by K. C. Finn
He might catch me. It’s not a thought I’ve ever had before. I’ve never met anyone who could. Even taking breakneck corners, I can hear him roaring up behind me with breath enough to curse me out. He’s catching up. Ahead the corridor takes another swerve, and beyond that I spot the doors that lead into the Bastion, now void of their armed guard. The doors are still barricaded, the poles that hold them shut coming closer with every stride I throw out. There’s no sound from within. The imprisoned kids are still sleeping, with no idea of what’s approaching overhead.
I make a sharp turn, skidding to a halt at the doors and pushing at the poles. They’re rammed tight, refusing to move against my sweat soaked palms. Briggs’s enormous shadow clouds my left side, his feet slamming the ground like they’re deep in my head. I snap my gaze just as he makes a leap straight for me, and that’s when I duck. His massive leg catches me when he lands, knocking my shoulder with a heavy thud, but most of me gets out of the way in time. The rest of his impact hits the door, and his weight bends the poles until they snap. Briggs goes rolling into the dark doorway.
I hobble after him and snap on the Bastion lights. Some of the kids are awake already, standing in guard positions as others crowd around them, still rubbing their eyes. I cup my hands to my mouth, but the shoulder where Briggs smashed me doesn’t move. In trying to move, the arm swings down low with a searing pull of pain. It’s like someone’s shoved a hot poker into the joint. I watch it hang for a second, but I drag my eyes back to the room, clearing my throat.
“Courtyard, south west corner. This is an evacuation! Your precious System is sending a fire strike to kill us all.”
“What?” Briggs yells, but he’s suddenly lost in a sea of panic.
Three hundred kids rush him at once, climbing the man mountain and pushing him around to get out and make a run for it. Once he’s out of sight entirely, I grab my lame arm and start to run too. Between the bad leg on one side and the agony of my shoulder on the other, scores of kids are outrunning me now. Whatever we said about evacuation before, I couldn’t be the one to leave them locked in. With any luck, they’ll help me meld into the crowd, and Briggs will be too lost and trampled to follow us.
“Hey! Hey Bullet! Come here!”
Someone calls ahead as I amble up. Standing to the side of the corridor is the girl with the bandaged leg, the one I shot several days ago. I don’t even have a moment to be happy that she didn’t bleed out. She pushes her long, dark hair over one shoulder, beckoning again as I stumble close. For a moment I wish I had a gun, just in case she has some kind of sick revenge in mind, but when she takes hold of my arm I can only scream like, well, a girl. There’s no joy in her expression at my pain, though, and she takes a measured look at me, holding my shoulder at an angle and my upper arm firm in her other hand.
She pushes forward without a word, and I hear a sickening crack. I scream out again, but then she’s pulling my good side into a run. I still have to clutch my sore arm, but every step is better now instead of worse. It works again, my fingers flexing, my shoulder back in place. Dislocation. I wouldn’t have known how to do a thing about it, but the girl I shot did. She holds onto me, pulling me until I catch her up.
“How do we get out?” She shouts over the din. “And what do we do about him?”
It doesn’t take a genius to know who she’s talking about. We’re almost at the opening that will lead us out into the courtyard, and when I glance back there’s no sign of Briggs following, only a long stream of black-clad legionnaires with bleary eyes and pale faces. I have no idea how to combat the possibility that Briggs might try to enter the tunnel, other than to see if my literal helping hand might stall him again when the moment comes. The System’s Heart clearly has limited strength, but the stall was long enough. It might have even been long enough to kill Briggs, if I’d been holding the right weapon.
I can’t even open my mouth to answer before the earth literally shakes beneath our feet. There’s a deafening bang, then another and another. I drop to the ground, my ears covered, huddling in a clump with the other teens. Some of them drop and some just fall, collapsing as the world shakes. The strike has hit, somewhere really close. The tang of blood hits the inside of my mouth, my cheeks clenched tight against my back teeth. My eardrums shudder like they might just burst, but then the rumbling subsides. There are cries up ahead, out in the courtyard, but this part of the building seems to have escaped a blast.
They’ll come back, of course, and hit again. We have only minutes to make it.
Fifteen
The courtyard is on fire, and half the walls are gone. The South Tower, my home from home, no longer stands where I’d expect to see it. Worse than that, the entrance to the tunnel tent is barely visible beside a toppling heap of rubble. Part of the cloth has collapsed in the blast and the passage through is full of dirt and loose concrete shards. I have to push my way through a crowd of stalling and retreating legionnaires to see the extent of the damage. Once I can see the courtyard before me, I realise that some of the kids were already out here, looking for freedom when the firebombs rained from the sky.
Bodies litter the debris.
When Valkyrie went down, I didn’t have to see the carnage that it caused. Here, there are short figures in black, some face down and others face up. Closer to the sight of the direct hit on the tower, there are parts of what used to be people. Bile hits my tongue, the thump of my pulse deep in my throat. I try not to look at the upturned ones, the faces caught half in horror at the sight of their own end. It would have been worse if I’d left them in the Bastion. It would have been all of them, not just these few.
“Straight ahead to that collapsed awning, soldiers! Dig it out! Escape route is underneath.”
Some of them move, but others are stuck, staring at the littered bodies ahead. I shove a few in the back, shunting them until it forces their feet to work again.
“Make a move, that’s an order! Those planes are turning for a second hit.”
That gets them moving, a horde working their way towards the rubble pile. The eldest and strongest are there first, digging deep with their bare hands to clear as much crud as possible from the pile in front of our entryway. I walk through the scattered remains from the blast, picking up the odd helmet and hoping that at least some of them were abandoned before their owners died. I hand them around for the smaller kids to scoop out the dust and smaller debris, and soon there’s a mass of activity at the mouth of our salvation.
“Got it!” Someone cries from the opening, and slowly I see the diggers disappearing.
They haven’t left much of a way through for the rest of us, only chopping away at the same gap in the rocks until it’s barely large enough for a single person to pass through. The kids file in, one by one, and the anticipation and agitation is palpable for those at the back. Scuffles are taking place, shouts and cries of “Get off” and “Me first” that I can’t see beyond the rest of the scurrying pack.
“Goddammit, get some order!” I bark over the din. “There’s no use being in the tunnel just to get crushed to death.”
There’s a lump in my throat. Aside from the dead out here, everyone else from my crew had vanished by the time my fight with Briggs was through. That’s at least a hundred of my men and maybe two hundred of the co-operating legionnaires, already deep beneath our feet somewhere. I have no way of knowing if that tunnel has connected yet or not. We were close, but no announcement had been made before the planes came sweeping. Never mind these kids crushing one another to get in, what’s happening to the ones crushing to get out?
The line is moving, and I can only hope that means there’s room for us all. I don’t know when I made the decision to go down last, but I’m standing back from the others as they file through. Counting heads and ignoring the small, still bodies that haunt the corners of my gaze. The more I look, the more the dead surround me. And though the System’s planes killed them, I take each body onto my back. Each child who we should have be
en able to free. Each parent who’s sitting watching their television set, and thinks that we, the rebels, killed their babies.
“Form a line, for God’s sake! I swear I’ll leave you out here if you cut again. This isn’t the canteen, children.”
There’s a snort nearby. A lithe but limping figure approaches me, her curtain of long hair neatly tucked into her collar now. She’s covered in rubble and dust, as if she was up front digging, but she’s still here. And now she has a gun. I stiffen, fists poised in case I need to knock the weapon from her grip, but the girl who fixed my shoulder lets it hang lazily from her neck strap.
“You sound like Briggs.” She grins when she speaks.
I glance back the way we came, from the corridor leading to the Bastion. There are only the doors we threw open, beyond the smoking wreckage and sea of bodies. No haunting figure or crushing weight. My leg twitches at the mere thought.
“He’d be out here if he was able,” I muse.
It’s not a question, but the girl nods anyway. “Maybe the kids trampled him like they did at Sunlight. It killed him before.”
The line of kids is vanishing, maybe only fifty to go. We shuffle closer to the entrance and I nurse my arm, kneading the muscles a few times around the delicate burn of reattachment. I quirk a brow at the girl.
“If you hate him so much, why run from me? Why let me shoot you?”
Her leg’s not in a bad state, considering the accuracy of my shot. I wonder if it was one of ours who dressed her wounds.
“How did I know whether you were any better or worse?” She shrugs. “I look out for me. Nobody else.”
I hold out the hand of my good arm. “Raja.”
She takes it, squeezing a little too hard. “Nema.” She cocks her head. “You took a boy’s name?”
“I was a boy, for a while.”
Nema smirks. “Is it any easier?”
I chew my lip a moment. “About the same.”
There are maybe a dozen kids ahead of us, but something is starting to slow them up. I take a few steps forward, moving along the line to look into the tent. A group are gathered at the entrance, pushing the furthest person I can see.
“I can’t!” the boy cries. “There’s someone in front.”
“What’s happening?” I call in.
“We can’t get in! They’ve stopped moving forward.”
That lump in my throat gets bigger. “Be patient. Someone could be stuck.”
They could all be stuck. And somewhere, right at the end of it, my father is trying to dig us out. Everyone I know is buried six feet under, and that’s the way they’ll stay if this line doesn’t suddenly move. I wring my hands, my body burning with the ache of everything that has gone before. There’s a hum in my ears. I don’t know when it started, but I rush to unblock them, hoping it will pass in a moment. I shove my fingers in my ears, shaking them out, but it’s still there. That low, droning hum that none of us want to hear.
“Raja, they’re coming back.” Nema clutches her gun, for all the good it will do her.
Dying by Briggs’s rotten hand is one thing, but being picked off by some anonymous missile dropped from a plane is quite another. As the sound of the strike slowly rises, the kids in front of me are clamouring to get in again. The boy who spoke to me is nowhere to be seen, forced into the deep crush of the tunnel mouth by the pack behind him. I think of the massive hulking body of Augustus Briggs, and how these six hundred feet have put him out of action. What damage they will do if they rush again now, I can’t begin to guess.
The planes are coming. I can hardly see the sky beyond the floodlights to know how close they are, but the noise is growing every second. As I stare into the blinding light, an idea sparks. I rush to Nema, glancing all around.
“Do you know where the controls are for these lights?”
She bites her lip. “Yeah, but-”
I shake her shoulder hard. “No buts, let’s go!”
I push and Nema starts to lead, taking us back across the courtyard. “Raja, the only control panel I know of is inside the Bastion. There must be another somewhere. We could try-”
Now that I know where I’m going, I take off in front of her despite my injuries. “No time! They’re coming back!”
I don’t hear Nema follow me. I understand it, the need for self preservation, and I almost went that way myself when I first joined this place. But if it weren’t for Stirling, Goddie and Apryl, those wonderful friends who threw themselves in at the deep end for each other, and for me, I wouldn’t be alive today. I run for the Bastion, despite the possibility of Briggs and the threat of the airstrike bringing the whole thing down on me. I have to stop the kids from making that final crush, and that means delaying the strike.
When my sore feet skid to a halt at the Bastion doors, Briggs is nowhere to be seen. He has left a few bodies in his wake, thrown around no doubt whilst he was struggling to get free. He is free, I reckon. And wide awake. Where he’s gone isn’t something I have the time to ponder. I rush for the desk that Sheila used to use, and beyond it there’s a panel in the wall that I remember. I tap the interface like a girl possessed, but it only shows the System’s austere logo. The bronze arrow points down, taunting like the strike that’s soon to land.
I grab for my radio, tuning and fumbling over the buttons.
“Apryl, are you there? Apryl? Come in?”
I let the button go. There’s nothing but static on the rest of the line. After a few more taps I get a new screen on the panel, but it’s only a pad to enter numbers. The damned thing needs a pin.
“Move!”
Nema does her speedy limp, dropping her gun on the desk as she sidles by me. She knows the pin, and once inside the panel she swipes through screens and menus like a pro. She turns, her eyes wide and lashes fluttering.
“What are we doing here?”
“Blackout,” I explain. “If they can’t see where to hit-”
“Then they’ll use tracking software,” Nema cuts in. “You brought me here for this?”
My gut lurches. My head and eyes ache like hell, and as I rub them a new idea forms. “What if we blind them? Can we rotate the lights to shine into the oncoming planes?”
“Better,” Nema says, returning to the panel.
“Incoming north west this time, judging by the noise.”
She nods, tapping away. The hum is loud enough now that it’s starting to enter the building, echoing against the walls and giving a faint rumble to the whole structure. The lights go out entirely, here and outside the Bastion’s windows, and we’re left with only the glow of the little panel to guide us.
Nema curses at the box. “South Tower connection is blown and it’s messing up the others. But I think I have two in the right direction.”
The hum turns to a buzz. I hear them like they’re flying straight into my throat, the power of the strike vibrating in the wall we’re both so close to.
“Just do it. We’ve no other choice.”
Nema flips a switch. The floodlights outside give only a sudden white glow to our otherwise dark surroundings. The planes scream overhead a second later and I drop to the ground, my arms protecting my head. I wait. Wait for the ceiling to drop and knock me out forever. No building falls. There’s no quake at our feet, and no screams or cries from those few remaining in the courtyard. The planes screech off, their shrill noise returning to a rumble. A rumble in the other direction.
“They’ll turn and try again,” Nema says. “Do we-”
“We know how long it takes them to turn now,” I cut in. “We have time. Let’s get back to the tunnel.”
I have bought us one precious moment, with Nema’s valuable help. We dash back to the doors to get out into the courtyard, Nema slightly behind me now. Her leg is wearing out from all the back and forth, a trail of blood following her bandages with every step. But I skid when I reach the doors and double back, pushing her in the chest to keep her at the doorframe. She tries to speak and I cup her mout
h, pointing with my bad arm out into the semi-shadowed yard.
Briggs is at the entrance to the tunnel. One of his metal arms is hanging off, and I’m disappointed to see it’s the left. He stumbles around like he’s punch-drunk, crashing into rubble piles and the helmets we left from the digging.
“Where did the other kids go?” Nema asks.
Maybe down the tunnel, maybe just away from Briggs. It’s hard to tell. And although it’s clear the SC isn’t at his best right now, without my trump card in his left hand, there’s no way I’m taking him on again.
“We can’t get down there,” Nema whispers.
“Even if we could, Briggs has found the entrance now. He’s trying to follow, however clumsy he’s being about it.”
His one good arm digs, though the SC falls flat on his arse every now and then. His balance is totally off, and it takes a shift of his body for me to make out the dent in the right side of his metal-covered head. I’d love to thank whoever did it. They may just have bought the rest of the Legion its lives.
Assuming the tunnel is working now.
“We can’t use it,” I say, turning my back. “We’ll have to go out overland. Get into the tunnel system another way and find the rest of them.”
“You and me?”
I look at her, for just one indulgent moment. She is strong and capable, skilled and fast. But scared witless, her wide eyes looking to me the same way I looked to Stirling, and to Malcolm.
“You saved my shoulder and my life, Nema. The least I can do is get you out of here alive.”
Sixteen
For the first few miles into the trek, I keep expecting Briggs to burst out of the forest. It isn’t until daybreak that the feeling subsides, when the trees around us speckle us with their light. We’re taking the long route, first south, then west through the forest, and the first sign of the river brings actual tears to my eyes. I wipe them away fast, glancing at Nema, but she’s already breaking rank to run for the water.