by S J Taylor
Callesco still held to the tenets of the Restored Society. He still recited the ideals they taught us at the Academy. He was still one of their true believers.
Because he was still part of the Restored Society.
“Starting to understand now, aren’t you Era?” Callesco took in a long, satisfied breath. “I can see it on your face. The Society is going to treat me like a hero when I turn you over to them. I’ll get to leave this place, finally. I’ll get to go back and live above ground with the civilized people again.”
He took a step towards us. The cannibals followed, at the edge of his light, until he raised a fist. The motion held them back. “Jadran here took more from me than he realizes when he threw me into that incinerator. In a lot of ways, old friend, it would have been better if you had killed me back then. When I survived, when I made it out, there was months of time that I had to spend in a medical facility just to be able to breathe again! I still need help from this blasted suit, sometimes. Like when I’m excited.”
He leaned into his next words. “Or, when I’m about to kill someone.”
“I do not understand,” Jadran admitted. He was backing up toward me, like we were regrouping. Not that I could see how it would make any difference. Callesco was the one with the gun. All we had was…
Oh.
“You do not understand?” Callesco mocked. “Then let me explain it to you before I end your life and take Era back where she belongs.”
“No!” Laria screamed. “You promised me. You promised me, we would be safe!”
“Shut up. You will live or die by my choice. Jadran owes me far too much for me to ever let him walk out of here again. I was going to make it last, Jadran. I was going to make you suffer like you made me suffer, but frankly you’re a lot more dangerous than I remembered. Something tells me if I give you another chance I actually will end up dead.”
“On that,” Jadran said levelly, “you can count.”
“Ha! Defiant to the end. I’m definitely going to enjoy killing you. Now, I might keep my promise to your blonde-haired girlfriend down there. I might let her live. I’ll need someone by my side when I rejoin the ranks of the Society.”
Laria whimpered, all of her strength going out of her as her body went limp. I let go of her, but I didn’t stand up just yet.
“You were placed here by the Society,” I said, painting a clearer picture of what I had already figured out. “Someone to watch over their genetics facility. Someone to make sure no one got too close.”
“They said you were smart. They didn’t tell me you were some kind of killing machine, but I should have figured. There’s a reason the Society wants you back, isn’t there?”
“Yes,” I admitted, hating myself for having to say so out loud. “They made me. Grew me to be like this. They want their little experiment back.”
Jadran’s hand settled on my shoulder, and I allowed myself to lean into that touch. I knew he didn’t care what I was. It didn’t matter to him who I was.
It still hurt, to know I was something more than human, and not know exactly what.
“So I’ve been here for years,” Callesco continued, as if it mattered to us. “Finding this group of kids here was kind of a surprise, but they serve their purpose, so I let them live. I’ve been a watchdog and parasite both, keeping away the curious by catching anyone who got too close and feeding them to the Society.”
I hadn’t expected him to say… feeding them to the Society? The words slipped right by me at first. I had been waiting for him to say he fed people to the cannibals. Caught them, and kept them away from the genetics facility, by feeding them alive to the cannibals.
But he said he fed them to… the Restored Society.
Callesco had been walking towards us as he ranted, a fever pitch clear in his words even through the mask’s filter. What could living this long among cannibals do to a man? Especially a man who had already survived the fires of an incinerator.
He was more than insane. Something in his brain had cracked.
Now he was right in front of Jadran, almost daring us to attack him. Leaning the stunstick against the side of the tunnel he took off his mask, the rubber sliding over his mix of smooth skin and ruined flesh. There were gashes and bruises in the mix now, left from Jadran’s attack. Blood crusted around his broken nose.
He winked at me. “Like what you see? Jadran does nice work. He has the fire to be a strong member of our Society. Just not the heart. He would never have the steel to do what I have done. Giving human beings over to be genetically experimented on. Of course, some of the experiments are a little flawed. That’s okay. The rejects always come back to be food for my children. The ones who make it through what the Society does to them… well. I wouldn’t want to be them. I’d rather be eaten alive.”
The look on my face must have shown how disgusted I felt. Callesco’s smile widened. “Yes, Era. That’s what the Society’s been doing out here all this time. Where do you think the Children of the Event came from?”
The shape of those monsters in the city came back to me. Twisted. Gnarled. Bodies that had been pulled apart and put back together in ways that made a person’s mind want to shut down. That had all happened in that genetics facility. The Children of the Event.
There was no way Callesco was capturing enough people wandering this far into the Outlands to feed his cannibals and simultaneously give the Society specimens for their experiments. This far out there weren’t any people to speak of. A few, certainly, but where did the rest of the supply come from…
Then my mind flashed back to when the Enforcers had destroyed Jadran and Laria’s village. They had killed almost everyone. Except, they had loaded up their HoverHawks with several captives. Now, where would those poor souls get taken?
To a genetics facility. To be used and experimented on and twisted into shapes that pleased the Restored Society.
Or else, to be eaten by these cannibals that helped Callesco patrol his tunnels.
My stomach lurched, and I looked down at Laria. Did she know? Had she guessed what Callesco was doing? No. She couldn’t have. If she had, there was no way she would have agreed to help him. She was just trying to save herself, and Jadran with her.
At my expense.
I stood up then, quickly, my right side hidden behind Jadran, allowing me to pull the knife from my bootlaces without being seen. It seemed like such a stupid little weapon in my hand. It wouldn’t be enough. We were going to die here, in this tunnel, before I ever reached my goal.
Except, there was something I forgot, in the middle of everything else Callesco had just told us.
Behind us the tunnel echoed with the timed blast of three explosive devices. The shockwave of sound and pressure compressed up against our backs and threw me into Jadran and Jadran into Callesco. We tumbled to the rocky floor, my ears ringing and pounding and pain cutting into my back. I’d been hit by several small objects. Rocks, thrown out by the explosions, ricocheting off the walls and ceiling like bullets.
I couldn’t tell who I was tangled with. The light orbs had both spun out of Jadran and Callesco’s hands and gone rolling in separate directions, casting more shadow than light over us. I had to get some distance between me and whoever I was caught up in. Because it might be a friend, and it might not.
I choked on dust as I tried to get a breath in. I saw movement, and forced myself to my feet with a firm grip on the knife, only to find it was the cannibals, the young teenage victims of the Event, running for cover from the noise and confusion. Good. At least I wouldn’t have to kill any more of them. They were just kids. What had happened to them wasn’t their fault. Callesco could have chosen to help them, to make them something more than savages. Instead he used them, just like the Restored Society used everyone to their own ends.
Up on my feet, I oriented myself as best I could with my head still hazy and my ears still muffled. Ceiling was up. Floor was down. The explosion had come from that way.
Jadran a
nd Callesco were locked together, hands and feet lashing out. Callesco got under Jadran’s attack and grabbed him around his middle, lifting him up off his feet, ramming him back against the wall of the narrow passage. The unevenly hewn rock must have bit deeply into Jadran’s exposed flesh. He grimaced, arching in pain, and it was the opening that Callesco needed.
Several hard punches to Jadran’s midsection followed, and they didn’t end until something dark and stringy flew out of his mouth.
Blood.
I reacted without thinking. Not with the cold and calculating precision of the calm, but with the certainty that if I didn’t do anything then Callesco would make good on his promise to kill Jadran. Knife swinging up from a low arc I stepped in between the two men and felt my blade bite deep into its target.
Callesco looked down at me, his harsh smile tugging at his scars and fresh wounds.
The knife had cut into a layer of his suit. Just a little. The leather was too tough and too thick to drive in any further.
His hand was around my neck suddenly, the gloved fingers digging in painfully while his other fist rammed down on my knife hand, knocking the weapon out of my grip. He tossed me aside like a ragdoll, and I realized too late that this man was far stronger than he appeared.
“Stay out of this, Era,” he told me, his ragged breathing making a slur of his words. “This is between me and Jadran.”
He pulled the stun pistol from its holster.
Jadran stumbled to his feet. He slouched against the wall, holding his stomach.
Callesco rotated the cylinder on the pistol, setting it to the highest yield. At close range, at that setting, it would kill Jadran.
The calm coursed through me so quickly that I was left gasping for air. My need to save Jadran had brought it out in me and now it controlled my movements, taking over my every thought, urging me into combat moves that would break Callesco’s neck and several other bones with a brevity of motion that was startling and beautiful and simple.
I could see every move I had to make. I knew I could kill Callesco. I could save Jadran.
Except… I would die in the process.
There was a moment when I could have stopped myself. I could have taken control back from that genetically altered part of my soul that brought on the calm. In that moment I could have chosen to save myself.
I didn’t.
Because…
Hellfire.
Because I love Jadran.
My heart pulsed, and the calm shuddered.
Callesco had aimed the stun pistol in the time it took me to put my thoughts back in order. He aimed it at Jadran’s chest.
A gloved finger tightened on the trigger.
I raised my hand to strike Callesco, and only then did I realize I was going to be too late.
The stun pistol fired.
Just as Laria pushed herself in the way.
The wild arc of the pistol discharging itself burned into Laria’s chest, burning through her shirt and through her flesh, lancing into her heart. She squeaked, her hair flowing out from her in a wave of resonant energy.
Then she fell on top of Jadran and they both toppled back to the tunnel floor.
Callesco stared, unable to believe what had just happened. The look of stunned surprise on his face didn’t change as I hammered into him, breaking his cheekbone, twisting the hand holding the stun gun back behind him and up past the point where his shoulder popped from its socket and he was screaming in pain.
Laria’s timing hadn’t just saved Jadran’s life. It saved me, too. I caught Callesco off guard. The flow of things changed in that instant.
I didn’t die.
With his arm broken and twisted around behind him at an impossible angle, I aimed the stun pistol at the base of his skull and waited for his hand to spasm when I broke his wrist.
His own finger pulled the trigger.
The shot burned through the back of his head. The discharge fried his brain.
I let him drop to the floor. He was already dead. He just didn’t know it.
Jadran held Laria tightly. She was limp in his arms, her eyes open and already clouding over. He was badly hurt. I could see the pain etched on his face. I could see the tears, too, as he held Laria to his chest and whispered to her. There were words of thanks, and there were words of regret.
There were words of love.
I didn’t rush him. He took the time he needed, and then we gathered what we could and moved forward, toward the next part of the story.
Just the two of us.
Era’s Journal, Entry #3129
I don’t understand my emotions.
Laria never liked me. You know how I felt about her. If either one of us had dropped off the face of the Earth… well, the other one probably would have thrown a party.
Then she went and got herself killed to save us.
Well, to save Jadran, actually. Did she know she was saving my life in the process? I’ll never know. Maybe she did. When I came in at Callesco he would have had time to bring that stun pistol around on me. We both would have died, right there, if Laria hadn’t stepped in the way.
Maybe she knew.
Maybe she didn’t.
Jadran and I very carefully avoided talking about it. There was a change in him, after. He put up walls around himself, a barrier I couldn’t get through. I don’t remember him being like this back when his entire village had been wiped out by the Enforcers.
Now, he was withdrawn so far into himself I didn’t know if he would ever come back.
It’s okay, really. I mean, he and I had been moving toward love. Rushing into it, I guess you’d say. Then I’d backed away from him when I found out how bad love can hurt. So, it’s all right that he’s moving away from me, now. It’s for the best.
It’s what I want.
If I write that enough times, here in this journal, I figure I’ll start to believe it.
The top part of Callesco’s suit made a passable leather jacket for Jadran, after the tubes and excess gear had been stripped away from it. There was a zipper up the front. It looked…
It looked really good on him.
We left Callesco’s body where it was, there in the near darkness of the tunnel. There was no reason to do anything else with it.
Callesco’s children eat their dead.
Jadran carried Laria with us, cradled in his arms like a sleeping child. We weren’t going to leave her behind to that same fate. She had been a pain in my side, a nuisance, a bother. In the end, she had tried to sell me out to save her own pretty neck.
Then she’d given her own life to save Jadran’s. Maybe it was because she knew she’d made a mistake, trusting Callesco, and wanted to make up for it.
Maybe it was because she loved him.
It doesn’t matter why. She’s dead, and I’m alive. One more name to add to the list of people who have died because of me.
I was going to have to do something to make up for all of that. For Saskia. For the villagers in Refuge. For the Freemen in New Merica. And, yes, for Laria, too.
That was exactly what I planned to do, once we got through this door at the end of the tunnel and found our way to the genetics facility.
The explosives had more than done their job. The door had been blown backward a good one hundred feet, into a hallway that was made of sheet metal instead of stone. Jadran and I shared a look, stepping carefully over the twisted bits of door and chunks of rubble from the blast.
“It can’t be the genetics facility,” I told him, again. “There were no buildings above ground. It has to be just some kind of supply depot, or something.”
He didn’t say a word. Just kept walking.
The cuts on my back from the pebble sized projectiles the explosive devices had sent shooting down the tunnel weren’t bad, as it turned out. They hardly bled. There were rips through the back of my shirt now, but hey, they matched the rest of my clothes.
Jadran, on the other hand, was in pain. I could see it in t
he strain around his eyes. The beating he’d taken from Callesco, mixed with the heat of his emotions, was beginning to take a toll on him. So when we quickly came to a section of tunnel with several doors that slid aside at the touch of a button, he found a cubbyhole with a bench and an empty locker, and laid Laria inside.
I didn’t blame him. It was as good a grave as we were going to find for her.
Shutting the door again, he took a step back, and raised the heel of his boot to slam it into the control panel, smashing it to bits, locking the door permanently.
And we went on.
We didn’t speak as we followed the hallway straight ahead. There was nothing either of us could say to the other that we weren’t already both thinking.
At the end of the passage we came to a walkway, running perpendicular to the hallway, left and right, with a high metal railing and closely spaced support bars. Past the railing gaped a wide open space. I could see the other side, far away from where we stood.
It was some sort of room, with a deep center, and walls made of metal, and lights up above that were as bright as a sun. The walkway circled the whole thing.
I looked up at Jadran. Silently, he stepped forward to the railing, and looked over.
Then he motioned to me. “Here, Era Rae.”
I joined him, the echo of my small footsteps the only sounds other than the constant hum of machinery. The railing was cold against my hand as I leaned over to look into the space below.
There were hundreds of stasis pods down there, shaped like pyramids without top points, connected by enormous black tubes, by wires, by electrical conduits. Lights flashed on each of the pods. They were active.
Something was inside each one of them.
There was no one else around, not a living soul, but there was no doubt where we were.
“This is the genetics facility,” Jadran said, simply.
He was right. And the reason we couldn’t see it up above in the Outlands was because the Restored Society had buried it underground to keep their secret.