by R. A. Rock
“But I’m not part of your community. If your rules don’t apply to Shiv, why do they apply to me?”
“Well…”
Then I interrupted her, suddenly wary.
“Wait, who am I supposed to have had sex with?”
She turned even more red.
“Well…”
“And is the usual punishment execution?”
“Usually it’s banishment,” she finally got out.
“And who am I supposed to have had sex with?” I repeated my question.
“Me,” she said.
I was outraged.
“We never had sex,” I said. “You lying sl-”
I stopped myself but I could see in her eyes she knew what I had been about to say.
“There was the intent,” she said, primly. “And you seduced me. That’s against the law, too.”
I was stunned.
“Are you kidding me?” I said. “You practically jump me, I refuse you, and now you’re going to execute me?”
“Yes.”
And there was no humour in her face.
Fuck. Hell hath no fury, eh?
I was angry. But not too worried because with our powers, there was no way that these people could really harm us, unless she pulled out a gun and shot me right now. And even then, Grace could do Kinetic surgery, the others could heal me, and it was highly unlikely that I would die.
“Hold out your hands,” she said, pulling something out from one of her desk drawers.
“What’s she doing?” Yumi sent.
“Putting some strange looking cuffs on me.”
“Why?” I said, not trusting her at all.
“Just do it,” Jeff said, his gun a sharp point pressing into my back.
I held out my hands, smelling the scent of her shampoo as she came around her desk and clapped large cuffs that felt weird on my left wrist.
“Does that guy have a gun?” Yumi sent, her voice almost a whisper that I couldn’t hear. “Should I come down there?”
“Nah, I’m good,” I sent back as Natasha closed the other cuff. “They just look weird.”
I kept my face impassive, though I could tell that the second half of my message hadn’t gone anywhere.
“Yumi?”
Nothing. I couldn’t feel her mind. Couldn’t sense the soul bond. I was alone in my head.
“Grace?”
“Shiv?”
“Where did you get these cuffs?” I said, suddenly making the connection. The cuffs had cut off my ability to use telepathy.
“You think we just let sick people walk around our community?” Natasha said, looking at me like I was an idiot. “We didn’t let your friend Audrey go because she was so healthy.”
“Audrey?”
Oh fuck no. She had sold us out?
“She told me that you folks were hard to capture and that we had to use a special metal for the cuffs. In exchange for this useful information, she was allowed free range of our city.”
I couldn’t believe it. Audrey fucking Merrywell had betrayed us. Again.
“Fortunately, we have stockpiled every metal and alloy on Earth even the most rare,” Natasha went on.
“Even Adamantium,” I said, trying to keep the despair our of my voice.
Not only was adamantium unbreakable — and necessary for the time travel devices — but it repressed the ante-prefrontal cortex. It was what Audrey’s evil team back home had used to create collars that could keep us from using our abilities. It was really the only way to capture someone with our powers.
And she had told Natasha about it.
To gain her freedom.
She was definitely more pissed at us than we had thought.
My only hope was that she had thought Natasha wouldn’t have any use for the information.
God damn it.
I couldn’t believe Audrey had sold us out.
And now I couldn’t warn the others.
“Take him to his cell. You will be executed outside at dawn.”
“Outside?” I said as Jeff grabbed my arm and pushed me towards the door. “You’re going to go outside?”
“We do occasionally,” she said, with a graceful shrug of her elegant shoulder. “Didn’t you see one of our citizens and that was what led you to the entrance?”
She had a point.
“Some of us go outside when there’s a good reason.” She paused and I could see the vindictive gleam in her eye. “And this is a very good reason.”
Adamantium
Yumi
Chad was in with Natasha for his morning meeting with her when our telepathic connection went dead. My heart nearly stopped and I contacted Gracie immediately.
“Grace, come here. And teleport. Something’s wrong.”
Grace appeared instantly in front of me in my bedroom. Her face was tearstained and her hair wild, but she seemed to have got herself under control.
“Did you get Shiv the stuff?” I said.
“Yes, I teleported it to him in the storage room they’re holding him in about two hours ago. He just contacted me and he’s almost done.”
“Almost as in he needs another day or almost as in he needs another hour?”
She shrugged.
“I’m not sure but I’m thinking closer to hours. Why?”
“First of all, they’re going to execute Chad and Shiv.”
“What?” she said, clearly distressed but I waved away her concern.
“Of course we won’t let them. But that’s not what I wanted to tell you.”
“What then?” she said, looking at me like I was crazy not to worry about them executing Chad and Shiv.
“Something really weird just happened. Chad and I were sending back and forth while he was talking to Natasha and then he suddenly cut out. And I can’t contact him anymore.”
“What?” Grace said again. Then her eyes’s went a little blank and I knew she was trying to contact him. “I can’t hear him either. Do you think it’s because of the fused bricks?”
I thought about that.
“It might be. But it didn’t feel like that. It was like…”
I tried to think of a way to describe it.
“You know when we had the dog collars on when Merrywell captured us?”
“Yes,” Gracie’s face was troubled at the thought.
“Well, it felt like that. Complete silence.”
“What about the soul bond?”
“Nothing,” I shook my head.
“What do you think that means?” Grace said.
“Chad said that Natasha was putting some weird looking cuffs on him.”
“Hey Shiv, you still working?” I heard Grace send.
“All good here,” he said. “I’ll be done soon.”
“How soon?” I sent.
“Why? What’s wrong?” Shiv sent, picking up on our anxiety.
“They put some cuffs on Chad and now we can’t send to him telepathically.”
“No way.”
“Yes way,” Grace sent back. “But you stay focused on finishing fixing those devices. I’ve broken the lock on the door so that will keep them out, even if they come for you. Try to finish. Yumi and I will figure out what’s happening with Chad.”
“Okay,” Shiv sent and then I felt him shield from us, so that he wouldn’t be distracted.
“I”m going to get him out of there right now,” Grace declared, her eyelids closing.
“No,” I said, grabbing her shoulders and shaking her. “You can’t teleport him out of there. That would confirm their suspicions.”
“Fine,” she said. “What do we do?”
“We can’t get caught, Grace,” I said, staring into her emerald eyes that were filled with worry and fear. “Or they’ll be able to execute the guys. And who knows where they’ll stop, once they start. It’s okay for you to teleport us because nobody’s going to see it. And we absolutely can’t let them catch us.”
“Okay, where should I teleport us, then?” sh
e said.
“Somewhere that no one else goes. We need to hide out for a bit and figure out what to do.”
A second later, we appeared at the narrow passageway where Chad and I had got stuck. I blushed, remembering everything and was thankful for the darkness to cover it.
“Did you have to bring us here?” I said, as Grace switched on a flashlight she must have teleported from Chad’s room.
“No one comes here,” she pointed out. “And besides I want to see that brick. You said we have to hide out for a bit so we have time, right? Come on.”
She entered the narrow passage and then she paused.
“Or do you want to go first? Maybe you can squeeze past me.”
Her face was full of mischief and I smiled, shaking my head. I was just glad she could still joke. I needed Grace on her game if we were going to get the five of us out of this city alive.
“Ha, ha,” I said. “Just go.”
I followed her and marvelled that I had thought I could get past Chad. I had been so scared from the panic attack that I hadn’t been thinking straight at all. Had they built this place in a time of famine when people were super skinny or something? Why would they make a passage so narrow?
We arrived at the end and crouched down, our boots crunching on the gritty floor. There was a metal plate attached to what must have been the founding block that was made of what looked like cement. Grace shone the light on it and rubbed the dust off.
“What the hell?” she said, flabbergasted.
“What?” I said, craning my head to see. The dust tickled my nose and Grace sneezed.
2002, the plate read.
“That can’t be right,” she said. “Natasha told Chad that the city was built when they first had warning. And that was only three years ago.”
“As in 2017?”
“Yes, exactly.”
“But this says 2002.”
“Chad did say that he thought Natasha was lying.”
“But if it was built in 2002, then that means that it was built fifteen years before the solar flare.”
“Fifteen years before…” Grace was silent. “Do you really think they could have built this place in three years even?”
I shrugged, then realized that she couldn’t see the movement in the darkness.
“It seems unlikely in this time. Especially since they would have had to do it in complete secrecy. Nobody knew about this place.”
“Nobody?” Grace said. “Or only a select few?”
“What do you mean?”
“Remember Shiv thought he saw Steve Jobs?”
“Yes.”
“Well, later, he told me that he thought that Steve Jobs had died in 2011 but that he must have been wrong.”
“Shiv is never wrong.”
“Exactly. And he’s also pointed out a lot of other innovators, scientists, artists, and other famous people who’s brilliance changed the world.”
“That’s weird.”
“Not weird. Smart. It’s as if they were stockpiling, not only supplies, but also the greatest minds in the world.”
“Whoa.”
“Yeah,” Grace said, her own brilliant mind at work. “You know what else?”
“What?” I said, wondering what else could be more impressive than holing up with all the smartest and most talented people in the world to survive a disaster.
“It’s as if they knew the solar flare was coming.”
I froze.
“You mean that it wasn’t a solar flare.”
“Look at the facts, Yumi. They built the city in plenty of time to collect all the Victorian furnishings, they gathered all the greatest minds of the twenty first century here. Probably faked their deaths!”
“What?” I said again, my mind blown.
“And then when the solar flare hit, they just went on with their lives as if nothing had happened. Rebuilt all the bits of civilization they wanted to keep. And waited for the world to emerge from the darkness.” She snapped her fingers. “Shiv told me that the people who had been in these cities were the ones who rebuilt the world. The governments and people of influence came mostly from the survivors and their descendants, who had been protected from the Dark Times in the secret cities.”
“The effects of the solar flare might have been caused by something else,” I said as we stood up and made our way out of the passageway. “Something that was not a solar flare.”
“Really?” Grace said.
“Yes. What happened is remarkably similar to the damage caused by an EMP bomb.”
“Did they have those then?”
“I think they did. They had only just been developed.”
“Are you saying that someone built a bunch of cities, put all the people they wanted to keep in them, and then set off an EMP bomb in the vein of a Noah’s Ark style scenario?” She gasped audibly, then went on. “Killing off all the unworthy people through rioting, starvation, illness, and just not being able to survive? While the people who set off the bomb, lived happily in splendour under the Earth?”
“That’s what I’m saying, Grace.”
“That’s terrible,” Grace said, looking as horrified as I felt. “Nessa and Matt need to know about this.”
“I don’t see how it will help them,” I said. “It’ll just piss them off. But we’ll tell them when we see them, anyway.”
I knew we had just been distracting ourselves from the shit show that was our lives by thinking about that other stuff. But now we needed to concentrate on our plan to get our of this underground city that had become a prison. Or maybe it had always been one.
“What are we going to do about Chad?” Grace said, looking to me to solve the problem, the way she had when we were little girls.
Not a problem. I had been trained to figure out shit like this.
“Well, I have an idea,” I said, standing up and brushing off my hands. “Instead of trying to break out of this ants nest ourselves. We’re going to let them help us escape.”
Death Knoll
Chad
At dawn, they walked Shiv and I, in our cuffs, all the way up the stairs to the outside world above New Winnipeg. And that first breath of fresh air was intoxicating. It really was.
I hate recycled air.
I know, you would think that living on a space station I would have become accustomed to it. But no. I hated it.
But this air was fresh and damp. It had the sweet smell of poplars and grass mixed with it. And it filled my lungs in a way that recycled air never could.
I glanced at Shiv and wondered where the bracelets were.
And what the girls were planning to do to get us out of this. I had a bash them over the head with the heavy cuffs plan but I didn’t have much hope for it, not with this many people. Without our abilities, we were at their mercy.
When I saw the noose, I was outraged.
“You people call yourselves civilized?” I said, turning to look at Natasha. “And you’re having a good old fashioned hanging? You’re as insane as the Plague Carriers.”
She scowled at me and then glanced around quickly. And I knew that the insult had hit the mark and also made her nervous.
But she was very determined to kill us and that scared me. I met Shiv’s eyes but he didn’t say anything. We hadn’t been given a chance to talk so I didn’t know if he had finished fixing the time travel devices or had any contact with Yumi and Grace.
Jeff was behind me, as usual it seemed, pushing his gun into my back and making me climb the surprisingly well made gallows they had constructed. I wondered if they did this sort of thing all the time. Soon Shiv and I were standing side by side facing the unsympathetic crowd with the ropes around our necks.
Audrey suddenly darted out of the doorway and ran straight for us. One of the guards grabbed her easily and held her by the waist.
“No,” she yelled at Natasha. “You can’t do this. I didn’t mean for you to kill them. I just thought you wanted to lock them up.”
&n
bsp; “They’re in my way,” Natasha said, showing how cold and cruel she really was behind the pretty smile. “We talked about how women have to be ruthless if they’re to maintain power, Audrina. You understand.”
“I don’t understand,” she said, looking crazed. “That’s how I lost every shred of power I ever had, Natasha. Killing people. Killing innocent people. Don’t make the same mistake.”
But Natasha only smiled at her as she kicked against the guard’s huge body without effect.
“It’s not a mistake,” she said, turning to Jeff. “Do it.”
Audrey fought harder but the guy was way too big.
“I’m sorry Chad, Shiv. Please,” she screamed. “I didn’t mean for it to turn out this way.”
And I couldn’t be mad at her anymore. She made such bad decisions sometimes but I had come to care about her. I glanced at Shiv.
“Forgiven,” I shouted over the noise she was making. She suddenly stopped struggling, tears in her eyes.
“Really?”
Shiv and I both nodded.
This seemed to surprise and confound Natasha.
“You’re forgiving this woman? She betrayed you. Sold you out. She’s the one who will have caused your death.”
“That’s right,” I said, looking out over the small crowd that stood assembled to watch us die. “That’s what the good guys do, Natasha. But you wouldn’t know about that, would you. Cause you’re one of the bad guys.”
The citizens who were here, turned to look at her, many of their faces troubled at the thought that their mayor was a bad guy.
“I am doing what is best for our city,” she said, straightening and attempting to look righteous.
“Whatever,” Shiv said in a bored tone of voice that wasn’t loud but carried nonetheless. “You could let us go and the Plague Carriers would probably kill us anyway. But you’re not. You’re killing us out of spite and revenge. And that’s what makes you one of the bad guys.”
There was muttering in the crowd.
The people didn’t like this turn of events at all.
That was good because I was getting pretty nervous that Yumi and Grace hadn’t shown up yet. Were they being held too? Were we on our own? Were they really going to kill us? I wasn’t ready to die.
“Sounds like the sort of civilization we were trying to leave behind when we created New Winnipeg,” a voice called out from the crowd. “What are these men even charged with? Did they have a trial? Or is this just a witch hunt, Natasha? Another one of your failed conquests.”