by K A Riley
The hands of the pilot of the heli-barge tremble violently as he fumbles with the projected navigational controls.
On its mag boosters and with its ramp fully receded, the heli-barge begins its smooth glide away from the Armory’s rooftop. Standing and lifting Kella up by the collar of her red jacket, I hook my arm around her waist, squeeze her to me, and rush to the edge of the barge, fully prepared to jump, even if it means she and I both plummet to our deaths. Anything is better than staying aboard this thing with Krug. But one of the soldiers, leaving Krug’s side, snags me by my upper arm and drags me back, locking his arm around my neck as I reach out across the growing distance between the barge and the edge of the roof.
Right next to me, one of Krug’s soldiers fires out at Brohn, who is sprinting across the rooftop right toward us. The burst of fire from the weapon so close to my ears sends me lurching to the side.
Brohn, his head down and with one arm covering his face, runs right toward us into the gunfire.
He slides to a stop at the edge of the roof, reaching a helpless hand out to me over the growing distance as the heli-barge, carrying me and Kella along with it, prepares to cruise away for good.
I’m wishing I could fly over to Brohn when a voice in my head tells me to do exactly that.
Remembering the halo and the time in the mountains when I managed to do the impossible, I wrench away from the solider who’s dragging me and Kella back toward the middle of the barge. A snap of my fist to his carotid artery just below the edge of his helmet followed immediately by a heel-of-the-hand strike to the bridge of his nose puts him down for the count. Lifting Kella up and hugging her limp body tightly to mine, I bolt back toward Brohn.
At the edge of the heli-barge and with Kella clamped to my hip, I leap, and the two of us go soaring out as one across the distance, my arms curled over both our faces as bullets zing back and forth through the air around us.
We land in Brohn’s arms with a heavy thud, and the three of us collapse onto the Armory’s rooftop. The shock of landing nearly knocks the wind out of me but, considering Kella and I should both be splattered five floors down on the ground right now and seeing as how I’m off the heli-barge and safe in Brohn’s arms, I’m not going to complain.
A few feet away, Cardyn and Manthy stand guard over Ekker who is battered and is now restrained with zip-cuffs, his head wilting into his chest in defeat. Four of the Patriots are on their knees or curled up on their sides, their hands cuffed behind their backs. The remaining soldiers lie still on the ground.
Rain, sniper rifle slung across her back, comes running toward us across the rooftop.
The second they realize the person lying barely conscious between me and Brohn is Kella, the rest of our team comes swarming over.
Cardyn, Rain, and Manthy slide to their knees around us, and we’re all struggling to catch our breath in the middle of a convulsive fit of relieved laughter, confused speechlessness, and grateful tears.
I look back to see Krug’s heli-barge growing smaller as it cruises away from us, heading out into the dark sky over the city.
From where he’s kneeling with the rest of us at Kella’s side, Cardyn bolts up like he’s going to go chasing after Krug’s barge, now a fading spot in the distance.
“So what does this mean?” he asks, his eyes jumping from Krug’s barge to Kella to Ekker and back to us. “Is it over? Did we win?”
“It’s over,” Manthy assures him, reaching up to take his hand.
Kneeling and with Kella’s head resting on my lap, I brush a tangle of blond hair away from her face. She’s conscious, but her eyes are still unfocused. It’s going to take a lot to undo whatever Ekker did to her. But at least she’s here. She’s alive. We’re together.
“We won,” I assure Cardyn. “We definitely won.”
27
“So,” Rain pants through a smile, her sniper rifle slung around on her back. “Am I the only one who saw Kress literally fly over here with Kella in her arms?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I grin, pointing back to the edge of the building where Krug’s barge was just docked. “If you time it just right, anyone can run on top of those magnetic distortion waves.”
“Yeah,” Rain grins as the others laugh. “Magnetic distortion waves. That’s what it was.”
“What happened to her?” Cardyn asks, kneeling with his arm around Kella’s shoulders. “How’d she wind up with Ekker?”
“That’s a story Kella will tell us when she’s a little more herself,” I explain to him and the others with a sad shake of my head. “I don’t think it’s going to be a pleasant one.”
Cardyn, his eyes brimming with compassion, gives Kella’s shoulder a gentle squeeze. “Maybe not,” he says. “But at least she’s alive, so we know it has a happy ending.”
When he says this, I’m reminded of another part of Render’s prophecy. He said we’d be “reunited with death.” I wonder if this is what he meant, our unexpected reunion with Kella, who has been miraculously returned to us.
Kella looks around at us through unseeing eyes and tries to stand but can’t. As we all get up and step back to give her space, Brohn scoops her up in his arms, her blond hair splayed out over his shoulder, and leads us back across the roof toward the door.
“Think they’ll be okay here?” Cardyn asks, pointing to Ekker and to the bloodied, bound, and downed soldiers still squirming but immobilized in their zip-cuffs.
“Let’s not leave it to chance,” Rain says. She taps her comm-link to connect with Wisp. “We’ve got Ekker and a bunch of Patriots up here on the roof.” There’s a pause, and then she says, “No. Krug got away.” Another silence is followed by, “Copy that,” and she taps her comm-link to disconnect before turning back to us.
“Wisp is sending up a clean-up crew.”
“I take it that means they’ve got things under control downstairs?” I ask.
Rain gives us a shrug followed by a sparkly-eyed smile. “Sounds like it. Let’s go see for ourselves.”
Following Brohn who has Kella’s head resting against his chest as he carries her across the roof, we step back through the big metal access door. Once inside, we look down from the top of the metal staircase to see the floor of the Armory, the size of two football fields and littered with discarded weapons and bodies, sprawling beneath us. The air is hazy and hot. A grayish-blue cloud floats lazily in the vast open space.
As we walk down the stairs and descend through the swirls of battlefield smoke, the aftermath of our rebellion hits us full-force. Mingled in with the red, white, and blue uniforms of the dead, unconscious, or zip-cuffed and captured Patriot soldiers are the black-clad bodies of a dozen Insubordinates and at least four or five uniformed San Francisco law enforcement officers. One of the Insubordinates leans against a wall near the bottom of the stairs. He’s clearly exhausted and has his hand clamped over a wound on his upper arm. I don’t know his name, but he manages to offer us a weak smile as we pass. Another Insubordinate, a girl I recognize as Triella, the one who asked us about our time in the Processor, is kneeling over an unmoving fellow Insubordinate. Triella looks up as us over her shoulder as we pass and shakes her head.
Seeing them makes me think about how we all knew the risks going in. That doesn’t make it any easier in a war to deal with the inevitability of injury and death. I take some comfort in knowing that the Patriots were fighting to preserve lies, disparity, and control, while we fought for equality, honesty, and the right to be free from fear.
There are plenty of gray areas in life. But here, there’s no question in my mind who were the bad guys and who were the good guys in this scenario.
Battered and limping, we head across the ground floor of the Armory, weaving our way through the people, weapons, thousands of shell casings, and the rest of the debris from the intense fight. Out toward the middle of the huge space, we meet up with Wisp, who comes running over, the relief to see us alive clearly visible on her face.
All around us, the Insubordinates are cheering, shaking hands, nursing wounds, and already exchanging exaggerated stories of their prowess in battle.
Above us, the railing running around the interior perimeter of the mezzanine level is lined with ravens, their shadowy feathered forms standing out like a queue of ominous gargoyles staring down at us with glossy black eyes.
Render flies down and lands on my outstretched arm. He’s exhausted, barely hanging on after expending so much physical, emotional, and psychic energy.
“So,” I ask him, gazing up at his raven army. “Who are your friends?”
Render lets out four short, sharp kraas! and we all do a double-take. Maybe it’s our exhaustion after such a pitched battle. Or maybe it’s just wishful thinking or a belief in magic, but for a second, it almost sounded like his four barked syllables formed a single word: Con-spir-a-cy.
As we’re contemplating this, Captain Huang limps up to us, his face a patchwork of scratches and blotches of dirt, sweat, and blood. “A few of the Patriots managed to slip past our clean-up crew,” he informs Wisp. “But don’t worry. We’ve got drone trackers on them. They’ll be in custody before they know what hit them.” Huang notices Kella in Brohn’s arms and takes a step back, his hand on his sidearm. “I know her,” he stammers. “I recognize the red jacket. She was with Ekker. She’s one of them!”
Huang pulls his gun from its holster, but Brohn stops him from raising it with a firm grip on Huang’s wrist.
“She was with us first,” Brohn says, his voice deep and resonant with the authoritative air of finality. “And she’s with us now.”
With Brohn’s hand clamped defiantly on his wrist, Huang looks back and forth between Brohn and Wisp who both look back like they’re daring him to challenge them over Kella. Huang seems to get the picture, re-holsters his weapon, and holds his hands up. “You’re the Major,” he says to Wisp. And then, with equal deference to the rest of us, “And you’re the Emergents. Whatever you think is best. You take care of your people,” he adds with a sweep of his hand at the eerie quiet of the smoke-filled Armory, “and my people and I will take care of this.”
“What’s best,” I suggest, my hand on Kella’s feverish forehead, “is for us to get our friend out of here and back to herself as soon as possible.”
At that, Wisp taps her comm-link and sends out instructions for all of the Insubordinates to rendezvous at the Style for debriefing and then to assemble the next morning at Grace Cathedral to celebrate our win and to reflect on all the losses along the way.
“Now, let’s get her back to the Style,” Wisp says, marching toward the Armory’s huge front doors. “The battle may be over, but we still have a lot left to fight for.”
Since we don’t need to sneak around underneath the city anymore, Wisp leads us between the police mag-cars and their flashing lights, through the dimly-lit streets, past the growing number of wary onlookers slowly emerging from the nearby buildings, and on to the Style.
Along the way, Kella, still in Brohn’s arms, drifts in and out of consciousness.
Back at the Style, we bring her with us upstairs to our fourth-floor dorm room. Wisp arranges to have a sixth bed brought in, and we insert it into our spoked-wheel configuration before collapsing, all of us drained to the core from battle and worried about Kella, who soon starts to mumble in a half-sleep about Ekker and the righteousness of his cause. It’s a horrifying thing to hear coming from her mouth. I know this isn’t her, though. This is the slave Ekker wanted to turn all of us into. Kella fought him as best she could. But she was alone then. She’s not alone now.
I reach across to her the same way Brohn has done so many times with me. Kella goes quiet, her breathing evens out, and I fall asleep, hand-in-hand, with my dear friend.
28
Saturday
The next morning, after the deepest and most thankfully dreamless sleep I’ve ever had, I wake up with the others, and we get ourselves cleaned and changed into fresh clothes. Kella is quiet, but she seems rested and much closer to being herself than she was a few hours ago. Cardyn is gigglishly chirpy and says how much he wants to leave the Style and go out to see the city we’ve just liberated. “I bet they’ll throw us a parade,” he says. Manthy teases him for his restlessness and calls him hyperactive, but he doesn’t seem to care. Like Kella, Brohn is quiet. He gives me a smile to reassure me that he’s fine. “Just having a contemplative moment,” he says, dropping down to his bed and lacing up his boots. I nod my understanding before walking over to the armoire where Render’s been perched for the night. With the first streaks of light leaking in around the edges of the windows, he kraas! out his desire to escape the confines of this room.
Are you sure?
I’m sure I’ll die if I don’t.
I don’t know if he’s serious or joking, but I’m not about to take any chances. I trot across the room and throw open the window. Render flutters over to the windowsill and hesitates for a second before launching himself out over the city. His wings are still weak, but the freedom to fly is giving him strength. He doesn’t go far—only to the next building over. He alights on the roof, his golden armor glinting in the morning light, and he’s happy.
Just then, Wisp pokes her head into our room and tells us it’s time to leave the Style. “The others are already at the cathedral,” she informs us. “Let’s get moving.”
We follow her down the stairs, and, unlike the other times we’ve left this building, we leave through the front door. It’s an oddly refreshing thing. No sneaking out the back. No dropping down into old sewer and subway lines to avoid being detected and shot. Just us. Walking out the front door like normal people about to enter into a normal day in a safe city.
Once outside, we inhale the fresh air of victory and march on a zigzag through the city streets all the way to Grace Cathedral. Along the way, people going about their daily routines stop to applaud and shout out their thanks. Some of the braver ones run right up and shake our hands or hold us by the shoulders and tell us how grateful they are and how free they finally feel.
Cardyn turns to me. “Not exactly a parade,” he pretend-complains. “But I’ll take it!”
“Come on,” Wisp urges, still all business. “We have more work to do.”
We jog the last blocks past more cheering residents until we arrive at the church. Nestled between an apartment complex, three large office buildings, and some smaller businesses clustered into an office park, the cathedral practically screams, “Sanctuary.” I’m a little nervous about seeing the place. After all, it was here that Ekker first caught me and Brohn, and we just walked past the exact spot where I was convinced Brohn had been shot dead at my feet.
Shaking off the painful flashback, I climb along with the others up the wide concrete steps and through the massive front doors.
Still a little dazed, Kella accompanies us, mostly hanging close to Cardyn, who has taken to mother-henning over her as she continues to try to orient herself to where she is and what’s happened to her.
Inside, the cathedral is already packed to the rafters with happy and mostly well-rested revelers. The Insubordinates are milling around with everyone recounting their stories from last night.
We’re all clean and polished and relatively stress-free for the first time in…well…ever. The enormity of what we did, of what we accomplished against all odds and what it means for the future of our nation, is starting to sink in. The clenched fist that’s been residing in my gut these past few days loosens its grip, and the pulse in my ears slows to a steady thrum.
Team Presidio of the Insubordinates is traveling around the room offering changes of bandages and tending to those of us with minor injuries left untreated from the night
before, while Team Bayview has recently arrived from St. Francis Memorial where they’ve spent the night overseeing and assisting the hospital’s medical staff with the more seriously injured.
As we walk deeper into the church, Cardyn is literally dragged away from us by a group of Insubordinates. Giving us a smug “what can I do?” shrug, he goes melting into the crowd where he seems to have achieved celebrity status. Three clearly infatuated, star-struck girls from Team Ashbury go bouncing around him, yipping at him with all kinds of questions I can’t hear, but I can see clear as day how much he’s enjoying the attention.
Taking over for Cardyn, Wisp draws Kella aside and offers to watch over her. The two of them meander toward the front of the room, Wisp talking quietly to Kella as they go.
Brohn tugs on my sleeve. “Not sure how,” he says to me over the din of the victorious celebrations, “but word’s gotten around about him.”
“About Cardyn?”
Brohn smiles in Cardyn’s direction like a proud brother. “It’s like a magic trick. Some kind of hypnosis.”
“I don’t know if you’re giving him enough credit. He’s cute. And funny. And sweet.”
“And an Emergent.”
“Maybe it’s not a trick,” I suggest. “Maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with what he is. Maybe they just like him for who he is. I know I always have.”
Brohn gives me a sideways glance. “Sure. And maybe you can communicate with Render because you’re secretly a raven, yourself, disguised as a human girl.”
Brohn stares for another second at Cardyn and at the adoring entourage around him before turning back to me and putting his hands on my waist. He winces when I sling my arms around his neck.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “That must hurt.”
Brohn slides his hands up to my forearms, preventing me from pulling away. “It doesn’t hurt as much as you not holding me,” he laughs.