by Lia Nox
“Well, at least we don’t have to go hungry tonight,” Kern said, looking at the dead creature appreciatively. “This one might be small, but it’s still good enough for dinner. Beats combat rations anyway.” Grabbing the combat knife that hung from his belt, he moved slightly away from the group and, taking the creature’s lifeless body from Roth’s hand, laid it on a tree stump and started skinning it.
“Are you hungry?” I asked Erin, taking over the spot where Kern had been. To make my point clearer, I laid one hand across my own stomach and moved it in small gentle circles.
“Yes,” she nodded, her exotic accent making the hair on my arms stand up. “Thank you.” She was about to say something else when Kern returned, the creature’s skinned body now pierced by a long stick. Carefully, he set it above the fire to roast and we all sat close to Erin, waiting as the shadows grew longer all around us.
“The others. . .were they a part of your team, too?” Erik finally asked, breaking the comfortable silence that had fallen over the camp. “You seemed friendly.”
“Yes, friends,” I nodded, careful in the way with which I spoke. “They’re uhayan. Warriors, but not part of our team. They are a team, we are a team.”
“I see,” she muttered, staring at the fire with a contemplative expression on his face. “And what are teams for? Why are you on this planet?”
That question, again.
I wanted to answer it, but even I wasn’t sure on how I could do it. I knew it all boiled down to something simple—we were here to fight—and that had always been enough for me. But would that answer be enough to sate her curiosity, to answer her questions? I doubted it.
As Kern turned the meat, its sweet smell making my stomach grumble, I forced myself to continue. Even if I couldn’t do it properly, I still thought Erin was owed an explanation.
“The Masters are our rulers. We live and die at their command,” I started, unsure on what she’d think of that. Here we here, as strong and brutal as anything that walked the surface of this planet, and we were still beholden to someone else.
“The Masters. . .are they like kings?”
“Kings?” I echoed, not sure on what the word meant. “They command, we obey,” I offered, hoping that would suffice. When she nodded, I felt myself relax. “The teams serve the Masters at all times, and all teams face different kind of trials.”
“Trials? Like what?”
“Depends,” I shrugged. “Our team is the best at scouting and spying. Axar’s team is often used in races to hunt and gather—food, weapons, whatever. All teams have different purposes, but we’re all very good at killing. Although we are the best at that,” I added with a small note of pride in my voice.
She looked at me, not even cracking a smile. Apparently, she wasn’t too happy about the fact that we were engineered weapons of chaos and destruction.
“But what’s all that for? The trials, the fights. . .are you guys at war?”
“War,” I repeated, this time understanding the meaning of her word clearly. What wasn’t clear was the answer she needed. “I don’t know if this is war,” I admitted, now my turn to stare into the fire, the flames leaping high into the air as the scent of roasted meat wafted through the clearing. “This is. . .entertainment.”
“Entertainment?” She sounded shocked, her eyes glinting with disbelief.
“Our job is to keep the Masters happy. The Masters are happy, we are happy. That is what we do.”
Kern
I listened as Talos spoke, his words blending in with the crackling of the wood in the fire. As a team, the three of us were family, and yet. . .I couldn’t recall the last time any of us had talked about the Masters so plainly. There were some things that weren’t meant to be discussed, their existence something that wasn’t to be argued, much like a force of nature. Even though we were warriors, we were also tools—at the service of the Masters—and none of us had ever looked at the world under a different perspective. And yet, with Erin with us, I felt something inside me grow restless.
“Talos is right,” Roth said, his words carrying the weight and sorrow of leadership. “We serve the Masters, and that’s how it has always been.”
“But things are changing now,” I couldn’t stop myself from adding. I got up from my log and, turning the meat one final time, removed it from the fire. As I reclaimed my seat, Roth handed me a flat piece of wood he had fashioned and I started cutting the meat into thin strips. With my hands busy, I continued. “Things were easy before. We slept for as long as the Masters wanted us to sleep and, when we woke up, all we had to do was follow orders.”
“And now?” Erin asked, her attention torn between my words and the meat I was cutting. I didn’t blame her. Even I was having a hard time focusing with something so delicious right in front of me, so much that I was having to do a conscious effort not to wolf the whole thing down.
“We have our orders. Or we did. Our mission was to look for other teams and ensure they’re keeping to protocol.”
“Does that mean. . .?”
“If they aren’t keeping to protocol, we are to eliminate them,” Roth said, not mincing his words. “That’s what it means.”
“But there is no protocol without the masters,” I continued, now splitting the strips of meat I had cut into four servings. Satisfied with my portioning, I handed everyone their dinner. Talos busied himself with turning the powder into beer using water he had collected from a nearby creek and some powdered ale packs in his bag. A few minutes later we were all sitting around the fire, chewing on meat roasted to perfection while drinking beer from our tin cups.
“What does any of that mean? Where are the Masters?” Erin asked after wolfing down half of her portion. She had been so busy with the food that her questions had been put on hold until now. “Who are they, anyway? What gives them the right to order you around?”
“We don’t know,” I replied, slightly embarrassed about how clueless I was.
Even while we debated this between us, Talos and Roth had never bothered with deep questions like that. Neither had I. We knew the Masters had grown silent, and that communication was down. . .aside from that, we didn’t really bother with exploring the mysteries of our situation. We were pragmatic to a fault. Maybe Erin was the team member we had been missing, the one that could pose all the hard questions.
“You don’t know?” Erin repeated. “You must have an idea about what’s happening.”
“No,” I shrugged. “We woke up, and we followed our standard orders. Find other teams, ensure they’re following protocol. This time, though, the Masters didn’t communicate with us. We tried to reach out to them, but assumed our equipment was faulty. We just carried on as usual.”
“Until Axar explained the same thing happened to them,” Roth added. “So either all equipment is faulty, the Masters have grown tired of us, or something is happening in this planet.”
We sat in silence for a moment, considering Roth’s statement. Could the Masters have grown tired of us? Could they have grown displeased with their entertainment and simply left us here to die?
As much as I had never considered it a possibility, I knew that it was a very real one. Aside from being the Masters’ property, what were we to them? We were tools, and expendable ones at that.
“We suspected something was wrong the moment we woke up,” I said, recalling how it felt to regain my consciousness after being cryogenically put to sleep. My limbs had been sore and my mind slow, my thoughts hazy and incoherent. Still, I had been alive and ready to receive my orders. “Our cryo chambers seemed to be working, but not all the equipment in the barracks was functional.”
I remembered the dirty walls of our cramped room, and that somehow the panels had been removed to reveal wiring so old that it seemed close to short-circuiting. I wasn’t an engineer, but I was almost sure that no maintenance crew had been around our cryo chambers for quite some time.
“So how did you know what your orders were?” Erin asked, lick
ing her fingers as she spoke. Watching her, for a moment I forgot her question. The way her lips moved reminded me of just how much pleasure she could inflict with her mouth, and I found myself having to swallow down the rising desire that was taking over me.
“The barracks computer had them when we woke,” I explained, talking slowly to maintain an even, controlled tone of voice. “They were standard orders, though. We don’t know if they were issued for this mission, or if they’re simply a leftover from a past one.”
“And still, you tried to follow them.”
“We did,” I nodded. “But the planet’s different, strange now. We didn’t find any teams for quite some time. The only thing we found was. . .you.” I still remembered how I felt the first time I had laid my eyes on her, and a shiver ran up my spine at the memory.
It was unlike me, a veteran of so many battles, to look at a chance encounter as something better than the completion of our mission. . .and yet, that’s how it was. “Aside from you and Axar’s team, we found no one else.”
“I don’t get it,” she sighed, dragging her teeth across her bottom lip. “Delia told me that her guys had no idea about what was happening either. So what does any of this mean? Are we stranded on this planet?”
“Maybe,” I shrugged. “Maybe not. Before, guests of the Masters would arrive to watch the competitions at close quarters, have feasts where they were served by warriors of the arena. It seemed to amuse them.” Her nose wrinkled. “That means somewhere, there must be a place where those visitors arrived and departed from. But someone needs to be here and find out exactly what’s going on.”
“Axar didn’t seem particularly interested in that.”
“Not all teams care for this life.” I chewed on my last strip of meat slowly, remembering the story Axar had once told me. His team had been tasked with annihilating a few soldiers who’d rebelled against the Masters, and I had no doubt that something like that had broken their spirits. I had fought against rebels and pariahs too, but never against those that wanted to overthrow the Masters. “I don’t think Axar and his guys care much for the Masters.”
“And you do?”
Her question felt like a punch in the stomach. I kept my silence, my mind abuzz with contradicting thoughts, and the only reply I managed to come up with was a pathetic one.
“We follow orders. That’s about it.”
“Have the Masters been good to you?” she asked.
I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. There was no provocation in her words, just curiosity, and yet I wasn’t sure how to reply. I hoped for either Roth or Talos to speak up, to save me from having to answer her question, but neither of them did.
“The Masters are the Masters,” I finally said. “They are brutal and merciless. Our pain is their entertainment. We have no family, and are allowed no bonds but those we forge in the fire of the battlefield. We are used like weapons, and put away when we are not needed.” I grit my teeth, feeling my jaw clenching, and remembered the many times the Masters had punished me.
I still had the scars to prove it. I wasn’t sure if Erin had understood every single word I had said, but the look on her face told me she had understood enough. She was both horrified and sad. “And yet, they are the Masters. They command, we obey.”
“That’s how it has always been,” Roth finally spoke up, and I couldn’t help but notice he was speaking in the past. Even though none of us dared to say it out loud, our allegiance to the Masters was starting to waiver. They used and abused us, and now they had vanished and left us to wander the planet aimlessly. They were still the Masters, but was it right for us to accept them as our masters?
Had it ever been?
“What about you?” I said, anxious to steer the conversation to another topic, on which didn’t require for me to battle my inner demons. “What’s your story, Erin?”
Erin
All eyes were on me.
I felt naked, too exposed. A vulnerable lamb in a den of wolves.
Given what Kern had just shared with me, it was more than fair for them to ask about my past, but that didn’t make the idea of telling them easy to swallow. It was a bitter pill that had lodged in my throat, its vile taste tainting my tastebuds the longer it stayed there.
I feared my tale would reveal a side to me they wouldn’t like. A traitor that hid under the surface, threatening to come out whenever greed consumed me. As much as I didn’t want to be the person I thought myself to be, the distorted image I’d created in my head was persistent.
“Erin?” One of them asked.
Finally, I looked at their faces. It had been Roth who had probed me, having clearly been bothered by my prolonged silence. His face was painted with confusion, disquiet, and curiosity, all of them vying for position as the main overriding emotion.
I kept my mouth closed, but what I really wanted to do was scream at them to stay away from me, that I worked better alone, that us all being together would end badly. They were bad for me and I for them—if they didn’t betray me first, I would them.
Except, this time you can choose not to, Mouse, I reminded myself.
“Sorry,” I mumbled awkwardly, not sure on where to begin. “Just trying to think where to start.”
“Do you want to share it with us?” Talos asked, the tone of his words still stern even in spite of us revealing intimate details about our lives. I didn’t take offense though, as he had a kind of regimented sternness naturally about him, as if it was part of his very DNA.
“Not really, but I will.” I decided in the moment, my answer surprising even myself.
Not that I could agree on where to begin—there was so much history to cover, so much I needed to decide whether to share or keep it to myself. I had to smile however, as I was editing my history to suit my own needs, not too dissimilar to the corrupt powers that be back home.
My smile was sour, the thought of being anything like them another difficult truth; it would seem my medicine was to be as bitter as could be. A horrible concoction of my own making.
“My world is. . .well, nothing like here. We don’t have all this open space.” I laughed. “Instead of wondering where everyone went, we worry about where we’re going to put everyone.”
Talos tilted his head slightly, listening.
“And with so many people, we needed just as many supplies. Materials. More than we have new components for. There’s nothing left to mine, I think we’ve taken it all out of the ground. So that means more and more we have to scavenge through the junkpiles and refuse of the past, pull out anything useful.”
I stared into the fire, seeing the buried piles of trash, endless heaps of computer components, precious minerals that had been discarded so easily.
“I had a job, of sorts. A band of scavengers, like me. Our leader was the one who found the jobs, found the best places for us to sell what we found, maps of when patrol times where.”
Because it hadn’t been a licensed, authorized operation. Of course not.
Pausing to see if they were following, I waited for some sign of comprehension, however small it may be. It was Kern who smiled between eager nods, his horns a pointed blur as he did so.
Assuming he spoke for the group, I continued. “I was the loner of the group. We’d complete jobs together and split the money, but I preferred to keep to myself than get too involved. Then, erm, one day a big job of ours went wrong. . .” My sentence trailed off into nothingness.
It had gone wrong because of me. I’d taken more than my share, kept a lovely piece of old art, just for myself.
And someone had told the others, it was that simple. Yet to say that to a group who had so readily accepted me felt like a massive mistake.
Would they want such a risk in their ranks? From what Kern had explained, their unit was one that weeded out weak teams who didn’t follow the rules.
If we applied that logic here, I was a member of the group who didn’t follow the rules, and so it was easier to remove me. Cut out the tumor a
nd discard it.
“What happened?” I heard Kern ask. My story had ended a little too abruptly for his liking, a rough but obvious hint that I wanted to leave it be. But he hadn’t taken that hint. Roth and Talos had noticed my cue to cease talking about it, but Kern had been so taken by my story that he’d become engrossed in all the details. It was such a pure reaction that I couldn’t be mad at him.
A long, hissing sigh was the first half of my response. “I, well, I fucked up. What I did was bad—it hurt my group. In return, they handed me over to the authorities.” This was so painful to relive; no matter how simple I made the story, the past still stung me with its unavoidable truths.
“Auth-roro-ties?” Kern was now quietly mouthing the word to himself, clearly not happy in how he’d pronounced it. Not that he was alone in this: Roth too was trying to say the word to himself, all while Talos shook his head in disapproval.
I wasn’t sure if he disapproved of them potentially making fools of themselves or them doing it while in front of me, but either way he wasn’t pleased. It wasn’t the first time I decided that Talos needed to have some fun. Not just sex (though I welcomed the next time we came together), but some let your hair down, go wild kind of fun.
“It means the police.” Here came more confusion for them, something I quickly rushed to correct. “Sorry, I mean the people in charge. You know, the ones who maintain the law?”
“Ah.” Talos nodded. “Like us.”
That didn’t help.
“However you want to refer to them, they didn’t like my behavior—they didn’t want me on their perfect little world mudding their false idyllic lives, and so they sent me here.” My heart was beating so strongly now, it almost felt like it was banging along to the point of exploding. It was too hot in here, the walls closing in with every breath I took. “Look, can we just be done with this? I fucked up, okay? I. Fucked. Up.” I couldn’t breathe, the air was so thin to me right now.
