by Bella James
She didn't claim to be friend to anyone other than Livy.
She didn't even claim to be friend to Livy. Merely protector. But she'd guided Livy past some mistakes on the bus ride to Arcadia and she'd watched over her since then, during the trip back for the nuptials, and until Arash had pried her from Selene's hands.
"I'm not of a habit of repeating myself. I respect you as selectman of this region, but my story will not change no matter how many times you ask it of me. I have come because Olivia Bane is here. It is my duty to protect her. I'm here to fulfill that duty."
Arash stepped forward then, slight and wiry and shorter than the female guard. He looked almost delicate beside her. Livy knew he was anything but.
"It is my place also to guard the girl," Arash said.
Selene looked him up and down and Livy liked that Selene looked more approving than not. "Then you may assist me in the matter."
Oh, frost, Livy thought. Another one. "Do I get a say in the matter?"
Both Arash and Selene turned to regard her shortly. "No," they said at the same time, then looked at each other with the barest hint of understanding passing between them.
Better and better.
"Let her stay," Sarah suggested. She was nearly as old, tiny and stooped as Jurek and seemed impatient with all the proceedings. "What can it hurt?"
"It can hurt," Scott returned with equal impatience in his voice. He was the only dark skinned one among them, probably from a Forbidden Zone borderland. "It can hurt if she tries to take the girl out of here." He looked at all of them in turn, severely but for the fact he looked a little like an owl, old and tufted and intelligent and confused at the same time.
"A fair point," Sarah acceded. "Can you guarantee us that – "
"Rot," Livy said. "How about this? I’m going to stay with Selene. If you try to stop me, I'll run, straight into the Void. How's that for compromise?" Her hands were fisted and stuck to her hips. She hoped it looked determined and not as if she were trying to stop her hands from shaking.
It took only minutes for the council to wrap their empty findings then, and Arash stepped up at the end to request something Livy couldn't make out. She was sent away with Selene and Arash followed, and took Olivia's arm as soon as they reached the corridor.
"Come – " he started and broke off, watching Livy. "I do say that a lot."
Too surprised to even speak, Livy just nodded. "Where?"
"I want to show you something."
Livy met Selene's eyes. "Where you go, I go," Selene said. "We just made that point in there. Don't try to convince me otherwise."
"I wasn't," Livy said. "I was going to try to convince you to come with us."
She thought she saw the slightest of smiles on the guard's face. Someday she'd ask what had led Selene to making the choices she had up until the wedding that hadn't happened and what she'd decided since then.
Not now. For now she followed Arash and Selene followed her.
Livy had seen very little other than the desert level of the cave. It stretched in some distance, mostly in curving corridors that led back to the start. It didn't seem that huge, just large enough for her to continually get lost in, but there was room to house 90 or so people, and to hide weapons. She'd had time to think about the explosions from the morning and Livy was pretty sure that was the rebels practicing with explosives, with firearms, and with whatever other weapons they could get their hands on.
What no one had explained to her was why. Fine, they'd taken Olivia Bane as a hostage, and they hadn't even yet laid out whatever demands they had to make to Arcadia or the leadership. They said they were at war, or planning to be, and they had every intention of trying to bring down the Plutarch.
She knew all that. The question Livy had was why. What did they think would happen afterwards? She'd read the histories Grandfather Bane had provided her and she'd listened to his sometimes rambling conversations about what the people in the Before Times did.
If the rebels really intended to try and overthrow Arcadia, what were they planning to put in its place? Surely someone had thought far enough along to realize if one government fell, another had to take its place.
She followed now, after Arash, with Selene moving close and silent behind. Everything else Livy thought she was getting a grasp on.
She just didn't understand what they wanted to prove by overthrowing Arcadia.
The trio stopped at the edge of one of the cliff faces. In Pastoreum, Livy sometimes spent the occasional holiday hiking in the foothills that ringed the valley where Agara was situated. There were very distant mountains, blue and snow capped. On the way to Arcadia the buses with the 16-year-old hostages passed through them. But around her village, there were mostly foothills, leading to the occasional lower, brown mountain. The mountains were covered in leafy trees that gradually gave way to trees with needles and then to no trees. The foothills, though, were generally full of scrub brush and cheat grass, and some of them were breathtakingly steep. Livy, her best friend Tarah and her sister Pippa would climb them, laughing and talking until the halfway part, and then panting and grunting questions and replies, largely, "Why are we doing this?"
The answer was always "For the view." All of their valley and all of their village of Agara would spread out below them, idyllic and quiet from a distance. The land could be full of people slaving in the fields to meet the newest tax quota, or families fighting, or children losing battles to diseases that could be so easily cured in Arcadia, so simply remedied if everything in the system actually was for the community, and not for the Plutarch and the Aristocracy. But from a distance – from a height – Pastoreum was a beautiful patchwork of color, an expanse of halcyon land that surely couldn't harbor such darkness.
Now they stood overlooking a lower level of the rebel waystation. She'd seen it once before, a nearly sheer cliff face with stairs and ladders hacked into it. Below the ground was more fertile, the growing region that sent up the potatoes and other root vegetables Livy had peeled.
She just had no idea why they were looking out over it now. They'd come to the far end of the cavern overlooking the growing region. Livy figured they'd made it a sixth of the way around a circle, a sixth of the way from the entrance where she'd run.
There was nothing here but stone ahead of them and void beside them, leading down to the growing fields.
"Where are we?" she asked when Arash stopped walking a very good distance later.
"Home," he said softly, and before Livy could ask anything, he moved fast up to a seemingly blank stone wall and offered his hand to the scanner that appeared out of nowhere as a section of rock peeled away.
Horrified, Livy watched. The last time anyone had identified her using a scanner, they'd cut open her wrist to extract and modify it, and now she wore the damned metal gauntlet. She scratched at the edge of the metal, wishing she could get to the flesh underneath and waited, suddenly not caring about anything – not the bracelet, not the ID chips, not Arcadia or the Plutarch, her wedding or her kidnapping or kidnappers.
Just blank. Tired, and blank.
Nothing happened to Arash. Instead, something happened to the solid wall in front of them. A section of the rock slid back and a softly glowing scanner lit the gloom. Livy licked her lips, her hands going to her solar plexus as if she needed to shield herself from some new surprise.
Arash held his wrist in front of the scanner, and a doorway in the rock opened. Livy glanced at Selene, but the Centurion's expression was neutral. She was waiting before making any judgements.
Arash smiled. "Come on," he said, obviously aware of his words. He stepped through the opening and Livy and Selene followed.
THEY STOOD on the edge of a cavern so vast Livy couldn't see across it. Natural light streamed in from above them through myriad holes in the rock ceiling far enough above them to nearly be sky. She took the first deep breath she'd had inside, and was unaware of it as she stared.
They stood as if on the side of one
of the Pastoreum foothills, looking out over a gently lit city that had to be more than five miles across in any direction. Trees grew along orderly streets. Vehicles moved. They could see distant people, small in perspective, moving through the streets. There were buildings clustered together that probably meant businesses and homes laid in semicircles that spread off from the businesses, the pattern repeating logically until the whole of the city formed circles within circles within one large circle. Trees dotted the well-ordered streets. Children ran and played. Ornithopters moved through the city, flying at low levels. Livy sought out the growing regions, green spaces where food was grown. She could hear the sounds of the city, mechanized vehicles, the very, very distant sound of voices, so faint they were ghostly.
One of the ornithopters winged toward them, gliding, wings out straight. Livy had seen the flying machines over Agara sometimes. They fascinated and frightened her. Even after her time in Arcadia, she couldn't imagine voluntarily getting into one.
This one came toward the cliff face where the three of them stood and hovered a short distance off. She could see the faces of the men inside, scrutinizing the three standing and looking down at the vast city. On the side of the machine was painted the bright green hummingbird symbol that adorned the clothes she now wore, matched the clothes Arash wore. The Centurion stood between Livy and Arash. She watched the men in the machine scan them visually, and then saw them take in her silver-clad arm, the Centurion with her ostentatiously peace-tied weapon, and Arash, who they clearly knew, standing unharmed and unworried with them, his green hummingbird rebel symbol displayed. The pilot gave a two-fingered salute, his fingers touching his brow and then pointing outward. It looked casual, nothing official, but when Arash returned something similar, the aircraft banked and turned back the way it came, running silent.
Livy looked after it with wonder, wishing Tarah were with her, or Pip, or her Grandfather Bane – he would have loved this, the wonder and the technology.
"Where are we?" she breathed again, and this time Arash answered.
Spreading his hands to encompass the city below them, he said, "Welcome to Utopia."
CHAPTER 5
A RCADIA
THE SCREAMING HAD STOPPED hours earlier. But it never seemed to completely leave Julia's mind.
She stood on the balcony outside her room, watching the people in the streets of Arcadia move freely through their days. No one seemed traumatized by the executions that had taken up the morning hours. Three men and one woman had been murdered for expressing beliefs not in keeping with the Plutarch's or for actions unbecoming or for violating curfew with the merest hint of subterfuge, of traitorous activity in the hours between midnight and dawn.
Shuddering, she pressed herself back from the stone railing so she couldn't be seen by those closest to the capitol building. The soft babble of voices reached her, the sounds of electric motors as cars ferried passengers wherever they wanted to go.
Eventually Julia sank down against the warm stone of the parapet, her legs splayed out in front of her. The elegant gold pocket watch the Plutarch's undersecretary had given her as an engagement present showed the day was early yet, however long the executions in the public square might have seemed to take. She had more than an hour before her lady's maid would come to do her hair or help her bathe and dress. There was nothing she had to do with the hour, and the day was beautiful, hot and sunny, summer in the most beautiful city in the world.
Just as there was nothing she had to do, there was nothing to do. Everything was done for her. That was the questionable gift of status. Only once had she asked her betrothed what she was meant to be doing with her time. She had not enjoyed his answer. So now she kept her boredom and impatience to herself and watched. Every minute she was with him, or his advisors, or his army, she watched the Plutarch, looking for information she could pass on.
She was lonely, if she wanted to put a fine point on it. Being inside the viper's nest was terrifying, but her interactions with her fiancé were short and generally to the point, and most often through an intermediary. They were to be married. She was to be his mate. Julia was named the mother of the race, the breeder of the future world.
Whatever that meant, it sounded dreadful. She didn't know anyone who had ever really witnessed the events that led to the naming, or understood the role of the mother of the race, at least past producing an heir.
And every one of them did. Julia had read it in the histories, dry, crumbling books that stank of stale ink and nicotine, the pages the color of spoilt cream and the ink brown stains on the pages, like blood. She'd pored over the books, looking for answers only to find none. She had discovered that every mate produced at least one heir for the Plutarch's line and because she was from Pastoreum and had seen the breeding programs of stock in action, Julia knew what she was reading was next to impossible. There would be females born. There would be women who couldn't produce. There would be stillbirths.
The fact that the Plutarch's line consistently produced healthy male heirs led Julia to hope that the proxy who produced such children in many cases could take her place for the run of it. She had no desire in being bred to the present ruler. He was not unattractive, on the surface, but underneath he was a monster.
He'd had Olivia Bane killed. That's how Julia had ended up in this mess. She'd been chosen to take Livy's place.
Julia strained to see in the direction of the Void. She had never been meant to be in Arcadia. Before her sixteenth birthday her brother should have sent for her. Something had delayed him. If he'd come, he'd come too late.
There had only been rumors, anyway. The stories that the Aristocracy and the leadership sent for and captured 16 year olds, holding them at the Institution and training them in Arcadian ways. The practice was thought to be archaic and outmoded, if not purely fantasy, the stories of monsters to frighten children into obeying even after they began to strain for freedom against parental boundaries.
When her brother had come for her in her village of Friends, he'd come too late.
A sudden ripple of green sunlight shocked Julia out of her thoughts. A hummingbird zipped through the air directly in front of her, tiny wings beating faster than the eye could see. Julia laughed, delighted, then looked fast into her rooms, but her maid hadn't returned and there was no one else there. That she was always under some kind of surveillance she was fairly certain, but on the balcony she didn't think anyone could see her and probably not hear her and even if they did? All she'd done was laugh.
When she held out her hand, the tiny bird alighted there, regarding her through curious black bead eyes as Julia loosened the tiny message from its clawed foot. She had no message to send in return, but the Plutarch had gifted her with a feeder, the bright red syrup replaced fresh daily because Julia loved the little bright green hummingbirds. She watched the creature feed and unrolled the miniscule message.
Before the wedding, she read, and sighed with relief. She almost dropped the tiny curl of paper into her mouth then, but something made her turn it over. There was almost never anything more than the most simple instruction or communication, but this time there were three more words, dangerous words that made her blood race and her thoughts race faster.
This was information that absolutely could not be released. It would mean Julia's death, probably, and redoubled efforts to find the rebels.
But she didn't immediately destroy the message. She read it again, almost uncomprehending, and then choked back a laugh, managing to make it into a cough in case anyone overheard her.
Impossible. But there were the words in her brother's infinitely tiny hand:
Olivia Bane lives.
The message blurred in front of her eyes. She lifted it to her mouth, and an errant breeze suddenly swept the parapet. It fluttered from her hand and flew up toward the overhanging roof that covered her balcony.
Julia flung herself heedless of her own safety, no other thought but to catch the slip of paper before anything could
happen to it. She startled the hummingbird back into flight, spun herself up and off the stone, into the air, grabbing and felt the paper just touch her outstretched fingers.
No! People would die because of her stupidity!
Her fingers grasped over and over, sending the paper floating just above them several times, until she controlled herself enough to stop, for a fleeting second, her movements stilling.
It was the longest two seconds of her life.
Then the slip of paper fluttered down into her palm.
Julia held her breath and with painstaking slowness, curled her fingers around the paper until she had it trapped.
Seconds later she swallowed it, secure in the knowledge the information was safely contained inside her now.
THE ORDERS CAME within 15 minutes. Her maid appeared in her chambers to prepare Julia for a journey.
"What am I supposed to take if I don't know what we're going to be doing?" Julia demanded of the girl, a sallow faced Alpha of low ranking.
Unpleasant looking or not, and not conversationally gifted, still the girl had been within the Plutarch's employ long enough to know her job. "Take everything, of course. Ball gowns, boots, trousers, dresses. You don't want to come up short."
"What are we traveling in, the capitol building?" Julia asked testily. "Might as well. I'm going to be taking the contents of my room."
The maid simply thinned her lips and gestured for Julia to go change into traveling clothes and leave Megan, the maid, to her work.
She hesitated a moment longer. Being sent anywhere with the Plutarch meant the chance of being found out. After the wedding, she assumed he'd mostly ignore her except for whatever the breeding and being the mother of the race required, and since she was fairly certain the mothers were figureheads unless nature cooperated, maybe even that would be something she was fearing unnecessarily.
But she couldn't ignore the facts. Sister of a rebel, she ran the risk of being found out, of her brother being found out, every time she was around her so-called fiancé. Trying to reassure herself that the rebels were at risk every hour, every day, did nothing to make her feel better. Losing Paul would be intolerable. Losing him because of something she did?