by Liam Clay
We press on for almost an hour, the monotony broken only by the occasional curious seabird and flitting mosquito. Then, without fanfare, the walkway comes to an end. But if there is a way over the wall here, I sure as hell can’t see it. There is no breach, no rope, nothing. Kai obviously thinks we’ve reached our destination though, because he puts his hands on his hips before switching to a cross-armed position.
“You are fools.” He tells Delez in a tone brimming with teenage disdain.
I can’t see my friend’s face, leaving me to imagine his struggle to keep from laughing. “You’ll get no argument there.” He replies lightly. “Most of us are dumber than twice-caught fish, myself included.”
The boy bristles even more, if such a thing is possible. “That’s not what I meant!” He points to the gun strapped to the Fractal’s back. “These weapons of yours may be fashionable, but what happens once their ammunition has been depleted? You will be helpless as newborns.”
Delez nods in a clear attempt to acknowledge the question’s worth. “You’re right about the guns, too. Realistically, we only have enough ammo for three, maybe four engagements. Less, if any of them drag out.” Removing his shear from its magnetic clip, he holds the weapon up for Kai to see. “Luckily, we also have these.”
In its current state, the device doesn’t look like a weapon at all, just a molded rubber pommel below a half moon guard. Then Delez flicks his wrist, and a full meter of polished titanium telescopes into being. The blade is straight along both sides and segmented like a box cutter, with the same angled point. When turned edge on the base segment is barely visible, the second is a rumor, and the tip is a figment of the imagination.
Kai seems doubtful. “Looks a bit flimsy.”
“I said the same thing to the tech who gave it to me.” The Fractal replies. “But watch this.” He squeezes a trigger on the grip, and then raps the blade against the curtain wall. There is a sharp crack accompanied by the smell of brimstone, and a deep vertical slash appears in the wall’s face.
“It uses sonic frequency matching to sever objects at a molecular level.” Delez informs the stunned boy. “The power source only activates when the trigger is depressed, and since motion charges the thing, its lifespan is basically infinite.” He flicks the blade closed with a grin. “Pretty cool, huh?”
“Very.” Kai says. And then, out of nowhere: “We’re coming with you.”
“Excuse me?”
“Did I stutter?”
“No, but... what about your godfather?”
Kai pulls a face. “Ven is living in a dream world. Do you know what people call the Sanctuary behind his back? The Iron Lung.”
“Let me guess. Because of the sound the wind makes through the tarps. Or is it all the oil drums? Or just because it sounds cool?”
“Don’t be stupid. We call it that because the Sanctuary was supposed to be a temporary solution, meant to sustain us until we found a better way to live. But if my godfather has his way, we will never leave. It’s like being on permanent life support.”
I could point out that a relocation might diminish Ven’s status, and that he doesn’t seem the sort of man to give up power easily - even if it means deluding himself and others. But maybe they’ve already figured that out for themselves.
“Your godfather will be super pissed if we let you come.” I point out.
“Good. Maybe he will be angry enough to come after you, and then he will finally see the truth.”
“What truth?” Tikal demands, shouldering her way to the front. Kai takes an involuntary step backward, but manages to meet the soldier’s eyes.
“That we were not meant to scavenge a feeble existence on the fringes of this island. We were meant to own it.”
“Sounds like culty nonsense to me. You’ve never been over the wall yourself, have you?”
The boy doesn’t answer.
“Thought not.” Tikal turns to Delez. “You want my advice? Leave the kids behind. Their goals don’t align with ours.”
“Ours?” I say. “What happened to ditching us as soon as we hit land?”
I had hoped to see her uncomfortable for the first time. No such luck.
“The situation has changed.” She says evenly. “I will be staying with you for now. And in my professional opinion, I think we should cut the youth loose.”
“We’re not kids!” Kai shouts, his point undermined somewhat when his voice cracks mid-sentence. Olia threads her way through the crowd to join him.
“My brother is right.” She says. “Do you think every ship that visits these shores is friendly? We have fought pirates before. Both of us have killed. Who among you can say that?”
Almost all of us raise our hands.
“Oh.” She says, momentarily deflated. Then she brightens. “If you don’t let us come, we won’t show you how to cross the wall!”
A knife appears in Tikal’s fist. “A thousand credits says you do.”
Delez holds up his hands. “Hang on there Mrs. Stabbypants. No one’s going to be shanking anyone just yet.”
With this comment, the Fractal succeeds where I had failed by bringing Tikal to genuine astonishment. Then she breaks out laughing.
“That’s Ms. Stabbypants to you.” She says with a wink. I steal a worried glance at Peace, but she is crouched down behind Tiana, watching a tiny crab scuttle across her forearm. God help us if Tikal and Peace ever come to blows.
Delez, meanwhile, is attempting to re-establish some control over the situation. “What’s your take?” He asks me loudly.
I make sure I’ve got the platoon’s full attention before replying.
“If we cross without them - assuming we can figure out how - they will probably follow us on their own. But you can bet your ass that Ven will assume we took them, maybe even by force. So we might as well keep them close and try to get us all back to the Lung in one piece.”
The conversation drags on a while longer, but my argument eventually carries the day. Looking both triumphant and terrified, Kai walks to the end of the platform and steps off the edge. The water stops at his elbows. We climb down after him and continue our journey.
Ten minutes later, we reach a vertical row of adhesive hooks that have been attached to the wall at two foot intervals.
“Our father planted these himself.” Olia tells us proudly, and another piece falls into place. The siblings want to find their lost daddy, but don’t think they can succeed alone. I wonder why Ven trusted them to lead us here. Couldn’t stomach the idea of ‘detaining’ his own godchildren, maybe. We start to climb.
The hooks enable an ascent not unlike that of a normal ladder. The lagoon stench falls away and the ocean grows larger. It’s a disappointing view, though - nothing but haze-blurred garbage to the horizons. Glancing up, I see that Kai has already vanished over the top. Delez goes next, and then it’s my turn. I swing a leg over the parapet, stand, and walk twenty feet to the wall’s interior side. And for the first time in fifteen years, the Hive unfolds before me.
Or a little bit of it does, anyway. The windfarm belt dominates the view, completely obscuring the island’s interior. Delez joins me in my survey.
“Bit anti-climactic.” He grunts.
“I’m okay with that. Climactic events tend to be fatal. But look on the bright side: at least we’re making progress.”
“Yeah, we’re progressing closer to the empire of one of the most dangerous people in human history.”
“You suck at the bright side.”
He shrugs and walks over to the siblings, who have located a trapdoor built into the walltop.
How did you know that was there?” Tiana asks as they wrestle it open.
“We come up here sometimes.” Olia tells her. “To keep watch.”
“For what?”
“Father.”
No one knows what to say to this, and so when the trapdoor swings open, we quickly turn our attention to the gaping hole it reveals. I wait for armed batchers to come surging
up into the light, but all we get is a musty smell that reminds me of an Underworld carpark.
After a brief discussion, it is decided that Peace and I will go first to scout the way. Olia asks to come too, and since she found the door in the first place, it doesn’t seem fair to deny her. We venture into the dark. My spheretorch (another gift from Ethan) detaches from its shoulder mount and floats ahead, illuminating our path. But there isn’t much to see - just an unpainted switchback stairwell leading downward. I suspect that we’ve stumbled upon an abandoned maintenance access point. Of all the ways I pictured myself returning to the Hive, this certainly wasn’t one of them.
After promising not to go far, Olia ventures ahead. Peace starts to prowl around me with her rifle out, alternating between making a show of protecting my person and eyeballing me through the scope.
“Could you please stop pointing that thing at me?” I ask after a while.
“Does it make you nervous?”
“Of course it makes me nervous! It’s a gun pointed at my face.”
“Guns aren’t dangerous,” she recites in sing song. “The people holding them are.”
“Yes, but guns make people more dangerous, and dangerous people make a habit of carrying guns. Either way it amounts to the same thing.”
She skips closer and digs me in the ribs with her elbow. “Don’t play coy with me, pretending like you hate fighting. We’re kindred spirits, you and I.”
As usual, I have no idea if she’s being serious or not.
“I think your reputation exceeds mine in that regard. I still can’t believe you’re actually Peace.”
“I’m not.” She replies after a pause. “Not really.”
My foot hovers over a stair. “No?”
She shakes her head. “Peace is a character. Other people made her, not me.”
“So you didn’t kill the man that murdered your parents? And all those people who watched and did nothing?”
“Oh, I killed them all right. And enjoyed it. But I’ve seen the movies the Topsiders made about me. The novels and the mangas too. And they don’t focus on what I did - they all try to guess why. That arthouse shit is boring, and they got it all wrong anyway. So that Peace, the famous one, isn’t me. She’s someone else.”
I stop myself from asking why she did kill all those people. She’ll be expecting that, and if I bore her this rare glimpse inside her head will probably vanish.
“Then who are you, actually?”
She doesn’t hesitate. “A convict.”
This could be taken one of two ways. In the first scenario, she is referring to herself as a captive of the media construct that is Peace. Crushed under the weight of her own mythos, unable to scrape an identity out of the few unedited memories left to her. I choose to assume the second.
“What was it like? Living in Australia, I mean.”
For anyone wondering, I’m not talking about the real Australia (which, ironically, may or may not still exist) but rather the Prison. So maybe it’s time I told you a little bit about the place.
In decades past, the Korezons used to shove Opacity’s most controversial criminals into a facility buried deep in the bedrock beneath the Underworld. Ever the multi-taskers, the family ran the place as a slave labor munitions factory, and an extremely productive one at that. For years, Australia fabricated enough arms and armor to supply the entire Opacian army.
But then the riot happened.
Think headless guards hanging from barred windows, tongueless shrinks drooling on network news and, most famously, a cockless warden set on fire outside the front gates. So, you know, fairly standard prison riot shenanigans. No, it was what the Aussies did next that made them a household name.
They organized. Formed sub-committees, elected a republic or bowed before a new king - no one knows. But whatever they did, it worked like a charm. And although jails are made to keep people in, they can keep them out just as well. The place became a fortress. Then the Aussies proved that they didn’t need a Topside management team to help them manufacture guns. Or body armor. Or bombs.
It was a PR nightmare for the Korezons. Something had to be done. So Carlel sent a full army division into the skyscraper that sits directly on top of the prison. Their orders? To storm the building top down, killing everything they encountered along the way.
Only things didn’t go quite as planned. Of the building’s 290 stories, it turned out that the Aussies had booby trapped the lower 230. And the floors that weren’t mined were manned, by trigger happy maniacs with an anti-authority complex so large you could drive a backhoe through the lobby. It became a battle of attrition: the Aussies ceding ground slowly, bleeding their opponents, sapping their will to fight.
The Topsiders finally called it quits around the 44th floor. Just threw down their guns and hightailed it back to the upper levels, with their own generals leading the way. Carlel was so mad that he disbanded the entire army not long afterward. And for years after that, Australia remained largely unchanged. They still made the finest weapons in Opacity, which they traded to the Underworld in return for food and clothing. They were still mysterious and withdrawn, and extremely violent when threatened. Still a massive embarrassment to Korezon, and still enjoying a cultlike fame.
Almost as much fame as the girl walking beside me, who has still yet to answer my question.
“You don’t have to talk about the Prison if you don’t want to.” I say carefully.
She disengages from some inner monologue of her own.
“No, it’s fine. Actually, it might be good to get some shit off my chest.” She grins at me. “Who knows, maybe you’ll even be able to commiserate. It sounds like your life has been almost as fucked up as mine.”
“I won’t argue with you there. So how about it: what is Australia like? Hell, I don’t even know how long you lived on the inside.”
“Since right after my parents were killed.”
“I see. So did you hijack a skiff and drive there yourself, or did they fish you out of the canals afterward?”
“Neither. Both of those rumors are totally false. In fact, the entire thing went down much different than in the stories. For one thing, the killer never tried to loot the corpses.” She doesn’t flinch as she says this, or show any sign that these are her parents we’re talking about. “He just stood there like a lump and let me shoot him. And the mob didn’t stand by and watch, either. Most of them were too busy fighting over the peas to even notice what I’d done.”
“Really? The Underworlders didn’t try to help your parents at all?”
“Help? They couldn’t have cared less. We were just a meal ticket to them - always had been. But the feeling went both ways. Our trips to the Underworld were about politics, not people. It was all optics.”
“Shit. Didn’t know that. And what happened next?”
“Nothing, really. I just said my bit about enjoying the peas and walked away. Aside from that guy with the voice recorder, I don’t think anyone even heard me.”
“Whoa, what? So how did you end up in the Prison then?”
“The Aussies kidnapped my ass, is how. Haven’t you ever wondered where they get the raw materials to make their precious guns?”
“Don’t they barter finished product for it?”
“No, they only trade for food. The ore is sourced from a mine they dug right under the Prison. Most of the work is done by machines, but they still need manual labor for some jobs. And small people in particular are always in demand.”
It takes a moment for this to sink in. “So they made you...”
“Not at first. The Aussies aren’t all psychotics; half of them are politicians who got sent down for trying to fuck with the Korezons. It didn’t take them long to figure out what they had in me. I was given my own rooms, a caretaker and a tutor, even a cat. For years, they fanned the flames of my hatred. Convinced me I was special. Taught me to shoot. And then, when I was old enough, they sent me out into the Underworld to take my vengeance.�
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“Why?”
“Because when I was at my peak, the entire Underworld was running scared. And what do scared people do?”
“Find god?”
“Buy guns. And guess who the Underworlders bought them from?”
“Ah.”
“Yeah. I was Australia’s golden child for a while there. Until I got tracked back to the Prison and drew the heat down on them.” She shows me her teeth. “That’s when they threw me down a mine shaft.”
“But then how did you wind up here?”
“A couple of months ago the Aussies made a mistake. They had us working on this tunnel that was supposed to connect the prison to a stretch of coastline just outside the city limits. A few of the big name politicians fancied themselves explorers, from what I heard. Wanted to get out and see the world; discover new and exciting cultures; maybe sell guns to them.”
“But they never finished it?”
“Oh, they finished it all right. There was even an unveiling ceremony with a ‘bringing our people out into the light’ type of vibe. Then, right in the middle of the show, a section of the tunnel collapsed.”
“For real?”
“Yup. Took out a bunch of the big names, and destroyed one of the prison’s richest mine shafts too. Crippled their economy instantly. And Korezon must have had moles - the human kind - inside the prison, because his people came calling not long afterward.”
Olia has probably reached the bottom by now, but there’s no way I’m cutting Peace off without hearing the rest of this.
“What did they have to say?”
“A lot, apparently. But it boiled down to an offer. Korezon would supply the Aussies with raw materials, and in return they would sell their entire output back to him. The politicians were all for it, but a group of hardcores refused on principal. And what started off as a disagreement escalated into a miniature civil war.”
She pauses to pick something out of her teeth. Examines it, eats it, continues.