by K. C. Finn
“Bollocks!” Kip shouts, slamming a fist against his thigh. “She’s done this before. This is how The Evil One got away with massacre in the Westlands. She made it look like we were a threat to the whole nation, and that she had no choice but to rain fire on us.”
“We’ve gotta get out of here before they gain enough media support to make that call,” Apryl says with a nod. “Grandpa’s still drawing pictures, but I’m getting a good collection for the road ahead. As soon as that tunnel’s ready, boss…”
“I know.” I pat her shoulder, looking deep into the eyes of Ivana Van Hope. “Dad says we’re working right underneath the siege squads to the south now. It has to be quieter, slower work to get by them, but after that it’s maybe only a half mile more to the Underground connection.”
“What’s that in days?” Kip asks.
“Two,” I reply. “Maybe three.”
He shakes his head. He doesn’t say it, but I know it means we don’t have that kind of time. If this is what happened to his people when Prudell wanted them eradicated, we could have a fire strike raining down on us by morning. If Prudell decides to do what she did to the Highland’s safe haven, we won’t have a shot in hell of surviving it. We’re lucky that there’s still so much doubt and trouble within the System itself. She can’t move without mass approval right now, else she might face another riot from those she’s placed closest to her.
The feed is still coming in live, and Ivana is chatting away.
“I’ve got an idea. Something that might stall them awhile on the decision.”
I drag Kip close, whispering into his ear. The Westie doesn’t even nod his approval, but takes off like a shot out of the room. Apryl watches him whoosh by, then swivels to face me.
“I wish I could get him to move that fast on a coffee run. What the heck did you tell him to do?”
“Wait and see,” I say, pointing at the screen.
We watch Ivana continue to talk. Other images appear in a split screen beside her, profiling the history of the Highlanders and their most bloody acts against the System. There’s a photograph of Malcolm, his face covered in blood. It looks like it was taken from a helicopter some years ago, the image fuzzy and over-zoomed-in. His mouth is open in what looks like a roar, his hair still mostly dark and his body thicker and stronger than it is these days. Or was, these days.
I catch myself thinking of the past, and shake my head. Apryl is watching the photos scroll, but then she suddenly jolts in her chair.
“Oh Lord, did you tell him to climb that?”
She points an accusing finger at me, though she can’t tear her eyes from the screen now. I watch too, creasing my brow.
“I told Kip to get to the top of the Bastion Tower. I didn’t tell him to climb the outside of it specifically.”
And yet, right behind Ivana Van Hope’s shiny head of hair, Kipling Ross is scaling the Bastion Tower with one of our grappling hooks. He’s on the right side of it to be unmistakeable, a black-clad figure crawling up the pale grey concrete. Hand by hand, he hooks and ropes his way onto the flat roof, standing between the crenulations that make it look fort-like from the reporter’s safe distance. Apryl clasps her hands together under her chin.
“Oh Jesus. Don’t fall. Please baby, don’t fall.”
My heart is in my throat, but I trust Kip. He knows what he’s doing, and he’s doing exactly as I’ve asked. From under his camo striped jacket, Kip unveils a white bedsheet from one of the cabins. He waves it back and forth, its huge mass catching in the breeze as an unmistakeable sign of surrender.
“You told him to surrender us?” Apryl finally turns, a hand on her hip.
“They won’t actually come here expecting us to hand ourselves over,” I say, shaking my head. “And it’s not what The Evil One wants. She wants to flatten us from afar, not negotiate releases and imprisonments. But the cameras are seeing the white flag, even if Ivana Van Snot-face hasn’t noticed it yet. It’ll have to create an argument. No-one can justify bombing a site that’s just given themselves up.”
“We’re losing signal,” Ivana says suddenly on the television screen. “This is Ivana Van Hope, reporting from-”
The screen dies. A moment later, the System logo appears with its bronze arrow and lightning bolt. The label reads TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES, and it makes me smile. Apryl rises from her seat, and in the same moment a figure bursts through our doorway. It’s Goddie, grinning and rushing towards me. I haven’t seen him much either in the last few days, and his presence lightens the room.
“Hey guys,” he begins, but Apryl shakes a hand at him.
“Sorry, hun. Gotta go get my suicidal boyfriend down from the roof.”
Goddie watches her go, then blinks at me.
“Don’t worry,” I reply. “All part of the plan. What were you going to say?”
“I got real good news for ya, boss.” Goddie is practically bouncing. “Cornell’s started to talk at last. Good stuff. Damn useful. I want ya to hear it first-hand.”
*
Goddie’s excitement is infectious on the walk to the room where he’s been holding Cornell. It has taken him days to break the young man down and, when I see him, I’m surprised to find he’s not looking any worse for wear than when I beat him up in one of my rages. When he locks eyes with me, Cornell flinches. Goddie has him holed up in a training room in a far corner of the interior buildings, tied to a chair that only looks back into the bare, semi-dark room. Cornell licks his lips, craning his neck forward against the bonds across his shoulders.
“Can I have that water now?”
Goddie waggles a finger at him. “Ya know how dis goes. Tell Raja what ya told me, den we’ll talk about water. Maybe even some food too.”
The growl in Cornell’s gut is audible. My violent approach couldn’t force a word of truth from the young man’s lips, but Goddie’s torture is far more subtle. This is what we’ve come to: starving our fellow recruits until they talk. I wonder if they started that way with Dad, when he was holed up in the Justice Tower at Sunlight City, or whether they just went straight into the unspeakable physical pain. When I blink, I find Cornell looking at me with a twitch in the corner of each eye. His reactions are scattered, his pupils wide in the darkened room.
“He’s a little hazy, but pay it no mind,” Goddie tells me. He rounds Cornell’s chair as the boy’s head droops. Goddie slaps his cheek lightly, and Cornell comes round again. “He doesn’t get much sleep in here, do ya Corny? I’m just so noisy, all night.”
I take a few steps towards the captive. He does look drowsy, like his ropes are holding him up on the chair rather than holding him back. Cornell’s hazy gaze clears when I lock my eyes with his. He squints, his lips beginning to move silently.
“The Reavers have been coming here for a few months now,” I tell him.
Cornell nods with a heavy slunk of his neck. “Yeah. My birthday.”
“Your what?” I lean closer to hear his mumblings.
“My birthday. The Reavers have been coming since then.”
“In June?”
Another lazy nod. “In June. The Reavers. Every few days. Fibonacci.”
“Fibo-what?” Goddie looks at me over his head. “He never mentioned dat before.”
I know something, something vague from way back in my Underground days and our meagre library sessions, but I can’t pull it to the front of my mind.
“It’s a number pattern, I think. Malcolm was looking for a pattern in the Reaver visits. He had Sheila writing down dates and times.”
“Numbers,” Cornell says, his head lolling.
Goddie picks him up by the chin, poking his face again. “Now, now. Ya haven’t told her de best bit yet. Tell Raja about ya parents, and why ya came to de Legion all dem years ago.”
“Water…” Cornell licks his lips again. “Please.”
Goddie looks at me. I nod. I watch him feed the teen a few sips, then Cornell coughs so hard he rocks his chair. It seems to bolster him at last
, waking him fully to the room. He looks around, then sighs.
“My parents were part of the Reaver Project. When they protested against what the System intended to do with the tech, they were threatened with death to keep quiet.”
I know this story well, from Lucrece’s diary. Her father, Doctor Esparza, lost his life in a devastating fire for the same reason. Cornell’s lip curls down, his eyes ringed red. He looks down, shaking his head sharply.
“I wouldn’t go with them. They left me. They left me and they said they’d come back.”
“Your parents left the System?” I ask. Cornell nods. “And what does that have to do with your birthday and the Reavers?”
“When I first came to the Legion, Briggs interrogated me.” Cornell sniffs hard. I roll my sleeve down to dry his nose, and he looks up into my eyes again. He half-smiles, just in one corner, but it soon fades. “Briggs said my parents stole technology from the project. They took stuff with them when they ran from the System, and I must have known where they’d gone with it.”
“And did you?” I ask.
Cornell shakes his head. My chest deflates just a hair. “Of course not. I was twelve. I didn’t even know what their work was about until they disappeared. I had to ask around, quietly. I had to find out bits and scraps over the years.”
“And now the Reavers are coming to the Legion, on certain days. Why? Can you tell us that?”
This time, the lad nods. “I turned eighteen. I think it’s my parents. Trying to get me to go back with them. Sending Reavers to take me home.”
Cornell has drooped in his seat, his face so low I can’t see it anymore. I motion to Goddie to give him some more water, then crouch down low to look up into his hangdog expression. He curls his lip, this time into a grimace.
“I don’t want to go back with them. They left me. I ended up here, instead of happy where I was at home. Why couldn’t they have let things be? Having to have some stupid sense of justice instead of… Caring. This is my home. The Governor gave it me. Spared me. And I’ll protect it.”
Much as I loathe Prudell, I can’t argue with Cornell’s urge to survive. I’m not sure I could go back to parents who abandoned me that way either, rebels or not. I pat Cornell’s knee, but he spits on my hand. Goddie gives him a slap, and I wince at the crack of flesh on flesh. I shake my head as I get to my feet. Goddie hangs back, his eyes boring into me.
“Is there more?” I ask him.
He shrugs. “I’ve been making some notes. I have de parents’ names. Cornell’s real name. Where dey lived in de System before dey were threatened.”
Cornell has slumped again. He’s asleep for real this time, his breathing heavy and his mouth open wide with pure exhaustion. I pull Goddie away by his elbow, our words hushed in a lightless corner of the room.
“Dis is great, right?” He still has that brightness to his voice. “If Cornell’s right and dese Reavers belong to his folks instead of de System, den Malcolm could be alive and with allies. If dey rebuilt de Reavers de same way, as portable life support, den-”
“Maybe,” I cut in, nodding.
My head is thudding, an echo that feels like Briggs is crashing around in there, smashing my brain up. Goddie holds my shoulders, then one hand moves to feel my brow.
“I thought ya’d be over de moon. What’s happening in dat head of yours?”
I clench my fists, willing the noise to stop. I have to turn away from Cornell and his hanging form. Just a few days ago, I almost killed him. And I’ve let Goddie find a slow way of doing the same.
“You can let him sleep now. Get him a proper meal.”
“Of course,” Goddie says right away. “I wasn’t going to keep-”
“I know.”
He pulls me in, kissing the top of my head. There’s a shunt of breath from further into the room, where I thought we’d left the tortured recruit sleeping. A single word that Cornell utters.
“Queers.”
Goddie sighs. “Der are some things dat just never change, eh?”
I think about the beating, the drums of war in my head. The onslaught of rescue and injury, pain and death. Blood on the hands of both sides, doing whatever they can to hurt one another. I bury my face deep in Goddie’s chest, and maybe he can’t even make out my reply.
“No matter how much we try.”
Thirteen
On August 13th, a new plan is set. We have eked another few days out of the siege with the white flag. Whilst the media discussed whether it was a trick or not, the tunnel has almost reached completion, but now the likes Ivana Van Hope are starting to make those comments again. Lies are circulating about more smoke and bodies, and the perimeter of soldiers have moved themselves further away, forming a wider circle around the Legion.
“They’re getting out of the way.” Kip rings his hands together at the morning meeting. “Not good. Not good at all.”
“We need one more night,” Apryl says, trying to wrest one of the Westie’s worried hands from his own grip. “If the Fibonacci sequence works out, then tonight the Beetles are coming back. We can send someone to find Hadrian.”
She speaks in code because Stirling is finally allowed to join us at the table. He and Sheila sit at the far end, his pensive look right opposite me. He nods. Sheila only stares at the table ahead, her hands gathered stiffly in her lap.
“And what about this?” Stirling asks. He too looks at the table now. “Is this what the rest of us are going to do?”
Pieces of scrap paper are arranged all over the meeting table. Apryl wasn’t kidding when she said that Briggs’s Reborn hand had continued to scribble during her tests with him. She now has a full map around the original schematic of a single building, taped together to form a wider city, and a landmass beyond it. I see the five-pointed pentagon, connected by monorails, and I can already imagine the pale white walls that enclose this world from our own. Mancunia, the northernmost city, sits at Goddie’s elbow to my right. Sunlight City is down between Stirling and Andrew.
And right in the centre is the building we need to find. Apryl points a finger at it.
“Our target is in Tania. Prudell’s capital.”
It makes sense that the heart of the System would literally be at its centre, but breaking into one of the outer towns has already proved nigh-on impossible without insider help. Getting right into the middle, through every defence imaginable, seems impossible even to me. I have no idea where to start.
“Hang on,” Apryl says. Her radio is buzzing, and she takes it out and holds it to her ear. “What’s up?”
She listens, and the whole table waits for her in silence. I watch her expression turning stiff, and even Kip stops worrying and takes hold of her arm. The radio slips from her grip and Apryl turns back to us, biting her lip.
“The siege soldiers have totally retreated into the woods. Every last one of them.”
The airstrike is coming, then. We don’t need any more media push to tell us that our time at the Legion must be at an end. Dad is further down the line than Goddie, his hands now permanently covered in tunnel dirt it seems. He gets up at Apryl’s news and approaches me.
“I’ll redouble the efforts. Extra bodies in the tunnel, more support. We need to connect that thing up right now.”
I nod, but I catch Dad’s sleeve before he can move off. “Is it deep enough to get away from the strike without collapsing?”
“I hope so,” Dad says. “We built it like we built the original tunnels. Deep and strong.”
“And how many could we fit in there to hide, even if it wasn’t finished?”
Dad sucks his teeth. “Not everyone. Not even half of everyone here.”
His news hits the pit of my stomach hard. “Get digging then.”
Apryl has recovered her radio to keep talking, and she steps away from the table to continue as Dad rushes off. People are standing all around me, leaning over to talk and waving for my attention. Andrew’s furious face is the one I catch sight of first.
“I need to prep all our units for Evac at the first sound of planes overhead, boss.”
Before I can even nod, Stirling jumps in. “What about the Legion kids? We can’t leave them to run around blindly when the fire strike hits.”
Andrew grimaces. “But if we prep them too, we’ll all crush each other to death trying to get down the tunnel.”
“Not if the tunnel breaks through in time,” Stirling counters.
Andrew’s voice is a growl when he answers. “I won’t die of suffocation in an open grave for you to be noble.”
“What’s wrong with being noble? What’s wrong with trying to save five hundred children?” Stirling pushes back.
“Nobility is for martyrs,” Andrew croons. “And it’s not your decision to make, laddie.”
He looks to me. They all do, once the heat of the argument between the Highlanders has quelled. And though he says nothing by my side, I hear Goddie’s warnings in my head about the leeway I give Stirling so often. I’m no stranger to the tunnels and I’m not afraid of a squash, but the threat of overcrowding and caving in was always real growing up. None of us wanted to feel that close to our bodies, keeping us trapped until the world goes black. Andrew doesn’t press, because it’s not his place to do so, but Stirling’s eyes are pleading with me. He shifts his lips like he’s going to tell me what to do again.
“As soon as the tunnel connects, you can prep every kid for Evac too.” I keep my eyes on Andrew, trying not to see Stirling shaking his head. “But in the first instance, it’s our people we brief for escape. The news of the strike doesn’t reach a single kid’s ears. You got that, everyone?”
Everyone answers except for Stirling. I dismiss the room to make their emergency preparations, and he’s the one still standing there when others have gone to do what I’ve asked of them.
“What’s next?” He says, his voice cracking. “Are you gonna go around shooting people willy-nilly? Torture? Death? Mass graves?”