Serah said, “Sure, if you call sitting together in total silence at every meal ‘together.’”
“Serah, if you were married to Fatima, you’d be afraid to speak too.”
Both women laughed as the exited the library.
2.
Two EnViro suits charged toward each other at full speed while one held back and waited. There was a clash of metal and steel. Blades whipped around and one of the suits, the much smaller Recon model, tried for a hard kick to their larger opponent. The larger combat suit dodged and then grabbed the leg, spinning and tossing the operator of the Recon suit up against the wall. There was a loud crash, but the woman in the Recon suit rolled over and stood, ready for more.
Then, the two large combat-grade EnViro suits charged, and Mimi in the Recon suit a full half-meter shorter, squatted down and felt the hydraulics in the EnViro suits legs charge before she released. She did a fantastic leap over the two women’s heads and landed with a thud just on the other side of them, turning to face them. This time, she stuck the landing.
Serah smiled. “Nice job today, Mimi.”
Shannon charged again, but this time Mimi didn’t move. As their bodies collided with a metal clank, Shannon puts her arms around Mimi. The size difference between the suits an echo of Shannon and Mimi’s normal heights.
“I’m so proud of you, love.”
Serah said, “She’s not the only one who's proud. I still can’t believe you can move as quickly as you do without muscle augmentation.”
Mimi said, “I told you. I might not be as quick as either of you, and I might get tired fast, but I told you I could manage.”
Serah said, “I’m sorry I doubted you.”
“Speaking of augmentation—” Mimi began.
“No,” said Shannon, and she put distance between their bodies. “We’ve been over this before. I cannot imagine you going through that kind of pain and you know there’s a chance you won’t make it through. Remember what happened to Leahara’s daughter?”
Mimi looked to Serah for support. She transmitted directly to her so Shannon couldn’t hear. “Serah, can you back me up here?”
Serah hesitated for a moment, then said, “It does make some sense, Shannon. If Mimi had the procedure done, can you imagine how quick she would be? Right now, she can almost keep up in the suit. In our simple hand-to-hand sessions, neither of us can take her.”
“I don’t care, Serah. She isn’t going through with it.”
Mimi said, “A year ago, you both forbid me from training in the suit in the first place. A year ago, you told me wearing one of those things without augmentation was impossible. Do you remember what I did?”
Serah Smiled. “You wore one for two days straight without a break. Forty-eight solid hours in that damn thing.”
Mimi said, “Shannon, do you really think I’m not strong enough to take it? That I wouldn’t survive?”
Shannon asked, “And what did Noatla say when you asked her, Mimi?”
Mimi sighed. “That it was an unnecessary risk. But that was six months ago. We haven’t spoken of augmentation again. The next time she comes down here, I’m gonna show her what I can do, and then she can decide.”
It was what she and Serah had discussed before Shannon woke from her alcove. Serah was entirely in support of Mimi being fully combat ready now. She had thought that having Mimi by her side if and when the Recycled Runners came around again would be a huge advantage. She, Serah, and Shannon could act as a kind of shield while the other women of the order attacked on a telepathic level. It would be a powerful way to hold back a flood of Recycled Runners. Mimi and Serah had agreed that it was time to bring Noatla down and show her what she could do; even if Noatla didn’t approve of the training sessions.
Mimi transmitted directly to Serah, “If we call her down now, while Shannon’s awake, it would be better.”
Shannon eyed the two of them and noticed they were making eye contact. “You’re skimming each other or whatever you call it, aren’t you?” Shannon’s face turned red. “I thought I asked you not to do that when I’m around.”
Mimi frowned. “Sorry, it’s just when you're not here it’s a sort of habit. We almost never communicate verbally.”
The tension in the room was growing. Mimi was feeling her own anger rising in her chest. She was an adult, and what’s more, she was centuries older than Shannon. Yet sometimes Shannon treated her like a reckless child. She could make her own choices. She was about to open her mouth to say so when the door to the chamber slammed open.
Rosita burst through the door. Something red, like strawberries, covered her face, but Mimi realized what it was at once. Rosita took a few steps toward them and collapsed.
Serah rushed over to her and picked her up. In the EnViro suit, it was an easy task. Serah said, “Rosita. What’s wrong? What’s happened?”
Mimi and Shannon circled. For a moment, they didn’t think Rosita would answer. Her face barely held an expression. It was half vacant. Only a few creases at the corners of her mouths moved and indicated she was still alive.
In a low, hoarse voice, Rosita said, “Nowhere... they attacked Nowhere.”
Panic rose. Mimi said, “What? Who? How? We were just there.”
Rosita’s face gained a momentary tinge of her normal color, and she turned her head toward Mimi. “They’re back, Mimi.”
Mimi reached out to Rosita’s mind. By default, all women of the order usually blocked casual skimming of their mind. But Rosita was holding no such block in place, and by the look on Serah’s face, Mimi could see that Serah was also skimming Rosita.
“Dear Gods,” said Mimi in what was barely a whisper.
Shannon’s face looked terrified. “She doesn’t mean?”
Mimi nodded.
“How many?” asked Shannon.
Serah shouted. “Shit, we have to get her into an alcove.” Serah, grasping Rosita in her arms, picked her up and moved quickly to the only open alcove available. She placed her in there, sealed the cover, and started the cycle. Immediately, the liquid filled the chamber.
Shannon asked, “Will she be okay?”
Serah replied. “It should be fine. I wish we could get her to a medical-grade alcove, but considering she was still breathing when we placed her in her, I have no doubt she’ll recover. It looked like it was only a head wound.”
“So why the rush to get her in?”
Mimi answered, “Because her brain wasn’t making any sense anymore. The images she was giving us were jumbled and mixed up between past and present, and she could no longer tell where she was.”
Serah said, “Which means, there was some serious head trauma and possible brain damage. It’s probably just a concussion, but if it was something more, well alcoves could heal a lot, but sometimes with serious brain damage you’re never quite the same.”
Mimi said, “Can you run a diagnostic on her?”
Serah nodded and moved to the center console. The Alcoves sat in a circle around it, each one filled with a different reserve Runner.
Serah’s face reflected the light of the screen with its vague bluish glow. “The scanners say it’s a serious concussion and suggest there was blunt force trauma to the head. But, she’ll be okay in a few hours. Concussions, even serious ones, are healed fairly quickly in an Alcove.”
“Mimi, you never answered my question. How many?”
“Too many.”
“What happened?”
Mimi looked at Serah. Serah nodded.
Tears started to well up in the corner of her eyes. Mimi couldn’t be sure if they were tears of rage or of guilt.
“Shannon they... they took them. The Recycled Runners took all of them.”
“What? Who?”
“The women, all the ones I’d rescued. They’re all gone.”
The tears let loose. There was comfort from both Serah soothing her and Shannon’s presence, but Mimi couldn’t feel it. And inside her, something stirred from slumber. A powerful he
at was growing in her chest.
Serah reached out her hand to Mimi. “Sister. Come. Let’s survey the damage.”
3.
The door stood open, barely hanging on one hinge. They walked through. Nowhere was empty. Not a single soul remained, nor did any of the shacks remain standing. The gardens had been trampled and uprooted, and the UV lights lay scattered and shattered along the concrete.
Serah repeated, “No, this is not your fault, Mimi. Thinking that over and over is only going to drive you insane. You were a good thing for these women. You gave them a second chance, and some of them have lives in the Lowers now.”
Mimi said nothing, but her ability to block Serah from her mind was virtually gone. She could only feel rage and guilt mingled up in whatever else was rising in her chest.
They still wore the EnViro suits. It was safer to assume the worst, but Mimi knew they would be gone already, that they wouldn’t come back.
“They were after me, you know.”
Shannon said, “You can’t know that for sure, Mimi.”
Serah nodded in agreement, “And besides, what if they were. Do you think that just because you were here, you would have been able to stop them?”
Mimi ignored Serah and Shannon and said, “Why did they leave Rosita? Why didn’t they take her too?”
Serah shook her head. “I don’t know. We’ll have to ask Rosita for more when she’s awake again. Maybe she was able to hide.”
Mimi’s anger flared, “Rosita would never hide. She was like a mother to these women.”
Shannon reached over and grabbed Mimi’s hand. “No one is accusing Rosita of doing anything wrong, Mimi. It’s just that we don’t know the whole story yet.” Shannon’s words were extra soft, and Mimi felt another round of tears swelling again.
Mimi walked around for a moment casting her eyes on the scene. Her eye caught something under one of the shacks. She moved toward it and picked up one of the fallen walls, an easy task in the EnViro suit. Underneath the first, a small bloodied hand stuck out, palm facing up.
“Oh, Gods! There’s someone here.”
Serah and Shannon came over and together the three of them moved the rubble aside in less than a minute. There, her body broken and still, lay Tanya, the most recent woman Mimi had rescued. Her face was pale, and a pool of blood lay spread below her. The back of her head was open.
Shannon ran over to the other side of the room and retched. Mimi burst into tears and Serah stood frozen, looming over the corpse and the wreckage.
For a while, there was no exchange, only stillness and the sounds of Mimi’s sobs. Even the underground seemed to be holding a moment of silence.
Then it came, a voice filled Mimi’s mind, and she looked over toward Serah and saw she heard it too.
Mimi said, “Shannon?”
Shannon looked up. For a moment, Mimi lost herself in the beauty of her eyes and the gratitude for still having Shannon in her life. It was moments like this that she was grateful for her sisterhood and the love of her life. “Yes, Love?”
“We’re being summoned. It’s time to convene.”
Chapter 14
Chaos in the Docks
The water in the sandy puddle at her feet was coming to stillness. She must be still now. On the shores of a great ocean, she sat alone. This ocean was still alive; the smell was refreshing and clear.
She was between worlds. She knew it. Watching the waves crest and then crash, she sat and began to breathe deeply and watched. What would come, would come. To fight was futile.
As the sun cast its presence on the water, the waves danced and shimmered and spun in perfect order. They sang a song of love and joy and hope. Alexa knew that oceans had no need to rush, to force, to worry. Time allowed for drops of water to separate briefly from the great whole and then one day return again. Here, in this place, she knew that to be the way of all things, but when she returned to her own waking life, she would forget in the troubles of the ordinary.
There was a change in the waves; tiny moving lumps broke the purity of the pattern. They were a disturbance, but the water paid no mind, it simply renegotiated its path and pressed forward. It was patient. Water persisted above all.
The lumps grew larger, moving closer to the shore. They were creatures. As they emerged from the water, they had no shape, no substance. At first, there were only one or two. Then came the hoard, like a slow stampede, the forms were nothing but potential. They could shape into anything they wished, or perhaps, she thought, it was anything she wished. The smooth movement became a soft shuffling. The shapes began to solidify, no longer did they move smoothly. A struggle between body and sand ensued. Alexa steadied her breath, steadied her mind, as their solid reptilian form took its final shape.
Alexa stood and walked over to the nearest one and picked it up. It did not struggle, but it did not stop moving either. Its flippers still worked as they did against the sand. For the turtle did not know Alexa held it in her hand.
She stared at the patterns on the top of its shell. The geometric shapes on its back rearranged themselves to form an image made from the deep swirl of green on the back of the turtle. The pattern morphed into a kind of tower, but the tower was connecting to earth at both the top and the bottom. It stretched from what appeared to be the core of the Earth to the surface of the ground.
Alexa put down the turtle and walked toward another. This time, she found she didn’t need to pick it up. The shapes formed under her gaze, and this one had a fallen city with smoke rising from scattered skyscrapers. Bodies and rubble lay strewn about it in a ritualistic pattern; the pattern almost looked like a great tree with one menacing eye blinking in its trunk.
A single glance toward the beach and she saw a blanket of scuttling bodies so thick, yet so perfectly ordered that if she had wanted, she could walk for miles without setting foot in the grainy sand.
The turtle at her right foot revealed the image of a large silver machine with a beautiful face, its mouth open, and singing. A soft lullaby issued from the back of the turtle's shell. The words were familiar to her, though she had never heard them in her waking life.
"Good night my angel, good night my sweet, the trials have ended, close your eyes, it's time for sleep.
Tomorrow will come when it's due, and no matter what happens, I'll always love you.
Sleep now, love, rest your eyes, the world is weary, ancient, and wise.
There is a time for all things, but the day is done, rest now love, ‘til a new day has begun."
She wasn't sure why, but as the words echoed in her head, she began to weep.
She turned, another turtle just behind her revealed an old balding man with two lights glowing in his chest and his face covered in tattoos. Then on the back of another turtle, a bird soared through a storm, gliding through the currents and eddies of the wind the way a fish navigates a river.
A sudden wind blew, it almost knocked Alexa off her feet. With the wind, the turtles began to dig under the sand. One by one they disappeared, leaving no trace of where they had once been. Alexa ran and grabbed one more turtle and drank in the final image, a woman riding on the back of a tiger. The tiger’s stripes began to fade until the tiger lay dead underneath the woman, yet she would not dismount.
The wind blew harder, and Alexa fought to hold the creature and her balance. The turtle, recognizing Alexa for the first time, snapped at her hand and Alexa dropped it. As it hit the ground, the shell shattered like a porcelain vase and the pieces melted into the sand.
Alexa repeated the patterns to herself. Tower, City, Machine, Tattooed Man, Bird, Tiger. When she woke, she would scribble down as much as she could remember in her dream journal. This pattern was important; it was always important when something came from the ocean. She didn't know how she knew that, but she did.
Like the Oracle at Delphi that she had read about in some ancient text, what she saw in her dreams or any of her visions could be vague and confusing. She may not understand it until afte
r the event or image had revealed itself. Occasionally, something was easy to interpret and clear, but this was rarely the case. But in her experience, what she saw here was important, and she would do her best to remember the pattern.
Tower, City, Machine, Tattooed Man, Bird, Tiger. If she could remember the essence of the symbols, she could probably extract the rest.
Alexa had worked hard in the past few years to master her talent. But she had wished for a teacher, someone to guide her. She was self-taught and thus had spent many nights probing the dark, dissecting the symbology of her subconscious. This was evidenced by the tablet next to her bed. She had filled it with descriptions of dreams, thoughts, and the lessons she had learned from exploring her talent.
There was a change in pressure in the air. It was a warning. Something was about to wake her. The ocean began to recede, and other forms began to fade. The sand under her feet and the sky both turned white and began to blend with one another. Then only whiteness remained.
“Tower, City, Machine, Tattooed Man, Bird, Tiger,” she yelled. But there was a roaring noise drowning it out. It sounded like the utterance of a single syllable over and over again. She repeated the pattern again. She had to keep saying it, had to hold it so that the knowledge wasn’t lost.
“Tower.... City... Machine...”
2.
“A-A-A-A-AAAAAlexa Turon, please report to the docks immediately,” said the AI over the intercom. The sentence condensed from the single, long, drawn-out syllable into its short final form as Alexa crossed the boundary into the waking world from her dream time.
The voice was a cold bucket of ice water on her consciousness, and Alexa jumped awake. The pattern was slipping away from her. A wave of frustration gripped her, quickly she grabbed her tablet and began typing. She hurried but could feel something important disappearing. She typed, Tower, City, Machine... and then paused. She closed her eyes and tried like hell to recall the rest, to picture what had been on the backs of the turtles. There was something about a bird in a storm and something about the human face of the tiger, but the rest alluded her. She wrote down every detail she could, but after a moment nothing more would surface.
Upon Stilted Cities - The Winds of Change Page 22