by Eve Langlais
Entering, she heard her mother say, “You’re sure?” Her gaze slewed toward Riella, a cold appraisal without a hello.
“We ran the tests numerous times to cross reference. Each time the result was the same.” The Earl pointed to something on her desk. Something Riella wasn’t asked to look at.
Since they seemed intent on their conversation, she took a moment to examine the room more than she had the first time she saw it. A bigger white box than she lived in, lined with shelves stacked with binders. So many of them because the Earl didn’t fully trust computers to not corrupt their files. With good reason. New Earth didn’t like electronics. Not the kind made by tri-dimensional printers at any rate. The things Riella made always worked.
There were no weapons in sight, not that they would do her much good. Even if she did subdue Mother and Arianne, there were guards just outside. She couldn’t escape out the door and hope to make it far. But she had to do something. She couldn’t live in that room forever. Maybe not even one more day. Soon, her mother’s threat would be realized, and then what?
I have to escape. The last time she faked an accident that made them think she was dead, she’d escaped through the sewers and then into the tunnels. It wouldn’t be as easy this time. Nor would her mother believe she’d died without seeing an entire body.
Riella might have tuned the queen and Earl out, but some words penetrated.
“What did you say?” Riella interrupted.
Earl Arianne paused and looked at her. “You’re pregnant.”
She eyed her belly. “How? You haven’t inseminated me.” Even she knew that required them poking at her vaginally, and yet that was the one thing they hadn’t touched.
“You know how!” her mother spat. “You lied. You did fornicate with that Wastelander rat, and now you’re carrying an undocumented fetus.”
Cold. Which meant Riella knew what would come next.
“You’re going to terminate the pregnancy because that’s what you do to the babies you don’t want,” Riella snapped even as her heart raced. Pregnant with Titan’s child? It never even occurred to her it might happen. Then again, she didn’t take any contraceptives while in the citadel. There was usually no one there to have sex with.
“I still think we should eliminate the waste in your womb, but Arianne has convinced me to wait,” growled the queen.
“A good thing, too, given it turns out the baby is psionic,” the Earl crowed. “We tested it five times to be sure. We have a live one.”
Riella’s blood chilled. “Hold on, you mean you can already tell it’s Deviant?” That explained why her mother was pissed. Even that wicked woman wouldn’t have a power-carrying fetus aborted, not until she decided if she could use it to her benefit or not.
“The child is already showing strong psionic markers.” The Earl waxed on, and Riella wanted to slap her hand on her mouth and tell her to stop. This was only making it worse.
“If she’s having this child, then that means I have to wait nine months before we can attempt a proper genetic match.” Her mother sounded utterly disgruntled. And with reason. There went her plan to breed Riella with an Enclave power of her choice.
“We recommend a year between psionic births. Better results that way.”
Mother growled at the further delay, but Riella saw it as a reprieve—and hope.
She cupped her stomach. Pregnant. With Titan’s child. The father might be dead, but she wasn’t.
Long after she was banished back to her room, she paced. Being with child changed everything. She couldn’t stay here and wait for the right moment to escape. If she was going to leave, she had to do it before she got large with child. She needed to start over somewhere new.
It took her three days to fine-tune her plan and reduce the amount of medication they doped her with. The Earl wasn’t taking chances with Riella, but she knew how to foil them. She reduced her intake of food and flushed her system by drinking water from the tap. On the fourth day, with a metal screw she’d filched on her last walk, she managed to start a fire in her room. Not easily. The exertion left her panting.
The alarms went off at the first sign of smoke, as did the chemical sprinklers. The soldiers who came running had her hustled from the mess into a new room, a space not yet tweaked against her. Then again, the queen and the Earl wrongly thought her subdued because of the pregnancy.
Wrong.
If Wastelander women could be nomads and birth babies, then so could she. She knew how to survive. The only chance this child would have required her escaping.
The soldiers locked the door on the new room and left. The drugs they’d fed her to keep her powers sluggish, while weakened, meant it took more than a little coaxing to convince the metal lock to open.
When it finally clicked, she felt nauseous and a sheen of sweat covered her. She had no time to recover, but she could cause delay and confusion.
She set another fire. She ignited one at each level on her way down, joining the milling Madres who emerged from their rooms, their mild panic keeping them from noticing the stranger in their midst.
When they spilled out onto the main floor, Riella kept going, ignoring the clamor of alarms as she entered the basement and the utility area that hummed with the machines that kept this building in the dome running. The warren of crawl spaces for pipes and conduits wide enough for a person to move unseen and cause havoc. She literally shoved a pipe into the one generating power. The building went dark. But that wasn’t enough. She needed pure chaos.
By the time the fourth explosion went off, the dome was in full revolt. Soldiers were running around, Madres were crying, the doctors and nurses were in the streets exclaiming.
It proved easy to slip into a room and change appearance. The soldier’s suit she borrowed hid her from sight, and the glitch in the communication system between the soldiers, courtesy of a bit of a metal meltdown, further muddled things. In the chaos, no one realized one of the small terrain vehicles went missing.
By the time Earl Arianna realized Riella couldn’t be found among the Madres, she was long gone. With luck, Mother would behead the Earl for this.
Nine
Back in Haven a month and Titan still didn’t feel any better about his bionic limbs, himself, nothing. A restlessness rustled his spirit even as nothing seemed to touch him. He felt detached from everything.
But it wasn’t Haven’s fault. It hadn’t changed. It still played home to the same group of people, going about their day-to-day existence, talking to him, including him, and yet he felt an utter disconnect from them. As if he weren’t really here. His mind kept straying elsewhere, thinking things he shouldn’t. Dealing with guilt, not just about Alfred left behind in the tank but, oddly enough, about Riella. He hated her. And yet he couldn’t help mulling over the events of the attack. The way the queen treated her. How she talked to her.
It sounded as if the mother hated the daughter. Which then led to him wondering what had happened to Riella. Was she the prodigal daughter brought home? Or, as Alfred had intimated, did she currently suffer?
He had no way of knowing. To go anywhere near the city and start asking questions was akin to a death sentence. The outer domes might be easier to raid, but the inner circle, where the Enclave seat of power rested, had the might to smite anyone who poked into their business.
Unless he could find a tunnel underground that led inside… Once he started thinking of it, he couldn’t stop. Perhaps he should give Riella a chance to explain herself. If he didn’t like the answers, he could kill her.
Kill a woman he’d fucked.
That seemed cold. A little too cold for him. The best scenario was to not go after her. He owed her nothing.
But not acting didn’t mean he could stick around. He would go insane if he couldn’t get out of here.
His friends noticed something off about his behavior, and Zara broached it first. She did it under the guise of asking him to visit her cubby so she could peek at his bionics once mor
e. He didn’t really mind. This was crafting of a type they’d never imagined. If machinery could be an art form, then, according to Zara, his arm and leg were masterpieces. Secure too. He’d long since ditched the harnesses, and while the seam of metal and flesh had some uneven edges, over time, he imagined it would become smooth.
Listing to Zara mumble when she studied him proved to be one of the few things he still enjoyed.
“It seems so impossible.” She poked at him, the lens over her eyes magnifying parts. “How did she get the metal to connect to your nervous system so seamlessly? And it works so well.”
“It does now.” It took practice to pretend the metal wasn’t there.
“But by all logic, it shouldn’t,” she mused.
He leaned back on his elbows, metal and bio, and glanced down at Zara’s tight rows of braids, nothing like Riella’s red crown.
“I told you, she used magic.” The princess could give it all the fancy names she liked. Her ability was on a whole new level that couldn’t be taught.
“There’s magic, and then there’s what she did. It’s bloody genius,” Zara grumbled. “Makes my stuff look amateurish in comparison.”
“I’ll take you and your skills over hers any day.” A halfhearted flirt that Zara didn’t even bother to respond to.
She was at least a decade older than him, her skin a naturally darker color. Her eyes dark and her long hair black. She claimed she learned everything she knew about fixing machines from her husband. A husband long dead. The Wasteland wasn’t an easy place to live.
“If anyone gets to have Zara, it’s me and Nikki,” Vera declared, walking into the room, although room was a bit of a misnomer. The term cubbyhole being more apt, given it was created by stacked crates. It served as a communication area, impromptu meeting place, and now examination room.
“As if Nikki would share you with anyone.” Zara snorted.
“She’d made an exception for you.” Vera’s flirt came with a wink.
Titan shook his head. “If Nikki heard you flirting…” Her jealousy was renowned.
“I know, she’d carve me and feed me my own tits.” Vera sounded quite pleased by her promised mate’s vicious side.
Titan wished at times he could find someone that evoked the same feeling.
“I take it you’re here for a reason other than getting in my pants?” Zara asked.
“Yeah, I wanna ask tin man here why he didn’t go on the ambush with Axel and the others.”
They’d gotten a tip about a sudden and unscheduled transport of something precious. Axel and the crew would lie in wait and appropriate the shipment.
“If I went, I’d only be in the way.” One month since his escape and his limbs at times proved erratic, only working when he heard the voice or didn’t think of them. But he did think of them, too much.
What else was there to do? If only he could find something to take his mind off it that didn’t involve fighting. He’d been sparring with the dummies as much as he could. Hitting things helped the frustration. But he feared he’d progress from hitting dummies to real people soon. His temper had been sullen of late.
“Jeez, even Old Gordie doesn’t look as pathetic as you. Have you been practicing your woe-is-me face?” Vera said with a grimace.
“It’s very similar to his ungrateful-to-be-alive one,” Zara added, not helping at all with her sassy reply.
It only served to make him feel even more of a failure. “You can both fuck off. You’re not the ones who had body parts chewed on.”
“And survived,” Vera remarked.
“With fake parts.”
“Installed by a woman who turned out to be a princess of the Emerald queen. Blah. Blah.” Vera waved a hand. “Still don’t see why you’re so bent. Sounds to me more like the makings of a romance story.”
“Never,” he swore, even as he recalled the passion in her gaze.
“He’s mad because he’s only seeing it from his perspective,” Zara replied.
At the statement, Titan’s lips twisted in confusion. “Because it’s the only perspective.”
“Really? How about we look at the reasons why she hesitated to save your whiny ass.” Zara held up her fingers and began ticking off points. “One, you’re a stranger, which automatically means danger. There are many who would have left you out there and never bothered to waste the ammo.”
“I guess.” He begrudgingly gave her a point.
“Two, you’re a man; she’s a woman. That automatically makes us hesitate even harder.”
“I would never force someone.”
“She doesn’t know that,” Zara reminded.
“We tend to assume any guy who’s not part of Haven is gonna try and jump us,” Vera stated as a matter of fact.
“And die.” He knew the women who lived here enough to know they wouldn’t tolerate any kind of abuse.
Vera smiled. “Well, yeah, we’d kill, but we don’t warn them it’s coming. Best to get rid of the bad ones before they hurt anyone.”
“Which brings us to the third reason she would hesitate,” Zara said. “Are you a minion of the queen?”
“No one would ever mistake me for a soldier.” Titan snorted.
“Spies don’t wear the metal suits. Don’t be so stupid. You lost an arm and leg, not your wits,” Zara snapped.
The rebuke stung. He glowered. “Fine, so maybe she had her reasons for leaving me out there.”
“And then deciding those reasons weren’t good enough, she saved you and gave you replacement limbs,” Vera declared.
“That only work part of the time.”
“Which is better than none,” Zara said quietly. “I would have given anything for Leroy to come back, even if he had metal parts.”
In that moment he felt shame. How dare he complain about living? Was this what he would do with his second chance? Mope inside Haven?
He sulked a little more. “You don’t understand.”
“Don’t we?” Zara stood and began fidgeting with her tools. “We all suffer loss. It’s how we handle it that determines how we survive.”
“And you ain’t handling it well, in case that wasn’t clear,” Vera added.
“What do you suggest I do?”
“What’s your heart telling you?” Zara eyed him.
“Don’t you mean my head?” he asked.
Zara waved a hand and shook her head. “Your mind tends to rely on logic and shit. It’s your heart, though, that’s making you miserable. So figure out what it wants and go after it.”
“What if it’s telling me I need to leave?”
“Then you’d better send us messages to let us know you’re all right. I think you know what you want to do.” Vera sounded so serious.
He did. “I want to find Haven a new home.” Because, while there had been discussion of sending people out, Axel couldn’t spare those needed to maintain the safety of Haven. But Titan was expendable, and he might have left out one important aspect of his story. He didn’t tell them about the tunnels. He’d told them he’d broken down beyond the humps and hiked in.
Why had he lied? He couldn’t have said, except the tunnels and Burton, even Alfred, were his secret. His…escape.
Vera assumed he meant find a new home via research, because, later that day, a tablet was dropped off loaded with all the rumors, gossip, and maps they had at their disposal. But Titan already knew he wouldn’t find a place in those notes.
He needed to leave Haven and return to the tunnels. The moment he made the decision, he saw no reason to wait. He left early the next morning. He wanted to be long gone before Axel and the others could return to change his mind. He’d memorized the location of the hump with the tunnel entrance he’d emerged from. It took him less time to reach it with his leg cooperating. It wasn’t hard to spot either, given it still oozed bits of fog that misted upon hitting daylight.
Chances were the monster, or whatever that thing was, remained inside. Obviously, it didn’t like the sun. He ey
ed the almost noon brilliance and realized he’d have to work fast. He pulled the light torch from his bag, feeling bad he’d “borrowed” it. However, he needed a bigger hole. More light in order to push back the Morass—the name he’d given the nebulous monster.
The brightness of the torch was dimmed behind the lenses of his goggles. He cut as wide a door as he could reach. Even longer across. When only the tiniest of threads held it, he kicked. The big metal rectangle fell with a clang inside. He stood and waited. Noticed the Morass pooling around the edges, wisping into white steam. The light didn’t penetrate far enough to clear all the way to the back. He needed to get back to the hatch underground.
He pulled a slim stick from his pocket. A crack and it began to sizzle and spark a bright light. Before he could think twice, he loped across the floor. The very thought of My leg has to work actually made it worse.
Stomp, drag, stomp, drag. The only good news was the Morass hissed when it neared his flaming torch. Given it didn’t like the light, he plunged into its foggy body, tunneling through. The Morass didn’t leave a hint of moisture on the skin. The foggy nature of it thickened so he could almost grab it, and even his flickering wand began to struggle. He pulled forth a second light stick and snapped it off his leg. There was more than hissing as the brightness pushed back the dark.
Screams. Faint ones, as if from far away. Whispers. Close and circling. Teasing. Suddenly he was past it, in an open space that gave him only a moment to halt his momentum before smashing into a wall. He veered and aimed for the blasted open door and the storage room beyond. The Morass didn’t follow. Once he got inside the room, a glance over his shoulder showed it hesitating at the doorway.
Odd.
The hatch in the floor remained open, and he practically jumped down it. He forced himself to go slow, pause on the ladder, and close the hatch behind him. Either the fog thing was already down here, or it preferred the hangar. Best ensure nothing followed.
He also tried not to wonder what would prevent the Morass from wanting to expand its reach into the tunnel.