by Nick Ryder
“I don’t think anyone else knows we’re here,” Marie added.
“Cara didn’t do this.” Elaine folded her arms.
“I’m not saying she did it,” Lisa replied. Her temper was shorter than normal, the only indication of how much pain she must be in, no matter how dosed. “I’m saying that one of her village might have done.”
“Not that she warned us about it if they did,” I pointed out. “We weren’t told about anything.”
Elaine shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “I told you she’s having leadership issues.”
“It would take her no time at all to come and see us,” I replied.
“Maybe she didn’t know.”
“Maybe she didn’t care,” Lisa said.
Ruffled, Elaine slumped back in the chair she’d pulled up beside the bed and kept her mouth shut.
“What are we going to do about the eagle?” Marie asked. “It almost killed all of us.”
“Nothing,” Lisa snapped. “It’s safely locked in its room. That’s all that needs to be done.”
“Your shoulder is fucked,” I said. “It really will kill someone next time.”
“Let’s focus on the main problem first,” Lisa replied. “Like what we’re going to do when the tribe comes back.”
“We don’t know they’re going to come back,” Marie said. “They took quite a beating.”
“They’ll be back.” I didn’t need to weigh it up. “The chief escaped, and he was out for blood. He’ll be back, to get revenge. To take what we have.”
“So we need to rebuild our defenses,” Marie said. “That should be our number one priority.”
“It should,” I agreed, at the irritation of the other girls. “It should be my number one priority,” I clarified. “I’ll restock and update the traps because I’m stuck here, but you can do more outside the facility. Find out what Cara is getting up to, and see if you can get any eyes and ears on the tribe. From a distance,” I stressed.
“We should be the offensive ones,” Lisa said. “We just keep sitting back and waiting to be attacked. That’s not good enough. We need to start making moves.”
“You saw what three of them almost did to you in there.” I wasn’t pulling my punches. “You’re powerful but you’re not trained, and you’re not disciplined. You can’t take on a whole tribe. We need to be smarter than that. I want to know what they’re up to, but I don’t want you to put yourselves in any more danger than you have to, do you understand?”
Lisa bared her teeth, and I thought she might disobey my direct command, but she forced herself to nod. “Fine,” she said. “I understand. Though I want it officially noted that I don’t like it.”
“Noted.”
“What should we do with the bodies?” Marie asked.
“Reclaim them,” I said. “We’ll test their DNA for any dormant powers first, but otherwise, reclaim them.”
Marie looked horrified. “You can’t turn them into nutrigel. They’re human!”
I’d forgotten they had no idea that the nutrigel already consisted of the humans that had died in the facility over the years.
“What else can we do with them?” I asked.
“Bury them,” she replied tersely. “Bury them with some dignity.”
“Do you think they buried the members of Cara’s village they killed? Or do you think they left them to be eaten by whatever animal stumbled across them?”
“We burned them,” Lisa said. “We cremated them,” she corrected. “We built a small pyre and honored them.”
“Fire creates too much attention,” I argued. “And the desert isn’t exactly conducive to burying things.”
“Creates too much attention from who? The tribe know we’re here and so do the village. There’s no one else to attract,” Marie continued to argue.
“You don’t know that. We didn’t know the tribe were here until they started killing, either.” I wasn’t going to back down on this one. It would be an unnecessary risk.
“And we don’t know how much the average villager knows,” Lisa pointed out.
“You always take his side!” Marie said, suddenly vehement. She stood up and clenched her fists.
“I always say what I think is the right thing,” Lisa replied, leaning up and grimacing when it moved her injured shoulder. “And I literally just disagreed with him about something! If anything, he’s always taking your side.”
Elaine’s tail bashed rhythmically against the chair she was sprawled out in. “All I know is that no one ever takes my side.”
“It’s not about taking sides,” I barked, hating that they talked about me like I wasn’t there. Not having a body meant they seemed to forget I was even there – that I was human, like them, sometimes. “It’s about taking orders.”
“Oh?” Marie rounded on me, snarling with her sharp fangs. The fur framing her face seemed to be stood on end. It was the only time I’d ever seen her angry. “That’s all we are, is it? Your subordinates? Here to take orders?”
“No, I–” But Marie had already strode from the room, slamming the door behind her.
Elaine stood, frowning, and followed her friend out. I didn’t follow them through the cameras, choosing instead to stay with Lisa.
Lisa sighed. She finally let her exhaustion show, and began the laborious task of getting herself prone in the bed without further agitating her wound.
“We’ll talk about it again tomorrow,” I said, though I wanted to just gather up the corpses and reclaim them tonight, before they started to decay.
“I don’t suppose the facility comes with a morgue,” Lisa said through gritted teeth.
“Maybe I should unlock the next level and see what it gives us,” I replied, making it obvious I was joking. We were struggling with just the six levels, and there was no guarantee what would come out of sub-level six if we opened it. Opening sub-level five had almost killed us, when a monster had appeared, ready to kill us all. It had required me entering the human body I’d been crafting for myself at the time before it was fully gestated – and had ended in its destruction.
But the memory was still a fond one.
I’d made a real difference in that fight. That had been my fight. I’d saved my girls, rather than relying on my girls to save me and the facility.
“You should get some rest,” I told Lisa. “Tomorrow is going to be a busy day, and I’ll need your advice.”
She nodded. “Yeah, okay. Don’t worry about Marie. She’s upset because the rat died.”
I hadn’t even considered that. I’d forgotten all about how one of her rats had been slaughtered at the beginning of the fight. “I should go and apologize,” I said. I’d been distasteful, talking about the humans and forgetting to even mention the dead rat – I’d just left the assumption that it would be reclaimed hanging in the air. That it would be used as sustenance for Marie was probably disgusting her.
“Just leave it for now,” Lisa advised. “Elaine will make her feel better, you can talk about it in the morning.”
“Your wolves died, too,” I said.
“They’re animals,” Lisa replied, even though it directly contradicted the attachment she felt to the small bird currently snoozing in her lap. “I know, I know,” she said, reading my thoughts. “I can’t explain it either. The human psyche isn’t exactly consistent.”
Chapter Seventeen
“It’s not that simple,” Cara said, for what she thought was probably the seventh time.
She had her halberd on her knee and brought the oiled cloth over the blade again and again, despite it already being spotless. The motion was soothing – it stopped her using the weapon on any of the people in the room.
Surre was the only person Cara wasn’t ready to stick a spike through, and that was only because she hadn’t attempted to offer any solutions at all. The small, messy-haired girl with the ability to manipulate plants sat quietly in the corner just observing the discussion.
After her, Wilbur was the least
irritating. Because he was the one who went out on scavenging missions with Cara, he had a very similar viewpoint to her. He wasn’t left in the village listening to how people talked about her.
She knew it meant they were looking at it all from a very specific viewpoint – one that didn’t really have all the facts – but she liked having someone on her side.
Her father, Sampson, and her and Wilbur’s best friend, Maurice, were strongly against all her suggestions.
“People aren’t interested in another fight,” Sampson said. “They want peace.”
“Well peace isn’t just an option when there’s someone threatening our borders,” Cara hissed, and then looked away. She hated getting mad at her dad. They’d always had a good relationship. “I told you what I saw at the military facility.”
Cara and Wilbur had gone alone to the military facility when they spotted some members of the tribe that had attacked her on the cliffs nearby. Guilt gnawed at Cara because she knew it was a member of her village’s fault that the tribe had found Sol and his home at all.
Her and Wilbur didn’t get close enough to be spotted by any cameras at the facility. Wilbur had wanted to go in, to help, but Cara had held him back. There were only two of them and they had no idea whether there would be a fight at all.
They’d seen the tribe go in with their weapons drawn after peeling back a locked door with a sword, sure, but Cara had broken into his facility, too, and they’d come out allies. She had no idea what tactic Sol intended to use with the tribe.
Presumably the girls had told him about how Cara had been attacked; she was sure it must have been the girls who had rescued them.
Her question about whether they’d made an alliance was answered pretty quickly. Only three of the six members of the tribe who had entered exited, and one was badly injured.
At least Cara didn’t have to worry about Sol switching alliances on her any time soon.
“Right,” Maurice said. “You told us what you saw. And that’s why we need to go to this Solomon and ask him for help. You know that’s what saved the village last time. That’s what made you our leader in the first place.”
She bristled at that. “I’m leader because I’m powerful.” She realized how it sounded, and readjusted her tone for the thousandth time. “I’m leader because I made a proactive decision, because I went out there and made an alliance with someone who could help us. Sol – no, the girls – didn’t make me into a leader. Me, figuring out that they could help us, did.”
Her father gave her an encouraging smile. “We all know that, Cara.” His voice was appeasing. “But becoming leader and staying leader are two different things, you know that. Victor maintained his control because of tradition. His father was leader before him. Now it’s changed hands once, it’s liable to change hands again and again.”
“Not if I can help it,” Cara said.
“To help it, you’re going to need a plan,” her dad replied.
Another round of sighs went around the room.
Maurice wanted to return to Sol and ask for help with ridding the surrounding area of the tribe.
Sampson wanted to make peace with the tribe and see if they could come to some kind of accord that would prevent bloodshed. The numbers still weren’t replenished after the last battle against outsiders, and people were still in mourning. Her father argued that even if they won the battle against the tribe, the loss might be enough that people wanted her out of power anyway.
Cara and Wilbur had no doubt that a fight was going to happen. What they were struggling to decide on was how they were going to win that fight. They knew it had to be the village alone that won it.
Reliance on Sol in the last fight had caused too much unrest in the village. People didn’t even know there was a Sol. They knew there were strange, mutant creatures somewhere in the desert nearby that had come to the villages aid.
The lack of knowledge had meant the filling in of gaps with incorrect information, and the forming of strong opinions as to what should be done about them.
Cara wanted to take Sol out of the equation completely, to not have to form an opinion about him one way or the other, and to save the village herself.
The issue was whether she really was powerful enough to do that.
Just then, someone knocked on the door to her father’s house, and everyone inside went deathly silent.
Whoever it was, they didn’t wait to be invited to enter.
She was about to jump to her feet and scold them for barging into the room when she saw the man’s face. It was white as a sheet. “You need to come quickly,” he told her.
She stood with her weapon tight in her grip and hurried outside. The rest of her inner council followed behind her.
She almost stopped in her tracks when she saw what had the whole village’s attention. The tribe. It was that same group of fur-adorned Neanderthals who were walking toward them. Her heart hammered, but her fists clenched.
Cara had so little information on the savages that she didn’t know how many members of the tribe there were, but two dozen men stood at the gates to the village. They had white scraps of material wrapped around their swords, which were held in the air in a universal sign of surrender.
Cara strode ahead – alone – to the gate of the village. She planted her halberd in the ground at her side, and wished the record keeper was at her side. She wanted to know the stats on these two dozen men and women, to know how many of them had powers and what kind of threat they presented.
The record keeper of the village was unique among them in his ability to see people’s potential in quantifiable, measurable units. It wasn’t something the naked eye could see. Cara could only see someone use their powers, and decide, subjectively, how powerful she thought they were.
The record keeper had a much more objective approach. Someone didn’t have to use a power for him to know that they were dangerous. He could read their strength, their vitality, their intelligence, just by looking at them.
He was a vital tool, and she didn’t know whether other people like him existed in the world.
She broke eye contact with the man at the head of the column of the tribe for just a moment to try and seek him out in the crowd. She couldn’t see him, and was forced to deal with this on her own, without knowing where she stood.
“You’ve come to surrender to us?” she asked archly, raising a brow. “Well I accept. Hand over your weapons.”
The man laughed. “I am Mart.”
She almost laughed too. She’d expected something … different, from this man in front of her. He was a huge slab of muscle. Well over six-foot and with weapons hidden in the curves of every piece of multicolored fur draped over him. Thick, brightly-colored feathers lined the sides of his handmade clothing, and the gaping maw of a dead-eyed, scythe-fanged cat mutant wrapped tight around his waist, a silently yowling trophy.
He was the least Mart looking person in the world.
“And I am here to talk.”
“You’ll do nothing inside my village with those weapons,” she replied, struggling to keep her voice even and loud enough that the swathes of people behind her could hear.
“I am not so foolish that I would enter your domain unarmed. There is no honor among anyone anymore.”
She blinked in surprise at his speech patterns. Both the members of the tribe that had attacked her and the snippets of conversation she’d overheard from the invaders of Sol’s facility had spoken in broken English, like it was a foreign language. Mart spoke just like she and her village did.
“Then I guess we’ll talk right here,” she replied.
Mart cocked his thick head, assessing her, and then nodded. “I guess we will.”
Silence descended on them for a moment, and she could hear the murmurs of the villagers behind her. She felt the weight of the words she couldn’t hear on her shoulders, threatening to drag her down to her knees.
Were they proud of how she stood her ground?
&nb
sp; Did they think she was stupid for refusing entry to people who had shown up with signs of peace wrapped around their swords?
Was she stupid for antagonizing people who might be here to make a truce?
Her father’s words echoed in her mind. People aren’t interested in another fight.
When Mart held out and didn’t speak, Cara fell for his bait. “Why are you here?”
“To propose a truce.”
It almost threw her off guard. “What kind of truce?” She suddenly regretted having this conversation out in the open, where everyone could hear her. She would have preferred to do it one-on-one, where she had some leeway with what she could and couldn’t reveal. She wanted to talk to him about his attack on the facility, to find out if it was something he intended to repeat. She could see one of the women who had emerged from the facility relatively uninjured in the back of the column right now. It was without a doubt the same tribe, if there had ever been any doubt in the first place.
“The kind of truce where we don’t kill each other. Is there any other kind of truce?” he quipped.
Cara was mortified to hear some small chuckles from her own side of the border. No one on Mart’s side changed their expression at all.
“There would be no need for a truce if you hadn’t killed my people,” she reminded him. “You attacked first. You shed blood without cause. Maybe I should shed some of your blood before we decide to stop killing?”
The murmur in the crowd behind her got louder. She couldn’t tell if it was good or bad. Were they getting ready to throw her to the wolves, or to lift her above their heads for not forgetting the deaths of two of her village?
Mart laughed, but it was too high-pitched and grating. “So I should return with two whelps for you to execute?” he asked.
It was a double blow, and she struggled not to recoil. “What can you offer me in exchange for their deaths?” she said instead.
When Mart stepped over the threshold of the village, the people behind her surged forward. There were weapons pointed at him, but no one got close enough to actually reach him before he acted.
