“I… maybe?” The old man shook his head and dropped into one of the chairs at the table, sending a cloud of dust into the air. “It’s only been forty years. How can so much have changed?”
“Forty years?”
“Forty-two and change,” said William, “yet somehow only the city’s geography remains the same.”
“You’ve been to Old Baltimore before?” asked Samara.
“Been here? I was born here.”
CHAPTER 4
“You were really born in Old Baltimore?” Without being asked, Samara had taken a seat in one of the other chairs. As she studied the old man across the table, CJ couldn’t decide whether she was excited or disappointed.
“That’s right,” said William. “Not long after the Break.” He paused. “You two do know about the Break, right?”
“Everyone knows about the Break,” answered CJ. “And the killing that followed here—”
“Not just here. Near as I can tell, it was damn near the whole world,” murmured William.
“—until Lord Legion rose to power and restored order.”
The old man paused and cocked his head. “That’s… one interpretation, I suppose.”
“What pod were you part of?” Sammie wanted to know.
“I don’t know what a pod is.”
CJ and Samara shared puzzled frowns. “It’s the people you’re raised with,” explained Sammie. “Fifty pods in Old Baltimore, each with a leader and twenty to forty members.” She tapped the patch on her chest proudly. “CJ and I are part of Pod 23.”
“And you stay with this pod all of your lives?”
Samara shook her head slowly. “Just until adulthood. Then—”
“Then you go on to serve Lord Legion or become a pod leader yourself,” finished CJ, peering at the old man suspiciously. “Wouldn’t you know all of this, if you really used to live here?”
“CJ!”
“Like I said, Cornelius, it has been decades, and many things have changed. I left the city not long after your Lord Legion took power.”
“Cornelius James.”
“I’m sorry?”
“My name is Cornelius James. Not Cornelius. Cornelius James. Or CJ.” He scowled and turned to Samara. “We should go, Sammie. It’s almost time for afternoon rations.”
“I’m not hungry,” Sammie shot back. “You can go if you want.”
Cornelius James loved Samara with every ounce of his heart, but there were times he was convinced she’d been born just to cause him grief. “You can stay and risk getting spotted by an Eye if you want. Just don’t think I'm going to come and save you or anything.”
William raised an eyebrow. “An Eye?”
“One of Lord Legion’s creations,” answered Samara. “They watch over the city.”
“And the other machines, the larger ones that patrol the streets?”
“His Hands.” Sammie shivered. “If the Eyes are his spies, the Hands are his soldiers. Them and the human guards, I guess.”
“And you fear these creatures, Samara?”
“Only because she knows we shouldn’t be here,” said CJ. “Lord Legion’s army keeps order.”
“A laudable goal,” said William, “and I admit that Old Baltimore is far better off than some of the cities I’ve seen in my travels.” He patted one of the thick objects he’d piled on the table. “Of course, Rousseau would say it takes more than just order to make a fair and just government.”
“Who?”
“Rousseau. The author of this book.” He pulled down the object, and peeled back a leather-bound cover to reveal sheets of paper within, far less shiny than the pamphlets Lord Legion printed his edicts on.
After a moment’s pause, William frowned. “You’ve never heard of books either?”
“Heard of them,” admitted Samara, “but that’s the first one I’ve ever seen.”
“The… social… contract…?” puzzled out CJ.
“You’ve never seen a book, but you can read?”
“All citizens are taught to read,” said CJ absently, trying to puzzle out the next few words. What did Jacques mean? “Being able to read Lord Legion’s orders means we have no excuse for not following them.” He glanced from the heavy book in the old man’s hands to the other objects on the table. “Are all of these books? I didn’t know there were this many books in the whole world!”
“This?” William shook his head, crooked teeth flashing white against his night-black skin. “This is nothing, young man. The room we are currently in was once one of the administrative offices of the Milton S. Eisenhower library. Do either of you know what a library is?”
Sammie and CJ shook their heads.
“It’s a place built to hold books,” grinned the old man. “There are four other floors to this library, all of them underground, most of them intact, and every single one of them full of books.”
“Books like that one?”
“Philosophy and ethics?” William nodded. “Math and science and history too. There’s even a section for the classics of fiction.”
“Fiction?”
“Lost kingdoms. Buried treasures. Ancient evils.” William’s smile widened, warm and slow as apple-flavored nutripaste on flatbread. “Even pirates.”
And that was when CJ knew, despite the very real concerns he’d just voiced to Sammie, that he would be coming back.
CHAPTER 5
That spring, visits to the Hill—and William’s library—became just another part of Sammie and CJ’s daily schedule; morning chores, mid-day meals, a round of foraging across their pod’s territory and finally, before night could fall, an excursion to the no-go zone. The university.
William was always there when they arrived, the wrinkles in his face and skin seeming to multiply with each passing day. Usually, they found him reading, but he was quick to put his own book aside to direct CJ to more novels or to answer Samara’s questions about the territories he’d visited beyond the city.
“It’s not good,” he’d told Sammie on one such visit. “Up north, they’d kill any of us just for the color of our skin. Steel and his people impose a sort of order, I suppose, but it’s one that has no place for regular people. Go south, past the wreckage of the district, and you’ll find territory that hasn’t known peace since the Break. Every few years, a new warlord rises to take power from their predecessor, only to end up being deposed themselves soon after. Each time, it’s the common people who pay the price.”
“What about the west?” Samara had asked.
William shrugged. “The further you get from the coast, the fewer people you find. Sometimes that’s a good thing. Sometimes it’s not. Go far enough and you hit mountains. Keep going and you might find water again.”
“And the Free States?”
That question brought the old man up short, the lines about his eyes deepening to bottomless ravines as he squinted over at Samara. “Now, how does someone in Old Baltimore hear of the Free States?”
Sammie shook her head, braids and beads dancing. “Some of Lord Legion’s guards were talking about them when they didn’t know I was listening. Does it really exist?”
“For now.”
“You’ve been there?”
“No.” It was William’s turn to shake his head. “Place like that may seem like paradise from a distance, but it has problems of its own. Enemies on all sides, Capes filling the skies, waging battle against other Powers…” His crooked teeth made a sudden reappearance. “Too much excitement for an old man like me.”
They’d continued talking for a bit, but CJ had turned his attention back to the book in his hands. Whatever the Free States might be, they were thousands of miles away from Old Baltimore. He had better things to do than listen to stories about a place he’d never see.
•—•—•
One day, their afternoon foraging went longer than usual, and Sammie and CJ didn’t make it to the library until well after dark. They found William’s light—something he called a lan
tern—in its usual room, but the man himself was nowhere to be seen. It was another half-hour before they stumbled across an old metal ladder, poking up through a large hole in the building’s dilapidated ceiling. They found William up on the roof, lying flat on his back with his hands clasped behind his hairless head.
CJ wanted to go back downstairs, where the light and his books were waiting, but Samara dropped down next to the old man, straightening her long legs in front of her and leaning back on bony elbows. With a sigh, CJ brushed away some pine cones and took a seat next to them both. Spring had started to give way to the humidity and heat of a typical Old Baltimore summer, but the night air was crisp and cool.
William gave no sign that he had noticed their arrival, his breath puffing out slowly and evenly, his dark eyes gazing into the distance.
“What are you looking at?” Sammie finally asked.
“I’m not looking at anything, young Samara. I’m listening.”
Sammie and CJ both paused for a moment, but neither could hear anything beyond the usual. “Listening to what?”
“Everything and nothing.” He finally spared them a glance, then waved a hand at the darkness. “There’s a music to the universe, you know. It never stops and it’s never silent.”
CJ frowned. “I don’t hear any music.”
“Neither did I, for the longest time.” William closed his eyes, and turned his head back to the sky. “But it’s there, if you can just learn to listen. A drumline echoing up from the earth, like a heartbeat at the center of the world. A melody of notes, dancing through the trees on tomorrow’s breeze, questioned and answered by the tiny harmonies of life unfolding in unique bursts of sound. And the stars…”
“What about them?”
For a long moment, William was quiet. CJ thought he might have drifted off to sleep, as he sometimes did, but eventually he spoke again, his deep voice quiet and almost reverent.
“Most are distant and silent things, quiet and ever-watchful,” he finally said, “but a few of them… a very few… long ago, they learned to sing.”
After another long pause, the old man looked their way. The night was too dark to see his face, but they could hear the smile in his words. “You think I’m crazy, don’t you, Cornelius James?”
That was precisely what CJ thought, but he just shrugged.
“Maybe I am,” said William agreeably. “When you reach a certain age, it can be hard to tell.”
“I don’t think you’re crazy,” decided Samara, peering up at the distant stars. “I just wish I could hear them too.”
•—•—•
“You know he’s nuts, right, Sammie?”
“I don’t know anything of the sort,” said Samara, reaching back to help CJ over the wall. Ironically, leaving the no-go zone was always more difficult than entering it.
“He hears things that don’t exist. That’s the definition of crazy!”
“If you say so. That hasn’t stopped you from coming with me though, has it?”
CJ felt his cheeks go hot. “I go there to read. You don’t even do that. Instead, you spend hours talking to a crazy man. Why?”
“Maybe what I’m looking for can’t be found in books.”
“And what’s that?”
She stopped, her face hidden by a dark curtain of braids. Her voice was quiet and serious. Just hearing it gave CJ a chill. It was the voice of an adult, a pod leader maybe, not the girl he had grown up with. “A way out.”
It took another block for him to find his own voice, and when he did, it was small and strained. “Why would you want to leave me?”
Even with the illumination of a glow torch on the nearest street corner, Samara’s fist was a dark blur—barely seen and impossible to avoid before it thumped into CJ’s shoulder. “A way out for us, you dummy.”
“But…”
“Cornelius James, what do you think will happen to us if we stay here in the city?”
“Eventually, we’ll grow up and become adults.”
“And then?”
He shrugged. “I guess we’ll either join Lord Legion’s guard or become pod leaders. I’m sure we can find some way to stay together.”
“We both know only Powers join the guard,” said Samara. “And they don’t have a choice in the matter.”
That wasn’t the only thing they both knew, but the other thing was something they never spoke of, something they’d silently agreed to never speak of. CJ met Samara’s eyes and felt that shared knowledge pass between them, like a vibrant river of energy.
“As for pod leaders,” she continued, “there are fifty of them in all of Old Baltimore, but the pods they lead each have at least a couple dozen members.”
“So?”
“So what happens to all those pod members when they become adults, if they can’t become guards, and there are only a handful of pod leader positions available?”
“I…” Cornelius James swallowed. “I don’t know.”
“Me neither. We’re told they go away, but nobody seems to know what that actually means.”
“Maybe they serve Lord Legion in his castle. Or… maybe they’re sent out of the city? As spies or scouts?”
“Maybe. Either way, the more we know about what's out there, the better chance we have of surviving it.”
CJ felt a rush of shame. Samara had spent the past month planning for the future while he’d been wasting his time reading a bunch of old stories about rings and magic. That ends now, he decided. I’m not a child anymore.
“I’ll help however I can,” he told Sammie.
She reached out and squeezed his hand. “Don’t worry, CJ. We’ll figure something out.”
“I know we will. But…”
“Yeah?”
“I still think he’s crazy.”
CHAPTER 6
“Something’s wrong.”
Cornelius James reacted to the worry in Samara’s words without even thinking, dropping down into a crouch so that the Hill’s wild foliage swallowed him whole.
“What is it?” he asked, his voice quieter than a whisper, barely sufficient to reach her, even though she was a mere two feet away. He hadn’t seen or heard a thing.
“Rotors, I think.” The look she gave him was full of concern. She glanced up the hill and frowned, hands unconsciously tightening around the long, paper-wrapped package she was carrying. Whatever that package was, she'd brought it back from afternoon foraging. “Let’s take the long way around and come up from the side instead.”
He nodded, swallowing nervously, and followed the older girl away from the path they’d broken on earlier visits and into the depths of the Hill’s overgrown jungle. As they walked, he took pains to make sure to follow Samara’s footsteps exactly. Despite the preponderance of undergrowth and vegetation, they made it to the top in silence.
At the top of the Hill, in front of the library’s broken door, stood William, leaning heavily on his cane. And ten feet above him, rotors whirring steadily, was an Eye.
Like most of its kind, the Eye was a grotesque and misshapen blob; leathery skin and circuitry wrapped around a preponderance of cameras. Lenses pointed in all directions, reflecting the late afternoon sun. Above and below the main body were two rotors, adjusting automatically to the wind that never quite left Old Baltimore’s streets.
CJ was so shocked at the sight of an Eye, seen up close rather than high in the sky, that he almost missed the second one. Instead of rotors, this Eye had a dozen metal legs sprouting directly from its fleshy body. It had scaled the wall of the library and now dangled upside down from the building’s broken roof, its single, enormous lens fixed upon William’s unprotected back.
There were no weapons in sight, which meant nothing at all. Every Eye could defend itself. Even worse, a Hand was probably already on its way.
CJ looked to Samara for a plan, but she was as wide-eyed as he was, the almost-forgotten package clutched tight to her skinny chest. After almost a month, they’d let themselves believe
that William wouldn’t be found… that Lord Legion had ceased to care about his city's so-called no-go zones.
The Eyes were proof they’d been wrong.
Then, something else happened that they could never have expected: the Eye spoke.
“You have been found trespassing in a secure location, citizen. You have ten seconds to explain yourself.” Its voice was flat and inhuman, absent of emotion, and overly precise in its enunciation.
If William was scared, he didn’t show it, leaning on his cane, the lines about his eyes multiplying as he squinted up into the sun. “What is there to explain? This was always one of my favorite places in the city. Mom’s too.”
In a flash, the flying Eye descended even further. When the voice came again, it sounded different. Still inhuman… still cold… but there was a sliver of surprise, barely audible above the whirring rotors.
“William?”
The old man’s smile appeared and then faded just as quickly. “Lincoln.”
“I do not go by that name anymore.”
“So I’ve heard.” William cocked his head. “You really prefer Legion?”
“It is what I am. What I have become.”
A third Eye swooped out of the sky, a dozen feet from where Samara and CJ were hiding. This Eye had only a single rotor, but several fleshy tendrils swung below the misshapen body, each ending in a serrated metal blade. CJ glanced to Samara to see if they should fall back, but she stayed still, hidden within the underbrush and fixated on the encounter taking place.
“I heard you were dead,” the cold voice continued. “Twenty years ago, in a small town in Kansas. And again twelve years ago, in Alabama. Yet here you are.”
“Here I am,” agreed the old man.
“Why?”
“This is my home.”
“Not anymore, it isn’t. Not for forty years.”
“Forty-two,” said William, “and I've found time has a way of changing things.”
“Not everything. Not this.”
“These, for example,” said William, ignoring the Eye’s response. “What happened to the chrome and steel units you used to favor?”
Stories From A Post-Break World | Book 1 | The Stars That Sing Page 2