The Infernal Lands (The Aionach Saga Book 1)

by J. C. Staudt

  Merrick’s thoughts returned to the infant in the cistern; the way his bullet had thrust the child’s jaw askew, and the horrible screaming sounds it had made as it craved death or reprieve. He could still smell the zoom haze, thick and acrid in the air. He’d stood there, gutless and impotent, unaware that his very hands had held the power to unmake his error. He would show Pilot Wax his value. He would make everyone see he wasn’t just another soldier, and they would listen to him this time.

  Yet somehow, listening wasn’t enough. They needed to revere him. And they will. No more groveling. No more fighting for second chances, crossing my fingers and hoping I catch a break. I’m bigger than that. I deserve more. I deserve to lead. What does Wax have that makes him so deserving, besides a smooth tongue and a sharp wit? It’s time to learn about this gift, and if Raithur won’t teach me, then I’ll do it on my own—without him or anyone else.

  The rest of the men from Decylum ought to be put to death, as far as Merrick was concerned. Then he would step in and make Wax see his power. Wax would never let Merrick leave his side after that. Maybe the Commissar would promote him; recognize him publicly in front of the whole city north. Someday, Merrick could even become the Commissar himself. Maybe that day would come sooner than Wax expected it.

  Merrick set his rifle against the concrete pillar and marched to the cell where the man lay slumped face down on his bed. There was a dry ring around the scarlet pool beneath him, like the edges of a coffee stain. When Merrick spread his fingers across the man’s scalp, the man made neither sound nor movement. His thin brown hair was damp to the touch, the skin underneath warm with fever.

  Merrick tried to remember the way he’d felt the night he met Toler. He thought his angriest thoughts. He tried to picture the shepherd’s face, to recall his arrogant smugness and the way it got under his skin, but he couldn’t remember what Toler had looked like. He tried thinking of his father’s face instead, but the result was the same. It had been such a long time since his father’s death that Merrick had forgotten the sound of his voice. But he would never forget the words. No room for weaklings in this world. Hard luck needs a hard will.

  Merrick had had enough hard luck for one long year. It was time to let his will take over. To sharpen his resolve and become the person he was meant to. But try as he might, nothing was happening. He concentrated, but his bandaged fingers grew no warmer than usual. Raithur said I was like a battery. A power cell. Did I use up all my power somehow? Maybe I need recharging. But where could he recharge himself? A striker went off in his head, and he knew.

  A few seconds later, the floor was rising and falling away from him. His hands were splayed flat and his arms were pumping, his body stiff as a board and the toes of his boots bent against the concrete. The other guards must have found his spontaneous workout odd, but Merrick didn’t care what they thought about him anymore. That was part of the price of becoming great.

  Drops of perspiration reflected daylight on the concrete. He regulated his breathing to maintain his stamina, knowing it might take some time to build up a charge. After he did a test run, he’d need to have enough left over to do an effective demonstration for Wax. He kept at it until his arms were about to give out, then collapsed onto his belly and caught his breath.

  The sick prisoner hadn’t moved. Merrick put his hand on the man’s head again and thought about getting mad. Nothing. He ripped off the other nine bandages. The nailless fingers beneath were just as pink and pliable as the first. Even with his fingertips uncovered and his mind laid just as bare, he could do nothing to elicit a reaction. Then his thoughts turned to Kaylene, and his fingers lit up like embers.

  The man stirred beneath his hand, but Merrick held fast and let the feeling swell. It built toward an ungraceful climax that felt like the moment before urination. It was advancing without his consent now, rising to an uncontrollable magnitude. It rushed out of him, an indescribable substance, or energy, or matter, or something else, and it was so intense he couldn’t breathe. When he felt it coursing over his palm and shooting from his fingertips, the pain started. His fingers glowed orange, then red. Before long they were pulsing bright white.

  The skin on the prisoner’s arms began to soften from blistered pink to smooth cream. Merrick held fast, sensing by some derivative force the level of need within him. He wondered if he would be able to stop when the time came. If the gift could kill the untrained and inexperienced, it could kill him. For now, he chose to push that fear away, keeping his mind locked on Kaylene, and the anger and madness and passion that followed.

  That’s it, he realized. That’s why thinking about Kaylene makes this happen. Anger wasn’t the thing that set him off; it was passion. Passion, the common thread woven into every emotion worth having. Pilot Wax had said as much during one of his speeches. You don’t always choose what you want to be passionate about. Sometimes your passion finds you and takes you against your will. But it’s as much an accessory to love as it is to rage. That’s why it moves us the way it does.

  At the time, Merrick had dismissed it along with all the other motivational nonsense the Commissar often spouted during his monologues. But now he was realizing that passion was the thing he’d been devoid of all his life; the thing he lacked without understanding why. He’d always been apathetic and uncaring about everything. It felt safer to stay beneath the shelter of disinterest. You couldn’t get hurt as easily that way. Even his allegiance to the Scarred only went so far as it served him with regular pay and enough leisure time to go out a few nights a week. He was bound to his station by duty, not passion.

  Something had happened that night at the Boiler Yard. It wasn’t as if he loved Kaylene. She had become like a little sister to him, someone whose safety he felt responsible for on a subconscious level. Maybe Toler had triggered that protective instinct in him, something Merrick’s own father had never displayed on his behalf. Her games and flirtations aside, Kaylene was family now, and Merrick wanted that to be something greater and more special than the family he’d experienced growing up.

  The prisoner inhaled as if coming back to life. Merrick released him, and the surge died away more quickly than it had come. His fingers were sore, the skin raw and bubbling down to the last knuckle. Though the burns were larger and deeper, somehow the pain was more muted this time, sweeter after the rush. He found he could push the pain to the back of his mind until it was no more than a dull itch. It wasn’t until the prisoner sat up and wiped the sheen of sweat from his forehead that Merrick heard the footsteps behind him.

  “What’s going on over here? Are you alright?” asked the Private, a tall man with a wiry frame and dark wavy hair.

  “I’m fine,” Merrick said. “What’s the big deal?”

  The other guard was a corporal, about Merrick’s height, with a mustache and faint age lines on his face. “We—er, heard you yell a second ago. Thought you needed help.”

  “What did you just do?” asked the wavy-haired Private. Aside from the movement of his mouth, he was frozen in place.

  This is my first chance to make a name for myself. Now that I know how to use my gift, it’s time for everyone else to find out. “I’m a healer,” Merrick said. The pretense of the statement made him cringe inside. He stood to face them, a confidence he’d never known before welling up within him. “I’ve just given this man a second chance.”

  The Corporal’s eyes widened. “Your hands…”

  Merrick lifted them for a look. Smoke was rising from the seared flesh and filling his nostrils with its coppery charcoal odor. “It’s okay,” he told them. “When I take someone’s pain away, I have to suffer some of it myself.”

  The two soldiers exchanged a look.

  “Here, let me show you. Do you have an ailment?”

  The Corporal shrugged. “Not really. This, I guess.” He rolled up his sleeve. There was a carpet burn on his elbow. “Got it roughhousing with a dway on my hall last week.”

  The Corporal jumped when Merrick touc
hed the wound. The other guard stood a few paces off, nonchalant but waiting to be impressed.

  Merrick concentrated. A full five seconds elapsed, and nothing happened. Ten seconds. Nothing. The silence mounted. Merrick brooded, trying to conjure up the right mixture of emotions to set off the reaction again.

  The Corporal sighed and shifted his weight.

  Merrick thought about passion. He tried to think about friendship, loyalty, love, sex, anger, ecstasy. Passion. An uncomfortable minute passed while he and the Corporal stood there like a pair of statues, unmoving.

  “This is a waste of time,” the Corporal said, yanking away his arm and unfolding his sleeve. “Whatever you were doing with that prisoner… quit it. You aren’t supposed to be fraternizing.”

  “I’m not. I—I just need to get the feeling right. I’m new at this. I just found out I could do it.”

  “Sure, okay. Practice on somebody else, and do it on your own time.”

  “That’s what I was just doing with the prisoner.”

  “Leave the coffing prisoners alone, or I’m reporting you. I saw you talking to that other dway earlier too, the big one. Watch yourself, or I’ll see that Robling hears about you dealing zoom to the inmates.”

  “I’m not—I… tell him,” Merrick said, turning toward the healed prisoner.

  But the man was otherwise occupied. His palms were pressed flat against the base of the cinder block wall. Wisps of smoke were curling toward the ceiling from his glowing fingertips.

  “No, don’t do that. Stop.”

  Merrick fell silent when the floor began to rumble. The prisoner raked his hands down the cinder blocks, and the wall of his cell disintegrated in a cloud of dust. He stepped aside to let the gray powder billow out and make piles on the floor like miniature sand dunes. Shouldering through the opening, he entered the adjacent cell and knelt beside its wounded occupant, then dragged him toward the bars.

  When the prisoner looked at Merrick, his eyes were borne with grief, yet they shone with a glimmer of hope. “Heal him. Please.”

  The other guards were staring in disbelief, as unsure how to handle the brazen jailbreak as Merrick was about whether to help the prisoner. He heard footsteps down the hallway. There would be a cadre of soldiers storming the cell block soon, he was certain.

  “I can’t,” Merrick said. “I don’t know how. I don’t know how I did it before.”

  The prisoner heard the soldiers, too. “Come here. I’ll show you.”

  Without thinking, Merrick went to the bars and laid a hand on the wounded man’s scalp, just as he had before. “I don’t know the secret.”

  “There’s no secret. It takes time to learn what sets you off. It’s different for everybody. If you do it often, it becomes like a reflex. Try to remember it. Try to feel the same way.”

  “I’ll try.” Merrick thought of all the same things he had before. Time passed. Nothing.

  “You know what it looks like when someone’s thinking too hard?” asked the prisoner.

  “No.”

  “Like you.”

  Merrick scowled. “I give up. I don’t get it. I’m just not coffing smart enough to know how to do this. I’m dumb as a box of rocks. Always have been. There should be a test you have to take before they stick you with this Infernal-forsaken gift.”

  The cell bars resonated when Merrick kicked them.

  “That’s what we say in Decylum about people who have kids,” the prisoner said, snickering to himself. “There should be an intelligence test first. Then again, most of us are genius-level…” His voice trailed. “Listen, just stop thinking, and feel. It would happen if you would let yourself feel things instead of analyzing them. I can tell that’s what you’re doing. You’re nervous, you’re tense, you’re overcompensating. It’s no good, commando. Open up and feel it.” He scrunched his neck, pale green eyes expectant beneath the sweep of brown hair in his face.

  Merrick felt it. Or did what he thought was feeling it. Nothing happened. “I can’t do this.”

  “You’re a failure, commando,” the prisoner said, suddenly cruel. “Nobody will ever want you, nobody trusts you, and everyone who acts like they do is using you. People can see right through you. You’re as transparent as the glass on those windows up there. Everyone knows your flaws and weaknesses. You’ll never be interesting to anybody.”

  “Why are you saying all this?”

  “I’m telling you all the ways you lie to yourself. The stuff you believe, and think is true, but that you’re too scared to say out loud. You’ll never know the gift unless you learn to feel. You’re so far removed from your feelings, you can’t even be vulnerable to yourself.”

  The prisoner was right, Merrick knew. These people are like sandciphers, the way they can sense things. Merrick believed in nothing, least of all himself. But how could he overcome that? How could he scrape away the layers of apathy he’d put there to protect himself? How does one break a habit he’s spent his whole life forming? It would be worth it if he could realize his potential… he just didn’t know where to start. The stranger in front of him could turn solid rock to dust in seconds. If only he could incite a change within himself that same way.

  The soldiers were still fumbling with the gates, but they were getting closer. The two other cell block guards had run over to help them.

  “I did it before,” Merrick said. “I don’t understand why it won’t just happen when I want it to.”

  “Have you ever willed a dust storm into settling? Have you commanded the light-star to rise sooner than it wants, or sent a river back where it came from? You breathe without thinking; you blink with no motive besides that your instinct tells you to. You can’t manipulate what isn’t yours to control, but you can yield to what you know needs to happen. As you blink and breathe—that’s how a blackhand ignites. It’s not a matter of desire; it’s a matter of necessity. The emotions are complex and the pattern is different for everyone. I can’t identify what ignites you. The only thing I can do is tell you when you’re doing it wrong.”

  Merrick pouted. “Obviously I’m doing it wrong, or it would be working.”

  The prisoner was amused. “Just by looking at you, I could tell you were puckered up tighter than a nomad’s asshole. But I didn’t know you were such a whiner until you opened your mouth.”

  Merrick was getting tired of being ridiculed. The only thing worse was being made a punchline, though the two often seemed to go hand-in-hand. He glanced over his shoulder at the rifle, still leaning against the pillar across the room. If he killed the prisoner now, he could report the man’s escape attempt. That would be excuse enough. The other guards had seen the man break down the cell wall with their own eyes; they’d vouch for Merrick.

  “I guess I didn’t want to heal him that badly,” Merrick said. “That must be why it isn’t working. If it’s about necessity, then maybe I don’t feel the need to help him.”

  The prisoner brushed his hair aside and stared at Merrick in disbelief. “What kind of person doesn’t feel the need to save an innocent man from death? We’re in need, commando. And helping people in need is a matter of human decency.”

  Merrick stormed over to his rifle and snatched it up, bringing it to bear. “Human decency isn’t how you survive on the surface, however things might be down in that hole you crawled out of.”

  “I’m sorry that I can’t climb inside your head and flip the switch for you, commando. I’ve explained it the best way I know how. You’re the only person who can do the rest.”

  When Merrick pulled the trigger, the rifle nearly jumped out of his hands. It had been so long since he’d fired a shot, he had forgotten how much the auto-fire kicked. On top of that, reloaded ammo could be inconsistent at times. The echo off the concrete rang painful in his ears, the room resounding like a giant tin can. He wasn’t sure he had meant to shoot so soon, but the deed was done. He lowered the muzzle and peered past the cloud of gunsmoke into the cell. The prisoner was encompassed in a bright red glow
. The half-sphere that encased him was turning the bars into columns of slag that dripped like melting candles.

  “I told you so,” the prisoner said, grimacing through clenched teeth. “Necessity.”

  The sphere winked out, and the prisoner kicked away a section of bars, leaving a circular hole in their place. Steel sang a deafening melody as it clattered to the floor. Merrick raised and fired again, a longer burst this time. The shield was up again before his brain had processed the first sound. Deep gouges began to crater the floor, walls, and ceiling around the prisoner.

  “Jailbreak,” Merrick screamed, turning to project his voice down the hallway.

  When he turned back toward the cell, the prisoner wasn’t in it. He was right in front of him. Then he was grabbing Merrick by the collar and heaving him toward the ceiling. Merrick could see the second-story cells and the criss-crossed metal grating of the catwalk and the girders beaming the high ceilings, all very close now. The prisoner was far below, and Merrick’s rifle was in the prisoner’s hands somehow, and the prisoner knew how to shoot it, and he had good aim. When Merrick reached the apex of his ascent he could see the lines of scarlet trailing out from his body, unfurling like kite ribbons on a gust of wind. His comrades would be here soon, he knew. The Sentries would stop the prisoner. Pilot Wax’s capable Sentries.

  The cold concrete floor came up to meet him.

  CHAPTER 31

  Jailbroken

  Jiren Oliver didn’t care that his hands were charred almost to the bone. Every soldier he’d killed was worth the discomfort. He had never shot a firearm before, so he’d taken the healer’s, both to disarm him and to try it out for himself. It was simple enough to hit what you wanted to, especially when the thing gave you so many chances. The weight of it felt good in his hands, but using it felt cold and judicial. It made killing easy; it took so little effort to point it and press the trigger and watch something die. Before he’d run out of bullets, he was already disillusioned with the idea of it.