by K A Riley
Tense-faced and looking helpless as she stands halfway between our divided Asylum, Libra calls back to the others and asks them to make me stop. “At least until we can figure out what to do,” she pleads.
“I’m done figuring things out,” I tell her over the space between us, my voice ice-cold now and razor-sharp. “We need to move.”
I know we shouldn’t be split like this—with me and Matholook charging forward, Sara, Ignacio, and Arlo waiting cautiously behind, and Libra in the middle trying to keep us all together. But standing around doing nothing is the worst of all possible options. Haida made that clear, and, calling back through cupped hands toward the wall, I tell my Asylum so.
“Branwynne’s right,” Arlo agrees as he breaks into a jog of his own, quickly covering the distance between us and catching up to me and Matholook. He slides his scythe from its straps and brandishes it in his tense fists. As if he’s trying to massage it to life, he clenches and unclenches his fingers around the weapon’s long wooden handle. “We need to move.”
I don’t know if he’s talking about us or about the curved and deadly blade at the end of his scythe, but the deep squint of his eyes and the flickers of rage reflected in them tell me that he’s as anxious about our situation as I am.
Behind us, the others nod, and I know they’re also feeling what I’m feeling. A part of us just died. They can either stand there in the shadow of the high wall and keep suffocating in their grief, or they can get moving and join me and Matholook as we investigate this place and maybe, along the way, try to salvage what’s left of our broken souls.
Libra, Sara, and Ignacio unsheathe their own weapons. Only Matholook is unarmed. That was Kress’s idea.
“Whether he’s with us or not,” she cautioned me when she pulled me aside right before sending us on this mission, “he’s still a Devoted. He’s still a wild card. An unknown. Until we know for sure where he stands, I don’t suggest turning your back on him.”
I promised I wouldn’t. But I didn’t mean it like Kress thought. Whatever connection drew me to Matholook in the first place is still intact and just as powerful as ever. Maybe even more powerful since I know Matholook feels it, too. Every look between us seems magnified beyond the level of any other human interaction I’ve ever known. He’s taken up space in my head where I can’t stop thinking about him. He’s in my lungs where something as simple as his touch has the power to take my breath away. He might even be close to breaching the last of my internal walls and getting inside my heart.
Kress wanted me to be careful so I wouldn’t get hurt by him. But that’s not what I meant when I made my promise.
I won’t turn my back on him, not because I’m afraid of getting hurt by him, but because I feel so powerfully pulled to him and because I’m not sure what’s going to happen to my insides if he decides to detach and disappear.
Throwing caution to the wind, I snap out the retractable, talon-shaped daggers from one of my Serpent Blades and hand the weapon to Matholook. He takes it with reluctant disgust, like I just offered him a maggot-infested racoon pelt.
“I don’t know how to—”
“Don’t worry,” I stop him with a raised hand. “I know you’re not trained with it. But it’s better than nothing. Whatever we find in here, I’m sure we’ll be better off armed than not.” We keep walking, and I give him a warning. “The blades are coated and sharpened with a laser-sheener.”
“What’s that do?”
“Ever see a laser beam slice through a merengue?”
“Um. No.”
“Me, neither. But I imagine it’s the definition of sharpness. So… try not to botch it up and cut your arm off. Or mine.”
Offering up a weak smile, Matholook says, “Thanks. And when this is over, I’ll make sure you get your Serpent Blade back.”
“Great. I’ll just have to hope you’re handing it to me and not throwing it at me.”
I’m joking. Sort of.
I may not share Kress’s fears, but I haven’t forgotten that Matholook is still a Devoted. Kress warned me there was more to them than meets the eye, and I’m willing to take her at her word. At least until all this is over, and we’re safely back at the Academy.
Ignorant of the weapon’s precise balancing point, Matholook grips the center handle of the Serpent Blade like he’s carrying luggage, and I smile a little at how awkward—and slightly adorable—he looks. As a Caretaker of the Devoted, he doesn’t get the same weapons training as his peers. Even if he did, there’s no other weapon out there like my Serpent Blades, and I send a mental, long-distance “Cheers!” to Kress and Brohn for all the months of training they’ve done with me.
Libra shuffles up next to me and asks into my ear if this is such a good idea.
I make sure I answer loud enough for Matholook to hear. “You mean giving him one of my weapons or going toward the sound of screaming?”
“Either?” Libra shrugs.
“I think all the ‘good’ ideas have been used up. All that’s left now is survival. And we’re not going to accomplish that sitting around here.”
Still walking along next to me, Libra hesitates and stares at the ground for a second before raising her eyes to meet mine. “Helping potentially dangerous strangers doesn’t feel like the best path toward survival.”
It’s a good point, and I don’t have an answer for her. But Matholook does.
He puts a hand on her shoulder. It’s a slightly strange gesture of familiarity, but Libra seems to relax when he says, “Helping others is the best way to survive, yourself.”
I have to admit, that’s an even better point. And now it’s got me thinking. In all the talk of helping others and saving the world, I never thought about surviving myself.
7
Zugzwang
Following the sound of the moans and the fading cries for help, we weave our way between the big pastel domes, jogging at times but inching along at others as we creep deeper into the settlement.
The compound is different than the others we’ve explored, and it’s bigger than I would’ve thought from seeing it on the outside. We spend several minutes taking wrong turns and doubling back as we try to locate the source of the sounds of human voices, which rise to a high pitch and then, just as quickly, fade into next to nothing.
The space between many of the domed buildings isn’t much more than dry, trampled earth. But in other places, great care has been taken to lay out walkways of smooth, brown and red cobblestones or square slabs of gray concrete embedded in the ground.
I try to concentrate so I can access Haida’s vision and sense of direction. It helps a little, but it’s not solid like it sometimes is. Instead of clear signals, I’m getting wispy feelings and a sort of mental static crackling around in my head. It’s not a migraine, but it has all the tingly beginnings of one.
Sara was right about us not being machines. For the longest time, I thought my Emergent abilities would quickly grow to be one-hundred-percent reliable and exponentially more powerful with each passing day. But like all of us, I’ve discovered that, despite the training and teaching we’re getting, true mastery over who we are and what we can do is a long way off.
Fortunately, Matholook seems able to home in on the echoing cries, so he stays in the lead with me right behind him and my Asylum scurrying along right behind me.
“Do you know where you’re going?” I whisper up to him.
He says, “No” over his shoulder. “But those cries are fading. So wherever we’re going, we need to get there fast.”
He picks up his pace with the rest of us following in a crouch behind him.
It’s hot out, but the smooth, round buildings are oddly cool to the touch. It’s Sara who notices this, but it’s Matholook who explains. In a muted whisper I think is still too loud considering the circumstances, he tells us about the Outposters. “Very smart. Scientists. Engineers.”
“How’d they wind up out here?” Ignacio asks from behind me, and I shush him for
also being too loud.
“They’re pacifists,” Matholook whispers over his shoulder to us as we continue to shuffle along. We take a wrong turn, hit a dead end, and have to double back. A ghostly moan comes to us from somewhere up ahead. Matholook puts his hand up and waits, but the sound stops. “They came out here decades ago,” he continues as he starts walking again. “Even before Krug. They saw what was becoming of the country, and they didn’t want any part of it. So they started building these settlements.”
“Oh, wait,” Libra says, forcing me to shush her, too. “I’ve heard about these people,” she continues, thankfully dropping her voice a few notches down from its normal, squealing, high-energy decibel level. “They have Veiled Refractors, right? To hide their settlements.”
“They invented them,” Matholook confirms. “The idea was to stay hidden and survive while the rest of the world tore itself apart.”
Cutting him off from any further explanation, an overlap of moans and the sound of shuffling, louder than before, comes at us from around a corner.
Whatever they were tying to hide from…it found them.
“We’re getting close,” Matholook whispers.
“Which might not be a good thing,” Libra mutters in my ear.
In the front of our procession, Matholook comes to another sudden stop, causing the rest of us to crash into each other. Without looking back at us, he says, “The whole hiding out thing…I don’t think it worked.”
We step from the narrow laneway we’re navigating and out into a wide, flat courtyard where we walk into the remnants of a massacre.
The open space is littered with dozens of bodies and patchy with blood. The people—most of them motionless but a few others writhing in pain as they fight to hold off death—are dressed in similar outfits as the one the dead man was wearing in the security doorway: pastel-coloured jackets, white linen pants, and matching white shirts, although with all the dirt and blood, not much of anything white remains.
Many of the people have been hacked to pieces. In some cases, literally. Scattered among the dead and dying, there are body parts bathed in pools of blood.
The moans we heard must have been the echoes—amplified by the configuration of domed buildings—of the few people still clinging to life.
Where I thought we might find hundreds of people calling for help and clinging to life, the opposite seems to be true: a few survivors, the last of them now slipping away before our eyes.
Libra is the first of us to start jogging out into the open, but Sara and Arlo grab her at the same time and haul her back.
“We don’t know what happened,” Sara snaps.
“Or if whoever did this is still here,” Arlo adds. “Let Branwynne scout it out first,” he suggests before turning to me. “Are you connected with Haida?”
“I’ve been trying. Give me a second.”
Breathe, Branwynne. Focus. You can do this.
It takes longer than it should, but I finally feel my black eyes with the random white specks—Epic once called them “Galaxy Eyes”—gloss over as I link up with Haida. She was perched in the shade of a cluster of trees on the far side of the settlement but is now flying overhead, her keen eyes on the lookout for danger.
I can’t always see through Haida’s eyes the way Kress can see through Render’s, so I still rely on Haida relaying information via our telempathic bond.
When she sends me vague warnings about the risks of leaping into this sea of misery, I try to get more out of her, but she seems overwhelmed by the carnage in the courtyard.
Welcome to the club.
“I’m not getting anything from her I can’t already see with my own eyes,” I tell the others as I let the bond disconnect. “If there were any Unsettled around, Haida would be screaming. I think we need to help these people. The ones we can, anyway.”
We don’t need special vision to see that nearly everyone in this courtyard is a million miles beyond help.
Matholook is the first to agree about helping and also the first to venture into the courtyard where he steps gingerly over a dozen dead people before stopping to kneel next to a woman, who reaches out a partially severed hand in an attempt to grab at the leg of his cargo pants. With several of her fingers dangling by splintered bone and white tendons and through a burble of blood, she begs him for help. As a Caretaker, he’s got a strong protective instinct and an almost superhuman level of empathy. Without hesitation, he grabs a stray linen jacket from the ground and rolls it into a ball, which he tucks under the head of the mutilated, dying woman.
Following his lead, the rest of us move through the enclosed terrace. We scramble to save who we can, but we’re too late and way out of our league. Our few months of field surgery classes aren’t enough. I don’t think anything would be enough at this point.
Still, we do our best. Wading through the sea of the dead and injured, we dash from person to person, offering consoling words to the two or three people still clinging to life, and making splints for compound fractures out of anything sturdy enough we can find.
“What are we doing?” Ignacio asks into my ear. “Helping these people is pointless. It’s like an above-ground graveyard here.”
Next to me, Matholook overhears him, and his jaw goes tight. “As long as a single person here is alive, there’s hope.”
For a split second, I feel like correcting him. I know from experience—and he does, too—that there’s hope even after death. It’s why his people were so keen to get their hands on Gwernna, the young Emergent girl, who supposedly has the power to raise up soldiers who have fallen in battle.
It’s why Kress and her Conspiracy still talk in hushed, reverential tones about their friend Manthy getting killed on a rooftop in Washington, D.C., only to turn up alive and well in London, England, not long before they met me and agreed to bring me back here with them as the first official student of the Emergents Academy.
There’s always hope, right?
They’re encouraging words, but I don’t say them out loud. How could I? Mattea is dead, and there’s nothing we can do about it.
Instead, we brace ourselves against the carnage and take turns applying pressure to what are clearly fatal wounds in the few Outposters still struggling, with no hope in sight, to choke their way to one more breath.
I hate to admit it, but Ignacio was right. As gloomy and pessimistic as it sounded a minute ago, we’re too late and too ill-equipped to save any of these people.
The sobs, moans, and breaths of the last of the living drift away, leaving us in a vacuum of silence.
I’m standing over Matholook as he leans down, his ear hovering over the nose and mouth of the last of the injured people to make a sound.
I put a hand on his shoulder, but he shakes his head and stands up. He keeps his back to me and stares out over the scene. I don’t have to see his eyes to know he’s crying.
“What now?” Libra asks. Her voice is hoarse—like the rest of ours—from offering whispered, consoling words to people who are too far gone for consolation.
“We leave,” Ignacio grunts, his arms stretched out to encompass the calamity at our feet. “Before we wind up like them.”
“And go where?” Arlo asks.
It’s not a challenging or a rhetorical question but an honest one. If the Unsettled are still outside of the Outpost, we’re dead. If they’re not, they will have certainly taken our Grip-bikes and stranded us out here in the desert. In which case, we’re dead. Whoever committed this slaughter could still be inside the compound, so if we stay here, we’re dead.
In one of Rain’s chess seminars, she taught us the term, “zugzwang.”
“It’s a German term,” she explained. “It means ‘an obligation to move.’” She went on to teach us how it’s a situation where you’re forced to take action and where any move you make is a wrong one that opens up a winning position for your opponent. The simple requirement of having to move leads to a loss.
It was frustrating
in theory and annoying in a game. In real life, it’s downright disheartening.
Everyone’s eyes pivot to me.
I don’t have an answer, and I don’t have time to give one if I did.
Before I can so much as part my lips to say a thing, angry shouts startle us into a combined and panicked gasp.
My muscles fire up, but my heart still sinks. We’re about to be forced into action. Can yet another loss be far behind?
8
Defeated
Spinning around we find ourselves surrounded by a small group of armed Outposters.
There are four of them—two men and two women—spread out to form a wide arc with the two men in front of us and the two women taking up flanking positions on the sides. They seem too calm and composed, considering the situation. I can’t tell if they’re going to invite us in for tea or kill us on the spot.
They don’t look angry. More like resigned, bordering on hopeless, and I don’t which is worse.
I’ve been face to face with the Devoted, the Unsettled, and the Leftovers. Back in England, I had my share of run-ins with the Banters and the Royal Fort Knights. I’ve never met the Survivalists or the Cysters, but I know people who have.
The Devoted are creepily kind, all smiles and hospitality on the surface but with some weird traditions, a fanatical adherence to history, and an undercurrent of dread running throughout their desert city at the base of our mountain. The Unsettled, as I now know first-hand and with soul-shattering certainty, are roving, unpredictable savages and ruthless, relentless killers. The Leftovers—the group of survivors holed up in a bombed-out ski lodge in the mountains not far from the Academy—are paranoid, irrational, and defeated. The all-teen alliances of the Banters and the Royal Fort Knights of London only cared about building strong enough garrisons to keep everyone else out while they struggled to survive in their own closed-off communities.