by Ann Bakshis
“Where are you going?”
“I’m working on tightening up the security in case we get visitors.” He winks at me, pushes a button on the panel, and the gates close as he begins to descend.
He’s really starting to grow on me.
I walk slowly over to the double maple doors while looking towards the south side of the room, monitors lining the rock wall, control panels underneath, and people in red tunics switching the displays every few minutes. The only noise heard is the humming of two nests of computers set ten feet in front of the work stations.
“You should never have brought them here, Holunder,” a woman harshly proclaims.
I stand just outside the door, my ear close to the slight opening.
“It was the right thing to do, Ares,” Holunder counters.
“You’re tempting the Tyrean army to come after us.”
“What are they talking about?” I whisper to Bevan who joins me, leaning against the closed door.
“You,” he says, smiling at me.
“I understand your feelings, but they’re here now and I won’t turn my back on any of them.” Holunder’s footsteps echo back and forth a little distance from the entranceway.
“Hundreds of Hostem died to obtain those Antaeans for you,” a husky male voice chimes in. “Do their deaths not mean anything to you?”
“They are a great sadness to me, Rafer, however they knew the risks of being in Sirain.”
“The army won’t risk themselves coming out here,” a second female voice states. “We are too far away from the safety of Sirain. Vladim wouldn’t risk sending any of the army or his Regulators to Tartarus.”
“He would for Trea,” Rafer replies.
“That’s my cue,” Bevan says. He stands up, opens the door, and walks in.
“Bevan, glad you could finally join us,” Rafer comments in a snide tone.
“I was getting some of our new guests situated into their residences, Rafer, you knew that.”
I hear wood scrape along the tile floor as if a chair is being moved. The noise repeats a few more times before silence settles.
“Let’s get this over with,” Ares declares, and I hear the sound of her hands hitting something metallic.
“Bevan has agreed to go back into Sirain to retrieve the last Antaean,” Holunder announces.
“I thought we had them all,” the second woman says, her voice high pitched with surprise.
“There’s still one more, and I am hoping Trea can tell us where she is to make the rescue quicker.”
“She won’t come,” I say, opening the door I’ve been hiding behind. “Kedua won’t leave Acheron.”
I step into the large oval room to find everyone seated at a round metal table in the center. The wall behind the table consists of heavy paned windows embedded with a wire mesh, covering the entire length of the room. A black sectional couch sits off to my right while bookshelves line the wall behind me.
A woman with extremely straight, raven-colored hair is glaring at me from across the table. Her facial features are sharp, eyes sitting prominently on top of high cheekbones. Her tunic is red with gold stripes, so she must be the lieutenant for Byrrus, the same faction Braxton has been relegated to. “How do you know?” she hisses at me.
“Kedua isn’t like the rest of us. She won’t go without a fight.”
Bevan, who is sitting next to Holunder, gets up and pulls out an empty chair next to him, gesturing for me to sit. I take the seat, watching as all eyes fall upon me.
“If she’s still in Acheron, recovery will be a lot more difficult since all entrances into the city have been destroyed.”
I remember what Braxton said about the detonators being in the water and only someone who knows the pattern could navigate safely by boat, but I decide to keep that information to myself for the moment.
“If she’s even still alive,” Rafer chimes in.
“Is there a way to find out?” I ask Holunder.
“Yes, that’s why I sent for you.”
CHAPTER 5
The woman to my right, who introduces herself as Caitrin, flips over a small portion of the table in front of her revealing a control panel. She glides her finger over the screen, activating a monitor, which rises up through the center of the table.
“I want to warn you, Trea,” Holunder begins, “some of these images are graphic. Let me know if you don’t want to proceed.”
“I’m fine,” I answer.
Laics lie, slaughtered, through the rough streets of the Acheron Boroughs. Those not killed are being ferried towards the shuttle platform on the outskirts of the city by men wearing Tyrean army uniforms. Factories burn in the distance, a river of fire snakes through the canals and into the lake. Hostem I recognize from the footage we saw in Hatchery Nine are patrolling the area.
“Those are Hostem,” I declare, pointing to the horde gathered at the bottom of the image.
“Not all of them,” Ares spits out, a nasty expression of contempt on her olive colored face.
The image changes to the fountain located on the east-side platform. Superiors are gathered underneath a balcony protruding from the top floor of the High Ruler’s home. A man with his head covered stands next to Kedua, but no one else is around them. I ask Caitrin to focus the image on the balcony. The lens zooms in and we can see the man has binders around his wrists behind his back.
“Does this have sound?” I ask, trying to make out what she’s saying.
Caitrin slides another dial, and the speakers come to life just under the surface of the table.
“Superiors of Acheron, a new day has come.” Kedua’s arms gesture outward as she addresses the audience. “Sirain will be united as one under Premier Vladim’s rule. We will defeat all those who defy us, beginning with this man.” Kedua grabs the man by the throat, dragging him closer to her. “Let him be the example to those who dare go against Premier Vladim.” Kedua removes the cloth sack from the man’s head and with one quick motion, she snaps his neck with her right hand.
The Superiors begin to holler with enthusiasm, many clapping as the body of Artemis Webb is thrown off the balcony onto the steps below.
Why would Vladim murder his own son? Did he feel Artemis posed a threat to his control of Sirain?
Caitrin turns off the screen, gets up, and fetches me a glass of water from a pitcher on a small stand behind her. I take the cup and sip at the cool fluid.
“Where did you get that?” I finally ask after regaining my composure.
“Vladim had this broadcasted all over the country about a week ago. We’ve always been able to obtain the signals from Tyre and Acheron, which is how we found out some of the Antaeans had survived the assault on the Dormitories,” Holunder says. He stands, walks over to the panel in front of Caitrin, and taps on the screen, turning the monitor back on.
My battle at the Tyre stadium dances across the wide display, the battle droid throwing me into the perimeter fence, my manipulation of the floor tiles, and finally my escape into the holding area.
A realization flashes across me. Holunder never told anyone that he already knew I was alive. He’s been lying to his people.
“Who was that woman?” Rafer inquires while the monitor descends back down. “Her right arm glows blue like yours.” He points to the line coiled around my forearm and bicep.
“That was Kedua,” I reply.
“So, the last Antaean you want to go rescue has sided with the enemy,” Ares comments, standing up from her seat, walking over towards the windows. “And you thought she needed rescuing?” She snickers at Holunder, almost at the point of laughter.
“That’s enough,” Bevan shouts. “No one saw this coming. Maybe now that Vladim has an Antaean, he won’t come looking for the others.”
“I wish that was true,” Holunder says, “but if we’ve learned anything from the past is that this man wants all of them. Especially Trea.”
“What makes her so special?” Ares shouts, anger building
in her voice.
“That’s a topic for another time.” Holunder walks over to the set of double doors, opening only one side. “Now, if you all will excuse us, I need to speak to Trea in private please.”
The four lieutenants exit one by one. Bevan is the last to leave, hesitant to leave for some reason. Holunder instructs him to go check on his faction and to return in a few hours. Bevan looks at me, smiles, and leaves. Holunder closes the door and takes the seat Caitrin just occupied.
“You’re just like the others,” I tell him. “Lying to your people about the truth. You’ve known some of the Antaeans survived because of Devlan, but you’ve convinced everyone that their discovery just came to light. What are you trying to hide?”
“Enough, Trea,” he shouts. “I will not justify my decisions to a child. Now, you probably have a lot of other questions,” he says in a quieter tone, recalling the monitor from its depths. “Let me first start by saying you and your friends are safe here. Second, from what Bevan advised me, you noticed Grainne can heal like you. The fact is there are four such children here, each one assigned to a faction and each with a lieutenant for their safety.”
“Piran. He’s one of them, isn’t he?”
“Yes, Trea, Piran is the oldest one at age sixteen and lives in the Verdant residence. Grainne is the youngest, at eleven. The middle two is a set of twins, brother and sister, Mair and Thane.”
“I thought Laics didn’t know their age.”
“They aren’t Laics…none of us are. Every birth and death is charted in Tartarus, marking each as celebrations of life. Laics aren’t told their day of birth as a way to control them. This has been their normal existence for well over a century.” Holunder activates the monitor in front of me, searching for a specific item under an image labeled “Records”. After a minute or two of searching, he finally locates what he’s looking for. “How much do you remember about the raid on the Dormitories?”
I look at him quizzically, surprised by the question.
“Enough of it to know the Hostem invaded the complex, killing almost everyone.”
He takes a deep sigh, and clicks on a file labeled “D3-4”. Various photos flash over the large screen, some showing the Dormitories in their glory, others of its ruins.
“How’d you get these?”
“The photos before the destruction we recovered from a server hidden underground, below the fountain in the center of the complex. The others we took after we arrived.” Holunder begins to scroll through the images on screen, stopping only when he comes across a schematic. The room is octagon in shape, divided in two halves. “We traversed the entire complex, locating a chamber under the fountain, which could only be accessed from tunnels located in a subterranean level of the research center, the gestation building, and housing unit four,” he continues as the image lights up when he identifies the specific tunnel. “We had to cut our way into the compartment through the housing unit after discovering it while trying to find survivors.”
“Survivors? Why would you be looking for survivors?”
“To see if we could help. Our original mission was to get to the Dormitories before the attack to help defend it, but we were too late. It was obvious there were casualties, but we were hoping to find people we could save. We came upon the Dormitories after the attack. The smoke was visible for miles.” He turns his attention back to the monitor, gesturing to the large room. “The left half, where the tunnels began, was a control room. We found several servers still functioning on back-up power. In the center of the dividing wall was a revolving door, which led into an incubation chamber where hundreds of thousands of tubes containing undeveloped embryos were being kept. Some of the cases had fallen over, smashed. Others had been contaminated by debris that rained down from the ceiling. We were able to recover only three vials from that room, as well as some history of the activities on genetic research that went on at the Dormitories before the power finally cut-off.”
He switches the photo on the screen to one showing a printout of every embryo’s identification number. Pages upon pages flash past my eyes. The various symbols on the monitor represent a different number: a dot is equal to the number one, a triangle the number ten, a square the number twenty, a star the number thirty, a rectangle meaning forty, and two hash marks equaling fifty.
I reach around my back and touch the spots just below my hairline.
“What do these mean?” I ask, my throat going dry.
“According to the records, each Antaean was marked with a sequence of these symbols just after birth. It was easier to keep track of them this way.”
I feel a headache growing behind my eyes, so I try to ease the pain by rubbing my temples.
“Why would they need so many?”
“To build an army, Trea!” he practically shouts at me.
“I don’t think I can handle any more,” I say, wanting to run from the room.
Holunder doesn’t stop talking. “The Antaeans weren’t built to defend Sirain from its enemies, but to help Vladim take control. He was able to convince Parson Mathan and the acting High Ruler of Acheron that a real threat existed. He showed them images of the scouting party I’d been a part of, hunting down Laics and killing them with the Levin gun. The images were false. It wasn’t the Hostem shooting, but Vladim’s own personal bodyguards. Acheron and Nuceira sided with Vladim in regards to the Hostem being a viable threat, so they planned on designing human weapons that could not only heal from injuries made by the Levin gun, but could also physically recreate and enhance the Levin gun’s power source astronomically.”
I look down at my hands that I’ve placed in my lap, noticing they’re clenched into fists. My fingers ache as I uncurl them.
“Why should I believe you?” I rub my palms on my legs trying to restore the circulation. “I’ve been told many things over the last several months that I’m having a hard time believing anyone anymore.” My chair slams to the ground as I abruptly stand up and begin to pace the room.
Holunder stays in his seat, watching me. I go over to the windows and look down into the fiery pit below us, steam rising from the molten rocks as a light rain begins to fall. The glass of the window is cool to the touch as I pound my hands against it. I lean my head on the pane, tears streaming down my face.
“Next thing you’re going to tell me is that the Hostem didn’t attack the Dormitories,” I whimper.
“No, my dear, that unfortunate bit of history is true.”
The Quantum Stream ignites as my hand finds Holunder’s neck, throwing him off his chair and onto the floor.
“You murdered everyone,” I spit at his face, “my friends…my family and for what? For your own selfish gain? Or because of your fear?” The life begins to drain from his face as I squeeze his throat.
“Trea, no,” Braxton shouts behind my shoulder.
Someone tackles me from behind, freeing Holunder from my grasp. I land on the hard floor, arms pinned to my side. I fight for my freedom, but the grip is so strong that I only manage to twist myself around into an awkward position, facing Holunder. Braxton is at his side tending to the man as he coughs for air.
“Let me go,” I scream, still thrashing around.
“Calm down,” Bevan whispers in my ear, “it’s all right, Meg.”
My body stops.
“What did you call me?”
“Meg…it’s the name your protector gave you isn’t it?”
“How…how did you know that?”
“As I said before, Trea, we’ve been watching you for some time,” Holunder coughs and groans, as Braxton helps him to his feet. “Perhaps we should continue this later, when you’ve had time to process this information.”
Bevan releases me, gets up, and helps Braxton escort Holunder out of the room, leaving me alone. I get up and walk back into the main concourse. The eyes of those working the monitors follow my movement as I walk towards the lift. Instead I change direction, noticing the wall behind the lift has doors to the o
utside, three on either side of the elevator shaft. The door is heavy, but yields begrudgingly to my push.
CHAPTER 6
The rain feels welcoming. Steam rises from the ceramic tiles that fill a small patio, with steps leading down to an aisle of tree-lined groves that cleverly hide ten geodesic domes: five made of glass and steel, three created from lumber, and the last two constructed out of the same metal as the transports. All rise a foot above the tree line, five on each side of the grove.
I walk down the steps and take off in a sprint along the grass pathway away from Tartarus, but I don’t get far before an electrical barrier ends my attempt to escape. The barrier is hidden among the thick foliage; an invisible fence weaving in and out of the tree trunks.
No matter where I go, I’m trapped. Freedom doesn’t exist for me.
“Trea.”
My name bounces through the mist around me.
“Trea, stop hiding and come out.”
I sit down on the wet ground instead of revealing myself.
Braxton finds me in a matter of minutes, by which time my clothes are soaked. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” I lie. I take a few deep breaths, trying to let my anger subside. “What lies beyond this place?”
“That I don’t know. The northern and southern limits are mainly forest with many deer that some of the crofters hunt for food, but they don’t venture far from the city. The eastern edge is cut-off by the barrier at your back.” He crosses his arms in front of his chest, puffing it out slightly.
“So, no escape,” I state more than ask.
“I take it you saw the footage from Acheron?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I grumble.
“Trea,” he begins, walking up to me and squatting down so we are face to face, “I know this is difficult.”
“No you don’t!” I shout, cutting him off. “You have no idea how this feels. You couldn’t possibly understand.” My stomach begins to turn as my emotions spill over, tears raining down my cheeks. “I’ve lost everything…everything…. I only exist because one man decided he wants to rule the world.”