Citadel: The Concordant Sequence

by Matthew S. Cox

Legacy bowed his head. “Thread Alpha. Did I not already tell you this? His name is not to be spoken to others. His very existence is a necessary secret. He has told me that you may encounter some, other than I, who will assist you on your path. Even though they are friends, do not speak of him to them.”

  Sure. No problem. I don’t need anyone thinking I’m crazy. She put on an innocent smile. “Right. Understood. No talkie about sky voice.”

  “It was Thread Alpha who told me where you would be born.”

  “I wasn’t born. The tank flushed me down the drain and I crawled from a vent.”

  Legacy showed no reaction to her comment, eyes still half closed with the distant-seeing gaze of a shaman surrounded by spirit smoke. “I am to guide you to the Citadel. I have been shown the way.”

  “Okay. Hope there’s no more bandits….”

  “Ahh.” Legacy smiled. He pulled open his backpack and held up a handgun. Shiny, metal, and factory-new. “I will not make the same mistake as last time.”

  Kiera glanced at it. “That’s a gun.”

  “Yes.”

  “Not a laser….”

  “Those fabricators cannot produce complex machines. A simple mechanical firearm, on the other hand, is possible,” said Pet.

  “Oh.” She settled back, trying to get comfortable enough to sleep.

  Legacy put an arm around her. “Rest child. I shall keep you safe.”

  30

  The Earth Child

  The next morning, they left behind the parking garage shelter, eating ration bars while traveling. Kiera worried that the chicken-soup-egg flavor mixture, initially so overpowering, had become bland. Her stomach growled for beans or fresh vegetables… or maybe the plea had come from her heart instead, missing her parents more than the actual food. Glum, she trudged along beside Legacy, with Pet leading the way.

  Close to noon, they reached a long, downhill slope covered in shifting whorls. Despite her best effort to be careful, she fell into a tumbling logroll about a third the way down when the dune shifted under her foot. Her scream cut off when her face plowed into the powdery ground, filling her mouth. The dense silt absorbed her impact, and slowed her slide to a stop before too long. Legacy skidded down after her and helped her up.

  Kiera spat out a mouthful of blech: part sand, part concrete dust, part ashed-over remains of plants, animals, people, and other things. She came close to throwing up, but held back long enough to rinse her mouth and spit a few times. “Note to self. Don’t scream when falling.” Another swig. She gagged and coughed it up.

  “Hills like this can collapse in places without warning.”

  She squinted at him, lifting her poncho away enough to dust sand from her body. After, she flapped the fur to knock silt off it. “I noticed. At least there’s like no sand fleas or stuff.”

  He shook his head. “No, but the bore worms are worse. They’re too small to see, and they dig into your skin to lay eggs. Itches like hell for days and then you break out in little pimples full of baby worms.”

  Kiera screamed, shivering in disgust. She swatted at herself, phantom tickles everywhere suggesting millions of tiny worms chewed on her already.

  “Hah. Got you.” Legacy chuckled. “I am teasing. There are no such thing.”

  Tears of anger gathered in the corners of her eyes as she blushed. “That wasn’t funny. You scared me!”

  Pet giggled.

  Kiera balled her hands into fists and fumed. “Argh! Why do old people always have to tease kids like that?”

  “It’s what we do.” Legacy winked, still chuckling. “Imparting wisdom. When I was a bit younger than you are, I became upset after swallowing a fruit seed. My mother had told us not to eat them. Well, grandpa had me convinced I’d have a tree growing out my back end in a few days. I cried, and cried….”

  Her laugh trailed off to an amused grin that lingered for a while after they reached the bottom of the hill and kept going across more wide-open nothingness. The dark form of the Citadel blocked off a scary amount of sky up ahead, but still seemed quite far away. She stared at it while walking, still unable to make any sense of what had happened.

  “Do you have any idea why the administrator would want to hurt me?”

  Legacy raised both eyebrows. “Of course. You are the Child of Earth. He is clearly afraid of the threat you pose.”

  If she hadn’t been sick with worry over her parents, the idea of her being a threat would’ve made her laugh. “Me? A threat? What possible threat could I be to someone like him?”

  Legacy planted his staff in the ground with each step, a constant skiff-skiff-skiff noise at the regularity of a clock. “He is a priest of Torment. He calls down the poison to burden the Earth and bend it to his will. You will cleanse it and destroy him.”

  “Uhh.” She spared a glance up at him. Ooo-kay. More than a little bit nuts. “I don’t want to destroy anyone.” A few steps later, she shrugged. “I wouldn’t mind cleaning up the poison, but I don’t know how. I’ve only taken basic chemistry so far. I have no idea how to fix this.”

  “Oh, child. It is not a problem of science. You are the Child of Earth. You will redeem the world.”

  Right. She suppressed the urge to roll her eyes. Just wiggle my fingers and blammo. Magic girl powers activate!

  “You do not believe me.” Legacy winked.

  “Damn. Saw right through me.” She gave him a genuine smile.

  Legacy patted her on the head. “If there is nothing to my prophecy, why then does the King of Torment seek you?”

  Her brain jammed to a halt. “Uhh….”

  He grinned.

  They walked on for a while more. Upon cresting a large dune, she squinted at the distant massiveness of the Citadel. Strips of blinding sun glare shimmered on a surface of dark metal. Angled walls that dwarfed the pyramids of Egypt stretched skyward to a flat point upon which sat a permanent tornado, threaded up into the cloud dome. The wind had lost some strength this close, enough to make the heat noticeably worse.

  “How are we going to get in?”

  Legacy paused to take out a water bottle. “We are not going in. I cannot. They will not allow me. He has told me of a passage, but you will need to stay out of sight. Tribals are not permitted in without a work permit, and they do not issue permits to children. You would be detained as fast as looked at.”

  “That’s stupid.” She followed his lead and drank. Warm, plastic-tasting water had never been so wonderful. “If they want to kick tribals out, why would they detain me?”

  “Oh, I mean that they would drag you to the gate and throw you out. Probably after they made you tell them how you got inside.”

  Kiera grinned and patted her satchel. “No problem. I won’t look like a tribal.”

  “Come. There is a place where we can shelter and wait for dark. It would be foolish to approach too close with the sun in the sky.” Legacy stashed his water bottle and kept going.

  She hurried a few quick gulps, put the bottle back in the satchel, and ran off. Pet hovered at her side, staying low. Inside of an hour later, they crested the top of a dune and faced another steep downhill. A ruined building stood at the bottom, the top two stories of a larger buried office tower. Skinny metal struts, bent and twisted, along the outside suggested it had been one of those all-glass ones, probably silver or black.

  Kiera managed to avoid falling on the way down the hill, though she did slide a few times. They crawled in the open side of the rotting building, taking refuge among mold-covered cubicle walls. Frequent rain had washed out most of the furniture and left a jungle of wires and cables hanging from the gaping ceiling. She crept straight ahead to opposite side, where she crouched to hide behind the decaying remains of a long radiator cabinet beneath the windows and stared up at the giant Citadel.

  “We are behind it,” said Legacy. “The gate is on the other side, so their sentries will not see us.”

  The ground between her and the eighty-story pyramid sloped downward in a bowl-shap
ed depression, the terraforming arcology at the center. Winds roared in the air high above, the sound of the storm’s fury didn’t match the gentle breeze at ground level. Jagged arcs of green lightning flickered across the top of the cloud dome and sometimes shot down the center of the twister to strike the metal pyramid.

  Kiera shivered, feeling tiny. She’d never been a fan of thunderstorms, but she had stopped hiding under her bed by around six years old. She lifted her hands from the top of the radiator, finding them coated in silvery glitter. The same metallic powder covered everything inside the dead building. “Pet? What is this?”

  The cube glided up to her hands. “Kiera, dust yourself off, please.”

  “Okay.” She brushed her hands clear and backed up. “Is it bad?”

  “Traces of lead, manganese, cadmium, and chromium(VI). I’m also detecting measurable levels of tetraethyl lead, and some radium. Likely, this is contamination stripped from the cloud dome, which rained down over the area outside the Citadel. I think these substances are being processed now, but when the machinery first went into passive mode, it only operated at a fraction of efficiency and ejected incompletely processed materials into the air.”

  Kiera scooted away from the edge of the building and checked her feet. “Okay, so don’t touch it.”

  “Your friend is quite helpful.” Legacy sat on the floor, in a space that looked clear of glittery dust.

  She fidgeted, staring worriedly at the ground. “Yeah, she is.”

  He beckoned her over, patting his leg.

  Kiera tiptoed to him and curled up in his lap, leaning against his chest, grateful to be away from the poisonous dust. “Thanks.”

  “I am not worried. I am old. A few more toxins won’t matter to me.” He took and held her hand, staring into her eyes. “I know you are the future of our kind. You will make a difference.”

  His hopeful gaze made her feel tiny. How wrong it seemed for an old man to be asking a girl her age to go off and save the world. But… he believed she could do it.

  “So, what do I do?”

  A broad smile bared Legacy’s teeth. “Now? We wait for dark.”

  31

  Shadow of the Citadel

  Perched on what could’ve been her grandfather’s lap, the absence of her parents grew more painful. In two months, Kiera had come to regard total strangers more dearly than she did her birth parents. By that logic, why not call the first living person she’d met after waking up in this nightmare grandpa?

  It didn’t matter that he was black and a person couldn’t get much whiter than her. It didn’t matter that had she not been frozen (and somehow lived) she should be older than him. She figured him for around sixty, which made him twelve years younger than her by birthdate. Numbers meant nothing. She may as well have stepped through a time machine. His hand, braced against her stomach to keep her from sliding off his lap, conveyed more protection than any words could.

  Her lip quivered at the sad realization she couldn’t remember her real grandparents at all, not even enough to know why she couldn’t. Had they died before she met them? Did her bio parents not get along with them, or did two real years spent in virtual reality overwrite those memories, deleting them out of her brain like unneeded files. Kiera lay back against Legacy’s chest, comforted by his presence. Eventually, her sorrow at the past gave way to worry for the future.

  “I hope I can do this Earth Child thing. I’m not sure if I can, but I’ll try.” She rested her hand on his, where he cradled her stomach.

  “I’m a tiny cube, and I believe in you,” said Pet. “O Child of Earth.”

  Kiera raspberried it.

  Pet giggled.

  An hour before sundown, they had a quick meal of protein bars. Once daylight weakened, Kiera got the shivers. Legacy rocked her in an effort to be consoling. Minute by minute, the sky grew darker. Soon, the Citadel changed from a looming shadow to a pyramid-shaped tower of color. Blue, red, and green blinking spots covered it as well as long amber lines where glow leaked out from between panels. The shimmering green radiance from the tornado perched upon the flattened top gave off enough light to illuminate the area like the moon she remembered, almost daylight compared to the natural moon struggling to pierce the clouds.

  “So nervous. Feels like I’m about to do something stupid and reckless. Like shoplift.”

  “I do not understand,” said Legacy.

  Kiera wrapped her arms around herself. “I mean, I’m not a shoplifter… but this is as scary as planning to steal.”

  “I’m not sure what you are trying to say, child. He knows you will succeed. Have faith.”

  Easy for you to say… you’re not the kid trying to sneak into that thing.

  Once it got dark, Legacy picked her up and carried her out of the tainted building, setting her on her feet in the silt a few steps away. “From here on, we should not speak lest we be discovered.”

  “Zero-eight-four?” asked Pet.

  “Yes.” Legacy nodded.

  Kiera glanced back and forth between them.

  “I should hide so I am not seen.” Pet glided up to Kiera.

  She held out her hands and the small cube set down, its glow fading out.

  “I would much rather fly by your side, but I do not wish to cause your discovery,” said Pet.

  “Yeah.” Kiera hugged her digital friend before putting it in the satchel. “I can’t stop shaking.”

  Legacy took her hand. “You have the advantage of surprise. The Priest of Torment will not expect you to come to his door.”

  “Actually, he is…” She fidgeted, explaining the message she’d received on the little memory fob.

  “Hmm. Well, he will not expect you to sneak in.” Legacy winked. “He is hoping you are frightened and emotional, and choose to trust he will not simply kill your parents once he no longer needs them to control you.”

  Tears slipped down her cheeks. Somehow, she kept her voice from shaking. “That’s what Pet said.”

  “I hear things, child.” Legacy walked on toward the giant pyramid of flickering light. “Not all within the Citadel adore their master. You may find friends within. This battle is not one you are required to face alone.”

  “You’re not alone,” said Pet from inside the satchel.

  Kiera hugged her bag. “Okay.”

  The ground leading to the Citadel consisted of hard-packed dirt rather than soft silt. The oddity of walking on a surface she didn’t sink into barely registered past her fear. She kept her gaze on the distant thrumming Citadel, attention darting from one flickering light to the next. Pet said the ground floor covered about three and a half square miles, a whole city enclosed in a building. Her jaw hung open at the unabashed massiveness of it.

  Constant mechanical droning plus the growl of the tornado funnel above made being quiet a futile point. If she spoke at normal volume, Legacy wouldn’t have heard her at all, even right next to her. They scurried at a light jog across a field awash in an unnatural emerald glow that flickered brighter every so often when lightning shot down the tornado with ear-piercing cracks. The distant structure grew and grew, until it became more of an endless wall than a standing building.

  Kiera gazed up, noting the utter lack of moving air for the first time since finding herself in a tank of clear ooze. “There’s no wind.”

  Legacy kept going, not reacting.

  She tugged on his arm and waved at the air. “No wind.”

  He bowed close, putting his ear to her face.

  “There’s no wind here. It’s strange.”

  “Ahh.” He leaned his mouth to her ear. “The wind comes from this place. We are in the eye of the storm.”

  She yawned, ready for sleep, but too nervous to consider it. Eventually, the ground leveled off at the bottom of the bowl-shaped depression. Legacy picked up to a light run. With a grunt of protest, she hurried after him. The one-mile run she’d had to do in phys-ed, or at least the virtual reality version of phys-ed, felt like a short trip compa
red to the dash across the last section of open ground.

  Legacy finally came to a stop at the edge of a metal trench running along the base of the Citadel. The enormous structure’s walls went from pyramid angle to vertical like a normal building at ground level, forming the inside of a trench perhaps twenty yards across and the same depth. She leaned forward, peering down. A tangled maze of large pipes ran along the bottom, navigating around enormous openings that led down to turbine chambers with huge blades. Despite none of it operating at the moment, gazing at wide-open drains big enough to swallow a grown man scared her to death.

  She clamped onto Legacy, shivering.

  He held her close and spoke into her ear. “When you call the Great Cleansing, this will become a raging river, spreading life to the world.”

  Kiera nodded and gave him a ‘what now?’ stare.

  He pointed to the left and pulled her along at a quick walk for a few minutes, stopping again by a ladder on the side of the trench that led straight to the bottom along a recess in the wall. Without a word, he threw his leg around and climbed down. Kiera stared up the side of the Citadel, feeling like a flea expected to kill an elephant. Worst thing that could happen would be getting caught. No different from being a chicken and surrendering. At least she had to try. Okay, check that. The worst thing would be falling into a pump shaft.

  She turned her back to the Citadel and lowered herself onto the ladder. Warm steel rungs at her feet felt slippery enough to make her grab on tight and take the climb slow. Pipes of various sizes passed behind her, some tiny like her arms, others big enough she could’ve stood up inside them. Everything thrummed and vibrated with machine activity. She tried not to think of falling into one of the turbine pits, which looked like it would chew her up like a frog in a blender. Of course, none of the turbines operated yet, but that didn’t mean crashing down on giant, sharp blades would be pleasant.

  Her satchel bounced against her rear end as she made her way down, keeping her gaze focused on the metal wall a few inches away from her face. Looking anywhere else would remind her of the dangerous fall below. Minutes later, Legacy put a hand on her side. She gasped, surprised at being so close to the bottom. She twisted around to look at him. He smiled, plucked her off the ladder, and set her on her feet.