by Amy Braun
She was already shaking her head. “I’m going to find something to make you better.”
I sighed. There were pain remedies available from the nurses, but there was no telling what was actually in them. On the other hand, the colonists tended to like Abby more than they liked me. Probably because she was an adorable little girl without an ounce of darkness in her soul, and she had no interest in engineering.
“Get something from Moira,” I murmured. “No one else. Don’t let Garnet’s guards see you.”
Abby nodded, planted a gentle kiss on my bruised cheek, then raced out of the lean-to. When she was gone, I reached under the collar of my shirt and tugged out the hidden necklace hanging against my chest.
The chain was thin, tightly woven silver. Dangling off the end of the chain was a black steel skeleton key with four blocky teeth. I turned the key over in my hands, but there were no markings to hint at what it was for.
But like Abby, I knew I had to keep it hidden and safe. That had been my mother’s final wish…
She closed the door with a harsh bang, making me jump and Abby wail in my arms. I looked at my baby sister, barely a month old, far too young to understand the loud noises surrounding her. Mom pulled down more furniture, blocking the door as best as she could. The Hellions pounded against it. The wood began to fracture.
She turned to us, pulling a silver chain from around her neck. She looped it over my head and tucked it under my shirt. I opened my mouth to ask what it was, but she spoke before I did.
“Take your sister and find somewhere to hide. Don’t let anyone see the key, do you understand?”
I jumped when a piece of the wooden door cracked and rained splinters onto the floor. The Hellions shrieks drowned out Abby’s cries.
“But you’re coming too?” I asked.
Mom shook her head sadly. Her long blonde hair was tangled and messy, and her green eyes were as sad as they were when Dad was killed.
“I can buy you time.” She looked at the ground. “I have to buy us all time,” she muttered.
I tried to ask what she meant, but another sharp crack made me jump and back away. The Hellions could hear Abby screaming, and it was turning them ravenous.
Mom grabbed my arms and pushed me toward the cellar door. She sent me through, then looked at me from the doorway.
“You need to survive, Claire. You can save us. Not just your sister, but everyone.”
Tears choked me. “What about you?”
My mother smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. There was pain in them, and a look of regret.
A last look. I choked again, trying to breathe and hold my sister close to me.
“Mommy…”
She knelt down touched my shoulder. The door was disintegrating behind her. The Hellions would be on us.
“You’re a strong, smart, brave girl, Claire. You have mine and your father’s talents. One day you’ll use that key, and you’ll save us all.”
I didn’t understand. Why was she wasting time telling me this? Why wasn’t she coming?
Mom pressed a kiss onto the top of my head, then bent and did the same to Abby. My baby sister’s cries lessened for a moment as her mother caressed the top of her head. As if she knew it would be for the last time.
Then without a final word, she slammed the door in our faces. I stood in the dark, staring in horror, listening to wood shatter and the rasping screeches of the Hellions while my mother began to scream…
Chapter 2
Despite the full night’s sleep and painkillers Abby had given me, I wasn’t feeling up to an entire day of scavenging. Not that Garnet would take any excuse, even though he was the one that caused most of my pain.
The throbbing agony in my stomach and ribs and soreness in my legs was replaced with stiffness every time I moved. I ate as much as we could spare, repacked my belt with tools, flashbangs and torches, and walked into the main intersection.
Garnet’s head scavenger, a tall, gangly man named Ben, shouted out the same orders he did every time we needed to scavenge.
The guards would take the fifteen healthiest, fittest people to a designated area of Westraven and have them pick it clean of supplies. Food, water, weapons, clothes, machines, tools, even damaged items were to be picked up, since engineers and Electricians could repair them. Anyone who strayed out of bounds would be left behind. Anyone who tried to run would be shot in the leg, and brought back to Garnet for proper punishment.
Garnet allowed children to scavenge because they were small and could fit into places adults couldn’t, which meant that Abby was allowed to come with me. My sister might not be an engineer, but she always found the little screws and bolts and gears I needed to put my inventions together.
The guards split up the groups and took them to different entrances aboveground. The Behemoth was a constantly hovering threat, and it was impossible to tell when the Hellions would launch a raid. Scavenging Day never went on for longer than a few hours, and stopped completely if even a single skiff dropped out of the Behemoth’s belly.
When Abby and I rose from the manhole cover, the first thing I did was take a deep breath of clean air. It tasted a little bit like dry dust in some areas, but I would take it over the stale humidity in the colony any day. My brain was a little fuzzy from the painkillers Abby got for me, but I could still see clearly when I opened my eyes and looked at the broken city.
We were downtown today, near the old market, which had received the worst of the bombings during The Storm. There were virtually no free standing shops or apartment buildings. Old, dark red stains filled the cracks in the shattered concrete. Most of the family homes were demolished, burned husks of white stone. Distant factories were imploded, their tall smoke stacks now collapsed inward and looking like a pile of broken sticks.
But no matter where I looked, I couldn’t see any bodies. There were rumors that the Hellions often took the bodies of the dead back to the Behemoth, but no one knew what for. No one really wanted to know.
On the far left of the horizon, I could see the Westraven port, the space controlled by the Westraven Trade Board for buying and selling. Before The Storm, Westraven was the central hub for air traffic and trade throughout Aon. The port was the only place in the world that the marauders couldn’t claim. The Sky Guard protected it, as they were the most elite soldiers in the Westraven Forces. While all the traders had their own individual landing spots by the dome-shaped airport, a separate landing pad and hangar/barracks was constructed for Sky Guard airships, right next to a freestanding tower.
Nobody dared go near the port. Those who tried to hide when the bombings began were hunted and slaughtered. It was said to be the most cursed part of Westraven. Even Garnet didn’t risk sending us there on Scavenging Days.
Looking away from the tower, I forced my attention onto the lone airship hovering in the sky. The scourge that destroyed us, and remained a staple in our sky.
Hanging in the stormy grey sky was the black monstrosity we called the Behemoth. It lived up to its name.
The atrocity looked like two ships stacked on top of each other. The top half was enormous, a black man-o’-war covered with thick iron plates. Four rows of gun-ports carrying heavy cannons on the sides pointed an ominous warning down on us few survivors. Three tall masts with black sails shivered like ghosts in the wind. The bow and the stern curved upward like two horns, rows of spikes jutting out from their middles. Just above the rudder was an exhaust port, which coughed out dark smoke that poisoned the clouds. Massive gears half the size of a house rotated on its side like a spinning saw, ripples of red electricity zipping through the spokes, creating a current that powered the gears and kept the beastly ship afloat.
No one knew how that bloody electricity was created, or how powerful it truly was. Perhaps we didn’t want to know. It was Hellion technology, which meant it was all but cursed to us.
Chained under the Behemoth was a smaller portion that was nearly its replica, except for the small slots
where the skiffs rested.
The skiffs backed out of their docks when they went on raiding missions. They were charred metal rowboats with pointed masts and inky black sails. Heavy, gushing smoke spewed from the stern when they steered. The figureheads were pointed, conical spears, used to impale an unlucky victim and hoist them to a fate worse than death. I’d never been on one, but I’d seen them close enough to know how crudely effective they were.
In the decade since it destroyed most of Westraven, the Behemoth had never moved from its place in the sky. I wondered if that was because it was damaged somehow, or if the Hellions on board simply chose not to let it move.
Does it really matter, Claire? The Hellions will kill you faster than Garnet will.
I pushed the thought away by tearing my eyes from the Behemoth. Most of our scavenging party was already working on finding the meager supplies in the dilapidated shops, broken concrete, and snapped piles of rebar. Only Abby and I were standing in place. My little sister was close to my side, her big green eyes fixed on the Behemoth. It terrified her more than anything else in the world. When the Hellions raided, they often stole children. No one knew why. No one wanted to.
I reached down and took Abby’s hand, giving it a gentle squeeze. She turned her gaze from the Behemoth to me, and I smiled at her. She held my hand tightly and smiled back, but it was weaker than mine. My heart sank a little. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen Abby’s real smile, let alone heard her laugh. I missed them a little more every day.
Before the other guards could bark at us to get moving, Abby and I walked to one of the collapsed buildings. It looked like it had imploded on itself, so I had no idea what it used to be. I barely recognized the streets anymore. Still, with the amount of rebar and metal sticking out of it, there was probably something hidden in the crevices that we could find and take back to the colony.
“We’ll start from the top,” I told Abby. That way the building wouldn’t collapse in on us. I crawled up first, still holding Abby’s hand so she wouldn’t slip. My stiff leg muscles and aching stomach protested with every movement, but the painkillers continued to dull the worst of it. At least by moving slowly, I could make it seem like I was pausing to look for supplies instead of crawling up a small mountain in pain.
Once we climbed the pile, I sat down and stretched out my legs. I hated being this sore. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought I was in worse shape today than I was yesterday. Still, I had to be strong in front of Abby, or she would start worrying and we’d never find anything. Garnet made it clear that I had to come back with something. I was an engineering miracle worker, after all. There was almost nothing I couldn’t make, and virtually nothing I couldn’t fix.
There was a low indent surrounded by rebar, so we started searching there. I warned Abby to be careful of the sharp metal edges, but she was far more graceful than me right now. Assured neither of us would hurt ourselves, we started tossing rubble aside and began our search.
Abby was the only one who found anything, her little fingers able to pick out screws and bolts and placing them into my hands. She chatted mindlessly, telling me about everything that happened in the colony while I was out working for Garnet. It was mostly useless information, like how her friend Brittany’s mother was spending her time kissing one of the dryers, who I thought smelled like sweaty feet.
Listening to my sister eased my mind. I even found myself smiling and laughing a couple times. I soaked it all in, wishing it would last.
One terrified scream told me it wouldn’t.
Abby jumped and dropped the bolts she’d been collecting. I twisted around and lowered myself onto the rough concrete, following the direction of the scream. The woman who’d cried out wasn’t under attack, but she was pointing at the sky. I followed her hand, my blood going cold when I saw three skiffs peel out from under the Behemoth and turn in our direction.
“Everyone get underground!” Ben shouted. He didn’t need to tell anyone twice. We were all running for the closest manhole cover we could find. I moved down the pile of concrete as fast as I could, trying not to slip or cause Abby to fall. We used the mountain of rubble for cover and hit the ground. I looked over my shoulder. They were almost over our heads. I couldn’t believe how close they were getting. The Behemoth had seemed so far away, but now it was all too close.
While I tugged Abby behind me, the guards used their guns on the skiffs, trying to shoot them down before they landed. All they were doing was creating sparks on the thick metal plating.
One of the skiffs dipped suddenly, gaining speed as it started to dive-bomb the survivors. At the very last second, the skiff’s pilot tipped the ship upward, the pointed spear on its tip stabbing straight through the chest of one of the guards. Blood sprayed out his back as he was impaled, and Abby screamed.
Four Hellions leaped out of the skiff, fully dressed in their jumpsuits and respirators, and pounced on the survivors. The impaled man was completely forgotten as the Hellions chased the guards who attacked them. Two of them plunged their needles into the necks of the guards, taking them out of the fight. The other two grabbed the children, dragging them kicking and screaming by their clothes and hair onto the other two skiffs settling onto the ground. Mothers and fathers screamed and tried to get their children back, only to be beaten to the ground, stabbed, and drained. The Hellions from the new skiffs overran the survivors and took more children. Some survivors began pulling up the manhole covers and dropping into them, only to be yanked back out by a Hellion and torn to pieces.
They hadn’t spotted us yet, but it was only a matter of time before that changed. I turned back to Abby and crouched down, putting my hands on her shoulders.
“Listen to me, Abby,” I said. “I’m going to distract them with a flashbang. Then you and I are going to run as fast as we can, all right?”
My sister was shaking under my hands, tears starting to spill down her face. But she nodded. Staying close to the pile of rubble, I took one of my last flashbangs from my belt, unscrewed the caps on either end, and hurled it into the middle of the blood-splattered chaos.
The glass tube exploded instantly, turning the entire world white. I hoped that the few survivors I’d seen by the manhole cover were able to escape, but I couldn’t wait to see. I grabbed Abby’s hand and dragged her away from the madness. I didn’t know where I was going, and didn’t care. This was our only chance to escape not only the Hellions, but Garnet as well.
Sharp, angry screeches followed us as we dashed from the main street toward the shadowed alleys. I recognized those narrow backstreets. If we could lose ourselves in them, we’d have a chance–
A thickset Hellion swung in front of me, grabbed my shoulders, and drove its needle toward my throat.
I reacted on reflex, twisting my head to the side before I could be stabbed. The needle missed my neck, but grazed the top of my shoulder. I let go of Abby’s hand to try and push the Hellion away, but it reared its fist back and hit me in the chest.
At first I thought a hole had been punched straight through me. I stumbled back onto the ground, clutching my chest, unable to breathe. I rolled and tried to get up as the Hellion got closer, fumbling to find the pocketknife on my belt. I found it and switched it open. The blade was about as useful as a butter knife, but it was better than nothing.
As I staggered to my feet, some kind of instinct just kicked in and I knew this Hellion was the one that saw me yesterday. That was the only conclusion I got to before it attacked me again.
I ducked under the sweep of its claws, trying to rush forward and stab the Hellion in the stomach. I didn’t know it planned to let me get close until its knee plunged into my ribs. I cried out from the pain, damaging already tender organs and skin. The Hellion grabbed my hair when I was doubled over, yanked my head up, and punched the underside of my chin. White spots dotted my vision. I couldn’t see clearly, couldn’t do anything when the Hellion kicked me in the chest and sent me flying onto the ground.
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I landed hard, my head smacking the pavement. The only sound I heard was the pounding in my head, though I thought I heard Abby screaming.
Abby, have to get to her, have to get up and save–
The big Hellion loomed over my head. I weakly slashed at it with my pocketknife, cutting the air uselessly. The Hellion swatted my arm away and picked me up by my throat. I slashed again, nicking its shoulder. It didn’t even flinch, dangling me almost a foot off the ground. Somewhere Abby was crying, yelling my name. But I couldn’t see her.
My eyes were fixed on the bloodstained needle pointed at my throat. One stab would do irreparable damage to me. If it didn’t drain me right here, I would bleed out in seconds. Unless I did something– and fast.
I had one flashbang left on my belt. I grabbed it. The Hellion pulled its head back. Abby screamed louder than ever. The Hellion lunged forward at the same time I swung the flashbang into its head.
Unscrewing the caps to tighten the wires inside caused a stronger flash, but the light still sparked and blinded the monster when it connected and shattered. The Hellion shrieked and dropped me.