by S J Taylor
“Era Rae… I…”
A spark popped from one of the electronic controls stuck into the side of her head. I saw the pain of it register across her face.
“It’s all right, Saskia,” I promised her. “It’s all right. I’m going to help you. We’ll fix you. I don’t care what they’ve done to you. I don’t care! I’ll make sure you get better. I’ll save you, Saskia.”
She looked at me, and I reached for her.
“Era Rae… I…”
My hand touched her ruined face.
“Era Rae…is…”
“Remember,” I whispered.
With her free hand, she took hold of my wrist.
In that instant I saw her face harden. Her eyes drained of emotion again.
“Era Rae is the primary target. Target acquired.”
The blood froze in my veins. My friend had been there, inside those eyes, and now she was gone again. “No,” I demanded. “No! Saskia, it’s me. It’s Era. It’s me!”
She tightened her grip and twisted, and I found myself on my knees as pain shot through my arm and into my shoulder. The end of the pulse rifle was pressed against my chest.
“You will comply,” Saskia told me.
I ground my teeth together and forced myself to look up into her eyes. “Like Hell I will.”
There was no way I was leaving her like this. I had promised to save her. If that meant ending this nightmare she’d been forced to live, then that’s what I—
From behind me, the dog barked and snarled and came running. Just like it had with the other Enforcer. Only, the other Enforcer hadn’t been ready for the mutt.
Saskia was.
“No!” I barely had time to say that one, small word before Saskia had moved rifle from me and fired from point blank range into Lacey’s midsection, burning away flesh and fur and bone.
My dog’s body landed with a wet thud, thirty feet away from us.
I shoved off the pavement with my feet, using Saskia’s grip against her to lever a strike with both knees into her midsection.
She looked at me like nothing had happened. Like she didn’t even feel it.
With a twitch of her hand she activated some device that sent radiating pulses of electricity out from her glove and through my entire body. I felt every muscle contract and seize.
Including my heart.
There was just enough time for a stray thought to wander through my mind—well that’s new—before I passed out in Saskia’s arms.
Era’s Journal, Entry# 3091
I don’t know how long I was unconscious, but it was long enough to dream.
Maybe it was just the stray voltage messing with the thought processes in my brain, or maybe it was something from my subconscious trying to send me a message. I don’t know. Not that I’ve been paying attention to anything my brain has been telling me lately. No, not Era Rae. I’ve just been going wherever my heart leads me.
Ran away from Colony 41 because I cared about Saskia so much. Couldn’t just let that go. Had to get myself into trouble.
Ran away with Jadran to the Freemen camp, because I cared about him and didn’t want to see him get hurt.
Then I ran away from Jadran, back to Saskia, only to get jammed up again.
My heart, as it turns out, gives horrible directions.
Maybe I should stop listening to it.
Anyway. I had this dream after being stun-shocked by Saskia. I was in a building somewhere. A huge, empty space with no windows and lights that hurt my eyes. In my dream I knew the building, just like I knew where I was going. I couldn’t tell you how I knew, or where the place was, or what I was doing there.
But my dream self knew.
I walked down the length of the building to a red door with a symbol painted on it in gold. On the other side, I found myself in a room.
The room was cavernous, and somehow I knew there were dozens of other rooms just like this one. Around me stood members of the Restored Society hierarchy. Third Marshalls. Adjuncts. Even a First Marshall, although it wasn’t Avin Blake. I guess even my dream self knew he was dead and gone.
Everyone nodded to me as if I was the one in charge.
Wait. It gets stranger.
At the opposite wall was a long, rectangular window. I walked up to it, to see what was on the other side.
The space beyond was empty. Four walls. A ceiling. A floor. Nothing else.
I watched myself stare at the emptiness in confusion, and then turn to ask one of the Third Marshalls what it meant.
Something big and fleshy and grotesque slammed against the thick glass from the other side. I heard the cracks start, the chilling sound of unbreakable glass… breaking.
When I looked again a Child of the Event stared at all of us with huge, round, hateful red eyes, its three mouths opening wide to screech in anger. Three limbs that were long and flexible like bloated worms beat against the glass over and over.
“We can’t contain it anymore,” one of the Adjuncts told me, standing there in his red uniform that marked his rank. “It’s going to get out.”
“It already has,” I told him, calmly. The dream mixed with my memories of fighting my way through the streets of Jacksonville while dozens of Children screamed for my blood. “They’ve already gotten out. We’re doomed. Soon everyone will know.”
It’s funny how truths can come to us in crazy dreams. I’ve never been to that building before. Maybe it doesn’t even exist in real life. But it was enough to fill in the pieces my waking mind had missed, and suddenly I knew.
The Enforcers were after something much bigger than the Freemen. If they had built New Merica twenty miles to the West, then the Enforcers would never have paid them any attention. They had something more important to do.
Because the Restored Society had been creating monsters.
That was the idea that had been nagging at me for days. Before the Event, the Society had been experimenting on living people, trying to make them better. Better human beings.
I was one of the results. So were a lot of the people in my Academy class back at the Colony, and probably others in Colonies around the world. I was created by the Society. I didn’t get to be a baby, born from my mother’s womb. I was genetically created to be a better soldier and a more obedient citizen.
They failed with me. Turns out, I liked to think for myself. That was something the Restored Society couldn’t accept.
From what I’ve been able to find out, a lot of their creations failed to live up to their expectations. Entire Colonies have been lost because they became infected with the disease of free thinking. The Society killed everyone in those Colonies, rather than lose control.
But we weren’t the only things the Restored Society created in their blind quest to remake the world in their own image.
The Children of the Event. That was another of their failures. Genetically created freaks that were completely uncontrollable.
Now, just like the Society had done in their own Colonies, they were coming to clean up their mistake. They’d taken the time to wipe out every one of the Children they’d encountered on their way to the Freemen camp. I’d seen them kill dozens.
They wouldn’t stop there. They wouldn’t stop until every one of their mistakes was erased, until they could pretend that none of it had happened. They wanted to pretend they were perfect.
Perfection came at a cost.
They wanted me back, so they could put the same kinds of controls on me that they had forced on Saskia. So they could make me perfect.
Now they were marching across the Outlands, in staggering numbers, to erase another one of their mistakes. Out there somewhere, past the Freemen camp, was a facility that had created one of the biggest mistakes of all.
The Children of the Event.
That’s where the Enforcers were going. Now I knew.
Which will be great, if I live long enough to tell anyone.
Chapter 4 - Seek
I woke up when someone sl
apped me.
The dream from my unconscious brain broke apart into jagged images, like a long window of glass breaking into hundreds of tiny shards, like the one in that building with the monsters behind it. I gasped, not from the sharp pain in my cheek, but because I knew the truth now.
“You’re going after the monsters,” I mumbled, my tongue thick in my dry mouth, a side effect of the electric stun Saskia had given me. The lingering pain in every single muscle was another.
“What’s that you say?” asked a familiar voice. It was a man’s voice, strong and deep. The kind of voice that commanded attention.
Third Marshall Amicus.
I forced my eyelids to open. I was in a room somewhere. A small space with steel gray walls and a gray floor. I was standing up somehow, I realized, and a wave of vertigo hit me. I was falling. I was going to land face first on that hard, smooth floor, and I tried to pinwheel my arms and grab hold of anything to save myself…
Only, I couldn’t. My back was to a wall, my hands held above me inside thick circles of black metal. I looked down, and found my feet held in the same way. Except, where my feet were bound up together, my hands were held wide apart from each other. Smart, said the part of my brain trained in tactics. This way, I couldn’t use my hands together to try to free myself.
But where was I?
The Third Marshall stepped in front of me. His black uniform was perfectly in place. The silver hash marks on his upturned collar reflected the overly bright light in the room. Up close, his scar was an uneven line leading to the ruin of his left ear. “Did you have something to say, Era?”
I had a thousand things I wanted to say. None of them nice. “Where am I?”
He smiled at me as I began to struggle against my bonds.
Then the room tilted sideways.
I felt it then. The artificial gravity emanating from the floor, holding us in place. It was disorienting, to be leaning sideways and still feel like I was standing in place.
Or, restrained in place, in my case.
My eyes popped. I was on the HoverHawk. I was on the Enforcers’ airship.
Oh, Hellfire.
Now I recognized the room. There was one in every HoverHawk, used to hold prisoners for transport or for sensitive interrogations. To either side of me were spots for more prisoners, the metal restraints recessed back into the wall until needed. For now, I was their only prisoner.
Amicus nodded when he saw that I understood. “Yes. We brought you up here, above the little Freemen camp, so you could witness their destruction before we move on. I have to admit, they are more dangerous than I assumed. I was impressed earlier by their leader’s little trick of turning off our electronics.”
“I wasn’t,” a woman sneered in a soft, feminine purr.
I rolled my head to the side and saw the other people in the room with us. I recognized the woman who had spoken from the scene in front of the Freemen camp. The one with the brown hair and the hard beauty. Master Field Sergeant Whatever-her-name-was. She smirked at me with one fist on her hip. “It was a child’s trick. Only children are scared by such things. We figured it out, of course. Simple matter of switching our frequencies to a higher modulation. Well. It’s all very technical. I’m sure it’s above your head.”
Her expression was smug, and I found myself already hating her.
There were two others in the room. There was the man who had been standing beside the Third Marshall when they offered to trade Lockett for me, and then there was one other person.
She didn’t have her helmet on. The wires and tubes that usually connected it to her hung loosely from the side of her head and neck, down over her shoulder, the way her shiny gold hair used to do.
Saskia.
Third Marshall Amicus looked from me to her, tracing the line of my gaze. “Ah, yes. I understand that you two know each other. She’s one of our greatest success stories, this friend of yours. Saskia Deberin. I don’t normally allow ground troopers to witness meetings like this one, but I wanted you to see the shining example your friend has made. A mixture of Restored Society breeding and our most advanced technology. The perfect soldier.”
He smiled at her like she was some favorite toy, and then his eyes hardened on me. “There was that glitch, of course, when she helped you to escape Colony 41, but we’ve upgraded her since then. She’s everything you were supposed to be, Era. You were supposed to be perfect. We failed with you. Now we have a chance to correct that.”
Correct… me? “What are you talking about?”
He tapped his finger up against his lips. “That’s a secret. For now. Something you’ll see for yourself soon enough. In the meantime…”
Turning with a flourish to the gray wall opposite me he pressed a series of buttons on a control panel. A large section of the steel brightened into a rectangular viewscreen. Just like that, I was looking at the Freemen camp laid out below us.
Except, my eyes kept sliding toward Saskia. She was staring at me, but looking right through me. Her programming had won out. She’d brought me here as a prisoner.
“Era. Over here, please.” Amicus snapped his fingers at me until I turned my attention back to him and the screen. “You see these people down here? Yes, these people. I want you to watch what happens next.”
He tapped the screen, and it focused in tighter, close enough to see the worried expressions on the faces of the resistance fighters behind their wall as they prepared for the Enforcer attack.
Why won’t they just run, I had to ask myself. What was it with these people that made them stubbornly stand their ground in the face of overwhelming odds? They had to know they would lose, didn’t they? They had to know they would die.
Maybe they were brave. Or maybe, they were just stupid. Either way I knew this was a part of the human spirit. A part the Restored Society wanted to stamp out. The people of New Merica were going to stand up for themselves no matter what the Enforcers threw at them.
I looked over at Saskia again. Was that same human spirit in me? I wouldn’t give up on Saskia, even though I knew I should just let her go.
I wouldn’t.
I couldn’t.
Suddenly, I understood the Freemen perfectly.
“Era,” Amicus snarled, an edge slipping into his voice. “Pay attention, please. Saskia remembers who you are. She remembers the enemies of the Restored Society.”
The Master Field Sergeant snickered in a fawning way.
Saskia shifted where she stood. She looked down, then back up at me. “I remember Era Rae. Target acquired.”
Her voice was tinny and distant and when I heard it my heart bled.
“This camp,” Amicus was saying, “is in our way. We have a destination, several miles to the west, and although we could just go around these… barbarians, and then come back later to inform them on the truth and the light of the Restored Society, I have a better plan. My troops need practice. Enforcers need to enforce.”
I ground my teeth together. That line was another of the Enforcer slogans that we had learned in the Academy, along with the three sentences of truth and the six standards of living. To hear it again now was like a slap to the face.
Not everyone in the room saw it that way.
“We live to serve the Restored Society,” the Master Field Sergeant recited.
The man standing with her parroted the same words. Third Marshall Amicus smiled proudly at both of them.
Saskia stood straighter. “I remember,” she repeated.
Tugging against my restraints had only managed to tear the skin on my wrists and I could feel my blood trickling down my arms underneath my sleeves. “You’re going to kill them.” It was a stupid thing to say. Of course they were going to kill them. It was the Enforcer way. “I know where you’re going, Third Marshall. I know what you’re really out here in the Outlands to do.”
He quirked an eyebrow. “You do? Now, tell me. How did you manage to find that out?”
“I figured it out on my own.”
I glared at him. I didn’t know why he hadn’t killed me yet, or started to butcher me like they did to Saskia, but it meant he wanted me alive and I figured that gave me a little freedom to speak my mind. “You’re just like everyone else in the Society. Just like First Marshall Blake was. You think everyone else in the world is so stupid. You think that only you have the intelligence to know right from wrong. Well, Blake is dead, and the Restored Society is wiping out entire Colonies because their loyal members are turning on them. You’re going to fail. You came out here to mop up another of your messes, didn’t you? You’ve been making monsters out here in the Outlands, and now you’ve come to hide your sins!”
I was out of breath by the time I was done, panting and tugging uselessly on my bonds again. Frustration welled up in me. I wanted so badly to put my hands around Amicus’s throat, and squeeze until he admitted how wrong he was.
Instead, he smiled at me, and leaned in close to whisper, “There are so many things wrong with what you just said, but I don’t have time to educate you. That will come soon enough.”
He stayed close to me for a long moment, and I could feel him, breathing me in, snuffing at my hair and my skin like a dog in heat. I couldn’t get far enough away from him.
“For now,” he said suddenly, moving away from me and back to the screen, “I want you to watch as your friends and the rest of the filth down there in that camp die.”
“No!” I screamed, managing to arch away from the wall just bare inches before I felt my wrists would snap in their bonds. “You don’t have to do this!”
“Oh, I’m not going to do this,” he crowed. “I’m going to show you that our ways do work. That we do know what is right for the world and no one can resist our truths. I’m not going to kill those bastards down there, Era Rae. Your friend Saskia is going to do it.”
Even as those words sank in, Saskia turned without hesitation to the controls on the wall. I choked on the words that came to mind, the insults I wanted to spit in Amicus’s face, the threats of death and destruction I would visit on every Enforcer alive, and tried instead to reach for the calm that had saved my life so many times. I couldn’t find it. My emotions were a twisted knot standing in the way of my desperation.