by J D Huffman
Instead, she was there with her father, and he smiled at her and told her he was proud.
Reality offered her a much less comforting view on the world. They were stopped abruptly by several bodies moving swiftly to surround them, unclothed, skin dusted with dirt and bits of plant debris, some with mud caked on their faces so she could most easily notice their eyes—fierce, white eyes with irises that, no matter their color, seemed somehow brighter than they should have been—and lips arranged in straight lines that betrayed no emotion except suspicion.
One of them—a woman who looked somewhat younger than Sasha—stepped forward with her hands in a defensive posture, muscles taut and eyes fixed directly on her. She stared straight into Sasha’s eyes, as if sizing her up, and when she spoke, she made a statement Sasha could only think of as laughably obvious.
“You’re not supposed to be here.”
Chapter 26
The Other Totality
Technically speaking, it was an ambush. The people that surrounded them didn’t appear armed, but Sasha wasn’t going to take the chance that they had weapons of a sort she couldn’t see. I’ve seen what Totality can do.
“Explain yourselves,” the woman standing closest to Sasha demanded, eyes cold and fierce.
“We came here looking for Arkady’s people. The Totality who broke away from Cylence. Is that you?”
“Maybe,” the woman said, cocking an eyebrow. “What do you want?”
“We need help.” Sasha motioned toward the cargo mover to which Angel was restrained. “Our friend’s been taken over by a Totality… being. We’re hoping you can help us.”
“What would we help you do?”
Sasha thought it should have been obvious. She searched for a good euphemism. “Make it leave?”
The woman laughed. “Good luck. No one’s ever come to us with a problem like that before.”
“No one ever comes to us at all,” one of the men chuckled behind her.
“True.” She put her eyes on Fred and squinted. “You’re a weird one. What are you?”
“A troll,” Fred said, his tone of voice almost proud.
“Weird. You smell old.”
Sasha wondered if that was meant literally.
“I am not in the springtime of my life, that much is certain,” he agreed.
“The what-time?” she giggled. “Weird. You’re all definitely weird.” She stepped over toward William and gave him a good up-and-down with her eyes. “You’re weird, too. Arkady will be interested.”
William smirked. “What does that mean?”
“Well,” Fred began, “It sounds as though Arkady is still alive. In which case, he can vouch for us.”
The woman turned to him again. “Oh? You know him?”
“Yes,” Fred acknowledged. “Personally. We were friends.”
“Just when I thought this place was getting boring,” the woman laughed. “Arkady’s old friends show up! Sure, let’s get you back to the village.” She started off in another direction and, with the rest of her crew continuing to form a circle around Sasha, William, Fred, and Angel, the three humans and the troll had no choice but to follow her lead. Sasha looked at the device strapped to her wrist. They weren’t going north anymore—it was an easterly direction now. That didn’t seem right.
“This isn’t the way to the settlement,” Sasha announced.
“You hear that?” the woman in the lead taunted, not breaking her pace or turning around. “Human girl thinks we don’t know where we live.”
“You think we’d leave our homes out in the open like that?” another mocked. “We’re not stupid. Arkady’s told us all about Cylence. One day, he’s probably going to come here in force and wipe us out. Surprised he hasn’t tried already, except he might know it’s harder than it would seem.”
“Decoys,” the lead woman explained. “We live over this way, where you can’t pick us up from orbit.”
“Right, should we let them walk freely?” one of them wondered.
The leader stopped and sighed, then spun around. “Fine. Cover their eyes.”
“With what?” a red-headed girl giggled.
“I don’t know! Tear off pieces of their clothes.” She moved her eyes along Sasha’s body. “You’re all wearing way too much for this planet as it is.”
Sasha held out her arms as one of them forcefully ripped her sleeves, fashioning the remnants into blindfolds.
Sasha didn’t resist as the fabric was tied around her eyes, blocking out her vision. She was then led to the same cargo mover that held William, and the two of them were made to sit side-by-side. Fred, she assumed, was crammed onto the one with Angel, somehow. When the cargo movers again came to motion, they accelerated so gently Sasha thought it impossible that a person was pushing them. She strongly suspected they were using their Totality magic—whatever it was—to move them along.
If any changes in direction came, they were so subtle she couldn’t sense them. They could have gone anywhere. She paid attention to the sounds of the forest, but they didn’t vary much: the crunching of sticks and leaves, the strange calls of different animals, the rustling of the breeze. Eventually, a voice came through her earpiece. “This is Meren, checking in. How’s your team doing?”
Dammit, not now, she thought.
She felt the cargo mover come to a stop, followed by a lot of footsteps moving closer. Fingers touched her ear, then reached in and snatched the earpiece. “Nice bit of technology,” the woman in charge said. “We’ll have to shut that off for now,” she sighed.
“If we don’t check in with our ship, they’ll come looking for us,” Sasha pointed out. “You’ll have more intruders on your hands.”
Reluctantly, their captor handed back the communicator. She put a stern gaze on Sasha. “Check in, but make it quick. If you do anything suspicious—warn them, talk in code, anything that I don’t like—you’ll die right here.”
Sasha nodded and accepted those terms. She activated the earpiece. “Everything’s fine here, Meren. Just busy gathering plants. We’ll check in again later.” She pulled the earpiece out and handed it back to the other woman. The homing device on her wrist was seized, as well.
They proceeded again.
After Sasha lost track of time, she began to hear falling water, and the sound of it echoed in a way that a forest canopy was incapable of producing. It reverberated as if in a hollow space. Caves? she guessed. The bits of light that crept in from the bottom of her blindfold, where it didn’t quite rest flush against her face, grew darker and darker, which helped confirm her suspicions. Soon, it was deep black, and not long after she again detected the cargo mover coming to a halt.
“We’re here,” it was announced.
The blindfolds were removed and they were permitted to stand and look around. Sasha found herself impressed by the sights before her. She’d been correct about the caves, but only to a point. They were in a deep ravine, narrow at the top, that gradually widened as it got deeper. She saw structures carved into the stone walls, lights flickering through excavated windows. Water poured in from above, landing in a black pool far below. The width of the chasm was crossed by several bridges made of hewn rope and planks of wood. Sasha imagined that the woman was right: detecting activity down here would’ve been difficult or impossible from an orbital vantage point. Nothing artificial was visible from above. She started to count and quickly determined there must have been dozens if not hundreds of houses carved into the sides of the ravine, stretching far into the distance. She suspected it all went on for several kilometers, and if tunnels had been dug out perpendicular to the ravine itself, there was no telling the extent of their quasi-underground city. When she turned to look behind them, she saw they’d entered by way of another tunnel, probably via a cave that looked completely natural and unassuming from the entrance.
Wooden po
sts with more rope served as a railing around the ledge in front of them, and to pass beyond that would take one straight down into the black waters below. Maybe there are fish down there, she speculated to herself. Maybe that’s part of what they eat. She wanted to learn more about them, despite herself, and despite her feelings toward the Totality in general. These people had been rude to her, but not unkind thus far—not brutal and inhumane, as she expected from Totality.
They were left under guard for a time as the lead woman and a few others broke off to presumably speak with Arkady or whoever acted in his stead at the moment. “Nice place,” William commented, taking it all in. “Clean air, clean water. Not sure I’d like living underground, but the rest is nice enough.”
“You could never convince me to live underground again,” Sasha said bitterly. She appreciated the beams of sunlight that shone down from above the ravine, but she couldn’t shake the idea that a Totality overlord lurked nearby to punish her for slacking off.
Fred offered no thoughts on the locale, himself. Sasha watched him stare thoughtfully down the ravine, as if he hoped to see to the other end of it.
Their lead captor returned shortly with another fellow, a man of generous size and a wide gait, hairy from head to toe, with brown locks flowing from the top of his head tied back into several long strands. His face wore a dark beard that he obviously didn’t let grow wild—it was trimmed enough that its maintenance was evident to Sasha. His nose was wide and flat, his eyes white and round, and his broad smile made Sasha feel strangely at ease. He wasn’t her friend. She had no reason to believe he would be. Ultimately, she planned to destroy this place, if she got the opportunity. And yet, seeing this man approach lowered her defenses. She struggled to find an explanation.
“Fred!” he roared in a less friendly tone than Sasha would have expected. He slowly wrapped his arms around the old troll and patted him hard on the back. Sasha sensed something forced, even comical about it, once she realized that this man wasn’t much taller than her, and she wasn’t exactly a towering figure, herself. What he lacked in height he made up for in girth, though, so she was left with the mental image of this short man’s body virtually swallowing up Fred’s lower half. He then pulled back and gave a courteous bow, still giving Fred a curiously skeptical eye.
“It has been a long time,” Fred said, offering a genial smile in return, after they’d separated.
“I never expected to see you again,” he said. His body jolting as if in realization, he moved toward Sasha. “Greetings! I’m Arkady.” He put his arms out, ready to embrace her as he had Fred.
She shook her head in the negative, raising her hands slightly in case he didn’t get the hint. “It’s nice to meet you but you don’t need to hug me,” she deferred. In truth, she was more than a little bothered by his nudity, or at least the prospect of this fat, naked man pressing his body against hers. His presence was disarming but not that much so.
He frowned at the rejection but quickly shrugged it off. “As you wish. No one is coerced around here.” He stared at her forehead momentarily, scrutinizing. “A slave, I see. I didn’t expect to see any more of you make it here.”
“Any more?“ she emphasized, eyes wider. “There are others?”
“Well, not since we first came,” he clarified. “I didn’t think more would ever come.” He looked to the woman who’d led them here. “You could have told me they were slaves, Elena! You should have been kinder to them. Treated them like common rabble, didn’t you?”
“I was as gracious as trespassers warrant,” she protested, then stuck out her tongue in defiance.
Arkady rolled his eyes and shook his head. “Children. This is what I get for letting children lead patrols. I apologize if she handled you roughly.”
“She was fine,” Sasha said honestly. “As Totality go, she’s already shown herself to be less terrible than all the other ones I’ve met.”
He nodded as if in understanding. “Cylence’s brood are a cruel lot, aren’t they? But that’s not why you’ve come here, is it?” He stepped toward Angel and knelt next to her. “You came about this one.” He gazed into her eyes, moving his head slowly around hers, like a planet orbiting a sun. “Yes, I see. Tell me your name, child.”
She spat in his face.
“You’re not the first person she’s done that to,” William noted. “She already killed a man, too.”
Arkady wiped the saliva from his face with one hand, then dragged it along the dirt to “clean” it. “That was unnecessary,” he said softly. “I can help you.”
“You can let me go,” Angel countered.
“And where would you go?”
“Anywhere.”
“But you’re an infant at this stage. You don’t know who you are, what you are. What you can do. What you could be. I sense that much. You’re lashing out because you’re frightened, and angry that you don’t understand what’s happening to you. But I’ve been like you. I remember when I came into this body, terrified and confused. It was a much smaller body then,” he chuckled, “but it’s mine nonetheless. Or as much mine as it could ever be,” he then admitted.
Sasha hoped to confront him about that at some point, after he’d done what they came here for. The more I can learn about them, the better. Maybe he can tell me something that will help us beat Cylence and the rest of the Totality. “We want to know if you can get the Totality out of her,” Sasha said bluntly.
From his crouched position, he turned and looked up at her, his face not hiding disappointment. “Nothing is that simple,” he warned. “And in this case, less simple than usual.”
“Because she’s a woman?” Sasha guessed.
“Indeed. She was an, ah, ‘normal’ human before? She wasn’t born this way?”
“Born this way?” What does that mean?? “Yes, she was as normal as any of us. She just went crazy. Killed her lover and started ranting and trying to escape from us.”
“Hmm,” he vibrated. “I’ll need some time with her. Let’s get her unstrapped from this thing. There’s no need for restraints here.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” William protested. “Like Sasha said, she did kill someone, and she’d probably do it again.”
Elena helped unfasten the straps that held Angel to the cargo mover, letting the woman stand up. Angel spun, arms bent, looking for an exit, and the moment she started to dart away, her body froze in place. Panic crossed her face and she made pained noises.
Sasha wasn’t sure what was happening. “What’s wrong with her?”
“As I said,” Arkady began, “The restraints are unnecessary.” He moved to position himself in front of Angel and spoke to her. “Now, if you’ll accompany me to my chamber, we have some things to discuss.” To the rest: “You are free to enjoy our hospitality for as long as you’re here. The dinner horn will sound soon. Elena can show you to the dining hall at that time. I hope to see you then,” he finished with a smile, then led Angel by the arm into one of the openings in the ravine walls that, Sasha assumed, led into Arkady’s own residence.
Sasha noticed Elena rolling her eyes at being made responsible for this band of interlopers. She strolled toward the railing that overlooked the great pool down below and leaned on one of the posts as William was doing.
“You have to admit, it seems nice and peaceful here,” William said, clearly awed by his surroundings.
Sasha tried to be positive, at least for his sake. “It has its charms,” she admitted. She looked over at Fred. “Is Arkady much different from how you remember?”
He shrugged. “Everyone changes. He was certainly thinner before. However, he has not aged at all. What I noticed most is how calm he is. He used to be quite agitated and fretful.”
“Fighting other Totality will do that,” Elena said scornfully.
“Were you there during the schism?” Fred asked her.
&nb
sp; She shook her head. “No, I was born here. He tells us all the story when we’re children, though, so we never forget.”
“About that,” William continued, staring down at the dark water for a moment before turning his body and eyes in Elena’s direction again. “How does this whole ‘having children’ thing work for you? I thought you were all Totality here.”
“Originally, there were Totality and some slaves,” Fred corrected. “I had assumed all the slaves would’ve died by now. Obviously, this would mean a very lonely existence for the Totality here.”
“Arkady didn’t let that happen,” Elena explained. “He and the other Totality had children with some of the former slaves.” Her emphasis on the word “former” was obviously intended to do away with any questions of consent, but Sasha didn’t so easily accept that. “That’s why you see people of all ages here.”
That much was true. Sasha noted young children, adolescents, nascent adults, more established ones, middle-aged people, and even a few elderly. She wondered which were Totality and which weren’t, and whether such a distinction even mattered in this situation. She had to ask. “What’s the point of Totality having children in the first place? It’s an entity occupying another person’s body. Why would a Totality ever consider that his child?”
“That’s a question better left for Arkady,” Elena said, frowning. “He loves talking about things like that.”
“Oh, that should be fun,” William quipped.
So, Sasha saved her questions for after the blaring of the dinner horn, which came soon after. It had a low tone that vibrated every stony surface within their ravine village. Sasha imagined that made it useful for attracting people who might not so much hear it as feel it in the floor and walls.