by K A Riley
She repeats what we already know. “Hypnagogics.”
I nod my confirmation, and Arlo asks what we should do.
Sara’s abrupt chuckle startles me, but not as much as what she actually says. “Why do anything? We have the best seats in the house” With all the appearance of a Wealthie casting an amused condescending eye on the commoners below, she saunters closer to the window on the opposite side of the cab. “Let them kill each other down there. We’re safe.”
Safe? We’re powerless and weaponless in a glass box thirty feet above Hell.
Scowling, I whip around to confront Sara. She gives a slow, deliberate turn away from her window, and I know in an instant that I’m nothing in her eyes. Just a nuisance. A prop. A tiny gap in the ground she’s happy to step over to get to where she wants to be.
I move toward her, anyway, but she stops me with a raised hand, and it feels like I’ve just slammed face-first into a synth-steel wall. “I know you want to take it out on me, Branwynne,” she says, her voice going satiny soft in my ears. “But I didn’t kill Mattea. And it wasn’t the Unsettled. Those Outposters were right. It was the Devoted.” Her eyes do a skipping dance from mine to Matholook’s and back to mine. “It was always the Devoted. But they’re not just the annoying instigators back East or the quirky little community out here you thought they were. And now you’ve got a nice seat in the front row of the balcony where you can see that for yourself.” She sounds sad when she adds, “We all can.”
Matholook puts his hand halfway up like he’s about to object, but Sara stops him, too, with a shake of her head. “No sense denying it, anymore,” she smiles. She directs our attention to the outside of the crane’s lofty cab where thick plumes of smoke are bursting up around us as far as we can see, and it looks like the entire desert of scrub brush, red rocks, deep canyons, and the entire Army of the Unsettled are being blitzed by a relentless meteor storm. “There are only two possibilities. In ten minutes, we’ll either be dead, or else we’ll be the last ones standing. If we’re dead, our problems are over.” Her bootheels thudding as even as heartbeats on the cab’s steel floor, she steps forward and stops in front of Matholook, planting a hand on his shoulder. It’s not an aggressive move or a flirtatious one. It’s more like the way a mother might reach out to her petulant child to keep him focused, to make sure he knows she means business. He looks down at her thin, delicate fingers on his shoulder and follows her arm up to her dull, blue eyes. “If we’re alive,” she tells him with a happy shrug, “your problems are just beginning.”
She drops her hand and lowers her head, and I can’t tell if she’s about to laugh or cry. She does neither. Instead, she sighs before gathering herself and lifting her eyes to meet all of ours. Her gaze settles on me, and a zippy little shiver skitters down my neck. The corner of Sara’s mouth parts, barely enough to let the words out. “It’s like Rain says in her chess lessons, isn’t it? The most effective attack will come from the enemy you thought was a friend.”
My own lips part, but anything I might have said is cut off by Ignacio, who calls out, “Hey!” loud enough for his voice to echo in the confined space of our elevated cab.
Startled, we all spin around to see that he’s got his back to us and is staring out of the window. “Something’s happening.”
“What is it?” Arlo asks, as we turn our attention away from Sara and gather in a huddle around Ignacio.
He doesn’t say anything, but he does press the tip of his finger to the glass.
The five of us circle around him, also pushing forward and doing our best to peer down through the scratched, foggy window into the dust storm swirling over the clashing armies.
Below us, most of the eight, black-clad Hypnagogics have faded into the battle. I can only see two of them from here. One of them—a girl with honey-colored skin and short, glossy pink hair visible under her hood—is holding up the front end of a cobalt-blue pickup truck with one hand and dragging a kicking, screaming teenage boy out from underneath with the other. The truck bounces on its front wheels as she drops it back down. She slings the boy with one hand, and he smashes back-first into the side of a second pickup truck, this one gunmetal gray with its doors and hood painted white. His head cracks and explodes in a splatter of blood. We can’t hear the sound of bone on steel from here, but it feels like we can.
The other Hypnagogic—also a girl but shorter and with her hood down to expose her stringy brown hair and a face full of freckles—is leaping with inhuman speed, balance, and lethal accuracy from the roof of one of the stalled yellow dump trucks to the next and firing deadly rounds from a pair of enormous Action Express, fifty-caliber Desert Eagles that look like golden canons in her small hands.
But the Hypnagogics aren’t the “something” Ignacio summoned us over to see.
It’s not even the Unsettled army, regrouped and over the surprise attack on their caravan and launching their own counterattack of rifle fire and precision strikes from entire battalions of archers, spear-throwers, and hundreds of soldiers wading fearlessly into battle with nothing more than hockey sticks, aluminum baseball bats, and long-handled, curve-bladed gardening tools.
And it’s not even the Devoted, who fall by the dozens, bloody and screaming in agony under the defensive stand by the brave soldiers of the Unsettled.
Instead, what draws our full, riveted attention, are the resurrections.
As we watch, fallen soldiers from the Cult of the Devoted—gashed, bloody, and fish-belly pale as life drains from their bodies—gather their feet under themselves, stand back up, and, shaking off what looks from here like some kind of zombie daze, charge back into the fray.
“Are you seeing this?” Ignacio asks, his voice high-pitched with disbelief. As mesmerized as a little kid at a snake cage in the zoo, he’s leaning forward with both palms on the glass now.
A woman in Devoted battle gear, her patriotic colors now soaked red with blood, stands up and, hunched over and apparently oblivious to the gaping wounds in her face and neck, searches around among the rocks and the desert thorn bushes for a weapon. A few feet away, one of her fellow Devoted soldiers stares down at the brown handle of the twelve-inch hunting knife protruding from his chest. Drawing a pistol from a holster in his boot, he makes a beeline toward a flustered regiment of the Unsettled, firing his weapon as they flee or fall.
Next to him, Arlo mutters, “It’s the zombie apocalypse.”
“Zombies are a movie invention,” Libra protests, her hands planted in defiance on her hips but her eyes locked, like the rest of ours, on the impossibility of what’s happening below. “That…down there,” she insists with a stab of her finger toward the scene below, “isn’t possible.”
Her black hair hangs in curving waves over her face, and I can’t make out her expression. But I know her well enough by now to know she’ll have her eyes narrowed and her jaw set in defiance. Libra is a grounded, down-to-earth girl. Her comfort zone is only as big as what she can get her mind around. And, right now, the burning world outside of this cab is a million times bigger than any thought she could ever hope to hold in her head.
Through the swirling fog of battle below, we continue to watch as the Devoted—the living and the dead—refuse to break off their attack in the face of whatever stand the Unsettled attempt to make.
Even though what we’re seeing is technically impossible, whether Libra wants to believe it or not and in spite of my deepest desire for this not to be happening, I trust my own eyes. They’ve seen too much for me not to.
When a fleeing group of the Unsettled cause the smoke around them to clear, we see the very last sight anyone would expect to see in the middle of a war:
A young girl.
Not more than ten-years-old, she’s wearing a kid-sized version of the Devoted military gear. Smiling, she moves among the dead Devoted placing her small hands, her fingers splayed out like starfish, on the temples and chests of the fallen soldiers.
And, one by one, like the man and the w
oman we personally saw rise from the dead, those same Devoted—bloody and very dead, themselves—stand up, shake off the fog like deep sleepers after a long nap, gather their scattered weapons, and rejoin the fray.
Brushing back her hair, Libra looks over her shoulder at me, her eyes dark with a question whose answer I think she already knows.
At the same time, Matholook and I say, “Gwernna.”
Gwernna. Ten-years-old. Cute. Quiet. A cherished and protected member of the Cult of the Devoted. And possibly the most important Emergent in the world.
The Devoted swept in like an ocean tide. The Unsettled pushed back in a surge of their own. And now, the tide that was the Devoted has swollen into an endlessly reviving and unstoppable wave.
“We have to help!” Libra cries.
Like the rest of us, I’m sure, her loyalties have automatically latched onto the Unsettled. Although Matholook is our friend, new classmate, and member of the Cult of the Devoted and, although I’ve personally met and been treated with great kindness and hospitality by the leaders of the Devoted, what we’re seeing now makes any alliance with them out of the question.
The Unsettled are ferocious in battle, but they have rules. The Devoted are merciless killing machines. Before our eyes, they swarm through the ranks of the Unsettled, firing high-powered rifles and disemboweling the wounded with serrated, arm-length blades and laughing and high-fiving each other the entire time.
They’re not just soldiers on a mission. They’re not civilians lured into a fight. And they’re definitely not a community of historians who’ve been recruited into a battle against their will.
They’re enjoying this…as if there’s no place else they’d rather be.
“What do you suggest we do?” Ignacio asks Libra with a curt snap. “Even if we had our weapons, there’s thousands of people fighting down there. And with that girl in the mix, the Devoted could keep fighting forever!”
He’s right, and the desperation of helpless futility in his voice hits me as hard as any punch I’ve ever taken.
While we watch and hope no one happens to look up, Gwernna—the delicate-looking little girl I once personally rescued from the Unsettled—walks in a casual stroll through the clashing, fighting, and dying bodies, reviving them one at a time before moving on to the next.
For all their civility and commitment to hospitality and history, the Devoted—the living and the recently revived—are ruthless, fearless fighters.
And why shouldn’t they be? With Gwernna wandering in the middle of their army bringing the dead back to life, they’re immortal.
The fallen soldiers of the Devoted continue to clamber to their feet and stretch like people waking up from a refreshing sleep.
The giant Bendegatefran, his upper body still visible even though he must be a quarter mile away by now, continues to swing that tree-sized axe of his in big, swooping arcs. It’s covered in more blood each time it reappears above the low-hanging clouds of smoke and ash above his head.
Faced with an indestructible enemy, the Unsettled instantly doubt their ability to succeed. I can see it from here. We all can. The way they halfway engage or else scurry for cover…whatever game plan they had for this war has gone completely out the window. I don’t know what their plan was or what they expected, but I’m betting it wasn’t this.
The Unsettled are going to lose. And we won’t be far behind.
Libra’s crying on one side of me with Matholook slowly backing away on the other. He shakes his head like he can’t believe what he’s seeing. Or, more like he’s trying to will away the fact that what he’s seeing is one hundred percent real.
Their own eyes glistening with tears they’re trying hard to hold back, Ignacio and Arlo turn to me for answers. They ask me about a game plan of our own. They beg me to try again to connect with Haida Gwaii. They ask if I think we can climb down from here without being seen and maybe find our way back to the Academy.
“Or find our weapons,” Libra suggests through a choked sob. “So we can at least have a fighting chance.”
On the far side of the cab, with her shoulders pressed to the glass and her arms folded, Sara grunts, and I realize she’s resigned to our fate. Live or die…I don’t think she cares one way or the other.
Arlo clamps his fingers around my wrist just below the cuff of my jacket. The waffle pattern of raised scars on his face takes on a blistering red blush. “There’s got to be something we can do,” he pleads. It’s a suggestion that lands somewhere between hope and terror.
But I’ve got nothing to offer. Nothing but my own fear and my own indecision, two of the last things any warrior could want.
And yet, trapped in here with the riptides of war churning below and ready to drag us down into its unforgiving undertow, they’re all I have.
39
Surrender
After all that, we’re up here in this cab for…fifteen minutes? Half an hour? A year?
What’s happened to my sense of time?
It occurs to me then: War doesn’t just claim buildings, equipment, vehicles, land, and lives.
War takes away time.
The time to think. The time to learn and grow. The time to be at peace with yourself long enough to know your own mind.
Over however long it takes for the fiery apocalypse to play out below us, Sara and Matholook both inch their way back into our Asylum. We’re no longer a confused, suspicious bunch of bickering, anxious kids. We’ve returned to being a collection of six teenagers with a shared sense of regret about what’s come before and a terrifying uncertainty about what might happen next.
I’ve faced impossible odds before. Hell, I grew up isolated in the Tower of London while millions died outside the stone walls of the ancient prison-castle. But these feelings I’ve got now—helplessness, uncertainty, and insecurity—well, those are brand new. And I’m not a fan.
Standing behind me, Matholook loops his arms around my waist and rests his chin on my shoulder. “It’s going to be okay,” he whispers. “We’re all going to be okay.”
With the tension in here and the bloodshed outside, it doesn’t take a mind-reader, which I’m not, to know he doesn’t believe any of that, himself.
But I give him credit. He’s trying.
And not totally without results. I know his arms aren’t enough to keep me safe. I know his words of reassurance aren’t enough to stop the fear or quell the pain. But his chest against my back and his breath in my ear feel…amazing. His hands are clasped together at the bottom seam of my leather jacket with my hands resting on his. He’s enveloping me as sure as if he were a human shield, and I get a little heart flutter I’ve felt less than a handful of times in my entire life (and Matholook has been responsible for nearly all of them), and I’m all of a sudden sweaty and out of breath even though all I’ve done is stand here in terror, pretty much waiting to be discovered by the Devoted and, eventually, killed.
Within the Branwynne-Matholook bubble, the world is okay at the moment. Except for everything and everyone around us.
This is what I need: Me, Matholook, and nobody and nothing else.
It’s a split-second moment of blissful, utopian perfection. And that’s the problem with split-seconds: They never last.
Her voice far too loud for the small cab we’re in, Libra cries out, “Look” and points to a spot in a square clearing between a dozen parked excavators about a hundred yards from the base of our crane.
In an area not any bigger than the size of the average football pitch and surrounded by the rust and black bodies and arms of the construction vehicles, Angel Fire steps forward, his head bloodied, and his once over-sized but pristine business suit smudged with dirt and ripped to shreds.
He climbs up on top of the cab of one of the excavators and signals his troops to stand down.
We can’t hear the words from here, but the slump of his shoulders and his downcast eyes make his intentions crystal clear.
I’m no lip-reader, but it feels lik
e I am—like all of us are—as we watch him order his Unsettled troops to surrender and give up their positions and their weapons.
Like rodents emerging from their underground burrows after a predatory threat has passed, the Unsettled emerge from every vehicle, shadow, and laneway.
Everything about Angel Fire screams defeat: The downcast eyes. The loose arms and fidgeting fingers. The lack of anything resembling strength or confidence in his eyes. And he looks more than ever like an undersized little boy in an oversized business suit with no idea what to do now or what comes next.
I don’t know what he thinks will happen. But what actually happens is sure to be a hundred times worse.
As we watch him watching the Cult of the Devoted and their immortal army, Bendegatefran and Efnisien, Bendegatefran’s half-brother, shoulder their way through the crowd of gloating Devoted and the dozens of the Unsettled they currently have on their knees, their wrists zip-cuffed behind their backs.
Justin and Treva, the leaders of the Devoted edge their way through the crowd as well and stand in front of Angel Fire in high-shouldered triumph. They’re not alone.
Each of the two leaders has a child in front of them. Justin stands behind a small boy, while Treva stands behind a small girl.
Justin and Treva exchange words with Angel Fire we can’t hope to hear from here, and I’m about to breathe a sigh of relief and suggest we use this break in the action to make our escape when the mirrored flash of a dark blade glints in the air above Justin’s head. It’s a black-coated, twelve-inch Bowie knife.
The exact same kind of knife that girl in the desert used to kill Mattea.
In a horrific moment of déjà vu, Justin plants the knife under the trembling chin of the small boy.
Libra, both palms pressed to the glass, stares down. “You don’t think he’d—”