In the moments that followed the eradication of the soldiers, the five of them all breathed heavily, but none of them spoke until Phulp finally said, “Oh dear.”
They all looked at him, but Sparks replied, “Oh dear?”
“Well, they may not have been here on official business, I do owe them money from a card game, but …”
“Spit it out,” Gurt demanded.
“They were still Crimson foot soldiers. Their deaths won’t go unnoticed.”
Gurt sniffed and wiped his forearm across his nose before he said, “It ain’t the first lot of these cloaked idiots we’ve killed.”
“It’s not?”
“No.”
“Oh dear,” Phulp said again as he gathered up some of his supplies that he’d bought from the shop. “Then we definitely need to get out of here. They’ll be looking for you.”
It took no more than ten minutes for the five of them to help Phulp pack up his things. “Right,” the small and pale creature said, “let’s go.”
Seb stood to one side to let all the others leave before him. Just before he followed on their heels, he knelt down next to the lead foot soldier and pulled her hood back. The sight hit him like a pit fighter and he nearly fell over backwards. A black and wrinkled face stared back at him. Two deep pits sat where she should have had eyes. She looked like she’d been burned from head to toe, yet she still walked. And she could still see.
“Seb,” Sparks called from outside the hut, “we’ve got to make a move.”
Seb shook from the shock of what he’d seen. He remained rooted to the spot for a few more seconds before he got to his feet on wobbly legs and walked out of the place.
Chapter 30
Phulp led the way through the dark and tight streets of the slum again. His awkward gait—an almost waddle in the way he tilted from side to side with each step—looked all the more comical for the creature’s disproportionately wide shoulders. Seb hadn’t seen it before that moment, but the small creature was square. Sparks walked behind him, her rucksack on her back and some of Phulp’s food in her hands. They all carried as much of Phulp’s goods as they could. After what had happened in his hut, he wouldn’t be returning there any time soon.
Gurt strode behind Sparks. Rounded shoulders and a heavy scowl, he kept his blasters hidden but seemed to be itching to draw them at any moment. The graceful SA walked with her chin held high while she scanned their environment. Ever alert, she padded through the dark, windy, and stinking streets like a deity.
Seb—as he had mostly done since they landed on Solsans—took up the rear. The slum seemed to be sleeping because they didn’t encounter many beings as they walked along the side of the path, the glisten of sewage in the full moon just inches away from their every step.
“Are you all right, Gurt?” Seb asked the large Mandulu.
Gurt spun around and glared at him. The brute ground his jaw, his horns moving up and down with the mashing movement. After he’d drawn a deep breath, he opened his mouth to speak, but before he could say a word, SA sprang to life. She slipped Phulp’s food beneath one arm, shoved Phulp, Sparks, and Gurt into a side alley, and then grabbed Seb before she dragged him into a dark recess on the opposite side to the others.
A shadowy alcove between two huts, they stood so close their bodies touched and Seb could feel the heat that came from her form. The sweet and floral smell he’d yearned for since they were last that close returned. As he listened to her slow breaths—ever calm—he relaxed in her presence.
A few seconds after SA had dragged Seb aside, a loud alarm went off in the slum. The heavy stomp of boots ran toward them down the path. About two dozen Crimson foot soldiers filed past them at a jog. Seb held his breath as he watched them, ready to drop Phulp’s food and fight should he need to.
Once they’d passed, SA stepped out into the street and Seb followed. The others came from out of the other side and Gurt looked at SA for a second before he dipped a nod at her. She nodded in return and they set off again after Phulp.
Now the alarm rang through the slum as a whining air-raid siren catcall, it made it harder to hear if someone approached.
Seb remained on edge as they walked through the streets. Many of the slum dwellers that had come out of their huts since the alarm had sounded watched the group walk past.
Slightly further back than the rest, Seb distanced himself enough so he could avoid the stares from everyone they passed. When they had their attention on the other four, what did one lone traveler matter?
Before they’d gone much farther, Phulp ducked into a hut that looked much like all of the others around them. The rest of the gang followed him in. Seb brought up the rear and chose to sit next to SA as they all made themselves as comfortable as they could be.
“This is my cousin’s hut,” Phulp said in a whisper once they’d all sat down.
“And he doesn’t mind us being here?” Sparks said.
“He’s dead, killed by his son in the square.”
The statement took Seb back to the images burned into his mind. Throats being cut, blood spraying everywhere, the reek of metal from so much spilled claret. “What was that about?” he asked Phulp.
Phulp’s eyebrows pinched in the middle, but he didn’t reply. He then drew a deep breath and stammered for a few seconds. The grief of reliving whatever ritual Seb and the others had witnessed seemed to trigger some kind of trauma buried deep within him.
Seb saw Gurt wince at Phulp’s discomfort and the large brute spoke. “So why don’t we keep going? Isn’t it a bit obvious for us to stay in the slum?”
“I’d say the exact opposite, actually,” Phulp said, apparent relief on his face at not having to relive his past pain. “As far as the foot soldiers are concerned, I’ve left my home. They won’t assume I have another one. So many people don’t even have their own place in here. They won’t search the huts; instead, they’ll go to the outskirts of the slum.”
“You sound like you know the Crimson soldiers pretty well,” Sparks said.
Phulp shrugged. “So we’re going to be here a while, until morning at least. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m not in the mood for sleeping.” As he spoke, he opened a can of something, took what looked like a huge date from it, and passed the can around.
When the can got to Seb, he didn’t want to seem impolite, so he too took one of the pieces of dried fruit. He hated the taste of dates, but maybe this fruit would surprise him. The sweetness spread through his mouth when he bit into it and he salivated as he chewed. “Wow, what is this?”
“It’s one of the only fruits that grows here. It’s called a plipple. We export it to the galaxy because as far as I know, no one else has the conditions to farm them.”
Seb put the rest of the fruit in his mouth and grinned. “It tastes wonderful.”
“I don’t want to ask why you guys are here,” Phulp said, “that’s none of my business, and I’m probably safer not knowing. So tell me a bit about yourselves instead.”
Silence swept through the small space until Gurt finally said, “I’m a Mandulu. We’re a warrior race that grow up fighting.” Gurt pointed to his horns with one of his large fingers. “When we’re little, these horns grow all the way up the side of our face. If you fight when you’re young, they snap off quite easily during battle. If you wait until you get older, they have to be ground off, which is excruciating. I hated fighting as a kid, but I got used to it.”
“Why can’t you just leave your tusks to grow?” Seb asked.
“Horns, Seb.”
Seb smiled at Gurt.
“Because they eventually grow into our eyes and blind us. They have to be removed one way or another, and it’s often done just before we hit puberty. Not only is it more painful to have the elders remove them for you, but it’s also more shameful. If you don’t lose your tusks in a fight, then you haven’t fought enough.”
After a deep sigh, Gurt looked at the ground and Seb gasped. “You had to have yours cut o
ff?”
Of all the times Gurt had looked at Seb with malice burning in his red glare, none compared to how he looked at him in that moment. He glared at him with such ferocity now, Seb nearly felt the heat of it. “I fought,” he said. “I fought a lot. And I won a lot. I was always under the impression that a pretty fighter is the one you should avoid.”
“I think so too,” Seb agreed. “Someone who’s been beaten up a lot suggests someone who can’t fight.”
“Right? But it isn’t like that in my culture. If I’ve not been beaten up enough, then I’m lazy and I deserve to have my horns ground off. After that day I focused on what I did best.” He pulled his jacket open and showed Seb his blasters.
The vulnerability in Gurt at that moment almost warmed Seb to him. Almost.
Although Seb had heard Sparks’ story of being orphaned at a young age and living on the streets, when she said, “… and my real name’s Louisa Grace,” he snorted a laugh.
The others in the hut turned to look at him and Seb’s face heated up. “Sorry, I just wasn’t expecting that.”
Gurt seemed to be reclaiming some of the power he clearly felt he’d lost when telling them about his childhood. He said, “You thought she was named Sparks from birth?”
“Um, I suppose I didn’t think about it.” Seb looked at his small friend. “I’m sorry, Louisa Grace.”
The tiny Thrystian scowled at him. “I prefer Sparks.”
Seb couldn’t hide his smile as he dipped a nod at her. “Right-o, LG.”
Sparks continued with her story, and once she’d finished, the room turned to Seb. The attention made him uncomfortable and his breathing grew shallow.
“Um …” he said. “I … um, I’ve not got much to say. I was a little shit when I was younger.”
“Weren’t we all?” Phulp said.
“Yeah, I suppose. I gave my parents hell—not that I cared what my dad thought—but my mum died young and never got to see the man I’ve become. I used to fight a lot. Unlike Gurt, my culture doesn’t like fighting, and those who did it would be outcast and excluded from many situations. I should have paid more attention at school, should have gotten smarter, but instead, I fought people. It was all I wanted to do. It took for my dad to die for me to try to do something else. Although it didn’t take long before I ended up in the fighting pits again. I have a brother who also likes to fight like I do. He went too far and killed someone. He’s now incarcerated on our planet. He’ll never come out again. I think my dad worried I would end up in the same situation, and maybe I would have if I hadn’t left the place. Have any of you been to Danu?”
When Seb looked up, the other four all stared at him and shook their heads.
“You don’t want to, it’s a horrible planet. Dusty all year round. Hot in the winter, burning in the summer. I felt permanently thirsty living there. And the sandstorms … I’m surprised I have any skin left because of the constant sandblasting every time I went outside. So, yeah, nothing that exciting, but that’s me, really.”
The stories of their pasts seemed to lift Phulp, who grinned as he watched the group with his albino stare. “And you?” he asked SA.
Just before Seb could speak on her behalf, she drew a deep breath as if to say something. The hairs lifted on the back of Seb’s neck and gooseflesh ran along his arms. The entire planet seemed to stop to listen.
Although quiet, SA sang the most perfect note. Long and drawn out, Seb’s mouth hung loose as the gentle tone changed pitch. A celestial lullaby, it came in waves. Seb swallowed back the lump in his throat. When he looked at Sparks, he saw her cheeks dampened with tears and even Gurt seemed to be moved by the song.
The longer SA sang, the more her eyes glowed. The expression seemed to be her truth and Seb squinted in the face of her radiance.
SA finished, blinked away her tears, and dropped her gaze to the ground.
Phulp said it as well as anyone could have. He gasped and uttered just one syllable. “Wow.”
Chapter 31
Silence filled the hut, and it took Seb a few seconds to notice the chaos had returned outside. When SA sang, everything else had vanished. As he listened to the heavy footsteps of what sounded like more soldiers, he stared at the graceful woman. SA continued to stare at the ground with her eyes closed. When she finally looked up, she locked onto him, the blue glow of her orbs glossy with her tears. Until that moment, he felt like he’d had all the breath dragged from his body by her song. When SA met his gaze, his lungs expelled a little more. She had him in the palm of her hand. He’d never felt so vulnerable.
“This hut isn’t comfortable at all,” Gurt said, and Seb looked at the brute. Now he’d broken away from SA he suddenly felt self-conscious about the way he’d stared at her, his face on fire.
No one replied to Gurt’s comment. Seb shuffled to ease the pain of sitting on the unforgiving ground and he looked at Phulp. Just before he spoke, another stampede of boots rushed past outside. Once it had gone, he said in a whisper, “So what happens now?”
Replying in the same low volume, Phulp said, “We wait until the commotion has died down outside.”
Gurt leaned forward with his usual aggression. “Isn’t that a bit risky? I’m not sure if you can hear it or not, but it sounds like there’s a ton of soldiers outside.”
Despite Gurt’s confrontational stance, Phulp remained calm. “They won’t look for us in the huts. They’ll assume we’ve run away from the slum and go that way. We go outside now and we’ll make ourselves much easier to find.”
“How do you know that to be the case?” Sparks asked.
“Would you search every hut in this place?” Phulp replied.
Silence, and then Sparks nodded. “Fair point.”
“No, the soldiers will probably search for the rest of the night, and they don’t know what any of us look like. I’d imagine they’ll be bored by morning.”
“What about the soldier you owed money to?” Seb said.
Phulp shook his head. “She wouldn’t have told anyone other than those with her. Gambling is punishable by death, even for the Crimson foot soldiers.”
“So even though some of them are dead,” Seb said, “they’ll still give up searching for us?”
“The life of a soldier is cheap. They won’t waste the resources on the detective work.”
Gurt leaned from the shadows again and stared down at Phulp. “You seem to know a lot about the soldiers.”
Silence returned to the hut. The alarm continued to pulse outside and footsteps ran back and forth, but at that moment, Seb and his three team members all stared at Phulp.
Their small and pale host looked like he knew he had to answer carefully. “I … uh, used to be one of them.”
Seb blinked and Gurt had already drawn his gun and aimed it at Phulp.
“Pretty much every adult male in this place used to be one of them.”
Gurt kept his gun raised. “And you aren’t one now?”
“Do I look like one?”
Instead of replying, Gurt kept his gun up.
“No,” Phulp said. “I’m not a soldier anymore. I told you this hut used to belong to my cousin before his son killed him, right?”
None of the others spoke.
“Well, the Crimson Countess has a special recruitment process for her foot soldiers.” A distant look washed over Phulp’s red eyes. “From time to time, she takes as many teenage boys as she can find and rounds them up. She then forces them to kill all their loved ones before she puts them in the training camps.”
“We saw that in the square,” Seb said.
“With no family left,” Phulp continued, “you exist in the pens and call her mother. They take years to make sure the soldiers are totally subservient to the Crimson Countess—or at least for them to believe they are subservient to her. If you can’t convince the regime that you’re loyal, they throw your body over the ledge of the city down into the slums below. The truth is, it seems that most of the soldiers hate the Crim
son Countess.”
“Why don’t they overthrow her, then?” Sparks asked.
“Fear. You’ve seen the size of her army. That’s a lot of people to persuade she needs to be overthrown. We don’t talk to one another with any kind of depth. You say the wrong thing to the wrong soldier and you end up dead. So even if I did find like-minded soldiers, the risk of finding one who would sell us out seemed too great. Living in Caloon is a daily reminder that you don’t own your life, she does. It’s a simple fact that those who march to the beat of her drum live longer.”
Seb replayed the massacre in the square. “So you had to kill …”
“My mum, dad, and baby sister.” After a heavy sigh, Phulp said, “She was only two. When she saw me kill Mum and Dad, she cried louder than I’d ever heard her cry before. I thought she’d be too young to understand, but she ran straight to me for comfort.” Phulp sighed and ran a shaking hand over his pale head. “I held her with the blood of our parents on my hands. The foot soldiers then gave me a knife and pulled her head back to expose her throat.”
SA gasped and Seb looked at her, his stomach turning in against itself.
“So when you were one of the soldiers, you had to do the same to young boys?” Seb asked.
Another heavy sigh and Phulp looked at the ground.
Before he could reply, Seb said, “It’s okay. I don’t need you to answer that.”
“So,” Phulp said, “although I hate the Crimson Countess, and whatever you’re on this planet to do is fine by me, just know how much of a risk I’m taking to try to get you into the city.”
“You’re not doing it for free.” After Seb had said it, he felt like a complete dick.
“No, you’re right, and I wouldn’t do it for free, but the fact that I’m putting my life at risk doesn’t go away, regardless of how much you pay me.”
Shame made Seb slump where he sat and he felt the others look at him. “I’m sorry. I can see that. Sorry.”
Phulp shuffled as if to make himself comfortable on the hard ground. “That’s okay,” he said as he curled up into a ball like a domestic cat. “Let’s get some rest. We’re going to need it for the morning.”
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