by Alex Fedyr
Instead, Kalei asked, “Does it have audio too?”
“Nope. Shit, I’m glad they don’.” She gave an exaggerated shudder. “That video woulda been hella worse with audio.”
“What video?”
Shenaia glanced back at Kalei and, for the first time since Kalei had met her, she seemed uncomfortable. Her mouth curled like she had just eaten something bitter and her eyes looked over Kalei’s face and then quickly darted away as she turned to face the desk again. She drummed her fingers nervously against the wood a couple times before saying, “Look, Terin didn’ want me to tell, but—” She spun back around and paused when she saw Kalei again. She chewed on her lip for a moment, then sighed and said, “Shit, you’re goin’ to find out anyway. You and Mar are probably the only ones in the whole damn town who didn’ see it.”
“Shenaia, what are you talking about?”
“Uh—” Shenaia spun the chair again and made two revolutions before she stopped and said, “Look, you know when them Estranged attacked yo place? Some son a’ bitch broke into the CNB news station, used their system to hack the ear cams, and then streamed the attack onto ev’ry screen in Celan.”
The darkness within Kalei stirred and swelled as it fed on the sudden influx of rage that poured through her veins “Who the fuck—!”
Shenaia grimaced. “I don’ know. The guy—”
“Terin!” Kalei looked away from Shenaia and her eyes scoured the monitors with their haphazard shots of Downtown. “He owns this fucking place! It’s his cameras; he—”
“It wasn’t me.”
Kalei spun around and looked down the aisle. The elevator door was beginning to shut as Terin walked past the towers.
Kalei took three steps toward him, then stopped. Terin continued to walk until he reached the edge of the small room, then he stopped too.
Kalei didn’t dare cross the four feet between them, but that didn’t stop her from lashing out. “You’re a fucking liar! If it wasn’t you, then who the fuck could’ve done it?”
“The cameras’ inventor.”
“Oh, so you’re going to throw the blame to someone else, huh? And who the fuck is that? Sorry little boy, but ‘Great Estranged Inventors’ wasn’t a topic in my history class.”
Terin put his hands behind his back and straightened his shoulders. “You know who it is because you told me he was there.”
“Who? Blondie?”
“Yes, Xamic.”
“So what’re you saying? One day he just gets up and decides it’s a good idea to swarm a house with Estranged?” Kalei raised her arms and mocked a male voice. “‘Hell, while I’m at it, might as well jack a news station and transmit the whole thing so everyone can have a good laugh.’ Is that it?”
Terin casually looked away and studied one of the towers. “Something like that.”
“What the fuck aren’t you telling me? Why’d Xamic pick my house?”
Terin looked her in the eyes. Kalei saw nothing in the steady gaze of his stone grey irises. They were as stoic and unyielding as the Alundai Mountains.
He answered, “To send me a message.”
Kalei didn’t break eye contact. “What message?”
“Six feet of dirt isn’t enough to bury history.”
Kalei blinked. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
Quietly, he asked, “Why do you want to join SWORDE?”
Kalei glared at him. “Don’t redirect me with a question.”
“I answered your questions. Now answer mine.”
“No you didn’t!”
As though nothing had transpired, he repeated the question in the same even tone as before. “Why do you want to join SWORDE?”
Kalei clenched her fists. “Because I’m just waiting for the day when I get to watch your carcass bleed.”
“You can do that any time. Here’s a knife. Go right ahead.” From his back pocket, he produced a pocketknife, which he flicked open with a jerk of his wrist and offered to her.
Kalei looked away from the knife and snarled, “You know what I mean. Ripping you open is only satisfying if it ends with you dead.”
Terin didn’t reply. He simply folded the knife shut and returned it to his pocket.
Kalei said, “The first day I came here, Erit said you guys would teach me how to kill Estranged if I become a Warden. Is that true?”
“It is.”
“So even though you know I will kill you, you’ll still teach me?”
“You won’t kill me.”
“How the hell do you know?”
Terin replied, “You aren’t strong enough. You never will be.”
“Like shit! You have no fucking clue what you’re dealing with! Once I know how, I am going to come after—”
“Kalei, don’t—” Shenaia started, but Kalei turned on her.
“Shut up, you fucking Estranged!”
Shenaia stood up and took a step toward Kalei. “You’re calling me the ‘fucking Estranged’? Last I checked, you were Estranged too, bitch. You’d better get that through your pretty little head before you get yourself hurt.”
“Where’d the mask go, Shenaia? I thought you were trying to be my friend? Yeah, fucking right, you were just waiting to catch a sweet high from a newbie. Am I right?”
“Fuck you! I’m trying to help you! You don’t know jack shit about who—”
Terin appeared between them, but before Kalei could react, she felt his hand on the back of her neck and her entire body went rigid. Shenaia froze too.
Terin said, “Shenaia, give me Walker’s key and get out of here.” He released his grip on her neck and Shenaia’s body relaxed again. She continued to glare at Kalei as she dug a hand into her pocket, produced the key, and dropped it on the floor. She broke eye contact and walked past Kalei to the elevator.
Once the elevator door shut, Terin removed his hand from her neck. Control returned to her limbs as he walked over to the computer, sat down in the creaking chair, and began to click through the blue program.
Kalei asked, “Why was my family used to send you a message?”
Terin didn’t turn around or pause in his work as he said, “What are you going to do when we’re all dead, Kalei?”
“Answer my question.”
“Erit will still teach you to kill Estranged once you are qualified.”
“Not that question!”
He continued to type. “What would you do if you knew where to find Fenn?”
Kalei could feel her rage escalating again. “Answer my fucking question.”
Terin spun around and yelled, “YOU ANSWER MINE!”
Kalei froze. She had never heard Terin raise his voice before. His words seemed to hang in the air. She wanted to answer, she tried to think of something to say, but his steely glare terrified her.
He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, the glare was gone, replaced with his usual stoic composure. He calmly repeated the question, “What would you do if you knew where to find Fenn?”
Kalei said, “I’d make sure he’s safe.”
“And then what?”
“I would leave.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want him to die.”
Terin turned back to the computer and put his right hand on the mouse, but he didn’t move it. He said, “It doesn’t work like that. If you attempt to find Fenn, I will kill you myself.”
He dismissed her.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Dancing with the Past
Kalei didn’t remember what happened after that. A week later, she woke up in what Erit called a “Recovery Room.” This, of course, was just a fancy name for the demolished rooms of the hotel, like the first one she had visited with the broken glass. This room was a sibling to the first Recovery Room she’d stayed in. The metal nightstand was dented and had two legs missing, a pile of grey plastic, frayed wires, and chunks of sanded pinewood sat where a TV should have been. Kalei sat in the bloodstained remains of a shredded feather bed.
The smell wasn’t great. Her first instinct was to check her feet for glass. She was both relieved and disappointed when she found none.
What do I do now? Cold, late fall air poured in through the shattered window, drawing Kalei’s attention to the overcast sky. She watched the swollen, low-hanging clouds roll silently past the enormous Terondac Mountain, its slate peak reaching for the grey clouds without quite touching them. But the clouds and the mountain only reminded her of how bleak and desolate the world had become.
Kalei took a deep breath and remembered something her mother had taught her before she died. Whenever Kalei had a problem, her mother had insisted, “Start by listing what you know.” It was a silly exercise, but doing it always made Kalei feel closer to those days at the kitchen table, talking to her mom about everything from life to homework.
So Kalei leaned back against the wooden headboard of the bed and started gathering facts. It was hard to do with the darkness pounding at the back of her skull, but she tried anyway.
I know the names of five people within SWORDE now, and I know the name of my parents’ killers. And I know that one of them is the Director of SWORDE. Kalei took another deep breath. I know that SWORDE will train me to be a Warden, and I know where they keep their central computer. Good. Now when Tusic is ready with the device, I can take it straight there, after I get my hands on a key. But how am I going to manage that? Kalei’s eyes scoured the cracked plaster on the ceiling. One piece looked dangerously close to falling on her foot. She closed her eyes and focused her thoughts. Walker and Terin are the only ones with keys, and getting close enough to either of them to steal a key without notice doesn’t seem likely. When the time comes, I’ll just have to take it by force... I hope Terin wasn’t lying about them teaching me to kill. I don’t care what he says, he’s going to be the first person I execute. In the meantime... looks like the only thing for me to do is join this damn recruit program.
Kalei pulled herself out of the bed, went downstairs, and returned to training. The whole gang was there: Erit at the head of the table, Shenaia at the opposite end, and Mar still sitting to Erit’s left. Shenaia tried to say something when Kalei stepped in, but whatever it was, Kalei ignored her as she walked past Shenaia and sat down in her seat across from Mar. Shenaia got the message and didn’t say anything further.
While Shenaia sat in what was essentially time out, Mar grunted at her blank wall, and Erit taught Kalei how to pull back her darkness. In their earlier lesson, when he had pushed Kalei’s darkness back, it turned out he had done it using his own darkness. Now Kalei had to learn how to pull back it back on her own. It was tricky at first. Grabbing the darkness was like trying to grip the smooth exterior of a skyscraper as she plunged to her death. There were no handholds, only the havoc-inducing darkness spinning through her mind the whole way down. This made it impossible to concentrate. But eventually, she got it. Break one of the windows and you’ll find a bloody handhold. And once she did, she yanked hard and shoved all of the darkness into a small knot within her chest.
The pressure immediately built within the mass of darkness, and before she could push the last shred into the knot, her entire body screamed as a sensation like a thousand suns exploding ripped through her. The next thing she remembered, Erit was standing over her, explaining how the darkness was like an agitated, carbonated beverage: it should never be bottled.
He helped her up.
So instead of bottling the darkness, Kalei had to learn how to vent the steam. First, she would pull back the darkness. As she did so, the black would retreat from her fingernails and she could feel some small amount of relief in her arms. That was the most rewarding part of the process. Then she would have to reintroduce a small amount of darkness into her nails, or even redirect it elsewhere if she could, but that took more concentration. So she watched as a controlled dose of darkness crept back into her fingers.
Erit explained that eventually she would have to come up with some sort of shape or design through which she could channel her emotions. This would serve as an outlet for the darkness and would help focus her control of it. For example, one member of SWORDE had a sun on each of her nails and the weather could become cloudy, rainy, or even windy, depending on her mood. Erit himself had the spines of books on each finger, the titles of which would change to whatever he felt appropriate. When he told her this, Kalei took a glance and saw the title Robinson Crusoe delicately etched in italics on each book. She couldn't imagine the amount of control that would take.
For herself, Kalei started with a single line that stretched from the base of her nail and reached out into open space. It took a week for Kalei to make that line stable. It would blur, it would bleed off into the rest of the nail, and at the slightest noise in the room, her concentration would break and her nails would flood black again.
But after about a week of working at it around the clock, she mastered the technique. One of the perks of being an Estranged was that she never got tired or hungry, which left her with far more time to work. Of course, Erit still forced her to take a break every now and again, during which she would usually wander the hotel or shut her eyes and force her body into a light sleep. Kalei wasn’t sure how it was possible that she could sleep when she wasn’t tired, but she was grateful for the opportunity to take a break from the world, if only for a little while.
On her excursions through the hotel, Kalei explored the various rooms, saw a few scuffles between Wardens and new arrivals, and learned where the key points of interest were. The building had a rec room, an indoor shooting range, an armory, and – rumor had it – they even had a prison in the basement. Kalei didn’t try looking for it just yet; she mostly preferred to explore the empty upper floors where she didn’t have to deal with the screams of unruly newcomers, or the watchful eyes of the Wardens.
She knew she should be mingling with the other recruits, gleaning what information she could from casual conversations and so forth. That was what spies were supposed to do. But it was more peaceful upstairs. And some of the rooms, although incredibly dusty and rotted, were still intact. Kalei enjoyed the opportunity to peer into the untouched world of almost twenty years ago. The faded grandeur spoke so much to what was lost on E-day.
In one room, on a brown metal desk, sat a crumbling notepad in which few words were still legible: million-, aeroscience stock se-, Friday afternoon, 3:30 pm. In another room, spoiled cosmetics on the bathroom counter sat beside a short stack of black and white photos that held a beautiful, smiling woman showing off a flowing ball gown. Several of the pictures had already been signed with the fat black marker that sat beside it.
On her fourth excursion into the hotel, Shenaia had jumped up and asked to go with her. Kalei had allowed it, and as they walked, Shenaia apologized about the fight. The girl sounded sincere, but Kalei wasn’t sure what to think of the apology. She saw the way Erit watched Shenaia warily. Whether it was because Shenaia was a former member of Tusic or because he simply didn’t trust Shenaia not to jump after one of the recruits for a high, Kalei couldn’t tell. Common sense told her this girl was trouble, but Kalei’s gut said Shenaia was someone she wanted to be close to. Kalei wasn’t sure which to trust.
So Kalei didn’t say anything in response to Shenaia’s apology, and the girl seemed to take the silence as “Apology accepted.” Shenaia then went on at length to tell Kalei all about a new gun she recently bought off a Warden, and how it would go nicely with the rest of her collection of vintage revolvers, but how she really wanted to start getting more guns for her rifle collection because she only had six of those... Kalei quickly tuned her out.
When Kalei went back to her lessons, she started to focus on bending the tip of the line in her nails, twisting it in on itself until it ended with a simple whirl. Satisfied with the design, Kalei stopped tinkering and left it at that. At first, she focused simply on holding that shape. Then she began to let it tighten and flex with the pulse of her darker emotions. Slowly, it began to take a mind of its o
wn, thrashing and undulating when she became frustrated, or calmly tightening when she regained her composure.
Erit moved Kalei on to multitasking while she tried to hold the pattern. At first, he would try to carry a conversation with her. Then he made her solve simple math problems.
Once everyone had progressed to Kalei's level – for somehow, she had passed both Mar and Shenaia just a couple days in – they moved on to physical activities. A walk around the room turned into a routine of jumping jacks. Then, finally, a game of dodgeball. Mar had a wicked arm. She had floored Erit with the ball more than once. Kalei was quick enough to dodge the worst of them. Shenaia, on the other hand, kept taking hits from Mar as she struggled to explain to the old woman that the game was not free for all. When that didn’t work, she left the old woman’s team and started throwing balls back at her attacker.
Going shooting for the first time was Kalei’s favorite part of training, although she didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as Shenaia did. The girl not only brought her own gun to the indoor range, but she brought her collection. A dozen suitcases and briefcases held at least two dozen weapons from every manufacturer Kalei had ever seen, and then some. And according to the grinning teen, this wasn’t even a tenth of what she owned.
“Aren’t they the shit!” Shenaia squealed as she opened up the eighth gun case.
“Yup, shit pretty well sums it up,” Mar mumbled as she looked over a double-barreled shotgun from case number three.
Shenaia reached into case six and pulled out a long-barreled revolver, swinging it around to point at Mar. “Hey! Don’t patronize my babies!”
“Ho there!” Kalei tried to smooth things over. “No need to point that at anyone.”
“What?” Shenaia’s wrist flopped to the side, the barrel casually aimed in Erit’s direction. “It’s not like I’m going to shoot her.”
“Rule number one about gun safety, Shenaia,” Erit said as he eyed the revolver. “Never point a gun at anything, or anyone, you do not intend to shoot.”