‘Once you drop me off in Karume, you should leave.’
Syn’s forehead crinkled into canyons. ‘I’ll see this through. The mad old girl might have a point, who knows?’ He ignored Sulara’s scowl, turning his usual smirk on Cale. ‘I’ve a mind to start billing you, buck. Some sort of bulk discount for heroic interventions.’ He pulled up his hood and left them.
Cale rose to gather his things, then remembered all he had was what he wore. After a moment of awkward silence, Sulara went into the kitchen and reappeared a few minutes later with hot drinks. He thanked her and sipped his, grateful for something to do now that everything had been said.
No, he thought. Nowhere near enough has been said. This woman knew Bowden, truly, as a man grown. More than you ever did. Why can’t you ask her about him?
He looked over to find her shuffling a stack of papers, sorting them into an order known only to her, her eyes intent and her mouth moving. The light hit her short silver hair and caught on her proud cheekbones and there was an instant where he saw what Bowden must have seen.
‘I wish…’ he faltered.
She put down the papers. ‘So do I.’
‘Did he ever talk about me?’
‘A little.’ She must have seen the pain in his face, the ache that never went away. Her voice softened. ‘He never sounded bitter.’
‘I never got to say I was sorry.’
She looked away, unsure. After a moment, she looked back. ‘All I know is that he lived his life. Whatever happened with you two must have been upsetting, but he got over it. He was happy, I think.’
Sons always fight their fathers, he thought. Where had he heard that?
‘I don’t know what to tell you.’ She was stern again. ‘He didn’t seem angry with you any more. Or maybe he was, but it didn’t rule him. Why don’t you try letting go? It worked for him.’ She looked down at the stack of paper, bending it between her fingers. ‘His death wasn’t your fault.’
The silence stretched but had lost some of its awkwardness. The whip of her words had somehow helped him feel better, though he didn’t know why. It was something to think about at least. Perhaps a way out of the spiral of guilt that had engulfed him for as long as he could remember.
A little later, Syn found them and told them the flyer was ready.
‘It’s a one-way trip,’ he said. ‘The fuel we have will only get us to Karume. Barely.’
Sulara shrugged it off. They were taking the two surviving soldiers with them, so she would have enough food and no shortage of water. Solitude, she said, didn’t bother her.
Not really solitude, Cale thought. Not with the data corpus, not with her.
As if hearing him, Kelbee’s image materialised under the eaves of the base doors. The wind had calmed and the air was crisp, the whiteness of the hills and sky seeming to wash her out, making her look even more like a ghost. Syn give a little grunt of surprise.
‘You’re outside,’ Cale said, the statement also a question.
‘I’m learning as I go,’ she said. ‘This is about as far as I can project. Maybe once more of the network is up and running…’ she trailed off, reaching up to brush her fingers against the outer wall of the outpost. Cale wondered if she could feel it or if it was simply an affectation, a remnant of old habits.
‘Come to say goodbye?’ he asked.
She nodded. ‘Look for Nebn. He always talked about finding another way. Tell him what happened here, about the corpus, what it means. He’ll help you. And tell him…’ Her face dropped, and for the first time since she’d changed Cale saw the woman he’d so briefly known. It was still there, the sadness, even behind the dizzying power.
‘I’ll tell him,’ he said, wishing he could hold her hand, touch her shoulder, something human. His chest tightened as she visibly collected herself. The look in her eye and her resolve reminded him so much of Aime it was as if a hand was gripping his lungs.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Tell him I died. Tell him both of us died up here.’
‘He’ll know eventually, if we succeed. Everyone will.’
‘I know. Perhaps by then I’ll be able to make him understand, but we can never be what we were.’ Sadness flickered, but she hurried it along. ‘Better if he thinks I’m gone, at least for now.’
Cale nodded. She needs the pain, he realised. It’s her anchor to the world. Perhaps she’ll stay human after all.
Syn shuffled, his boots squeaking on the powder. ‘Fuel’s a-wasting.’
* * *
The flyer rose easily over the mottled white. From a monitor he watched the outpost dwindle to a child’s toy, then a shadow, then nothing as Syn pushed the nose up towards the hazy canopy. They punched through it, emerging into a nowhere place between two layers of cloud, towers of vapour joining them like the pillars of a great temple that stretched to the horizon. The howling engines pushed them ever upwards, the pockmarked ceiling approaching the windscreen at a sickening pace before blinding them in a grey nimbus of wispy tendrils.
Above, Ras shone down on them; clear, cold, dazzling. Cale looked at the dome of sky and felt an instant of pure, dizzying terror as he thought of the infinite miles of nothing beyond it, the edge of everything now just a refraction of light on particles. The thought flitted away, leaving behind only the apprehension of what was to come.
‘You look worried, buck.’ Syn’s hands rested lightly on the yoke as he throttled the engines back to let the flyer cruise over the cloud tops.
‘This might be another mistake.’
‘Likely. But you won’t know unless you try.’
‘And you’ve changed your mind.’
Syn shrugged. ‘I still think it could be an awful cluster-fuck of a mess, but you said something about choice. Maybe there’s something in that; they’ll never thank anyone for it, but they could just be better off.’ He grinned. ‘Or maybe it’s for the sheer joy of watching you fall on your arse.’
Revolution
The Home Peninsula was spread out like a game board under the late afternoon sky, Ras dipping towards the distant ocean, towards Aspedair and beyond. The golden light picked out fields and roads in ambers and browns, casting long shadows. The great grey band of the Walls fled underneath them as they powered into their descent, the air smooth under the black angular wings.
They’d decided to put down outside the city and go the rest of the way on foot to avoid drawing attention. Cale was already thinking about how the next few hours, weeks or months would play out. He would need to contact the underground – perhaps the hardest part would be convincing Brennev to trust him again.
Seeing his former friend – and rival – had been a strange awakening. He’d surprised himself, in the brief moments before grief over Bowden overtook everything, at how fresh the anger still was after all these years apart. Seeing that face, though changed by age and scarring, that single violet eye where he remembered two, took him right back to that day when the course of his life had veered away.
Aime had been meeting a contact in a tenement near a marketplace. She’d not known of the inspection, the senior Factor showing his face in his new district, or of the bomb placed in one of the stalls. The explosion took out its intended target, as well as the support pillars of the building Aime was in. They never found her body.
The hurt was still as sharp now as it had been then, at Brennev’s part in the bombing as well as other things he was still afraid to explore, but he would have to put it away to convince the man he held responsible to help him get inside the Tower. It would take patience, and time.
Syn grunted with surprise, drawing him back. Through the windscreen ahead he saw great plumes of smoke reaching up from the factories of Karume like crooked fingers, as they did every day. Then he saw others, coming from inside the ring of the city itself, some reaching high, some smaller and based by the faint licking of flames.
Karume was on fire.
They sacrificed stealth for speed – the Factors would be distracted, meaning th
ey should be able to land inside the city itself without attracting too much attention. Syn brought them down in the skeleton of a warehouse, now roofless, grey plaster walls stained with mildew. As soon as Cale stepped from the ramp, he smelled the familiar stink of guns and knew insurrection had come to the capital.
They kept the weapons and ammunition of the two soldiers. The two men, looking so much smaller stripped of their body armour, caught the scent of fighting and Cale saw the terror of its implications writ large on their faces. Syn slung his weapon, made a small adjustment to one of his arms, then made for the hole in the wall that had once been the warehouse’s main door. Cale followed. Outside, he waved his former captors towards an alleyway; with a brief look of thanks, the pair took to their heels and disappeared into the warrens. Cale and Syn headed in the other direction, towards the centre of the city, hearing the crack of distant gunfire.
As they penetrated deeper into the maze of buildings, the hush of the place hung over them, punctuated by distant sounds of battle. The streets were deserted; normally there would have been a well-ordered throng lining the pavements and goods vehicles circulating. Now there was not a bus to be seen, no military convoys pushing through the traffic. The vacuum of silence had mass – it raised the hairs on the back of Cale’s neck. They hugged the walls; any open ground they couldn’t avoid was crossed fast and low. On their way they passed a speaker post emitting a faint hiss, barely noticeable over the sounds of their breathing. Even the Seeker had been silenced.
They saw more signs of fighting as they got closer to the centre of the great wheel. The backdrop to their cautious, darting route was a jumbled multitude of burned-out vehicles, pockmarked walls and the acrid tang of cordite. They passed a ground car, flattened under heavy treads and still on fire. The wall behind it was perforated in several places, the distinct patina of plasma fire coruscating around the edges.
Not far down the road a Factors’ checkpoint had been torn open by an explosion. Bodies lay in a jumbled heap, one man hanging over the crumbling lip of the crater, his legs a bloody crush of bone and torn flesh. A little further on a row of troops in stained Army uniforms lay against the wall where their execution had taken place. Cale saw the look of fear still painted on the face of one of them, the hole in his forehead absurdly neat. The military had not been prepared for this.
An enormous pounding shook the earth and they dove for the safety of an alleyway. Threading through its narrow darkness, they found their way through to the other side, the close walls channelling the echoes of gunfire until it sounded as if the battle was on top of them.
At the other end they came upon a dun expanse: one of Karume’s state parks. A section of trees had been toppled by an enormous battle tank that squatted at the end of its ripped-up trail like a monster of steel and smoke in the centre of the lawn, its turret sweeping the area.
They took cover behind a powered-down skimmer truck just as a war-walker erupted from the other side of the park, its massive feet churning up great chunks of grass as it closed on its prey. It was a patchwork of parts, unpainted ceramic plate showing through the soot that coated it, engines roaring as it brought its weapon arms to bear. The ground tank fired but missed, the concussion from the shell knocking the walker – but not toppling it – before obliterating two floors of a building. The walker dug ruts in the turf as it skidded to a stop, centred itself, then fired both cannons at once. The tank split open like a fruit as the heavy shells ripped into it; there might have been screams, but they were quickly swallowed by the howl of superheated air and metal. The walker made sure its prey was dead, then took off in the other direction.
Cale indicated to Syn that they should skirt the edges of the park with a wave of his hand, receiving a nod in reply. As they were about to move, a noise from above stopped them in their tracks. The speaker posts all along the pavement came alive with a loud crackle. Then a voice started to speak, garbled, distorted by the static. Cale felt Syn’s hand on his arm, followed the pink finger up to where a large screen was mounted on the side of the building over their heads. This had to be one of the major parks that lined the parade routes – screens like this were reserved for propaganda. Cale looked around and saw the many other screens all around the park were also lit with static.
The grey snow dissolved. In its place was a face staring into the camera, a grizzled chin and a single violet eye filling the screen. As the image cleared, so did the sound from the speaker posts. A deep, familiar voice boomed all around them, echoing from the buildings.
‘Citizens, this is a great day: the day of freedom. In years to come, when your children ask where you were on the day your bonds were cut, you will tell them you were here. At the very heart of it.’
‘Your chum has a taste for the grandiose,’ said Syn, his face grim.
Brennev stepped away from the camera, revealing a large room. Hundreds of candles flickered, washed out by harsh floodlights that picked out a solitary figure bound to a chair. Its bald head drooped.
‘Here is the one that has maintained your bondage,’ said Brennev, stepping behind the seated figure. ‘She has kept you slaves to a broken dogma, only to maintain her own place at the top of a corrupt hierarchy.’ He lifted her chin, showing a swollen right eye crusted with blood. Fulvia’s other eye shone with poison, but her mouth had lost its arrogance.
‘This isn’t going to be good,’ said Syn.
‘Now, we change things. Together. We will pull ourselves from the quagmire of tradition towards a brighter future, a more plentiful future, full of peace and freedom. I make it my solemn promise to listen and guide as she never dared.’ Brennev walked around the chair to stand beside Fulvia and someone handed him a pistol. He levelled it at her temple.
‘You don’t deserve last words, monster, but I’ll show mercy.’
Fulvia looked up at him as if the gun wasn’t there but said nothing. She glanced over at the camera. Cale saw resignation there, the look of someone who’d gone past anger and fear. It was the look of someone who had played a long game against a tenacious opponent and, in a last-ditch effort, lost.
Her mouth twisted, and Cale thought she might be about to cry. Instead, she began to laugh. Loud, throaty and from the depths of her being.
Brennev’s neck tensed.
She took a deep breath, the laughter still on her lips. Then she spoke.
‘Well pla—’
The gunshot snapped her head sideways, the sound of it screeching through the speakers. Cale and Syn both clapped their hands over their ears. When they looked up, the chair was on its side, her head out of sight. Brennev’s face was terrifyingly blank.
‘Rejoice! The great enemy is gone,’ he said. ‘No more subservience, no more scraping to a lie. You are free, Karume. And here is the final proof, the moment you cast aside the wretched tradition that has held its boot on your necks.’ The camera panned around to fully take in the dais and the huge translucent coffin that topped it. Crystal shimmered in the candlelight.
Syn gasped. ‘Skies, that’s…’
‘The Seeker’s sarcophagus,’ Cale finished.
Men walked into the frame holding long metal bars. They wedged the ends under the crystal box, took the load. At some signal off-camera, they heaved down. The sarcophagus tipped up, grating, its weight bending the metal rods. More men rushed in with more levers and jammed them into the widening gap. They heaved again. The crystal coffin tilted, teetered, then crashed off the dais. As it hit the bottom of the steps the lid cracked open and a dark bundle flopped out, rolling away across the floor.
Brennev’s face filled the screen again. ‘Stay in your homes, stay safe. No one else needs to die today. Remember the day of your new beginning.’ The screen dissolved into static.
‘You saw?’ said Syn, his face drawn in horror. ‘Under the coffin?’
Cale nodded. As the sarcophagus had toppled, it had revealed something beneath, something ancient. Illuminated markings – the controls Kelbee had described to hi
m. But there had been something else, at the far end of the room, that had caught his eye. Faint, barely lit by the candlelight and out of focus, but to him unmistakable. A shock of red hair over a pale face and large, frightened eyes.
Derrin was at the Tower.
* * *
Nebn stopped pacing and sat down heavily in the camp chair, his face ashen. Cale waited for him. He’d told him of Kelbee’s death in the simplest terms, knowing exactly how it felt to be on the other side of that news, the feeling of emptiness. There would be pain later, when the magnitude of the loss hit home. The tall young man passed a hand over his eyes, his breathing laboured. Cale was silent, knowing nothing he could say at this moment would make it easier to bear. Instead, he listened to the noises filtering in from outside the large tent: the bustle of a busy field encampment, the shouts of sergeants, the rustle and clink of equipment and heavy weaponry being moved. Above them, its presence inescapable even through heavy layers of canvas, the Tower spired into the sky.
On reaching the camp that ringed the base of the edifice, they’d surrendered themselves to be searched. It had been mid-afternoon, but low cloud had blown in and made it seem like early evening, the colours washed out. The mere fact that they’d not been shot on sight told Cale that the battle for the city was almost, if not totally, won. They’d been stripped of their weapons and packs and made to kneel. After a while Nebn had appeared, trailing a young woman with bright yellow hair and green eyes. She’d eyed both of them as if they might explode, but Nebn ordered their restraints removed. Then, they’d talked.
Nebn took a long breath, contemplating the ground between his boots, his shoulders hunched. He looked up, his eyes coming to rest on Syn.
‘I should march you out and shoot you for taking her,’ he said, though his voice was hollow.
‘I never hurt your girl,’ answered the mercenary, his voice devoid of its usual mockery. ‘We needed an out. Blame your boss.’
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