Athel

by E. E. Giorgi

  Bombs explode above our heads. Each time I hear the whistling that anticipates another missile, I cringe and close my eyes, not knowing if I’ll be able to open them again. Sadly, after a while I get used to the rattling and the roaring of fire. The plumes marring the horizon multiply and spread over the forest. I find a crying child and it takes me ten minutes to find her parents—both alive, luckily.

  The next find is not so fortunate. The blast resonates within a few hundred yards of where I am. It rings in my ears for a good ten seconds, followed by piercing screams. I run, and what I see is something that will stay with me for years to come.

  Body parts lie scattered over a diameter of two hundred feet. A torso is splattered against the trunk of a barren tree, and the legs of a beheaded body dangle from a branch. A faint moan surfaces from a jumble of splintered wood, the ground all around blackened and smoky. I take a deep breath, refusing to step any farther and yet forcing myself to. I try not to look at the mess of limbs lying everywhere, flesh intermingled with burnt wires and pieces of twisted prosthetics.

  I almost step on a hand, only to see the fingers twitch under my eyes. The arm is so badly twisted that the bone at the elbow has pierced through the flesh and lies exposed, bits of pine needles clustered around it. I almost gag before realizing that the moaning I hear comes from whoever is attached to that arm, the rest of the body hidden underneath a fallen tree. I carefully remove the broken branches and pieces of wood, but I soon realize there’s nothing I can do to save this person. She’s already missing her legs, and her prostheses are now crumbled into pieces below her chest. Beneath a mask of blood and torn flesh, her eyes stare wide at me.

  “Please,” she mumbles. “Take my baby. Please.”

  I frown, unsure what to reply. I don’t think she knows her child’s missing, but I don’t have the heart to break the news to her. So I open my mouth to tell her that her baby will be fine, when I see a tiny foot emerge from a bundled blanket next at her side. The smell of blood and burnt flesh is doing a number on my stomach, yet I lean forward and pick up the bundle, only to find a surprisingly unharmed baby inside.

  “She’s blind,” the mother says. “But with the right prostheses—”

  “I’ll bring her to safety,” I say.

  She manages to smile through her pain, then her eyes close never to open again.

  Another explosion rocks the sky. I wrap the baby back in the blanket and run.

  I find more lost people in my quest. A young woman offers to take the baby so I can continue my search through the forest. I run without thinking, no longer stopping at each explosion, no longer scared or angered, just running. When I hear screaming I double back, slowly growing accustomed to the horror. I come to realize that human bodies are much like prostheses: you salvage what you can, the rest you have to look away and leave it, no matter how difficult it is to come to terms with the loss.

  I run without thinking, until I’ve got no more strength in my legs and no more people to find. Eventually, the explosions stop, just like they started. When I get back to the old plaza by the Foresight door, the place is far from deserted. People stand and watch the sky, now obfuscated by plumes of smoke and the flames ravaging the forest. I find Mom sitting on a pile of rubble. She comes running as soon as she sees me. We hug, she tells me both Taeh and Dottie are safe. I nod and wish I could tell her Lilun was safe too.

  But she wouldn’t know who Lilun is.

  She wouldn’t understand, either.

  Lilun was not the enemy.

  Tahari was.

  The sky rocks one last time. A huge rumble ripples through the air, making the ground shake. A mushroom of dust rises behind the trees, so tall it touches the clouds above.

  Aghad shuffles over and drapes a hand over my shoulder. “It served us well.”

  I blink.

  “The Tower,” he repeats. “It served us well. Over three generations of Mayakes. And now it’s gone, just like everything else.”

  He turns and walks away, this quiet hero who silently saved our lives.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Athel

  Day Number: 1,591

  Event: The Underground City is our new home

  Number of Mayakes left: 382

  Goal for today: Rebuild.

  The horizon is yellow and gray. Untouched by the events of the past forty-eight hours, the Gaijins factory keeps spewing ashes and pollution onto our land.

  Not much is left of the Tower. The north wall is still standing, but the rest is a pile of rubble, whiskers of steel bars gnawing at the sky. Parts of the forest are still burning, and plumes of smoke rise over the treetops, tingeing the air with the reek of fire. The Kawa River carries downstream burnt logs, black ashes, and sometimes even bodies. Our fishing platforms, so carefully and promptly rebuilt, are once again gone.

  Kael squawks and swoops over the rubble.

  “I bet he misses the Tower too,” Dottie says.

  “Of course he does,” I reply. The falcon still hasn’t come to see our new underground quarters. Can’t blame him. There’s no view down there.

  Our boots crunch on the debris as we take careful steps around the devastation left behind by the Gaijins’ attack.

  It could’ve been worse. Many more would’ve died if we hadn’t evacuated the Tower. Even more, had we not unlocked the Underground City. Tahari’s plan backfired, and now the conspirators are dead and the Mayakes, once again, have survived. Decimated, and wounded both in their bodies and in their pride, but we survived.

  Lukas climbs over a pile of crumbled cinder blocks. He digs in the rubble and finds a piece of foam gushing out of what used to be one of our charging stations.

  “I doubt you’ll find anything useful,” I say, scuffing the ground with the tip of my boot.

  Lukas crouches and examines the foam. “You never know. I think this has just become our new landfill.”

  I shrug and walk around the north wall. Dottie points to the blackened solar fields and the charred pile of debris that once was our barn. She and Wes decide to go check it out, while I stay behind with Lukas, scavenging for anything salvageable. I watch my sister limp across the burnt grass, her injured leg still recovering from Golow’s fangs, and wonder what will become of us.

  We’ve lost everything. Our home, our belongings, our leaders.

  We’ve lost our identity. Who we were is no longer who we are. Who we thought we were, the Mayakes, the meek, the survivors.

  Lukas pulls something out of the dirt.

  “What have you found?” I ask.

  “Just wires,” he replies. “But you can never have enough wires.”

  “Right,” I say, looking for anything that reminds me of home, maybe a doorknob, or a bathroom faucet, anything. I find nothing.

  “Athel!” Dottie calls. “Come!”

  Lukas and I scuttle over. Wisps of ashes scatter at our feet as we cross the burned soil.

  “Something’s stuck beneath these metal sheets,” Wes says when we get there. Both Dottie and he bend over trying to free a panel of rugged metal from underneath the debris. I can hear a distinct moaning coming from below. Lukas and I roll up our sleeves, and soon the four of us are all digging, our arms and clothes caked in ashes.

  We manage to lift the sheet of metal a notch, enough for me to shove a rock underneath and then use a metal beam as a lever to pull it up. Dottie crouches and takes a peek inside.

  “Something’s there,” she says. “Alive.”

  “Move over,” I tell her. “I can see in there better than you.”

  I peer under the metal and finally see it. “It’s a mama goat,” I holler. “A mama goat with her newborn baby!”

  “You’re kidding,” Wes says. “How could she survive the fire?”

  “The metal saved her life,” Lukas interjects. “It protected her from the blaze.”

  We help the mama goat and baby out of the pit, our excited voices adding some color to the gray landscape around us. Both animals l
ook scared but seem to be doing fine. The goat bleats and we give her water from our bottles.

  Dottie cuddles the baby goat in her arms, tears shining in her eyes. “Guys. This is a sign. A new life in this utter devastation. It has to be a sign, don’t you think?”

  Lukas sits on the ground, his cheeks floured with gray ashes, and digs through his satchel. Yes, he was able to save his satchel and data feeder. He wouldn’t be Lukas without those.

  “All negative has a bit of positive,” he says, in his typical, cryptic wisdom. He shows us his open hand, where a tiny microbug is peering at us from the tips of his fingers. “Thanks to Golow, I now have lots of pieces to make an army of these.”

  I chuckle. “Right,” I say. “Suit yourself.”

  Lukas flashes me a miffed look. “Go ahead and laugh. No matter how much stronger than us they think they are, we can still defeat the Gaijins. Don’t underestimate what tiny crawlers can do.”

  Dottie tilts her head, intrigued and skeptical at the same time. “And how would an army of those help us defeat the Gaijins, Lukas?”

  He shrugs. “For one thing, they can carry tiny things inside.”

  Wes raises a brow. “Like weapons? But how can you make a weapon so small that it can fit inside—inside that?” he asks, pointing at the critter on Lukas’s finger tips.

  Lukas gives us one of his pitying looks, as if what he’s saying is so obvious it’s a mystery we haven’t grasped it yet. “No, not weapons. Not manmade weapons, anyway. Nature already has beautiful weapons. Why bother with new ones?”

  We all blink and frown. The goat bleats.

  “It’s very simple,” Lukas says. “I’m going to put a bug inside them. The bug.”

  The Plague. The one thing the Gaijins fear the most.

  That’s when I finally see it. Lukas is a genius.

  Wes pats him on the back, Dottie claps her hands. They walk back to the Tower—what’s left of it—talking excitedly among them. I stay behind a bit longer, my gaze straying back to the mesa. Out there, beyond the cliffs and the walls of rocks, a factory keeps spewing ashes at us. And beyond that factory, different people live, people who hate us so much they destroyed our home and our land.

  Then Lilun happened.

  And that changed everything.

  ~ END OF BOOK 2 ~

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  Also from E.E. Giorgi

  The Mayake Chronicle series:

  AKAELA (Book 1)

  ATHEL (Book 2)

  ASTRACA (Book 3, pub. 2016)

  Detective Thrillers:

  CHIMERAS (A Track Presius mystery)

  MOSAICS (A Track Presius mystery)

  GENE CARDS (A Skyler Donohue mystery)

  Set in the Apocalypse Weird world:

  IMMUNITY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Another story went by. As always, I wouldn’t have made it this far without the loving feedback of my beta readers. Thank you John L. Monk, author of the Jenkins Cycle trilogy, Carol Kean, Perihelion book critic and an amazing writer herself, and special thanks to my good friends Karen Alaniz, Gianluca Memoli, Kat Fieler, and Lily Chylek. I’m sorry I bug you guys so much. But then I see how much better my stories turn out because of you, and I can’t help but bug you more.

  Heather Holden, author of the webcomic Echo Effect, made the map of the Five Chavis. Background image provided by Ayelie-Stock.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  E.E. Giorgi is a scientist, a writer, and a photographer. She spends her days analyzing HIV data, her evenings chasing sunsets, and her nights pretending she's somebody else.

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