Colony 41: Volume 1 (The Era Rae Series)

by S J Taylor

  I saw all the eyes that turned to look at me with an accusing glare, as if the Event had been my fault. I was just a girl when it happened, I wanted to shout at them. I was only six! Younger than most of you were!

  With an effort, I kept my tongue still, and leaned in closer to Jadran. My hip touched his. He didn’t move away.

  I liked that he didn’t move.

  “From the ashes we have created our little village. My old life is long gone. Most of you are too young to remember what life was like before the bombs fell. Before madmen took away from us everything that it meant to be human. I still remember. Every day, I look back. At the same time, I look forward, into the future, to a day when free men and women can live however they choose.”

  He paused to take a breath, and I saw one of the other Elders reach out a hand to him before the Venerate shook his head and muttered that he was all right. “Let me continue, please. We will not get to the future, my friends, by ducking our heads in the sand. We will not get there by hiding and hoping the storm will pass. Pretending there is no danger, we can not do.”

  This time, the Venerate’s eyes found me.

  The desire to scream at them in my defense rose up in my again. I didn’t know! I didn’t bring the Enforcers here! Sure, the Restored Society was looking for me and the Enforcers would no doubt capture or kill me on sight but they would have swept through this little corner of the world sooner or later and… and… it’s not my fault!

  Somehow, I doubted anyone would listen. Except Jadran, maybe.

  Less than a few heartbeats had passed since the Venerate’s ancient eyes had turned to me. Now, with another shaky breath, he told the crowd what I already knew. “The Enforcers have come closer to Refuge.”

  The whole crowd gasped. It was the sound of one single voice recoiling in shock.

  “They found one of our own,” the old man said. “You all saw Ethyline earlier. She was wounded as she ran away from a patrol of men in gray uniforms carrying weapons. Now, now, please. Everyone. Listen to me. They have never come this far up from the coast before. Until now, we thought we were safe here.”

  “What about the Freemen?” a voice called out. One of the villagers stood forward, closer to the Venerate. “I thought the Freemen were fighting the Enforcers?”

  The Freemen. Until coming here, I’d never heard of them. Maybe it was something the Academy would have taught me about, if I’d stayed at the Colony. They were an army, of sorts, made up of men and women from all different places, fighting against the rule of the Restored Society. They wanted to stay free and run their own lives. They didn’t want anyone telling them how to live, or hurting them because they wanted something different. They wanted to be free.

  Well, like I said, the Enforcers don’t care about freedom. Just the rule of law.

  There had been fighting down on the southern coast since before I arrived. That was a dozen kilometers from here. Jadran and the Healer had told me about it while I lay in my sickbed in the back of Jadran’s house. The Enforcers had landed and set up their basecamp, and just a few hours later the Freemen attacked. It was like they’d been waiting, or like they’d been tipped off somehow. Could there be moles within the Enforcers, helping the Freemen?

  Not likely. Disloyalty in the Restored Society was only handled one way.

  Before the Venerate could answer the question about the Freemen, another of the Elders stepped in front of him. Tray. He was in a robe nearly the same blue as the Venerate’s, with the red stole over his shoulders. His thick black hair waved in the breeze, and his smile was less friendly than it was calculating. At least, that was how it seemed to me. Everyone else seemed to relax when he stepped up. Like he was the answer to all of their problems.

  For all I knew, he was. I’d only been in the village for a few days, after all.

  “Friends,” he said, “please. Do not worry yourselves. We have sent out our best scouts. They returned safely, all of them, to report the Enforcers have moved back to the coast. Refuge is in no danger.”

  I shifted my feet where I stood. Tactics and battle strategy ran through my mind. Everything they had taught me at the Academy. Falling back was a solid strategy in a number of different situations. Like when you were running from a superior force. I doubted the Enforcers considered Refuge and its villagers a superior force, so it wasn’t that. But in good tactics, you also fell back to a stronger position when you wanted to regroup and launch an offensive with your entire force…

  Hellfire. Refuge wasn’t safe because the Enforcers had all dropped back to their basecamp. They were in more danger than they realized.

  Jadran turned to me, sensing my thoughts. “Are you all right, Era Rae?”

  All I could do was shake my head. What could I tell him? He was raised here, in this little piece of Outland paradise. What could he know of the outside world? How could he possibly understand what I was thinking? It had taken me ten years of Academy training to think like an Enforcer.

  To think like the Restored Society.

  “But what about the Freemen?” the same villager asked Tray. “What protection can they give us?”

  Tray’s smile slipped, and here he turned to the Venerate, like he didn’t want to be the one to answer the question.

  The old man’s expression turned sad as he stepped up to the front again, scanning the crowd slowly. “The Freemen have fallen.”

  Somewhere in the crowd a woman cried out and then broke down in tears. I knew there had been a few people from Refuge who had gone to join the Freemen. Stupid, I thought, considering they had no training, no knowledge of how to fight, no advanced weaponry. What did the Freemen even fight with? Bows and arrows? Sticks? Rocks?

  “Hear me, people of Refuge,” the Venerate said once the woman had been led away from the crowd. “The Freemen were unable to stand against the Enforcers, that is true, but that does not change who and what we are. We will continue to live our lives, and we will show the Restored Society that we are no threat to them. They have no reason to bother with us. Our life here is good. We have done more than make a place of wood and brick here. We have made a home. Thriving, is what our community is. Peaceful, is what we are. The Enforcers have no reason to bother us.”

  “Fools,” I muttered. No one was close enough to hear me except Jadran. He caught at my arm as I stepped forward but it wasn’t enough to stop me.

  Someone had to tell these people what the Enforcers were really like.

  “Venerate,” I called out, realizing I didn’t even know the man’s name. “Please, listen to me. The Enforcers are—”

  “Who does she think she is, to talk to us about the Enforcers?” someone shouted over me.

  “One of them, is what she is!” someone else insisted.

  “She should not be here!”

  “How dare she address the Venerate?”

  So it went, each voice getting louder and louder, people crowding closer around me and Jadran, and finally I was forced to admit that all I’d done was stir the crowd up into a mob. For peaceful people they sure had a lot of anger built up, and right now it was all being directed at me.

  I felt a calm coming over me as my mind identified the people in the crowd as targets, as threats, as problems to confront and overcome. I set my feet, and bladed my hands, and in my mind I saw how I could strike my way through the group on my right and then that would clear a path for me to—

  No. I couldn’t do that. Not here. I looked down at my hands, making them relax, feeling them shake with the need to carry out the thoughts burning in my mind. This was what the Restored Society had done to me. When I was born, or created, or hatched… whatever the term was for someone like me, I had been ingrained with the skills to fight. I could calculate the best place to deliver a blow to a human body, I could sense every threat around me all at once, and I could make my body respond like an inhuman killing machine. When I was threatened, that deadly calm came over me, and I became nearly unstoppable.

  Only, that
wasn’t everything there was to me. There was more. I was more than that.

  I wanted to be more than that.

  Please God, let there be more to me than flesh and blood and death.

  Jadran stepped in front of me, holding me back behind his arm. He was trying to protect me from the villagers. Little did he know that he was protecting the villagers from me.

  “Enough of this!” he shouted at them. “Era Rae is not our enemy. The Enforcers and the Restored Society, they are the enemy. They are the reason Ethyline was hurt. We must turn our attention to them, and prepare ourselves. We should be making ready to leave Refuge. For our own safety, we should collect our things and as much of our food as we can and go under the mountains. To the caves. Just until the Enforcers are gone.”

  A man in a ragged brown shirt that strained over his belly pushed through the crowds to point one dirty finger at Jadran. “You want us to jump like rabbits when there is nothing to be afraid of. You heard Elder Tray. You heard the Venerate. The Enforcers have gone back to the coast. They don’t have any interest in Refuge.”

  “I only want us to be prepared,” Jadran explained, somehow keeping his voice level and even. “If they come, we should be ready to move. For our own safety.”

  “And I suppose,” said a woman standing to Jadran’s left, “that you intend to bring her with us.”

  There was no mistaking who “her” was. The way she said it, I figure she’d rather see me tied up and delivered to the Enforcers as a gift than have me anywhere near her.

  The woman was tall and blonde, just like Saskia had been, and about my age too, but the resemblance ended there. This woman was long and lean where my friend Saskia had been strong and wiry. Her dress was a simple homemade thing of brown fabric, yet it managed to emphasize the shape of her chest and her hips and I had the feeling she liked it that way. A seashell that had been carved into a pick held her hair back over her left ear. Her face was pretty, I guess, in the same way that a good blade can be pretty and still hold an edge to it.

  The way she was glaring at me, it was obvious which direction the blade was pointing.

  “They really know how to welcome the new girl here,” I muttered to Jadran.

  “Shush,” he told me, “you’re not helping.”

  “Well, Jadran?” the woman pressed. “Are we supposed to take this little girl with us?”

  “Little girl!” I snapped, trying to push past Jadran’s arm even as he held me back. “I’ll show you who’s a little girl—!”

  “Enough!” the voice of Elder Tray cut through the crowd. “This is not how we will behave in a gathering. You have heard the facts, all of you. Ethyline suffered only a cut to her leg. She will be fine. The Enforcers have retreated.”

  “They haven’t retreated,” I hissed to Jadran. He nodded, like he knew that already, but still held his arm across my midsection.

  “Yes,” Tray continued. “The Freemen have suffered losses, and some of those who fell to the Enforcers were our own, but they had taken up arms against the Restored Society. They would not have died, if they had not tried to fight the Enforcers.”

  The crowd murmured agreement to that twisted logic. My jaw dropped. How could they be this blind?

  “So the mistake the Freemen made, we will not make in turn.” Tray lifted his hands, palms out, and put that smile of his back in place. “You have heard our decision. We will remain, as we always have, peaceful and free. The Enforcers will not bother us here. Our word and our protection, is what you will have from us. Now please, go. Back to your duties. The gardens need tending, and there is bread to bake for the morning meal. All of you. Back to work.”

  Everyone in the village square, even Jadran, bowed low to the four Elders, and together they all said, “We hear the voice of wisdom. We learn, and we live.”

  I’m sure I said something about where they could stick their wisdom, but I made sure it was under my breath. No reason to stir things up again. These people had made their decision.

  So had I.

  Just like that people began to drift away. Their anger at me was forgotten. Or at least, set aside for now. The Elders had told them it was all right and they all believed it.

  The last person to walk away was the girl who had confronted Jadran. Was she a little older than me? Maybe. So was Jadran, and I suddenly had the feeling there was more between those two than just some hastily exchanged words. Jadran’s face looked pained, like he was trying to make a decision when none of the choices were good ones.

  “You should introduce us sometime,” I said to him as I watched the girl leaving, my voice stiff. “I think we made a real connection.”

  “Please stop,” he said, without any anger in his voice. “Laria is a friend.”

  I watched his expression carefully, although he wouldn’t meet my eyes. Oh. That kind of friend.

  Suddenly I felt very tired. It wasn’t because Jadran had a special friend who was pretty or anything. Not because I missed Saskia, either. At least, those were the things I told myself. My legs felt wobbly and my still healing scars tugged at my sides. “Jadran, can you take me back to your house?” I asked him. “I think I just want to lay down.”

  He nodded, reaching out to take me by my arm, and we started down the path, only to find the Elders standing in our way.

  All four of them aimed their gazes on me. The Venerate seemed to look through me.

  It was Tray who spoke.

  “Jadran. Taking our wayward visitor back home?”

  After a bow that made his red stole hang low, Jadran held his hand up over his heart. “Elders. Venerate. Thank you. Yes. Era Rae was feeling tired.”

  Tray turned his smile on me. “I’m sure she does. Such an ordeal, she has had. Coming to us from one of the Colonies. You are healing, I trust?”

  “I am. Thanks. Your medical practices are different from what I’m used to but I’m sure I’ll be fine.”

  “From what I understand,” he said slowly, “the Restored Society teaches its people to be tough. You are tough, are you not?”

  My jaw clenched. I could see what he was doing. Implying I was part of the Restored Society. It rubbed me the wrong way. Which was exactly what Tray wanted.

  “I’m tough, yes,” I told him. “But I’m my own person.”

  “Of course you are,” he said dismissively, turning his attention back to Jadran. Like an expert fencer, I thought. He took his stab at me and then he danced away. “We need to speak with you, Jadran.”

  “Now?”

  He didn’t sound happy about it. I studied him in that moment, wondering why the leaders of Refuge’s community would choose to pull him aside, out of everyone here.

  The Venerate nodded. Jadran sighed out a slow breath through his nose.

  Then he looked over at me.

  “I will see you back at my house. You could take this time to look around our village, Era Rae. Find your place here.”

  “Jadran,” Tray said, a deeper meaning in his tone.

  “Yes, Elder,” Jadran answered, giving me a hopeful smile before turning away to follow the Elders in another direction.

  Find my place here in Refuge. I ran my hand back through my shortened hair. Hellfire. I might not belong to the Restored Society and the Colony anymore, but that didn’t mean I fit in here. I looked around me, at the villagers who had gone back to toiling in the gardens, at the men repairing the thatch roof of a house not far away. At all the little things these people had to do day in, and day out.

  Had I ever pictured myself here?

  No. Not really.

  Even if I could, inserting myself into this life wouldn’t change anything. The Enforcers would still be out there, bringing the rule of law to the world. They would still be experimenting on innocent people to create a better soldier, like they had done to Saskia.

  Like they had done when they created me…

  “What are you staring at?” I heard a voice ask me.

  I’d been so wrapped up in my own
thoughts that I hadn’t seen Laria come up behind me. “Listen,” I said to her, feeling tired all over again, “I’m not interested in whatever issues you feel like getting off your chest. Just leave me alone.”

  “If you want to be alone,” she told me, “you should leave. Just go. Then all the alone time in the world, is what you can have.”

  My hands wrapped themselves into fists at my sides and I walked faster. Laria matched me stride for stride.

  “Why won’t you just leave me alone?” I finally asked her when we were at the door to Jadran’s home and she was still nattering on about how I should just leave. “Look, whatever’s going on between you and Jadran is no business of mine.”

  “No. It is not.” She crossed her arms over her chest.

  Laria arched one perfect eyebrow at me. “Being with Jadran, is something you will never have. You will never come with us to the caves, either. If we go there, Jadran will bring me. Not you.”

  I met her glare and folded my arms over my chest, just like her. Sort of. I was jealous that she was so... developed and I was so… not, but that really wasn’t the point. Leaning up against Jadran’s doorway I forced a smile. I wasn’t trying to lay a claim to Jadran’s place, but if she saw it that way, it didn’t hurt my feelings. “What are these caves everyone keeps talking about?”

  Laria opened her mouth like she was going to spit the answer at me, but then she clamped it shut again and looked away. “No concern of yours, is what they are. Just stay away from Jadran.”

  She turned and stalked away from me.

  Well. If I hadn’t made up my mind earlier, that little chat certainly would have done it for me.

  Inside Jadran’s home I went straight through to the back room and my little cot. I might still feel a little tired, maybe, but this couldn’t wait anymore. Under the thin mattress, up near the front legs, was a little box. Jadran had put it together for me. I’ve taken it out to look through it every day. There’s not much in it.