Mayfly Series, Book 1

by Jeff Sweat

  Before she can say anything to explain or defend, the alarm drums start clanging.

  * * *

  They’re attacking the southeast wall. Grease knows because he built the drums with a different tone for each part of the wall. So he immediately goes to the scopes on the southeast edge of the Horn. The things he sees:

  The Biters, battle ready and screaming, lit by the pots of burning tar for their arrows. 150 of them. The fire gleams off the single shaved side of their heads; the smoke from the tar drifts between them and makes it look like there are twice as many of them. Beyond them, he sees something else, darker skin. Have they brought the Lowers, too?

  One in three of the Biters carries a bow; the rest bristle with swords and long rusty spears ripped from iron fences. It’s not rust, he knows; it’s blood. Only—some of the lances aren’t covered in blood. Some of them are smoky black, the black of the Newport tribe of the Biters.

  He turns away from the scope, reeling. They’ve joined forces, the Newports and the Palos. The main thing that has saved the Kingdom from the Biters in the past was that the Newports and Palos hate each other almost as much as they hate the Kingdom. They’ve never attacked together. But here they are at the fences, the blood and the smoke.

  “The Biters, sir,” he says. “The Newports and Palos are both attacking.”

  The King doesn’t notice; the King hasn’t moved. Neither has the Round Table. They should be riding out on the enemy’s flank, but all their attention is focused on Jemma and Lady. “Who sent you here?” the King says. It sounds almost like a cat’s growl, it’s coming so low and deep within the King’s throat.

  “You captured us,” Jemma says.

  “You killed a cow so we would capture you and you could take over.”

  Lady steps in front of Jemma, as if to shield her. “We killed an animal that we never heard of to get captured by a place we never heard of?” She shakes her head.

  “You’re working with the Biter. You talked to him every day, and he’s escaped.”

  “We just wanted to know what he knew,” Jemma says. And then her face brightens. “He said there was a place they could climb in. The Mono track.”

  Grease has warned the King about the track before, about the way it pierces the wall, but the King just shakes his head now. “That track’s twenty feet off the ground.”

  “It’s not that far with a rope,” Grease says.

  “Whatever magic you’re working, the Biter is helping you make it,” the King says.

  “Give my girl some credit,” Lady says.

  “I can see them in the haze,” Jemma says, and Grease can’t tell if she’s telling the truth or not. “But it’s shown me a way to stop them.”

  “Neither of those things are true,” the King says. “You’re working with the Biter.” But Grease steps to a different telescope, pointing at the Mono track outside the wall. He can’t tell if they’re climbing it or not, but he sees Biters below it. Jemma’s right.

  There’s more, though. Whatever caused the Biters to hold off attacking, they’ve started now. The sky lights up with burning arrows falling like stars into the Kingdom. The gunner on top of the Horn starts firing, deep guttural shots. Below him, on the wall, other defenders fire as well.

  “The enemy is at the wall.” Grease says it slow and loud enough for everyone. “They’re firing at us. They’re at the Mono track. We need to close up the hole.”

  “The wall will hold until we’re done here.”

  “Sir, the enemy is at the wall.”

  “We could help you,” Jemma says. “We can stop them.”

  “The wall will hold.” There’s something unsure, a dangerous amount of unsure, in the King’s eyes. “It’ll hold until I’ve taken care of these girls.”

  Grease punches the King in the face.

  “Forget about the girls! Be a king!” Grease says. The words break through, but it’s the fact that the King has been hit by the one person in the Kingdom who doesn’t fight, who hasn’t hit anyone since he was seven, that snaps him around.

  The King looks as if he wants to add Grease’s head to the ones on the gate, but the reason comes slowly back. He turns to his Knights, who have their swords half drawn. “Give me the room.”

  They file out, and the King stares at the Round Table without meeting their eyes. He sighs. “All these signs of strength … for what?” When he looks up, it’s to Jemma. “What was it you said? There’s appearing to be strong, and there’s actually being strong.”

  She doesn’t say anything, as if it will break whatever spell he’s under. He says, “Are you sure of her, Grease?”

  “I know what she can do,” Grease says, and his gaze opens to Pico and Lady, too. “More importantly, I know that they’re strong and they’re good. Just … listen to them.”

  “You have a plan?” the King says. “Tell me fast.”

  Jemma tells him, and it’s a good one.

  “You okay if that happens to the Mono?” the King says.

  “It’s just stuff,” Grease says. Then Grease tells him about the golf cart of the apokalips, and the King raises an eyebrow but nods.

  Grease remembers how smart the boy X was, before he became the King. How kind he was. Grease remembers when people used to make fun of him, as a Tween, playing with the machines, when he first got his name. Only X gazed in wonder at the little motor puttering away inside the yard mower, the smoke rising in the air. Only X saw the power. “You got to make more of those,” X had said.

  A little of that X comes back into the King’s face. “I think you’re both right. I want your help. So … this is me actually being strong.” And he points to a different door than the Knights used. “You’ll want to take the fast way down.”

  * * *

  Rollertrains are meant to go down. Lady keeps telling herself that.

  They tiptoe along the tubular rail as it ducks through outcroppings and grottos until they get to the rollertrain car. The wooden gate on the track is the only thing that holds the rollertrain in place, and Grease opens it while they climb in. She gets in the first car with Jemma straddling the seat right behind her.

  When it moves, it lurches once, as if to warn them. But then it travels smoothly, gently, around the bend. “This ain’t so bad,” Lady calls to Grease, who jogs along and then hops into the back seat behind her.

  “That’s what everyone says at this part,” Grease says. The next moment the rollertrain glides through a jeweled grotto—and the bottom drops out. Lady screams, involuntarily, and realizes she’s not sure if she’s scared or not.

  It feels like nothing else she’s ever experienced—like flying down a zigzag path on a bicycle, if the bicycle were crossed with a goat and bucked and jerked at every step. Beams zoom over her head, rocks fly past her hands, sharp turns threaten to tumble her out of her seat.

  She hates it. She loves it. She’s never been in anything built just to thrill—and this thrills.

  The track careens around the Horn, falling closer to the ground.

  “One other thing,” Grease shouts above the noise. “They made this without brakes!” They’ll reach the bottom soon. Were there other cars at the bottom? She can’t remember. The train swoops down the last curve away from the Horn, and she sees a flash of the night sky above and the ground below and a long line of train cars ahead.

  Then there’s a bang and a jerk and she doesn’t feel pain but finds herself slamming into the lip of the rollertrain car in front of her seat.

  Her breath is gone, but when she sits up she pumps her arm in the air. “Wooh!” she says.

  She can’t wait to do it again. She knows she never will.

  “Is that how this thing stops?” Jemma says, stretching her neck as if it’s hurt.

  “We never got the seat belts to work,” Grease says, shrugging.

  * * *

  The stairs to the Mono station are at the base of the Horn. Jemma and Lady roll plastic barrels toward it, delivered by Grease from his shed
after they came down the rollertrain. They carry swords and a pistol that Grease had stored in the back of the cart.

  The Mono stands empty, torches still lit around the drivers’ nest, the two pairs of tow lines dangling slack below the track. They’ll need more rope. Jemma sees several coils of it on the outside of the pen and starts to pay it out and cut it to length. Lady takes one end of the ropes and runs it up to the front of the Mono, where the driver normally sits.

  There’s a pen of cows a few paces away from the station. Some of those cows are used to pull the Mono. The others are used for milk and food. They’ll need all of them now.

  Lady drops rope after rope from the track. Six. Seven. Eight. Ten ropes in all. Now they need to find enough cows for them.

  At first it’s simple. She ties the ropes around the necks of the cows that usually tow the Mono, and they don’t budge. But the fourth cow snorts and jerks its head, and Lady accidentally smacks it on the nose. It bawls and shies away, and then all the cows are jostling her. She isn’t worried about tying the loops anymore, she’s worried about being crushed.

  Lady slides down one of the ropes to the side of the pen, but she can’t calm the cows, either. They’ve sent Pico and Grease to load the cart with food and weapons. They won’t be getting any more help.

  “Your visions show you this?” Lady says, a little panic in her voice.

  “Wasn’t quite a vision,” Jemma says, and throws a loop over the cow closest to her. “Just a good idea.”

  “You see the Biters climbing the track, at least?” Lady says.

  “Mostly,” Jemma says. Lady flips her off.

  A cow knocks Lady down, and Jemma dives between the cows to pull her out. A hoof strikes her, and she’s not sure how she’ll get up again.

  A whistle splits the air, and the cows somehow separate. In front of them, on her horse, is Tashia. Her cowboys line up next to her. She shakes her head. “I thought I told you two to leave the cows alone.”

  Jemma points at the slot where the Mono passes through the fence and says, “We plugging the gap.” She tells Tashia their plan, and Tashia nods and motions to her cowboys. Within moments, all ten ropes are tied to cows.

  This is the moment when they know if it will work. Four cows can pull a full Mono at walking speed. Ten cows and empty Mono? It should move the Mono as fast as they need, enough to shove the train halfway across the wall.

  The cowboys pull down a section of the fence, so the cows have only one way to go. Jemma and Lady carry the barrels up the stairs and to the front of the Mono. They open the spouts and stuff short lengths of frayed rope in the mouths.

  “See ya on the other side,” Lady says, and the cowboys wheel to the edges of the herd. Tashia smacks the last cow with her folded bolas. Another cracks a whip, and they all shout and slap at the cows’ flanks.

  Jemma and Lady plant their feet inside the Mono, waiting for it to lurch into motion. Lady holds up the pistol and fires it. The cows start to run.

  The Mono train they’re on is two hundred yards from the wall, crossing it almost square, just below the track of the return loop. Jemma can see the gap they’ll need to pass through and plug with the Mono. And the four Biters who emerge from the gap, walking along the narrow Mono track.

  “They’re in!” Jemma shouts, pointing at them so that Tashia can see. Then Lady fires a pistol at them.

  It’s a tough shot from a moving Mono at that distance, and Lady misses widely. She kneels down on the floor of the Mono, rests her barrel against the lip of the drivers’ nest. The pistol flares and a Biter drops from the track—no sound, no flailing, just a cold drop to the hard ground.

  There are archers on the wall who see the cannibals, but they’re too far away, without a clear shot. This is too much wall, Jemma thinks. A bullet clangs into the metal support above their heads, and Jemma and Lady get as low in the Mono car as they can. The Biters have at least one gun.

  One of the cowboys has a bow, and she brings a Biter down. Another Biter just seems to trip and fall. The bolas.

  The Mono wall is coming up close, a stretch of steel plate and razor wire on top of a fifteen-foot earthen bank. They’re not going fast enough. The train curves toward the wall, and the cows are barely trotting. Worse, two of them are pulling to the side. They need to go at full gallop so that half the train gets thrown across like a slingshot, using the full mass of the train to block the gap. Anything less and the Biters could just slip through.

  “Faster!” Jemma says. Tashia clicks to her horse and it cuts toward the herd, squeezing them together. Tashia grabs a cow’s line and gallops faster, practically dragging the cow along. The other cowboys do the same, and the Mono almost doubles its speed. Twenty animals, aiming them for the wall. The wall comes quickly now.

  Without having to say a thing, Jemma and Lady grab a torch and hold it to the ropes in the barrels. They’re soaked with skyplane gas. Lady’s lights right away, but Jemma’s refuses to catch. The wall is at sixty yards now, at fifty, and thirty, and still it doesn’t light.

  Three more Biters climb onto the track, just on the other side of the wall. The Biter who had the gun is still there and fires again. Jemma’s too busy to duck. What if the barrel doesn’t light? And how long will they have when they do?

  The flame on Lady’s barrel spurts up, as if it’s tapping into the gas below. Then Jemma’s catches, finally. She makes sure her sword is ready. Lady has another loop of rope in her hands and gives one end to Jemma.

  Twenty yards. Jemma nods, and they both lean out the window and slash at the lines that hold the cows. The speed still carries them toward the gap.

  The Mono breaks through the gap, flaming now. They see below dozens of Biters waiting to climb the track, dozens more on their way. The Mono hits the first Biter, and he’s inside the drivers’ nest for a moment, biting and scrambling. Lady swings at him with the pistol, and he falls off—but so does the pistol. Another Biter jumps away from the flames, and the third just bounces away from the front of the Mono like a pebble on pavement.

  Lady holds one end of their rope, Jemma the other, and each stand on the edge of their side of the Mono.

  The cowboys reach the bank, and the horses climb up it before they peel away to the right and left. Some of the cows stop, confused, when there’s no place left to run, and the other cows pile into them. The Mono slows with the cows cut away.

  The girls jump. The Mono comes to a rest with its nose fifteen feet through the gap, exactly where they wanted. As the girls fall down on both sides of the track on the outer side of the wall, the Mono catches flame. That way, no one can climb through the Mono to the track beyond.

  No one will get through the gap now. Including them.

  The Biters who watched them fall from the sky slowly turn toward them, lances up.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  THE BITERS AT THE WALL

  Lady laughs at the Biters’ expressions when they appear. Those stupid faces. The Biters might have expected boiling oil, or rocks, or a hail of arrows. They didn’t expect two girls dropping out of the sky with flame at their back.

  The girls stay close to the Mono tower and move with their backs together, their swords in front. Lady feels the heft of her sword and wonders how it will swing. Heavier than a machete, shorter than an ax, sharp on both edges.

  “Do we slice or poke?” Lady says.

  “Anything you can manage,” Jemma says, and the Biters attack. The Mono flares overhead.

  Slicing or poking is more than Lady can manage. All she can do is block the thrusts of the spears, frantically batting them aside and letting the weight of the sword do most of the work. Luckily, most of the Biters aren’t by the track, so she has time to get the feel. She disarms a girl with a sharp downward blow and swings a sword at the Biter’s neck. She accidentally hits with the flat of the sword instead of the blade and the girl goes down, unconscious.

  I hope I didn’t break her neck, she thinks. Actually, who cares.

  Jemma
wields the sword like it belongs in her hand—after the training she used to get from Apple, maybe it does. Lady meets Jemma’s eyes for a moment and then they flare and Jemma lunges past Lady. Lady spins in time to see a Biter’s sword at her neck, and then it’s on the ground in a pool of blood—with the arm.

  “You cut off his arm!” she says.

  “There’re a lot more of those,” Jemma says, and Lady can tell she’s not being clever.

  Lady’s never seen the Palos in action. Everything about them is designed to frighten—the screams that sound like they’re strangling themselves, the oiled skin, the necklaces of human teeth. Now she knows why the Kingdom never let down their guard until now, and what it might cost them.

  The army blurs together for a moment, and when it separates again she sees people who are not Palos in the midst.

  In the blond hair, black. In the blue eyes, brown. But brown eyes rimmed with charcoal, like the faces that haunted the Holy Wood.

  The Mono explodes above them, and they hold up their arms to shield themselves from the heat and debris. They step back from the track.

  “Do you see em?” she says to Jemma. “Do you see em? Apple was right.”

  Last Lifers.

  * * *

  Their two worst enemies, in the same army. Jemma knew it could happen, but it’s something else to see them shoulder to shoulder.

  Jemma can’t think about that now, because the Biters hit them hard in the glow of the Mono, as if they’ve been waiting for someone to give them permission to attack. Her blade barely blocks the spears again and again until one of them slices through and her left shoulder burns. She still holds the sword with two hands, but she has to lead harder with the right.

  Then—then the Biters in front of her make way for something worse. Something lumbers through the night, pushing its own soldiers out of the way like reeds. She catches glimpses of it through the flashes of steel, hears its bellows. Then its bare chest is behind the soldiers attacking her and he’s a Biter, but he’s also a giant.