The Book of Olivia

by Paxton Summers

  “That they are—but brilliant. That whole bit about delivering the food in their hides… even took me by surprise. I could tell he wanted to play the game, so I responded, rose to the challenge, picked up the gauntlet.”

  I sucked in a breath, unsure why his confession took me off guard. The murders, rapes, and butchering hadn’t been Marcus, but Pilot. I found myself surprised and in the same moment also wondering why.

  “You didn’t know?” He clucked his tongue. “Marcus doesn’t have the stomach for what I do.”

  “You’re the Butcher.”

  “Give the princess a prize. You should have seen Marcus’s face when the packages arrived, all wrapped up like gifts. He didn’t see the message it contained, but I did. It said, Let’s dance. So I did.”

  “I’m glad I didn’t. What Axel did was horrible.” I swallowed thinking about the dying men’s screams that I’d never be able to block from my dreams. They would go with me to my grave, and with them guilt that I might have been able to stop it somehow. “It was inhuman.”

  “Was it? Barbaric—yes, but inhuman?” He chuckled. “It’s still the work of a man, and it got the desired result. Marcus stopped raiding your fields, for a while anyway. Sometimes you have to be a little masochistic to get someone’s attention. I believe they call it ‘shock and awe.’ Think of whom history remembers most. It’s certainly not the peacemakers, now, is it?”

  “Axel didn’t do it to be remembered.”

  “Did Marcus ever tell you about his childhood?”

  Pausing, I wondered why Pilot suddenly changed the topic and if I really wanted to hear what he had to say. Thinking about what he’d shared with me thus far… I shook my head, really not wanting to take the discussion further. I feared what he would tell me. As they said, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. Marcus could be every bit as twisted as his brother—just better at hiding it. I didn’t want to know the truth.

  “We had different mothers. My mother, offended my father would take up with the likes of a servant woman, fired her and had soldiers drag her out in her bloody nightgown minutes after she gave birth, not giving her time to gather her baby or belongings.

  “Mother was left with a helpless infant she wanted gone and decided to drown him before my father got back from a meeting at the palace. Dad caught her on the riverbank and saved him before he could be tossed into the water. He located Marcus’s mother and brought her back, allowing her to live in the conservatory keeper’s quarters. A slap in the face to my mother.”

  “So you hate Marcus for this reason?”

  “He’s my brother. I don’t hate him. There are only a few months between us. I am his older brother. But I didn’t always feel that way about him. He took some getting used to. In the summer when we were five, I’d take him down to the very river my mother wanted to drown him in as an infant, toying with the thought of finishing the job.”

  “What stopped you?”

  “He amused me, and later, I grew to like his company. I often captured frogs in a giant net and put them in a bucket. Marcus would try to scare them away so I couldn’t trap them. But the stupid things would just swim into my net, making it too easy. Do you know what I did with the frogs, Olivia—why Marcus tried so desperately to free them?”

  I knew what he did to the clones he’d gotten his hands on, so it didn’t take much of an imagination to put a potential scenario together, one I didn’t want to hear about. “I don’t care.”

  “I cut their back legs off to see how long they could tread water before sinking to the bottom. I told Marcus if he spoke of it, I would do it to him. He never did mention it to Father.”

  I clamped my hand over my mouth, feeling the vomit starting to rise.

  “You’d be surprised at how long a frog will stay afloat without legs. Sometimes I’d only cut one off and watch the helpless creature swim in circles. It would go around and around and around without purpose, until it could go no longer. Kind of like you—like those clones you love so much.”

  I jumped up and ran for the sink, dizzy from the infection. Heaving, I lost the acid and bile as Pilot laughed from the other side of the wall.

  “Oh, I have so many tales to share, Olivia. Don’t waste it all on the first.”

  “Shut up!” I gagged and heaved again. “You’re sick.”

  “Maybe I am, but I’m not the only one. Open your eyes. I know what your boyfriend is. Remember, I told you, like recognizes like.”

  “Axel is nothing like you.” As I spew the denial out, I knew Pilot was right. There was a monster buried deep inside Axel, one created from human depravity. I knew this split personality was not his fault. He had two choices. Survive or die. He chose to live and to cope with what was done to him on a daily basis, and in doing so, he developed another ego, one I’d never realized existed until he gained freedom.

  If you put a tiger in a cage and abused it, eventually it would learn to bear what you did to it, go somewhere in its head where it could hide from the unavoidable, but it didn’t forget. One day, when you opened that cage, no matter how subdued or tame the beast appeared, the tiger that pulled inside itself would come out. When it did, you’d be dead. Axel was a tiger.

  Marcus… I wasn’t sure what he was. He’d never been beaten down and subdued as a clone would’ve been—or I could only assume he hadn’t. Nor did he know the pain of a keeper’s neglect, but it didn’t make him any less fierce or deadly. He was the son of an evil man and sibling to an equally nasty one. I could only guess what came of his upbringing.

  I met him face-to-face only a few weeks ago, but I believed he was as determined as Axel to destroy the people he was against. Where we were now was not what I envisioned when I plotted to free the clones. None of it was what I thought it would be.

  Sometimes, the lines between friend and foe blurred. This happened five weeks ago, as the sun began to sink on the horizon. I’d dared the suburbs to scavenge for parts needed to build a device to tap into the grid and power our electromagnetic shields.

  I pressed my body tight to the crumbling stucco, molding my form against it, holding my breath as the Aeropite soldier approached. He seemed to step out of thin air, and I hadn’t expected to see him as night began to fall. They never left the city after dark or visited the ruins. My dark clothes helped me to blend into shadows, but that wouldn’t matter if he saw me through the sensors on his headgear or caught the red pulse of my chip. I slowly turned my head, pressing my cheek with the chip against the wall.

  Back and forth, he scanned, sweeping right and left, sighting through his heat visor. In moments, he’d spot me. A rodent squeaked and scurried away on his right, pulling the soldier’s attention away from where I’d chosen to hide. He swung his weapon around. Pfffft. The rat turned red like a hot coal then black, only to crumble to ash before my eyes. The charcoal particles swirled and caught the wind, blowing away in the breeze.

  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. My pulse throbbed in my neck. It could have been me—still could be.

  His hand moved to his visor, which he flipped up to survey the now-empty space. My heart tap danced in my chest, and the way my stomach churned, I was certain I would have vomited if he’d gotten any closer. But at least with his visor up, the sensors deactivated and gave me one less scanner I’d need to worry about.

  It didn’t mean I wasn’t frightened. I had one thing to look forward to if he discovered me. Immediate death. Contact with rebel body fluids could result in a horrific ending. Not knowing who carried and who didn’t was like playing russian roulette, and the soldiers no longer took chances, having witnessed the outcome.

  First, the telltale copper flecks appeared in the infected person’s eyes. Next, their blood began to hemorrhage from their organs as vessels and arteries broke down. The final stage of the plague looked like lividity, but it covered every square inch of flesh, including the victim’s eyes. Even though they swelled and turned purple, the person still breathed, for a little while anyway. Then they woul
d bleed from all their pores. When they finally died, they’d become a bag of bones and dried flesh, no moisture left, much like a water balloon with pinholes poked all over it. One massive hemorrhage.

  I’d tried to convince the rebels bio-warfare should never be used, but, like the night Axel ordered the young soldiers skinned alive, nobody heard me. Axel’s tactics worked. The rapes and gruesome ways they killed us stopped. Now, they simply vaporized us. I supposed, in a way, it had been a solution, but that Axel had come up with it terrified me.

  I closed my eyes, remembering the day he’d discovered the plague and its cure in the abandoned lab, the very lab he’d ordered burned to the ground.

  A green metal case passed me, carried by two men. I eyed it, knowing all too well what it contained, having seen it only an hour before in the deepest room in the facility, behind a door that took us over two hours to cut through and inside a vault which took the remainder of the day to crack open. “That should be destroyed with the lab.”

  “The contents of that box are an advantage. If we’re to survive, we need to use everything at our disposal,” he said.

  “It becomes airborne once someone is infected. It could spread throughout the continent and from city to city, killing everyone.”

  “Not if you have the antivirus, the master strain.”

  “It’s unethical.”

  “No, Olivia. It is called survival.” He followed the case out the door and stopped at the threshold, turning back to me. “Don’t think they wouldn’t use it on us. We only got to it first.”

  I opened my mouth to tell him nobody should use it, but he’d already gone. There was killing to survive, and then there was genocide. Axel crossed the boundary that day.

  * * *

  I’d refused to be a carrier, participate in the slaughter. Instead, I focused on escape, a means to flee across the oceans to lands long forgotten. I wasn’t alone in my thoughts. Many refused to use the engineered bug as a weapon, leaving our enemy to guess who the carriers were.

  Peace would never happen in this place. Hatred ingrained from childhood could be a bitter enemy and rarely forgave.

  And that was how I found myself in this situation. Like before, I’d tried to do the right thing, listen to my conscience. I’d never learn.

  The rough surface of the building scratched across my back as I slid along the wall, attempting to retreat while he faced the other direction. I needed to move quickly but also silently. In my hand, I clutched the handle of a blade, which would be of little help against the disrupter he carried. I’d make a bigger pile of ash than the rat. Not my goal that evening.

  But neither could I walk away from what I’d come for. The only way to end this would be to leave. Without the gas-fired airships we’d rebuilt from the skeletons in an old boneyard, there would be no retreat. We needed parts and a defensive shield to protect our hangers as the enemy drew closer every day. One day they’d find them, and then there would be no trip to our new home.

  Only extinction.

  Axel refused to have further to do with the ships, as though he no longer wished to escape. All his focus instead turned to destroying his enemies. But I could not let the dream of living in a new land slip from my grasp.

  I should’ve stayed out of the sector, listened to what I’d been told about scouts sighting troops in the area, but we’d already picked clean the territory outside the inner grid, which meant, if I wanted the parts, I’d have to venture into the sectors surrounding the walls.

  I’d been ordered by Axel to stay out of it but chose to ignore him. Scavenging would ensure our survival. I needed to pick through the discarded junk for components no longer manufactured, and that meant going where I could find what we were missing. There had been no other answer, and as I watched the soldier’s back, I cursed the stubborn streak that made me defiant. There were other cities, places we could go if we traveled to them, places away from the storm brewing on the horizon and the destruction that would follow.

  Axel didn’t own me, even if he thought he did, and I’d ignored his orders, certain I would be fine. Others listened, so I found myself here alone and sinking in an ocean of shit. Deeper by the second, drowning in trouble. But I had no choice. Someone had to save us, get the components required for our shield and ships. Axel embraced the fight to seize territory. I’d already chosen to leave it to our enemies but would not go until we had shields up, a means to protect those who remained. Our people were being picked off from above, and I could not stand by and watch. Never again.

  That buffer would come in the form of electromagnetic waves generated from a device that would tap into their wireless power grid and create a safe zone over and around us.

  By bending the electromagnetic waves, we could also become invisible, escape unseen. We only needed one part to finish the device, and it sat but a few yards away, waiting for me to haul it off.

  Ships couldn’t fly over or around the protective shield, not from the cities, and not from across the borders. That kind of safety could only be bought with courage and sacrifice. And though some might call me foolish, there were traits you inherited from your parents you could not change. From my mother, I inherited self-sacrifice. The heart that beat in my chest would never let me forget it. She’d saved me for a reason, and I could not ignore it.

  From my father—well, that was where I got the pigheadedness. That was no secret, and, at times, it got me into situations I’d rather not be in. No matter how hard I tried not to be like him, there were occasions I showed my Braun genetics.

  Voices approached, and I froze. The sound of debris crunched under boots as they drew closer. My entire body tightened, every muscle tensed, readying to spring. With any luck, they wouldn’t see me. The setting sun cast deep shadows against the building where I stood. As long as they didn’t look directly at me with a heat visor, I would remain hidden. Fifty-fifty chance. Maybe. I kept my chip turned away from them so the dim red light wouldn’t snag attention.

  “Hale, sir.”

  I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth. The vein in my neck pulsed so hard, I felt it in my jaw. I dared not draw a breath. One sound.

  “Is the sector secure?”

  “Nothing living or breathing here but soldiers from the city and rats. I’ve swept it twice,” one of the new arrivals said to the man who’d shot the varmint. When I opened my eyes, the man who’d been about to discover me had backed up and was now close enough to reach out and touch. His body blocked me from their view. I could swear I could feel the heat off his torso. I’d never been thankful for my enemy until that moment. That one action most likely saved my life.

  The special ops uniforms on the soldiers and the solid black clothing my barrier wore, along with the skull patch on their sleeves told me it would be particularly bad if they caught me. Death squad. Would the shadows be enough? One mistake.

  “Seal it and move to sector 7-A. I want them out of this grid. We’ll start expanding the walls tomorrow. If we can’t drive them off the land all at once, we’ll push them back and reclaim a little at a time. Our food storage is reaching critical levels. We can’t wait.” I couldn’t see his face, but from the way he talked, their reactions, I could tell my secret savior was a man of importance.

  “Yes, sir.” The sounds of boots retreated, fading into the distance. I nearly collapsed in relief. If he’d shifted to the left or right, they’d certainly have seen me. I shivered, watching them go.

  As they disappeared behind a dilapidated building, my blockade spun around and pointed his weapon at my chest. “You can come out now.”

  3

  I wanted to retreat, but I had nowhere to go with the building at my back and the soldier at my front. So I moved sideways.

  A little red dot followed me, staying center mass on my chest. “Stop or I’ll open a hole in you.”

  “Please, don’t shoot.” The soldiers didn’t hold a shred of compassion, but I prayed this one might be different, only because I wasn’t dead yet. D
id he intentionally hide me? If he had, I could not begin to explain his reasons, but it made him some kind of ally. For the moment.

  “If I wanted to shoot you, I’d have done it. Get out here where I can see you.”

  I raised my hands and stepped into the open.

  “Beautiful traitor.” The officer sucked in a breath as his gaze swept me from head to toe. I didn’t know if he called me a traitor because he caught me outside the city walls with the clones or because he recognized my face, one that had changed a lot in the last five years. That girl, Olivia, the president’s daughter, had been left behind in the city when it burned.

  I had heard many tales of my exploits, that I was seven foot tall, more man than woman, and ate human flesh for dessert. Somehow, I doubted this man bought into the stories being told, and I found it funny they would even have the stories, as pictures of me taken during my hand-fasting when I was nineteen—the only images of me left after the uprising—had been everywhere until they’d scrubbed me from existence. The citizens made me into a fairy-tale ogre. They needed someone to blame—a monster—so they created one and put a huge price on my head.

  The rebel who stood before him was older and healthier because of her mother’s heart and hard living. I’d become all muscle and anger, wrapped in five-foot-two inches of thin blonde in worn clothing. No one would doubt whose side I stood on, but would they know the new face of their most-hated enemy? The innocence I’d once worn had vanished, replaced with a wiser, situation-hardened countenance. I looked much different than the pictures of my pampered youth or the lies concocted about my appearance.

  He eyed my cheek, and I knew to what he referred, why he called me a beautiful traitor. Even though he held a weapon on me, I relaxed. The residents of the city would not stoop to permanent disfigurement to become wolves in sheep’s clothing, or take a chance of being shot on sight. Only one group marked themselves.

  His gaze rested on my chip. The mark started at my temple and traveled to my cheekbone on the left side of my face, one of the bigger implants. Oh, it had hurt like a bitch to have it inserted there. The primitive surgery had left half my face swollen for the better part of a week afterward. Those outside our tribes would not understand its significance, what it really meant. And I prayed our enemy had not become educated enough to recognize the mark belonged to a leader of the rebellion and not just a foot soldier.