Fallen Firsts

by Jillian Torassa

“Gideon, come on!” I yelled, slightly hysterical, over the sounds of the crashing waves and whipping wind.

  “Jade, you have to be quiet,” Cece hissed, suddenly at my side. “There are ears everywhere.”

  I knew she was real. I knew it. But her proximity sent goose bumps crawling up my arms, as though she was nothing more than an apparition.

  How had she survived?

  She stepped around me and beckoned for Gideon to keep moving. “We’re almost there,” she said. “Don’t look down. Focus on your balance. You can do this, Gideon.”

  Her voice was calm and coaxing. It was familiar—the kind of voice only Cece could have.

  A warm rush of acceptance caused my muscles to relax automatically. She was here. She was unscathed, and she was probably leading us to relative safety.

  Holy hell, I had missed her.

  Nodding slowly, Gideon moved his feet once more. His face was pale, but his eyes were determined, and soon he had made it across. Slumping against the hill and putting his hands on his knees, he breathed heavily.

  Cece patted his back, but then kept walking as if nothing had happened.

  Business as usual.

  “You okay?” I asked, putting my hand on his shoulder.

  “Fine.”

  “Let’s not do that again.”

  “I’m on board with that.” With a half-smile, he straightened. “Let’s catch up with Cece, though. She’s already disappeared.”

  Just beyond us, the path curved, and sure enough, Cece was now out of sight.

  “Roke, she’s quick.”

  “Come on.” He gestured forward and I nodded, moving onward once more.

  As soon as we rounded the corner, a large pile of rocks came into view; the tracks led right to it, and it looked as though it had once been a tunnel through the mountain. Cece waited with obvious impatience at the base, dwarfed by the jagged stone.

  I looked at her questioningly, but she pressed her finger to her lips again and pointed upward before she started to climb.

  “Did I ever tell you she’s crazy?” I whispered to Gideon.

  “Shh!” He smiled back. “Did she ever punish you for talking when you weren’t supposed to? I’m not going through that again.”

  I laughed, but quickly stifled it as she threw a dirty look in my direction. Instead I grinned and followed her up the small hill, Gideon right behind me.

  Near the top, there was a hole (invisible from the ground) that Cece dropped into, and I could hear whispered voices coming from inside it.

  Voices.

  Cece wasn’t the only one who had survived.

  A surge of energy flooded through my legs, and I dropped to my knees to peer into the darkness.

  “There are others!” I called to Gideon, who was still climbing.

  “Really?” My news seemed to drive him onward, but when he reached the top, the “y” between his eyebrows crinkled with concern. “They’re down . . . there?”

  “Do you think you’ll be able to make it?” I asked, starting to feel claustrophobic for his sake. Though he hadn’t been eating particularly well, he was still a lot bigger than Cece, or even me.

  But he merely shrugged. “I guess there’s only one way to find out. After you?”

  “Hurry, you two!” came Cece’s voice from out of the nothingness.

  Taking a deep breath, I squirmed into the hole, trying not to scrape my knees or bang my head as I slid into the gloom.

  After several feet, the narrow cavity opened up into a surprisingly large cavern. A single electric lamp lit the entire space, but my eyes quickly adjusted as Gideon slid in next to me.

  Five sets of weary eyes gazed back at us; Cece’s were the only ones I recognized.

  “Welcome to our home,” she said at last, a tired smile on her thin face.

  A reedy man with a shaved head and caramel-colored skin was by far the most hostile looking in the group. “Who the hell are you?” he growled at us.

  “We can trust them,” Cece said calmly. “These are two of my original rebels from Liminis.”

  “You can’t just bring people back here, Phillips. Were you not there that night? We can’t trust anyone.”

  She ignored him and instead looked at me. “Where have you two been?”

  “It’s a long story.” I looked around the cavern at the other faces. There were five survivors huddled there in the dark: three women and two men. They were all sallow, thin, and haggard, and Cece was the only one who didn’t sport visible injuries. “What about you? How did you survive?”

  “How do we know you aren’t spies?” The bald guy cut in again. “There are only five of us left. Can’t they leave us the hawk alone?”

  “Relax, Malek,” Cece said coldly. “I would trust both of them with my life.”

  “And that’s what you’re doing.”

  “I am aware.”

  He and Cece glared fiercely at each other, and I stared uncomfortably at my feet.

  “Fine.” He exhaled tensely and crossed his arms. “Tell us about yourselves, then.”

  Gideon cleared his throat and took a step forward. “My name is Gideon Aarons. I’m a gardener from Liminis.”

  “A Second?”

  “Yes.”

  Malek’s face relaxed slightly. “Me too. I’m from Furoric. Got to Erroris right after they released you guys.”

  My cheeks reddened at the casual mention of Cameron’s less-than-humane treatment of the non-Third rebels.

  But Gideon remained unruffled. “Oh yeah? What did you do?”

  “Tech guy.” Malek uncrossed his arms and then gestured at me instead. “What about you?”

  “Uh . . .” I glanced at Cece, and she nodded at me encouragingly. Clearing my throat, I continued, “I’m a Third. My name’s Jade Doe.”

  “Doe, huh? So your parents were Seconds or Firsts, and they didn’t want anything to do with you?”

  My eyes narrowed as my temper sparked. “Excuse me?”

  “You have more cause than most to seek redemption.”

  “What gives you the right to talk to me like that? You don’t know anything about me!”

  “Shut up, Malek,” the other man, whose name I didn’t know yet, cut in. “If Cece says we can trust them, we can trust them.”

  Malek’s eyes lingered judgmentally on mine for a second more before he sneered. “Whatever.”

  I continued to glare at him, but he turned his back on me and skulked into the back of the cave-room, kicking a pebble against the rock wall.

  A middle-aged woman with steely grey hair but a young face cleared her throat, stepping forward. “Have you eaten?”

  Her words pulled my attention away from Malek as I glanced around at their thin faces. It was obvious that they were barely surviving.

  But Gideon was the one to answer. “We have some supplies we can contribute, actually.”

  “Yeah.” I agreed quickly, swinging the backpack off my shoulders as my annoyance melted into compassion. “Yeah, we’ve got lots.”

  Her eyes widened.

  “What to do you mean, ‘we’ve got lots?’” Malek demanded, turning around to glower at me again.

  Before my empathy had the chance to turn back into antagonism, Gideon cut in and answered Malek’s presumptuous question with pointed calmness.

  “We just came from the Doctors’ headquarters,” he said. “And we took what we could from them.”

  “The Doctors’ headquarters?” Cece’s asked, surprised. “What were you doing there?”

  My mind started to whir because I knew I didn’t have a good answer to that question. We were trying to collect proof? Sabotage? Infiltration? Our plans had never been terribly concrete.

  “We were trying to hurt them but didn’t really have a plan,” Gideon responded eventually.

  I didn’t have to look at Malek to know that his eyebrows shot up. “You just waltzed into the Doctors’ headquarters without a plan? After they lit us up? I thought you were a Second, not a First.”<
br />
  Gideon’s jaw line tightened as he clenched his teeth, pausing before he answered, and I couldn’t help but feel a little validated. If Gideon found Malek irritating, too . . .

  “We had blueprints of the facility,” he continued. “We rescued them from the Factory wreckage, and we figured that we could use them to penetrate headquarters. Pick up—more or less—where we left off. Before they attacked.”

  “Just the two of you.”

  “And two others.”

  A stab of pain jabbed my chest.

  “Where are they now?”

  Michael lay on a white sheet that was soaked with his blood. His pale chest, exposed to the harsh light that hovered over his body, did not move. He didn’t breathe.

  And then there was Cameron: grey, ghastly, and scorched, covered in scarlet blood . . .

  “Dead,” I said numbly.

  “Lucky you didn’t go the same way.”

  “Malek, please.”

  He huffed before turning away again.

  “Anyway . . .” Gideon’s voice sounded measured, as though he longed to lash out; he must have been exhausted. “When we couldn’t find anything useful there, we came back here to look for survivors. We figured we couldn’t do it alone.”

  “Do what alone?” Cece asked.

  “Take down the Docs, of course.”

  His voice seemed to echo off the damp walls as they all stared at him in disbelief.

  “You can’t be serious,” the third woman huffed in disbelief, speaking up for the first time. (With a jolt, I realized she only had one arm.) “There’s nothing more we can do. They won. We’re living in a hawking hole, starving our asses off because we can’t leave. We can’t go back to our homes. We have to just wait here until we die.”

  “What do you expect to do with seven ravenous rebels and a set of blueprints?” Malek asked.

  “Actually, we lost the blueprints.”

  He laughed humorlessly in response.

  “But I may have a plan.”

  I looked at him in surprise. This was the first I was hearing about this.

  “When we were at their headquarters, we found out that there is a bounty out on our heads. Jade’s and mine. We were supposed to be executed before we escaped and joined up with the rebels here.”

  “You escaped from a colony prison?”

  “Yes. And Jade’s First found out that we weren’t killed. He’s been spreading their failure throughout Liminis, and the Docs are losing control there.”

  He was making things up. We had already discussed this; we were wanted, true, but we had no way of knowing what was going on inside Liminis. The Doctors couldn’t prove we were dead. But we had heard that one Erroris Third complaining . . . if there were more like him at home—if Walter’s words plus the extra work caused by the missing Thirds were the reasons the colony had been locked down—maybe we had a chance.

  “So what do you propose we do?” Malek asked.

  “Let’s go back to Liminis. We can still prove that the Doctors are actually the ones in charge, especially if people are beginning to doubt them there anyway, and we can convince others to help us bring them down.”

  Malek still looked skeptical. “Without weapons? Or manpower? Why would they believe us? Or help us?”

  “We just have to prove that everyone’s life would be better with Knowledge. That the only reason they don’t have it is so that the Docs can control them. That it’s all been a lie.”

  “Not to mention the fact,” Cece added, “that many of Liminis’s Seconds were murdered by the Docs. They had friends there. At the Factory. People will listen.” I couldn’t tell in the dim light, but it looked as though her eyes had filled with tears.

  “I suppose that’s true . . .”

  “Besides, if we’re going to die anyway, shouldn’t we wreak as much havoc as we can first?”

  “Amen to that,” said the other man whose name I still didn’t know.

  I was beginning to like him.

  Gideon smiled slightly before addressing the others. “So, what do you say? You with us?”

  “I am,” Cece said.

  “Me too.”

  “I guess it could work . . .”

  And just like that, we had a plan. We had a team, and I started to feel genuine excitement again. We weren’t powerless because we could make their lives hell, even if we could do nothing more than that. And wreaking havoc happened to be something I was very good at. Besides, what if we changed a few minds in the process?

  “Excellent,” Gideon said. “We start in the morning.”

  ---

  We were the only ones in the world, hiding there in that caved-in railroad tunnel. After sharing our food and getting comfortable for the night, Gideon started to ask the others about themselves. Since I wasn’t particularly gifted at socializing, I sat back and listened with my eyes closed.

  Besides, I wasn’t really in the mood to talk.

  Between the snatches of overwhelming memories that kept playing through my brain (mostly of the night when all of this started), I tuned in and out of the conversation.

  “I helped create the communication system that allowed the ‘Ten Colony Council’ to correspond with each other, and that’s how I found out the truth,” Malek said.

  “Can’t you hear that? It’s getting louder.”

  “I can hear it, too!” Michael shouted. “There he is! He’s coming!”

  Sure enough, a helicopter flew in our direction, but it was flying in an odd zig-zag pattern, and there were several other gray dots zooming through the air behind it.

  “I barely escaped Furoric with my life, and then I came here. As a Second, you can only imagine how I was received.”

  Malek threw a knowing look at Gideon, and I shifted uncomfortably before spacing out again.

  “Look!” Gideon pointed toward the dots. “Planes. I told you the noise I heard didn’t sound like a helicopter.”

  Something shot out of the first plane and hit the drunken chopper with a deafening BOOM.

  “At least you escaped your colony with all your limbs.” That was Christa, the one-armed survivor with a mass of curly brown hair that flowed past her waist. “If I ever see that cop again, I’ll kill him.”

  Jaron, the shorter of the two men, agreed. “I know the feeling.” He was dark like Victor, but he had a ball of pure black hair on the top of his head, and he was also a Third. “I got a beating I’ll never forget after they caught me carrying that old Bible around.”

  “Bible?” Gideon asked.

  “It’s an ancient book of scripture, and it’s why I’m here. It contains an account of Adam that is so different than the one we’ve been groomed with, that I started to suspect something was screwy with the history we’ve been force-fed.”

  As interesting as that was, it couldn’t keep me grounded in the present, not this close to the scene of recent mass murder.

  “They’re heading toward the Factory!” Jackson yelled, dashing across the clearing toward one of the vans.

  “Jackson, wait!” Tip ran after him as the planes flew above the clearing. “Get down!” He managed to tackle him against the side of the van as a bomb hit the forest and engulfed the trees in a fire so intense, I could feel it scorch my face from 100 yards away.

  “And what about you, Marsh?” Gideon addressed the woman with grey hair. “You said you had a child who was killed?”

  “Yes. My son, Peter. He was a Third, just like me, but he got caught up in the middle of a fight that turned violent. A Second pushed him off of a bridge, and when the Doctor came, he didn’t even acknowledge Peter’s wounds. He just focused on the others who had been injured, and my son died hours later.”

  “Something similar happened to me,” Gideon said quietly. “To my sister.”

  “I knew Knowledge was evil, but he was just a child. He deserved the chance to redeem himself. And that’s when I started to question everything I’d ever been taught.”

  The sounds of hummin
g planes, roaring fires, and falling branches were suddenly accompanied by sounds that were much, much worse: Through the smoke, through the haze, through the falling snow, the sounds of explosives mingled with the cries of human screams, filling my ears as though they were the last sounds I would ever hear.

  The ground shook as the bombs fell on the Factory, three miles away, and I could barely stand as I gazed, horrified, at the orange glow that splashed across the darkness.

  “Don’t worry,” Cece said. “The Doctors will pay for it. For all of it. We’ll find justice for Peter, and for everyone else who has died under their rule, as we bring Knowledge back into the light. I truly believe that.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut and saw one last image:

  Michael slammed on the breaks, and my face smacked hard into the dashboard.

  “What the—”

  With my hand to my face, I pulled myself upright and stared out of the window. A slight figure with long brown hair stood in the beam of our headlights, a terrible smile on her pretty face.

  Mata.

  She lifted her fist, revealing a dark green grenade. Her smile widened as she waved lightly and leisurely with her other hand, patting her fingers against her palm as she bid us a mocking farewell.

  Then she lobbed the explosive toward us.

  I threw my hands over my eyes, felt the van roll nose over rear, and then everything went black as we landed with a sickening, gut-wrenching, bone-cracking crash.

  Shaking my head, I opened my eyes again, trying not to think about the pile of dead bodies that lay just miles south of us. Damn right they’ll pay, I thought.

  I didn’t know where Mata was, but if I ever saw her again, I would kill her, too.

  These people were filled with as much fury as I was. And that was powerful.

  Maybe even powerful enough to change everything.

  Chapter Six

  It was safer to travel in small groups.

  Cece, Jaron, and Marsh left at dawn the next morning, slipping into a nasty rain storm, and the rest of us planned to meet them by nightfall.

  While Malek and Christa waited for their turn to leave, however, a dangerous side-mission was proposed, much to Gideon’s chagrin.

  “There’s no way in hell I’m heading into a fight without guns,” Malek growled at him.