by K A Riley
It's a bunch of groups from two different countries on opposite sides of an ocean with nothing in common except the desperate terror of prey animals and a complete and total lack of hope for anything resembling a decent, easy future.
In my limited experience, there are only two kinds of hopelessness: the kind that curls you up into a ball while you wait for death and the kind that drives you into committing the most insane acts of depravity and violence.
Because, after all, without hope, who cares about consequences?
Two kinds of hopelessness: One, passive. The other, violently aggressive. Which sort of hopelessness are we facing now?
All I know about the Outposters are the smatterings I’ve overheard from Kress and her Conspiracy around the Academy. They didn’t sound too worried about them, so I never got the sense they were anything to press the panic button over.
Of course, that was before my mates and I wound up off guard and facing four of them in a huge, open courtyard knee-deep in the bodies of their dead.
It’s our unique but lethal weapons and our glitchy Emergent abilities against the four of them and the strange collection of small, black batons they wield like bladeless axes.
Gripping the eighteen-inch, glossy lengths of pipe, the four Outposters are dressed in sandals and wrinkled linen outfits with white or khaki pants and rumpled pastel button-down shirts. There’s a breezy casualness to their style of clothes. It’s the same kit as we saw on the first dead body in the doorway and on the newly dead bodies currently carpeting the courtyard.
I don’t know what kind of weapons these Outposters are carrying, but at least they don’t look like guns. In this open space, my friends and I would get mowed down before we could even think about defending ourselves and launching a counterattack.
Normally, I’d be overflowing with confidence and brimming with bravado. Normally, I’d put the odds in our favor. As Libra likes to point out, though, there’s nothing normal about any of this.
Haida is circling overhead, but I’m having trouble connecting with her. Still, I can feel tiny tendrils of her natural abilities—her superior senses and reflexes—mingling with mine.
It’s frustrating. After all these years and after all of the training, in times of stress or crisis—exactly when I need it most—my telempathic connection with Haida drizzles around in painful currents inside my head.
What’s going on here? Why are Arlo and I both having so much trouble at the same time? It can’t be a coincidence, right? Libra, Ignacio, and Sara haven’t had to call on their Emergent abilities. When the time comes, will their experiences be as failed and frustrating as ours?
Of all of us, only Mattea’s abilities worked like they were supposed to. And she ended up murdered before our eyes.
I clench my Serpent Blade but then try to relax like I’ve been taught. “They’re your friends,” Kress always reminds me during weapons training. “And we don’t strangle our friends. Hold it like you’d hold a kitten: delicately, firmly, and ready to release it when it tells you it’s time.”
I ease up on my grip as my Asylum and I shuffle around to form a shoulder-to-shoulder defensive semi-circle like we’ve been taught. “Straight lines are for military training exercises and firing squads” is another one of Kress’s famous lessons. “Think organically and be flexible enough to bend to your situation. Having each other’s backs isn’t just a metaphor.”
With Kress’s training and advice surging through me, I twist my boot heel into the ground, bracing myself and preparing for a battle to the death.
Matholook hands me my other Serpent Blade. “I really think you should take this.”
“Let me guess…,” I say out of the corner of my mouth. “You’re a lover, not a fighter.”
“I’m a Caretaker. I’m trained to prevent fights and to clean up after them. Everything in between…”
“Is my domain. I get it. Just stay behind me.”
Matholook slips the Serpent Blade to me and inches around to stand behind my shoulder. He’s an odd combination of brave and cautious. He’s got the stalwart confidence of a warrior but the wary nature of a boy who believes in his cause, but who isn’t quite ready to die for it.
When it comes down to it—when we’re faced with having to choose between our convictions and our lives—which path will he choose?
“Arlo?” I whisper through the other corner of my mouth.
“I’ll try,” he answers, but he’s not exactly brimming with confidence.
His face in a knot, Arlo once again attempts to cast his Aegis Shield.
This time, it works. Kind of.
For a second, it seems like the Outposters, stepping forward and raising those glossy black batons, are slogging through mud. I offer up a mental cheer for Arlo and prepare myself to go on the attack, but just as I’m doing that, the hazy bubble evaporates, and all four of the Outposters spring toward us at full speed.
Arcs of crackling green light snap out from their batons and engulf the six of us in a mesh of tingling electricity. It sort of tickles at first, and I’m chuckling inside at the weak attack as I get ready to hurl my Serpent Blades at the Outposters when I realize my arms aren’t doing what I’m telling them to do.
In a flash, the electric tickle becomes an itch, the itch becomes a searing pain, and the searing pain knocks my feet out from under me and plunges me to my knees.
Libra, Sara, and Matholook collapse next to me. Arlo fumbles with his scythe before letting it clatter to the hard ground. He gasps and clamps his hands to the sides of his head and crumples down next to his fallen weapon.
Only Ignacio—tall and strong with his rippling muscles at the ready—is left standing.
Our attackers fire again, but he shakes off their attack.
Big mistake on their part. This guy practically lives on electrical impulses. They might as well be attacking him with a hail of cupcakes.
His face contorted but with a mocking smile behind his eyes, he brandishes his twin shillelaghs, spinning them around his hands. In a move too fast for me to follow, he lashes out at the nearest Outposter, covering the distance between them before the woman can even think about firing that electric stick of hers again.
His light but stingingly powerful shillelagh catches her on the jaw with a crack loud enough to hear from a mile away.
Her eyes rolling back so they’re nothing but the whites, she spins into the arms of one of the men, who catches her but stumbles back in the process, sending both of them to the ground in an out-of-breath tangle of limbs.
Ignacio follows his initial strike with another that just misses the nose of the second man. The tall man smiles, seemingly pleased with himself for his quick reflexes. But Ignacio wipes the smile clean off the man’s face with a sizzling, backhand strike with his other shillelagh that cracks the orbital bone under the man’s eye and sends him pirouetting into the second woman.
Giving his twin staffs a helicopter twirl, Ignacio plants himself between us and the four staggered Outposters, daring them to take a step closer.
Two of them take a giant step back.
One of them, though, accepts the dare.
The brave Outposter—the shorter man with close-cropped hair and a marble-sized mole on his chin—turns a clicking dial on the base of his baton and fires it again at Ignacio.
Ignacio’s grimace turns into a grin as he lashes out with one of his shillelaghs. The thin wooden stick with the titanium core strikes the Outposter right behind his ear where his jaw meets his neck.
His eyes roll back in his head, and his knees quiver and clack like a rattlesnake’s tail before he drops with a groan to the ground.
Shaking off their own injuries and in frantic unison, the three other Outposters turn dials on the base of their batons and fire off another round of arcing green lightning at Ignacio.
Their electricity-shooting batons don’t seem to affect him.
Unfortunately, a storm of tranquilizer darts do.
In a
fluid, well-practiced motion, the two women holster their batons in exchange for small guns with red tips and a red, rubbery waffle pattern on the grips.
A hail of tiny silver barbs bursts from their toy-like weapons, and Ignacio pauses for a second—surveying his body and smiling at the dozens of quivering darts embedded in his combat gear but also in nearly every inch of his exposed skin, including the back of one hand and the palm of his other. His smile fades. He drops his shillelaghs with a tinny clatter and then follows them straight down to join his weapons and the rest of us on the ground.
We’re in training to be a lethal reconnaissance, fighting, and infiltration force.
So how come we lost?
Holy frack! Did we really just lose?
Rolled onto my back by hands I can barely feel, I see and hear everything the Outposters are saying, but it comes at me in disjointed fragments. I can’t move a muscle. I try and fail to blink. Staring up at the linen-clad men and women, I can feel my eyes drying out.
The taller woman, pale-skinned to the point of near translucence, hovers over me and stares with a worried frown into my “Galaxy Eyes.” The three other Outposters join her, and together, their words drizzle down on us in a cold curtain of word-rubble:
“…invaders…”
“…guilty…”
“…revenge…”
“…interrogation…”
“…Emergents…”
“…impossible…”
Grunting with the effort, the four Outposters drag us by our boot-heels, one by one, through a cut-out, slide-away doorway in the lavender-colored dome behind them.
In my mind, I reach out to Haida Gwaii, but all I get back is a static-filled feedback of helplessness.
Is that coming from me or from her? Either way, this impromptu scouting and rescue mission of ours has just gone pear shaped.
Like bags of sand, my Asylum and I are dragged into the dome, planted into a line of mag-chairs, and our hands are bound behind our backs with some sort of electric cuff that feels like it’s burning my skin.
The two men stand in front of us, and the two women are behind us, all of them with those black batons at the ready.
I have to give them credit for their respect of our abilities. We’re bound, nearly paralyzed, and barely conscious, but they’re not taking any chances.
With dull halo-bulbs spaced evenly along the walls and with natural light seeping in on steep angles from the round windows ringing the dusty space like a spider’s eyes, the curved-walled room is a maze of sharp, angular shadows. The floor, seamless and milky white, sifts with distorted reflections.
Across from us, the taller of the two man stands with his shirt torn open halfway down his chest. He nods his head to the woman standing behind Matholook. The woman slips her arm under Matholook’s chin, locking him in a tight stranglehold with her baton planted with concrete firmness to his neck. She pulls hard, and I think she’s going to kill him.
“Leave him alone!” I shout, my voice strained and raw. I tug against my bonds and snap my head toward the door. “We didn’t do that out there! We’re not the Unsettled!”
“We know it wasn’t the Unsettled,” the man with the open shirt growls. He directs a hairy-knuckled finger at Matholook. “It was his people that got in here and killed everyone. Forget the Unsettled. Our people were murdered by the Devoted.”
9
Story
Next to me, Matholook gulps, and I’m pretty sure it’s loud enough to be heard clean across the room.
“What are you talking about?” I growl in his defense, my head tilted toward the door. “The Devoted didn’t do that.”
I’ve been inside the Devoted’s compound three times in my life. I’m not exactly an expert, but I feel like I know something about them. They were mostly kind, sort of serious, a little odd with some of their traditions, and maybe a tad tunnel-visioned when it came to their dedication to using how things were in the past as a template for how to live in the present and for what they wanted the future to look like. Sure, they have a reputation for being aggressively patriotic and a little intense when it comes to recruiting new members. And okay, they have some violent factions in other parts of the country. (I’ve heard ample war stories from Kress and her Conspiracy about the True Blue faction of the Devoted back east.) But the Devoted I’ve met, including their leaders, Justin and Treva, were reasonable and hospitable. They had teachers and administrators in their compound and a bunch of Guilds so everyone would have a role based on their interests and abilities.
People like that don’t force their way into the multi-colored compound of a bunch of linen-wearing scientists in the most remote depths of the desert and brutally slaughter everyone in sight.
Do they?
Ignacio puffs up his chest. His eyes go narrow and dark with rage, and the muscles in his arms flex against his restraints. “That out there…that was the Unsettled.”
Scowling at our captor, Libra narrows her eyes as well and hisses through her teeth. “We should know. We just barely escaped from them with our lives.” She swallows hard. “And one of them killed our friend.”
“And they would have killed all of us and the rest of you without thinking twice about it,” I snap. “We were lucky to get in here when we did and to get your security door closed and locked behind us. If not for us, they’d have come in here and finished the job.”
I don’t mention the dead body blocking the door.
“We heard your people crying for help. We were just trying to give it to them,” Arlo adds. He wrenches against the restraints, but one of the women lunges around behind him, clamps a hand to his shoulder, and places one of those black batons next to his ear.
“The list of the dead doesn’t need to be any longer than it already is, kid.” Her long, black hair brushes his shoulder. Her voice is husky and ominous in his ear.
“You know,” Sara sneers, “the Unsettled are probably still banging around outside your wall if you want to go and check.”
“Sure,” I say through my most sinister smile. “Maybe invite them back in here for a cup of tea?”
The tall man chuckles at me and Sara before turning his attention to Arlo. With deep grooves forming on the bridge of his nose, the man looks like he might be about to ask Arlo about the scars on his face. (I wouldn’t blame him. Arlo is a great guy, but, honestly, with the red waffle pattern of blistered ridges covering his face and body, he looks like he just got spit out stone-dead at the back end of a wood-chipper.) The man squints at him through one eye and then stops and shakes his head.
Stepping back and appearing to be deep in thought, he cups his chin in his hand and gives us a long look. Then another. Reaching over, he glides a mag-chair from the side of the room and spins it around backwards. Sitting down across from us, he folds his arms over the back of the chair and points to Matholook. “You’re one of them, right? One of the Devoted. A Caretaker, I believe.”
This time, I’m sure Matholook’s gulp can be heard halfway across the country.
Looking between Matholook and the man, I ask, “How could you possibly—”
“It’s important to know your enemy,” the man says. Biting his bottom lip, he stares at us, his pale brown eyes lingering on mine for an uncomfortably long time. Clearing his throat, he introduces himself as “Simmons.” He gives a sharp, military salute and then gestures toward the other man and the two women behind him. “This is Vander. His wife, Rosalind. Her sister, Fatima.” Simmons drums his fingers on the top edge of the mag-chair and offers up a sort of ominous smile. “Out here, assuming everyone is an enemy is an absolute necessity.”
“We’re not the enemy,” I object.
I don’t actually know if that’s true. Enemies seem to be a lot easier to make these days than friends.
Giving me a dismissive wave, Simmons sighs and seems to debate something in his head for a second before announcing with finality, “We were a colony of fifty-three. There are four of us left.” He f
licks his eyes toward the door. “Just outside…that courtyard. It used to be our meeting place. We talked about supplies, health, our plans for the future…everything that has to do with life. Now, there’s forty-nine of our friends lying out there, pointlessly dead.”
His voice trails off as if the reality of the math just landed on him with all its weight and is now taunting him with how close it’s gotten to zero.
“Who are you?” the woman called Fatima asks, her unreadable dark eyes narrowed into either curious or furious slits.
“We’re students,” I tell her.
“Students.”
“From a school. Up in the mountains.”
I hope she doesn’t press me on that. The story of our Emergents Academy, our complicated history, and our impossible future…well, I’d hardly know where to start.
Fortunately, Fatima seems more interested in a conversation than in an interrogation. “I mean what are your names?”
No sense lying about this part of us.
“I’m Branwynne.” Gesturing with my head toward the far end of our queue, I introduce her to Libra, Sara, Arlo, Ignacio, and, finally, to Matholook, who’s sitting next to me and staring daggers at Fatima and at the other three Outposters, who have just accused his people of a mass murder.
The pale woman called Rosalind points an accusing finger right at me. “What’s with your eyes?”
“My eyes?”
“She means your ‘Galaxy Eyes,’” Ignacio says out of the corner of his mouth.
“I don’t know,” I answer Rosalind with complete honesty. “They’re just my eyes.”
“Hardly,” she scoffs. “You’re an Emergent, right?” When I just stare, she adds, “Let me guess…you’re telepathic.”