by Alex Leopold
“She'll get you through.” He replied offering her a glass filled with a tonic that looked like curdled milk. She drank it in one go.
“You should come with me.” She told him, wiping her mouth with the sleeve of her coat. “When they find out I'm gone they'll come looking for me.”
She didn't have to say who’d come, Kamran already knew and his hands shook as he rinsed the glass out in the basin. Myrmidons.
“I'm needed here.” He declined with a smile. “Other people require my help to get out of the city. I can't abandon them.”
“Then this is goodbye.” She said and in her first display of real emotion, she kissed his forehead.
“Perhaps we will see each other again.” He tried to humor her but neither needed to be a predictor to know that if he stayed he was as good as dead.
“When the war ends, come find me?” She tapped after closing her eyes.
“I will.” He whispered to her as he started the cognitive transfer. “Even if it’s only in your dreams.”
Perhaps soon people could afford to do that again, he thought. To dream, and not to worry they might reveal their secrets to those who were always listening in.
Difficult to think such a time would come. Difficult to imagine a weapon powerful enough to break the Directory’s grasp. Yet such a weapon existed and it could crush their army in an instant. For that’s what the Oracle’s last prophecy spoke of.
The location of that weapon which had remained a secret for the past seventeen years was now buried deep in Nakano's head and she was heading off to find it. Kamran could barely fathom at what this weapon might be. For what kind of weapon could destroy an army so powerful it controlled a nation as big as this one?
3
“Keep your head up, Cooper! Don’t let her corner you, Riley!”
On the grounds of a lost civilization lake house, by a rocky outcrop that looked out onto the water, they'd marked out a confined grid between two uprooted great oaks.
Panting heavily, their training clothes stained with dirt and soaked through with sweat, the twins were close to exhaustion. Yet their mentor, a bear-human blend named Acadia, didn’t let up. If anything seeing them so physically spent only made him push them harder.
Nearby, their father stood watching. Yet, they’d find no sympathy from him. With his hands clasped behind his back and his face as impassive and unemotional as the mountains behind him, he rarely spoke a world. Leaving it to the grizzly to train them how he saw fit.
“Hey ladies, you’re starting to bore me.” He boomed and pelted them with acorns scooped from the ground.
“Stop that!” Riley complained when one of them hit her on the jaw. “They hurt, you know.”
“Would you prefer I motivated you with my bow instead?”
“I almost lost a foot the last time you did that.” Cooper grumbled as she cut down with her sword.
“The arrow barely grazed you.” He replied dismissively but his eyes twinkled with mischief.
“I couldn’t walk for a week!”
Taking her eye off her sister to glare at him, Cooper left her body exposed and Riley jabbed her hard between the ribs with her fighting-staff.
“Not so hard!” She winced loudly, rubbing the spot where she’d been struck as she mouthed obscenities.
“It’d sting more if she’d cut you with the real thing.” The grizzly reminded her idly. When they trained they only fought with wooden equivalents of their weapons.
“Really? Are you sure?” Cooper replied with salty contempt.
“Do you want me to show you?” Acadia asked holding up his hand so she could see the tips of his retractable claws.
She bit her lip cause she knew he’d do it.
“No.”
“Good. Then let’s go again. And this time concentrate! I don’t know what’s wrong with you this morning, Coop.”
That had to be a lie, thought Riley as she once again squared up to her sister. Acadia had to know that today of all days they’d be distracted, and that Cooper would be the worse of the two. She’d been talking about nothing else but this day for over a month.
“Begin.” Acadia grunted.
Armed with a sword no longer than a human arm, Cooper immediately lunged for Riley, cutting and thrusting forward. When Riley used her fighting staff to parry both blows meticulously, Cooper lunged for her again, believing – as she always did – that she could create a weakness through sheer force of will.
Riley was more careful, always retreating and parrying blows, always waiting for her opponent to tire and present a weakness for her to exploit. It came when Cooper once again lost focus and Riley used the opening to crack her staff against her sister’s knuckles.
“Sorry.” She said as she watched Cooper suck on her fingers.
“I don’t need your pity.” She seethed with unexpected venom.
“No she doesn’t.” Acadia agreed. “And never apologize to your opponent for beating them, Lee. It’s not your fault you’re better than them.”
That would make Cooper see red, Riley suspected. She also knew Acadia didn’t care. He was ursinian after all – part-bear – and like many of his kind said what he pleased. You could do that of course when you were over seven feet tall, bull-necked and as broad as a tree, with a large hump-like mass of muscle on your shoulders.
“Maybe we should call it a day.” He huffed, scratching at his button-like nose that gave his face an almost baby-like appearance.
“No, we go again!” Cooper refused.
“Pick up your staff, Lee.” She ordered Riley as she took up her own position. Digging her feet into the sand to find purchase.
Riley gave her a tired look. “Do we have to, I’m …”
Exhausted, she was going to say. Yet, the moment she had her staff even slightly elevated, Cooper pounced.
“What the hell are you doing?” She asked as Cooper brutally pounded her sword against Riley’s fighting staff again and again.
Cooper didn’t answer, and Riley had seen her sister become possessed by her anger before. Her pride had been wounded. She wanted revenge, and wouldn’t stop till she got it.
“Hey! This is not my fault.” Riley tried to remind her when Cooper shoved her to the ground. She wasn’t the distracted one, the one who hadn’t slept in days because she was too excited.
“Calm down!” She added, but that only seemed to enrage Cooper more.
Seeing Riley with her back up against the trunk of one of the fallen oaks, Cooper pressed her advantage. She attacked for what she must’ve thought would be the final time. Yet, lacking finesse, she gave Riley an opening to both parry the blow and then to step nimbly around her, reversing their positions.
Now Cooper was up against the tree.
Riley swung her staff down to cut her sister at her mid-rift but found nothing but air. Cooper had dropped down into the splits and curved her chest backward to miss the strike.
The advantage was gone and a furious Cooper was rolling and slicing before Riley could inflict another blow. So she retreated across the grid her feet kicking up sand as she ran. When she got to the opposite fallen oak, she used her momentum to vault her body up onto the trunk.
“Coward!” Cooper snapped tartly at her.
“Tell her, she has to get back into the grid.” She said to Acadia.
He shook his head. “Sometimes the rules change, little one. Adapt.”
The younger twin gave him a cold look before turning her attention back to her sister.
“Get back here!” She said pointing at her feet.
“Why don’t you come join me?” Riley asked as she lazily swung the staff like a windmill, her feet dancing as she moved down the trunk of the tree right over the lip of the outcrop.
“Or are you worried I might hurt your pride when I push you off?” She added unable to stop herself.
Cooper deserved to be teased, and not just from this morning’s hysterics. She was the better marksman and arch-man of the pair, and glo
ated about it openly whenever they practiced. It was time to take her ego down a peg or two.
Cooper’s eyes narrowed and she rankled her nose in disgust. Then she was on the tree, charging Riley down.
For a moment all of her lunges came up short as the tree’s branches kept constricting her. Then Cooper leapt down to a branch below Riley and reached for her foot to trip her. Before she could, something snapped loudly and she only had time to cry out in frustration before her body crashed down into the lake.
When she surfaced, she was less hurt than humiliated. Her embarrassment only magnified by the sound of Riley’s laughter.
“You look like a drowned cat.” Riley giggled and with Cooper’s dark hair plastered against her skull, there was some truth in it.
Cooper didn’t see the funny side of it however, and looked at Riley with an almost feverish rage.
“I’m not done with you.” She ranted.
“Looks like it from where I’m standing.” Riley pointed out. Then she casually made her way back up the tree. That was until something whipped into her ankles and knocked her sideways.
She fell flat on her face and rolled off the tree, hitting the water in a belly-flop. When her head came above the water’s surface all she could hear was mocking laughter.
“I can't believe you tripped, what an idiot!” Cooper said with obvious satisfaction, her rage instantly extinguished at Riley’s expense.
“Something pushed me!” Riley protested.
“Who?” Cooper asked pointing at the tree.
“Wait!” She added, a devilish thought flashing behind her eyes. “Perhaps it was me. Perhaps I did it with the power I can weld in my little finger.”
“Get off of me.” Riley snapped, flicking away Cooper’s pinky when she tried to stick in her ear.
“Get out of the water you two.” Acadia ordered them from the top of the bluff.
“Something pushed me!” Riley protested again, with a childish whine.
“An invisible man perhaps?”
Riley shrugged. “I didn't trip.”
“It's not going to change the fact that you're in the water.” He responded dryly. “Now come on out, Whiskers has returned.”
The twins looked to the shore and saw a dark figure standing by their father’s side.
Dressed in the garments of the Sekhem warrior caste, she wore a dark grey loose tunic-cloak over dark clothing that looked to be almost wrapped around her body like bandages. On her head, she wore a tight head-cloth, and her eyes were hidden behind thick black goggles.
It was Mayat, the felisian or feline-human in their service.
“Welcome back, Whiskers.” Acadia called out with a teasing grin, never failing to enjoy watching her visibly bristle at his nickname for her.
“What’s the story?” Cooper asked excitedly as she followed her sister out of the water, their anger toward each other instantly forgotten in the excitement of Mayat’s return, and the news she was bringing.
Their father looked at them with his usual blank expression. If there was ever going to be a time for him to change his mind and send them back to the ranch this would be it.
Then he told them what they'd wanted to hear for the last ten years.
“It's safe for us to go.”
4
Acadia asked Mayat to take the girls back to the wagon to dry and change. After they left, he joined Quill at the shoreline of the lake.
"You saw what your daughter did to Riley when she was on the tree?" He asked as both men looked out across the water toward a line of lost civilization ruins that were slowly crumbling into the water.
"I did."
"Do you think we should be worried about snoopers?" The grizzly asked, referring to the Directory’s telepathic army that scanned the nation for fugitive anomalies.
Quill shook his head. "It was only a small disturbance."
"Then, do you think the girls realized what happened?"
"No." Quill answered pointedly. "They thought nothing of it."
It was still early in the morning and a thin layer of mist hovered just above the surface of the lake giving it an ethereal quality that beckoned you to enter. Quill wondered what he'd find if he plunged to its depths. In the cold suffocating darkness would he be able to reach across the boundary that separated the living world and the one that existed just beyond it? Would he be able to find her down there, he wondered? Would she come for him?
Acadia's voice returned his thoughts to the present.
"If these things keep happening they're going to get suspicious." When the grizzly spoke softly his voice sounded thick with gravel, as if it had been dragged over the pebbles they stood upon.
"Suspicions can be erased if required." Quill replied stone-faced.
He was a lean man now having lost much of the muscle he'd had in his youth. To look at him you wouldn't think he was only in his forties. His face was too rough, his eyes too sad, his hair too grey. So much had changed in the last seventeen years that he was barely recognizable from the man he’d once been, outside and in.
"I have it under control." He added.
That caught Acadia by surprise.
"Are you sure? Cause from where I was standing I'd say the box you built to hold them in is starting to come apart."
Quill didn’t flinch at the criticism.
“It’s time to tell them, Quill. They're ready.” Acadia pressed.
“Really? At only seventeen?”
“This nation demands you grow up fast. You of all people should remember that.”
“I remember the blows hurting more at their age. And the scars I have from then are deeper, too. That’s what I remember.”
“Then when?”
“When I say so, and not before.”
That made the ursinian growl.
“Like it or not those girls are growing up and soon they're going to want to know what part they'll play in this nation. When that time comes you won't be able to stop them and this land is unforgiving to people who can't protect themselves from it.”
Quill already knew this, it was exactly what scared him.
“If I do what you say and they're not careful, the Directory will find them like that.” He clicked his fingers. Then shaking his head he added. “It’s too big a risk.”
“They have a gift, Quill. One they could use to help the resistance win this war.”
Quill shook his head. “I’ve already given this war one person I love. I will not give it any more.”
Acadia dismissed him with a wave of his hand.
“I'm going to get some coffee.” He huffed after rolling his big globular head around his shoulders to ease the tension in his neck.
Grabbing his coat he made to leave but paused after noticing something unusual.
Quill saw he'd discovered a faint message carved into one of the larger boulders on the beach.
It was worn almost smooth by the elements and was just one of many thousands of similar inscriptions littered throughout the nation. They’d been made by a dying group of people trying to leave one last mark on a world that had suddenly grown weary of them.
“Why don't you ask this person how prepared he was to survive?” Acadia asked. “If you search around the void for him I'm sure you'll find him. I doubt he went far.”
Then he spoke the parting words they'd once said to each other when they were young and brave. Yet, now they sounded hollow and meaningless.
“Live free or fight on, my friend.”
Quill continued to stare at the boulder long after Acadia had gone. The grizzly was probably right, it wasn't carved by a person who expected to live long. It read simply:
There’s no one left … 2025
5
What had come first, the great plague or the wars? Those who still cared to discuss it, thought the Dark Storm started it all – the name given to the plague – but no one could really know for certain; writings from that time no longer existed.
What they did know
was that in the year 2025, now over a quarter-millennia ago, the unthinkable happened. One day it was said there were as many humans on the earth as grains of sand on a beach. Then within the blink of an eye the shoreline was swept clean.
The Dark Storm took ninety souls for every hundred and the wars took almost all the rest. What remained after that was lawlessness and chaos.
In the first few months after the outbreak, scientists believed a cure could be found. Only humans seemed susceptible to the plague so they believed humanity’s survival lay in blending the genetic code of man with animals.
That's how the mutants were born, though in this world they were simply known as ‘blends’ and in-turn they called the non-mutants, ‘basics’. There were many different kinds but the most well-known were the felisians, ursinians, houndsmen, scalies, ratties and serviles. And though their existence was the result of a series of desperate scientific experiments, the blends had over the centuries developed their own way of life, some even their own language.
The felisians, like the cats they took after, were reclusive types and kept to themselves. If rumor were to be believed, they lived in a secret city that no one outside of their kind was allowed to enter.
The ursinians were like Acadia: grouchy, bad-mannered and aggressive. They'd been the guardsman to the Elders of the Torchbearers and during the attack on Sancisco many had fought to the death to protect them. Now their kind lived as fugitives and it was the noose for many if they were ever captured.
Loyal, happy, playful and persistently hungry, the houndsmen were as much dog as they were human and exhibited such traits. With their near limitless energy they were excellent trappers, cattlemen and farmers. Yet, if there was mischief to be had you could be sure they’d be at the center of it.
Scalies, ratties and serviles – part-lizard, part-rat and part-toad, respectively – exhibited all the worst qualities of the human personality. They were scheming, sly and devious and given the opportunity, they’d stab you in the back for little more than the money in your pocket. They were Directory men through-and-through.
