by K A Riley
Please tell me we’re going to be okay.
~ I can’t promise that.
Great.
~ But I can promise, when we fully connect, you’ll be a lot better than “okay” for the rest of your very long life.
Fully connect?
~ We’re not where or when we’ll ultimately be. Not yet.
Where or when? What do you mean?
Haida and I get disconnected before she has a chance to answer.
Haida?
I can hear her calling back to me, saying my name, but our voices get muddled together until I can’t tell which is which. And then, there’s only me. Jostling around in the back of a truck with my five closest friends, I feel strangely alone.
Next to me, Libra breaks into a shuddering sob. “I’m so sorry for back there.”
“Sorry for what?” I’m too sore, tired, and annoyed to offer words of consolation or even a supportive arm around her shoulders.
“I should have stopped us from going into the settlement. I should have dragged us all away.”
“It was me,” Matholook says glumly, his hand half-raised. “I can’t hear suffering and not help.”
“We’re a team,” I tell both of them. “We live or die together.”
“Not Mattea,” Sara mumbles into the air. “She died alone.”
All at the same time, I want to tell Sara to shut it, to have faith, and to tell her she’s right.
I wind up not saying anything.
Arlo asks Ignacio if he can do something to disrupt the vehicle’s electrical system.
“Yes!” Libra squeals, clapping her hands and going from despondency to delight in less than two seconds. “You can do that thing you do! You’ve done it before.” She hops to her knees, her hands clasped in prayer, her eyes pleading and wide in the dim light of the truck’s shadow-spackled interior. “Come on, Ignacio. Please get us out of here!”
Partially illuminated by the meager strips of particle-filled sunlight from the ceiling vent, Ignacio’s eyes are desert dry. But there are tears of frustration and futility in his voice.
“I can’t feel…”
“Feel what?” Sara asks.
“I can’t feel my abilities.”
We’re all quiet, and it feels like another one of us just died.
I swallow hard. I know exactly what Ignacio means. Three times in my life—twice with Kress next to me and once on my own—I’ve been able to pass through solid walls. It’s a painful trick, and each time I’ve felt like I was being ripped apart and reassembled on a molecular level. (Which Kress later explained is a pretty good description of what’s happening.) Right now, though, I don’t feel like I could so much as pass through a stiff breeze. It’s not that my Emergent abilities aren’t there. I can feel them lurking around like lost ghosts in the back of my mind and wafting with slow, miserable moans through my body and limbs.
But it’s like they’re scared or defeated. Like they don’t want to…emerge.
I tried to explain the feeling to Matholook once before. We were alone in the room Kress and Wisp set aside for him at the top of East Tower in the Academy, and he asked what it felt like to be superpowered. I thought he was teasing so I gave him a good swat, but he insisted he was serious.
“I just want to know what it’s like to be…”
“Different?”
“No.”
“Powerful?”
“No. Not exactly.”
“What, then?” I asked.
“I like you,” he confessed through an adorable blush. “And I guess I just want to know what it’s like being you.”
I didn’t answer. I would have, but that’s when he leaned in to kiss me, and the fact of my being an Emergent and him being a Typic suddenly didn’t seem so important.
I don’t have a lot of experience with Typics. But one thing I’m finding out is that, in the mind of the average Typic, there are two sorts of Emergent abilities: the sort they imagine we have and the sort we actually have.
In their minds, we’re techno-genetically enhanced lab rats who have these weird and dangerous superpowers we can turn on and off like a light switch. Flick the switch, and you can do superhuman things. Flick it again, and you’re just a regular person.
But that’s not anywhere close to what it means or what it feels like to be an Emergent. (Unless you’re talking about a malfunctioning, short-circuiting, grease-covered dimmer switch that toggles randomly and uncontrollably in the wide range between pitch dark and ultra-bright. Then, yes, it’s a lot like a light switch.)
But no. Being an Emergent is more like being a professional athlete, like the kind my father used to be before his stint in the military. He loved telling the stories of his football days. “Some days, you’re in the zone,” he told me once, “and you feel like you can take on the world and do no wrong. Other days, it’s hard work just to remember and realize a fraction of your training. Some days, you’re sore all over, and some days, it takes ten times the effort it took to perform to the level you did the day before.”
He puffed out his chest and looked over to make sure my mum wasn’t paying attention. (She had an annoying habit of diluting his stories of his glory days with too much truth.)
“And some days,” he added, fixing his eyes back on mine, “your body hurts down to your bones, and you just can’t seem to get out of bed at all.”
I used to think that Emergents like Kress and Brohn and their Conspiracy were invincible and in top form at all times.
It was only after Kress started mentoring me five years ago that I discovered that, like the rest of us, they have their good days and bad days. (They have a lot more good days than we do, but Kress promises me that I’ll get there, too, someday…provided I keep training and concentrating and not going out of my way to get my stupid arse into trouble all the time.)
With my thoughts on Kress, I have a slow look around at Matholook and my Asylum, and I wonder just how much trouble we’re going to get into before all this is over.
If we’re alive when all this is over, that is.
Matholook rests his hand on my leg. I put my hand on top of his, and he squints like he wants to say something or ask a question, but he winds up pursing his lips and staring at the dust specks dancing in the empty belly of the truck. He’s wise not to say anything. After what happened back there with the Outposters—after what they claimed his people did to theirs—he’s got to be assuming that whatever he says right now will be received by the rest of us through a filter of suspicion and doubt.
And he wouldn’t be entirely wrong.
The rest of the trip is at least two hours of tooth-jarring, bone-rattling, and bum-bruising bumps.
We don’t talk much. It’s more than just the after-effects of the Outposters’ drugs. There’s a fatigue hanging over us. It’s not that we’re not used to challenges and setbacks. We are.
But this collection of setbacks is different. It feels like piling on. Like it’s curveball after curveball, and we keep on swinging and missing.
And the specter of Mattea’s lifeless body—faded of energy and color and already stiffening under the desert sun when we had to abandon her—hangs over us, weighing us down like a suffocating blanket we can’t kick our way out from under.
Back in London, my mum used to talk about “closure.” She said it was one of the worst parts of the Atomic Wars.
“People were vaporized, crushed by falling buildings…so many missing…no chance to say a proper goodbye.”
I knew what she meant. Sort of. But now, losing Mattea like we just did and with no chance to pay our last respects or give her a proper burial, the idea of “closure” has taken on a deep, personal, and painful new meaning.
With no closure, all that’s left are open wounds.
As the feeling finally starts returning to my body, I ask everyone else if they’re okay.
With a chorus of feeble grunts, they all say they are.
Matholook rubs his arms and massages his
shoulders. He taps the toe of his boot against mine. “We’re going to get out of this, right?”
I’m tempted to tell the others about the images Haida sent me of us being trapped in glass, high above a war, and the haunting feeling that we’d been betrayed. But that would mean telling them that my telempathic bond with her may be going even beyond just glitchy. Or worse, that Haida has found a way to show me the future. And, with what we’ve been through already and what we’re going through now, I don’t think I can handle trying to get my mind around what might be yet to come.
So, instead, I lie and say, “Absolutely. We’re going to get out of this just fine and be back at the Academy before you know it. This truck ride can’t last forever, right?”
The answer not only seems to put my friends at ease, it also turns out to be mildly prophetic as, at that moment, the rig we’re bouncing around in slows to a grinding crawl.
When the steel door at the back of the truck swings open, Domino-teeth greets us with the business end of a hunting knife strapped with barbed wire to a thick silver pole.
The truck is still moving, and she and her fellow Unsettled are marching behind it as she steps to the side and orders us out.
One at a time, we hop down from the steamy camper to the hot, hard ground, and it’s like we just stepped into a towering city of moving, smoke-belching machines.
The panorama from East to West and the air from the blistered and pock-marked ground to the smog-choked sky, is filled with monstrous vehicles, churning along at a casual walking pace on thick studded wheels or on metallic, interlocking tank-treads—all of it thrumming at deafening levels in our ears and grinding deep ruts into the barren and bumpy earth.
The cloud hanging over it all is a molasses-thick mass of pinwheeling debris. Spreading in a slow-moving vortex across the expanse of sky, it’s nearly enough to block out the sun.
Every one of us breaks into a simultaneous fit of coughing and hacking, with Ignacio doubling over, his hands on his knees, as he hocks up a wad of sticky green phlegm, which he spits into the caked dirt next to us.
I don’t bother asking if he’s okay. It’s a safe bet none of us is.
In front of us, the truck we were just in continues to trundle along, oblivious to the fact that it’s been emptied of its human cargo.
With her makeshift spear nudging me in the lower back, Domino-teeth announces with the grand flourish of a carnival barker, “Welcome to the Army of the Unsettled.”
13
Arrival
I’ve always wondered how the Unsettled live. Now I know. And I really, really, really wish I didn’t.
In addition to being an endless collection of every dinosaur-sized vehicle imaginable—all of them in constant, crawling motion—a noxious cloud of thick, gunmetal gray smoke rolls in burbling waves over us. Ashy flecks of dust, rust, sand, and oil-residue stick to my clothes, and I can feel a layer of grime already forming on my teeth, against my skin, and in my hair.
It’s more than just walking through a cloudy spectrum of dirt and debris. It’s more like walking through the entire idea of filth.
The sound of it all is deafening.
The feel of it is bone-quaking.
The smell is worse.
Overall, it’s a sensory overload of the most putrid kind.
While Ignacio coughs, Arlo gives him a couple of light pats on the back.
Sara’s mouth hangs open, which she quickly realizes is a bad idea as she inhales a lungful of wispy fumes and joins Ignacio in a fit of raspy hacking. Her normally pinkish-white cheeks go tomato-red, and Matholook reaches out to steady her and ask if she’s okay.
She wipes her watering eyes and puts her hand on his. “Only someone as cute as you could get away with a question as dumb as that,” she grins.
In my mind, I hiss at her not to touch him.
It’s bad enough we have to be shuffling along at what’s barely walking speed in this moving Hell on earth. I don’t need Sara to be doing her flirty thing right in front of me at this particular second.
On my first day of classes at the Academy, Kress used me as a punching bag in her and Brohn’s Unarmed Combat class. Seeing Sara and Matholook lock eyes doesn’t hurt quite as much as that did.
But it’s close.
Her unsubtle attempts to win Matholook over and my unexpected and unwelcome jealously aside, perhaps most disturbing is that Libra, the ultimate Miss Chatty Cathy, is totally speechless.
I wave my hand in front of my face to clear away a small vortex of smoke and sand. “It’ll be okay,” I assure her, doing my best to make myself heard over the commotion around us.
I don’t know if what I’m promising is even remotely true. But I do know that I’ll do whatever it takes to make it true.
At any other time and in any other place, Libra’s feeble smile of thanks might make me laugh. Here, it makes me wonder if all of this—the deaths, the captivity, the uncertainty, and the fading sense of hope—will be too much for her, and she’ll lose her perkiness and break under the weight of experience.
Snapping us to attention, Domino-teeth orders the six of us into a line as we continue to move along.
I scan the sky for any trace of Haida Gwaii.
She must have followed us, right?
But I don’t see her, and, even worse, I don’t feel her. Squinting with as much intense focus as I can manage, I reach out with my mind and try to open our bond, but I might as well be trying to grab a handful of air.
Resigned, I slip my black hair into a ponytail, partly to keep it from flying in my face but also partly to preserve some semblance of neatness and orderliness in this hellscape of pure chaos.
My Asylum and I are herded from a cluster into a queue, and two of the Unsettled boys, walking along on either side of us, clamp thick metal bands around our necks and slide a length of braided steel wire through loops welded to each band to link us together.
“Great,” I mumble to Matholook, who’s shuffling along behind me. “Just what I’ve always aspired to be: a giant, six-person charm bracelet.”
He lets out a hearty laugh, which one of the Unsettled boys cuts off with a sharp jab to his ribcage.
Matholook responds with a glare that the shaggy-haired boy ignores as Domino-teeth shouts for us to keep marching. I turn to face forward, glad to see Matholook flash a little anger but also frustrated that the little row didn’t escalate into a full-on fight.
I’ve got some serious anger to vent.
The ground under our boots is packed down and dug through with deep tread-marks that make us stumble as we’re paraded between a shifting line of crawling vehicles.
Many of their whirring joints are glossy with black grease. Others are crusted over with layers of rust and lumpy red sand. The monstrous arms of a pair of excavators swing deadly close over our heads. On one side of us, there are smoke-belching tractors and white cube vans, each with a silhouette of a green vulture painted on the sides. A queue of front-loaders, their buckets big enough to hold a hippo with room to spare, rock and sway on tires that have to be fifteen feet high and as wide as I am tall. On our other side, rhinoceros-sized bulldozers—some automated, others with teenage boys and girls at the controls in the cabs—thunder along to create a series of crawling laneways. With the ash-covered rigs chugging forward in evenly spaced rows and columns to form a system of streets in between, the whole place feels sort of like London. Instead of skyscrapers, though, giant cranes dot the skyline, their crisscrossed metal frames casting a checkerboard pattern of shadows onto the clouds of dust hanging over every person and vehicle around us.
We all get startled and hop to the side as three Container Shuttle Carriers—each carrying the carcass of a dismantled and torn-to-shreds military jeep in its three-fingered claws—thunder past, one right after the other. Shaped like an upside-down “U” and cradling their cargo on huge iron hooks under their steel bellies, the carriers are enormous and wide with their glass-enclosed cabs high up on the top of t
he foul-smelling machines.
The boy behind the controls in the last of the three carriers spits out the window at us as he passes. As a group, we shout our objections, with Ignacio bellowing out some choice and vaguely sexual words about all the terrible things we’re going to do to the boy’s mother.
Domino-teeth snaps at us to keep quiet and stay in line, which we do as the three towering carriers cut at a sharp right angle up ahead and disappear down a lane between parallel rows of gold and gray campers, driving along, twenty-feet apart, in perfect sync.
With the constant motion of mega-tons of treads, wheels, and steel shuddering us to our teeth, the ground beneath our feet trembles in an ongoing succession of tremors I’m sure is going to split the earth in half at any second and swallow us down in one big, dusty gulp.
Risking a glance over my shoulder, I can see a fleet of identical, muck-crusted, yellow dump trucks about a hundred yards back, pushing the whole caravan forward like sheep dogs wrangling a flock.
Trying to think logistically like I’ve been taught, I make a mental note: We must be toward the back of the fleet.
In between the rows of rigs, boys and girls of the Unsettled zip around on puttering dirt bikes or on battery-powered wheelchairs, kicking up dirt clouds, and appearing and disappearing around and under the enormous construction vehicles of the armada.
Laughing, some of them buzz us, and one of the bikes ridden by a girl with foggy green goggles over her eyes and a braid of thick black hair looped around her neck, comes close enough to brush the sleeve of my red leather jacket.
I kick at her but hit nothing but air as she pumps her fist and tears off, laughing and high-fiving her fellow bikers.
As Domino-teeth pushes us along, some of the younger Unsettled throw pebbles and fist-sized balls of aluminum foil at us from the windows and rooftops of the RVs, campers, and tractor-trailers we pass.
Like the Devoted’s hodgepodge of a compound and Epic’s underground lab-city, there’s more to the Unsettled than I first realized. Yes. Everything is dirty and coated with layers of sand on top of layers of dirt and a foundational layer of permanent grime. Yes. It smells of burning oil, mold, old vegetables, animal fat, and a swampy miasma of flatulence and body odor. But it’s still a city. Shuffling along in the middle of it, I’m already able to see some method in the middle of all the madness.