by K A Riley
“Ledge?” Brohn asks.
“Ledge. Baron o’ the Banters.” Trolly’s eyes bounce back and forth between us, and, for a second, she looks more amused than dangerous. “You all always ask so many questions?”
“Only when we’re outnumbered and about to be killed,” Brohn jokes.
It feels like the moment’s been put on pause before Trolly breaks the tense silence. “I like ya already. Be a shame ta lose ya. Could use yer ‘elp against the Royals. But it ain’t my call now, is it?”
“Come on, now,” Chunder wheezes before hocking up a glob of phlegm and spitting it into one of the deep pits in the street next to us.
Trolly signals to the six archers behind us to take our weapons. Brohn gives the powerful-looking girl in front of him a grimacing glare, but he unslings his arbalest and hands it over. The girl tries to meet Brohn’s eyes, but then she lets out a little groan and stumbles as Brohn drops the heavy weapon into her arms.
One by one, the other archers take Cardyn’s twin tomahawk axes, Rain’s dart-drivers, and Terk’s flail.
Out of the corner of my eye, I catch one of the girls stopping behind Terk. She seems to notice the round shape of the Auditor’s disk pressing out from under his brown cloak. She does a quick double-take but doesn’t say anything as she goes to rejoin her fellow archers.
I still don’t know what the Auditor is exactly, but she’s apparently smart enough to keep her non-existent mouth shut.
The archers ignore me and hand our weapons over to Chunder who loads them into the rag-filled shopping cart.
I guess they figure I’m unarmed and just wearing a pair of ordinary leather gloves because they ignore my Talons. My Conspiracy and I exchange a furtive glance at this oversight.
We’re marched through a gate in the giant wall of steel and junk about a hundred yards ahead and are taken from there around the outer perimeter of an expansive line of small sheds lined up in orderly rows.
Extending into the distance over patches of brown grass and trampled dirt, the tent city before us goes on and on as far as the eye can see.
The majority of the sheds are ordinary, aluminum-sided garden sheds. Some are made of wood. Others are cobbled together out of mismatching strips of old lumber. Most of their rooftops are coated in thick carpets of dried grass.
A creek running through a nearby section of the makeshift town has flooded, leaving a long strip of gloppy, red mud and countless dead, dying, and decaying fish and birds on its banks. Knee deep in the muck, a dozen small boys and girls are bent down, loading the dead animals into wicker baskets strapped to their backs.
Trolly catches us staring out at the camp. “Impressive, innit?”
Cardyn makes a gulping sound in the back of his throat. “Gross.”
Trolly shakes her head and points out over the hundreds of thatched rooftops. “I meant the settlement.”
“It’s…big,” I say.
“‘yde Park,” Chunder beams. “A city wiffin a city, this.”
Trolly shakes us from our awed reverie and orders us in the opposite direction toward a huge brick mansion.
I’m thinking maybe our luck is changing for the better. After all, in our time away from the Valta, we’ve been kept in some pretty bleak places: an underground bunker, a stifling rail car, sterile one-room cells, a high-tech VR-lab at the top of Krug Tower. But an opulent-looking mansion of red brick and mostly intact glass windows…that seems to sing safety and sophistication.
Instead of going up to the doors at the front of the mansion, though, we’re escorted around the side, through a pair of bent iron gates and over to a slanted set of red-painted stables. Surprisingly, the four wooden barns, built in a semi-circle around a fenced-in corral of hard-packed mud, are in fairly good condition. There are boards missing on the sides, and there are gaping holes in the rooftops, but, considering the hellscape we just came out of, they’re not too bad.
Inside the humid barn, we walk across a floor of moldy, musty hay.
Emaciated, sway-backed, bleary-eyed animals peer out at us from over the top half of a line of stall doors.
“Horses?” Terk asks me from the side of his mouth.
“Looks like it. And a few goats. Sheep. And donkeys. Not the healthiest looking ones I’ve ever seen, though.”
“Not the healthiest ones I’ve ever smelled,” Cardyn gags with his eyes and nose rumpled into a wrinkle of embellished revulsion.
At the end of our forced march, there’s a stall with a set of thick iron bars instead of the half-gates of chipped and weathered wood.
Trolly and Chunder usher us inside as the six archers draw their arrows behind them, ensuring we don’t make any last-ditch attempts at opposition or escape.
Not that that’s on our to-do list, anyway. If it was just me and Brohn, we might have risked fighting our way out. As long as I’m tapped into Render, I can access some pretty superhuman reflexes. And, of course, Brohn’s skin is tough as a tank.
But Cardyn, Terk, and Rain…they’re as vulnerable to knives, swords, and arrows as anyone. We can’t take the chance of making a move until we know for sure who these people are, what they want with us, and how much danger we’re really in. If we can negotiate our way out of here, we will. If not, we’re going to be forced to fight.
When the gate clangs shut behind us, one of the smaller boys slips a clunky iron padlock through the two thick black rings on the side of the cage and clicks it closed.
Standing back to admire their prize through the bars, Trolly and Chunder guess about what this mystery person named Ledge is going to do with us.
“Stocks?” Trolly asks.
Chunder answers, “Drownin’?”
“Hangin’?”
“Dunkin’?”
“Drawin’ ‘n quarterin’?”
Cardyn squeezes his face up against the bars of our cell. “I haven’t heard ‘let them go’ as an option, but can I just say, it should definitely be on the table.” When they stare blank-faced at him, Cardyn fixes his gaze on Chunder and suggests, firmly and with that weird Emergent cadence of his, that he let us go.
Chunder’s eyes go glossy, and he steps over to where a ring of keys, thick around and loaded up enough to be fit for the busiest dungeon master, is hanging on an iron spike hammered into a vertical wooden support strut.
Confused, the team of archers behind him lowers their bows, but Trolly leaps over and twists her brother’s arm behind his back. She leans her weight into him, slamming him face-first into the thick beam.
He struggles against her, and she’s forced to pound the side of her open hand into his neck and crack a sharp kick to the back of his knee at nearly the same time. He drops to the ground as limp as the canvas sacks of grayish-brown hay lining the stable gates behind him.
“‘eard about your kind,” Trolly says, whipping around to face Cardyn. There’s not a trace of surprise or fear in her voice. “Never took ya for bein’ real, though.”
Cardyn steps forward, his fingers curled around the metal bars. “Speaking of real, you really need to let us out of here and let us be on our way.”
Trolly shakes her head. “Tricks like that’ve never worked on me, Lad. Far tougher’n you ‘ave tried.”
Cardyn shoots me a “What the hell?” look over his shoulder, but I can only answer with an equally confused shrug.
“Who knows?” Trolly giggles. “Maybe I’m a Mergie, meself.”
She tells Chunder to get up and pull himself together before calling out to the team of archers to follow her out of the stable.
When one of the shorter boys in their company puts up a tentative hand to ask about keeping a guard on us, Trolly seems to contemplate this for a second before smirking and shrugging off the suggestion.
“No sense leaving one o’ ya behind ta ‘ave yer brain ‘ijacked by ol’ Carrot-top ‘ere.”
With our weapons in her wobbly shopping cart, she and her brother and their platoon of swordsmen and archers leave us unattended but sti
ll trapped in our foul-smelling prison cell.
14
Barn
“So…,” Cardyn drawls, making finger-quotes to Rain through the musty air. “Nice job ‘Culling’ us into this mess.”
Rain takes a small step toward Cardyn, and he takes a giant step back. “My ability doesn’t work like that,” she hisses before taking a deep breath and mumbling to herself to calm down. “Most of the time, I don’t see anything. Other times, I see options. And sometimes the options are all equally bad.”
Terk presses the open pincers of his mechanical hand against the wooden wall. The servos in his elbow and shoulder joints whir like blender blades. “We could get out of here, you know. This isn’t the strongest wall we’ve come across.”
Brohn thumps the wall with the side of his fist and agrees with Terk. “Two hits, and I could have us out of here.”
“I don’t know,” I tell him with a teasing smile. “That thing looks pretty solid.”
“Okay. Three hits, tops.”
“Then what are we waiting for?” Cardyn asks, springing to his feet. “Besides,” he adds with his typical unhelpfulness. “It stinks in here.”
As if in response a haggard, one-eared horse across the stable aisle shakes its mud-crusted mane and whinnies its offense.
Turning her back to the boys and facing the iron bars at the front of the cell, Rain hums a happy little tune in the direction of the horse. It snorts and whinnies again before blasting a puff of air from its nose and going back to snuffling at the wooden gate of its stall.
Giving a half-turn over her shoulder, Rain tells Brohn and Terk not to bother breaking us out. “There’s more danger out there than there is in here. Right, Kress?”
I know exactly what she’s asking me to do.
With a deep breath, I feel my eyes go black as I connect with Render who is gliding in wide, graceful circles high above the sprawling compound.
To anyone catching a glimpse of him from below, his black and gold-trimmed form must look pretty demonic against the red sky and the rising sun. Even with all the other ravens flying around, screeching at each other as they scavenge for food, Render is sure to stand out. He’s bigger than other ravens, his calls more resonant and varied, and he’s threaded through with high-tech, mechanical circuitry.
Fortunately, for the moment anyway, he’s currently flying free, unobserved, and unbothered.
“Rain’s right,” I murmur, thrilled to feel the exhilaration of real flight as my breath catches in my throat. “There’s a dozen or so of those girl archers outside this barn and two more on either end of it, and there’s a boy with a crossbow posted up top for good measure.” I turn to Brohn and tell him not to worry. “Your crossbow is a lot bigger.”
That gets a frown from Rain, a belly laugh from Cardyn and Terk, and a deep, strawberry blush from Brohn.
“They may have left us,” I assure them, getting back to the business of survival. “But they haven’t exactly left us alone.”
Render spots some potential dinner scurrying around one of the small sheds below and breaks our connection, leaving me to blink my eyes and bring the dark cell back into focus.
“I say we sit tight,” Rain says, turning back around to address all of us but mostly Brohn. “These kids could have killed us if they wanted to. If we can convince them we’re no threat, we might also be able to convince them to let us go. Maybe even help us on our way.”
Brohn grinds his jaw but nods his head at the same time. “Makes sense. They seem to have some kind of order around here, anyway. It may not be advanced, but at least it’s civilized.”
“Their houses are in nice rows,” Terk offers. “That’s something, right?”
Cardyn tells him, “Sure. But they also look like they eat diseased birds. I say we break out of here, take our chances with the guards, and try to find a nice English pub for some proper fish and chips.”
“We’ll stick it out for a few hours,” Rain says, dropping down to sit with her back to the bars. “You can try making a pub run then.”
Either fortunately or unfortunately—I’m really not sure which—we don’t have to wait nearly that long. After less than twenty minutes of sitting in silence, we’re startled to our feet by the sound of the big double-doors grinding opening at the far end of the barn.
Trolly enters, accompanied by her brother Chunder and by the six female archers who first accosted us.
“Timetable’s moved up,” Trolly informs us as Chunder lifts the heavy key ring from its peg and starts to unlock the gate to our cell. “We told Ledge about ol’ Sweet Potato’s little parlor trick, an’ ‘e says ‘e’s got ta see this fer ‘imself.”
Cardyn gives an exaggerated stretch. “I’m just glad to get out of this smelly hellhole. Two weeks was more than enough for me.”
I give his cheek a light smack. “It’s been twenty minutes, Sweet Potato.”
“You’re worse than your Auditor-mom with your facts,” Cardyn says through a cheeky grin. “I can see where you get it from.”
“You’re not funny,” I tell him as Trolly orders us to move it along.
Cardyn shoots me a smug grin. “I beg to differ.”
Leading us through a huge garden of dried mud and rows of spindly vines on shabby trellises, Trolly announces that we’re on our way to be interrogated.
“Don’t worry,” she reassures us. “Nuffin ta lose yer ‘eads over.”
Plodding along next to her, Chunder gives her an elbow nudge and a phlegmy, guttural laugh before turning back to us. “Not yet, anyway. Besides, ‘eads are overrated, eh?”
15
Welcome
I can tell Brohn and Terk still want to fight our way out of this, but Rain and I snap them matching “Don’t do it” signals with our eyes. Brohn and Terk stand down.
The Auditor continues to stay quiet, which remains a wise move on her part. From what we can tell, the technology around here is limited to wood and steel and to whatever weapons these kids have been able to scrounge. We already draw enough attention as it is without them realizing that Terk has a talking techno-consciousness strapped to his back.
And they still haven’t figured out that my black gloves double as deadly weapons, so that’s two aces we have up our sleeves.
Although I’m nervous about not fighting back, Rain seems pretty confident, so I’m following her lead, while Brohn, Terk, and Cardyn follow mine.
Ahead of us is a long three-story building of faded red brick and boarded-up windows.
Trolly calls it a “palace,” although it looks like it could have just as easily been a school or a factory at one point.
As we get closer, though, I see what she means.
The building is a strange, formidable sight in the middle of this landscape of destruction and death. Covering the three sides we can see from here, it’s got rows of tall, narrow windows with many of the squares of glass still in place.
Despite being faded and scabbed over, the brick is warm and inviting. A series of peaked rooftops caps it all off with at least half a dozen brick chimneys—many of them fortified with slanted wooden beams and patches of aluminum—rising grandly into the sky.
Trolly guides us around to the front of the building where there are two ten-foot high doors. Each has an ornamental gold knocker the size of a hula-hoop in the middle, with the remnants of some detailed etchings engraved around them. Trolly and Chunder each latch onto one of the thick, tarnished rings and lean backwards against the weight of the massive double-doors.
Pulling hard and with their heels carving deep trenches into the mud where it looks like a concrete stoop used to be, Trolly and Chunder draw open the doors to reveal a dark, high-ceilinged room.
The floor is inches deep with dirt, splinters of wood, and fist-sized clumps of concrete. Huge windows rise up on either side, but they’re covered with panels of crispy-looking wood and jagged-edged sheets of corrugated sheet metal, so no more than a few slender shafts of light come through.
> Instead, the vestibule is lit by silver-handled torches that protrude from the wall and by what I have to admit is a pretty impressive, candle-filled chandelier hanging down from the cathedral ceiling.
On either side of the main vestibule, a staircase curves around and rises up to the second floor.
Shuffling our way deeper into the entranceway, we’re stopped by Trolly.
Chunder gives a signal to three boys who are sitting in a small circle of chairs off in the corner. Dressed in flowing orange robes with white, ruffled collars, they yank themselves up from some kind of card game they’ve been playing on the floor and skitter over to a system of braided ropes and pulleys attached to the wall.
One of the boys attaches four ropes with steel hooks to the corners of Trolly’s cart. The other two boys work a crank attached to the ropes, and the cart rises up through the open vestibule and is grabbed and pulled onto the second floor by another boy, also decked out in an orange robe and a white collar.
“Come along, now,” Chunder says, panting and wheezing his way up the right-hand staircase ahead of us.
I’m careful to avoid the gaping holes in every other stair, but I also don’t want to hang onto the guardrail, which is puckered with reddish-black rust and coated with curls of razor-sharp brass shavings.
At the top of the stairs, crimson-faced, sweaty, and completely out of breath, Chunder manages to point us toward an open doorway, which Rain winds up leading the rest of us through.
The room is almost completely red. Threadbare red carpet. Red sheets of light-blocking plastic stretched tight over the ten-foot tall, floor-to-ceiling windows. Red wallpaper streaked through with vertical gold lines. And a squat wooden platform—also painted red—with two gold-framed, red-cushioned chairs sitting on top of it. Extending from both arms of the larger chair is the hilt of a sword with the blade slotted into a horizontal storage slit.
With the wall-mounted torches casting their warm hues of orange and yellow, the room gives off a creepy, Devil’s Waiting Room kind of ambiance.