Song of the Badlands

by Joshua Guess

  The land dropped off steeply after that first mile—which was saying something because the plane was down its own plunge in elevation relative to Brighton—and gave way to a vista of heart-stopping beauty.

  No. More than that: the scene was pure, uncut glory.

  The haze vanished as Beck stepped through a last line of dense evergreens with needles that mostly kept faith with the name. The ceiling of thin, dusty fog sat above her head as if on a sheet of glass. She understood this as a function of air pressure and temperature differentials, but as she emerged from the trees, Beck found she couldn’t muster the heart to give a shit about the science.

  A vast, gorgeous valley spread out before her. In the far distance stood a mountain, and Beck’s entire concept of the world shifted slightly. Brighton must be situated near the edge of an enormous plateau, because she’d traveled in every direction but this one and never encountered a drop off like this. It couldn’t be man-made, could it? Had any feat of engineering ever been so large?

  No. This valley had to be a natural feature. Once the initial shock of the vibrant greenery lining its sloping walls, riotous bursts of other colors dotting it here and there, she spotted the culprit. A narrow but powerful river cut through the land, shaping it. Beck reassessed everything, then did it again. The mountain wasn’t really a mountain, she suspected. It was a land feature on a scale she had never witnessed in person. A hill of impressive proportions. Through narrowed eyes she could make out jagged edges on its face along with too-regular gouges in its striated rock.

  Man-made, then. Or at least partly shaped by men.

  “Wow,” Eshton said when he stepped out of the trees behind her, nearly knocking her down the slope to her certain death. It might have been worth the trip; certainly the view was stellar.

  “Pretty much,” Beck agreed. She glanced at Andres, who stood with heavily-muscled and tattooed arms crossed over his chest. “How much farther to Canaan? I could stand to look at this for a little while, but I don’t want to put us behind.”

  Andres had brutal, hard features but the mind and soul of a master of debate. He had lent Beck books, real paper ones, on ancient philosophy and law. Some of those old Greeks were clever and more than a few were surprisingly funny. She thought a shadow of that humor showed on his lips just before he answered. “Oh, I think you’ll get your chance. We can be in Canaan in about ten minutes.”

  Beck blinked, then scanned the valley. “If you tell me you guys figured out how to make things invisible, I’m going to scream.”

  Andres laughed. “Nothing that exciting. You can’t see it because we’re standing right on top of it. You’ll understand once we take the path down the hill.”

  Beck had no trouble fighting Pales and barely batted an eye when told she would be thrown out of the world she knew for a far more savage one, but that path almost made her piss herself. Heights were not a thing she enjoyed, and the yard-wide gravel path dropped nearly straight down where its width abruptly stopped. The switchbacks were sharp and steep, each making her want to scream when the shift in her balance needed to navigate them almost sent her tumbling.

  It took three of those torturous changes in direction before they reached the level Canaan sat on. Or rather, was partially carved into.

  The Remnant town spread a solid hundred yards past the seam where the vertical wall of the valley met the horizontal flood plain at the bottom, though geography here was a bit jumbled. A thick, fast-moving creek flowed beneath one section of wall, heading into the deep overhang the other half of Canaan was situated beneath. Gantries and catwalks connected platforms attached to and occasionally hanging from the stone mouth surrounding the town.

  Crops grew on every surface capable of holding dirt, and what Beck had taken for wild greenery on the rich land at the bottom of the valley was anything but unplanned growth. From above the patterns were impossible to see, but reality took her breath away.

  Food. Every damn inch of the valley was used to grow food. How many hectares was it? She tried to estimate, to calculate, but something deep in her brain fundamentally just could not compute. Her world view was ill-equipped to process the sheer density of life surrounding her and to immediately grasp the differences between her old life and the new.

  So it shut down for a few seconds.

  Andres laughed. “Yeah, people generally react that way. Come on, I’ll show you to Intake, and we’ll have a chat with Estelle. She’s a friend. I don’t think we’ll have too much trouble getting you a place to sleep. Just don’t kill anyone.”

  Eshton raised an eyebrow. “What’s funny is I can’t tell if you’re joking.”

  Andres shook his head but smiled. “No, I’m serious. You shouldn’t kill anyone. But if you’re going to live here, we can’t hide the fact that you’re Deathwatch. Everyone knows about you, if not what you look like, so word will get out fast once I vouch for you. Some people won’t like it and they’ll probably try to provoke you. Hence my concern about you killing someone.”

  Beck waved away the concern. “We’ll be fine. How could anyone living out here even want to start shit with another person. It’s so…man, it’s just so perfect.”

  Andres snorted. “So was Eden, but we all saw how that worked out.”

  15

  Intake was not gentle with Eshton. He was separated from Beck as soon as they entered Canaan, pulled along by a beefy female guard and an even beefier male counterpart. He was ordered to strip down to his underwear after being manhandled into an alcove the size of a closet. Under their direction he lifted his arms and slowly rotated in place.

  The male guard grunted. “Lot of scars for a city boy, even one in the Watch.”

  “Stop there,” the female guard said. Eshton complied.

  The alcove was a patchwork decon unit, obviously discarded from either the old world near the end of the Collapse or from an early Rez. Its design was old but rugged. He waited for the inevitable with arms still raised high.

  An armature on the wall of the small space whirred and clicked before extending a trio of arms that wavered slightly before zeroing in on his rib cage. Each produced a thin needle. The pain was surprisingly intense when they entered his side, but Eshton didn’t so much as twitch. Every set of Deathwatch armor held arrays of needles for delivering medicines and drugs. It was hard to go through any shift that wasn’t simply standing watch without being pricked with them.

  “Trying to look tough won’t make you any friends here,” the female guard said. She tapped the ancient terminal on the wall and squinted at the screen that came up. “Doesn’t look like you have anything we need to worry about, based on the preliminaries. You can go to holding.”

  Eshton took this as permission to lower his arms and get dressed, which he did without much haste. “Why the injections, then?”

  The woman glanced up at him, her eyes tracing the scar on his face. “That’s not for us, kid. It’s for you. Hundred years of living in the wild means we have germs you don’t. Usually the stuff we load new arrivals up with does the job, so you shouldn’t die.”

  “Super encouraging, thanks,” Eshton said, following them to holding.

  The entire process was surprisingly boring and bureaucratic. Far more so than he expected from a society based in the badlands. Though of course the valley was only technically in the badlands in the sense that everything outside a Rez was part of them. For these people the presence of Pales didn’t cause an area to fall under that general label. And his view of the area aligned with theirs; any place capable of producing so much food could hardly be put in the same category as the man-made desert around Brighton.

  Four hours of moving, then waiting, then moving again eventually reunited him with Beck and Andres. The bald man wore different clothes—the leathers and cobbled-together armor he wore out in the world were nowhere to be seen. The long-sleeved homespun shirt draped across his frame showed off his muscles nicely. Which was clearly the point. Eshton’s own clothing was too large for h
is wiry body.

  “Well, good news and bad,” Andres said as he led them from holding and down a narrow street lined with what appeared to be homes and food stalls. “The good is that you’re allowed to stay. For now you have the same rights and responsibilities as any other citizen.”

  Eshton raised an eyebrow. “For now?”

  “Yeah, that’s the bad news,” Andres said. “When our people come across an exile we don’t quite trust, they’re sometimes put on probation. You two qualify. For the next three months you need to keep your heads down and behave. If you don’t, you could get put out on your ass.”

  “Exiled twice,” Beck said. “At least we’d be in a small club.”

  Andres snorted. “Look, I know you two can handle yourselves, but living out here is different from patrolling. Especially because you don’t have your armor. You get kicked out of Canaan and I promise you’ll be dead in weeks if not days. The threats never stop.”

  Eshton wanted to take a look around, doubly so since he now knew his time in Canaan might be limited. “Where are we going in such a hurry, man? Shouldn’t we get to know this place?”

  Andres pointed down the twisting road toward a fairly tall building. It was white—well, closer to white—than the rest of the structures, which were mostly the same pale brown stone as the gaping overhang they sat beneath. “That’s where you’ll be staying. We’re going to get you settled in.”

  “Looks nice,” Eshton said honestly. By Rez standards, Canaan was messy. Dirty was the wrong word, because Brighton’s constant rime of dust certainly qualified it for that title. The Rez—any Rez—was a structured place where waste was managed and everything was planned down to the smallest detail. Aside from the dust, a Rez was a place that felt almost sterile until you went inside a building and found the warmth of lives lived inside it.

  Here, laundry was strung on lines between homes. The occasional cat or dog could be seen slinking from alley to alley looking for scraps of food. Children chased each other between properties. Smoke rose from a dozen places in easy view as people cooked dinner. Here, signs of life spilled out of every door and window and into every street.

  “What is that place?” Beck asked, nodding toward the white building. “Halfway house or something?”

  Andres, who looked like and probably was a bruiser when the need arose, smiled with gentle humor. “You could say that. It’s my place. Our place, where Scott, Karen, and I live. You’ll be staying with us.”

  Karen wasn’t home, but her giant dogs were.

  They clearly remembered Beck, because Jake and Tiger made doggy whines and bowled her over as soon as they cleared the door. Eshton was happy to let her take all the affection. His first encounter with the dogs still lingered in his mind.

  “You don’t have to do this,” Eshton said as Andres used his considerable mass to carefully extricate Beck from beneath three hundred pounds of Great Dane.

  “Sure I do,” Andres said. “If I don’t they’ll lick Beck’s face for an hour before sitting on her like a chicken with an egg. They’re very needy animals.”

  Eshton laughed. “No, I meant take us in. We can make our own way. You’ve already done so much.”

  Andres’s face grew serious as he hauled Beck to her feet with no apparent effort. “You’re right, I don’t have to do it, but I made it my responsibility to get you a place in Canaan, and while no one here would let you starve, I’m afraid there’s too much distrust for the Watch for your lives here to be anything but brutal on your own. Everyone has to work, and work earns credits. Credits don’t mean someone will rent you a place to live or give you anything but the dregs from a communal pot of stew. The push back against bringing you here was…stronger than I expected.”

  “How bad is it?” Eshton asked. “Honestly. No fucking around.”

  Andres moseyed over to the small but surprisingly well-equipped kitchen area and began pulling food out. “No one is going to try to kill you in your sleep. Probably. Doesn’t mean people won’t be looking for a reason to kick you out.”

  “Or creating one,” Eshton said.

  Beck looked up from scratching behind Jake’s ears. “Think people will pick fights with us?”

  Andres barked out a laugh. “Only the truly stupid. They might not like you, but everyone knows what you are. Er, what you’re trained to do, I mean.”

  Eshton crossed his arms and leaned against the door frame, happy to stay at the edge of the room. It felt strange being in another person’s space like this, especially someone he wasn’t close to. Years of living in chapterhouses had cleansed him of a sense of normalcy outside his routine. “No, you were right the first time. For better or worse, the Watch forges us. We live it. It’s not a job we leave behind at the end of the day.”

  Beck wandered over and perched on a stool next to the island counter Andres worked at. He was constructing sandwiches, a rare treat in a Rez given the difficulty finding real wheat. Vat wheat wasn’t useful for making the stuff. Mostly people turned it into flat breads or used it as an ingredient in other food.

  “What kinds of jobs do you think we’ll be able to get?” Eshton asked. “I don’t mind hard work. Don’t have much pride about what it is, either.”

  Andres didn’t look up from the trio of sandwiches as he worked. “Imagine not, when you have to kill people so often.”

  The words weren’t loud or accusatory, but they cut through the room like a knife through flesh. A sudden, silent tension rippled through the space in their wake. Andres slowed, then stopped as he realized what he’d said.

  “Well, I think I’m going to keep putting my foot in my mouth if I carry on talking,” he said. “That was unfair.”

  “No, it was honest,” Eshton said. Below the surface of his practiced Deathwatch control, a low anger boiled. “You’re willing to help us, and I appreciate it.”

  “Same here,” Beck added, though she looked far less bothered than Eshton felt.

  “You’re going to have some prejudices,” Eshton said. “I get that. And some of them are going to be reasonable. So if you have something to say, say it now. I can deal with honest dislike, disagreement, even hate. If staying here is going to be one ‘accidental’ comment after another where you try to test our reactions, I’ll take my chances out there. At lease the rest of the people here will be straightforward about it. One thing I’m not going to do is shut my mouth when I hear you pulling this bullshit just because you’re helping us. Politeness is one thing, but letting anyone use their kindness against me isn’t going to fly. If you expect me to shut up because I’m afraid you’ll put me out on my ass, you got another thing coming.”

  Andres finished cutting the last sandwich in half and handed it to Beck, then looked up. “Here, come have one of these. They’re pretty good. Ever had ham?”

  Eshton stayed where he was. “Are we going to have a problem?”

  Andres stared at him for a few seconds. His eyes didn’t challenge or demand, only observed with intelligence beyond what his appearance implied. “No. No problem. I had to see how you’d react before I could trust sending you to work for other people. I can help you with some jobs, but if you ever want to get out on your own you’ll have to deal with folks who have more resources than the three of us. There’s a reason we’re housemates.”

  Eshton slowly walked over and took the last sandwich, eyeing the dark brown bread curiously. “Fine. Test passed. We’ll get along better if you go ahead and assume Beck and I have training meant to deal with large groups of people who hate us and how not to let them get under our skin. Since, you know, losing control of our tempers would have fatal consequences if we punched some asshole in his face while wearing our suits.”

  Andres cocked his head to one side. “I never thought of it that way.”

  “Most people don’t,” Eshton agreed. He took a bite of the sandwich. “Oh, founders. This is delicious. You guys breed pigs?”

  Andres shook his head. “No. Part of why we took the job manning
the post is because it gives us time to hunt. We make extra credits trading meat, but we keep a lot of it. That’s wild pig right there.”

  Eshton took another bite. “Find me a job fast, then, because I want to eat this from now on.”

  The grin splitting Andres’s face was wolfish but not wholly unkind. “Oh, no worries. I have a couple ideas for each of you. But tomorrow, like every new citizen does their first day, you’ll have to work in the maze.”

  16

  It was impossible to stop Pales from coming at Canaan, so no one tried. Like a river, the flow could only be managed, not halted. The maze served this purpose.

  The rushing water cutting the valley in half protected their environs from that direction. The steep, almost sheer face with the narrow path Beck and Eshton came here on was the only way to approach Canaan from the west or north and their overseers explained that it was trapped and guarded nearly all of the time. Only the stretch of land on the Canaan side of the river heading southeast allowed ingress, and at first glance the immense area looked impossible to defend.

  Beck corrected that assumption almost as soon as she saw the maze. From even a hundred yards away—on the Canaan side of it—the structure was invisible. She had walked with Eshton and the team they were assigned to through the fields of crops in confusion until the expanse opened up below them.

  The land between the cliff and river a quarter mile south of Canaan had been worked and molded with what had to have been immense cost in labor. The croplands ended abruptly, dropping nearly fifteen feet to a level platform of earth below covered with an intricate lattice of walls and buildings. Nothing down there was meant to provide comforts, that much was clear at a glance. The small stone boxes situated at strategic places had slots and sometimes windows cut into them, just large enough to slide a weapon through.