by Jaymin Eve
Whoops.
“Learn something new every sun-cycle,” I allowed.
They chuckled, and I looked around for my mother. She wasn’t there.
“What happened while I was asleep?” I asked, swallowing down the panic at having her out of my sight. “Where’s my mothe—Donald?”
“Why do you keep calling her Donald?” Siret asked me. “That is just a stupid server name that Staviti randomly picked.”
“I … don’t want to hear her correcting me,” I choked out.
I stumbled up off Yael’s lap, my legs wobbling under me as I tried to get the blood pumping through them.
Siret was watching me closely, his expression hard to read. “We’re stopping here for the night. The bullsen need to be watered and rested,” he finally said, when I got my footing.
“Just like the dweller,” Yael added with a smirk.
I punched him in the arm, mostly because I tripped while trying to slap him, but it all worked out in the end. He just grinned, before palming either side of my waist, and setting me firmly on my feet.
“Sacred One!” The unfamiliar mechanical gasp had me spinning around, until I remembered that my mother now sounded … mechanical.
I moved toward the doorway of the cart, trying to see what was going on. I still couldn’t see her, but at least I could hear her.
“Yes?” I finally asked, a dose of caution in my tone.
“Sacred Staviti has asked me to report all acts of violence perpetrated against you. This will not be tolerated. He does not like bleeding on his rugs. Or his artefacts.”
“Just a love tap, right Willa?” Yael’s grin got broader, if that was even possible.
I narrowed my eyes, judging the distance as I tried to figure out if I could love tap his face. Harder, this time. More like a love-punch. A love-black-eye-and-possible-broken-nose.
“This is what happens when soldiers become heroes,” Siret announced to the group, as though we had all gathered just to hear his opinion. “The power goes to their heads; suddenly, they’re changed; suddenly, they start beating up their—what would you call us?”
He directed that question to me. “We’re not your friends, so you have to pick a different word. Maybe … boyfr—”
“Princesses,” I inserted.
“Not where he was heading with that,” Yael inserted blandly. “But go ahead and explain.”
“If I have to run after you five, rescuing you all the time—that makes you the princesses in the story.”
“When you finally get around to rescuing us, we’ll revisit nicknames.” Yael smirked at me.
I prepared to launch myself at him, but Siret materialised right in front of my face, bending over to fit in the back of the cart. “Come on, Soldier.” He was trying not to smile. “No time for more violence. Besides, you don’t want to break a Staviti rule, right Donald?”
“Correct, Sacred One.”
Irony didn’t register with the servers, but it registered with me, and I appreciated it. No one broke more rules than the Abcurses. I took two steps toward the exit, only stopping because my mother’s head was still poking through—that mess of blonde hair taking up a lot of space.
“I … uh, need to get out,” I told her.
She gave me a blank look and a nod, before backing out. I took a fortifying breath, mentally preparing myself as best as I could, before I ducked my head out. It was twilight, just a shadowy light remaining to illuminate the forest area we had stopped in. I slowly descended, scanning the surroundings so that I could find Rome and Coen. Two huge shadows looked to be moving a few yards away, but I couldn’t tell if it was them. Of course, if it wasn’t them, then this was probably not the best place to be sleeping for the night. They were very big shadows.
Three Abcurses pressed in close behind me. None of them seemed concerned about the area we were in, so I would adopt some of their confidence.
“I have set the cave up for you,” my mother said, standing off to the side. “As requested.”
I levelled a glare at Siret, then Yael, and finally Aros. “Stop ordering her around. She is not our server.”
I didn’t care if she gasped like all the other servers and used all the proper nouns like all the other servers. Whatever Staviti did to make her this way didn’t matter—she was still my mother. A sharp sting of pain travelled up to my head, and I quickly shook the thought away. I couldn’t dwell on it right now—Yael wouldn’t be able to use his Persuasion on me every time the pain got too much, so it was better if I just focused on what we had to do.
“Can you please show us this cave?” I did my best to make that sound like a request, and not an order.
My mother’s spine was suddenly ramrod straight, a sense of purpose filling that blank face. “Of course, Sacred One. It is my honour.”
“Can you call me Willa?”
The words slipped out before I could stop them. It was a stupid thing to ask, because I knew the servers were programmed, and they would never call me just Willa. And sure enough.
Gasp. Mouth open. Hand flapping.
“No worries,” I said with a wave. “Sacred One is fine.”
Donald calmed herself then, before spinning around and marching off into the woods. I hurried after her. The boys moved a little slower, but stayed close. Donald was heading for the shadows, and within a click or two, the distinct shape of two more of my Abcurses came into sight. They looked to be arguing at the entrance of the cave. I strained to hear what they were saying, but the sound of rushing water nearby muffled the conversation. By the time we were close enough, they had quit whatever they were doing, instead turning to watch us approach.
I sensed their eyes on me, and I wanted nothing more than to drown in those stares. But I couldn’t. The Abcurses made me feel too much, they always had. They penetrated the bubble I had lived most of my life in, the bubble that protected me from any kind of emotional overload. Because life was hard. Really hard. I dealt with it in my own way, but I still felt the pain of it.
I always had. Over the life-cycles I had developed a pretty useful shielding technique … only that shielding was pretty much fucked now. Fucked, because five beautiful, arrogant, asshole-gods had fallen into my life, and I was pretty sure they crushed my shield on their way down. Best sun-cycle of my life, really. But now, with my mother, I was desperate for that shielding to return. I needed it. I wasn’t going to survive this otherwise.
“Dweller-baby?” Coen’s concern hit me in the chest; I forced a smile to my face.
“Yes, One?”
“Are you ok—”
“Fine, no worries at all. Got any food? This dweller needs to be fed and watered.”
The silence after I interrupted was heavy, but no one pushed me again, so I just strolled into the cave. My mother said that we were sleeping in the cave, and sure enough, inside, a fire was blazing in a natural fire pit near the entrance, and there were some blankets and coats laid out in makeshift beds. I had no idea how she’d managed to get them there, but it probably also wasn’t that big of a mystery. No doubt, the carts had an emergency storage of camping supplies in the event of broken wheels or flooding. Even though I’d slept most of the journey there—wherever there was—a deep-seated exhaustion was tugging at my centre. Pulling me down and making my thoughts hazy.
A sliver of my brain was aware that it was likely grief, an exhausting sort of emotion, but I ignored that part and pretended to just be tired. The Abcurses filed in one by one, each picking a spot on the floor, their long legs spread out in front of them as they rested back against their arms. Donald remained standing near the entrance, keeping an eye on everything. No doubt waiting for an order.
The silence felt … tense. Unnatural. No one really knew what to say or how to put into words everything that had just happened. Eventually, though, I couldn’t handle one more moment, so I had to talk.
“What are we supposed to do now?” I asked. “Staviti … he’s not going to stop until I go to him.�
�� My eyes darted to my mother. “He’s not going to stop hurting people I care about.”
Panic froze my vocal cords, before I managed to force a single word out. “Emmy.”
Why didn’t I insist that she come along, I mean … my mother was one thing, but Emmy was so much more. I couldn’t survive losing her.
A male voice cut through my freezing terror. “I’m keeping an eye on Emmy; she’s fine.”
Sixteen
The voice didn’t belong to any of my guys, and by the time I turned my head, Rome and Coen were on their feet, both of them blocking Cyrus from entering the cave. I stood, unable to see him through their bulk, but I needed answers, so I made to push through Rome and Coen. They both caught each of my hands at the same time.
“We can’t trust any of the gods right now,” Coen said, his voice terse.
I swallowed roughly. “I need to hear what he has to say.”
“You can hear from right there,” Rome countered.
With a loud exhalation, I stopped trying to move forward, and stopped attempting to pull my hands free. If I was being honest, I kind of needed the support anyway. Cyrus was relaxed, standing with ease; his bright eyes observing us all closely in the same calm and unaffected manner that he usually displayed. The disconcerting expression made me uncomfortable, and I didn’t even know why.
“Why are you keeping an eye on Emmy?” I asked.
He shrugged, his white robe lifting and shifting across broad shoulders. “I have a theory about how all of this plays out. I’m not going to ruin that by letting the dweller die.”
That made … no sense. Asshole.
Siret let out a low laugh from behind me, and I knew that my thought had been heard.
For now, I’d accept that Emmy was under Cyrus’s watch, and when he changed his mind about that—which no doubt he would—then we would deal with it accordingly.
“Why are you here, Neutral?” Aros bit out. He had moved close to my back, working with Rome and Coen to close me in.
Cyrus stepped to the side, revealing a crate sitting at the entrance to the cave behind him. It was made from wood and a golden, glittery metal: it was finer and more ornate than any storage crate I’d ever seen.
“I heard about what happened in the Sacred Sands Arena,” he announced. “Thought I would drop off some supplies and information.”
“Information first,” Yael demanded.
He was his usual, bossy self again, and there wasn’t a hint of the worry in his voice that I was sure he felt. I knew him well enough now to see the tension in his tight jaw and the muscles in his arms that were starting to stand out starkly against the dark tan of his skin.
Cyrus’s eyes flashed and his own casual geniality disappeared. “Staviti wants Willa. He is not going to stop until he gets her, and he doesn’t care how many dwellers and sols he has to destroy to make it happen.”
I’d already deduced most of that from what the servers had told me, but hearing it put so bluntly hit me like a punch to the chest.
“What does he want with her?” Rome was practically vibrating next to me, his huge body seeming to swell even larger as his voice boomed out.
Please don’t say kill me. None of the servers had attacked me. No Order Stick had been used on me, but maybe Staviti was waiting to do it himself. Maybe there was something specific he wanted from me before he did it. Maybe he wanted to turn me into a server like my mother, so that he would have a matching pair. No, that couldn’t be it, servers were made from dead dwellers. So what the hell was it?
Cyrus met my gaze full-on, his pupils burning through me with their intensity. “She is too powerful already, and will become the Chaos Beta when she dies. Rau has been trying to rally anarchy against the Creator, and if he gets the power of a Beta, he might just succeed.”
“So … he definitely doesn’t want to kill me then.” I laughed.
Cyrus’s brow wrinkled. “Of course not. If you die right now, you become the Beta.”
That was something I was aware of—but not in the same way as I was aware that I had blonde hair and a general lack of balance. It didn’t quite seem like a fact. It didn’t quite seem real.
“What is he going to do with me if he can’t kill me?” It was worth asking; being prepared was always a good thing.
“He will weaken you. He will make you wish and pray for death—but he will not let you die until you are too weak to cross into Topia.”
Everything inside of me stilled, fear seeming to attack my mind from all sides, prickling along the back of my neck. I fought through it, falling back on my usual coping mechanism.
“He’s not very original for an Original, is he? Torture and death, blah, blah. He needs a new bad-guy rulebook.”
Six sets of eyes locked onto me with matching expressions that I had become used to seeing. They were looking at me as though I was insane. Probably because I had a huge, beaming smile plastered right across my face. Admittedly, smiling in this situation made me pretty damn insane, but if I didn’t smile, I would lose it completely, and losing it wasn’t something I was ready for.
No one spoke; I wasn’t sure any of my guys could get words out from between their clenched jaws, so I tried again. “Maybe one of you should just kill me now? Then I’d be a Beta and it would be too late?”
It had been a random thought, but the moment I said it, it felt like a good plan. A great plan, even. Rome and Coen had let me go at this point, so I could turn and better see all of their faces. No one looked pleased by the plan.
“We’re not killing you,” Siret said. “Even if one of us was capable of doing that to you, Chaos would take you as soon as you became the Beta. That, or Staviti would find a way to end you with one of Crowe’s blades. You’d find yourself in the middle of a war. A war we might not be able to save you from.”
I pushed out my bottom lip, and for once, I allowed my face to show how troubled I was.
“Are you seriously pouting because we won’t kill you?” Rome blinked a few times.
I sniffled, and he threw his hands in the air, before whirling around on Cyrus—except Cyrus was gone, and all that remained was the crate. It looked like he had decided to bail before we started fighting amongst ourselves. My mother had no such qualms: she was opening the lid of the crate to reveal what was inside—from my vantage point, I could only make out the top of a bread loaf.
“Should I prepare some dinner?” she asked, her hands digging in and coming up with a bunch of carrots and a loaf of bread.
Of everything that had happened that sun-cycle, those words were the thing to finally break me. The shield I had erected around my heart shattered, and the pain I’d been trying to hold at bay threatened to burst out of me and send me crumbling under the intensity of it.
“Willa-toy?” Yael noticed, and I swallowed hard before waving him off.
“I’m fine. Just fine. I need to … you know, girl-stuff.” I stumbled toward the entrance of the cave as I spoke, needing to get away from everything. From my mother, who for most of my life would never have asked to prepare dinner. She was dead. Really, truly dead. “Be right back.” I was surprised that I even managed to sound somewhat normal.
Coen called after me. “Don’t go far, Rocks.”
I waved behind me before continuing on, stumbling only a few times as I broke out into the trees again. It was almost completely dark now, but I wasn’t scared. I was already full of grief—there was no room left inside of me for fear.
Hot, salty tears were making a slow trek down my cheeks. I didn’t wipe them away. More would come: the absolute soul-crushing pain that clenched my chest and had shooting pains crashing through my mind was too much. The tears wouldn’t stop for a long time. I had so little in my life. There had hardly ever been anything that I could call my own.
Except my mother.
She had been mine. My mess to clean up; my dweller to complain about. My memory to leave behind …
A damaged piece of my life that Staviti had n
o right to touch. Especially not before I had a chance to go back and say goodbye. Or go back and say anything. A scream built up in my throat, but I choked it down. If I screamed, there would be five pissed-off gods and one confused server out in the woods with me.
I just couldn’t handle the way the gods played … well god, singular. What fucking right did they have to meddle in the lives of others, to set the rules that everyone else had to live by—which they broke when they felt like it—and hand out punishments to whoever they wanted, for any crime they determined?
It had to stop: there had to be a way to stop it.
“Dweller-baby?”
Coen stood beside me. I had been so worked up that I hadn’t even heard him approach. His large hands cupped my face, and the pain in my chest increased further, the tears a veritable stream that I was almost choking on. I was struggling to breathe as they filled my mouth and nose.
“Baby, please, just stop.”
He was cupping my face, his thumbs wiping the tears away. I lifted my face to him, gasping breaths escaping out of me.
“She’s dead,” I whimpered. “Gone. Stripped away and reduced to a brainless server.”
It was too dark to see his eyes well, but I didn’t miss the flash of fury that carved his face up into hard lines.
“Staviti will pay for that,” he promised. “We’ll make sure that he learns not to mess with us again.”
I shook my head rapidly. “No, you can’t do that. He’s already proven that he can and will punish you five.” They needed to stay as far from Staviti as possible. “Promise me you won’t do anything to him.” I sounded desperate, but I didn’t care.
Coen dropped his hands down from my face, running them across my shoulders and wrapping his fingers around my biceps. “I can’t promise that, Will. He started this, and we aren’t going to let it stand.”
I forced myself onto my tiptoes, a brief flash of warmth brushing through me. Will. He had used my nickname.
I wriggled closer to him, desperate to get my point across. “If I lose you,” I started on a whisper, “any of you five, I won’t survive. My mother …” My voice broke, but I recovered. “My mother is killing me, but I’ll learn to live with it. I can’t lose you guys as well. I can’t lose anyone else.”