by S J Taylor
Where Laria had been sitting, the ground had opened up in a nearly perfect circle.
It was swallowing her down.
Scrambling for the edge, she was quickly losing her grip as the cracked stone around the fissure turned to sand and spilled into the gap. Every time her grasping fingers caught hold the ground broke away again, and again, and again.
Terror reflected in her eyes. She was already falling over the edge as Jadran made it to the sinkhole.
He reached for her.
His hand caught only the air.
Laria’s flailing arms disappeared below the surface, and she was gone.
At that instant, the ground stopped trying to shake itself apart, and the rolling echoes of the tumult passed away. The world was calm again.
Jadran knelt at the edge of the hole, his mouth hanging open, his hands flexing closed and open.
Closed.
Open.
Empty.
Chapter 2 - Ashes, Ashes
Era’s Journal, Entry #3121
If you’ve read my journal this far, you know where I came from. You know where I am now.
You have no idea where I’m heading next.
I’ve lived through enough adventure to fill a vid novel. Jumping over the side of a ship. An entire army of Enforcers. Mutant humans. Wrecked cities and the Outlands and everything else along the way. I’ve lost myself and found myself… and then lost myself again. That’s a lot for one sixteen-year-old girl, don’t you think?
Well, so did I.
No spoilers. I’m just saying. This is the part in my story where things go from really bad, to even worse. It’s not even what’s about to happen next that makes me say that. It’s what comes after that. It’s the part you can’t see coming that’s going to really make you sit up and scream.
Like I did.
I’m not alone. That’s the thing I need to remember. Jadran is still here, by my side. No matter how I try to push him away he won’t go. Maybe I should just stop trying, and let things happen. Is that what Saskia would want for me? Would she want me to love someone again?
No. Everyone who gets close to me suffers for it. I won’t do that to Jadran.
This man… I’ve never met anyone like him. Loyal to a fault, and smart and strong and kind. He showed me what love is. Real love. He showed me how to open my heart and let someone inside until you can’t figure out where you end and the other person starts.
It was because of those feelings Jadran had awakened that I could finally recognize how much I loved Saskia, and how much she loved me.
I can’t let that be my legacy. Death, and dark love. Shadows, and shadows of shadows.
That can’t be all that is left of me.
These words I’m writing down have taken on a new meaning. They’re for me, sure. I use them to sort out my tangled thoughts and remind me of all the things worth remembering in a world that is full of chaos and distraction. It’s my journal. My words. My life.
Now, it’s more than that. These words have to continue after I’m gone. People need to know why the Restored Society is evil. People need to know what the Society has done, and what they still plan to do. When I’m gone, if I haven’t taken every last speck of the damnable Restored Society with me, then others will need the words in this journal to know why they have to finish what I’ve started.
Because I’m pretty sure… I won’t survive what comes after this next part.
The question is, will you keep reading my words if I die?
Laying on my side, my body aching everywhere from falling on the ground that had seemed so solid just a few minutes ago, I stared at the gaping hole where Laria had fallen through. Grains of sand still slid away from the edge and into the pit.
I couldn’t believe what I’d just seen. Laria was… gone. Our packs and our weapons, too, and I strained to remember what that meant. My brain had been knocked around inside my skull and a haze was lifting slowly as the clanging bells in my ears quieted. The hole had opened up right under Laria…
And our equipment.
The food.
The weapons.
Without those things, we were as good as dead out here in this wasteland. We had to get our things back. All of them, including… my journal!
No, no, no! I shook myself and got to my hands and knees, favoring the wrist that had taken the brunt of my fall. I could almost think clearly again. How could a hole just open up right under our supplies? What were the odds of that?
“Does this happen a lot out here?” I asked Jadran. He was still lying at the edge of the hole, which I thought was pretty stupid of him, considering it might collapse more. He was reaching one arm down inside, craning his neck to see further into the fissure. He ignored my question. I knelt down a good distance away from him, away from the hole, not wanting to get any closer to that death trap. “Jadran? Hey, Jadran. Is there a way down? We need to get the rifles back, and our food—”
Suddenly, he spun back from the hole, up onto his feet, towering over me. “We need to get Laria back, is what we need!”
I blinked up at him. With the sun shining behind him, his silhouette was an outline against the harsh blue sky. He looked like one of those Greek statues we studied in our first few years at the Academy. The naked, perfect embodiment of male pride and power and strength. Jadran wasn’t naked, but I could see his muscles bulging as he flexed his hands and the comparison was hard to shake.
“Jadran, I—”
“No, Era Rae. We are going after Laria. That is what we are doing, and I will have no argument from you.”
His expression was more than just worry or concern for a friend. There was something else I saw there now, mixed in with the anger and the fear.
It was something very close to love that I saw there now. Directed not at me, but at Laria.
Well. That was what I had wanted, after all. By pushing him away from me I knew I was basically throwing him at her. It was what Laria wanted. This was what I wanted for Jadran, too. Because I couldn’t give myself to him.
Um, right. Exactly. Because, I didn’t want him to die like all the others. I wanted Jadran to live, and be happy, and have a life.
Era Rae didn’t get to have those things, but Jadran should.
Then why did it bother me so much to think he might have them with someone else?
Guilt, I decided. I felt guilty because I had hated Laria, been jealous of her pretty face and her innocent way of looking at the world. I lashed out at her every chance I had. I had so desperately wanted her to go away.
Now, she might actually be gone.
“Jadran,” I said, gently, standing up again and moving in close to him, daring to put my hand on his chest and meet his heated gaze. “Of course we’ll go after her. I didn’t mean… I just meant… oh, Jadran.”
I couldn’t bring myself to be heartless and cold like someone trained as an Enforcer should be. Whatever genetic codes the Restored Society had imprinted me with when I was born, I was more than my programming. I was more than a tool like they had expected me to become. More than the living weapon and faithful citizen of their world.
He trembled under my touch, threatening to break apart just like the ground had. I put my head down against his chest, and held him, and my walls came down a little.
Guess I’m human after all.
He held me back, and we took strength from each other. Just a quick moment there in that endless desert, done and over all too soon.
“Come on,” he said to me, untangling us and turning back to the hole. Unless I was wrong, there was a little hitch in his voice. For Laria, I’m sure.
He brought me to the edge of the hole, kneeling down at the very edge.
“Are you sure this is safe?” I asked him.
“Yes. I know what did this.” Fisting his hand into the dirt just inside the hole, he brought it back out, and opened his fingers to show me.
A fine gray ash blew away on the dry breeze. I studied his hand, confused. “T
he ground was burned.”
“Exactly. Burned from below. This was not a natural occurrence. Made by man, is what it was.”
Made by…? I looked at the hole again, noticing features that I had missed before in my panic to stay alive as the world was falling apart around me. The hole formed a nearly perfect circle. The inside of the lip all the way around was dusty with the same gray ash that Jadran had shown me. What I had mistaken for fine grains of sand slipping through Laria’s fingers had actually been the rock burning into ash. No wonder she hadn’t been able to pull herself back up.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I pointed out. “You can’t burn dirt.”
He stood up again, slapping his hands together to clean them off, his eyes flicking here and there at the landscape around us. “You can if you infuse it with a chemical agent first.”
That sparked a memory from my Academy classes. Powdered chemicals that could burn in water. Powders that exploded when they were exposed to air. Others that were perfectly safe by themselves, until you mixed them together, when they would ignite to spew toxic smoke.
And…
“Cyaflouricane,” Jadran said, finishing my thought. “Remember? Mix it with dry soil, add a concentrated heat source, and it will burn right through. Used for mining, mostly.”
He’d been through the same Restored Society education that I had. His Colony didn’t exist anymore, wiped out for the sin of curiosity, but the Society had taught Jadran all the same things that they’d taught me before that happened.
Both of us had rejected that education. I said before that I didn’t want to trust anything they taught me. Didn’t mean we couldn’t use the information when it was useful.
“So who would have cyaflouricane?” I asked him. “And what are you looking for?”
He was still moving around in a slow circle, searching for something in the uniform, unbroken landscape all around us. Two more degrees to his left and he stopped turning. He ran to a spot that looked exactly like everywhere else to me, stomping on it with his foot, his boot kicking up clouds of dust when he did.
“Hey!” I jogged over to him, looking back over my shoulder at the hole where Laria had vanished. “Where are you going?”
“Here,” he answered me, as if that explained everything. “Come here. Stand close to me.”
I did as he asked, keeping just a little distance between us, careful not to look into his eyes this time. I was glad he was still with me, fine, and yes we needed to find Laria or at least figure out if she was alive or dead, but I did not want whatever he was doing to lead us back into that wonderful moment from a few minutes ago when he was holding me. Not now.
“Jadran, what are we doing? Shouldn’t we try to find a way down that other hole? I know our equipment is gone but there might be some way, right?”
I mean, I still had my stun pistol tucked in the back of my pants, and I was willing to believe Jadran had a few things in his pockets because he always did, but that wasn’t a lot for us to work with. We needed to get to our supplies, maybe even more than we needed to find Laria.
Not that I was going to tell Jadran that.
Because I had to ask myself, who would have cyaflouricane powder? The Restored Society, that’s who. They were the only people left in the world who would have that level of technology. That meant the Enforcers would be carrying it with them, and that meant we could be in serious trouble.
I had thought the Enforcers were still a day or two behind us. What if they’d gotten in front of us somehow, and were lacing the ground with traps?
“Jadran, I think we need to…”
He held up a finger, cutting me off, his face serious. “Watch,” he told me.
From his front pocket he took out an ignitor, a little metal rectangle with a push button activator and a small circular opening on top for the small flame it created. Useful device when you wanted to start a fire. This one had a sliding switch where his thumb rested so that the flame, once sparked, could be locked on for continuous burn…
Oh.
“Jadran, don’t!”
Too late. He lit the ignitor, a tiny burst of flame no bigger than my thumbnail popped out of the top corner. Then he locked it open and dropped the shiny metal device.
I threw myself into his arms. It was that, or run. I guess my reflexes drove me toward him instead of away from him.
Have I mentioned how my heart gives lousy directions?
I heard the tink-tunk sound of the ignitor landing against the hard earth, bouncing and then spinning onto its side, and I had just enough time to take a breath before the ground below our feet burst apart. There was a little flash of heat that was hardly noticeable against the sweltering temperatures of the Outlands. Then we were falling, and I was screaming until ash coated my mouth and I choked on it.
We landed on our feet. It was a hard drop, but short, and when I could open my eyes again I looked up to see the sky high above us through an opening that was almost perfectly round, just like the other one. Ash and dirt billowed around us in plumes that got into my eyes and my nose and my mouth again. It was Jadran who kept his balance and held me up. I realized my hands were fisted into his shirt, my body pressed just as tightly against his as it could get.
When I could breathe again without trying to cough up my lungs I stepped away from him. I was alive. This stupehead had set off a chemical explosion under our feet and I’d lived to tell him exactly what I thought of that.
I wheezed out a few words and then gave up. I let the backside of my hand speak for me instead.
Rubbing his cheek where my slap had landed, Jadran still smiled at me, the filtered sunlight from above showing me the smugness on that infuriatingly handsome face. He was very proud of himself.
Hellfire.
“Give a girl…” I paused for a shaky breath. “…some warning next time.”
“Easier to show you. It was a contained explosion.”
“Yeah, sure. Whatever.” I brushed at the dust and ash on my face and tried to get it out of my hair without much success. “How did you even know that would work?”
“I recognized the markings around the spot.” He was kicking at the dust at his feet. Underneath was black, chipped rock. The walls were the same. I realized we’d fallen from above into some sort of tunnel running under the ground. It led off in both directions, into darkness.
And the opening was too high for us to reach.
Jadran made a little noise in his throat, like he’d just arrived at some answer, then bent down to retrieve his ignitor. The flame was still lit and burning merrily.
“The area we were walking through was set up to catch people in these traps,” he told me, pointing to what was now the ceiling of our tunnel. “I did not see it until Laria got caught up in one. I knew what to look for, after that.”
Suddenly I felt the need to have a weapon in my hand. We weren’t safe here. I felt behind me for the stun pistol, sliding it out from my waistband. “These are traps. To catch people?”
“Well. To rob people of their supplies, anyway. Our bad luck to take a break right on top of one, it was. Although I think we would have walked over one eventually. There were several I saw, once I knew what to look for.”
“Wait.” I really wish we had more light. “These traps are here to rob people? Like, steal from them? That doesn’t sound like something the Enforcers would do.”
He cocked an eyebrow at that. “No, of course not.”
“But… if it isn’t the Enforcers trying to catch us, then who is it?”
Jadran bent down to pick up handfuls of dirt and ash from the floor, and flung them down the tunnel in one direction. He did the same thing the other way, barely missing me.
“Watch it! What are you doing?”
“Getting an answer to your question.”
Still bent low, he touched the ignitor to the paths of cyaflouricane-laced dirt leading away from us. First one, then another.
They flared briefly before goin
g out. Showing us a short distance all around us. There was nothing to see behind us.
In front of us, there was a group of figures shuffling closer.
Oh, fantastic.
They moved quietly on bare feet, without a word, but I could hear another sound now. Several somethings being dragged against the rock floor. There was no way of knowing how many there were in that group. The light flickered over five, six, eight… more. I could see something else now, too. Dark green dots. Almost invisible in the darkness, they floated in and out among the heads of the things coming at us. I swallowed, backing up against Jadran, him with his ignitor and me with my stun pistol.
This was so not good.
A memory of fighting with the Children of the Event flashed through my head. Mutant humans who only wanted to kill and destroy. No. Not good at all.
I held my stun pistol level, ready to use, until the first green dots came into the circle of the sunlight.
They were people. A dozen of them. Maybe more. At least, they were sort of people. Men and women both, short, scrawny, stripped naked from the waist up and wearing scraps of cloth sewn together and wrapped around their hips. Their exposed skin was painted with some kind of white paste. They carried long poles in their hands tipped by irregularly shaped bits of metal honed to a sharp edge. At least, some of them did.
Two of them were dragging our pulse rifles by the barrels, like they planned on using them for clubs. Another had the stunstick Jadran had been carrying.
The green dots still bobbed up and down as the group of them came closer. Vision enhancing goggles. The black rubber devices with the thick, black glass lenses and embedded sensors were strapped to their heads, over their eyes, around stringy clumps of long hair greased with the same paint that covered their bodies. The dots were indicator lights set between the eyes. About half of the group had them. The others followed behind, being led like dogs.
The mix of technology and savage thuggery caught me off guard. They didn’t appear to have a clue what a pulse rifle was, but they could use vision enhancing goggles?
Didn’t matter. They weren’t friendly. They had taken Laria and our supplies and now they were coming after us.