by Quil Carter
And somehow… someday… it has to change.
“Elish?”
The voice reached through my inner reverie like a hand coming to snatch and pull me back to reality. I looked to where it was coming from, down the street in front of me, and stopped dead in my tracks when I saw Nero, with Finn walking beside him. They were both in their underclothes, with only jackets over the both of them. Nero’s six-foot-three burly frame towered over my small sengil, who looked utterly petrified in his shadow.
This brought up a fresh swell of fear. “What happened?” I asked anxiously. I jogged to the both of them, quickly closing the distance, and the first thing I did was check Finn for any injuries. “Why is Finn with you?”
Nero yawned, looking like a roaring lion with short black hair. “Silas was moving around in your room and peaches in the closet got scared.” Nero put a hand on Finn’s bedhead blond curls and shook it back and forth. “I guess he trusts me? I don’t know why, but he does.” Nero squinted his eyes and looked behind me. “I followed you that night you went to run off to your boyfriend’s. I know where he lives so I was dropping off scardy.”
My mouth dropped open. “W-what?” I exclaimed. I looked behind me and hissed through my teeth when I saw several workers in mechanic uniforms twenty feet away but approaching quickly. I grabbed Nero and Finn and pulled them both to the nearest alley. “You followed me?”
Nero looked at me like I was insane. “Uh, yeah? Mysterious call from your boyfriend, leaving before I could come with you. What the fuck did you expect? Privacy? You fucking new here, Eli?” He rolled his eyes when he saw the expression on my face. “I ain’t telling Silas. You’ve actually been happy for a change, ‘cept when Kingy is fucking around with you. I’m not going to be the one that fucks it up, the other two would never forgive me.”
That helped, but not much. Having Nero know about Julian… know where Julian lives. It fucking made me nauseas.
“You… you can’t tell him a thing,” I said, panicked. A thousand possibilities ravaged my head, each one leading to a terrible way this could all go wrong. “He’ll hurt him. You fucking have–”
“I said I won’t!” Nero said, throwing his hands up into the air. He exited the alley and started walking back towards Alegria. “I fucking told you… you’ve been real happy. You seemed even more happy walking home. I’m not an asshole. I don’t like seeing you miserable, even if you do act like a fucking twit a lot of the time.” He then smirked. “Julian, huh? Nice name too.”
I ground my teeth. “If you’re going to be true to your word… don’t say his name again, Nero, please.”
“Fine. Fine. Just walk faster. I’m tired and now I gotta get ready for Cardinalhall.” He gave me a dirty look then. “And you get to sleep in… asshole.”
“No… I…” I could feel my stomach churning, the dread making it feel like I’d swallowed ball bearings. “I… I’m supposed to go to Kreig with Perish.” Another thing to worry about, another problem I had wanted to take on.
“Really? Lucky fucker. I love exploring Kreig.”
This was bad. I wanted to trust Nero, I really did. But the more people you trusted with a secret, the more likely it would be that the secret gets out. This wasn’t good… and it was just another thing I had to worry about.
Silas had Nero under his thumb… if Silas suspected anything, fucking anything, he could get Nero to talk.
No, Silas wouldn’t suspect a thing. I wouldn’t let him. I’d keep Julian safe… I’d keep both Finn and Julian safe.
Finn…
I sighed when I heard him make a nervous noise. But when I looked to Finn I saw that he was worse than I thought. My sengil had his hand over his mouth and he was staring terrified at the ground.
“I’m not mad at you,” I said to him quietly. “If… you feel like you’re in danger you can go to Nero. He’ll protect you.”
Finn slowly looked up at me, terror etched in his face. And as I stared back at him, trying to look as confident and in control as I could, the poor boy’s eyes brimmed and tears began to slip down his cheeks.
“Finn… it’s okay,” I whispered. I looked around to make sure no one was coming towards us and put a hand on his back to encourage him to walk faster. He’ll feel better once we were in our bedroom. Every time he got like this, I’d always managed to make him better. It was my duty as his master after all. “I won’t let him hurt you… you know I won’t. It’s okay.”
Finn choked, and as his eyes shut tight, he shook his head. “No, Master Elish. It’s not okay…” he whimpered. He let out a choked sob and began to cry when I pulled him to me. “It’s not okay.”
CHAPTER 38
Perish was the normal Perish I’d now known for years. He flashed me a sunny smile as I approached the Falconer plane and introduced himself to Finn who was walking behind us with our bag of lunch and some other supplies that the scientists working in Kreig had asked for. There wasn’t a single twitch or movement out of place, he was Perish again.
“We have a lot of things to look over when we go to Kreig,” Perish said happily when we were high in the air and leaving Skyfall. I was standing in front of the windows in the cargo hold, watching Skyfall disappear into the mist. There was something so freeing about seeing Skyfall vanish in my dust, and I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a part of me that wished I could permanently leave it behind.
Julian keeps saying we should run away… run into the greywastes where Silas will never find us…
“Wow, I’ve never seen Skyfall like that!” Finn said in a loud whisper. I looked down and saw my sengil with an enchanted expression on his face, gazing out the same window in wonder.
But… I don’t think Julian realizes that I’d never leave Finn behind.
“The last surviving city in the world,” I said to Finn. “Just wait until we land in Kreig. It’s bigger than Skyfall but completely uninhabited by arians. It’s just the scientists, animals, and the occasional radanimal.”
“Wow,” Finn said. “Imagine what it must be like for the immigrants the first time they see Skyfall. They’re travelling in nothing but grey death and desolation… then they see the outline of the cityscape break through the fog. A real city… with life, electricity, animals… no radiation.” Finn glanced down at his collarbone. “I’m glad you checked to make sure my Geigerchip was working. The most radiation I’ve ever been exposed to was during an x-ray.”
I had remembered to do that before we’d departed. Every arian in Skyfall was implanted with a Geigerchip at birth, a device invented by Perish and Sky that absorbs radiation and makes it so one can survive in the irradiated greywastes. If you were in the greywastes and didn’t have a Geigerchip, eventually you would turn into a raver. The greywastes were covered in irradiated animals, animals that had evolved to be able to withstand the radiation, but they were deformed monsters, a shadow of what their ancestors looked like and usually aggressive and crazy from the radiation’s effects on their brains.
“The amount of radiation you would be exposed to if it was broken would be minimal,” I said. “We’ll be spending all of our time underground. You’ll barely see the abandoned city.”
Amusingly, Finn frowned at this. “We won’t be able to see the city? Oh…” He sounded relatively disappointed at this.
Perish chuckled from the cockpit. “Elish has never been in the greywastes, Finn,” he said. “Only from the plane to the underground lab and Cardinalhall. It’s dangerous out there, Elish can’t take you out exploring.”
I gave Perish an unimpressed look, and through the reflection in the plane’s front window he saw me and smirked. “Well, it’s true,” he said in his own defense. But then his pale eyes detached themselves from mine and he looked over his shoulder. “If you want to see the greywastes, Finn, I can ask the scientists’ bodyguard, a friend of mine named Joel, to chaperone you two. He’s an experienced greywaster and he knows Kreig like the back of his hand.”
A weird high-pitched squ
ealing sound came from my sengil, the kind of noise reminiscent to when Garrett accidently stepped on Ellis’s rabbit’s tail. This one, however, was made out of happiness.
I never knew a man could make such a sound, but there it was.
“Don’t get too excited yet,” I warned Finn. My sengil’s face was plastered with an excited smile, and there was an air around him that seeped giddy anticipation. “I’ll size up Joel and if I think he’s up for the task… I suppose we can spend a few minutes and explore the city.”
“Can we go into an abandoned building?” Finn asked. “Please, Master Elish!”
I sighed. “Perhaps.”
And the rabbit squeal of happiness returned. I hid the smile that threatened my features upon hearing it, it was rather endearing to see him so happy about the prospect of exploring Kreig. Things that made me happy were in short supply lately, and I wasn’t picky about what lightened my mood.
But even though Finn’s excitement had brought an energy of positivity to the plane, there was still the nagging reason as to why I was actually on this Falconer. Perish’s request of me…
However, Perish’s mind was back to its default setting, with seemingly no memory at all of him calling me.
Several hours into our flight, with Finn settled down in the back with a book, I sat down in the co-pilot’s chair and handed Perish a cup of tea. He thanked me and took a drink, the two of us staring out into the greywastes we were flying above.
There wasn’t much to see right now, Perish was following the highway which would eventually bring us to the city of Kreig. Occasionally we would see greywaster settlements, towns, and blocks, clusters of homes with smoke billowing from the chimneys and structures painted different colours besides the usual marbled browns and greys. Upon seeing this, I’d call to Finn and he’d fly up and run to the window to observe the greywasters carrying on with their lives, and though they couldn’t see him, the boy waved to them with a happy smile.
But mostly, we saw desolation. An expanse of grey rock, broken and hollow buildings, and crumbling roads cut across the grey like a badly healed scar. Even the trees in the greywastes, simply called black trees, were naught but sparse ebony sticks that stuck out of the ground as if they were stray unwanted hairs.
Finn was fascinated with the greywastes, but seeing such a wasteland always stirred up suppressed feelings of anger toward both Silas and Sky. I was reminded every day what the world had lost when the Fallocaust happened, but seeing it first-hand, and knowing that this barren destruction was everywhere in the world, not just this small pocket of greywastes, had my mood plummeting.
And unfortunately, Finn would pay the price for such feelings.
“I see a bunch of abandoned cars on the road!” Finn said excitedly. “It looks like they were trying to flee that town on the west-hand side… Do you think their skeletons are still inside?”
My jaw twinged and anger flared. “Over six billion people died a hundred and fifty-six years ago, Finneus, show some god damn respect,” I turned around and barked. “If you had any fucking concept of what the world lost you’d be crying about what you’re seeing, not jumping around like an idiot!”
Finn’s face dropped, then his chin tightened and began to quiver. He broke my brumal gaze then, his eyes shifting instead to the floor or the plane, which he looked at with grief and shame.
“I’m sorry, Master,” he squeaked, his voice wobbling. And whatever happened after, I didn’t know, I turned away from him and swallowed down the barbed responses that clung to my tongue for the chance to be spat.
There was sniffing after that. I knew he was near tears, but there was nothing I could do for him. I was sitting beside Perish for a reason, and gently probing the scientist for clues on his mental state would be a good way to clear the awkward air.
“What tasks do you have laid out for today?” I asked Perish. I removed my cigarette tin from the inside of my black overcoat and fished out a cigarette. I offered the tin to Perish. “It sounds like you were planning on being quite busy.”
Perish glanced over, then raised a hand over the open tin, his fingers wiggling as he decided which cigarette he wanted. I stocked different kinds, some helped me wake up if Julian had kept me awake, others gave me a more relaxed feeling.
Finally Perish plucked out a Skyland-made SilverFinish, and put it into his mouth. “The Kreig lab is where most of the work on cloning Sky takes place,” he explained. I already knew this information but I let him continue uninterrupted. “I’m going to be doing the usual: looking over their notes, their data, and double-checking to make sure everything is functioning smoothly. And I have made several discoveries about Silas’s future Sky clone. I’m going to transfer the scientists my newest genetic text. It might be the key to getting the baby’s heart to not give out. So many heart attacks. It’s quite sad.”
I nodded. I was suspecting Perish had more research for the scientists in regards to the Sky clone. Kreig was the lead laboratory in creating those clones. “And is there something you wish for me to do?” He’d told me that he wanted me to come on this trip with him, but perhaps the only reason in the end, will be to get away from Silas for the day.
Perish opened his mouth, the cigarette now burning between his fingers, but he shut it slowly.
That’s what I was hoping for… his mind was searching itself, trying to find the connection that would lead him to the information it was seeking.
Information that was being hidden from Perish due to what Silas had done to his brain.
What had Silas even done? I’d never asked that. Silas was no scientist. Was it Silas who had performed the surgery? If so it would make sense as to why it had been botched.
“I’d like for you…” Perish’s words trailed. His dark brows met and his eyes twitched around as he mentally read his internal monologue.
Then he smiled and looked at me. “I’d love for you to show Finn Kreig. Take him and take Joel and have a wonderful time outside.”
Failure… unfortunate failure.
Several hours later and way too many cigarettes and cups of tea, we approached the city of Kreig. The time had been spent with casual conversation between Perish and I, with Finn sulking in the cargo hold, reading his book and tending to his injured feelings. I’d attempted to point out several things of interest while on our way to the lab, but all I got in return was polite recognition, followed by silence.
Another passive-aggressive one, great.
But once we were flying over the city, not even Finn could resist looking out the window in awe. All around us were buildings of various sizes, including the occasional skyscraper, every one of them in mixed states of decay. The city looked like it was made for ghosts, every window was broken and hollow, some even showing glimpses of their innards, and several even had their facades sheered off, showing the individual floors, still with furniture in place all covered with debris and thick dust. Finn had his face pressed up against the window when we flew by such a building, and he pointed out with muted excitement that he could see what appeared to be a kitchen.
“If it wasn’t for the radiation in the plaguelands, Finn, I could take you to Edmonton or Calgary,” Perish said. I could feel the plane’s altitude lowering, the buildings that had at first been below us now creeping up to the windows like they were to snatch us in midair. “Those two cities are as big and as developed as Skyfall and completely abandoned. Kreig here is big, but not as many skyscrapers and not as many people lived there before the Fallocaust. But unfortunately the plaguelands radiation is too extreme for anyone who isn’t a born immortal or a chimera.”
“Oh that is too bad. I’d love to see an abandoned city so big,” Finn said. He was putting on his bullet proof vest now. I made him bring one, just in case. “Especially one that has never seen a scavenger. It must be fascinating.”
There was a shift of the Falconer’s engine as the thrusters adjusted themselves to land. A Falconer jet could land horizontally, it was one of th
e last planes created before the Fallocaust and the military base in what would become Skyfall, had over three dozen of them. Perish and his scavenging team were also able to salvage other planes before time took them, and now Skyfall had quite the impressive air force. I remember Silas once saying offhandedly that Sky loved planes.
“One day you may be able to go, however,” Perish said. His tongue was poking out of the side of his mouth as he adjusted levers and pushed buttons on the Falconer’s control panel. “I’m sure there’s a way to make an arian immune to radiation. If I had free time, I’d focus all of my attention on it.”
“That would be wonderful!” Finn said excitedly. Then with a glance outside, he grabbed onto a metal bar above his head, just as the Falconer landed in the middle of Kreig’s main road.
Finn was intelligent enough to step to the side when Perish and I walked towards the sliding door. The two of us secured our guns and Perish opened the door, he stepped out first and I followed.
The air was musty and dry, the sun hidden behind the tall buildings that encompassed us. It was cold out and I was glad that I’d told Finn to wear a proper jacket. The weather in Skyfall was tepid when we left, but Kreig was northeast inland and in the mountains, winter was shaken off later in the year than on the coast.
“Ah, there he is. Hello, Joel,” I heard Perish call. I closed the door of the Falconer and followed Perish to the front of the plane. I noticed that Perish was carrying a black briefcase in his hand, inside was his personal laptop, one that no one was allowed to touch but him.
Joel was definitely a greywaster, that could be seen from his appearance alone. He had riding goggles over top of messy auburn hair, a dirty ash-covered face that hid any attractiveness he may have concealed under the grime, and a short scraggly beard. His clothing I recognized as Skyfall clothing however, but the beat-up brown leather jacket and the dark green shirt were scuffed and torn, and his ratty blue jeans had leather armour strapped to his knees and a belt of knives and guns across the waist.
