by Sparks,Cat
Grieve wasn’t listening. He walked all the way around the thick blue column of light a second time, touching it again and again, jumping each time sparks flew from his fingers.
She was almost crying, almost but not quite. “You can’t help me, Grieve, this is my destiny. I don’t want your blood on my hands, please won’t you just go? Do what I say for one time in your life.”
“There’s gotta be a way.”
“Not this time. It can make you see things. It can do whatever it wants.”
“Can’t make me do anything.” He stopped directly in front of her and looked her in the eyes.
“Grieve—”
“Shhh. Let me think.”
The Lotus Blue’s poetry had melted into song, flat and atonal, a lot like the funerary dirges of Grimpiper, chanted around stone cairns to mark the fallen.
Meanwhile, shadows started shifting, and it became harder for Star to see beyond the wall of blue. There was the scratching and scraping of metal on stone, thunks and clatters intruding upon the Lotus General’s miserable attempt at music.
Spider-things with elongated, mismatched appendages emerged from in-between the tanker wheels and started creeping closer to the light.
“Grieve!”
He snuck a speedy, sideways glance at the advancing mecha, then turned back to Star, his eyes shining, bright and blue. “Trust me, Star, just this once. I know I’m full of it, but this time, trust me—I know what I’m doing.”
More metal slammed and echoed in the distance, and there was a sound like steel blades clanging together. Not far away.
“Run Grieve—run!”
Grieve turned and ran, just like she told him—but not in the right direction. He ran beyond the pillar of light, away from the one and only exit. Ran, then stopped and turned around, back to face her and her luminous prison. He gathered up his strength, then came sprinting back towards her, full pelt, hard as he could. When he reached the light, he leapt through the air and slammed right into her, his shoulder raised, letting loose a scream as blue fire raked his nerves. He kept on screaming as he knocked her forward, clean out of the light, and they both tumbled into a heap on the cold grey ground.
Star was shaken by the shock of sudden release, but sprung up, pulling Grieve to his feet with her.
The Lotus Blue left its poem-song trailing in the air. “You—cockroach—get away from her,” it said in a booming voice.
The timid mecha spiders edged up closer, curiosity winning out over other concerns.
Star pulled Grieve up and shook him till his eyes were bright again. “Don’t let go of me—Lotus Blue won’t shoot you if there’s a risk of hitting me. It needs me alive, it wants my body. I’m our ticket out of here.”
He nodded. They linked arms and hurried in the direction of the metal cage, Grieve loping unevenly, slowed by his injured leg and smarting nerves. Clutching each other as they journeyed across the wide expanse of cold pale concrete, past the sleeping tankers and that rasping, scraping metal mecha. There was no time to look back and see if anything else more deadly was on their tails. No time to see if the sounds they were hearing weren’t solely in their heads.
= Seventy-five =
The square of light was small and fiercely bright, so bright that both Allegra and Jakome dismissed it as merely another illusion created to confuse them. Penetrating the wall of flames—even an imaginary one—had taken an emotional toll on them both. They didn’t trust anything, not even each other, and especially not the useless map with its pretty, distracting squiggles.
Falling rockets, Angels, rolling tankers, the excavation process—there was no telling what could be causing the booms and muffled shudders that shook the very foundation of the bunker, producing cascading rivers of concrete dust. But there was light: less blurred, grey-green, the colour of dank pond algae. A window.
“Daylight!” exclaimed Allegra. “We’ve reached an outside wall.”
Jakome wasn’t looking to where she pointed. His attention remained fixed upon the map. He shook it, trying to force further meaning from its luminous, writhing lines.
“We don’t need that thing anymore, we’ve found the way out. Quickly, help me up.”
He wasn’t certain, but not able to offer a better option he did what she commanded, knitting his fingers to give her a leg up. Her toes poked through the remains of her shredded slippers. She grunted and swore and then she had pulled herself through, her torso momentarily blocking the corridor’s light. Fine particles of sand rained down upon his face.
He looked back down at the map. Suddenly, the squiggles made sense. He was not standing that far from a proper exit. He walked fifty paces down the corridor, forgetting about the other window exit, and found, exactly where the map said it would be, a ventilation slit big enough for him to squeeze through without being hoisted up.
He found the slit and dug his way to freedom. Outside, he discovered Allegra standing on a ledge, staring into the distance, shielding her eyes from the sunlight.
The excavation of the bunker they’d escaped from was not complete, but the digging machines surrounding it lay still. Some had toppled on their sides, while others stood frozen, mid action, as if at any moment they might resume their labours.
The sand lay several metres below them. Too far to jump; they would have to find a passage down. Allegra was already looking for it. Jakome tucked the map inside his Impact suit, its lines and squiggles illegible in the bright sunlight.
There was no path, but they did find an access ladder welded to a wall; the dark grey metal cool to the touch, despite being directly in the sun. Allegra went first. Halfway down she looked up at him and suddenly began exclaiming, pointing up past him. Jakome turned and saw a giant needle of steel grey granite protruding from the top of the bunker’s three-tiered structure. Light was pouring out the top of it: light and cloud and swirling plumes of fragmented, glittery material. It was like nothing he’d ever seen before.
“We must hurry,” said Allegra. “Look—there’s the ship. Thank the gods it hasn’t sailed without us.”
Jakome had no spirit left for argument. Guilt was beginning to seep in through his skin. What had become of Tallis and Kian, abandoned fighting deep below the surface?
The familiar sight of the Razael flooded him with sweet relief. The ship was a safe haven, somewhere to rest up and take stock of the events that had befallen them all.
Closer to the ground, Jakome was shocked to realize that many of the dark shapes standing like trees around the bunker’s perimeter were not trees at all, nor ruins. They were Templar soldiers, frozen at attention. Old, some of them, patched and wounded, with missing limbs and scar ravaged faces. Fleshmesh men and women who should have been long dead and buried.
Allegra was at once both horrified and curious. “Where did all of you come from?” she said to the nearest one, reaching out to touch its sinewy hand.
“Don’t be an idiot,” spat Jakome. “You don’t know what’s going on here. They might still be functional.”
The soldiers did not look functional. They looked like dead things forced to stand and rot in the blazing heat. But she withdrew her hand with haste anyway.
They hurried past the sleeping machines, stepping around snapped off and discarded mecha parts and the broken bodies of Templars who had outlived their usefulness, some already half trampled into the ruddy ground. An eerie silence hung over the frozen shapes and mounds of shifted sand.
“Wait,” said Jakome. He stopped walking. She turned around, and they both stared back at the bunker, now silhouetted against a swirl of muddy colour.
“We can’t just leave the others in there,” he said.
She held her hands up in exasperation. “There’s nothing we can do for them. We can’t go back inside that thing—and even if
we did, we’d never find them. Not with all that . . . trickery. The map is broken. We were lucky to get out with our lives.”
The bunker loomed overhead like a shadow made solid, its dark surface sucking light from the sky, making the swirling morass overhead seem more menacing, more potent.
“Kian is my cousin, and Tallis my brother.”
“Your half-brother,” she corrected, “but what else can we do? They are grown men. They made their own choices.” Her eyes widened, startled by a sudden thought. “Mercy—Papa! He must still be waiting aboard the ship. Come on, we must hurry!”
Jakome picked up the pace, shouted after her, “So it’s different when a member of your own family is in danger?”
She shouted something back over her shoulder but the words were lost. Jakome didn’t like her, not at all. He knew he would have to watch his own back and keep his eyes wide open because he couldn’t trust her not to stab or shoot him at the first opportunity. Kian had been foolish to believe he could control her or arrange for any kind of deal.
They made it back to the ship without anybody—or anything—trying to stop them, sloughing through thick sand. The wind kept depositing more of it, pushing it up against the hull. The Razael would not be going anywhere; its main mast was snapped and had fallen across the deck. The ship lay at an angle, half buried under sand, so much so that the wheels weren’t even visible.
“Mohandas!” Allegra called out to her father. Jakome winced, too late to warn her that anybody might be standing up there on deck.
As she hurried to climb up the ladder up the side, he walked around the hull to inspect the damage. It was there that he found a grotesque object embedded deeply within a couple of the ship’s planks. A giant tooth, long, white, and sharp. The length and curve of a scimitar, to be precise. What kind of creature . . .
He didn’t have much time to ponder. From up on deck, Allegra started shouting. Jakome turned in time to see a curious thing, a beam of high intensity light stabbing down from the sky, hitting the bunker square on as a high pitched whining cut the air. It was not a lightning strike—he’d seen plenty of those in the days since three princes of Axa had set forth on their unforgettable journey. An adventure of which he was now the sole survivor.
= Seventy-six =
Daylight, blessed daylight. Open sand had never looked so beautiful, so inviting. Star and Grieve clambered out through the slit window, helping each other down the side of the bunker wall, dropping down onto the sand and running, dodging past the row of Templar soldiers still standing at attention.
Running, not looking back to see if anything was chasing them. Running as fast as they could through the cloying sand until a sound like magnified thunder filled the air, followed by a blast of hot wind against their backs, pushing with great intensity and force, sending them tumbling and crashing into one another so fast there wasn’t even time to react. The next thing they knew they were face down in the sand, arms and legs a tangled heap, screaming as a wave of heat washed over them.
Gravel rained down from the sky, then chunks of stone and lengths of twisted steel. They picked themselves up again, half ran, half stumbled, as fast as they possible could, hot wind whipping at their hair. That final sprint had taken everything and now the heat was sucking the life out of them.
Several smaller explosions followed, deep underground, shaking the sand and knocking them sideways, but they leant upon each other for support and kept on going, afraid of what might happen if they stopped.
Ahead, the Razael poked up above the dunes. When at last they had it squarely in their sights, both collapsed in a tumbled heap, panting, trying to catch their breath, eventually turning to look back at the smoking ruins where the bunker and its surrounding buildings used to stand. Not a single structure had survived the carnage—had survived whatever had caused such astonishing devastation. In its place, a boiling puddle of slick grey gloop. The air hung heavy with the stench of it, something mineral and pungent. Nothing natural. Nothing good about it. Wrapping their faces didn’t help. Grieve got up first and offered Star his hand. The sooner they were away from that burning mess, the better.
They walked in silence for a while, the nearness of the ship ahead almost intoxicating. The hope it offered, a safe place, safer than the open sand at least.
Eventually Star spoke. “What happened back there? No bomb could have carried that much power.”
He shook his head and kept on shaking it. “Don’t know. Don’t want to know—we made it out, both of us did, and that’s enough for me.”
Grieve had wrapped his face up tight—only his eyes were showing.
“I can’t believe you ran in after me, took such an enormous risk. Did you know the bunker was going to blow?”
He tugged down the fabric so she could hear him better. “Course not, that old lady told me there was plenty of time, so I just figured—”
“You saw Marianthe—when was that?”
“Her and that barking mad Templar of yours. Practically singing, he was so far gone.”
“What happened to them? Where did they go?”
He shrugged, glanced back at the smoking, bubbling ruin. There was nowhere they could have gone. Nothing around them but melted slag too hot to touch, let alone search. There would not, could not, have been any survivors.
She gripped his upper arm firmly. “We have to check. We have to go back, someone might have . . .”
He didn’t say anything. Didn’t need to—Star knew it was hopeless. He waited until she was ready to let it go, then they turned their backs on the devastation and continued on towards the ship.
They were not the first to reach the sanctuary of the vessel. Star caught flashes of red sari visible on the starboard side deck.
“Allegra!” she called out at the top of her voice as the girl came into full view, the sight of her friend filling her with energy she didn’t know she had. She trudged through thick sand to the side and scaled the ladder, climbed up and threw herself into her arms. “I’m so glad you’re safe. I was so worried. . .”
Allegra peeled herself away. “I’m fine,” she said, “but look at the sorry state of this ship.” She gestured at the broken mast. “How are we ever going to get this fixed?”
Star opened her mouth to speak but Allegra cut her short by shouting at a couple of men attempting to force barrels open with crowbars.
“Leave them alone—they have nothing to do with you! Get down in the hold and make yourselves useful.”
Star waited patiently for Allegra’s attention to return, but the girl became distracted by another man, and then another, none of whom were apparently doing anything right.
As Allegra shouted orders, Star became aware of Jakome seated off to one side, sharpening his blade with a whetstone, a grim expression on his face. When she tried to catch his eye, he looked away.
Mohandas was exactly where she had left him, propped amidst his cushions, swigging from a hip flask, completely ignoring his daughter and all the commotion.
“Your father is unharmed?” she shouted across the sloping deck.
“Yes yes, “Allegra shouted back. “He’s fine.”
Star smiled. Despite the air’s bitter burning taint, the burden of the past few weeks was beginning to lift from her shoulders. Somehow, against all odds, they’d done it—or someone had. The Lotus Blue had been destroyed, an act that had nearly cost them everything. But the Sand Road and its people were safe—for now, at least.
She’d already made the decision not to tell the others what she knew, the intelligence gleaned from her time encased in harsh blue light, the Lotus brain itself, or part of it. Its thoughts had been a powerful hurricane, impossible to read, but one thing she’d comprehended, loud and clear: the Blue was not the last of its kind. Others like it had survived the Ruin. They lay out t
here somewhere, sleeping, waiting to be discovered and awakened.
Grieve paced the deck, agitated, glaring at both Allegra and her father. “She’s nuts,” he said when Star tried to calm him down, aiming his thumb in the rich girl’s direction. “Reckons we can dig this ship out—it’s impossible, I had a look at the wheels up close. There’s barnacles sucking on the butyl, bastards to get off, those things, and I’m not touching them . . .”
Star nodded, waiting for him to finish. “Come with me,” she said in a low voice so the others couldn’t hear. She dragged him aside. “Let’s pack a kit and hit the sand.”
“The sand? But why—”
She smiled. “I’m going home to find my sister.”
He baulked in surprise. “You have a sister?”
“I do,” she answered proudly.
Grieve stood waiting for further explanation but she didn’t offer any. When she headed for the companionway, he followed, squeezing past and pushing ahead. “My territory,” he said, stabbing at his chest with his thumb. “I know where they keep the good stuff on this ship.”
When they emerged an hour later, a muttering group had gathered on the deck. Grieve recognised several faces from his own ill-fated voyage across the Black. The ones who had been hoping to score treasure in the bunker. They’d come out with their lives, but that was all. He ignored the gawks and gapes of those who’d expected him to be long dead, remembering how not one of them had even tried to help him.
Star and Grieve had taken as many essential provisions from below deck as they could comfortably carry. She hadn’t argued when Grieve explained that they weren’t stealing, that they had earned every scrap of what they were taking. For once she agreed with him.
Grieve managed to souvenir a coil of rope. She wished she had a tanker lance, but those on deck who still possessed such items did not look likely to part with them.
“Hey wait, where do you think you’re going?” said Allegra, cutting in front of them. She’d been shouting at a group of men who’d been sitting and smoking, passing liquor and utterly ignoring her instructions.