The Foretelling of Georgie Spider

by Ambelin Kwaymullina

  He was right about that. “We need to make contact with the detainees. Let them know we’re here to help.”

  Connor inched forwards, and pointed to a distant rooftop. “If I’m remembering right, that building over there is solitary confinement.”

  Jules nodded approvingly. “Good idea, flyboy.”

  “What’s a good idea?” I demanded.

  “You’ve got to have caused some serious trouble to get thrown into solitary,” Jules explained. “Anyone in there will be a fighter. Our kind of people.”

  “Also,” Connor added, “there’s only six cells in the building. We need to make contact with a small group, not have dozens of Illegals using their abilities on us before they realise we’re not their enemies.”

  I grinned. “Let’s go make some new friends!”

  We hurtled across the rooftops and then down into the centre, landing in the narrow gap between solitary confinement and the next building over. Connor’s voice wasn’t blaring out any longer. They must have broken down the door to the office to cut the announcement, but they’d been too late. I could hear distant shouts and streaker fire. At least some of the detainees were out and there was a fight going on somewhere, although apparently not here, which seemed strange given that we were near a set of cells. Maybe none of the detainees in solitary had abilities that could free them. Still … “Shouldn’t there be more guards around?”

  Connor shook his head. “Solitary is some distance from the main cellblock, which is where they’ll be concentrating their resources. We should be okay for a while.”

  “Don’t forget we’re being careful,” Jules whispered. Pen’s death really had affected him; he was usually the most reckless out of all of us. He pointed to a high, mesh-covered window above. “You two try to see what we’re dealing with inside. I’ll go keep watch.”

  He skulked away to hide in the shadows at the edge of the building, peering out into the centre. Connor and I drifted upwards to the window. It was hard to make out details through the mesh, but I could pick out the main features of the space. A door to my right, that must lead outside onto the wide lane that Jules was watching. Directly opposite the door were two desks, positioned either side of a passageway, only I couldn’t see what was down it from this angle.

  “No guards at all?” I whispered. “That doesn’t seem r–”

  I broke off as the door opened and a heavy-set enforcer strode in. He shut the door behind him and hurried across the room, past the desks and into the passage.

  “That corridor leads to the cells,” Connor said. “I think we’d better go in.”

  We both floated back down, turning towards Jules.

  He wasn’t there.

  Then I heard the faint but familiar sizzle of an energy weapon firing from somewhere inside solitary confinement, and understood.

  The heavy-set enforcer was Jules. “Oh, that idiot!”

  We raced around the corner and into the building. I’d barely closed the door when Jules came stumbling in our direction, wearing his own face. There were three enforcers and an administrator sprawled on the floor behind him, and Jules had one hand clapped to his shoulder. Blood was pouring over his fingers.

  Jules staggered. I ran to catch him, lowering him into a chair. Connor began to yank open the drawers of the desk, saying over his shoulder to me, “There should be a first-aid kit in here somewhere. Check the other one!”

  I darted across the room to the second desk. Procedure manual … forms … more forms … first-aid kit! I flung open the lid and gazed at the contents in dismay. The healfast strips I understood. The small bottles I didn’t. I knew how to do first aid with forest herbs, not with this stuff.

  Connor had medic training, and he would know. “Connor? Help!”

  He was at my side in seconds, grabbing hold of the kit and racing back to Jules. He leaned over him, trying to pull Jules’s hand from his shoulder. Jules wouldn’t let him.

  “Here.” I crossed to Jules’s other side. “Give your hand to me.”

  “’S got blood on it,” he objected.

  “That’s okay, I don’t mind. Come on, hold on to me, now.” I prised his hand gently away, clasping it in mine.

  “I’m dying, aren’t I?”

  “It’s only your shoulder,” Connor told him, taking a pair of scissors from the kit and cutting away Jules’s shirt. “Stab wound … it’s deep, but it won’t kill you.”

  “Are you sure? It really hurts.”

  “I’m sure.” Connor reached into the kit to take out a cloth, and poured the contents of one of the bottles onto it. “I’m afraid this is going to hurt too. Try not to yell.”

  He pushed the cloth against the wound. Jules sucked in a harsh breath, crushing my hand, but was otherwise silent. Connor took away the cloth and held out another one of the bottles to him. “You need to drink this.”

  Jules let go of me to reach for it. He was shaking so badly I knew he’d drop the thing. I grabbed the bottle and held it to Jules’s lips as Connor pressed a healfast strip over the wound. By the time Jules had finished drinking some of the colour had come back into his face.

  “You shouldn’t have come in here alone,” I said.

  He looked up at me out of half-closed eyes. “Hey, I did pretty good, being as it was four against one. Saved the lives of whoever’s in those cells too. The guards were going to kill ’em.”

  “What?”

  Jules tilted his head towards the bodies. “When I got here they were all standing in front of the cells, checking a file to see what the detainee locked inside could do. So they’d know what to expect before they opened the door and – well, let’s just say I don’t think they were planning on having a friendly chat.”

  I felt cold all over. They’re killing the detainees. Picking off the ones whose ability couldn’t be used to escape from a locked room, before they got released by another detainee who had been able to get out. “We’ve got to help them!”

  “We will,” Connor said. “I’ll–”

  He broke off as there was a distant booming sound, and the building trembled. Boomer. But we were feeling the edge of an explosion that had happened somewhere else. Cellblock, probably. Either the detainees were fighting back, or someone had lost control of their ability. The people in here had been in collars for a long time, and I really hoped they could manage their abilities well enough to be more of a threat to the guards than they were to each other. Otherwise this would be over fast, and without the guards having to do much of anything at all.

  The reverberations eased, and Connor said, “Wait here with Jules. I’ll go open the cells.”

  I leaned back against the desk. But Jules lurched to his feet, staggering after Connor. “I’m the one that saved those detainees! Stop trying to steal my glory.”

  I ran to Jules’s side. “You need to sit back down!”

  He threw his good arm around my shoulders, dragging me along with him. “We all have to open the cells together. Can’t make the right choices if we’re not together …”

  He was a little delirious from either the wound or the medicine or both. And his grip on my shoulder was surprisingly strong – there was no way I’d be able to force him back to the chair, at least not without getting into a fight that would only hurt him worse. Connor hesitated, looking back at us.

  “Let the detainees out,” I told him. “Then we’ll deal with Jules. We can’t stay here anyway, we’ll have to get him somewhere safer than this.”

  “No one needs to deal with me!” Jules objected. “I’m a hero. Stories will be told about me. Statues built. Songs sung …”

  I helped him along, manoeuvring around the bodies on the floor and trying not to stare into their slack faces. I was sorry they were dead in a larger sense – sorry anyone was dead – but I couldn’t be sorry about them in particular given what they’d been about to do. Besides, that could have been Jules, and back at the administrator’s office it could have been all of us if Connor and Jules hadn’t m
oved as fast as they did. A shudder ran through me, seeming to linger in my legs and around my heart. Reaction. I’d been too close to death too often over the past few days, and it was starting to fray my nerves.

  Only two of the six cell doors were closed and Connor walked up to one of them. He peered into the tiny window set into the door, speaking to whoever was inside. “We’re here to help you. I want you to listen to the sound of my voice, because you’ve heard it before. That was me over the PA system, telling everyone the code. Do you understand?”

  He paused. I didn’t hear the detainee answer but they must have nodded because Connor said, “Okay. There’s three of us here, and when you come out you’ll find we’re wearing enforcer uniforms. But we’re not enforcers.”

  He stepped away and pulled out his streaker, aimed it at the keypad lock, and fired. The door clicked open and was immediately yanked back from the other side to reveal a brown-skinned woman wearing a white detainee uniform.

  Connor rose up into the air until there was clear space between him and the ground. She cast an assessing, dark-eyed gaze over him. “You’re Illegals. I understand.” Then she surveyed the bodies on the floor. “Did you do that?”

  “I did,” Jules carrolled. “I’m a hero.”

  “Well, you seem to be injured, hero. Lucky for you I can fix that. I’m a Mender.”

  Jules gasped. “Don’t trust her! Can’t be a Mender – they get Exemptions!”

  I grabbed the streaker at my hip, pointing it at the stranger. I couldn’t see why she’d lie to us, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t lying. It wasn’t totally impossible for a Mender to end up in detention – Stella, the Saur Tribe Mender, had gotten detained after she’d tried to help her Waterbaby best friend escape the enforcers. Only Jules was right that it was rare and after everything we’d been through, I wasn’t in a trusting mood.

  “Why can’t I move?” the woman demanded, glaring at me and Jules. “One of you is, what, some kind of Paralyser?”

  No, it’s Connor. She’d seem him levitate and assumed his ability was flying, and I wasn’t going to correct the mistake when I wasn’t sure I could trust her. For all I knew, she still didn’t believe we were here to help her and was telling us her ability was something it wasn’t. “How’d a Mender end up in detention?” I asked. “If that is what you are.”

  “My Exemption was revoked when I refused to treat a Citizen.”

  That made even less sense. “What kind of Mender refuses to treat a patient?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Oh yes, anyone with my ability is supposed to be about the love of all of humanity. In case you hadn’t noticed, all of humanity doesn’t exactly love us. As far as I’m concerned, Citizens can get sick and die.”

  Those words had the ring of truth to them, even if it did mean she was the most un-Mender-like Mender I’d ever met. But if she was telling the truth about her ability, she’d have to be unusual to have ended up here.

  “Shoot me,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Shoot me!” she repeated impatiently. “Just my foot. Then I’ll Mend it, and you’ll see.”

  This was getting ridiculous. “No one’s going to shoot you. We’ll let you go.” Because I didn’t see what else we could do. We couldn’t keep standing around here, and if she wasn’t a Mender and tried to use some other ability on us, I was going to have to trust Connor to stop her.

  Jules was shaking his head but Connor had already released her because she reached across to drag her nail across her arm, hard enough to draw blood.

  “What are you doing?” I demanded.

  “Proving what I am,” she answered. She put her fingers over the cut for a second before wiping the blood away to reveal undamaged skin. “See?”

  She’d been telling the truth all along. “Sorry.”

  The woman shrugged, tossing her hair back over her shoulder. “I can appreciate a touch of paranoia in an ally. Means you’re smart enough to stay alive.” Then she jerked her head towards Jules. “Can I fix him now?”

  “Go ahead.”

  The Mender strode forwards to put her hand on Jules’s shoulder. After a few minutes she released him and said, “You’re good, hero.”

  Jules let his arm fall away from me, reaching up to pull off the healfast strip. The wound was gone. He jabbed at his now-whole flesh. “Nice work!”

  The Mender was already moving away, striding across to the other cell with the closed door. She pounded on it with her fist, and called out, “Laurie! It’s Shona. Hold on and I’ll let you out.” She turned to Connor. “How do we let him out?”

  He pointed his streaker at the door. “Stand aside.”

  She stepped back, and Connor fired on the lock. The door clicked, and Shona shoved it open all the way. The cell beyond was empty except for an open collar sitting on the floor.

  Then there was a stirring of the air and a gangly, freckled man appeared in front of her. “I Ran, Shona! I heard the guards coming, and I Ran very fast and when I Run fast no one can see me and no one can catch me. And no one did!”

  “You did good, Laurie,” she told him. “Really good.” She waved at us. “These are our new friends – ah, whose names I don’t know.”

  Connor pointed at himself. “Connor.” Then Jules. “Jules.” And finally me. “And this is Ashala Wolf.”

  “Leader of the Tribe?” Laurie exclaimed. “I thought you were just a story!”

  The Tribe had been called a lot of things, but “story” was a new one. “I promise you, we’re totally real.”

  Laurie beamed at me. “Is it true you live with saurs?”

  “You can ask about saurs later,” Shona told him. “Right now we’ve got to get everyone out of the cells who hasn’t already made it out.” She looked at Connor. “If you can spare that streaker I’d like you to show Laurie how to fire it. He can get to all the cells a lot quicker than anyone else.”

  Connor handed it to Laurie, showing him the firing button.

  Laurie shot a few experimental blasts at the doors. “This is fun!”

  “This is dangerous,” Shona told him. “You need to get to the cells and Run through to shoot all the locks, but you have to do it very fast, because it’s going to make the enforcers angry. Too fast to be seen, and too fast to be caught. Okay?”

  “Okay!”

  Laurie vanished, and a second later the door whipped open and slammed shut.

  Connor winced. “I hope no one heard that.” He paced to the door, opening it gently to peer out. Grey light filtered in; the sun had started to rise. No more hurtling through the skies. We’d be easy targets for streakers in the daylight, and the fighting I’d overheard earlier had gotten more intense – with the door open there were clear sounds of distant shouts and screams and the sizzle of weapons fire.

  “All clear,” Connor said. “I think–”

  The door suddenly flew all the way open, and Connor was sent staggering. I drew my streaker, aiming it at – I didn’t know, air! Then Laurie materialised again. Only now there was a ginger-haired, sharp-faced woman clinging to his back.

  Jules had also pulled his streaker, and his hands were trembling. I hoped the shaking in mine wasn’t that visible. He looked over and gave me a half-shrug, as if to say, you too huh? If we weren’t careful we’d end up shooting someone out of sheer nerviness. We lowered the weapons and Laurie set the woman onto her feet.

  “Cat was coming to save us,” he announced. “Only I told her we were saved already. Now I’m going to save everybody else!”

  And he was gone, sending the door slamming for the second time.

  The newcomer cast a wary glance at our uniforms. Flames flickered across her fingers.

  “They’re friends,” Shona said. “Illegals. This is Connor, Jules and Ashala Wolf.”

  “Ashala Wolf?” The flames vanished. “Aren’t you supposed to have some kind of ability that makes the impossible real? Can you help us?”

  “My ability is used up right now,” I answered.
“We’ll help any other way we can, though. We’ve got streakers, and–”

  “Don’t care,” Cat interrupted. “I mean, I do, but what I need most right now is a miracle or a Mender.”

  She switched her attention to Shona, and said, “Jacks and Vishan Strongarmed open as many Leafer cells as they could get to. They got almost all of them out, only some are hurt.”

  I couldn’t see why it mattered that Leafers in particular were hurt, but from the expression on Shona’s face it was a disaster. She leaped for the door. “Show me where!”

  THE DAY

  ASHALA

  Shona and Cat hurried out and the rest of us followed, skulking through the centre in the cold dawn light. This place was a grey maze – even the ground was covered in composite, and the buildings were gathered together in haphazard groupings that meant we had to keep twisting and turning back and forth. But we had to be getting nearer to the fighting because the shouting and weapons fire were growing steadily louder. Then Cat ducked into an alley between two buildings, swinging around to face us as we crowded in after her.

  “Everyone’s holed up just ahead,” she said. “In the dining hall, or what’s left of it, at least.”

  “What’s left of it?” Shona asked.

  “Priya blew part of it up trying to break the composite.”

  I had no idea why anyone would want to break composite but it seemed to make sense to Shona, who nodded as if it explained everything.

  “Thing is,” Cat continued, “to get to the hall you need to – um, perhaps it’s easier to show you. Look around the corner to your right.”

  Connor, Jules, Shona and I crept to the edge of the alley and peered around. I could see … my foot.

  I was looking at my foot.

  Why was I looking at my foot?

  I tried to look ahead again – and stared at my foot. Oh.

  “A Lookaway?” I asked, turning back to Cat.

  “Ten of them,” Cat answered. “Standing in a circle around the hall, and every last one staring outwards onto the centre.”