by Jaymin Eve
“Actually that makes perfect sense.” I took a shaky step toward the cart, bracing myself for what I’d find inside.
Zac seemed to relax as soon as I made it clear that I was going to go with him, and he pulled the canvas back further for me. Laid out across the benches were several wrapped bodies, shapeless white figures, all stacked up on top of each other. The smell was awful, now that my nose wasn’t full of dust.
“Just … try not to make any sounds, okay?” Zac seemed almost embarrassed that he was forcing me to hide in a cart full of dead people, even though he was technically saving my life, and probably putting himself in danger to do it.
It made me realise that I should probably be a little more grateful, so I quickly pushed into the opening and then reached out and caught his hand before he could close the canvas on me.
“Thanks.” I tried to sound sincere, instead of sick-to-my-stomach. “I won’t blow your cover, I promise. And as soon as we reach the ninth ring, you can get rid of me. I’ll find my own way back to Blesswood.”
His dark eyes widened for a moment. “You’re from there? You were serving in Blesswood? That’s a long way to travel, just to dump a dweller. It would have been easier if they’d killed you and waited for someone to come and collect the body. I don’t do the Blesswood pickup myself, but my brother works the sol-cities. There’s another guardian temple right in the middle of Tridel. So why didn’t they just kill you?”
“Well,” I shook my head, a laugh bubbling out, “turns out I’m not so easy to kill. By the way, you’re a weird guy, Zac.”
“Says the dweller walking around the abandoned lands all on her own before sunset,” he replied dryly, quickly securing the canvas and disappearing.
I looked around, trying to find somewhere to sit before the cart started moving—but I was too late, and one of the wrapped bodies was jostled off the seat before I could move, landing right at my feet with a sickening thud. I tried not to scream, or anything pathetic and girly like that, but a sound might still have slipped out, because the little wooden window facing toward the front of the cart slid back.
“Did you just squeal?” Zac asked.
“No,” I snapped back. “Do I look like the kind of girl that squeals?”
“Little bit, actually.”
I reached forward and slammed the little wooden window closed again. “Asshole.”
“This asshole saved your life,” he sang back to me, apparently all cheerful and friendly, now that we were moving again.
“You don’t really have many friends, do you?” I shouted back, stepping over the body and crouching into the only unoccupied corner of the bench it had fallen off.
“It’s a lonely profession, this.” He slid the window back again, so that he could talk to me.
“That’s because you drive dead people around. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but dead people aren’t that responsive. They’re not fun to show affection to.”
“Especially the ones that died of flame-rash.”
I jumped clean off the bench again, accidently landing on the chest of the body that had rolled off earlier. I edged away, backing myself against the canvas lining. I was three clicks away from jumping out of the damn cart and taking my chances with the guardians.
“You squealed again,” Zac decided to inform me, laughing. “I was only kidding about the flame-rash. The guardians only want the dwellers that they can turn into pleasing little puppets for the gods. There’s nothing pleasing about a flame-rash death.”
“You want to make more friends?” I spoke through gritted teeth. “Then here’s a tip: quit talking about gods-dammed flame-rash. That stuff is nasty.”
“Noted.” He suddenly sobered up, and I saw one of his eyes peeking through the window at me, before turning away. “You can sit down. None of the bodies are contaminated. If you pull the panel off the front of the seat, you’ll be able to crawl into the storage space beneath. We’ll be there in two clicks.”
“We haven’t gone very far,” I said aloud, while internally I was cursing Dru and Karyn for dropping me so close to the secret guardian-hideout.
“Who’s Dru?” Zac asked.
Okay, maybe not that internally.
“Some ballbag,” I replied.
“Aww. Is he your boyfriend? Did you guys get into a fight? Is it because you were being a bad dweller and pissing off the sols?”
“Seriously?” I groaned, crouching back onto the bench seat. “Who taught you manners? Please tell me it was one of the dead people. That would make so much sense.”
He didn’t reply, and I realised why a moment later, when the movement of the cart started to slow. I pulled my legs up to the bench, curling my arms around and trying to turn myself into a little ball of invisibility. I could hear muted voices, and then louder conversation as we approached.
“Zachary,” a man spoke up, his voice so raspy it made my skin scrawl, “you’re late.”
Seven
“One of the wheels broke, I had to fix it.” I could hear Zac speaking as he jumped down. I expected him to come to the opening of the cart immediately, but his voice was travelling further away the more he spoke. “I brought seven from the ninth ring. All clean deaths. Only one over the age of thirty-five—”
“Take it back,” the husky-toned man replied. “The Sacred Ones don’t like wrinkles. You know that.”
I wrapped a hand over my mouth, catching the derisive snort before it erupted out of me, and then eased up toward the still-open window, trying to peek out without being seen.
“I told them that,” Zac was replying. “His family. They insisted. These people think that I’m transporting the bodies to the cemetery caretaker, but someone started a rumour that my cart takes the bodies of the people that the gods have favoured, while the other cart from the cemetery takes the bodies that the gods have frowned upon.”
“They think the gods care about whether they are good?” The raspy voice sounded angry.
I could see him now, walking beside Zac. He was cloaked in heavy black cloth, the sleeves pushed up to the elbows, displaying long, pale arms. The hood was drawn over his face, but I wouldn’t have been able to make out his features anyway, because he was facing away from me, approaching another group of hooded people. They all stood gathered at the entrance to a worn-down temple, the stones cracked beneath the sweep of their dark robes. There were only three torches lit, set into brackets against the pillars out the front of the temple, so there wasn’t enough light to make out their features. I could only decipher the pale blur of their faces beneath the hoods.
Zac and the guardian were too far away for me to hear anymore, so I drew back from the window, staring down at the body on the floor of the cart. It was almost annoying, that these bodies were about to go exactly where I needed to go, whereas I would have to find my way back through all the rings to Emmy, before taking the cave entrance to Topia. Which would probably kill me, because I wasn’t attached to a god while entering.
Could I even be close to Emmy?
I had no idea what was happening with my Chaos, but it seemed to have an agenda. It had brought me to the meeting of Vice-Chancellors—probably because I hated the vice-chancellors—and then it had proceeded to burn down the building. Probably because there was some small part of me that wanted to burn down the vice-chancellors. Even though I now knew the real reason that Emmy was hanging around with the creepy sols, my Chaos had still taken matters into its own hands, intent on ending whatever was going on, once and for all.
Bad move, Chaos. Bad move.
I glanced out the window again, and then quickly slipped to the floor beside the body. I had no idea what they did with these bodies before taking them into Topia, but I was about to find out.
I was about to go and get my Abcurses back.
Unless they had already returned, and were currently scouring Blesswood for my whereabouts. In which case, I was going to find Cyrus and force him to fix this whole mess, because even if it wasn’
t his fault, I still liked blaming him.
I started to unwrap the body on the floor, scrunching up my nose the whole time. There was another under-wrapping beneath the outer-wrapping, which was just fine by me, because that really wasn’t something I needed to see. I rolled the body away from the bench seat and felt around for a little handle, since Zac had told me to hide in there. There were two latches on either side of the front panel, and the panel fell outwards when I released them, revealing a small, dark storage space. I rolled the body into the space, accidently hitting the head once or twice—not that it mattered. The person was already dead.
When the body was nicely squished into the storage space, I quickly re-latched the panel and rolled myself up into the top sheet that I had taken off. It wasn’t a very precise job, and I was just laying there on the floor of the cart, one of my feet still poking out of the sheet … but I doubted that anyone really cared about how well-wrapped the bodies were. They were about to be turned into Topian serving robots anyway.
“Another four sun-cycles before I get back from the eighth ring,” I heard Zac saying, his voice becoming clearer again. “Do you have any you want me to take back this time?”
“No,” the raspy voice replied. “We have disposed of them already.”
Well that’s not creepy at all.
I tried to be as stiff as possible, playing dead. I heard the canvas being pulled apart, and then there was a hand on my ankle, right on the exposed foot. Whoever-it-was hauled me out of the cart and dumped me onto another hard surface—something that smelled like musty wood. The sheet slipped off my face, and since my eyes were still wide open, I ended up taking in the entire scene of one of the guardians standing at the opening to the cart and reaching in, while another guardian stood off to the side, watching. I could see his face clearly, and it was deathly pale. It had the same waxy quality as the Topian servers, though somehow less refined. Uglier. I was laying on another cart—open-topped, and considerably smaller. A common cart used to transport fruits and vegetables … and dead people, apparently. That didn’t seem hygienic. I quickly flipped the sheet back over my face and braced myself as a body landed beside me half a click later. The cart thumped several more times, with one of the bodies landing directly on top of me, and then it was moving.
I felt bad for Zac. He was going to discover the body stuffed in the storage space at some point, and probably freak out—but as bad as I felt, I knew it needed to be done. I had to get into Topia. I had to find either Cyrus or the Abcurses, and I had to figure out what the hell was happening to me.
As soon as the thought entered my head, I started to feel dizzy again; the same kind of dizziness as before. My hands were tingling and dark spots were starting to flash behind my eyelids as I screwed them shut. The heat inside of me flamed to scorching levels. I could feel bile rising to the back of my throat, and I curled my hands into fists, my nails cutting into my palms.
This cannot be happening right now!
When I opened my eyes again, the white sheet over my face had disappeared, along with the smell of musty wood and the feel of bodies stacked around me. Instead, I was staring at a rough, stone ceiling, and the surface beneath me was cool and hard.
“Have all the bodies been collected?” a voice asked, sounding close-by.
I turned my head, taking in the rest of the room. There was a row of cupboards beneath a work bench of some kind—one of the cupboards hanging half open. Other than a wash-basin in the corner and the steel bench that I was lying on, the room was bare. A curtain over the doorway was the only thing hiding me from discovery. I started to slip off the bench when the other voice answered.
“One of the bodies is missing. Summon each of the guardians tasked with transforming a server tonight, and figure out who hasn’t submitted yet. Staviti will not want to be kept waiting any longer.”
“I will summon them immediately.”
I froze, halfway off the table, and glanced around again.
What the hell had I done with my guardian? No—scrap that. What had my evil, Chaos alter-ego done with my guardian?
The guardian on the other side of the curtain was still referring to the dead people as bodies, and not servers, so I assumed that Staviti would be needed to put life back into the them. That was an important thing to know, because it meant that I couldn’t just get off the table and start walking around. I would need to figure something else out.
I shivered when my bare feet hit the stone floor, glancing down to find that I had been stripped to my underwear. My guardian had definitely been here. He had started the process—but he hadn’t gotten as far as putting one of those creepy bodysuits on me, so that was a plus. Reaching up, I brushed my hand across my hair, relieved that it was still there. I skirted around the room, trying to find something that I could maybe use as a weapon, just in case I would need to fight my way out of the temple. Not that I’d be any use in a fight, but I could always practise positive thinking.
I grabbed the top of the cupboard door that had been hanging open and pulled it out further, bending down to peer inside.
“Holy gods in hell,” I gasped, falling back onto my ass.
There was a pale face staring back at me, eyes closed, a small trickle of blood leaking from a gash in his forehead. A bloodied object had been stuffed into the cupboard with him—it looked like a small, stone bowl, and the unconscious guardian had been made to look as though he was cuddling it to sleep, like a stuffed toy. I didn’t even pause to think about the fact that evil Willa had gone ahead and stuffed another body into another tiny storage space, as though taking cues from me. The good Willa. I simply reached in and wrangled the hooded cloak right off his back, standing and pulling it around my shoulders before re-arranging him and closing the cupboard door.
I’d feel bad about that later, but for now, I had to sneak into the land of the gods. Again.
I had taken two steps away from the cupboard when those voices floated in through the sheeted door again. “The guardian must have fled. We have no time to hunt him down now, we need to catch the next transport to Topia. But he will be disposed of as soon as we find him.”
Disposed of? They were definitely taking their employment termination advice from Staviti. Speaking of … I needed to be on that transport. I had to get to Topia. Who knew what would be left of Minatsol if my Chaos was left to its own devices for much longer. That was the real reason I was in such a panicked rush: I was worried about the good of the worlds. Yeah, that’s right. I wasn’t needy and pathetic and missing my Abcurses.
I was a heroine.
I needed to save the worlds.
Both of them.
Sneaking to the door with as much stealth as I could muster, I managed to not make a single noise. To be fair, it wasn’t hard to avoid the single, steel-topped table that I’d been lying on after somehow beating my guardian senseless. Maybe this Chaos thing wasn’t so bad; it had already kept me from one of those skin suits, and I still had my hair.
Making it unscathed to the curtain, I quickly peered around one of the edges to find at least a dozen cloaked individuals. They were busy carting the dead out of a large doorway. Red dirt was visible in the distance. No one noticed me, and since most of them kept their cloaks right up over their heads, I hopefully wouldn’t stand out.
With a deep, fortifying breath, I slipped out from the curtain and hunched myself over as I walked purposefully to the door.
I noticed a body stretched out across a slab of timber as I passed. It was a female: she was dressed in a skin suit, her head shaved, her eyes wide open and glassy. I tried to breathe through my mouth as I hauled her into my arms, since the scent of some sort of embalming fluid was strongly emanating from her. I grunted as the solid weight fell against me. Of course I would pick the dweller who lifted weights and broke in wild bullsen with pure muscle and strength of will. Her will was so strong it was almost sinking us both into the ground.
Staggering slightly, I hurried with a few others
to the doorway.
“Where is my body?” I heard a low, confused-sounding man ask from somewhere behind me. “Did someone else move her?”
There was no answer and I didn’t bother to look back. Stepping outside, there were still a few rays of sun left in the sky, so I could see everything clearly. I looked around for the cart, because random carts seemed to be the story of my life lately, but there was nothing like that in the area. Instead, the plain housed a dozen pantera, all kicking up the red dirt in a restless, irritated manner. I should have guessed; nothing but the best for Staviti and his creepy little server-creations.
The Jeffrey concept was starting to make me ill. Dwellers were treated like shit in life, and now I find out that in death they got an even worse lot. They were wiped of all free thought, relegated to slaves, and then, when they displeased a god, they were dropped in the banishment cave to waste away as trapped spirits.
Wow. Put so succinctly, it was horrendous. How could Staviti do something like that? I thought he was supposed to be a wonderful, benevolent, creator-type god. Nope. He was an asshole, just like the rest of the gods. He was the king of the assholes, actually. Just a stupid creator asshole who had made some asshole minions to serve him and his asshole imaginary friends in their asshole floating platforms.
A shove from behind cut off my internal ire, and I started shuffling along again. I bumped into more than one guardian, but when they glared at me, I only mustered up a raspy voice and snarled, “Learn how to carry a dead body! What is this, apprentice-sun-cycle?”
I was sure that I was getting a few confused glares beneath those hoods, but they were too busy to stop and question if something was amiss—which was lucky, because I was ready to bring out all my skills. I had clumsy and Chaos on my side. Ten tokens said I could take them all out in one well-timed blackout.