SLAM

by Tash McAdam

  A black and inconceivable shape is falling, bouncing off the Wall. Once. Twice. She pushes her power out and wraps it around the thing, pulling it away from the Wall, slowing it like she did for Sam.

  Something in her chest collapses like a punctured balloon.

  She lays it down gently. It’s Abial, but instead of landing on her feet like a cat, she’s horizontal. The puddle she’s lying in is reflecting moonlight, and looks almost white. Sam starts forward as Serena falls to her damaged knees, crawling the distance between them. The brown-red mud of soaking slum dust coats her, sticking to hands and legs and elbows, holding her down like it wants to stop her from reaching Abial.

  It feels as if it takes her an hour to get to her friend. Maybe more.

  When she finally, painfully does, she reaches out, and notices that her hands are twitching. They’re also dirty, caked in grime. She can’t help Abial if she is covered in mud. She chokes, hastily rubbing them together and wiping them off on her thighs. Then she delicately sets them on Abial’s torso, searching for injuries, just like she’s been taught. She can’t feel anything – it’s all soft and wet. Come on, come on. You’re okay. I caught you, you’re okay. You have to be okay.

  She tries to make sense of the scene in the stuttering light. Abial is jerking, and Serena’s hands are dipped in black, then red. Red.

  Abial wheezes something out, coughing a drop of blood that flies up and then falls onto her cheek, only to be immediately washed away by the rain. Her hair is sticking to her face in a dark sheet, hiding her eyes. Serena pushes it back, frantically trying to decide what to do. Abial’s pupils are blown wide and impossibly dark, almost obscuring the familiar ring of orange-brown.

  The light cuts again. Sam is slumped on his heels, a ghost of a boy in the shadow of the Wall. There’s a roaring noise in Serena’s ears, no, overhead. She looks up, tilting her face against the rain and howling an animal’s shout of pain and outrage. A chopper is banking in the skies, its searchlight twisting. It will be on them in moments. She fumbles for her zap, fingers made of rubber twisting round the trigger, and hauls it out of her soaked pants, but Sam staggers forward, jabbing his hand into her armpit and hauling her up with a reserve of strength she didn’t know he had left.

  “Bring her. Pick her up. Now. Run.” His voice breaks in the middle, but it’s firm.

  Gasping, she obeys, sliding her hands underneath Abial’s shoulders and knees, and scooping her up. They stumble forward, the white light of the chopper brushing over the stone behind them, inches away from her heels. She risks a glance back to see a pool of blood-filled water, shockingly lurid against the desaturated surroundings. But Sam twists, dragging her attention away from it, and thrusts his hand into the sky.

  Above them, the sound of the chopper pauses for a moment, starts again, and then chokes as the power dies.

  Sam shudders and falls to his knees, and this time Serena doesn’t have it in her to catch him. She already has one body cradled in her arms, pressed against her cold chest: feet, fingers and heart numb.

  In the sky, the engine starts again just as the chopper starts to fall toward the slums. As soon as it’s back under control, it banks and flies back over the Wall.

  THEY STAGGER INTO a lean-to made of aluminum and plastic sheeting, and see an old woman huddled in the corner. Well, old by slum standards – she’s probably only thirty-five or so, but the haggard lines ingrained with dirt ruin her face. Her greasy hair is lank and wet, and her eyes are wild, flicking from side to side. She’s probably flying on one of the street drugs.

  They ignore her. Serena sets Abial down gently, using the dregs of her power to guide her body, not wanting to drop the heavy weight. The woman curses emphatically under her breath, seeing the slight girl floating a body to the floor, and bolts into the rain.

  Serena starts after her for a split second, realizes she wouldn’t know what to do with her even if she caught up, and sags down onto the uneven floor instead. The lean-to doesn’t cut out the wet and wind, but it is a kind of shelter, even with the water streaming down the runnels in the ‘walls.’

  For the moment, at least, they’re safe.

  She leans over Abial, pressing her hand to her cheek, and communicating mentally. Abial, hold on. Listen to me, we’ll get you out of here, it’s going to be okay. She tries to inject her mind-to-mind speech with confidence, but can’t hide the edge of panic. She wishes she’d paid more attention in the classes meant to help you separate emotion from sending. Her thoughts are scattered and confused, splitting away from each other like light refracting through a prism, but she knows Abial is getting a sense of everything she’s feeling: fear, uncertainty, misery. Regret.

  Abial shudders. No. She sends a wavering image of the chopper beam finding her as she stood, poised to jump, then heard the stuttering of zapfire that broke the air as she went over.

  Serena curses and tries to rip away her shirt, to see the damage. As she does, she realizes that the flatpack Abial had been wearing is gone. All for nothing. It’s gone. She counts the noises Abial sent her.

  Eight zap hits at close range. She knows it’s hopeless, and that knowledge is painted starkly on her face. Abial’s insides must be mush; not even a shockvest could dull that amount of energy. Abial’s hand clutches feebly, golden faded to willow white, and Serena’s lip trembles before she takes it in hers. Skin to skin, their connection reignites. The pain drives a gasp from Serena. Please don’t. She isn’t even sure what she means. Please don’t hurt, please don’t go, please don’t die, please don’t leave me. She can’t look away from the pulverized mash of body armour mangling the torso of her oldest friend.

  Abial opens her mind. I’m sorry. She shows Serena Kion, starting from the very first day they met. Abial as a twelve-year-old slum kid, and Kion a dashing young operative. He saved her life, once, twice and she was his from that moment, always. The following years she’d spent training, and a closeness had developed between them. Then the raid. Damon taken, months of watching Kion helping Serena train, looking after her, only paying attention to Serena, as though Abial no longer existed. Caught up by Serena’s intensity and purpose, dismissing Abial as a kid, not a soldier. Not an adult.

  The only reason Abial had taken the test so early was to prove to Kion that she wasn’t a child anymore; that she was ready to fight. To fight for him, by his side. For a while, he’d looked at her again, seen her with those arresting, driven eyes, shadowed with all the pain he’d never shared.

  Then Serena was ready to test.

  Abial shows the jealousy and hatred that built up in her until she finally snapped, and Serena feels the roiling emotions like they’re her own as Kion whispers, ‘She’s amazing’ over the ear comm units the defending operatives wore while they struggled to catch her in the Arena. The words had cut Abial to the core, laying something open she was unwilling to face herself, and the pure pain and rage had boiled out of her, sculpted into an image she knew would make Serena feel that pain, that rage.

  There hadn’t even been conscious thought to it, just a bitter outpouring of jealousy and hatred. Of love turned to dust.

  I didn’t know. You never told me. You should have told me.

  Serena bites her lip and sends memories of her spending time with Abial, hanging out, talking, killing time and training together, playing with Damon – all the good memories she can muster. She winds her power into Abial’s and helps her block the burning pain of her ground-up organs, using techniques they learned together. She lets Abial see deep into her mind, and tries to show her how wrong she was to suspect something romantic between her and Kion. How the feeling between them could never be that way. She feels as though she has been skinned alive, sharing the hurt Abial has carried. Tears streak down her cheeks, following tracks left by the rain and dripping to the floor.

  Never?

  Never.

  Abial relaxes a little, sighing, eyes fixed on what passes for a ceiling.

  Sam sits down by Abial’s head a
nd combs her wet hair from her face, looking blank and shocked. They wait quietly, uselessly, and soon Abial’s chest stutters and stills, her harsh breathing catching and dragging wet in her throat, then stopping. The silence beats down like a drum until Serena sniffs and drags her hand roughly across her face.

  “We have to go.” She sounds bleak, even to her own ears. I lost Abial. She’s gone.

  She watches with a strange detachment as her hands move of their own accord, business like, closing Abial’s eyes and removing her few personal effects. There’s a picture of Kion and Abial playing Rizkball together, laughing. This she carefully slips into her chest pocket, and the rest of the odds and ends are put away without looking. She gets to her feet.

  Sam grimaces and looks around. “Are we really leaving her ... her body in that woman’s house?” His voice breaks halfway through the sentence, and he has to clear his throat.

  Serena shrugs a shoulder and jerks her head at the gaping hole in the hut. “I can’t carry her. I’m too weak. They’ll find her wherever we leave her. They’ll find us if we don’t get gone. We don’t have a choice. At least …” Her voice cracks for a moment. “At least it’s not raining on her in here.”

  She swallows, looks at the body for a long second, and then ducks out the gap that serves as a door. Back into the night. Sam follows her hastily, clanging something on the entrance on his way out. She doesn’t look back.

  Serena checks her wrist unit robotically and leads them on in silence, her mind playing the evening over again and again. She catalogues her injuries, keeping her mind veering away from a place that threatens to collapse her. Chest: badly bruised, but nothing broken or cracked. Manageable. Face: cut, no problem. Knees: twisted, at least, badly. She’s limping heavily, but has no power left to brace them, having spent the last dregs of it carrying Abial with them. Feet: sore, bruised, but nothing life threatening for now. The dirt of the slums is deep in her, ingrained in her wounds and the creases of her skin. She’ll need medicine, soon, to hold off the sickness.

  She chokes back a sob as she realizes that the place that hurts the most won’t stop hurting, no matter what medicine she’s given. Her heart feels too big, too heavy for her chest, like it’s pulling her down and down into the mud, dragging her to the floor with the weight of the changes the night has wrought on her.

  The journey is a meaningless blur. When the chopper throbs overhead, scanning for them, they duck into whatever shelter they can, startling groups of people hiding from the weather. Serena would prefer to leave less of a trail; her bare feet will be leaving evidence of her passing, of her misery. She can only hope that the rain will wash it away. But if these people are questioned psionically, it will be easy to follow them. She’s relying on the fact that the slumdwellers have no love for the Watch and know how to make themselves scarce. Nobody interferes with them; seeing the looks on their faces seems to be enough of a deterrent.

  Dawn is lightening the horizon to a paler shade of black when Serena finally checks their position one last time, and, furrowing her brows, raps lightly and rhythmically on the plastic sheet in front of them. It is exactly the same as all the sheets around it – wet and grimy, haphazardly leaning against whatever has been scrounged up for a wall. She doesn’t feel entirely confident in her navigation, but thankfully, a returning knock is heard, and when she responds with the arranged answer, the sheet moves, screeching against the rough floor. A brown hand is visible, holding it back.

  “C’mon in, kids. The weather’s terrible, ain’t it?” The voice is so incongruously warm and cheerful in the desolation of the slums that something inside Serena loosens, just a little, and she squats and shuffles through the gap. Leaf promised they’d be safe here, for now. And so far, he’s kept his word.

  She has no idea how they’re going to get home. Their mission is well and truly blown, Abial is dead and left behind, and she’s certain that everyone in the Institute knows her face. The bag, with Sam’s all-important comm unit, is lost somewhere, probably smashed when Abial was shot at the top of the Wall. All that information, gone.

  Worse, the tube is probably crawling with Readers and Institute soldiers.

  If they’re going to get back to Fourth City, they’re going to have to go overland. And she doesn’t know how that will work. Or if Sam will make it.

  But, she knows she’s not going to die here, like Abial did. She’s already lost her oldest friend. She’s not willing to lose herself, too. After all, if she gets Sam home, the information he has could save them all.

  Tash McAdam’s first writing experience (a collaborative effort) came at the age of eight, and included passing floppy discs back and forth with a best friend at swimming lessons. Since then, Tash has spent time falling in streams, out of trees, learning to juggle, dreaming about zombies, dancing, painting, learning Karate, becoming a punk rock pianist, and of course, writing.

  Tash is a teacher in real life, but dreams of being a full-time writer, and living a life of never-ending travel. Though born in the hilly sheepland of Wales, Tash has lived in South Korea and Chile and now calls Vancouver, Canada home.

  Maelstrom, the first book in The Psionics, is Tash’s first published work. Visit the website or Facebook for news, gossip, and random tidbits about Tash’s adventures.