Suddenly, the boy felt indescribable pain. A rifle report echoed around him. He dropped to all fours but scrambled forward. The water was close; he could see the ripple of the current. The giant metal man picked up speed to intercept him. It met him at the water.
The giant reached for him with hands bigger than the boy’s body.
With his last ounce of energy, the boy dove under the Moldy Giant’s arm and plunged into the dark, fast-moving current. The giant raked at the water to snare him, but the current was strong, the water deep, and the boy disappeared into the blackness.
“How did you miss him?” Tank Minor Wesley hissed. He had jumped down to the road after taking the shot.
“He moved,” Tank Major Kadir—the Moldy Giant—grunted, still working his hands along the water, just in case. He found purchase and pulled out the ancient husk of a car. His eyes traced the river’s flow.
Wesley watched Kadir with disgust. He had never seen a giant so poorly maintained. “You’re a fucking mess, Kadir.”
The Moldy Giant’s head clicked back and forth. His eyes squirmed. “He wouldn’t have wanted you to shoot him.” His voice had become a boyish whine.
“No one gets out,” Wesley said.
“This has never happened before.”
“A malfunction released the boy.” Wesley leaned over the river and followed the water to the wall, hoping to see the boy skewered on rebar. “Where does this river go?” he asked.
“To Abdul Haq,” Kadir replied, his voice back to normal.
There was no reply. Kadir, the Moldy Giant, turned to make sure that Wesley had heard him, but Wesley was already gone. Fear crept through Kadir. He wasn’t afraid of Wesley; he could mash him into gravy—and one day he would. He intentionally cowered around him in order to make the sniper let his guard down.
But he did fear his boss.
The Man who said the boy was not to be hurt.
= = =
A ray of sunlight snuck through the blinds and fell onto Aadil’s eyes. One by one they cracked open. He glanced at the clock: 5:29 a.m. He flinched as the clock switched to 5:30 and the alarm erupted, sending a shiver down his spine.
He unrolled one of his arms, the skin loose from age, and slapped the snooze button. Every day. Every day, for over sixty years—since he was just a boy—Aadil had woken one minute before the alarm went off. But he knew if he didn’t set the damn thing, he’d sleep right through. A little joke from Allah.
The smell of tea was in the air. His wife was up. He headed for the kitchen.
The creak of the stairs announced his presence, but Batrisyla continued to fix breakfast with her shoulders square and her back to Aadil. He poured himself tea and sat at the table. He watched her while taking cautious sips. She was ignoring him.
“Batrisyla,” Aadil said.
Without a glance, she placed breakfast in front of him. He watched as she walked back to clean a spotless counter. He rose, went to her, and wrapped his arms around her waist. She stiffened. He put his chin on her shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I was wrong. I should have come home.”
She faced him. “I was worried sick, Aadil! And you come home laughing. Drunk.”
His friend, Khayr, was a doctor in the borough. A patient had given him a very old and very good bottle of scotch. Aadil’s intended hour-long visit with Khayr had extended into the early morning. That was two days ago, and it had been a cold house since.
“I won’t do it again,” Aadil said emphatically.
Batrisyla looked out the window over the sink, reliving bad memories. “You just never know,” she said.
He understood. In the last thirty years, men who didn’t come home on time, never came home.
He flexed his scraggly arms. “Why worry when I got these?”
She tried to stay mad, but when she covered her mouth, he knew he had her. He threw in a few exaggerated poses. A laugh squeaked through her fingers. She smacked him with the towel and shook her head. “How could I have been concerned?”
Aadil pressed his forehead to hers. “It was a thoughtless thing to do to the best thing in my life.”
“Will you remember that, you old geezer?” Batrisyla said. He kissed her and nodded that he would.
= = =
From the aqueduct’s entrance, Aadil watched as his twelve-year-old apprentice, Nashat, pulled on his waders. The boy was clumsy and too short for work in the fishery, but he was the son of Khayr, the doctor, and a good kid.
Situated near the aqueduct’s mouth as it entered the borough, Aadil’s fishery—a former tyrant’s swimming pool—was a key part of the borough’s small ecosystem. No longer allowed access to the ocean, the old fisherman had improvised long ago, and in the process had made himself a very valuable part of his borough. He bred and harvested fish.
Food rations had been airdropped since the beginning of the occupation over three decades earlier. Since each of the thirty boroughs was an entity of its own, commerce with other boroughs was impossible. But in the last decade, the Coalition’s airdrops had become erratic, an afterthought. The last shipment was five months ago. What started for Aadil as a way to bide time had turned into a necessity.
One leg in the wader, Nashat tried to pull up the other and failed miserably. Aadil was unable to suppress a laugh as Nashat hopped, hopped, hopped and then tumbled headfirst into the fishery. Aadil hurried over and pulled him out. His laughter stopped.
“You have cut yourself, Nashat,” he said.
The stunned boy touched his hand to his forehead and pulled it back to see red. His face crumpled.
“No need to cry. I can do this task myself. Go inside and Batrisyla will clean you up, okay?”
Nashat nodded and headed to Aadil’s house with one half of the waders still dragging behind him. Aadil turned back to his work, looked at the order sheet, and sighed.
A few years after moving into this borough, Aadil had rigged metal grids on each side of the pool to push the fish toward the center and make it easier to net them. But the grids were now rusted and would occasionally stick to their tracks.
Aadil lowered himself into the pool and waded over to the nearest grid to check the track and pulley chains for any obstructions that had been carried in by the aqueduct. After ten minutes of work, he trudged across the pool to repeat the task on the other grid.
Along the way, his eye caught something bright at the far corner of the pool, where the current swirled with debris and algae. When he got closer, his heart stopped. Extending from the nest of garbage was a small hand. The wrist was traced in hunter orange.
“Batrisyla!” he screamed. He pushed himself through the water, using his arms like oars. Little tails splashed around him as the fish fled his path.
It was a boy. He was unconscious and deathly pale. His mouth and nose were just above the water.
Aadil yelled again. “Batrisyla!” He heaved himself over the grid.
The door slammed open and his wife ran out. Nashat followed with a bandage half attached to his head.
Aadil pulled the boy out of the water and brushed away the branches and trash. A light red mist from the boy’s chest sprayed Aadil. The boy was struggling to breathe.
“Is he alive?” Batrisyla asked. Her arms were outstretched to receive him.
“He’s alive. He’s alive,” Aadil heard himself say as he handed her the boy. She cradled him in her arms and ran to the house.
Aadil pulled himself out of the water. “Nashat! Get your father.” The boy stood still, staring dumbstruck at the trail of blood now leading to the house. “Nashat, go!”
Nashat ran off toward town.
= = =
Khayr arrived twenty minutes later with a medicine bag in hand. His mouth was a line of concentration as he inspected the boy. “The bullet passed through the lung,” he said.
“Can you save him?” Aadil asked.
“I don’t know.” To Batrisyla: “I need boiling water and your cleanest sheets.”<
br />
Khayr injected the boy with morphine and pulled out the supplies and tools he needed to treat grievous wounds. He ordered Aadil and Batrisyla around as he prepped for a surgery that wasn’t meant to take place on a kitchen table.
Three hours later, the boy was bandaged up, and a tube was draining blood from his chest cavity. They gently moved him to the couch. Khayr prepped a bag of saline and hung it on the wall.
“This will rehydrate him,” Khayr said, wiping the sweat from his brow.
“Will he make it?” Batrisyla asked.
“It’s too early to tell.”
= = =
The three of them sat around the kitchen table, afraid to look at each other, forbidden drinks in their hands. Drinks that had yet to touch their lips.
“He’s the Coalition’s,” Khayr finally said. “Had I known, I wouldn’t have come. You have put my son and I in terrible danger.”
“You are not a coward,” Aadil said.
Khayr laughed—a sad, sorrowful sound—and emptied his glass. “I am, Aadil. That’s the only way to survive. All I have is Nashat. And I’m all he has. We do not live in a land of reason or fairness. Good deeds go punished all the time.”
Khayr looked to the couch where the boy slept. “You, too, have put your life in peril by saving him.”
“Why are those metal things in his head?” Batrisyla asked.
“I don’t know,” Khayr replied. “But they shot him, so he was meant to die. And when they find out he’s alive, they will search for him and finish it, and they will kill you too. It’s their way.”
“What else should we have done?” Batrisyla asked. Anger filled her eyes.
Khayr looked at her for a moment. He grabbed his glass and threw back its contents in one gulp. “You should have let the fish have him.” He grabbed his bag and went to the door. “Do not contact me or my son. I’m a coward, yes. But I want to live.”
“Khayr, please don’t do this. After all these years,” Aadil pleaded.
“I cannot help you, Aadil!” Khayr said. And then he left.
= = =
Aadil couldn’t sleep. He thought of the boy. Color had already come back to his face. The young heal easily, Aadil. You do not, a voice whispered in the back of his mind.
A part of him hoped the boy would die. The recognition of that cowardice struck through his numbness like a spear through a hide. He cried. But he didn’t know for whom.
Batrisyla rolled over.
“What is the right thing to do?” he asked her. “I am at your mercy. I will do whatever you think is best.”
Batrisyla wrapped Aadil’s hands in hers and looked into his eyes. “We must take him to my brother.”
“He is a part of it, Batrisyla!” Aadil said, bewildered.
“He isn’t part of this,” she replied. “Abdul will know what to do. And it’s better we tell him than let him find out from someone else.”
Aadil knew she was right. But his stomach turned at the thought. “He never liked me.”
“He doesn’t like anyone. Tomorrow you will go and tell him. He will decide what to do.”
= = =
The next morning during the hour-long walk into the city, Aadil thought about Batrisyla. Why she had chosen him, he still didn’t know. She came from a military family, a strong hierarchical clan that had served the nation for over a century. Up and down the line, the men were to be feared and respected, and the women were to be—well, feared and respected.
Batrisyla could be soft, and on many nights over their fifty years together she had shown that side. But when things got tough, those soft features hardened, and her glare could cut like a knife.
Aadil’s family were fishermen, and he had met Batrisyla at the market. Her family had servants, but she always came alone. For months he watched her: her face hidden, her eyes filled with intelligence. And then one day she approached him and asked about the catch. A smile lit up her eyes as he stammered to produce a coherent sentence. He finally succeeded and added a joke. And she came back the next week, and the next, and their conversations grew longer.
As the man, it’s strange knowing that your wife is the stronger one, he thought. He would wake up many times to find her watching him, and she always said the same thing: “Do you know why I love you?”
“No.”
“Because you are kind.”
Batrisyla’s family was steel, unrelenting in a civilization that preyed on weakness. She had enough steel; it was woven in her. But she hadn’t had enough of kindness.
When they married, she was cut from the family and almost murdered. Her father’s ailing health was the only thing that brought her back. But that was long ago, before the Terror War, before the Coalition and the occupation. A bad memory made fond by the atrocities that followed it.
Aadil remembered the day the Coalition first rolled into their town. Turret guns moaned back and forth over the native crowds. Young, scared men, white, black and Chinese, squinted behind their rifle sights, barking orders in tongues no one understood. Religion had been used as a weapon throughout history, and when the Coalition slammed their flagpoles into the ground and said, “This place is ours now,” religious extremism made an already violent region boil over.
“For Allah,” Aadil said, shaking his head. He’d seen the body parts of women and children; old men lying on the ground pushing their guts in; people walking like zombies, deaf, with dried blood around their ears from the concussion blast. At a birthday party. At a funeral. At the market. Never-ending. The people who brought this pain did not know Allah. And they would never meet Him.
Abdul Haq was born of these times. Aadil remembered how Haq lost his family: a suicide bombing on the first day of school. His boy vanished in the blast. It took days to find even a piece of his wife to identify. It took over a year before the doctors would say that Haq would live—a crummy, burnt, armless and legless existence.
After five years of heavy losses and guerrilla warfare, the Coalition formed a new strategy. Old boundaries disappeared as they carpet-bombed the region into a logical grid. Cities mentioned in the oldest of testaments were turned into uninhabitable vacuums of rubble. The region’s natives were corralled and compressed into thirty walled-in boroughs. The miles of space between them were called “dead zones” and were aptly named: no one that left a borough ever returned.
Each borough was governed by the military. Populations were mixed and matched to prevent uprisings. Fighting? No food. Protests? No water. Any technology not used for basic life needs was torn from homes. You could live, and live in peace, but you could not live free.
And then the soldiers began to leave. They had done what they had come for: they had secured the oil and had constructed impervious barriers that required civilians to live with order. They had whooped and hollered as the trucks carried them out of the borough. Some residents celebrated—they thought the occupation was over. But they were wrong. When the last trucks rumbled through the vault-like gate, it locked behind them. And soldiers still walked the walls, armed to the teeth. They were waiting. And as days passed, everyone below began to whisper: for what?
Two months before, Abdul Haq had disappeared from the hospital. Then, days before the exodus, soldiers uprooted Batrisyla and Aadil from their home and moved them to this town, to this particular borough, with no explanation.
Aadil remembered when he first saw Abdul Haq again. He and Batrisyla had been in the town’s center. People were scurrying past them like rats, fleeing from footsteps that could pound holes into the earth. When Haq’s massive shadow came over them and Batrisyla saw what her brother had become, her eyes rolled back to whites and she fell into Aadil’s arms.
Tank Majors would rule the boroughs.
= = =
Aadil arrived at Abdul Haq’s bunker, a converted missile silo in the middle of town. Massive steel doors dwarfed him. To their right, Aadil saw an Arabic inscription: “WARNING! This is the residence of Tank Major Abdul Haq. Do NOT enter unan
nounced.”
Beneath the warning was a diagram that showed the scale form of a Tank Major, five times the size of the human next to it, with “Caution!” inscribed underneath. Above the warning was a button.
Aadil pressed it, and an intercom crackled into life. A moment passed and then a voice, deep and coarse, asked, “Who is it?”
As the elevator took Aadil twenty stories down, he thought about how everything had come to this: a military bunker carved out of a missile silo; a tyrant’s pool turned into a fishery; a young boy with electrodes embedded in his head and a bullet through his chest. It seemed that sanity had left the world without saying goodbye.
At the bottom of the shaft, the massive elevator doors opened with a hydraulic whoosh. Aadil walked out into a blast room over thirty yards in diameter. The room was dimly lit, and it took Aadil’s eyes a minute to adjust. He would have never guessed that a silo like this would be housed in a city. Aadil knew little about missiles, but he could see that whatever had previously filled this silo had been gigantic. If launched, the surrounding blocks would have burned to ash.
Dirty lights encircled the launch room. Ancient scaffolding that had supported the missile gleamed like bones. On the opposite side, Aadil saw an exit to the rest of the bunker.
He took the exit and entered a long hallway. Rooms splintered off it. In one, there were at least forty video monitors, each displaying a different view of the borough. A few views were from the sky; Aadil knew these were shot from hover-rovers: propeller-driven aerial drones that belonged to Haq. He controlled these drones mentally, and they acted like a second (or third, or fourth) set of eyes. The hover-rovers served as a warning. If you, as a law-abiding citizen, saw a hover-rover stationary in the sky, you knew not to go there. And if you were below one, you knew to stop whatever you were doing—immediately. There was no second warning.
The Northern Star Trilogy: Omnibus Edition Page 63
