It is a huge honor to have a story in this collection. One thing that is changing quite rapidly is the number of opportunities for writers to reach an audience. There is no guarantee that anyone will listen, nor should there be, but the walls that once blocked our voices are coming down. I’m fortunate to have been writing when I was. I write some dismal stories, but I remain an optimist. The future is bright. Hope to see you there.
Cray stood on a northern hillside, facing the city of Tritan far below, the wretched place he used to call home.
Used to. Back when. Twenty years? Thirty? Had it really been that long? He hefted his rucksack higher up onto his shoulders, feeling the weight of the small bomb inside. Small, but powerful enough to reduce the Consulate into a fine, white mist. There would be nothing left of the wickedness contained within the tall, pyramid-shaped building where evil men ordered evil things.
To Cray’s left, a crow sprang from a limb in a flurry of wings, almost as if it knew that distance was the wisest option.
The white-haired, archaic man beside him, Rowan, cleared his throat and readjusted himself on his crutches, the wood at the handles worn smooth by many miles and countless years. “I haven’t seen it since you were a boy,” he said. “From up here, you would never know.”
“How long has it been?”
“You were five, I think. They were able to keep you hidden for so long, even after your time for the Ritual. Lots of winters since then.”
“Do you really think she’s still down there?”
“I wouldn’t swear on my right leg, but Arka, he said it was so.”
“You don’t have a right leg.”
Rowan chuckled, lifted the stump. “Sure I do. See my toes wiggling?”
Cray ignored him. Below, he watched the city move. Railcars, transport vehicles, the occasional hovercraft zipping in from the south, likely bringing the wealthiest citizens back from their ocean-side retreats—those that had bought their freedom for a weekend.
At least, that’s what he remembered. As a little boy, he’d slip the curtain aside, just enough to peek out with one eye and watch them riding the escalators down from the docking bays in their brightly colored shirts with their deep, dark tans; balancing on expensive crutches inlaid with gold and jewels. He recalled daydreaming about where they’d been, imagining himself running down the beaches he’d seen in pictures. Soft sand, green seas, waves capped with white as they rolled and crashed.
Running. On two legs.
Regardless of social status, the great equalizer, the thing that made the richest citizen no different than the poorest, sewer-dwelling tripod, was the absence of the right leg, amputated at mid-thigh.
Old, young, athlete, grandmother, it didn’t matter. Tritan was a metropolis of single-legged citizens, made that way by ancient customs. A means to appease invisible gods and keep the population under control. A barely mobile city was a contained city.
“You’re really going to do this?” Rowan asked.
Cray glanced to the side, watched as the cool autumn breeze lifted Rowan’s thinning hair and pushed it across his face. He tried to mask the scorn in his voice. It didn’t work. “You told me she was dead, Rowan, and my answer is the same now as it was a hundred miles ago and a hundred miles before that. I have to get her out. She deserves better. The only reason you’re here is because I needed someone to carry extra water. I don’t care how close you were to my mother or my father before he died, nothing you say is going to change my mind, understood?”
Rowan shuffled around on his crutches. Facing Cray, he lifted one and rested it on the younger man’s shoulder. He started to speak, then shook his head and looked down toward Tritan.
Cray shoved the crutch away. “What?”
“She didn’t want you to know.”
He stepped closer to Rowan, bent over, face to face, noses an inch apart. “Know what?”
“That she was still alive. She never wanted you to find out,” Rowan said. There was a sadness in his eyes, and maybe a touch of relief, finally admitting it after so long.
Cray ground his teeth together. “You’re lying.”
“It’s the truth.” Rowan hopped back a step, bent low, resting his aching back and tired arms on the thin, wooden props. “You were always such a precocious child. Too intelligent, too soon. Bright. Gifted. Whatever you want to call it. Headstrong and stubborn, too. She knew that if you ever found out, you’d try to come back.” He nodded at the satchel slung across Cray’s shoulders. “And do something like this.”
“She was right.”
* * *
Nighttime, five years old. Alone. Mother slaving through triple shifts at the wood-shaping plant, securing screws, affixing rubber stoppers to the bottoms of poorly made crutches. As grueling as it was, hours and hours propped up in front of the never-ending assembly line, her job was vital. Oak legs splintered. Handles broke. Nuts and bolts loosened over time and distance. Children grew taller. The work she did kept the city going, kept life moving.
Three quick knocks on his window. Lifting his head from the pillow. Outside, a much younger Rowan, taller, not shrunken by decades and age. Long, brown, stringy hair pulled back and tied there with a thin strip of cloth.
His mother’s friend.
Rowan motioning for him to open the window. Harried. Frantic. Pleading for him to open the window. Then, ten words that held no weight to his young ears, not until they were far, far from home, after slinking through dark alleys, hiding from strangers, and nearly being spotted as they clambered underneath the mountain-high fence surrounding Tritan. After he realized they weren’t going back.
“Your mother was in an accident. We have to go.”
It took him years to ask why they had to leave, why they didn’t remain in Tritan and live at Rowan’s house there, why he had to stay in the tiny village hidden among tall evergreens as thick as their hovels were round. He knew he was different, unburdened by the lack of a right leg. Others needed crutches to get from one place to the next, just to get through the day, while he walked and ran wherever he wanted to go.
The villagers had their own rules, their own customs, and their own celebrations. But even out there, in the middle of the forest, miles and months of walking away, those that had escaped lived physically as they had lived at home—incomplete. And hanging over them, every time the sun rose or the smoke drifted too high during the evening campfire, was the constant fear that, one day, the Tritan soldiers with their robotic legs would come with their guns.
Since he was able to move unhindered, a number of chores and tasks were given to him, like carrying firewood and water, hunting, and chasing squirrels, rabbits, and deer. He didn’t mind; it meant less waiting. The impatience of youth rewarded his growling belly and warmed him on cold nights. He grew strong, both in body and in mind.
He’d seen ten winters before he’d thought to ask Rowan, “Why did we leave?”
“Aren’t you happy here?”
“Yes, but why? I could’ve lived with you, at your house. We didn’t have to leave because she was dead.”
“How many legs do you have, Cray?”
“Two.”
“That’s your answer.” And Rowan would say nothing more.
Summers came. Winters passed. New tripods arrived, old ones died. He fell in love; lost Eryn to the fever. He grew bitter after that. Sullen. Morose and listless, but he pressed forward in a fog, day after day, because he’d become their leader, shoved into the position because he could do what they couldn’t. Run, jump, climb. Carry.
Their one steadfast rule—the one and only rule that none dared break—was no children. No new births, for two reasons. First, as a means to defy the tradition they’d left behind; and second, if they were ever discovered and the soldiers came for them, they couldn’t bear the thought of loved ones being ripped away and made incomplete. Or executed for their insolence.
Cray remained the only whole member of their tiny clan.
Strangers drifted in
to the encampment from far away, from other reclusive, secretive places like their own, all coming to see what they thought only existed in rumors and whispers: the man with two legs.
It was dangerous to allow them in—they all knew it—because any one of the many visitors could’ve been a spy from Tritan, scouting for runaways, marking their position so that, one day, the rulers in the Consulate would know where to find Cray and his people. But they brought gifts: much-needed items like extra clothing and dried meats. Fruit and vegetables that hadn’t spoiled or been ruined by frost and poor storage.
So they let them in. Cray let them see.
And he hated being a spectacle. He hated the way they marveled over his wholeness as a human being. They’d ask him to scale a tree or jump over a log unhindered. He felt like one of the dancing monkeys he could see from his window as a child, down at the docking bays where the merchants offered their wares and promised entertainment to visitors.
Most of the time he would politely decline their requests, telling them that they would have to be satisfied with their slack-jawed stares, as if he were on display, a thing to be admired, like a picture in the history books from long ago: the ones that had survived centuries, secured away in an airtight museum.
Books. The things he barely remembered.
Some were satisfied. Others left disappointed.
Then, on a warm spring afternoon, when the sun had turned the air thick and muggy, making Cray sweat through his shirt as he hauled yet another load of wood for that evening’s meal around the fire, a lone tripod shuffled into their encampment.
The emaciated man was exhausted, his hands bloody and blistered. His left foot was swollen, the boot missing, and the skin on the bottom worn so raw that he cried when their healer tried to soothe it with a poultice and fresh bandages.
His name was Arka. He’d escaped from Tritan months earlier, and he’d never heard of Cray, nor his two legs.
But he knew Rowan. He knew him well.
Arka had leaned back against a maple tree and lifted his wounded leg onto a sack of acorns, while Cray and Rowan stood near.
“How long has it been, Rowan?”
“Thirty years. Maybe more.”
Arka took a sip of water offered by the healer. She tried to adjust his foot, but he hissed and shooed her away. “I thought you were dead.”
“Good.”
“And who’s this? The whole one,” he said, flicking his chin toward Cray’s legs.
Rowan looked sideways at Cray. He sighed, lowered his head. “I knew this day would come, eventually.”
Cray waited, wondering what the old man meant.
“Who is he?” Arka asked again, more insistent this time.
“I suppose it’s a good thing you don’t know, but the truth can’t stay hidden forever,” Rowan offered, then turned to Cray. “It’s been long enough.”
“What do you mean?”
Rowan ignored his question. To Arka, he said, “Do you remember the Hallory woman? Worked in the factory? Her husband died on the docks that day when the airboat came unmoored.”
“Caran?”
Cray winced at the sound of his mother’s name. He hadn’t heard it from someone other than Rowan since they’d left Tritan. “You knew my mother?”
“I saw her at the market the night before I escaped. She looked good. Doesn’t get around as well as she used to, but she’s healthy.”
Cray blinked, shook his head. “No, she died when I was little.”
Arka shrugged, held up his hands, the thin, white cloth wrapped around them already soaked through with blood. “I’ve stood beside Caran Hallory on the assembly line for the last decade, son. I probably know her better than I knew my wife before she passed. That was Caran, flesh and blood.”
“And now you know,” Rowan whispered.
* * *
Standing on the hilltop, overlooking the tall buildings and busy roads of Tritan below, Cray reeled from Rowan’s revelation, angry and even more determined than before. “She was right,” he repeated. “But that doesn’t mean you couldn’t have told me all of this sooner, ages ago. You told me she was dead, and now you say she didn’t want me to know? You took my choice away from me. You both did. Coming back here, coming back for her, no matter how stupid it was then, or now, that was my decision to make.” He pounded his chest. “My choice, Rowan. Mine.”
Rowan rocked back and forth on his crutches. “An apology will never make it right, but you—”
“Just shut up. You’ve said enough.”
“You have to understand, it was for your own good. Cray? Cray, listen to me. I took you out of that miserable hole and I raised you like you were my own. I didn’t have to. I didn’t have to. ‘Take him, get him out of here,’ she said. ‘Find somebody to raise him, whatever you have to do, just make sure he stays whole.’ She made me promise, and I did it, I got you out of there, but I didn’t trust anyone else to make sure you were safe. You—you—” He paused, the words catching in his throat. “You’re my son, too, and my lies are why you’re standing on your own two feet, instead of hopping around like another one of us pathetic tripods. My lies kept you from coming back here and getting yourself killed.”
“But why? Why should I get to keep my leg?” Cray insisted. “I’m nobody. I’m not special. I wasn’t then, and I’m not now.”
“You were to her…and are to me.”
Cray relented. He walked over to a massive pine tree and leaned up against it, the rough bark digging into his arm. He felt the weight of the bomb against his shoulders, pulling him down. The trip to Tritan shouldn’t have taken as long as it had—a month on foot if you went in a straight line—but as Cray had marched forward without a plan, Rowan struggling to keep up behind him, they’d met a man who knew of another man, a merchant with smuggled weapons who would trade for vegetables and fruit.
Out here, in the thick forests where food was hard to come by in the long winters, a potato free from mold and rot was more valuable than a gun with limited ammunition. A potato might keep someone alive long enough to find their next meal, but a gun, without proper training, could be dangerous, or a complete waste. Once the rounds were gone, you had nothing more than an awkward hammer.
They’d gone a hundred miles out of their way and found him tucked in a cave, hunched over a small campfire, warming his hands. His name was Ollen, and he’d been so mystified by Cray’s wholeness, and what he planned to do, that he’d offered the bomb for free, barely accepting a hunk of cured deer meat when they begged him to take it.
“If she’s as old as you say, you’ll never get her out under the wall. She won’t make it. She won’t be fast enough. You’ll need a distraction, a big one, and this should do it. Go for the Consulate. Take them down,” he’d said, his voice hoarse and gravelly. “Take them all down.”
Cray looked up between the tree limbs at the waning afternoon sky. “I’m going,” he said. “As soon as the sun dips over the ridgeline, that’s it. I’m bringing her back with me.”
Rowan nodded, understanding that further arguments were futile. He hopped over to a fallen maple tree and sat down, leaning his crutches against the log beside him. “You’ll have to go without me. I’ll slow you down.”
After all this time, so many nights arguing over whether or not this was the best plan, bickering about the foolhardiness of Cray’s intent, the idea that Rowan might stay behind punched a hole in Cray’s stomach. Regardless of the man’s lies and misinformation, Rowan had more claim to being his father than anyone, and Cray regretted his harsh words, and the need to be apart.
Rowan was right. He wasn’t fast enough. If it was going to work, Cray would need to move with speed and stealth, and Rowan had neither.
Cray walked over, sat on the trunk next to him. He apologized for his outburst, then said no more.
They sat in silence until the shadows encroached and the air left a chill on their skin. Cray removed a thick shirt from his pack and put it on, followed by the supple
jacket that Eryn had made from deer hide and given to him on his birthday. She’d been so proud of her work. He missed her so much.
If the plan failed, she wasn’t too far away in the Beyond. They could be together again.
“Sun’s down,” Rowan said, breaking the quiet. “Remember what I said. Wear that merchant’s smock that Ollen gave you and tie your leg up. You walk in there on your own two feet a grown man, you’ll be in chains before you get past the gate.” He patted Cray on the knee and stood. Balancing himself on his remaining leg, with one hand on an errant limb, he arched his back and stretched. “And take these. Don’t waste time looking for a set.” Rowan bent, grabbed his crutches, and shoved them into Cray’s chest.
“What? No, I can’t leave you here without these. What if the perimeter patrol finds you? You won’t be able to get away.”
Rowan lifted his arms, tied his white hair back, and hopped to steady himself. “I’m old, Cray. Tired. Let them come. And if they don’t—this is the best place to watch.” He smiled. “Go, now, save her.”
Cray nodded, leaned over and hugged Rowan. “I understand, old man. I do. And…thank you.”
Rowan raised an eyebrow. “For what?”
“For keeping me whole.”
Cray walked down the hill, stepping sideways on the steep embankment to prevent himself from slipping—a privilege he was grateful for—picking his way through the low-growth underbrush, winding his way through the thick cluster of pines. Thirty yards below, he glanced over his shoulder, hoping for one last gesture of reassurance.
Rowan was gone.
Strange, he thought, then assumed that the old man had hopped away to find a more comfortable spot.
Darkness settled in while Cray navigated through the forest, deftly climbing over stumps and easing around moss-covered rocks. An owl hooted overhead and he paused to listen to it. He hadn’t heard that sound since the night he and Rowan left Tritan at their backs. The subtle sounds of the woods, alive but subdued, its occupants having settled in for the evening, were calm around him. A breeze sighed through the tree limbs and a stream gurgled nearby.
From the Indie Side Page 9