Song of Sundering

by A. R. Clinton

  "We are deploying the whole Pact army in a few weeks. Everyone but the Prin Guard. I'll be staying a little longer to recruit where I can—there are a lot of people on either side of the conscription age bracket that we could really use."

  Shara took a sip, feeling the cloud of shadow over both of their thoughts filling up the surrounding room. “You won't get many—maybe not any…” She swirled the liquid around and glared at it, only slightly aware that her and Hafi looked like mirrored images, "We can’t keep doing this, Hafi… These aren't little skirmishes of our men and a handful of Xenai anymore. This is a real war. The only allies we have close to us are Century, and you know Kingston Cross isn't willingly going to bring his people here to be conscripted. Even if he did, there aren't enough of them to make much of a difference. We have to win something. Have you talked to her about letting—”

  “I talk to her about it every goddamn week, Shara, but you know how it goes. Your mother won’t agree unless everyone else is dead, including me. And even then, you’ll have a harder time fighting her than the Xenai. She is as stubborn as a damned croc prepping for a death roll.”

  Shara swallowed the smile that threatened to take over her face. The schools of Prin had never thought it important to teach the kids about the swamp creatures around Ceafield. Shara had never asked what they were like. It seemed more fun to imagine the craziest beasts that her mind could conjure. Putting on her grim stare again, she continued, “We have to convince her.”

  “You convince her. I’ve been trying for three years, Princess—and warning her she'd have to face that day for seven more years. The day I started training you, I told her this would come. Eventually”

  “I can’t convince her, either. She always brings up the cave and how I needed to be rescued.”

  Hafi let himself show a slow but sad smile, “She does the same with me, no matter how many times I remind her that it was you who saved my life in the end.”

  Shara shifted lower onto the couch, resting her neck on the arm as she let her mind wander. Thoughts slipped over her at different angles, and she spun them around, contemplating the way forward and what few tools she had at her disposal. She held the drink by the rim of the glass as she moved it in a circle, sloshing the last sip of amber fluid in the bottom up the sides. She let her hands drift down to her lap, rebalancing the glass between them both. She could almost see it. The full thought, the first one in a plan, was in front of her, but still in a bunch of unconnected pieces.

  “You have the same look as your mother. You even mouth words to yourself like she does when she is coming up with something. What horrible idea are you thinking?”

  It took a moment for her brain to shift from the forming image to process the words that Hafi had said. “It’s just the start of an idea. I’ll let you know when it solidifies.”

  Hafi stood, “Yes, you will tell me before you do anything. I agree that we need to convince her, but you running off and being a bullheaded dumb ass won’t help.” He stood and took her glass from her hands, downing the last of the drink before taking the cups back to the kitchen. Shara let her mind wander down each path of the problem. She wasn’t aware of the small living room anymore as her thoughts took her away.

  3

  Ayna

  It always came down to numbers, data and logistics. Ayna Shae was not sure how she ended up here. This was not at all what she had intended when she got into politics. Of course, it ran in the family to be politicians. Her mother, Mara, and her father, Shannon, had been pillars of the Illara community before they had built the Statehouse. But they had lived through tragedy.

  The Sundering had torn the worlds as they knew them into pieces and put them back together like some surreal piece of artwork that had an echo of horror, but mostly just chaos. Both her parents had come through the Gates together. The strange pinpoints of light that most people ran away from had collected a few that walked right into them. Those few that got to them in time had survived. With the remnants near where the Nagata had crashed, they had started the community that had become Prin.

  Ayna was here because she carried the torch, sure. But she was ultimately here because she cared. Born into chaos, grown into order, and built up from nothing, she and Prin had many things in common and her love for the place went deeper than anyone fully understood.

  “Fuck no. We will not use the hill tribes as bait.” She spat.

  The dozen mouths around the table stilled. The room looked at her, holding its breath. She could hear the arguments they were spooling up in their minds. Every single one would come down to one point: Sacrificing the hill tribes would give them the greatest chance of survival and the lowest amount of deaths.

  “No way in fucking hell we are just going to leave them to die with no warning.” Ayna turned to Hafi, the General she had brought to power precisely for his brutal problem solving. “Is there any way to use the settlements as bait after we evacuate the people?”

  Hafi shook his head. “The Xenai scouts are in full view of the settlements. Any movement or attempt to evacuate will raise flags.”

  “How long will it take for Xenai command to take action if we start an evacuation?”

  “Minutes to put a plan into place. A few hours at most before they hit the evacuation.”

  “We can use their normal daily activities to evacuate some people during the day. Then start a full evacuation near the end of the day. Ambush the scouts before they can get the word out that we are there for the evacuees. Once your men are in place, you start the evacuation.”

  Hafi opened his mouth to protest. Ayna already had a raised eyebrow pointed at him. He closed his mouth and nodded.

  “We will need about a day to get in position and lay some traps without being seen.” Ayna gave a curt nod in his direction as she turned toward the aide at the door. “Let me know when you get the last person safely into Prin.” She turned her head an inch to the side to look at the boy, “Bring me some fucking coffee.” The sudden shift of her gaze startled the poor kid.

  His eyes grew wide. He jumped to his feet and fumbled with the door while mumbling something that ended with, “Ma’am,” before bolting through the doorway toward the Statehouse's kitchen.

  The door to her office clicked shut. Ayna turned on her heel and gave a wide gesture with her arm towards the door to signal to the other observers that the meeting was over. They all stood, eyes scanning the room for anyone else willing to change her mind. No one made the move, and so they formed a line to leave the room.

  Everyone except Deman Dekro. He stood in his usual casual manner, his tall frame always somehow looking like it was leaning up against something, even when he was standing straight. He kept his eyes firmly down on the table ahead of him. As each other member of the council filed past him, they looked away. They all knew, just as she did, that the Pact Army recently conscripted his son; he was just a year older than Shara.

  “Hafi.” Ayna met his eyes and nodded back toward the blackboard wall covered in chalk drawings. He stayed while the room emptied. Ayna walked over to where Deman stood at the end of the table, still not moving to leave, and still not looking or saying anything to her.

  She did the only thing she could. She reached across the table and put a hand over his and she lied, “I know, Deman. We have all been where you are… Or we will be soon.”

  He looked up at her, surprise on his face. She could see the question in his eyes of whether she would allow Shara to be sent when she turned seventeen—a question she often asked herself. She smiled and nodded, giving his hand a small squeeze. He seemed to accept her implied promise that she would send Shara, and he nodded back to her and turned to leave the room.

  As the door shut behind him, Ayna sat down with a heavy sigh. “I don’t know how to do this, Hafi. How do I choose who lives and who dies? Against all logic, I’ve made a call. A call that sentences your kids to death, rather than a few farmers in a small mountain pass. Is it justifiable just because your sol
diers agreed to some terms when they moved here? Or their parents did, anyway.”

  Hafi sat and placed his hand on top of hers. “You don’t decide who dies. You don’t decide who lives… You… you decide what matters to those of us who lose sight of it.” He waved at the chalk on the wall behind them. “We all see strategy. You see people. We all want to win. You alone know what isn’t worth losing.”

  Ayna smiled down at the table. “Thanks. I needed someone to make up emotional bullshit to keep me going.”

  “That's what I am good at.”

  She laughed. “It is good I didn’t meet you until I was about to have you killed. This entire city might not exist, otherwise.”

  He winked, “I've never forgiven you for nearly sending me to the grave. But, at least I am badass enough to change your mind, you stubborn bitch."

  Ayna threw her head back and laughed. As the moment tapered off, she reached over and squeezed Hafi’s hand. “You mean, luckily you were useful enough to change my mind! But, now I need to figure out all the other ways Prin could fall apart.” She tapped the tabletop, which lit up in response to her fingerprint. She began shuffling through documents too classified for Hafi to see, knowing that he would take the hint.

  The door swung open, and her aide shuffled in. He placed the coffeepot in the center of the table, glanced at her, then bolted back out of the room to his desk. Hafi chuckled as he stood and moved toward the door. “If you’re not careful, that boy will need to be potty trained again.”

  Ayna smiled, but didn’t look up from the pages of text. “I’ll call his mother.”

  Ayna burst into the study that her husband kept meticulously clean. From outside the room, she had heard the light strum of a guitar. She crashed through the doors. She had intended to walk lightly through, so as not to interrupt him. Often her inner turmoil burst out of her, no matter her best intentions.

  He sat in his corner in a deep forest green, high-backed chair, surrounded by shelves of books. Most of his library had been salvaged, and covered such a wide variety of topics there was no way he could ever consume all of it. He kept them for the house, believing that someday the books would be needed by someone in the city. Most seemed too arcane or filled with Old Earth to be of much use. Sure, maybe someone would pick up that electrical engineering textbook, but outside of the basics of circuitry and soldering, many things in Prin were different. Their primary means of manufacturing was through the dimension bots. Feed them any blueprint, and they could print it out; sometimes in minutes, sometimes in days. There was little to no need to wire anything up, let alone use resistors or capacitors, as the old books talked about. The machines printed materials with the needed levels of conductivity, or could create amalgams on the fly with the right resistance.

  On the table in front of her husband was a spread of tools he had recently used to change the strings of his guitar. Guitar strings were one of their luxuries. They had been rewound with various scraps scavenged from the world around them. Jo complained about this fact often, the way it changed the tone of the guitar and how they so easily fell out of tune. It was easy to forget how many people had never seen a guitar, much less held one or learned to play one.

  Ayna raised a hand, palm up, and shrugged in apology when Jo looked up, startled by her explosive entrance. He smiled and placed the guitar on its stand next to the armchair. She kicked off her shoes and walked across the worn Persian rug — another salvage — until she was close enough to collapse into his lap, pulling her knees up to her chest as she wrapped an arm around his neck and leaned into him. She sighed contentedly, letting the day slide off of her.

  “Your ass is so bony,” Jo mumbled, shifting underneath her until he found the right angle to avoid her bones digging into his legs. She lifted her head and looked at him with a mischievous, unapologetic smile, then rested her head against him again.

  Jo chuckled. “Rough day?”

  Her rough days were the days she brought home her fury, which quickly dissipated into dark humor and playfulness with Jo or the girls. Jo could never drop his anger and frustration completely, which was why he had retired from the eye of the public nearly as soon as Ayna and he had married. Without the worries of a newborn city and its survival, he was calm and collected and hard to ruffle. It suited them to be such a pair: the woman who never stumbled for long and the man who stayed level-headed in the background.

  “Jotryll Shae.” Her voice rang out in sharp, stern tones before dropping into a sigh. “Every day is a rough fucking day,” she muttered into his chest.

  He rubbed her shoulder softly and waited for her to continue. Sometimes she did and sometimes she didn’t.

  “We’ve had to start evacuations along the Cascade Line settlements. I had to fight for it, too. No one else wanted to take the risk of evacuating the people there. In a room of twelve, I was the only one who cared for hundreds of lives…”

  Ayna knew this was an exaggeration. Hafi cared — but slightly less than he cared about winning. It was what made him good. He had served Ayna well, first as a hired bodyguard, then in the Prin Guard and as General of the Army of the Pact. It was his need to win that had brought her back to Prin, when she had wanted to forsake the duties before her. She had not wanted to marry the strange Illara man in whose lap she now lounged. She had not wanted to run Prin after her parents. She had taken up the mantle because no one else would, and she didn’t want to watch Prin die.

  Hafi was for hire, so she had hired him. She had run away to Ceafield right when Hafi needed to leave Ceafield. So he had convinced her she needed to win for her people in Prin, because it was the only way he could win. The journey out and back had taken longer than the time she’d spent there, and she had always been grateful for Hafi. He was a face and a name that others may have forgotten, but he was her cornerstone. He had taught her about a struggle she had never known. It was all around, even here in Prin. Layers of society. Those that weren’t worth risking a small evacuation team to save before a giant Xenai army swept over them, compared to those like her that an entire squad would risk their lives for without any question. Unquestioned and protected.

  Jo dropped his hand to her back, massaging in slow circles. Patient. Waiting for whatever else she decided to share.

  She thought about Shara’s own seventeenth birthday. If Prin was still standing, Ayna had come up with various ways to avoid Shara’s own conscription into the Army of the Pact. She could easily pull off any of them and keep her daughter safe, and she believed, keep Prin safe as well. But, explaining those actions was not as simple even to herself.

  Jo’s two eldest daughters had both missed the mandatory conscription ruling, already enrolled as full-time students at the U. This had been their way out, along with having received no combat training. Mandatory conscription for them would have meant administrative tasks and medical assistance, which near a battle is not without risk, but the closest to safety they could have gotten—this was where Dekro's son would end up.

  Shara was well trained. She would be in vanguards and used wherever her power made her valuable, and the way Hafi talked about her, Ayna suspected that would be everywhere. Ayna had done her best to downplay how powerful her daughter was with Source from the public and even her fellow politicians, but she could not hide it from Hafi, who had helped trained the girl. Would his desire to win still be more than how much he cared for Shara?

  Hafi knew the other risks of placing Shara in the path of the Xenai. Neither of them forgot the day when nearly fifty of them had charged at the walls of Prin, howling her name. But she knew it was only a matter of time before he weighed those risks far enough below the consequences of not having her in the Army that their occasional arguments became something more.

  Am I weighing it all wrong, too? Am I lying to myself just as much as I lied to Deman today?

  She needed to get more conscriptions, to keep Hafi happy and give her a reason to not send Shara before her seventeenth birthday. There were only two other
places untapped places for her to get soldiers: the unregistered people in the Underground, and Century. She would try to pull Century in first; at least they had some experience fighting Xenai. The Undergrounders would have to be a last resort.

  Ayna decided these thoughts were not worth breaking the quiet peace of the moment with Jo. I'll send a message to Kingston tomorrow. She sat patiently as Jo worked his way over her mid and lower back. His hand gave a gentle but abrupt squeeze at the top of her butt, and he kissed the back of her head. Ayna let him continue massaging her before she stood, took both his hands into hers, and pulled him gently behind her toward the door to their bedroom.

  4

  Hafi

  It was the stench they all noticed first, but only Hafi—born into a world of death a lifetime ago—recognized it. The mountains looked as they always did, the aspen, pine and juniper trees framing the path that was covered in dry pine needles and the leftover crumbles of leaves decayed in winter. Everything was as it should have been, except for the smell.

  As they progressed toward a drop in the mountainside, the smell grew more potent. At first it was sweet and curious. As it lingered in the nose, it turned sour. The aroma felt sticky. It permeated the senses and didn’t quite leave before the next breath, which increased the intensity of the scent, rather than clearing it. By the time the troop of soldiers and civilians had progressed another dozen meters, the smell had dripped through them all—through the cloths and clothing they held to their faces and sent them into fits of hacking. Whatever it was, they all felt like it covered them—it stuck inside them. It clung to their skin, hair, and clothes.

  Hafi held his fist in the air, signaling for all that followed him to stop. He waved them toward the thicker trees to the north and singled out one of the new recruits, Lee, to follow him. As the civilians and remaining escorts hid in a cluster of juniper trees, Hafi stepped forward until the steep decline severed the group from his view. He shifted to descend at an angle that would prevent the pull of gravity from toppling him and his recruit. Lee followed the path Hafi was making, but not at quite the right angle. He lost his footing a few times. Hafi was certain he would watch the boy tumble to his death, but at the last second, Lee always managed to grab a root or thick clump of brush before his slide turned into an unstoppable tumble.