by James Welsh
Stormrunner suddenly felt a scream next to her. She twisted and saw her new friend Adelita being dragged by one of the shadowy guards. She didn’t even know that the guard had been standing behind them – it was as if the soldier had unhinged from the darkness like a snake’s jaws as it swallows its prey.
As the guard hauled Adelita over to Milcom, the elderly man smiled generously. He opened his arms wide, exclaiming, “My child! Just when I thought I lost you…”
“You’re not my father!” Adelita screamed, trying to break free from the guard’s grip. But the masked man was too strong, carrying her with just one arm. She kicked in the open air as if she was drowning.
Milcom tried to look distraught, but he just couldn’t pull it off. “Of course I’m your father! Don’t I care for you, feed you, put a roof over your head? How much more can I be a father?”
The guard dropped Adelita on her feet in front of Milcom. Adelita tried to run away again, but the guard planted his thick hands into her shoulders, pinning her where she stood. She struggled for a few moments before realizing that it was no use. Then, looking up at Milcom with a hate no child should ever feel, she spat, “You’re not my father – you’re a bad man.”
“You’re too young to understand this. But when you get older, you’ll realize then that there is no difference – I have to be bad for your own good. Let’s go.”
Milcom roughly grabbed Adelita by the arm and began dragging her away. As she was being led away, Adelita turned and called out, “Stormrunner!”
Milcom stopped and looked down at Adelita curiously. “Who’s Stormrunner?” He then added with a sly smile, “Aw, did you make friends with some of the dirt?”
Adelita snapped, “She’s not dirt – she’s my friend! And she gave me food. At least let me thank her. Aunt Moa says to thank people who give you food…”
Adelita’s words were harvested early as Milcom slapped her across the face. The snarl in her voice gone, her lip trembling by instinct, Adelita looked up as Milcom growled, “How many times do I have to tell you not to say her name!”
But then, a thought crossed Milcom’s mind, and he immediately calmed down. He turned back to the silent gypsy camp and called out, “This Stormrunner, please step forward!”
Reluctantly, Stormrunner walked towards him, her knees shaking. She felt no urge to bow before the demon. But this Milcom had poisoned Guntram – from where she stood, Stormrunner could see that the gypsy lying in front of the trailer was no longer twitching. Resistance meant death, and Stormrunner was not going to let anyone else die that night.
Milcom looked at Stormrunner curiously as she approached, as if he recognized her from someplace. It wasn’t until she was standing in front of him that Milcom smiled with recognition.
“Ah!” He said. “I know who you are. You’re the little girl who’s been robbing the convoys! The description the guards gave was very accurate – although they said that you have blue eyes, when they’re clearly hazel.”
“What do you want from me?” Stormrunner asked shortly.
“Spoken like a little girl who’s grown up too quick! Now, this is what I’m thinking: you have two options. First, I have you arrested and executed for stealing from the charter’s supplies. But that’s not before I throw every gypsy in this camp off the cliff for harboring a known thief. Second, you come with me, and you work at Acheron’s granary. They need a new worker to distribute food, something I think you know a thing or two about.”
“Why? Why would you do that for me?”
Milcom cocked his eyebrow. “Don’t you see? The daughter of a powerful – and I do mean powerful – charter executive was hungry, and you fed her. And they say that an act of kindness never pays.”
“That’s all?”
“Well, it means working the rest of your life for us, but look at your choices, kid. You either work for the souls you hate, or you watch the mud you love die. So what’s it going to be?”
Stormrunner looked him steadily in the eye. After three seconds, she said, “I’ll go with you, but only if I can bring my brother.”
Milcom laughed. “You have a deal, little lady. Acheron always needs another lowlife desperate for a paycheck.” There was a pause as two fresh enemies glared at each other. Milcom was the first to speak. “Well, what are you waiting for? Call your brother over.”
Without looking away, Stormrunner called out, “Wolfmouth! Let’s go.”
Wolfmouth stepped out of the darkness, led by an invisible chain that his sister was pulling. But the twins understood each other at the genetic level. They knew that they had to sacrifice themselves in order to save the camp, the closest thing to a family they had left in the world.
As Wolfmouth stood next to his sister, Milcom noticed that the young boy had a stone in his hand. Not realizing that Wolfmouth had been throwing stones across the canyon when the guards had invaded, Milcom barked sharply, “You’re going to drop that rock right now. Don’t think you’re going to fight your way out of this.”
Wolfmouth started to protest, but Stormrunner silenced him. As he threw down the rock, Milcom said, “You’re going to learn that you’re going to hold only what we tell you to hold. Let’s get going.”
As Milcom’s army and their captives began to withdraw, the demon suddenly stopped. “I have to check something before we leave.”
The guards halted immediately, and waited patiently as Milcom trotted past the staring gypsies, towards the spot where Guntram had fallen. He knelt down and pressed a finger against the man’s neck, digging for a vein of pulse. He got there just in time to feel one long beat and nothing more – Guntram had just played the last note of his opera.
“Hmm,” Milcom breathed, mildly interested. He checked his watch. “It took him four minutes to die. Interesting – I thought it would have been shorter.”
***
2196 AD
It was later that day when something important had happened: Wolfmouth had lied to Stormrunner for the first time in their lives. It was something he had never considered before, and not because he was the definition of honesty – far from it. It was because he thought his twin sister would immediately smell the lie on him. But when he told her that the shipment of food that had arrived just a few hours before was larger than anticipated, she accepted the lie without question. And he wondered why, if it was so easy to lie to her, he didn’t start it sooner in life.
But now was as good a time as any to start lying. He needed her to believe that the food would be more plentiful this time around. His theory was that the temptation would be overwhelming then, that Stormrunner would feel obligated to relieve the colony of its windfall in food. And when she broke into the storeroom under the camouflage of night to steal it, Wolfmouth would be there hiding, waiting.
As the last shift of the day wound to a close, the workers left the granary to head to their apartments above. Wolfmouth started to leave, and then smacked his forehead. “I have to stay back for just a minute,” he told his assistants. “I forgot my book down in the storeroom.”
“You want us to stay behind?” One of the assistants asked.
“No, no, that’s okay. You all go ahead. It’s been a long day for all of us. I’m just going to grab the book and close the granary.”
The granary workers didn’t need to be told twice – Wolfmouth was right that it had been a long day. But then again, every day for them was long. Wolfmouth stood at the granary door and watched the workers walk down the long tunnel, the overhead lights following their steps like an eagle. He watched until the lights dimmed into the distance before stepping back into the granary.
As he walked around the Dives, towards the elevator platform, something felt wrong in the air. Everything – even his footsteps, even the waterfalls – was silent, like the second before the panther’s leap. It was almost as if there was another person in the granary with him. But as Wolfmouth looked around, he didn’t see anyone else. He figured that he was just imagining things. After a
ll, it was the first time he had ever found his self alone in the granary.
Wolfmouth took the elevator down to the storeroom. Once the platform clicked against the stone floor, he hopped off and walked down one of the storeroom’s many aisles. In the glow of the light, he found the hiding place that he had picked out earlier that day: an empty crate, lying on its side. With a grunt, he pushed the crate on its side across the floor, until its opening was just a few feet away from the wall. He then squeezed himself between the crate and the wall and dove into the box.
It was there, in the empty stomach of the harvest, where Wolfmouth sat for what felt like hours. The dimensions of the crate were cramped, enough to pump the air out of any panicked soul. Wolfmouth managed to keep the claustrophobia caged inside of him by projecting himself out of his box. He thought years back in his footprints, back when he was a child walking on the cliffs overlooking the River Sedna. That was a happier time, before his sister cracked a deal with Milcom.
The timeline since that moment was a tightrope drawn taut in the sand, and Wolfmouth was still learning his balance. There was his side, a side that believed in the rationale behind rationing, security through moderation. He would rather eat a little every day than to have a feast today and starve tomorrow. But then there was his sister’s side, a side that loved charity like it was a sin. Stormrunner’s urge to give away bordered on the pathological, and yet no one looked at her and saw a criminal. That was because she was giving them second helpings of food and no one was ever executed for that. If anything, they loved her for it. Bribing people is only socially acceptable when it’s done with food.
But there would come a time when the colony would regret their greed. Wolfmouth understood this because it had already happened in the past – just two years before, to be more precise. The granary’s harvest that year was expected to be weak, and so the charter back on Earth sent additional food supplies with a starling frigate. However, the frigate experienced technical issues, causing it to be delayed by four months while technicians back home scrambled to fix it remotely. The colonial leadership had learned their lesson from the last food riots, which had occurred almost a decade earlier. They kept it under wraps, and none of the colonists were the wiser that there was anything wrong.
But while they could keep the secret from the ordinary colonist, they could not hide the truth from granary assistants. They were instructed, under the threat of arrest, never to reveal the food manifest to anyone outside of the granary. But this did not stop the assistants from noticing that the food levels were dropping dangerously – it would not be long before there was another famine. And while Wolfmouth was able to stretch out the food through watering down the rations, the stress of an impending famine was too much for one of the granary workers. One night, Titus Pelops snapped, drugged and dragged his son down to the granary, and chopped him up with a laser saw.
It was Wolfmouth who found him the next morning, as he was opening up the granary for the day. Pelops was sitting in the corner, chewing on a severed finger. When he saw the horrified Wolfmouth, Pelops offered the rest of the finger, saying, “Taste it – but if you do, you’ll never taste anything this good again.” Pelops could barely get the sentence out before he broke down, sobbing. The leadership knew better than to go public with a trial. Instead, they put Pelops into a box and had the guards wheel him out to the dock, where the box was dumped into the hell of their planet. No one ever asked whatever happened to Pelops and his son – either the colonists didn’t care or were afraid to ask.
Pelops hadn’t always been like that – Wolfmouth remembered him as being perfectly normal. This scared Wolfmouth even more, that famine could spark the oil slick of madness. This was why – to Wolfmouth – it was all the more important to save what food they could, for as long as they could. This reminded Wolfmouth of a saying that Pelops used to repeat, but he couldn’t quite remember how it went.
Just then, Wolfmouth thought he heard something. He stopped thinking and held his breath. He thought he heard something like the rustle of the wind, which was impossible, because there was no wind on their planet. Was it a memory of the Earth he missed?
That was when the light bulb in his eyes exploded. There was a lurch born in his stomach as he found himself tumbling into a hole of light. And then all was ebony.
***
“Wolfmouth! Wolfmouth! Are you okay?”
“What? What’s going on?” Wolfmouth slurred, his eyes drunk.
He slowly sat up, the lenses in his eyes focusing. As the world around him slowly sharpened, he suddenly felt a terrible ache in his back. He patted the ground, realizing that he had been sleeping on smoothed stone. But why was he sleeping on stone? It didn’t make any sense.
“Wolfmouth, look at me,” the voice repeated through the thinning fog. “Concentrate.”
And that was what Wolfmouth did, waving away the mist with a thick hand. And that when he saw his sister, Stormrunner, was standing over him, with a look of worry scratched into her face. He glanced around, and he realized that he was on the elevator platform at the granary level.
“How did I…I get here?” Wolfmouth asked, more to himself than to his sister.
“I don’t know,” Stormrunner replied, her eyes steady. “I went over to your apartment to ask you a question, and you weren’t there. I asked around, and someone said that you had stayed behind to get something. Is that right?”
“Huh? Oh, yeah, yeah, that’s right,” Wolfmouth mumbled, struggling up to his feet. He pushed away his sister’s helping hand, although he could have used it. He then latched onto something that Stormrunner said. “Wait, it’s still night?”
“Yeah, of course it is. It’s only been an hour since the granary shut down. Why…?”
Before Stormrunner could finish her response, Wolfmouth had already activated the elevator. As the elevator descended into the storeroom, a confused Stormrunner asked, “What’s going on?”
“I was waiting...for our thief,” Wolfmouth said, his mind racing. “They were here, they …they found me – must have knocked me out. I wasn’t on the elevator – I was in a box, waiting…”
With there still another foot to go before the elevator came to a stop, Wolfmouth jumped off and rushed around the storeroom. Stormrunner called out to him, “Stop! Wolfmouth, stop!”
He searched every one of the aisles, knocking over packets of food on the shelves around him, as if he was searching for something he had lost. He felt a hand on his shoulder and he turned, expecting to see his bandit. But it was Stormrunner, who used her momentum to pin him against the wall. If he wasn’t awake before, the shock of his own sister pushing him against the cold stone wall certainly helped. He never realized until that moment just how strong she was.
Stormrunner said calmly, “Listen to me. The tunnel’s the only way in or out. If some thief actually attacked you, I would have run into them in the tunnel. There’s no one else here. But I think you’ve already figured that out.”
“But you’re here.”
Stormrunner laughed humorlessly. “And so are you. But I’m not calling you a thief, now am I?”
“No, but I…” Wolfmouth said, his voice trailing away as he suddenly realized how ridiculous his accusations sounded. He could certainly see how his sister could be the thief. After all, it was what the gypsies had taught her in their childhood – it was written with ink in the paper of her brain. But in the lifetime that he had known her, he had never seen Stormrunner lift a hand against another person. The crackling pain on the back of his head was not her signature – it was impossible.
“Here,” Stormrunner said, guiding him gently towards the waiting elevator, “let’s get you to the clinic. I want to make sure that you’re okay.”
Wolfmouth, in a daze, did not resist. As the twins walked across the storeroom, there was a gear in his foggy brain that was still whirring. Is it possible that he could have miscounted the food packages after all? Had he simply invented the thief? But if he had, w
ho had knocked him out and dragged him to the next level in the granary? There were so many questions, but for once he wasn’t interested in answers. He wasn’t sure why – maybe it was because of the concussion ringing his head like a bell, or maybe it was because his twin was there to keep him from falling. Or maybe it was because he was beginning to understand something that she had known all along: that control was meant to be given away, never kept. And the only control they had was food. He saw how wrong he was and how right she was, and they became even closer twins than they were before.
As they walked towards the elevator platform, though, they were unaware that the footsteps that they had left behind on the mesh floor were breathing. The footsteps only stopped breathing when they boarded the elevator and rose.
Lupus
2197 AD
It was morning at the Sanctions, the start of a new day. But, for those whose lives revolved around the colonial courthouse, every day felt like the day before. There had been a routine frozen in place since the building’s opening years before, because the guards felt that improving perfection was blasphemy. Suggestions had been brought up before at the colony’s meetings, but any breath of creativity was a cough in the face to the security force.
It was certainly an impressive building, and by far the largest structure at the colony – although there was no competition. While most of the buildings in the cavern were simple and built into either the ground or the walls, the Sanctions rose above them at three stories tall. And those were just the stories aboveground – there were an additional two floors underground, one for the armory and the other for the prison.
From the outside, the courthouse looked and shined like a towering ice cube, with one of its corners melted away – this was where the sliding doors were located, inhaling and exhaling guards throughout the day. And, in spite of the fact that the entire building was crafted with blocks of windows, the charter architect designed a steel cage that hugged the building. And so someone looking out through one of its many windows saw bars beyond the glass – appropriate for a courthouse.