by Bella James
What Cindy thought was going to happen now was beyond Livy's understanding. What she did know was that anyone who wanted to give them a chance at determining their talents likely wouldn't come from the capital, where no one seemed to have much interest in those living in the "Outlying territories" which was, as Olivia had once pointed out, most of the rest of the world.
Another boy, Zach, who weighed probably three times what anyone else did, believed gloomily that they were all being taken for sacrifice.
"To what?" Simon had asked as Livy, against her will, had initially frozen in fear with Zach's words.
"To anything that will keep the capital safe," Zach had said knowingly, nodding his massive head.
"Safe from what?" Simon had persisted and Zach had gone back to humming and watching everything passing outside the bus windows. "Safe from what?" Simon persisted. "The Senators are safe from everything!"
Zach turned his massive head and snarled, "Safe from the world serpent."
There was silent in the small knot of people surrounding Zach, and then one of the girls said softly, "There's no such thing, Zach."
Something that looked crazy surfaced in Zach's eyes. "My brother told me about the worm. It's a serpent, miles long, something wrapped around the world and threatening to crush it. It could blot out the stars. It could end the sun. It's giant and we live and die at its wish." He stared at them all, not looking quite sane, then crossed his arms over his chest and thumped back hard into his seat.
"Are you sure your brother wasn't teasing you?" Simon asked. "Brothers have been known to do that."
"My brother is not a liar." Zach struggled to get to his feet, even as Simon backed up, hands out in a gesture of nonaggression.
"Just asking. Brothers sometimes do make things up."
Zach glared. "The serpent is real, and the world is doomed."
Everyone was stunned into silence for an instant, wondering if what Zach had said had any basis in truth. Then Simon said brightly, "Well, that was cheery! Now why don't we all sing?"
His suggestion met with groans and hurled objects.
"Right," Simon said brightly, as if unperturbed. "I'll start. Plow, plow, plow your field, gently in the rain, Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is not a pain. Come on, everybody, join in!"
Despite all the eye rolling and expressions of This is so stupid! Most of them joined in, and for a few minutes the bus rang with the voices of sixteen year olds, singing a round, one group starting, the next coming in a line later, the next a line later, until one by one, as if prearranged, the groups began falling out and at last, one group finished the last of the round.
When the song ended, most of them grinned at each other, briefly comrades who had created something, however ephemeral.
Into the silence, a voice asked, "Anyone know To Call the Sun?" and several voices instantly chimed in:
To call the sun in dark of night
To start the fire and bring the light
To turn the year and start it right
To end the dark in a blaze of light.
Livy sang with the group, but her sharp eyes missed nothing as she sang. She had seen who suggested the song and knew it was one of the Centurions. She saw the tension in the others at the suggestion that they join their charges in something communal and joyful. She knew from the choice of song that the Centurion who suggested it was from Pastoreum because To Call the Sun was the regional name given to a traditional ballad called The Turn of the Year.
And she knew that the Centurion who had asked for the song was a woman.
* * *
THE FOLLOWING DAY they stopped to load more prisoners from one of the southern towns near the edge of Pastoreum. They were close enough to the capital now, even the guards were anxious, watching out the windows as the bus traveled along a land bridge over the Pac, the ocean the islands of Oceanus rose out of. Not true islands, they were also connected by thin fingers of land to the whole of the super continent. Before much longer they'd be reaching the capital.
The Centurions let them off the bus. This had become habit. There was nowhere much to go. Everyone's faces were familiar now and everywhere they stopped the townsfolk pulled together, as afraid of the kids as they were of the Centurions. Somewhere, Livy realized, the Magistrate had to be riding also, perhaps a day ahead of them, but on the same road, because everywhere they went the sorting happened, the culling of sixteen year olds as some kind of tax or tithe. Those times Livy would burn with anger, her grandfather's words in her mind – she would remember who she was and where she was from, and she would not let them change her.
She may be a prisoner on the outside, but she would forever be free in her own mind.
No one ever went very far when they left the buses, it was just a pleasure to be free of the metal beasts and walk on the ground again. Livy, used to having time alone or being able to plant or walk with Tarah, the two of them able to go long tracts of time without speaking, would instantly seek solitude, wandering in the nearest Agara-like field or near trees or anywhere that allowed her to touch nature and walk alone.
Today she did the same thing, leaving the square where new families were just beginning to wail as they understood what hell had come to them and what loss they were facing, seeking the solitude of a field that reminded her of home. The second bus pulled up before she'd gone more than a few yards away, and several of the prisoners disembarked waving their hands madly, swearing and shaking their heads.
Livy, half smiling, shrugged at Simon, who called, "Grain flies." Livy nodded. The things were pests, with a hard sting that could raise a welt, but common enough in her village. If they'd brought corn or grains with them in the belly of the metal beast, likely a new crop of the flies had hatched.
She nodded at Simon and continued toward the edge of the field when a scream came from the assembled villagers. Livy started running before she even knew why, her mind moving even faster than her legs. Her mother had screamed like that when Tad had been stung by a grain fly and Grandfather Bane had been right there that day, knowing what to do. He'd found –
Cow's spittle, stupid ugly name for a little brownish daisy like flower. Named that maybe because it was so bitter cows would mouth it and spit it back out and it grew in fields like the one fronting the town square. While most people either froze or ran toward the still screaming mother, Livy took a chance she was right and ran from her, finding the flower easily and tearing up a handful before running back.
It was easy to find the afflicted child and his mother, harder to force her way through the crowd to them but she managed, throwing herself down and quickly rolling the sap-rich flower stem between her palms.
"Where's the sting?" she demanded of the woman who kneeled, wailing, above the child, whose face was already swelling, his breathing becoming thready and weak.
The woman pulled her son's hand up, holding it, watching Livy with hope that scared her even as she covered the site with both hands, rubbing hard to introduce the sap into the wound.
It took only minutes before the swelling began to visibly reduce, and then a few more minutes before the boy opened his eyes and sat up, starting to cry and reaching for his mother, but he was no longer swollen, and he was alive.
Livy sat back on her heels and panted. The mother's gasped out thank you's weren't the point. The boy's shaky breaths were.
Finally she attempted to climb off her heels, her legs having fallen asleep, and looked up only to find herself eye to eye with the female Centurion who had asked for the song.
Startled, Livy started to smile. Only to stop.
As very slowly the Centurion shook her head, nodded toward the boy, and mouthed, "No."
THE MILES ROLLED AWAY as the buses lumbered south, passing through the lower third of Pastoreum. From the farming lands of Agara, they passed through villages where serfs also labored in the fields or fished in enormous natural lakes and dams, where farmers raised cattle and where bread was baked hour upon hour b
y men with skin burned dark from the constant ovens.
Livy watched out the windows as the landscape changed, barely perceptible at first but finally faster as they reached the incredibly dense, rich lands near the capital city. After they'd left the village of Elle, she'd tried to find a way to speak with the female Centurion, the one who had warned her, but after dispensing her message the woman had turned as uncommunicative as any of the others.
What had been wrong with helping the child stung by the grain fly? All she'd done was use a simple, traditional remedy, the sap of a flower that grew freely in Pastoreum. At home it was as common as cleaning the knee of a child who had fallen. Flies bit; daisies healed.
* * *
AFTER A WEEK on the road the buses passed onto a narrow isthmus with the sea of Oceanus on one side and to the east, the Void began. Brutally hot, rocky, with sand dunes so vast trying to cross them would be similar to crossing an inland ocean.
As the land first changed, from pastoral to wooded to the barren desolation of the Forbidden Zone, everyone crowded by the windows on that side of the bus, watching the scorched fiery wasteland.
"This is where the world snake lives," one large rural youth declared. He was burned by the sun, peeling now from his forced days on the bus, into a patchy, pale, soft-looking youth.
The boy next to him gave a derisive laugh. "It's a myth. How stupid are you? There's no such thing. There's a reason they want to keep us out of the Void. It's only called that so no one goes in and finds what's there." He was dark haired and lean, tall and well muscled and clearly thought he was superior to the spotty youth.
Another girl near Livy spoke up. "I've heard that too. There's all manner of wealth in there, and everything wonderful to eat. The fruit grows on beautiful, low hanging trees, and you can pick as much as you want and never run out."
Livy rolled her eyes. This was a girl from Pastoreum? Maybe from one of the larger cities. If she'd ever worked a day in the fields she'd understand how hard it was to grow anything, beautiful land or not. The laws that came out of Arcadia overtaxed the land, and the fields were never rotated, never given time to rest. The best that anyone could do was change out what crops grew in what fields what years, and sometimes they couldn't even do that because a family in need would have to have a specific cash crop or they couldn't make it. The rest of the community – they were a community, at least in Agara, and not only because the government ordered them to be – would try to help out, but there was so little for every family, it was almost impossible. And even if they wanted, the families couldn't always assign the top crops to the poorest families – like tobacco, and corn which was made into a million sweet treats for the Arcadians – lest they themselves become the newest group of ultra poor families.
Olivia's grandfather had told her about deserts. He'd told her about the Forbidden Zone, which wasn't the entire Void but a section within it, enormous, more than huge enough to drop several times Agara in it and maybe even more than one Pastoreum.
It's where he'd gone to trade. Where he'd lived before the war. Where he'd returned to learn to work with more and more of the Before Times technology.
He'd gone back originally to bring out Livy's grandmother. He'd failed. After that, her mother had told her once in a more mellow mood when she wasn't calling him a stupid old man, foolish and not to be listened to – after that he'd lost the will to fight. He started collecting anything he could from the borderlands, the stretches between the outright Void and the lands around it, then venturing further and further into the desert.
Until he'd gone in one day as a middle aged man and emerged white haired and crippled, limping and nauseated, dying by degrees.
His disability stopped him venturing into the Void anymore. The inability to travel inside the desert halted the disease before it could spread any further through his system. He grew ill, but never ill enough to die, and he came to live with his son – and with Olivia Bane – in Agara.
He told her stories. Livy knew about snakes and spiders and scorpions and other things she didn't want to know about. She hated them and stomped them when she saw them in the field or in her parents' house. Grandfather Bane, though, told her about four foot tall scorpions and ten foot long snakes. She had nightmares for months and her mother did nothing but swear at her for hanging around that foolish old man and swear at her grandfather for filling her head up with your stupid stories.
Livy wasn't so sure they were stories.
But her favorite stories were of the desert itself, a living, breathing, independent entity indifferent to human wants, needs or suffering.
AFTER A WEEK ON THE BUSES, one per province, even those from different villages knew each other better than they wanted to. Close proximity and a small number of facilities, shared meals and unsound sleep took their toll. There were scuffles among the boys, face slapping among the girls, name calling between everyone and out and out speculation of what would happen to them when they reached the glass and steel heights of the domed city. Stories ranged from the cannibal leaders of the world, who devoured sixteen-year-olds for their inherent power, a story that made the nearest Centurion simply scoff and tell them to shut up. There were stories in which they'd all be honored and set up as rulers to make the rules for their own lands. That story lasted longer than it should have despite a rational third of the bus asking questions like what would have happened to them all to turn on their families, since the laws that came from the capital were never, ever in favor of the villagers. That one caused one of the boys to be struck a hard blow across the face with one of the Centurion's staffs. Livy found herself almost on her feet, ready to go to him. She'd seen him around Agara, knew he was a shop keep's son, and she thought his cheekbone had probably been broken.
But when she tried to stand to go to him, her seatmate, today a tiny girl named Lilac, put one hand on her wrist without moving anything else – not her faraway gaze, not her body, nothing but the one hand, cold and small but incredibly tight on Livy's wrist.
At the same time she caught sight of the female Centurion, the one who had warned her off when the grain fly had bitten the child. She wasn't moving either, simply watching Livy with eyes that bore into her.
Livy turned to the window, trying to control her emotions, her mind torn between the screaming of the boy with the broken cheekbone and the wonder of the desolate land beyond the bus windows.
Logic won. There was nothing she could do for the boy. He'd brought his punishment on himself and she'd been warned by more than one person not to try and heal him.
She turned her back on the boys with the flasks and the girls with the soft hands and looked out at the vision of expanse beyond the window.
She wished the injured boy would shut up.
Tony was on the ground, writhing, and his mates were trying to get ice to him, divvying up any willow bark they might have. A surprising number of the boys carried flasks of alcohol, and those were proffered in closed fists, one over the next as the knot of boys knelt at the back of the bus.
It was the first time Livy had seen a separation like that, the voluntary difference of boys and girls.
The next day the glass and steel city rose into view, as cloudy as a barely glimpsed dream behind its glass dome. Livy had always anticipated it would be small and finite – how could a city under glass be anything else? But ingenious engineering and no price spared had gone into making a dome that stretched farther than her eye could see, the dome itself rising high, high into the blue sky.
Moments after the city came into view, the shutters over the bus windows slammed down, sealing them into premature nighttime. In the front of the bus, a shield went up between passengers and the Centurion driving.
The others stood at the front of the bus and stamped their staves until they had the attention of every last one of the youths on the bus. Livy looked around, still putting names and faces together. The thirty or more kids on the bus were more people than she'd ever been introduced to at th
e same time. It was confusing.
"Listen," intoned the guards at the front and everyone fell silent more readily than Livy would have expected, given the excitement and terror that the sight of the capital city brought.
"You'll be separated in the capital, by province and sex. You'll follow all instructions given to you, whatever the source."
The staves stopped stamping. The Centurions were done.
"Wait!" Voices chorused up together, demanding to know what was going to happen to them, begging for something to drink before they left the bus, for food, for a way to contact their families, for reassurance, for word about what would happen to their loved ones.
There were no answers. The guards slipped through an opening in the shield that had separated them from the front of the bus and cut off all view and now they were alone.
The silence was stunning.
THE WINDOW BLINDS went up without warning. Suddenly they were passing over paved roads, leading ever deeper into the city-state of Arcadia.
"Look at them!" someone shouted and everyone raced to the windows.
Outside in the dirt and dust of the far end of the capital, crippled children and adults were begging, pleading, falling to their knees with their hands outstretched toward the bus. The sound of their wailing started to come in through the windows. High pitched and eerie, the Untouchable's call for food.
The boy with the bruised and discolored cheekbone came up on one side of Livy, and Lilac on the other. Silently they watched the wretched masses begging for succor until more Centurions arrived out of nowhere, beating the already broken creatures, sending them running from the whip.
Livy turned away and covered her face.
"Best watch, girl," the soldier closest to her said. "You never know when that might be you. Maybe you'd better become familiar."
Livy looked at him coldly. The Centurions still frightened her, but after a week on the bus, she knew they didn't have permission to kill any of their charges. She let her dislike show and turned her back, choosing instead to watch the throngs of Untouchables.