Children of the Bloodlands

by S. M. Beiko

  That was Saskia’s superpower, negligible as it was. But she’d relied on it for the past seven years as if it were a gift from whatever had touched her when she was small and more desperate than she’d even been. That little darkness that had crept out of the earth and stayed with her — it made her see things more keenly, especially in the dark.

  The Task Guard cast its own shadow, especially over school. And after they got what they wanted, their perceived peace after Denizens were outed, they liked to gloat. That was their first mistake. There were so many ETG presentations at school, talking about their fancy tech, their one-up techniques to keep the enemy down.

  Even though her classmates often slept through these presentations, Saskia had always listened.

  Each guard is equipped with state-of-the-art optical enhancements, utilizing government-sanctioned augmented reality programming, helping them to identify those Denizens who don’t wish to take part in our peace. There had been a sad irony to that. This new regime had invented a Spirit Eye. Death’s patent had been robbed.

  But now these devices, little more than contact lenses, could suss out any Denizen wishing to hide their identity. Their power. It fed information back to the guard through the optic nerve. It made things easier for them.

  And it certainly would for Saskia.

  She made it to the range road — the ring of high-security fencing and military-vehicle access roads around what was once the provincial parliamentary building of Manitoba. Now it was an army palace for Federal Task Guard only and hiding gods-knew-what beneath the sprawling complex.

  There was still some kind of commotion going on towards the front of the building, likely where the blast had originated, and Saskia threw herself down into the cold, wet grass as another explosion went off. A siren was sounding. She had to act fast.

  Her bag was already on the ground beside her, and she yanked out the heavy spikes, their cords trailing, thick as her thumbs. She hooked the clamps at the end of them to the posts on the enormous control box, then shoved the spikes into the ground. Atop these were the caged speakers. She turned every dial up, and though the buzzing was low it vibrated harshly in her shivering stomach. She hesitated only another second before hitting the main button on the huge device.

  The sound that the device emitted was like the weapon the Elemental Task Guard favoured — a hand-held baton, shaped almost like a spear, that gave off a terrible smell of ozone before it was slammed into the belly of anyone not cooperating, shocking them to a crumpled pile. Set phasers to stun. Except Saskia’s version put out a high-pitched sonic wave that temporarily shorted out the electricity functioning on the perimeter fence, including all spotlights directed on blind spots and the sirens.

  It also left a gap in their digital fence, something Saskia was about to burst through.

  Body low, she rushed towards the part of the fence that had been taken out in the blast. The Task Guard soldiers were otherwise occupied at the front steps of the building, and she’d have the element of surprise on her side now that they were shouting, scrambling. She took out the VR visor, slid her finger across the banged-up tablet, and shoved it into the back of her jeans. The firewall was down. Her code was doing its parasitic work in their periphery system and would provide ample distraction for those in the Old Leg’s control centre in the massive dome Saskia stared up at.

  The Dome was once the eye of the Owl’s authority, but no longer the story went on. A lot had changed. But that wasn’t going to stop her now.

  Saskia dropped the VR visor over her eyes, slid her micro-sensored gloves on, and lowered into the stance she’d seen her real hero, first-hand, drop into before rushing in.

  “Showtime,” she muttered.

  ~

  “Get away!” Ella screamed, arms and fists flaring bright with fire, and every time she lobbed one at an advancing guard, her elbow felt the kickback like a sawed-off shotgun.

  She wasn’t the only Fox still standing, but there weren’t many left after the first bluff. The Guard had known they were coming. That was the risk they always took. She hadn’t wanted it to escalate like this, or so quickly. They hadn’t even gotten inside, to the general. They were still within the main courtyard. They hadn’t made it very far before the sonic clubs were out, before Denizens had gone down.

  Now Ella was trapped, cornered on the huge limestone steps that she’d only ever seen through industrial fencing. She’d gone on a tour of the building, once, when she was very small and the world had been different. Damien was on her right, but he was coughing up blood, and Ella wasn’t exactly the strongest of the lot of them that had rushed in here in the first place. Clare, on her left, was cradling her shoulder, and when her crisp eyes met Ella’s, they were wet with tears. Ella had never felt more like a kid than at this moment. And she was definitely no Roan Harken.

  She wished Saskia were here. To tell Ella one more time that she was an idiot, so that Ella could tell her she was right. And though she knew it would fall on deaf ears, Ella prayed, stupidly, to anyone who would hear: To Deon. To Ancient. To Roan Harken herself. Prayer was the last futile thing she’d try for liberty as the guards charged up their weapons and advanced.

  Then the sirens and the lights died. And the Task Guard wasn’t looking at Ella anymore. There were surprised shouts, the blue sparking light of the sonic batons fizzling along with the certainty of their trigger-happy owners.

  “What the hell is that?” she heard a guard cry, pointing towards the ruined fence in the murky dark. He dropped his weapon and fled, screaming.

  Ella lowered her fists, squinted. They were all looking towards the gates now, the ones she’d blown apart to barely make it past the first wave, and the guards were scattering now, terrified. Some staggered, as if struck, and with each blow of this invisible monster chasing them out of their own turf, there was the sound of an awful roar, like a house fire, like a howl, and Damien nearly fell down the stairs when they all caught a glimpse of what was on one fleeing guard’s visor monitor.

  “Deon?” Clare hissed, and Ella caught Damien, and the three of them decided that, divine intervention or not, it was time to go.

  ~

  The problem with any bit of tech that is worn to augment reality is that anyone can augment it. So reality itself is easily manipulated. Saskia knew that better than anyone, code or not.

  She’d spent foundational weeks, probably more like months, sculpting and designing and building the enormous image of Deon now burned into the retinas of the fleeing guards. Her research had been thorough. She’d interviewed a lot of older Foxes who had been more than happy to describe the god their Family had taught them to revere. An enormous warrior woman, with a head — or a helm, some people said — of a fox, with a mantle of white flames on her wide shoulders, nine tails, like the Japanese myth, wagging behind her, arms and legs braced in the leathery hide of primordial beasts she’d slaughtered with her blade of flickering purple garnet.

  A world like this could still use a few heroes. And Saskia was more than happy to provide one.

  The second problem with tech wired into an optic nerve is that seeing was believing — physically. Tangibly. It meant that, whatever the poor viewer was seeing, their brain registered it as real. Corporeal. So if that manufactured semi-hologram took a swipe at you, your eyes told your brain which told your body that you were, in more pointed terms, screwed.

  These were problems Saskia had planned for. But she had her own crosses to bear. To get the best range, she had to move in order to make her digital Deon maquette move. She picked up an errant bit of fence from what was probably Ella’s first foray into criminal terrorism, and that bit of fence became Deon’s garnet blade. And many of the Task Guard weren’t sticking around long enough to figure out they were being bested by a ghost in their well-oiled machine.

  It was anarchy, to say the least. And those without the faux–Spirit Eye tech caught on
to the fleeing guards’ hysteria. She hoped Ella had dropped the stupid risk-taking bravado and seen this turn for what it was — a way out. Saskia lifted her visor, and her enormous, flickering mirage of Deon stood over her body like a skin, waiting for her next physical command. There was a flare of fire somewhere near the huge stone steps of the legislature, and in that flash Saskia swore she saw a girl, grinning, as she ushered two others past the still-dead fence and into the safety of the dark.

  Saskia laughed out loud, pumped her tense fist. She imagined that her VR Deon cracked its wide fox jaws in an unsettling smirk of its own.

  Then her chest tightened, because in that same dark she’d only just thought safe, something else climbed out into the gloaming and was staring right at Saskia.

  She stopped breathing. No. Not now. Not again.

  There was a second of pregnant silence, then a bang like a thunderclap in her skull, and the lights and the sirens were back on, the doors of the Old Leg bursting open before her, with the Task Guard in their cruel grey service-issue uniforms pouring out.

  “No,” she hissed. She slammed the visor down, ripped the tablet out from her pants as she backed up, back towards the busted fence she’d only just brazenly come through, certain and unafraid. But when she whirled she was knocked over by the butt of something made of steel, and the tablet and the visor went flying. They didn’t matter now. Both were useless. Dead. Her head rang with pain, and she tried to get up, to run like Barton had taught her, but her hands were being pinned behind her, a zip tie tightening as a knee pressed her into the cold pavement.

  She didn’t close her eyes, though, still staring at the place where Ella had gotten away. Where the Moth Queen stood, as she had moments ago, clear as the illusion of Deon Saskia had conjured. She knew this was no illusion. Death’s many eyes were full of their terrible knowing. Her enormous wings gaped wide, many needle fingers folded, patient.

  “Follow the moth,” the great old Mother Death whispered. “The choice must be yours.”

  The words cut the last shrinking bit of fight out of her. As Saskia was hauled to her feet like a quivering fawn in a sprung snare, as she was taken up the steps and inside, all that was left behind were a few brown moths, fluttering around the floodlights of the city’s Denizen prison.

  This time, unlike all the dreams she’d suffered in the years since Roan Harken had changed her life forever, Saskia was wide awake.

  About the Author

  S.M. Beiko is an eclectic writer and artist based in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She also works as a freelance editor, illustrator, graphic designer, and consultant in the trade book and comic publishing industries in Canada and the U.S. Her first novel, The Lake and the Library, was nominated for the Manitoba Book Award for Best First Book as well as the 2014 Aurora Award. Her fantasy trilogy, The Realms of Ancient, began with Scion of the Fox, followed by Children of the Bloodlands, and will be concluded with The Brilliant Dark (2019).

  DISCOVER ONLINE

  A rebellious heroine faces a colonial world coming unstitched in Jae Waller's stunning debut fantasy

  Seventeen-year-old Kateiko doesn’t want to be Rin anymore — not if it means sacrificing lives to protect the dead. Her only way out is to join another tribe, a one-way trek through the coastal rainforest. Killing a colonial soldier in the woods isn’t part of the plan. Neither is spending the winter with Tiernan, an immigrant who keeps a sword with his carpentry tools. His log cabin leaks and his stories about other worlds raise more questions than they answer.

  Then the air spirit Suriel, long thought dormant, resurrects a war. For Kateiko, protecting other tribes in her confederacy is atonement. For Tiernan, war is a return to the military life he’s desperate to forget.

  Leaving Tiernan means losing the one man Kateiko trusts. Staying with him means abandoning colonists to a death sentence. In a region tainted by prejudice and on the brink of civil war, she has to decide what’s worth dying — or killing — for.

  ECW digital titles are available online wherever ebooks are sold. Visit ecwpress.com for more details. To receive special offers, bonus content and a look at what’s next at ECW, sign up for our newsletter!

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  Copyright

  Copyright © S.M. Beiko, 2018

  Published by ECW Press

  665 Gerrard Street East, Toronto, ON M4M 1Y2

  416-694-3348 / info@ecwpress.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Editor for the press: Jen Hale

  Cover design: Erik Mohr

  Interior illustration: S.M. Beiko

  Author photo: Teri Hoffard Photography

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Beiko, Samantha, author

  Children of the Bloodlands / S.M. Beiko.

  (The realms of ancient ; book 2)

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77041-358-0 (hardcover).

  Also issued as: 978-1-77305-229-8 (ePUB),

  ISBN 978-1-77305-230-4 (PDF)

  I. Title.

  PS8603.E428444C55 2018 JC813’.6 C2018-902526-3 C2018-902527-1

  The publication of Children of the Bloodlands has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays. We also acknowledge the support of the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), an agency of the Government of Ontario, which last year funded 1,737 individual artists and 1,095 organizations in 223 communities across Ontario for a total of $52.1 million, and the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.