Kane resists looking over to where he saw the perpetrator throw her package. No point complicating a simple matter. He just wants to get out of here.
“Whatever she had, she either took it or disposed of it before we started our pursuit.”
The Detainer nods and calls her colleague over to load the body into the van. The process completed, Kane nods and takes his leave.
“Keep the fire, Peacekeeper,” she calls out after him.
That’s what I’m trying to do.
Chapter 13
The strange emotions and distracting thoughts are still with Kane at shift’s end, spurring him towards the Wild Rover and the promise of synth cocktails to chase them away.
The first day after his injury had taken some adjusting—his mind wandering and unfocused. He had dismissed it as a temporary side effect—of the fall, the injury, the heavy anesthetic. But, days later, with unfamiliar emotions dragging at his core and strange thoughts spiking in his mind, the conclusion is harder to cling to. The only thing that dulls the confusion and deep-seated unsettling is sleep and alcohol. And, though the crack of dawn’s light should be driving him to his bed, he doesn’t slow as he free-runs towards Precinct 13 instead.
Stepping inside the izakaya as the sky turns a brassy shade of brown brings a strange kind of relief. Aura calls to him from a table over by the bar, his partner surrounded by a group of Peacekeepers. Under the fluorescent lights, the table glitters with dozens of dodecahedrazines. Aura raises one of the tumblers, the dodeca’s blue alcohol shining. “This one has your name on it, Kane.”
He strides over to the table and takes it from her hand, letting the alcohol fizzing with a crystalline enhancer run bitter down his throat, and then reaches for another.
Even at the early hour, the izakaya is busy with Fire Elementals—Peacekeepers, Detainers, Infrastructure Protectors, and the like. They crowd the bar and stand around high-set tables, watching the avatar sports on the wallscreen, drinking, boasting, laughing—content to let the alcohol and mindless entertainment eliminate the memories and after-effects of long and demanding shifts.
The door to the izakaya opens and admits another group of Infrastructure Protectors, laughing among themselves and heading straight for the bar. One of the lowest-level ranks of Fire Elementals, Kane turns his back on them and finishes his dodeca.
“Hey, IPs,” Aura calls, her voice carrying over the loud hum of the izakaya. “Which one of you was the dim-witted, short-sighted fool protecting the Fraise residence on Rue Dorian?”
Kane puts a hand on her arm, a silent request for her to leave it be, but the other Peacekeepers around them seize on the opportunity and back Aura with their own catcalling and insults.
“What of it?” a Protector calls back.
Sighing, Kane turns around to face the scene unfolding. A group of five Protectors have peeled off from the larger group and step toward the Peacekeepers.
“I’m sick of cleaning up your mess, that’s what of it,” Aura replies, brushing aside Kane’s hand and stepping forward herself.
“And what mess would that be, Peacekeeper?” The older Infrastructure Protector sneers as she asks the question, the expression pulling on her otherwise attractive features and promising conflict.
“How hard is it to stop an Earth Elemental from lifting tech?” Aura’s voice is pitching higher—she wants this fight. “I mean, they can barely walk in a straight line, they’d likely make enough noise to wake a score of drunken Labourers, and yet you let one not only steal a next-gen screen but make it out of the building with no damage.”
“Your ego is sucking up brain oxygen, Peacekeeper.” A smaller Protector steps forward, his breadth of shoulders making up for his lack of height. “No tech was lifted from Rue Dorian tonight or any night.”
Aura laughs, a tinkling of glass shattering against a wall—beautiful and deadly. She turns to Kane and frowns in mock surprise. “Hear that, Kane? No theft tonight from Rue Dorian. No missing tech. No fugitive Earth.”
Normally, by now, Kane would have injected himself in the situation. And the IP has opened up a perfect opportunity for some old-fashioned fighting. But, a strange sense of warning is fighting in the depths of his brain, breaking out above the torrent of dodecas he seeks to bury it under.
“Then why did I waste fifteen minutes chasing her through the precincts and into the Edges?” Aura asks, turning back to the Protectors.
The laughter from the Protectors ratchets up the growing tension. “You ridicule us, and yet an Earth evaded you for fifteen minutes and made it to the Edges?”
Aura steps closer again, now flanked by four of the other Peacekeepers who either share her wounded sense of honor or merely crave a fight. “Are you calling me slow, IP?”
“No,” the smaller male says. “I’m calling you slow and misinformed.”
The crack of Aura’s fist into the Protector’s jaw is quickly followed by a flurry of swinging arms and roundhouse kicks. While the Peacekeepers have the speed and precision, the Protectors outnumber them two to one.
Kane has been in enough Fire Elemental fights to know that they burn hot and fast. This will all be over in a few minutes. Some will walk away with angrier wounds than others, but they’ll all end up at the bar buying drinks for each other before the Otpor sky turns its dirty brown.
Turning his back on it all, Kane downs the rest of his dodeca and heads for the izakaya exit. The glare of the early morning sun pulls at the tiredness in his muscles and mind, but he pushes it aside for a little while longer. Easing into a slow jog, he heads in the direction of the rising sun—back to the Edges where a restrained Earth Elemental spoke of lies and a better life.
Chapter 14
Gravel crunches underfoot as Kane makes his way to where the Detainers picked up the Earth Elemental. The stench of stale and stagnant water from leaking substations pricks at his nose, made worse by the rising temperatures under Otpor’s violent sun.
He kicks his feet out in frustration, cursing as the shards of broken concrete skitter along the ground. His self-imposed directive is futile—even if there was something to find out here in the in-between space, the wind and sand and rats would have long since hidden or destroyed it.
Even so, he keeps walking, tracking lines in the sand and gravel, sweating in the heat. His mind constantly returning to the same question—if it wasn’t drugs that the Earth stole and discarded, what was it? What was so Unorthodox that she couldn’t be detained with it?
The heat and tiredness slow his feet and he sinks down, defeated, in the shade of a nearby recycler. The pitted concrete is cool against his back and he leans into it, letting it numb some of his anger and frustration. From his new perspective, he watches the Wasteland breeze pull at particles too small to resist its power.
He sits there for an hour, longer, content to watch the sand and grit disperse and coalesce. Occasionally a rat scurries past, sniffing at the air, startling when it sees him. There is a moment when Kane can almost see in the animal’s eyes a consideration of the impossible, a temptation to take on the bigger beast to get its fill for an empty belly. Kane stays still, watching it, waiting for it to make its decision.
The sou-easterly blows again, finding its way through the cracks in the Border Wall, insistent in its demand to touch the inner city. The rat forgets its earlier bravado and scurries to the shadows of the next recycler, pausing only to sniff and tear at something poking up from the nearby sand drift.
Kane leaps to his feet, sending the rat bolting further into the Edges. Racing to the next recycler, his hands tingle at the rough sand as he sweeps it away. Grabbing at the fine sheaves of material beneath, he yanks them free, an entire volume coming away in his hand. Though it cannot weigh more than three hundred grams, there is a strange heaviness to it. It is strange and unfamiliar and everything about its organic form screams its Unorthodoxy.
He should destroy it. If his brain wasn’t so broken, he would have already.
But c
onfusion and curiosity are twin spikes stabbing at his mind, so he secures the object in the waist of his pants, hides it under his shirt, and walks out of the Edges.
Also by Mikhaeyla Kopievsky
Divided Elements
Resistance (available now)
Rebellion (available now)
Revolution (coming in 2019)
About Mikhaeyla Kopievksy
MIKHAEYLA KOPIEVSKY is an independent speculative fiction author who loves writing about complex and flawed characters in stories that explore philosophy, sociology, and politics. She holds degrees in International Relations, Journalism, and Environmental Science. A former counter-terrorism advisor, she has traveled to and worked in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.
Mikhaeyla lives in the Hunter Valley, Australia, with her husband and son—where she wrangles black angus steer, waits for her tomatillos to grow, and watches crimson sunsets light up southern skies.
For information on new releases, book recommendations, giveaways, and free short stories, sign up to Mikhaeyla’s Author Updates. You can also get updates on new releases and book sales by following Mikhaeyla on Bookbub.
A Note to Readers
On behalf of all the authors who’ve contributed to On the Brink, thank you for reading our stories. We had a lot of fun writing them, and I hope you have enjoyed reading our visions of the future.
Positive reviews make a huge difference to independent authors. If you can spare five minutes, we would really appreciate a short review on Amazon and Goodreads.
On the Brink has been a truly collaborative effort. I would personally like to thank Heather Marie Adkins for the wonderful cover, Carissa Andrews for her fantastic formatting, and Alanah Andrews and Clare Littlemore for their tireless efforts proofreading.
I hope you’ve discovered some new dystopian authors in the pages of this book. Please do check out their other books and get in touch—we always love hearing from readers.
Happy reading!
Alison Ingleby
On the Brink Page 45