Nor was it the only trophy of zer work. The bomb had perhaps been a little more energetic than ze’d anticipated. So energetic, it triggered a massive cave-in. The craggy rocks piled up from the floor all the way to the ceiling, cutting the dead-end of the tunnel off from the rest of the cave system.
The stones ranged in size from pebbles to multi-ton boulders. Several bodies, or pieces of bodies, protruded from the spaces between the rocks, mashed into a morbid sort of mortar. Benexx’s stomach turned at the sight and ze had to look away.
Ze was bleeding internally, cut off from escape, using up whatever air remained in the chamber with each breath, and ze’d just blown up everyone who had any idea where ze was. So, zer return was in sight. Benexx’s spirits imploded. It now came down to a simple question of whether zer airsacks would fill with blood before the air inside them ran out of oxygen.
Something stirred in the rocks and snapped up zer attention. With a mix of amazement and horror, Benexx watched as an arm dug its way out of the rubble. A dirty, blood-streaked face lifted to look at zer. Sula’s face, Benexx realized in shock. It was like something out of an old horror movie, the enemy ze thought dead crawling zer way back out of the grave for one last, defining attack.
Benexx kicked with zer good leg backwards until zer back was pressed against the wall, but it quickly became obvious Sula didn’t have revenge in mind.
“Help,” a noticeably diminished voice pleaded weakly. “Please.”
Benexx sat, unmoved.
“Please.” Sula stretched zer free hand towards Benexx in desperation. “I can’t breathe.”
“No?” Another round of wet coughs racked zer chest. “I’m not doing so well on that account either.”
“Ple…” Sula tried to shout, but ran out of air before ze even finished the word.
Benexx growled low to zerself, then used zer hands to get upright. The gunshot wound through zer leg kept zer from putting any weight on it, so ze hopped to the pile of rubble and cleared the smaller rocks away from Sula’s body. But a large one pressed down on zer right side, pinning Sula to the floor and preventing zer from drawing any but the shallowest of breaths. Benexx grabbed it with both hands and strained to roll it out of the way until the muscles of zer back felt like they were about to snap.
“I can’t move it by myself,” ze said between ragged breaths. “You have to push.”
Weakly, Sula’s free arm reached up and added what strength it had to offer. Between them, the rock shifted. Only a fraction, but it moved.
“Harder,” Benexx commanded through clenched teeth plates. “Rock it back and forth.”
Their momentum built with each cycle, until the stone finally reached its tipping point and rolled away. Sula opened zer mouth and pulled in a gasping breath.
“Why?” ze asked once zer inhalations slowed to a more normal pace.
“Why what?”
“Why do you help me now, when you tried to kill me?”
Benexx worried at one of the wounds on zer face. “Just squeamish, I guess. Blowing you up while you were pointing guns at me was one thing. Watching you die slow and helpless, maybe I’m not that cold just yet.”
“It’s not in your nature.”
Benexx snorted, then spat out bloody phlegm. “And how would you know what’s in my nature?”
“Because, you’re not a warrior. You’re a bea–”
“If you finish saying ‘bearer,’ I swear to Cuut I’ll use whatever strength I have left to bash your head in with a rock. Probably should anyway. You’re burning up my air.”
“I thought you just said you’re not a killer.”
“There’s a lot of bits and chunks of your friends lying around here that say I am. It’s just situational is all. So if I were you, I wouldn’t cause another situation.” Benexx resumed the work of clearing debris from Sula’s body until ze reached just below the trapped elder’s waist. Ze gasped at the sight.
“What is it?” Sula asked.
“It’s…” Benexx cleared zer throat. “Your legs are crushed under a big-ass rock. Badly. I can’t possibly move it. It’ll probably be easier to cut them off and grow a new pair.”
Sula actually laughed at the suggestion. “I doubt either of us have that kind of time left.”
“I suppose not.”
“Although that does explain why I can’t feel them.”
“Sorry.”
“No, you’re not.”
“No, I’m not.” Benexx sat back down and stretched out zer injured leg. They sat in silence for a long span. It was so deathly quiet in the chamber. Between breaths, Benexx could hear the blood moving through zer body. It was… unnerving. Ze decided to break the eerie quiet.
“Why?”
“Why what?” Sula responded, matching Benexx’s own tone and cadence from minutes ago in a mocking sort of way.
“This. All of this. Why the attack on the parade? Why kidnap me? Why set up a bomb factory down here in, wherever the hell here is? What were you trying to accomplish?”
“To prevent you.”
“Prevent me?” Benexx repeated. “Well you’d have to go back in time for that, and I don’t think even the humans have the first idea how to actually pull that off.”
“Prevent more like you, then.”
“Why? What’s wrong with me?”
Sula sighed. “You have to ask? Look around you. Bearers–”
Benexx grabbed a rock. “Careful.”
“Go on, prove my point. Bearers bring life, not take it. It is not the way of things. But you have been poisoned by the humans. Their disrespect for our ways have perverted you into an abomination.”
Benexx gripped the rock even harder. “If my parents had respected ‘our ways,’ an elder would have sliced my head off fifteen years ago while I was a naked, defenseless infant, because I was too small, or too fat, or too quiet, or too noisy.”
“That would have been wise.”
“Excuse me if I disagree. The humans I know have shown me nothing but love and compassion. You say I’m unnatural? Good. Maybe bearers everywhere should fight back against the old ways that have imprisoned them. Maybe you think it’s not in our nature because you’ve never allowed us to be anything else but living fish tanks. Did you ever ask any of the bearers who carried your broods what they wanted out of life? Did the question even occur to you?”
“Such questions are dangerous.”
“For who?” Benexx barked. “In Shambhala, we get to ask our own questions, and come up with our own answers. And not just bearers, either. Youths who would have been condemned to either field work or soldiering have been able to decide how to live their own lives. They’ve become artists, musicians, athletes.”
“And struck with poverty, overcrowded buildings, forced to adapt to human customs, adopting human vices, exploited, pinned under the toes of their new masters. The Bearer with No Name should never have brought them here. The Trident is a false idol, a broken promise. We should either return to our own shores, or drive the humans back up to their sky city entirely. We were not meant to live like this.”
“But you have humans helping you, freely. I’ve seen them. They built your bombs.”
“There are humans who share our goals for their own reasons. We work together now so we may come apart later.”
Benexx just shook zer head. “Racists working together to destroy each other. Can’t you hear how idiotic that sounds? We have bigger problems to face. Whoever destroyed Earth.”
“Oh spare me the myths of your parents. Only Cuut Zerself could end a world, and if the humans really did escape Cuut’s wrath, Ze would reward us for finishing the harvest.”
“Would have, if your little insurrection hadn’t been beaten by a lowly bearer. That must just burn you up inside, being beaten by someone who was never meant to be a warrior. How much of a failure does that make you?”
A vibration emanated from the rubble pile, low at first, but it built into a grinding sound, followed by… voices? Sho
uting? Someone on the other side was still alive.
Sula managed a weak smile. “Perhaps not such a failure after all, young bearer. Some of my allies survived and will be here soon. You did very well to get this far, but it’s over now. I’ve changed my mind about you in one respect, however.”
“Oh yeah?” Benexx sneered. “How’s that?”
“You are definitely not worth the trouble. Your body will just have to suit our purposes.”
Benexx raged. After everything, ze was almost at peace with dying in here along with the last of the monsters who’d taken zer from zer family, zer city, and zer life. But this? Taken alive once more, wounded, without a weapon, all of the last few days of fighting for naught?
No, not like that.
“Maybe it will, but you won’t be alive to see it.” Benexx lifted the rock high over zer head. Just as ze was about to bring it crashing down on Sula’s impassive face, a ray of light broke through the wall of rubble and fell right in zer eyes.
“Benexx?” a bright, familiar voice yelled through the new hole in the pile. Sakiko’s voice.
Benexx’s arms went weak at the sound of zer best friend’s unexpected arrival. Ze almost dropped the rock on zer own head, but instead, it fell harmlessly… onto Sula’s face.
“Acha!” Sula shouted.
OK, not harmlessly, but Benexx didn’t care as she climbed numbly up the rocks.
“Kiko?” ze asked unsteadily.
“It’s Benexx!” Sakiko shouted. “Ze’s alive. Looks like total shit, but ze’s alive!”
“Thanks…”
“Scoot over,” a new, yet very old voice said. With the light shining in zer eyes ruining zer night vision, ze couldn’t make out anything but outlines, but the voice, and then the smell, were unmistakable.
“Daddy?” Benexx’s voice quivered.
“Yes, little Squish, it’s me. Mom’s here, too. We’re going to get you out of there.”
A wave of relief crashed into Benexx and beat at zer emotions until they all hung limp like boned fish.
“I thought you were dead,” ze said to zer father’s voice.
“We thought the same about you, kiddo. But we’re not.” His hand reached through the hole and grasped at air until Benexx laced zer rubbery fingers with his knobby ones and squeezed. “It’s all right, sweetheart. You’re safe. It’s all over.”
With that, Benexx let zerself relax, truly relax for the first time in days. By the time they finished loading zer into the medical evac quadcopter, ze was fast asleep.
Epilogue
Five tense weeks passed while the city, indeed the world, knit its wounds. It was a messy process with a lot of moving parts, and it was a long way from over, but the cooler heads in both Shambhala and G’tel seemed to be winning out.
No, not the “cooler heads” in G’tel, Benson corrected himself. That phrase had an entirely different meaning among his Atlantian friends.
And family.
Doc Russell had discharged Benexx last week, feeling it would be better for zer to finish recuperating at home. Of course, “home” was a little sparse at the moment, their house having been looted during the riots. Temporary plastic tarps covered the windows to keep the weather out until replacement plexiglass could be poured and cut, but they were pretty far down the priority list and regular service up and down the beanstalk had only been restored a few days ago.
Benexx was healing quickly, as was typical of zer race. Absurdly difficult to kill, those folks. But the gunshot wound to zer leg went all the way through and pulped quite a bit of muscle tissue as it did. Ze still needed help getting around, and would for a while yet, but ze’d passed zer rite of Hulukam by any measure.
Besides, Benexx’s injuries were trivial compared to the carnage ze’d single-handedly inflicted on zer kidnappers. Elder Sula was one of the few survivors of Benexx’s rampage, and it hadn’t come cheaply. Ze was currently cuffed to a bed and under guard in a secured room at the hospital regrowing zer legs and half of zer internal organs. Ze’d sung like a canary in exchange for medical treatment. Of course, ze would’ve gotten medical treatment anyway, but somehow ze hadn’t known that, and Theresa hadn’t gone out of her way to correct the terrorist’s misunderstanding of Shambhala law.
Sula’s testimony had confirmed Benson’s suspicions about Sco’Val. Ze’d been caught in a stolen canoe about twenty klicks west of Shambhala furiously paddling towards Atlantis, apparently unaware of exactly what “twenty-seven-hundred kilometers” actually meant. The rest of their coconspirators, Atlantian and human alike, were unmasked in short order and rounded up. The trials would come soon, but not until Benexx was well enough to attend as the prosecution’s star witness.
In the aftermath, and with considerable prodding from Devorah, the Bearer with No Name emerged from zer self-imposed hermitage to become the public face of the Atlantian expat community in Shambhala once more, beginning the morning after the riots when ze appeared unannounced on the steps of the Museum to sweep up the mess zer children had left the day before.
There was an immense amount of work to do, but maybe that work had already started. Instead of shattering the Trident as they’d hoped, the bombings and the attack on the beanstalk had only sharpened its tips.
Theresa descended the stairs from the second-floor bedrooms. Fortunately, the ransacking of their furniture and possessions had been mostly limited to the ground floor. However, the looters had made off with the luxurious silk bedsheets that had miraculously materialized in their linen closet after the conclusion of the Laraby investigation eighteen years ago. Theresa had made noises about catching and shooting whoever had done it before they ever reached the station house.
Benson was sure she’d been joking. Well, ninety percent sure.
“How is ze?” he asked.
“Asleep,” Theresa answered. “Or that’s what ze wants us to think. Ze’s probably going to get on a link with Jian again.”
“Heh, little sneak.”
“I wonder where ze got that from.”
“I don’t know what you mean. The only thing I sneak these days is a beer or two.”
“Or three.” Theresa reached down and patted her husband on his slowly expanding belly.
“Whatever, I can still kick ass. For a little while at least. Then I need a nap.”
Strictly speaking, they weren’t supposed to let Benexx talk to Jian, because Jian wasn’t supposed to be talking to anybody. At least no one in Shambhala or onboard the Ark. The ballsy ass kid made one last smart play when Varr’s orbit brought it back into shuttle range ten days ago. Then again, he’d had almost a month of sitting around with his thumb up his ass to come up with it. Instead of burning for the Ark where he awaited certain arrest and court martial for his exploits, he’d parked his damaged shuttle in low Gaia orbit and suited up in one of the shuttle’s emergency, one-time use reentry suits.
Calling the coffin-sized ablative aerogel sled a “suit” was being generous. It had winglets just big enough to keep it aerodynamically stable and pointed head down, a parachute pack, minimal thruster capacity for orientation in vacuum, and that was about it. Jian’s jump was the first and only time someone had actually used one of the batshit contraptions since the days of Earth, and even then, the only people brave or suicidal enough to jump out of a perfectly good spacecraft wearing one had been military spec-war operators doing orbital combat insertions, and later civilian thrill-seekers with more money than sense.
But instead of landing in Shambhala, Jian had timed his drop to put him in Atlantis, where he made his way to the gates of G’tel and requested political asylum. A status Chief Kuul was only too happy to grant. Partly as a way to poke back at Shambhala for taking in the Bearer with No Name years before, but mostly because Jian was already being venerated by the population as the human who risked everything to defend Varr from defilement. He was a hero to them, while being a wanted criminal on the other side of the ocean.
As was so often the case, both sides
were spot on. Who knew which version of the truth would win out in the end? The details would be left to diplomats and historians.
“Should we stop zer?” Theresa asked as she flopped down on the borrowed couch next to Benson.
“Nah, let zer think ze’s getting away with something. We have plausible deniability anyway.”
“That’s not what I meant, Bryan.” Benson made a “go on” gesture with his hand. “I mean, Benexx already had a crush on Jian. Now after he saved zer from those zealots, it’s approaching hero-worship levels.”
“We saved zer,” Benson corrected.
“Using intel he threw away his career to get. That’s going to take even a base of flirty infatuation through the stratosphere.”
“Wait, how do you know ze had a crush on him? They’ve been friends for years.”
Theresa stared at him with a pained expression. “Oh, honey, you’re so oblivious. How did you ever get laid before I came along?”
“I don’t know. It always just fell into my lap.”
The door chimed. The longtime lovers looked at each other with surprise.
“Are we expecting anyone?” Benson asked.
“At this hour?”
Benson got up, ignoring the twinge in his right knee. Usually, he’d just query the door’s security camera to see who’d come calling, but the looters had rather thoroughly smashed it on their way into the house and it hadn’t been replaced yet.
Theresa followed close behind, holding a sidearm discreetly behind her back. Benson had no idea where she kept the damned thing hidden, but it never seemed to be more than an arm’s reach away.
They stacked up by the door, Benson’s body providing cover for Theresa and her weapon. Probably overkill, but there had been sporadic fighting in the days after the riots, and times were still tense. It paid to be overly cautious.
Theresa tapped his shoulder, signaling she was in position and ready. Benson reached out and keyed the door, which swung inward to reveal…
Children of the Divide Page 37