Smoke Sky

by Amy Braun

  Why didn’t they finish us off?

  The Hellions knew that most of us were underground. They knew we were easy to hunt, attack, and kill. They never tired of taking us. If they were so intent on our destruction, why hold back?

  I shuddered. I didn’t want to know what the Hellions final plan was. I simply wanted to avoid it as much as I could.

  I continued to walk in the dark. The tunnels of the underground were pitch black until you came by one of the small colonies, which were lit with torches and weak fires. Our locations were obvious if the Hellions ever decided to launch an attack in the tunnels.

  But they never came down. They waited until we were on the surface to kill us.

  I shook the thought from my head. There was no point in figuring out why the Hellions acted the way they did. They were monsters that saw us as one thing, and one thing only:

  Food.

  Reasons didn’t matter anymore. Survival did.

  Though it didn’t mean that mistakes couldn’t be made.

  He heard me before I heard him. I barely passed the turnoff that would lead me to Garnet’s colony when the wide barrel of a blunderbuss swung into my face.

  I stopped and held up my hands, though I knew the guard wouldn’t shoot me. At least I hoped not. Given how hard he was scowling, he might allow his finger to “slip” on the trigger and give me a dozen-grapeshot-welcome.

  “Shut that damn light off,” he growled. He had a glass lantern dangling from his hip that gave off less light than my own torch did. I might as well have been shining the sun down here. He was incredibly dirty, even for a scavenger that lived in the sewer.

  Sighing heavily, I pushed my torch closed, collapsing it inward and hearing the gears click as they worked to shut the yellow light off. I hooked the torch back onto my belt and waited.

  “Where are Kevin and Gordon?”

  Their pain-filled screams rang through my mind. I shook my head. I closed my eyes, and tried not to remember their agonized faces. The way they screamed for help that I couldn’t give without dying myself. I told myself that wherever they were now, they were free of pain. Ghosts couldn’t be hurt.

  The fantasy didn’t dispel the guilt nearly as much as I hoped it would.

  The dirty guard’s sigh was even heavier than mine when I finally exhaled.

  “Get moving. Garnet will want to see you.”

  He turned and stomped through the left tunnel, heading toward the colony.

  I didn’t want to follow him. If I did, that meant I would have to tell Garnet why I left two of his men to die. He’d accuse me of being a coward, no matter how much I reasoned with him, or if I told him that he still got what he wanted– the generator powering the substation was working again and the outages would stop.

  Garnet wouldn’t listen to me. Why should he? The man was an Electrician, and Electricians held all the power in this subterranean tunnel one step above the abyss– figuratively and literally. During The Storm, all power was rerouted from the surface to the underground. People who weren’t engineers or technicians naturally started following them, offering work for food and shelter. So the Electricians established dominance, knowing they couldn’t be touched as long as they held onto the last remnants of Westraven’s power.

  If that wasn’t enough, Garnet took in grounded marauders, the vicious pirates who terrorized the skies before the Hellions forced them from the sky. That made Garnet a tyrant and a warlord.

  Not the best man to have as an employer. But I couldn’t walk away. Not if I wanted to keep Abby alive.

  I followed the dirty guard without a single word of protest. I did my best to match his pace, but at this point it felt like every tendon in my legs was an elastic band being stretched and snapped back and forth. I was probably going to collapse any second, and the dirty guard would have to come back and drag me to Garnet. So I had to tough it out. There was no other option.

  After what seemed like hours, we finally made it to the heavy door that would lead to the heart of the colony. There weren’t any guards out here. Guards would be a dead giveaway that something important was hiding beyond the door, but by itself, not even Hellions would pay it any attention. The only reason my current guide was out there at all was because we’d been sent on a mission. He was told to wait a certain amount of time for us. If we didn’t come back, he would have left his post and went home.

  The dirty guard stopped in front of the thick, dark iron door bolted to the tunnel walls. At first glance, it looked like a dead end. There was no visible latch– unless you knew where to look. The dirty guard did. He slid his hand underneath a barely visible slot on the right side of the door. There was a loud screech, followed by a solid thunk. Then the dirty guard put his shoulder to the door and began to push. He couldn’t move it himself, but the four men waiting on the other side were strong enough to pull the metal wall back, leaving the barest amount of space for us to slip through.

  “Get in,” growled the dirty guard.

  I did as he commanded. I didn’t want to be in the tunnels anymore. I wanted to be… back somewhere familiar. The colony wasn’t home. My real home was gone. This place was just where I slept and ate.

  I didn’t look at the four standing beyond the door, slipping past them so the dirty guard could get inside. I shuffled forward and looked at my “home.”

  The colony resided at an intersection in the tunnels. Similar doors made of bolted iron blocked all four entrances, though air was able to filter through from the surface thanks to the vents constructed fifty feet above the floor. The air might have been fresh, but it tasted and smelled the same way everything down here did– thick, muggy, and a little sour, like old tar that coated the back of your throat. Whenever it rained or the heavy snows melted, some the colonists were selected to bolt the vents and doors shut so the water wouldn’t fill up the tunnels and drown us. They were opened gradually after the rains stopped, so other colonists could collect the water and boil it until it was drinkable or could be used for cleaning. To empty the worst of our sewage, we had to take the wastewater and chamber pots to a series of bolted dump-holes that had been drilled into the bottom of the tunnels outside the colony doors. It kept the colony relatively clean, though I couldn’t help but wonder what we would do when those dump-holes were filled.

  Under the vents were lean-tos made of cloth and held up by metal posts. Garnet’s arrangement with the South Junkers gave us access to all the metal we needed, but building decent homes for the two hundred people that lived here never seemed to be on Garnet’s mind. Not once in the seven years since this colony’s creation had he thought about improving the lives of those he “protected.”

  I didn’t know which was sadder– that he got away with it, or that the survivors simply assumed this was the best they could hope for now.

  The lean-tos were built around the edges of the tunnel intersection, and each one had a specific task. Survivors bustled through the colony, doing everything from blacksmithing, engineering, food drying or cooking, sewing, nursing, schooling, to weapons training. Illuminated by stuttering electric string lights crisscrossing over their heads, women held bundles of fabrics to be sewn into new clothes. Men sharpened blades and cleaned guns. Teenagers carefully tended the cooking fires, which smelled like the usual charred rat meat. Younger children ran around with bare feet and dirty clothes. Babies cried, hungry for the milk of mothers just as starved as they were.

  Along the back wall was one lean-to larger than the rest. Garnet’s tent. It spanned almost the entire length of the back wall, its tattered, patchy roof seeking elegance it would never have. Black wires snaked down the walls and slipped into Garnet’s tent, powering all his tools and generators. He barely worked any more, throwing down-on-their luck people like me into the fray so he could bask in fake luxury.

  But those wires going into his tent were a reminder that Garnet literally held the power. He could shut it off any time he wanted to, leaving the rest of us to go cold, starve, and die.<
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  The four guards from the door and the dirty one surrounded me. They were all big bruisers that had no problem hitting an eighteen year old girl nearly a foot shorter than them and half their weight. I marched with them through the intersection. The busy workers and traders all darted out of their path. Garnet’s men were known for roughing up anyone who didn’t give them exactly what they wanted, exactly when they wanted it.

  Sometimes they even did it for fun.

  I turned my face toward the ground, but was looking for Abby out of the corner of my eye. She knew that she was safest in our lean-to while I was above ground working, but she never liked being far from my side. I’d raised her in this world. She’d never known our mother.

  Some days I wasn’t sure I had either. Or maybe I was just feeling bitter because she’d left us.

  Garnet’s two personal bodyguards– bald, dark skinned twins named Tyson and Malik– stood up from the plastic crates they’d been using as chairs on the porch of the Garnet’s lean-to. They looked at me with cold dark eyes, then glanced over my head.

  “Where’s the escort?”

  “Dead,” the dirty guard answered for me. “She left ’em behind.”

  I wanted to protest that there was nothing I could have done, that it happened too fast, but he wasn’t the person I needed to believe me.

  Tyson and Malik glared at me. Gordon and Kevin had been their friends, and they were going to look for any chance they could take to punish me for their deaths. The twins stomped forward, each of them roughly grabbing one of my arms and dragging me out of the circle. I stumbled to follow them as Malik (who I think was the one on my right), yanked open the curtain door of Garnet’s abode.

  Most of the lean-tos were crammed with the most basic items. Between the one crate for food, one crate for clothes, a dented metal basin for bathing and collecting water, a chamber pot, and one or two thin cots, there was barely enough room to move in your home.

  Garnet didn’t have that problem. A chunky metal generator powered the string lights sewn into the ceiling, casting the worn carpets and patchwork quilts in pale saffron tones. Across from the generator was a wide metal worktable with various wire strippers, pliers, gauges, hammers, and wrenches. It looked more like a torturer’s desk than an Electrician’s.

  Crates filled with handmade clothes and dried meats sat in the far corners next to a wide metal bathing tub and a tank of purified water. Next to them was a hand-built throne. Or what Garnet probably assumed was a throne. Really it was just a very tall, very wide chair covered in red fleece resting on a metal slab. In front of it was another wooden desk with maps of Westraven and Aon spread across it. Garnet was by neither. He wasn’t in the main tent at all.

  At least not that I could see. Though I could hear him.

  Behind the throne was another curtain that led to Garnet’s bedroom. I’d never been inside, and never wanted to be. Beyond it, I could hear soft smacks and grunts, often followed by a painful squeal. I cringed and looked at my feet.

  Garnet believed in repopulation. He insisted on being at the forefront for it. He took great pride in picking the prettiest girls in the colony to be his one-night brides, then expecting them to take care of his child when it was born. If they failed to carry the child to term, he beat the girls before giving them to his men to try again.

  The only reason I escaped Garnet’s hands was because I was an engineer, and he didn’t want to burden me with being a mother when I could fix and create things for him. But Abby was eight years old, and had dreams of being a nurse instead of an engineer. We needed nurses, but not as much as we did engineers. In Garnet’s eyes, anyone could use a needle and thread to sew a wound. Repairing a broken machine to give us light or heat was much more difficult.

  If I didn’t escape Garnet before Abby turned twelve…

  I stopped that horrifying thought when a sharp yell and another painful cry came from behind the curtain. After a muffled but sharp conversation that ended with a young girl sobbing, Garnet pulled back the door to his bedroom and stepped out.

  Garnet Dayton’s stomach spilled overtop of his drawstring pants, sheens of sweat plastering his hair to his shirtless body. One of his arms was the size of both of my thighs. Pockmarks lined his fleshy cheeks, dark red stubble growing out of them like bloody grass. His head was shaved, though I could still see the bald spot growing near the back of his head. Bushy auburn eyebrows pulled together as he glowered at me. Olive green eyes were filled with impatience.

  I was in a lot of trouble.

  “Did you get it done?” he grunted.

  I nodded and glanced at the lights strung through the tent. “Looks like the power’s already back, but is it missing in any other areas?”

  Garnet didn’t answer me. He walked over to the crates by his throne, opened one of the smaller ones up, and took out a glass bottle. I stared at it with a parched throat. I needed food, water, and rest. In any order.

  “What happened to your escorts?”

  “The Hellions caught them,” I reported sadly, wondering how many more times I would have to repeat that. I wouldn’t forget it, but I wanted to move on from it. We were all accustomed to loss, though the pain never lessened, no matter who was taken. “There was nothing I could do.”

  Garnet opened the bottle and took a long swig. I gritted my teeth and balled my fists, fighting the urge to rush him, grab the bottle, and either drain it dry, or smash it over Garnet’s head. I would have indulged in the fantasy, if I didn’t think that Malik and Tyson would grab me and pummel me before I got within five feet of their boss.

  The fat warlord finished his drink, put the cork in the bottle, and set it back into the crate. He started walking toward me.

  “That’s what you said last time, Claire,” he told me.

  My heart rate began to pick up. “It’s not my fault,” I defended. “Everyone knows the risks aboveground. The Hellions could show up at any time on a mission, and you told me not to come back until it was completed. I was following your orders, getting the job done. Just like I always do.”

  Garnet stopped in front of me, so close his bulging gut brushed against my stomach. I stood my ground, when all I really wanted to do was run.

  “I don’t have many men to spare, Clairy. The bastards running around out the colony are barely old enough to hold their own dicks, let alone a gun. How am I supposed to keep my people alive when you get them all killed?”

  “It’s not my–”

  Pain exploded across my cheek, wrenching my head to the side. For a fat, lazy warlord, Garnet was shockingly quick and strong. My weak legs couldn’t support the sudden hit, so I toppled onto the ground, catching myself on my hands and knees. Garnet said something, but I couldn’t hear it past the ringing in my head.

  Large arms crushed my biceps and hauled me onto my feet. I stumbled, but the twin guards jerked me into place. Garnet was in front of me again, so close I could smell the sour wine on his breath and rancid sweat on his body.

  “Not your fault, I think you were trying to say?” Garnet taunted. “I don’t think that’s the case, Clairy. See, it was your parents who failed to close the Breach. They didn’t stop the Hellions from coming through and dropping the barricades, trapping us in these piss and shit holes. I was there. I remember. And now you’re doing the same thing. Getting my men– my friends– killed because you just think about yourself. That’s not something I’ll allow, Clairy. I own you, and I will not let you fail my people the same way your parents failed all of us.”

  My face flushed with heat, and not just from the forming bruise. Anger boiled in my veins, pushing my temper to the breaking point. It was barely under my control. The last ten years of my life had been nothing but pointed fingers and hateful whispers. Blame for something I didn’t have any involvement with. Blame for something I couldn’t change.

  If there was a solution, I would have found it and done something, but I couldn’t get into the sky and fight the Hellions. I wouldn’t have any al
lies, and no reason to attempt suicide.