“Are you there?” he whispered tentatively into the darkness. His eyes were not accustomed to the dimness outside the walls. He appeared blind, his right arm clutched warily at the stone wall for support and his left hand held the faint light aloft. Despite the gentle glow of the lamp, he narrowed his eyes against the eternal night sky, desperately trying to discover the shape of his charge. He had been spoiled by the machine light of the city and was more accustomed to the bright electric globes that lit the streets of Arkaiden. Shiane knew he would have jeopardised his liberty to reach her and she appreciated him all the more for his courage. He was risking everything for her and her child.
“I am here,” she replied, peeling back the white cloak and unveiling herself. Her bright red hair was taken up by the fierce winds and whipped wildly about her face. She pushed it back behind her ears so that she could see the man better. “Thank you for coming.”
The man inched backwards startled to see her standing so close.
“I didn’t think there would be anyone here. I thought it was just a silly dream . . . I can’t believe. . .” he stuttered over the relentless wind.
“That it was real? That I am here?” she smiled knowingly. The man she had seen in her visions nodded and smiled at her.
“Did you send the dreams to me? I have seen your face every night for the last three months. Each time I woke I felt that it was real . . . that you were real.” His hand reached out to touch her, to see if he was still simply dreaming, but she took his hand in hers and pressed it to the mound containing her unborn child.
“It was real, Alastor . . . we are real, and right now we need your help.” As if on cue another shudder broke through her body and she sunk to her knees. Alastor had no time to ask her how she knew his name. She was in pain and needed help. He gripped her under her arms and brought her back up to a standing position. He carefully lifted her, cradling her in his arms and carried her to the narrow opening he had made in the gate. Shiane gave herself up to his care, closing her eyes and focussing only on whispering the words to relieve his burden.
Alastor
The woman did her best to help him. She whispered words, foreign to him, into the night. With each word she seemed lighter in his arms, until she weighed no more than his own four year old daughter. He glanced down in amazement. He actually felt the need to check that she was there. He could see from her porcelain face just how much pain she was in, and yet never once did she stop chanting the words.
He walked with her through the dark Arkaiden streets wondering what people would see if they happened to look out of their windows. Would they be able to see the heavily pregnant woman? He suspected not, but he questioned how it would be possible to cloak oneself from sight. He shook the questions from his head, after all, it had already proven to be an impossible night. All his learning told him that it was impossible for people to live in the wastelands. His common sense told him that it was impossible for dreams to come true and even more impossible for people to communicate through dreams. Yet here he was, carrying a beautiful woman he had assumed to be a figment of his imagination.
He glanced down at her once more. There were dark circles under her bright golden eyes that told him she had not slept for days. Her lips were dry and cracked from lack of water - they formed a tight line across her face as she grimaced at the pain of another contraction. She wore a pale green shift dress that, to Alastor, seemed too fine for the unbridled weather of the land beyond the walls. Over this she wore a lightweight, white fur cloak – this too seemed impractical for the harshness of the winds. He was amazed she had made it to the city at all. He burned to question where she came from. How many more like her were out there? How was it possible to survive without Machine power? But he would save his questions for after. When the woman had delivered the child and rested.
His eye caught a steady stream of blood snaking its way down his arm. He twisted slightly to avoid marring the woman’s pretty cloak. He had cut his tracker out of his arm and forgotten to bandage the wound in his rush to open the gate. The blood, stark against his skin, was a fierce reminder of the reality of his situation. Watching the rivulet trickle from the self-inflicted wound brought everything into focus for him: All that he had done in the past few hours, put him and his family at risk. He had acted without thinking of the consequences and had broken more than one Arkaiden law following his dream into reality. He frowned as a thought prickled in his mind - there is still a long way until morning.
The woman groaned as he finally arrived at his little home on the rim of the city. She had stopped chanting and her weight bore down upon him suddenly. His arms felt the strain of the whole journey in an instant and he almost dropped her. Buckling under the strain he heaved and readjusted her weight, freeing the numbing sensation that had begun to spread. His muscles screamed and tendons shook with the effort but he was nearly there. His wife Rula waited for him in the doorway of their little house. As he neared, she came out to meet him, her mouth gaped at the impossibility of the scene before her. She froze and for a moment, Alastor feared her rigid form would block his entrance. Thankfully, Rula’s instincts and training kicked in before he reached the top step. She indicated that he should take the woman straight through to the birthing room, breathing only one word to him as he passed her:
“Hurry!”
Alastor realised that his time with the strange woman was up and, as he laid her down upon the bed, he asked one last question before readying to leave her in Rula’s capable hands.
“What’s your name? All those dreams and you never once told me.” The woman laughed, despite the pain, and smiled up at him.
“I am Shiane and the dreams were not sent by me, they are hers. . .” They both looked down at the bump which Shiane tenderly stroked. Alastor, silenced by yet another impossibility, allowed Rula to shove him from the room. He stood outside the door feeling physically numb and buzzing with questions: Who were they? How could an unborn child even have the ability to do such things? Why him? What would this mean for his family?
Shiane
Shiane barely managed to thank Alastor before he hurried from the room. Rula, his wife, was curt and obviously put-out by Shiane’s appearance, but she knew what she was doing. Shiane couldn’t say how long the labour took or give an estimation of how bad the pain had felt. She could only describe it as something close to what she had experienced whilst lying to Ulliel earlier. Both her husband and her daughter had been torn from her this day.
Rula laid the tiny bundle in her arms. Aletheia’s little face gazed up at her. Shiane marvelled at her perfectly formed daughter, who was surprisingly wide-eyed and smiling knowingly.
“Hello Aletheia, I am your mother. My name is Shiane and you are so very welcome in this world.” Aletheia reached up. Her little hand touched Shiane’s tear-soaked face. Her little eyes beamed a bright pink—the colour illustrated emotions of love—their illumination was so bright they lit up the wall behind Shiane.
“I am sorry, little one, but I am going to have to leave you. This place may not be your home but it will be your sanctuary. They won’t understand you, my darling. So for your own safety I am going to bind your abilities. This way you will be safe. Just remember that I love you, little one. You are destined for a great and terrible future but it will all be worthwhile. I promise.” Shiane felt her strength wane but she had energy enough for this. Her last act of love.
Shiane hummed a tune, a lullaby filled with the last of her strength and power. She wove herself into it and bestowed its harmony upon her daughter, binding her powers until she came of age. Aletheia’s Dakkar would awaken them and her future would be written just as it had been seen in the first’s prophecy.
With the final twisting melody of the lullaby, Shiane slipped away.
Alastor
When Rula eventually appeared, blood soaked and tear strewn, Alastor knew his questions would forev
er go unanswered. He glanced down at the baby cradled in his wife’s arms, unsure of what to do. The sweet little thing slept, peacefully unaware of her loss: her features, even in their unformed infancy, so much like her mother’s.
He stroked her cheek.
As his fingers made contact with her soft skin, her eyelids flew wide revealing two little glowing beacons of bright blue: As bright and luminescent as the fire in the hearth. Seeing those eyes snapped Alastor’s brain into gear and he knew what he had to do to protect this child. He would raise her as his. He would watch over her.
Leaving the baby with Rula, he once more ventured out into the dark Arkaiden streets with the woman in his arms. This time there were no words to lighten his load. No thoughts or wonders to lighten the heaviness of his heart.
There was only a man, a body and an unmarked grave.
Delilah’s Birth
K.C. Finn
*This story is written in UK English*
It’s funny what goes through your mind when you realise that you’re about to die. It was January when I lay on the battlefield, long after the fight had moved uphill. The cold nip of the winter wind blew at the gaping gash on the side of my head, freezing the blood even as it poured down my neck to pool at my shattered collarbone. The breeze whistled so loudly against my half-ripped ear that I had no chance of listening out for anyone coming to my aid. Not that I felt they would; winning the battle was far more important than losing a few good women along the way.
January was the month when I had first met Malcolm, twenty-seven years prior to the date that I died. He was already military back then, working for the intelligence division in the Twenty-One-Hundred program. He smiled with bright white teeth and told me that the army was going to do great things at the turn of the twenty-second century. I applied for a job in his department, not because of his great dream, but because of his smile. It took him a few months to realise that I was interested in him, but during that time I bought into the TOH ideal. I, too, believed that the army was going to transform our struggling nation.
To build, one must first demolish.
It became the project’s motto on New Year’s Day, when the city of London was erased from living history. It was the first of many great settlements to fall nationwide, its gilded skywalks and shining skyscrapers collapsed in a matter of hours by government war machines. Malcolm and I were supposed to be the intelligence department, but we were even blinder than the rest of the team that we worked for back then. Our sweat, toil and ingenuity had brought about the end of days.
Malcolm and I had been in London the day it fell. I could remember us trying out the new double-sync cameras he’d bought for me; broadcasting our stupid young love to the world even as the super tanks were setting their course for the Thames’s south bank. Sometimes, Malcolm told me that he’d been planning to ask me to marry him that day in London. The breakout of war against the military machines had rather put a spanner in those works. Even after, when the System had taken over as the new form of supreme government, we never seemed to manage to get around to the white dress and the big wide aisle. It just wasn’t important anymore.
I wish we had, as I lay on the cold ground watching the blackness creep into the corners of my vision. If we’d managed to get around to getting married, then my empty grave would read ‘Beloved Wife’ on the tombstone. Now what will it say? ‘Here lies Delilah Stewart, who faced the System and lost’. It is an uninspiring thought to know that a simple flamecannon mowed me down in the end. Its flames burned a hole straight through the left side of me, nicking the edges of vital organs and ripping away most of that side of my face. It wasn’t instant, it wasn’t elegant, and it wasn’t as though I couldn’t have avoided it, if I hadn’t been so stupid as to look around for Malcolm when I should have been gunning the enemy down.
I don’t know where he is, but all I can hope is that he’s safe. Malcolm was always the better soldier of the two of us; the taste for war is in his blood. I expect he’s back at the base already, probably wondering what happened to me and when I’m going to call in my report. When no report comes, I can’t imagine what he’ll do. I can’t bear my last thoughts to be of guilt over Malcolm’s grief.
All I can do is think of January as the cold air whips against my burns, and of the year we spent together before the wartime came. We’d spent twenty-six years in battle together since then, but no moment had ever come close to being as sweet as the one before London was no more. That was the day when Malcolm really loved me; that was the day when nothing in the world mattered more than our being together. That was…
I should have died then, with those thoughts. Everything went black, the way the movies tell you that it’s supposed to, but in some distant, echoing corner of my mind, I could hear the buzzing coming in the distance. It was like a fly in my ear, though I couldn’t move to swat it, and it stayed with me for a long time, lingering like a dream whilst the rest of me seemed to cease to exist. Perhaps I was dead for a while, somewhere amid the droning sound, but it can’t have been for long.
I wake in a room lit with low, green lights. Green is not as vibrant a filter as one might think when a light bulb illuminates it. All it seems to do is intensify the shadows of everything that I can see, like the shadows behind the liquid that’s pumping through the tubes around me. Dark liquid of indeterminate colour seems to be flowing into a drip at my side. I shiver at the thought of my side, the pain-memory of the flamecannon sending me reeling with aftershock. I shouldn’t have a side left for the liquid to be pumped into.
I look down to my left, my neck pulling with a strange, new tightness as I move. A metal rig holds my naked frame in place amid the tubes, lying at a forty-five degree angle on a hard, flat surface. Some of the flesh on my stomach remains, its caramel hue looking all the darker in the green light. The skin ends about three inches from where it ought to, replaced by a thin, flexible metal. It moves like chainmail when I try to wriggle, but it doesn’t hurt where the needle with the liquid drip is jabbed into it. The new covering completes my shape, a mirror-image of my other side, as though someone took the time to sculpt it to my body with precision.
Someone has fixed me.
I suppose this must be a hospital of some sort, though it feels like a cross between a butcher’s and a mortuary. I am hung like a shank of flesh for safekeeping; there is even a label printed over my bare stomach. It takes a while for my eyes to adjust to the grim lighting, before I can strain them to decipher the upside-down stamp. It proclaims me UNSUITABLE. Well, that’s just charming. Unsuitable for what, I’m left to wonder.
The military protocol in a prisoner of war situation is to demand an audience with one’s captors. I scream until my face hurts, hollering my demands until the tiled room is filled with echoes of my own desperate cries. One side of my face doesn’t move the same way as the other anymore, and it’s now that I remember how the flames tore away at the left half of my body. I wish that I could free my hands to touch my cheek, to see if the chainmail skin has been grafted there too, but the metal bonds on my wrists are far too tight to allow it.
The eerie solitude gives me time to assess the rest of my body. The collarbone that was broken is now painless and flexible, feeling stronger and heavier than the one on my right side. My stomach doesn’t ache with hunger, which probably has something to do with the tube in my side, and the precision with which I can hear that tube’s liquid bubbling suggests that my ripped-off ear has been successfully reattached. Good news so far, but the label on my stomach is still a worry. If I am so unsuitable, then why has someone gone to all this trouble to save my life?
A clattering noise sounds overhead, and I crane my neck as far as it will go to try and follow it. The bare white ceiling tells me that the sound is coming from somewhere close, but above it, outside the room. I listen, wondering whether I should cry out once more, but a sudden instinct stops me just as I open my mouth. Hissing, like that of a snake, circulates my l
ittle chamber, and moments later I see the reason why. A faint purple gas is permeating the room between the cracks in the tiles. It would be futile to hold my breath in the sealed room, so I try to keep my breathing level as the fear makes my heart thump harder in my chest.
I was right. They didn’t want to keep me alive after all. They have let me wake in the room in which I’ll die. This isn’t a butcher’s. It’s an abattoir.
I’m not dead, again, which is less of a relief than it was the first time. The purple gas must have knocked me out for quite some time, for all the furniture in the dim greenish cell has been rearranged. There’s a chair this time, for starters. I’m sitting upright in the cup-shaped structure, which is made of hard, shiny metal, and my wrists are clamped to its curving arms. My long, black hair is loose and it hangs limply at either side of my face. It’s greasy, like it hasn’t been washed for a long time, and I’m sure that the dark strands are a little longer than they were before. A woman notices these things, even in such bizarre circumstances.
There are three things of interest to occupy my solitary mind. The first is that the tube in my side is gone, and my body is now covered by a thin, white smock. The second is that my room has a door, which I must have been facing away from before, and the door has a slide-away slot where someone outside could peer in. Then, there is perhaps the most interesting new fact of the three. Next to my chair is another chair. An empty chair, suggesting that someone may arrive to occupy it soon.
A woman could go mad in a place like this. It must be hours before my first visitor comes, yet I do not feel hungry, or tired, or indeed anything at all. All that stirs within me is the sting of vengeful hatred when the man in the brown suit opens my door. On the pocket above his heart, there is a logo of a bronze arrow splitting a lightning bolt in half. I know the symbol well from my days at the TOH Project. When I worked there, I used to think that the arrow was a symbol of progress. The industrial fortitude of man overcoming nature’s dangers: famines, droughts and diseases.
After Tomorrow: A CHBB Anthology Page 31
