Elite Nation: Book One

by H. A. Rockley

  Ari does not reply, as she searches the room for a way to rescue her sister.

  ‘I lost everything once,’ Mei-Ling says, ‘but I won’t this time. I found my love,’ she gestures to Eli, ‘and I intend to live my life as an Elite.’ She now addresses the assassins, ‘release them, or this one dies.’

  Kaley shouts, ‘don’t do it!’

  Mei-Ling’s face scrunches up in fury, as she digs the knife into Kaley’s skin, drawing blood, but then there is an explosion and the door and wall to the basement is a pile of rubble.

  As the dust clears, Ai-Ling, Delta and Malik stand before them.

  Mei-Ling scrambles to her feet, blood spilling from a gash on her forehead. Kaley rushes over to Ari who has been knocked unconscious with the force of the blast. Xavier and Guy still hold their sabres to Eli and Julie’s chests.

  ‘Oh what fresh hell is this?’ Xavier says, as he looks upon the girl who caused such destruction.

  ‘You are truly naïve, sister,’ Ai-Ling says to Mei-Ling, ‘to think I could not escape a prison of your making. You forget that my power is much more developed than your own.’

  Mei-Ling lets out a high-pitched scream before launching her arms forwards, energy bursting from her fingers tips, picking up the rubble and throwing it towards her sister. She gets to her feet and brings her fists down around her, at the same time causing the basement to shake, dust falling from the ceiling, as the marble pillars are pulled through the ground floor, below.

  Delta, Malik and Ai-Ling, scramble in all directions, as they avoid the concrete, limestone and marble. Kaley, drags Ari to safety, beneath an upturned desk, as she lays her hands over her sister, willing for her healing to happen faster. Xavier and Guy pull their prisoners with them as they move across the room towards the exit, passing Kaley and Ari.

  ‘This place is going to come crashing down,’ Xavier says, panting, ‘we’ve got to move now.’

  Kaley follows close behind, pulling Ari’s lifeless body with her.

  Delta and Malik shout to Ai-Ling, as they too leave the basement.

  The two sisters, however, continue to fight, using their power to manipulate the Earth to throw rocks hewn out of the Palace floors. There is another shudder as the ceiling above starts to crack, before caving in. Ai-Ling ducks out of the way, fleeing up the remaining stairs to the floor above. She follows the others out of The Palace doors, onto the courtyard below. They continue to run as The Palace falls into a heap, spires collapsing, stain-glass windows imploding, walls now a pile of twisted metal and stone.

  Ai-Ling looks back at the destruction, falling to her knees, crying at the realization her sister lies beneath the debris. Delta and Malik, place a hand on either shoulder in comfort, as they look out to the place that was their Prison for so many months.

  Kaley continues to work on her sister, healing energy flowing out through her fingers and into the unconscious body. Ari’s eyes flicker a few time and then open. She smiles up at her sister, before rising to hug her, squeezing tight.

  Approaching slowly, Guy tentatively advises them all that it is time to leave The Island to head back to the mainland. The group makes their way through the low-lying scrub towards the white sandy beach, where a boat is docked.

  ‘Well this sure beats our sad excuse for a raft,’ Malik jokes, as he boards the boat.

  He jumps suddenly, bumping into Delta as she boards shortly after him.

  ‘Watch it,’ she scolds. Before following his line of sight, to see Julie’s cronies slumped in the corner, blood plastered to their faces.

  Ari and Kaley sit port side, as Kaley recounts the events of the last two months that led her to find her sister.

  ‘I cannot believe you put yourself up to be bait,’ Ari grins, as she admires her sister’s sequined dress and white silk gloves.

  ‘Why not?’ Kaley shrugs. ‘I’m not about to let you become a bad-ass whilst I continue to mope. It was time I stepped up to the plate and did what I had to in order to help you.’

  ‘Well I’m glad you are now too, a bad-ass, as you say’ Ari laughs.

  She looks up as Xavier and Guy board the boat with their captives in tow.

  ‘Where are Justin and Maude?’ Ari asks her sister.

  Kaley tries to avoid answering by looking into the waves, ‘do you ever wonder if there are still sea creatures out there?’

  ‘Kaley. Please tell me.’

  Kaley’s eyes are downcast as she looks back to her sister and tells her the truth. ‘They went missing a couple of months ago. They went out to complete their mission in The Republique, to take down their Weapons Industry and no one has heard from them since. Their communicators and trackers are offline. Sentries are searching for some news but generally came back empty handed. There is some talk of Chancellor Chvostek re-opening the uranium mines in the East and enslaving thousands of people to work for them. There is some thought that maybe Justin and Maude are there.’

  A rushing sound fills Ari’s ears, and she feels light-headed, as she processes this news. Justin and Maude missing.

  How could this happen?

  They were skilled assassins, able to blend into the darkness and their surroundings, only being found when they wanted to be. Ari looks over to Xavier and Guy who now emerge from the boat’s hull, having stowed their prisoners below deck. She notices Xavier’s usual happy-go-lucky demeanour lacking and Guy’s usual stoic appearance more resigned than she remembered. Justin and Maude’s disappearance must be at the forefront of their minds.

  Instead of troubling them further with questions, Ari decides to approach Ai-Ling, who sits alone at the stern of the boat, gazing out at the moonlight reflecting off the choppy waves.

  ‘How are you doing?’ Ari asks quietly, as she sits by her.

  Ai-Ling shakes her head. ‘I knew she was planning on betraying us,’ she says, continuing to gaze out to sea. ‘I tried my best to dissuade her from making this mistake. But she wouldn’t listen. She wanted me to join her in becoming Eli’s mistress too so that we could both Ascend.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Ari whispers, unsure what else to say.

  ‘I never thought she’d try to hurt me,’ Ai-Ling murmurs, as she hugs her knees close to her body, resting her head on them. ‘We’d been through so much together, from when we were taken from our family when we were only children, and forced to work in the Southern uranium mines. Our earth-wielding abilities came in handy for mining, you see. Then we were rescued by Julie and taken to live with Eli and his siblings.

  ‘Mei wasn’t always in love with him – she, like the rest of us, worked on a plan for escape. But slowly, he manipulated her. He convinced her that she would become Elite if she did as he said. He convinced her to murder his siblings, so that they would not ascend to the Head of their family, as he wanted all the power for himself.

  ‘And having all of us, as his collector items wasn’t just for that purpose – it was so we would work with him, to help him continue to hold on to that power. He wanted us to be his personal army, to protect him from anyone who would seek to take his place and power.’

  He must have thought that Chancellor Chvostek would come for him, Ari thought, as she continued to listen to Ai-Ling.

  ‘So my sister was sucked in by his lies and deceit. And now she’s dead,’ Ai-Ling says as quietly as the breeze that twists her black curtain of hair about her face.

  ‘We are near the mainland,’ Delta says to the two girls, as she approaches them and sits by Ari, Malik joining shortly after.

  ‘I wonder if we can finally find our families,’ she whispers to herself, as she rests her head on Ari’s shoulder.

  ‘I sure hope so,’ Malik says, determined. ‘I vowed I will stop at nothing to find my sister.’

  The stars start to wink down at them in the night sky and before long the boat is mooring at a worn jetty. The timber piles are covered in algae and barnacles. Holes pepper the wooden planks, some almost as wide as the plank itself. As Ari crosses the jetty in the dark
, she almost slips, catching her foot on the edge of one of the holes, steadying herself before falling. Xavier catches her from behind, as they follow Guy who escorts their two captives up ahead.

  ‘Try not to fall in,’ Xavier laughs, as he steadies Ari. ‘I must admit I’m not the greatest swimmer.’

  ‘You don’t need to know how to swim when I’m around,’ Delta says as she passes them by and with the clap of her hands, two waves rise nearby the jetty then slam into each other, before falling back into the ocean.

  Once they have all made it to the other side of the jetty onto dry land, they reconvene and try to work out where they are and how to get back to The Underground.

  Guy clicks on his communicator and a map of the mainland appears, floating inches above his wrist. A tiny red dot indicates their location. With his thumb and forefinger, Guy pinches the pixels of the map, zooming in to where they are. He turns the map with his finger, and it flattens out in the same plane they are standing. He flicks through the map to the nearest town – a ghetto shantytown just outside the Tuchersfield Village.

  ‘If we make our way through to Tuchersfield,’ Guy explains, ‘then we can continue onwards to the City of Secrets and through to The Underground.’

  ‘Underground?’ Malik asks, confused. Guy does not answer but closes his map and continues on, poking his captives in the back, forcing them to move, Julie, sulking as she pushes Eli in his chair.

  ‘Guess he’s not the chatty type,’ Delta shrugs to Malik, as she follows after them.

  ◆◆◆

  The sun rises and they pack their belongings, clearing their campsite they established in a shallow abandoned cave before carrying on with their trek across the arid landscape. The ground is cracked and dry, no greenery for as far as the eye can see. The sun beats down on them hard, scorching without a cloud in the sky.

  Ari holds her black jumper above her head, shading herself from the harsh heat. Her skin glows red from sunburn. Her sister is the same, skin blistering with the heat. She feels like the day is dragging on forever, mouth dry with thirst. She removes one of her last water bubbles from her belt and drinks it, hoping they will last until they reach the Village, or at least the shantytown.

  After hours of trudging the desert landscape a mirage appears - squat buildings and a tank high up on stilts.

  No, Not a mirage, Ari realises.

  They have made it to the shantytown.

  Chapter TWENTY-SEVEN

  Maude sits alone in the corner of her padded cell, hugging her knees as she softly sings to herself.

  A lullaby she loved, as a child, sung to her by her grandmother, she thinks. But her grandmother’s face is blurry - as are the faces of everyone else she once new. She remembers she was brought to this place with someone.

  Yes, there was a friend.

  Whatever happened to that friend?

  Is he suffering as she is?

  Does he know the pain she has been subject to? The mental and physical torture she has been privy to?

  She stares blankly, eyes wide and hollow, into the gloomy light of her cell. The grate in the bottom of the door slides open and a tray of food is tossed across the floor, stopping at her bare feet. Maude slowly glances over to the tray of dry bread and dirty water. Before the grate slides shut like it usually does, a lilting voice echoes around the walls.

  ‘Eat up – you need to be healthy and strong for what is coming next.’

  Maude looks up, puzzled; for this was the first time anyone has ever spoken to her these last months since she arrived. The grate slides closed with a clang that reverberates around the cell. Settling back into her corner as she usually does with every intention not to touch the food, as she usually did, something unusual catches her eye.

  Sitting under the tarnished silver plate of stale bread is the corner of a newspaper. Newspapers haven’t been around for almost two hundred years. Print died out with so many other relics of The Old World and Maude was surprised to see such an item accompanying her daily meal.

  She lunges forward, pulling the newspaper out from under the plate, before glancing around the room sure this must be some sort of trick.

  Nothing happens.

  Tentatively, she unfolds the paper and lays it out on the cold concrete floor in front of her. She breathes in deep – the scent of the ink and the fraying pages something she has never smelt before, yet seems so familiar – almost comforting. As she peruses the paper, wondering why of all days she was given reading material, she notices certain words or portion of words in the various articles and advertisements are circled on multiple pages. She flicks through the paper to the end, staring at the last page. Surely, these words being circled was just coincidence – perhaps done in a time by a person who died in The Old War.

  Or it could be a message.

  Maude shakes her head before scrunching up the newspaper and throwing it across the room at the opposite wall. All this time spent in isolation was making her mad, she thought. As if someone would be sending her a message.

  Who else knew she was here?

  No one, that’s who.

  Maude eyes the scrunched up paper before crawling forwards to collect it. She straightens it out again before carefully combing the pages for each circled word, making a mental note of them.

  Page two: the word ‘meet’ is circles in the article’s title Presidential meeting – the first step in denuclearisation.

  ‘Yeh, fat chance of that happening,’ Maude says to herself as she skims the page, thinking how wrong the world was on the inevitable nuclear war back then.

  Page five: an advertisement on travel to an exotic island, that no longer exists, since global warming caused the oceans to rise ten-fold wiping out such locations. Visit now at an incredible price. The word ‘at’ is circled.

  Maude flicks through more pages before she comes across two circled letters on Page 13 – another advertisement for a local supermarket chain that existed before the world was turned into an autocracy. The letters ‘CC’ are circled.

  Page 21: a small article to the bottom right on the page, addressing a suspicious explosion at a laboratory, where biological weapons had been stored. ‘Lab’ is circled.

  Page 30: Another advertisement, this time a woman’s face beams up at her in the black and grey print. She shows off her new smile for miserly sum of $10 000. Amazing how beauty standards amongst The Elites have changed so much, Maude wonders, as she softly touches the woman’s skin – no evidence of hiding the small crows-feet and laugh lines on her face. The number ‘10’ is circled.

  Page 38: A page addressing international news with an article on a Prime Minister serving on the other side of the world at the time of the paper’s publishing. The article mentions the trials and tribulations this Prime Minister has had, ‘..for being the first female PM in any nation to attend the Conference with baby in tow..’.

  Female leaders taking their babies out with them on duty – how could this have been such a contentious issue it made it into this newspaper? Maude thought to herself, as she made a mental note of the letters ‘PM’ being circled.

  Page 46: an article addressing the need to take a break these upcoming holidays during the Silly Season.

  Silly Season? Maude could not make any sense of that, as she noted the word ‘break’ was circled.

  Page 52: the first of many pages dedicated to sports – sports with bats called cricket, others with people riding four-legged creatures that no longer roamed the earth, for money. One such article talks of the defending team being, ‘..all out for nothing after the batsman went for a duck.’

  Maude notes the word ‘out’ is circled, as she admires the simple lives human beings once lived. A time when they could play sport for money, and were hailed as heroes for making a goal. She vows to herself as she flicks through the last pages of the newspaper for any other circled clues – that if she ever gets out of this wretched place and makes it back to The Underground, she and the others will learn a sport. The
y will learn the thrill of playing with a bat and ball and learn what it is like to be a hero like this.

  She goes through the words she uncovered: Meet. At. CC. Lab. 10. PM. Break. Out.

  Meet at CC lab. 10PM. Break out.

  Maude stares down at the newspaper, dumbfounded.

  Was this is a trick? Was there someone really trying to tell her that there was a plan for escaping this horrid place?

  And what was CC lab?

  Something clicks as she remembers hearing that evil bitch scientist’s name was Cecelia or something like that. Perhaps she called herself Cece for short.

  If it was true, Maude didn’t know how she would even know when the time was 10 p.m. After all, the ploy of the guards and that sick scientist was to keep her confused, unsure of the time or day or month. She just had to guess. She tended to get her meals at the same time everyday. Usually two hours after her last session of the day in the laboratory. Perhaps that was dinner.

  So maybe, it was close to 10 p.m. after all, she thought.

  But how would she get herself out of this cell and to the laboratory?

  She looks down at the grate in the door. Cursing herself for what she was about to do, she kneels down, and slides the grate open, slowly, trying to avoid the scraping whine it usually gave out when opened.

  She knew the infirmary was attached to the laboratory, after the daily trips she took past there, when she’d feign being mute and unconscious on the gurney the guards would wheel her out on.

  She folds the newspaper twice and places it between her teeth. She takes a deep breath and places her hand and wrist between the grate opening. Before she could think much more about what she was about to do, she takes her other hand and with force, slams the grate shut with a loud clang!

  Her vision goes white as a searing pain spreads through her fingers, up her wrist and to her shoulder. She cries out in pain, as she falls to the floor, tears streaming down her face. She looks down at the blood pulsating from her wrist, bright red and flowing fast. The hand itself is deformed, bent in places it shouldn’t be.