by Eden Wolfe
And then he heard her.
55
Maeva
The Queen's ears perked again at the sound.
A baby's cry should not catch her attention. No, this was something different. Something unidentifiable. It was audible only to her even across the din of the thousands greeting and laughing. The sound was clear as a bell, undeniable, and she couldn’t ignore it.
She cocked her head. The sound was somehow both familiar and new.
Thousands of babies were across the city. They all cried. But they sounded the same as each other with only minor variations.
This sound - this had a depth to it. It wasn't loud, wasn't far, and wasn't the cry of just any child.
She took a moment to take in the surroundings, allowing the remaining crowd to watch her think.
The Tower is quiet; most of the staff are here. Where’s Adam?
The fortress had the normal rumblings, people moving at a quicker pace than usual. Steps heavy with the food platters, swift movements that were excited and cheerful.
What then is this threat?
"Is something wrong?" Irene asked as the Queen turns around. "Your look as if-“
"I don't know." The Queen turned back to look at the crowd lingering and chatting, none of them aware of what was happening among them.
Irene approached, climbing the platform alongside the Queen's seat. "What is it?"
"A sound."
"A sound?"
“It doesn’t belong.”
Irene cocked her head, "A scout?"
"No."
"I'll prepare the Guard."
"No, not yet. First, I will go."
Below the people continued milling and greeting each other in a state of general excitement. A group of women demonstrated a little dance routine, a spontaneous performance that brought a crowd around them. They sang and taught the simple movements to their onlookers, kicking and waving their hands. Others caught on and even more joined. From above it was like watching a flower gathering petals as the women moved towards different centers of activity. The Queen saw nothing of note in them, nor to the east, nor to the south.
Where did it come from?
Maeva scanned across, seeking anything out of place.
"Could it be a child from outside the city?” Irene offered. “And therefore a sound that is unusual to your ears? Perhaps from Gana, as you know we have different ways of raising children-"
"No. I can tell a baby's cry. This isn't a baby. Or it isn't - " she couldn’t find a word to describe it.
And then she heard it the sound again.
It's not human.
She was out of her seat, across the square and walking past Central Tower in the moment of a breath, almost invisible to everyone but Irene, who had witnessed her ways many times before.
The Queen moved almost leisurely past Central Tower, listening through the floors. There were only sounds she recognized. Tapping, and clinking, turning of pages, doors. Nothing out of place, not now.
She could smell it, a mingle of fluids and skin, almost familiar, and yet with a tone so distinct she finally recognized it. She recognized it because it was in her own skin. Familiar and foreign, for only a few beyond the Royal line had it.
But this scent was contorted, debauched, something terribly wrong, out of place.
She quickened her steps. First, she saw the sack.
Then she saw the man.
He turned with the being, whatever it was, into the alley four hundred feet ahead. Maeva moved and was immediately there.
Turning the corner, the betrayal came more clearly into view.
Adam’s back was to her; he didn’t see, hear, or sense her. She watched as he opened the bag and paused before caressing the anomaly.
"Why, hello," she said, sounding and feeling curious, but the voices began to grow from deep within her.
He turned and met her eye to eye.
His act will not go unpunished!
The voices rose from within and Maeva let them guide her hand to Adam's throat.
56
Lucius
Lucius waited for what felt like years for any report. Holed up in his Cork Town flat, he didn’t move more than a few inches once the designated hour arrived. He tried to pause all thoughts, all expectations. So many times he'd learned that things never went to plan. And so he waited, hovering somewhere over real life but with the occasional jab of pain, fear, or thrill. Adam and the others would get there when they got there, and no sooner.
In that suspended state, he found a quiet peace with the past.
Memories floated by his eyes, he exhaled them away like wisps of dust caught in a sunlight ray. Off it would go - and he knew that all those moments that came before had always been leading to this. He felt himself becoming new. A freshness inside him that he had almost forgotten; he hadn't felt it since that moment at Rainfields when his piece de resistance had been ready. When the incubation program had been at its height. All the belief and faith he’d poured into that program, the opportunity to find the genetic mix that would finally overcome the Mist.
But that was before he knew the Old Queen had twisted his dream into her own reality. His faith had burned to the ground that day in Rainfields.
Rainfields.
His spine stiffened.
The smell of the burning came alive in his nose again. It had been fierce, that burning. He felt himself being taken out of the now, taken back to that time.
Rainfields.
Watching sun turn to cold, burning cold and the fire. In his former body. His real body.
In her madness, she hadn't seen him approach from the east while the sun set in the west. She was a frenzy of black skirts and black hair.
Maeva.
She had raced past from left to right, far wing to near wing, pulling it down, ripping apart the station, cursing the land and the sky and her mother. He could not hold his eyes on her. The speed and imprint of color as she moved hurt him to watch. He stayed back, knowing any movement risked catching her attention.
So much he hadn't known, and couldn’t have known. The limits of his own arrogance. The limits of his physical body, which was then still tall, broad, muscular, refined. Whole. Functional.
He could not have known his landscape for the Male Program would become the Old Queen's sick riddle on her own genetic offspring.
Maeva. Still so young, barely eighteen. The queens who'd come before had all begun their reigns much, much later. Lucius wondered at the consequences of an adolescent queen and felt he was watching some of them before his eyes. The young Queen tore away at what had been his near-triumph, his almost-greatest success. All the incubators smashed; the files ripped. She set them on fire.
He felt her pain with her. He witnessed it, and he experienced it, somewhere deeper than he knew feelings could be felt.
The young Queen rested but a moment on her haunches. She was consumed, livid, the scent of wrath seeping out her skin. And yet – Lucius saw it – she was fragile.
It's my fault, I made her fragile, the voices - it is my fault, I pushed the design too far.
Overcome with shame, Lucius had to hold her, to comfort the girl. She was the closest thing he had to kin.
The pull of her emotion, raw and magnetic, drew him in. Her eyes were seeing beyond, into the distance, to the cliffs. He watched her step in a trance, deathly slow, like the earth had stopped and all was frozen but the sound of her dress brushing past her calf as she pushed on through time and space.
Her lungs expanded with each breath and he could hear it in his ears like he heard his own breath.
Is it her breath or mine?
He was suddenly aware that she was walking to her death.
Just like the old Queen. His instinct rang out the alarm. He didn’t know whether to run to her or to run away.
If she jumped, he could not bear to witness it.
This is it, he thought, this is how it feels to love a child.
Closing
his eyes, he listened for the voice of human instinct.
He followed her. Stepping with as much silence as his body would allow, taut and tight, he controlled each muscle's move. He could not emulate her walk, though he tried. She barely left any sign of having touched the ground, slow with the spin of the earth and light flutter of breath, her feet brushed by. And he followed. The sound of the crashing waves grew, becoming like thunder as they approached. Was it coming for them or were they going to it? He couldn't tell as his eyes tunneled in on her. He didn't dare look away.
She stepped.
He stepped.
She sighed half a breath. He held his closer in.
He heard her name coming from the cliffs.
This is madness, he thought, I'm being sucked into her madness.
Louder her name rose into the sky, and she looked for it, frightened. Her eyes, such deep green, he was swimming in her eyes, feeling her fear, following too far behind to save her if she really walked to the edge.
She won't walk to the edge. She won't.
He stopped.
She was walking to the edge.
Panic alit and suddenly he was back in his body, hard and fast slamming into it.
“Maeva!” he cried out, screaming against the waves and wind and that voice that drew her forward. That Old Queen’s voice calling her forward. He screamed against it, screamed at her.
"You are mine, Maeva! You never belonged to her!"
All the air was sucked out of the earth. He was sure of it.
Nothing moved.
“Mine, Maeva. My child. Not hers. You are only her blood. I am your creator. Don’t go, don’t go to the edge.”
He froze.
No sound, no breath, no time.
The waves seemed held in place, frozen white bulbs waiting for the clock to start again.
She turned to see him, staring into his soul with blazing eyes.
And she ran.
Inland.
He saw only the imprint of her body where it had been. She was gone. He felt the absence of her as she ran past, the panic that had remained in place after she'd gone. The memory of panic. Only after several minutes did he find the strength to move.
She was saved.
"Saved."
The memory lifted and he was left back where he started.
Did she even know it was me? Had she seen me in that flash?
He stared down at himself. So much had changed since that day. But he was still the man he had been, though stuffed inside all this mess of body. He was the man who had saved the Queen, saved his design, saved her from that unknown silent enemy who called her name on the waves.
The current moment washed over him. He was still waiting alone in Cork Town, waiting for someone, anyone, to arrive at the door.
"Heavens, what is happening out there?" he asked himself aloud.
When his fairy appeared back at the door, he felt no comfort. It was the look on her face.
"Ah, yes, there you are. I was just thinking it was time for news."
She didn’t speak.
"Come now. I'm ready. I can handle it."
"No." Her deformed face twisted.
"Yes, dear.” His heart was pounding. “Come now. What is it?"
A tear rolled down her cheek. She choked on her throat, seemingly unable to make a sound.
"No words."
Lucius stood. He took a deep breath and waddled over to her. He didn’t want to ask. But he had to know.
"Just tell me what you saw."
"He won't be coming. Adam won’t be coming." she inhaled the word, "Ever."
Lucius nodded, short and fast nods. His head nodded without stopping.
The mass of red hair waited, her chest rising and falling in swallowed sobs.
"Yes, yes - " he kept nodding, "One could expect that." Nodding. "He was only human."
His silent sobbing began, and she ran into him, holding as much of him in her arms as she could.
He sobbed for his only son, for the world's only son. The one who could have changed it all.
The whirr of the fan drowned out the quiet violence of angry tears.
He held his little girl close, her red hair full and falling over him, comforting. He knew she was hurting inside for him. But this was his loss. He felt it in the center of his gut, the center of his soul.
He didn’t hear Sara come in.
Didn’t hear her opening her cloak.
Didn’t hear the vials clink as she unstrapped them from her body and placed them on his little metal table.
57
Aria
Aria turned to Ariane.
"Do you feel this?"
"Yes. They hide in plain sight."
The two were only just beginning to understand the real situation facing Lower Earth. The foreigner they had spotted on entry to the city was not at all the only one.
There are scouts everywhere. They shared the thought, still stepping softly around corners and keeping their heads low. A woman caught their sights.
The first sign was a burst of hair. Hair that waved just so, wind-like in its movement. It was out of nature for the peoples of Lower Earth. They knew it immediately and watched the villain from afar. She turned and looked in the direction of Aria and Ariane, but didn’t seem to know she had been identified.
"Perhaps they aren't as perceptive as we believed," Ariane whispered.
"How long do you think she's been here?"
"She seems at ease with the people, speaking and moving like them. It has been some time."
Aria nodded, processing.
Situation more advanced than believed. Scenarios are multiple without more input. Impossible to calculate the consequences until more is known.
"Do you think the Queen knows?"
They ran the probabilities through their minds, but the pathways came empty. Too many variables, too little information. The Queen's behavior too erratic to know.
The woman lifted her eyes at that moment, catching them staring. She shifted her weight, turning slowly, unremitting, and holding their glance. She continued to do the wash but did not let her eyes lower. She held the two in her sights, her hands slowly running up and down the washboard, moving with grace and simplicity. A smile started to curl on her lips.
The two perceived her evil intentions.
"We must move."
"She will expose us."
"She's already decided she will."
"I sensed it too."
"Run."
A voice rose behind them, not unfriendly but filled with the menace Aria knew would follow.
"We must be more careful," Aria lowered her voice to a whisper. "We don't know what they know."
"Any one of them could be after us."
They looked at each other and shared their uncertainty.
"Nothing is as the Queen described."
"We have no time to reflect on it."
"Listen!" Ariane pulled Aria toward her by the arm, her fingers pushing imprints into her skin. "I hear others.” They stood, listening, becoming aware of how acute their situation was. “We cannot continue running recklessly around the city."
"They will catch us out immediately."
"We need a plan."
They pulled their faces further back under their hoods. Stepping as the ordinary people did, one foot at a time, they made their way into the shadow of a new city apartment block, into the back range. The only sound was the sewage pipes blasting into the grate behind. They would be left alone here to think.
Aria recalled the moments her body changed in the night, the muscle that shred and rebuilt without her will. Finally, she understood. As they stood in the shadows, their muscles flexed in response to each other.
The reflection has my face and my body.
They cut the cells and shared them between us.
We live the same physiology. We can read the situation better together.
We are far more powerful together.
They sat s
ide by side in identical folds of legs and arms on knees, back to the wall as putrid thrusts of sewage filled the air in smell and sound. They held each other with their eyes, searching in behind them. Knowing the answers were inside. She only had to find them. She inside she.
They leaned forward, bowing their eyes, letting them close as they felt the heat from the other approach. Waves of heat, so palpable and so real. So close and familiar, their first memories flooded in shared moments of joy and fear.
Their heads touched and burned fires between them. They exhaled the heat with a barely audible cry.
Together they were so much more.
Their molecules moved faster, harder, than they ever had.
Together, their firing synapses made apparent what was only a hint when they were each their separate self: their lives depended on the next twenty-four hours and on how they handled the city of betrayers, for the betrayers were everywhere and would seek them out.
Their lives depended on the Queen.
The organized chaos of weighted options flew between them faster than light.
To see the Queen immediately: not sufficiently informed. Run: but stay within the city. Be amongst them: but only with great care. Together: no. Separate: no. Other options: in hiding, suspicious; in daylight: apart; appearance: too close, too clear. Someone will know.
Someone knows already.
The scout with the washing.
She plays the long game.
She has been here for years.
Perhaps her whole life.
She will betray us.
She will betray us all.
And they had their first answer.
They ran through the city, returning to the washing place, just in time to see her packing it into the bin, strolling as in any other day to the line.
She is the enemy.
The washing woman's head snapped to them, eyes set as the leopard on prey.
The two took their posture; this was the defining moment.
Does she hear us think?
The woman smiled, rotting teeth behind the soft, rosy lips, they couldn’t tell if she heard or was just responding to their stare.
