from a life that had been far beyond awful and placed her in the hallowed above-ground life. She knew, with every fiber of her being that the life she had had up there, in the sunlight and air, would have been completely beyond her otherwise.
She owed him her life, but was she willing to let him take it from her?
Hell no.
She had to placate him. She held her hands up, her empty palms showing. “So you own me. I don’t mind that. I have never minded that. I have always known it.”
She had known it. Deep down in her soul and heart where it counted the most, she had known that he had played upon the loyalty that she felt for him and used it to take her into the resistance. It had not taken much convincing though. Every single day of her life she had seen the injustices that he had sworn had to end, and she had wanted them to end as well.
He said, “You I am going to regret having to kill.”
She managed to get out the words, “Then don’t kill me.”
His face contorted. “I don’t want to. I always loved you. Even after you no longer loved me, I still loved you. I did everything I could to get you off this planet, and what did you do? You opened your mind just enough to get yourself wiped and put on a slaver ship.”
