Sisters of the Sands

by Villinger, James

  “Remember that once you’ve gotten into line, remain silent and facing forward … go!”

  The green squares below our feet disappeared and most of the men started to move. An alarm resounded throughout the facility.

  “Five, four, three …” she counted down while aiming her pistol at whoever she believed was farthest from the line.

  I rushed over to the line, but there was no room. A hand grabbed my shoulder and pulled me in front of him. I glanced back and saw that it was Pilgrim. He caught my eye, gave me a scared look and gestured back to the front.

  “Two, one.”

  When the last man had gotten in line, the alarm stopped, as if knowing we were all in proper formation.

  I looked forward again as the ugly woman came walking past to inspect us.

  “Good,” she said, lowering her gun and smiling. She turned to the guards up on the catwalk. “Open the gate.”

  The big doors opened up by themselves, almost like magic. I had never seen machinery so complicated, or buildings so sleek and smooth. The ugly woman took her place at the front of the line again.

  “Stay on the red line and follow me,” she commanded, before leading us through the big doorway.

  The next room was narrow, a thin corridor, with more guards stationed on the catwalks above. The line stopped as the man at the front was forced to put his right arm into a white box. The guards shoved the man in closer until his whole arm was in the machine.

  A nearby woman, with white streaks in her hair and plain grey clothing, pressed a switch on the machine. The man screamed out in pain and fell to his knees as the machine hummed loudly. The machine beeped, and his arm came loose from it, revealing a black mark on his wrist.

  “Kid, just do as they say for now,” Pilgrim whispered to me as the man wailed in agony. “I’ll look out for you, I promise.”

  The guards picked the man up off the floor and dragged him forward along the line. The second in line stood still, hesitating. He looked up at the guards on the catwalk, who were all aiming their weapons down at us. After taking a deep breath, he stepped forward and placed his arm in the machine.

  The machine started again, but the man fended off the pain and resisted the urge to scream out. He strained and groaned, but didn’t yell. The machine beeped again, revealing another still steaming black mark, surrounded by scalded flesh. It wouldn’t be long before it was my turn. I gritted my teeth and closed my eyes, trying to hide my fear.

  11. Persuasion

  Sacet

  My mind spun, and all I could hear was the sound of my heart thumping. My brother faded into my vision, as did an audience of others around him, watching him silently cry out in pain. I couldn’t move, in-fact I couldn’t feel my own body. What was happening to me? Eno was trying to pull his arm out of a machine. Why was no one helping him?

  It all disappeared, turning to black. I opened my eyes and saw something I wasn’t accustomed to. I had been living among the rocks and sand for most of my life, but now I was sitting in a perfectly constructed and polished room. I turned in my steel-framed chair and saw that it had six light-grey walls and only one door.

  The room was small, but still accommodated a table and two chairs. Although it was well-lit, I couldn’t seem to locate the source of the light. Somehow, it felt as if this experience wasn’t real, that this was still some kind of nightmare.

  I leant forward onto the metal table. My arms were covered in the same under-suit material that Tau wore, and I looked down to find the suit covering my whole body. I buried my face into my arms but as I did I reminded myself of the pain in my jaw. It still hurt, but I didn’t think it was broken. I whimpered, hoping for this to be over soon.

  An irritation on the back of my neck started to itch. I placed my hand to the source of the discomfort and felt an odd protrusion from my skin. A scarred surface surrounded the lump. Surgery? What have they done to me?

  The door in front of me shuddered open. I raised my head from the table as the tall, uniformed, blonde woman entered the room with her arms behind her back. It was the same middle-aged woman from the river. She sat in the chair opposite me and folded her hands on the table.

  “Welcome back home, Sacet,” she said. “If I had of known you used to be one of us, I would have treated you much differently at the river. I’m sorry we lost you to the Nomads so long ago. We tried tracking you down, but all this time … we assumed you were dead. I hope the savages didn’t … torture you?”

  She already knew everything about me? Tau probably told her.

  She smiled. “Allow me to formally introduce myself, my name is Mira, but you can call me Commander. How are we feeling today?”

  I knew what this was. But no matter what she asked, I would never tell her anything of value. I shifted uncomfortably. “Confused.”

  She looked at me with a phoney look of surprise. “Oh? And why’s that?”

  I hated this act she was playing. I stood up in my chair. “You know damn well why! Where am I? Where is my brother? What are you going to …”

  She shushed me. “Calm down, all of your questions will be answered in due time. You need to be patient,” she said as I sat back down and folded my arms. “To answer your first question, you are in a containment chamber. It inhibits your Acolyte powers, so any ideas you have of teleporting yourself out of here are pointless.

  “But let’s get back on track. How are you feeling, really? How’s the jaw?” This brought a smirk to her face. She found this funny?

  I glared back at her. “It stings. What was that, super speed or something?”

  She looked back down at her folded hands and closed her eyes, smiling as she did. “Hmph! Now that would be a good power, wouldn’t it? No, no. My powers are illusionary; I create pseudo-physical projections, bending the light to show you what I want you to see. In reality, my trooper was standing by your side in the river for quite some time.”

  “Well, I see you for what you really are in here, neither of us can use our powers. I’m not falling for anything you’re about to try.”

  She lowered her eyebrows and grinned at me. “Who says I’m in the room with you?”

  My hands started to shiver, and my whole body shuddered in the chair. The room was freezing.

  “Now that we have the pleasantries out of the way, here is how it’s going to work,” she said clasping her hands together more tightly. “I ask you questions and then you answer them. If I think you’re lying, then I’ll start to do things like this …”

  My hands suddenly felt very heavy. They were covered with blocks of ice. My teeth started to chatter, the sound echoed off the walls.

  “I tho … thought you’re illusions … weren’t real?”

  I looked through the glass-like ice that had encased my hands. My skin was turning black from frostbite. The ice began to spread up my forearms. As it did, the blackness followed it, causing my extremities to lose feeling. There was an overpowering numbness throughout my body.

  “St … st … to … op!”

  The ice stopped growing up my arms but it didn’t subside, and Mira’s grin turned to a solemn frown. “So are you clear on how all of this works?”

  I nodded back at her, wanting this illusion to end. As quickly as it grew, the ice fell from my wrists and fingertips onto the floor, fading into vapour as it landed. My freed hands shook as I brought them together and up to my mouth to blow on them, attempting to return the feeling.

  “Alright, question one: how far can your portals really go?” she asked.

  I panicked. I couldn’t tell her that. If she found out I could portal to anywhere I had visited in the past, she might try and force me to use my power against the Nomads.

  I shrugged. “I’ve never thought about it before. I’ve only ever teleported to things that are fairly close by. If I can’t see it, then I can’t get there.”

  There was no ice, no illusions to follow what I had said. It seemed as if she had bought it.

  Several lar
ge bulbs of light were now hovering above our heads. They grew brighter and brighter as they encircled the table from above. Mira was becoming more difficult to see, for the light was obscuring my vision.

  “Your brother, he’s a little young to be travelling in the desert with you, isn’t he?”

  “People like you didn’t give us a choice. You better not have hurt him,” I said through gritted teeth.

  “Is he an Acolyte, too?”

  “What? No, and if he was, I’m sure he would have escaped,” I replied, and there was a silence between us.

  “Hmm … very well. I’ve decided that you’re going to be a soldier for us again. You’ll have a great, new home here in the capital city, and you’ll follow every rule and order we give you. Although, I doubt you would willingly kill someone on command, right?”

  I furrowed my brow. “I’ll never kill for you.”

  Mira ignored me, stood up and edged around the table. “Tell me what you think of Tau. You seem to be quite fond of her, saving her so much,” she said as she placed her hand onto my shoulder. “And why is that? Why would you put your life on the line for her?”

  “Because she didn’t seem to be … like you people,” I said. But it turned out I was wrong. She was just like them after all. How could she betray us like that?

  My vision started going black again. What was happening? Mira lifted her hand from my shoulder, and she completely disappeared, along with everything else. An image of Tau appeared in front of me where the table once was.

  Mira’s voice echoed and boomed in my ears: “So, if I was the one to ask you to kill … hmm, no. But her? What if she wanted you to kill someone? Yes? Like … perhaps … that soldier in the village?”

  Tau must have told her about him, too. The images of her washed away, replaced with the gruesome sight of the soldier I had killed, limply hanging from the rusty spike.

  “Do you … hate them? What he could have done to her, is that what made you want to kill him?” she persisted, her words phasing in and out. It was as if they were spoken by hundreds of voices at once.

  “No! No, I wouldn’t. I won’t!”

  “But you already did.” A high-pitched hum was ringing in what I thought were my ears. “You did kill him, and look at what they did to that village as they tried to find you.”

  More hallucinations formed onto the dark canvas in front of me, this time of the Nomads. I recognised some of them, even the small one-eyed boy came into view, but they were all lying on the ground, dead. They had been torn to pieces by the red beam of energy, which was shooting from one side of my sight to the other, still annihilating the huts throughout the village even now. The villagers who were still alive were screaming and reaching towards me, steam rising from their cauterised wounds.

  “No! That’s not what happened.” The visions were all around me now. “Stop this torture. Stop it!”

  “I’ll ask again. Do you hate them?” she said. Her voice was now so distorted she barely sounded like a person at all.

  I just wanted this to stop and so I gave in to what she wanted from me. “Yes! Yes, now please stop this!” The veil of deception lifted like a curtain from my eyes. The room reappeared around me; Mira was standing beside me with a stern look on her face.

  She faced away, moved behind her chair, and clasped her hands behind her back. “You have a tracking device implanted inside of you, so it doesn’t matter where you try to hide, we will always be able to find you. It’s also a specialised acid capsule. When remotely triggered, it releases its contents and burns through your spinal cord, leaving you paralysed. Even with the best surgeons, trying to remove it will kill you.

  “You will live as one of us, train like one of us, and fight like one of us. You’ll receive assimilation sessions every day. If you disappoint me, I’ll have your little brother killed. And if that doesn’t convince you, then I’ll just kill you instead. You will bow to the Queen if you ever get to see her, and you will show the proper respect to your superiors at all times.”

  Mira sat back down on her chair, folded her hands onto the table and continued: “If you honour this agreement I have offered you, you will live your life mostly in luxury. Everything you need will be provided for you. I’ll even see to it that Tau can help out with showing you around, help you adjust to your new life.

  “And one last thing. I’m not entirely convinced you’re worth my trouble, you are lucky to be alive as it is. Every day, you should be striving to become stronger and better than what you already are. Prove to me that you’re worth keeping!”

  Mira’s body dematerialised in front of me, as did the room itself. I spun around in the chair and watched as the room transformed from solid walls and floors to metal gratings. I stood up from the chair and saw that my cell wasn’t the only cage in here. Other roofless cages were suspended from the ceiling.

  In the nearest cell sat a man in a chair who stared back at me. The other cells contained similar sights, men wandering around them, or lying down on the cell floors.

  My eyes were drawn upwards to a catwalk that overlooked all of the cells, which was filled with women gazing down at me. Mira stood in the centre with her arms folded. She had been controlling her illusions from above this whole time.

  Standing next to her was an Acolyte, a woman I didn’t recognise that had blocks of ice levitating around her wrists. That explained why I felt so cold earlier.

  Another shuddering as the door behind me opened for real this time. The water Acolyte that had helped defeat me stepped in. She gestured for me to follow.

  Back up at the catwalk, Mira still stared down at me. The other women dispersed and began examining the other cells and some nearby equipment. I walked towards the door and left my cell.

  I stepped out into a steel corridor and faced the water Acolyte, who was still wearing her armour from earlier.

  “Hello Sacet,” she said.

  To my side there were three other soldiers. Iya, the child Acolyte, was among them and she appeared to dislike the idea of standing near me right now. Her arms were crossed and her eyes were staring up at the ceiling as if that was more interesting than I was.

  “Sorry about what we had to do to you. I hope we can still be friends,” the water Acolyte said as she walked down the corridor. “I’m Maya by the way.”

  I caught up to her and walked beside her. The other three followed close behind. The long corridor turned left and brought us to the main entrance of the facility.

  Maya smiled. “I’ve been ordered to show you around the place and get you settled in. If you have any questions, I suppose just ask away.”

  I was admiring the sleek, chrome surfaces that the corridor was made from. A bright, neon-red line was lit along our path.

  “Not feeling like talking, right?” Maya continued. “Still in a bit of shock from your ordeal? I can honestly tell you I know the feeling.”

  She looked towards the exit and lowered her voice: “It’s normal.” She shook out of it and smiled again. “Anyway, let me be the first to welcome you to FDC.”

  As she approached the door, it automatically opened to reveal a starry sky and a bright city below, the lights from the city like the stars themselves. I had never seen anything like it. These buildings were enormous. I couldn’t see anything desert-like, no sand or cliff-faces. It felt like an entire other world.

  It took me a while to break out of my awe, before realising that Maya had already started walking down the stairs in front of us.

  Iya prodded me from behind. “Move!”

  I made my way down the stairs and caught up with Maya, who had stopped in front of a large station at the bottom of the stairs. There were a number of benches for people to sit, but there didn’t seem to be anyone around except for us.

  “Maya, where is my brother?” I asked, my jaw still aching.

  “He’s safe,” Maya replied, looking back at the facility behind us. “So long as you and he both follow instructions, you’ll be fine.”

>   She turned to the city. “The city is broken up into numerous sectors. In the very centre is the Royal Citadel − that’s where our Queen lives and commands us from. She has her very own Royal Guard detachment of the military, and only the most loyal of soldiers are chosen for it.”

  Towards the centre of the city was the elaborate golden tower of which she spoke.

  “Just outside the Citadel is the Residential Rim. The Queen says she likes to surround herself with her people, and so dormitories and apartment buildings were built encircling the capitol building.

  “On the far side of the city is the Commercial Quad, where the civilians usually work.”

  There were tall, sleek buildings behind the Citadel tower. Bright neon lights covered the surfaces of the skyscrapers.

  “At the moment we’re in the Prison Quad, which includes a massive mining operation underground. That’s where your brother is right now. We’re about to travel to the Science Quad, and that’s where you’ll be having these assimilation sessions Mira was telling you about.”

  She pointed to the left of the station and down the thin pathway connected to it. The buildings in the direction of the Science Quad were industrious, with black plumes of smoke billowing from their chimney stacks.

  “… and back over in that direction is the Military Quad. That’s where all of the military trains, eats and sleeps,” she said and gestured towards the right side of the station.

  There was a gigantic grey facility in the distance.

  “Although, you’ll be staying with me in the Residential Rim, so you won’t need to worry about that. You’ll just do your training there.”

  I looked back at the Commercial Quad, which looked so alive with colour, so surreal.

  Maya now looked towards the city buildings, too. “If you ignore the fact that we’re at war, it’s the safest and nicest place to live in the world … well, if you’re female. Everywhere else is pretty much all desert,” she said.

  “But there are other cities?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes, but none of them compare with this.”

  There was a loud groan from behind. Iya stepped forward towards a small pedestal and then pressed a button on it. She shot a frustrated look at the two of us. “Do you ladies just want to stand here talking all night?”