by S. C. Green
The question threw me off-guard. I was expecting to be dealing with Malcolm and the girl, but I remembered Dorien’s drawn face as he sat in the courtyard, staring down at those wooden boxes containing the earthly remains of his friends. For the Reapers, the wraith were the more pressing threat.
As an outsider to their Order, I technically had no place in the meeting, but both Dorien and Alain believed I needed to be there. They still seemed to think that my sight might offer some future advantage against the wraith. After some initial prayers and ceremonial handing over of a sceptre and signet ring to Dorien, he’d asked me to take the floor. Once again, I recounted what had happened in the Citadel and what I’d heard the Mayor say in as much detail as I could remember, and then what I had seen in the streets when Cory had died.
“We have to find a way to fight them,” Devlin declared, who could’ve been Alain’s brother with his serious face and dark hair curling over his shoulders.
“But how?” Lorcon—a Reaper with straight, jet-black hair that shone in the dim light—shot back. “They’re only going to keep getting stronger. We’ve already lost so many, and with Cory dead, we’re unlikely to be able to adapt our weapons as fast as they’re changing.”
“We could use the Mimir,” Devlin suggested. “May did that inside the Citadel—”
“No,” Alain said, squeezing my knee so hard I winced. “May only did what she did out of desperation. She was untrained, and very nearly turned herself into a vegetable.”
“Dad!” May’s voice cut in sharply. “I can speak for myself.”
“—and she was close to the Mimir,” Alain continued. “It would be even harder for an unpracticed Reaper to channel it without being right up on it. Our senior Reapers have tried to channell it, but their minds cannot through the walls of the Citadel.”
“Perhaps if we brought all the elders close to the walls,” Lorcon said. “With their combined power, they might be able to harness it.”
“I’ve already thought of that. Look around you.” Dorien gestured around the room with the sceptre. “We just lost Vincent and Alistair to the wraith. That much Reaper energy will have bolstered their powers even further. That only leaves Lucian and Malcolm as our remaining elders, and they won’t do it.”
“How do you know?” Lorcon asked.
“Because Malcolm doesn’t want us to stop the wraith,” Dorien said. “His mind has been twisted by so many years trapped inside this dome. He believes that death is our best and only option. And Lucien has just lost his only son, and he blames me for Cory’s death. He will follow wherever Malcolm leads.”
“Dome sickness?” Lorcon shook his head. “That doesn’t sound like Malcolm.”
“Doesn’t it?” Dorien paced across the room, drumming his fingers against the shaft of the sceptre. “He was the one who told us to let the wraith husk those in the Rim so our resources would stretch further. He was always against us using new weapons, trying to infiltrate the Citadel. He only agreed to let Sydney go because he was certain that, as a human, she would fail.”
“And besides,” May piped up, her voice dripping with barely concealed rage. “He can’t do much from his holding cell.”
“His cell?” Lorcon leaned forward, his eyes blazing.
The other Reapers whispered amongst each other. Clearly, this was the first they’d heard of Dorien and my discovery.
“Why is Malcolm in a cell?” Lorcon asked.
Dorien’s eyes flashed with menace. “Because I have evidence that he is the Reaper behind the sex trafficking through the Compound, and he will be tried for his crime. If found guilty, he will be sentenced to death.”
14
The room went silent. Reapers stared at each other, their mouths hanging open in shock. They’d all heard the rumours, of course, but to have confirmation it was someone in their ranks who was in charge of something so foul, someone whom they had trusted and placed in a position of power ...
I glanced over at May, and my stomach twisted at the violent rage contorting her face. That conversation I’d overheard in the hallway earlier—Malcolm grabbing May, threatening her--echoed in the back of my mind. The fire that burned in her eyes now was not the same disgust the men in the room expressed – it was rawer, more visceral, more personal. What had Malcolm done to her?
Alain had told me Malcolm was one of the men in line to breed with her. To breed with her, like she was a sow at market. It was disgusting. But she wasn’t of age yet, although what if Malcolm hadn’t wanted to wait—?
White-hot rage flared in my own veins as May’s lips curled back. She stared at Dorien with such venom, I almost thought it was him she was mad at. Had Malcolm done something to her? Had he touched her? Had he, in his decaying mental state, gone after the girl who was hailed as the future of the Reapers? Had he tried to break her remarkable spirit?
Alain had said Malcolm had been against Alain going after May when she was taken by the wraith. For the first time, it occurred to me that Malcolm might have had something to do with her kidnapping. If May knew too much, had Malcolm tried to silence her by giving her to the wraith? Was he that addled with dome sickness he was hell-bent on destroying the Reapers?
I glanced across at Alain, wondering how much he knew, what he might guess about what Malcolm had done deliberately to his own daughter. Alain stared at Dorien, his face registering as much surprise as anyone’s. That was odd—he and Dorien were as close as brothers. Why hadn’t Dorien informed him of his decision to imprison Malcolm and put him on trial for his life?
“On what evidence?” Lorcon piped up from across the room.
“I have been putting together the pieces of this mess for some time now,” Dorien replied. “Some concerned brothers had previously spoken to me about the sex trafficking during Malcolm’s leadership, but like a fool, I brushed aside their questions. I’ve long thought this sex-ring was a rumour invented by the gangs in the Rim to discredit the Reapers, to weaken our power in order to thrust the city into chaos. But then I realised my complacency was causing my brothers to suspect me of being involved in trafficking. And I knew that wasn’t true, so I looked to the source of those rumours, and I found Malcolm.”
“I suggested to him that we launch an investigation into these rumours, sending out Reaper spies into the Rim to hunt out and destroy the ring at its source. But Malcolm disagreed, believing we had to repair the damage to our Order from within. He forbade me to open an investigation, insisting that prayer and reflection would lead the guilty back to the true path. At least, that was what he wanted us to believe. I now know he was trying desperately to cover his tracks.
“When you lifted me to power, three of our brothers came to me in private, free to voice their concerns at last. I had the chance to listen to their evidence, and my suspicions about Malcolm’s involvement in this ring grew. But never did I imagine …” He stepped forward, his fingers clenched so tightly to his sceptre his knuckles were white.
“I came to Malcolm’s rooms to speak to him today, and I took Sydney with me so that she may act as a witness to whatever was said. However, I found that he was not in. But there was a banging beneath his bed. I moved the sheets aside and discovered one corner of his bed rested on top of an old cellar door cut into the floor. We lifted the lid, and down there was a girl, not more than sixteen years old. She has been mistreated in the vilest of ways.”
“Where is this girl now? Can we question her?” Lorcon looked indignant. “If there is this kind of cancer in our order, then we must root it out and kill it.”
“She is traumatized, too frightened to speak,” Dorien said. “She is being looked after while she recovers enough to give us an account of her tale.”
“When can we question her?” Tristan demanded. “We should not let these charges against Malcolm stand without evidence.”
“For Christsakes!” I yelled, my hands balled into fists. My gaze remained on May’s stricken face as I stood. “This girl has been through hell, and all you�
�re talking about is the rights of her abuser!”
“Sydney.” Alain tried to tug me back into my seat. “We have to weigh up all the different sides—”
“No,” I snapped. “This is ridiculous. Malcolm is not dying down in that cell. Let him stay there and get a small taste of what he put this poor girl through.”
“Sydney is right,” Dorien said, holding up his sceptre. “Let him rot in the cell until the girl is ready to speak.”
I relaxed a little, and Tristan sank back into his seat, although his face still appeared stony.
“Malcolm will have his trial in the proper way of our Order,” Dorien continued. “For now, he is locked away where he can’t do any more harm. We have a more pressing issue at hand. All this talk of his guilt or innocence will be moot if we don’t figure out a way to stop the wraith. We can’t put Malcolm on trial if we’re all dead.”
“So, fearless leader,” Lorcon snapped. “What do you plan to do about the wraith?”
Dorien lifted his arms. “I want to hear any ideas.”
“I still believe the key to stopping them is the Mimir,” Devlin said. “That is why they took it from us. May managed to use the Mimir to draw power to defeat the wraith while it was in their possession. Perhaps if we all worked together to try and draw that same power, we would be able to control it, to force it to do our will.”
“I can’t believe we’re even considering this,” Alain snapped. “Look at what that orb did to my daughter. What makes you think you will fare any better?”
May turned away, hiding her ruined face from twenty pairs of penetrating eyes.
“We would have to get inside the Citadel in order to access the Mimir,” Tristan said. “And we know from Alain’s previous experience that this is not possible.”
“It is possible,” I explained. “May was brought inside there. Alain was in his raven form when he got sick. I think that you can only get in while in your human form, and once inside, you won’t be able to shift or use your powers.”
Reapers murmured to each other. Alain shot me a filthy look. He didn’t want me to give them any reason to consider this plan. I ignored him. Let him be pissed. These were people’s lives we were dealing with.
“What if we could find some way to trap the wraith inside the Citadel?” Tristan asked. “We don’t actually have to kill them. If we prevented them from accessing any souls, then we cut them off from their source of energy, and they will effectively starve.”
“That plan is brilliant. Except they have a huge reserve of stored energy at their disposal, and we just lost our best technological whiz,” Dorien explained. “I’m not sure if we’ll be able to come up with a way to trap them inside.”
All around me, Reapers bent their heads, their eyes searching the room, deep in thought. No one spoke.
“There is another way,” Dorien said, breaking the silence. “We have all thought it, but now I must speak it. We could destroy the dome.”
Beside me, Alain stiffened. I could tell from the alarm in his eyes he hadn’t known Dorien would suggest that.
“We can’t do that,” he said, his voice shaking. “We would unleash the wraith upon the world. We’d be condemning thousands, millions of people to sharing our same fate.”
“I’m just thinking of alternatives,” Dorien said, pacing the floor, his new signet tapping against the hilt of his sword. “Feel free to pick holes in this idea. That is, of course, why I chose you to be on my council. Unlike the last leader, I intend to listen to my advisors. But I only ask you to hear me out before you make a judgement. We need to consider this as we would consider any other option.”
“Why?” Tristan demanded. “Why should we consider it? Our duty is to protect humankind, to destroy the wraith. Not to hand them a feast of souls to husk.”
“Actually, our duty is to move the souls of the dead into the underworld,” Dorien replied. “We are not guardians. We are the ferrymen. We have taken on a role outside of our purpose to maintain order within the dome, but now that order is breaking down.”
“The dome remains for a reason,” Tristan said. “If they knew how to defeat the wraith, they would have taken it down already.”
“Do you know that for a fact?” Dorien asked. “What if the dome remains because it is their plan to defeat the wraith? Think about it. We were imprisoned in this city because neither the government nor the military could come up with a way to stop the wraith. They figured if they sealed us off, at least the wraith couldn’t escape and terrorise the rest of the world. The dome is about containment.”
I nodded, having a sinking feeling I knew where he was going with this.
“Now, the wraith aren’t growing in number. Even though we can’t kill them, as far as we can tell, they can’t make more of themselves. The people they husk don’t turn into wraith. Their population is static. However, inside these walls, we are trapped with them, and they are stronger than us. In their frenzy, they are husking the population of Petrified City faster than it can be replenished. In weeks, if not days, they will have wiped out every last source of life energy in the city. After that, who knows what will happen to them? Our best guess is that they will fade away into nothingness again.
“Perhaps the government already know this. That would explain why in ten long years they haven’t lifted the dome, why they haven’t come back with a solution to the wraith problem. For fuck’s sake, they haven’t even bothered to send us a message to say they’re working on it. Why not? Because they’re waiting until we wipe ourselves out and the problem simply disappears. When I think of that, I find it fucking difficult to be a martyr to save them.”
There were nods all around the room. Neither Alain nor May joined in.
“But out there … we are no longer finite. We outnumber the wraith. We have access to better technology. We can replenish our numbers with more Reapers and more humans, tap into the Mimirs held by other Orders, and find more clever minds like Cory who can take the knowledge we have gained and create weapons to defeat the wraith.
“Yes, there is a risk. We’re giving the wraith access to an unprecedented amount of potential energy. Their prey would be limitless. And yet, I have to think the government suspects the dome might one day be tampered with. They will not have left this to chance. They will have some kind of weapon trained on the wraith, ready to pulverise them as soon as they step out of the wall.”
“That’s a lot of fucking ‘ifs’,” I piped up before I could stop myself.
Dorien turned to me. “You’re right, Sydney. Of course you are. But given everything we know about the government and its research on the wraith, I think they will have taken every precaution. They don’t ever want this to happen again.”
I thought of what Alain had told me about his wife Raine’s work with wraith. They were already known to the government before they rose from the dirt of Brookwood Hill Cemetery. Dorien’s assumption seemed plausible, but that didn’t make what he suggested – to free the wraith into the world – right.
“What if we break down the dome, only to have government forces take us all down?” Alain asked. “They can’t have expected us to last for so many years inside the dome. They probably suspect we’ve been somehow corrupted by the wraith. They will not trust us.”
“The military tend to shoot first, apologise later,” I added.
“It is another risk,” Dorien admitted. “And one we would have to take, and may be able to protect against with some of Cory’s weapons. But is it a greater risk than staying behind and succumbing to husking?”
“At least if we did that, we’d only be forfeiting our own lives,” Alain shot back. “With your plan, you expose the whole world to the wraith, and you have no idea what they’re capable of if they get their hands on all that energy.”
“At least with my plan,” Dorien said through gritted teeth, “we won’t all lose our souls when we die. We won’t be forced to live a million excruciating deaths trapped between the worlds, like Cory is
right now.”
Bringing up Cory was low. Dorien knew how beloved he was. I could feel the tide of the room swelling in support of Dorien. I had to do something to bring it back.
“Are you twenty men in this room really presuming to speak for everyone in the city?” I snapped. “For fuck’s sake, there are hundreds of people still living in this city. Don’t their lives matter, their opinions matter? Shouldn’t they be given a say?”
“We don’t exactly have time to organise a vote,” Tristan snapped.
Everyone started shouting at once, waving their arms, yelling insults. Beside me, Alain spoke his concerns at Dorien, who didn’t seem to be paying any attention. I added my voice, trying to call for some sense to be maintained. May was the only person who didn’t speak, her face still twisted with rage.
Dorien yelled over us, calling for calm, but it took several minutes before the heated discussion broke apart once more.
“I’m calling a vote,” Dorien announced. He walked around the room, holding out a bowl containing round crimson and milky white stones.
Each Reaper took one stone of each colour. Dorien did not offer the bowl to me. When I dipped my hand in anyway, he snatched it away. I glared holes through his back and clamped down on my back teeth to keep from screaming at him. Everyone in the dome, not just me or the Reapers, should have a say in this.
“Cast your vote,” he said. “Will we destroy the dome? White for no, red for yes.”
One by one, each Reaper stepped forward, his fist closed around a different coloured stone. He placed his hand into the velvet bag Dorien held out, depositing his stone inside. When all the Reapers had their turn, Dorien added his own stone, then went over to the central dais and dropped the contents of the bag into a small ceramic dish.
Eleven white stones, nine red stones.
“It has been decided,” Dorien announced, his voice betraying no emotion. “We will not destroy the dome. We will continue to attempt to fight back the wraith.”
