Renegade Red

by Lauren Bird Horowitz

  “Stop!” the Captain demanded, but the hail of bread kept coming until no one had any more to throw. For several beats after the air was clear, the front gate smashed down and up again, still struggling to keep up.

  Noa was transfixed at the bars of her cell, her second piece of bread still clutched in her hand in the now-silent hallway. Somehow in this place of desolation, her fellow prisoners had risen up to save her.

  “It was her!” Geezer shouted clearly from behind Noa. “I saw her!”

  The Captain whirled on Noa, eyes like ice.

  Noa heard a body slam into the bars of the cell beside her, heard Callum fuzzily protesting, but all Noa could see were the Captain’s eyes, boring into hers.

  “Interrogations start today,” the Captain smile-leered. “I think you’ll go first.”

  • • •

  The interrogation room was small and windowless and gray. A perfect cube, the walls pressed with flat vines like dead-eyed serpents. They left Noa in there, feet and hands bound to a hard, stark chair, and let her wait alone to imagine what was to come.

  Spider-Eye came in first, holding a tray of silver instruments.

  “I don’t know anything,” Noa heard her voice say defiantly as he began to arrange them.

  Spider-Eye paused, looked at Noa as if seeing her for the first time. He studied her eyes, her lips so long it made Noa squirm.

  “They say you’re Tunnel Fae,” he said finally, in a rumbling voice Noa realized she’d never actually heard before. He’d become so familiar, and yet, she knew with shocking clarity, he was still an unfathomable enemy. “But I’m not here to ask about that.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  Spider-Eye looked at her, again with that odd, open curiosity. Not hostility, but objective fascination. “The Otec wants us to learn, challenge ourselves. Do things on our own.” Spider-Eye sorted through his tray, then picked up one silver instrument, a long, sharp needle, examined it carefully and calmly. “So I’m going to experiment with these, before the questions start. Such oddities, these tools.”

  Then, faster than Noa could have seen or tracked, Spider-Eye whipped the needle down clear through her thigh.

  • • •

  Noa lived in an endless loop of pain. Spider-Eye had grown old and died; the square room had crumbled away to dust; the universe Before had expanded too far, too fast, had ratcheted back and swallowed itself up. The only thing left was this rawness of flesh—not skin but flesh that once had been called a girl, bare flesh now for name and skin were gone. Flesh and nerves exploded to a million shards of light, constellations of a girl unwound. Raw matter for some new universe to await its own destruction. Noa was caught in it, again and again, for the cycle was inexorable: the world destroyed, life erased, eruption of the cosmos to die anew.

  Then suddenly there was a face. And something changed.

  On its trillionth echo, the cycle slowed and flickered—that face—and resumed, then slowed again. Then it paused and he came fully into focus—the curious man with the strange marks around his eye. Around his face, civilization rebuilt itself in four white walls, a room that was a perfect cube; Noa’s cells multiplied, divided, and new limbs stretched into legs, and arms, tied to the hardness of a chair. It all wavered—here, then disappearing like a mirage—and then the face became Noa’s father, leaning over her in bed.

  Don’t scratch, Christopher told her, his hand cool on her fiery skin. She couldn’t lift her arm for some reason, not when she was lying down. But she saw it was blurry with tiny red bumps: the painful rash of scarlet fever.

  Poor you, Christopher told her. You’ve had this before, you know.

  Noa wanted to tell him she knew, but she had no voice; her throat felt sanded dry. She looked into his eyes instead, his calm eyes, and thought how nice it was to have a father—

  “The Otec is right,” Spider-Eye said, his face crashing like glass through Christopher’s calm eyes. “Invention is worth the effort.”

  Noa tried to cry out, back in her body lashed to the chair; she heard a whimpering, high-pitched gurgle and wondered if it came from her.

  “Be still,” Spider-Eye told her. His rough hand clamped her shoulder. She tried to scream as again heat seared across her skin, but she couldn’t—then suddenly his hand was gone, her vision was clear, and the spots of fire across her skin only throbbed, like old bruises on the bone.

  Spider-Eye smiled kindly. “Some things you still need to Channel for. Can’t have you bleeding all over the Captain. Now, you answer the nice lady’s questions, or I’ll come back for you, you hear?”

  Noa could barely breathe for the relief, even as every part of her still hurt. Distantly, she could appreciate why the Guards operated this way: she was torn apart, her body rent; her brain screamed, Tell them everything! Her body pleaded with her to save it; her lungs sucked in the cool, cool air. She wished she could live inside that air forever.

  Then suddenly, so suddenly, the Captain was looking at Noa with her slicing scar, her twisted mouth. Noa gagged to see the Captain’s tortured ear-stump up close. Clearly, it had been torn, not sliced. The scars were old but still looked infected, seething, like something rancid was trapped beneath the surface.

  “You and I are kindred,” the Captain began. Noa looked from the stump to her eyes, startled. The Captain’s eyes were soft gray, and gentle. “You’re surprised to hear me say I feel kindred to a Color? Perhaps you think all Clears are the same.”

  The Captain leaned forward and Noa flinched, but the Captain didn’t seem to notice. Her fingers gently, tentatively, went to trace the skin beneath Noa’s collarbone. Noa’s scar.

  “You never had this healed?”

  Noa swallowed. “Some scars are necessary.”

  The Captain leaned back slowly. “Yes. Some scars. Some crimes, even.”

  “H-how did you get yours?”

  The Captain looked Noa in the eyes. “Tell me about the Tunnel Fae. How big is the Resistance and when did it reform?”

  “I-I have no idea.”

  The Captain’s mouth twisted down in disappointment. “I was hoping we might do this in a civil way.” She sighed and gestured to the door, which immediately opened. Spider-Eye came in and deposited a dazed pixie on the ground.

  Noa swallowed. A Red Channeling slave. The Captain was going to break into Noa’s mind, the way Spider-Eye had bored through Noa’s flesh. And Noa knew it completely in that instant: she would never be able to hide Sasha from this woman. Sasha was everywhere in Noa, in every synapse and every cell. Her chocolate curls and glittering eyes shone like beacons across the heartbeat of Noa’s brain. There was no box she could lock her in, no way to bury her, no way to keep the secret safe.

  Noa looked at the dazed Red pixie on the floor: she had wavy yellow hair, not messy blond variations like Noa’s but yellow like the sun, or cornfields in summer light. A sunlight pixie. To bring her doom.

  Noa didn’t have time even to brace herself; suddenly the Captain’s hands were on her and the pixie, and the room ripped apart to blinding white. To Noa’s surprise, her body was not in pain—in fact, her body was not there at all—everything, skin and bone and flesh itself, vanished, and her whole being became like a living eye. Images flickered so fast she couldn’t see one color from another. They blurred into a vibrant smudge, lightning on the ribbon of everything in her mind.

  The Tunnels—find the Tunnels. The words were not Noa’s; they reverberated from some outside place, some above-place that shook everything from every side. Noa-the-Eye was plastered wide and open, and immediately she saw the winding Tunnels, and Judah’s back, the little room lit by Stellabugs. She saw herself fall down a shaft, saw Hilo wielding her fiery knife, saw Callum and Judah backed against the mossy wall. Then inside the cave again, she saw Hilo look longingly at Judah, pleading silently for forgiveness or was she asking something more, t
he way they fell into one another, embraced each other, two parts of the same whole—

  Focus! The Resistance! The Captain’s earthshaking voice again. A knifelike pain drilled down into Noa’s skull, and the images flickered faster: now they were in marching lines, surrounded by gray-clothed Fae in rags, but the Clear Guard was closing in. The ground was erupting in spikes, alarms were screaming overhead, there was Callum, pulling her, lifting her over and up and around, hands sure and fast— but gloved in white—

  And then Noa was suddenly leaning against Judah’s chest in Lamont Library, and he was playing with her hair. They were smiling; things felt easy but not quite right. Noa turned, a ghost-girl stared back at her from the shadows—

  No … not here … This was Noa’s voice, not the Captain’s, thin and faint, as she pushed the Girl back into the shadows. With great effort, she built a box around her, a box that turned into a wall—the wall of the room where Callum stood, hands gloved white and raised around Annabelle as she disintegrated into nothing—

  Go back! There’s something there!

  The ground shook as Annabelle swirled away, and Callum spun around in circles, getting smaller. Noa was in the library again, Judah was at her back, but this time Noa refused to look where she had seen the Girl. She looked down a different aisle. Judah reached into his pocket, gave her a jigsaw puzzle he’d made with his own hands. It was beautiful, she hadn’t known he could draw—and the puzzle became a book of sketches, hidden beneath his bed. Of a brother, of a father, a little girl—

  No, no, not here either, we have to run—Noa-in–the-Memory said to Judah, crumpling the sketches. He looked confused, and the drill bored and rattled inside Noa’s head, its gears caught on something uneven. It hadn’t happened that way, it hadn’t happened that way at all—

  But now Noa was running, running and grabbing the shears from the body of the dead Hunter, Thorn, on the floor of Kells’ shack; she brought them up and slashed them deep across her chest, opened her arms wide toward the heaving, spitting Portal. Her blood is my blood, Noa cried, and then the brothers were holding both her hands—

  It cannot be! The Captain’s voice was urgent, splintering down into Noa’s mind, needles pressing in from every side. Noa tried to run again but where was left—s? She turned and found herself in a great fire, a terrible fire in a club, and everywhere she looked were stars of flame—Noa screamed and heard her real body scream aloud as something pressed upon her chest, a hand splayed harsh and rough upon her scar—

  —and the stars of fire became stars of tiny hands, fingers sticky, warm in hers. Then the hands were limbs, starfish splayed, in the cool air of the sleeping night. The starfish moved, scrunched, and turned, its eyelids flickering: Sasha’s eyelids, Sasha’s face—

  No! Noa screamed, with strength this time, and the scream shook the image into a million points of light. They blended together, turned back blinding white, the entire canvas too bright to see—

  Then Noa was standing, solitary, black against the white, silhouette in the vision. She planted her feet, stared straight ahead, yoked the world deep into her core. The colors stopped, the noise went blank—

  —and Noa saw it all.

  She saw them, the ear-scarred Captain and the yellow-haired girl, linked by light and pressing in. Between them, a sort of golden rope—thick and spiral-woven, its ends fraying open to splay their threads. The threads looked alive, like tentacles or searching roots, reaching into Noa’s mind. The filaments were fine and bright and quick, so fine you almost couldn’t feel them, so bright you almost couldn’t see them, so smooth you could mistake their pathways for your own—

  But Noa didn’t.

  Noa saw them. Noa felt them. And with the simplest raising of her hand, Noa found she could control them.

  Calm settled over Noa. She flicked her pinky finger, and the searching threads dipped and bent and stilled their advance. Beside Noa, Sasha now stood, backlit too against the white. Sasha looked up at Noa and laughed, tugged on her hand. Noa turned her head: on her other side was Isla. Isla rolled her eyes and smiled.

  Noa looked back toward the Captain and the yellow-haired pixie. Their faces were wrinkled with confusion, their reaching tentacles of Red magic no longer obeying their commands. Noa tilted her head, and the tentacles wiggled back to life and moved in toward their keepers.

  The Captain’s and the Red’s faces startled in shock, in fear. Noa let Isla and Sasha vanish as she pressed her wriggling tentacles harder, pushing with everything she had. She forced them into the Captain’s face, the Captain’s head, and suddenly the white world shook and blasted wide:

  Images spun and rushed, images Noa didn’t recognize or know quite how to see: a baby’s face, downy reddish hair, gurgling up in happiness; another face reflected in the baby’s pupil: the Captain’s, maybe, but unscarred. Then both faces shattered—woman’s and child’s—by rocks hurled through a window. Cracks flowered up and split the ceiling, which collapsed into a silver swirl of marching boots. The Captain was there again, her boots among the boots, but she had no epaulets; then she was marching in an empty hallway, all alone, standing at a single door. The door opened to show Arik, angry and yelling: the Tower … no clearance … for this weapon. Noa’s fists, the Captain’s fists, curled with rage, and she screamed—not Noa but the Captain—terrible and gargled—

  And Noa was slammed backward in her chair, to which she still was tied, and her head smashed into the floor of the square interrogation room.

  “Get her back to her cell!” someone was screaming, amidst thunderous commotion somewhere in front of her. Noa was ripped upward and off the chair, flung over a Guard’s broad shoulder, whisked roughly from the room.

  “Smoke her!” a different voice commanded, and green sparkles exploded in Noa’s eyes. Guards massed inside the interrogation room; Noa glimpsed them as her vision faded; they were huddled around a mass of silver on the floor—it was the Captain, eyes huge and wide and frozen, body unmoving.

  • • •

  The Smoke numbed Noa’s consciousness, or tried to—she dimly felt her body bumping as she was heaved down hallway after hallway, each jostle more and more annoying. She craved rest, oblivion, but sounds niggled at her ears, garbled and indecipherable. By the time she was tossed onto the dirty, stone-cold floor of her cell, her eyes were blinking rapidly, vision already clearing, and mere moments later, she was up and rubbing her elbow. She looked from the red welts on her arms and legs to the bars around her cell.

  “Noa!” Callum’s urgent, frantic whisper. Noa looked and saw his hands grasping the bars in the window between their cells.

  “Move over!” Judah, jostling to get close.

  “I’m fine, I’m fine,” Noa winced their way. Geezer watched guardedly from his corner. He clearly had not expected her to be returned alive.

  “A ton of Guards are massing at the front,” Judah said anxiously, and suddenly Noa realized how loud the ward was with noise and arguments and commotion.

  “They know, don’t they?” Callum asked desperately. “They know everything—”

  “No, no—” Noa tried to push her mind to focus. “The Captain didn’t—I stopped her—”

  “What do you mean, you stopped her?”

  “I mean I did what you said, I tried to hide her … and you … both of you. Make a box, bury it like you said … But it was coming from all sides. It felt like me, it looked like me, I couldn’t tell—”

  “I knew it! We never should have let her—” Callum cried.

  “Shut up!” Judah hissed.

  “I ran, but there were no more places…” Noa gulped down air like water, each second more awake to the panic pounding in her veins. “So I, finally I … stopped running. I stopped. And I … looked at it, and I … pushed it away somehow—” She broke off, not sure why she felt apologetic.

  “You pulled apart what wasn’t you—” J
udah began.

  “But were you in time?” Callum interrupted, frantic.

  Noa’s heart hammered wildly. “I—think she saw us, the Portal. Maybe everything—”

  “That’s it, we have to—”

  “No, but wait!” Noa cried, her mind moving so fast it was like she couldn’t see. “I pushed it back on her! I turned it around, I took it away, and I saw—I saw something!” Noa’s head was spinning but this was too important, she needed to come back to focus—“ She’s in the Tower! I saw it! I saw Arik tell the Captain, the weapon’s in the Tower—”

  Yelling erupted from the Guards’ station, cutting her off.

  “Call Arik! I don’t know! The Captain’s out!”

  “No report! I say juice ’er and keep it quiet—”

  “Who the hell put you in charge?”

  “Someone has to be!” Wild scuffling, angry fighting.

  Callum flung himself to the bars. “That’s it then! We go to the Tower. I’ll find Darius—”

  Judah screamed. “No! Run first, plan a rescue later! We agreed!”

  “No!” Noa interjected. “I’m with Callum, we go to the Tower!”

  “What?”

  “She’s there! I know she’s there! She’s right here, we can’t leave her!” She heard her desperation but didn’t care. Her aching head and limbs swirled with strength and heat and the wildness of hoping. “And the Captain’s out! I saw her! She was unconscious!”

  That was enough for Callum. “It’s now or never! Get ready—”

  There was a huge bang against the wall as Judah shoved Callum into it. “That’s your plan? You can’t be the distraction, you idiot!”

  “Someone has to set off the—”