by Frankie Rose
I’m jerked to savage halt. My arm sings out in agony as it’s wrenched upward, something steel and vice-like clamping hold of me.
“Ahhhh!” The pain is blinding. Black pinpricks dance in my vision as I look up to see the hand firmly locked around my wrist. A big, strong hand—Ryka’s. Somehow, during the fall, he managed to sight the narrow metal rung of a hatch, a mere three feet from the lip of the machine. And somehow, he managed to grab hold of it. His body is stretched taut, one arm holding the metal rung, the other holding me as I dangle over the side. A fresh round of gunfire roars beneath me, except this time my feet seem to be only mere inches away from the mounted weapons below.
“Ryka!” It’s a plea for him not to drop me. For him not to let go.
“I’ve got you,” he grunts out, grimacing through the pain. “Lift your legs!”
I have to do it. If I don’t, they’re likely to get shot off. With my free arm, I reach up, grabbing hold of Ryka’s arm and I rock my legs upwards, hooking first one foot and then the other up onto a slim narrow rail that rims the machine. To pull myself up from there is relatively simple. Or as simple as it can be given the unforgiving motion of the ship. The whole thing is still descending. My throat is raw from panic as I struggle to clamber back up the slope of the ship, hooking my arm underneath Ryka’s and helping him to safety, too.
“Luke. Luke! Is Luke okay?” Ryka pants. Further up toward the midsection of the ship, my brother is lying flat on his back, head raised, peering at us. I exhale for the first time in a minute, sagging against the arc of the metal beneath us.
“Yes. Yes, he’s fine.”
We’ve dropped enough that the ship is now hovering less than twenty feet from the ground. All of that and we may as well have stayed where we were. I feel like smashing my fist into the pristine panelling of the ship, but my arm already hurts enough. I may have managed to keep hold of my rifle as I fell from the building to the ship, but it’s long gone now. Ryka’s weapon has a strap to it, though; it’s still looped over his shoulder. He reaches for it, drawing it over his head.
“We need to put this thing down,” he says.
“Over the other side of the ship,” I reply. I gesture with my head back toward my brother, who is getting to his feet now that the ship is maintaining a stationary position alongside the lower ground floor of the Det. He, miraculously, still has ahold of his gun, too. If my plan is to work, we need to get back to him. And now.
But then the reason why the ship moved makes itself clearly known. The gunfire stops. And in its place, a high-pitched whine, rising, rising, rising, piercing our ears, rips through the air. Just as the sound seems to reach inaudible, painful levels, the ship jerks and a thick plume of white smoke erupts from beneath us. A black, oblong shape zips through the air toward the Det, and suddenly the air is boiling with sound and dust. A wall of heat slams into Ryka and me as we scramble across the roof of the ship to Luke.
“What…what the hell was that?” he gasps, as we reach him.
On the other side of the Det, a building shunts sideways, a glowing ball of fire and smoke rolling into view as massive chunks of rubble and concrete explode from out of nowhere. The building, as tall as the Det, rocks on its foundations…and then rapidly begins to crumple to the ground.
“Another weapon,” Ryka says as he exhales, watching the building collapse, smashing into another already half-ruined structure as it topples. “A bomb. They fired it at the Det. It went straight through.”
Thank the Gods for that. The fallen walls to the Det have seemed like an inconvenience before now. Now, they’ve saved the building and everyone inside, too. Who knows whether anyone has been hurt by the incessant gunfire, though.
“They’ve missed once,” Ryka says, turning away from the carnage to face me; there’s panic in his eyes. “They won’t miss again.”
I know it all too well. “Now, then. Now we have to shoot out the engines. Aim for the vents!”
James gave me the idea. He had screamed for us to aim for the vents. The box-shaped nozzles jut from the side of the ship, swivelling to change the direction every few seconds, blasting out white-hot exhaust. From our vantage point, only one of the vents is faced toward us, but that’s enough. Or I hope it will be.
Ryka realises what I mean to do before Luke. He nods once, and then he seizes the opportunity. He opens fire.
Bullets churn from his rifle one after the other, making metallic pinging sounds as metal meets metal. Showers of white and red sparks spew from the opening of the vent. Luke joins his firepower with Ryka’s, and the vent begins to oscillate in an unhinged, mechanical way.
Come on, come on, come on!
Below us, the whirring, whining, high-pitched sound starts to build again.
“Ryka! It’s not…it’s not working!” I scream. It has to, though. It has to. Louder and louder, higher and higher. It can only be so long before—
CRACK!
The ship lurches and then judders underfoot. A jet of flames rockets from the vent in an unexpected sword of fire. “Kit!” Luke sounds scared. I reach out and yank him backward, out of the reach of the flames. The three of us duck instinctively, covering our heads as the vent chokes and splutters, and with an inward whooshing sound, discharges a searing hot ball of fire and smoke over our heads. In less than a second, the ship is crippled.
First to the left and then to the right, it swings wildly, and then starts to tip toward the ground, rotating the barrel-shaped mass of its belly skywards. And once again, we’re falling all over again. There’s absolutely no hope of us hanging on this time, though.
Despite the pitching of the ship, the rocket that has been gathering energy this whole time still jettisons from its launcher, but its trajectory is no longer focused on our home. Instead, it flies upward and straight past the Det, a small, dark shape tearing through the skyline. The ship is rapidly spinning toward the ground now. We have to get the hell off the thing, otherwise we’re going to be crushed. Over the roar of the straining engine, desperately warring to right the hulking machine, Ryka yells, “Jump!”
And we do.
The fall is only twenty feet now, but hard enough that my throat swells shut from the pain when I land. I want to be sick. I want to curl into a ball and hold my body and try to recall how to draw breath in through my lungs, but Ryka is beside me and dragging me up onto my feet.
“Move!” he hollers. The ship is coming down on our heads. I run. I run fast and I run hard. “Move, move, move!” Luke, Ryka and I charge forward. I pump my arms, pouring every last ounce of energy within me into getting the hell out of the way of the lumbering machine as it rolls and smashes into the ground. Luke ducks to the right, grabbing hold of my arm and yanking me after him. I do the same, grabbing hold of Ryka, and then we’re not in the path of the ship anymore. We’re down a constricted alleyway between two buildings, choked with the centuries-old debris of a fallen city. The ship grinds to a halt, blocking the exit.
But we’re alive.
Fire will eat metal. It’s a persistent and hungry thing, and, given the right conditions, it will consume anything. The people sealed within the ship are almost half cooked by the time the fighters from inside the Det pull them out. James wears a mask of death as he bodily tears them from the wreckage of their broken, burning vessel, a dark look of hatred fixed firmly on his face. The people inside, coughing and choking, are polite and compliant as he pushes them into the dirt, one by one. Fifteen of them in total—they oblige him by sinking to their knees, meekly awaiting their fates.
“Why isn’t the other ship attacking?” he demands, leaning into the face of a tall woman, smudged with dirt. Her once white uniform is now mottled with the black and red stains of violence. I can see the glint of silver below her neckline, plain as day.
The woman attempts to answer him. “We received—” she breaks off to hack. Her body may not feel pain, but it certainly objects when subjected to smoke inhalation. “We received an order to return to the
Sanctuary. The Commander will not disobey.”
James scowls at this, shaking his head. “Will not disobey? They’ve left you for dead.”
“Strategically, we are already dead. There is no point in our retrieval.”
This answer doesn’t please James. He snatches up his rifle, draws back the action and primes it for use. He aims it at the woman’s head. “Tell me something I don’t know,” he grits out. “Why now? When are they going to come again? And who sent you?”
The woman blinks up at him, her face twisted in a puckered blister underneath her eye. The wound looks painful, and would probably have a member of Freetown in fits of agony. She doesn’t even seem to notice the damage to her body, though. “My unit’s orders are received through an automated system. We acknowledge receipt of the Sanctuary’s command, and we carry out all actions required of us. We don’t know who our orders come from. We don’t know when they will come again, and we don’t know what they will be.”
Her logical, flat response would perhaps be viewed as sarcastic by someone who didn’t understand the workings of a halo. This woman physically can’t be sarcastic, or evasive or anything other than what she is told to be, which in this case appears to be a soldier. James regards her with distaste, shaking his head. I can read it on him easily enough: he wants to pull the trigger. That can’t be allowed to happen. I step forward, guiding the stock of his rifle so that the weapon points to the ground.
“She’s wearing a halo, James. She can’t be held responsible.”
“And why not?”
“Because she’s not in control! None of them are!”
His fury is mirrored by a lot of Freetown’s fighters. They circle around us like the wolves I’ve seen in the forest, hungry looks traded between them. My brother is crouched, back pressed against the wall of the Det, hands gathered in his lap, his skin a pasty, ashen colour. I want to make sure he’s okay—he doesn’t look okay—but I get the feeling that the people who have been momentarily rescued from the Sanctuary’s ship might not live very long if I leave.
“You are not hurting them, James.”
The steel in my voice must amuse him; his lip curves up to one side. “You know, I respect you a lot more when you show some backbone,” he informs me, letting the smile spread slowly across his face. He’s darkly handsome, and yet the sinister edge that underlies everything he says and does totally counteracts this; he just ends up irritating and scaring me in equal measure.
As soon as the ship went down, Ryka rushed inside the Det to make sure no one was injured. He emerges now, covered in a light coating of white dust—he looks like he’s ready to do some hurting, himself. He doesn’t attack the hostages, though. He charges straight up to James and shoves him hard on the shoulder.
“Don’t look at her like that. Never look at her like that.”
James holds up his hands, raising his eyebrows. “Just trying to be polite. What do you intend to do with our guests here, Ryka? Perhaps you’d like to start leading your people, before someone gets hurt.”
Before someone gets hurt. Yeah, and he’ll be the one to do the hurting. That much is clear. Ryka bites down, glaring at the man. “Just get the people who can’t walk up to green five. Ella’s set up a medical bay there. And the rest of you,” he says, his voice growing louder. “The rest of you will not touch these people. You won’t even breathe in their general direction. You, you, and you,” he says, pointing out three different men. “Split everyone into groups. Go and find the rest of the people who arrived from Freetown. And for the love of all that is holy, make sure you bury our dead.”
******
Ryka doesn’t react well to the news of Olivia’s arrival. His face turns a sickly shade of green and then he’s running. Running through the ground floor of the building, up stairwell after stairwell, never ceasing, never resting, until he reaches the room where I left his sister bleeding on the bed. She’s stopped bleeding, but the cuts and scrapes all over her body now look even more menacing, black with congealed blood, the skin an angry red surrounding each one. A wave of relief cascades over me when I see that someone, probably Ella, has found some clothes for her to wear. There isn’t a scrap of red material in sight.
Ryka stands, clenching and unclenching his fists at the foot of her small cot, staring down at the delicate, frail-looking body before him. His nostrils flare as he blows out each breath in sharp blasts; the effort it takes for him to control his rage is plainly visible. “Those bastards,” he hisses. “How could they? How could they do this to her?”
“They showed her a kindness.”
We both bristle at this comment; it comes from behind Ryka, from a small figure standing in the doorway. It’s Simone, holding a steaming bowl of hot water in both hands. She looks nervous, but she appears to rally herself, standing up a little straighter. “The only women who have chosen the hundred cuts before have all died from their wounds. Olivia won’t die. The cuts they gave her are deep in places, but they’re mostly superficial. Ella says if she can avoid any infection, she’ll pull through.”
“Superficial?” Ryka looks stunned. “Superficial?” His voice is a weak rasp, losing all power toward the end, as though he simply doesn’t have the energy or the inclination to finish the word. He runs his hands back through his hair, lacing them behind the back of his head. He closes his eyes and turns, leaning his forehead against the wall, bracing himself. It’s like he can barely stand to look at poor Olivia, still unconscious in the cot. I can barely stand to myself, especially given the loop of silver metal circling her throat. The last words she said to me are still ringing in my ears—don’t take it off. Don’t ever take it off—and yet I know there’s no way Ryka will leave the thing on her. No way in hell. And neither would I. Simone places the bowl of hot water on the ground beside Olivia’s cot, and she begins to carefully swab at the gashes with a wet cloth, dabbing softly to draw away any dirt. In the Sanctuary, fighters are vaccinated against infection and germs after nearly every match, whenever they have obtained an injury. There’s no getting sick, no real chance of infection. Right now, though, it’s a very valid concern. I’m just hoping the halo will be able to heal her on its own. It might. If we’re lucky.
I haven’t overlooked Simone’s odd defence of the priestesses when she said they went easy on her, but I get the feeling that probably has more to do with superstition and tradition than actual belief. No one could ever look at Olivia and say the wounds inflicted upon her body were softly dealt. They run centimetres deep in places. That takes real effort—the human body isn’t quite as fragile as some people might expect.
“Ryka?” The voice is cracked and weak, but loud enough to make everyone in the room freeze. Ryka stiffens, straightening up, turning quickly with a look of horrified relief on his face. Olivia’s eyes are open, shining glossy and dark in the badly lit room. Ryka attempts a smile—a valiant attempt—but fails. He hurries to her bedside and drops to his knees, carefully picking up her hand from the cot with gentle fingers.
“This…this is crazy,” he says softly. “What were you thinking?”
She attempts to move one shoulder up in a token gesture, presumably meant to represent a shrug. “I wasn’t,” she whispers softly. “I just wanted to get out. I couldn’t spend another…another minute in that place, Ry.” She pauses, as though lost in thought. “Everything’s flat,” she muses after a moment. “I can’t feel anything.”
“It’s the halo.” I drop down beside Ryka and tuck my arms in close by my sides. I’m not good at touching people at the best of times, but right now the thought of making physical contact with Olivia causes unbridled panic to sing through my veins. She’s so hurt. She’s so raw that just the thought of breathing on her makes me cringe. I know how painful that would be now. Once upon a time, something like this would have been little more than a mild inconvenience while my body healed under the halo’s drugs, but now…
“Kit?”
My head snaps up. She’s looking right at me
, brown eyes intense and penetrating. “You were right,” she tells me. “You were right all along.”
“About what?”
“The Keep. It’s not a sanctuary for the holy women. It’s…it’s evil.”
Those words tear a hole in my heart. I can’t believe she’s been suffering this whole time, and the only thing I’ve done to try and help her—grabbing hold of her at Max’s funeral—undoubtedly only made things worse for her.
“Why, Liv? What happened?” Out of sight, Ryka reaches out with his fingertips until he finds my hand at my side, and then he clasps hold of it. I squeeze his hand. Hopefully he can draw some strength through me; enough to at least see him though this conversation, because I doubt I have much more to give myself.
Beneath all of the grime and dirt caked onto her face from spending days out in the forest, Olivia’s brown eyes close for a second. “They just…weren’t what I thought they were,” Olivia says. “I thought they were doing good, helping people and carrying out works of the Gods. But…the things I saw…” Her voice is steady enough, but the hollowness to the words isn’t something the halo could be doing to her. She may be relatively composed right now, but she still carries a maelstrom of emotion inside her that has already had time to establish itself. The drugs will mask it for now, but the chemicals will never be able to kill the dark tangle of horror that has taken root in her soul.
I know this isn’t my fault. Olivia joined the priestesses because of her mother—her desperate need to find the woman who gave birth to her had been her single driving force for a long time—but I knew, I knew it was wrong for her to go. I should have done more to prevent this.
A huge weight presses down on me as I watch Olivia staring, unseeing, up at the bare concrete ceiling. She should be back in her tent, recovering in the place she grew up in, surrounded by her friends, her family, her trinkets and her beautiful clothes. Instead she’s stuck in a narrow cot in a cold, damp tumble-down building, surrounded by strangers and the threat of further attack. And that is my fault. If I’d never shown up here, the people of Freetown would still be living their lives in the forest. It wasn’t a perfect life, not by any stretch of the imagination, but it was better than this.
