But Ella was gone.
Riley slowed down at the end of Willis, buying himself a bit more time. He could just see the corner of their roof beyond the trees. He could almost picture his father, chewing on a sprig of something or other he picked up from their little herb garden, or at least that's what mom called it. It was really just a dozen old pots with dirt in them, and a few always struggling plants craning their necks to the sun; mint and rosemary and something else whose name always escaped him were the only things that ever took.
Father always told Mother to put the plants inside for the winter, but their house was so dark, mother said that even in the midst of the coldest winter, the plants would be better off outside, feeding on light as they did. The days when she'd spot new growth in one of her pots were the happiest. She'd sing to herself while cooking supper. She'd tuck him and even Ella to bed at night. She'd hug Father, unprovoked. She'd even laugh at something silly Samson did on occasion.
He remembered coming home the day they'd taken Ella, only that would happen later, and Mother found a new sprig of thyme or something that smelled just as awful growing out of a pot. She ran out to meet him in the street, something she hadn't done in years, and she was beaming. Her eyes were sparkly and all the sadness was gone out of them. He let her hug him and kiss him right there in the street, hoping nobody was watching, but he was happy to see her like that.
That was almost two years ago. That night Ella was gone. His mother's sadness came back into her eyes and stayed there, even with the new greens in her pots. He could feel the sadness leaking out from under the unfixable space in the corner of their roof, like smoke from Father's old pipe that he kept still, even though there hadn't been any tobacco to put in it for years now.
He turned the corner and picked up the pace to his house. He was suddenly eager to get it all over with. The door was wide open. He wiped his boots on the torn-up pale brown mat in the mudroom, knowing that it wouldn't do any good, but Mother always insisted on it anyway. The house was eerily silent. His parents were not in the kitchen or the yard—he could see all of the back yard from the small kitchen window without even needing to turn his head. Something was wrong. He’d felt that wrongness the night their parents fought with the strange men and they lost Ella for good. It made it hurt to breathe then. Samson … Where the hell was Samson?
That was the wrongness. The dog was always there to meet him at the door, his ears up, tail wagging into the walls of the narrow hallway, his soft whimpering noises. For some reason, Samson never barked. "Samson! Come here, boy!" Screaming into the silent house made it feel worse that no one replied. And that there was no sign of Samson. Riley took his coat off and hung it up on the rack, only now noticing that all the other coats were gone. Hats and scarves too. And Samson's collar lay opened at the link on the floor by the mat.
He should have noticed it earlier, but he wasn't looking down then. Stupid of him, not to notice. It was a habit of his to analyze everything he'd done wrong. As if it would bring Samson running through the mudroom. Or his parents. Or Ella. He knew then, knew for sure they were all gone. Not a temporary out for a walk gone, or an emergency visit to the only doctor who'd still take them gone, or to barter for a small quail gone. Ella kind of gone.
He threw his coat back on and ran to where Brody's uncle worked on old boats and strange ancient machines, all the way up the road to the railway station that hadn't seen a train on it since before he was born. That's where Brody went to every day after school. Andy needed his help, Brody would tell him, but Riley knew Brody just stood there most days staring at these ancient bits of machinery and imagining what it was like to live back when the trains carried people and machines to any place they wanted to get to. That was the stuff he and Brody talked about. They’d never been outside of Waller, not even Andy or the other older people he knew. There wasn't any point in going anywhere much these days.
By the time Riley got to the warehouse, his hands were frozen and he had to hold them under his coat for a beat to warm up enough to pull the door open. It creaked metallically, letting him into the barrage of voices, all adult, all stopping abruptly as he came in. Brody was leaning on the back wall, not looking at him. This, too, was full of wrongness. Why wouldn't Brody look at him, or run up and put him into a headlock like they always did with each other? A woman separated herself from the others and slowly walked over toward him. She was smiling at him, not unpleasantly, but there were no sparkles in her eyes.
He wanted to run away from this smile and from what he knew she needed to tell him. The ugly thing that would make this wrongness permanent. He just needed some time to unthink it all. To start his walk back from school over again. Only now he'd take a different route. He'd think different thoughts. He wouldn't kick the rocks from under the coal dust. He'd stop by the fence and erase the thing he wrote on it, the thing that would have got him in trouble if anyone saw him do it. Maybe that's what it was. Maybe somebody saw him write it and now they took his parents and Samson away as punishment. He needed to know if he'd done this.
The woman was saying something to him, softly, but he didn't hear her. He didn't want to hear her. He turned around, his wet boots squeaking on the tiles, and bolted for the door, only he couldn't push it open for the life of him. He banged his shoulder against it over and over and over again, putting all of his weight into it. Nobody stopped him. He knew nobody would stop him then, not even Brody. He knew then nobody could undo any of this. Slumping against the wall next to the locked door, he looked up at the strange woman and nodded. He was ready now. He wouldn’t let himself turn into a whimpering little boy like he did when Ella was gone.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Andy carrying a steaming thermos to him. Tea. Andy always drank tea, usually spiked with moonshine he bartered some old part for. He had a feeling this thermos was spiked and he didn't want it. He and Brody had snuck plenty of the stuff when Andy had to run an errand and they were left alone in the warehouse. He kept it in the little cupboard behind the tool rack. It had a lock on it and Andy always had the key on him, but the lock was so old and so simple, Brody figured out a way to pick it with a penny nail years ago.
Riley shook his head at the offering of a cup of steaming brew. It was too quiet in this room, too quiet for so many strangers being in it. They were all looking at him as if waiting for him to do something. Something as stupid as bruising his shoulder against a sealed door. Or maybe they were waiting for him to cry.
The morning he woke up when Ella was gone, he cried. He cried for so long that he missed breakfast and then school. Brody came to see him afterward but he refused to see him. He didn't want Brody to ever see him cry again. But he needed to then. He could either cry or stop breathing, and his body wouldn’t let him stop breathing. His parents let him be that day. They let him skip supper too, and that night his mother came to tuck him in, but he could tell from the sadness in her eyes that he couldn't ask her to comfort him.
The woman was speaking again, less softly now: "Riley. I don't know how to begin to tell you this. Any of this, really. I don't know how much you know about the wars and what's been happening here for the last four decades or so. We don't tend to discuss things like this with little kids much...."
He cringed. "Where are my parents?" He hoped his voice wasn't of a little kid.
She walked a pace closer to him and crouched so her no longer smiling face was in front of his. "They are gone, Riley. The Alliance took them. Your parents knew this might happen. They asked me to look after you."
The words seemed detached from him. It was like she was describing someone he didn't know, other people, strangers, not his parents, not him. He stared at her, waiting for her to tell him that she made a mistake, and it wasn't his family that was now lost. She didn't. "Where is Samson?" he asked in almost a whisper.
Brody ran up to him then, tears in his eyes, and flung his arms around his neck, sobbing into his coat. "Samson was barking at them and they shot him, Riley. The
y shot him to keep him from barking. I'm so sorry...."
Samson, who never barked, got shot for barking. This was the thing he could hold on to. Samson never barked. Everybody knew that. They've had him since Riley was a toddler and he never once barked at anything or anyone. He laughed in relief. This was about someone else's family, not his. Couldn't be his. Samson never barked.
He needed to go home. They would all be there, waiting for him, worried that it took him so long to get home from school. Mom, and dad, and Samson. All but Ella.
He stood, looking Andy in the eyes. "I have to go home, Andy. I have to go home, and you have to let me."
Andy nodded and reached for his coat. Brody was already at the door. They were going with him, and there was no arguing this point, so he didn't. He just needed to get home, and they'll see that everything was okay.
Mom would be just starting on supper. Dad would be chewing on a piece of mint or whatever he was in the mood for today. They'd be very angry at him for what happened in school today, and his father would likely beat him and then ground him, and he wouldn't argue with any of it. He could whip him with that old skinny belt if he wanted to until his back was bleeding, he would smile through it all.
He was running now, Andy and Brody barely keeping up, just past Mrs. Olden's house with her perpetually littered yard, and four more houses till the last turn. From here, he'd ordinarily already see the thin sliver of smoke from the chimney. Maybe Mother didn't want to start supper until she knew he was home and safe. Maybe they were out looking for him at Brody's. Just a few more steps and he was staring at the very words he wrote on the fence written in yellow paint across the front door of his house. The door was left ajar and was swinging lightly, creaking as it went, the words turning into a blur at the arcs.
He stood there, unable to take another step and not letting himself look away as the three words came swinging in and out of view, edges blurring more and more now, as blurry as Ella's face had become, and saltily running down his frozen cheeks. Brody handed him a thermos, nodding for him to take it. The cap was already off. He drank from it, greedily, not stopping until he was done, burning his tongue and then the rest of him, all the way down to the pit of his stomach, burning through the blur of words on the fence, words on the house, Ella's face, until he finally felt warm and the distance between where he stood and the swaying front door was suddenly too great.
He knew then, knew for sure that the wrongness was permanent. And that he would never again walk through that door.
4
Razor
Drake, March 25, 2236 (3 days prior), Female Replenishers Compound
When Drake saw them bring Ella in, his heart sank. He would have rather he never saw her again than see her with the slave band on her hands, and those eyes, her always alive and watching everything eyes now so timid, all the fire gone out of them. People didn't change like this. His Ella would have fought them, even with the stun gun jammed between her shoulder blades. She would have at least screamed, to let them know that her voice was still hers. That they didn't own her, not yet anyway. But this Ella didn't do any of those things.
This Ella looked half-asleep as if she didn't know what was happening to her. As if she didn't know what they would take from her, but everybody knew that. They'd been doing it for so very long now, they didn't even try to hide it. It was as if they wanted everyone to know. Maybe they did. Just another way for them to keep them afraid, to keep them from fighting. He laughed at the thought of anyone fighting anymore. They were all half-starved, and far too broken.
That was a week ago, and he hadn't seen her come out of the compound since. Most slaves didn't though. He didn't know where they put her, and the few notes he passed around the slave kitchen went unanswered. Nobody seemed to know anything about her.
He hoped Riley was gone. Not dead gone, not Brody gone but gone someplace far enough away from this compound. There were rumors he'd been looking for her everywhere he could get to for years. Maybe his search took him well out of range. He couldn't see her like this. Not ever. Drake tried looking after the boy when they took Dave and Anna, but the kid didn't let anyone in, not really. He just didn't seem to want to talk to anyone, not to him, not even to Brody.
He was like a ghost of the old Riley, sleepwalking through the mandatory school years, doing okay enough, from what he heard, and then, as soon as it was over, he was gone. He should have told him about Samson. He never could get over that the bastards shot his dog, that sweet mutt who loved on everybody. Drake buried him when he heard what happened before Riley got home, so at least he didn't have to see him like that, to remember him with the hole in his chest, and all that blood coming out of it. He’d wanted to tell him so many times that he'd buried his Samson, but he just couldn't bring himself to do it, to remind him of it.
Drake filled up his large thermos with steaming hot tea at the slave kitchen, and grabbed a few bars that tasted like sawdust, but would keep his belly from growling for the six hours he'd spend in the tower. He didn't know why they trusted him to guard the place or what he was guarding it from. The damn walls were too high to scale anyway. Maybe that's why they let him do this. They didn't have boy slaves and probably didn't know what the hell to do with him. Just as well. He liked being alone, and the tower was as good a place as any for that.
He climbed up the ladder to the door without counting the steps. He'd done it so many times, he hardly paid any attention to it anymore. Maybe people did change. He couldn't even climb to the roof of their tiny house when he was a kid, and they had that kitten stuck up there. The poor bastard was making the most pitiful noises too, screaming in its tiny voice. He tried to, he really did, but his hands just wouldn't listen to him when he was just a few meters up.
It wasn't that he was afraid of hurting himself, he got hurt plenty. It was that the world moved and swayed down below making him feel shaky and wrong everywhere. His insides just weren't where they were supposed to be when he was up there, making him too dizzy to climb or to think, and so he slid down and ran across the street to get Ella, and he was so ashamed. But she didn't even say anything. She went up to the roof quickly, without once looking down, and then sat there for a long time holding the frightened kitten, petting it, and talking to it in that way she had. And the next morning she told everyone in school how brave Drake was, how he had saved that poor kitten, and he was even more ashamed.
He heard a branch snap somewhere outside the fence. They didn't have any trees on the inside for some reason. Another crunch and snap. Something was off. It wasn't windy enough for the branches to snap like that. He walked over to the open window and pointed his ray at the fence. He adjusted the spread of the ray to cover a larger slice of the wall and waited. The light lit up the tall tree just behind the fence, so tall it must have been there for centuries. He always liked looking at this tree, swaying lightly, the leaves making a swishing sound, soft, always soft.
It was all alive with leaves now, earlier than last year. This winter was gone in a flash as if in a hurry to leave this sad place. Something gray moved in the trunk of the tree, shadow-like, but there was nothing to make shadows this high up. He couldn't find it now, so he waited, the ray starting to fade some. He'd have to remember to charge the damn thing tomorrow. There it was again, only now he could see the ghost of Riley in it. Didn't so much see as felt it, the thing he was afraid of, Riley not being gone after all.
The guards at the compound would have seen the light and would come to see what he was shining the ray on for so long. Stupid of him to have done that. He had to tell him to run somehow, without screaming it, without alerting the guards, but there was no way to do that. He flicked the ray off and slid down the ladder of the tower as fast as he could, letting go with still a few meters left and landing hard. Nothing was broken. Lucky, that.
He started toward the compound at a brisk walk, hoping to intercept the guards before they crossed the lawn, trying to make up something about a squirrel running up
and down the trunk, something he could jot down on his pad quickly enough for them, nothing to worry about, just him being stupid or scared. They'd buy it too. Slaves were supposed to be stupid and scared. They'd laugh at him and go back to their drinking, or games, or whatever they did when not bringing new slaves in.
He made it almost to the door of the guardhouse when he saw from the corner of his eye the three shapes running along the wall too far to the left for him to be able to catch up. They were almost at the tower. He stood there, mortified, hoping Riley saw them and ran or hid up in that tree. Hoping he hadn't tried to climb over the wall. He screwed up, running out here like an idiot, cutting across in a straight line, not thinking clearly. Guards wouldn't run across the lawn. He should have known that. The wall was safety. Of course, they'd use the damn wall, the cowards. He, of all people, should have known that.
He was just nearing the tower when he heard it, the buzzing of the stun guns. He could tell by the sound that they were set to lethal. There was nothing he could do to help him now.
"Hey, you bloody dumb mute, get your lazy ass over here. We found us a wannabe rapist while you were asleep at your post." The one with an ugly mustache glared at him. He looked like he'd been drinking. They probably all were, but not enough to give him any kind of an edge.
Drake lowered his head and walked over. The three guards were standing over the boy, spitting on him, and occasionally kicking him in the ribs. Riley’s hands were banded in front of him. His head down, knees digging into the lawn. He didn't make a sound when they kicked him, and there was nothing he could do about wiping the spit off, with his hands the way they were.
Alliance: The Complete Series (A Dystopian YA Box Set Books 1-5): Dystopian Sci Fi Thriller Page 3