by J. A. Huss
And still, Crage never comes.
Each day my workforce gets smaller, until finally, after six continuous days of harassment by Aesin, the slaves rise up and he slaughters them all, leaving me with no one to farm.
It’s not the first time. This is a well-known pattern. But the slaves are not smart enough to understand what he’s doing. They don’t see it, otherwise they would not react to him by rising up.
Now I am forced to go to Gibborum Plaza and request a new crop of workers.
This excites me. I’ve stayed away from the river for a week. I didn’t even send a servant to check and see if she’s there. But now I will surely bump into her in the plaza. They have to know that my workers have all been killed by Aesin. They have to be expecting me.
The gardens inside the plaza are lush and green, the small irrigation systems built to support the botanicals flowing in small canals all over the place. There are little foot bridges that allow passage as I make my way over to the genetics building and relish the artificially cooled air inside after the door closes behind me.
Environmental conditioning units are enough to convince me to turn scientist. The genetic labs must be kept cold in order to thrive.
I chat with the man in the reception area, then take a seat in a chair with a view to the outside where small colorful birds hop from limb to limb in the branches of a great billowing tree.
Minutes later I am greeted by Amelia. “Hello, Lucan,” she smiles. “My father is waiting for you. Follow, please.”
She is so beautiful. I can’t take my eyes off her when she’s speaking. Her eyes light up with her smile, and her skin looks as soft as I remember it being. I regret every night I stayed away from the river.
She stops and waves me into the ordering room, but I halt next to her and take her hand. “How have you been?”
“Lonely,” she says. And then she pulls her hand away and walks off.
“Lucifer?”
I turn at the name and recognize the Justice officiator. “Hello, Rache. Tell me you’re not part of this? You? The presiding legal entity here for Earth-sanctioned creation science?” I point to the empty hallways where Amelia just was.
“No, that was Gib and Ea. I think she said she mentioned it.”
“Yes, but I assumed that was a collective name for the institute. I do not know this Gib.”
“Ah,” is all Rache says. “I’ll introduce you before you leave. But let’s talk business first. I hear your father has slaughtered your workers once again? Let’s try another type of worker this time, shall we? See if we can’t get them to learn to keep their mouths shut when he’s on a rampage. It will save us all a lot of time and resources if we do it this way.”
I chuckle a little. They mistake my quiet nature for ignorance, I suppose. “No. Messing with the native genetics is illegal. I’m not sure how Amelia was created but—”
“Your High grandfather made her, Lucan. She is sanctioned.”
“My grandfather, as powerful as he is, has no domain here. He’s going to get everyone killed with this nonsense. That girl will be slaughtered if she is seen by Aesin.”
Rache spreads his arms wide. “And so what will you do about it?”
“Me?” I laugh. “I’m not involved, Rache. Whatever it is you’re doing here, I’m not getting—”
“Lucan!” my uncle exclaims.
“Lucifer,” I growl. I don’t lose my patience often, but I’m losing it now.
“Come,” he says, taking my arm like a child. “I’ll show you the new models we’ve designed. They work smarter, Lucan. We’ve programmed them to think critically, to learn from the past, to try to imagine the future before committing to an action. They will last much longer than the last batch.”
I walk with him and try to concentrate on what he’s saying, on how I will object when he’s done, on how angry my father will be once he realizes this is going on right under his nose… but Amelia walks past down the hall and my mind is held prisoner with her beauty. Outside under the bright sunlight her hair is as red as the earth in the southern deserts. But inside under the artificial lighting of the institute, it’s almost brown. Her hair, like her eyes, changes with the light. I’m studying her dress—it’s blue hemp. Now where did she get that color fabric here? I don’t even think Aesin’s goddesses have blue dresses. The process of making the dye from woad is tiresome for the goddesses, and none of the native women are capable of a task that complicated.
Crage spots me eyeing Amelia’s dress and grunts. “She makes the dye herself, Lucan. But our new workers can also make dye. They can do more than plant and harvest. And—” He stops to pull on my arm a little to snap my attention back to him. “We’ve taught them how to work the mines, Lucan. We could be done here decades ahead of schedule if we make these new workers.”
“What?”
He laughs. “I thought that might get your attention. We’ve made them smart. They reason now, they remember lessons learned from experience. They can get you home faster.”
It’s a trap, I realize this. They are luring me into giving them permission by dangling the idea of home in front of my face. I imagine home for a moment. Cool, dark, familiar. My friends from Clutch, my team from Fledge. I ache for these things. I ache so badly for them. So even though I know it’s a trap, even though I know that what they are offering will anger my father, and even though I know I’m being used… I begin to listen.
I begin to think about life after Earth. I begin to think about the friends and teammates. My world, the cool darkness—all of it.
“Listen, Lucan,” Crage whispers. “We have them already made up, son. All you have to do is give the order. You will have workers tomorrow who will please your father. Women who will know what to say and how to act to make him happy. Men who will not rush to retaliate, but instead take time to think through their revenge. Aesin is on his way out. I am giving you this world, do you understand? You can finish the mining operations and be done with this place. I will give you Inanna to make Archers with, I will give you Rache to keep the peace, I will give you the talented geneticists, Gib to create whatever you require.” And then he points down the hallway as Amelia walks past once again—her long blue gown made of cloth only a goddess can wear—and whispers, “I will give you her. I will give you Amelia to take as your own. You will have everything, Lucan. And you can keep it or go home. It will be your decision, not your father’s.”
“How?” I ask, succumbing to his words. “How will you deliver all this? You know I cannot kill my own father.”
“There are worse things than death, my son. Gib has engineered a retrovirus that will infect him, unravel his DNA and cause him problems. This will force him and those loyal to him to leave Earth and get treatment from home.”
A retrovirus. “That’s dangerous for everyone, not just Aesin.”
“Yes, but we have the complement virus, Lucan. We have the cure so it’s not dangerous for us. So all who work with us will be cured. All future generations will be cured. There is nothing to worry about.”
I stand there, silent. Watching Amelia as she flits about the lab down the hallway. She does amazingly complicated tasks—tasks I would not be able to do. “She says she has a soul.” I look up at my uncle. “Does she have a soul? How?”
“Ea made her. He controls all souls.”
I scoff. It’s not true, and no one knows better than I that Ea is no god. He’s just the one of the oldest Archers we have. He’s lived longer and seen more than the others. He knows more secrets, he’s made more mistakes, he’s learned more lessons.
“Souls are everywhere. Ea knows the secret to corralling them, Lucan,” Crage says, as if reading my mind. “Souls leave the body at death, but they are not destroyed. He can shuttle them places. Here and there into new bodies that have a receptacle, even straight through that portal we found. He can populate that universe with souls, we can make new races, beings, civilizations. And you can be part of it. Think about it, Lucan. W
e may not be gods, but we certainly can play like we are.”
I hesitate. And in that moment we both know he’s won. This place will be better without Aesin. These native people deserve to evolve into higher thinking. Who are we to prohibit them?
And I can have what I want.
All I have to do is agree.
I sign the order to have the clones infused with the new code and I sign the order for Gib to make and insert the virus into the crops we eat. Everyone will be affected, but only some of us will recover.
Crage makes plans to take over the portal and alludes to additional culling of the natives and flooding of the basin to wipe away any contaminants left over from the retrovirus. Inanna makes plans to join him across the Bridge, and Crage does not correct her. She’s the only female High Order being on Earth, she must stay. He will give her to me in case it becomes necessary to procreate High Order beings, and she will be angry, but I have no intention of keeping Inanna for that reason or any other. What Crage does with his wife is his business.
I take Amelia home from the institute with me that very day.
She is perfect. She distracts me from this insufferable planet. She is sweet and she cooks and washes my clothes, and lies with me in bed and lets me touch her softly after lovemaking. She whispers things in my ear at night, just as she falls asleep against my chest. She speaks of a future, of children, of a family.
She is my answer to everything.
Everything I’ve ever wanted from my life, aside from being on my home world, is contained within this one life.
The new workers are a lot better. Aesin still comes to torment them. He kills many, he’s still forcing the women, but they adjust to his requests so that he won’t kill them. They learn to survive. And I watch the men. They still get angry, but they formulate a strategy. They walk their women home from the fields. They keep them locked away at night. They pay very close attention to them, even go so far as to assign the biggest and strongest men to act as guards.
This does not go unnoticed by Aesin. It only takes a few weeks for him to start questioning me. I plead ignorance. I simply put in an order for workers, I tell him. I was instructed by Crage to direct Aesin to the institute when he starts questioning. And that’s exactly what I do.
I have no idea what they tell Aesin at the institute, but he goes away for a while. Not just away from my fields of working women, but away from the city. He goes to the world down below to talk with the gods and goddesses who run the mines. He’s gone for days. Rache comes by one afternoon and catches me working. I’m sitting on the overseer’s terrace watching the progress of harvest.
“This crop has the virus. Remember, you must eat it, and so must Amelia. We must all get sick, Lucifer. So there is no suspicion. Crage is building the Bridge and it will complete in the next few weeks. All of our plans must be timed accurately. Timing is critical. The cooks in the ziggurat are planning the harvest festival now, and it will distribute the virus to the masses.”
He made it sound so simple.
But when you’re fucking over a god, nothing is ever as simple as it sounds.
Chapter Twenty-Seven—TIER
Rural Republic
I cool off in my old cave below the RR not far from Junco’s house. There are no nightdogs. My cavern is trashed and dark, all my things strewn about from when I left this place almost three years ago. There’s nothing left of her here, so I pass through quickly and make my way to the hot springs. I strip in the dark and lower myself in the steaming water, and then walk over to find the ledge where I tried to kiss Junco and she pretty much told me to fuck off.
“So, Junco Coot. Why did ya not just walk home when ya got out of the cave earlier?”
Her breath comes quicker as I slide my hands around her waist and tug her towards me a little. She’s soft in the most unusual way. Pliant almost. Her body is malleable, like she fits against me, like she belongs there. I’ve seen her kill, I know what she is, what she’s capable of. Yet she’s so soft.
“Would you have come gotten me from my home, if I did?” she asks, looking over her shoulder at me. I take in her bloody and bruised face. It’s so young. She looks like a child even though I know she’s of age. She’s so small. And her mouth always looks like it’s caught between a laugh and a frown. Like she’s struggling to keep her sadness locked inside but deep down all she wants is a chance to be happy. I nod out a yes to her question. “So, there was no point then, right?”
“And?” I question her, to see if she’s lying to me and putting on an act, pretending not to understand what’s going on, or if—and shit, please, for all that is just, make this not be true—she seriously has no comprehension of who and what she is. Because beyond possibly being the Seventh Sibling, she’s still a ruthless killer who tortured her own father with a SEAR knife two weeks ago. And that seems to have slipped her mind right now. I do not understand what’s going on at all.
“And—I dunno. What am I gonna do in that house by myself?”
“So, yer lookin’ for company?”
“Jasus, Tier. I don’t know. I’m looking for answers, I guess. Just drop it.”
She’s telling the truth.
This hurts me in a way I can’t understand. She’s insane. She’s not all here. There are parts missing. Maybe large parts missing, even though her life is written all over her body in battle wounds. She traces a scar on my chest and asks about it.
I trace one of hers too. It’s large ad it’s ugly. My fingertip caresses the thick line running across the muscle that connects her neck to her left shoulder. It looks like… something impaled her. Like it went in one end of her muscle there and right out the other. Like an arrow, or a knife, or a… bullet.
It looks like someone shot her.
I can’t help myself, I need to feel it. I reach out and stroke the long, thick, tissue left behind after healing. If she were mine, I’d have fixed that wound properly and there would be no scar. But maybe she needs the scars to remember?
When I look up at her, she’s watching my finger as it moves towards her neck like it’s a snake that might bite her. I don’t stop even though I know I’m getting close to setting her off. I continue to trace under her chin and her eyes dart to mine.
She’s afraid of my touch.
I turn her face towards me gently and lean in to kiss her neck.
She lets off a small, barely audible gasp. Something between pleasure and shock.
I turn her again and find her lips.
She softens even more, if that’s possible, then pulls away.
“Don’t—do that.”
Don’t do that, she said. I laugh at this as I settle against the stones. “Junco,” I sigh. “Where are ya, darlin’?” I try to reach out to her and then stop. She belongs to Gideon now, he needs to keep her close. He needs to make her comply. I’ll just fuck it all up if I see her again. I’ll want to keep her, take her away, hide us from the future.
And everyone will die if I do that.
“Do ya want me to give ya the answers yer looking for, then?” I ask her to try to ease her back down from her annoyance.
She tucks her legs up near her chest, shielding her body from me. She’s not shy. She stripped her clothes off right in front of me and never even blushed. She watched me do the same, but she did blush at that. It’s like everything about her is caught in between.
In between killer and child. Between guilty and innocent. Between ruthless and gentle. She’s hateful and caring and big and little. She’s strong and fragile and forceful and still, all at the same time.
She’s a contradiction to the extreme, in every way possible. She’s pretty, that’s for sure, even though she’s scarred up with battle wounds. Those marks just make her even more beautiful. They show her spirit. They show her will to live and succeed.
She’s strong and muscular and even though she’s small—absolutely tiny in comparison to me—her body is not childlike. She was embarrassed when I looked at her like a man
would, but I couldn’t help myself because for me, she’s partner material, as we say back in the Band. She’s easy to like. It’s hard to hate her. In fact it takes a lot of effort to remember that she might be the one person… avian… thing… that can bring the worlds down. It’s so very, very difficult to reconcile all the contradictions that are Junco.
“Do you have them?” she asks, almost hopeful.
Oh, yeah. We were talking about answers. “I’m not sure. Some. Maybe.”
She sits still, like she’s mulling it over.
I almost laugh at this. How? How could she not want to know what’s happening? It’s like she’s living in her own world and nothing can touch her until she gives it permission. I picture her as an avian. How would her life be different if she was with us from the beginning? If I had known her when she was younger. My hand slips below the water and I trace a line down her back where a long red rash marks her spine.
She arches and squirms away, like I’m tickling her. I have to stop the laugh that wants to burst up when I picture her yelling at me not to touch her armpits back at the Goat wreck. “Does that hurt?” I ask her.
“A little, why?”
“Plasma burn on yer back. When did that happen?”
“The MR. They stunned me when I was running in the tallgrass.”
“Why?”
“Who knows,” she says, annoyed again.
“Ya know why, so tell me. Why did they stun you, Junco?”
She twists her head just enough to throw me the stink-eye and growls, “Back off, OK? It’s none of your fucking business.”
None of my fucking business, she says. I sigh. What can I tell her that might make it easier? I drag my finger up and down her spine, tracing over so many scars, aside from the plasma burn, that it makes me sad. I just want to soothe her a little. “How about a story, then?”
“What’s it about?” she asks softly. The childlike Junco is back and this pleases me.