by West, Kyle
“I can manage,” she said.
She groaned as she sat roughly in the vinyl-padded seat. She closed her eyes, wincing in pain.
“I left my katana on the bridge,” Anna said.
“Alright,” I said.
I started to wheel her toward the bridge, but when we entered the wardroom, she placed her hands on the wheels, stopping the chair.
“Let’s just get to the council.”
“You sure?”
Anna nodded. “I need to accept things as they really are. I’m incapacitated, and I can’t fight. I have to make peace with that. Accept the things I cannot change.”
She began to wheel the chair forward, pressing the exit button to the ship. When the door opened, she pushed herself down the boarding ramp. The wheels squealed, so much so that I was afraid the chair would fall apart. The chair careened onto the cement. She flew with the chair, laughing, as a couple of Raiders dodged her path. She circled around, still going fast, before stopping herself and looking up at me, seeing if I was impressed.
“Pretty good,” I said.
I walked down the ramp. As I did, I looked up to see Char walking toward Anna. Seeing me look that direction caused Anna to wheel her chair around.
“Char!” she said.
He gave a tired smile. His face was thin and gaunt, and he seemed older than the last time I’d seen him. His eyes were tired and circles underlined his sharp, blue eyes. Those eyes had not lost their light or intensity, but Char looked worn, for lack of a better word. The marred left side of his face lay in shadow, hiding the horrible scars of his disfigurement.
Anna stood, and the man who was like her father embraced her.
“You shouldn’t stand,” Char said.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
She sat back down, wincing in pain.
By now, I’d reached them and stood beside Anna’s chair. Char’s gaze shifted to me, his eyes appraising.
“I don’t think you realize the kind of girl you got,” Char said. “Or what you got yourself into.”
“Now what’s that supposed to mean?” Anna asked.
“Let me put it this way,” Char said. “Most seventeen-year-olds who wander into Raider Bluff don’t become the Alpha’s chief bodyguard. There were men under my command who would have killed you.” Char smiled in remembrance. “You challenged any of them to a one-on-one fight, and one of my top guards took you up on it.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“They fought, right there in the dirt of the marketplace,” Char said. “No weapons. My guard had the upper hand most of the time, as might be expected for a man his size. A crowd of hundreds gathered. All business stopped as Anna fought for her right to be a Raider. I remember watching this kid, thinking she was foolish. Dead.”
Anna said nothing, only listening to the story.
“Then like lightning, she pinned him to the ground. You could see how his eyes widened. I knew he wasn’t destined to be on the ground for long, given his size. But from nowhere, a knife was in Anna’s hands, at his throat.”
“I thought the fight was without weapons,” I said.
Char paused and looked me in the eye, as if that were the point of the story.
“That was when Anna said, ‘Don’t expect me to fight fair. Expect me to win.’”
“She was booed and jeered at, until I called everyone down. I walked into the ring, and held out my hand to her. I still remember the way her eyes blazed, like green fire. ‘This is a fighter,’ I thought. ‘This is someone I need.’ At the time, I trusted no one in Raider Bluff. I thought with someone so young, she would have no thought of corruption or betrayal.
“I took her to the top of Raider Bluff, gave her food and shelter, told her she could stay in Raider Bluff as long she liked, but she had to fight for me.”
“What did she say?” I asked.
“She agreed. And as if testing that agreement, there was a plot on my life just a few days later. She killed the assassin. Then I knew I made the right call.”
“I just wanted food and a home,” Anna said. “I stayed in Raider Bluff, honing my skill, eating all I wanted. Protecting Char was easy after the two years surviving the Wasteland. I was in Raider Bluff for two months, when...”
She trailed off, but I knew what came next.
“We came,” I said. “With our crazy idea to go to Bunker One and stop the xenovirus.”
Anna nodded. “Yeah. I never meant to come along the whole way, but the Wanderer changed my mind. I knew I had a part to play in this still, for good or bad.”
“For good,” I said.
Anna didn’t answer, remaining doubtful.
“Let’s go to the council,” Char said, grabbing Anna’s chair by the handles.
“Where is it?” I asked.
“Here, actually,” Char said, pointing to one of the hangar’s corners.
A long table with chairs had been set up. There was seating for about twenty people.
“Besides everyone from the inner crew,” Char said, “there will be representatives from all the other groups: the Community, the Suns, the Raiders, the Exiles, and the Vegas Exodus.”
“Do you know what will be discussed?” Anna asked.
“Everything,” Char said. “It’s clear we’re going to go help Augustus. It’s the logistics that are up for debate.”
We arrived at the tables. I cleared a chair to make room for Anna. I sat to her left while Char sat to her right.
Over the next few minutes, people arrived. Samuel and Makara came, sitting near the head of the table on my left. Julian followed shortly after, sitting next to Makara. Ashton walked from Perseus, making his way toward the table. He sat next to Julian.
“Where are the rest?” Makara asked.
“There’s still ten minutes,” Samuel said.
A few people I didn’t recognize sat at the table – probably some of the civilian leaders of the Vegas Exodus. Deborah took a seat at the table. She was silent and contemplative, apparently finding more interest in staring at the surface of the wooden table than in making conversation.
Five minutes before the meeting, people began to gather around the table, wanting to hear everything that was discussed. This group included Raiders and Exiles, along with people from Las Vegas and the Community, whose faces were worn from all the hard times they had endured. All they wanted was peace and rest, the one thing we weren’t able to give them.
Finally, the last group of people arrived: Michael, Lauren, and Ruth, leading a battered Marcus, whose face was bruised and whose right lower leg was in a cast. He advanced slowly on a pair of crutches, his face worn and his reddish-brown beard long and tangled. Like his brother Char’s, Marcus’s blue eyes were bright and alert. With help from Lauren, he was eased into a seat next to Char. Michael knelt in front of Callie, who had been following her parents, pointing her toward a group of children who must have been part of the Vegas Exodus. Reluctantly, Callie set off.
All the seats at the table were taken, and everyone waited for Makara to begin. The crowd around the table murmured, but its voices were stilled when Makara stood, the legs of her wooden chair squealing against the cement.
“Thank you for coming,” she said. “I know the last few weeks haven’t been easy, and I can’t promise they’ll get any easier. We lost a lot of lives and we barely have time to mourn our dead. I’m sorry for that. Askala and the Radaskim aren’t going to wait for us, so we can’t wait for them. We have to move on to Los Angeles and help Augustus, for several reasons.”
Makara paused a moment, and everyone waited quietly for her to continue.
“The first reason is one of food. Even with our numbers lower, the food in Hydroponics won’t last forever. Samuel, Ruth, and I took inventory of what we have, and it’s clear: even with the canned food, we don’t have long. A couple of months at most. Civilians can stay in the Bunker for the meantime, but eventually, everyone will need move to Los Angeles.”
Everyone
had grown quiet, waiting for her to say more. Makara continued.
“Augustus is being attacked from the west by the Reapers in the Inner City, and from the east by the Blighters. It won’t be long before his forces are crushed between the two sides.”
Miraculously, everyone was still quiet. The crowd was actually hearing Makara out. I had expected them to protest at having to continue fighting.
“Without Augustus, there’s no way we can win the war against Askala,” Makara said. “That’s why we have to help him. I don’t know what we’ll find when we get there, but winning means we’ll have the chance to make the counterattack on Ragnarok Crater.”
There was a sharp intake of breath from the crowd. Even a few faces at the council table went white at that announcement.
“So you’re just going to leave us behind?” One of the civilian leaders of the Exodus had spoken. “What if you don’t come back, like last time?”
“Please hold off on questions and comments for now,” Makara said. “But I will answer this one. We will come back. And if not, there should be few enough people here to survive for a long time, if not indefinitely.”
When no one protested, Makara continued.
“This is the first question I put before the council,” Makara went on, “and it has nothing to do with Los Angeles, but with Cain of the Sworn, along with those of his gang who followed him and surrendered to us. What is to be their fate?”
Now, the crowd’s voice rose in an angry murmur. Members of the council table looked at one another, waiting for the crowd’s voice to die.
When it became quiet, Samuel was the first to speak.
“It makes no sense to keep them alive anymore,” he said. “Keeping them alive would waste time and resources, draining our food and our manpower. They betrayed the New Angels, and they deserve nothing more than swift retribution.”
The crowd roared its agreement. I didn’t realize that we’d also be deciding the fate of Cain and the Sworn. Before I could think about my own feelings on the subject, Makara spoke.
“All members in the council in favor of the swift execution of Cain and the three Sworn who survived the battle, say ‘aye.’”
“Aye,” most all of the people at the council said in unison. I wasn’t ready to vote, so I said nothing. But it didn’t matter which way I voted; Cain and his followers were as good as dead.
“Now,” Makara said, “I’m going to open up the floor to discussion about how we can best help Augustus.”
The table was silent, and the crowd surrounding it stilled. From somewhere, a baby started crying.
“Obviously, the ship can only carry so many,” Ashton said. “We’ll have to find a safe landing point to unload all our forces. Whether that is Augustus’s camp, or somewhere else entirely, I don’t know. And we’ll have to make quite a few trips to transport everyone.”
“We have about two hundred fighters left,” Makara said. “What is that, five, six trips?”
Two hundred fighters sounded so pitiful when said out loud. Just a week ago we had been at least five hundred.
“If anything is clear,” Makara said, “the survival of the New Angels depends on winning the battle in Los Angeles. Two hundred fighters won’t do much to augment Augustus’s legions, which number in the thousands. Maybe if we set up a flank, we can get at the Reapers where it will hurt the most.”
“What do you mean?” Anna asked.
“If Carin is focused completely on Augustus, an attack from us would be completely unexpected,” Makara said. “It might be the chance we need.”
“That’s something we should talk about with Augustus,” Ashton said. “But maybe we should be focusing on the Blighters. They are the real enemy.”
“He’s been expecting us to come back for a few days by now,” I said. “The Blighters might have already gotten to him.”
“No, he’s alive,” Makara said. “I spoke to him a couple of hours ago. The Blighters started their attack this morning. He’s getting impatient, and I told him I’d let him know our decision tonight.”
“How soon do you plan on leaving?” Lauren asked.
Makara looked at her grimly. “Tonight. Every minute we wait is more men lost.”
Everyone in the hangar fell quiet at that.
“It will take many trips on Perseus to ferry two hundred people there,” Makara said. “I only trust the ship to carry thirty or so at a time.”
“That makes about seven trips,” I said, doing the math. “That’ll take at least a full day, working nonstop.”
“Probably longer,” Samuel said. “We can expect there to be roadblocks. Let’s expect two, or even three days. There are dragons to worry about.”
With the mention of dragons, I was reminded of Askal. It’d been a while since I’d seen him. I had gotten a glimpse of him defending Pyrite from the Radaskim when we had relocated to Bunker 84. And then there had been the dream, where he was outside Oasis. I had no idea how he was doing now, or even if he was safe.
Thinking about Askal made me realize that the key to our victory was with the Elekai.
“Anna and I need to find the Elekai,” I said. “Two spaceships against all those dragons won’t be enough. We need to be able to fight in the air on an equal footing.”
“And how would you get the Elekai?” Makara asked.
I thought for a moment. The home of the Elekai had to have changed, because we had destroyed their Xenolith outside Vegas before realizing they were allies.
“We would have to find them,” Anna said.
“I don’t know if I can risk Alex going on such a dangerous mission,” Makara said. “And you’re injured.”
Anna shook her head. “We’re going.”
Before Makara could respond, I cut in.
“Look, I know it sounds crazy on the surface. But we need those reinforcements. Without them, the Radaskim dragons will go unchecked. Usually, the Elekai have always helped us without our asking. The fact that they aren’t in Los Angeles tells me something is wrong.”
“This is all conjecture,” Makara said. “Show me some proof, and sure, you can go.”
Makara’s tone said that my idea would never happen. In a way, I could understand her perspective. The last place she’d want me to be was the Great Blight. If I died, it was all over.
The real reason Anna wanted to go was to see the Wanderer. I couldn’t say that to Makara, though.
Makara’s eyes narrowed in skepticism. “There’s something going on between you two. Something you’re not telling me.”
Makara went quiet, waiting for me to explain myself. I’d been caught, somehow.
“I’ll just say it, then,” I said. “This is something Anna and I have to do together.”
“Why?” Makara asked.
“Because...” I wasn’t sure how to continue.
Thankfully, Anna picked up for me. “I have my own questions to ask the Wanderer.”
“What questions?” Samuel asked.
Everyone at the council table became more alert, as if this question was more important than anything that had been discussed so far.
“I...”
Anna didn’t continue. She knew as well as I did that her question was personal. It wasn’t likely that Makara, Samuel, or anyone else would see it her way.
But just because it was personal didn’t mean it wasn’t important.
“The questions have to do with the final battle,” I said. “We need specific answers that only the Wanderer can answer.”
Samuel and Makara exchanged a look. Everyone waited for more of an explanation.
“I want to look the Wanderer in the eye, and ask him the reason Alex has to die,” Anna said. “That’s it. So far, we’re just taking his word for it.” She paused a moment. “There could be another way to win. We just don’t know it yet.”
A heavy silence followed. Makara looked at Anna, as if weighing her, and Anna merely looked back. Samuel and Julian looked down, as if in thought. Ashton str
oked his chin, chewing his lower lip.
Makara at last looked at Samuel. “What do you think?”
It was a long moment before Samuel answered. “It’s been a while since we’ve heard from the Wanderer. Maybe...maybe they’re right. And Alex was right, earlier. We haven’t heard from the Elekai in a while, and Augustus didn’t mention anything about the Elekai being at the battle. It might be worth investigating, if they’re in trouble.”
“And how are they to get to the Great Blight?” Makara asked. “Perseus will be busy transporting our men.”
“Askal will take us,” I said.
“Even with the cold?” she asked. “And with Anna’s injury? Besides, you don’t even know where he is”
I knew Makara was right on all those counts. And Askal wouldn’t be fast enough, anyway, for wherever we had to go – especially if the Elekai’s new home was far away.
“We’d need the spaceship,” I said, finally.
“This is just more time,” Makara said. “Time we really don’t have. And I don’t like sending the person who’s our only hope for victory into harm’s way. What will happen if you die, Alex?”
“I won’t die.”
“You don’t know that,” Makara said sternly. “If you die, the rest of us die as well. We’ve had more than enough close calls. I’ve already put you through too much danger and I’ll be damned if I do it again.” She crossed her arms. “And having Anna go with you is also unsafe. She’s immobilized from her injury.”
The rest of the table went silent. All of her points were valid. Probably far more valid than mine. All I knew was that I had made Anna a promise, and I meant to keep it.
“Can’t Augustus hold on for a few more hours?” I asked. “We have to remember why we’re fighting. There are powers at work far greater than us. There’s the Wanderer. And there’s Askala. Only one of them can win. If there’s any chance of victory, our forces will need to join. If Anna and I go find the Wanderer, we can bring back the Elekai army. We have to bring the Reapers to our side, as well. If we’re not standing together, Los Angeles will fall. But we need the Elekai if we’re going to win.”
I looked at Makara, who looked as if she was finally being won over.
