That was Brendol. He put their GAV into gear, turned a sharp left, and floored it. Siv’s turret spun around, and she struggled to stay focused and figure out where to point the gun. She soon realized that Brendol wasn’t going to help any of their people; he was making a sharper left into the desert, speeding away from the city and the ditch. He didn’t comm his people, didn’t attempt to fight, didn’t try to save anyone.
He just ran.
The other vehicles gave pursuit, and although Siv aimed her gun and pulled the trigger, she didn’t see the same success as her first hit. The turret jiggled her everywhere, and she was starting to feel sick to her stomach. She lost track of Torben and Phasma. One of the attacking vehicles ran over a speeder bike, breaking it like a child’s toy.
“We have to go back!” she shouted. “They need us! We’ll lose them all!”
“Wrong. We have to get away. To my ship. We can’t help them now.”
Siv roared her anger—this was not how life was lived in the Scyre. Every body was necessary, every person had a particular job. What a different place Brendol must have been from, if he was willing to abandon his people and run for his life. And what a conscience he must have possessed, to know he could live with such a decision and just go on with his days instead of being crushed by shame and regret.
Even in her condition, even knowing how badly they were overpowered, Siv almost scrambled down from the turret and leapt from the GAV to hurry back to Torben and Phasma and Gosta. But she didn’t get a chance. The vehicle suddenly slammed to a stop in a huge burst of sand.
“What happened?”
“We hit something!”
At that, Siv did hurry down, and the moment she was in the passenger seat, she found a ragged spear point firmly held in front of her face. Brendol had his hands up, so she put her hands up, too. The attackers were strange, clad only in colorful, finely woven clothes like the ones the Scyre folk kept stored in the Nautilus as sacred relics. No armor, no masks. But every centimeter of skin was covered by cloth, down to thin gloves on their hands. Their heads were wrapped in long swaths of the vibrant fabrics, only their eyes showing.
“Get out. Don’t try anything,” the one she assumed was the leader said. His words had a strange accent, but it was closer to what she was used to than the way Brendol spoke. “We already have your other people, so don’t bother trying to be heroes. Yet.”
It was a baffling thing to say, but Siv didn’t have time to consider it. Someone opened her door, and she slid down from the GAV, landing in a puff of sand. They slapped battered plastic binders on her wrists and searched her to remove all her weapons. On the other side of the vehicle, Brendol was undergoing the same treatment, his face red with growing fury. Two more groups of brightly dressed strangers joined them, bringing Pete and Huff in chains, seemingly unharmed, and dragging an unconscious Elli.
“And the others?” the leader asked one of his people.
“Still fighting.”
“Are they winning?”
The woman chuckled. “They will. We always do.”
“Arratu!” the leader shouted, shaking his spear and howling at the sky.
“Arratu!” the others answered, taking up the manic shriek.
Brendol looked beyond disgusted. “Madness,” he muttered.
“Shall we watch, then?” the leader asked his people.
The only answer was another cheer. Siv was roughly turned with the others to face a wide spread of sand. Phasma and Torben were fighting back-to-back, Gosta’s prone body on the sand between them. Phasma had her blaster in one hand and her ax in the other, and judging by the colorful, unmoving lumps in the sand, she’d already taken down two fighters on her side of the field. Torben twirled his ax and spiked club and had three bodies littering his side. As Siv watched, Phasma winged one of her attackers in the arm with a blaster bolt, then spun and caught him across the chest with her blade, kicking him in the stomach as he fell. The ring of attackers stepped back, uncertain.
Torben roared, and Siv knew what would come next and smiled to herself. With a fatal weapon in each hand, he ran into the circle of assailants and spun with an elegant grace no one would’ve expected from so big a man, hacking bodies across the gut and leaving a circle of blood. The sand bubbled up with a volcano of beetles, and Siv cried, “Torben! Back away!”
When Torben looked up at her, his face stricken—that’s when they got him.
The attackers threw a net over him, pinning him to the ground. As he stood to toss it off, someone jerked it, and it narrowed around his ankles, tripping him.
The leader, standing between Siv and Brendol, laughed heartily.
“Even the mighty fall before the will of Arratu,” he bellowed.
Phasma was the only one still up, and she hadn’t slowed her assault. She’d wing one of the assailants with her blaster, then hit them somewhere mortal while they were still in shock. Looking around, Siv realized that these people weren’t really fighting or using their blasters. They all carried guns, and they had the huge weapons mounted on the GAVs, but they seemed more interested in watching the show than protecting one another.
This, then, wasn’t an attack or raid like one of Balder’s, not a risky bid trading lives for resources. Whoever these people were, they wanted bodies. People. Even great Torben, who had killed so many of them, hadn’t been harmed or punished. And yet they didn’t seem to mind watching their own people die and thus far had lost at least a dozen, for all that they had fifty more just standing around, watching.
“What do you want with us?” Siv asked the leader.
“Wait and see, little sand flea,” he said. “For now, let’s watch the show.”
Phasma’s fight was valiant, extraordinary, and bloody. She used the blaster like she’d been born with one in her hand, showing unerring aim, even without the ability to stop and carefully focus her shots. She was adept at maiming an enemy and then perfectly timing the killing shot. One of the men went down in two pieces, bisected across the stomach, and much to Siv’s surprise, the leader behind her just laughed his booming laugh.
“Justinian was always a bit tall, wasn’t he?” he shouted.
The more Siv watched, the more disgusted she became. Whatever these people wanted, it wasn’t as pure and true as what the Scyre wanted. They weren’t fighting to live, to eat, to hold on to vital land. They weren’t fighting to defend their elderly and young from attackers. They seemed to be fighting for entertainment only, a vile blasphemy to Siv’s mind.
“I grow bored,” the leader said. “Tell Seylon to end it.”
The woman he’d spoken to nodded and darted off across the sand on huge, wide shoes that kicked up puffs of gray. Whatever she said when she reached the clot of people circling Phasma had the desired effect. A big man split off from the group and held up a long spear, which crackled with what looked like lightning. As three other assailants taunted Phasma from the other side, he casually poked her with the spear, and crackles of electricity wreathed her body and helmet. Phasma went stiff and fell over backward, flopping on the ground, her body rigid and slightly smoking.
“Package them up and let’s hurry home before the next storm. The Arratu will be pleased.”
The leader walked calmly to a GAV and took his seat while the rest of the group poked, prodded, and hurried along the captives. When Phasma stopped sparking, Seylon threw another net over her, dragged her away, and hefted her into a GAV, tossing her fallen helmet in behind her. Brendol and Siv were kept together, ushered into a spike-covered GAV that smelled of strange spices.
“See?” Brendol whispered to Siv as she watched Torben, now out of his net and forced to carry Gosta. The girl was still unconscious, and Torben draped her across the backseat of another GAV. “I told you. Whatever the Arratu is, it will live in the highest building, and whatever it wants will cost us more than we’re willing to give. You can bet on that.”
Siv didn’t like Brendol Hux, and she didn’t trust him, but she suspecte
d that on this occasion, he was right.
She wasn’t looking forward to finding out what the Arratu really was.
RIDING IN THE ENEMY’S GAV, SIV quickly began to feel ill. Instead of driving relatively straight, as Brendol had, the driver swerved this way and that and plunged up and down the small dunes like he had a death wish. Her stomach roiled, and she realized this was farther than she’d ever been from another Scyre member. The band was a family, and she was stuck here with Brendol Hux, who was hunched down as far from her on the seat as he could get, sulky and glaring.
At first Siv felt as if she were getting feverish, her skin alternating from hot to cold, but then she realized that the sky was growing dark. When a storm came to the Scyre, everyone quickly found a stable place to ride it out, making sure their lines were hitched to steady spikes, as the oil-slick rains and buffeting winds could easily knock a person off a rock spire. On the best days, they huddled in the Nautilus, in the corners away from the hole in the ceiling that gushed toxic rain, even when they put a woven cap over it. On the worst days, the Nautilus was full of raging water, and they hunkered down in the miserable, stinging, sputtering rain with no cover and no way to avoid random lightning strikes and cruel, cutting winds. Siv and Torben had a rock they liked, a bigger sort of spire that could almost hold them both comfortably as they huddled under a protective hide.
But this storm was strange. The air didn’t feel heavy and wet and thick. It felt hot and sucking and sparking, and when the leader, now driving Brendol’s old GAV, shouted something into the wind, Siv’s driver accelerated even harder, making her put a hand over her mouth under the mask to keep the sick in and the sand out. It wasn’t long before they were approaching the city head-on, and Siv had trouble grasping how very large it was. Bigger than the Scyre and Claw territories put together, bigger than Terpsichore Station. The wall had to be the height of ten people and was solidly covered in those dangerous-looking plants. Just when Siv was sure they were going to splatter against it, a door slid open, just wide enough to allow the GAVs entry. Although the wall had appeared entirely solid from the outside, apparently the vines hid their own secrets.
Once they were inside, the city was beyond overwhelming for a woman who had only ever known perhaps a hundred people by name in her entire life. It was so crowded with people hurrying to and fro that one of their brightly clad captors had to get out of Siv’s GAV and shove people out of the way with a long, colorful stick covered in bells, calling, “Clear the streets! The Arratu’s orders!”
The people were of all ages, some so old that Siv was fascinated by their stooped bodies, wrinkles, and gray hair. In the Scyre, few people lived past thirty-five. But like the Scyre, this place had few babies or small children; the majority of the population seemed to be in their older teens and twenties, the strongest and most robust ages.
The next thing she noticed was that the people seemed to be of two different sorts: gaunt and raggedly dressed or large and decked out in swaths of vibrant fabric and layers of gold jewelry. She’d never seen bodies carrying so much extra flesh, and it did not escape her that the larger and wealthier folk seemed far happier than their skinny neighbors. Everyone was running to shelter, glancing up worriedly at the darkening sky.
When Siv looked to Brendol, a question in her eyes, he shook his head disapprovingly. “I told you. The people who live up high have too much, and the people who scrape in the dirt are starving. Overindulgence and suffering with no in-between, no thought for the city’s welfare. This world needs the First Order.”
“What can be done for them?” Siv asked.
Brendol raised a feathery red eyebrow. “They must be ruled by someone with a firmer hand.”
But he didn’t go into any further detail, and one of the captors poked him with a stick.
“Don’t be talking like that where the Rats can hear you,” she murmured. “You won’t last long, making threats like that.”
Brendol looked at the woman, whose face was baked a beautiful sandy brown that Siv had never seen before. She had pulled down the cloth that had previously covered her nose and mouth, and her light gray eyes were lined in deep black.
“What’s to be done with us?” Brendol asked her.
She gave an elegant shrug. “Not mine to say.”
“But we’re not guests.”
The woman smiled, showing dimples. “Oh, no. You’d have to earn that, first.”
The driver grunted. “Hush. Don’t give them ideas.”
And then their captors went silent, which was disconcerting. Although Siv was accustomed to enemies, they’d always struck violently, never wasting time and resources on adult captives whose hearts couldn’t be turned, as a child’s could. Whatever these people wanted from them—well, Brendol was right. Siv didn’t want to give it.
To take her mind off her concerns, she turned her attention to the wonders of the city. Since the Nautilus held so many artifacts, and since she’d spent time at Terpsichore Station, Siv knew a little more about the world that had once been. The structures in the city—those were buildings, where people would live and work. The structures, though—they were so close and tall and crowded together that there was barely enough room for the GAVs to pass between them. The paved ground they were on—that was a road. And up ahead, she recognized a building similar to the orientation disk’s images of Terpsichore Station before the planet had gone strange. But this city had other structures built up around and atop the old station, making it the base of the highest building in the center of the city, the one that Brendol had so many thoughts about.
“Who lives up there?” he asked, arms crossed. “Your god or your king?”
In response, their captor pointed a blaster at him and growled, “Do not speak ill of the Arratu.”
“Sounds like both,” Brendol murmured, barely loud enough to be heard. The woman glared daggers at him but didn’t shoot him, although she looked like she sorely wanted to.
Another curious thing Siv noticed as they slowly navigated the crowds was the proliferation of plants and greenery. They were atop every roof, hanging from every window, and lining every wall in colorful containers. Vines snaked across the roads, bare of leaves where they’d been ripped off by passersby but budding again as they dug into the sides of buildings and climbed closer to the sun. There were creatures in the plants that Siv didn’t quite understand, things flying about that weren’t anything like the seabirds and bugs in the Scyre. Small and delicate as gems, they buzzed here and there, dipping into the plants and smacking against one another with a pleasing thump before moving on.
“What are they?” she asked as they passed near a plant covered with blooms, each one surrounded by the jewel-bright creatures.
“Squeeps,” the woman said with a brief smile before hardening her expression and returning to silence.
“Why do the starving people not eat them?” Brendol asked.
The woman aimed her blaster at Brendol again and shook her head. “Is everything you say blasphemous?”
Brendol’s eyebrows rose, but he wisely looked away and didn’t pursue the conversation further.
The sky was almost black now, the wind whipping sand into Siv’s eyes under her mask. The air felt electric and uncontrollable, and the streets were empty. Finally, the GAVs reached the building that resembled a Con Star Mining Corporation station, although it looked nothing like the images Siv had seen on the screen at Terpsichore. This structure had been painted in bright pigments and was covered in vines. The sliding doors were open, showing a yawning white hallway that made Siv’s skin crawl. Naturally, they drove straight into it. Once within, the driver parked the GAV in a long row with other vehicles likewise decorated to look dangerous, and Siv recognized a room much like the one where they’d found the speeder bikes. A hangar. Each of the GAVs plugged into the wall, and there was a gentle hum of machinery. Brendol, for all his sullenness, had a sharp look about him as he took in the room, and Siv wished she had some idea of what
he was thinking. She was pretty sure he was developing a plan. Among the Scyre, plans hadn’t been something kept secret from the warriors. If even one person didn’t know what to do in case of emergency, things tended to fall apart. But Brendol was crafty and strange, and once again she was reminded that something about him didn’t sit well with her.
“Barely made it,” the leader crowed, hitting the button that closed the hallway door. The howling of the windstorm stopped, and the room went unnaturally silent.
“Out,” their captor said, blaster pointed at Brendol, as if she didn’t even consider Siv a threat.
Brendol hopped down, followed first by their captor, then Siv. No matter which way she moved, blasters pointed in her face. After so much time spent on hot, shifting sand, it was strange to stand on the cold, hard floor, and she wobbled for a moment, trying to regain her footing.
“Walk,” the woman said, nudging Siv in the back with the blaster. That, too, was a new experience. Having grown up with a cache of old, broken blasters in the Nautilus, Siv wasn’t accustomed to thinking of the small, blunt, harmless-looking machines as a real threat. But when the woman nudged her again, she moved in the direction indicated.
Brendol was already walking, his head turning this way and that, up and down. They were soon joined by the others, and Siv felt a profound sense of relief to be near Torben and Gosta and Phasma again. The stormtroopers fell in step behind Brendol, carrying poor Elli between them. Siv couldn’t tell if the woman was breathing or not; she hung between her fellow troopers, limp and unconscious. Gosta was awake but still in Torben’s arms, and Phasma, clearly dazed from being shocked, was having trouble walking in a straight line. When Torben’s arm touched her own, Siv smiled slightly, but she knew where she was needed, so she bumped against him in a telling way and hurried to help Phasma.
Now, the Scyre were a people who enjoyed physical touch and comfort, considering that they faced a cold, unpredictable, cruel life. But Phasma had always held herself apart. Siv trusted Phasma with her life and knew she was the most talented strategist and the fiercest fighter on the planet, but that didn’t mean Siv was just going to walk up and put an arm around the staggering fighter. Even then, there was an aura around Phasma, almost like an animal’s unspoken warning to keep a distance.
Phasma (Star Wars) Page 17