by S McPherson
She sucks in air through her teeth, and pauses before saying, ‘I came shortly after my parents were killed. Feasting season,’ and she glares at no one in particular. ‘I came to die. Supposedly, counterparts can’t coexist in the same realm for longer than a fortnight, so—’
‘So, you came here…’ my mouth seems to withdraw from the words.
‘To die,’ she states when I do not.
I swallow. She says it so easily, with such finality. ‘But your counterpart would die too.’
She looks at me, eyebrows raised, tongue twisted. ‘I know.’
I don’t know how to respond to that, and once again my eyes meet Jude’s. Tension swells in the car like a balloon fit to burst.
‘But you didn’t die,’ Nathaniel belatedly points out.
‘No.’ Sakiya looks back out through the window. ‘I guess my counterpart died without my help.’
‘How long have you been here?’
‘Seven collectives, nine sets and two quarters.’
She doesn’t elaborate, leaving us to make sense of the Coldivian jargon. I know sets means months and from there assume collectives to be years and quarters to be weeks.
‘How have you survived?’ Jude frowns.
She smirks, ‘By the skin of my teeth. It seems fighting for your life every day gives you a taste for actually living.’ She licks the blood from her lip. ‘My streetlings are how I got into this mess.’
‘Streetlings?’ I ask.
‘Wannabe recruits to my one-woman gang,’ she snorts, ‘got themselves into some trouble trying to prove their worth. Uselessness more like.’ But she says it without any conviction.
‘What happened?’
‘I had to rescue the things, didn’t I? Before they got themselves shackled in the system.’ She shakes her head. ‘I had to use my…talents,’ and this time pink flames dance around her fingers and skip from one to the other. ‘One of those uniform wearing Neanderthals saw it. What with protecting the streetlings, I didn’t stand a chance.’
‘That was very noble of you.’ Jude almost sounds surprised.
‘An incredible sacrifice,’ I add, hoping to clear the scowl from her face.
She harrumphs and closes her eyes. ‘Overrated. My parents sacrificed themselves for me. Look how well I turned out.’
Jude brings the car to a stop in its usual hiding place behind a stand of trees at the edge of the woods. We clamber out, neither of us commenting on how we’ll explain the damage to the rental company. That’s a problem for another day.
‘So where are we going?’ Sakiya asks as we amble out of the woods and make our way down the deserted country road.
‘To a place where you’ll be safe,’ I say, glancing surreptitiously over my shoulder despite knowing we aren’t being followed.
I cannot help thinking about all those customers at Fixer Upper. Those who saw Sakiya, battered and bruised, racing from the building. Witnesses to alleged car salesmen pulling out guns and firing at the four of us. Innocent bystanders who saw me, an ordinary girl, cause bullets to ricochet and rain from the sky. Though I want to believe that the R.U.O.E. organisation let those people go, an arrow of doubt pierces my resolve. They saw too much.
Sakiya blows her fringe from her eyes as we cross the street. We leap over the fence that leads to the field and she peers at the house in the distance. ‘Safe, you say?’ and her comment drizzles sarcasm. ‘I’ll be the judge of that.’
I nod. Though she looks frail, beaten and broken, her spirit is anything but. When we come to the boulder, Jude slides it aside and Sakiya raises a sceptical brow, her lips clamped down on anything she might want to say. When the ground shakes, her eyes dart to us, wide and alert.
‘What is this?’ she snaps, her body poised and taut with primed muscles.
‘It’s okay,’ I say, lifting a hand to steady her as the ground rattles our bones.
She looks like she might bolt, her gaze, that of a frightened horse, fearful yet fierce, but when Jude leaps into the ground, she jerks and tentatively steps forward.
‘What is this?’ she asks again, studying the ground like the jumbled pieces of a puzzle.
‘A place for people like you and people like us.’ Nathaniel gives a brisk encouraging nod, before he follows after Jude.
‘You don’t have to join us,’ I tell Sakiya over the sound of the ground caving in, ‘but if you do, we’ll work together to make sure what happened to you never happens again, to anyone.’
The earth stops trembling and I rest my foot on the boulder to keep it from sliding back into place. Sakiya studies me, her eyes flicking between my own and the tunnel burrowed into the ground. I swallow the ache as I sense a ‘No’ on her lips
‘Sakiya,’ I shrug, ‘we’re the good guys.’
She pushes her fringe from her eyes and adjusts her poor-excuse for a dress back over her shoulders.
‘I suppose I’ve got myself out of worst positions,’ and she takes a step right up to the edge. ‘I leave whenever I want.’
‘Whenever you want,’ I agree, not bothering to hide my relief.
She leaps into the hole, whooping the whole way down and I chuckle as I plunge in after her.
We slip out of the tunnel and skid across the flattened grass where Nathaniel and Jude are waiting to help us to our feet.
‘What is that heavenly smell?’ Sakiya sniffs and twirls around until her eyes find the Bar & Grill. She stalks across the road as the rest of us trail after her.
‘Sakiya, wouldn’t you rather change first?’ I call, rushing to keep up.
‘Do you have any money?’ she asks, seemingly oblivious to my question.
‘Don’t you want to rest?’
‘I’ll rest when I’m dead,’ she snarls and pushes her way into the bar. It’s bustling as always—we seem to have arrived around lunchtime—but our usual booth is thankfully vacant. We shuffle through the crowd, avoiding puzzled stares as people notice Sakiya’s battered state. She doesn’t seem to mind as she carelessly slinks between tables and slumps into the booth.
‘Feed me,’ she demands, once seated.
Nathaniel signals one of the barmen and orders us each a round of beers, and a plate of fish and chips for Sakiya.
‘Make it two,’ she interjects.
The man scribbles down the order then slips away.
From that moment on, I stare in awe as I watch Sakiya guzzle down beer after beer and devour countless plates of chips and fried fish. Grease coats her fingers and glosses her mouth. Beer sloshes down her chin, both hands clamped around the mug. It’s mesmerising and yet terrifying as I think of the reason she eats like this, the weeks she’s been held captive, labelled as a monster and clamped in chains.
We don’t speak much while we wait. Jude approaches the subject of R.U.O.E. once or twice, but each time Sakiya simply grumbles some vague response that’s swallowed by her mouthful of food. So instead, the three of us sit, fulfilling her orders, and wait for her to be ready.
The server returns, pen poised over his pad. ‘Can I get you anything else?’ he asks, derisively.
‘Another pint wouldn’t go amiss,’ Sakiya snaps, slamming down her third empty glass.
The server eyes her. ‘Don’t you think you’ve had enough?’
‘No,’ and she wipes the back of her hand across her mouth before wiping it on her still flimsy sheet of clothing.
‘How old are you, anyway?’ he asks, repulsion wrinkling his nose.
Sakiya sneers, ‘Old enough to gut you in your sleep.’
I grimace and look apologetically at the server.
‘My mother said she can have whatever she wants,’ Jude lies.
The server glares at Sakiya, seeming to be caught between defying the boss’s son and putting this girl in her place. His eyes meet Jude’s, and at last his shoulders droop.
‘Anything else?’ he mumbles. We shake our heads and he leaves in a huff.
‘It wouldn’t kill you to say “Please” and “Thank
you”,’ I hiss.
‘It might,’ Sakiya grins and sits back in her seat, ‘but I’ll try.’
‘So, are you about ready to tell us what you remember?’ Nathaniel asks, his untouched bangers and mash steaming in front of him.
Sakiya’s chewing slows for the first time since we sat down. She gropes for her beer, scowling at the empty pint glass, then leans over, swipes Jude’s and takes a gulp. He doesn’t even flinch.
At last, Sakiya wipes the crumbs from her face, and for a beat, simply stares back at us. ‘They threw me in the back of a van, a bloodstained one that reeked of sweat and who knows what else. It was dented, parts bashed in, and believe me, I added to them.’ She pauses to push a chip in her mouth. ‘If I hadn’t been shackled, I would have torn that tin can to pieces, but the chains, they did something. I was still strong but not as strong, and my fire came out in flickers.’
‘Probably an enchantment put on the steel,’ Jude states, leaning in intently.
‘Whatever it was, they kept them on me ‘til I was inside their basement den. Green walls were everywhere, little shards of bright gemstones. The floor was as dark as the deepest ocean and iron doors lined the corridor, but I couldn’t see anything past them.’ The server returns and Sakiya snatches the mug from him, then, as an afterthought, smiles and practically purrs the words ‘Thank you’.
I snicker, not meeting the server’s eye, but I hear his startled garbles as he walks away. Sakiya downs half her pint in one and I’m impressed when she bothers to conceal a belch with her hand.
‘Please excuse me, if you please, if you can…please…thank you’ she proffers, tauntingly.
I roll my eyes. ‘Just get on with it.’
She chuckles. ‘I was down there for a while: a few quarters—weeks,’ she amends. ‘I carved grooves on the ground as each day passed. Not that I could see them, but my inner clock didn’t fail me.’
‘Were you alone?’ Nathaniel asks.
She nods. ‘Surrounded by the same green walls. There was a grate in the iron door they shoved me through. They used it to deliver meagre scraps of food, just enough to keep us alive for their experiments. They came to get me on my first day, took me to a room. This one was all sleek and shiny, everything metal. Tools and machines were hooked up to who knows what. I felt my power return there, like a weight had been lifted, but they didn’t give me chance to enjoy it. They bound my wrists and flung me on a metal table that dented under my weight. It was so cold.’ She takes a slower, more thoughtful sip of her beer. ‘Then I was back in chains. They were looking for something, I think, testing my blood. I was bricking it. My teeth were chattering like a gaggle of old ladies on the bus and my knees were hammering together like the start of a bad knock, knock joke. Didn’t know what I was going to do, just knew I had to get out.’
‘And how did you?’ I ask, my voice barely a whisper. ‘Get out.’
‘They were clever, never took me at the same time. Sometimes attached the shackles as soon as I entered the room, other times I had a few seconds. I knew that those few seconds, when I wasn’t oppressed, were all I had. So I waited for a day when I had the courage to use them, and that day came today.’ She shovels in a few more chips and gulps down the remainder of her beer.
Without being asked, Jude slides his half full glass over to her as she goes on to tell them, ‘I socked the one holding me, right on his nose. Whole thing smashed in and shot through the back of his skull.’ She grins, feral, at the memory. I gulp and slightly edge away. ‘Then I surrounded myself with a wall of fire to block the others and raced down the corridor towards the exit. I encountered a few of them on the way, all carrying clipboards or odd tools, coming in and out of the rooms…cells. One ran for the fire extinguisher whilst some tried to get at me with the shackles, but there was no getting through my flame, and if they got too close, I flung them against the cell doors, as far away from me as I could. Dead or alive, I was leaving that place.’
‘So your abilities worked in the hallway,’ Nathaniel observes.
Sakiya nods, sucking mushy peas from her fork. ‘Only after I stepped into the room. Before that it was the same pathetic flicker and slightly above average strength.’
I watch Nathaniel think, idly drumming his fingers on the table, eyes distant, then he turns back to her. ‘I’m guessing that was your first time in the hallway unescorted.’
‘Obviously,’ she splutters, sending clumps of mushy peas and flakes of fish spraying from her mouth.
‘And what did the men wear when they escorted you?’
Sakiya considers this. ‘That blooming uniform…although they also wore metal gloves.’
Nathaniel smacks the table, a victorious grin on his face. ‘I’ll bet it’s the same enchanted metal they use on the shackles and probably on the cell doors.’
Sakiya shrugs.
I slouch down in my seat and drag my weary hands over my face. ‘It sounds awful.’
‘It’s worse,’ she grumbles.
‘Well, at least you’re out of there,’ Jude offers, beckoning the server back over.
‘Yeah,’ she nods, ‘but what about everyone else?’
SCULPTURES OF WAR
Milo collides with packed earth, soil and ash curling around him. A violent whiff of sulphur and filth sting his nostrils and though his eyes are closed, he knows he has left Vistasha and entered Vedark.
The air is stagnant; no sound or shudder of life, nothing but a hot and seedy musk that presses down on him, as if the cloak of death were draped over the entire land. Holding his heaving stomach, Milo steadily clambers to his feet and tucks the gethadrox into his satchel.
He scopes the barren wasteland, nothing but churned up clumps of terracotta earth with epic slabs of forgotten rock bulging from it. Naked and brittle trees stand like the remnants of barbed wire fences, and above, a cement dipped sky with red gashes torn across it arches over him.
Milo dabs at sweat that’s blossomed on his brow and takes his first step, surprised to find his feet sink into the earth as though wrapped in a cushion. He steps on again and again and again, deeper into the unknown, deeper into nothingness. Soon, his legs groan, his breaths coming out in ragged bursts, but he squints against the beads of sweat now dribbling down his lashes and marches on, past rock after rock, each one precariously tilted, their arrangement as haphazard as if dropped from the sky.
Milo does not let himself relax as he wanders, one hand pressed against his satchel and the other resting on the curved hilt of his sword. He tries to breathe heavily through his nose, keeping his mouth clamped shut against this tainted world.
A large stone structure looms ahead, curved and bent like an old lady. Carved into its base is a shallow cave that emits a peculiar scent, on a par with spiced acid, and standing proud in its entrance are torches that burn with what looks like eternal flames. They tower over Milo like sentries as he ventures closer and presses his ear to the wall. No sound, no movement.
Deftly, he creeps around the wall and peers inside. Strange markings have been slashed into the stone, highlighted by the torches’ dancing flames. Though harsh and almost chaotic, they seem to be intentional; a calendar or a tally chart.
Milo hesitates as a voice within urges him to turn back, screams at him to run. But instead, he takes one last look at the vast nothingness behind him and steps into the cave’s shelter.
The ground is just as soft here but bits of something brittle crack and snap under his feet. Spying an unlit torch hanging from a bracket in the wall, Milo draws closer.
‘Iginassa,’ he intones and the torch ignites, lighting a shelf below, where rests a spread of mud figures depicting scenes of war.
Milo steps even closer, taking in every expression etched on the faces of the figures, faces he knows, faces that keep reoccurring—like Dezaray’s. Her anguished, bitter or broken face is clear in every one. It starts with her lying atop a mountain, one Milo recognises as Aulock Peak from the aural shades of greens and reds shimmering ab
ove it. Her hands are tied and two figures stand over her. One is female with wings at her back, the other concealed beneath a hood. What Milo assumes to be the moon, a circle of swirling orange painted on the wall, hangs low in the sky, hovering just beside the mountaintop. A twig that leaks an ominous cyan substance arcs from the ground beside her.
He knows, without a shred of a doubt, that that stick is a piece of the Elutheran plant. He has seen it enough in books and read of it enough in stories to recognise its treacherous beauty. He turns his eyes to the markings on the wall: a tally that seems to count down the days to something. Something marked by the same orange circle; the moon. It doesn’t look like more than a few months’ away, eight at the most. Milo sucks in a jagged breath.
What is this place?
The next scene shows Dezaray standing beside the winged woman and the cloaked figure, all three staring out at Melaxous below them. What follows is a vicious display of Exlathars and Court members battling each other, Dezaray always at the heart of it, fighting against the Coltis. Fury and something darker cloud her features. The last two scenes show Dezaray against Lexovia. In one Lexovia fights with vigour, xyen raised and writhing. But in the last, she is on her knees, as the Court of Coldivor crumbles behind her, never to rise again. Dezaray and the cloaked figure stand victorious over Lexovia, flanked by Exlathars and the mysterious woman with outstretched wings.
Milo studies the scenes, again and again, trying to pick apart their meaning. He has found what he came for and yet feels no joy. This is Diez’s plan. To use Dezaray against them somehow, to turn her into something dark and unforgiving, no doubt with the aid of Elutheran magic.
A sudden frost turns the edges of the figures white and Milo stiffens. He feels a bitter cold energy, a dark zing that stings the air as something materialises not far from him. It carries a cool inviting musk, one Milo wouldn’t have expected, but beneath it bites the stench of age and something rotten.
‘Diez,’ Milo says with an air of comfortable familiarity, though a film of fear shrouds his heart.
‘Hello, darling,’ a velvety voice responds.