by S J Taylor
Instead he dropped the cloth and took hold of my lifeless arm by the wrist and the elbow, bent it out until I thought he would break it again, lifted it up, and then rotated my arm back into my midsection.
And my shoulder popped back into place.
I took a deep breath. The pain wasn’t gone so much as it was reduced to something like a toothache, but I could move my fingers again, my arm too, and that in itself was such a relief that I nearly cried.
“Thank you,” I murmured. Oh, sweet relief. Back in the Colonies, there would have been medical scanners and fusion lasers to do what Jadran had just done for me. Out here in the real world, things were a lot different. “That’s a lot better. Nice technique, by the way. I have the feeling, Jadran Rill, that there’s more to you than most people know.”
“This is something you already know. No one else knows my life story, Era Rae. Only you. I never even told the Elders of my village where I had gone. It was something I could not risk. Not everyone is who they seem to be.”
I knew the truth of that. “You could say the same thing about me.”
“I think I just did.”
His smile was kind as he started wrapping the tied strips of cloth around me. Still, it made me wonder what he knew about me. Or, what he suspected.
He had to lean in very close to me to get the strips behind my back. Three of them, up at the level of my chest, and his eyes never left mine, and his breath was on my cheek…
And then it just happened.
Jadran’s lips brushed over mine, gently, like he was asking me if it was okay. It was a warm feeling, tender but firm, and I opened my mouth to him and held my breath and the world turned underneath us for one long, incredible moment.
I’d kissed men before. Well, boys. I’d kissed boys. Different guys at the Academy, when we were curious, or bored, or needed to release the tensions that we built up during our training sessions. This was better than any of those times. This felt… real.
I argued with myself that I shouldn’t be doing this but then I told myself to shut up and just let things happen for a change. Jadran knew what he was doing. Even if I didn’t…
It was when Laria stirred in her sleep and cried out in the middle of her nightmares that Jadran and I pulled apart. How long had we been like that? I didn’t know. I didn’t care.
I wanted to do it again.
But we weren’t the only two people here.
I knew we were being foolish. He had Laria to think about. Who else did she have except him? I didn’t know the answer. I just knew how I felt.
I didn’t even know what I was going to do next. I never had. I hadn’t exactly had a plan in mind when I escaped Colony 41. All I’d had was a desire to save my life. It had gotten me this far.
But I knew whatever was coming next would be harder than anything I’d faced so far.
The Restored Society was after me with a vengeance. That was true, but there had been three columns of Enforcers in Refuge. A column contained forty soldiers. Times three. That was too many soldiers to send out after one little girl like me.
All of those Enforcers mustered together for one purpose.
What was it?
They were after something bigger. I was sure of it. Something big, and probably very close by. Refuge had just been in their way. The Enforcers had turned the attack on the village into a practice run for whatever the real target was. Finding me there, well, that had been a lucky surprise for the leader of that little army, Third Marshall Amicus.
Now that I’d slipped through his fingers, he’d be even more eager to find me.
“Are you all right, Era Rae?” Jadran asked me, his fingers brushing the hair away from my forehead.
“I… I’m fine, Jadran. Um. The kiss. That was nice. More than nice. I mean, um. Can we… talk about it? Tomorrow?”
He sighed. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“You didn’t,” I promised him. “It’s just that we’re still running and in danger and it’s just, um, not the right time.”
His hand cupped the side of my face and I have to admit that I let myself nuzzle into his touch. He looked me straight in the eyes, and I wish his face wasn’t buried in shadows so that I could see what he was thinking.
“When will there be a right time, I wonder,” he whispered.
Before I could answer he stood up, one of the MARs in hand. “I’ll take first watch, then. Get some sleep, please.”
He walked away into the trees, the wristcom from my bag in hand so he could monitor the Enforcers’ transmissions. Maybe we’d know if they were coming for us before they got here. If we were lucky.
I touched my fingers to my lips. The feel of his mouth against mine lingered there, a sweet memory of the moment we’d just shared. Stupid, I told myself. I kept pushing him away. Why couldn’t I just let him love me? What was stopping me?
Saskia.
The Restored Society.
First Marshall Blake.
The 26ers.
Laria.
The whole damned world, burned by fire.
I’m just one girl.
That was why.
Wishing I could just be little Era Rae again trying so hard to please her professors at the Academy, instead of some genetically altered creation of a shadowy, evil cult, I lay down on the ground and called myself every kind of stupid for not just taking what was in front of me. I couldn’t do anything about the problems swirling around me. Jadran was offering to make things better. If I let him.
Sighing, I rolled over to keep my injured arm elevated. Sleep was a long time coming.
I heard Laria talking in her sleep again as I finally drifted off. I’m pretty sure she was calling for Jadran.
Nothing was ever simple.
The sun wasn’t up over the trees yet, just a bright yellowish line on the horizon, when Jadran woke me.
I blinked up at him. “You let me sleep the whole night?”
“Yes.” His eyes were ringed by dark circles, but his smile was genuine. “The Enforcers set up camp in Refuge for the night. They were no threat to us. Rest, is what you needed. I wasn’t the one who got her arm broken.”
Right. That had been me. “Fine, but I’m taking watch tonight.”
“You might not have to. If we get where we are going, no one will need to sit watch.”
“Where’s that?” I asked him.
“Does it matter?” Laria complained, her voice high-pitched and tense. She was sitting on the ground right where I had seen her sleeping, rocking herself back and forth with her arms wrapped around the knees of her simple cream-colored dress. “Does it matter? Refuge is gone. All of our friends and our family and the Elders are gone and it’s her fault!”
Her hand thrust out an accusing finger at me.
I flinched like I’d been struck. I know what happened to Refuge. It would have happened whether I was there or not. I know what the Enforcers did. I know what they would do to the survivors they took away, too. I’d tried to stop it. I really had. I tried to convince the people in Refuge to evacuate before it was too late but no one would listen to me. No one wanted to hear the truth.
They’d paid for it with their lives and that wasn’t my fault, because I’d tried to save them, but all the arguments in the world weren’t going to make me feel any better.
“Laria…” Jadran tried.
“No,” I interrupted him, standing up, untying the bindings around my arm. “She still doesn’t want to listen. Whatever.”
“You should keep your arm wrapped for another day, at least.”
I flexed it for him, lifted it up above midline, until the ache of it made me wince. “It’ll do. We don’t have the luxury of waiting and I’ll need both of my arms if we run into trouble. Let’s just go.”
It was hours of walking later before we saw anything other than trees. Jadran and Laria showed me how to find edible plants. A yellow flower called a dandy-lion was tart and dusty tasting but the wild plums sort of made up for
it. Sort of. It was enough to keep me from being hungry, anyway.
Judging by the sun, it was nearly midday when we cleared the last of the scraggly trees and stood looking out on a scene of complete annihilation.
What had once been a great city lay spread out from horizon to horizon before us. Buildings as tall as mountains rose up, broken and cracked and fallen in ways that exposed the bones of their structures. That was the only way I could describe it. They reminded me of the hanging animals I had seen in Refuge, dead and gutted and stripped of their flesh.
I’d never seen anything like this.
This was one of the places from the past. The Old Society. A place that had been teeming with life before the Event.
There was no life here now.
From where we stood, a wide open area of sand and dark mud stretched. It must have been a river once, judging by what I saw. Now it formed a borderland between us and the broken city.
Where there was no water, there was no life.
A bridge arched across the furthest half of the expanse, massive in scale. The section of it closest to us had crumbled to broken metal bits that had collected in huge jagged piles on the ground. Support framework thrust upward to the sky on the part that still stood upright, rising hundreds of feet high and leaning precariously, heavy cables that had once held it all together now hanging snapped and loose, creaking back and forth in the wind. The noise of it frayed my confidence.
This was the first time I’d ever seen a city. They took me to the Colony when I was just six years old, right after the Event. I tried to imagine what this place must have looked like before. Scary, I decided. Nothing should be this big.
In front of where the bridge touched land, far across from us, stood the bottom half of what must have once been a soaring monolith of steel and glass. It was wider across than the bridge itself, wider than most of the buildings around it, with a sloping base and large corner frames that made it resemble vid pictures I’d seen of pyramids. The top half had broken off some time ago, and I had no idea what heights it might have once reached.
“That’s where we’re going?” I asked. I kept my voice low and quiet, humbled by what I was seeing.
“Yes,” Jadran answered, sounding a lot more confident than I felt. “You wanted to know where my people’s caves are. In that place, is where they are.”
“That’s why you couldn’t get everyone to safety in time when the Enforcers attacked,” I realized. “Well. You said they were too far away.”
Laria pressed herself to Jadran’s side again as soon as I mentioned the Enforcers, as if invoking their name would make them appear out of the mud and dust. Oddly, I felt a sort of sympathy for her. Jadran and I knew about the world of the Restored Society. She was only just starting to see what kind of monsters they really were.
Still. Did she have to attach herself to him like that?
I had to look away from them. My eyes scanned the horizon instead, filled with the devastation of metal and stone that had once been a city. It was uncomfortable to stand here. Once, there had been life on this scale. Enough people to fill a hundred thousand places like this and more. Now it was all dead. The Enforcers were trained to go into places like this, where there might be pockets of humanity still holding on by their fingernails, exposed to radiation and sick and dying or… changed. There were singular dangers deep in the Outlands. Enforcers lived and died to make sure those dangers either stayed out here, or got eliminated.
For the Restored Society, that meant eliminating humans who chose to live in the wastelands. I wondered if maybe this was where all those Enforcers behind us were coming. To this city. Was there something here that was worth three columns of Enforcers?
I didn’t see how there could be.
“What was this place?” I asked Jadran.
“Jacksonville, is what it used to be called,” he told me, his eyes scanning ahead of us just like I’d done. “That was before the Event. Now, it doesn’t have a name.”
“Just one more part of the Outlands.”
“Correct.”
Hiking his weapons further up on his back, Laria on one arm and me close to his other side, he nodded to the broken city. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go.”
At first the depleted lakebed sucked at my boots, trying to draw me down into its mucky depths. Each step was a struggle. Laria lost both of the homemade woven boots off her slender little feet. I tried not to smirk. She wasn’t trained like me and Jadran. Step with your heel, keep your toes pointed up, and you aren’t walking barefoot.
She glared at me like that was my fault, too.
About halfway across it didn’t matter anymore. The surface of the lake became dried and cracked and hard as concrete. The city loomed above us, the creaking skeleton of the bridge filling the air with whines and moans and noises that stabbed at my brain. My nerves were stretched tight and I found myself unstrapping the rifle and carrying it at a low ready even though there couldn’t be anything out here to shoot at. Or anything out here that was even alive.
A piece of the bridge fell with an echoing cra-cack that boomed across the land. A moment later I realized I was down on one knee with my rifle aimed and my finger tensed on the trigger.
When I swallowed and stood up again, Jadran was watching me with a little amusement shining in his eyes. Laria sniffed and shook her head. Right. Like she hadn’t flinched closer to Jadran just now.
I licked my dry lips. “How far into the city are these caves?”
“The entrance is right there, actually.” Jadran pointed to where the base of the bridge sat against the far side of the riverbed.
Under the hulking giant death sculpture.
Of course that’s where it was.
Something flitted across my eyes, very close to my face. Some kind of insect, I supposed, but it was moving too fast for me to get a good look. It was fat and black and buzzing loudly, and that was all I needed to see. I took a step back from it, even though it had already disappeared from my field of view.
“It was just a bug,” Laria told me, her voice oozing with ridicule.
I was really keyed up. With everything that had happened since my last days at Colony 41 until now I had more than enough reason to be a little jumpy. But that wasn’t it.
“We were taught to avoid all insects.” I realized how stupid that sounded after the words were out of my mouth. I looked to Jadran for support. “You know? We were taught they carried disease and the only way to stay safe was to keep them from touching you.”
He nodded, and then shrugged. “Most of them are harmless.”
“Most of them?”
“Yes. Avoid the ones that throw their stingers.”
I couldn’t tell if he was kidding or not.
We kept going, but now my eyes darted all around us. On the ground, in the air, on my own clothes. I know that we were lied to in the Colonies, and that disease doesn’t have to be the instant death sentence the Restored Society makes it, but still. Bugs.
Yuck.
I was so wrapped up in watching for insects that I hadn’t been paying attention to our progress. Now, I looked up to find we were at the other side of the riverbed, near the base of one of the bridge supports. A dry wall of dirt stood in front of us, where all of that river water would have been contained, once upon a time. A massive rust-colored spire shot up next to us, thick and round, towering so high overhead that the top of it was just a blur against the mid-day sky. I got dizzy looking up at it. Dizzy, and sick. I know it was irrational, but I was sure that it was going to fall on us at any moment and we would all die because there would be no way to run away from that much… cold, sterile death…
When Jadran tugged on my hand, I floundered. I couldn’t catch my breath or find my footing. I sort of ended up in his arms, holding on for dear life, with my face buried in his very strong chest, trying to stop myself from falling on solid ground.
The world stopped spinning as he held me.
“If you
two are done,” Laria snarled. “We should go in.”
I jerked back from the comfort of his embrace and tried to act like it was only because I didn’t need him to steady me anymore. Not because I was embarrassed by how nice it had felt.
And there it was. I had to admit I had feelings for him.
Jadran looked like he wanted to tell me something but instead he just nodded, and turned to a gap in the rise of the dirt wall, an irregular shaped hole, right next to the bridge pillar. It nearly blended into the shadows. I hadn’t noticed the opening to the caves until now.
“What’s in there?” I had to ask.
“Some supplies,” Jadran answered. “A network of tunnels under the city, is what it used to be. Our people took them over a few years after the Event. When we knew it would be safe.”
“Safe?”
Jadran eyed me levelly, and I knew what he was going to say. “When we knew the latent radiation would not kill us.”
It was one of the very real dangers in every area of the Earth that hadn’t been a Colony safe zone. Fallout from the directed nuclear weapons that had burned the planet. I knew at this point, ten years after the Event, that there would still be “hot” zones to avoid but for the most part, the world could be walked again.
There were other dangers out here to worry about.
Without another word, Jadran led us through the tall, narrow opening. Laria followed close behind. I brought up the rear.
Somewhere inside, past the edges of the slanting sunshine, I heard Jadran grunting with effort, moving something that apparently didn’t want to move, and then lights snapped on overhead with a soft hum.
I blinked up at the long tubes of pulsing white in their metal canopies on the ceiling. After the austere lifestyle of the villagers in Refuge, I hadn’t expected this.
“You have electricity here,” I said, pointing out the obvious.
Jadran was setting a long lever in place with a piece of chain, over against a wall that turned out to be made from solid concrete. There were other metal plates on the wall with buttons and levers, and I could only wonder at what they all did. What had this room been, before the Event?