Future Mage

by R H Nolan

  “How do you know I’m a Scavenger?” He wanted to hit himself the minute the question was out. He couldn’t possibly be anything else dressed as he was, skin darkened and hardened already by the sun, and perpetually covered in sand.

  The girl’s eyes flicked briefly down toward the pockets of his cargo pants bulging with food picked right from this garden. The corners of her mouth lifted into a knowing smile, and Max found himself admitting to what he was with another shrug.

  “My name’s Ayla,” the girl said.

  “I’m Max.”

  She gave him an odd little frown, like she hadn’t expected Scavengers to even have names. But then she folded her arms and gave him the first real smile he’d seen in a long time. It seemed Dwellers even smiled easier than anyone out in the Wastelands.

  “How did you get inside the city?” she asked.

  Max smirked. “I guess there’s a reason we’re called Scavengers.”

  Ayla looked like she was about to laugh, but she didn’t. “What?”

  “I found a way.”

  Sure, he would have loved to share the secret of the ventilation system with someone, and Ayla seemed like she might actually appreciate what he’d found. But it was too dangerous for both of them. This girl didn’t seem all that upset by his forbidden presence in the city, but he didn’t think anyone else would be so willing to stand here and have a conversation with him. Plus, he didn’t want his only access beyond the high metal walls to be closed off to him forever, especially after just finding this garden. And Ayla.

  “So what’s it like?” she asked him, her blue eyes shining.

  “Finding a way inside?”

  Ayla chuckled. “No, living out there.”

  “Uh… well, it’s hot.” Max scratched his head and searched for the words that wouldn’t make her automatically pity him. “And dirty. Nothing like this place.”

  He gestured to the lush garden around them, bursting with more life than most likely existed in the entire desert around Neo Angeles.

  “Yeah, this place is nice.” Ayla viewed the trees and flowers around them with a small sigh. “I don’t know about the rest of the city.”

  “Are you kidding?” Max said before he could stop himself. She looked at him strangely, and he shook his head a little. “I mean, any Scavenger would give everything they had just for a day in here.”

  “Is that what you did? Give everything you had?”

  Ayla’s raised eyebrows reminded him that, while this was going pretty well so far, he still couldn’t tell her everything. Not if he wanted to keep his head and get this food back home.

  “No,” he said with a small smile. “I just got lucky.”

  She studied him curiously again, like she just couldn’t wrap her head around the fact that he was standing here, right in front of her, acting like a regular person. Max was thinking pretty much the same thing himself.

  “Well, I can tell you things are pretty boring around here,” she said. “You might just be the most exciting thing that’s ever happened.”

  Exciting?

  Ayla’s words brought on a growing rush of confidence Max hadn’t expected. He laughed.

  “Maybe. But you Dwellers have everything you could possibly want. I mean”—he gestured to her prosthetic—“that arm is amazing.”

  He’d meant it as a compliment, but her playful smile darkened into a frown.

  “Just because you haven’t seen a prosthetic before doesn’t make it okay to gawk,” Ayla said. She took a step back and unfolded her arms to clasp them behind her back, as if it might hide the sleek metal prosthetic starting at her shoulder.

  “Oh, no, I’ve seen plenty. My brother’s got two robotic legs. And my mom has a prosthetic arm, too. It’s just…” He gazed at the light reflecting off the top of Ayla’s smooth, pristine enhancement where she didn’t quite manage to remove it from view. “I’ve never seen one as beautiful as yours. That’s all I’m trying to say.”

  He looked up at her face again to see her cheeks blushing a little.

  “…what?” he asked uncertainly.

  “That’s funny.” Ayla unclasped her hands from behind her back and looked at her metal arm, turning it over and stretching the fantastically crafted fingers. They glinted in the sunlight. “I’ve never thought of this thing as beautiful.”

  “Well, it is,” Max said. He held her gaze for a few seconds, the water splashing somewhere and the birds chirping around them. Ayla smiled, then Max couldn’t help but look at her arm again. “So how powerful is it?”

  She chuckled. “Maybe a little better than my other arm. There’s a limiter on enhanced limbs, so even if I wanted to crush a man’s head or break his fingers, I couldn’t… why are you looking at me like that?”

  Max cleared his throat and looked away from her arm again. “Like what?”

  Ayla grinned. “Pretty much the same way you were looking at those apples.”

  Honestly, Max was drawn to the perfection of her metal arm in a way he couldn’t really control. Nothing like that existed in the Wastelands. The other part of it was that he’d never expected to hear a girl—a Dweller—talking about wanting to crush a man’s head with her metal hand. He liked it.

  “This is just really cool,” he said instead. “Can I…”

  He extended his hand towards her arm.

  Her frown made him think he’d offended her again, but then Ayla slowly lifted her arm.

  “…okay…”

  She stepped toward him and lifted her prosthetic. Max reached out to brush his fingers down the cool, seamlessly integrated steel, fighting not to grip it with both hands and flip it over to try picking out how it worked so well.

  Ayla laughed. “How different are the limbs out there?”

  Max trailed his fingertips down the silver white forearm and over the rise of knuckles onto the delicately flexible fingers. Then he remembered this was Ayla’s actual hand he was touching like this, and he withdrew his own before looking back up at her.

  “About as different as the desert and this garden.”

  Ayla smiled and bit her lip.

  Max smiled back. “I can’t even tell you how—”

  “You, there! Scavenger!”

  Max stepped away from Ayla as they both turned toward the garden entrance. Three guards passed beneath the tall metal arch covered in vines, walking briskly toward them.

  “Stop!” one of them shouted again and placed a hand on the butt of the firearm holstered at his hip.

  In a split second, Max took in all their Health numbers, which were remarkably identical—all ranging between 98% and 100%. All three of them broke into a jog.

  He turned back toward Ayla, who looked at him with wide eyes.

  “Sorry,” he said, then turned and ran toward the opposite side of the garden and its other entrance.

  A mix of shouts and curses rose behind him, followed by the sound of the guards’ boots tromping through the grass.

  As soon as the grass gave way to the metal ground of Neo Angeles’ streets, Max activated his skates and took off.

  Then he realized his apology had sounded like he was sorry he’d snuck into the city in the first place. He wasn’t. He should have apologized for having to leave her so quickly, because he definitely wanted to stay.

  4

  The danger of being caught by Dweller guards kept Max from immediately seeing the rest of Neo Angeles in all its advanced glory. It took a hovering trailer speeding past him to get him to pay more attention, which he avoided by kicking out with one skate and spinning into a sharp right turn. Then he kept heading that way. But he let himself take it all in—or as much as he could with the guards on his trail.

  Neo Angeles was made of as much sleek metal on the inside as its outer wall suggested—thin, square pillars of dark-colored buildings rising almost to the top of the walls; windows cut into almost every surface; what looked like apartments or living quarters built into the inside of the wall itself; flashing lights; blarin
g, mechanical beeps; the clatter of people’s shoes on the metal floors; the buzz and hum of wheel-less transportation flitting in and out of small ports and through alleyways. He figured those used very much the same technology as his skates, which made him a little nervous now. Max had been the fastest in the Wastelands because no one else knew how his skates worked or could replicate them. Here, though, he was a Scavenger using Dweller tech, running from Dweller guards with Dweller tech. But he bet on his pursuers not fully understanding the kind of desperation the Wastelands pumped into each and every Scavenger, no matter their tribe. They might not expect him to do whatever it took to escape now that he’d been caught. At least he had that advantage.

  Max skated through the city streets, followed by the guards and their shouts for him to halt immediately. He bumped into a man stepping out of some small vehicle with only enough space to stand.

  “Sorry!” he called out and raced on.

  He thought he might be able to lose the guards if he doubled back around the thinly spaced buildings just ahead. This area of the city, he recognized; the storage room he’d entered so many times before was just on the other side of those buildings. If they didn’t see him enter, he could slip back into the ventilation system and hopefully get out before they realized what he’d done.

  That thought was blown to pieces when a flying skiff veered around the corner of those buildings, right where he’d meant to turn, and cut him off.

  “Halt!” The driver wore the same guard uniform, one hand on the controls and the other on his firearm.

  Max darted left toward the large crowd milling through the streets that hadn’t yet quite caught on to the Scavenger in their midst. But long before he could reach them, a brilliant yellow flash streaked past his head and put a smoking dent in the nearest metal wall.

  Max turned just fast enough to see all three guards on foot had drawn what he knew now were energy blasters. And all three weapons were pointed directly at him.

  Blasters weren’t deadly—at least, a single shot wasn’t, unless it hit you in the eye or temple—but Max had no desire to see how many times they needed to hit him before he died.

  Another guard fired, and Max dropped into a crouch and commanded his repulsor skates forward. He took off in the only direction left, still ducking below the energy blasts that would have necessitated a mechanical prosthetic of his own.

  Did they really want to shoot first and ask questions later?

  Apparently so.

  His skates took him all the way to the outer wall of the city where he’d seen the built-in, cubicle-looking apartments rising nearly to the top of the wall.

  Ahead of him was a ten-foot-tall metal box with windows on three of its walls. People stood inside.

  Farther ahead, another box just like it lifted with incredible speed towards one of the highest rows of apartments. It moved along a track, so that it could only go up and down.

  The boxes were on the outside of the buildings, apparently so that the people inside could have a view of the magnificent skyline as they zoomed up and down. The boxes could have been built inside the wall, Max supposed, but everything Dwellers had was interesting and beautiful just for the sake of being interesting and beautiful. The boxes were no exception.

  A word from Max’s distant past filtered up out of his subconscious:

  Elevators.

  Then Max realized he didn’t have to be inside the elevator to grab a ride all the way up to the top of the wall.

  He whirled around the far side of the closest rising elevator, then stood fully from his crouch and grabbed the access handles on the side just before the box launched itself up into the air, following the slight inward curve of the wall.

  Max’s stomach dropped uncomfortably with the speed, the cool city air whipping through his hair. He turned off his skates to step firmly onto the box’s bottom ledge, then peered through the window. A man with an immaculately trimmed beard and mustache scowled at him, and Max grinned.

  The elevator stopped about halfway up the wall. The man didn’t move from inside— he seemed a little frightened of Max, no matter how much he was scowling—but Max knew he himself had to move. He had a feeling the elevator would be lowering again and returning to ground level, which definitely wasn’t what he wanted.

  So he launched himself from the ledge and grasped the iron railing running the length of the exterior walkway in front of the apartments. He pulled himself up, leapt over the side, and landed squarely on a metal walkway stretching past dozens of doors.

  Activating his skates again, he took off down the walkway toward the next rising elevator box a few dozen yards away.

  As it rose towards him, he climbed up onto the iron bannister again and leapt onto the elevator’s top.

  He might have misjudged the speed or the distance; either way, he slipped on the top of the elevator, and his feet slid fast towards the far edge.

  With a grunt, he activated the sole of one skate, which stopped his slide and kept him from toppling over the edge and tumbling hundreds of feet to the street below.

  A round of startled screams rose from the people inside the elevator. He doubted they were screaming on his behalf, and were just surprised by having another rider a few feet above their heads.

  He took the few seconds he had to put his goggles on. Just in case.

  His stomach lurched again when the box slowed about a dozen yards from the top of the wall. He realized he was as far as the elevators went—there weren’t any other apartments above him.

  The desert wind whistled dramatically over the top of the wall, flattening his hair against his forehead.

  Max leapt from the elevator roof to the railing and the grated walkway of this level.

  Another bright-yellow flash whizzed past him to strike the wall with a sparking hiss.

  He turned to see two more guards running at him from fifty feet away. So he powered up his skates again and kept moving.

  He thought he’d run out of walkway and options—and then he found the metal rungs at the end of the walkway leading up to somewhere above him. Well, it was something.

  Another energy blast struck the corner of the rung he’d grabbed, but he pulled himself onto the next one and climbed like he’d never climbed before.

  Angry shouts rose below him from the highest apartment walkway, and he wondered whether the Dweller guards were just really bad shots or if they were trying not to hit something up here.

  Either way, he made it to the very highest level above him, which could only have been meant as a walkway for sentries. There was nothing else up here at all, and the outer shell of the wall barely past his waist.

  The wind whipped furiously at him now that half his body was above the wall. He turned to look back down into the city, where he could still see the people walking around like tiny insects.

  Then he turned and looked out into the distance. He was on the opposite side from the Peacewind settlement, so the desert stretched out in front of him endlessly, with only the picked-over carcasses of starships jutting out of the sand a mile away.

  He glanced down the outer edge of the wall. To his surprise, the wall wasn’t a straight drop; it was more like a sixty degree incline. Still incredibly steep, but not straight down. From the ground, it had always looked like a sheer cliff.

  The desert floor was hundreds of feet below him, even farther away than the people walking around the interior of the city.

  A massive whir rose below him, and then the top of another flying ship much bigger than the skiff rose right in front of him, backing him up against what little remained of the city’s high wall. Two guards glared at him in the cockpit, and one of them pulled a blaster.

  “Wait!” Max yelled as he put up his hands in surrender.

  The guard ignored his pleas and aimed the blaster through the ship’s open window.

  Guess he wasn’t going to wait.

  Max activated his boots and moved instantaneously to the left.

 
The blaster ray shot inches away from his raised left hand.

  Max gulped, turned, and grabbed the edge of the wall.

  It was either die up here for sure, or take his chances.

  He decided to take his chances.

  He vaulted over the handrail, landed on his hip, and slid down the wall.

  It felt like a straight drop. The wind whipped into his face so hard that he couldn’t catch another breath.

  He used his skates like he had on the roof of the elevator, pressing the edge of the repulsor beam against the metal surface for resistance. It actually slowed him down, at least a little. It took all the strength in his body to keep his balance and not tumble out of control down the wall, but he somehow managed to stay upright.

  A whoop of terror escaped him, then the desert was rising up to meet him a lot sooner than he’d expected.

  The repulsor skates helped a little with the impact, but his knees still buckled and he tumbled head over feet, somersaulting over repeatedly across the sand. His knees screamed in agony, but he picked himself up and kicked off against the desert as fast as he could.

  A laugh escaped him—he’d done it! He’d survived! He felt absolutely elated—

  And then another whir rose from behind him, this time on the ground.

  He looked over his shoulder to see three other repulsor skiffs veering around the curve of the city wall and heading straight for him.

  Max had no idea how they’d gotten out into the Wastelands so quickly, but if he didn’t really push it, they’d be on top of him in no time at all.

  He pushed himself faster than he ever had. A quarter mile from the city wall… now a half mile…

  Blaster shots kicked up explosions of sand all around him.

  Max realized that if he was wanted to get out of this alive, he had to find shelter.

  But out here, the only thing anyone could consider shelter was one of the scattered starship wreckages half-buried in the desert.

  One of them rose up just ahead and to the right. If he could get inside, he might be able to lose them, or at least hide and hope they were smart enough not to follow him.